The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  “No.” He shook his head without looking at the officer speaking to him. He held out his hand as if to push the woman away.

  Winnie, Winnie. Look at me. Turn towards me. Give me that smile. Please, Winnie.

  His bootsteps sounded muffled on the latticed decking. But she must have heard, because she turned. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Macawley. You’re late.”

  Late? How could he be late? They hadn’t met yet. He clearly remembered his first few hours on board, touring the ship from top to bottom, from bridge to engineering. That was where he first saw her, sitting at her tech console on the left.

  He glanced over her head at the stat-board. Eleven-twenty. He’d come on board at oh-eight-hundred. That was about right.

  But she called him Macawley. Not Commander. They hadn’t been introduced, yet she knew his name.

  He stared back at the stat-board. Eleven-twenty-one. Galactic Date 874-987.

  He’d been on board the Versatile for three months. He’d already made three months of abysmally stupid mistakes.

  “That bitch!” The words exploded from his mouth before he could stop them. But no one turned at his outburst. Winnie seemed unruffled. They were already used to him.

  That bitch Jezebel had tricked him. With her sultry voice and fanciful tale, she’d tricked him. He wasn’t starting at the beginning with Briony Winn, as she promised. He was—

  She hadn’t promised. He grabbed the back of the vacant chair next to Winnie, leaned on it. Jezebel hadn’t promised to send him back to his first day on the Versatile. She had promised to send him back to the day that would make a difference in his relationship with Winnie.

  No wonder the ship didn’t look as bad as he remembered. He’d been pounding it back into shape for three months.

  He collapsed into the chair, leaned his elbows on his knees, then ran his hands over his face. He peered at Winnie from over the tips of his fingers.

  Every finger represents a choice.

  What was today? Damn it, why couldn’t he remember? Jezebel said . . .

  . . . that he would begin to forget from the moment he got back on board. That his past and present memories couldn’t coexist.

  Galactic Date 874-987. What was it?

  Winnie was staring at him. “You okay? Maybe you should be in sick bay.”

  “No. I’m fine. It’s just that—” Think! Think! What’s today? Or more importantly, what happened before today? “I need to talk to you. It’s a matter of . . .” He waved one hand aimlessly in the air, let his voice trail off as two techies thumped by in their thick-soled black boots.

  “Life and death?” She wrinkled her nose at him. His heart did a flip-flop. “What is it this time? Can’t find a power outlet for your personal massaging recliner?”

  Gods, he forgot about that. A gift from his uncle the senator.

  “Winn – Briony.” He used her given name deliberately. He didn’t remember doing so before. He needed some way to signal to her that he was desperate. “I really need to talk to you.”

  The fact that she didn’t come back with another quip told him she was at least taking him seriously. “I’m off shift in four hours.”

  He didn’t have four hours. He could no longer remember the name of the bitch in the Second Chance Saloon.

  “Now. Before I forget what I’m going to say. Or the rest of my life will be a total waste.”

  “You’ll have to clear it with Admiral Wellinsky. But I don’t think he’s going to put up with any more delays.”

  Wellinsky? What would that pompous son of a bitch be doing on board?

  He groaned. The Parken Random Calibration Unit test run. The PRCU was Wellinsky’s pet project. Better to risk blowing the drives on the Versatile than on one of the Fleet’s better ships. If the unit didn’t work and the Versatile had to sit in spacedock for months for repairs, no great loss. At least, not to Wellinsky.

  He glanced at the data on Winnie’s console. A strange lightheadedness washed over him. Wellinsky’s voice bellowed at him through his comm badge but the hand that moved in extreme slow motion to tap at it in response didn’t feel like it was his. The air around him felt thick as Suralian honey soup.

  “I’m waiting on your release code, Macawley!”

  Release code. A safety procedure. The captain and the XO had release codes to be entered at separate stations before the test could begin.

  “Ten seconds, Macawley!”

  Seconds. Seconds. The word echoed in his mind.

  I said you get a second chance at love. I didn’t say you can pick up your life right where you left off. A woman’s voice, sultry, soothing.

  He felt his eyes move slowly towards Briony Winn. She hadn’t spoken. Then who? Whose voice was that?

  His fingers touched his comm badge and he snapped back into the present. “Acknowledged, Admiral.”

  Hell, that was the last time he was having Oysters Galafar for a late-night snack. Felt like he was going to keel over there for a moment.

  He reached for the console, keyed in his codes, saw the PRCU initialization sequence scroll down the screen. Then a flurry of activity around him as the experimental-matter conversion system came online.

  Time to get back to the bridge. He didn’t trust Wellinsky’s tinkerings, but the chief would handle the problems – and he knew there’d be problems – as they surfaced. Plus Winnie was on duty. Whatever Chief Damaris Lagronde couldn’t tackle directly he knew Lieutenant Winn would solve, albeit in some wildly unorthodox manner.

  He pushed himself out of the chair and nodded to Lagronde, who was already frowning. But something made him stop just before he reached the corridor. He turned, saw the stout woman leaning over Winnie’s shoulder, talking to her.

  Talking to her. What was it he had to talk to Winnie about?

  He shook off an inexplicable sense of edginess and strode briskly for the lifts.

  He had just stepped onto the command deck when his existence shifted again.

  Love. A woman’s voice. That woman’s voice. The one thing left on your to-do list.

  Winnie. He didn’t tell Winnie he loved her.

  He did an about-face, reached for the lift pad.

  “Commander Macawley, the Admiral’s waiting for you.”

  Gods damn it! He spun on the young ensign in the corridor, fist clenched. He didn’t have time for the Admiral’s petty experiments.

  The young man stepped back quickly. Mac reined in his emotions. Yes, the crew knew what he was like. Knew he was an unmitigated bastard who trampled over people’s feelings like a gelzrac on a rampage. Three months and they already knew it.

  So did Winnie. Because he’d brutally trampled over her feelings last night. Then downed a bottle of Pagan Gold and a dozen spiced oysters to ease the pain.

  He knew now why he was here. And why he had to apologize. And why if he didn’t in the next few hours, he’d never be able to. He had to get back down to engineering.

  “Tell the Admiral I’ll monitor the test run with Chief Lagronde.”

  “Sir, I don’t think he’ll agree to that.”

  “It’s not your job to think!” he almost barked at the young man, but stopped. He had to do more than just apologize to Winnie. He had to change everything about himself. Starting now.

  “No, Ensign. I’m sure he won’t. And I’m sorry to put you in the line of direct fire.” He twisted his mouth into a wry grin. “But the Admiral’s less my concern than this ship is. Help me out here. I’ll owe you one.”

  He admired the young man’s ability to prevent his jaw from dropping. But it did take him three attempts to get out a stuttered: “Yes, sir!”

  The lift, uncharacteristically, appeared when summoned. He stepped in and, for fifteen shimmying seconds, leaned his forehead against the slick metal wall. A sense of disorientation returned. Damn those oysters!

  The doors opened and he trudged towards engineering, shaking his head. He just left here. But had to come back, for some reason, some imp
ortant reason.

  Which he couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter because when he stepped over the hatch-tread, all hell broke loose.

  “Chief, we’ve got a full system lock-up starting in the starboard feed!” Winnie’s voice carried clearly over the discordant beeping of alarms.

  Mac sprinted to her station. Lagronde came puffing up behind him, swearing.

  “Gods damn him! Gods damn that asshole, Wellinsky!” The stout woman glared at the data cascading down the console screen, then turned, startled, towards Mac.

  “Macawley? Thought you went back up.”

  “I did. But then I remembered something.” He slid into the seat next to Winnie’s. And recognized the slight skewing in the initialization sequence codes. He’d seen it once before, but only in a sim at the academy.

  “You don’t want to see this in real life. Ever,” his aged professor had growled.

  He was looking at it now. “We’ve got a breakdown—”

  “In the anti-matter core slough,” Winnie finished for him. Her fingers flew over her console.

  “A shutdown will rupture us.” Lagronde yanked the datapad from her utility belt, keyed in her own commands. She slapped it into an open terminal port. “Containment field activated,” she hollered over the din.

  “You picked a bad time to go slumming,” Winnie said to him as Lagronde hurried away. Her voice was light but he clearly heard an undercurrent of pain. And knew it wasn’t related to their present somewhat critical situation.

  “Actually, no. I always wanted to see a real core-slough failure. The sims just don’t seem to have the same urgency.” He picked up on the modification she was entering on her console, nodded in approval. Then keyed in a few adjustments of his own.

  She hazarded a glance in his direction, arched an eyebrow. “I never thought dying down here with the black shoes was on the top of your to-do list. You strike me as more of the ‘in the arms of a beautiful woman’ type.”

  Her console beeped twice. “I didn’t ask for your opinion!” she told it and entered another sequence. It quieted.

  His mind hung for a moment on her words. His list. His to-do list. They were a regular item already: Mighty Macawley’s To-Do Lists.

  What was it that topped his to-do list?

  Not dying on the Versatile. Even in the sim, he’d not been able to stop the disintegration of the slough. And that was a sim based on top-notch equipment. Not an ageing destroyer that didn’t have half the fail-safes and sensitive components the newer ships did. The Versatile was a basic starcruiser. Functional. No frills. No—

  He pulled up a secondary screen, his mind racing over the data. Somewhere, somewhere . . . there!

  “We can manually override her slough filters!” He took his fingers off the pads just long enough to grab Winnie’s arm.

  She looked at him, startled. Then her eyes grew wide in amazement. “Damn straight! Damn straight we can.”

  He fed her some code strings. She segued them in, then threw the modified functions right back at him.

  The first in a long row of alarm lights stopped blinking.

  He tagged Lagronde’s terminal, sent her the data. A few seconds later her whoop of joy sounded over the wails of alarms just now beginning to recede.

  An hour later, the containment field was lifted and a red-faced Admiral Wellinsky harrumphed through engineering and out again.

  Lagronde stood with her arms folded in front of the main console. A detailed re-creation of the entire fiasco scrolled by. “Lucky as hell you came down here, Commander.”

  Lucky as hell. But not for Wellinsky, who wanted to blame the Versatile for his project’s failure. But this time, he couldn’t. The slough didn’t rupture. The evidence the PRCU itself was flawed wasn’t destroyed. And Lagronde’s career, along with the careers of a few other competent, and equally as innocent, black shoes, wasn’t ruined. After all, who would dare find fault with the Wellinsky? Only the Mighty Macawley—

  Who had no idea how he knew all that, but he did. Just as he knew he was standing in engineering, with Lagronde on his left and Winnie on his right, so close he could feel the heat of her body against his arm.

  Winnie. He had to talk to Winnie. He grabbed her elbow, pulled her towards him as she shot him a startled glance.

  “Ten minutes. Please.”

  That made Lagronde turn and he knew why. It was probably the first time the Mighty Macawley had ever said “please” on this ship.

  “With your permission, Chief.” Another first. “But Lieutenant Winn is mine. Until further notice.” Until all of the seven hells freeze over. And until the roof collapses on the Second Chance Saloon.

  He propelled a protesting Briony Winn into the corridor. The small conference room at the end was empty. He guided her inside, locked the door.

  “Sit.” He pointed to a gimballed chair at the end of the table.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.” A tired defiance played across her features. He knew his timing was horrendous. They were both exhausted, physically, mentally and emotionally. And not only because of Wellinsky’s foolish experiment.

  He had to make things right.

  “I mind. Now sit.”

  “Give me one good reason.”

  He heard it in her voice. She was pissed, royally pissed at him.

  He sucked in a deep breath. “My reason is that I’m going to get down on my knees and beg for your forgiveness. And that’s going to be damned awkward to do if you’re standing up.”

  She sat, her eyes wide with surprise.

  He knelt before her. “I’m an idiot. A moron. An unspeakable imbecile. I know you’re angry with me and I know you have a right to be. Even if I have no idea of exactly what I did.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Not completely. It was still only a sensation, a sickening sensation; much less than a memory. Still, he could make a stab at it. “I don’t know which of all the abysmally stupid things I’ve done tops the list.”

  “Besides being ill-mannered, arrogant and insufferably rude?” She pointed her finger in his face. “Berating and belittling every member of the crew? Then demanding we jump when you say ‘jump’, just because you’re the Mighty Macawley?”

  He nodded. “Besides all that.”

  She looked away from him. “I don’t like being reduced to a name to be crossed off a list.” Her voice was soft, laced with bitterness.

  “This is about last night.”

  “Yes. No!” She turned back to him suddenly, her eyes bright with tears. “It’s about your damned lists. And that one list of suitably worthy women that a Mighty Macawley could spend time with, and still maintain his high standards.”

  He reached for her hands. They were balled into small fists. She snatched them away.

  “I don’t meet your high standards, do I? And you made damn sure I knew that, Raphael! You figured it all out from one short kiss.”

  It wasn’t one short kiss. It was one of the most intense kisses he had ever experienced, packed into a very short period of time. It had scared the hell out of him, made him jump from the lumpy couch in his small quarters and turn his back on her.

  And then, because she couldn’t see the agony on his face, say some extremely nasty, unkind things to a very young Briony Winn. Because he knew if he didn’t push her away then, he was never going to let her go. And that just might affect his perfectly orchestrated, Macawley-like soar to the top. His finely honed love-’em-and-leave-’em image. The facade he called his life. His former life.

  “I didn’t mean what I said last night.”

  She sat very still. Some of the anger seemed to drain out of her. Finally, she shrugged, but wouldn’t look at him, toyed with her academy ring instead. “It’s no big deal. You’re not the first guy to dump me. Probably won’t be the last. I have this tendency to fall in – to pick the unsuitable.”

  Fall in love. He heard her almost say it. He swallowed hard. Could you l
ove me, Briony Winn? He hoped so. His knees were starting to hurt.

  “I’m definitely unsuitable.” He reached again for her hands, grabbing hold of her before she could pull away. “An arrogant bastard. But I’m also very much in love with you.”

  She raised her lashes. A small tear glistened in the corner of her eye. He felt as if an ion lance pierced his chest.

  “That’s why I had to stop kissing you. And that’s why I said what I did. Because if I didn’t, I would’ve gotten down on my knees,” and he winced as he brought his left knee up, “and begged you to stay. To give me a chance. To let me love you.”

  He rose – damn, that hurt! – and pulled her out of the chair. He held her hands against his chest and, when he was sure she wouldn’t back away, let them go, and wrapped his arms around her. “I love you, Winnie. I want to spend the rest of my life telling you that.”

  She gave him a tremulous smile. It heated his blood like no bottle of Pagan Gold ever could.

  “I’ve no reason to believe you,” she said cautiously, but a haughty look crept into her eyes. “But then, I never thought you’d stand up to Wellinsky, either. I think there’s hope for you yet.”

  There’s hope for you yet, Mac. A woman’s voice, sultry, yet now not much more than a fading whisper.

  He lowered his face. “I’d like to try that kiss again, if you don’t mind, Lieutenant.”

  She brushed her lips across his. “I think I’d like that, Commander.”

  And this time the Mighty Macawley didn’t pull away when bolts of lightning arced across an imaginary sky, or waves crashed fiercely against an imaginary shore. Or a thousand imaginary stars exploded and vibrated in a little hip-bumping victory dance inside his heart. A dance accompanied by a jaunty piano tune, which haunted him at the oddest moments.

  Like whenever anyone, other than Briony Winn Macawley, tried to fill the number-one spot on his list of things to do.

  Wasteland

  Jess Granger

  One

  “C’mon, baby,” Rexa whispered under her breath as she watched the information flashing on the screens in large three-dimensional blocks of glowing blue on the inky black field. Tugging on the sync gloves that both controlled the cursor and decoded the encryption on the files, she sorted through the large cubes of information. She didn’t dare turn on the lights. The glow from the screens was enough of a risk.