Prime Selection (26 page)

Bre’s forehead creased in thought. “I have heard of such creatures living in the Andromeda galaxy. This life-form could have been brought here by an asteroid from that galaxy and found a perfect environment to thrive.”

“Interesting theory, Bre. One which I’ll ask you to explore once you’ve finalized the examination.” The science tech nodded and went back to work taking preliminary readings.

Nadia swept a glance over the teams standing around the dead creatures. “People, if you see one of these creatures alive—do not approach. Call security. If attacked, you can only kill them by a direct laser shot to the brain or by cutting their brain stem and cauterizing it so it won’t reattach. Do you understand?” Or at least she hoped those methods would work; they had on the Prater giant worm creatures.

A chorus of “yesses” and “aye-ayes” swept through the crowd. And she had to smile when she heard a couple of “eeuws.” She was so there with that sentiment.

She waited for the teams to go silent and then continued with her instructions. “Cas Jod has the complex’s artificial environment up and running. The air and temperature should be suitable for working without environmental suits. No one is to work alone; work in pairs at a minimum. You all saw the condition of the bodies we removed. You’ve seen the remains of one of the creatures that killed them. Do not assume because the two giant worms we found are dead there aren’t others. We have no idea of how these creatures live or hunt. I don’t want to lose anyone because we weren’t cautious.

Understood?”

Again assent rippled through the teams.

“Aeron, will your teams handle documenting the facility, mapping it, and checking out the systems now that Cas has them running?”

“Gladly, Nadia. But what will you be doing?” Aeron replied, tension in every line of his body.

“Testing the geological soundness of the mountain over the facility and the strata under it.” Nadia’s narrowed gaze swept the rock-strewn area leading to the entrance. “I don’t like the signs of rock fall I see. My readings from the ship indicated no seismic activity. There’s no molten core. This planet unlike Earth or Cejuru Prime is a hunk of dead rock. And the substrata read as solid. I need to figure out how the caves were formed—we know your forebears adapted what they’d found here. So, what natural forces—or who—made the underground complex?”

Aeron inhaled sharply. “You don’t think the…” he eyed the creature, “…the worms created the cave and passages, do you?”

“It’s a working hypothesis and needs to be ruled in or out.” Nadia walked to her team, which included the Jod brothers and four security people. “And I hope I’m wrong,”

she muttered. She had a bad case of déjà vu—because her encounter with the giant wormlike creature in the Prater system had happened in what had turned out to be the creature’s underground home and not a cave formed by water or tectonic activity.

Damn, she hated giant worms!

Huw sat in the chair next to Wulf. Both men were transfixed by the sights and sounds coming from the surface.

“It is a pseudo-worm, then?” Huw turned to Wulf. “If it has a brainstem and teeth, it isn’t a true worm, but without a skeleton it isn’t a reptile either.”

“We’ve seen such before, brother.” Wulf’s gaze never wavered from the screen. “I sense your tension. What’s the problem? Are you worried about Nadia being underground and coming up against a living pseudo-worm?”

“Yes.
Ansu bhau
! She’s scared out of her mind, and I’m not there to help her. She shut me out.” He rubbed a hand over his aching forehead.

Wulf snorted. “And why shouldn’t she? You’ve been denying her very existence since we began this mission.”

“Yes … all right … I’ll admit it … I care for Nadia. I-I love her, but…”

“There is no ‘but.’” Wulf shook his head and growled. “Huw, I’m not sure what rod you have up your ass about mating with a Terran, but let’s face facts—you are bonding with Nadia. You can’t continue to deny the evidence. We all see it. You’re hurting her, brother.”

“I know.” Huw grimaced. “I will make it up to her.” He looked at his brother. “I could not approach her before now.”

“What in Balcon’s balls do you mean, you could not approach her before now?”

Wulf frowned and his eyes held disbelief.

“I have cared for Nadia since I met her. I grew to love her courage, intelligence, beauty, spirit.” Hue looked his brother in the eye. “But I could not offer her a relationship of any sort until I was sure I had no
gemate
waiting on her
gemat
. If I had, I would not only have dishonored my potential
gemate
, but would also have hurt Nadia when I had to leave her.”

Wulf closed his eyes and muttered curses under his breath. Huw winced. “You mean to tell me you hurt Nadia’s feelings and denied the obvious signs of more than a physical attraction between you on the off chance you might … might find an unmarked Prime female on this mission?”

“Yes.” Huw firmed his mouth when his brother started to swear once more. “You found Mel when there had been no hope at all. Could I do less when there was even a small chance?”

Wulf shook his head and began to chuckle. “When you put it that way, I guess not.”

He laid a hand over Huw’s. “You’ll need to court her—and I suggest starting with an apology on your knees. You hurt her very much.”

“I know. It hurt me also.” Huw swallowed past a giant lump of regret in his throat.

“It was like cutting off a vital part of me, but I felt I could do nothing else. I didn’t want to tell her I loved her and then later have to reject her if a miracle happened.”

“Tell her that.” Wulf’s voice was soft. “It might go some way to allow her to trust in your honor.”

But what if she rejects you?
Even after you apologize and explain your actions or
lack of actions?

Failure was not an option. He’d have to woo her into his bed and bind her to him with sex. He needed to claim her openly, declare his intentions, and make sure no other man could steal her away.
That will not happen.
He would grovel if he had to.

Wulf punched him on the arm. “If I were you, I’d greet Nadia upon her return to the ship and begin courting. You have lots of ground to make up. But for now, you have the Command Deck. I will join Melina in the storage bay and help receive the bodies of our dead Lost Ones.”

Huw nodded, not envying his brother the sad task. “Thanks for listening and your advice, brother. You will have a new sister-kin soon. I intend to do all I can to convince Nadia to be my mate, uh, my wife in the Alliance way.”

A strange light entered and left Wulf’s eyes and his lips twisted before straightening.

Huw puzzled over his brother’s expression—it looked a lot like a smirk. “Let me know if anything happens on planet that Mel or I need to be aware of.” Wulf saluted casually and strolled to the lift.

Huw took the seat Wulf abandoned and donned the command head set. Iolyn came to stand next to him, a grin on his face.

“You heard all that?” Huw asked.

Iolyn chuckled. “Yes. Maybe you should invest in some knee guards for all the crawling and begging you will be doing in the near future. If I were Nadia, I would make you pay.” Iolyn sat in the chair next to Huw and put on a com unit to monitor the oral feed from the teams on the planet. “You, brother, need to act quickly to secure Nadia’s affections. She is a fine woman—and many members of the crew have their eye on her.”

Huw growled. “They can find another woman. Nadia is mine.”

He had to make a plan to get Nadia into his bed. If he couldn’t seal the deal and make love to her, he didn’t deserve to be called a man. He wanted her attached to him completely. Then he would do everything in his power to make up for his previous behavior for the rest of their lives.

And he had better do all of this wooing sooner rather than later, because the pain of denying Nadia’s mental touch was getting worse every day.

“Commander,” Bre Jod called to Nadia from a side tunnel off one of the main arteries of the huge underground complex. “Come see this.”

Nadia abandoned her examination of what she’d concluded were man-made handholds. The grips carved into the solid rock wall should’ve led to an upper walkway hidden behind a waist-high curtain wall such as the ones found in the Prime complex on Obam IV, but didn’t. Something had caused a cave-in and the upper walkway and any of the rooms off it were now buried under tons of granite.

The whole frigging planet was a solid ball of granite and iron, and the underground complex was definitely not natural. It had been carved out … whether by the Prime or a planet inhabitant was the question for which she and her team sought an answer.

“What have you found, Bre?” She stood next to the tall Prime and stared at the wall he indicated. “What am I looking at?”

“This tunnel is new.” He traced the variance in coloration of the wall from top to bottom. “This rock has only been exposed to environmental conditions for the last ten or so standard years. Our people could not have done this.”

“Theories, Bre?” Nadia’s gut wasn’t happy. She moved in closer and spotted etching in the granite. It took a lot to etch granite. A laser-cutting tool could do it. The ancients on Earth used chisels and hammers. Or…

“It was chemically hewn.” Bre held up his analyzer. “Some strong acid. The chemical composition resembles nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“Shit. Giant worms use acidic secretions to digest their food.” She shuddered at the memories threatening to take her over. “What if the creatures on this planet also excrete strong acids?”

Bre nodded. “Very possible. Also, the bodies we found, though dehydrated, had teeth that were still intact and as hard as diamonds. The creature could also eat rock.” He touched a pattern of scrapings in the tunnel wall. “These are very regularly spaced. It might use its acid to soften the rock and then it eats it and creates a passageway.”

“But why kill the Prime crash survivors if its diet is mineral?” Nadia’s stomach roiled at the thought of the women and children running from the creatures. “No, don’t answer that. The creature must’ve felt threatened and killed them.” And liked the taste and decided to eat some more. “God! I hope there aren’t any live worms left. They have a taste for human prey now.”

“Commander, the creatures must have been here when the Prime first landed and adapted the caves for their use. Why wasn’t there a warning about this planet? Why would the Lost Ones come here?” Bre’s face flushed dark red with his anger. “Coming here was a death sentence.”

“Maybe they didn’t have a choice. After we receive the report from the team examining the ships and study the survivors’ logs, we’ll know more.” Nadia looked at the wall and followed it up. “There has to be an upper tunnel—and a room where the first Prime who came here left records. The upper walkway which the Prime added in the main hallway has collapsed.” She led the way out of the side tunnel and back to the main passage.

Nadia pointed to the handholds and the Prime markings indicating the hidden walkway. “See? I’ve seen similar on Cejuru Prime in the fortification outside the capitol—and Mel reported on the ones on Obam IV.”

“Then we should advise the other two-man teams to be on the lookout for such adaptations?” Bre asked.

“Yeah. Contact the others and tell them what we’ve found. I’ll go farther up this tunnel and see if the upper walkway opens up.” She left Bre at the tunnels’ intersection and headed for what looked to be the main tunnel’s dead end, about ten meters ahead.

As Nadia walked, she dictated her observations. “Ceiling height remains at approximately fifteen meters. Prime markings and handholds are evident all along this particular corridor. There is a distinct possibility there could be an upper walkway leading to storage and/or safe rooms.”

She paused and touched Prime symbols, which she loosely translated as “climb up”

and a letter and a number. “The Prime who adapted the tunnels labeled the lower and upper corridors with an alpha-numeric system. If the underground complex proves safe, it would be interesting to have a scientific team map the facility and compare it to other ancient Prime facilities documented in the galaxy. I know of three in the Steppes of Russia that remind me of this complex, but they weren’t nearly as sophisticated.”

Nadia reached a solid wall. “The tunnel ends abruptly with no markings.” She ran her handheld sonar over the wall. “The dead end appears to be a collapse. I read an open space behind it. The fill is not loose, but is a block of granite as high as the tunnel ceiling and two meters thick.”

Bre came up behind her. “Dead end? That makes no sense.”

“There’s an opening beyond. This block of granite either fell or was placed here.”

Nadia looked at the smoothness of it. “I’m thinking placed. To block out the creatures?”

She looked at Bre whose lips were fixed in a thin, grim line.

He nodded. “That would seem logical. The Prime who came here many millennia ago might’ve tried to box the creatures out of the tunnels they’d taken over.”

“The creatures would just eat through them.” Nadia stated the obvious.

“Maybe the Prime didn’t stay around long enough to know that. Ursa 345 was probably a way station infrequently used and they only needed security for short periods of time. These walls would slow the creatures down.” Bre shook his head. “Or at least I would hope so.”