Dark Solstice (19 page)

“He can take care of himself,” Kyle muttered irritably.

Rhea felt her face heat but decided not to respond since she couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t annoy Kyle even more. She wouldn’t have worried about Raathe ordinarily—not as much anyway—but he was hurt. As hard as he was trying to hide it, she could see he was in pain.

Kyle effectively distracted her a few moments later, however, by bringing up a map that looked familiar enough that excitement surged through her. “I think that’s it!”

She moved closer, studying the construction site in relation to the mountain range and was more convinced than ever. Ground level vids would’ve been preferable, but when the computer zoomed in for a closer shot she saw several landmarks that looked vaguely familiar.

The trouble was, it was a map of the area around the construction site where they’d been working, and she couldn’t be sure if the memory was from what she’d seen from the construction site or what she’d seen before.

She discovered Kyle was studying her face rather than the map. “You’re sure?” he asked when she met his gaze.

It unnerved her, knowing if she was wrong they were all going to die. “I believe it is.”

Kyle got up from his seat after a few minutes and allowed her to take it and study the map more closely. “We’re only going to have one shot at this.”

“No pressure,” Rhea retorted dryly.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his lips curl. “No pressure.”

She shook her head after a moment. “I think I’m as sure as I’ll ever be short of going. This looks like it. I know when we first went down to the Mars surface it looked familiar to me and I thought it was near the place. I still do. If I’d been there more than once, I could be more positive, but I didn’t get the chance to go back. They caught me when I transmitted my report.”

Kyle shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“Assuming we can set this thing down,” Raathe commented, returning in time to catch the conversation. “And we won’t know that until we try.”

“Why don’t you tell us what you do know about the caverns, guesses, certainties?” Justice suggested.

Rhea focused on collecting her thoughts and impressions for a moment. “It’s like … a naturally occurring biosphere. The air’s good. I did test that—not too rich, which surprised me with the abundance of plants, but I think, maybe, that could mean some fairly complex animals, too, certainly there’s something producing carbon dioxide. I didn’t see anything—so that’s a guess—but there was balance. I did some preliminary tests on the water with what I had with me. I’m not sure of the quality, but no dangerous contaminates that I could pull up.”

“You said it looked huge, that as far as you could see it went on for miles,” Raathe prompted. “How could you see?”

“An ice flow covers a good bit of the top of the cavern. I’d guess it’s been peeling away soil and rock as it moves. Light filters down through it. There was a constant dripping, so I’m guessing most, if not all of the water is coming from the melting ice flow. Some geothermal warming. It certainly wasn’t ‘tropical’ but it was definitely a lot closer to human survival temperatures. Although I wasn’t there long enough to know how wide a range we’re talking about, the temperature was constant enough to promote prolific plant growth. And it’s been there a while … a very long time. It’s firmly established and evolving.”

Raathe and Justice were both silent, considering, when she finished speaking. “Food could be a problem,” Justice said finally.

Raathe nodded. “Assuming the broadcast I sent makes it through, someone will come, though, if for no other reason than to find the caverns. We need to gather up what we can by way of provisions, as much as we can carry, and hope we’re found before it runs out or that we find a way to supplement our supplies. If there’s abundant plant life, some of it’s bound to be edible. We need to take a portable scan if we can find one to take readings.”

He turned to study the map. “There’s a large ice flow here—must be a hundred miles long, maybe twenty to forty across. That much fits the description for sure.”

Warmth flooded Rhea as it dawned her abruptly that Raathe must have taken all of that into consideration when he’d been determined to leave her. It wasn’t just that he’d thought she would be an unwelcome burden or that he’d figured her chances of living would be better if she stayed in the prison. He’d really believed she would safer if he left her because he’d believed all along that his plan, if he could execute it, would bring help.

“How much longer before we reach Mars?” she asked.

“At this speed … a little over an hour. That gives us time to gather up what’s available if we hump it. I don’t want to hang around the ship long after we set it down—they’ve probably been tracking us since we left and will know exactly where we’re headed—it’ll be getting close to dark anyway. It’s winter solstice, the shortest day. The closest landing possibility is a good five miles from the entrance you found and it looks like rough terrain.”

“What were Grimes and Cook up to when you found them?”

Raathe glanced at Justice. “Supposedly gathering supplies. They were going through the food supplies. The weapons locker is still intact. I checked that first.”

Justice nodded. “Me and Rhea will get started.”

Raathe’s lips tightened, but he merely nodded. “I’ll set the course and join you in a minute. Keep an eye out for a scanner.”

Rhea divided a glance between the two men and got up to follow Kyle, feeling an uncomfortable mixture of emotions. The escape hadn’t allowed time for any thoughts beyond outrunning the guards, dodging laser fire, and getting into the ship, and the rough take off had completely focused her mind on her terror. They were hardly free of duress even now, but the relative calm had eased the way for more personal concerns—namely the complex relationship she had between two dangerous felons.

She was afraid there was a territorial battle brewing. Neither man, fortunately, seemed so primal as to ignore the more important issue of survival, but the life they had led since they’d been confined in Phobos Prison was almost calculated to bring the inmates down to the level of savages. No one survived who couldn’t adjust to that savagery and both men had beaten the odds, which meant they were very good at being savages.

And both men not only seemed to want her, they seemed to consider that she
was
theirs, which produced a hell of a dilemma for her, a quandary, if she was honest with herself, that she’d
created
herself.

She didn’t see that she could have done anything differently and survived. Although she was fairly certain, now, that neither man would’ve treated her violently if she hadn’t been willing, she certainly hadn’t known that in the beginning. It had seemed best, for her, to do what she could to soothe the savage beasts and if sex was the way to their ‘hearts’ then it was a small price to pay to remain intact.

It had ceased to be that simple even for her, though. She’d come to care about them—far more than she would’ve dreamed possible.

She’d truly believed when she’d thought she might be watching John Raathe go to his death that she loved him or she would never have told him. She still believed she did, whether it was reasonable or not, even if he didn’t return her feelings, and she doubted very much that he did.

The problem was, she cared about Kyle, too, and although she wasn’t as certain how much, if it was love as she felt for Raathe, she
was
certain that it was too much to make any decision easy for her in their territorial war. She didn’t want either one of them hurt. She hadn’t lied to Kyle about that either when he’d suggested that she’d rather see him dead than Raathe. The possibility had desolated her.

There was no doubt, at all, in her mind that Kyle had a core of goodness in him. His tenderness and concern for her had won a piece of heart as surely as Raathe’s deep wounds had.

It occurred to her, forcefully, now, that she might be the catalyst that would bring about one or the other, or maybe even both men’s deaths. That was a strong possibility if she couldn’t think of a way to stop a territorial war over her. Choosing one or the other certainly wasn’t the way. She didn’t think either one of them would simply accept and back off, not when it was obvious that both of them thought they were the better man and that it was their ‘duty’ to protect her from the other.

Choose neither? She didn’t think she had that option either. The truth was, if they were caught it would be neither, because both of them would be going back to prison and neither man was ever likely to see his freedom again. Regardless of what crimes the Johann company had committed, that didn’t erase their criminal past.

Even if they weren’t caught any time soon, she didn’t think they would
allow
her to choose neither. They would protect her. She didn’t believe either one of them would hurt her, but they were aggressive alpha males to the nth degree. They wouldn’t give up on trying to dominate her. It wasn’t in their nature.

So what could she do? How was she going to prevent the ripples of aggression she could already feel building from becoming all out war?

Chapter Seventeen

Despite Rhea’s internal wrestling with her anxiety about Raathe and Justice and her focus on searching for anything that might help insure survival, she couldn’t throw off the uneasiness that curled through her every time she sensed Grimes’ or Cook’s gazes. She might have put it down to paranoia except that she caught them studying her more than once and although she couldn’t see anything particularly threatening about the expression on either man’s face, she
still
felt threatened, unclean.

Raathe had discovered a supply of thermal sleep bags. There were only four. She had no idea why there were even four when Raathe had said the crew numbered three, but he’d found four and they used those to form packs, stuffing them with supplies.

Neither man mentioned the weapons Kyle had secured in the captain’s weapons locker and neither Grimes nor Cook asked about weapons.

That seemed significant even to her even though she wasn’t used to operating in survival mode and having to consider such things, and it added considerably to her uneasiness.

It occurred to her to wonder if Raathe had only suggested they ‘lose’ Grimes and Cook because he hadn’t wanted to tell her he planned on killing them. Considering that it had occurred to her that they would all be safer if Raathe
did
kill them, she wasn’t exactly horrified when that occurred to her, but she wasn’t actually comforted either. It tied her stomach in knots to think that the first battle on Mars might be a fight to the death between Raathe, Justice, Cook, and Grimes. Once the thought occurred to her, though, it couldn’t be shaken.

Would Raathe and Justice calmly pull their weapons and shoot the two men down like dogs?

They
were
dogs—the worst kind, she told herself, and yet the idea still horrified her.

Or worse, what if Grimes and Cook, whom she could see were closer akin to cold blooded reptiles than human beings, managed to take Raathe and Justice by surprise and killed them first?

She rather preferred the idea of Raathe and Justice shooting them down a good bit better than the alternative.

Merely abandoning them as Raathe had suggested could be the equivalent of killing them, only worse, unless the guards from the prison managed to catch them before they ran out of air or froze to death.

She tried to push those thoughts and fears from her mind when she discovered that she’d allowed them to distract her from what she needed to focus on—packing what they needed to survive. Pausing with a container of moist wipes in her hand, she stared at it for a long moment when it dawned on her that it was a comfort not a need, set it down, and opened the bag to examine what she’d already thrown in.

An alarm went off, the noise tearing along her nerve endings like a jolt of electricity.

“Finish up—and be quick about it!” Raathe shouted over the deafening noise, racing toward the cockpit with Kyle hard on his heels to discover what had tripped the alarm again.

Rhea nodded jerkily, automatically, to the command, but the alarm and the possibilities of what had set it off had so thoroughly rattled her she stared at the stuff she’d poured from her bag into a pile without any comprehension of what was there.

Food, medical supplies, she prompted herself, purification filters for water, medical scanner, element scanner. She snatched each up and shoved it back into the bag or discarded it as she managed to identify it and catalogue it as essential or non-essential.

There wasn’t nearly enough food. Grabbing the bag, she lugged it toward the food stores locker again. There were more s-rations, space meals, than anything else and she had no idea how they were going to heat/reconstitute them, but she couldn’t think straight with the alarm still blaring and obviously Raathe and Kyle had been too busy since they’d returned to the cockpit to order it off.

She tried to close her mind to the horrific possibilities that suggested.

Her thoughts were so chaotic she didn’t even react when she was abruptly seized from behind beyond the instinctive reflex to catch her balance and a sharp intake of breath. Her mind didn’t actually assimilate, at first, that she’d been grabbed. She was so focused on the possibility that the ship would begin to pitch her around any second as Raathe tried to avoid being hit again that she thought she’d fallen back.

The blade pressed to her throat banished that illusion. “Got her!” Grimes said with satisfaction. “I’ll take care of her. You go make sure they’re locked up tight in the cockpit.”

The moment Rhea’s mind leapt to Raathe and Kyle, prompted by Grimes’ order to Cook, she began to struggle, but it was far too late by then. The blade bit into her throat in warning, the pressure alone enough to choke off her air and send a wave of dizziness through her even if not for the burn that told her the blade had broken the skin.

“Be still, you cunt, or I’ll cut your fucking throat and leave you here!”