Homecoming
Driven out, taken in
The scars were what convinced her. His ursine size notwithstanding, Nessa O’Clery might have written Jake off if not for that spider web of white lines tracking across his forehead and cheekbones and vanishing into his unkempt beard. This guy was a survivor.
“Let him live,” she ordered. Her three companions, two men about equaling Jake’s proportions and a graying woman with steel eyes and a few scars of her own, bared their teeth in unison but lowered their weapons. Jake, sitting on the rover deck where they had dumped him, turned his wild grin on them, which made them want to kill him all the more, and slowly. But Nessa had spoken.
They had removed their helmets already — Jake’s had been forcibly removed at gunpoint — but they still wore their envirosuits. The red Martian dust clung to the white fabric like dried blood. Nessa, with her cropped red hair, might have been drenched in battle gore. She motioned Jake to stand. “Up, my friend. What are you?”
Jake gathered himself to his feet. He towered over her. He could have flicked her with his finger and knocked her clear across the rover’s crew compartment. “Told you,” he rumbled. “Jake.”
“What is Jake? Smuggler? Tracker? Lost soul seeking enlightenment in the Martian wilderness?” She cocked her head. “Just an idiot?”
