Frost Station Alpha 1-6: The Complete Series

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  “Like you feel when getting a massage?”

  He chuckled softly. Tamryn’s eyes had been closed, but she opened them, almost startled by the sound. She’d never heard him laugh before. Of course, when she’d been busy running from, shooting at, and cursing at him, he wouldn’t have had much reason. She probably shouldn’t be giving him a reason to chuckle now, but she liked the sound and didn’t want him to stop. She especially didn’t want him to stop massaging her—he had reached her lower back, and she had to resist the urge to wriggle off the table and into his arms.

  “More like thinking of pleasant times with people you care for, or places you’ve been where you were completely at peace. Content. The monks who taught us this as boys had me think of hunting with my dog. You have your family, so you could think of them. My brother was my only family, and we were usually at war with each other, so the dog got my compassionate thoughts.”

  The mention of her family reminded her that Brax had asked Makkon to look hers up. She was glad he was here rubbing her back instead. Maybe it wouldn’t be entirely selfish to encourage him to stay rather than remembering that task.

  “Did you give your dog massages then?” she asked, wanting to avoid the talk of families, though she found herself thinking of his. Only a brother? No parents? For the first time, she wondered if he had a wife back home. Or children. He was older than she was, in his thirties, she was sure, so that seemed a likely possibility.

  “No, we weren’t quite that close.” His voice held a smile. “Besides, dogs rarely need it. They’re better at handling stress than we are.”

  “We had hounds when I was growing up. I think the secret to their stress-free existence is that they sleep twenty hours a day.”

  “Could be.” He chuckled again, and his jaw brushed the side of her face as he adjusted his hands to work a stubborn muscle in her lower back.

  His beard stubble had started to grow again, and the rough sensation sent a shiver through her. She wouldn’t have to turn her head far to kiss him. She would have to move even less to kiss his neck. If she shifted her head an inch, she could run her tongue down the strong tendons of his throat, taste him, breathe in his masculine scent. Of course, she wouldn’t, not even to keep him from looking up her family.

  Someone’s voice—it didn’t seem like it could be hers—asked, “Are you married, Makk?”

  His hands stilled for a moment, and intense disappointment filled her at the certainty that the answer would be yes.

  Her disappointment was foolish—why should she care? They weren’t going to have a relationship. Once Fleet arrived, Makkon and his men would be killed. Even if they weren’t, if they somehow got away, she would go back to her normal job, her normal life, and he would be elsewhere, some criminal who had attacked a GalCon station and would be hunted for the rest of his life. Somehow, these thoughts did not make her feeling of disappointment wane.

  “No,” Makkon said. “There was someone a few years ago. Make that a hundred and fifty and a few years ago.” He snorted, though there was little humor in the noise. “She went off with the insurgents. I’m sure this will surprise you, but I had no interest in starting a war. I stayed on Glaciem. Most of us stayed on Glaciem. It was only a few who... whose actions resulted in the obliteration of our moon.”

  “You’re talking about the people who went out and took over stations? Planets?” Tamryn had gotten the history lesson from Anise, but they had only been able to speculate as to what had happened to result in this group surviving.

  “Yes. You have to understand, Glaciem is a hard, bitter place to live. Survival was never guaranteed for anyone. Even though generations had passed since we’d been stranded there, nobody had ever forgotten the unfairness of that ruling. There were always some who wanted to take revenge, to find a better world to live on, one where going out on the surface for more than a few minutes wasn’t a death sentence. But it wasn’t until our generation was born that we actually had the technology and ships ready to do so. The first group was sent out to look for a more hospitable home world that we could move to, but the system was fully colonized by then. Anything that wasn’t harsh and inhospitable had been taken. Our president was considering what to do, if negotiation might be a tactic that could possibly improve our lots in the system, but there were those who had no faith in the rest of humanity. While our leaders were debating options, groups of people formed a militia and went out without permission, determined to carve out a piece of the system for our use. Perhaps if they’d only taken one moon or a small planet out here in the rim, they might have gotten away with it. I wasn’t there and don’t know why they chose to try and take so much, but I’m sure your history tells what happened.”

  “Your people were killed, and Glaciem was nuked,” Tamryn said, staring at his neck. He was still massaging her, but his hands had slowed. She remembered how Anise had seemed sympathetic to their cause, despite what they’d done here. She must have known more, suspected more, all along.

  “A few of those insurgents survived and made it back to warn the rest,” Makkon said. “Brax was a commander out there.”

  Tamryn wasn’t surprised at that. He had probably enjoyed the conquering, the killing.

  “By the time those survivors came limping back to us in a broken shuttle, we had nothing left with which to defend ourselves. They’d taken all of the ships and most of our meager weapons. We had developed a few cryonics chambers, and we had time to take them deep within the tunnel system in the hope that some of us would survive, to ensure we weren’t completely destroyed as a people. We drew lots. There are less than...” He hesitated, perhaps remembering he wasn’t just telling a story, but he was also giving intel to an enemy, even if she was an enemy with her head on his shoulder and enjoying the ministrations of his hands. “There aren’t many of us who survived.”

  “And your... lady friend wasn’t one of them?”

  “No, she died early in the fighting, I heard. She was passionate, fierce, a warrior.”

  Yes, Tamryn had no problem imagining him being attracted to warrior women.

  “But brash too,” he went on. “All of those who left our home and ultimately condemned us to that fate were. We argued before she left. She wanted me to come, and I wanted her to stay. Neither of us got our way. Our last words to each other were harsh. I’ve often regretted that I didn’t get to tell her... Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

  Tamryn sighed, her own past relationships seeming piddling when compared to not getting to say “I love you” to someone before she died.

  “Some things always matter.” She kissed him on the neck before her mind caught up with her action and reminded her that kissing the enemy wasn’t a good idea. Maybe he was lost in his own memories and hadn’t noticed.

  Makkon’s hands grew still. He’d noticed.

  He drew back slightly, his hands sliding down to rest on her hips. When he looked at her face, she told herself to look elsewhere, anywhere but into his eyes, because she was already afraid of what she might do. She ought to push herself off the table, put some distance between them. That would have been the smart choice. But his face had a magnetic pull on her, and she couldn’t look away.

  His blue eyes were warm, brimming with emotion, a tenderness that made it so she could no longer see the fierce tattoo or remember his power to kill. It would be easy to forget all that he could do—and all that he had done.

  “What made you come here?” she asked. If he had chosen to stay in his homeland instead of going off to war with Brax and the others, why had he come here, the act of a terrorist?

  “Desperation,” he said quietly, still gazing into her eyes. He lifted a hand and brushed the side of her face with his knuckles. She had to wrestle with herself not to close her eyes and lean into his touch. It was as if with that massage, he had taken away her ability to fight him, claimed her body for his... and made her want to succumb to that claim. “The cryonic chambers returned us to living when the radiation levels ha
d dropped enough for humans to survive again, but most of the animal life was gone. We had nothing left to eat and were on the verge of cannibalism when someone found that crashed mining ship. This mission up here—it’s our only chance to survive.”

  Tamryn searched his face, looking for the lie, the trick to make her trust him when she shouldn’t. “What did you ask for in that list you sent to the council and headquarters?”

  “Terraforming equipment and food.”

  She wanted to ask why they couldn’t have looked for a peaceful way to get those things, but would the government have bargained with them? Especially when it found out this was the same generation of people who had been responsible for that war? Besides, what would they have bartered with? What could an ice moon that had endured a nuclear holocaust have to trade?

  “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” Tamryn asked.

  “Would you have believed me?”

  No.

  Makkon tilted his head. “Do you believe me now?”

  “I... It doesn’t matter what I believe.” She looked over his shoulder, toward the shadows in the corner of the lounge. “I still have to do my duty.”

  “I know.” He smiled sadly. He leaned back, about to step away.

  Before she could think better of it, Tamryn caught his hand to stop him. She wasn’t sure why or what she intended to do after that. For a moment, he stared down at her hand. When he looked up, gazing into her eyes, all the tension in her heart melted away, the same way the knots in her muscles had under his hands. He stepped closer, his body brushing her knees.

  He leaned in slowly, his lips parting. She could have turned away, rejected the kiss, but she opened her mouth instead. She’d kissed him before, in the corridor when she had been trying to talk him into going with her to her room, and that had been appealing, but it was nothing compared to this. For the first time, there was no tension between them, no plotting of deaths in the back of her mind. She relaxed, letting herself enjoy his touch, letting herself lean into him, reveling in the way her body flushed with warmth and desire as his lips stroked hers.

  He slid his fingers through her hair, finding her scalp and massaging her again with those strong, sure fingers. Pulses of heat radiated through her, pooling in her core. He eased closer and bumped her knees. She let them fall open, until nothing but their clothing separated them. She shifted closer, on the very edge of the table. One of his hands slid around her back, holding her tight against him as their kiss deepened, intensity flaring. She slid a hand up the bare muscles of his arm, relishing in the feel of those hard curves beneath her fingers. His scent and his taste and his raw power nearly overwhelmed her, leaving her heady with desire. She could feel the swell of his cock through his trousers, throbbing against her heat. She wanted him, wanted to tell him that, but that would have meant taking her mouth from his, putting a stop to the delicious strokes of his tongue. She moaned instead, trailing her hand down his chest to his belt, trusting him to figure out what she wanted.

  A rustle and a faint gasp came from somewhere else—it hadn’t been from him or her. Though confused, Tamryn might have ignored it, continued with what they were doing, but Makkon broke the kiss. He was breathing heavily, his body as full of desire as hers, but his head turned to the side, away from her. She slid her fingers through his hair, tempted to pull him back toward her, but she glanced in the direction he was looking first.

  A chill of horror swept through her, squelching her desire like a bucket of ice water. Sergeant Gruzinsky had woken up and was staring at them from across the room.

  Tamryn dropped her hands, the enormity of what she had been doing—and what it would look like from the outside—striking her so hard that she could barely breathe. She couldn’t gather her thoughts at all. There were too many of them spinning through her head. She was consorting with the enemy—kissing the enemy. Instead of doing her best to escape, evade, and report back, the rules dictated in the Fleet officers’ manual, she was wrapping her legs around one of the men who had taken their station and killed their people.

  Gruzinsky looked away, staring up at the ceiling, but not before she saw the expression of horror and fear on his face. It was as if he thought he’d be killed for what he had seen. No, never that. Even though Tamryn knew he would be duty-bound to report this. Now, whatever happened in the future, even if the Glacians were utterly wiped out by Fleet’s troops, her career would be over. Even worse, Gruzinsky and everyone else would think she was a traitor and a whore.

  She leaped from the table, wanting nothing more than to flee into the corridor, to escape the memory of Gruzinsky’s condemning eyes, to escape her own thoughts.

  But Makkon caught her before she’d gone more than two steps. He didn’t say anything, but he glanced at the door. Right, she was still a prisoner. Prisoners couldn’t be allowed to flee, even when they were having a meltdown.

  With tears of self-loathing pricking at her eyes, she darted to a far corner instead. She dropped to the floor and buried her face in her hands.

  Part 4: Contagion

  Chapter 16

  Makkon waved his finger, flipping through the pages of data that floated in the air above him, barely seeing any of it. He was leaning against the wall by the door, where he could keep an eye on the Fleet soldier and Tamryn, not that either of them was looking at him. The soldier had turned his back to him, though from the tense hunch to his shoulders, Makkon could tell he wasn’t asleep. He looked like a man fearing he was about to receive a dagger in the back. Tamryn sat in the corner of the room, her knees drawn up to her face. He didn’t think she was crying, but she looked miserable. He tried not to find that a reflection of what she’d thought of their kiss. He had enjoyed it very much. It had been so much more enthusiastic and full of passion than the one from earlier, the one where she’d had an ulterior motive. He’d never thought he would experience her passion, or that she might actually come to care for him.

  But he didn’t know if she would ever kiss him again now. She clearly saw it as a mistake, something to be ashamed of, something that might have been all right if they didn’t have a witness, but not something she could ever do in front of her people, not without being considered a traitor. Makkon understood that, knew her distress was because they were enemies, or they were supposed to be, and not because she had realized that he was... that he was an abomination by the standards of the rest of the system. She hadn’t seemed to care that his ancestors had been born in laboratories and were soulless heathens according to the system’s main religion, or what had been the main religion back then, but he couldn’t help but wonder if that was some of why she was so distressed that someone had witnessed their kiss.

  Sighing, he made himself focus on the display. Before he’d grown distracted—delightfully distracted—he had meant to look up her family, to see if that pirate had been crazy or if he had known something his team hadn’t. That wouldn’t take much, given their missing hundred and fifty years. He felt guilty, using her tablet to snoop into her background, but his own personal computer didn’t have access to the system-wide network. Though they were too far out to get updates in a timely manner, the tablet had a massive database on its harddrive, or perhaps accessible through some mainframe computer in the station. He couldn’t get into any of her personal files, or see any of her messages, but the general information displayed for him, allowing him to do a search.

  When he typed in her name, a handful of Tamryn Pavlenkos came up, but she was the only one serving in the military. Her records couldn’t be accessed without a password to get into the Fleet database, but that wasn’t surprising. As young as she was, she wouldn’t have much of a record, anyway. The general entry listed her birthdate and birthplace and the names of her parents and her siblings. She had four older brothers, with one of them being an Ernest Pavlenko. She’d mentioned that name earlier, so he had the right person. He ran searches on the mother and the father. Her mother had been an accountant, though she seemed to have quit
her job shortly after she married into the Pavlenko family. She was now on the boards for a number of charities and volunteered in several sporting organizations for children. Makkon had very little context when it came to what constituted a normal life in the rest of the system, but he got the impression that money wasn’t a problem for the family if the mother didn’t have to work at an actual job.

  He shifted his weight, starting to get the idea that maybe the pirate had been on to something. Next, he tapped on her father’s name, Tomas Pavlenko. He had served in the military, having an illustrious career and reaching the rank of admiral before resigning his commission. Five years later, he owned several businesses, including many that supplied the military with ships, weapons, and computer systems. The record didn’t indicate how he had come up with the money to buy the businesses. Given the dates of their incorporation, he would have had to start them while he was still in the military. That seemed unlikely. Maybe it didn’t matter. Makkon knew enough, that Tamryn’s family had money, perhaps enough for a ransom. That was probably what the pirate had been thinking about. It did seem strange that the pirate would have heard of her, simply because her father ran some businesses. As the network encyclopedia told him, there were billions of people in the system, spread out across more than thirty planets and moons. There had to be millions of businesses.

  On a whim, Makkon returned to the beginning of the entry on the father, the page that had listed parents and relations. He tapped on the father’s father’s name, Pyotr Pavlenko.

  The entry that came up was about five miles long. At the top of it, in big bold letters, read the words FINANCE LORD.