Shipwrecked!

by Marquis, Michelle

  Morgan’s stomach knotted. God, she hoped not. That would mean a lot more work for her. “I don’t think so. I think she just has a bug.”

  “Morgan, don’t be so naive. She’s been getting sick every morning since we left the mining colonies,” Strong said. “Rumor has it the pregnancy is the result of an affair with Lawless.”

  Morgan was beginning to feel nauseous. “Please—Penny isn’t anything like his type.”

  “Does Lawless have a type?”

  “Look, I’ve got to go or the engine room is going to start paging me,” Morgan said. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  Tess lifted three fingers from her cup in farewell. “Till later.”

  * * * *

  “There you are,” Lieutenant Ross said, a muscle twitching by his right eye. “What happened to Penny?”

  Morgan settled into the NAV seat and sipped her cocoa. “She’s sick. Sick Call gave her a pass.”

  Ross snorted. “She’s sure sick a lot lately.”

  “Yeah,” Morgan said impatiently. “Can I get a turn-over here?”

  “Nothing to turn over,” Ross said with a shrug. “Nothing out there but deep space. No meteors, one planet, and nothing else. Have a nice night.” He grabbed his backpack and rushed to his station before Morgan could even say goodbye.

  Glancing at the clock, she settled into her terminal and ran a routine check of the watch status. Everything seemed fine. This was going to be a long night. Scrolling through the watch bill, she noticed one of her rovers was scheduled to check in. In fact, he was more than ten minutes late. Not this again.

  Morgan frowned and toggled through her camera checkpoints. Nothing. She depressed the button on her transmitter and glanced at the name of the rover on her watch bill. “Blake?” she said into the microphone.

  The radio crackled. “I’m taking a piss, Ross.”

  “It’s not Ross, its O’Dell.”

  “Sorry LT, but Ross has been riding my ass since I got on,” he said.

  Morgan smiled and glanced at her screen. An alert flashed across the inky blackness of space, and the aft camera displayed closeups of several large bright objects. Oh my God, those are asteroids!

  “We’ve got a situation here,” Morgan shouted over the din of casual conversation in the engine room. The crew fell into a stunned silence.

  Commander Lacosta swiveled his chair around. “What kind of situation?”

  Typing as fast as she could, Morgan sent a screenshot to him. “Looks like an asteroid shower.”

  Lacosta hit the General Quarters alarm. A robotic female voice said, “General quarters, General quarters, all hands man your battle stations. This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill. General quarters, General quarters . . .”

  Everyone strapped themselves into their seats. “We’ve got three minutes to impact, brace yourselves,” Lacosta said. “Lieutenant O’Dell, I need all squads to report.”

  Morgan scanned the designated battle stations trying to see how many people had already made it to their safe area.

  “O’Dell!” Lacosta snarled.

  “They’re not ready yet!”

  “What do you see?”

  “Squads one . . . two . . . seven . . . I can’t see—”

  The impact slammed into the ship with bone shattering force. For a few moments, they lost power, and then the lights flickered on again. Five more asteroids impacted the ship, plunging them into darkness again. Morgan tried to bring her system back online, but the only thing that worked was her audio. Its only sign of life was a faint hissing that she could barely make out.

  “O’Dell,” Lacosta bellowed. “I need a damage report!”

  Morgan’s hands trembled as she worked to amplify the sounds. But a moment later, she wished she hadn’t because the bridge filled with the terrifying sounds of the crew screaming.

  Chapter Four

  Lawless arrived at the engine room door with the General Quarters alarm blaring in his head. He tried to cue the doors to open but they wouldn’t budge. Fishing in his pocket, he pulled out his override key and slipped it into the lock. The doors slowly pulled back revealing an engine room illuminated in red lights and buzzing in chaos.

  Lacosta turned to him, his face beat red. “Why aren’t you at your emergency station in the aft of the ship?” he called to Lawless.

  “Because there is no aft of the ship,” Lawless replied. The room’s activity froze. The crew stared at him dumbfounded.

  “Sound the abandon ship!” Lacosta called out. “And get to your escape shuttles!”

  Lawless met Morgan’s gaze. She looked so lost and beautiful. In that moment, he knew he’d made the right decision to come here. If they were going to die, let them die together. He closed the distance between them, all the while being jostled by the fleeing crew.

  He held out his hand. “Time for us to go.”

  Morgan took his hand just as the ship began listing to the right. “We’ll never make it.”

  “Maybe not, but we can try.” Squeezing her hand, he dragged her out the door and into the crowded corridor. Using his size and strength, he muscled his way through the throng, making sure to keep a firm grip on Morgan so they wouldn’t get separated. They rounded a corner, and another, each passageway a bottleneck of clogging bodies.

  Morgan pulled on his hand, and he looked around to see what was wrong. “We’ll never get through this way,” she said, breathing hard. “But we might be able to use the utility tunnels.”

  Breaking off from the escaping crowd, Morgan led him to a maintenance area with metal grates over dark utility tunnels that went several stories down. With only the emergency lights to guide them, the utility tunnels were very claustrophobic. Being in small spaces had never bothered him, but following Morgan down a steep ladder in a tube for several flights was almost enough to make him lose it. He kept his cool for several flights, then decided there had to be a better escape route than this. “Are we almost there?” he called down to her as she led the way.

  “Yes,” she said. “Just one more floor and we’ll be on the flight deck. If there is a flight deck anymore,” she mumbled.

  Finally, they reached the Flight Deck Two and Morgan climbed out. Lawless was close behind her. To his surprise, everything looked deserted. The empty shuttle appeared undamaged, but it was also completely unprepared. It was strange that no one could have gotten here first to prep all the systems for flight. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I thought everyone was abandoning ship. Where is everyone?”

  Morgan rushed to a nearby terminal and tried to get the auxiliary system online. “This damn thing,” she said frowning. Lawless moved up behind her.

  From the evacuation charts that they could access, it appeared the only way to Flight Deck Two was the way they’d come, through the utility tunnel. Another loud crash rocked the ship, and more alarms went off.

  “Come on,” Lawless said, “we need to get the hell out of here.”

  Morgan didn’t argue. They raced for the shuttle and scrambled on board. Lawless climbed into the pilot seat, and Morgan slipped in behind him. She began the copilot check of all the systems. The shuttle growled to life and everything came online. She switched on the distress signal. It was a faint signal on a small ship like this but they didn’t have any other options. “I sure hope our signal reached someone out there,” she said.

  “Let’s just focus on getting off this dying monster first.”

  “All systems are a go on my end.”

  Lawless increased power to the engines and steered the ship toward the open bay door. “Keep your fingers crossed, babe, because here we go.”

  “Have you finished plotting a course?”

  “No time, we have to go now.”

  Chapter Five

  The USS Defiant was disintegrating before their eyes. The entire aft section of the ship was smashed beyond recognition leaving the battle ship a drifting, crippled hulk. The damage was so severe, Morgan could hardly make out it was a
ship at all. She wondered if the other three shuttles had made it out. She sure hoped she and Lawless weren’t the only ones.

  “Anything on the tracker?” she asked Lawless.

  “The instruments are all screwed up, but it looks like two other shuttles escaped. Readings indicate they’re on the other side of the ship from us and heading for a small green planet. Maybe they’ve found a place to land.”

  Morgan returned to her computer and brought the planet up. “Terago, never head of it. The life readings are off the charts though. It has plenty of water too. Well, I guess we’re not too bad off. At least it can sustain human life.”

  He glanced at her, his expression grim. “Until something indigenous eats us.”

  Morgan felt light-headed as a wave of fatigue moved over her. She yawned. “That’s want I love about you, Lawless, you always look at the bright side. I’d say we’ve been pretty lucky so far, at least we’re still alive.”

  Lawless set a course for the planet and set the shuttle on autopilot. He leaned back in his chair and propped his boots up on the control panel. “You look tired.”

  “Imagine that, I wonder why. Could it be because someone wouldn’t take the extra bridge watch?”

  He shrugged. “I told you I’d do it.”

  Morgan shook her head and lay back on a cargo bench. “There were strings attached. I don’t understand why you couldn’t take that watch for me. You just can’t stand to do someone a favor. There always have to be strings attached.”

  “You really think you know me that well?”

  Morgan held her hands out as if the answer was obvious. “Look at our conversation not two hours ago. I asked you to do one thing for me, and you refused unless you got something out of it.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Morgan closed her eyes feeling drained. “See? I rest my case. I shouldn’t have to sleep with you for taking a watch for me.”

  Lawless frowned. “Hey, wait a minute. Who said anything about sleeping with me? As I recall, the only thing I asked for was dinner and drinks.”

  She was melting into the bench as sleep started overtaking her. “Please. Don’t insult me. You’ve slept with every woman in the Fleet. Everyone knows your track record. You don’t just simply go out to dinner, everything turns into a seduction.”

  “You know all that from talking to me in a bar once on a mining colony,” he said, annoyed.

  “I heard the stories.”

  “The stories you’ve heard are crap, Morgan.”

  “Don’t get so touchy. Besides, what do you care what I think? You scored with me before,” she said her voice getting softer.

  Lawless let out a sinister chuckle. “I never slept with you.”

  A rush of adrenaline chased her relaxation away. “What are you talking about? We slept together the first night we met.”

  “No, we didn’t. You were too drunk. I was planning to nail you in the morning, but you were already gone when I woke up.”

  Morgan’s cheeks grew hot. She folded her arms and turned her back to him. “Sorry to ruin your plans. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to get some sleep before I pass out.”

  He grunted, and she felt sure it meant nothing at all.

  “Wake me if something exciting happens,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said sarcastically. “The day’s been boring so far.”

  Chapter Six

  The sweet aroma of baked beans filled the air and woke Morgan from her sleep. She opened her eyes, blinked twice, and stretched. Every muscle in her body felt stiff as if she’d been sleeping for a hundred years. She tried to remember where she was, and then it hit her. The Defiant had been destroyed. She and Lawless had escaped together. A sorrow filled her belly, and tears threatened to flow from her eyes, but she fought it off. It was too early to mourn her friends, because for all she knew, they had landed safely on the planet. She and Lawless wouldn’t know anything until they landed themselves.

  Sitting up she spotted Lawless crouched at a small round table. He was wolfing down beans and studying some star maps. He looked calm, relaxed as if all this disaster was something to be expected. Just watching him made her feel better. If he wasn’t panicking, then neither would she. “Did you make some of that for me?”

  He gestured to a covered bowl without looking up.

  Morgan came over and sat down with him. She uncovered the bowl, her mouth watering. Picking up her spoon, she dug in. “How long did I sleep for?”

  Lawless glanced at her. “About six hours.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “What for?”

  Morgan shrugged. “So I could help you navigate.”

  “No need,” he said and paused to gulp down his coffee. “We’re on autopilot. The plotting has already been done for us.” He leaned back in his chair and dropped the charts down by his feet. “You want something to drink? I made coffee.”

  Morgan finished her beans and wiped her mouth. “Do we have any cocoa?”

  He grinned. “I doubt it.”

  She looked away from him and went to get herself a cup of coffee. The minute she poured it she regretted it. She hated coffee, never drank the stuff, but he was making her feel foolish about the cocoa so she pretended she liked it. “How long until we get there?”

  Lawless stared out the window at the endless sea of stars. “Another three, four hours.”

  Morgan sat in the copilot seat and sipped her coffee. She listened to him hunting around. He grabbed two survival backpacks and started stuffing them with food and water. Watching him brought all her emotions to the surface. She wanted to help, but she was afraid she’d cry. She really didn’t want him to see her cry.

  After twenty minutes of watching him prepare for their landing, she said, “Why didn’t you?”

  Lawless took the opportunity to take a break. He came over and sat in the pilot’s seat. “Why didn’t I what?”

  “Seduce me that night at the colony. You had the perfect opportunity.”

  He stared at her, his gaze cool and predatory. “You were passed out. I’m not a rapist, Morgan.”

  “I know,” she said with an apologetic shrug. “I just thought, well . . . maybe you didn’t find me attractive.”

  He laughed. “Are you insulted that I didn’t rape you while you were passed out?”

  “Of course not! That’s not what I said.”

  “Then what are you trying to say?”

  Morgan shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I just meant that if I hadn’t passed out, would you have . . .”

  He laughed, and it annoyed the hell out of her. “Yes, I do find you attractive, and yes, I would have.”

  Morgan nodded. She saw him look at her full coffee cup and grin. “When you’re done with your drink, maybe you can come over and give me a hand getting the weapons ready.”

  She got up and stretched again. Boy, she sure could have used another few hours of sleep. “Do you think the other shuttles made it to the planet?”

  “I don’t know. We lost their distress signals when they landed on the planet surface over an hour ago. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Morgan nodded stiffly and joined him over by the blasters. What if they’re all dead? What if something down there got them?

  “Are you all right?” he asked staring at the expression on her face.

  Morgan gave him the best smile she could muster. “Sure, it’s just that . . . I hate coffee.”

  Chapter Seven

  The planet was a stunning bright and vibrant green. Lawless put his harness on and glanced at the atmospheric readings as they flashed across his screen. The surface is just like Earth. If everyone else survived, they should be fine for a while anyway. Morgan leaned over his shoulder to check the readings. As she did so, he caught the faint scent of soap on her skin. Her skin was lovely, the color of warm honey, and he ached to run his tongue along every exposed inch.

  “That’s amazing,” she said not noticing his react
ion. “It’s just like Earth.”

  She looked into his eyes and smiled. Then she blushed and moved away. Desire roared through him like a sudden summer storm. He wanted her in a way he’d never known before. She was so beautiful, with her too-long body and her medium-sized breasts and eyes the color of good soil in spring. He wanted to bury his lust deep inside her until she cried out in passion, to consume her with his mouth and tongue and hands. Aware he was frightening her, Lawless tried to get a handle on his emotions. He took a deep breath and focused on the instruments but a moment later, he was lost in a vision of the past.