The Phoenix Project (50 page)

    
“One for the road?” she asked and set her
glass next to the bottle of disappearing brandy.

    
“You’re planning on leaving?”

    
“Just a figure of speech,” she said as he
replenished her drink. “Can I stay here tonight? I don’t want to be alone right
now.”

    
“Sure, you can have the bed: I can take the
couch. It’s pretty comfortable and I have some extra blankets anyway.”

    
She smiled and took his right hand in hers.
“I don’t want you to take the couch.”

    
“So you’d rather take the couch?”

    
She laughed at his facetious remark.
“You’re always joking when someone else is serious.”

    
“I like to think it helps to disarm the
situation.”

    
“It does, but do you want to disarm this
particular situation?” she asked with his hand still in hers.

    
“Nadine, I haven’t done this in a really
long time.”

    
“Neither have I.”

    
“For me, though, the last time was with my
wife.”

    
“Oh.”

    
“It’s not that I don’t want to. Lily died a
long time ago and I just never found the time for a relationship since then,”
he said.

    
“She meant a lot to you, didn’t she?”

    
“Yeah,” he said and shifted his gaze to the
windows looking out on the American
Sea.

    
“I’m not trying to replace her you know.”

    
“I know you’re not, but she will always be
important to me,” Elliot said.

    
“And she should, but maybe it’s not that
you haven’t had time for a relationship, but that you didn’t want one.”

    
“You’re probably right. I’m not sure I’m
ready.”

    
“There’s only one way to find out for
sure,” Nadine said and drew his face close to hers. She searched his eyes and
saw his desire for her. Nadine kissed him so quietly that the sound of the
base’s generators could be heard. In that moment, Elliot heard his thoughts for
her.

    
Nadine smiled to the look of clairvoyance
on Elliot’s features and waited for him to respond.

    
“Maybe I don’t want the couch either,” he
said. Nadine got up from her chair and led him to the bedroom. Just as they
reached the bed, Nadine surprised him with a forceful push onto it.

    
“Have you had too much brandy?” Elliot
asked with a grin.

    
“No.” Nadine removed her navy duty tunic
and let it drop to the floor. Nadine leaned over him and unbuttoned his double—breasted
Alliance uniform.
She took it off of him with the sound of cotton brushing against cotton. The
uniform stayed under Elliot while she pulled of his duty shirt.

    
He sat up long enough to pull off her shirt
and toss it to the floor. Elliot ran his hands along her side as she ran hers
down his chest and abdominal muscles. He had a small inverted crescent of hair
on each chest muscle that she ran her fingers through. Elliot ran his own hands
up her smooth stomach and gently cupped each of her breasts before carefully massaging
them. Nadine smiled as she saw his arousal and leaned forward to kiss him. He
moved his hands to her back as she bent forward and unclasped the black bra she
wore and slid it off of her.
 
Nadine
leaned back and got up to reveal her half—naked body. The medical ingenuity of
their age gave her the look of a topless thirty year old despite her actual age
some fifteen years older. She unbuttoned the pants of her uniform and allowed
them to drop to the floor. Nadine laid down beside him.

    
Elliot removed his trousers as the two lay
next to each other on their sides, lightly touching the other’s skin. With
insatiable curiosity, Nadine pulled off Elliot’s black boxer—briefs while he
removed her underwear. They both explored each other looking for areas that would
result in a moan of pleasure or sudden intake of breath. They carefully watched
each other’s faces for signs of ecstasy as they experimented with different
movements of their hands.

    
Nadine stopped in recognition of Elliot’s
mounting excitement and placed a firm hand to his shoulder and pressed his back
to the blue bedspread. He watched her smooth, nude profile in the dimness of
the bedroom while she positioned herself over Elliot and then guided him into her.

    
A spasm passed through both their bodies as
their first mutual thrust was initiated. She stared at him in surprise at the
revelation that the first orgasmic sensation had opened both of their minds to
each other. They experienced a shock at discovering their deepest thoughts come
forward. Their minds and bodies intermingled.

    
Elliot found himself lost in physical
pleasure and then saw himself looking through her eyes at Nadine’s father. His
appearance told him that this must have occurred at least twenty years ago. He
felt her affection for him even though it was discouraged by MERA. They had no
marriages between members and she was the product of an arranged pregnancy.
Catherine was encouraged to have three children by him and Douglas
had fathered at least a dozen children with three other women. Just like
Catherine, Douglas took pride in the fact that
he was considered to be good stock worthy of preservation within the
organization’s ranks. Love was not something required within MERA nor was it
encouraged and her two parents were not supposed to have any for her.

    
Against the discouragement of MERA she had
subtly found ways to get to know him. Nadine had found him a good man and a
worthy friend. The attachment was mutual and secretly encouraged by her father
over a period of months of polite conversation.

    
It was one day that Catherine gave her the
orders to escort Douglas along with a small
detail of guards to Detention Room E. Her knowledge of MERA was much more
limited at the time, having only completed her training three years earlier,
the designation had little meaning to her. The reaction on his face at being
told she was taking him to Detention Room E gave her a small hint of what was
to come. Douglas went from presenting a warm
smile to becoming so pale that he looked ill. Nadine accompanied him to a
section of MERA that she had never seen before. A small group of guards more
familiar with the route accompanied her. A long ride in an elevator brought
them deep below ground to a level of cement floors and walls with long tracks
of fluorescent lights casting a deathly glow onto the already white Douglas. “E” was the first thing she saw on the wall
stenciled there in black. Elliot noticed Douglas
was trembling the entire way. Her father hung his head in defeat as they
progressed down the unadorned concrete corridor until it met up with a large
area the size of a gym but with a ceiling height of only ten feet.

    
The lead soldier nodded and then spoke in a
low whisper to her.

    
“We can handle things from here. You can
return to duty.”

    
She obeyed her senior officer without
question. The last thing Nadine saw on her father’s face was a look of betrayal.

    
She had a vague suspicion of what was
occurring but left without a word only to hear the crackle of particle beam
discharges behind her. Once on the elevator, she stared at the opposite wall
and wondered if what she had witnessed could have been real. The elevator doors
opened a moment later to Catherine standing at the entrance to the lift.

    
“It was real,” Catherine confirmed with a
quick scan of her mind. After years of experience she could easily keep her out
now, but was unable to then. “It was necessary for you to have this lesson
child. We are not blind. I am well aware of your secret friendship with a
family member.”

    
Catherine shook her head in response to Nadine’s
suspicions.

    
“It wasn’t because of that. No forbidden
relationship here is worthy of a death sentence.”

    
“Then why?”

    
“Because we discovered evidence that he’s a
traitor. Several subtle mind—scans conducted over the last few weeks have confirmed
it. Treason is a capital offense.”

    
“And I just had to witness it?” Nadine asked
in bitterness.

    
“Yes, if only to reaffirm why we have the
rules we do. Anyone of our people can be lost and such deep emotional
attachments are a weakness no soldier can afford. Now you know why we
discourage such things.”

    
Catherine regarded her for a moment with a
steel gaze and then turned away. Nadine merely stared, shell—shocked at her
back while she left.

    
To this day, this moment with Elliot, she
never forgot the lesson or the look on her condemned father’s face. Elliot’s
realization of everything that motivated this woman towards such a
dispassionate stance forced a tear down his face. Nadine had experienced the
memory with him; in return, he shared his most guarded memory with her.

    
For Nadine, a bridge materialized into
existence and she saw through his eyes. She recognized the technological level
of the control covered consoles and displays as a period some ten years ago
just before the last major refit of the Alliance
fleet. To her right, someone standing on the bridge said something to her she
didn’t hear due to her distraction at her surroundings. The person who had
spoken was a gorgeous woman with long red hair and doe—brown eyes. The image
seemed so vivid that she nearly said “Excuse me?” out loud before realizing
that the Elliot of ten years ago was responding in a conversation that was a
ghostly shadow of a real event.

    
The two were talking about what they would
do after their duty shifts ended. Elliot suggested the officer’s lounge.

    
“We did that last night,” the woman said.
“Can’t we stay in tonight? Maybe see a movie?”

    
This was his wife Lily, Nadine realized.

    
Nadine felt Elliot’s disappointment for a
moment and then saw a smile appear across his face as Lily moved closer and
grasped his hand.

    
“All right,” he sighed, “but Josh and Madi
are only on leave for another day here before they go back to work on the
Suffolk
.”

    
“Then we can invite them over,” Lillian
said and walked away towards the Science Station. Three vertical silver bars
sat on either side of the purple collar indicating her Commander’s rank. Elliot
had never mentioned she was part of the Science Corps.

    
Nadine was surprised when the eyesight of
Elliot became unfocused for a moment as the ship seemed to experience a jolt.
Alarm klaxons went off and the crew jumped to their duties.

    
“We’re under attack by two enemy
destroyers,” one of Elliot’s officers reported.

    
An attack?
Nadine wondered before
the knowledge of the event was reconciled with her memory.

    
The Norfolk Incident!

    
She was amazed to realize that he was the
Captain that had commanded the Alliance
vessel through that crisis. Nadine felt excitement at the knowledge that she
was about to witness the events of the historic incident that had marred nearly
a century of cold war.

    
The Coalition had recounted a series of
events that had ended with a direct confrontation between the enemy destroyer
Norfolk
and two
Coalition destroyers. The battle ended with the loss of the
Potemkin
but
the
Warsaw
was victorious. That version of the story seemed to fall into the category of
erroneous events as Nadine realized that the
Warsaw
and the
Potemkin
had, in
fact, fired first.

    
“Battle stations!” Elliot barked to his
crew. Shields went up and the ship powered its weapons. Nadine carefully paid
attention to everything Elliot heard and saw in the next few minutes while she
witnessed the real events of the incident.

    
“I need a damage report,” Elliot said. He
got up from his command chair and advanced on the Damage Control station for
answers.

    
“They’ve hit two of our shield generators,”
the officer responded. “We’re operating on one quarter shields.”

    
“Send out a call for any Alliance ships in the area and request
assistance. Why the hell did they fire?” Elliot asked aloud in frustration. Her
attention to detail was disrupted when he hit the floor as a result of a
massive detonation below decks.