Enemy Games (27 page)

He watched her stride out of the cockpit into the corridor, her glittering skirts swaying. She was his. All he needed was open sky, no one shooting, and the leisure to show her in detail. His pulse sped.

She returned wearing an oxygen generator.

“Jay?”

“My physiology doesn’t handle the stresses of takeoff as easily as yours,” she said as she sat. “Minor hypoxia. It won’t take long to clear my system.”

She’d already activated her handheld and linked into the weapons panel.

“Mother ship on long range,” she said.

The claxon warbled. Damen swore and shut it off. “Keep your eyes on. Given the size of the attack force on planet, I’d expect more. They may try to box us in.”

“We can’t outrun them?”

“Damn it. I need that crystal,” he muttered, scanning for potential hiding places.

Jayleia shot him a penetrating look and tucked hair behind one ear as she scanned the floor. She scooped up a metal tube and presented it to him.

“Tahem gave it back,” she said. “Coded to you.”

He took it and spared a glance at his panels. The clump of fighters had managed to close by a few kilometers. One mother ship registered at the edge of long range, along with a few commercial freighters.

He opened the tube. The milky, opaque crystal slid into his palm. He frowned. “Why?”

“Tahem gave it to Bellin,” Jay replied, staring at the crystal, her brow furrowed as if in concentration. “He’d said, ‘You’re going to need this.’”

She frowned. “He had to have given the crystal to Bellin after he had us arrested.”

“Which makes you think he counted on our escape,” Damen said. “He’d provided intel on the crystals. Admiral Seaghdh had me run a joint mission, me on recon and recovery, Tahem on analysis.”

We must have been compromised and the games to mislead us in his cabin were his way of mitigating damage.”

“I don’t see how,” Jayleia grumbled.

Damen stared at her. “He knew you, knew what you could do.”

“He also knew I’d been kicked out of the Temple seven years ago,” she protested. “He had no way of knowing I’d stayed in practice. He gambled your life on me.”

Elation filled his chest, crowding out breath. “You said he loves me.”

“He does.”

“Would he have gambled with my life unless he’d looked in your eyes and decided it was a very safe bet?”

She blinked, looking stunned as a tremulous smile spread on her face.

Damen grinned.

“No need to look so smug,” she said, “there’s still the question of how Trente and Edie knew where to find us.”

“You think Tahem told them?”

She shook her head. “He would have to have known that they were on our side. He’d have to have known they’d come from my mother . . .”

“He already knew about your father’s disappearance.”

“I know. What the Hells is going on?”

“We’re getting out of here so we can find out without getting shot out of the sky,” Damen replied, jumping to his feet, and tearing for the engine. He tossed engine covers open and dropped into the compartment.

“Second mother ship!” Jayleia yelled.

The proximity alarm fired. Damen heard a sound like a fist landing on a panel. The alarm died.

“Much closer! She was using the Lunar Agro Platform for cover.”

Growling low in his throat, Damen set the crystal into place, grabbed a screwdriver from the tool set in the compartment to tighten it down, then yanked his handheld from his belt with one hand and put the screwdriver back with the other. It took interminable seconds to initialize his handheld and link into the engine interface.

Damen routed the plasma flow through the crystal.

The stone cleared and flared to gleaming life.

The
Kawl Fergus
surged.

In the cockpit, Jayleia whooped. “Ha! Cross everyone but mother two off the ‘on our tail’ list.”

“Distance?”

“Twenty-six thousand kilometers and closing,” she called. “Coming in on a trajectory intersecting ours.”

“On my way!” he yelled.

Something buzzed in the cockpit. Target warning. The mother ship was lining them up for a shot. From so far away?

He barreled into the cockpit and threw himself into his chair.

“Changing course to match,” he said. “Watch the distance.”

The star field swung.

“Run us off a few degrees,” Jayleia advised.

He nodded. So the mother ship couldn’t drive them straight into a waiting trap. A few degrees off course translated to hundreds of kilometers over distance. It would give them time to react.

“Too bad I can’t get a crystal like that integrated with sensors,” she quipped, removing her oxygen generator and dropping it into the equipment pouch on her chair. “Or weapons. Or the onboard computers. If that crystal could boost processing and data storage the way it boosts engines . . .”

Scientists.

“Jay. Distance?”

She shook her head. The bells tied to her braids chimed. “We’ve put a thousand kilometers on them. That’s all.”

He glanced at his handheld, then back at her. “V’kyrri recommended keeping particle flow through the crystal at a trickle. He had concerns about the structural integrity of the stone and the damage it would do to the
Kawl Fergus
if it blew in contact with the engine feed.”

The proximity alert fired again.

They spun to their respective panels. Two more mother ships.

“Twelve Gods!” Jayleia yelled. She slammed a fist down on the button to silence the alarm. “How many ships do they have out here trying to murder one person? Unless . . .”

He cast quick looks at her face, uneasiness boiling up within his gut.

“This is it,” she said, her tone dead. “What if this was Eudal’s plan? Neutralize and discredit my dad. Then eradicate the Swovjiti warriors, the last remaining dedicated force within the confederation with the will and the unswerving loyalty to rise up and oppose the overthrow of the Tagreth Federated Council. The soldiers weren’t after me. They were sent to destroy the Temple.”

“They were failing,” Damen said, closing a hand around her arm. “Your mother said they were being driven back. We pulled an entire squadron and three mother ships away from the planet.”

“Increase the power to that crystal,” she instructed. “If we survive, make for the
Dagger
. The traitors believe I’m a threat worth killing for? Let’s find out why. Maybe Ari and Seaghdh can think of something I haven’t.”

Damen released her and altered course again, diving out of the snare set for them.

The ships opened fire.

He bared his teeth in a silent snarl.
Ah. Didn’t like that move?
Desperation from their tormenters, at last? Good.

The
Kawl Fergus
bounced as energy bolts sprayed past.

“Increasing particle flow by five percent,” he said.

The engine pitch changed.

“Distance to mother two still twenty-seven thousand kilometers. No. Twenty-seven five.”

Another barrage of slow-moving weapons fire rattled the ship.

“Distance to the noose, twenty-nine thousand kilometers,” Jayleia said.

“Another five percent?”

“Being vaporized by a plasma burst would be better than ending up in Chekydran captivity,” she countered.

Damen couldn’t smile at her dry tone. He’d seen firsthand the horrific damage the Chekydran did to the humanoids they captured. She was right. He nudged the particle flow.

The interstellar drive howled. Consoles shook. The deck plates clattered. Damen’s teeth vibrated in sympathy with his ship. Adrenaline flooded his blood, shooting his heart rate to a painful gallop. Too fast. The
Kawl Fergus
couldn’t handle the stress.

He stabbed at his handheld. Miss. Concentrating, he poised to try again.

Jayleia caught his wrist in her hand.

He glanced at her and squinted. It didn’t help. She seemed to be synced to a different vibration frequency than he was. That she held up her other hand in a command to wait a moment, he could make out.

Most disconcerting to him was that she seemed not to be troubled by the energy trying to shake the
Kawl Fergus
apart.

“Now!” she shouted, releasing him. The sound distorted as if her voice couldn’t find a place to fit into the cabin air.

Damen tried to hit his handheld and failed.

Jay turned, watched him for a split second, then latched on to his wrist to guide him.

Hull stress chimes sounded as if from very far away.

He shut his eyes.

She pushed.

He obeyed. His fingertips connected with the handheld screen. Already entering the power down commands, Damen opened his eyes.

The
Kawl Fergus
dropped out of the odd asynchronous vibration. Metal creaked and popped. The engine quieted. The hull stress alarm cut off mid-chime.

Jayleia, breathing as if she’d run a race, stared at him, elation in her wide, sparkling eyes. “Over two and a half times your engine’s top speed rating.”

“What?” Damen whispered, staggered.

A grin grew on her face. She nodded. “Forget about being followed or tracked, much less captured.”

He pounced on his panel. “Changing course. Give me a long-range report. Where are we?”

“Nothing on long range,” Jayleia replied. “We don’t seem to be near the commercial traffic lanes. No buoys or aids to navigation.”

“We’d been running for the border zone when mother two tried to intercept,” he said, working the navigation console. He whistled. “We flat covered some space. I have a fix. Fifty-seven hours, give or take, we’ll be in Claugh space.”

“With or without tapping the crystal again?” she asked.

Damen shook his head and eyed her. “Without. I don’t want to find out at what point the
Kawl Fergus
will break apart. That distortion didn’t bother you?”

“It didn’t seem to impact me the way it did you. Different species, different abilities,” she said with a shrug. “We’re still running faster than spec. Good. Even if we blunder into someone, we’d be gone before they could bring weapons to bear.”

“Setting shields to standby,” Damen said. “Enabling long-range alerts and engaging autopilot. We’ve earned some downtime.”

D
OWNTIME? Jayleia closed her eyes and propped her elbows on her knees, hands hanging, letting her hair fall, bells tinkling, to shield her from Damen’s gaze. She had to resist the urge to grit her teeth.

“Jayleia. What’s wrong?”

“It’s all questions and no answers,” she grumbled. “I have two code phrases that sound exactly like something my father would hand me to decrypt. Tahem saying, ‘Don’t let the past dictate what I could become’ and my mother telling me to ‘Go someplace that knows how to deal with these monsters.’ Neither makes sense. I feel like I’m in the middle of an enormous puzzle with a pattern that keeps morphing and shifting under my feet. I can’t help my father. I don’t know what made me think I could.

“We have a crystal jammed into the matter injector on your engine, and granted, it saved our asses, but we don’t even know what it is!”

“Jayleia,” Damen said, wrapping his hands around her wrists. “Look at me.”

She met his hooded gaze.

“How do you resolve roadblocks when you’re working research aboard the
Sen Ekir
?”

“I train.”

His eyes lit with interest. “Train?”

She shrugged. “My aunt, Raj’s mother, sent me training holos. She insisted I wouldn’t be exiled forever.”

A dead sexy smile touched his lips. “You require physical distraction to give your brain the time to fit puzzle pieces together?”

“I suppo—” she began and froze.

Twelve Gods.

He was stalking her.

Hot blood fluttered low in her abdomen. She broke eye contact. Not that it helped. She found herself staring at his luscious smile.

He fingered one of the bells tied into her hair.

Jay caught in a breath at the electric sensation and at the look of transfixed delight on his face.

“You picked me,” he noted. The combination of teasing and deadly velvet in his voice shot a heady mix of hormones into her belly. “Why?”

“You won. I can admit that you make me feel things I didn’t know were possible for humanoid physiology,” she breathed, knowing she was handing him a potent weapon. Her heart raced. She wanted to know sooner rather than later whether he intended to use it against her.

He growled. In a blinding move that left her dizzy, he scooped her out of her chair into his lap.

Blood thundering in her ears, she struggled against his hold only to realize that’s all it was. She wasn’t trapped.

“You’re mine. We both win. Let me show you.” He stroked her hair.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Heat rippled through her.