Games of Command

by Linnea Sinclair

  He didn’t care about the cloying smell, didn’t care about anything except removing his uniform and that thin bit of lace sloppily wrapped around her….

  Then she saw the scars on his chest and arms. And as his hands moved to cup her heavily powdered face, she saw powermesh on his palms and the two small ports at the base of his wrists.

  She jerked back, her mouth pursed as if she’d just tasted something sour.

  “Yer that thing, that ’cybe, ain’t you? Whassyer name?” she drawled.

  “Kel-Paten,” he answered automatically, swaying slightly toward her.

  “Yeah, thass right.” She looked him up and down. “You may look like real people all right, but they ain’t payin’ me enough to do the likes of you.” Then she snatched her lace robe from the bed and bolted out the door.

  He stood there shaking, pained. Shamed.

  Killing Serafino wouldn’t have erased the pain or the shame. But it would have helped.

  GALAXUS COCKPIT

  Eden sat cross-legged on the floor of the cockpit next to the nav station and sipped at her cup of hot tea. Serafino swiveled his chair around, his back to the nav station, Reilly sprawled across his lap. Tasha—very much in the role of captain—had just spent a good ten minutes laying down the law to Serafino and then, with a sigh, ordered him off duty. Everyone was tired, everyone was worried. Tempers were short. Take ten, she’d told him, and let Eden check your broken arm.

  So they took ten, during which time Eden removed the regen band and certified him fit for light duty—at least, his left arm was. She wasn’t making any prognosis about his head. Oh, he was still talking to her telepathically. Teasing her. But he shut her out from anything beyond that. She took another sip of her Orange Garden. At least the galley stocked that. She needed some good news.

  She glanced at Tasha in the captain’s chair, hunched in concentration over the command console, her aura pulsing tiredness, frustration. Kel-Paten was nowhere to be seen.

  Bringing the admiral’s image to mind—and the hard, frightening edge of anger that rolled over her empathic senses earlier, jolting her awake—she reached out in thought for Jace, nudging his foot with hers at the same time. Did you need to hurt him that badly?

  Jace gave a mental sigh.

  It’s not cruel, sweetling. Remember, he’s a protégé of PsyServ and no doubt the annual winner of the Most Devoted Triadian Officer award. Until I peel away those impenetrable layers he’s concocted, I won’t truly know whose side he’s on. Whatever happened to him because of Sass opened a hole in his defenses. That’s my only way into his mind and his only way out of whatever programming PsyServ embedded in there. Do you understand now?

  She did. But it was a frightening and dangerous route he’d chosen. All the more so because he was blocking her view of his path—a path he seemed to enjoy a bit more than she was comfortable with.

  It had been almost an hour since the admiral stormed off to the main cabin. On a small ship like the Galaxus, there was no room for histrionics. But Sass gave Kel-Paten some space because what precipitated his departure had wrenched Eden out of a deep sleep, made her grab Sass and propel her to the cockpit with no explanation other than a frantic “Make them stop it now!”

  Sass had stopped what looked to be a spillover from the admiral’s botched interrogation of Serafino. He’d walked out of that too. So she knew he needed time to power down. But when he didn’t return after a reasonable time, she decided to go after him—not out of concern for whatever sparked the tiff, she told herself. What sparked the tiff was Kel-Paten and Serafino in a small ship. And not because she was worried about him. She wasn’t worried about him. He was a ’cybe, and his anger—his love letters to her notwithstanding—was programmed. The fact was, they had to make some important decisions to get the shuttle dirtside. Decisions she knew the admiral wasn’t going to like. Best to get that over with. They were about twenty hours out from a max GEO orbit, at which time additional critical decisions would come into play.

  Serafino was placing both his and Eden’s empty mugs into the recyc panel when Sass stood. The two had been suspiciously quiet during their break. She had a feeling—no, she knew—Eden knew what had set Kel-Paten at Serafino’s throat. She trusted her friend would tell her when Serafino wasn’t around. “You have the ’con, ’Fino. I’m going to brief Kel-Paten on our schedule.”

  Jace started to head for the captain’s chair. Sass laughed and pointed to the copilot’s chair. “Over there. I’m still in charge here, big boy.”

  “Just wanted to see if you’d notice,” he drawled with a wink.

  “My ass,” she quipped back, and hit the hatchway release. His laughter followed her as she stepped through.

  Kel-Paten was seated in the last row, staring out a small viewport. He didn’t turn when the hatchway opened, or at the sound of Serafino’s deep laughter, or when the hatch thunked closed. He didn’t turn when her footsteps came down the aisle toward him. And he didn’t turn when she sat next to him. It was as if he’d crawled in somewhere deep and dark and locked the door after him. Locking everyone else out.

  However, with less than twenty hours of fuel on board and stuck in some gods-forgotten corner of the gods-knew-what galaxy, Sass had no time to mollycoddle him.

  “Serafino and I will take the shuttle in,” she announced without any preliminaries. “We have considerable heavy air time, and he has more freighter experience than any of us. And this thing, once we hit heavy air, is going to fly like an overloaded ten-bay freighter.”

  That got his attention. His face jerked toward her, and she was surprised by the bleakness in his eyes. She expected anger after what had happened in the cockpit. Or perhaps even righteous indignation.

  The surrender she saw made no sense. Though his question did shed some light on the subject.

  “You think I’m losing my mind, don’t you?”

  “Serafino excels at fraying your last nerve,” she said. “And you, no doubt, also fray his. We’re all stuck in a rather small shuttle with very little fuel left. Whether or not you’re losing your mind is the least of my worries.”

  “Then why did you decide to have Serafino assist without consulting me?”

  She shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t agree. And we don’t have time to argue.”

  “Am I arguing now?”

  His tone was too calm. It worried her. But she didn’t have time to worry.

  “No,” she said.

  “Do you think I don’t trust you?” he asked quietly.

  She’d thought that for quite some time. Until she read those damned personal logs of his. Logs she tried hard to forget every time she caught him looking at her with that almost pleading look in his eyes.

  Like now.

  She picked at some nonexistent lint on her sleeve. “I think there have been misunderstandings on both our parts. You and I operate from different command methodologies.” She looked back at him. “I didn’t ask Serafino to fly right seat to undermine you, Kel-Paten. He has the heavy air experience. It’s not like we’re going to get a second chance at putting this bucket down.”

  “You made a wise decision,” he told her softly.

  She tried unsuccessfully to keep the look of surprise from her face. “Thank you.”

  “If the engines do start to blow, I can do a lot more good hands on than I could in the cockpit,” he continued.

  Being in the engine compartment would also put the necessary space between himself and Serafino. “You don’t sound overly optimistic.”

  “I’m not. You saw the damage. The Galaxus has only rudimentary heavy-air capabilities. When we hit the planet’s atmosphere, we could encounter additional problems.”

  Sass understood now what was so odd about Kel-Paten. It was as if he’d deleted the part of him that was human. His phrasing was automatic, mechanical. And, save for the humanly strained look in his pale eyes, he was all ’cybe. Unemotional. Reporting the facts.

  “Are we talking total engine
failure here?” she asked.

  “Do you want probabilities?”

  She had to keep herself from raising her eyes to the mythical Five Heavens. He was definitely in a mechanical mode now. “Why not?” she replied grimly.

  “There’s a seventy-six-point-five percent chance of total engine failure. A forty-three-point-two percent chance we’ll experience more than a fifty percent loss of power upon atmospheric entry. A—”

  “Miracle, Kel-Paten,” she cut in. “What’s the percent probability for a miracle?”

  He regarded her plainly. “I don’t believe in miracles.”

  “I base my life on them.”

  He seemed shaken by her statement, a small spark of human emotion flashing briefly in his eyes. “Do you?”

  “Bet your ass I do.” She stood, braced one hand on the back of his seat, and looked down at him. “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one. We’re all going to walk away from this one. I’ll give you a one hundred percent probability on that, flyboy.”

  She hadn’t called him that in a long time. He closed his eyes, but not before Sass saw the undisguised heat in them.

  She straightened, stepping back. She was so used to interacting on a personal level with her crew, sometimes she forgot and did the same thing with Kel-Paten. Only things weren’t the same. He was a ’cybe. And he wanted her in a way a ’cybe shouldn’t.

  She tossed a light parting comment over her shoulder as she headed back to the hatchway. “When we land, you get to buy me a beer, Kel-Paten. And if we don’t make it,” she stopped at the hatchway and turned, “you still get to buy me a beer. In the hell of your choice.”

  She returned to the cockpit, tried to forget the bleakness in Kel-Paten’s pale eyes. And the exactness of his probabilities: seventy-six-point-five percent chance of a total engine failure.

  Seventy-six-point-five percent chance that twenty hours from now, they’d all be dead.

  And she’d be sipping hot beer in hell.

  “Let’s take her in, ’Fino.”

  Sass tapped a command into the console before her. The Galaxus responded, her sublight engines cycling off. And, with a slight jolt, the emergency heavy-air engines kicked on. All systems were—if not at optimum—at least showing green. And, equally important, Tank and Reilly were securely stowed in a makeshift survival kennel just outside the cockpit hatchway. Eden came up with the design, and the admiral somehow created it—from what, Sass had no idea—while Serafino took his required three-hour nap in the main cabin. She and Eden had done what they could to keep the two apart in the hours following the confrontation. The kennel was simply an idea that served double-duty.

  Sass glanced at the furzels’ life signs, knowing Eden monitored them as well.

  They were annoyed, perhaps, at being cooped up, but fine.

  She turned back to the ship’s readouts and coordinated landing data with Serafino. Eden had designated a southern area of the largest landmass as the most amenable area for them to put down. The CMO’s scans showed a sizable freshwater supply, lush vegetation, and, more important, an adjacent mountain range that contained a possible fuel source if they could mine and convert the natural ore. But that was a distant problem. Getting this bucket down was the immediate one.

  “Firing thrusters,” Serafino told her. She watched their attitude, speed, and temperature carefully. Coming through the planet’s atmosphere, they could encounter any number of problems, not the least of which would be in response to the damage the vessel had already incurred.

  She tapped open the mike on her headset. “Status, Kel-Paten.”

  “Holding our own,” came back the reply from the engine compartment belowdeck.

  “I’m keeping this line open,” she told him. “First sign of any trouble, you talk to me, got it?”

  “Affirmative.”

  The shuttle shimmied slightly. Sass glanced over at Serafino. “We’re getting some vibrational feedback from the deep-space shields.”

  “Hmm.” He keyed in a few adjustments. “I don’t want to reduce them more than that. Not yet. We need the drag.”

  She noted his changes. “Agreed.”

  Serafino put the shuttle through the first of a series of S-curves, bleeding off extra speed. His flamboyance, his arrogance, was noticeably absent, and his focus as he handled the bulky craft was almost Kel-Paten-like.

  “ETA thirty-two minutes thirty-four seconds,” Eden said from her post at navigation.

  “Thirty-two thirty-four,” Sass repeated. “You hear that, Kel-Paten?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Talk to me about the drop in coolant level,” she continued. “What’s our rate?”

  “Moderate,” came back the reply.

  “Moderate, my ass. I need numbers!” Next to her, Serafino adjusted the craft’s attitude as the shimmying started again.

  “Your job is to bring this thing in, Sebastian. I’ll keep the mechanicals online.”

  “You can be very annoying sometimes, Kel-Paten, you know that?”

  “Thank you.”

  Serafino raised one eyebrow. “Sometimes?” he said loudly enough for her headset mike to pick up.

  “Fuck you, Serafino,” Kel-Paten’s deep voice growled over the speaker.

  “You’re not my type, Tin Soldier,” Serafino shot back.

  “Enough, boys!” Eden voiced her displeasure before Sass could.

  The black starfield outside the forward viewport was replaced by a deeper blue, then a lighter blue as the shuttle hurtled through Haven-1’s atmosphere. Hull temperature increased, not critically but worth watching. Serafino worked the shields, but Sass could tell by the frown on his face that they weren’t responding as he would have liked.

  “Thing flies like a rock,” he muttered when, for the third time in less than five minutes, the shuttle shimmied almost out of control, her thrusters straining audibly.

  “Worse than a ten-bay freighter,” Sass agreed. She needed to be able to buffer their descent with the thrusters. But given the damage they’d received, she didn’t dare bring them online until she absolutely had to.

  Gravity exerted a more potent pull on the shuttle, warning messages flaring correspondingly.

  “We have to reduce those shields,” Sass told Serafino.

  “I don’t like this, but…” He made the adjustments.

  “I know. Eden?”

  “Twenty-two minutes, fifteen,” Eden replied, and wiped her hand over her brow. The interior temperature of the shuttle had increased dramatically in the past few minutes and would get worse as the deep-space shields came off-line.

  But it had to be. The Galaxus wasn’t a heavy-air craft. The only way the ship would be able to negotiate in that foreign environment would be to reduce power to the shields and siphon it to the engines and thrusters.

  Minutes later, the grating whine of the engines crested, then sputtered. The shuttle veered sharply to port.

  Sass grabbed the armrest with one hand and frantically keyed in adjustments with the other.

  “Kel-Paten! Talk to me!”

  The response that came back was strained. “Thruster failure…feed lines one and two out…doing what…I can.”

  “Shit!” she said. “’Fino?”

  He was already rerouting the remaining power feeds. “We’ve just encountered a storm cell. It may not be the smoothest of entries,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Seventeen minutes, ten,” Eden told them over the ship’s rattling and groaning.

  They broke through into the cloud layer, the brightness of a flash of lightning almost blinding.

  “We’re coming in way too hot!” Sass tried to alter the angle of their descent, with no success.

  “Braking vanes will shear off at this speed,” Serafino noted tensely.

  As if in response, the shuttle shuddered violently again, prompting a flurry of activity in the cockpit. Sass watched the readouts with a critical eye. She had no doubt they were pushing the shuttle to its de
sign limits. She was surprised there weren’t more systems shutdowns than the ones already…

  Then she knew. She knew what was keeping them together at this point. Her breath caught.

  “Fifteen minutes even,” Eden said.

  “Damn him! Bloody fool’s spiked himself in!” Sass unsnapped her harness and thrust herself to her feet, ripping the headset off. “’Fino, you have the con. Just do what you can!” She bolted through the cockpit hatchway, past the kennel, and ran toward the rear of the craft.

  Sass scrambled down the ladderway into the engine compartment, one look confirming her guess. Kel-Paten sat on the floor next to the dismantled main power panel, datalinks snaking from the panel to the small ports in his left hand. His head was bowed, his breathing ragged.

  She hunkered next to him and grabbed his forearm. “What in hell do you think you’re doing? Spike out now!”

  His face was covered with a sheen of sweat, his eyes a bright luminous blue. “Desperate…times.” His voice was thin, raspy.

  “Spike out, Kel-Paten, or I’ll rip those things right out of you,” she said harshly.

  “Too risky. Systems are…unstable.”

  “Damn it, this’ll kill you!”

  “No…”

  “I don’t have time to argue.” She reached for the datalines. His right hand clasped her wrist.

  “No. Tasha…” His voice was barely above a whisper, and the hand that held her wrist trembled.

  She stared at him. He’d kill himself. She knew that, knew the energy requirements of slowing and landing the shuttle would take every bit of life from him. Suddenly she realized how very wrong everyone’s appraisals were of the man called Branden Kel-Paten. He was willing to lose his life to save hers. To save even Serafino’s.

  He was choosing to die. She had to make him choose to live.

  She kissed him with a passion born of desperation, fear, and anger, taking advantage of his gasp of surprise to let her tongue probe his mouth. He leaned into her, wanting more, and she willingly gave it. Because behind her desperation and fear and anger was something else. Something that recognized how empty her life would be without his damnably annoying steadfast presence. His devotion to her—so misplaced, but so very much needed.