Hot Zone

by Cindy Dees

  He shook his head weakly.

  “Don’t argue with me,” she snapped. “We’ll share whatever I’ve got. I don’t know a lot about all this energy stuff, but even I can tell you’re dying. Take some of mine, dammit!”

  She slid her hands up, pressing her palms to either side of his head. Mimicking what he’d done with the horses earlier, she laid her forehead against his.

  If that draining feeling, the sudden weakness, the abrupt fatigue weighing down her limbs was any indication, she’d successfully transferred some of her energy field to him. Too exhausted all of a sudden to stay upright another moment, she collapsed on top of him.

  And slept.

  Sometime later, something shifted beneath her, rousing her enough to crack one eye open. She was looking up at the stars. They had rotated almost a full night’s turn overhead. She tensed her muscles to sit up, when something warm and heavy landed across her shoulders.

  “Stay,” Rustam murmured. “You need more rest, my brave little fool. Especially now that you’re carrying—”

  He broke off. She murmured, “Now that I’m carrying what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are we safe?” she mumbled.

  “For now.”

  She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

  The next time she woke, it was because something warm and velvety nudged her cheek. Insistently. She reached up to push it away, and cracked one eye open.

  “What do you want, Cygna?” she mumbled.

  The mare nudged her again, this time on the shoulder. The sun was bright overhead. It had to be at least midmorning, if not later.

  Cygna? Tessa sat up, startled. How had the horses found them? Rustam was still out cold on the ground beside her. Both Polaris and Cygna stood over them, providing welcome shade.

  Tessa looked around. They were in a gentle valley, completely unlike the rugged landscape they’d spent the past two days traversing. Whereas the terrain at Thermopylae had been of gray-black rock, volcanic in origin, this valley was beige sandstone, and the silhouettes of the nearby peaks, and even the scree beneath, were worn smooth with time. Tufts of wiry grass grew here and there, and a few wildflowers poked up their cheerful heads. This was not the same place they’d looked down on last night from the top of that cliff.

  Rustam woke up beside her. One moment his presence was quiet and subdued, and the next his vibrant mind was active and awake, as dynamic and forceful as always.

  She glanced at him. “Feeling better?”

  He squinted up at her. “I’m alive. Still feel like I’ve been through a gauntlet of barbarians with clubs, though.”

  She nodded in commiseration. “So. Are you ready for a shock, or do you want to rest a little longer?”

  He sat up quickly, groaning under his breath. “What’s wro—” He broke off, gazing around him. He swore under his breath.

  Oh, he sounded roundly annoyed, all right, but he was definitely not freaked out. He should be coming out of his skin right about now. They weren’t anywhere near where they’d been last night.

  Why wasn’t he panicking?

  He glanced at her quickly. Guiltily.

  “Is there something you’d like to tell me?” she asked ominously.

  He shot her a thunderous scowl. “Funny, I was thinking the exact same thing.”

  It went without saying that they hadn’t borrowed each other’s thought on this one.

  “You first,” she snapped. “Last thing I remember, we stepped off that cliff. And then I woke up here. How did we get here, Rustam?”

  He winced. The guilty look intensified. “I cannot answer that question.”

  “Yes, you can,” she exclaimed. “And you will.”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  An awful suspicion tickled the back of her mind. Surely not…But how else…? If not Athena Carswell, then who…

  “Try me,” she growled, suddenly furious. Too agitated to sit still, she leaped to her feet and glowered down at him.

  He sprang to his feet, as well. The horses danced away from them, perhaps sensing the humans’ growing agitation. Rustam took off pacing, marching in a circle around her, gazing at the terrain in all directions.

  “I shouldn’t have been able to do that,” he muttered. “It’s shattered. Unusable. I already tried everything before—”

  “With all due respect, what in the hell are you talking about?” she demanded.

  He shook his head. “It can’t be.”

  “What can’t be?”

  “We shouldn’t be here. We should be dead. Lying at the bottom of that cliff with those Greek soldiers.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” she replied with scant patience. “So how did we end up here? What did you do?”

  He continued to mutter to himself. “Our imminent death must have cut our full powers loose, the same way making love did. Perhaps even more strongly. It’s the only explanation. But if I could do this, can I do more? Is it possible—”

  She stepped in front of him, physically blocking his path.

  He pulled up short, glaring at her irritably. “Don’t interrupt me. I’m thinking.”

  “Too bad. I want some answers. And I want them now. How did we get here? What did you do?”

  His gaze narrowed as he studied her intently. Finally he announced, “You’re some kind of warrior princess, aren’t you? You give orders as only a military commander can. You have an astonishing grasp of tactics, and you know when to stay silent and when to obey. You know your way around weapons and horses and camp gear as no normal female should. And you fight like a man.” He nodded to himself. “You’re soldier trained! Where do you come from?”

  She rocked back on her heels, startled by the accusation. She shrugged. “What of it?”

  His voice rose in indignation and he threw up his hands in irritation. “Yet again you avoid the question. Name your homeland, woman. Draw me a map and tell me exactly where it is.”

  “Nice try, buddy. I refuse to be distracted from the issue at hand. You tell me how we got here. You know, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes.”

  When he didn’t answer, she continued forcefully. “You’re absolutely right. I’m a military commander back home, and a damned good one. And part of my training includes being able to spot a lie at a hundred paces. You’re evading the question. Cut the crap and start talking.”

  As she’d expected, her strident tone aggravated the living crap out of him. He was not accustomed to anyone speaking to him that way, particularly a female. And he didn’t appreciate it. His nostrils flared, and he seemed to swell up, growing even taller and wider than he usually was. Excellent. Time for one more nudge to push him over the edge.

  “You’re not scared to tell me the truth, are you? Are you actually afraid of me?”

  His eyes snapped with fury. He snarled, “I fear no female, and certainly not you, human.”

  Human? Her jaw sagged. What in the bloody hell did he mean by that? If she was “you human,” then what did that make him?

  Oh. My. God.

  Fourteen

  Tessa took a horrified step back from him. Another. “Who are you? What are you?”

  Glaring, he growled, “I’m a traveler. I got stranded in this place by accident, just like you.”

  No. Not just like her. She was a time traveler. He couldn’t possibly be…or could he? She was familiar with all the Project Anasazi time travelers—even the lost twelve. And they were the first ever to master time travel. Could he be from a future earth sometime beyond the twenty-first century? Possible but unlikely. He should have seen her face in files of previous time travelers, or at a minimum, known her by her coloring and modern name. Which meant…

  She swore under her breath.

  “You’re not from here, are you?” she demanded.

  “I already told you—”

  She interrupted him. Time to cut to the chase. “You’re not from this planet, are you?”

  He
stared. “How do you know what a planet is? Only a few astronomers understand the concept.”

  Rage began to build, roiling upward in her gut. “But you understand it, don’t you, Rustam? You understand a great deal about the galaxy. Now that I think about it, you didn’t even bat an eyelash when I used that term last night, did you?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut.

  She took off pacing, circling him this time. “Oh, it all makes sense now. Your crazy psychic abilities. Your uncanny knowledge of what happened—what’s going to happen—at Thermopylae. I suppose it even explains your ability to talk to horses!”

  While she ranted and raved, he stalked over to the nearest boulder and sat down on it, his arms crossed over his chest. His alert gaze followed her every movement.

  “So. Are you some alien observer who’s been sent here to watch us stupid humans evolve? Or maybe you’re one of those extraterrestrials who came to Earth to mess us up?”

  He lurched, and she pounced in response. “You are an alien, aren’t you?”

  He said nothing, but his jaw muscles rippled visibly.

  She was too agitated to press him for an answer just yet. “Or maybe you’re just some exceedingly unlucky galactic schmuck who happened to crash-land here. But either way, let me be the first to officially welcome you to Earth, you alien bastard.”

  “Are you done?” he bit out.

  It was her turn to cross her arms defensively.

  “Sit down, Tessa. We need to talk.”

  “No, you need to talk.”

  “Sit.”

  The whiplash command in his voice was hard to resist. But resist she did.

  He sighed. And said more politely, “This is going to take a while. I think you’ll be more comfortable if you sit down. Please.”

  Dammit, she hated logical requests when she was this mad. Reluctantly, she did as he suggested. “Start talking,” she said truculently.

  “You are right. I come from the stars. The reasons for my arriving here are not important. But my craft malfunctioned and I crash-landed as I said I did, on the shores of Halicarnassus. My ship was not repairable, so I dragged it out to sea and sank it. Eventually, my people will figure out that I’ve gone missing and come looking for me, I hope. The emergency signal I got out before I went down will take a few more years to reach them. But until then, I’m stuck here.”

  To hear him confirm what she’d already surmised was still a severe shock to her system. She stared at him in disbelief. She was sitting in front of a no-kidding, one-each alien. All the science fiction stories were true. Mankind was not alone in the universe.

  Someday, if she didn’t screw this mission up any more and found that blasted Karanovo medallion piece, humans might, indeed, take their place among the peoples who traveled the stars. All of the stuff Athena Carswell had theorized about was true.

  Her entire existence shifted on its axis as that truth sank in. Too agitated to sit, she jumped up and paced yet again, her mind racing. To his credit, Rustam said nothing, giving her time to absorb the immensity of it.

  Finally, she stopped, staring intently at him. He’d almost managed to distract her completely from the question of what he’d done to get them off that cliff alive.

  “What did you do last night?” she demanded. “We should have been dashed to death on the rocks when we hit the ground.”

  Confusion clouded his vision. “We…I believe your word for it is teleported.”

  “Tele—no way! It’s physically impossible for people to just blink out of one place and suddenly be in another. Not without some serious alien technology…. Oh, wait. You’ve got that. You did it, didn’t you? You brought us here.”

  His frown deepened. “My technology is broken. Otherwise I wouldn’t be stuck on this godforsaken chunk of iron and water you call home. My people can perform time and space displacement, but we need certain equipment to do so. We do not have the capacity to do it spontaneously. In fact, no race anywhere in the galaxy has such ability. Mind power must be greatly amplified through mechanical means to affect physical objects strongly enough to disrupt their conductive field patt—”

  He broke off, as if realizing he was about to digress into a technical discussion that was not germane to the conversation at hand.

  And in that moment it all fell into place in her head. Her cuff. She’d reached for it at the exact moment he’d made a last-ditch effort to teleport them away from that cliff. Because of the whacky psychic link they seemed able to share, he must have tapped into the power of her cuff by accident.

  Curious, she asked, “As we went over that cliff, did you try to teleport us without your…technology? When we were falling, did you do whatever it is you usually do to travel?”

  He nodded tersely.

  That explained it.

  It was his turn to lean forward aggressively. “How did you power the jump? You had to have amplified my thought waves.”

  She shrugged. She wasn’t about to tell this alien traveler that she had a piece of his technology in her pocket. He would snatch it and boogie out of here. And then she would be the one stuck in this place, waiting on an improbable rescue from the gang back in Arizona.

  “You still haven’t told me where you come from,” he prompted.

  She stared at him long and hard. A certain rueful humor glinted in his dark brown eyes, and gradually, the bizarre humor of the situation they found themselves in overtook her. The only two aliens on the entire planet, and they’d managed to run into each other and promptly get themselves into a horrible pickle.

  Of all the people alive in this place and time, the two of them should’ve been able to use their superior educations and foreknowledge of history to their advantage. And yet here they were, stuck in the middle of nowhere, running for their lives.

  Oddly enough, they had even more in common currently than they’d had before. If anything, she felt closer to him, now that she knew how alike they really were. She studied him idly. She had to admit that, for an alien, he was one serious hunk.

  “Is that what you really look like?” she asked. “Or is this some sort of mental projection to hide your six octopus arms and your innards worn on the outside?”

  He grinned. “When beings travel to other places, their energy fields, and hence physical appearances, align to the local field patterns. Nobody really knows why it happens. But you arrive with an ability to understand local language, too.”

  She nodded. “We’re familiar with the concept. We call it Intent.”

  He continued, “This is mostly how I look at home, with a minor adjustment or two to make me look fully humanoid here on your planet. Normally I have a bony ridge down the back of my neck and spine that’s slightly more pronounced, and hair grows down that ridge, too. But the rest of me is as you see it.”

  For some reason, she was abjectly relieved. Not because she was worried about the looks of the creature she’d slept with but purely for selfish reasons. He was such a good-looking guy…

  Ohmigosh. She’d slept with him. Could they have made a baby together? She remembered belatedly—and gratefully—that she’d gone on the pill as one of the many health precautions she’d been required to take before this mission.

  He was in front of her in a flash. “What’s wrong?” he asked urgently.

  She stuttered, “I, uh, was, uh, wondering about our…genetic compatibility.”

  “Ahh.” Laughter glinted in his gaze.

  “It’s not funny!”

  His arms went around her, gathering her lightly to him. “Our races are entirely compatible genetically. Most of the life forms in this part of the galaxy are loosely related through various planetary seeding and settlement projects.”

  Whoa. Seeding and settlement?

  “Humans are native to Earth, of course, but other DNA was introduced to help advance the species more rapidly.”

  Had he just accounted for the jump from cave-dwelling near-ape to fire-lighting, tool-making, ta
lking modern man?

  He murmured into her hair, “When are you from?”

  She sighed. She supposed it would do no harm to tell him at this point. He had come clean with her. Fair play dictated that she do the same with him.

  “I’m from a couple thousand years in the future. My home is on the other side of the planet, in lands that these ancient people don’t have the faintest idea even exist.”

  He nodded, kissing his way across her temple and distracting her thoroughly. Liquid heat warmed her lower body and melting need made her knees suspiciously weak all of a sudden. He was mesmerizing. Even when she was so mad at him she could spit, she still couldn’t get enough of him.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked, his tongue swirling around the shell of her ear, causing her body to arch into his of its own volition.

  “Research,” she managed to mumble.

  “What did you lose?”

  That startled her partially out of her sexual haze. “I beg your pardon?” She hedged, thinking fast. How was she going to answer or avoid that without lying to him?

  “You’re looking for something you said you lost.”

  Inspiration struck. She said smoothly, “It’s a modern map. I accidentally lost it, and it has to be recovered. I can’t interfere with the natural development of mankind, and leaving that kind of information behind could affect human progress.”

  Rustam nodded in understanding. “Tricky stuff, time travel. We try to do as little of it as possible for the very reason you’re talking about. Time paradoxes are difficult to untangle and put right.”

  “They can be fixed, then?” she asked with interest. “We haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  He smiled wryly. “Then I guess I’d better quit talking about that, and not set your own history awry by giving you information your civilization isn’t ready for yet.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh. The irony was too rich. She looked around the valley curiously. “Do you know where we are?”