Old Earth.

Jessica stood looking at it, and her heart gave a hard throb.

She stared at the spinning blue and green orb, the browned and uninhabitable parts of the planet showing in stark contrast to the parts that still held life.

Centuries ago the air had become tainted by pollution, and the seas had gone bitter, killing off the life and food that could be found within those bodies of water. The freshwater wars had caused real havoc, and many had died when the oceans rose and drowned cities that had once been the seats of power.

There had been no Federation then. Back then; Old Earth had been stuck in a weird time and space hole that let other species go past without ever noticing that place. It had only been after an intrepid explorer who had heard the old tales of how once there had been a place that his race had gone to many years before. They went there because the beings there made for wonderful slaves and they had possessions. Old Earth had not even known that they were not the only beings in the universe.

Being that Earthlings would fight for any reason at all, especially if they had a common enemy, they finally banded together to stop fighting over the resources left on the planet in order to wage war on those in the fledgling Federation.

As a result, they had won a place in it, and their planet, while still mostly ruined and demarcated into two clear cases of rich and poor, had gotten much in the way of tech and aid from the Federation. Tech and aid that helped them to rebuild the still habitable areas until great cities once more stood.

Jessica had grown up in Old Toronto, below ground. Her father had been a smoke boiler, a man who kept the stacks of sun batteries working, and her mother had been a servant in a Federation house.

When she had been eight, her father had sold her into service to the Youth Brigade in order to pay for a medical procedure to save his life.

She had been given a bag and a rake and sent down to the bowels of the tunnels that lay just below the exquisite and guarded communities that those who could afford to live above resided in. Her job had been to gather up as much of the trash as possible every day and take it to the incinerator and compress stations, also below the communities. She knew, going in, that she had little chance of living more than a year at that job. If she didn’t fall off a rope trestle or catch a sickness from the trash and other things down there, she would likely be killed by a terra rat.

Terra rats had long heavy teeth, and they could weigh up to sixty pounds and stand up to three foot tall. After Jessica had witnessed not one but three other workers—all of them adults who had banded together in an effort to survive those terra rats, being killed and eaten, she had known just how expendable she was.

The very rich did not give a damn about the people from the below ground. That she had always known. That they would let them die so they did not have to deal with their own damn rats and trash. That had made her angry. She had been determined to survive the year of labor that her father had sold her into and she had been smart enough, after witnessing what the rats could do, to fashion a weapon for herself.

Her first training had been against those rats. It was only after a curious young man from above and his equally curious friends had come down to the tunnels to see if the terra rats they heard of but never saw really did existed that Jessica was noticed by the Federation.

That boy, who had been fourteen and twice her age and much more than twice her size, would have died if she had not seen him and his cowering friends trying to flee from a pack of terra rats.

“Stop running!” her voice echoed throughout the tunnel. “They will kill you if you run; you have to stop and stand your ground!”

They hadn’t stopped, and she had swung down from her perch above, her weapon at the ready. She stabbed one rat and then scrambled up the perch again, her feet barely clearing the perch before the rats began to snap at the dead one, tearing into the carcass with real relish.

The boys had huddled in a blind corner, trapped and unable to get out because the rats were there, right in front of them. Jessica reached a filthy hand down. “Come on. Climb!”

They’d climbed. But the rats, which could also climb, finished snacking on the body of their friend and began to stalk toward them again, their long tails slithering and swishing along the garbage-strewn gutter tunnels.

The one who’d led his friends demanded, “Give me your weapon!”

“No.” her fingers clutched it more tightly. “You don’t know how to use it. I made it myself.”

His hands clasped hers, and he yanked hard. They grimly fought for control of the weapon, a simply sharpened hunk of metal she had found on the trash heaps and sharpened on the stone walls.

The rats got closer. One of the other boys screamed and hid his face. The one tugging at her weapon shouted, “You don’t deserve to live, and we do! You’re just a slave!”

Her scream held fury. “If you take this weapon you will still die because you don’t know how to use it!”

A hand met her chest. Jessica fell, her body arcing over the perch and landing far below in a trash heap.

The terra rats swarmed the perch. Jessica knew now was her chance to run, to let whatever happened, happen. The rats would eat and be full, and she could make her trash quota of twenty bags much more easily if she did not have to fear being killed and eaten.

Only she didn’t. Instead, she fished a heavy length of metal from the pile and ran into the fray, whacking one rat so hard it fell to the ground and writhed in its death throes. That bought her just enough time. She yanked her weapon from the rich boy’s hand and said, “Grab the ropes and run. Run!”

They did. She went with them. They raced along the upper rope walkways. The tunnel walls were too slick for the terra rats to climb but they could and did climb the massive trash heaps to get to those rope walkways near the very top arch of the tunnel, and she knew it.

She shouted, “How did you come in?”

The boy who had taken her weapon shot her a look. His face was solid white, and there were dark rings of shock around his eyes. His mouth worked. He shook his head.

A slighter, younger boy said, “We came in from the Hotelier grate.”

“Shut up, Yori!”

The cry was from the one who had called her a slave.

Yori said, “We don’t remember the way, Heren! She has to show us!”

Jessica did know where that was, and it was not far. The rats were climbing the piles now, frenzied by the scent of fresh blood and fear. She ran faster, herding them along ahead of her. Yori fell, and she gripped his arm and dragged him along until he gained his feet and ran beside her. They burst out of the Hotelier grate only a few steps ahead of the rats. Jessica slammed the grate back into place, and they stood there staring at the hissing rats for a moment.

“Yori! Heren!”

The shout made them all turn away from the grate, a low-lying thing in the ground. The rats were unused to light, and it could kill them, so they slunk backward, still hissing as a tall man rushed toward them, his Capo uniform perfectly pressed and his hair waving back from a high forehead.

He stopped short, looking from Jessica to the boys. His voice went flat. “What are you doing above?”

She swallowed hard and blinked as she looked around herself. She had never been above before, and the sunlight suddenly hit her face, warming her skin. Her eyes closed from the brightness and the smell of things she had never smelled before—grass, air that was clean and not constantly recycled—hit her nose.

“You!”

The word jerked her eyelids open. She said, “I got them out of the tunnels.”

The Capo recoiled. “What?”

“Heren told us to come along,” one of the other boys blubbered out. “These big rats tried to kill us. They do exist.”

Of course they existed. Jessica closed her mouth over those words. They are in the tunnels, but not there in that sunlight and clean air. Terra rats were often driven back from below by the use of smudge lights and poison, but in the tunnels, they roamed freely.

The Capo said, “Get back to your work, slave.”

Yori spoke in a firm voice. “She saved our lives. We owe her something.”

The Capo’s lips lifted off his white teeth. “Oh. Very well; here.” He flipped a single credit chip toward her feet. Jessica ignored it. She was too busy looking at the sky. The Capo said, “Girl…slave! Get back to your—”

“Do not raise your voice.” That was Yori again, and that caught Jessica’s attention. She looked over at Yori. He drew himself up. “My father will want to meet someone who can fight off those rats with just a homemade weapon.”

That was how she had ended up in the training program for the military. She had been so good that she had been promoted to Capo and she had lived above ever since that terrible day in the tunnels, but she had never forgotten what it was like to live below or to be sold off for nothing more than a debt that was not her own.

“A credit for your thoughts.”

Talon’s words snapped her out of her memories.

“I don’t know that they’re even worth the credit.” The memories of her time on Old Earth were not all bad, but they were bad enough that she didn’t want to relive them if she didn’t have to.

Talon pointed a finger toward the docking station. “I guess it is a good thing we removed your chip and got you a whole new identity.”

“I’d say so.” She wanted to say so much more, but she wasn’t sure what there was to say. She had not intended to have sex with him, and she damn sure had not meant to ambush him the way she had. Now that the sex was over, she was both confused and slightly embarrassed. Yes, his body had responded to hers and in a way that said he wanted it as much as she did, but he had not initiated it, and she had no idea of what to say or do next.

Talon wasn’t meeting her eyes. “I’m not really sure what sort of a plan we have here. I know the Gorlites will be coming, but we have no idea when. I don’t know how much good we can do on the ground either. I hope your contacts down here will be able to give us enough information for us to get a good handle on what we should do next. I also hope that you are right in saying that there would be many who would fight with us against them. I’m good, but I’m not that good. I’ve got one ship against what sounds like an entire fleet of those creatures, and there’s no way that we can win this if we don’t get some assistance.”

Jessica’s tongue wet her lips. “I know. I know exactly how high the stakes are. We have to get off the ship in order to raise more crewmembers, which we need desperately. And you’re right; we need information, and I only know one person who could give us that information.”

Talon said, “Are you sure about this person?”

Her smile was grim. “Not entirely. Nobody should trust anybody entirely. Not ever.”

She should know.

Talon said, “Tell me something, Jessica; do you trust me?”

She studied his face. What she would not give to be able to say to him that she did trust him, that she trusted him completely. That she trusted him with her body, with her heart, and to be a good and just being who would help her write the injustices of the universe no matter what the cost.

She wanted to trust him in that way, but she knew him too well to do so. Talon wanted only what he wanted, and what he wanted was vengeance, pure and simple. He was only along on this mission because it would give him the opportunity to eradicate the race that he had such hatred for. When it came down to dealing with the Federation’s problems, he would walk away, and he would not even look back if she chose to stay.

That thought broke her heart. She wanted him to stay with her. She wanted to stay with him. Only how could she stay when she didn’t even know what he felt for her, if anything? It was highly possible that he felt nothing and that he’d only engaged in sex with her because he had been heated by battle and blood and in need of a physical release.

She spoke quietly. “I should like to think we trust each other, Talon.”

It was not exactly the answer to his question, and they both knew it. Talon looked away from her face. His jaw tightened. “I find myself in a highly unusual position, Jessica. I must trust you now. I am putting not just my life in your hands, but also the life of my crew. I am not asking for perfect loyalty and servitude from you, but I am telling you right now that if you betray me, that if you betray my crew, I will kill you myself.”

The words struck her directly in her heart, slicing through that organ like sharpened knives. He had every reason to say them of course; he really was entrusting himself and his entire crew to her.

“I would never betray you, Talon. You have no reason to believe me. I know that. We mean nothing to one another, really. You were gracious in allowing me to come along with you to help you isolate your enemies and attain some credits for myself.”

The bitterness in her words softened his expression, and she saw a quizzical look come up on his face. He leaned in, just slightly closer. His fingers, those long and slender marvels of bone and flesh, lifted and landed on her cheeks, tilting her head up and back so that she was forced to look him directly in the eye.

Talon said, “Do you really think you mean nothing to me?”

Her breath went short. She wanted, badly, to tell him exactly how she felt about him. That during all the long months of their journey together and battles shared in one together, all the meals had together, that she had gotten to know him.

He wasn’t always the best being, no. He was selfish and hard and hell-bent on his revenge and sometimes that blinded him to what was just and good and fair. He was stubborn; even if it meant losing something that mattered to him, he would not change his course once he had decided on it. She knew him, and she loved him.

Only she had no idea what he felt about her.

Tears threatened to come up in her eyes, and the fact that she was about to spill tears, something she had not done since she was a small child, shook her to her core. What was happening to her that he could weaken her with just a single touch? She could not afford to be weakened in such a manner.

“I do not care if you feel nothing for me, Talon.”

It was a lie. The biggest lie she had ever told someone she cared for. She cared very much whether or not he cared for her and how he cared for her.

His face registered nothing. His expression was so impassive, and what she wanted to see there was something that would tell her that she was important to him, and not just as a crew member or as a warrior, but as a woman.

His voice was cool. “We are docking.”

Jessica looked out to see that they were indeed docking. Her heart trembled within her chest. For better or worse, she was back on Old Earth.