Episode Six
The Forgotten:
Discovery
By
Kaitlyn O'Connor
© copyright by Kaitlyn O'Connor, January 2010
Cover Art by Alex DeShanks, January 2010
ISBN 1-978-60394-396-3
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author's imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
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Chapter Eleven
Kiel watched Danielle ascend the stairs to the second level, his mind curiously blank, his body so weak his muscles still trembled with the effort to hold him upright. When she disappeared from his view, he dragged his gaze from her to his cock, staring at the flaccid flesh, still glistening with his fluids-and hers, he reminded himself. Frowning, he stuffed it into his loincloth, adjusted it and looked around, trying to decide what he should be doing. The only thing that rose to mind, however, was his strange weakness and an urge to sleep that was so strong he was tempted to simply drop where he stood.
A half formed thought, more instinct than thought, really, urged him to leave rather than display that weakness to Danielle, however, and he moved to the door and went out. Unfortunately, his mind was still strangely blank when he emerged and looked around without really seeing anything. Frowning, he headed to his own habitat after a few moments of hard study to figure out what he wanted to do.
Jalen waylaid him before he could reach his goal. "What are we to do about Manuta?"
Kiel stared at him blankly. "I have not decided," he said finally. "I am going to rest for a few hours." It occurred to him abruptly that Danielle had pointed out that the injured men were thirsty, however, and he paused. "See that someone fetches water to the wounded and then everyone should rest for a few hours. We have much to do."
"Are you alright?" Jalen asked, frowning at him curiously.
"Yes." The response was automatic. In point of fact, he was not certain that he was 'alright'. All he could think about was sleeping, though, and he knew that must mean that he needed to.
He was also thirsty, painfully thirsty, but by the time he had managed to reach his habitat, he discovered he did not want water badly enough to fetch it. Instead, he climbed the stairs and collapsed on his bunk, passing from consciousness so fast he did not have time to wonder at it or feel any great concern.
Despite his intention to rest only a few hours, it was bright enough when he woke that he knew it was well past dawn. Except for the fact that he was thirstier than the night before, however, he felt surprisingly well-better than just alright, energized in a way he never had before.
And starving.
He was working on his second breakfast when Jalen and Baen arrived, unannounced. Irritation flickered through him when they simply entered his habitat and strode into the food preparation area, although he could not have said why it annoyed him. It had been a habit of Jalen's since they had become friends.
He supposed part of the resentment was due to the fact that Baen had kissed Danielle the night before and gained the upper hand when he had challenged him over it.
Then again, he had done a good deal more than kiss her, he thought, a sense of pleased smugness replacing most of his anger.
"Your wound must have been worse than you believed," Jalen said as a conversational opener as he helped himself to one of the meals in Kiel's cabinet. "I had understood that you only meant to sleep a few hours and it is nigh mid day."
Kiel sent him a startled look, flicked an assessing glance at the rear viewer, and then glared at Baen. "It was bad enough before Baen decided to drive his head into it," he growled. "In any case, I only slept a few hours. It is not much past dawn and it was nearing day when I took to my bunk."
Jalen shrugged. "Still, you are usually up at dawn."
"I would not have driven my head into your gut if I had known you were gut shot," Baen responded tightly. "I could not see that you were wounded at all and you certainly did not behave like anyone injured! You should not have challenged me to start with if you were not up to sparring!"
Kiel glared at him but decided not to try to explain that the fury was only partly because he had found Baen kissing Danielle. It was the fear that she had been hurt and the discovery that, far from it, she appeared to be enjoying herself that had sent him into a blind rage. That seemed illogical even to him, however. He should simply have been relieved that he had been wrong.
In any case, he discovered that he was not nearly as angry about that kiss as he had been.
"What the hell happened last eve?" Baen asked after a moment. "It will take weeks, perhaps months, to repair the damage from what was supposed to have been a simple operation!"
"You have been too preoccupied going over what happened between you and Danielle to question anyone?" Kiel shot at him.
Baen flushed with anger, but a look of smug satisfaction settled over his features for all that that evoked the urge in Kiel to punch him in the face. Jalen slugged him in the jaw, snapping his head sideways before Kiel could decide whether to go with the impulse or not. Surging to his feet, Kiel blocked Baen's attempt to retaliate. "Go outside if you are inclined to spar about it. My habitat is fucked up enough as it is."
Baen and Jalen glared at one another balefully for several moments but apparently decided against sparing for the moment. Jalen settled on a stool with his food and Baen, rubbing his jaw, got up to find something to eat. "No one seems to know what happened," Baen responded finally.
Kiel shrugged. "Manuta had a backup power unit."
"If Manuta suspected we would try to disable it, then it is a very good thing that we struck when we did. Undoubtedly, we were not as discreet as we had thought we were."
"I do not know that Manuta had constructed it for that reason. It may have had the emergency power for some time. You are right, though. Manuta did suspect that we had planned something and it misunderstood. Manuta thought we meant to destroy it, not disable it."
Jalen and Baen exchanged a long look.
"Well, its logic circuits were clearly defective!" Jalen said angrily. "And Manuta has brought about its own destruction when we had only meant to disable it!"
Kiel frowned. "You have examined it? It is completely destroyed?"
"Heavily damaged. I do not know that we could restore it to the way it was," Baen answered disgustedly.
Kiel felt the last of his good humor vanish. A sense of loss took its place that was hard to understand. "How many did not recover from their wounds?"
"Nigh sixty have been terminated," Baen responded. "There are nigh twenty more that are so badly damaged that it will take a while for their nanos to repair them-days, perhaps months. None of us have ever suffered that much damage. There is no way to calculate it."
Shock rolled over Kiel. "Gods! So many? How?"
"Manuta turned the construction bots on the workers at the project site. They were taken completely off guard. I suppose they thought as we all did that Manuta could not communicate properly with the wall blocking transmissions. Well, we know that for a fact. However, it managed to send out a signal to attack, mayhap contacted those outside who forwarded the communications to the others. We will never be certain, now, and I am not sure that it matters. The deed is done now."
Kiel frowned. The food he had consumed with such gusto began feel like a rock in his belly. "I think we must accept, though, that Manuta not only realized our intent but had already considered terminating the cyborgs if it was prepared. We thought that we were engaged in a covert operation and we have fought a war."
; Jalen and Baen both looked doubtful and angry, but neither of them argued the matter. Kiel discovered that he had completely lost his appetite and shoved his food away. "How are repairs going?"
"We have not gotten to repairs yet," Jalen responded. "We have been cleaning up. The server bots are all disabled."
Kiel frowned at that news. He glanced at Baen after a moment. "We should meet with the other captains and discuss what we are to do next."
* * * *
The feeling of well-being that Danielle woke with was akin to coming awake with an adrenaline rush. She didn't just feel 'fine'. She felt wonderful, filled with anticipation, happy. Stretching all over, making no attempt to quell the smile that seemed determined to curl her lips, she began a search for the reason behind her good mood. It was a short search. Images began to fill her mind almost instantly of her lovemaking with Kiel the night before, making all the right places tingle with remembered pleasure.
Chuckling with sheer exuberance, she bounded out of bed, not even mildly irritated by the stickiness between her legs, and headed for the shower.
Alright, maybe a little. She'd forgotten when she headed upstairs that she couldn't bathe, damn it! She'd gotten into the habit of taking the one shower allotted to her first thing in the morning to help her wake up. Kiel had been gone by the time she trudged back downstairs again and cleaned up the best she could with the piddling bit of water she could get in the kitchen.
Mildly disappointed that he hadn't stayed long enough for another round, she'd dismissed it with the reflection that it was probably just as well. It wasn't as if she actually felt a need for more. She couldn't recall the last time she'd felt so thoroughly satisfied. It was rather like eating something delicious, though-she wanted more like the first even though she was satisfied.
Well, she thought dismissively, there was more where that came from!
She frowned at that thought, feeling her first twinge of uneasiness. By the time she'd finished bathing, horror had pretty much annihilated her good mood of before.
Not only had she started out trying to seduce Baen and not, she'd practically climbed up Kiel and mounted him without bothering to set any ground rules whatsoever!
"Oh god! This is a disaster!" she muttered, wondering how the hell she was going to manage to establish boundaries, now, when she hadn't made any attempt to establish them before she'd had sex with Kiel.
She tried to convince herself while she was eating her breakfast that she probably didn't really need them but failed since she knew damned well that they didn't even know the customs of their own people, let alone hers!
And he'd left before she could recover her wits enough to even think about it! "Damn it!"
It was unfortunate that it popped in her mind that she'd explained it to Baen. Because the moment she thought about the possibility that he might have passed the information to any of the others, Kiel in particular, she realized that that was not only extremely doubtful. But any attempt on his part to do so after what had happened the night before was likely to result in a fight.
She'd gotten herself into just the kind of mess that she had wanted to avoid at all costs! Baen was obliged to be pissed off that she'd gotten him all worked up and failed to honor her end of the deal and Kiel had already been pissed off about her kissing Baen.
Fortunately, the thought of them fighting distracted her, or at least sent her mind off at a different tangent.
They'd fought a major battle in the settlement the night before while she'd been occupied with Baen down by the river. It was disconcerting that she hadn't even realized what was going on. Not that she hadn't heard the commotion! She had, but she'd dismissed it as night exercises. The construction went on all night anyway and there was always noise emanating from the construction site. It could well have been going on for a while before she even noticed the other noises didn't sound like construction but rather destruction!
Actually, she'd thought, at first, that the booming was a storm coming up. She'd been too focused on Baen to realize that she was hearing gunfire and even when she had, she'd decided it was just night exercises.
It hadn't been, though! Even with darkness shrouding the compound, she'd seen signs of a major battle and it occurred to her abruptly to wonder what the hell had started it. One of the soldiers had said it was Manuta, but why? Right out of the blue, Manuta had suddenly decided to wipe out the settlement?
She had a bad feeling that there'd been nothing 'out of the blue' about it. An uncomfortable sense of guilt settled in the pit of her stomach that she could neither dismiss nor explain. Was it significant that Manuta had tried to wipe out the colony after she came, or not?
She didn't know, but that added to the sense of doom that was rapidly overtaking what was left of the good mood that she'd awakened with.
Dare she go out and see if she could discover what had happened?
Finished with her meal, she got up and paced, thinking it over, trying to decide if it was a really bad idea to try to appease her curiosity or not.
Kiel had seemed to be pissed off about her wandering around outside the night before, but he hadn't specifically ordered her to stay inside. He'd said before that she could come and go as she liked as long as she didn't leave the settlement without an escort for protection. Did that still apply? Or had the rules changed when Manuta attacked?
Maybe she was overreacting, she thought hopefully? Maybe Kiel hadn't really thought anything about it. He'd wanted to fuck. She'd obliged, and he'd left satisfied?
That wasn't a particularly happy thought, she discovered. She decided she didn't want to examine it too closely. She hadn't just established the ground rules for Baen's benefit. She'd been marking her own boundaries. They needed to have at least some idea of what sort of behavior was acceptable and what wasn't if they were going to charge off planet in search of mates. She owed it to her own people to make certain of that even if she hadn't offered to befriend the Danu in an effort to gain allies.
Not that she was trying to convince herself that her motives were purely altruistic! She'd realized fairly quickly that she was pretty needy herself.
And there was nothing wrong with that!
Not as long as she was upfront about the limitations, which she hadn't been with Kiel!
As unpleasant as it was to consider discussing it after the fact she realized she didn't really have a choice. She needed to be sure that Kiel understood that what had happened between them the night before was nothing more than two people appeasing their needs. She couldn't allow him to the get the idea that she was willing to have a baby for him-any baby right now for anybody!
She doubted that they thought in the terms she was used to. Despite her attempts to explain, she was pretty sure they were still looking at mating as being a onetime shot and then moving on to the next available female as quickly as possible. Didn't the fact that Kiel had left as soon as he'd finished support that?
It was amazing how much that thought irritated her! And depressed her.
She shook it off, reflecting that it could only be considered a good thing if she was right. It would definitely make things easier when she had to explain her position on the subject. It probably wasn't even necessary, but she couldn't take the chance that he might have misunderstood. She wasn't a Politian, but even she could see that it could make for really bad relations between the Danu and her people if they started out with a misunderstanding like that.
* * * *
Baen, Kiel, Aeyn and Dex stood on the city wall watching the armies approach from the south, east, and west, their expressions grim. There were others moving in from the north-in fact from all points between.
"I had not expected this," Aeyn said finally.
"Manuta summoned them before we could shut it down," Dex said with conviction. "They know only what Manuta told them."
"That seems likely," Kiel agreed dryly. "We will have to go out and negotiate a truce."
Baen frowned, his mind leaping instantly fro
m the strategic disaster they were facing to Danielle. "I think we should discuss strategies with our first lieutenants before we leave Manu for any attempt at negotiations."
The other three glanced at him sharply. "It will not hurt, though I do not see much point in it," Dex responded, voicing the thoughts of the others.
"Danielle will be safest inside of Manuta's complex," Baen said pointedly.
"There is no place that she will be safe if we are overrun," Aeyn countered. "She would only be safe until they have destroyed us."
"He is right," Kiel responded after a few moments thought. "We cannot remove her from harm's way this time. If we had completed her ship in this time, there would be an option, but we have not. It will be better to take her with us."
"How will that be safer for her?" Baen demanded.
Kiel studied him for a long moment. "They will protect her."
Baen felt his belly tighten, but he knew Kiel was right as little as he liked it. With the entire military force of Marchet advancing upon their colony, Manu, there could be no safer place for her than among the captains of the approaching army. He swallowed a little sickly. "I will fetch her."
Kiel instantly felt an objection to that, but he tamped it. He had been fighting the urge to return to her almost from the moment he had left her. He was uncertain why, but each time it came to mind he felt an unaccountable uneasiness slither through him.
He had not asked her if she was willing to mate with him. He had … He was not entirely certain what had happened, but the fear churned in his belly each time he considered approaching her again that he had not behaved acceptably and she would react badly to seeing him again. If he had had some idea of how to defend his actions, he realized, he would not have felt so reluctant, but he did not-not when he had no clear memory of what had happened.
Beyond what he had done, that is. He remembered all of that with sharp clarity. He remembered how he had felt even more clearly than that.
He realized after a few moments that that was why he was uneasy about facing her again. Even at a distance, all that ran through his mind when he thought of her was repeating the experience and he had a very bad feeling that if he approached her he would be less able to think rationally than he had been the first time.
The Forgotten Six Page 1