Connor struggled to his feet, but somehow Rana was already there. He looked up just in time to catch a knee to his eye, a strike that snapped his head up into her waiting grasp. She wrapped her arms around his neck, twisting painfully. He was choking, his throat crushing.
Connor dropped to his knees and seized Rana’s nearest leg. He heaved, bringing her over the top of him. She had to let go as she hit the ground but managed to catch his shirt on the way down. There was a tearing sound as she rolled away, finishing on her feet near the wall. Connor charged as she spun to face him, driving his full weight into her chest. He sandwiched her between himself and the wall, driving the air out of both of them.
For a moment they stayed there, his body pressed against hers, her body pressed against the wall. Then they slid down as a pair, gasping like animals. Neither moved nor spoke. Both were physically shaking, drained. But for the first time in a long time, Connor could think clearly. Rana had chased away his demons.
They sat side by side, gasping in a world of absolute destruction. She sat to his left, leaning onto his shoulder. Not that he was any sort of pillar of support. His body was shaking so hard from the pain and workout that he could barely move. When he turned his head to look at the battered mess of a woman, a new and searing pain erupted in his neck. So rather than turning his head, he settled for leaning it atop hers.
His chest was also burning, both from the workout and the knee she’d driven into it. Connor wheezed as he breathed, coughing occasionally from a suspected bruised lung. His left eye was so swollen that it would no longer open and three fingers on his right hand were twisted in an unnatural direction. His knee ached fiercely and he doubted very much he could put any real pressure on it. Formerly one of his favorite shirts, what he wore now was little more than shredded fabric hanging from a stretched-out collar. His remaining useful eye did its best from his poor angle to take in the spectacle that was Rana.
Rana’s tank top fared only slightly better than his shirt. The entire right side somehow missed any real damage. The left side, however, was torn from collar to underwire leaving her left breast completely exposed. Her right eye was red from a ruptured blood vessel, and most of her hair had found its way free of its hair tie. Stringy, thick strands hung in every direction, including in front of her face. Blood seeped out long nasty gouges that started on her upper right abdomen and ran down to her left hip. The gouges would have run below the waist band of her yoga pants except the band was completely torn away and laying on the mat several meters away. The tight fit of the leggings was the only thing keeping them on. She looked far more battered than she should have been.
“You went easy on me, didn’t you?” Connor coughed out. It was a constant fight to control his heavy breathing and alleviate that agonizing cough.
“What makes you think that?” Rana’s panting didn’t disguise the hint of humor in her voice. Connor was amazed that she could be bruised as shit like this and still have any kind of humor.
“I’ve seen you take down several people at once who were far better fighters than me.”
“You’ve gotten a lot better.”
Connor harrumphed at her, immediately regretting the act from the accompanying cough. “Not that much better. You could have destroyed me. Why take the beating?”
“Honestly… you looked like you needed to blow off some steam.”
“So, you took a beating to let me win?” He’d be insulted if he wasn’t so exhausted. He made a mental note to be angry at Rana for that later.
She turned her face toward him with a fair amount of effort. Her normally beautiful features were quite a bit more swollen than normal. “I didn’t ‘let you win’, Connor. And I really didn’t take a beating just to be nice. I’m good enough to beat you if I fight to win, but you’re good enough to slip some of shots by if I’m fighting only to draw.”
She laid her head back on his shoulder and they were quiet for a few moments again. Slightly less intense panting was the only real sound in the empty gym. Then Connor pushed past the agony in his neck to turn his head to Rana.
“I’ve been a real dick lately, haven’t I?”
“Lately?” She wheezed a snicker out. “I’ve been on the verge of shooting you for the past three months.”
Connor gave a rasping chuckle, which quickly turned into a rasping cough. “I owe you one,” he said and, with some difficulty, turned his torso to gently kiss the top of his best friend’s head.
“You owe me a lot,” Rana said once again turning her head toward him. “And if you ever kiss me again, I’ll kick your balls so hard they’ll come out your ass.”
The pair chuckled together, wheezing and coughing all the while. Their laughter had died into labored breathing and semi-ruined smiles by the time Jackie strolled into the gym. He stopped as he saw the two, a smile spreading across his face. For a silent moment, he took in the spectacle of pure carnage before him. His eyes paid extra attention to Rana’s torn clothes and bare breast.
“I think I see the motivation behind your training intensity,” Jackie said to Connor as he turned toward the weight-training area. “I may have to start taking lessons myself.”
“I’m going to shoot him too,” Rana said with a smirk, drawing an agonized chuckle from Connor.
Chapter 24:
Connor leaned against the wall of the shower, the hypnotic sound and feel of water droplets messaging his mind into relative calmness. The past week had been anything but calm. The base commander had chewed out Connor and Rana for their training injuries, telling them she wouldn’t put up with hoodlums under her command. She put them both on report for a week, giving them the worst jobs available.
Connor’s secret communication with Krieger involved a fresh berating from the old German. In his own inimitable way, the old man reminded Connor of their jeopardy and how foolish they’d been. Connor couldn’t argue the point. Krieger had told him to be careful before he left the Pegasus, then Connor goes out and gets into a slug-fest with Rana that nearly makes him an invalid.
Charisma took it best. She’d just stood as he tried to explain himself, eyes narrowed at him and arms crossed as she listened. He started well, relatively speaking. But as Connor stared into those hard eyes, he’d lost his nerve and started to babble. No matter what he said, she stood silent and judging. Soon he’d become so flustered that he was making up excuses and suppositions as to why he took such a risk. After what felt like an eternity of demeaning explanations and useless apologies, he stood awaiting her wrath. Charisma looked him over silently for a few more moments then asked if it was out of his system. When he said yes, she looked him over once more and brushed past him without another word. The next day she almost acted as though nothing happened, but there was the slightest chill in the way she treated him.
Now, he rubbed his aching knee in the warm and soothing shower. His broken ribs, fingers, and nearly torn knee ligaments would have been healed in just a few hours with the regeneration pods from the Pegasus. But the cellular regeneration devices on Zlotoff IV, while thousands of times more efficient than the human body’s natural ability to self-repair, were still vastly inferior to the pods. After a week of medical visits, any real damage was fixed. But the low tech medical devices left behind what the medical staff called ‘ghost pain’. The human body wasn’t designed to heal that fast and, without all the extra goodies of the pods, he was expected to continue perceiving pain signals for another few days. The only thing that seemed to relieve it were hot showers.
The shower cubicles were roughly eight feet by eight feet and stretched along all the walls. There were six showerheads in each cubicle, two on each wall. Six people, one cubicle. The open end of the shower cubicles faced a row of lockers that ran the center of the room. Connor had chosen a cubicle dead center of its row. It was mid shift for the sentries, and the shower room couldn’t have had more than twenty people in it at the moment.
Squeaking hinges caused Connor to look up. The doors to the hall w
ere still closed, so it must have been the doors to the gym. He glanced in that direction, but the row of lockers blocked his view. Connor closed his eyes and turned his face back to the warm water, momentarily content in his little shower cubicle.
“I’m getting tired of all this waiting,” grumbled a familiar Chilean accent behind him. Connor looked up to see Tejeda and Jackie strolling into view from a corridor in the lockers. She wore a simple gray t-shirt and off-yellow shorts, while he was in what could best be described as pajama bottoms and undershirt. Tejeda walked to a locker that was two shower cubicles away from Connor. Jackie picked a locker right next to his.
Each locker had a thumbprint lock that glowed either red for locked or green for open. Both Jackie and Tejeda pressed their thumbs onto a glowing green thumbprint lock and the locker doors released. Inside a clean towel awaited. In just a few moments, the two had their workout clothes in the locker’s internal cleaning compartment. Their clothes would be clean long before their shower was done.
Tejeda stepped into a shower three cubicles away. All Connor could see of her was dark hair and a pair of eyes as she stared hard at him over the wall. “I not kidding about being tired of all this sitting around. I need to get out there before I go nuts, Menso.”
“Rana and I weren’t cleared for duty until this morning,” Connor said. “And besides, the weather’s been shit since we got here. The backwards-ass gear they give us here can’t survive temperatures below -40 Celsius.”
Tejeda nodded unhappily. Since they’d arrived on Zlotoff IV the temperature outside hadn’t gotten above -60 Celsius. The fingers of both her hands held onto the top of the wall as her dark eyes seared into the two men in frustration. Her brow was furled as she stared, the water of her shower sprinkling onto her head. The water matted down her ebony hair, making it seem like chiseled obsidian.
“Think about it this way,” Jackie said as he stepped into the same cubicle as Connor. “When they do send us out, we won’t be able to spend so much time together, Copihue.” Lately, he’d taken to calling her by the common name of a beautiful flower from her homeland.
Connor looked at the almost empty row of cubicles, then to Jackie. “There are plenty of other open cubicles.”
Jackie made a show of looking carefully up and down the row of shower cubicles. “There are, aren’t there?” He gave Connor one of his big cheeky smiles and stepped under the showerhead right next to his friend. “It’s a first! Guess everybody’s busy now.” He turned his grin back on Tejeda. “At least all this waiting around had one good effect. Our Professor here finally got his head on straight.” Jackie wrapped an arm around Connor’s shoulders and slapped him hard on the chest several times. “Isn’t that right, Professor?”
Connor looked at Jackie, inwardly recoiling from both that hated title and the massive black cock that hung just inches from his bare hip.
“Please don’t touch me when I’m naked.”
Jackie’s face became an insincere mask of disappointment. “And here I thought we could share our innermost,” he said. Then that sardonic smile returned with a force. “That’s all right. I can just share something with my little Copihue.” He shot Tejeda a wink and went back to his soaping a few feet away.
“In your dreams, Pendejo,” Tejeda said with a smirk. The frustration in Tejeda’s eyes had eased at Jackie’s teasing. Ever since discovering their mutual love of hijinks and vulgarity, the pair had been almost inseparable. The lack of another lesbian on Zlotoff IV severely limited Tejeda’s options for companionship, and Jackie’s close friend Akshay preferred overwhelming solitude. Circumstances being what they were, the two formed a strong friendship based on a near constant string of jokes, pranks, and bawdy stories.
The hinges of the hallway door chirped as it opened, drawing three pairs of eyes. Charisma shuffled in, eyes half drooping. She’d obviously skipped the mandatory morning workouts. Mandatory in rule only since no one actually enforced it. Connor was surprised to see Rana follow behind. This was the first time since he’d known her that Rana had ever skipped a workout.
“Morning everyone,” Charisma said sleepily. She smiled at her collected friends as she walked to the shower cubicle between Connor and Tejeda. Rana simply nodded her greeting at the group. Jackie greeted them with unnecessarily robust and grandiose response, drawing a chuckle from everyone. Even Rana cracked a smile.
“You know there’s room over here,” Connor said, smiling at Charisma.
“Very true!” Jackie said. “I could always go and wash Corporal Lavi’s back.” Rana said nothing but flicked open her folding knife and hung it on the locker door while she prepared. The woman fixed him with an icy stare.
“I think I’m fine over here,” Charisma said with a little smile. Both Jackie and Tejeda snickered at the look of dejection on his face.
The two ladies barely had time to strip down and step into the cubicle between Connor and Tejeda before the hallway door opened again. Small patches of their skin hadn’t even been touched by water when a hard voice barked over the showers.
“Out of the showers and get dressed! All of you!” Major Tom Beckett’s hard voice cut through the entire shower room. He could easily have been talking to anyone in the room from that doorway, but his stern eyes were on Connor and his friends. “You’re to be in Captain Durand’s office in ten minutes!” He didn’t wait for a response. Just turned and marched back into the freezing hall.
“Maybe we’re finally getting out there!” Tejeda exclaimed as she excitedly rinsed the last of the soap out of her hair.
“I don’t like the cold,” Rana said, “but I’m sick of this fucking hole in the ground.”
In seconds, everyone was out, sitting or leaning on metal benches between the showers and lockers as they dried off. Connor toweled quickly, an unexpected excitement charging through his chest. As he hurried, he cast a few side glances at the women. A strange site on Tejeda’s neck caught his eye while she was drying her hair.
“Hey Danielle, what’s that on the back of your neck?”
For a split second, the woman went rigid. But, just as fast, her usual easy nature kicked back in. “It’s my cyber-jack,” she said. The woman looked over at him as she dried her hair, expecting his eyes to be anywhere on her body but where’s appropriate. She was mildly surprised to find his eyes locked on the back of her neck. “It’s used to link my mind directly with a network mind.”
“So, you can link with a computer?”
“A very specific computer, yes. It’s meant to link to an Excalibur.”
Connor furrowed his brow in confusion as he pulled his shirt over his head. “An Excalibur?”
“Next-gen short range fighter.” Connor opened his mouth to ask another question but Tejeda cut him off. “We have work to do, hermano. Save your questions for later.”
Connor nodded and finished dressing as quickly as possible. She only called him hermano, or ‘brother’, when she was serious.
In just under ten minutes they marched as a group into Captain Renée Durand’s heated office. Akshay Ghale was already there, standing in front of her desk and looking bored out of his mind. The room was as lavishly decorated as possible in that frozen nightmare. Fleet commendations and accolades decorated the walls, and an old leather chair sat behind an antique black cherry desk. Most likely both salvaged from the opulent resorts built for the paradise this planet was supposed to become.
The fleet captain herself was in a well-worn but perfectly maintained fleet officer’s uniform. None of her medals were on her chest. Instead, they were in a wooden plaque with a glass cover mounted on the wall. Captain Durand didn’t smile as they entered but she had a look in her eye. Hard to read, but perhaps contempt. Or smugness. Connor couldn’t read a stone face the way Wild Bill could. Or Rana.
They started for the small collection of seats before Captain Durand’s desk, but she waved them away. “Don’t bother,” she said. “You won’t be here long enough.” Captain Durand’s sweet voice w
as softened even more by her melodic French accent. But the look of controlled sadism starting to show on her face made Connor shudder.
“We’re having a heatwave,” she continued. “The temp’s shot to -10 degrees outside, so it’s time to get out there and do some actual work.” Captain Durand paused a moment to look each of them in the eye. “There’s a small Ka’Rathi outpost about one hundred twenty kilometers to the northeast. Since we have no idea what they’re doing on this planet, I want you to scout that compound. Sergeant Lavi will be in command. Harper, Van Dorn, and Ghale will support. Adams will act as corpsman and Lieutenant Tejeda will provide aerial reconnaissance and cover should it be necessary. Ensign Baker will pilot the shuttle that will drop you off and pick you up an appropriate distance from the compound. You leave in thirty minutes. Prepare yourselves appropriately.”
“With respect, captain,” Charisma tentatively said, “shouldn’t Lieutenant Tejeda be our dropship pilot? She’s always done it before.”
“Lieutenant Tejeda is a fighter pilot, not a shuttle pilot. Unlike your last post we actually have fighters here. There’s no reason to continue wasting the lieutenant’s skill.”
Before another question could be asked, she gave them a dismissive wave and turned away. Captain Durand picked up a small, hand held screen, making a show of studying it intently. Without another word, the group filed into the icy hallway.
They should have been giddy. Each suffered from their own version of cabin fever. Each desperately wanted out. For the last month, the entire group had been desperate for an escape, some way out of that frozen maze of tunnels. Frayed nerves had only served to aggravate that cabin fever. Hijinks and insensitive comments often led to standoffs between the individuals of their tightknit group. Though it was rare, sometimes even fights broke out.
Echoes of Avarice Page 22