Looking first taken aback and then angry, Mel snarled back at her, “What is it with you, anyway? That time of the month?”
“Excuse me,” Anya said tightly, getting up abruptly and leaving the mess hall.
She slammed into Laine as she rounded a corner. They both fell back a step and glared at one another. “I’m surprised you’re not wearing a big cat-that-ate-the-canary grin,” he growled.
“What the hell are you talking about, asshole?” Anya demanded indignantly.
He blinked, but his scowl returned fairly quickly. “They gave you a go on examining your pet rock.”
A mixture of emotions roiled through Anya so rapidly she couldn’t identify the half of them. Finally, she pasted a feral grin on her lips. “Better?” she asked.
His lips pinched. “More like I’d expect out of you!” he retorted and turned on his heel, heading back toward the bridge. “Keep me in the loop!” he called over his shoulder.
Anya was still angry when she reached the med lab and she had no idea why. She paced for a time, irritated that the obelisk hadn’t already been delivered to her. She was on the point of striding to the communicator and demanding to know why the hell Laine had told her she was to be able to examine the alien artifact and he still hadn’t delivered it to her. What was she supposed to do? Go down to the bay and fetch it back by herself?
The unreasonableness of her attitude abruptly struck her forcefully, however.
Stopping with her finger suspended over the button, she drew her hand back. After a moment, she moved to the stool that sat in one corner and settled on it. Melanie was right, she thought irritably. She was behaving as if her hormones were in flux and she had no reason to be in that state. It wasn’t even nearly time for her courses, because she had had her period only the week before.
She was tired, but she didn’t think that could explain her agitation and irritability, unnerved by their near brush with disaster the day before—unnerved by the alien artifact for that matter, but even so it just wasn’t like her to be so mercurial. She was usually so cool headed, so laid back.
What had gotten in to her?
She’d snapped at Melanie for nothing.
She’d been nasty to Laine when she should have been ecstatic about his news.
Closing her eyes, she began to work on relaxing the tension in her body, breathing slowly and deeply, focusing her mind on each part of her body and consciously forcing the tension from it.
It would have been better if she could have lain down, but she found it worked after a fashion anyway. She felt far more like herself when she’d finished, less like she would explode.
She heard the men quarreling before they reached the lab with the object. Opening her door, she watched them as they maneuvered the eerie black obelisk down the corridor.
It had never seemed narrow to her before, but the artifact made it so, dwarfed the men struggling with it. She stepped back out of the way as they reached the med lab, glancing around belatedly to see where she wanted them to put it. The examination table could be moved. The scanner couldn’t.
Moving to the table she tried to shove it out of the way and discovered she couldn’t. When she knelt to examine the bottom, she saw why. It was bolted to the floor. Embarrassed, wondering why she hadn’t realized immediately that it would be, she came erect again as the men began struggling to maneuver the flat cart carrying the thing through the door. They fought it for several moments before it finally dawned on them the obelisk was too wide for the door.
Settling to measuring it, Vance finally stood. “We’ll have to lift the heavy son-of-a-bitch and turn it on its side!” he growled.
“I need it here so I can run a scan on it, but the table’s bolted to the floor.”
She saw that he was sweating with effort as he stared at her, examined the table, and then stared at her again. “We’ll put it on the table,” he responded tersely.
She was about to tell him that wouldn’t do at all because then she wouldn’t have an examination table for potential patients besides the fact that she’d need a ladder to get high enough to look down at the top. She thought better of it after she’d examined the men’s faces. “Sure.”
It took another fifteen minutes for them to turn the thing on its side and manhandle it through the door that wasn’t wide enough for both them and the object. When they’d left again, she stood staring thoughtfully at the door, wondering if Melanie had been closer to right than she was. Was it possible they were all beginning to suffer from dementia? And if so, what had triggered it?
More importantly, she supposed, did she have enough medication on hand to deal with the problem?
Turning finally, she surveyed the black obelisk, feeling a shiver work its way down her spine. It looked more like a coffin than ever and she wondered if there was any possibility that that was what it was—that whatever was inside it had been ‘buried’ in space and then had dropped in their laps.
That didn’t explain any of the strange things already associated with it, however. It had changed speed and trajectory. It had even managed to almost maneuver right into their landing bay without mishap—almost. Without guidance or propulsion, however—if it was a coffin it certainly wouldn’t have either—how had that happened?
Emptying her mind of suppositions with an effort, she bent to the task of extracting data. When she’d set the scanner to work, she went to her medical supply cabinet to examine it for any medicines that would be suitable for treatment of dementia if, in fact, that was what she was seeing. To her relief, she found a couple of medications she thought would help. There wasn’t a great deal of the medication generally prescribed for it, but she had several different types of sedatives, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics, enough, surely, to deal with the problem if there was one.
The big question was how was she going to administer the drugs if she found it necessary? Nobody had even been down to the infirmary for so much as an aspirin.
Locking the cabinet again, she turned to watch the progress of the scanner while she pondered the problem.
The scanner had covered maybe half the obelisk when the lights winked out. She scarcely had time for an indrawn gasp of surprise when they came on again, but then irritation surfaced as the scanner automatically reset itself.
“Damn it!”
Sighing, she stood with her arms crossed, tapping her foot as the scan began again. The scanner nearly made it all the way to the end of the thing before the lights winked off again.
“Shit! Damn it! Damn it! What the hell’s going on!” she exclaimed, stalking toward the door as the backup lights kicked in. The door opened sluggishly. As she stepped into the corridor, she saw Laine stalking toward her, his face eloquent of frustration to match hers.
“What’s up with the lights?”
He stopped and looked at her. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.” Glancing past her shoulder, he stared at the obelisk for a moment and finally stepped inside. “What have you found out so far?”
Anya frowned at him. “Nothing. Not a damn thing! I haven’t managed to get a full scan yet. I get part way through and the lights flicker and the scanner resets. What’s wrong with the power?”
He shook his head. “We’re leaking.”
“What?” Anya demanded, completely mystified.
He glanced at her absently. “Power drain. It seemed localized in the bay. I figured it was from the damage yesterday, but we finally got everything working ok down there. Now we’re having a problem on this level.”
Uneasiness wafted through Anya. “How bad?”
“Bad enough,” he said curtly.
“Life threatening?”
“Hopefully we’ll track it down before that becomes a concern.”
“Hopefully?”
He glared at her. “What do you want me to tell you, Rambo? We don’t know what’s causing it and until we do I can’t say whether or not we can fix it. You think it could be the scanner?”
&nb
sp; “I don’t see how,” Anya responded, lifting her head to stare at the equipment. “It was working fine before.”
“You’ve used it?”
“I used it on everyone when I did a six month check up, remember?”
“You haven’t used it since then, though?”
She thought it over. “A couple of months back when Russo fell and we thought he’d broken his leg.”
He nodded. “I need to get the techs in here to check it anyway.”
Irritation surfaced, but Anya resolutely tamped it. It wasn’t like she was going to make any progress with the lights going off every few minutes. “Give me a minute to see if the scanner got anything at all. If it did, I’ll upload the data to my personal computer and look it over in my quarters.”
Curled up on her bunk in her quarters a few minutes later, Anya waited tensely for her computer to bring up the data the scanner had managed to record before it went down the second time. Disappointment filled her, however, when it finally did come up.
It looked corrupted. “Damn it!”
She studied it anyway, trying to see if she could glean any data from among the garbage. She had already deleted a full page before it dawned on her that it wasn’t garbage. It was data. It was their onboard computer trying to decipher information it found completely indecipherable. The material the artifact had been fashioned from didn’t conform to any known materials, manmade or natural. It contained elements of a few recognizable minerals, however.
Feeling a headache coming on after a while, she decided to close her eyes for a few minutes and try to will the tension away.
Chapter Four
She was standing on the hill this time. When she looked around she was almost disappointed to see that she was on Earth. The alien landscape had intrigued her and she’d wanted to study it more closely.
The sun was lower in the sky this time, nearing sunset.
When she turned finally to look at the area where she’d seen the man appear before, she saw that he was already climbing the hill toward her.
His face wasn’t devoid of emotion this time. He was angry. She saw it in the glitter in his eyes and the harsh lines of his face, the set of his jaw and lips, the line between his brows that had drawn the dark, golden-brown twin arches together. She saw it in the tension of his body and the stiffness of his movements.
“Why did you leave?” he demanded in a low, growling voice.
Surprise and confusion filled her at the question. Alarm filled her, too, because he was one big mother, but she dismissed that. “I didn’t leave. I was never here to start with,” she retorted. “This is only a dream.”
He looked disconcerted. She had a feeling he wasn’t disconcerted often. A look of cunning swept over his handsome face after a moment. “If it is only a dream it cannot matter what happens in the dream, can it?”
Uneasiness wafted through her. “Why do I have a feeling this is a trick question?” she responded uneasily.
A slow smile lit his face, beginning with a gleam of amusement in his deep blue eyes that made them twinkle, spreading to his lips, which curled upward, then parted to reveal even white teeth, growing until laugh lines creased his cheeks and the corners of his eyes and Anya’s belly began to shimmy. “Because you have a suspicious nature?”
He was teasing. She didn’t know why she found that so surprising, or so—charming that she found herself smiling back at him like an idiot, but she did. She looked away, determined to resist his allure, reminding herself that he had no more discrimination that the next man. It was all about conquest. There was nothing the least personal about it beyond a determination to use her body for their pleasure. “I don’t see that it mattered anyway—that I left. From what I heard from Melanie you had a whale of a good time without me.”
Something flickered in his eyes. “This bothers you?”
She gave him a look. “Not particularly,” she lied easily. “I was only pointing out that you obviously found someone—several someone’s—to play with besides me. And, that being the case, I think the anger’s a little out of proportion. Don’t you?”
“No. I chose you.”
“Well—tough! I didn’t choose you.”
He tilted his head curiously. He was frowning again, but this time it was more confusion than anger. “Why not?”
She had to bite her lip to keep from smiling at his expression. Obviously, he wasn’t accustomed to being turned down.
“I am not,” he responded as if she’d spoken aloud. “You find my form as desirable as I do yours. I would give as much pleasure to you as I take for myself. I can give you pleasure such as you have never known before.”
“A master of pleasures of the flesh, huh? You’d no doubt be surprised to hear this, but there are a lot of men that think that and they’re usually wrong.”
His lips tightened in irritation. Instead of responding directly, however, he asked another question. “What is a tight ass?”
Anya issued a snort of a laugh that time, unable to keep it in. “God! Even the guys in my dreams are calling me that now!”
He moved toward her. She didn’t see him move. One moment he was standing a good three feet away and the next he was chest to face with her—because he towered over her—one of his great hands cupping one of her buttocks. “This is ass. Taut? Is that tight ass?”
“Having trouble with the slang, are you?” Anya asked with amusement. “Don’t feel badly about it. Foreigners usually do.”
“Why does Laine think you are a tight ass?” he demanded.
“Because I won’t fuck him—and, like you, he’s laboring under the impression that he’s a master at pleasuring women and he can’t figure out why I won’t let him.”
She felt absolute fury radiate from him for a moment. “This man appeals to you?”
Unnerved as she was by the sense that his temper was barely held in check, she shrugged almost off handedly. “Actually, he does on a physical level—just like you do. I don’t especially like him, however. I don’t admire him. I don’t respect him. I don’t trust him. He doesn’t interest me on a mental level, or as a friend, or a companion, and, because I find him lacking in every other way, he doesn’t really turn me on.”
He digested that in silence for several moments and finally his anger began to dissipate. “You seek a mate.”
Anya was more than a little taken aback, because it was more of a statement of fact than a question and she had the uncomfortable feeling that he was right. “Actually, no. I’m not seeking anything because there’s nothing to find,” she said, struggling against the old sense of loss that she’d thought she had long since banished. She’d discovered from experience that casual sex just didn’t work for her. It might have if she’d never known anything better. The problem was, she did. She’d loved once—wildly, passionately, completely—and casual sex just didn’t even come close to the powerful physical and emotional completion she’d experienced with him. She knew because she’d spent a lot of time hoping to find something like that again, or even close. And the closest she’d come was when she’d developed an emotional bond with her lovers. Unfortunately, the couple of times she’d found that, she’d discovered that she and the guy were both fond of the same person—him.
That was the main reason she’d avoided Laine like the plague, she realized. She suspected she would be vulnerable to him, and Laine only cared about himself.
“What happened to him?”
She looked at him, resentful that he’d intruded on her thoughts again. “He died.”
He looked thoughtful, puzzled. “What is this, died?”
“How can you not know what died means? Ceased to exist! Left me forever!” Anya said angrily and then shook her head. “Why do I dream about you? You’re not real. You don’t exist at all. That’s why you don’t understand anything.”
“I am.”
“What?” Anya demanded. “An alien? You don’t feel anything. If you did you wouldn’t have to ask me these thin
gs. You’d know!”
“You are an arrogant species!” he said, an undertone of impatience in his voice.
“Not nearly as arrogant as you are!” Anya shot back at him.
He looked amused. “But I am a god.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Anya snapped even as everything around her vanished and she felt herself jerked upwards toward consciousness.
Her communicator was on she discovered when she opened her eyes. Laine’s features slowly focused. “Thinking? Why am I not surprised to find out you argue even in your sleep?”
Anya stared at his image for several moments, trying to gather her wits. “I must have dozed off.”
“The data must have been fascinating,” he said dryly. “We’ve got the problem with the power resolved.”
“Then I can safely do a scan?”
“As far as I know.”
He lingered until he saw as she threw the covers back that she was still fully clothed and then closed the communication when she glanced at him again. A mixture of amusement and irritation filled her. She was under no illusions either about herself or Laine. She thought she had a good figure, but so did most of the women on board because they were all in peak physical condition. She couldn’t imagine that there would be a great deal of difference between them. Why he wanted to look at her when he’d already seen all the others, she couldn’t imagine. Or why he thought it would give him a thrill.
Men!
And Laine was that most annoying of types—one of those who bragged that one woman in the dark was the same as any other—which had never made any sense to her, because that was always the type that wanted to screw every woman they ran across. If they couldn’t tell the difference, why not just stick with one?
It had to be the conquest.
After washing her face to revive herself, she left her quarters and headed down to the med lab again. Without much surprise, she discovered when she’d managed a complete scan that the readout was just as garbled as the one she’d been trying to decipher earlier.
Almost as garbled. She did discover that the thing was a capsule—hollow inside, and contained something carbon based.
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