He lifted his dark brows and sent her one of those slow grins she had once thought was sexy as hell. “Whatever you say.”
Pursing her lips, she gestured toward the only casual chair her quarters boasted and, after some consideration, decided to pull out her desk chair for herself when she noticed Laine glance toward her bunk. “The computer’s managed to decipher some of the writing on that alien artifact,” she announced without preamble.
Something flickered in his eyes. “And?”
“It looks like a warning.”
“Looks like, or is?”
Anya got up from the chair and began to pace. “I can’t be sure, but I’m starting to get really uneasy about that thing.”
Surprise flickered over his face and then doubt. “You said it was just a box, empty except for the remains of some dead alien.”
Anya swallowed and returned to her chair. “I don’t think it’s completely dead.”
Laine stared at her. “There was no sign of life. Are you telling me there is now?”
Stupid! Why hadn’t she thought to run another scan? It was careless and sloppy considering her suspicions, and not the sort of thing she would ordinarily be guilty of. She’d been too preoccupied with trying to rehearse what she was going to say to Laine, she decided. “Haven’t you noticed the mood swings in the crew?”
“I don’t spend a lot of time examining moods,” he retorted dryly. “As long as they do their work ….”
Anya tamped her exasperation with an effort. “Have you had any strange dreams?” she asked finally.
He frowned at her. “What the hell are you getting at?”
“I’ve dreamed of a man—a being that looks like a man anyway, over and over again, dreamed of walking on an alien world. And I’m not the only one that’s had this particular dream. I’ve questioned every woman on board and all of them are having the same dream—or something very similar.”
Laine settled back in the chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “And you think that thing could be causing it?”
“I think whatever’s inside that sarcophagus still has some life in it, and I think it’s manipulating the crew.”
“To what end?”
“I’ve got no idea—and I didn’t want to tell you, but I caught Carol in the lab yesterday. She was stroking the casket. And when I asked her what she was doing there, she began to talk about him.”
“Him, who?”
“The man we’ve been dreaming about. The being, I think, that’s inside that thing. She told me he had meant no harm, that they had tried to destroy him.”
“I’m thoroughly lost,” Laine growled. “What happens in these dreams?”
Anya felt blood surge into her cheeks. “He seduces us.”
He stared at her blankly for a moment and released a chuckle that contained more sarcasm than humor. “You called me in here to tell me you and the other women are having wet dreams about some dead alien?”
“Damn it, Laine! Could you get your fucking mind off your dick for five seconds? What do you do when you want to control a woman? You try to seduce her, convince her you’re crazy about her—and then you get her to do things for you. Right?”
He reddened angrily. “Guess that explains why you treat me like a leper,” he growled.
“It does, but that isn’t the point here. He is weak, possibly dying—too weak to come to us—except in dreams, but he’s a master of pleasure. I’ve seen the look they all have in their eyes whenever they talk about their dreams. Slowly but surely, I think he’s gaining control of this facility. And whatever it is he has in mind, I’m not at all convinced it would be best for us.”
“Exactly what the hell do you want me to do about it?” Laine growled. “We’re under orders to take the artifact back with us—intact.”
Anya stared at him, realizing she hadn’t really formulated any sort of plan. She had no recommendation. She certainly wasn’t willing or ready to suggest they pitch the obelisk back into space. God only knew if it would do any good even if they tried. Something had guided it directly to them. “I only called you here to apprise you of what I believe may be a dangerous situation,” she said more calmly. “You’re the captain. You should know.”
“Except you’ve got nothing to give me except speculation, and, maybe, a warning scratched on that thing by whoever launched it into space to begin with.”
Anya stared at him in disbelief. “I know it sounds crazy! Don’t you think I know that? But you saw what it did before. It slowed down, changed course. It landed in our shuttle bay, for god sake! I’ve examined it as well as my instruments will allow, and I’m telling you that capsule is nothing but a hollow casket! There is nothing inside of it that could possibly have made it do that unless it’s the being inside. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that everyone was fighting the day after it arrived. He was angry, and everybody in the station was affected.”
Laine scrubbed his hands over his face. “They’ve bumped up our departure,” he said almost tiredly. “Central command can’t wait to get their hands on the artifact. I’ll send some crewmen up to the lab in the morning to remove it to storage in the bay until we leave. It’s the best I can do. I’m not saying I’m buying anything you’ve told me, or dismissing it. But the orders are to bring it and that’s what we’ll be doing.”
Anya dropped weakly into her chair. “When did you get the orders?”
“Earlier today. We’ve repaired the collision damage. SP-13 is as ready as we can make it.”
“They must really be anxious to get hold of it if they’re ordering us to leave the station unmanned. The replacement crew isn’t due for another three or four weeks.”
Laine shrugged. “That’s not my decision. I just follow orders,” he retorted irritably.
“When are we leaving?”
“We’ve got six days to prep the ship and launch homeward. I’d planned on making a general announcement tomorrow.”
Melanie was smirking at her at breakfast the following morning. Anya had not had a restful night and she took the knowing smirk in bad part.
“I heard Laine paid you a visit in your quarters last night—stayed a while.”
Anya’s eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t a social visit, Mel. I wanted to give him my report on my findings so far.”
Melanie’s smirk vanished. Her gaze was speculative. “About him?”
Anya didn’t bother to pretend ignorance, but it irritated her that everyone—at least the females—had begun to refer to ‘him’ when not one of them had set eyes on the alien. “About the artifact.”
“And what was decided?”
Anya’s lips tightened. “We’ve been ordered to take it back with us, not surprisingly.”
Melanie seemed to relax. “Oh.”
“They’ll be removing the obelisk to the bay today and keeping it under guard until we depart.”
Melanie sent her a sly look. “You and I both know that they could put a dozen guards on him and it won’t make a bit of difference.”
Unnerved by the comment, Anya simply stared at her friend for several moments and finally got up and left abruptly. She wanted to do one final scan on the sarcophagus while it was still in her hands.
Setting up the scan, she watched the machine for a few moments and finally moved to the computer to study the data from the previous reads. The computer, she discovered, had managed to decipher more of the hieroglyphs. She studied the translations, trying to decide if it really was a warning of some kind, or if it only seemed like one because of the word structuring.
A sound behind her finally penetrated her absorption and she lifted her head, thinking the scanner must have gotten off track.
The scrape of metal against metal wasn’t the scanner, however.
The blood seemed to freeze in her veins as she stared at the sarcophagus, which was slowly opening.
She couldn’t move. She didn’t breathe for so long that dizziness swept over her as her body finally commanded her lu
ngs to drag in air. Her heart was thundering so hard in her ears she could hear nothing else, her mind screaming an alarm that none of the rest of her body registered.
She had to command herself to move and even then each smallest movement was only the result of concentrated effort, jerky, uncoordinated.
She had managed to lift her body onto her shaky legs and take no more than one step when she saw a body begin to rise from the cavity within the sarcophagus. Golden hair appeared first, hair that appeared to be spun from gold filament, not merely pale.
He was wearing the robe he had worn each time he had appeared to her in her dreams.
When he’d sat up, he looked slowly around the lab until he found her with his gaze.
Anya wilted back into the chair she’d only just vacated. He looked just as he had in her dreams. Exactly. She tried to speak, swallowed, moistened her fear dried lips and tried again. “Who are you?”
His gaze flickered over her face. “I am Legion.”
Chapter Five
Every tiny hair follicle on Anya’s body seemed to stand on end as the deep, resonating voice washed over her—the voice that sounded as if it were many voices because it came from alien vocal chords unlike any human’s.
He rose from the capsule—floated upwards as if there was no gravity within the space station.
Anya’s mind seemed to kick start when he settled on his feet not much more than an arm’s length from where she sat. She scrambled out of her chair so fast she turned it over. “What are you?” she gasped hoarsely when she’d put some distance between them and whirled to face him again.
Something flickered in his eyes and then his face hardened. His beautifully molded lips—those lips that had kissed her with both hunger and tenderness, drawing pleasure from her as effortlessly as a master musician drew beauty from his instrument—compressed into a tight line and cold dispassion turned his blue eyes to ice. “You know.”
Anya blinked. “I don’t know.”
He tilted his head to one side as if studying an oddity. “Liar. You remember.”
A knot seemed to wedge in Anya’s throat. It took a supreme effort to dislodge it. “The dreams,” she said faintly.
“Not dreams. You knew they were not.”
She stared at him, trying to create order of the chaos of her mind. “You can’t be real,” she finally said, her voice emerging as little more than a hoarse whisper. “It defies logic. You must have been in that thing for years. There was no air, no water, no food. It’s not possible.”
He smiled, but it was a cruel twist of his lips containing little humor. She couldn’t tell if the fury she sensed in him was directed toward her, or those who’d placed him in the coffin and launched him toward eternity.
His eyes narrowed, his lip curling. “They did not place me into the liezarct,” he murmured. “They were far too terrified of me to ….”
He broke off without finishing, but Anya wasn’t certain whether it was because he decided that he had said too much or if it was because the detail that had been assigned to remove and guard the alien artifact arrived at that moment and skidded to a halt in the door of the lab.
One moment Legion was facing her, the next he was facing the threat hovering just outside the lab. Stunned to discover that he moved just as he had in her dreams when she had thought that was merely a part of the dream, Anya stared at his back in disbelief for several heartbeats before she glanced toward the door of the lab.
Vance, she saw, was in the lead, his gaze fastened upon the alien as if he had just inadvertently walked up upon a wild beast. In stunned horror, she watched as Vance’s hand moved to his service pistol as his gaze flicked from the alien, to the now empty capsule, to her. The revolvers the men carried, she knew, had been set with inhibiters to prevent any accidental hull breach, but that concern didn’t enter her mind. It was her fear of how Legion would react to hostility when he was already angry—with her, she realized belatedly, because her reception of his ‘true’ self had hardly been the warm welcome of a lover. No doubt he’d expected that. He had every reason to, she realized considering the way she’d responded to his touch.
She shook her head, but she knew even as she did so that Vance was hardly even aware of her.
Almost as if time had slowed to a crawl, she saw Vance’s fingers close around the butt of his pistol. Legion moved. One moment he was standing beside the sarcophagus, the next he was within reach of the men at the door. Shots rang out, the blinding red beams of the laser pistols pinging in a wild zigzag around the lab.
She felt her jaw sag in stunned disbelief as the realization struck her that not one penetrated Legion despite the fact that he was less than an arm’s length away from the men firing in mindless panic. The beams seemed to bounce off of him.
Something slammed into her chest so hard it knocked the breath out of her. Slowly, she looked down, stared at the blackened burn in the center of her chest and the thin, bright red stream of blood that shot from her, and then lifted her head again and stared helplessly at the group near the door as her knees buckled and darkness descended on her.
Through a gray fog, Anya found herself looking up at the ceiling of the lab. A face appeared above her and then rage that was palpable surrounded her. Legion slung one arm out as if swatting at a gnat. Anya’s eyes automatically followed the motion and she saw the crewmen flung backwards from the room as if a giant hand had scooped them up and pitched them into the corridor. The lab door slammed closed behind them, sealing her into the lab with Legion.
She seemed to float upwards, but in the next moment she felt the warmth and strength of Legion surrounding her, his chest against her side and cheek, his arms beneath her shoulders and knees. She didn’t realize until that moment how cold she was. A shiver went through her as his heat began to filter into her icy body. “C-cold,” she uttered between chattering teeth.
Legion pulled her more tightly against him and she could see nothing at all for several moments. The gray fog was deeper and darker when she felt him move away from her. A deeper cold touched her back and she found herself on a hard, unyielding surface staring up at the lights in the ceiling. She knew, somehow, he’d settled her on the examination table, though she had no idea what had happened to the capsule that had been there before.
Legion’s hand settled on her forehead and for a moment the darkness parted. His face was grim as he stared down her. Do not be afraid, Beloved. I will not allow life to leave you. And when I am done, I will crush them for your hurt.
She didn’t see his lips move, but she heard his voice clearly in her mind. Don’t! They didn’t mean to hurt me. And I’m not afraid, she thought, realizing with a touch of surprise that she wasn’t. Living without Jeremy was the hard part. Dying isn’t nearly as bad as I had thought it would be. Let me go.
The rage wafted over her again. NO! You were destined for me. I knew it the moment my mind touched yours. In time, you will also know it in every fiber of your being, just as I do.
She would have argued but she felt a searing pain enter her chest that was far worse than the mortal shot she knew had pierced her heart, far worse than anything she had ever felt in her life. It crushed her breath from her lungs and she felt herself falling deeper into the velvety blackness.
* * * *
Anya’s first awareness was of pain and noise. Both increased exponentially as full consciousness exploded in her mind and she opened her eyes. The arms that held her in a painful grip against a hard chest didn’t belong to Legion. Confusion not enlightenment filled her as her gaze raked her surroundings. Laser blasts were exploding all around them. Laine was hunched over her, grunting with effort as he hurried along one of the station’s corridors with her. Sweat soaked through his suit and into hers.
They settled behind something big and Laine lay her on the cold floor with more haste than gentleness. She strained to move, but her entire body was a mass of raw nerve endings and the effort only spread the fire further, made it impossible to d
rag in even a tiny breath. She relapsed, panting. “What’s happening?”
Laine shot her a quick glance and returned his attention to what he’d been doing, which she realized was firing blast after blast at someone beyond her view. Around her, she realized, other crew members were huddled, each of them firing one blast after another.
“That alien bastard’s taken over the station—and more than half the crew is helping him, the mutinous bastards,” Laine growled.
A scream erupted and cut off abruptly. On the heels of it, Anya heard a man cry out and then the blasts stopped abruptly. “Hang on,” Laine growled, shoving his hands under her again and groaning as he lifted her against his chest. “We’re going to make a run for it. Let’s hope they haven’t disabled the ship.”
It took an effort to lift her arms high enough to drape them around his neck and she was too weak to manage much of a grip, but Laine’s labored breathing and movements inspired her to hang on the best she could. Light and shadows flashed over her eyes, making it impossible to focus, but she saw they were in the bay. Clenching her teeth to keep from biting her tongue in his jarring rush, Anya glanced around, trying to grasp what was going on.
She recognized Cooper and Russo. She thought there must be three or four others running with them, but she hadn’t seen them well enough to tell. Seven? Eight? Out of a crew of twenty they were only ones left?
“How long was I out?” she managed to grit out.
Laine ignored the question. She heard a change in the sound his boots made against the decking and a moment later realized they were going up the gang plank.
Another shot rang out. “Fuck!”
A half dozen blasts reciprocated. “Move it, ladies!” Laine growled.
“Son-of-a-bitch! They’ve taken the inhibitors off their pistols. They’re going to fill the hull full of holes!”
Laine dropped her in a seat and dashed toward the cockpit. Anya was still struggling to right herself and drag her harness over her shoulders when she heard the engines fire. The ship bucked and then she was plastered back against her seat as it shot toward the bay doors. Her heart clenched painfully when she saw the bay doors open half way and stop.
Lords of Mayhem Page 7
