Hot Zone

by Cindy Dees

  He followed her gaze. “I told the horses yesterday to head south as far as they could and still avoid any humans. When we went over that cliff last night, I willed us to appear wherever the horses were. I imagine we gave them a hell of a shock when we showed up beside them.”

  She nodded, thinking aloud, “So if the horses did as you said, we’re somewhere to the south of Thermopylae. Hopefully, well clear of the battle, which should start in earnest today or tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow if my race’s histories of Earth are accurate.”

  His people kept histories of Earth? That was interesting. She would have to remember to ask him about that later.

  Tessa continued her line of thought. “A horse without a rider would travel fifteen, maybe eighteen miles in a day. So we’re still thirty or forty miles from Athens, somewhat farther inland than we were last night.”

  “Based on this terrain, I would say your estimate is correct.”

  “Too bad you didn’t imagine us landing at the Parthenon.”

  He grunted. “Xerxes is going to sack the place. I have no desire to be in Athens when he does.”

  His arms fell away from her with a last caress of his fingertips along her wrists. Shivers rippled through her that had nothing to do with cold.

  He murmured, “We ought to get going. I don’t know how far we are from the battlefield, and more Greeks may be moving through this area. As I recall, several local tribes joined the Spartans for their stand at the pass.”

  She nodded. “The Thespians and Thebans.”

  “Exactly.”

  She nodded again and headed wearily for her mare. Apparently, teleporting really took the starch out of a person. It would explain why both of their auras had been so badly drained last night. Rustam looked tired, too, as he headed for Polaris.

  They went through the simple motions of checking the horses and repacking gear that had been jostled about during their time away. Then the two mounted up, and Rustam turned the stallion to the south. In this open terrain, Tessa was able to ride beside him easily.

  “Need to check anything?” she murmured, holding out her hand to him.

  He smiled ruefully. “I still haven’t figured out why, ever since you showed up, my powers have been so messed up. Care to share what you’ve done to me?”

  She blinked in surprise. “You’re the one who’s been messing up my powers.”

  “Okay, so we’ve messed each other up. Any hypotheses as to why?”

  “Maybe our mental energies operate on conflicting wavelengths,” she tossed out.

  “Could be. Although, meaning no offense, humans aren’t advanced enough to generate wave lengths in the same spectrum as my people.”

  “And yet I’m here,” she said lightly.

  With a faint frown creasing his brow, he reached out and took her proffered hand. As usual, awareness of the local area promptly flooded her. She didn’t sense any large life signs in the vicinity. Rustam let go of her hand. Darned if she didn’t miss the contact with him.

  “So what’s up with you needing to touch me to do your thing?” she asked as the horses settled into a ground-eating walk.

  “I’m not sure. I just know that when our energies mingle, I recover a portion of my old abilities. The rest of the time, I seem to have lost my skills.”

  Alarmed, she said, “Do you need me to stop touching you, then?”

  He sighed. “Ahh, my dear. I don’t think I could go more than a few hours without touching you even if I tried.”

  Warmth shot through her. Was it possible that he craved her the way she craved him? But then her thoughts derailed. He was an alien. She had yet to figure out if he was one of the good-guy Pleiadeans or the bad-guy Centaurians. Not to mention that anything between them would give new meaning to the phrase long-distance relationship. This was a short-term fling they were having, and that was all it could ever be.

  She clamped down on her rampaging feelings for him. She could never pursue them. She could have epic sex with him, even like him.

  But nothing more.

  He would go his way and she would go hers, once she recovered the medallion. She was an army officer, for heaven’s sake. She had a vitally important job to do. Not the least of which was to return home and report the presence of this shipwrecked alien in ancient Greece.

  She reached out with her mind to see if she could sense his thoughts, but got nothing at all from him. Did that mean he was sensing none of her thoughts, either? Hopefully, that was how it worked.

  They made good time through the afternoon. It wasn’t as hot as the day before, and as the gentle hills continued, the terrain was immeasurably easier to traverse.

  When the sun sank in the west, a blood red ball of fire, Rustam spotted a damp spot near the base of a large rock formation. “A seep,” he pointed out. “We’ll have to stop and spend the night collecting water, but it smells like the only moisture nearby.”

  Gotta love that alien sense of smell of his.

  They dismounted, and he started to set up camp and build a fire while she went to rig a collection system. The seep turned out to be a small spring, bubbling sluggishly from a crack low in the rock wall. She only needed to move a few large stones to get better access to the sheet of moisture trickling down the wall.

  She’d lifted a big slab of rock, dumping it aside, when a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye made her freeze. A gigantic black snake, as thick around as her wrist, had lurched back violently, coiling itself defensively before her. A good three feet of the serpent lifted up off the ground as she watched, its head fanning out into the distinctive flat hood of a cobra.

  Rustam!

  She didn’t dare take her eyes off the agitated snake and didn’t dare move a muscle. She was no more than six feet from the creature, surely well within its striking range. She could only pray this wasn’t a spitting variety of cobra. The snake wove back and forth slightly, its forked tongue darting out every second or two. Tessa’s terrified gaze followed the beast.

  Don’t move. Rustam’s voice flowed through her mind reassuringly.

  And then a strange whooshing noise came from behind her and something whisked past her cheek, so close it stirred her hair. The snake flew backward, pinned against the wall. It writhed wildly for a few seconds and then subsided, hanging by what looked like three steel spikes lodged in its throat. Each spike was maybe four inches long and slightly thicker than a toothpick.

  Rustam lunged to her side, gathering her in his arms. She turned to the comforting bulwark of his chest, shuddering in terror. She was a military officer, for crying out loud. She shouldn’t lose her cool like this! But man, that had been a huge snake, and it had been so close she could see the vertical slits of its pupils expand and contract as it had watched her.

  “I’ve got you,” Rustam murmured. “You’re safe.”

  She turned her head to look at the snake again. “What are those?”

  “The flechettes? I shot my needle gun at him. It uses compressed air to fire metal spikes at hypersonic speed. I kept it when I sank my ship.”

  “I would ask to see it, but humans in my time are just starting to experiment with that technology. I’d better not.” She paused. “Thanks for saving my life, especially given how much simpler yours would be if that snake had killed me.”

  He went rigid against her. A fist under her chin forced her gaze up to meet his. “You are my consort. I will protect you with my life.”

  Wow. She had to give the macho, alpha alien male credit. He sure knew how to make a girl feel special. “Uh, maybe we better have a little talk about this consort business. What exactly does that mean in your world?”

  “You belong to me.”

  Belong—“Come again?”

  “You are mine. I own you. No other male may mount you.”

  “Whoa. Stop. Rewind, big guy. You own me? Nobody owns me.”

  Fifteen

  Rustam stared down at Tessa in shock. What did she mean, he didn’t
own her? Of course he did. She’d given herself to him. She’d specifically accepted his offer to make her his consort. True, she’d done it deep in the throes of passion, and that maybe wasn’t the most fair time to ask a female to take the title. But there was no rule saying a male had to play fair. And accept his offer she unquestionably had.

  He was just infatuated enough with her to hold her to her word, even if it was unchivalrous of him.

  She stepped back, violet sparks flying from her hair and fingertips. God, she was glorious when she was riled up like this. “Humans don’t tolerate slavery,” she declared.

  He snorted. “Have you looked around? Xerxes rules the greatest empire on Earth on the backs of slaves. The Greeks take slaves, the Egyptians, they all have them. And as for owning women, every great prince on this planet has a harem of women whose lives he utterly controls. He can have them all killed on a whim if he likes.”

  Tessa visibly checked her outrage. Still throwing plentiful sparks of anger, she said carefully, “You forget. I am not of this time. In my own era, two-thousand-plus years hence, slavery has been abolished for the most part on Earth. I will not be your slave.”

  “You are not my slave. You are my woman.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  He frowned. He’d never had to explain the concept before. Everyone understood the layers of social order in his home world. “There are drudges who do manual labor. They are not slaves in the Earth sense. They are paid modestly and can change employers at will, but I admit their lives are hard and mostly unpleasant.”

  Tessa frowned but refrained from commenting.

  “Then there are the working classes. They comprise most of society. Those males take a single female to wife and maybe receive licenses to have one or two offspring if they show a special talent.”

  If her eyebrows went much higher, they would disappear over the top of her head. He ignored her disapproving look and plowed on.

  “Then there is the breeding class. The nobility. Within it, males compete fiercely for wealth, prestige and power. The more of each they amass, the more females they may take into their…harem is probably the closest equivalent word on Earth.”

  “And you’re one of these males?”

  Despite him trying not to let it, his mouth twitched into a smile. He answered dryly, “I am.”

  “So you have a harem of women waiting for you back home?”

  He nodded. “Of course. But I have no consort. Or at least I didn’t until I found you. A male may only have one of those. She is first among his females. It is a position of great prestige. And power, I might add.”

  “Do males of your class marry, or just collect females and toss them into their harems?”

  He drew back, insulted. “We do not marry…nor do we collect females. The genetics are thoroughly analyzed, and matings chosen to maximize the potential of the offspring. In my case, because I am a star navigator, all females I take must exhibit genetic potential in that area.”

  “Then how do you explain me?” she challenged. “I’m no star navigator. I’m just some human who can find lost things.”

  “I—” He broke off, frustrated.

  There was no explanation for her. He was drawn to her as to no other woman he’d ever met. She exasperated him much of the time and infuriated him the rest. She was too smart for her own good. Too independent. Too stubborn. Completely unlike the docile, obedient females of his own kind, who understood their place as the mothers and nurturers in society.

  Even now, with Tessa tapping her foot in agitation, glaring openly at him, he wanted nothing more than to throw her down and mount her wildly, to lose himself in all that crackling energy and untamed power.

  “Never mind,” she said sharply. “Don’t answer that.” She turned away and jerkily went about setting up a funnel beneath the seep for water collection.

  He was unaccustomed to restraining himself around a female like this. Did she not know how hard it was for him to keep his hands off her? In his society, breeding males were expected to take their pleasure whenever and wherever the urge struck them.

  In certain venues, such as a business meeting, the pair in question might withdraw to a discreet side room, but it was entirely acceptable for the alpha male in a meeting to call for a short recess that he might indulge his whim.

  Particularly star navigators. They were the lifeblood of his people. Without them, the Centaurian stranglehold on interstellar travel could very well be lost, and with it all the wealth and power of Centaurian society.

  As Tessa bent and straightened before him, lust pounded through him, grating across his skin like sandpaper. Frustrated beyond all imagining, he stalked forward, recovered his flechettes from the throat of the dead serpent, and dragged the snake back to the fire. At least they would have fresh meat for dinner.

  Tessa came over to the fire sometime later and held out a full water skin to him. “Drink as much as you’d like,” she murmured. “I’ll refill it overnight.”

  He tipped up the soft container, sending a stream of water into his mouth. Over its curving top, he caught sight of Tessa watching his throat as he swallowed. She swallowed convulsively herself.

  Of a sudden, he felt much better. At least he wasn’t alone in his sexual frustration.

  A bowl of steaming-hot stew made from the snake seemed to soothe Tessa’s bad temper somewhat.

  He ventured a conversation with her. “Tell me of your people. How is human society in your time arranged?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not so easily categorized as yours. I suppose you’d find it entirely chaotic. We are arranged into geographic and political divisions called nations. But people travel freely from one nation to another and work, live and marry as they wish. Traces of old ways—more like your layered society—linger here and there in the world, but for the most part, such views are fading.”

  “What use are these nations, then?”

  “The government of each is supposed to look out for the best interests of its people. But some governments are corrupt or paranoid or selfish, and fail to do so. Increasingly, Earth’s economy and political dealings are becoming more global in nature, and the importance of individual nations is beginning to diminish somewhat. I expect that when we join the intergalactic community, we will simply become ‘mankind’ and stop worrying about the various flavors of humans.”

  He managed to keep the expression on his face bland, but just barely. Humans join the intergalactic community? The very idea made his blood run cold. It was that exact thing he’d been sent to Earth to help prevent.

  Of all the indigenous races ever discovered, only humans had shown a widespread, if nascent, talent for star navigation. Worse, the talent seemed to reside in human females. They must not be allowed to develop it, or Centaurian primacy would be destroyed!

  “And for the record,” Tessa continued, thankfully not seeming to notice his panicked reaction, “men and women are widely perceived as equals in my time. Earlier, women were thought to be second-class citizens, but that belief is disappearing fast.”

  A shudder of horror rippled across his skin. Women were weak. Governed by their emotions. Totally incapable of acting as the equals of men! Except…

  Images of Tessa over the past several days flashed through his head. She’d kept her cool this afternoon when confronted by that snake. She hadn’t run screaming or fainted or reacted in any other way a Centaurian female would have.

  Back at the palace, when those randy boys had jumped her at the feast, she’d fought like a tiger.

  She’d even absorbed the revelation that Rustam was an alien with relative calm, and quickly started asking intelligent and insightful questions of him.

  Even now, she’d rapidly gotten over her snit at the way Centaurian society was organized and seemed to have accepted their differences with a certain grace.

  She spoke reflectively. “I actually am a military officer. I command dozens or even hundreds of men at a time and am expec
ted to be able to lead them in war as well as manage them in times of peace.”

  He stared openly at her. “Truly?”

  She nodded, grinning. “Truly.”

  He shook his head, muttering to himself, “We not only failed, we failed colossally.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he replied quickly. “Do you want more stew before I smother the fire?”

  “No.” He caught her wistful look at the flames. It was already cold and the sun had set an hour ago. “We can’t leave it going, a beacon announcing our presence to anyone who passes within a mile or two of us.”

  She sighed. “I know. But after that snake, I was rather enjoying the critter-repelling qualities of a nice fire.”

  He chuckled quietly. “If you’ll sleep close to me, I’ll keep an eye out for any approaching critters through the night. The horses will let us know if any large predators get too close.”

  Quick alarm flitted across her features. “I’m not sure that’s so good an idea, for me to sleep next to you.”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Why not?” he asked blandly, masking his amusement. His keen Centaurian sense of smell detected the quick surge of desire in her at the mere thought of lying beside him.

  She surprised him by looking him square in the eye. “I want to make love with you again. A lot. But no way can we do it, especially knowing what we know now.”

  He leaned back against his saddle, lounging casually. “What has changed that we could make love last night and we can’t tonight?”

  “Well, we know who we are, now.”

  He laughed. “I knew who I was last night, and I suspect you knew who you were, too.”

  “You know what I mean. We’re not even the same race….”

  She trailed off, as if unsure how to finish that argument.

  He commented casually, “My kind have mated with humans before. We breed with most of the races we discover, to test the genetic interaction. My kind and humans can produce offspring, and they’re not monsters, if that’s what you’re worried about. They appear like humans, with a slightly pronounced spine. Or, if you will, like my people, but with a smaller spinal ridge than usual.”