She knew that darkness. It lived in her bones. She might not be able to remember how it got there, exactly—she figured she was better off not knowing the details—but it had to be a holdover from her time on Lysander.
Along with knowing how to do serious damage to someone who’d gotten rich by murdering people for pay.
No way she was getting back to sleep, even with the lights on. The cold black was so thick the cabin lights couldn’t cut it.
Maybe company would, and she knew who’d be awake and alone. Buck was pretty dark in his own right, but they could always find a little light for each other.
Besides, he always had booze. Booze might not help in the long run, but it made her feel warm and bubbly while it was dancing in her veins, and she’d take that cheap comfort for now.
Buck, Naked (Chronicles of the Malcolm 3)
To save him, she must strip him bare.
Security expert Buck’s senses are inhumanly keen, to the point he can see through time and space, and that’s just the start of his odd abilities—thank you, alien captors. He also experiences paranoia, flashbacks, and the occasional hallucination—thank you, PTSD. No wonder he fears he could hurt one of the Malcolm crewmates he lives to protect, the closest thing to family he has left after the destruction of his home planet.
Brilliant scientist Aleema can teach him how to use his modifications without triggering PTSD. She’s survived the same meddling aliens and suffered even more dramatic alterations. At least her unwanted immortality means she’s had time to figure out how the modifications work and use the knowledge to aid other survivors. Helping Buck means spending some serious time together.
Time enough to fall in love.
Just as happiness seems within their grasp, Aleema realizes one of Buck’s modifications dooms him to an unthinkable future. To save him, she must place herself in the hands of their common enemy and leave Buck to face his worst fears without her.
More information here.
BUCK WASN’T NEARLY as drunk as he’d expect to be on the day Xia, the closest thing he still had to a kid sister and never mind she was a felinoid and he was more or less human, left the Malcolm for her journeykitten run in private law enforcement. Especially considering the going-away party. Felinoids, even itty-bitty ones like Xia, could drink space marines under the table and suffer no noticeable effects. Usually he’d have kept pace with Xia and her felinoid partner, Rahal, but he barely had a shine on. It hadn’t felt right to drink too much today.
Buck was dirtside in the largest city on heavily populated Khetti, and all his inhumanly keen senses weren’t dulled by alcohol. Strangers pressed in on all sides. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but he didn’t think he was about to fall into the horrors and present a danger to everyone around him.
Granted, Khetti was peaceable, and he was with his crewmate Rita and her husband, Drax, who was a former agent of the Banjali Intelligence Corps, so if trouble erupted, he’d have backup. But being sober in a crowd was huge.
His liver must be thanking him, but he couldn’t make up his mind if he’d taken a step toward getting past his horrors or if his screwed-up brain thought he might need a twitchy trigger finger today. It was so calm here, though. Probably it was nothing more serious than his taste buds not appreciating the good booze that Rahal and the human partner in their triad, Cal, sprang for at the party; he was used to the cheap soy-based stuff that smelled like fermenting tofu.
“After seeing Rahal off for his first semi-legit work in over a decade—and I still can’t believe Cal convinced him to join the private law team after Rahal’s spent so much time breaking laws—I could go for another drink,” Drax announced to the universe at large as he twitched his rust-red and yellow wings. “Anyone else?”
Buck surprised himself by saying, “I’m more interested in a meal and a fizz than booze right now. A glaspoid kebab sounds mighty tasty.”
Rita slipped out of Drax’s sheltering wing and hugged Buck. “You know, that’s one of the first times I’ve ever heard you mention being hungry, even if you do most of the cooking on the ship.”
He immediately felt uneasy at the attention. “Without Xia around, someone’s got to be sharp and it ain’t going to be you two tipsy lovebirds. Not the captain and Gan either. They’re probably looking at old holos and getting all maudlin.” Everyone would miss Xia, but she was Mik and Gan’s adopted daughter. They needed time to themselves to adjust to her absence.
Rita smiled that sweet New Canada smile that embraced the whole galaxy and made her look even younger and far more innocent than she was. “I could use some food myself to soak up all those glowing pink cocktails. A smallish human shouldn’t even try to drink like a felinoid, and I did. Drax, can you find that place Cal took us a few days ago, the one with the crazy-good hopper poppers? I think they had kebabs too, or at least some lizard-on-a-stick thing that’s the Khetti version.”
The Banjali bowed theatrically to Rita, his wings brushing the ground. “Your wish is my command.”
Damn pretty-pretty Banjali didn’t look ridiculous doing it. Even as a young man, completely sober and with two natural legs, Buck would have face-planted trying something like that.
Drax led them from the side street they’d taken from the spaceport back to a crowded main road, its slidewalk lined by the colorful twisty towers that the natives of Khetti fancied and the human immigrants had made even bigger, brighter, and weirder.
On the side street, he’d convinced himself there was nothing to worry about. Lots of people, but he’d been managing. But in this more crowded place, Buck felt too damn exposed. Too many towers, and never mind he’d been admiring them just a few minutes ago—they were fun to look at, like giant corkscrews made from gaudy tiles—but they’d give a shooter a lot of camouflage if she dressed right. An itching started behind his right eye, the one the army had augmented so he could use any old gun like it had a fancy scope that fed right into his optic nerve, and the Seera had tweaked further because they could. Things got way too keen and sharp out of that eye, but dim and a little blurry through the unaugmented left one. The leg he’d lost to the Seera ached.
This was no place to get the horrors. Especially not when two-thirds of the folks on the street were native Khettians, who were just over a meter tall. He drew a deep breath, smiled at Rita like nothing was wrong. She grinned back. A Khettian standing next to her on the slidewalk said something he didn’t quite catch but figured was along the lines of, “Nice night, isn’t it?” For a second, seeing Rita’s familiar face and the Khettian’s unknown but friendly one, Buck convinced himself everything was fine. Just a brush of the familiar old shadows in his head that had nothing to do with the moment.
And then everything went supernova.
A laserifle shot zipped just past Drax’s left ear. Drax shoved Rita down toward the slidewalk, shouted a curse in Banjali, and lifted into the air. He only made it a few meters—Khetti’s gravity was high enough for Buck to feel a little strain, so it must be challenging for the Banjali, whose species evolved on a lower-G planet—but he was off the crowded slidewalk and behind a blue shrub with yellow flowers planted in front of an office building. It didn’t provide much cover, but Buck figured Drax wasn’t hiding so much as trying to draw fire away from Rita and the people on the street.
The shooter fired off a few more laser blasts.
Then the screaming started.
One laserifle shot might not get attention on a crowded street where no one was expecting such a thing. It made a quiet zing, a flash of light that many humans couldn’t even see, and if it missed and dissipated in the air, as it was designed to do if it didn’t hit a target in a pre-calibrated distance, people might not realize what it was. When the shrub near Drax turned into a few scorched twigs, though, it was obvious something was wrong.
Buck took a deep breath. Things got dark around him and he smelled smoke and gas that he was pretty sure were only in his head.
Two choices. He could let the ho
rrors take him or he could use the horrors. He’d been in far worse situations. This was one sniper, as far as he could tell. Piece of cake.
“Private law,” he announced loudly. There was no way anyone would give him a PL license, not even on Mrrwr, where the felinoid population encouraged what most planets called insanity. But the people around him wouldn’t know that, and Rita and Drax would play along. He’d drawn his own laserpistol without thinking about it, so he might as well work with it. “We’ve got this.”
He scanned the direction from which the shot had come, grateful that his body mostly worked as well as it used to. He was nearly forty, an age by which most humans had a vanity regens to keep everything running smoothly and looking good, but other than a few gray hairs and lines around his eyes, the years hadn’t caught up with his body. Which was good, because the medicos didn’t think he could tolerate a regen in an actual-factual medical emergency, let alone for maintenance. Too many biomods done with alien tech they didn’t understand, they said. Too risky.
But the unfortunate mods he got as a Seera POW could be useful when they weren’t making him borderline insane. This looked to be one of the useful times. He hoped. Being wrong about that tended to be unpleasant for him and dangerous for anyone who got too close.
All around him, people were screaming, running against the direction the slidewalk was traveling, trying to get inside any building they could reach. A lot of Khettians were getting knocked down in the panic by the humans who made up a good chunk of the population. The two species got along fine, but when people started acting like startled gulbas, the petite natives were no match for their larger neighbors.
“Everybody freeze!” Buck could still do a sergeant’s intimidating bellow when he needed to. For a few stunned seconds, the crowd obeyed him. He took advantage of the stillness to step off the slidewalk and steady himself on the ground.
Another shot zinged through the crowd. It missed Drax, who was in labored flight toward somewhere else, but from the scream that echoed between the buildings, it had clipped someone.
That was marling unacceptable. Bad enough Drax had an enemy serious enough to keep sending assassins after him, though that kind of thing did happen to ex-spies. But a hired gun should at least have the skill and courtesy to hit the target, not some poor bastard out running errands.
Protect. Defend. Shoot.
Other Books by Teresa Noelle Roberts
Adventurously sexy science fiction romance
The Chronicles of the Malcolm series
Thrill-Kinky
Bad Kitty
Buck, Naked
Triple Play (coming soon)
Contemporary kink
Drive
Out of Control
Knowing the Ropes
Christmas Stockings
The Lion of Frenchman Street
Yield (coming soon)
Fantasy romance
The Seasons of Sorania Cycle
Lady Sun Has Risen
Rain at Midsummer
Threshing the Grain
A Satyr for Midwinter
Dark, romantic fantasy
Blood and Lotuses
Red-hot paranormal romance
The Duals and Donovans: the Different series
Lions’ Pride
Foxes’ Den
Fox’s Folly
Cougar’s Courage
Witches’ Waves
Copyright Information
Explode: Team Supernova
Teresa Noelle Roberts
Copyright © 2017 by Teresa Noelle Roberts
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Teresa Noelle Roberts, Mansfield, MA
Inquiries should be addressed to Teresa Noelle Roberts
mailto:teresanoelleroberts@verizon.
http://www.teresanoelleroberts.com
Cover by Flirtation Designs.
Cover images © AY_PHOTO/DepositPhotos.com (human) and TsuneoMP/Shutterstock (ship)
Table of Contents
About This Book
Welcome to The Great Space Race!
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Interlude: Unedited Interview with Sarr’ma
Interlude: Unedited Interview with Tripp
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Interlude: Second Unedited Interview with Sarr’ma
Interlude: Second Unedited Tripp Interview
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Interlude: Unedited Interview with Sarr’ma
Interlude: Unedited Interview with Tripp
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Interlude: Unedited Interview with Sarr’ma
Interlude: Unedited Interview with Tripp
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Dedication and Acknowledgements
About the Author
Chronicles of the Malcolm
Thrill-Kinky (Chronicles of the Malcolm 1)
Bad Kitty (Chronicles of the Malcolm 2)
Buck, Naked (Chronicles of the Malcolm 3)
Other Books by Teresa Noelle Roberts
Copyright Information
Explode: Team Supernova (The Great Space Race) Page 21