Blowback

by Lyn Gala

  “You three come up with anything interesting?” Ramsay asked the second the hatch latched behind them.

  “Don’t know. I thought we did, but then Da’shay lost it,” Becca answered.

  “She lost more than a trinket,” Tom muttered. Da’shay had been stranger than ever, staring at the colors on the tents and following only when Tom pulled her with the leash. He was pretty sure she’d lost her mind out there.

  Da’shay did an odd little sidestep dance down the hall, pushing past them in the corridor on her way to the galley, the only real communal space on the ship.

  “I found a priority divider,” Becca offered, holding the piece up. “I should go put it in my room.” She gestured toward the other end of the corridor and then turned and headed toward officer’s quarters. That left Tom standing in the corridor with Ramsay.

  “You okay?” Ramsay asked.

  “No reason for me not to be.” Tom was hyperaware of the chain draped over his shoulder, but he ignored it. Ramsay stood there, studying Tom, and Tom crossed his arms and waited for the captain to finish. Sure enough, the captain’s gaze kept going back to the slave mark.

  “Looking at it won’t make it go away,” Tom pointed out. Ramsay tore his gaze away and looked into Tom’s eyes, that same quiet sympathy in them, and Tom really was going to punch the captain in the nose in about two seconds. Generally he tried not to hit people old enough to have fathered him unless they were threatening to hit him first, but he was real close to making an exception.

  “Green lights sparkling,” Da’shay called out. The words didn’t make sense, but the tone was a warning.

  “Where’s Eli?” Tom asked.

  “We have some weird chatter and codes in the broadcasts. Eli’s running code-breaks. You three were so late I was thinking about coming out for you.”

  Tom didn’t point out that the captain had agreed to not come after them. When it was clear that Tom had no comment, Ramsay finally turned with a sigh and headed into the galley. “Damn stubborn son of a bitch,” Ramsay muttered just loud enough for Tom to hear it.

  “Food!” Da’shay said as they walked in. She’d set a variety of dried food bars in the middle of the table.

  “Don’t look bad,” Tom said, passing Ramsay to grab one. Real food would have looked better and the people in the tents were selling it at prices that even he could afford, but Da’shay was right to stick to the packaged foods. No use making it easy for some enemy to poison them. Da’shay walked up and stood next to him, leaning into his shoulder.

  “Maybe you should sit,” Ramsay suggested.

  “Too round,” Da’shay said with a smile. Yep, she was not having a good day.

  “Are we eating?” Becca walked in. “Where’s Eli?”

  “Working communications,” Ramsay offered. He ripped open a bar. “So, what was it you thought you came up with?”

  Da’shay interrupted by flipping her skirt. “Good for more than being helpless.” She twitched her hips and the round device fell to floor with a metallic thump. Da’shay smiled and dropped down into Tom’s lap. Tom stared at the device, seriously hoping that she had only been keeping it between her knees. The other alternative was just too disturbing. Tom went to rest one of his hands on Da’shay’s leg and she flipped her skirt again so that Tom’s hand came down on her bare thigh. He froze, half wondering if she’d take offense. Most women weren’t fond of getting touched in public but Da’shay reached up and traced his bottom lip with one finger. Tom’s cock was getting all kinds of interested but this wasn’t the time. Tom wondered if anyone would notice if he took Da’shay and vanished for a bit.

  His musings were interrupted by an excited Becca. “Is that…? Da’shay, you’re so bad, stealing that thing. Good for you!” Hurrying around, Becca picked it up and turned it over in her hands.

  “What is it?” Ramsay stood up and leaned over to get a better look.

  “I can’t really tell. Doesn’t look like anything from my books and I know I’ve never seen one in person. I’ve never met an engine part I didn’t remember.” Becca put it on the table and it wobbled like a children’s toy. “Captain, could it be casslit?”

  Ramsay pursed his lips. He was one of the few people to survive getting captured in the casslit war, but near as Tom could tell from the bits and fragments Ramsay let slip, he’d been unconscious and getting poked and prodded for most of the time he’d been on their ship.

  “Their tech had that sort of roundness to it, but I never saw any sort of engraving like that. We could run it through the computer.”

  “Not theirs,” Da’shay said. She draped an arm over Tom’s shoulders as she looked at them. She wiggled just enough to put her weight down on his cock and Tom struggled to not groan.

  “Maybe the slave colonies are doing some research,” Becca said. At least she believed Da’shay; the captain had his constipated expression on.

  “Doubt it,” Tom said, struggling to keep his voice even. “Human tech tends to look more… I don’t know, human. That don’t look human.” Tom couldn’t come up with a better explanation for what his gut said, and he sure wouldn’t bet money on his conclusions, but he didn’t think a human had made it. The surface was two different metals forged together to make random swirls, and humans tended to make their machines a little more plain.

  Ramsay sat on the edge of the table. “Da’shay, you got any clue who might have made this?”

  Da’shay stole the last piece of Tom’s bar. “Yep.” She ate the food solemnly, looking at all of them in turn as she swallowed. “Totally and completely fucking crazy people.”

  Tom sat up so fast he had to catch Da’shay around the waist or risk knocking her out of his lap. “Wait, you saying that those people who cut you up made that?”

  “Actors creeping in the shadows.” Da’shay nodded.

  “Actors?” Ramsay snorted. “I’m starting to feel like I need a translation dictionary. Tom, you got a clue about what actors might mean?”

  Tom grabbed another food bar and shrugged. “Out in the desert when she was making sense, she said we needed to be actors and dress up in clothes that weren’t ours. I reckon this shirt is about not me as I can get.”

  Ramsay leaned back and blew out a breath. “Well, shit.” He ran a hand over his face and looked about as weary as a man could. “Da’shay, can you tell me what an actor is?” Ramsay asked.

  “We were actors,” Da’shay said with a smile. “Dress up and say things we don’t mean.”

  “Shit, Tom. People who dress up and play act, like us. Those aren’t actors. They’re spies.”

  Tom blinked. Well damn, that actually did make more sense. Da’shay had been telling him to finish the spying job Command had sent them on.

  “Which means her crazy people are spies. Question is, spies for who?”

  “Um, Captain?” Becca’s voice was panicked and Tom looked over. She had the cylinder in her lap and a blurred holographic image rose from the vented end. The creature was making a humming noise, but it wasn’t any alien Tom had ever seen. It looked a little like a casslit. Those were stick-thin creatures, all sharp angles with an impossible number of elbows and knees. Their faces had a long horse-like quality that led a lot of old soldiers who’d fought in the casslit wars to call them “horsetails” because of that animalistic face and weed-like body. Scientists said that humans were more closely related to casslit than meaiai, but Tom got the creeps every time he saw one.

  This hologram had that same horse-face and oversized eyes, but the mouth was larger, more like a human mouth and the hands that were gesturing had five fingers, not the casslit’s three. However, it was just as thin.

  “Engineer Williams, is that playing or transmitting?” Ramsay demanded. He was up out of his seat and standing over Becca so fast that Tom didn’t have time to do more than blink.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Get it off.” The captain had lost most of the color out of his face, but considering where he’d spent the war,
Tom couldn’t blame him. Da’shay got up and Tom went to stand next to Ramsay.

  “I’m trying. I’m really trying,” Becca pressed every symbol on the engraved band, but she only succeed in turning the alien’s image purple. Da’shay walked over and knelt next to Becca, reaching out and sliding her fingers along the band until the alien blinked out and vanished. The thing gave a last hum and then went silent.

  Ramsay stared down at it and Tom could see him breathing fast. “I want that thing off my ship. Now,” Ramsay ordered.

  “We could put it—” Tom started to say.

  “Off my ship,” Ramsay snapped before he turned to head toward officer’s quarters.

  “Yes sir,” Becca agreed in a contrite voice. Tom pressed his lips together and didn’t point out that the captain was being unreasonable by dumping good evidence.

  The three of them listened as Ramsay’s footsteps vanished into the far end of the ship.

  “It seems like those looked a lot like casslit,” Becca said quietly.

  “Seems like,” Tom agreed. “Only not quite as stomach turning.”

  Becca nodded. “Maybe the full-gentas are making human-casslit hybrids.”

  That made Tom cringe, but he supposed it would make anyone who’d ever read about the war cringe. “Yeah, but if that’s the case, what’s their salvaged tech doing lying around on a human world?”

  Tom didn’t answer, but he looked at Da’shay. The bigger question was what she knew and how exactly she’d run afoul of this mess already. Da’shay looked back at him with an expression of utter calm, her blue tinted face looking even more alien.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Tom pulled off his shirt and dropped it to the floor before sitting on his bunk. It felt like a world had gone by since he’d been in this room. At the time, he thought he’d do most anything to get out of the room, and now it felt good to get back into it.

  He couldn’t stop cycling through images of the past few days—Da’shay sitting on his lap and shaving him, Ramsay’s gaze darting down to the slave mark, Becca’s wide eyes when the leash had gone on. He scratched his slave mark. Ramsay wouldn’t ever look at him the same and he had no idea what was going on with Da’shay. If he believed Becca, it was some genta thing to try to gather followers, and Ramsay clearly thought Tom should get away from her and stay away. However, Tom really couldn’t figure out what he was feeling.

  He pulled his boots off and tossed them on top of the shirt before lying down in the middle of his bunk, his stocking feet propped up on the wall. Years ago he’d decided to trust people just so far and that usually meant not trusting them at all. It had served him well. He moved from ship to ship and did his job. If he was unpopular while he was doing it, he didn’t much care. Tom preferred being disliked—it was easier. If people hated you up front, there weren’t any surprises later on—no struggle to figure out where you screwed up.

  Like with Ramsay. Getting the mark clearly made him real unhappy with Tom. The man had a narrow view on certain topics, like women and victims, and now Tom had neatly slipped into that last category in Ramsay’s mind. He could see that as if it were carved on Ramsay’s face. Maybe he should cash out his retirement and go work for Carla. His pension had a lot of credits sitting in it and Tom wasn’t a fool who would run through all that money in one year. He could set it aside for emergencies or to pay the bills when he was too old to work and he could live on the salary from the doxyhouse.

  Tom’s hand stilled over his slave mark. Carla had suggested that some women would pay to have him in their beds and he wondered if the slave mark would change that. Some people never knew how to talk to someone who’d been slaved and it wouldn’t matter if Tom explained that it had only been for a case.

  A crack of light darted across the floor and Tom rolled to his side to watch his own door come open even though Tom had locked it. He reached for his gun, pulling the hammer back and waiting for the intruder to show himself. If the Kratos had been invaded, he should have heard the alarm, but “should” and “did” weren’t always the same.

  A hand wrapped around the edge of the door. Tom shifted his aim. Black hair appeared a second before Da’shay’s face peeked around the corner.

  “Da’shay?” Tom uncocked the hammer on his gun and slipped it back into the holster. “You gonna get dead sneaking up on a man in his bunk.”

  She slipped inside and pushed the door closed before walking over to the side of the bed. The low light that marked where the wall and floor met let him see her standing there, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Her nightgown was cut low enough that he could see the top of the darker skin where the blue stripe between her breasts started. “What are you doing here?”

  “Too many. Lights like prisms, diamonds spinning across the ground. Sunlight refracted into a million pieces.”

  Tom sighed and sat up. “You and your diamonds.”

  “Yep,” she whispered. Moving closer, she let her hand brush over Tom’s arm, fingers tickling him.

  “So, your diamonds are bothering you, so you come here?”

  She nodded. Tom sighed, not sure what to think. If this were just about her wanting to control him, he suspected she could have reached that goal without too much fuss. The fact was, he liked being led around by his dick. He liked it so much that he had to be careful about when to allow himself to indulge in that particular pleasure.

  His first year in the Corps, he’d misjudged a woman and had spent a night tied to a bed while her and her partner had spent every credit off his ident card. Then, when they figured out that he really was as broke as he claimed, they’d come back to give him a good beating before tossing him on the street. That time Tom had passed it off with his captain as a rookie trying so hard to impress the Corps that he’d gone in chasing a vague rumor and gotten himself in trouble. This time, Tom wouldn’t have that excuse. If he fell for Da’shay and she turned on him, he wouldn’t convince anyone that he’d made some rookie mistake. Even knowing that, Tom wanted her.

  Da’shay ran a finger up and down his arm. She smiled and straddled his legs so she could sit on his lap and face him. Tom groaned as his cock hardened. Reaching down, she unbuckled his gun belt and pulled it free. Tom had a real strict policy about others not touching his gun, but something in her gaze caught him. He studied the tilt of her head and the way her nightgown rode up on her thighs. After pulling the gun belt free, she gently lowered it to the ground. “Gave me a gift,” Da’shay whispered. She pushed his shoulders, urging him to lie back on the bunk.

  Tom struggled to stay upright since he didn’t want to talk about that when he was on his back; however, she was just too strong. He ended up on his back looking up at her.

  Running her thumb across his lips, she leaned in so that her cheek pressed to his, her breath stirred his hair. “Saw me—saw genta girl and not crazy girl—and all the red diamonds turned white. I was trapped and then I was free.”

  “That ain’t—” Tom tried to push her aside, but she easily held him in place. “I’d be more willing to talk if you’d let me up for this conversation,” Tom said calmly even though his cock was getting all kinds of excited about a woman strong enough to push him down and hold him down.

  “Ramsay brought you calm. Steel strong enough to chase the fears away.” She caught his wrists in her hands and pinned them with her genta-strength. “We all would have died in fire, fire starved by space, torn bodies turn to ice. Little nanowiring whispering in the black.”

  Tom stopped breathing. Fuck. She knew. She pulled back just enough to give him a small smile. “It was a gift. I lost my first gift from you.”

  That made Tom frown. “Wait. You like that I tried to stab you in the back?”

  She looked down at him, her fingers tight around his wrists and she nodded. “You saw me. I was so lost in Becca’s swirls of yellow, all numbers like teardrops of color.” Da’shay leaned in and brushed her cheek against his again. “Washed it away. You saw me as the threat. You let me find
part of myself that the vultures had picked out with the scabs.” She pressed herself back so she was sitting right on his cock, and Tom groaned and arched his back. She gave him a wicked smile. “All lust,” she whispered in his ear, her warm breath tickling across his skin. “You’re so sure.”

  “Being sure ain’t the same as being right,” Tom pointed out. Da’shay shifted around until she could put her knee into his crotch and then she pressed up, forcing him farther up onto the bed. Since he liked his genitals right where they were, he cooperated. Da’shay smiled at him and released one of his hands long enough to run a finger over the slave mark. Tom shivered.

  “White. All white.”

  A little part of him cautioned that he was seven kinds of a fool for letting this go any farther because he was already tangled up in his head and he knew it, but he just watched her, waiting for her move. She pulled back and smiled at him and Tom could only stare up at her. He strained against her hold on his wrists, and her smile grew feral. “Nope. Not strong enough,” she said. She started to rock forward and back, torturing him by mimicking the motion of riding him while his cock was still trapped in his pants.

  “Fuck. Just let me get my pants off,” Tom begged.

  She stopped riding him, but she didn’t move as she stared down at him. “Nope,” she said, her voice almost playful. Tom let his head fall back onto the pillow as he groaned. Shit. Plenty of times he’d negotiated something very like this with a doxy, but there hadn’t been any negotiations, just Da’shay taking what she wanted. Tom was pretty sure he was going to come in his pants.

  “Over,” she said, releasing his wrists.

  He brought his hands up to feel her strong thighs, the silky fabric of her nightgown cool under his palms. “Can do it better face to face.”

  She leaned down, resting her hands on either side of his face as she brought her lips right up to his ear. “Over. You’re mine. My toy to enjoy and protect.”

  Tom froze, his hands still on Da’shay’s thighs as her words sank in. He sure as hell didn’t need anyone to protect him, not from anything except his own mistakes maybe, but the way she traced fingers over his skin, he wanted to lay down for her. He wanted to give her the power and let himself slip into the role of the toy. That’d been about his earliest fantasies. And all he had to do was follow her orders. The world seemed to pause as he looked up at Da’shay, struggling with a need to obey and the fear that he was being a fool. However, worse came to worst, he’d been a fool before.