Solar Heat
“DERREK?” A woman called out his name and his heart skittered like oil across a hot pan. For a moment the voice had sounded like Azsla’s. But why not? He’d been obsessed with her from the first second he’d seen her. If he was freaking out, why wouldn’t she be in his vision?
“Derrek. I’m getting cold.”
She didn’t sound cold. She sounded tempting and warm and very close by. Derrek glanced over his shoulder once more and checked the dead end behind him. It was still a dead end. Shrugging, he strode forward, thinking he was ready for anything. He wasn’t.
Praise for Susan Kearney:
“Kearney is a master storyteller.”
—Virginia Henley, New York Times bestselling author
“Susan Kearney is a gifted storyteller with carefully woven plots and refreshing characterization. Her style is crisp, and keeps her readers hungrily turning the pages.”
—Tampa Tribune
“From the first page, Kearney captures the reader.”
—Affaire de Coeur
The Novels of Susan Kearney from Bell Bridge Books
Kiss Me Deadly
Dancing with Fire
The Rystani Warrior Series
The Challenge
The Dare
The Ultimatum
The Quest
The Heat Series
Lunar Heat
Solar Heat
Solar Heat
The Heat Series – Book 2
by
Susan Kearney
Bell Bridge Books
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-393-1
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-370-2
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 by Hair Express, Inc.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
A mass market edition of this book was published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, a TOR book in 2008
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo/Art credits:
Photo of couple © Tara Adkins | Meteor Shower (manipulated) © Bram Janssens | http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-meteor-shower-image11409611
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to Tara. It’s not every mom who is lucky enough to have such a creative daughter, especially one talented enough to shoot Solar Heat’s cover models, design her mom’s press kits, and act in her book videos. But most of all, thanks for putting up with me. I love you.
1
“CAPTAIN, THE starboard stabilizers are malfunctioning,” Rak, Azsla’s second in command, reported.
As captain of her brand new crew, Azsla habitually double-checked status reports. Especially critical ones. She leaned over the con, and her pulse ratcheted up a notch. Unfortunately, this time Rak was correct.
Azsla turned to Kali, her worried co-pilot and chief engineer. “Fix the stabilizer.”
“I’m on it, Captain.” The giant, gentle man narrowed his thoughtful brown eyes with uncertainty.
Azsla restrained a sigh. For the thousandth time, she reminded herself to have patience. After all, she’d volunteered for this mission, agreeing to work with this crew of ex-slaves, in order to go to Zor as a spy.
Her mission—to prevent further uprisings and retaliation from the slaves on Zor—was critical.
A loud bang, followed by the ship’s shudder shot them into a spin.
Azsla swore and fought the controls. Talk about unlucky missions.
Alarms wailed.
“We have engine failure,” Rak shouted to be heard above the sirens.
Kali’s fingers flew over his console. “Repair bots aren’t responding.”
“Reboot the bots,” Azsla ordered.
“Power is fluctuating,” Kali complained. “I can’t fix them.”
Everything that could go wrong had. One moment Azsla and her crew of four “fugitive” slaves had been on course for Zor, the next every damn system in the ship was on the fritz.
The vessel jolted. Lights flickered, and the bridge went dark except for emergency lights.
“Quark,” Azsla swore at her dead controls as she floated and hung onto her seat. Gravity was down. Life support was down. The emergency generators had failed to kick in.
In the weak yellow backup lighting, Azsla spied Kali floating by the ceiling. Rak bumped into a bulkhead. Both looked unconscious. Neither man had Azsla’s superior reflexes and had failed to grab on when the gravity had failed.
The cosmic whammy had dealt them one hell of a beating, but even as Azsla assessed their predicament, she thanked Holy Vigo that as a First of Rama, she had been entitled to all the strength-building salt she could swallow. So her reflexes were faster than the escaped slaves that made up her crew, but she didn’t have much time to save them.
With the ship currently powerless and spinning out of control toward the portal that was supposed to have transported them to Zor and freedom, Azsla snapped a toggle, cutting the blaring alarm. She didn’t need a news flash to know that unless she altered her damaged ship’s course, the forces sucking them into the black maw would squash them flatter than a neutron particle.
Why the hell hadn’t the automatic backup system fired up? With an agile spin to port, Azsla flipped open the auxiliary engine panel. Twisting the manual override, she thrust the handle to starboard.
And swore.
The reboot mechanism was fried.
Licks of alarm shot down Azsla’s back. Mother of Salt—a double cosmic whammy.
Keep it together.
She’d drilled for emergency situations. Only this was no drill. They were in trouble. Bad trouble. And fear ignited in the pit of her gut like a retrorocket on nitro.
She checked her watch, then estimated the triple threat of time, distance, and mass. At the inescapable result—certain death—her scalp broke into a sweat.
She’d always thought she’d understood the risk of covert operations. When her superiors had cooked up this mission, she’d volunteered. The decision hadn’t been a hard one. Fifteen years ago when she’d been in her early teens, a slave uprising on Rama had killed her parents and ruined her home. Some 200,000 slaves had escaped her world and resettled on the planet Zor. Eventually the Firsts had regrouped and regained control, but life as Azsla had known it was over.
After losing everything, her existence had gone from street orphan to ward of the state. When the Corps offered to train her as a weapons specialist and promised her a shot at stopping any chance of another slave rebellion, they hadn’t had to ask twice. As a First she’d understood, even as a teenager, that as long as Zor offered safe haven to slaves, all Ramans stood in peril, their way of life threatened.
It h
ad been surprisingly easy to leave behind her regimented, friendless existence. But to become an effective spy, Azsla had been asked to accomplish what no other Raman had ever done: suppress her Quait, a First’s ability to dominate. She’d accepted she might never succeed—but after years of training she had achieved the impossible. Sort of. As long as she kept her emotions in check, her Quait didn’t take over, and Azsla could prevent herself from overpowering the will of her crew and outing herself. By reining herself in tight, she could now pass as one of them.
She’d never considered that engine failure might kill her in this tin can before she’d even landed on Zor.
If her crew ever sniffed out her real role, they’d sabotage the journey to Zor. Slaves might be weak, but they were fanatical. Dangerous. They placed little value on life, even their own. To find out what the Zorans were up to, Azsla had to be just as ruthless. Knowing any one of them would turn on a First to keep her from landing on Zor reminded her to keep up her guard. Always.
Getting to Zor, at this point, was secondary to staying alive. The air grew stale. It was already freezing cold, as if the heat hadn’t been on since liftoff three days ago.
Azsla gripped the command console to maintain her position at her station and ignored the white vapor puffing from her mouth, the prickly bumps rising over her flesh, her body-racking shivers.
Her crewmen floated still unconscious, and although she shouldn’t care about their welfare, she couldn’t squelch the sparks of sorrow over their plight.
During the long months of training for this mission, she’d come to know her crew and, to her surprise, respect them. Now, she couldn’t remember when she’d stopped thinking of them as slaves and started thinking of them as people.
“Anyone awake?”
Rak drew in choked breaths. Kali flailed on the ceiling, seeking leverage to alter his attitude.
Knowing she had mere moments to divert the ship, Azsla stayed put. If she couldn’t change their course, the wormhole would devour the ship, leaving nothing, not even scattered debris, to mark their passing.
“Report,” she insisted, her voice lowering an octave as if ashes filled her mouth, her cold-numbed fingers flicking the damaged control toggles, frantic to restart the engines.
Surely Jadlan or Micoo, her two additional crew, in the sleepers had been jarred awake? Or had they ditched protocol, abandoned their posts, and ejected in their escape pods? Azsla had no way of knowing, not with her instruments off line, but as always, she cut her crew some slack, all too aware that none of them had her superior intellect or physical strength.
Rak pulled himself toward his console. “Captain, the stabilizer damaged the hull.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she snapped, her voice firm.
“We’re spiraling end over end. If we don’t regain control, our hull’s going to be crushed within minutes.”
She knew that, too. Azsla ripped open a panel’s cover to examine the wiring. The reek of burning plastic singed her nostrils. Smoke filtered into the cabin, and fear scratched along her skin like claws, ripping and shredding, threatening to tap out her last reserve of Quait control.
Kali, her engineer, should be doing this job. But he was weak.
She vibrated with the need to use her Quait—to force Kali to wake up and help her.
Her fingers trembled, and she loathed her own weakness. With her gut doing a slow spin job, she battled fresh panic.
Easy. She could do this. She could beat the brutality of space.
Never had she missed Rama so much. She yearned for fresh air, a cool breeze, dirt under her feet.
Sweet Vigo, people were supposed to live on planets where they didn’t have to breathe recycled air, where every little mechanical failure wasn’t life threatening, where a stray piece of dust didn’t create lethal havoc with her ship’s systems.
Trying to buy herself a little relief from pounding panic, Azsla dialed down her emotion. She cornered it, squashed it. Beat it into submission.
Pretend it’s just another drill. Pretend no one else is here.
She could fix the ship without their help. Without using her Quait.
After ten years of keeping her cool and suppressing her Quait, her spontaneous instinct to dominate should have been under control . . . yet, as the port fuel tank exploded, her natural inclinations to overpower kicked in.
Every cell in her body ached to reach out and make the crew work as one. But if she reverted to instinct and used her Quait to save all their lives by forcing them to fix the ship, her crew would then learn that she wasn’t one of them. If they didn’t kill her, she would wind up returning home in defeat. Sure, mind scrubbers could erase her crew’s memories, but the Corps didn’t accept failure. Azsla would never get another shot at returning to Zor.
But the aching instinct to survive at any cost began to burn. Sizzle. Her blood boiled with the need to take charge . . . for the sake of self-preservation.
She was about to lose it and take over the will of every underfirst on board.
With no time to talk herself down slowly, she popped a tranq, swallowing the pill without water. Immediately, the fire eased. The seething boil cut to a manageable simmer.
Of course, later, if she lived that long, she’d pay for relying on the tranq. If her superiors ever discovered she’d resorted to artificial tactics, it would put them off—enough to shut her down, boot her from the Corps.
But with the metal hull groaning, official consequences were the least of her problems.
Rak shouted, “The portal is sucking us in.”
Praying to save the ship from annihilation, Azsla struggled to route the last remaining battery power into the bow thrusters.
Behind her, she heard Kali groan, shove off the ceiling, and buckle into his seat.
Her fingers manually keyed in instructions, and she regained her normal tone of voice. “Kali. Report.”
Kali slapped a flickering monitor. “Navigation’s a bust. Hyperdrive’s nonoperational. Engineering’s off line. Life support’s nonfunctional. Time to bail?”
Unless she could alter their direction, they’d have to abandon ship or be crushed four ways to summer solstice.
“The portal will draw us into the sleeping pods,” Rak told Kali.
“Correct,” Azsla agreed. “But, as long as the emergency batteries maintain the pods’ shielding, they’ll shoot us straight through the portal to Zor.”
Kali’s face brightened with hope. “And someone at the other end will pick up our automated distress signals.”
“That’s the plan,” Azsla straightened. And if the plan failed, they would drift in space, frozen. Forever.
She jerked her thumb toward the escape pods. “Hit the airlock.”
Although her crew often disappointed, not quite living up to her standards, they tried hard. And she wasn’t cruel enough to dash their hopes and reveal they had little chance of survival, never mind escape. Of course, the Corps never intended for her crew to achieve the freedom they sought. Even if they reached Zor, they’d be rounded up by other spies and sent back to Rama in chains as an example of what happened to slaves who attempted escape from the mother world.
Rak swam and snaked his way from the bridge.
Kali unsnapped his safety harness and floated toward the rear. “Captain, you coming?”
“Just messing with the bow thrusters.” She didn’t exactly lie. Although she had little hope of cranking out a course alteration, she used the excuse to stay at the helm to secretly shoot the logs and a report of the disaster back to Rama, a last-ditch effort to inform the Corps of their predicament.
Notifying home was a calculated risk. Her crew believed they’d escaped Rama, when in actuality the government had allowed them to leave in order to insert Azsla into their midst. If any of them caught a w
hiff of what they’d consider betrayal, there was no telling if she could handle them after swallowing that tranq.
“Captain.”
At Kali’s sharp tone, Azsla stiffened. She hadn’t expected him to return for her. Had he seen her dispatch the log? Despite the tranq, she couldn’t conceal the edge to her voice. “Yes?”
“Ship temperature’s approaching freezing. The hull’s breached. Shields are failing. We need to leave, now.”
Relieved her cover remained intact, Azsla skimmed her hands over the keys, robbing the remaining power from every system except the pods. “I’m right behind you.”
Kali soared through the control cabin toward the ship’s bowels. She heard him pop open the pods and the terrified voices of her crew. So the others had awakened. Good.
No, not good. She shouldn’t be thinking about them. Slaves were easily replaced. Weak. A waste of salt.
Yet . . . this crew had trained hard. Not as hard as she had. But then they didn’t have her abilities. Still, they’d done what they could with what they had.
With her remote, she shunted the last of the power into the boosters.
Done.
As the last shields began to fail, the injured hull squealed in agony, the tearing of metal a death knell.
The crew scrambled into their escape pods.
Diving for safety, Azsla overshot her mark.
Kali snatched her by the ankle, saving her from a painful smack into the bulkhead.
“Thanks.” She seized a handhold and righted herself. The big man had already stuffed Jadlan, Micoo, and Rak into the pods and ejected them through the airlock.
Kali slid into the last remaining pod. “Ready to bounce?”
“Let’s do it.” Azsla slapped the button to open her sleeper. Only her pod didn’t open.
“What’s wrong?” Kali asked as he climbed out of his pod.
“Don’t know.” She nailed the button mechanism with her fist. All hell was about to come down on the ship.
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