by Celeste Raye
Chapter 10:
Time was very strange there in Tralam. Drake had to admit to himself, however, that everything was very strange there.
When he had begun walking, what looked like sunlight had lain on the floors, and the crumbling walls had poured in through the broken windows and the shattering stone that had once formed columns. Now, after what felt like only a few mere moments, full darkness was everywhere. The small pack-lights that they carried were the only light along this hallway now. Even though it was fully dark, he could not keep his eyes off of Lornia.
Not that he had tried.
He had taken a glance out of one of those windows earlier; what he had seen out there had horrified him. Nothing but space. The landscape. No ground. Nothing. Not even stars or moons or a single glimpse of the other planets that had formed the gates to that place.
The seriousness of the situation kept seeping into him with every step. He said to her, “The weapon. How heavy is it?”
She said, “Do not worry. You will not have to carry it.”
More irritation slid along his veins. She seemed to answer every single question with an evasive, off-hand sentence. He wondered if part of that was due to her rustiness with human language or if she were deliberately avoiding the questions.
He tried another approach. “Does it have wheels?”
Her head shook in a negative gesture. “No. It does not need them.”
He asked, “Can you describe the weapon to me so that I shall know it when I see it?”
“The weapon already knows you.”
Drake pushed down the urge to shake her. He had a feeling it would do no good anyway. Besides, after having seen her fight off that beast, he really was certain that he did not want to fight her.
They came to a large center hallway. Lights suddenly blazed into being. They all stood there, the entire crew with Lornia in their midst. Drake’s jaw sagged almost to his breastbone, and his was not the only one.
Jessica gasped out, “What is it?”
Lornia replied, “It is the machine that forms Tralam. It is the machine that holds the gate closed against all of those who would enter here.”
Talon whistled. “Did the machine break down? Is that why we were able to get in?”
Lornia’s hair rustled as she moved forward. Her voice was faint as it drifted back over her shoulder. “No. The machine knew you were coming in and allowed you entry.”
Drake pressed forward with that question. “Why? Why would it do that?”
She paused. She turned to face them. The light glowed off her pale skin and was lost there. None of that light could spark any sort of color up from her flesh. “The weapon chooses who guides it. It has chosen one of you to be its hand and commanding voice.”
Murmurs broke through the group. Drake stared at her, his heart suddenly seized with both jealousy and a sort of awful and very vital hope. His voice lifted into the question that he knew he should not ask but had to. “Who? Who of us will be the one to guide the weapon?”
Her eyes went straight to his face. “You, of course. Did you doubt it?”
Yes. He had. It was obvious that Blade and the others were a little put off by that violently ambitious question he had asked. Blade would never have asked it. Blade would simply have allowed the honor to be bestowed upon him and said thank you. As would have every other one there.
That cold part of him that longed for recognition and power reared its head again and screamed that it did not matter that he had asked the question. She probably would never have volunteered the information after all. Another part of him cowered back slightly in shame at his wanting that; at his wanting to be the person who could command a weapon that could kill millions in the blink of an eye.
His eyes went back to her. His body pulsed again. It seemed that the only thing that he wanted more than that weapon was this strange creature with her lovely face and her tall, slightly chilled body.
Would her body warm under his touch? Would her lips heat as he pressed his mouth to hers? Would her skin soften, and was the center of her, the core that he wanted to thrust his rising member into so badly, not just warm but hot to touch? That onslaught of desire came back, battering away at his mind and body. He managed to battle it back, but he still had to shift a little and readjust his trousers with a very discreet motion.
There was something undeniably attractive about her. There was something that simply called to him. He had never felt that way about a female before, and it disconcerted him.
He asked, “If the machine exists to build this fortress, why is it tearing it apart?”
Her eyes shifted to his face. “Because it was built to hold the weapon. The weapon is leaving. There is no more use for this place. It has been crumbling away for many centuries. The machine was broken apart by one of your kind. A human. The ones who called themselves the founding members of the Federation.”
He could hear the suspicion and anger in her voice. Obviously, those founding members had not treated her nor the others of her race well. He shuffled his feet a bit. “I see. Then we need to retrieve and go before there’s nothing left of this place and we are all hurled out into space.”
She nodded and went toward the machine. She reached into it and then said, “This is not something that you can see. Not only because you are not given to see what I do now, but because looking at what I bring forth as I bring it forth could blind you or drive you mad. Do not just close your eyes. Turn away.”
Turn away? Drake wanted to protest, and as he looked at the faces of the others, he saw that they did as well. But there was a clear warning in her voice, one that would not be denied, so one by one, they turned their backs and then closed their eyes. There was a loud ripping sound. The machine groaned as if it were a mortal thing that was being torn into bits. He could hear its death throes.
Lornia spoke. “We need to go to the gardens. I have to take things from there.”
Drake turned around. The machine lay broken and dead, its guts all strewn onto the floor. That it was broken so badly gave him a momentary pause. Lornia was already on the move, her lithe body so swift that he and the others found it hard to keep up with her.
Drake caught up finally and huffed out, “Whoa. Slow down.”
She didn’t look his way. “I can’t. Any minute now the gardens will go. There are things in there that must survive.”
He stopped in his tracks. Talon stepped onto the back of his boots, but Drake hardly noticed. Bile rose up in his throat, and his skin creeped along his bones. He got out, “What did you do?”
They stood there staring at the rows of human heads inside the clear glass bubbles of the chambers they had been preserved in. To Drake’s horror, one head’s eyes opened and stared at him. Lornia said, “It was not me. Franchine did that.”
Franchine? The founding and originating member of the Federation.
Jessica cried out, “My God! They’re still alive!”
Tara, Blade’s woman, choked and gagged as she tried to back away from the gruesome sight. Blade uttered a few swear words. Talon pressed closer, a frown coming up between his eyes. “How do they remain alive yet?”
Lornia said, “They don’t. They were hooked into the machine by Franchine. It was his bid to keep them alive. They were, I suppose, in some small way, but they could not speak nor move nor understand.”
Tara cried out, “Of course they couldn’t move! It’s just their heads!”
Drake, his dark humor once more breaking free said, “Why are all of you being so squeamish? Seeing the heads of the Federation’s leaders on spikes seems like a good thing to behold as far as I am concerned.”
But it was still a revolting thing, and his eyes went back to Lornia, and he asked, “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I was in a cryo-chamber and not awake. When I did awaken, I found that he had done much worse to my people. Of them, nothing remains.”
The words landed in the distance between them. Drake read real
rage in those words, and he knew then that she not only did not trust them, any of them, but her distrust might prove to be a hard thing to overcome.
And if Franchine had done worse to her people, he didn’t want to know what it was that that he had done.
The gardens eventually opened to their sight, and Drake stood there, awestruck as he took in the cavernous rooms with the hanging greenery, the deep and seemingly endless water in the middle of one room and the growing plants and food there.
Lornia said, “Fill your packs, and not just with foods. I need those,” she indicated a long twisting fruit vine, “the vine and the fruit.”
She began to gather things. Drake did too. He took part of vines and much fruit and other things. He had no idea what they were, and he didn’t care. She had said she needed them and he was determined to get as many of the things that she needed as possible.
That he should not really care about what she needed crossed his mind. It was unlike him to be so obsessed with a woman’s wants and needs. He was though, and time passed quickly as they gathered and cut and stowed away the things Lornia said she needed the most of.
Finally, he said, “We have to go. I don’t know how much time has gone by since we crossed the threshold of this place but I know time’s different here. We can’t afford to tarry too long. We might return to our universe to find that the war ended without us being in it.”
Lornia said, “Outside of Tralam, time goes on as always, but you’re right. In here it’s strange and different. You will find the war still raging though, of that I have no doubt.”
Tara muttered, “What a pity that would be.”
Drake tended to agree with the emotion behind those sarcastic words.
Chapter 11:
They’d flown hard and without stopping except to refuel. Every time they did, they heard the same grim and hard news. The Federation had embarked on a legacy of utter ruthlessness. Their campaign was cruel and their retribution unchecked.
The Federation had gathered all of its ships and those ships were dropping neutron bombs on every system that had denounced the Federation. Entire systems had winked out of existence.
Lornia stood in the small chamber she’d been assigned with her face turned toward the cleansing chamber and her heart heavy. She’d wanted company for so long, and now that she was constantly surrounded by people, she often felt weary and confused.
They thought she was carrying the weapon with her. She had yet to tell them that she was the weapon. She had yet to decide if she truly wanted to be that weapon, and while the weapon as it had been had had no choice once commanded, she did.
She was still a being with a heart and a mind and a conscience. She still didn’t trust Drake either.
He was so charming and kind when he chose to be, but he was also a man endowed with an ambition that oozed out of him. She started a bit as a knock sounded on the door. She had not yet undressed for the chamber, so she called out for whoever was on the other side of that door to enter, and immediately regretted that as the door slid open to reveal Drake standing there.
His handsome face always sent flutters racing through her belly, and that happened again as he said, “I haven’t seen you today and wondered if you were all right.”
The door still stood open. He had not crossed the door to enter her chamber. Common sense told her to tell him to go away, to leave her be. Her body cried out for her to ask him in.
She cleared her throat, trying to fight back that raw and powerful attraction that lay between them. That he felt it too was no secret to her. That neither of them had done anything about it spoke volumes about how little she trusted him or wanted to know him.
He was the man who would cause her to kill millions—and even if those deaths were necessary, there was another purpose she must serve as well, and that purpose was one she would never tell him because she did not trust him—or any of his kind.
Drake stepped into the room. His head tilted to one side. “Lornia? Are you all right?”
She looked away fast. Dammit, he was too close. Her body was betraying her. That dream came rushing back as it did every time she was in his presence, filling her mind with vivid images of the two of them entwined on the narrow bed that lay just to her right. “Yes, thank you. I’m just…I don’t know how to be near so many people yet, I guess.”
“I understand. If I were you, I would have probably run screaming the first day.”
The words caught her off guard. “You would have? You don’t strike me as someone who would run from anything.”
He didn’t. Drake shrugged, “I sort of feel like running away from this war. To be honest, I didn’t imagine the Federation would start blowing up entire systems and now that I know that they will, and are, it’s…I can’t believe they’d be that ready to destroy so much just to hold onto that power of theirs.”
She drew a little closer even though she knew that was a dangerous thing to do. It was like being a light gatherer, one of those tragic and doomed creatures that always flew too close to the flames, and died as a result. “You seem to want power.”
He didn’t look away. His gaze was forthright and open. “I don’t know that I want power that much. What I want is to be recognized.”
His eye contact broke. She knew then that he had said something he had not meant to say, had never said to anyone. Her hand came out of its own volition and touched his arm. Little shocks ran through her system. “Because?”
He drew a breath in. His hand came up and rested on hers. The heat of his skin warmed hers and sent little shivers running up and down her body. She knew she should move away, right then. But she didn’t. She didn’t because she didn’t want to.
What she wanted was him. She wanted to know if that dream of hers had any basis in reality; if she had seen something that would be or should not be.
He said, “Blade’s my brother. You know that. He’s my half-brother. Our father was a general in the Federation and Blade was on his way to being a high-ranking officer until the Federation did something that turned them against them. That’s his story to tell.
“But he left, and my father arranged it so that it seemed as if he had died. I thought that then I could rise in the ranks of the Federation. Bastards, illegitimate children, are not allowed rank. It’s Fed rule.”
She saw the pain in his eyes, and it hurt her to the core. “I see. Even with him supposedly dead, that did not happen.”
“It could not happen. All my life I have been the bastard. I had to go to the academy as a bastard, which meant I would be an officer due to my birth, but always a lower ranking one no matter how hard I worked or succeeded. I saw those with less aptitude get the promotions that I wanted so badly simply due to their births, and myself passed over because of mine.”
How unfair. His race had some odd notions of what was right. Children were a blessing, no matter their lineage; at least they were in her race. Her race did not often bear children though, and from what she knew of humans, they had the ability to reproduce almost wildly. Perhaps that was the difference.
“You felt lessened by your birth.”
His smile was bitter. “I was lessened by it. There was no feeling that way to it. Blade was a top-level student. I always had his record to live up to. I always had him to live up to. Not in the wider world, that thought he was dead…”
“But in your father’s eyes.”
The words lay between them. Drake nodded. “Blade was one hell of a criminal. The best in the universe. Assassin, thief, rebel. He was larger than life and even as my father hated the things that he did, he admired the man who had done them, and I always seemed to fall short somehow.”
Lornia said, “I understand. I do. I’m sorry.”
She did understand. How painful it must have been to never quite be the son that his father loved the most.
Drake sighed. “I think what I want the most is just to be remembered.”
That was ambition in its purest form, and he ha
d no idea of that fact. She knew it because she had lived long enough to know that. He either had never considered it or his mind could not grasp it and that he had such a huge ambition meant that he was a man who would do anything to be remembered, to have his name written large in history—and such a man was a ruthless man. A man willing to use power to his advantage and in a way that would almost guarantee that harm was done.
He moved. It was a slight shift of his body, a negligible thing that somehow brought his chest into contact with hers for a split second. That small second was the turning point, and she knew it. There were only two options. Move away or move closer.
She knew she should choose the former.
Instead, she did the latter.
Their bodies collided. Drake’s eyes widened, then darkened as the desire that lay between them lashed in like a lightning strike, felling all of her defenses and common sense and leaving only that urgent need still there and alive in her thoughts and body.
Drake’s skin was heated and smooth, silk and satin over lean muscle that flexed and still held the tensile strength of steel. Lornia’s breath caught. That dream she’d had of him came rushing back. Her body strained forward, and their skin met. Her nipples pressed against his chest, and her fingers clutched at his strong shoulders as her legs went weak. It had been so long since she had known this kind of touch and she craved it so much, and there was something so familiar and so right about his body: the shape of it, the weight and size of it.
Of course it was familiar. She had known him in some way she could not explain. That dream had brought him to her, and as her hand dropped to his trousers, she felt the thick and long outline of his member. It was chubby and already stiff and as she ran her fingers along the length of it and his flesh went even more rigid: a fact that made her breath go fast and sharp as his tongue slid into her mouth and met hers.
Her breath hissed in and out of her mouth as his mouth turned demanding and fierce. His hands pulled her closer yet, his hands dropping to her ass and cupping it, tilting her pelvis so that her lower body pressed against his hard rod.
