Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The coffee was perfect this morning. Strong and dark, with none of the bitterness he’d resigned himself to drinking every morning since they’d bought the True.
Tix had fixed the food dispensers almost immediately.
She’d taken one sip of her tea their first morning, hissed in horror, and declared the contents of her mug to be a crime against nature.
She’d put things right with the dispensers and then moved on to repair or improve everything on the Live True, including his and Xaber’s lives. Thirteen days of laughter, sex, and a deep sense of contentment that soothed his soul in ways he didn’t know were possible.
Thirteen days with Tix had changed everything.
The repairs were well underway. Some of the parts they needed had taken time to arrive, but that hadn’t slowed Tix down. When she couldn’t finish one job, she’d pivot to something else.
The trove of replacement parts they hadn’t known about had proved invaluable. She’d taken the items out and shown him and Xaber what they were and where they could be used. Then she’d taught them how to do basic maintenance on vital systems like life-support and the water recycler.
For the first time, he felt as though he understood the ship they called home.
Some of the heavier work had required more than one mechanic.
For those jobs, she’d asked some of her workmates on the docking ring to help out after hours.
She’d cleared it with Grotta first, of course.
They’d managed to pay them with a combination of scrip, barter, and in some cases, a meal and a beer at Flek’s.
Not everything had gone perfectly. There were issues they had to work through.
He and Xaber had spent a lifetime in each other’s company.
They knew each other’s moods and habits and could read more in a single expression than a paragraph of words could explain.
Tix was a breath of fresh air, but her presence changed everything.
They had to work at communication, make changes to their daily routines, and learn how to fit her into their lives and not just their bed.
Tix slept with them, but she’d ended up claiming one of the cabins for herself, too.
It gave her a place to store her things and to be on her own when she needed time to herself.
Every day had brought new challenges and minor frustrations.
He loved every second of it because he was finally fulfilling the promise he’d made to Star so long ago.
This was his life, defined by his rules and actions.
Tix had helped him find his way, and he hoped she’d be around to keep him on the path going forward.
He took another swig of coffee as Tix gestured at him with her mug of tea from the other side of the table. “You still owe me a story.”
He blinked at her, his mind not yet awake enough to make the connection to whatever she was talking about. “I do?”
“Uh-huh. You promised to tell me the story about how you got your scars.” She grinned at him. “Then we got distracted.”
Xaber chortled. “Is that what we’re calling it now? I don’t remember anyone being distracted last night. In fact, I recall a certain mechanic being very focused on something…what was it?” He snapped his fingers. “Right. You demanded orgasms. Which we delivered.”
She spluttered into her mug. “I did not demand anything. You generously provided me with them. And the way I remember it, you had your fair share of them, too.”
Mace leaned forward and growled—not because he was annoyed but because he now knew what it did to her. “I have no regrets.”
Xaber nodded. “No regrets. Only orgasms. Do you think we should make that our new motto? We could put it on a plaque by the main hatch.”
She shot them a look of wide-eyed panic. “Don’t you dare.”
“Oh, she’s daring us now.” Xaber waggled his finger at their female playfully. “You know what happens when you do that.”
“I’ll make some inquiries,” Mace stated as if it were the most reasonable idea in the galaxy. “Something like that should be easy to make.”
“If you do, I’ll put the food dispenser back the way it was. Chile powder and curry on everything, including dessert.”
Mace grinned. “Turns out, I like my dessert spicy. And you are my favorite dessert, little temptress.”
She hid behind her mug, but he could still see the way her skin temperature rose and her pulse accelerated.
“You’re both lunatics,” Tix declared.
Xaber leaned back in his chair, as relaxed and at ease as he’d ever seen his brother. “You’re the one who picked our bedroom, mechanic. If we’re lunatics, what does that make you?”
“Lucky,” she answered without hesitation. “I’m the luckiest woman in the galaxy because I wake up every morning between the two of you.”
“I feel the same way about you.” The words left his mouth before he could think about them. “Accidentally blocking your escape that night was the best mistake I ever made.”
He set down the mug. “Which seems like a good introduction to the story of the day I made the worst mistake of my life.”
Tix made a soft sound in the back of her throat before speaking. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I want to. I’ve relived it so many times in my head, maybe it will help if I actually say the words out loud.” He didn’t know if anything would ease the pain that always came when he thought about that day. If anyone could help, though, it would be Tix.
“This wasn’t long before the Resource Wars ended. There weren’t many of us left. Just me, Xaber, Star, and Morning. Usually they kept us together, but for some fraxxing reason, our corporate overseer decided to split everyone up. Not just us, but all the other units. It was a mess.”
“Stupid bastard,” Xaber said.
“You were separated, but you still had contact with your batch-sisters?” Tix tapped her temple. “With your link?”
“No. Comms were jammed. We got sporadic messages but nothing more. They messed with our communication. We messed with theirs. It was chaos,” Mace said.
“As a bonus, it was colder than the void, overcast, gray, and the rain was mixed with snow to make a sort of frozen drizzle. Oh, and there were trees. Lots of trees. We couldn’t see anything,” Xaber added.
“Yeah.” Mace shivered at the memory. It wasn’t the coldest place they’d been, but it was the most miserable.
“Anyway. Xay and I were sent to an enemy encampment on the far side of the valley where the fighting was happening. They wanted pretty boy to sneak inside and find out whatever he could about their plans. Morn and Star stayed back at the base.”
“What happened while Xaber was inside?” Tix asked.
“He got some information that changed everything. Our side thought we had a few days before anything major kicked off. Our intel was wrong. The enemy intended to take out the entire camp. Rules of engagement be damned.”
Tix winced and reached across the table. Mace placed his hand in hers. It helped a little.
“I managed to get a message to Mace through our link. I couldn’t get one to command, though. There was too much interference,” Xaber said softly.
Mace heard the guilt in batch-brother’s voice. Until now, he hadn’t understood. Xaber blamed himself for what happened. Why? He didn’t know. His brother had succeeded in his part of the mission. Mace was the one who failed.
“Xaber told me to leave him and get back to camp so I could warn the others. I didn’t want to do it, but there was no other way.” He looked at Xaber. “If you’d been with me, things might have turned out differently.”
Xaber shook his head. “If you’d waited for me, we wouldn’t have made it back in time. I screwed up and tipped off security when I was poking around in their systems. I had to play hide-and-seek instead of making a clean exit.”
“How long did it take you to get back to camp?” Tix asked. She had a strange look on her face, as if she were trying to work through a puzzle but didn’t have all the pieces yet.
“I didn’t. It should have taken me fifteen or sixteen minutes at a flat-out run.
We had maybe twenty minutes left before the attack started.
It would have been enough time. Except I was going too fast to see that the trail was trapped.
I still don’t know exactly what happened.
I triggered something. A wire or a pressure switch.
The explosive was something we call a shredder.
Directed explosion that throws a lot of shrapnel into the air. ”
He pointed to his ruined face and then to his neck and chest. “It was too much damage for my medi-bots to handle quickly. That’s why the scars are so bad.”
“When I found him, he was still unconscious and had lost a lot of blood. I cleaned up what I could and waited for the nanotech to fix the rest.” Xaber scrubbed a hand over his face before adding, “By then, he was the only family I had left. I was not going to lose him, too.”
“They attacked the camp.” It wasn’t a question, but he answered it anyway.
“They did. Xaber saw it happen.”
“Everyone did. Even the ones in orbit. It was like a beam of white fire streaked down from the heavens and burned away part of the planet,” Xaber said.
“They took out your camp with a plasma cannon in orbit? I thought that was against the rules? Isn’t that a war crime?”
“Not when the target was a cyborg encampment. You can’t use weapons like that against a sentient race, but back then, we were still classified as equipment.
The handful of human techs and leaders that were killed weren’t enough to merit more than some fines and a strongly worded warning,” Xaber said.
Tix nodded thoughtfully but didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then, she let her gaze lock with his. “Mace. I have a question.”
“Ask it.”
“Why do you blame yourself for what happened?” Then she turned to look at Xaber. “Xaber, same question.”
“What do you mean, why? If I hadn’t gotten injured, I could have made it back in time to warn them.”
“And if I hadn’t accidentally tripped the alarms inside the camp, we both could have made it back,” Xaber stated.