Kieran (Tales of the Shareem)
Chapter One
By the time Kieran dodged his fourth set of patrollers, he started to get pissed off.
Sure, send Kieran down to the dockyards. If the patrollers catch me, all I have to do is pretend I have no idea I’m in a restricted area, and they’ll just cart me home.
The problem was that Rees, who’d decided Kieran should go, was likely right.
Kieran was a giant of a man, and very strong. People were terrified of him at first, and even his Shareem friends jumped when they saw Kieran step into a dark room, before they realized who it was.
Good for being their bodyguard,
Kieran thought irritably.
Or helping them move.
He ducked into the shadows under a colossal K-class freighter as three women patrollers in sand-colored coveralls, carrying stun rifles, went by in their long-legged stride.
A fierce whisper came out of the darkness near Kieran’s feet. “Hey!” It was a woman’s voice, the words dry and cracked. “Find your own hiding place. No way they’re not going to see
you.
”
Kieran looked down—a long way down—at a woman dressed in a dirty coverall crouched next to a support strut. She was a young woman, which was about all Kieran could tell beneath the grime that covered her. Spaceport filth, Bor Nargan dust, soot from exhaust ports, and things Kieran didn’t want to know about caked her face, hair, and coveralls. From all this dirt, light gray-green eyes stared up at him with a glare attempting to mask absolute terror.
The patrollers stopped next to the freighter, and Kieran jammed a finger to his lips. He hunkered down next to her in the shadows, and wisely, the young woman shut up.
She stank like she’d been crawling through waste ducts, and her matted hair bore a sheen of slime. Only her eyes were clear, the sparkling gray of them broadcasting that she wasn’t from around here, in spite of the perfect Bor Nargan that had come from her lips.
“Thought I saw a Shareem in here,” one of the patrollers said.
Kieran eyed the backs of the patroller’s legs in her coveralls, along with the blunt end of her sidearm.
A second patroller laughed in derision. “You wish. Bet you’d let him go if he gave you a freebie.”
The first patroller snorted. “Like I’d let one of
them
touch me.”
“Huh,” the second one said. “You’d do anything for a look at a Shareem cock.”
“No way.” Patroller One sounded offended. “See what happened to Deanna? On her way to a great career as a patroller, a Shareem smiles at her, and
boom
. She’s gone.”
“I haven’t heard her complaining,” the second patroller said. “Let’s find him. Maybe he’ll do all three of us.”
“Oh, for the gods’ sakes,” the third one spoke up. “Someone needs to hose you both down. You didn’t see a Shareem. They’re not stupid enough to come in here. Even if they’re walking gonads and nothing else, they at least know the rules.”
Kieran wanted to laugh at her description of Shareem, which was exactly the kind of thing Shareem strove to portray. A glance at the woman hiding with him showed she didn’t think it was funny—she was tense, watching, seriously scared. Her fear came to Kieran in waves, and he wanted to reach down and soothe her. That was what he was programmed for, after all.
The second one snorted. “Better luck next time, eh?”
“Would you two shut up?” the first one demanded. “I told you. Not interested.”
“Right,” said patroller number two, and the three of them finally moved off.
About time. As soon as Kieran judged that they were out of earshot, he leaned down and whispered to the woman, “I know why
I’m
hiding from them, sweetheart. Why are
you
?”
*** *** ***
Felice stared up at the huge man, her thoughts and fears churning rapidly. He hadn’t betrayed her to the patrollers, but did that mean he was on the run too? Had she come out of the frying pan, as her trainer had liked to say, into the fire?
And what was a
Shareem
? Him? Or some other alien of Bor Narga? She could understand why one of the patrollers mentioned sex in the same breath with him, because he was an amazing specimen of human male.
The man had dark hair, nearly black, stood well over six feet in a body that was tightly muscled, and had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. Felice knew from her research about Bor Narga that the natives’ eyes were almost always brown—blue,
this
blue, was unheard of. His eyes nearly glowed, and the irises were unusually large.
He also bared a lot of skin, strange on a desert world. The few men Felice had seen since she’d slipped off TGH Corp’s freighter kept themselves covered from head to foot, usually in gray coveralls. This man wore a short tunic that hugged his torso and left his legs and hard-muscled arms bare. His left arm bore a black chain that moved as he did.
Had he kept quiet to help Felice, or to put her square in his power? Damn, it was hard to know if she could trust him. Her policy, in the last four or so years, had been to trust nobody.
“Well?” the man asked. He’d softened his tone, but it carried a deep note, one that warned a bellow from him would rock the girders of the massive dockyards. “You didn’t answer me, sweet.”
His voice, even with the rumbling growl, was a caress, the
sweet
reaching out to stroke her. Felice Henderson had gone a long time without a touch, always looking over her shoulder, tensing at the slightest noise. “What about you?” she asked. Her own voice sounded strange and harsh—it had been so long since she’d carried on a conversation. “Why are you ducking the patrollers? And what’s a Shareem?”
“A Shareem is me,” the man said without inflection. No boasting or shame, just a statement. “I’ll get arrested if I’m found down here. Best you go and not get caught with me.”
A fellow fugitive then. Felice took a chance. “I need somewhere to stay. Cheap.”
Free
, actually. She had no money, but maybe she could clean rooms or something for her board. One thing Felice was familiar with was work. But she’d figure that out whenever she found a place.
Without a word, the man gave her a nod, motioned for her to follow him, and then stepped swiftly and quietly out from under the ship. For such a big man, he could
move
. Felice unfolded herself stiffly to her feet, stumbling a little as she hurried after him.
The man skirted empty cargo crates, heading in the opposite direction the patrollers had taken. Felice panted as she tried to catch up to him. He was seriously athletic, and Felice was exhausted from the long flight and working her ass off twenty hours a day for the past four years. Before that, she could have easily kept up with him, admired him, maybe thought about him the way those patrollers had. But that had been her old life, before the joy had been taken from it.
The man noticed her slowness, and stopped to wait for her. When Felice reached him, he wrapped his fingers around hers. “Come on,” he said softly.
As soon as he took her hand, a strange thing happened. Felice felt suddenly safe, as though everything would be all right. No more running. No more hiding. False safety, she knew. But the strength of this man, her partner in flight, came to her through his hand, and she clung to the feeling.
He led her through a maze of crates, ships, and dock equipment, this part of the dockyards so densely packed that the sunlight coming through the open roof didn’t reach the ground. They walked in half-gloom that should have been cool but wasn’t. The air was as dry as the dust around them, and Felice fought the urge to cough.
From what she’d read in her research, it was some kind of festival day on Bor Narga, which was why Felice had picked today to make her escape. So many had gone to the festival area that the docks were deserted. Nearly. The man leading her skillfully avoided all other human beings and even robotic loaders, seeming to know where he was going. Felice was already lost. Even if she’d wanted to rush back to TGH Corp’s freighter and her life of hard labor, she wouldn’t have any clue how.
They reached a narrow opening between towering crates that were at least twenty feet high. Here, the big man stopped so suddenly that Felice ran into him. As she bounced off the solid wall of male flesh, he seized her by the shoulders, pulling her into a thin space between the tall containers. Hot air blew around her feet.
The man lifted her into his arms before she could gasp a question. She had one moment to feel the hardness of his body, then he set Felice down on her hands and knees facing a crawl space that was way too small for him to consider squeezing through.
“Get out there.” He gave her a firm push, his hand warm on her backside. At the other end of the short tunnel, bright sunshine beckoned—a street outside the dockyards. “Run four blocks straight ahead, and wait for me at the corner between the market streets. All right?”
Felice gave him a nod, too stunned to argue. For a second, the hand on her ass lingered with a light caress, then he shoved her into the hole.
Felice tried to ignore the wild feeling that flooded her at his touch, the regret that she hadn’t met him at some bar back home, years ago. She could have smiled at him, and he would have smiled back, and maybe she’d have worked off some of her fighting adrenaline with him.
But that was the old days, when she’d been free to flirt and laugh, when every day had brought excitement and challenge. Now, she could only turn her back on him and take her next step on the journey to freedom.
Felice crawled over broken rubble and looked out into a street that was narrow and empty, dusty and hot. So different from home, where she’d lived on a wide avenue lined with green trees, in innocent happiness without realizing how fragile happiness was.
She took a breath. No time to be maudlin. Felice had to survive first. She glanced back into the dockyards, but the man had gone. He’d moved off in uncanny silence, leaving Felice alone. She let out a breath, turned away, and slid out through the opening.
A few feet down the street, a metal canopy arched overhead from the low-roofed buildings, offering some shade from the sun. A derelict man, who couldn’t be Bor Nargan, because they didn’t have derelicts, sprawled just inside the shade, snoring, his sun-blocking robes in a pile next to him.
Those robes would conceal her perfectly from passing patrollers or stray crew members from her freighter. Felice crept quietly past the man, lifting the robes in one smooth movement. She disappeared around the next corner as she pulled the concealing robes over her head.
*** *** ***
“Shareem.”
The patroller’s voice was triumphant. “I knew it.”
Kieran stopped and turned at the footsteps he’d heard behind him. There was nowhere to go in the narrow aisle, cargo containers hemming him in. He wouldn’t have been caught if he hadn’t helped the woman get away, but oh well. Rees also wouldn’t get his intel if they cuffed Kieran and led him away, but, again, oh well.
He did his best to appear confused. “Knew what?”
“That you were in here,” the patroller said, her tone turning to impatience.
The patroller was alone now—her voice put her as Patroller One, who’d sworn she’d seen a Shareem wandering around. She had mud-colored hair and a beaky nose, but she might be pretty if she didn’t scrape back her hair so severely or wear that permanently sour expression.
“Yeah, I’m in here.” Kieran spread his arms. “See?”
“Don’t get smartassed with me, Shareem. This is a restricted area.”