Stripper: The Fringe, Book 4 (10 page)

“Network Thirteen obviously doesn’t put their money into their ships.”

“I can’t tell you how true that is.” Beating him to the bridge, she dropped to the pilot chair and flipped a series of switches.

“Shut down—”

“The fuel system.” Diane cut him off. “I just did. And that alarm.” Diane nodded to the copilot chair. “Strap in. I’m gearing up to shut off the grav gen too.”

As she clicked down her three-point restraints, Duster mimicked her. A part of him wanted to take command, but it would be nothing but pig-headed male pride to take control from the person who knew the ship best. So he didn’t. Between Michael and Mary, Duster had learned a great deal in seven months.

“If we’d been watching the bridge, we would have known that those idiots were in the vicinity and likely to attack.”

“With this pathetic array?” Duster asked defensively. Because what he heard her say was that if
he’d
been watching the bridge, this wouldn’t have happened. If he’d been paying attention to the ship and not getting between her thighs, they wouldn’t have been attacked in the first place. Worse, she was 100 percent correct.

“As pathetic as it is, this array would have shown you—us—those idiots long before they got in visual range, and long before they sank a hook into a fuel line, then breached our airlock.”

Her cutting words made him clench his jaw, but he accepted the accusation with a nod. He wasn’t going to deny the truth, not when he’d been harping on her to be honest. Lifting his gaze to the dash, assessing what controls he could easily reach, he said, “Shutting down energy-cell feed.”

Lights dimmed. Emergency lights came on. Amber flickers lined the bridge and the hall that came off it.

“Shut down all superfluous energy drains.”

After flicking a series of switches, Duster confirmed, “Off.”

“Switch everything we have to—”

“Life support.” Duster did and grabbed his restraints when gravity fell sharply away.

Den of Iniquity
went suddenly still, even though it maintained forward momentum, eerily silent and filled with shadows. There wasn’t the comforting throb of the engine, no pull of gravity. Only a low whisper of air. At the moment, they were an object in space going until they hit something.

Secure in her restraints, Diane assessed the dash. “Good news. The fuel is contained at prox three hours. Nearest planet—”

When she turned her attention on him, Duster realized it was his call. Tapping up the local chart, he said, “Dahank.”

“City?”

“Jade.”

She swallowed hard, then said, “Set coordinates. Time?”

“Prox—shit.” Duster tapped the dash, searching the chart. “Prox four.”

“We’ve got three hours of fuel.”

“If we patch or don’t patch the leak?” Duster asked.

“If we don’t.”

“If we patch?”

Diane tapped her controls. “Prox four plus ten.”

“Four hours and ten minutes will get us there.”

“I don’t have much in the way of a patch.”

“Got plastimirror?” Duster grinned at Diane’s utterly baffled expression. He really had to live through this just so he could tell Mary thanks for all she’d taught him in a short seven months.

“Tons of it,” Diane said. “But I don’t see how plastimirror can patch anything outside the ship.”

“I think it will. Got duct tape?”

“I think there’s a roll in the back with the tools, but that won’t hold it either.”

“It might.” Duster released himself from his restraints and floated up to his feet. “And we’ve got nothing to lose by trying.”

They argued for a bit. Then he bounced around as he gathered supplies. In short order, Duster found himself off the ship.

Outside the
Den of Iniquity
in a suit, Duster crawled along the exposed nubs of Diane’s ship. Ponderous as a newborn babe, he made his way to the damaged fuel line. It was buried deep in the metalwork of the ship, but the band of desperate idiots had sunk a grappling hook into Diane’s ship without a care to where it landed. They’d ripped the damn thing in half. Hell. Had they actually succeeded in taking over the ship, they would have rapidly run out of fuel as they argued.

Duster slapped awkward dabs of plastimirror to the damaged line. Working with the liquid, moldable mirror with gravity was tricky. Without it, and in vacuum, it was even more so. The plastimirror didn’t vaporize so much as it oozed in a curious curve as it bubbled.

“Turn the pump on.”

Diane did.

Duster saw wisps of vaporized fuel. “Off.” Carefully, he packed more plastimirror into the crevice. All at once, Duster realized how vulnerable he was sitting outside the ship. In a suit that was barely thicker than his canvas trousers. Moreover, he was held to the ship by a metal cable no thicker than his wedding band. All this while Diane was inside at the controls.

That voice of doubt, the one that would probably never fall silent as long as Diane was around, whispered,
If ever she would betray you, this would be the time.

He tried not to think about his defenseless position as he bought time with spit and bailing wire. Well, plastimirror and duct tape. If he died, Diane would too. They had to trust each other. Alone, they would not survive. Together, they would. But only if they worked in concert. Duster trusted Diane because he had no other choice.

As he added another layer of moldable mirror, he thought that wasn’t quite true. Duster trusted Diane because she told him the truth about the past. She looked him right in the eye and told him everything without one damned bit of subterfuge. After all this time, he had his answer.

For seven years, he’d agonized over what he’d done to drive her away. Was it the fact he’d been a slaver at all, no matter how long, and she couldn’t forgive him? That was the horrible truth that Duster hadn’t been able to tell anyone, even Michael. Diane hadn’t betrayed him; she’d stayed true to herself and walked away from a slaver. Her father had sold her, and Duster feared that she thought that if he were ever desperate, he would sell her too. To find out she was aligned with Network Thirteen changed everything he’d ever thought. But that truth didn’t change, and nothing ever could change, the taint of self-loathing for what he’d once done by running slaves.

Duster had wanted to blame Michael for luring him into becoming a slaver, but he couldn’t, because Duster knew he could have said no. He could have walked away. But it was the temptation of the money. Piles and piles of script would solve so many of his problems. It was his own damn greed that had ensnared him. And Diane’s tender vulnerability had yanked him right back out.

As Diane toggled the fuel pump off and on, he dabbed patches to the damaged line. Pressing the plastimirror in conservative doses, he watched as it miraculously bonded. Duster couldn’t believe it worked. Mary had used plastimirror to thwart Windmere’s global security. It now worked in tandem with duct tape to give him and Diane another hour of time. An hour was all they needed to maybe start again.

And Duster wanted to start again. Watching Diane put his ring—a ring she’d kept for seven years—on her finger without a moment’s hesitation pleased him so deeply he could barely stop smiling. Clearly, she wanted him, and he wanted her too. After they’d hashed out the past, he felt they could move forward. But what really sold him was the way Diane knew him at his very worst and loved him anyway. Unconditional love was a rare and precious thing.

“Is it bonding?” Diane asked, her voice filled with desperate hope.

“Thank that wonderful woman Mary, it is.” Duster quickly strapped layer after layer of duct tape to the lines. “Hit the fuel pump.”

Diane did. Little spurts jumped out and froze like bristly hairs. “Shut it off.” She did, and he knocked the sickles away, then slathered more plastimirror and constricting tape. “On.”

Working this way, Duster and Diane patched the gouged fuel line.

“I’m coming back to the airlock.”

As he made his careful way toward the airlock, the voice of doubt, the one that, no matter what happened, kept insisting Diane would turn on him, wondered if Diane would let him in.

Secure, strapped to the pilot chair without gravity, Diane flipped power to the airlock so Duster could pull himself back inside. “Clear?”

“Clear,” he said over his suit com.

Once she heard the airlock close, she shut down the electrical feed to it.

“Fuel?” Duster wrenched off his helmet, and she heard the words in both the hall and bridge com.

“Recalibrating. Prox four two.”

“That should get us to Dahank alive.”

“Confirmed.” Diane said it and shuddered. Dahank. City of Jade. Sheldon and Scott. A thousand nightmares coming true. “We’ll need money to repair and refuel.”

“Obviously, my funds are a little low at the moment.” Duster yanked his way along the ship to the bridge. He closed all the doors behind him so they only had to run air to the bridge.

“I have money on Dahank.” There was more too waiting for them on that planet. How could she do this? She would have to trust that the fragile truce they had would be strengthened before she had to tell him the rest of the past.

“You’re not going to try to get away?” he asked with an air of jocularity, almost like the question itself was a joke, but she sensed his worry simmering.

“No.” She looked him right in the eye. “I am not going to try to get away.”

Balancing his body, pressing arms and legs against the walls, ceiling and floors, Duster angled himself back into the three-point restraints of the copilot chair. Muscle-bound, knowing the strength of his body, Duster made his aerobic finagling look easy when Diane knew it wasn’t. Without gravity, someone had to be strong to move their body like that. Lifting his large hands, Duster tapped the dash and double checked the fuel level and their destination and distance.

“Dahank. City of Jade. I think now is the time you tell me about Sheldon.” Duster waited expectantly.

While he’d been outside the ship, she’d been inside fretting about how to explain everything to him. She pictured blurting everything out in one big chunk when he returned, but she imagined his face melting from shock. When she envisioned herself telling him in more manageable doses, she saw a return of his distrusting, angry face. In the end, she decided to start with Sheldon and go from there, so she was relieved when Duster’s first question was about him.

“Sheldon is a friend of mine.” Diane calmly assessed the dash. “See if you can give a burst of spin and at least get some semblance of gravity back.”

Duster did. It cost them seven minutes of fuel to mimic light gravity by spinning the ship, but if they compensated by cutting off life-support to the rest of the ship, they should be okay. They couldn’t get up and walk around easily, but at least they weren’t dangling from their chairs, and her stomach wasn’t floating up and making her gag.

“Sheldon is a friend of yours.” Duster nodded, still striving for a cool air that he was missing due to his clenching and unclenching fist. “Sheldon is a man’s name, isn’t it?”

“I guess.” Diane shrugged, baffled as to why that mattered. Even though she’d had time to think about how to explain, she found herself stumbling over her words now that the time had come. “For a first one, I guess it’s a male name.”

“It’s his last name?”

“No. It’s a middle name, actually. Mother’s maiden name. Sheldon is my best friend.” She swallowed hard. “And my roommate.”

“And Sheldon is a he?”

“Well, yes. I mean, Sheldon is definitively a he, but technically…” She trailed off, not sure how to explain this part to Duster. Diane felt guilty for discussing something so private with someone who really didn’t have any business knowing. Not really. Every word out of her mouth felt like a betrayal of Sheldon’s trust.

“Technically, Sheldon isn’t a he?”

“No.” This is where the explanation got a little tricky. She wasn’t sure how Duster would take the information. She hoped with an open mind. “Technically, physiologically, Sheldon is female, but she lives as a man and acts as a man.”

“Sheldon is a lesbian?” His face twisted up with what she hoped was confusion and not disgust.

“Well, no, not technically. Transgender. Biologically female, Sheldon lives and loves as if male, liking females, so not technically a lesbian, but basically. It’s complicated.” She shrugged and smiled. And then held her breath waiting for his reaction.

“So your roommate is a woman who lives as a man.”

“Right.”

Duster opened his mouth, but nothing came out for a long time. “Are you a lesbian?” Duster inspected her from head to toe with a critical eye.

Diane knew if she said she was, Duster wouldn’t touch her again with so much as a ten-foot pole, let alone his penis. She’d anticipated this reaction but worried that even if she said no, he wouldn’t believe her. Still, she forged ahead, determined to tell him nothing but the truth from here on out.

“I’m not a lesbian. I like men.”

“Which Sheldon dresses and acts like.”

“I’m not dating Sheldon.”