Armageddon (13 page)

* * * *

“You think it’ll work?”

Dax sent the security chief, who was hovering over his shoulder, a narrow eyed glare and the man stepped back uncomfortably. Returning his attention to the quad-screen, he saw that Mel had just looked up at the vid. Mouthing the word ‘asshole,’ she turned away.

Dax’s lips thinned, but he ignored her insubordination, switching from vid to vid, tracking Lena as she raced from the med lab. He frown drew his brows tightly together over the bridge of his nose when she stopped at the gym and went in. Taken totally by surprise, he watched in confusion as she scurried into a dim corner and crouched into a tight ball, covering her ears with her hands.

For many moments, he simply stared at her, too stunned to figure out what she was doing. Abruptly, an errant memory surfaced. It might not have if she hadn’t mentioned the incident to him earlier, but in any case, he
did
remember even though it was the only time he’d been around her when she was little, the only time he’d tried to go home after he’d left.

He and his father had gotten into an argument about the waifs his father had brought into his home. It hadn’t taken much for the argument to escalate into bellowed accusations and recriminations about his mother, because he’d always blamed his father for his mother’s death and, to him, it had only seemed to add insult to injury that his father had pretty much ignored his own family and then taken in someone else’s.

When they’d finally exhausted every curse they could fling at each other, his father had looked around, discovered Lena and Nigel had vanished, and promptly gone into a panic. They’d found Nigel quickly enough, hiding under his bed, but they’d turned the apartment upside down twice before he’d finally discovered Lena in the back of a closet behind a stack of boxes in a space so small he wouldn’t have thought she could squeeze into it. She’d been curled into a tight little ball, her tiny hands over her ears to shut out the angry bellows of him and his father and he’d felt so shamed by his behavior and the things he’d said, it was that that had kept him away more than anything his father had said.

“What’s she doing?”

“Hiding,” Dax said grimly, just like she had when she was a baby--like Lena had.

No clone would have ‘remembered’ the things she did, the things that had driven Lena to try to protect herself in the only way she knew how whenever she felt threatened.

“Not very well,” the security chief said, chuckling.

He took a step back at the look of rage in Dax’s eyes when he surged to his feet.

“Is there something about terrorizing people that you find amusing, soldier?” he growled.

“No sir.”

“Good, because I don’t keep sick fucks around me. We do what we have to do.

Nobody enjoys it.”

“What’s eating him?” the man muttered when Dax had disappeared through the access tube.

“You’re lucky he didn’t stomp the shit out of you and throw your broken,

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bleeding carcass in the brig,” Rodriguez retorted when the man turned to look at him.

“What did I say?”

Rodriguez shook his head at the man. “You are stupid, man. Either he’s right and you are a sick fuck, or you just haven’t had the pleasure of watching somebody you care about replaced by a stinking clone.”

* * * *

She’d vanished by the time Dax reached the gym. After glaring at the empty room for several moments, Dax moved to the com. “Cline, where is she?”

“She’s in the hold, Captain.”

“Fuck!” Dax growled. Striding from the room, he sprinted down the corridor toward the aft tube, hooked the heels of his boots on the vertical bars and slid down the three levels to the hold.

She was arguing with the guard when he landed. Shaking his hands to cool the friction burn, he headed toward the bow where the brig was located.

She whirled to face him when she heard his boots clicking along the metal tiles of the corridor. For several moments, she merely stared at him, as if she was trying to gather her wits.

“You bastard!” Lena snarled when she saw that it was Dax who’d come up behind her and the soldier, her fear and frustration instantly transformed into rage. Launching herself at him, she swung at him with her fists, landing blows at wild random, mostly on his hard arms and shoulders. “Why didn’t you just leave me there? You’re as bad as they are!”

It only fed the flames of her fury that he made no attempt to evade her or to block the punches she slung at him. It only made her more determined to hurt him.

“Damn you!” she screamed at him hysterically when she’d beat at him until her fists and arms were bruised all over and she could hardly lift them to swing at him.

He caught her wrists. “Finished?” he snarled at her through gritted teeth, giving her a hard shake.

“No!” she screamed back at him, fighting the sudden wobble in her chin. “I’ll kill you if anything happens to Nigel because of you! Why did you drag him into this, damn you?”

“
You
dragged him into this,” he said tightly.

The statement was as effective as a slap, knocking the hysteria out of her like a stunning physical blow. She stared up at him in dawning horror as the image flickered through her mind of her and Nigel at the diner and her trying to hint of her fears about Morris.

“Or, if you need somebody else to blame besides yourself, blame Morris. But don’t blame me, lady. I came into this on the tail end.”

“You want me to lock her up, captain?”

Dax’s head swiveled toward the guard. “No!” he snarled.

Grabbing Lena by one arm, he shoved her back down the corridor toward the access tube. Halting when they reached the tube, he jerked her around to face him, grasped her jaw and lowered his own face until they were almost nose to nose. “I owed you that. I know you’re scared, and I’m used to pain, but that doesn’t mean I like it.

Don’t ever try that with me again, especially not in front of one of my men.

Understood?”

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Lena gaped at him in sudden fear, realizing she must have been completely out of her mind to attack him. She’d never done anything like that in her life before, and deciding to pick a huge brute like Dax for her first victim was not the act of someone with a sound mind. Numbly, she nodded at him. “I’m sorry,” she said weakly.

Releasing her abruptly, he pushed her toward the ladder. “Climb.”

Swallowing with an effort, Lena grasped a rung and began to climb. “Where are we going?” she asked worriedly when they’d passed two levels and he’d said nothing more.

Instead of answering her, he glared at her when she glanced back at him.

When they reached the level of the crew quarters, he told her to give off. Feeling extremely uneasy, she did, waiting until he’d climbed off and grasped her arm. She made no attempt to resist as he led her along the corridor, until she saw the destination he had in mind. She hung back then, for all the good it did. He simply yanked her forward and continued as if he was completely unaware that she was trying to resist.

If he hadn’t still looked as black as a thundercloud, she might have been able to find enough of her spine to complain. As it was, her tongue felt as if it was glued to the roof of her mouth.

When he’d opened the door to his cabin and shoved her in, she stumbled toward the bunk, tried to catch her balance and finally sprawled across it on her side, staring up at him wide eyed.

He stared back at her for several moments and finally looked away. “Damn it to hell, Lena. Don’t look at me like that!” he growled, moving away finally and throwing himself down in the chair behind his desk.

After searching the drawers, he pulled out a tumbler and a bottle and poured himself a drink.

Lena sat up slowly, licking her dry lips to moisten them. “You said....”

He sent her a narrow eyed look.

“I’m not … I’m not … I won’t...,” she stammered.

His lips thinned. He transferred his gaze from her to the brown liquid in his glass, studied it a moment, and downed the liquid in one swallow. “I think I might be able to contain myself,” he retorted dryly.

Embarrassment flushed Lena’s face and throat with heat. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not that he’d remembered the ‘threat.’ On the one hand, she was almost surprised that he did, and that she hadn’t had to say anything more to remind him that he’d told her he would consider it as an invitation if he found her in his bed again.

On the other, his snide rejection stung.

Of course she
had
threatened to kill him, and she had tried to beat him down.

Obviously, he hadn’t considered that a turn on, or a come on, she thought wryly.

Despite her uneasiness about his temper, she found she felt immensely more secure in Dax’s cabin than she thought anybody with any sense should have.

She wasn’t all together certain she would have objected all that strenuously if he
had
taken it as an invitation. In fact, she was fairly certain objecting would have been the last thing on her mind.

It was a good thing she’d managed to thoroughly piss him off, because she was a complete moron. “You want me to stay here?” she asked, proving to herself and Dax

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that, yes, she was an idiot.

He sent her a look. “Not especially,” he growled.

There was nothing quite like a warm welcome, Lena reflected miserably, but at least she didn’t have to worry about anybody else trying to kill her. Just Dax.

“Nigel will know me,” she said abruptly.

He said nothing, merely staring at her speculatively.

“I knew right off when they … when they....” She broke off, struggling against the sudden urge to burst into tears. “They killed him, didn’t they? There’s no chance that they just imprisoned him?”

His face hardened. “None.”

She wanted to cry. She hadn’t really had the chance to let go of her grief over losing Morris. She’d been too scared at first to let on she knew it wasn’t the real Morris, and too busy since the attack trying to stay alive. She saw that Dax wasn’t just angry.

The knowledge hurt him, too, and it didn’t seem right to inflict her own sorrow on him when he was struggling so hard to contain his. She’d loved Morris like a father, but he
had
been Dax’s father. That had to wound him deeply, maybe more so because he’d seen so little of him in years and there had been a tremendous barrier between them that they couldn’t seem to bridge.

“I’m so sorry,” she said shakily.

He sent her a surprised look and then frowned, pouring himself a second drink.

“About what?”

Right up until he asked, she hadn’t realized that she had so much she should apologize for. Guilt swamped her. “About … everything. About Morris, about hitting you, about blaming you when it was all my fault.”

He sent her a searching glance and finally shrugged. “Like I said, I figured I had it coming.”

She saw with a touch of relief that he merely sipped the second drink. “It wasn’t really your fault, you know.”

She tried not to look too hopeful.

He scrubbed his hand over his chin tiredly. “Mostly, you were just caught up in the middle of things completely out of your control. Nigel would’ve been dragged in even if you hadn’t gone to him for help. They would’ve still gone after you, and he would still have felt the need to try to help you.”

Lena thought that over. She knew that much was true, but she also knew that she’d set the entire thing in motion by deciding to try to talk Morris into coming to live with her. “I led them to him, didn’t I?”

He shrugged. Leaning back in the chair, he lifted his long legs one at the time and stretched them out on the desk top, crossing them. “Maybe.”

Lena got off of the bed, looked around for some place else to sit and finally sat down on the edge of the bunk again. “I’m pretty sure I did. He said something was going on at the clinic where Nigel worked, and I went to see him not long after I’d been.”

Dax’s gaze flickered over her. After a moment, he drained his glass, set it down carefully on the desk top, and got up. As she watched, he rounded the desk and moved toward her.

Her ass came up off of the bunk as he neared her. He sent her a wry glance as he dropped down on the edge of the bunk, tugging his boots off.

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Lena put a little more distance between them, eyeing him uneasily.

“They were already on to Morris,” he murmured, lying back against the pillows and draping an arm across his eyes. “That’s why I was there the day you came. He’d sent for me, because he didn’t trust anybody else with what he had to say.”

Stunned by his revelation, Lena moved back to the bunk to stare down at him and finally perched on the edge. “They were? You mean … I didn’t lead them to him? It wasn’t my fault?”

He sat up so suddenly Lena merely gaped at him, too surprised to consider what the purposeful gleam in his eyes might mean. She gasped as he caught her and rolled, pressing her to the mattress and pinning her down with his weight.

A faint smile curled his lips as he gazed down at her startled expression. “Don’t look so hopeful,” he murmured, snuggling his head next to hers on the pillow. “I’m dead on my feet. I wouldn’t be of any use to you if I tried anything.”

It took many moments for indignation to usurp her stunned surprise. By the time it did, Dax was breathing the heavy, even breaths of sleep.

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