Armageddon (9 page)

He didn’t like to argue about it, especially when she had him in a stranglehold.

After a few panicked moments, he decided to try to focus on taming the beast. It wasn’t easy all things considered, but after a moment he felt the blood ease from his member.

Unfortunately, the moment it began to go limp, she decided she’d dropped what ever it was she thought she’d had hold of. He knew this because she began to shake it.

“Broke.”

“It will be if you don’t stop,” he ground out.

“S’not broke?”

“Just give it to me,” he hissed.

To his immense relief, she let go of him.

Grasping her hand, he moved it to his chest again, holding her palm over his frantically pounding heart until she relaxed and went limp.

He lay perfectly still for a while, struggling with his private demons, which had taken that really inappropriate time to prompt him with temptations he knew he had no business considering.

She was putty in his hands at the moment, though, completely compliant--almost completely--and it took all he could do to shrug off the temptation to take advantage of her and assuage his needs knowing she would probably yield without argument.

It might have been easier if he had not been thinking about their coupling in the cell only moments before. It certainly didn’t help that, except for that, he hadn’t touched a woman in nearly two months.

When he finally managed to get his mind off of fucking her brains out, it dawned on him that he had stumbled on what might be the only opportunity, short of torturing her, of getting reliable information from her. He lay pondering that for a while, trying to think of questions he could ask that would give him answers. Somehow, he doubted she could handle any question that was too complicated at the moment.

As far as any of them had been able to determine, the conspirators hadn’t figured out how to record real memories and implant them in the clones. They usually managed to put together and implant a pretty impressive background package--which meant they had access to the entire security net which missed damned little--so even though they didn’t actually remember the incidents because they hadn’t been there, they did know about a lot of the same events the real person knew.

“Do you remember meeting me?” he asked finally.

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She nodded.

“Where did we meet?”

Her face crumpled. “Morrisplace.”

Dax frowned thoughtfully, but realized after a moment that that still didn’t tell him anything. He’d been in the apartment to scan for surveillance cams and ‘spike’

them. They’d learned very quickly that simply deactivating them didn’t do much good.

The very next time they went to a place they had to do another search and destroy. If they left them, though, planting a false feed, they could be pretty sure the goons wouldn’t be back to check on them.

The problem was, the cams might have caught his visit. He’d been as careful as he could about spiking them, and thought he’d made sure he had erased everything directly before the tampering, but he couldn’t be a hundred percent certain that they didn’t know that was the time and place he’d first encountered her. And even the real Lena wouldn’t know that he’d known about her for years.

The real Lena would know what hadn’t happened, though.

“You were happy to see me. It had been years, after all.”

Her brow wrinkled in confusion.

“I was glad to see you, too. That’s why I kissed you.”

She looked even more confused. “Didn’t,” she said finally.

“You kissed me back.”

She moved restlessly, as if wrestling to extract that from her memory. “Did?

Doan ‘member.”

Dax frowned in irritation. That didn’t tell him a damned thing, and unfortunately he couldn’t tell if she was being deliberately evasive or if he’d just confused her because she did remember the incident but couldn’t remember something that hadn’t happened.

“Fucked. Din kiss me.”

Dax stiffened. Catching her jaw and tipping her face up for his inspection, he studied it searchingly. “When?” he asked sharply.

“While ago.”

“Where?”

“Bed,” she responded reasonably.

He was tempted to shake her. She might be thinking about the time in the cell, and she might not be. It was just as possible that she was faking the whole damned

‘asleep’ thing and thought something had happened at Morris’.

The line of questioning wasn’t doing him any good otherwise either. Pushing her onto her back, he rolled up onto one elbow to stare down at her for several moments. She lay sprawled as she landed, bonelessly, showing no sign at all that he could see of tension. Finally, he settled his chest against her, pinning her to the bed with his body and tried to focus on relaxing enough himself to sleep.

* * * *

“Captain Morris?”

The voice jerked Dax rudely from sleep, yanking his head upwards as if someone had grabbed him by the hair and lifted it.

“We’ll be docking at Antaria in about twenty minutes.”

Dax stared down in bemusement at the breast he’d been using for a pillow for several moments and finally rolled off the bunk and strode to the com. “I’ll be up in a

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minute.”

Struggling to shake off the dregs of sleep, he looked around for the uniform he’d discarded and finally spied it hanging from the corner of the mirror mounted above his shaving basin. Recalling, vaguely, that he’d wadded it into a ball and tossed it at the wall when he’d discovered his bed was occupied, he retrieved the jumpsuit and pulled it on, studying Lena as he pressed the front seal together.

She’d rolled over onto her belly when he got up, exposing a long shapely back and heart shaped buttocks that tempted him to explore the cleavage with his face.

Shaking the thought, he grabbed the edge of the cover and tossed it over her before leaving the cabin.

The smell of coffee led him to the galley. Grabbing a steaming mug full, he downed a mouthful before he was clear headed enough to think better of it, scalding the inside of his mouth, his esophagus, and his stomach. The burn more than the caffeine jolted him into alertness, and he headed out again. When he reached the bridge, he could see the busy space port in the forward viewing screen. They’d already been caught by the tractor beam and were gliding in for hookup.

He settled a hand on the docking pilot’s shoulder. “Stay put. We won’t be here long. When you check in with the dock master, tell him we’re headed to Andromeda to pick up a load of ore.”

Stepping to the com unit, he touched the pad. “Marx, Johnson, Gracia, and Vang-

-meet me at the main airlock--NOW!”

Vang and Johnson were the last to arrive, and they looked like he felt, glassy eyed from too little sleep, their hair standing on end, and their uniforms fastened crookedly.

He glared at them. After staring at him stupidly for several moments, both men looked down at themselves and began trying to tidy their appearance. “Each of you are to take one of these locators, find a ship ready to leave that has a deep space destination, and make sure you get the thing on board without getting caught--and move your ass. If we stay put too long, they’ll be all over us.”

Saluting, they held out their hands for the locators, tucked them in their chest pockets and hustled out the airlock the moment the door opened. Dropping the last two in his own pocket, Dax followed them. Walking briskly along the docking arm until he reached the main dock, he scanned the vessels lined up on either side. He’d just decided to try his hand at a freighter near the center when he spied Johnson talking to one of the crew members.

Changing course abruptly, he continued down the main concourse until he reached the furthest end and took a right along a secondary docking arm. He was in luck.

He found a deep space rescue vessel that was loading supplies. Hailing one of the dock workers, he told the man he wanted to make sure the meds he’d sent over had reached the dock safely, gave him a fake name, and set him off to look. Wandering casually among the crates while he was waiting, he removed one of the locators and dropped it into the open crate the man had been trying to secure when he arrived.

The dock worker looked worried when he came back. “I didn’t find it. You sure it was supposed to be going out on the Mabel?”

Feigning surprise, Dax stared at the man a moment and then cranked to get a look at the vessel. “Hell! Wrong ship! Sorry.”

The man glared at him irritably, but kept his thoughts to himself.

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Satisfied, Dax turned and strode purposefully away. The man would no doubt remember him if questioned, but that hardly mattered. Vids were everywhere. One could hardly take a leak without being examined thoroughly. He was just hoping the trackers wouldn’t stop to question anyone at this point or examine the surveillance vids.

When he reached the main concourse again, he considered what to do with the last of the locaters. Five ships would be leaving port with Lena on board--six if he planted the last one. Were they more likely to follow the six carrying her, figuring she must be on one of them? Or more likely to ignore the six, figuring they were all decoys?

Deciding to see just how clever they were, and how many were trailing them, he returned to the ship with the last locator and headed for the bridge. “Set a course for Andromeda,” he told the navigator as he settled into his chair.

“Yes, sir!”

His pilot, Rodriguez turned to look at him questioningly.

Dax returned the look in silence for several moments. “After we pass the seventh buoy, change course and head for the dead system and settle the ship into orbit around the sixth planet. We’ll wait there for a few hours and see if we’ve got company. If nobody shows, we can head back to main base.”

Rodriguez frowned. “They’ll pick us up right away if we deviate from the flight path we charted.”

“They won’t. Trust me. They won’t know until we don’t pass the eighth on schedule that we took a detour. That will give us a good three days lead on them. We’ll be home before they notice we’re missing.”

“The seventh buoy?”

Dax nodded. “It’s currently inoperable. I’m going to my cabin. Call me immediately if you pick up anything we need to worry about.”

Once he’d entered his cabin, Dax simply stood over the bed for several moments, wondering if it was even worth the effort of
trying
to get some sleep. It was only the reflection that he wasn’t likely to fare any better, for other reasons, in the crew quarters.

More than a little tempted to roust Mel out of her quarters and take her bed, he considered that option for a few moments and finally discarded it. No body, including him, wanted a med working on them that dead on her feet.

What he needed was pain killer--some of the stuff doc had given Lena would do the trick.

The only problem with that was that he couldn’t afford to take anything that might make it hard to get his head straight if he only managed to get a few hours sleep.

A whole lot of Lena would work even better, but that wasn’t an option, be she ever so comfortably ensconced in his bed.

Muttering a curse under his breath, he finally decided on option number three--a stiff drink. One wasn’t likely to impair his judgment, but it would relax him.

Settling in his desk chair, he poured himself a couple of fingers of whiskey, chilled it in the freeze unit and sipped it slowly, allowing his mind to drift where it would as long as it didn’t drift in Lena’s direction.

He’d spent a lot of years resenting Lena and her brother Nigel for ‘usurping’ his place with his father. It was unreasonable, of course, and he’d been old enough to know better, but that sort of thing rarely touched on logic.

He couldn’t recall that he’d ever really gotten along his father. About the only

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thing he remembered with a lot of clarity about his childhood was that his father was hardly ever around--too busy saving the world to spend much time with his family. And pretty much all of his memories from when he’d been a youth were about fighting, mostly his father.

He’d been nearly thirteen when he’d decided to take off and find his mother. The old man had always sworn the feds had gotten her, but he’d never believed that. He figured she’d just gotten tired of him and his father and left. One day, she’d just left him a note that she had gone to look for food and never came back, and he’d figured, because that was what he really wanted to do, that she’d just kept going.

By the time he’d turned twelve, he had outgrown his father in size and decided he’d outgrown needing somebody to tell him what to do, too. His father had been training him as a rebel pretty much as far back as he could remember. Mostly it was just talk at first, but it wasn’t long before he began showing him how to make war, how to fight, how to kill quickly and quietly, always teaching him the art of warfare.

His mother had hated that. He supposed, in the back of his mind, he’d thought that was probably the main reason she’d left, because her husband was a conspiracy fanatic and her son was a budding killer.

As it turned out, he wasn’t as ready to take off as he’d thought. The first time he decided to take his old man on, Morris had beat the hell out of him in about two seconds flat.

The second time, he’d had time to add weight and muscle to his height and he’d put Morris down.

And then he’d left.

And it turned out that Morris was right. The gov had gotten his mother, rounded her up in the middle of a food riot, hauled her off to one of their camps, and kept her there until she died.

He’d cried like a baby when he had finally tracked her down and only found a grave that didn’t even have a name marker on it--just a fucking number.

He hadn’t gone back, though. He’d hated Morris then almost as much as he hated the gov, and for the same reason.

He’d spent a lot of time trying to decide the best way to pay them both back for his mother and finally ended up focusing on the gov. They were the real villains, after all. It was because of them that his father hadn’t been around to protect his mother.

He’d been seventeen the first time he’d gone back, the first time he’d set eyes on little Lena. She’d been just about as big as a minute, spindly arms and legs and not much to her besides huge blue eyes.

She’d hidden behind Nigel and stared up at him like he was the boogie man until his father had gathered his ‘baby girl’ up and cuddled her protectively.

And she’d still peered at him over his father’s shoulder, her eyes as round as saucers.

He’d been torn, because he could see why his father wanted to protect her and her brother, because neither one of them had been much more than breath and britches, and at the same time he resented the fact that his father, who’d never treated him like a child in his life, had found the nurturing side of fatherhood with two children that weren’t even his.

Maybe Morris had needed them as badly as they needed him. By that time he no

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longer had the family he’d been fighting the great battle for. He was still in the game, thick in the middle of it, but he didn’t participate in actual operations any more, and he didn’t do undercover, and he didn’t handle any of the leg work. He was too old, he claimed, to be any good anymore. He’d gotten slow and become a liability to his fellows in arms. He was a coordinator, nothing more.

That job kept him in the know, but it also kept him on the sidelines so that he could devote himself to raising Lena and Nigel.

Dax, his father had made it pretty damned clear, had also become a liability. He was already a wanted man, pretty high up on the gov’s hit list, and Morris didn’t want to take any chances that Dax might lead a hit squad to his door.

It had rankled. He couldn’t help but resent that his father favored Lena and Nigel above him, but he also couldn’t help but see Morris’ point. He was grown. He was used to taking care of himself. Lena and Nigel were still just kids and they needed somebody to look out for them.

She’d grown into those eyes since the last time he’d seen her, but they were as wide and innocent and vulnerable now as they’d been when she was little more than a baby.

The body that went with those baby blues was another matter all together.

Setting his empty glass down on the desk, he got up, shrugged out of his uniform and sprawled face down on the bed bedside her before his body had a chance to catch up with the direction his mind had taken.

His last thought before he dropped off was that he hoped to hell he’d managed to save Morris’ baby girl, because if it turned out the woman he’d rescued was a forgery, he didn’t think he could handle the termination.

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