He may have failed to convince the woman to confide in him tonight, but she needed to ensure he didn’t' get a second chance. He had failed, hadn't he? What made her think that? She couldn't remember. Regardless, she should get the assistant off the station and into Samir's hands. Her boss would soon find out what the woman knew.
"Have you thought about applying to Oasis?" Kama asked. McTavish cut into the gooey cake, and dark chocolate syrup oozed out. He smiled, first at the cake, and then at her, his eyebrows waggling. She grabbed the edge of the bed, resisting the urge to drag her finger through the syrup.
"Oasis would never take me," Miss Patty replied. "I'm not a computer programmer."
McTavish plunged the spoon in again, slicing off a bite of cake and popping it in his mouth. He groaned and licked his lips, smearing them with chocolate. Kama turned her back on him, but that put Greg, spooning up his own luscious dessert, squarely in her line of vision. From behind her, she heard McTavish smacking his lips. A faint keening sigh escaped her.
"We hire more than computer programmers. We have lots of different positions in the company, and I'm sure we'd have one just right for you," she lied, unable to take her eyes from the boy's fast disappearing dessert. There must be something wrong with the climate control. The room seemed unusually warm.
Miss Patty stopped fussing with the platters on the trolley. "You'd recommend me?"
"Of course. We working women need to stick together, and Oasis is a wonderful place to be." She rejoiced, but hid it with a serious expression. She had the old biddy right where she wanted her. "I can even offer you a free ride."
Fingertips touched her forearm, and she turned. McTavish waved the plate of half-eaten cake at her, and her mouth watered.
"Want to share?" he asked.
Without waiting for her reply, he scooped up an enormous spoonful of cake and aimed it for her mouth. She leaned forward and crammed it all in, sucking hard on the spoon to get every drip of syrup off as he pulled it out. That's when she noticed the crafty look in his eyes and froze.
"Does Oasis still screen all its prospective employees with psychological tests and biometrics interviews?" he asked, all innocence.
Kama choked on the cake.
"Biometrics interviews?" Miss Patty asked. "What are those?"
"They hook you up to a med scanner while they do the employment interview," he said, giving Kama an impudent smile. "It works like an old-fashioned lie detector test, only it's much harder to fool."
A platter crashed to the floor.
Chapter 13
What the hell happened?
Practiced as he was at deflecting the unwanted attentions of women, he'd failed to prevent Kama from beating—no, seducing—her way through his defenses and scrambling his brain. He'd lost Miss Patty when, by now, she should have been gushing her confession. Why was Kama so intent on getting the woman away to Oasis?
Rafe swung his feet off the cot and stood in front of the filmies. For the first time since his arrival, he felt almost human. He still had plenty of aches and pains, but a trickle of energy coursed through him. He didn't know whether to credit the coffee, the nap, the excellent meal, or that last bag of blood hanging empty on the pole. Or maybe it was Kama. Damn, she was hot when she wanted to be.
He scratched the rapidly growing stubble on his chin and peered at the blueprints, then located the showers—right next door to the infirmary. It looked like a long night ahead. A shower would help him stay awake; maybe a cold shower. He unhooked his IV and shuffled to the door.
Then he pulled up and shuffled back. Still unconscious, Warner lay on his cot, breathing slowly. Rafe took a couple of pillows and stuffed them under the blankets of his own cot, mimicking the shape of a sleeping body. He dimmed the lights, hoping his ruse would give him time to complete his shower before Kama found out what he was doing. He was sure she'd be back, even though he didn't understand why she hung around.
The hallway was clear. Keeping a steadying hand on the wall, he crept to the shower room door.
Inside, he found soap, shampoo, towels, and a packet of depilatory cream. Apparently, injured miners weren't trusted with real razors. He stripped out of his workout clothes and unstrapped the nanocom from his wrist, finding exactly how many muscles still didn't extend to their full range, but feeling stronger and much less sore than earlier in the day.
He turned on the shower and smeared the cream on his face while the water warmed up. Then he stepped into the hot water and let it stream down over his aching body. The bruises made unattractive splotches of purple and green across rigid muscles, which gradually relaxed under the gentle, steaming massage of the shower. He groaned in satisfaction as the water worked its magic.
Judging that he'd left the cream on long enough, he ducked his head under the water and lathered the shampoo into his hair. He winced when he touched the lump from the blow that had mercifully knocked him unconscious in the docking bay. Wriggling his toes in the puddle of water forming at the drain, he slapped his feet down, delighted with the splash.
"All right, Mr. Kelly, time to get out of the rain before you fall down and hurt yourself again."
He whirled to face Kama, then just as quickly turned away. "How long have you been there?" he asked, face burning.
"Long enough," she replied. "But I promise I'll turn my back while you get dressed if you do it sitting down." From behind him, he heard the rattle of a stool sliding across the floor and the thump of a towel landing on top. When he looked, she faced the door. At light speed, he snatched the towel, made a bad job of drying his legs, and pulled on his pants.
"Who's Mr. Kelly?" he asked.
"Not a fan of old movies, I see," she chuckled as she advanced on him. She'd zipped her coveralls firmly against her neck again and replaced her hair tie. She still looked gorgeous. He sucked in a breath through his teeth, not at all confident he could keep his mind on business.
"Gene Kelly was a famous dancer, oh, a hundred or so years ago. He sang a song and tap-danced on a rainy street. And he was better dressed than you."
She pushed him down on the stool, grabbed a towel, and rubbed his hair. He winced when she hit the tender place on his skull.
"Sorry," she apologized.
"I'm not completely helpless, you know," he grumbled, pretending he didn't enjoy her attentions as she started again, more gently. The scent of lavender wafted off her, and he drank it in, a twinge of desire purring to life in him. She finished with his hair and stroked the towel down his back and arms as gently as if handling a baby. His body responded while his brain screamed about how inappropriate the timing was. Focus.
"The pillows didn't fool you?"
"You have more lumps."
He laughed openly, giving up any hope of resistance to her charms. "Too true, I'm afraid."
She was reaching for his t-shirt when a loud clatter in the infirmary next door stopped her. She opened the shower room door, and then a thunderous roar shook the walls and knocked her against the doorframe. Smoke rolled over her in a hot, acrid cloud.
The blast wave, damped by the distance, was still enough to rattle Rafe's stool. Plastic explosive, his ear told him, not an accident. A station alarm blared out, raucous and insistent. He snatched up the t-shirt from a puddle on the floor, pulled it over his head, and made for the door.
The corridor outside was filthy with smoke and dust, and the infirmary door hung halfway off its hinges. From the infirmary came the crackling and snapping of flame and the clatter of falling debris. Kama sat on the floor, one hand pressed against her head, a bloody smear on her cheek. Rafe crouched next to her, paying no heed to the stab of pain in his ribs. He ran his fingertips over her scalp, searching for the spongy depression of a fracture but finding none.
She levered herself up as shouts of alarm and the sound of running feet approached. Browning rounded the corner, closely followed by Roshal and half a dozen miners. They lurched to a tumbling halt as they saw Rafe and Kama, then the smoke burst
ing from the ruined infirmary.
"What the hell's going on?" Browning roared.
"Bomb!" Rafe shouted back. "Someone blew up the infirmary!"
"Fucking EcoMech!" someone yelled. "Bastards are attacking us again!"
Browning approached the ruined door, one hand shielding his face from the heat beyond. "Everybody out!" he shouted. "There's a hull breach in there, and this bulkhead's compromised! We need to seal off this corridor!"
"Wait!" Rafe shouted. "Warner's still in there! He could be alive!"
Browning yelled to the men. "We have to seal this corridor! That whole outer wall could collapse!"
Rafe shook his head and lunged forward. "Be ready to seal the corridor when I come out! I need two minutes!"
Browning stared at him in disbelief. "You're crazy!" the big supervisor shouted. "You can barely walk!"
Rafe turned and caught Kama's eye. "Look after Greg for me," he said, then plunged into the smoke and fire.
He held the front of his t-shirt over his mouth, and crouched low to avoid the smoke. The heat was stifling, and he felt the cooling water leaching out of the shirt with each passing second. It was dark in the infirmary—the emergency lights must have been blown out—and he shuffled his way forward by dim firelight. The back of the room was still in flames, a roiling orange mass thrusting out from a blanketing cloud of smoke.
His foot caught on something soft and giving. He tumbled forward, his knee smacking painfully into the deck, and he took an unguarded breath. Coughs wracked his body as he took in a lungful of smoke, each hacking convulsion grinding at his injured ribs. His vision swam, and he grabbed a fistful of drying fabric to breathe through. In his head, he heard the seconds ticking away—Browning wouldn't give him more than the two minutes.
Rafe reached down to disentangle his foot, and his hand met wetness and the horrible sponginess of meat. He found himself clutching the ragged end of a severed leg. He retched and flung it aside, swallowing the foul taste of vomit, then turned to press on. Warner was a black man, and that—thing—was white.
The adrenaline that had thrown him through the door drained away. He was going to die, an idiot to the last. His hands trembled, the pain in his ribs increasing. He clutched at his chest, letting the shirt fall away from his mouth. Somewhere ahead, in the darkness, a piercing whistle rang out, the whistle of air escaping into space.
The heat of the fire rushed over him as he tried vainly to choke down each agonizing cough. His vision blurred, and he wondered if it would be the searing fire or the icy cold of space that killed him. Suddenly, he was back in the nightmare, the hideous, never-forgotten scene of Youko's death, in another endless, blood-soaked room, lashed by the flames of demons and his father's scorn, his whole being reduced to a single, taunting thought—you aren't good enough; you should have done more.
He crawled, his hands encountering scorching metal, ashes, and fragments of shattered glass and plastic. He swept them aside, along with another gobbet of dismembered flesh—still not Warner's. He kept the layout of the infirmary in his mind. The cot hadn't been more than a few feet away. There it was! He ignored the burning in his fingertip as he touched the scorching metal frame. The blanket was not on fire, and Rafe grabbed the edge and flung it up over the top of the cot, where Warner's insensate shape still lay.
He seized the wounded man by leg and arm, and hauled him up onto his shoulders, staggering underneath the weight. He hefted Warner's uncooperative bulk and took a first, shuffling step away from the fire. Wind tugged at Rafe's clothes as the whistle of the widening hull breach dropped rapidly in pitch. A low, ominous groaning of fatigued metal reverberated over the whistle. One pace at a time, one foot in front of the other, he forced himself toward the door.
"There he is!" someone cried, and Warner's weight slid from his shoulders. Hands grabbed his arms and legs, and a swarm of men hoisted him long enough to run through a rapidly closing bulkhead door. They set him with care on the deck, and Kama speared between them to crouch by his side. He coughed and rubbed his stinging eyes, insanely overjoyed to see her.
"I got him," he said, grinning.
"Moorhk," she muttered. Her smoldering eyes raked over him before settling on his med bracelet.
His grin broadened. She cared. A thrill raced through him. He struggled to get his feet under himself. A dozen miners' hands reached down and pulled him upright. They slapped his back or squeezed his shoulder. Gone was the sullen hostility. They looked on him with respect and admiration.
"Let's go! Let's go!" Browning shouted, pushing through the growing crowd of miners. "We've got a hull breach. Man your stations! Yuri, get your tug and bring a replacement hull section from storage. Where's my welding crew? Suit up! The rest of you start closing bulkheads on both sides of this section and on the floor above. Move!"
Browning and Roshal led the miners away at a trot. The medic crouched over Warner, who lay on a blanket. Swede and another miner looked on. The smell of burnt flesh hit his nostrils.
"How is he?" Kama asked, looking away from the hideous melted husk on the deck.
"Burned pretty bad." He waved at Swede. "Hold the packs in place. Dammit, I can't work like this! I need another med kit! He's lucky to be sedated. But he'll come around in about an hour, and I haven't got anything to give him. These burns are more severe than I'm qualified to deal with."
"Can we ship him to the jump gate hospital?" Kama said.
The medic shook his head. "He'd die long before he got there."
"Do what you can for him until we get back," Rafe told the medic. He pulled Kama aside. "You said you could fly a runabout?"
"Yes," she said.
He detected hesitation in her voice, but he saw little choice. Warner needed help, and he wasn't keeping Greg on the station another minute. He ought to get Kama off, too.
"Where do you want to go?"
"Maltraw's. Warner needs help, and I want Greg out of here now," he said, walking away.
She jogged to catch up to him. "I'll get Greg and meet you at the runabout bay."
She ducked into the shower room, emerged with her duffel, and sprinted away. Rafe shuffled his way through the dimly lit station, warning lights still strobing at every intersection until he reached the runabout bay. Within a minute, Kama and Greg joined him, out of breath. Greg looked pale and frightened, but at least he was unharmed. A little tension released in Rafe's shoulders. Together, they crossed the deck and climbed into one of the craft.
Kama stowed her duffel in a storage bin and took the pilot seat. By the time Rafe had his harness buckled, she was looking over the controls. She licked her thumb and scrubbed it over a couple of the control labels, cleaning grime from them. They didn't seem any more readable for her efforts. She keyed a switch, then another, with no result.
"You do have a pilot's license, right?" he asked.
Kama pressed a button beneath a vid screen, which filled first with a splashy logo, and then with a menu. She touched one of the options. He thought it looked suspiciously like the option for an instruction manual.
"This isn't the model I usually fly." She glanced his direction. "Don't worry, I'll get us there."
Dense text filled the screen. She flipped to the next page, flipped again. Pages rushed by in a blur while she squinted at them. When she reached the end, she sat back, took a deep breath, and placed her hands on the console. He swore he heard her muttering a checklist as though reading it while she brought the runabout to life. With the final press of a button, she opened the bay doors and coaxed the craft out. After a bump and a screech of metal, they cleared the station.
"Sorry," she murmured.
"And what model do you usually fly?" he asked, his stomach already starting to roll as they became weightless.
"I have several hundred hours at the controls of an X311."
She goosed the thrusters, and Rafe was pressed back into his seat. "I don't think I recognize that one. Who makes it?"
From the seat behind him, Gr
eg hooted. "Uncle Rafe, don't you play Galaxy at War? The X311 is what Henderson uses to transport his squad for planetary missions."
Chapter 14
Kama's hands shook at the controls. Piloting the runabout didn't worry her; she'd done hundreds of hours in various simulators, and she'd just memorized the flight manual for this one. What made her hands shake was the close call in the infirmary. Someone wanted McTavish dead. She had to convince him to leave the station.
"I can take the medical supplies back. You and Greg should wait at Maltraw's and get Goldman to pick you up there."
"I'll contact Captain Benson to pick up Greg, but I'm going back to the station." McTavish looked decidedly green and clutched the armrests. "You should go with Greg. Or stay at Maltraw's for the time being."
"That blast was meant for you. You can't take the risk. Next time, you might not be so lucky."
"Next time Levine comes at me, I'll be better prepared."
Kama stared at him. "Levine? You don't think you were attacked because you represent the big corporation about to throw the miners off their station?"
"No one on the station is more rabidly anti-corporate than you, and if you haven't seen the need to blow me to Kingdom come, why would they?"
"Be serious," she said. In her mind, she saw him emerging from the smoke of the infirmary, Warner on his back, and shuddered. All the management types she'd met would have run the opposite direction. He was a genuine hero. Or maybe just insane.
"Levine as the bomber is the only choice that makes sense." McTavish ran the back of his hand over his mouth. "Maybe I can draw him out before Leon's men board."
"Make yourself a target? Are you crazy?"
He wouldn't know who to look for, but it sure wouldn't be Levine. She had to get him off the station. And if she did, it would make her search for the killer that much easier.
While they crossed to the cargo hauler, McTavish radioed to the EcoMech ship. Over Greg's protests, he arranged for his pick up at Maltraw's.
Calculated Risk Page 14