Bad Boy Romance: Bad Marine (Bad Boy Military Romance) (Alpha Bad Boy New Adult Contemporary Male Stories)

by Joyner, GP

  "Fine," said Callum. "Remember my instructions. You and the rest of the crew go from there and the other escape ports. Everyone else gets off first; they can come for me if there's still time."

  The Engineer protested, "Captain, some of those things are still aboard; you're still in trouble up there!"

  But Callum cuts him off. "The orders stand. It's bad enough we've had to scrub this whole mission and come home empty handed. A lot of people are in for a hell of a disappointment over this. I won't add grief over any of you to that. That's final."

  Grimly, the Engineer accepted. "Aye, Sir. Engineering out." That section of the screen in Callum's hand disappeared.

  In silence once more except for the sparking and crackling of disrupted control surfaces, Callum kept his eye on his screen and cursed. Inwardly, he fumed, Damn. It would have been so perfect. So much money. This whole bloody nebula is a mass of money and because of those damn things we'll never get at a farking cred of it. What am I supposed to tell them when I get back--if I get back? How am I supposed to face them? The whole damn thing is a failure.

  He looked up, breathing heavily, his entire face pressed into a frown of frustration, rage, and regret. If I die now, I die with this failure. That's how they'll remember me. Damn. Damn, damn, damn... A vicious noise welled up on the bridge, a noise from inside the wall facing Callum. It was a sound of metal rending and grinding and tearing, a sound of hard things being ripped asunder like tissue paper. The sound grew louder, getting closer. Callum watched the wall and saw it start to shake and buckle. Beyond the fact of his failure, he was sorry that he would probably never get to look that beautiful Captain Talbot in the face in person. In the next few minutes he may take the memory of her on his viewer with him as he left this universe. He slipped his screen into his uniform pocket and went for the holster at his belt, drawing his pulser and bracing himself.

  _______________

  The docking port hatch doors of the Engineering section slid open haltingly, grudgingly, with a complaint of gears and servos, until at last they were wide enough for Reyna Talbot and a detachment of rescue and medical personnel, six of her crew besides herself, to step through. The Engineering bay looked a fright. Reyna could tell that before the Urchins struck, Callum was running a tight ship. The disarray and controlled chaos before her--broken and fallen fixtures, heaps of debris on the floor, fibre optics spilling out of bulkheads--was the damage done to a place that had started out shiny and spotless and in perfect order. The place had taken collateral damage from power surges when the Urchins struck, but it was only the presence of antimatter in the engines that had stopped the things coming in here directly. Space Urchins, like most everything else in the universe, did not take well to antimatter.

  At once the Engineer, a short-haired Asian man, stepped out from the huddle of Morrow personnel and addressed them. "Captain Talbot," he said, "Captain Callum is still on the bridge. He ordered us all..."

  "I know what he ordered you to do," Reyna said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "The Captain stays behind, going down with his ship; oldest story in the book. I'd have done the same. We're tracking the last of the Urchins that you have on board. Show my people to your wounded and help them get everyone out. I'm going after your Captain myself." She motioned to a man and a woman from her group. They headed for the portal out of Engineering, leaving the other four to their work.

  Reyna and her comrades made a brisk pace through the outer corridor. She ordered the woman at her side, "Scan all the lifts. Find the one nearest here that's in the best order. If there isn't one, we're going to have to use the service ducts to get to the bridge. And look sharp for Urchins popping out of the walls."

  The female officer called out, "Captain, there's one coming through a conduit about eighteen..." Suddenly, a metallic tearing sound filled the corridor. The three Aureole officers halted in their tracks at the rupture of the wall ahead and to the left of them. Fragments went flying, and behind them a Space Urchin came glowing with its whirling maw into the corridor. It stopped in the middle of the passage, flexing its appendages and sucking the air at them, as if ready to charge them. "...meters ahead of us," the officer finished.

  The three from the Aureole drew their weapons and aimed in unison. The danger was not so much that the Urchin would try to devour them--the space beasts did not consume living creatures--as that it might charge and chew through an outer section of the hull. If it did, the decompression would blow the lot of them out into space. "Fire!" cried Reyna. As one, she and her fellows shot their pulsers right at the creature. In the barrage of beams, the Urchin throbbed like a rapidly beating heart and threw off a trembling radiance while emitting a high-pitched whine that grew to a nerve-grinding crescendo. "Cease fire and duck!" shouted Reyna. The three of them broke off their beams and hit the deck together. Less than a second later, the pulser-struck Urchin gave off a final, deafening wail and exploded, spewing clouds of the glowing stuff of its body up and down the passage.

  Reyna quickly collected herself and the others followed suit. She rose, squinting in the spoor of rapidly cooling plasma that hung in the air, grateful that its temperature was dropping enough that it would only give them the equivalent of a sunburn as they made their way through it. "Let's go, people," she called, and the three of them were off down the corridor again.

  _______________

  Callum did not know what infuriated him more: that the creature on his bridge set directly into chewing up the instrument panels, or that it was completely ignoring him in the act. Callum, to this thing, was a mere flesh-and-blood human being. He was not something good to eat. He found it insulting in a perverse way that the Urchin would utterly disregard him and threaten his life only by consuming the ship around him. By munching its way through his bridge, it would eat through the central controls for artificial gravity, life support, the helm, and threatening to chew the deck right out from under him. At the moment it was gnawing at the Comm station, sending a shower of sparks and metallic and plastic shards that had made Callum leap and flinch back, throwing him off balance and down on his bottom. But he steadied himself and leapt back up at the same time as his anger and indignation over the beast's disregard stabbed inside him. Automatically, he raised his pulser, aimed, and fired. His combination of movements made the shot fire wild; the pulser beam stabbed up and out at an angle that grazed the upper part of the Urchin's mass and sent plasma spraying from its body into the air--and only now did the Urchin see fit to acknowledge his presence.

  The Urchin whirled about, showing Callum the churning place in the front of its mass that did all the damage. With so little knowledge of Urchin physiology, it had long been assumed that the whirlpool-like orifice was an all-in one combination of mouth and sensory organs; it actually "saw" and ate with the same part of its body. Callum took it that he was now staring into the creature's eyes and mouth at the same time. Fine, then, he'd hit the plasmic bastard right where it lived. "Oh yeah, buddy, now you see fit to notice me!" he mocked it, knowing that the Urchin probably did not have enough sentience to appreciate being mocked. "Good; you ought to look a guy in the face when he's ready to vaporize you!"

  Callum's indignant taunting cost him the upper hand. Emitting a keening, whining noise, the Urchin flailed out with one of its leg/claw appendages, stabbing it into the floor in front of Callum and forcing him to leap back and away once again. Callum spun back onto the deck and rolled onto his back. The Urchin loomed over him as if to gnaw its way into him. For a moment Callum wondered how it would feel to be chewed up in a maw of whirling plasma and spat out again in bloody shreds as something unpalatable. He opted not to find out and quickly climbed to his feet at the same time as the Urchin lunged downward and ripped into a section of the deck in front of him. It brought its maw back up again and Callum watched, angered and disgusted, as a huge piece of the deck of his bridge disappeared into the Urchin's whirling gullet with the most revolting noise of shredding metal and plastic. In reaction, the circuitr
y and conduits under the deck protested, spewing a geyser of sparks and vapor up into the air, shocking Callum and hurling him back against the bulkhead behind him.

  "That's it, you son of a bitch," Callum winced and grimaced, a sharp pain spiking at the back of his head where it had hit the bridge structure. "That's the last bite you're taking out of my ship." The pain, likely at least a mild concussion, made Callum's vision blur and lose focus. The Urchin became an even uglier thing in his half-focused sight. He raised his pulser once more and forced himself to take a straight, dead aim. The Urchin loomed at him again, threatening him once more with the experience of being shredded alive, and in that instant Callum hit the trigger button. The pulser beam leapt forth and stabbed the Urchin right in its whirling mouth. The reaction was instantaneous. Callum's ears were filled with a sound like nails on an old Earth chalkboard mixed with an oncoming tornado, his eyes with something like sheet lightning through churning clouds. There was a brutal, punishing heat, and the slam of a shock wave hammering him into the bulkhead again. Then, everything was still, and he was only dimly aware of being crumpled on the floor.

  He rolled over and looked up into the flickering lights of the bridge ceiling. His vision was fuzzy; he could see only the indistinct shape of a figure--a human figure--stepping in front of him and standing over him. He blinked and focused, and thought he must be somehow entering the mythical afterlife. How else to explain the vision looking down at him, the angelic apparition that looked so much like that Captain Talbot from the Aureole? He took the explanation with him, slipping away into darkness.

  _______________

  Reyna's crew got all of the injured off of the Morrow with all of the efficiency that she expected of them. They quickly transferred the Morrow crew who had gotten into escape pods on to the Aureole, then managed to take the Morrow in tow before it drifted too close to the whirling core of radiating neutrons at the center of the Xerxes Supernova Remnant. Pulling the Morrow behind it, the Aureole made good time out of the nebula. Reyna set course for the Briareus Station of the Stellar Patrol.

  In the Sickbay of the Aureole, Reyna watched the medical personnel work and stayed out of the way of her Medical Officer, a Latina who fired off orders at her nurses like a commander on a battlefield--except to linger a bit at the bedside of the unconscious Captain Callum. The protein gel applied to the superficial burns on his face, neck, and hands would make short work of those injuries, and the mild concussion he had sustained would hardly trouble him with the care he was receiving. Watching him sleep under sedation, Reyna found her thoughts about him turning in some less than professional and disciplined directions, which she attributed to his simply being so damned handsome. Chasing these thoughts from her mind, she made her way out of the Sickbay to return to her own duties. But on her way out, she could not help stealing a last glance at the sleeping Ty Callum. With a sigh that only she could hear, she was on her way.

  The Aureole docked at the Briareus Station. The crew availed themselves of a bit of shore leave, the people from the Morrow were likewise taken aboard and their injured were transferred to the Station's larger Sickbay, and the Morrow itself was put in drydock. After making her report in person to the Station Commodore, Reyna decided to head directly for Sickbay when the Station's comm channel notified her that Captain Callum was awake and asking for her. She found the skipping of her heart along the way as unprofessional and undisciplined as her thoughts at having him aboard her own ship.

  She found him sitting up in bed in the Station Sickbay with only a fading redness on the parts of his skin where the burns were--and a smile not too broad but pleasingly warm to show her that he was happy to see her. But then, as she reached his bedside, she thought perhaps it was only that he was happy to see anyone who was not a medical professional at this point.

  "Captain Talbot," he said. "Nice of you to drop by."

  "Good to see you, Captain," said Reyna. "I'd have spoken to you sooner, but my ship's Doctor insisted on keeping you under during the day's travel to the Station, then once we docked here I was a bit busy helping your crew take inventory of the damage to your ship and initiate repairs. You and your crew are going to be here a while."

  "Nothing like the hospitality of the Patrol', he said. Then, after a beat, his mood turned more sober. "Oh, hell, my ship. My ship. The Morrow took a hell of a lot worse beating than I did. The only thing worse than that is the crew members I lost. I've had people hurt, Captain. My crew and I have been through some rough things and some close calls. But this is the first time we've ever taken casualties. The idea that we haven't all come back alive from this voyage...it's hard to take. Damn hard."

  "I'm sorry," said Reyna. "We have Counselors here aboard the Station. They're here for you and your people."

  "Yeah. One of them's been by already. She was concerned and kind, of course. But my crew and I...we're kind of close knit. I think we'll be working out our feelings about this mostly between ourselves. They're taking the failure of this voyage almost as hard as I am. This one...you might say this one was personal."

  Reyna found this curious. "This wasn't just business? I mean, not just for profit?"

  "I know the assumption about me, Captain Talbot--and a crew like mine," Callum replied. "We're all mercenaries. Everything we're in for, it's only about what we can get. Our share of the Commonwealth isn't enough. Just the guarantee of all our needs always being provided for isn't enough. We're fortune hunters with Old Earth ambitions. It's nothing I haven't heard."

  Reyna tensed up at that, a bit defensively. "I didn't mean to make a judgement, Captain," she said.

  "People's judgement is automatic when it comes to us," Callum said. "We expect it. And...frankly, people are right. We are ambitious. I've even heard us called vulgar. And maybe we are. Maybe it's fair, what people think of us. We're not 'Protect and Serve' like you are. We're 'Search and Profit' all the way. And we're honest about it."

  Maintaining her civility, Reyna said, "Listen, Captain Callum, I don't know anything about you. I respect you as a fellow Captain and I wanted to look in on you and see how you are. The reasons you do what you do are your own business. Wanting to know someone is all right when I've rescued them is mine."

  Callum looked at her with narrowed eyes, then turned up just one corner of his mouth in a smile. "Then that was for real. That, when I passed out on my bridge after blasting that Urchin...that was for real. I saw you. You were there."

  "Yes, I was," Reyna replied softly.

  "I may not be in the Patrol," he observed, "but I know that's not necessarily standard procedure. Your place is supposed to be on your ship. You didn't have to be in the boarding party. Most Captains wouldn't be."

  "It's my prerogative to go on any mission at my discretion," she said with authority.

  "But you didn't have to," he argued.

  An awkward silence followed that. Callum watched Reyna acknowledge with the way she looked away from him that he was right.

  "You don't always do that," he pressed.

  Reyna continued to look away, mildly annoyed at how right he was. When her eyes met his again a second later, she returned, "It was a unique situation. You were in danger from the Urchins and the pulsar."

  "Which is that much more reason for you, the Captain and most valuable officer, to stay on your ship and let the boarding party do their job."

  "I'm a Captain. My place is where I decide it is."

  "You have a very interesting interpretation of Patrol Regulations, Captain."

  This brought another awkward silence. Reyna was finding this man very presumptuous. Irresistibly presumptuous.

  Opting to shift the discussion before she grew so annoyed with him that she'd have no choice but to grab him and kiss the daylights out of his smug, stubbly face, Reyna said, "You said this voyage was personal for you and your crew. I got the impression it wasn't just about profit. If it was something else, what was it?"

  Callum paused at that, with a far-off look in his eyes,
as if considering whether or not to answer. Then, he did. "We were going to extract the gold and the other precious elements out of the Supernova Remnant without having to go to the trouble of processing them the way we'd have to if we got them from asteroids. Taking elements from nebulae is a short cut; everyone knows that. And we were going to sell off what we collected. But we weren't going to keep the profits. Not this time. We had...something else in mind."

  "What?"

  Looking her right in the eye now, he replied, "The situation at Tau Eridani. You know what's going on there."

  Reyna jerked back her head at that, startled to hear him bring up the very thing she had been following on the Hypernet before she received her orders to rescue him. She blinked at his answer: ""The supervolcano eruption--the disaster relief effort going on there. Of course I know. What has that got to do with you?"

  Callum replied in a bitter voice, with a darkness seeming to descend upon his face, "When the Patrol gave you your marching orders to come and get us at Xerxes, they didn't include my bio, did they? Captain Talbot...I'm from Tau Eridani. My family was one of the first to settle there, before I was born.