Games of Command

by Linnea Sinclair

  Damn him for making her feel this way!

  He released her wrist. She broke their kiss, placed her hands on either side of his face. His luminous eyes blazed like a white-hot flame.

  “Spike out,” she told him softly, her thumb against his lips, stilling his attempt to claim her mouth again. “Please.”

  He closed his eyes briefly, cycled into a shutdown. He pulled out the datalinks before she could. She wrenched him to his feet, and for a moment they stood in an awkward half embrace as the shuttle jerked and trembled around them. Her heart pounded, the solid feel of him reassuring in a strange and bittersweet way.

  “Tasha—” he started.

  The ship bucked, hard. His arms tightened around her as an alarm wailed briefly, then was silenced. She pulled abruptly away, lunging for the ladderway. He followed, swearing, his voice still raspy.

  She clambered back into her seat, raking the safety straps across her chest as Serafino fought to control the bucking shuttle, which seemed to want to do nothing more than drop like a rock out of the skies.

  Kel-Paten, at the station behind her, manually adjusted the failing engines.

  Sharing a beer in hell was beginning to look more and more like a realistic possibility.

  “Thirty-three hundred feet…Twenty-five hundred. Two thousand…” Serafino read out their descent as he manipulated the controls. Another flash of lightning arced through the dense cloud cover blanking the viewport.

  “Eighteen hundred. We’re still coming in hot,” he said.

  “Got to chance the braking vanes,” Sass told him.

  “Try one more steep bank first.” This from Kel-Paten.

  “Hard to port,” Sass said, and the shuttle’s frame groaned under the pull of gravity.

  “Eleven hundred,” Serafino said. “Starting landing sequence.”

  “Extending vanes,” Sass noted, a lot more calmly than she felt. A lot more calmly than the shuttle reacted.

  “Heading corrected,” Eden said for the third time as the craft slipped out of control.

  “Hope you found us someplace soft!” Sass managed a tense grin.

  “Like a baby’s bottom,” Eden replied.

  Suddenly the dark clouds parted. Rain spattered the forward viewport, which was filled with deep greens and browns of a forest and, beyond that, a long wet expanse of meadow below.

  The meadow. They had to make the meadow. The shuttle’s power—

  —died.

  Screens blinked off. Lights blinked out. The rush of air through the ventilation grids ceased.

  “Brace for impact!” Sass grabbed her armrests just as the shuttle carved a deep furrow into the soft, green-carpeted ground.

  HAVEN-1

  The sound woke her. A thin, high-pitched keening cry, grating in her ears. Painful and only slightly less so than the throbbing discomfort now blossoming like some crazed, viciously spreading weed running rampant over her back, her arms, her left side.

  Something restricted her breathing, her movement. She pushed against it, pain flaring. A click sounded. Then it was gone.

  “Tasha?”

  Warmth on her face, her neck, her left side. Someone prodded her, but that wasn’t uncomfortable. Even her name sounded nice, though a tad insistent.

  “Tasha.”

  If only the damned wailing would shut up.

  “Hmm,” she said, finding her mouth dry, her eyelids sticky. She fluttered them. Light and dark. The light was hazy. The dark…

  A man blocking the light. Her brain recognized the square-jawed face, the luminous eyes. The steadfast, unshakable presence. “Kel-Paten?”

  Mommy? MommyMommyMommy!

  Kel-Paten’s lips quirked slightly, trembling—trembling?—into a small, crooked smile. “Tasha.”

  MommyMommy!

  “I’m not your mother,” she told him over the shrill wail she now recognized as a ship’s emergency siren.

  Kel-Paten frowned. “What?”

  She leaned forward, grasping his arm. She—they were on the floor of the cockpit. Her chest ached, exactly where the safety straps would have been. Kel-Paten was on one knee, his arm around her back holding her upright, the empty copilot’s chair behind him.

  Gods’ feathered asses! The shuttle. Haven-1. Kel-Paten’s death link to the failing power panel. The landing, had they, were they—

  “Status!” She leaned against his shoulder, trying to stand. Her legs failed to cooperate.

  “Easy,” he said, his arm tightening around her. “Take it slowly.”

  Good idea. She steadied herself against him and remembered the last time their faces were so close together, remembered what he had attempted to do. For them. For her. “You…you okay?” She touched his jaw briefly, concerned about him yet feeling oddly awkward about this new closeness. If that’s what it was.

  He nodded as she withdrew her fingers. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

  She was worried about herself too, but not for any reasons he’d guess.

  “And Eden?” It was easier to focus on Eden. She tried to turn her face toward the nav station and received a shooting pain in her neck for the effort.

  “Coming around. Serafino survived.” He glanced past her, eyes narrowing. Serafino must be there. “He’s with her. Emergency shutdown completed. Shuttle has some structural damage but no fatalities.” He repeated the last words more firmly.

  No fatalities. Everyone was alive. It sunk in.

  And the voice began again. MommyMommy!

  But Kel-Paten’s lips weren’t moving. And the sweet-sounding, almost childlike tone wasn’t remotely the admiral’s deep voice.

  MommyMommy!

  “Who’s—” She turned slightly, trying again to stand. Her legs worked this time. Kel-Paten drew her to her feet. “Who’s saying, ‘Mommy, Mommy’?”

  “That’s the emergency siren. It’s stuck. I can—”

  “No, it’s not.” She limped toward the cockpit hatchway, half pulling Kel-Paten, half leaning on him. “Someone’s crying. It sounds like—Tank?”

  The kennel was tilted sideways but intact. Through the grated opening, a furry paw reached frantically toward her.

  Mommy!

  “Tank?”

  “I checked their vitals. They’re fine.” Kel-Paten guided her—hands on her waist and arm—as she dropped into a crouch. “I don’t think it’s safe to let them out yet.”

  Sass clasped the frantic paw, then pushed her fingers through the kennel’s small opening. A soft ear rubbed, hard, against her.

  Mommy! Tank scared. Reilly scared! Bad here! Bad Thing!

  “It’s all right,” she crooned, tickling the fidget’s chin. “I know it’s bad being stuck in the kennel. But you have to stay there until we’re sure it’s safe to let you out.”

  Safe soon?

  “Soon,” she promised.

  Food soon?

  “Soon.”

  O-kay.

  Okay. Okay? Oh, gods. Sass’s knees gave out and she sat down, hard, on the decking. She was having a telepathic conversation with a furzel!

  Kel-Paten’s concerned face swam before her. “You shouldn’t be moving around yet. Sit still.” His fingers gently probed her neck. “Let me—”

  “You didn’t hear him, did you?”

  “Serafino? No, I—”

  “Not Serafino. Tank. The fidget. He’s calling me Mommy, and then he told me he was scared. And hungry. And that Reilly was scared.”

  Kel-Paten cupped her face with his right hand. “Take a few deep breaths. You’ve been bumped around a bit.”

  “I’ve been bumped around a lot.” Damn but her shoulder throbbed. Probably tore her rotator cuff. Again. “And I’ve been bumped around a lot worse. But I’ve never had my fidget talk to me before, and he’s talking to me now.”

  Kel-Paten frowned, but it was one of those half-condescending, half-sympathetic frowns. Her fist itched to clock him one. “Of course. Just take a few deep breaths. It’ll pass.”

  “Bran
den.” She paused. Deliberately. She glared up at him.

  One dark eyebrow quirked up slightly. “Tasha.”

  “I can hear Tank. In my mind.”

  “Reilly’s talking to Eden.” Serafino’s voice came from behind them, over the siren’s wail.

  The dark eyebrow that had gone up now slanted downward.

  “How? Why?” Sass asked. If anyone knew anything about telepathic talking furzels, it would be a Nasyry.

  “Fynn’s a telepath,” Kel-Paten said in a low voice.

  “But I’m not,” she countered. “And I can hear Tank. And he understands me. This is…strange.” She shook her head slowly. She raised her voice. “You didn’t answer me, ’Fino. Why?” She turned slightly, trying to see past Kel-Paten’s wide shoulder and back into the cockpit.

  “Don’t know yet,” came the answer.

  “Yes, Reilly. Food soon,” Eden called out.

  Food? Soon? Food? Tank asked.

  Sass pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “This,” she said, “is going to be an experience.”

  It was. For the next hour, disjointed sounds, half words, and odd images bombarded Sass as they worked through the required postlanding checklist, reconfirmed the planet’s habitability factors, and Eden poked, prodded, or patched their various infirmities. Furzel ears were far more sensitive and furzel eyes considerably closer to the ground. Sass became intimately acquainted with Kel-Paten’s and Eden’s boots—through Tank’s eyes. His small, singsong voice floated in and out of her thoughts. Some things—most things—made no sense.

  “It takes a while to unravel what they’re saying,” Serafino advised from his seat at the copilot’s chair, where he was keying in a basic repair program, coordinating with Kel-Paten belowdeck in the engine compartment. The engine and power grids had fared the worst. Luckily, they had no hull breeches or major structural issues.

  Sass felt talking to TeKrain Namar would have been easier.

  “What’s this ‘protect, protect’?” she asked, plopping down into the pilot’s seat. Her back ached. Her knees ached. She’d spent the past twenty minutes hunkered down in the corner of the main cabin, trying to reroute a starboard power line so the exterior rampway stairs would function.

  “A result of the bonding process, I think.” Eden was at the small science station, running the final tests on outside air samples. “Something in their nature makes them feel it’s their duty to guard their ‘person.’ I’m getting it from Reilly too, off and on.”

  “Because something’s bad here or they just fear anything that’s not MommySass or MommyEden?”

  Eden shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure. Jace isn’t sure.” She glanced at Serafino, who leaned back in his seat and nodded.

  “We were just discussing that,” he said. “Reilly was in that protect mode on the Vax too. I thought…I sensed something then. But there are so many variables, including…” and he tapped his head, indicating the disconnected PsyServ implant. An implant Sass knew she’d have to discuss with Kel-Paten at some point. Now, however, did not seem like a good time.

  “Jace may have some residual effects from the surgery we have to deal with,” Eden continued. “The med-panel on board doesn’t have any equipment to accurately test that. And I’m sure getting bumped around during landing hasn’t helped.”

  “But it could be this place, this planet?” Sass asked.

  “They’ve been confined on a ship pretty much their whole lives,” Jace said. “Any kind of dirtside environment with things like wind or natural sunlight or rain will feel very strange to them. It could be as simple as that.”

  It could be, Sass thought, bundling Tank once again into her arms as Protect Mommy! Love Mommy! Protect Mommy! sang through her mind. She stroked his ears, his audible purring replacing his mental pleas.

  He relaxed against her as Eden pronounced a decisive “all clear.” Kel-Paten’s agreement came moments later from belowdeck. The shuttle was secure. The planet was safe. They weren’t going to fry from the radiation in its atmosphere or take a breath of the outside air and die.

  Perhaps that’s all it was. A new place with new sounds and new smells.

  But what if it wasn’t? She swiveled around in the pilot’s chair and gazed out the viewport at the greens and browns of trees and grass and earth. Dirtside. Tank’s nervousness notwithstanding, she hated being dirtside.

  It reminded her of Lethant.

  It was a hazy morning, or perhaps early afternoon. Light—broken by the irregular line of tall trees—flickered over the expanse of green in dappled patches, reflecting now and then off small, irregular pools of water. The storm that had accompanied their arrival was nowhere to be seen. The smell of raw, wet earth was pungent. The smell of hot metal and burning plastic, acrid. Coolant, steam, and other fluids hissed and whistled through the various exhaust ports of the leviathan called Galaxus that had dropped from the sky and partially embedded itself into the soft ground.

  Tasha marched around the shuttle, datalyzer in one hand, her plump fidget trotting alongside. Every few steps she uttered a soft but insistent “Damn it!”

  Kel-Paten trailed through the damp grass behind them both, bemused. He should be as upset as she was. The shuttle had damage. Nothing a good spaceport repair dock couldn’t fix, but they had no reason to believe HV-1 offered such facilities.

  So the captain’s frustration was understandable.

  However, they were alive, and—other than the odd fact that Tasha and Fynn could purportedly communicate with their furzels—they were recovering as well as could be expected from their assortment of bumps, breaks, and bruises.

  But their physical condition only contributed to the source of Kel-Paten’s good humor and bemusement. It wasn’t the cause of it.

  The cause of it was that Tasha had kissed him. And let him kiss her back. And didn’t flinch at his touch.

  Gods’ blessed rumps, she kissed him! Even called him Branden. And ever since then, something changed in the way she looked at him or spoke to him. It wasn’t just his ability to expertly analyze human facial configurations that told him this either. It was…something else. Something warmer and real and…human.

  Even Serafino’s presence failed to completely disturb that.

  Tasha stopped at the shuttle’s rampway and ran a hand through her hair, wincing as she moved her shoulder. He could tell she was exhausted. So were Serafino and Fynn. Even he was tired, and his artificially enhanced endurance level was far beyond theirs. They all had been awake and in crisis mode—save for a few hasty furzel-naps before landing—for almost forty-eight hours. His last-ditch efforts to sub-route the shuttle’s power through his systems had taxed him, temporarily compromising a few functions, but there was no permanent damage. Once they determined the shuttle’s status and secured their perimeter, he was going to order them all off-duty for six hours, and himself for two. That would make Fynn happy. Or at least stop her from scowling at her medicorder so often.

  Tasha was tapping the datalyzer’s screen, transmitting her scans to the main computers inside. “Got that, ’Fino?”

  “Yeah, got it,” Serafino’s voice replied through the unit’s small speaker.

  “Wish it was better news.” She sighed and handed the unit to Kel-Paten.

  He dropped out of Tasha kissed me mode and scrolled quickly through the data. The appraisal was more thorough and slightly worse than his initial scans conducted from inside the shuttle, but—given the condition of the shuttle’s equipment—he’d expected as much.

  However, key components and mechanicals—engines, thrusters, power grid—were surprisingly intact. The news was bad but not devastating, and he told her so.

  She rocked back on her heels and looked up at him, a slow grin spreading across her mouth for the first time in almost two hours. “Then I guess you owe me a beer, eh?”

  Whatever rejoinder he could offer was interrupted by the sound of footsteps from inside the shuttle and the appearance, seconds later, of
Eden Fynn at the top of the rampway, bioscanner in hand. Which was just as well, because he really didn’t have a rejoinder. His limited social skills went into stasis whenever Tasha smiled at him. Kisses notwithstanding, this was all too new—and he had no data by which to judge it. He had no experience flirting with women; he had no experience with women at all. He’d never even—

  “No known toxins or poisons,” Fynn announced, turning the scanner in a slow half circle. “A few molds and mosses. Pollen spores all register as benign.”

  “Any edibles?” Tasha asked.

  “Don’t stick anything into your mouth until I run a lab test on it.” The CMO trudged down the short flight of stairs, her furzel at her heels. She’d donned her blue lab coat over her rumpled uniform, and her hair—usually so neatly tucked behind her ears—was mussed. A small med-broche, affixed to her neck just under her right ear, peeked over the edge of her uniform collar, mitigating the effects of her concussion. “I’m also picking up evidence of fresh water. A spring, most likely.” She glanced to her left, squinting, then raised her free hand to shade her eyes. “That mountain range is probably the source.”

  It was the same mountain range where earlier scans had showed deposits of sharvonite. Essential if they were to refuel, though refining the compound would prove to be a challenge. Kel-Paten segued back into work mode, though not completely. Tasha was inches from him. He felt her presence like a sun’s heat against the cold metal hull of a ship.

  “Fortuitous choice of locations,” he told Fynn, and briefly calculated the odds that they should find, exactly within their limited fuel range upon coming out of a near fatal jump, a habitable planet with breathable air, edible vegetation, and potable water. The odds weren’t staggering, but they were sizable.

  When he added to that the fact that Tasha had kissed him—and what were the odds that that would ever happen?—it occurred to him that he might be dead and this was the gods’ Lost Paradise. After all, he never had this kind of luck when he was alive.