Kneeling beside it, the three of them searched carefully for some sign of an opening or device that would make it open. When they had each checked it thoroughly, they sat back and stared at each other, for none of them had found any sign that it would open at all. The object looked to be solid.
Anya knew it wasn’t. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. She was also certain that it contained something, and was not merely an obelisk. Extracting the portable scanner she’d brought, she settled it on the topmost surface. Before she could activate it, Laine stopped her.
“Wait!”
Anya looked up at him in surprise.
“You and Vance move back as far as you can. I’ll scan it.”
“Why?” Anya demanded suspiciously.
His lips tightened. “In case the beam sets it off.”
Vance didn’t argue. He’d already headed toward the far side of the bay.
“There’s nothing inside to be set off,” Anya said with a certainty even she wondered at.
“Just give me the damned thing before I write you up for insubordination. Why the hell you have to argue about every damn thing, I sure as hell don’t know, Rambo, but you’re really starting to piss me off!”
“Fine!”
Slapping the scanner into his hand, she stalked across the bay to take up a position near Vance.
Despite her certainty that the object contained nothing they need fear would explode, Anya waited tensely as Laine slowly scanned it. When he’d finished, he merely remained still, staring at the read out.
“What is it?” she asked finally when she couldn’t contain her curiosity any longer.
There was a lengthy pause before he answered. “Damned it I know. Either nothing’s inside, this scanner’s broke, or I used it wrong. I’m not getting anything.”
Anya surged forward at once. When she reached Laine, she held out her hand. “Let me see.”
He was right. There weren’t any readings. Adjusting the scanner to full power, Anya did her own scan. This time the scan picked up just enough to assure her the object was hollow, but not empty. “It’s a capsule, and there’s something inside.”
“What?” Laine demanded, moving around the black lozenge to stare at the readout over her shoulder.
“I can’t tell—nothing living.”
“Well hell, Rambo! I could’ve figured that out!”
Anya’s lips tightened with irritation. “I meant, no sign of organisms we need be concerned about. Whatever this thing is made out of, though, it’s nothing we’ve ever encountered and the scan can’t really be relied on. I need to get it up to med lab and use the big gun.”
“No fucking way!” Vance put in his two cents worth. “We’re going to ditch it, ain’t we Captain? This thing gives me the creeps.”
“You can’t be serious!” Anya demanded. “Look at it! This is an alien artifact! We’ve been oh so carefully avoiding saying it, but we all know it is! Aside from the fact that it came from deep space, the writing—or whatever that is all over the outside—and the materials it’s made of are dead giveaways! No way is control going to go for us dumping it like so much space debris!”
Laine gave her a look that she had no problem interpreting as a deep seated desire to throttle her even in the inadequate lighting. “I agree with you, Vance. I’m not convinced it isn’t dangerous, but she’s right. And something tells me she’s going to take the first opportunity to report it. I don’t think we’ve got a choice.”
The sense of triumph had barely begun to invade Anya when he spoke again. “We don’t have to do anything more than take it back, though. I’m sure as hell not hauling this thing inside the main station with us!”
* * * *
There was more than enough energy here, he realized, to supply his needs, and yet—caution—he told himself. He must be careful.
They were an intelligent species, far more advanced than any that he had encountered in all his travels. They were an unknown quantity. He could not be certain that they would not instantly detect the drain upon their resources.
They did not have the physical senses to do so, he was almost certain. If they had, they would have had no need for all the machines that they had devised to compensate for their physical limitations.
There was still a grain of doubt and, in any case, there were the machines.
Beyond that, he had learned his lesson. These life forms were doubtless as fragile as those on the world he’d fled. If he brought harm to them, however inadvertently, they would hate and fear him as the others had, shun him, flee from him, and he would still be alone.
He needed … acceptance if he was to have the chance to walk among them.
How to go about it, though, when he was not as they were?
The doubt was almost as seductive as the endless possibilities.
He drank, very carefully pulling just enough energy into himself to begin to regain his strength, but he found that he couldn’t completely contain his impatience. It had been too long since he had had anything to challenge his mind.
He needed to see the treasure he had found. He needed to study them, he told himself, to learn what they would accept and what they would not, to begin to understand the way their minds worked and what their customs were.
When he had gathered enough strength to safely do so without endangering the slow reawakening of his corporal self, he separated his psyche from his weaker physical form, and looked about him with interest.
Pleasure wafted through him when he beheld the beings he had found. Such excitement followed through him that he was almost giddy with it.
They were like him—in the physical sense, in any case.
When he was certain they had no awareness of his spirit form, he moved closer to examine them more carefully.
Having studied their forms meticulously, he was more convinced. A cosmic fluke, he wondered?
Or had his people visited their world long ago? Perhaps manipulated their development as he had considered doing when he had not known that the life forms he detected were already so evolved?
Ruthlessly, he tamped the spark of hope he felt within him.
His people were gone, just as his world had vanished.
These people did not carry the seed of his race. If they had, surely they would have passed down more of his race’s traits than the physical? Surely, no matter how weakened the strain, they would have had some of the heightened senses that he had himself? The would know the beziartre. These beings, so far as he could tell, beyond being every bit as fragile as the others he had found, had no awareness beyond those senses their physical bodies gave them. They could not see or even sense his presence. Their energy aura was so weak he could not help but wonder how it even sustained the bodies.
He tamped his disappointment with an effort. It did not matter. He had long since, he thought, accepted that there were no others like himself in existence.
At least physically these beings were close enough to give him comfort in familiarity.
It was a true joy to look upon beings that so nearly resembled those from his memory that he could almost feel as if he had come home at long last.
If he was careful, he could walk among them as one of them, find acceptance, exist, finally, as a part of a living world and cease his lonely wandering.
Perhaps find a mate among them, he thought as he studied the females, feeling a stirring of another emotion he hadn’t felt in many an age—the interest of a male for a female? Enthralled by the concept of producing his own offspring, which he had never considered before, he wandered the ship, searching to see if he could find one that appealed to him enough to actually consider bestowing his seed upon her.
Not that it really mattered whether he found one here or not. It was clear from the thoughts he intercepted that they came from a world teaming with possibilities.
He had just decided that he might as well wait to make his choice until he had seen what their world had to offer when he spied a fem
ale that stopped him in his tracks.
For what seemed an endless time, he could only stare at her in appreciation akin to awe. Finally, because he could not seem to help himself, he approached her. Resisting the urge to touch, or to encroach too closely upon her mind for fear she would detect his presence, he moved around her, studying her carefully from every angle, almost as enthralled by the emotions that flitted across her expressive face as he was the thoughts that flickered through her mind.
But not nearly as enthralled by either as he was her form.
Desire, he finally decided, pleased when he identified the heady emotion. He felt lust for her, not merely interest. He was almost as intrigued by the fact that he had so readily identified an emotion that he had not felt in so long that he had almost forgotten it, had never really felt as he did now, as he was by the effect it had upon his psyche.
He felt—hunger that had nothing to do with survival.
Anya. He savored the melody of her name when he had plucked it from the minds around him. And, because he could not contain his impatience, or tamp the fear that he would find only disappointment if he allowed himself to merely imagine what sort of creature she was, he very carefully probed her thoughts. Intrigued, he moved a little deeper, piercing her subconscious mind for the memories recorded there.
They unfolded for him like the delicate, deliciously scented petals of a breeybic, each a joy of discovery and when he had finished, he felt … drawn by the warmth in her, needy in a sense that he could not entirely grasp. But the want he understood. The desire to have her as if she was a shiny treasure he had discovered, he grasped.
A sense of possessiveness moved through him, solidified, became an absolute certainty.
She was the one.
* * * *
On a personal level, Captain Laine looked upon her as a tight ass, up tight bitch. On a professional level, he looked upon her as a pain in the ass, which meant he didn’t particularly care for her on either a personal or a professional level, Anya reflected.
She didn’t especially care. She had a fairly low opinion of him, as well, on both levels. She had enough trouble dealing with him as it was, though. So, although it had chaffed her to refrain from volunteering her opinion regarding the obelisk and demanding the right of first examination of the alien artifact because she’d been one of those who’d ‘found’ it, she’d behaved when she and Laine had filed the report.
She was counting on control being as excited about the find as she was and ordering her to do a preliminary examination. That way, she wouldn’t be adding fodder to the problems she was already experiencing with Laine. Unfortunately, if she’d misguessed, she was going to have to break ranks and demand the right to examine the piece, because there was no way she was going to miss this opportunity even if it meant being at loggerheads with Laine.
She supposed, if she’d really been smart, she would’ve just given the prick what he wanted. She knew damned well the only reason he wanted to fuck her so badly was because she’d been completely unmoved by his none too subtle moves on her. She knew he mostly wanted her because he couldn’t stand the possibility that not every female he came across wanted him. She also knew that it would only have taken the one capitulation to divert his interests elsewhere. But it would also have diffused the animosity he radiated whenever he was anywhere near her. Very likely, they would still have had some conflict simply because he found her personality an irritant, and because she had no respect for him because he was her polar opposite.
He had some skills and some sense of responsibility, not much in the way of honor or respect for others or even compassion for his fellow man. He was as cold in his self-centeredness as he accused her of being only because she wouldn’t fall into bed with him and spread her legs.
It wasn’t his great intellect and skills, contrary to what he believed, that saved his ass time and time again. It was barely adequate skills and a great deal of dumb luck.
Ultimately, if the space station had blown up and Russo and Mitchner had died, their deaths would have been his responsibility and he would have been court-martialed for it. He had authorized the alcoholic beverages, knowing full well that his crew had been confined for so long that they could not be trusted to behave like responsible adults, knowing, too, that it was against policy to have enough on hand to make it possible for any crew member to become stinking drunk.
His dumb luck had held, however, because both men had lived and the circumstances were such that no one, even the two men who could have died, was going to report the incident without doing a good bit of glossing.
Dismissing Laine from her mind finally, Anya settled as comfortably as she could in her bunk and commanded the lights out. She lay staring up at the darkened ceiling of her quarters for a few minutes before resolutely closing her eyes. Almost immediately, she felt herself begin to drift.
She found herself lying on a blanket overlooking an alien landscape. The sky was a deep, almost painfully clear blue without a cloud in sight. It wasn’t night, or even close to it. She knew that somehow, despite the darkness of the sky.
Turning her head, she saw the sun, surprised that she could look almost directly at it without it hurting her eyes. It was huge, and orange, but nowhere near the horizon which meant it couldn’t be the distortion of the atmosphere that made it appear so large, or so dull an orange.
The area around her wasn’t a field or a meadow, but the vegetation that covered it grew low, crawling along the ground. Looking down at it, she saw that it was green, but also veined with purple. It wasn’t moss. It wasn’t any plant that she was familiar with.
When she lifted her head, she saw that what she’d dismissed before as trees weren’t familiar to her either. The bark of the trees, if it could be called bark, was rough looking, and a mixture of gray and purple. The limbs were fat and stunted and did not spread into smaller and smaller branches. Instead, they grew out spoke like around the top of the trunk and supported something that looked far more like a solid canopy than individual leaves.
The trees moved restlessly, although she couldn’t feel any breeze strong enough to make them sway. It was rather more as if the trees were stretching and preening on their own to expose the canopy as thoroughly to the sun’s rays as possible.
She was on the point of rising to examine them more closely when she sensed a presence. Directed by she knew not what, she turned her head. A man had appeared in the distance. As she watched, he climbed the brow of the hill where she rested, his pace unhurried, unthreatening.
Fascinated by the long, gleaming hair that flowed around his shoulders with his movements, feeling a strange sense of excitement begin to thrum in her blood, a sense almost of awe rising in her, she sat up slowly. He looked like a man. But he wasn’t a man. She had no idea how she knew that, but she did.
He wore a long, flowing robe that covered him from neck to ankles, with long flowing sleeves that covered his arms, but she saw that he was built like a human being. He had two arms, two legs, one head.
As he drew nearer, the sense of awe increased. His face held no expression that she could decipher unless it was cool interest, for she could see that he was appraising her just as she was him.
His features weren’t just regular. They were absolute perfection, flawless, perfectly formed, perfectly symmetrical.
That was why she knew he wasn’t human. Although she wasn’t exactly certain how she knew that he was perfectly symmetrical, she did, and nothing in nature that she knew was perfectly balanced.
He stopped when he was towering over her. For several moments, he simply stood perfectly still, studying her, his features clouded in shadows.
“What manner of being are you?”
Anya blinked at the question. “Human.”
He tilted his head slightly to one side as if the word puzzled him, although why it should she couldn’t imagine. He spoke English, not some foreign or alien tongue incomprehensible to her. Finally, he knelt in front of her. The
movement brought his face nearly level with hers, making her excruciatingly aware for the first time that he was far bigger than any man she knew. She didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed before, but supposed it was because she was too stunned by his beauty to fully register much of anything else.
His shoulders were massive, and she could see from the way the fabric of his robe conformed to his body that his chest and arms were equally massive.
He sat back on his heels. “You are made much as I am,” he said finally. “Outwardly, at least. That pleases me … infinitely.”
It took her several moments to grasp what he’d said because she had just noticed something very strange about his voice. When he spoke, it was as if many voices rumbled from his deep chest at once, almost, but not quite, synchronized—rather like a reverberation.
Anya moistened her lips. “You’re not human?” she managed to ask, hearing her voice quaver faintly.
“The word means nothing to me. I have not heard it before.” He tipped his head up. “But I have not been here before. Mayhap my people have. Did your ancient ones speak of gods who walked among them and looked as I do?”
Instinctively lifting her head to look around just as he had, a start of surprise went through Anya. Instead of the alien landscape she’d seen before, she saw the sun and trees and vegetation of Earth.
Frowning, Anya looked at the man again. “What happened?”
A faint smile curled his chiseled lips and Anya felt her belly tighten.
“You don’t know?”
She stared at him for a moment. “You took this from my mind.”
He looked surprised and then pleased—rather as if she was a pet that had performed a trick unexpectedly.
A low chuckle rumbled from his chest. His eyes, which she saw now were a beautiful, unusual shade of blue, gleamed. “Not a pet—worthy.”
She didn’t particularly like that. She found it insulting.
His amusement deepened. “Why? Would it not have been more insulting to say you were unworthy?”
Lords of Mayhem Page 3
