Three Worlds 01 - Seduce Me In Dreams (2 page)

To make matters worse, the sand was black.

That meant it soaked up the rays of the sun all day and could melt or burn the hell out of anything that touched it, stumbled in it, or outright fell down looking to bake their face. Only the special protection of the soldiers‟ boots and clothes kept them from this type of fate. That and Bronse‟s impressive sense of balance.

The faster they were out of that hostile environment, the better, Bronse thought as he began to trek off again.

For this mission, the team had split up to do reconnaissance at two separate locations.

Bronse hadn‟t recommended or approved of that plan. However, due to the sand hurricanes and an awkwardly timed insert by their command center, they hadn‟t had the time to recon their target sites in succession. Their limited circumstances had meant hitting the recon objectives simultaneously, which meant either aborting to a later mission or splitting up a single team right then. Abortion meant doubling the danger of detection, doubling the risk to lives. Bronse had given in to his upper command and split his team. Justice, Lasher, and Ender had taken the north site, and Bronse and Trick had taken the northwest target. Bronse and Trick had been filling PhotoVids with recon information when they‟d been made. Bronse still couldn‟t figure out how it had happened. They‟d been silent and—wearing black—all but invisible. The Nomaad patrol had jumped them from behind, six to two, and the indigenous life-form‟s guards had been very skilled in hand-to-hand fighting.

Still, nothing compared to ETF training. Especially when it came to hand-to-hand fighting. Bronse and the kid had moved like lightning to eliminate their threat, working silently so as not to alert any other patrols. Trick hadn‟t even cried out when he‟d been pig-stuck by a wicked Nomaadic knife with a dual edge and hooks in the hilt meant to either hold the knife in, or rip flesh violently away if the wielder recalled the blade. Trick had done the smart thing, bracing a hand to hold the knife in place as he cut off the Nomaad‟s hand at the wrist. No small feat that, Bronse knew.

Though he rarely made a sound to reflect it, Trick still had the six-inch blade stuck deep in his gut, the hilt of which Bronse could see if he glanced past his arm on the left -hand side.

Removing the blade would guarantee Trick‟s death. Moving Trick, every step and every slide in the sand, jiggled sharpened metal against the fragile pink tissue inside the young soldier‟s belly.

But Bronse had no choice. The area had been too hot for a pickup with the light transport ship they‟d brought for the recon. Plus, covert reconnaissance produced little advantage if you announced you‟d been there with the screaming engines of a flight ship.

With luck, a sand hurricane would hit within a couple of hours and the patrol that had jumped them would be considered lost to it. There certainly wouldn‟t be any traces of bodies or blood. Bronse had already seen to that. In and out like ghosts—that was how ETF preferred to do their work. It was such a habit for Bronse to cover his own tracks that he could cook a four-course meal in a stranger‟s house and leave them none the wiser for it by the time he‟d finished. His ex-wife, Liely, claimed he‟d done the same thing to their marriage. She‟d insisted that, for the two years they had been wed, she had hardly known he was there.

He‟d never understood why she‟d been so surprised by that. What had she expected it to be like? He‟d been ETF born and bred—ate it, breathed it, practically made love to it—and she‟d always told him that this was a major turn-on for her.
She
had sought
him
out, not the other way around. Having a relationship had been nowhere on Bronse‟s radar. He‟d learned years ago that the Extreme Tactics Force and long-term liaisons did not mix. But Liely had come on strong, oozing attractive enticement, hero worship, and a hell-acre of wild and adventurous sex. It wasn‟t often that a soldier argued with that kind of easy fortune. She‟d been smart, witty, and sizzling hot, seemingly with a good head on her about what it meant to hang around with a First Active soldier who shipped off in a heartbeat when called. With the volatile politics and disturbances of three planets to manage, that tended to be fairly often. Hell, she‟d waved him off and hugged him hello every time without a single complaint, and after a while he believed that he‟d found the rare fortune of a woman worth asking to marry. She‟d said yes before he‟d even finished popping the question.

And that was when everything changed. Or nothing changed, according to his discontented wife. Liely had bitched and moaned nonstop about his “inaccessibility” and how lonely she was all the time. Why wasn‟t he home more often? He had a family now, so why didn‟t he change—work a desk, get promoted so he‟d make more money. Her logic was lost on him when she told him she‟d expected it to be “different” once they were married. He‟d been dumbfounded. He‟d never once intimated that he saw himself changing for any reason. Still, Liely thought he should make concessions to coddle a whining wife—just because.

Grounds for a segregation? Yeah, inevitably it had been. Like every other fight, he‟d done it quickly and quietly, putting an end to his mistake as soon as he legally could.

Bronse wasn‟t introspective at heart. He had a very basic makeup and that never required much self-discovery. However, he moved better when he kept his mind occupied with a lot of things at once. He kept his attention on the terrain, checked the sandline, and kept an ear out for any agony on Trick‟s part, but the rest of him did whatever it took to make travel through the awful conditions fly by faster.

The transport was waiting another mile and a half away now, the closest they could get and stay undercover. Justice and Lasher had wanted to trek out to meet him, but he didn‟t want them in the sand so close to a hurricane event. Bronse‟s equipment had read the storm forming an hour ago. By now it was fast approaching, and he‟d soon see it on the sandline. He wouldn‟t risk them as well as himself and Trick. He knew that his decision had burned them, knew they were furious with him, but they‟d obeyed and would continue to obey unless he said otherwise.

It rubbed them the wrong way, though—this group who lived by the motto no fear/no fail/no fatality—to be coddled by their commanding officer like a father protecting his children.

Bronse looked over to the distant sandline. The sky was becoming obscured with swirling black and violet clouds, and ground lightning was illuminating the funnels and downdrafts of the approaching hurricane.

“Hey, Boss,” Trick spoke up in a rasp of repressed pain, “not that I‟m complaining, but I hope I won‟t be washing sand out of every crack and crevice for the next few weeks.”

“Can you think of a better way to encourage you to take a bath once in a while?” Bronse retorted breathlessly as he tried to pick up his pace and keep jostling to a minimum. “Gonna need a sand hurricane to scour the stink off you, boy.”

“That‟s just—” Trick broke off his riposte to grit a low sound of agony through his throat. “Arrrhh!”

“Hang on, kid. Last leg. And I‟ll beat the storm with at least a minute to spare.”

Trick‟s forehead fell limply against the back of Bronse‟s neck. The pain had to be horrible, Bronse knew, even though Trick had barely made a sound. The pain was communicated in the feel of the boy‟s skin—both clammy and hot—and in the slackening of Trick‟s strength and grip. He was losing consciousness, and Bronse wasn‟t sure that it wouldn‟t be the kinder thing, as long as the kid didn‟t slip off his back. Bronse leaned into his trek, keeping Trick pitched forward against his spine and balancing him even more as he went limper, finally falling unconscious.

Deadweight.

Trick was out, and Bronse could feel it in every ounce of the body on his back. He had always been fascinated by why that made a difference. It was a balance and weight distribution factor, he knew logically. The person wasn‟t awake to best center himself on the person who carried him. Still, it was remarkable how consciousness, or lack thereof, made such a difference in the feel of their weight.

Bronse realized he was grasping for thoughts. Practically babbling in his own mind, really. But he had to do something to make himself move faster, maintaining burden and strength, beating out the storm, and not second-guessing himself about why he wouldn‟t have the rest of the team come out to meet them.

“That was cutting it close!”

Justice made the declaration seconds before she yanked and banked the transport away from the approach of the storm. She pitched up toward the higher atmosphere of Ebbany, the gravity decks working hard to compensate so the team didn‟t end up spilled across the flooring.

But it wasn‟t Justice that Bronse was worried about. All of his concern was aft, in medbay, with Trick and the medic. But because he needed to hear his team‟s report, he had to fulfill command first and let the others get back to him as to Trick‟s progress.

“I sure hope we don‟t have to find another nav/com officer,” Justice quipped over her shoulder. “They come and go so fast around here; I‟m getting tired of wiping the butt streaks off this chair.” She nodded to the empty chair behind her and to her right.

“That isn‟t funny, Captain,” Bronse said sternly, looking up from his VidPad, where he was recording his portion of the report before transmission.

“You‟re right, sir. I‟m sorry, sir,” she agreed quickly.

Captain Justice Mulettere was looking straight ahead, piloting them out of the atmosphere and into the starred darkness of space, but she was also glancing in her backview disc. She kept the little shiny disc clipped to her console so she could see the activity behind her. Not having to turn around to see what her crewmates were up to made for better piloting. The ship‟s designers could have set the pilot‟s chair farther back, she supposed, but she preferred models like the transport which let her feel the nose of the craft around her rather than the pilot‟s chair being muffled in its mid-section.

So she could clearly see Commander Chapel‟s reflection in her shiny disc as he sat sprawled in the command chair behind her. He hadn‟t even paused to breathe after dropping Trick on the medbay table and ordering her to get the transport out of there. The commander had come forward, sat down still drenched in sweat and blood and caked black sand, and gone right to his report. The trek had been brutal on him, and she could see the tremors in his overexerted muscles, even via the disc. She wasn‟t one to second-guess her commanding officer, but she hadn‟t understood why he wouldn‟t let them meet up with him so they could help bring Trick in.

Was Bronse protecting them? They were ETF, for Great Being‟s sake. They were
supposed
to stick their necks out. But she‟d known her superior officer for a while now, and she suspected that Bronse had been a little wrecked up about letting the new kid get tanked. The commander got very strict after one of them got hurt. His personal motto, they had learned, was no fear/no fail/no fatality, and no fuckups.

Justice sighed. The episode with Trick meant they‟d be running rigorous drills and extreme training again during their next downtime. Not that she minded, because a girl had to do something to keep her figure, but she did wish that Bronse would parallel that way of thinking with other things sometimes. Like snapping a bootlace would mean a day of intensive shoe shopping. She chuckled noiselessly to herself, trying to picture the hulking men she was teamed with sitting in a shoe emporium, eating canapés and sipping Lathe wine, while salers slid the latest in fashionable shoes onto their feet, one after another. Actually, Lasher was a mighty fine fashion plate when he was out of uniform, Justice mused. He would probably get a kick out of a day of shoe shopping.

But Commander Chapel was plainly not in a mood to appreciate her humorous ideas on these matters, so she kept them to herself. Perhaps she would share them later with Lasher. And Trick would get a kick out of them for sure.

Justice frowned, hoping that Trick would be all right. She had faith in their medic; he could hold the kid over until they returned to Ulrike. The best medical care in the tri-planet system was on their base planet. Once they got the kid there, he would be good as new.

Of the three worlds, Ulrike was the most advanced and civilized in many ways besides medical care. The ETF was based there, as was IM headquarters. Although the planet was half land and half water, most of the landmass was settled and there were few uninhabited areas.

Not like Ebbany, the planet they had just left. Ebbany was mostly landmass, with little in the way of water and oceans. That made for a high percentage of deserts covering the face of the planet. However, the Ebbanites had managed to eke out an impressive civilization along the edges of the waters. Yet the bane of the peace seekers were the barbarians of the wilderness areas and the Nomaad populations wandering the desert highlands and the lowlands of belowground caverns that stretched for hundreds of miles in all directions. The endless squabbles and arming for war, especially in the Grinpar Desert, had begun to make Justice feel like she would be wearing black camouflage for the rest of her life.

If Ulrike and Ebbany were polar opposites in civilization, however, Tari had to be the middle ground. Living there was rough, whether you chose jungle or desert, city or country, or life on the many colony platforms sharing the planetary orbits and sight line between Tari and its forested moon of Adia. The platforms were situated in a line from Tari to Adia like metallic stepping-stones, each one housing tens of thousands of citizens. They had the best advantages and technologies that life had to offer, their supplies often coming straight from Ulrike, where they got first dibs on imports before they even filtered down to the planet itself.

The trouble with Tari was that each colony was a faction unto itself, and they were always squabbling over trading rights or imagined slights from another colony. Feuding was frequent, and policing the colonies was difficult because it was hard to blend in on a floating piece of metal where everyone lived in close quarters and was wary of strangers. Planetside wasn‟t much better. Trading rights were a bone of contention there too. Traders figured, why spend time flying all the way to the planet surface when they could simply go to the nearest platform colony. This meant that by the time goods filtered down the line to the planet, the prices were exorbitant. Only half the planet was settled; the other half was a wild frontier that drew adventurers, troublemakers, and a serious criminal element.