Armageddon (14 page)

After her second attempt to wiggle out from under Dax failed, Lena decided to leave well enough alone. The first time she tried, his hand merely tightened on her arm.

The second time, he lifted his head and very causally threw one leg across her lower body, grinding his pelvis into her hip and proving beyond a shadow of doubt that, regardless of what he’d claimed to the contrary, there were parts of him that were very much alive.

She subsided, staring at the ceiling for a while, trying not to think about the warmth of his body against hers, and especially trying not to think about the very different kind of warmth that began to hum through her.

He didn’t trust her. That fact seemed unavoidable, that, as tired as he was,
knowing
he had to sleep, he figured the best way to do so was to make sure he didn’t have to concern himself about where she was or what she was doing. She didn’t delude herself into thinking it was anything else, even if his body said differently.

Sighing, she tried to angle her head enough to look down at him.

There was an angry red welt on his neck that would probably be a bruise before long.

She’d done that. Remorse filled her. She didn’t know what had come over her to fly at him like that. She’d never thought she was a violent person. She would never have believed she was capable of such a thing.

She’d been scared, and she’d felt threatened, but neither of those emotions were an excuse for behaving like a complete savage. It had been different when the clone had attacked her, mostly because the clone
had
attacked. She hadn’t been doing anything but trying to defend herself.

She
had attacked Dax, though. He hadn’t done anything to her to warrant the attack.

Feeling his fingers grow lax on her wrist, she pulled free and lifted her hand to gently stroke the spot.

“I’ll live,” he murmured.

Lena glanced at him sharply, discovering his eyes were open a slit. She wondered how long he’d been watching her.

“Go to sleep.”

Lena sighed. “I’m not very comfortable.”

“You’re a real pain the ass, baby girl,” he growled, lifting away from her and pushing at her shoulder until she rolled onto her side facing the bulkhead.

She felt a lot more comfortable, for all of five seconds, but he merely scooted up behind her, threw one arm and leg across her and snuggled his groin against her ass.

She rather thought she’d been
more
comfortable with that beast of his against her hip. Having it nudging the cleft of her ass was a lot harder to ignore.

So was having his heated breath drifting over her neck and ear.

She wiggled, trying to get a little more comfortable.

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The effect was immediate.

His cock grew hard as rock. Angling her head around, she slanted a suspicious glance at his face and didn’t know whether to be relieved or irritated to see his face was completely relaxed.

Settling again, she laid perfectly still, waiting for her body, and his, to cool, and somewhere in the rounds drifted off to sleep.

* * * *

“Hungry?”

Lena stretched, allowing her eyes to drift open at the question.

Dax was studying her from across the cabin, one hip propped on his desk. His hair was tousled as if he’d just gotten up himself and his eyes looked nearly as tired as they had when he’d lain down.

Still more than a little disoriented, Lena pushed herself upright. “I’d like to bathe.”

He jerked his head in the direction of the door to his private bath. “You’ll have to put on the same uniform, though, unless you want to borrow one of mine.”

She could imagine how well that would fit. He was at least a foot taller than she was. “This is fine,” she murmured, wondering how long she was going to have to live in it. It seemed doubtful she would be seeing any of her own clothes anymore and clothes, like everything else, were hard to come by.

The bath didn’t have a lock. As unsurprising as that was given the fact that it was Dax’s private bath, attached to his cabin, it was still disconcerting. Shrugging it off after a moment, she struggled with the self sealing closure that ran down the front of the suit and shimmied out of it. It wasn’t easy because the room was tiny and the shower took up almost half of it. She might have been inclined to climb into the shower to undress except for two circumstances. It was no bigger than the area outside the shower, in fact smaller, and it was made entirely of crystal clear acrylic, which meant it offered no more privacy.

After placing the suit carefully on a hook behind the door, she stepped into the shower, studied the control a moment and finally pressed the decon button. Foaming, decontaminating lather immediately began to spray from a nozzle overhead. The first glob hit her right on top of the head, punctuating the fact that the shower had either been adjusted for Dax, or built to begin with for a tall man. Arching her back and holding her hands out palm up, she caught the stream, scrubbing it over her neck and breasts and belly with her hands and then filled her palms again with the lather and leaned down to lather her feet and legs and genitals. She’d just straightened when she happened to glance toward the door.

Dax was standing in the opening, one shoulder propped negligently against the frame, watching her with unabashed interest.

Lena jumped all over, throwing lather into her face.

His lip curled up at one corner. “When you’re done, we’ll go down to the mess.”

Lena glared at him indignantly.

He arched a brow at her.

She presented him with her back.

“This view’s good too,” he murmured, laughter threading his voice.

“I’m not used to having men in my bath,” she said testily.

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“Good.”

When she glanced back, she saw he hadn’t moved so much as a hair.

She thought about telling him to go away, but she doubted he would. He had to know she was uncomfortable with being watched, and that hadn’t fazed him.

And he had certainly not come in only for the purpose of telling her they would go to eat when she was done. He’d already asked if she was hungry.

Deciding to simply ignore him, she finished lathering herself and switched to the rinse. The fine mist that began to spray her from every direction caught her in the face, too. Covering her face, she found that the only way she could avoid the spray was to turn toward the door--where Dax still stood, watching.

She tried to ignore him anyway, lifting her arms and legs to make sure she’d rinsed the lather off thoroughly before she shut the rinse off and touched the dry button.

The warm air that immediately enveloped her made goose flesh rise on her skin, but it dried most of the water up.

Dax tossed a small towel at her as she stepped out of the shower. She caught it by reflex, glancing up at him as she did. There was no amusement in his eyes now. They were stormy, glittering with some emotion that her body sensed and reacted to. Pushing away from the door frame, he stared at her a moment and finally turned and left.

Feeling weak-kneed, Lena dried the residual dampness from her skin and blotted as much water from her hair as she could before she grabbed the uniform and tugged it on. Dax was sprawled in the chair at his desk when she returned to the main room of the cabin, a glass in one hand.

She glanced at the glass disapprovingly and then, without saying anything, moved to the lav and looked around hopefully for a comb or brush.

“In the cabinet next to my shaver,” Dax offered, his voice sounding husky. From the fire water, Lena wondered, or something else?

Her hair was still damp when she’d finished combing it, but she merely blotted the wet ends again and left it to dry naturally. It was one of the things she liked about her new hair, that all she had to do was comb it and allow it to dry.

But it hadn’t been worth what she’d paid for it, she thought as an avalanche of guilt washed over her, wondering if what Dax had said was true, or if he’d only said it to keep her from feeling so guilty that that one act of vanity had cost them all so much.

Dax was studying her pensively when she returned the comb and turned to him at last.

Without a word, he downed the last of the liquid in the glass, set it down, and stood up.

Lena found that her body was still buzzing with ambiguous sensations as she moved along the corridor slightly in front of Dax. He’d settled his hand along her waist, resting on the top of her hip, as if to guide her, which was nonsense of course since the corridor was straight and he must know she’d already been to the mess hall before. She couldn’t decide if it was possessive in nature, or a precaution because she was still an unknown entity, or maybe even protectiveness, but she found it raised the level of awareness in her until she felt almost breathless. When they reached the tube, he gestured for her to precede him.

She heard voices coming from the mess hall long before they arrived and the sound instantly redirected her tension from awareness of a sexual nature to anxiety.

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Slowing, she threw a glance at Dax’s face. His grip on her tightened fractionally, urging her forward, but she abruptly felt a protectiveness in his touch and his nearness and some of her uneasiness abated.

The mess hall, she discovered to her dismay, was full. If Dax hadn’t been directly behind her and had a firm grip on her she would’ve retreated immediately, particularly since conversations all over the room died the moment she was noticed in the doorway.

They picked up again almost immediately as Dax pushed her gently but firmly into the room and guided her toward the buffet. “I already got a tray earlier,” she murmured when he took a tray and handed it to her.

“You can get it later.”

She didn’t want to argue about it, not when she felt like everybody was listening.

Shrugging mentally, she took the tray, but she was very careful this time only to take a little food. She was hungry, but unnerved by being around so many strangers. She would have been anyway, feeling as she did that all of them watched her, but it made it particularly bad knowing what she did now.

A man of obvious tino heritage hailed them as they left the buffet and Dax guided her toward that table, pulling out a chair for her before he set his tray down.

“What’s the word?” Dax asked without preamble as he settled in the chair beside her.

The man glanced at Lena. “One.”

Dax’s brows rose. “Only one?”

“It was a trawler.”

A smile of satisfaction curled Dax’s lips. “Good. They took the bait.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled something out and dropped it on the table in front of them. It pinged metallically as it landed.

The tino man stared at it as if it was a snake.

After glancing from one man to the other, Lena peered at the tiny fleck of metal.

“What is it?”

“The last of the locators.”

“You brought one with us?” the man asked in a strangled voice.

Dax shrugged. “They planted six on her. The only thing they could deduce from sending them off in six different directions was either that we’d killed her and cut her up, or we’d removed the locators and sent those off in six different directions--in which case, I thought it might work better to be one of the ‘diversions.’

“Take it, attach it to a torpedo, and launch it toward the sun of this system when we leave. When you get back to the bridge, you can set a course for home base. Keep a sharp eye out, though. Once they’ve eliminated the ships not carrying, they’ll figure out pretty quickly which one of the diversions is us.”

“That was in me?” Lena asked, stunned by the entire conversation.

Dax slanted a glance at her. Almost casually, he leaned back in his chair and draped an arm over the back of her chair. “One of six. Obviously, they were pretty certain we’d come in after you.”

Lena met his gaze. “I didn’t know they’d done this,” she said faintly.

His lips curled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I know.”

Lena looked down at her plate, wondering if she could manage to choke down enough food not to look like she was a nervous wreck. It wasn’t enough everybody on

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the damn ship thought she might be a clone? Now she might also be a spy? Or a clone who was a spy?

She didn’t know what to make of his behavior, which seemed to be a vast contradiction. Obviously, he still distrusted her, but he was behaving in a way that would surely convince everyone that saw them together that he’d accepted her, more than accepted that she was the real Lena. His manner had seemed protective as they’d made their way to the mess hall, but almost from the moment they’d stepped into the doorway she’d sensed a subtle change in him from the protective to the possessive. She just wasn’t sure whether it was deliberate on his part, or a subconscious reaction to the way the men in the room were all studying her, either blatantly or furtively, but she didn’t think she was imagining it.

Dax leaned down until his lips were next to her ear. The gesture, Lena was sure, must look almost like that of a lover to anyone who saw it. “Eat.”

A shiver traveled through her as the warmth of his breath caressed the sensitive flesh, but she picked up her fork and went through the motions, finding after a few mouthfuls that it was easier. “What do you think would’ve given them the idea that anyone would consider me important enough to try to get me out?”

Dax shrugged. “You were important to Nigel … and Morris.”

Lena’s head came around so fast a bone popped. Cold washed through her. “You think they know about Nigel offering to help in return for getting me out?”

A look of irritation flickered across his features. “Nigel’s safe. I’m fairly certain it was the connection to Morris, not Nigel, that interested them most.”

Lena set her fork down. “Not if he keeps his end of the bargain, he isn’t.”

His lips thinned. “They made the connection between you, Nigel, and Morris before any of this went down. If I was guessing, it would be that they just hoped they could use you to bait their trap. They knew about Morris. They may have suspected that Nigel was the source they were looking for and you were the go between, but I doubt it.

They took the informant out that had contacted Morris before he could deliver the goods.”

Lena frowned. “They kept interrogating me about the rebels. They thought I knew something. They were asking for names and meeting places.”

Dax flicked a glance at the man across from him. “They interrogate everybody, just in case they know something,” he said slowly. “The fact that they questioned you isn’t necessarily significant.”

Lena frowned, trying to recall anything about those sessions that might give her a clue. “Maybe. There were two of them. One was like a med tech. He gave me the injections and it seemed he was only there for that, and to observe. He said
if
I knew anything, I’d have to tell them because of what he’d given me.”

“What
did
you tell them?” the tino man asked.

Lena glanced at him when he spoke. “Nothing. I didn’t know anything.” She frowned, wondering whether to mention what she
had
told them or not. Finally, she decided against it. “Morris never told me anything. I didn’t even know he was actually involved in the rebel movement. I thought it was just … talk.”

“What
did
Morris talk about?”

Lena shrugged. “He was always talking about gov conspiracy. I knew he hated them, and with good reason. But I thought that was all it was. I mean, it just didn’t make

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sense to me. The Prez doesn’t have that kind of power anymore, not since just before the downfall, the one back in the early part of the century that abused his office so badly and ruined the economy and the environment that they changed the laws to keep anyone from holding that much power again. Even the congress, because they were either ineffectual against him, or a part of his agenda, doesn’t have that much power anymore. Of course, he never talked to me about the cloning, not until toward the last, but the only way anyone in the gov could benefit would be if they could remain in power, and they can’t.

The Prez can’t. The congress can’t, because they can’t serve more than two consecutive terms either anymore. It’s not like it was in the way back when a lot of them ended up serving in congress for life, getting elected over and over. If it was, then it might make sense.”