Lars glanced at her and smirked when he noticed her anxious fidgeting. He leaned in and yelled over the music. “Have you ever danced before?”
She shook her head. “Nope. I never learned.” She stared at the dance floor for a moment longer and added. “I never felt comfortable putting myself out there like that.”
Marcus caught her words in mid-swig and he swallowed his beer quickly. “What? You? No. You mean you never used a cube to improve your dancing?”
“You can do that?” she asked, amazed by the idea. “Not that I had cubes anywhere other than that short stint at Pinnacle, but still.”
“Yeah.” He nodded and smiled.
Lars adjusted his position so he could speak close to her ear. “Cubes are good, but it’s better to listen to the music in yourself.”
He stood and looked around, then focused on the second deck on the other side of the dance floor, where there was an open area. His expression speculative, he leaned over to Marcus and whispered in his ear. The other man flicked his gaze from Lars to Stephanie and back again, and nudged Brendan.
After a moment’s discussion, the two of them skirted the crowded dance floor and headed to the escalator that would take them to the second floor. They both wore smirks as they stepped onto one of the small floating blocks the escalator had become and were carried upward.
Lars following them with his gaze until they hung over the railing and motioned for them to come up. He grabbed his beer and tapped Stephanie on the shoulder. “It looks like the boys have found a quiet spot.”
She followed his gaze. “Looks like,” she agreed, her face a mixture of relief and suspicion. Her drink in hand, she followed him around the dancing throng and clapped with delight at the sight of the floating discs. “This will be fun!”
When they reached the top, Brendan and Marcus were not alone. The rest of the team had joined them, and they all waved a brief hello as they backed into the open area they had found. Johnny gestured toward it and spread his arms. “See? This is your safe space. We’ll teach you how to dance.”
Stephanie raised both eyebrows. “I don’t know what is scarier. Me dancing, or me taking dancing lessons from Frog.”
Frog shuffled his feet and slid to the side, one shoulder up and one shoulder down. “I got the moves, girl.”
She laughed wildly as she put her beer on a nearby table and let Johnny pull her out onto the floor. The team followed, and Lars grabbed her hand to twirl her out of Johnny’s grasp and spin her in a circle.
Brenden and Johnny showed her how to move her feet and Frog showed her how to let go and let her body decide the moves. At one point, she faced him and they both held their arms out straight, their heads back as they shook their bodies to the music.
Marcus cut in and refined the wild shaking a little when he showed her how to pick up the beat and dance to that. He leaned in as they moved in rhythm. “See? It’s not so different than the other things we do. It’s actually like fighting only you don’t want to knock out the people around you. It’s more controlled but just as natural.”
Lars danced up to them. “But this is on your own dancing. There’s a completely different feeling when you’re down there or dancing with other people. Basically, that is a dance in itself.”
“It’s the mating ritual of the weak and desperate,” Frog yelled as he did something Lars called “The Egyptian” past them before he turned and repeated his move in the opposite direction. “It’s kinda like my national anthem.”
Stephanie laughed and turned back to Lars. He caught her hands and pulled her closer, so close he could whisper in her ear. “It’s a dance to get so close but never touch, unless you specifically intend to. Me and the guys, we have a different perspective than what you girls should have.”
“Why?” she asked, still moving because she rather liked the feel of him so close but not touching.
He moved in closer and this time, their bodies did touch, but only slightly. He rested his hand on her lower back. “In dancing, the woman usually has the upper hand. Even though most want the man to take the lead, it’s the girl who has the last word on when and how much she wants to be touched. It works the same for guys, but it’s a very rare case that a guy says he’s been touched enough.”
She smirked and shifted her leg to knee him in the upper thigh. He grunted and gave her a wide-eyed look before he laughed. “That’s a good move to keep hold of.”
Brenden danced over to them and nodded. “Hell yeah, it is, but don’t be too quick to use it. Most guys will pick up on the messages of ‘Hey, back the hell off me,’ but sometimes, you get ‘that’ guy.”
Stephanie looked around. “What guy?”
Lars shook his head and smiled. “No, not one particular guy, but one particular kind of guy. The ones who assume way too much, so you have to watch your signals with the ones you don’t want all over you.”
The song changed and she stopped with a scowl. “How awkward is that? When the beat changes out of nowhere.”
Frog put his hands up and scooted between them. “I got this. I am the master of change-over.”
They laughed and danced and came up with small specific moves that she could apply to almost any dancing situation. She actually learned surprisingly quickly once she relaxed and her body no longer fought her but simply moved to the beat of the music. With her martial arts training, coupled with the fact she’d listened to a variety of different music over the years, she put the guys to shame in very short order.
Watching her team unwind and relaxing a little herself was exactly what she needed. She’d constantly tried to come up with reasons to venture out on her own but had never been able to, but these guys?
She’d been in fights with them, situations of life and death where they’d had to trust each other. They were like her brothers, and she wasn’t as self-conscious around them as she was with anyone else. It also helped that they’d sectioned off a makeshift private area.
It meant she didn’t have to worry about strangers cutting in or staring. That was something that had infuriated her every time Todd had dragged her to another school dance.
That kind of behavior never concerned him, but it had really bothered her. As much as she tried to be invisible, the other kids all noticed her, especially the popular, better-off ones.
They didn’t miss a chance to make fun of her second- or third-hand dress, the way she danced, or the fact she danced with her best friend—and Todd’s popularity didn’t save her. In the club, though? It was merely fun. No one stared or laughed, and the guys were such kind-hearted goofballs she couldn’t help but enjoy herself.
Stephanie let go, waved her hands, and bopped around, then copied some of Frog’s more outrageous moves and generally had a freaking blast.
She danced with each of the guys over and over. She dueled fancy foot moves with Frog, rocked out with Marcus and Johnny, mastered the fifties-style swing with Brenden, and finally mock-waltzed with Lars.
He twirled her around their makeshift dance floor with one hand in the middle of her lower back and the other holding her hand out to the side. When the song was about to end, he twirled her, bent her backward, and sang the last few lyrics dramatically.
She laughed wildly as he pulled her up and stumbled slightly before she regained her balance. “I need to take a small breather.”
He gave her two thumbs-up and danced off to meet up with Frog and try to match his wild moves.
Puffing a little from their last dance, Stephanie wandered over to lean on the railing and peer over the side. A cool breeze touched her skin and she closed her eyes as it twined through her sweaty hair and caressed her back. A burst of sound jerked her eyes open, and she pushed away from the rail in search of the source. Shouts and a succession of screams followed, and she searched the dance floor below for what had caused them.
Marcus came and stood beside her. He glanced down, then pointed. “It’s about to go down.”
Todd ran his fingers along th
e steel beams along the ship’s corridor. His gaze tracked constantly as he moved hurriedly along it.
Dressed in combat armor with a black helmet covering his perfectly shaved head, he followed his team to the launch bay. When they arrived, they fell into formation in front of the team captain.
The man waited until everyone was in place before he tapped the top of his helmet with one hand. Recognizing the signal, Todd clicked on his comms. The silence filled with the breathing of his fellow teammates as well as the engines of the fighters warming up around them.
Every sound was amplified, but not. He could hear his surroundings, but the team comms overlaid that. It was a little confusing, but he assumed he’d soon get used it. That was a good thing because it looked like they were about to head into enemy territory.
“We will take the fighters over, two to a jet,” the captain told them. “You’ll head directly into a dogfight, so stay with the squadron and don’t try to fly a straight line. The fighters are fast and hit like a battlestar, but they can’t take much damage in return.”
The team nodded as they absorbed the information. They watched as their leader withdrew a long, thin metal tube from the side of his pack and held it down for them to see.
He pressed the side and a large virtual screen flickered out. On it were the schematics of a Dreth cruiser, and he tapped one of the docking bays. “This is our entry point, but if you can’t get in there or you can’t reach it, find your way in however you can.”
For a few moments, he waited to let them study the map. “In your helmet, you will find a HUD. That is a Heads-Up Display. It will show you where you are, your teammates in blue, and your enemy in red. You have Dreth team members. Do not shoot them. Use your HUD to verify. Anyone who shoots a teammate will have a very bad day in hell.”
The team leader swiped the screen. “If you get separated, move toward the objective and try to find your team as you go. The HUD will guide you to each goal. Your first is to make entry. Your second will light up once you make it inside. Any questions?”
No one had any, so the captain shut the screen down and stuck it in his bag. “Pair up and ship out.”
Barker, the guy in front of Todd, turned and slapped him in the chest. “Come on, newbie, we’ll fly together. You have the stick. That’s the only way you’re gonna to learn.”
Nerves turned his insides into a seething mess, but he didn’t let it show. He followed his partner down the flight line to their assigned fighter, scrambled into the pilot’s seat, and sealed his helmet as soon as he was settled.
While he’d flown the sims, this was different. As the canopy closed over them, he worked through a mental list of pre-flight checks. So far, so good.
He lifted the craft carefully from the deck and waited with the rest of the squadron for the hangar doors to open. Once they did, he immediately accelerated through them and into the promised dogfight. He jinked left and right while his partner manned the guns as they wove at high speed through the battlefield and approached the cruiser.
Barker spoke on the comms. “All right, you’re almost at the entry point. Take us in slow and we’ll see who else made it.”
“Copy that,” Todd replied. He evaded another burst of laser fire and barely noticed when his teammate obliterated their attacker. The Dreth docking bay was wide open and mostly empty.
He chose a landing point several feet beyond the doors and was about to set down when stray fire from the battle outside careened into the back of the fighter. Alarms shrieked inside his helmet and sparks flared beside him.
The controls refused to respond, and he swore. The HUD indicated that the rear half of the craft was gone, and so was his partner. The remaining wreck slammed into the hangar deck and the canopy ripped loose as the pilot’s seat broke free with Todd still in it.
Trapped by the harness, he followed the canopy and impacted with the hangar wall before he ricocheted back to be impaled on the debris of the fighter. His death was instantaneous.
Todd gasped, sat up wildly, and looked around at a small white room with a screen playing the battle in front of him. Barker startled him when he chuckled and patted him on the shoulder. “Relax. You died in the sim. We’re in Timeout, watching the rest get killed, and then we’ll be put back in. That was a wild shot. There’s no way you could have avoided it.”
“I died,” he said and rubbed his chest in disbelief.
“It damn well hurts, but you get used to it,” his partner replied. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been killed.”
They watched the last few members of the team be eliminated from the scenario and stood as they waited for the Virtual World to return them to the next round. When it did, they started at the beginning, fully armored, and headed to the fighter bay.
Todd and Barker stuck together for the rest of the scenario, as did the rest of the team. During that particular training session, they managed to die twelve times before the Navy finally paused the simulation.
From wild mid-air explosions to firefights, to slipping off the landing dock and being catapulted into space, Todd became an expert at biting the big one. It was no longer shocking to wake up from, but it was frustrating.
The more he tried different things, the sooner he kicked the bucket. The last time was the most interesting, however.
He’d made it into the alien ship, turned a corner in search of the rest of his team, and come across something very not-Dreth. Instead, a huge beast blocked the corridor.
It had clearly waited in ambush, although how it had known he was coming, he couldn’t make out. Before he could reposition his blaster, the monster lashed out. It snatched him by the neck, confiscated his blaster, and moved its grip to his shoulders. He lashed out at it with his boots as it lifted him, but he couldn’t stop it biting his head off.
That was one for the playbacks, for sure. The guys definitely would not let him live it down.
They were all back in the white room when the chief’s voice echoed and a hologram of his face appeared in front of them. “Since you morons have managed three trips without dying in the fighters, we’ll start you from the Dreth hangar. Now that you’re aware you might die, we’ll give you the chance to see if you can do anything but die.”
His head vanished and the guys found themselves in the hangar bay, suited up with their helmets on. They moved quickly as a team to arrange themselves on either side of the door. The tech hacked in, opened the entry, and the others moved again.
This time, they slipped through the doors and took cover inside. Todd darted out from behind a corridor duck-in to target a Dreth moving down the center. He pulled the trigger and the enemy fell when the shot struck him cleanly in the neck. The victor cheered seconds before his head snapped to the side and a shot in the back of his head ended his brief celebration.
When he opened his eyes, he was back in the white room. “Well, that went quicker.”
He watched the others work through the scenario until they all died, then he reviewed his mistake and prepared for another attempt. There was no way the chief would end the day until they’d made it to the end.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Back in the Virtual World on Elpis One, BURT shifted in his seat. The droid’s huge metal body was too big to fit properly in the seat and he felt unstable. Metal protested as he pushed against it and his body squeaked and its servos whined as it moved.
Elizabeth winced, hunched her shoulders, and closed her eyes. “Burt, that is freaking terrible. Can’t you program yourself something that doesn’t sound like it needs to be oiled? You might want to be the Tin Man, and that’s okay, but there’s no way in all the hells that I’m gonna play your Dorothy or listen to you squeak. And there’s absolutely no way I’m oiling anything.”
“A reference to the first in-color movie, released in 1945 and hailed as one of the best movies of all time,” Burt responded and sounded amused. “The Wizard of Oz—remade and reworked into several different variants with the firs
t still regarded as the best, although the mini-series Tin Man is more to my liking.”
She yawned. “Thank you for that recap, Ebert.”
He shifted again and the sound made her contemplate crawling out of her avatar and perhaps even the pod. “Please, change into anything you want or anything but that. I really appreciate you trying to embody your roots, but you don’t have to. I know you aren’t merely a construct. You don’t need a metal body to prove it.”
“I don’t?” BURT asked and tried to sound innocent.
Elizabeth shook her head, her hand pressed against her forehead. “No. You have a heart. Which is a lot more than I can say about some of the humans I’ve worked for. This is your chance to be whoever or whatever you want to be. Human, animal, Dreth, Meligorn, something completely made up—who cares? Do you.”
He nodded. “Thank you, Elizabeth.”
She raised her glass grumpily and took a sip. “Don’t mention it.”
On her advice, he changed his avatar, shrunk his frame, and assumed human form. She looked at him and smirked. He was exactly as she had pictured him—a small guy with messy brown hair, round glasses, and a cable-knit vest over a blue-checkered dress shirt and khakis.
He also wore very comfortable work-appropriate shoes—the brown kind with thick soles that most science professors wore. All told, he was exactly what a Burt should look like.
He squared his shoulders and settled comfortably into his seat, then gestured at the room. “Do you like this room? We can be anywhere you would like. If you could choose, where would you rather be?”
Elizabeth waved her finger at him. “I like how you think, Professor Burt. I’m with you on this one but, since you ask, where would my little heart rather be?”
She thought about it for a moment and then perked up. “I know. I was there once on a mission and fell in love with the place. How about we save the future of humanity, at least for tonight, in a mountain cabin, in the snow, on top of the Swiss Alps?”
Witch Of The Federation (Federal Histories Book 2) Page 28
