Enemy Within (2 page)

“No,” he said, relish in his tone. “You. In trade for your father’s life, all their lives.”

Dismay drove ice through her. She shivered. He wanted her? Why? She shoved speculation aside. First things first.

“Secure the crew and my father off ship,” she countered. “I’ll give you the decode.”

“You. Or they die.”

She rested her forehead on her arms. Damn it. She should have known that half a dozen different enemy governments and criminal organizations would come looking for her. She’d been captured and imprisoned by the Chekydran. Humanoids in Chekydran captivity didn’t live long, but she’d survived. Her own government kept asking how. Why shouldn’t everyone else? Who was the pirate who’d taken her father’s ship working for? Shaking her head, she swore again. Her friends and family were in danger because of her. The captain had her by the short hairs and he knew it.

“I’ll take your answer, now. And your weapon. Not necessarily in that order.”

Ari heard the click of a safety being cycled off a gun. Then she realized. She hadn’t heard him via her transponder. She’d heard him with her ears. Damn it all, he’d used the distraction of her father to get the drop on her. And she’d let him. She rolled over in a flash, bringing her gun to bear, and stared up the barrel of a slim-line Autolyte 49-G modified assault rifle. Illegal. Highly illegal.

Golden eyes glared down the barrel at her. Unruly chestnut hair fell across his forehead. He was tall, his body lithe with a hint of long, lean muscle beneath bloodstained, ripped, and singed freighter-brown fatigues. She noted visible bruising on one prominent cheekbone and the shadow of a beard on the carved plains of cheek and jaw. The arrogance, intellect, and skillfully masked pain in his face tripped her internal alarms.

The man wasn’t simply dangerous. He was a weapon. A lethal, tempered work of art.

“Give me the gun,” he commanded, edging forward and kicking her booted foot out of his way.

Her grip sagged, and Ari belatedly registered the thread of power he’d tucked into his order. Fear gripped her as she fought the compulsion to obey and failed.

He took the pistol from her limp hand. “Get up.”

No ring of control in that instruction. She rose, watching for any lapse of attention, any mistake she could turn to her advantage. He didn’t make any.

“Hands on top of your head,” he commanded. “Lace your fingers. Turn around. You wouldn’t be hiding anything from me, now would you?”

He sounded hopeful. She braced herself, but his pat down was swift, efficient, and thoroughly professional.

“Turrel. Secure. Inform Daddy his little girl’s coming home.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“A Wrate Leaf burger?” the captain said, amusement in his tone. “If you’re a scientist, I’m the Ykktyryk king.”

Too few teeth and definitely not reptilian
. Ari bit her tongue to keep from saying it aloud.

“You can put your hands down. Turn around,” he ordered. “Slowly.”

When she glanced at him, he gestured her down the hill with a jerk of the rifle. She trudged past him. He grabbed a handful of her shirt and rested the barrel of the rifle against her back. Steering her by the scruff of the neck and the pressure of the gun, he ushered her toward the ship. They passed his perimeter guard.

She frowned and looked long at the guard’s blue-black face. Chilly violet eyes watched her pass. A Shlovkur. Official word had it that a race-specific plague had exterminated the entire population. Interesting. Almost as interesting as the fresh blood on the man’s face and the fact that when he fell in behind them, he glanced uneasily over his shoulder. They feared someone, or something, other than her.

She felt marginally brighter.

If they were on the run, how had they gotten to the tiny world her father and his crew had been investigating for the past five years? A ship would have set off the sensor array alarms, unless they’d set down outside of range. Possible, but a damned long walk. And from what she’d seen of the Shlovkur’s injuries, if they’d had a ship, they’d either been cast away or they’d crashed. Either scenario could explain why they’d commandeered a vessel with no weapons.

Despite the muzzle bruising her right kidney, Ari stopped walking at the ship’s hatch and turned her head. “Take me in via cargo, straight to decontamination,” she said. “I’ve been mining specimens for the past two days.”

“Your beam system didn’t issue a decon alert,” he countered, but he didn’t shove her up the ramp.

Ah. The first useful tidbit of information about her mystery captor. No science background and no experience with science ship protocols. She shrugged. “I’m fine with gambling the lives of your remaining, injured crew if you are. A quarantine lockdown would strand your people in the cockpit. Medical is accessible from there, but I’m betting you don’t have anyone trained in anything but combat first aid.”

He swore and wrenched her off the ramp. She stumbled. He let her get her footing. She marched into the cargo bay still filled with half-finished experiments and crates of samples waiting to be sealed. Near the doors to the rest of the ship, her father and his crew sat, hands and feet bound, under armed guard. She glanced at them but didn’t stop. Delaying decontamination could be fatal.

“Ari!” Jayleia, her father’s xenobio tech cried, stark relief in her voice.

Ari met the young woman’s gaze.

Jay flushed. “I’m sorry.”

The young guard with red blond hair looked from one to the other, apparently feeling some deeper message passing between the two of them.

“It’s okay,” Ari said. Jayleia’s people trained their women to be warriors, but Jay had chosen to reject the path laid out by her mother’s family. She’d chosen a life of science. Ari gathered that her friend felt responsible for the hijackers’ incursion.

Ari offered Jayleia a smile as she keyed open the decontamination unit and stepped inside. Maybe between the two of them, they could take back the ship after they’d cleaned up any stray pathogens.

“You’re next in decontamination,” she said to the captain.

He arched an eyebrow but lowered the rifle and nodded. Good. She wouldn’t have to argue the point. He’d touched her. If she’d picked up a bug, so had he. As the decon door shut and the pulses of energy and antimicrobial-treated water saturated her, she sighed. The pirates had been tramping all over the ship, and their captain had proven he didn’t understand decontamination protocols. Those men had made the ship a plague carrier. Without some drastic measures, they’d be shot out of the sky of any inhabited world or station they tried to approach.

The system cycled down. She stripped. At least she had access to sterile clothes just outside the door. A chime and the system cycled back on, the medicated water stinging in the cuts and scrapes she’d acquired. When the spray shut off, she wrung the water out of her hair and waited for the water recycle to suck the moisture from her body. She shoved every last scrap of clothing into the laundry bin and slapped open the door.

“Go,” she said to the captain as she accessed the lockers.

“Don’t let her catch you trying to get an eyeful,” Pietre, her father’s second in command said. “The Ice Princess doesn’t like it.”

Ari sighed.
Ice Princess
. Didn’t Pietre realize she’d been forced to make the words true while the Chekydran held her? Ari shook off a sense of loss and glanced around at the surprised and riveted stares.

The captain swept his appreciative gaze up her body to meet her eye. A tingle followed the path of his stare as if he’d done far more than stroke her with a look. Swallowing a curse, Ari stepped into and fastened a pair of fatigue pants.

“Jilted lover?” the captain asked, nodding at Pietre.

She snorted and jerked a shirt over her head. “History? Yes. Lovers? Hell, no.”

“Alexandria!” her father barked.

For a moment, she wilted, still a little girl desperately wanting Daddy’s approval and never getting it. She clenched her teeth and, yanking the rest of her clothing into place, slammed the locker door on her reaction.

She turned on the pirate captain and snapped, “Decon.”

He ignored her in favor of glaring at Pietre and her father.

“Put them off,” the captain ordered.

One of the men heaved Pietre toward the open cargo door. Pietre stumbled and fell, cursing. “You’re going to maroon us because of her? I always knew she was going to get us killed.”

“No,” Ari snapped, spinning on the captain, her hands balled into fists.

“Another word out of you and I’ll maroon everything but your tongue.” Palpable menace radiated from him as he stared down at Pietre.

Ari shivered at the deadly earnest tone of his voice and at the power he’d twined into the words. The force of it hadn’t been turned upon her, but she could still feel the coercion rippling through her head.
Silence,
it urged.

The captain turned his gaze upon her.

Something in the depths of his golden eyes shot heat straight through her body, startling her. She stomped on the sensation. The man could manipulate her with that voice talent. He had already. She would not hand him yet another advantage over her.

“You give orders like you forget you’re not in command,” he observed, his tone a silken caress.

Anger burned the back of her throat when she had to suppress a sensual shudder. “I’m not in command, yet.”

Humor flashed briefly in his eyes before his face darkened. “Are you challenging me?”

Hesitating, she raked him with a glance. He sounded eager. He outweighed her by half and every last bit of it was muscle. His reach exceeded hers, but she could get around that. Maybe. What would he demand of her if she couldn’t? Unbidden, the image of those strong arms wrapped around her flooded her internal field of vision. A rush of weight and heat pooled in her abdomen. Ari backed away a step, disarmed by the sensation.

“Got a name?” she forced herself to ask. Her voice sounded rough to her ear.

“Cullin Seaghdh, at your service.”

“Shaw?”

“Close enough. Your language doesn’t use the same set of sounds.”

“All right, Cullin Seaghdh,” Ari said. “I’m not the one stealing someone else’s ship and threatening to maroon her crew. You challenged me. So let’s . . .”

“Choose your weapon,” he commanded.

She blinked. He’d pounced on her use of the word “challenged.” What trap had she walked into? “You can’t be serious.”

“Alex, I forbid . . . Oof!”

A glance assured her that her father had damaged nothing more than his pride by being shoved into a bulkhead by one of Seaghdh’s goons. “No one gets left,” she said.

“Not that long ago, you wanted the scientists secured off ship,” he noted, his voice again threaded with power that brushed against her in lush promise.

She sucked in a slow breath as goose bumps rose on her arms. Damn, he was deliberately using his racial voice talent to distract her. It pissed her off no end to have to fight for concentration. More than that. He was using his talent to break her open, to pry apart her defenses and lay her bare. It was wrecking her control, and he had no idea how dangerous that made her.

“If they stay, I stay,” she gritted.

“No.”

“Then no one gets left.”

“You seem to forget who has the ship and the guns.”

“Threatening to hurt me won’t get you anywhere,” she said. “If you harm them or leave them behind, you lose your leverage.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Seaghdh countered. “You don’t seem to lack imagination, and you obviously understand persuasion. We both know these people aren’t your sole weakness.”

Ari did not want to discuss weaknesses while goose bumps still prickled her body. She commanded the sharpest Prowler crew in the . . . No. She used to command the best Prowler crew in the Armada. That had been taken from her. Now she was in limbo, nothing more than an adult child who disappointed her father at every turn. The thought laced pain through her chest.

She glanced down, expecting to see that Seaghdh had shot her. He hadn’t. It wasn’t much comfort. She blew out a shallow breath. She desperately needed options.

“Cycle through decontamination, Seaghdh,” she said. “Then . . .”

“Losing your nerve?”

“You’re on the run with an exhausted and injured crew. You need off this world. Just so happens we’re done here and it suits me to lift anyway. I’ll cooperate. We lift with everyone and I take you to the nearest neutral . . .”

“Choose. A. Weapon.”

Thrice-damned, single-minded bastard wanted a fight? Fine. “I win, we lift with everyone?”

“Yes.”

“Alive.”

He grinned. “Yes.”

“Energy blade.”

Seaghdh scanned the cargo bay where she’d laid down a practice floor so many years ago when her father had first gotten the ship and made it clear he’d wanted her aboard. Seaghdh nodded. “Energy blade.”

His grin widened, and Ari realized she’d gone still at the apprehension prickling through her. She hadn’t expected such ready acceptance. Energy blades weren’t exactly common. They were relics, really, and the skill required to use them relegated to little more than an unpopular sport. He could only have learned one place. The same place she had, at a military academy, where the Art of the Blade was valued for the discipline it instilled. Cursing, she strode to the equipment locker, opened it, and threw a shielded jacket at him.Why wouldn’t he go through decontamination? Not that it mattered, considering the fact that the ship itself needed to be sterilized. Still. What did he have to gain by refusing?

“Federated Worlds Regs?” he drawled, confirming her fear that he knew more than which end of the weapon to hold.

“Sure.” Three touches to the jacket or one solid hit to the tiny heart symbol on the left breast. She could do this. Couldn’t she?