by Tamara Hogan
“Lorin, do you really think I want to be here, spending the summer living in a tent, with no decent coffee in a fifty-mile radius except here in your cabin?” Gabe rubbed his neck with his hand, looked at the beamed ceiling, then back at her. “You’re the one who screwed up. Don’t blame me for how Elliott chose to respond.”
Okay, that smarted. “Have you seen the playback?”
“Not yet. I’m still waiting on clearance.”
She hoped Gabe thoroughly enjoyed the microscopic background check Lukas would perform before giving him access to the Underworld Council network. “Well, there’s no way that the box should have opened. I barely touched it. The metal is… unusual.”
“That much I’ve been told. I can’t wait to examine it.” At her narrowed eyes, he added, “Lorin, who did you think would analyze your find?”
Him. No matter how much he annoyed her, Gabe was the most skilled metallurgist and all-around geologist at Sebastiani Labs. Of course he’d be working with her on this project. She sighed and fidgeted in the chair. “Okay, cards on the table. You annoy me. A lot.”
“Same goes,” he immediately responded.
“Someone mark it on the calendar—we finally agree on something.”
Gabe took another sip of coffee, clearly considering his words before he spoke. “Listen. You don’t want me here, and I don’t want to be here. I’ll stay out of your way as much as I can. But we will present a united front to Elliott. I don’t care what kind of nepotistic connections you have to Elliott Sebastiani. I don’t care that you’re the Valkyrie Second. You report to me, and unfortunately, shit flows up the food chain as well as down. Your screwup is my screwup.” His gaze speared into her. “We won’t make another one of such magnitude.”
Her breath caught, but not with anger or fear. No, fear would be preferable. This was lust—sheet-rolling, wall-banging, bone-incinerating lust. Who knew that Gabe could be so… alpha?
He sighed. “Lorin, I have no intention of getting in your way on day-to-day operations—I’m buried up to my ass in my own work. But you can use me here.”
Lorin pictured his long, rangy body stretched out on her bed, those oddly sexy glasses dropped carelessly to the floor. She could think of a lot of ways she could use him—
He cleared his throat and stood, his neck flushed with ruddy color. “Maybe now would be a good time for you to give me a tour, fill me in on how things work here.”
“Good idea.” Breakfast be damned, she needed to get out of this cabin before she did something monumentally stupid. She stood too, crossing her arms over her pebbled nipples. “I can show you where we keep the space heaters.”
“Space heaters.” After a fleeting dirty look, he quickly schooled his expression. She had to give him points for control.
A phone blipped at Gabe’s waist. “Excuse me, I have to take this.”
Lorin’s eyes widened as he removed a Bat Phone from the leather carrier. “How the hell did you get one of those?” Lorin didn’t want one of the coveted Sebastiani Labs prototypes for herself, but the fact that Gabe had snagged one before she had a chance to turn one down smarted.
He grinned like the Cheshire Cat.
Game on.
***
Several hours later, Gabe sat in the outer room of his two-room tent, taking a breather before he started working again. Lorin had given him a quick tour of the site, pointing out the bunkhouse, the outhouse—Jesus, he was going to be using an outhouse all summer—but they’d spent most of the time in the site’s largest building, which housed a good-sized workroom on one side and eating facilities on the other. He’d immediately commandeered the one dusty desk in the workroom as his primary workspace.
They’d spent too much time in a tiny space Lorin called the Control Room, about the size of the stingiest networking closet at Sebastiani Labs. The room housed not only the backbone of the site’s computer network, but the brains of the idiosyncratic electrical grid. Earlier in his career, Gabe had happily rappelled into sphincter-tight crevasses and caves. Why had a six-by-six room felt so claustrophobic?
Lorin had been as ready to leave as he’d been, and he was finally, thankfully, alone in his tent, his home away from home for the summer. He was the proud borrower of not one but two space heaters, and a thick extension cord now snaked along the perimeter of the tent, providing him with electricity that he promised himself he’d use as sparingly as possible.
Now that he had firsthand experience with the conditions Lorin was dealing with, he’d cut her a little more slack the next time she called in late for a meeting. Network connectivity was dodgy, and the electricity, Lorin had told him, could be hit or miss. He’d been glad to see that the backup generator was gassed up and ready for action. Most of the devices he considered essential for daily life would be useless without electricity.
His phone blipped, and he snatched it off his waist. Tilting his head slightly to the left, circumventing the void in his field of vision, he opened the video his parents sent to him and his siblings. Gabe grinned as he watched his mother, in wolf form, pose in front of the shatter-topped mountains that time had shoved to the sky. It had taken every bit of his negotiating skill to stop his mother from coming home while his retina problems were being diagnosed.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he heard his father mutter. The picture jittered as he set the camera down on a rock. After a pause, his father trotted over to join her on four legs.
His parents looked healthy. Their fur was shiny, and they were moving well. The terrain they were covering was some of the most rugged and desolate on the planet, and the fact that his mother was navigating on three legs chilled his blood. But she and Glynna had never known anything else.
At least he had all his limbs.
Gabe stood abruptly. He had a steep learning curve on how the dig operated, and the filing cabinets he’d seen in the workshop office seemed as likely a place to start as any. Delving into files would also help him stay away from Lorin long enough to get his thoughts and unruly body under control. Exiting the tent and zipping it closed behind him, he walked to the workroom. Where was Lorin, anyway? She’d disappeared after helping him lay the extension cord in his tent. What was she doing?
It was… too quiet. He was used to the hustle and bustle of the city. What the hell did people do up here if they weren’t working? On the quick tour Lorin had given him earlier, she’d pointed out her running trails and the dock that the crew would help put in at the lake after they arrived. The local watering hole they’d eaten at last night, Tubby’s, was the closest thing to a social opportunity he’d seen. It was too depressing for words.
Well, he had his computer and a pile of technical journals. He could always catch up on his reading.
He could also remind himself of all of the reasons why sleeping with Lorin Schlessinger would be monumentally stupid—the first point being he was her boss. She reported to him, at least on paper. He’d never dated a co-worker, and he wasn’t about to break his rule with the Valkyrie Princess.
As he opened the workroom door, the phone gave a single blip, quickly followed by a second. High priority emails. Plucking the phone from its holder, he squinted and skimmed, a smile growing as he read. Lukas had finally authorized his access to the Underworld Council’s confidential workspace, and Elliott’s email approved Gabe’s request to retrofit Sebastiani Labs’ most secure facilities, a lab located in SL’s sub-basement, for this project. He tapped back a quick response to Elliott, confirming the timeline and thanking him for the speed of his response. Another blip; another message from Lukas: Lorin will help you config your Council_Net access.
Yeah, right. He’d have to find her first. No, first things first. With a wince, Gabe opened the workroom’s sole file cabinet very slowly. “Hmm.” Instead of the unorganized mess he’d expected, crisp manila file folders lined up like soldiers on parade. He flipped through the files. Status reports. Geological assays. Budget. He pulled the file labeled “Training Record
s” and quickly flipped through its pages. Processes, procedures, confidentiality agreements, advanced first aid training… the records were current, complete, and clearly Alka’s work, thank god. Gabe was particularly glad to see the exhaustive inventory list of first aid materials, because Underworld Memorial was a good three hundred miles to the south, and they couldn’t exactly call a local doctor if someone got hurt. The injury log cited minor cuts and scrapes, a sprain here and there, a broken finger last season. Most of the entries were made in Lorin’s crabbed handwriting, and most of the injuries she logged were her own. He imagined her swearing up a storm as she did so.
He touched a bloody smudge at the top of a page. He leaned down to sniff it, and jerked his head back when he realized what he was doing. Shoving the file back in the cabinet, he bypassed the Budget file and pulled Assays. He paged through the records slowly. Previous years’ crews had performed all the right geological tests, utilizing radar, sonar, and various metal detection techniques. His own department had assisted, and—yes—there was his own signature at the bottom of the most recent report.
The command box Lorin found hadn’t pinged anywhere, and it should have. What properties did the metal have that it had evaded detection despite the technology they’d thrown at it?
The metallurgist in him was definitely intrigued. And damn it, so was the man.
Chapter 4
“No running water, wood heat, and cold as the moons of Gennadia Prime,” Beddoe muttered, shivering in his inadequate skinsuit. The gleaming panels resting atop the buildings indicated that they’d started to learn how to harness the power of their nearest star, but Dia, Minchin hadn’t mentioned how primitive the conditions were. He blew on his chilled fingers as he assessed the domicile’s stubborn closure. The entrance hadn’t opened at his voice command or touch, and the near-translucent wash of data scrolling along his peripheral vision wasn’t helping. Door. Tree. Roof. Dirt. Rocks. Lock.
“I know it’s a lock. Directions to open.”
Door. Lock.
The door stayed stubbornly closed. “Dia.”
His uplink to the Core provided him with little more information than he could discern perfectly well for himself: his vitals, the molecular composition of the strange items he encountered in this even stranger place, and the simple names these simple people had given to their simple things. In one of the countless small economies he’d instituted on board the TonTon, he’d budgeted and expensed for unlimited access to the Core, but instead of connecting, he’d shuttled the funds to his personal account. If there were massive holes in his knowledge base, he had only himself to blame.
Why in the name of the multiverse would the Arkapaedis’s homing beacon have blipped here?
He could really use Minchin’s help, but he could hardly trust his first officer with this delicate task. Minchin had his uses, but the man was certainly his uncle Lorcan’s spy, and the last thing Beddoe wanted his boss to know was that the homing beacon for the legendary lost Arkapaedis had popped on an inconsequential mudball in a territory so remote that the very assignment was considered a punishment route. But he’d get the last laugh. Yes, he would. Once he found the Ark and claimed the astronomical finder’s fee, he’d be able to buy this unknown jewel of a territory outright. Its treasure trove of water and resources would be his to use. His to sell.
If he could find and disable the beacon, he could buy himself some time. If he couldn’t, it wouldn’t be long before the quadrant would be crawling with pirates and salvagers who wouldn’t care what damage they left behind.
Voices approaching. A woman and a man. He chanced taking one last look through the domicile’s small window, seeing a raised sleeping pallet—bed—what he thought was a heating device, open shelves laden with supplies. The small fortune in clean water, sitting in clear view of whomever passed by, made his fingers itch.
Beddoe exhaled, surprised he couldn’t see his breath. They relieved their bodily wastes into a hole in the ground but bathed with clean water. To use such a precious resource for mere body hygiene was an act punishable by death on his homeworld.
Luckily for them, he wasn’t a particularly law-abiding man.
He scrambled around the corner of the domicile and out of sight just as the man and woman emerged from the tall stalks of vegetation. As he watched, the woman said something he couldn’t hear. The man didn’t respond, which seemed to annoy the woman even further.
“Damn it, I can’t believe this!” she yelled. “So much for not interfering with day-to-day operations.”
The man looked baffled. “Lorin, I just want to take some soil samples. You can work around me, can’t you?”
Beddoe raised a brow. The Core’s language translation module was doing a better job than he expected it would—and though it was missing a word here and there, the woman’s tone was universally recognizable.
Just as he thought she might actually strike the man, she growled in frustration, about-faced, and strode away. The man stared after her, shook his head, then ducked into the flimsy shelter he’d searched earlier, zipping it closed behind him.
Beddoe felt an odd communion with the man wearing the vision correction appliance. He’d have a hard time looking away from those buttocks too.
Peering from around a tall stalk, he watched her approach the door in her heavy boots, her footfalls loud against the platform. Shooting one final glance back to the man’s shelter, she extracted a ring of jingling metal pieces from her jacket pocket. Selecting one, she inserted it into the tiny jagged slot.
Mechanical lock—a truly ancient technology. It figured.
The man and the woman were both very pleasant to look at. Despite his obvious vision defects, there were always customers for the man’s type of tall, dark, and handsome—but it was the woman who drew his own connoisseur’s eye. Her long hair was not blond or brown, but a streaky combination of both. She had a classic figure, with breasts and hips that would more than fill a man’s hands. Stunning facial structure, with a particularly stubborn jawline. Beautiful, really. She was almost as tall as the man and looked like she could take a lot of physical damage. He could think of several TonTon clients with rather… exotic tastes who would empty their personal accounts to spend some time with this one.
He wouldn’t mind breaking her in himself.
A vibration pulsed against his wrist as she slammed the door closed behind her. He sighed. Just as well. He pushed the button acknowledging his readiness to return to the ship. Darkness was falling, and the temperature with it—
Something bumped his foot.
His T-Mach was in his hand before he was aware of having grabbed it. He aimed, hesitated, but slowly lowered his weapon. The animal—small, deep-space dark, with a distinctive white stripe—wasn’t attacking, and firing his weapon so close to the woman’s shelter would draw attention he didn’t want. “Identify.”
After a short pause, the creature’s molecular composition scrolled across his field of vision—and that was all. As he cursed his limited data, a familiar stinging chill washed over his body. Timeless beats later, he shimmered onto the bridge of the pleasure cruiser TonTon, locked in orbit a planet and a dimension away.
“Welcome back, Sirrah.” Xantha Ta’al, his second officer, rose from the command chair and stood at attention, acknowledging his return—and his still-drawn weapon—with a careful nod of her head.
He nodded back just as neutrally, hiding the fangs that had just descended into his mouth with a brutal shove. Minchin should be sitting in the command chair, not Ta’al. Minchin was cutting too many corners, powerful uncle be damned. “Where’s Minchin?”
Ta’al pushed keys on the console, her fingers moving with lightning speed. “Entertainer’s residence, Captain.”
Beddoe cursed under his breath. Minchin spent far too much time with the incubus Stephen, who’d recently been reacquired after a lengthy escape to the planet’s surface.
“We appear to have a stowaway, Captain.” Ta’al indic
ated the black-and-white creature sniffing at his feet.
Was that amusement in Ta’al’s voice? No, it couldn’t possibly be. The woman, a stoic Valkyr, was as emotionless and as reliable as an automaton. “It had contact with me when I transported. Send it back down.”
“Aye, Sirrah.” As she flicked the controls, the animal lifted its tail, spraying something from its back end an instant before it disappeared.
A thousand dying suns, what was… The noxious odor came straight from the bowels of hell. “Toxin?” he gasped.
He already knew the answer. They were going to die.
The unflappable Ta’al coughed, and though her eyes had to be as blurry as his were, her fingers flew at the con. “Bridge contained,” she choked out. More keystrokes. “Assessing composition.” Time dragged as Ta’al studied the console and finally spoke. “Negative.”
“What?”
“Negative for toxicity,” she repeated, coughing again. “Noxious, certainly. Most disagreeable. A very effective defense mechanism.”
Choking, Beddoe strode blindly to the elevator. “I’ll leave cleanup in your capable hands. Please keep the scent out of the customer areas. I’ll be with Minchin in Stephen’s quarters.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Immediate response, respectful tone, implacable facial expression. How had such an excellent officer fallen into his hands? “Ta’al.” Despite her streaming eyes, she met his gaze squarely. “I am pleased with your performance. Consider your probationary period complete.”
Ah, there it was—a flicker of expression, the slightest lift of an eyebrow. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Carry on.”
With a few flicks of her fingers, Ta’al reversed containment, reactivating the elevator. Stepping inside, Beddoe took deep, grateful breaths of clean air. The doors closed and the elevator descended, each ticking number carrying him further away from that bedeviled scent, and closer to Minchin—and whatever damage he’d already done to Stephen.
