Greenshift (7 page)

He tore the disc out and flung at
its owner, piercing the guy between the eyes and dropping him onto his knees
then the dock. David spun around, the shield more difficult to maneuver as dead
weight. It may not have been as advantageous as donning his Srmdana armor, but
David gave up that nice piece of equipment when he left the
Protector
.
He braced for a third volley.

Two more men rushed him.

Did you learn nothing from
this guy?

David dropped the body, snatched
up a wrench, and met both charging men head on. They hesitated in their attack,
probably from seeing a man two heads taller and fifty kilos heavier than them
brandishing a wrench singlehandedly that they could barely wield with both
hands.

There was no hesitation on
David’s part as he smashed his makeshift club into the first unlucky bastard’s
rib cage, and as the dock worker doubled over, David followed through with a
blow down across his back, laying him out face first on the concrete.

“Shit.” The blonde man’s
expletive drew David’s attention to the cender he now gripped in a shaky hand.

Spinning behind his second
attacker, David pulled him in tight against his body, using the wrench to choke
him. He was smaller than the last shield, the top of his head barely reaching
David’s sternum, but he’d have to do.

The gunner released an electric
bolt before aiming. The shot sliced just above David’s head.

“Don’t shoot. You’re going
to hit me.” The other man’s voice grated in the chokehold.

The blonde man fired three more
times into the sky behind them. David didn’t flinch. He’d stared down cender
fire, rifle fire and cannon fire. An aging dock worker with a cender ranked
just above rude waiters on the list of things that scared him.

The gunner turned as Killian and
Ward closed in on unhurried steps. “You said there wouldn’t be any
voyeurs.”

Ward fired his cender, a barely
discernible hazy blue wake dropping the blonde dock worker to his knees. The
man’s weapon clattered to the concrete before he pitched forward onto his face.

From this distance David couldn’t
tell if Ward had dialed down his gun, rendering the man unconscious, or dialed
it up for the kill. Still he smelled the ozone and burnt flesh all the way over
here, and the hair on his arms was still standing from the surge of static
electricity released into the night air.

David kept tight hold of the man
squirming in his grasp, just in case Ward was still in the mood to shoot.

He aimed his cender at David, no
doubt thinking it over. Killian sauntered up to him and said, “I guess we
should call in a med team and a prison transport. Why don’t you take that guy
off the retired captain’s hands?”

Ward lowered his weapon, but it
took him a good ten seconds before he finally holstered it, and only then
because the errant voyeur the blonde man had seen floated closer to the scene.

The Media, ruining lives or
spreading justice for entertainment.
For once he was glad of society’s obsession
with transparency.

David pushed the dock worker in
Ward’s direction, making sure his hands would be full as David walked away.

He crunched over pieces of his
wrist reporter that were now spewed across the concrete. At least they weren’t bits
of his skull. The dock workers, if they even worked here, could have caused him
more bodily harm if they had had the foresight to catch him unawares. Or maybe
they thought they had.

David looked back to watch
Killian and Ward making arrests and calling in clean up and med crews as the
voyeur recorded their every move. They’d come off as heroes, maybe get a bonus
from the Embassy.

Killian called out to him. “We’re
going to need a statement from you later. Have a good evening.”

A sick little thought entered
David’s head—if that stray voyeur hadn’t happened by and witnessed at least
part of the incident, Killian would be rounding David up, too, either for
prison or the morgue. That had probably been the plan. Still might be.

“That was amazing,”
Mari said, peeking down from the top of the gangway. Her heart raced. “Smashing
those guys’ heads together. Throwing that one guy around like he was a
doll.” Then her praise turned to concern when David stepped into the
light.

“Are you okay? You’re
bleeding.”

“I’m fine.” He pushed
the manual control to raise the gangway.

“What happened to your
reporter?” she asked.

“What happened to you
locking yourself safely inside?”

She ignored his parental tone.
“You may have needed help.” She wiped blood from David’s lip with her
thumb and examined the nasty gash on his arm. “Come to the med suite. I’ll
patch this up for you.”

“Out of curiosity…” As
they walked, he put his uninjured arm around her in a protective gesture, still
unsettled that she had been in harm’s way. “What would you have
done?”

“When?”

“If I had needed help?”

She searched his expression to
see if he was making fun of her, but found his face full of earnestness.

“I would have called for
someone to come… and help.” She giggled a little as she said it, realizing
how absurd it sounded out loud.

“Yeah, you could see those
contractors were ready to jump right in,” he said.

Mari could smell the tell-tale
hint of antiseptic in the air before she activated the lights in the med suite.
The soft blue of the floor and ceiling cut down on the glare.

“You didn’t need them.”
She willed away the little tremble in her voice and her shoulders. Maybe David
would think it was the cold instead of the incident just now, but he was
smarter than that.

He squeezed her closer and kissed
the top of her head as they strolled past the green glass cabinets to the
surgery.

“You’ll have to sit down so
I can reach you,” she said.

David sat in one of the floating
chairs, which didn’t really float, only looked like it because they were
attached to the wall by a support on their backs.

“Do you get into a lot of
fights, like Sean?” she asked, searching the cabinet shelves for
disinfectant and mender patches.

“I haven’t been in a brawl since
last year, and even then it wasn’t my idea,” David said. “Fighting is
more my brother Ben’s style.”

“Which brother is Ben?”
Mari asked.

“The one who bugs the shit
out of me.”

“Thought so.” Mari
placed all the medical items she needed on the counter beside David, but kept a
pair of scissors in her hand. “Maybe I’ll get to meet him one day. Like
when you take me to see the forests at your family’s estate.” She hoped
the reminder of this evening’s earlier conversation about the beautiful
mountains on Yurai would push away the ugliness of the recent violence.

“That would be nice.”
The way David responded sounded like he had already considered taking her.

She forced herself not to read
too much into it and focused on sewing him up. “I’m going to have to cut
off your sleeve.”

“I think the shirt is pretty
much a loss anyway.”

“Well, you looked really
nice in it,” she said.

He gave her a little smile for
the compliment.

“Did you have to do this for
the miners often? Perform little surgeries?” he asked.

“Sometimes more than
little
ones.” She didn’t like to think about those days of tending to sick miners
who barely had anything to live for anyway. They were often worse off than many
of the Lowers here at the Hub, little more than indentured servants, paid by
the ton. Just work, then home for a few days, then work again. Some even
smuggled in their sons to get a bigger load out quicker—for what? A few extra
items from the only store around, owned by the mining corporation? She shuddered,
thinking that would have been her life…still could be.

“I was enamoured to a miner,
or rather my family arranged the betrothal,” she said, needing to share
this information with David because her memories snapped at her in agitation.
“I never accepted his proposal, and I’m not sure my family really forgave
me for embarrassing them like that.”

David remained silent so she kept
talking.

“I couldn’t do it. It felt
so suffocating there, and not just because the air quality is so bad.”
Mari’s voice became low. David ran his palm up and down her back.

“My sisters are only a
couple of years older than me and already have several amours. I was a late
start. I mean,” she said quickly, hoping he didn’t pick up on the real implication
of her words, “I just didn’t want to get married.”

“Well, you are still a
teenager,” David said.

She shrugged out of his touch and
put her fists on her hips, a mender in one hand and disinfectant solution in
the other. “My age has nothing to do with it. I didn’t want to marry
that
guy. Or any of the other ones I would have ended up with had I stayed on
Deleine. They were nice, hard-working guys, but they were complacent, happy to
spend the rest of their lives at jobs they hated.”

“I’m proud of you for
leaving, for following a different path than was laid out for you. That took
courage.”

“Thank you.” The
earnestness of his expression took Mari’s breath away. She looked away quickly,
afraid he would be able to read her emotions. She had never had this kind of
reaction to any man. Maybe because David was
so much
of a man. Strong,
mature, commanding, smart, confident, good-looking—she could list his
attributes the rest of the night, but he needed her to sew him up right now.

“I should put a couple of
sutures in here before I put the menders on. The cut’s deeper than I thought.
Does this hurt? I can give you a stim patch.” She swabbed the disinfectant
over the area again, trying to be professional but unable to ignore the delight
of touching David so intimately, of feeling like she was taking care of him.
Most of her life someone had taken care of her, she was happy to be the
responsible one for a change.

“It’s fine. Just another
battle scar.”

“Oh, I’ll make sure it
doesn’t scar.” Then she asked, “Do you have real scars on your
body?” Mari assumed the military had the most advanced healing and
reconstructive technology in the system. Even her miners could walk away
without many visible souvenirs of their wounds.

“I kept a few as reminders,”
David said.

“Really?” Mari suddenly
felt a little too warm next to David in the med suite. “Can I…see
them?”

“They’re not all that
exciting,” he said, but showed her a halfmoon scar near the crook of his
elbow. It was only a couple of centimeters long, but she was surprised she had
never noticed it before.

“What did you do?” she
asked.

“Ben did it. Took a chunk
out of me with his teeth when he was four. I didn’t tell anyone about it, just
let it heal on its own, then kind of forgot about it after a while.”

“You didn’t want to get Ben
in trouble?” Mari asked.

“No.” David broke into
one of his little smiles which always lit up his smoky eyes. “I didn’t
want to have to explain to our father how a four-year-old got the drop on his
eleven-year-old brother. Now, I keep it to remind Ben what a pain in my ass he
has always been.”

“Is Ben your favorite
brother?”

“Just the one who would
never leave me alone.”

Mari could tell David was joking.
Family was so important to him, and despite the fact that she felt as though
she had abandoned her own to chase her dreams through the stars, family was
very important to her, too.

“Did Ben give you all your scars?”
she asked.

“Not this one.” David
lifted his shirt to reveal a raised patch of flesh that left a dark zigzag starting
only a few centimeters above his waistband and disappearing somewhere below it.
Without thinking, Mari rubbed a thumb over the scar. A surge of arousal shot
through her and settled right between her legs.

“What is this from?”
Her words came out on a light breath as her pulse raced.

“A retractable electric whip,
if you can believe it. They’re actually illegal and extremely difficult to
control, but the contractors we were engaging were rogues, so didn’t care much
about formal Embassy rules. If we hadn’t been ambushed, and I would have
insisted the team wear their armor, the whip would have never touched my skin,
instead it sizzled right through my fatigues and gave me a good zap and third
degree burns. This one I kept to remember that Armadans are fitted with
personal armor for a reason. So they can wear it.”

“Uh huh,” Mari said, only
hearing half of what David had just said. She wanted more than anything to
touch that scar again, and this time trace it all the way to its end. “How
far down does it go?”

She felt her cheeks instantly
flush, but curiosity had gotten the best of her.

“The scar? A couple more
centimeters.” He sounded amused.

“Oh,” she busied
herself applying the menders and acted as though she meant that as a clinical
question. Then to push the point home, she made her voice as impersonal as
possible and asked, “Would you like a stim patch for the pain?” Then
remembered she had already asked him this question.

“I think I’ll be fine
without one.”

He never flinched as the suture
needle pierced his skin. She would have had to have a double dose of stims.

“Okay, it’s all finished.
Keep the mender on for a day. The two stitches will dissolve on their own. I’ll
check the cut again later.” She couldn’t wait.

“Thanks for fixing me
up.” He took her hand and brought it to his lips.

Mari wanted to faint, and it must
have shown on her face because David suddenly became very serious and asked,
“Are you okay?”

They looked at each other for a
moment. Mari broke the silence. “Do you want a drink?”