Crystals Three Chosen Mates (7 page)
Bella grinned conspiratorially at Crystal. “I’m afraid they won’t let me leave the bed if I get any curvier.”
“Well, hellitude then. Let me give you a double serving.” Crystal laughed with her new friend, who’d managed to get the Council to agree to her mating with three members of Fourth Quadrant’s special security force after the men had acted as her bodyguards during the initial OAS attacks.
Their mutual friend, Doctor Anna, had also been mated with three members of the military, but the Council had assigned them before the attacks when they’d heard rumors of the possibility of danger. The Council had hoped to keep their elite bio-researcher safely protected by three high-ranking Generals. The men had brought Anna to Fourth Quadrant, where Crystal had met her and helped introduce her to the Food Producers. Anna was working on some theories on the link between whole foods and increased fertility rates.
“Stars, no!” Bella pulled her plate away before Crystal could add a second slice of lasagna. “I enjoy my work too much to be tied to the bed.”
“Oooh, now there’s a delicious thought,” Crystal teased.
Bella chuckled as she turned to leave the line. “You’re a bad influence,” she murmured as she walked away.
Crystal wondered if there was any validity to the whispers that Bella and her three military mates were involved with the Pro-Freedom Movement at a key level. Her stomach soured as she considered turning her friend over to the Council.
How could good people like Bella, Henri, and Stepho be on the wrong side of this conflict? And how could Crystal live with herself if she caused the deaths of other good people like them and later learned that she’d been working for the wrong people?
Chapter Five
“Looks like a public gathering of protestors,” Fisher said, leaning over the service counter to get a better look. “By my count, there are about forty people.”
Demonstration crowds had been reported with growing frequency in other sectors of First Quadrant during the past two moon cycles, but Crystal hadn’t heard of any in sector one, until now. What surprised her the most was that civilians of the manufacturing and engineering classes intermingled with members of the intelligentsia. They all seemed to share the same goals as small clusters gathered in hushed, but intense, conversations.
Crystal gave these men and women a lot of credit for their bravery, or perhaps they were merely foolish. Each of them risked capital punishment just by being in this room, as the Council had already sentenced several members of the Open Air Society to death for treason.
Crystal scanned the room, watching for any signs of trouble, but the crowd was calm. The differences between the classes was obvious by their uniform colors—intelligentsia in beige, manufacturing in black, and engineering in dark brown—but it didn’t seem to interfere with the communication between them. She recognized several of her regular customers among the crowd, including Doctors Zeke and Brentan.
Fisher nudged her with an elbow in her side and nodded in the direction of the hallway entrance directly across from them. “We’ve got company.”
Crystal quickly identified the olive uniforms of the Council Guards on the five-man team entering the cafeteria. “Oh shiitake, do you think they’re going to arrest all these people?”
Fisher shrugged. “They’re kind of outnumbered for that.”
“This is an unlawful gathering,” the senior officer of the Council Guards shouted at the crowd. “You are ordered to return to your personal pods immediately.”
The citizens closest to the Guards looked startled by the sudden command, apparently they hadn’t noticed the Guards entering the cafeteria, but none of them moved toward the exit.
When the mass of people showed no signs of dissipating, the officer raised his right hand in a fist, and more than a dozen teams of Council Guards swarmed the room, far exceeding the number of civilians.
“Lay on the floor and put your hands on your head!” the Guards yelled as they shoved people down to the ground.
Crystal’s hand tensed at her side where she kept her laser gun when in her field uniform, but as a Food Preparation Specialist, she was unarmed. She threw a quick glance at Fisher. “What the hellitude?”
Fisher’s stance showed he was ready to jump into the action, but whose side would he take?
She searched his face for a clue, but before she could come to a conclusion, voices from the crowd screamed in pain and the distinct odor of burning flesh reached her nose.
“Holy shiitake,” she cursed. “They’re firing on unarmed civilians.” Crystal’s stomach heaved as she watched Doctor Zeke take a laser shot to the chest and stumble backwards over a chair to lay unmoving on the floor.
The Guards tightened their circle around the crowd, shoving tables and chairs out of the way as they forced the people to lie on top of each other on the ground. The men and women cried out in pain and fear, unaccustomed to any sort of violence on Profortuna.
Fisher turned toward the door leading from the kitchen to the cafeteria.
“Are you going out there?” she asked with disbelief. He was as unarmed as she was.
He glanced back at her. “Are you really going to stand here and do nothing?”
“You willing to choose sides?”
“The Guard is attacking helpless civilians. Whose side do you think I’m going to take?” he asked, disgust thick in his tone.
“There’s nothing you or I can do. There are only two of us versus more than sixty Guards.” Crystal’s gut twisted as she watched men and women hauled to their feet and dragged from the cafeteria. Doctor Brentan had lost his glasses, and he blinked rapidly as if to bring the world into focus.
Within a surprisingly short amount of time, the cafeteria was being cleared of protestors. “What will the Council do with them? They wouldn’t really sentence them all to death, would they?” Crystal swallowed hard to keep her lunch in her stomach.
“If they want to send a message and stop the protests, they will.”
A familiar head of red hair in the crowd caught Crystal’s attention. “Oh, hellitude, no! Bella’s in the middle of that.” She rushed through the cafeteria door without thinking through the consequences.
“Shiitake,” Fisher cursed at her side. “I’ll get her out.”
“I can do it.” Crystal elbowed ahead of him.
He grabbed her upper arms and spun her to face him. “I’m taller and wider. I’ll get her. Stay out of the way of the Guards’ laser guns.” His face was deadly serious as he glared down at her.
She hated to back down, but he was right. He would have a better chance of getting Bella out safely because he could find an escape route easier by looking over the heads of everyone.
Feeling inadequate, she stood along the outer wall of the cafeteria, hopefully outside the notice of the Guards. She watched Fisher blend into the crowd as he arrowed in on Bella, who was trying to help an injured man get to his feet.
Fisher appeared to exchange some urgent words with Bella. From the shaking of her head, she didn’t seem willing to follow Fisher out of the melee.
Come on, Bella,
Crystal pleaded silently.
Walk away so you can fight another day.
Fisher must have run out of patience because he wrapped his arms around Bella’s waist and forcibly removed her from the center of the conflict. Bella got one good elbow thrust in Fisher’s gut before he contained her in an arm lock and hustled her out of the chaos. As they neared the edge of the circle, they caught the attention of a nearby Guard.
Crystal shouted a warning, and Fisher put his body between the laser gun and Bella. He stumbled as the blast hit him in the thigh, but he shoved Bella at Crystal while maintaining his upright stance.
Crystal grabbed her friend and shoved her into the kitchen. “Take the back door, and get out of here,” she urged Bella.
Bella glanced back over the service counter at Fisher, who was being swarmed by Guards. “What about you and Fisher?”
Crystal took an assessing look and made a quick decision that surprisingly hurt more than she could have imagined. “We can’t save him. Not by ourselves.” She hurried into the kitchen after Bella, resisting the internal personal impulse screaming at her to stay and fight for Fisher.
Banking the outrage at the injustice she’d just witnessed, the soldier in her began planning a strategy to make things right.
Crystal looked behind her through the service opening one last time, grateful the Guards didn’t seem very concerned about two women who’d left the scene while they were engaged in subduing Fisher.
Stars, that man had a lot of fight in him, but it wasn’t doing him any good. He was going to end up a bloody mess before they sentenced him to death.
Bella tugged Crystal into the hall, and they sprinted through the corridors of sector one. Crystal’s military training rebelled at abandoning her fellow soldier, but she had to trust Bella’s contacts could do more to rescue Fisher than Crystal could alone.
Suddenly, she stopped running and bent over, dry-heaving.
“Crystal?” Bella rushed back to her. “Are you injured?”
“No,” she gasped between heaves. “I’ve been nauseous lately. Too much job stress.” She tried to make a joke of it, but she didn’t feel anywhere close to laughing.
“We can’t stay here,” Bella pressed. “The Guards may still decide to come after us.”
Crystal stood upright; dizziness spun her brain cells. She grabbed for the wall, but Bella stepped in and wrapped an arm around Crystal.
“Come on. We have to go,” Bella urged. “The Council will enjoy making an example out of a member of the military. Fisher doesn’t have much time.”
Crystal choked back the nausea and accepted Bella’s assistance of a steady arm. Together, they rushed through mostly deserted hallways. Then, finally, after bolting through nearly the entire length of the sector, they ended their nightmarish race at the door to a personal pod.
“Who lives here?”
“My mates and I,” Bella said.
“Will they be able to help Fisher?”
“They might be able to get him free, but I can’t promise. If they do get him out, we’ll have to find somewhere out of the way to keep him off of the Council’s radar for a while. Maybe even get him on a flight headed back to Fourth Quadrant.”
“Fisher won’t run away from this fight now that it’s been made personal for him.” He didn’t think Crystal really knew him, but her instincts told her differently. She’d seen how he’d reacted to the Council Guards’ abuse of the people. “I know someone who can help us while he recovers.”
They entered Bella’s pod to find two large black military officers in the first room, apparently in the middle of a heated debate.
“Thank the stars,” exclaimed the younger one, a First Lieutenant according to the silver bar insignia on his collar. “We thought you’d gotten caught up in the raid in the cafeteria.” He swept Bella off the floor into an all-encompassing embrace.
“Wex, put me down,” Bella ordered. “I need you and Dete to help my friend. Where’s Novi?”
“Checking the informational pipeline,” Major Dete answered, casting a questioning glance at Crystal’s military uniform.
Obviously, “informational pipeline” was code for something they weren’t willing to discuss in front of her. From the looks of this situation, Crystal figured Bella’s mates were pretty deeply involved with the opposition. But were they working undercover for the Council or truly supporters of the Pro-Freedom Movement?
At this point, Crystal wasn’t even sure anymore where she stood on the issue. After the horrendous use of force by the Guards, she could no longer support the Council, but her military blood ran deep. How could she turn her back on her family heritage?
She looked to Bella’s mates. How did they manage to reconcile their military backgrounds with their involvement with the OAS if they were genuine proponents?
“What do you need us to do?” the Major asked Bella.
“Corporal Fisher has been arrested by the Guard as he was helping me to escape the raid.”
“Shiitake, you
were
there!” the First Lieutenant exploded.
“Hush, Wex. We’ll deal with that later,” Major Dete commanded. “Bella, you need me to get Fisher out?”
“Yes.”
He looked at Crystal. “You work in the kitchen, right?”
“Yes, sir.” She nodded, glancing sideways at the bathing room as her stomach tossed around, and hoped she wasn’t going to have to bolt to the toilet.
“Brief me on the sitch, and I’ll figure out a plan, but we have to do it en route. The Council will be making an immediate unanimous judgment on everyone they arrested.”