by Jael Wye
Except for her heart, of course. Her heart was not safe with him at all.
He hadn’t said a word about them being together last night. He hadn’t made any move to touch her. Hadn’t even looked at her that much. She might not be very experienced at morning-afters, but even she knew these were bad signs.
She couldn’t be surprised, though. Once again, he had done everything he could to get close to her, and now he was pushing her away. It was getting to be a habit of his.
He had turned toward the front viewport, gazing out at nothing, his brows drawn, his thoughts a million kilometers away. She wondered what was going through his mind. Dust her if she would ask, though. She saw she was twisting her fingers in her lap again, and forced herself to stop.
“We should get going,” he finally said.
The last spark of that warm feeling inside her flickered and died. Get a grip on yourself, chic, she thought. She straightened her shoulders. Smiled pleasantly. “I’m ready,” she said. “Nothing to pack, you know.”
* * *
The rover ate up the k’s, the six big mesh wheels leaving a dusty wake on the glaze road behind them. They had left the plateau above the canyon, beginning to switchback down into the network of fissures of the Noctis system. The rover autopilot could have handled all this perfectly well, but Cesare kept it on manual control anyway. He needed the distraction. The sight of Bianca walking into the rover in nothing but her liner still had him in a sweat. If he didn’t concentrate on his driving, he would be naked with the sexiest chic on Mars under him on the bunk. Or possibly on the floor, if he couldn’t make it as far as the bunk. And, insane as it sounded, that would not be a good idea. He needed some space to get a grip on himself.
He took his eyes off the controls for a moment to slide a glance at the chic sitting quietly next to him in the cab of the rover. She didn’t seem to notice, just nibbling daintily on a meal bar as she gazed out the passenger viewport. Cool and composed as always. To look at her now no one could guess at the passion that had blazed in her last night. The way she had held nothing back from him. Memories of her twisting over him, under him, flashed through his mind. Instantly his blood ran hot in his groin. He shifted uncomfortably.
He was staring at her again, he realized. He forced his gaze back to the rover console and focused on scanning the weather and traffic feeds. Weather conditions looked normal; low wind and dust levels, the temperature at a balmy—5 degrees Celsius. On the traffic feeds, something odd snagged his attention. There was another rover on the same glaze road they were using, a few k’s back, just out of sight.
Cesare frowned. This was a little used back trail, mostly just servicing the RedIce mining sites. Traffic out here was unusual. But it was pretty far away from them. Probably nothing. After a few minutes, his mind was drifting back over the events of the morning once again.
He had woken up with his arms full of the most perfect woman he had ever had in his bed. Which was wonderful. But his head had been full of churning thoughts and strangling emotions, which was not. For a brief moment he had lain still beneath the slight weight of Bianca’s slender arm curving over his chest, and brooded.
He never woke up in a woman’s bed if he could help it. Best way to keep things simple and smooth. ’’Course, nothing involving this woman’s bed was ever going to be simple.
He had slipped out of the cot, away from the soft, sleeping curve of her and resolutely set about stowing their ruined suits and cuffs and finding something for them both to wear. Then he got Angelo on the com.
Angelo hadn’t been very happy with him this morning. He had kept the details of what had happened to an absolute minimum, but he knew Angelo would guess what was really going on with Bianca soon enough. Not much escaped his notice. And Cesare had no doubt his brother would strenuously disapprove.
But the gripe probably wouldn’t last too long. Even Angelo and his grudge couldn’t possibly stand firm against a concentrated onslaught of Bianca’s charm.
If anything, Angelo would end up aiming all his disapproval in Cesare’s direction. He would think that a chic like Bianca deserved better than to get rolled by a cowboy like him. And he would never believe that this might be more than a roll. That Cesare might want to...keep her.
And there it is. He forced himself to face the fecked up truth. He wanted to keep Bianca with him. He saw his knuckles going white as his fingers clenched around the controller.
The thought of her leaving him, going off on her own, was maddening to him. The thought of those StarLine feckers putting her in danger made him want to pound something.
He swore under his breath as he drove. None of this was like him. He wasn’t the kind of bloke who got moony over one particular woman. Everyone knew it. None of the chics he was with ever wanted anything from him but a good time.
Ay, they all knew he was good for a roll and good for a laugh and not much more. But what if this time Bianca did want more? What if he wanted more?
What has this chic done to me? he wondered with a feeling close to panic.
Just then, she glanced over at him, her eyes dark and thoughtful. Carefully, she set aside her uneaten meal bar. Dust me, here it comes. The serious emotional shite.
Her red lips parted, and he braced himself. “Cesare, I think—I think the tower crash may have been my fault,” she said.
He stared over at her. That...was not what he had expected her to say. He shifted his mental gears as fast as he could, and said, “What do you mean?”
She was twisting her fingers in her lap again, he saw, the way she did when she was truly upset. “What if the gremlin in that compac infected the tower when I was working on the GenIe problem? What if that was what triggered the collapse?”
“That’s cracked,” he said bluntly.
Her delicate brows came together. “Why?”
“In the first place, the tower had been freezing up for weeks before you came along.”
“Ay, but the gremlin might have given it that last little push that tipped it over the edge.”
Cesare shook his head. “The comps in your rover and our suits died instantly. None of the comps you interfaced with in the hab or tower did that. I think that gremlin was harmless until it was activated by an outside signal. They waited for you to get way into the Outback, and when you were far enough away from help...bam.”
She looked thoughtful, turning it over in her mind, and nodded slowly. “You might be right.” She thought some more. “They must have been watching me,” she added in a monotone.
“Ay. They must have been.” Cesare caught sight of the traffic data again and frowned. That rover was still back there. He was beginning to have a distinctly uneasy feeling about it.
“And in the second place?”
Distracted, he shot her a confused glance.
“Is there a second reason you think my poisoned comps weren’t responsible for the crash?”
He was silent for a moment. “Because the tower crash was my fault,” he said quietly. She started to shake her head, but he cut her off. “I should have replaced the units when they first started degrading. I cut corners so that I could use the money to rescue Earthers.” His mouth twisted. “And the whole time I was putting the Earthers in danger.”
“You don’t know for sure that was the cause,” she protested. “The miners couldn’t pinpoint the source of the problem. I only tracked it as far as the anchor sensors myself.”
Cesare said nothing. Things might have been different if only he had made different decisions... He had been haunted by that particular ghost ever since the lander crash ten years ago, and he was used to it. He could handle the consequences of what he had done, and not done. Bianca didn’t need to rationalize his feckups for him.
Bianca looked at him thoughtfully. “Well, when we get back to the hab, I’ll try to sort thro
ugh some of the data and get the truth. Until then, you are not to flog yourself over it. Consider that a directive from your new boss,” she said, chin in the air.
He felt his mouth quirk up in spite of himself. “Ay, M’Ross.”
She fell silent, and Cesare’s smile faded. Well, no serious emotional shite after all. He was relieved, of course. What bloke wouldn’t be?
The road had begun winding along the face of a cliff. They could peer out the side viewport and look over the edge of the narrow road ledge into a deep chasm nearly a kilometer straight down.
“What a spectacular sight,” Bianca murmured. Her fine profile fairly shone against the red chaos outside the viewport.
“Ay,” he said, “it is.” And he knew he wasn’t talking about the landscape. He set his teeth. Enough already. Once again he tore his gaze away from her and forced himself to focus on the readouts. Weather normal. Traffic...
He peered closely at the traffic feed. The cold touch of unease he had felt earlier suddenly turned to an icy jolt. The rover behind them had picked up speed. It was closing in on them fast. He punched on the visual of the road behind them. He took one look, and swore. New model rover. Bigger and faster than his. No way they could outrun it. And once it caught up to them, it would force them off the road into the bottomless canyon below, no doubt about it.
Only one thing to do. “Strap in, Bianca,” he said in a fierce, low voice. “This ride’s about to get bumpy.”
Chapter Ten
Ice
Bianca twisted in her seat at Cesare’s rough command. “What—”
He nodded sharply at the picture on the vid panel, his eyes hard. There, on the road behind them, a big, sleek rover sent a plume of dust into the sky as it charged straight for them at high speed. “I think we got bad company,” he said.
She stared at the vid, her heart stuttering. Whoever was in that rover was definitely trying to catch up with them, and when they did... Well, they probably didn’t want to invite her to tea. She looked out the viewports a little wildly. They were in the perfect spot for an ambush, she realized, trapped between the cliff face and a sheer drop off into the chasm below.
Next to her, Cesare was already strapping himself into his seat harness. Bianca quickly followed suit, snapping the belts over her shoulders and thighs with trembling fingers. “What now?” she asked tightly.
“Now, we go for a joyride.” Cesare held the controller rock-steady with one hand, the fingers of his other hand flying over the console. He called up what looked like a series of maps, studying them intently for a few seconds. Then he shot a look at her, his teeth suddenly flashing in a fierce grin. “Hang on.”
He wrenched the controller, and the rover whipped into a tight curve. The mesh wheels shrieked as they skidded and bit over the glaze road. Bianca flung out her arms in a futile attempt to brace herself as she bounced around in her harness. “Ciel!” she gasped. Cesare ignored her, his big hands flying over the controllers. A metallic groan echoed around them as the rover lurched forward up the road the way they had just come, aiming straight for the oncoming rover.
The black shape of the other rover grew larger with terrifying speed. It was only a few hundred meters away, and coming on fast. It showed no sign of wavering. Neither did Cesare. His jaw was set, his eyes narrowed.
Bianca choked in a breath. “Are you fecking cracked?” she screamed.
“Shut it, Spacebabe,” he bit out. “Driving here!”
Two hundred meters. One hundred. Fifty. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the shock of impact and the sound of crunching metal.
There was a hard jolt, and she was flung sideways and then back. Her eyes flew open. They were charging diagonally up the side of the cliff, a cliff she could have sworn was close to vertical. She looked frantically at the vidscreen. Behind them, the other rover had careened past the point where they had suddenly turned off. It ground to a halt, and began to turn around in the middle of the road below.
“They’re coming around!” she said.
Cesare didn’t reply. Dust and rock churned under their wheels and began to slide down the slope beneath them. They skidded, then caught. Skidded again. She clenched her fingers in a death grip on the edges of her seat. Behind them, the hostile rover had begun to cautiously work up the cliff after them.
Cesare forged onward, the rumbling, jolting progress up the cliff stretching on and on. Suddenly, the driver’s-side wheel reared up over the crest of the ridge. The rover stalled, every moving part screaming with strain. Then the wheels bit, and they were up and on the plateau. They tore along the narrow rib of rock between the canyon branch they had just left and the next one, the relatively flat surface making a road for them for several minutes. Just when Bianca thought the insanity was over, Cesare turned off the plateau onto a long scree slope falling down into the next branch of the canyon. Bianca flew forward in her harness, too breathless to scream, as Cesare forced the rover into a series of skidding turns down the side of the chasm. Rock and dust tumbled around them, their headlong descent setting off a landslide. Down and down they plunged, straight for the ice-choked canyon floor.
A metallic glint flew past the viewport, and a warning light flared on the console. “We’ve lost a wheel!” Bianca choked out.
“Don’t worry, we have a few others,” Cesare said.
They plowed into a drift of dirty snow, then another, then another, each drift slowing them down a little more. They began to level out, and turned to run along the narrow rift. The rover was nearly buried up to the viewports in snow, but still grinding forward.
“Come on, come on,” Cesare muttered. His fingers jabbed over the console.
The rover screeched, the wheels clawing for traction on the ice. They shot forward, scraping through a gap between two towering columns of rock, and burst out onto a glaze road running along the opposite side of the canyon.
The rover had taken so much damage that they jolted and skidded along the road almost as badly as they had going overland, but Cesare kept forcing more and more speed from the limping machine.
Ahead of them, the road ran into what looked like a cleared compound surrounded by a fence. They burst through the ancient, flimsy-looking gate at high speed. A massive overhanging cliff loomed above them, the foot shrouded in snow, rubble and dense shadow. Cesare aimed the rover straight for it.
“Where are we going?” Bianca demanded, a hysterical note in her voice.
“There!” Cesare pointed. “Old mine shaft.” Bianca looked, and could just make out a crumbling glazestone structure amid the shadows, half buried in snow and dust. They drew up on it quickly. Cesare plowed through the drifts across the entrance and brought the rover to a screeching halt just inside the glazestone walls. At the last moment, he jerked the controls, turning the rover sideways, so that the rover body completely blocked the opening. Then he cut the power.
There was a moment of utter silence.
“That was fun,” Cesare said.
Bianca slowly turned her head on her creaking neck, and stared at him mutely.
Cesare was already clicking off his harness. “And the fun’s not over yet,” he said, that feral grin flashing. “We have a few minutes at most before they get here, so we need to gear up and get gone.”
Bianca concentrated on peeling her fingers off the edge of her seat. “We have to com MarSec,” she managed to whisper. “We have to tell them that we were almost...”
“No chance,” Cesare said immediately. “If MarSec even bothered to respond, they wouldn’t get out here for hours. Besides, whoever’s out there in that rover is probably listening. We can’t give away where we are or where we’re going.”
“And where is that, exactly?”
He jumped up and strode to the lockers. “Back to the hab. But not to the main entrance. It’s too far on foot
, and they might be watching it.”
“Then how...”
“There’s a secret entrance to the hab’s lower level about five kilometers from here. That’s where we’re headed.” He grabbed gloves, visors and a couple bags of hydrocarb solution out of the lockers and wheeled around. He dropped the gear in her lap and turned toward the console.
“Secret entrance,” she repeated.
“Well, more of a secret exit,” he said. “Mehmet and the boys built a bolt-hole when they first came here, just in case they needed to disappear.” He dug a multitool out of one of his pouches and started prying the console panels off the controller unit. “We’ll ditch the rover here and make our way through this tunnel complex to a different entrance. Then we hike through the canyons to the bolt-hole.”
“What about the bloke chasing us?” Bianca mumbled. She mechanically started to unfasten her harness.
“We’ll shake him here.” Cesare pulled off the controller panels and reached in to pluck out the circuit slips. He tossed the delicate wafers on the floor and crushed them under his boot heel. Then he gave the slip slots a few swift whacks with the multitool. Standing back, he nodded at his handiwork, apparently satisfied that the unit was completely wrecked. “Even if he manages to get this rover out of his way, he won’t be able to navigate these tunnels,” he said, turning toward her. “This mine is so old, I’m the only one who still has the maps...” he trailed off, his brows furrowing as he looked down at her.
Ciel, she must look pretty fried for him to be staring at her with such alarm. She tried to school her features into an expression of alert confidence, but it felt a little shaky.
Cesare knelt down in front of her and folded her icy fingers between his big, warm palms. “Bianca...this is all going to work out. Trust me. I’m an expert at cracked shite like this. I’ll have you back at the hab by teatime.” The corners of his eyes crinkled a little as he smiled at her.