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“Are you sure you’re ready for this, Hal?”
“If you ask me that one more time, I’ll throw you to the back of the shuttle,” he growled. He’d do it too, though Bernadette was piloting.
“Fine. Since I don’t want us splattered all over this pretty countryside, I won’t say another word about it.” Her concerned glances didn’t lessen, however.
Halmiko concentrated on the landscape displayed by the craft’s dash vid. Haven was a lovely colony, a vision of farmland and wide-open spaces. Though it had experienced its share of upheavals during its early years, with its resident population of Earthers and Kalquorians living in suspicion of each other, the civil war had accomplished what peace hadn’t been able to. Living under the siege of the traitors to the empire had brought Havenites together as a bonded community. Everywhere Halmiko looked, members of both species worked side by side in the spaceport where theRoguehad docked, in the town Bernadette had flown them through, and in the fields that stretched to the horizon.
His stomach churned uneasily. In minutes, he’d be face to face with a man he’d had no intention of seeing again. A man who’d once been his best friend and dearest companion.
“There’s the school.” Bernadette nodded to the structure that approached too quickly for Halmiko’s liking. It seemed he barely took a breath when she set it down where a few other smaller shuttles were parked in a flattened field of grass.
He tried to swallow and discovered his pulse beat too hard in his throat to allow it. His ears were ringing too.
Stop it. For all you know, Tumsa will take one look at you and walk away without a word.
Bernadette switched off the shuttle and glanced at him. The question hung between them, no doubt on the tip of her tongue. She didn’t speak it, however. Instead, she climbed out of the seat and headed for the hatch, leaving him to stay or follow.
Halmiko drew a deep breath. He followed.
They walked toward the school, a stone-looking edifice no doubt poured in a factory off-planet and assembled once it had reached its destination. The surrounding grounds had been landscaped nicely, with a large field at the rear. They approached it, and Halmiko noted rectangular-framed nets and chalked lines denoting the playing space.
“After-school practice. That means kids are present. No confrontation,” Bernadette warned him unnecessarily. “We’ll tell him hello and to meet us later to talk or we’ll yank his dicks off in front of the children.”
Halmiko snorted, covering his growing unease. “What sort of game are they playing?”
“We called it soccer in my neck of the woods. They might call it football here.”
He eyed the “children” as they drew closer. Most were as tall as the Earthers he’d encountered, but their faces betrayed their youth. Teenage Earthers. A few children as young as five years ran up and down the sidelines, some obviously human, a few showing characteristics of a mixed heritage There were close to a dozen of these Earther-Kalquorian hybrids.
A whistle sounded, and a voice called to the teens passing white and black balls with their feet. The whistle had been shrill, but it was the deep voice that shivered Halmiko’s bones.
He slowed as a Kalquorian with shoulder-length, wavy hair trotted onto the field. The teens gathered around him, only a couple approaching his six-and-a-half-feet frame in height. His boyish but somewhat pointed features were gentle as he spoke encouragingly to his charges, but those eyes were as intense as Halmiko remembered.
The group clapped once in unison. Tumsa trotted off the field, where he ruffled a hybrid child’s hair when she ran past, kicking a ball as she went. He smiled at her laughter, but it wasonly a slight bend of his lips, far from the happy grin he’d worn when times were good.
“Hal?”
Bernadette’s voice woke him to the fact he’d stopped in his tracks. He glanced at her, then at Tumsa. He tried to move his feet, but they stayed planted as a storm of feelings swept over him.
* * * *
Twenty-eight years ago
“The new guy’s a hardass for a Dramok. Where’d Rifar find him?” Halmiko sat in the massage chair with a groan. He willed the cuffs on the leg supports to hurry as they closed over his thighs and calves.
“The training assistant, you mean? You haven’t heard?” Nobek Edran, another defender on the team, cracked an eye open to look at him as his own chair hummed quietly.
“Heard what? That he’s begging for us to kick him across the field?” At last, the cuffs gripped Halmiko’s aching legs. Heat sank into his spent muscles, and his chair hummed in concert with Edran’s as kneading vibrations began to work their magic.
“He’s Zakla’s kid brother.”
“No shit.” Now that he thought of it, Halmiko recognized the resemblance between the Dramok who’d pushed them so hard during practice and the Conquerors’ recently acquired second-string hurler. “Zakla made hiring his brother a condition to join us?”
Edran snorted. “Zakla’s in no position to demand anything.”
That was true. A superstar hurler a mere three years ago, Zakla had become famous more for his partying lifestyle than his playing. It had cost him his starting position with the Zibgers, as well as taking his former team to the playoffs.
“Baby brother was brought on to keep an eye on him,” Halmiko guessed. “Though Zakla’s supposedly been clean for the last six months.”
