Enemy Within (13 page)

“Personal assessment,” she hedged. “Maybe tactical. We’re a methodical people. Makes for great scientists and for a very capable military . . .”

“Makes for a military that’s a true thorn in my side,” he interrupted.

“We have more ships and more personnel,” she said, “but your military is lighter, faster, more agile. It’s adaptable.”

He drew in an audible breath. “We focus on knowledge and understanding.”

“TFC is concerned primarily with superior firepower and price tag,” she finished. “That meant that when we discovered that Ioccal was a dead world with reasonable soil fertility and a moderate climate, TFC marked it for colonization. The ionosphere was more than adequate to filter out radiation. We were just finishing up digs . . .”

“When you discovered the world was plagued.”

“Yes.”

Seaghdh blew out an audible breath. “What happened?”

“I watched my crewmates die in slow, bloody agony, that’s what happened.” Her voice broke. She bit her lip. That had been so long ago. She thought she’d gotten over it.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he rumbled. “No wonder they promoted you. You got the survivors out.”

She shook her head and then realized he couldn’t see it. “No. They promoted me because I got a Prowler Class ship back to Tagreth without being detected by the Chekydran. I was very clear on my duty in those days. If the survivors had listened to me, I wouldn’t have lived for Tagreth Command to promote.”

“You were going to destroy everything?”

“Rather than fly infected ships back to an inhabited world? Yes. We’d already determined that those of us who’d survived weren’t carriers. The disease either killed or missed altogether. To this day, we don’t know why we’re immune.”

“Your father, Pietre, Raj, Jayleia, and you,” Seaghdh murmured, a frown in his voice.

“We were clean, but the ships had become carriers.”

“The plague isn’t destroyed in vacuum?”

“What’s outside the ship, yes. We’d tracked it in on our clothes, our shoes. It was everywhere. By the time quarantine kicked in, our sick and dying had shed incredible volumes of the disease into the ventilation and sanitation systems. We couldn’t guarantee that normal disinfection routines, the UV and shielded irradiation of the O
₂
recycling and generating systems, could handle it. Watch one person die from it and you’d never gamble with several billion lives by putting down someplace without knowing for sure.”

“So Raj came up with the radiation bath.”

“Yes. We were bickering about our lack of options. I’d locked Pietre in my cabin aboard the
Balykkal
, but he’d managed to get into the communications channel . . .”

“You and Pietre were alone on that Prowler?”

“Yes.”

Seaghdh laughed. “You wouldn’t sleep with him.”

“Not even on a bet and certainly not after I’d just buried my first commanding officer.”

“Why lock him . . . ?”

“He was incensed that I was willing to fly us into the sun and tried to take command from me,” she said. “He’d destroy a civilization if it meant he didn’t have to sacrifice himself. He wanted to believe that medical facilities on a central world could find a cure before we’d wiped out seventy to eighty percent of the population. I clubbed him over the head, hauled his ass to the nearest cabin, and locked him down.”

It sounded like Seaghdh sat up in the bed. “You single-handed a Prowler from Occaltus to Tagreth? Ari, that’s one hundred hours.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No wonder you were ready to suicide.”

She sighed. She’d been full of ambition. Duty had seemed very black-and-white. Snuggling down in the nest she’d made of her comforter and pillows, she said, “Raj came up with the radiation idea after Jayleia made some comment about wishing we could rig UV with enough reach to sanitize every nook and cranny. He did some research and brought back hull penetration tolerances versus human tissue tolerances. The three of them, Dad, Raj, and Jay, mixed up the pre-exposure cocktail to minimize tissue damage. It’s remarkably effective, but we had no way of getting it to the
Balykkal
.”

“It won’t teleport?”

“No.”

“Radioactive all on its own, is it?”

“Just enough.”

“You took a full dose of radiation.”

“And exposed Pietre to a full dose,” she said. “We both spent a good long time in gene therapy afterward.”

“Ari, a radiation dose like that,” Seaghdh said. “That does things to a man.”

“Women, too, Seaghdh, I assure you.”

“Aye. But the female genome is encapsulated. It’s harder to damage and easier to repair.”

“Yes.”

“You sterilized him.”

“Yes, and I’d do it again. Dead is dead. Pietre’s alive. Dad has a grad student working on a way to repair the damage to a single sperm cell. I understand they’re making significant progress.”

Seaghdh uttered a harsh laugh. “You have had to make some tough calls in your time, haven’t you?”

“Part of the job description.”

“I don’t envy you. I’d have done the same thing, up to and including flying into the sun. Think of the songs they’d sing. You might have gotten your own holiday.”

She laughed, but his approval warmed her. It had been one of the few times she and her father had agreed. Radiation could be recovered from, death couldn’t. It hadn’t made it any easier to break the news to Pietre. She’d demanded to be the one to do it. He’d been on her ship and under her command, such as it was. She had to take responsibility for telling Pietre that her decision had left him sterile.

Seaghdh flopped back down in the bed. “He’s not just an orhait’s ass.”

“Nope,” she said, struggling to stifle a yawn and the picture of Pietre’s face affixed to the body of one of Tagreth’s infamous six-legged, nasty-tempered pack animals. “His hatred is justified. I only poke him in the eye when he lets it get in the way of doing his job.”

“You told him to check for a fuel clog in the starboard atmospheric, didn’t you?” Seaghdh demanded. She could hear the mirth in his voice. “He tuned the engines instead just to spite you.”

“Yes.” She couldn’t choke back her yawn that time.

“Rest,” Seaghdh said, his voice deepening. “Sleep.”

Ari wanted to tell him she rarely slept, that when she slept she dreamed. She wanted to tell him, but unable to resist the caress of power in the rich, melodic voice curling around her, her eyes drifted shut.

ARI
propelled herself from the depths of sleep, automatically swallowing the scream that tried to escape her throat. She was upright and halfway across the room before she realized what had happened. Breathing hard, she set her hands on her desk and leaned, head hanging, trying to calm the shudders wracking her body. Humming. She heard it now. It jolted her heart into high gear. It didn’t matter that it was just a harmonic in the interstellar drive. It never mattered.

The bedclothes rustled. Seaghdh sat up.

“Ari? Are you all right?” he asked. “Half light.”

The lights switched on. She flinched.

“Sorry,” he said, rising. He moved as if afraid she might shy away. “Do the lights bother you?”

“No,” she rasped. Not now that they were on and she could plainly see she wasn’t in a Chekydran cell, no, they didn’t bother her.

“Trouble sleeping?”

“Engine harmonic,” she said.

“I hear it. I don’t think it’s anything to be concerned about. V’kyrri would be on it already . . .”

She shook her head. “Nothing to be concerned about.”

He paused at her side, peering into her face, looking unsettled. Finally, he laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’re shaking and you’re cold. Come on. Into bed. I’ll take the floor.”

“I cannot sleep in the bed.”

“You obviously aren’t sleeping on the floor, either,” he replied. “Just warm up. You don’t have to sleep.”

He put an arm around her shoulder, drew her to the bed, and released her as she climbed in. She huddled under the blankets, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around her shins. Concern puckered the skin between his brows. He eased down to sit facing her as if afraid she might object.

She flushed, embarrassed that in his company she felt so vulnerable, so exposed. Why, when he looked at her, did Cullin Seaghdh see so much more than anyone else? Every time her father or Raj or Jayleia looked at her, she saw walls go up in their eyes, as if they couldn’t stand to see what she’d become. To know what had happened and was still happening to her. Seaghdh seemed to accept her. She sighed.

“The Chekydran hummed,” she explained, her voice shaking.

Seaghdh closed his eyes and nodded, but not before she saw pain flare in his gaze. When he looked at her again, only a hint of it remained. For some reason, it reached a deeply hidden part of her. He hurt because of what she’d been through. He hurt for her.

Ari swallowed hard and forged on, wanting him to understand, hoping he wouldn’t look at her with that damning mixture of pity and hopelessness she saw in her family’s eyes.

“Everything vibrated. Skin, muscle, bone, teeth. This damned, barely audible buzz. It never stopped.”

Warm, strong fingers covered hers and she realized she’d twisted the blankets into a hard knot with her white-knuckled hands.

“From watching them, I gathered that it functioned as a kind of neural network, a framework of communication and awareness,” she said. “If we could develop some kind of sonic disruption, we might be able to . . .”

“You were a prisoner and you collected intelligence?” he asked. His laugh sounded brittle.

“I became what they accused me of being.”

“And when the engine drops into a harmonic?”

“I’m right back in that cell with very little to do to stay sane but catalogue details.”

He shifted. Without a word, he turned and sat beside her, nudging her over. Propping his back against the headboard, he tugged her into his grasp. His thighs cradled her backside. He drew her against his chest, his arms closing around her. She blinked, uncertain how to respond, afraid to let herself feel. Or want.

“Relax,” he rumbled, his tone unsettled. “Pretend for me that this helps.”

He needed it, she realized in a flash, needed to feel useful. Why? Why did it matter to him? He had helped her. She could admit that. Could she do as he asked and pretend she was okay in his arms? She sighed, loosed the tension from her body, and rested her head against his shoulder. Maybe she could. Heat seeped through her. The rhythm of his breath rising and falling rocked her. It felt so good. So safe. It dismayed her to find just how badly she needed to be held. She closed her eyes on the shudder of fear that rippled through her.

“How did you manage to wake up without screaming?” he asked, his breath puffing against her hair.

“Officers don’t scream.”

He chuckled. “Armada boot camp suddenly scares the hell out of me.”

“It isn’t something one picks up in boot camp. Besides . . .” Ari broke off, fear spiking through her again.

He tightened his arms around her. “Besides?”

She fought the urge to deny him. No matter the cascade of adrenaline and cortisol in her blood, her survival no longer depended on silence. She
could
fight back.

“Besides,” she forced herself to say. “If I scream, they win.”

Seaghdh swore, the sound angry, desolate. “V’kyrri will take care of the harmonic.”

She nodded.

He released her to tab off the light, then wrapped her in his embrace once more.

She stared into the darkness for several minutes while his breathing deepened and slowed, lulling her.

“Would you be okay lying down?” he murmured.

She started and forced herself upright. By all the Gods. She’d fallen asleep in his arms after a nightmare. She’d never slept after waking from . . .

“I can’t do this. If I dream again . . .” She gasped and shook her head at the desire welling up within her to stay locked in his arms.

“You won’t,” he whispered into her hair as he eased them down in the bed. “You won’t. Sleep. Only peaceful, pleasant dreams.”

He’d put that indefinable something into his voice, using his talent to compel her again. No. He was offering his ability to her, to help her. Again.

Desperate, needy, starving for the emotional comfort Seaghdh offered, a part of her lunged for and clung to the lifeline he’d thrown. Her eyes burned as he turned to his side and tucked her back against his chest.

“Sleep.”

Weariness closed over her head like deep, silent water.

 

 

ARI
had finished running her fifth kilometer in the cargo bay and had started loading weights on the weight bar when Seaghdh sauntered in. Wiping sweat from her forehead, she nodded, mistrusting the sharp look in his eyes and the hard line around his mouth.