Saving Morgan
Page 17
Shaine turned away from the blast of sand and returned to where Reyes waited. The chop of the rotors rapidly faded into the distance.
Reyes hitched up his half of the equipment box and palmed the door open. She grabbed the other end and followed him into the control building to set the container down in front of a short reception counter. Behind the counter, three rows of inter-linked desks trisected the room. Widescreen monitors and projected 3D holomaps took up the top of each desk. About a dozen uniformed men and women manned the computers. A couple of workers looked up curiously before turning back to their duties.
Reyes waved a hand, indicating the room. “Welcome to Desert Weather Central.” He grinned. “Pretty low-key for the most part. Come on into my office and we can talk.”
Shaine followed him through the three rows of workstations to a glass-walled inner office at the back. The door was open.
Reyes slid behind the desk and dropped into a creaking plasti-form chair.
Shaine took the chair in front of the desk and sat down, scanning the room. All the techs appeared focused on their screens rather than on her or Reyes, but she knew appearances could be deceiving. There were no shades drawn over the clear walls and her conversation with Reyes would be out in the open. She wasn’t comfortable with the scenario. She shifted her body to face away from most of the room and turned her attention to the dark, muscular man.
Reyes leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his middle. “Mr. Rogan says you need a lift to the deep desert. Doesn’t sound like much fun. Nothing out there but sand and fleas.”
She met his obvious probing with a flat stare. “Actually, you’d be surprised how much fun it can be.”
He raised a brow at her sarcasm. “Is Rogan always so uptight?”
She asked, “You’ve worked with Rogan before?”
“A few times. I drop someone off in the desert, middle of nowhere, someone else picks em up. Or doesn’t, for all I know. My superiors have a deal worked out with his people. I just do what I’m told.”
Shaine nodded. She assumed Rogan was spying on Charun, using multiple drop points with evacuation provided by his own people. Unzipping the side pocket on her cargo pants, she retrieved a small data chip, which she handed across the desk to Reyes. “Drop coordinates.”
Reyes took the chip and plugged it into his system. After a handful of seconds, he glanced at her. “Swing around and take a look.”
Shaine got up and moved around the desk. The monitor built into the desktop displayed a topographical map overlaid with weather radar.
“This is where we are now,” Reyes said. “This is the drop point. There’s a big sandstorm blowing up. It’ll reach us in a couple of hours and it looks like it’ll last at least a day. The outer edges of the storm will hit your drop point within the next forty minutes or so.”
Shaine studied the map and the storm data scrolling up the side of the screen. For the best cover, she’d want to time her arrival at Charun’s compound at the height of the storm, so late morning was best. She glanced at her chron, considering the distances and the increasing wind speeds she’d be fighting. “I want to get to the drop point at oh-five-hundred hours.”
Reyes nodded. “Sure. Then we leave here at oh four fifteen. Gives you a couple of hours before we take off.”
“Fine.”
“What the hell are you doing in the middle of the desert, anyway?”
She gave him an annoyed glare, wondering if he really thought she was stupid enough to answer his question.
Reyes shrugged when he got no response. “You can work on instruments only, right? Because you’re not going to be able to see a damned thing in that storm, even in the daylight.”
Shaine managed not to roll her eyes. “I have it covered,” she said. “Is there a locker room where I can get suited up and maybe crash for an hour?”
Reyes said, “There’s a locker room off the side hall.”
Shaine glanced over her shoulder. “I could use a hand with the equipment case, lieutenant.”
“Yes, ma’am. Not a problem.” He stood.
Shaine hid a grin and continued out of the office.
Reyes left her alone in the cramped locker room with her equipment case. She flipped open the box packed with a desert survival suit and her weapons. She went through the contents, double-checking everything. She glanced again at her the wrist chron and decided she had time to relax and get focused.
She stretched out on the long plastic bench, folding her arms over her stomach and closing her eyes, listening to the quiet hum of air-cyclers. She sought a quiet space in her head. A picture of Morgan formed in her mind’s eye with the memory of how good it had felt to hold her and be held. She let the comfort and warmth seep through her consciousness.
Her mind wandered to Morgan lying in the grass beside her, staring at her with those deep gray eyes. She could feel Morgan’s warm skin under her fingertips, feel Morgan shiver under her touch, smell the clean scent of her hair, and taste the pulse point of Morgan’s neck beating wildly under her tongue. Calm slipped away.
She shook off the vision and the need and scraped her fingers hard through her hair. Focus. Focus. Jesus, Shaine. Get your fucking libido in check. She sat up, swinging her legs to the floor. You know what you need to do. You know how to do it. Just get in there and get the job done.
Three hours later, Shaine balanced in the cargo space behind the heli-jet’s cockpit, suited up and ready to make her drop. Glancing out the front windshield, she saw nothing through the darkness.
Still a couple of hours before the sun comes up, she thought. Not that it would matter much in the middle of a sandstorm.
Without the headset, the drone of the rotors and engines nearly drowned out the howling wind and the sizzle of sand whipping against the fuselage. Earlier, Reyes had told her he would keep the heli-jet hovering about two meters above the ground, but the way the wind buffeted the craft around, she figured anywhere from a half meter to probably upward of three or four.
The heli-jet lurched up and did a freefall back down. She grabbed a handhold for support. She shut the faceplate of the desert survival suit with a sharp slap and adjusted the pack on her back. Reyes gave her a thumbs-up and a grin. She acknowledged him with a quick nod and hit the hatch release. The door grated open. A blast of sand streamed into the small compartment. Fighting the gusts, she swung down until her feet rested on the heli-jet’s landing skid. Taking a breath, she jumped clear.
It was a longer drop than she’d hoped.
Her boots connected on solid ground with a jarring impact. She let her knees flex, tucked and tumbled down a sharp incline. Rolling to a stop, she took a few seconds to lie on her back, doing a quick inventory to make sure she was in one piece.
Sand pelted her helmet’s faceplate. The blackness enveloping her was nearly complete. She hauled herself to her feet, finding her balance in the shifting wind, and pulled her comp pad from one of her suit’s sealed side pockets to get her position and direction.
Shifting her pack more comfortably on her shoulders, she started forward, head down against the buffeting wind. Unable to see more than vague shadows, she shuffled her boots lightly over the sand to keep her footing and followed the directional heading provided by the blue-lighted comp pad screen. Fighting winds that pushed her backward and sideways more than ahead, she resigned herself to a long hike.
Chapter Twenty-One
Morgan relaxed in bed against a pile of pillows with her comp pad on her knees. She’d wanted to catch up on some reading, but found herself spending most of her time staring through the open bedroom door to the living room windows and out at the flickering lights of the New York City skyline. After going over the same page five times, she still had no idea what she’d read.
She sighed, contemplating her current reality, which felt so surreal. She missed the familiarity of her own bed in her own tiny apartment, surrounded by the domed safety of Moon Base. Not an exciting existence, and admi
ttedly, there wasn’t much of a future in it. She would never be rich or famous. She would never be noticed outside her group of friends. She didn’t care. She was content with her life.
These last two days, she’d felt like she was drowning—cut off from her safety lines. So many things she thought she knew were twisted into half-truths and outright lies. The certainty of tomorrow had become an uneasy knowledge that nothing was going to be quite the same again and she couldn’t yet fathom what the changes might mean.
Even Shaine fell into the category of the unknown. Regardless, she clung to the somewhat slippery support Shaine represented. She saw the irony of leaning on the strength of a woman she probably shouldn’t trust, given Shaine’s dubious background with Maruchek’s company. Her head warned her off while her instincts trusted implicitly. Instinct or hormones? she wondered dryly. Either way, she couldn’t deny the attraction.
Her thoughts drifted to the afternoon she’d spent in the garden with Shaine. She had found it so achingly difficult to watch Shaine walk away from the hidden clearing where they’d laid in the grass touching, kissing and holding each other. Shaine had seemed to need the comfort of contact as much as her.
She set aside the pad and grabbed Shaine’s pillow from the other side of the bed, hugging it and burying her face in the cool fabric. She breathed in traces of the light, musky scent of Shaine’s shampoo and imagined the strength of Shaine’s arms around her.
God, Shaine, you haven’t been gone a day and I miss you. What is going on with me? Was I ever this needy before? With Gina, my feelings were more fear and anxiety and waiting for the relationship to blow up around me. This thing with Shaine is so very different. I’m not scared, except to lose her. Even not knowing what the future holds isn’t as terrifying as the thought of Shaine not being with me. I’ve always been okay being on my own. Now, I just don’t know. She squeezed the oversized pillow tighter.
Over the course of the evening, she considered bringing up a net connection and contacting Charri, but tossed the idea aside. There wasn’t much she could say without either lying outright, or completely avoiding all the important details. And it was possible talking to Charri would somehow put her friend in danger. She thought, too, about calling her dad on Moon Base, but put the notion aside for the same reasons. In any case, she didn’t think she had the emotional strength to deal with trying to explain everything that had happened.
She wished for the millionth time Shaine was with her. Shaine would understand. She didn’t know why she believed that, but she knew it was true.
She took a last deep breath into the pillowcase and set it purposely aside, forcefully shoving down her raging emotions and grabbing the pad again. Hoping to distract her brain from thinking anymore, she brought up a tile game. With any luck, at some point she’d just fall asleep.
She had drifted into semi-conscious dreams when a soft click in the outer room snapped her eyes wide open. Her muscles stiffened. She peered into the darkness, her mind suddenly alert. “Hello?”
An indistinct shadow moved toward her.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. She slid a hand under her pillow. Her fingers closed around the cold stock of Shaine’s pistol. She brought the weapon around in front of her, hidden under the covers, and sat up, repeating her greeting. “Hello?”
The shadow morphed as it came toward the dim light from the bedside lamp, shifting into the vaguely familiar shape of a tall woman purposefully crossing the living room. “Ms. Rahn?” Lissa’s lithe form moved fully into the light at the bedroom doorway. She carried a thick holo album similar to the one Morgan already had. She held out the album. “I’m sorry to intrude, but your father asked me to bring this to you.”
Shaine’s words from the previous night echoed in her head: The only people who can come through that door without you physically unlocking it from the inside are you, me, Maruchek and Rogan. A cold shiver ran down her spine. “Just leave it on the coffee table,” she said, impressed her voice sounded so confident. “You startled me—I was almost asleep.”
Lissa smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been a busy couple of days.” Morgan paused, but Lissa didn’t seem to get the subtle hint. She added, “Um, if you can let yourself out, I’m really tired.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Lissa nodded. She didn’t move to leave. “If you’re sure you don’t need anything else?” she asked.
“Just for you to leave,” Morgan returned.
A dark expression flashed across Lissa’s features. Her hand twitched under the photo album. A dull glint flashed in the dim light.
Time slowed painfully between pounding heartbeats.
The thin streak of a laser bolt hissed past Morgan’s head, leaving behind a whiff of burnt hair. Her finger tightened on the pistol’s trigger.
Lissa stumbled and fell backward with a startled look on her face. Her gun went off again, firing wide into the wall.
Morgan fired twice more at empty air, unable to stop the reaction.
Time resumed its normal course.
Morgan’s heart pounded deafeningly in her ears. For a long moment she held herself completely still, trying to remember how to breathe. Slowly, she folded away the comforter with its three new singed holes. She eased her legs over the side of the bed and stood on shaking legs. Her trembling hands held Shaine’s pistol in front of her. She was vaguely aware she’d seen people adopt the same posture in the holovids.
She stepped around the bed, half expecting Lissa to surge up firing, but nothing happened. The tall woman lay in the doorway, a charred hole burnt through her jacket and blouse into her chest, eyes open wide in shock. The hole was bigger than Morgan would have expected.
Lissa’s breath came in shallow, pained gasps. For a brief second, the glassy stare focused on her, then Lissa slipped away after a ragged sounding wheeze.
Morgan dropped bonelessly onto the edge of the bed. The pistol slipped out of her fingers and clattered on the floor. She stared at the dead woman in the doorway. Lissa’s fingers were loosely wrapped around a palm-sized laser pistol.
“You probably won’t hit anything,” Shaine had told her.
Well, fuck. Now what?
Call Maruchek. He’d given her his private com code.
She got up and fumbled for the com unit on the nightstand. After a couple of tries, she managed to punch in Maruchek’s code. The call only buzzed once.
His voice sounded tinny over the small speaker. “Maruchek.”
She stared blankly at the communicator for a long moment.
Maruchek’s voice became somewhat impatient. “Hello?”
She swallowed, cleared her throat. “This—um, it’s Morgan.”
“Morgan?” His tone instantly changed from impatient to concerned. “Morgan, what’s wrong?”
“Um…there’s a body…well, Lissa—I just shot her.”
“What?”
She heard motion in the background, as though Maruchek had jumped up and was suddenly moving around. “Morgan, are you all right?”
The world slid away for a moment, her focus narrowing to the com in her shaking hand. “I killed her,” she mumbled, shocked at the words coming out of her mouth.
“You’re not hurt?”
“No. I—”
“Morgan, just stay put, I’m on the way.”
The connection clicked dead, leaving her to stare at the small rectangular unit. Her gaze returned to the body in the doorway and the charred holes in the bedding. Her knees gave way. She slid down against the side of the bed until she sat on the floor staring at her hands, her whole body trembling.
Morgan didn’t know how long it took for Maruchek, Rogan and a number of others to burst into the suite. She heard Maruchek calling for her, but she had no voice to answer. She was barely able to look up and focus when he dropped to his knees in front of her.
Other voices gave orders. All the lights came on, glaring and making her blink.
Unresisting, she let him hold her, thankful for the safety of his presence, while part of her wondered why she should feel safe with a man who was a virtual stranger.
A voice snapped sharply, “Tarm, she’s okay. She’s in shock.”
Maruchek’s arms loosened around her.
She looked up. “I’m not hurt,” she rasped.
Maruchek smoothed her hair. “Probably not, but we need to get you out of here.” He eased to his feet, bringing her up with him. “Can you walk?”
Morgan nodded. “I…yeah, I think so.” She wavered, her knees still rubbery, but he put his arm around her waist and guided her to the bedroom door.
She didn’t want to, but she had to look down to step over Lissa’s body. She shuddered and fought back a wave of nausea. I did that.
Maruchek murmured, “Morgan, come,” and urged her forward with a gentle nudge.
She let herself be led away from death.
Not long afterward, Morgan curled into a corner of a love seat on the far side of Maruchek’s office, her knees pulled up to her chest. The lights were dim in her corner of the big office. She was glad to have at least the illusion of hiding in the shadows.
She still wore the short-sleeved, oversized tunic and boxers she’d worn to bed. The medic had given her a soft, maize-colored blanket, which she’d wrapped tightly around her shoulders. The young doctor had pronounced her physically fit and merely “shaken up” by the experience. Of course, he had only been told she’d had “a bit of a scare.” At the moment, she felt rather like she’d been run over by a freight train.