“One more thing.” The frustrated look on his face would have been priceless if Lily wasn’t feeling the same herself. “It’s not fair that I’m already half-naked and you’re not,” she complained.
“You’re not half-naked,” he protested. “But you would be if I took this off.” He slid a bra strap down her shoulder.
She took a handful of his shirt and lifted it. He helped her and stripped it off, shucking it to the floor. He stood before her, lean-muscled, his blue eyes boring into her. There was a small round scar on his left shoulder that had to have been a deep gash at one point. She touched it gingerly. “How did you get that?”
“Civil war on Naa’natcha when I was an ensign,” he replied. “Fleet stepped in. Enemy laser rifle was set to stun.”
She stood up on her toes and kissed it. He reached around her back and with a muffled curse against her hair finally unsealed her bra, tossing it to the floor. She grinned against his shoulder, let her hands creep down his abdomen, and unsealed his pants. Her fingers slid into them and grazed his erection, and a low moan sounded from his throat. He tilted up her face and his mouth crushed hers, tongues tangling as he guided her towards the bed.
She lay down as Rian kneeled over her, his lips moving over her throat and collarbone before finding one taut nipple. He eagerly took it in his mouth, and Lily’s breath caught as he caressed it and then the other. She felt his hands unfasten her pants, and she lifted her hips slightly as he slid them down her legs. He raised his head, and his eyes looked over her now-naked body. Any self-consciousness she felt at being so exposed evaporated when she took in his appreciative gaze.
His head dipped further south, and his tongue found the aching spot between her legs. Her hands fisted in his hair as he explored her, setting off tiny electric sparks through her body. She felt the first wave of climax and her breath came in irregular pants. His tongue delved further into her and she moaned. He raised his head. “I don’t want you to stop!” she insisted.
“I’m not,” he said.
“Rian, this is not the time to let your sense of humor show,” she muttered. He slid a finger into her, then two, stretching her. “I’ll take that as an—” She gasped harshly. “An apology.”
She groaned in disappointment when he withdrew his fingers from her, then watched as he pushed off his pants. He positioned his body atop hers, propping himself up on his elbows. His knee nudged her thighs further apart; his kisses became more urgent. The head of his cock nudged against her, and she gripped his shoulders in anticipation before he thrust into her. The feeling of connection and completion was so gratifying that she cried out.
He stroked her hair, concern across his features. “Are you okay?” he whispered.
She kissed him in reply. “Better than okay.”
One hand slipped beneath her hips, lifting her up as he began to move with an agonizing slowness that left her on edge. Before she could plead with him, he increased his pace, thrusting into her more forcefully. She wrapped her legs around him as he stroked deeper into her, bringing her closer again. She felt the tension in his body as he fought for his own control.
She lost hers first, crying out as her orgasm finally racked her body. His rhythm sped up, intensifying and prolonging her climax even as his body went rigid with its own. He sagged against her, burying his face in her neck and tightening his arms around her. For a moment they breathed in sync, then he rolled over and took her with him. His thumb gently pressed against her lips before he kissed her. Wordlessly, their gazes caught each other’s. There was an unexpected tenderness in his eyes, a look that warmed her heart.
* * *
Rian had pulled the blanket over them, and he lay with Lily snuggled against his chest. Her eyes were closed, but his years in the military told him she wasn’t really asleep. He had had to catch more catnaps than he could remember for him to recognize the signs of deep sleep. She stirred a little, and his arms curled around her instinctively.
He was in deep shit. Not just professionally, although the Fleet higher-ups would roll over if they knew what he had done. No, this was personal. Fleet he could handle; despite their presumption that Lily was some kind of helpless, backwards idiot and victim, he couldn’t be court-martialed for having a relationship with someone under his command. If that was the case, two-thirds of Fleet’s captains and all of the admirals would have been tossed out on their asses. A life in the Commons Fleet meant near-total devotion to it. Officers usually gravitated towards partners who understood those obligations.
When this got out, and he was almost certain it would no matter how discreet they were, he and Lily would never stop being the objects of scrutiny. He knew there had been whispers going around the ship since they started sharing meals and coffee breaks. The Defiant was a patrol ship often in sleepy parts of space, and there was lots of time to gossip.
He had already broken his own rule about not getting involved with someone on his ship. But she wouldn’t be here for long, he remembered sadly. She was going to finish her pharmacy course shortly, then leave for practical training at Kevnar Station before being assigned to a clinic. And she would be gone.
That thought discomfited him more than breaking his own rules. That was why he was in deep shit. He didn’t want to let her go. Lily—on some station or, Gods forbid, a well-equipped battleship—in danger, having to pretend to be someone she wasn’t, stuck in yet another unfamiliar place with more daunting technology. He didn’t want that to happen. He wanted to keep her with him for as long as he could.
He lightly stroked her hair, loose and spread over her shoulders. Her eyes blinked open and she leaned, away into the pillow, and propped herself up on her side. She had a satisfied smile on her face, and she stretched. The sheet slipped down, and Rian’s heart sped up a little at the sight of her. He reached for her and ran his hands over the curve of her breasts, her neck, to cup her face. Her hands moved to caress his back and she kissed him, and gods, could the woman kiss.
He could never get enough of her. He knew that now, and that scared the hell out of him more than anything.
* * *
His alarm trilled at 0600 hours and the bedroom illumination eased on. He kissed Lily’s shoulder and neck until she stirred. She rolled over to face him, a smile spreading across her face. He knew there was one on his, too.
He had to start his rounds in an hour fifteen, but that thought slipped from his mind as his hands took on a mind of their own and pulled her to him. It was Lily who remembered and reluctantly pulled away. “I could go for another repeat,” she murmured.
So could he, and he told her so. Their second time had occurred a bare five hours earlier, when they had woken up in the middle of the night unable to get back to sleep.
“But you have to be at work soon,” she lamented. “And I have to read up on Fleet medical ethics. I scheduled another test three days from now.”
“I’d rather stay in bed with you,” he said, but he reluctantly got out and reached for his bathrobe, draped over the bedpost. He left Lily in bed as he headed for the shower, turning back in the doorway to look back at her. The sight of her—come-hither look on her face, hair tousled, one bare leg peeking out from the sheet—nearly did him in. A frisson of need shot through his body, but he didn’t have time to indulge it properly.
“If you look at me like that, I’ll never make it to the bridge.”
She sighed dramatically. “I’ll replicate some breakfast, then.” She tossed off the blankets and stood up. She caught his wide-eyed stare and pulled a sheet off the bed and wrapped it around herself. “Go shower. I’ll have coffee ready when you get out.”
He grabbed her around the waist and led her to the bathroom. “I’ll have coffee in my office.”
Chapter 12
Lily didn’t just have a very boring module on ethics to study back in her cabin. She could tackle that in a few hours. She had also been combing through the volumes of data she and Rian had downloaded at the Rubidge Station libra
ry, and she had stumbled across a tiny file buried in with some other historical texts on Earth. These ones were standard in what must be the modern equivalent of master’s programs in Milky Way ancient history, a subject no one in Fleet ever studied. There were complete e-books by Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, and a thrill shot through her at seeing the names. She dug into the files’ subdirectories and came across some short video clips from the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.
Wonder of wonders, there was an eight-minute segment from Toronto’s local news, detailing the explosion of a cryonics lab in northwest Toronto and the disappearances of its two doctors and receptionist. It added to another layer of mystery surrounding the pair of decomposed bodies found in the Humber River a few weeks before, which had just been identified as James Richards and Graham Kent, identified using DNA from relatives. The syringes that had been stabbed into their necks had held an unidentified toxic substance that corroded the police department’s forensic unit’s equipment, and the homicide unit was baffled. Richards and Kent had been the lease holders of the lab, and Lily now saw how Zadbac and Pitro had taken hold of the property.
The inferno had occurred moments after Lily was abducted. It had leveled the industrial park, a bus shelter in front of the building, and damaged a condo development that was under construction. Not a trace of human DNA had been found in the vicinity of the industrial park. It was mentioned that the daughter of “noted” science fiction and horror author Daniel Stewart was the lab’s receptionist and hadn’t been accounted for, and the police were doubtful she had survived the blast. Local music entrepreneur Andrew Claybourne had had an appointment scheduled that afternoon and was likewise unaccounted for. The cause of the explosion was unknown, and like the toxin in the murdered men’s needles, the authorities hadn’t yet identified what substances were used.
The clip was used as an educational tool to illustrate the limitations of Earth’s science in investigation and the sensationalism used in journalism; it was included in a text by a current researcher on Earth’s ancient culture. Lily felt her chest constrict watching the clip a second time and seeing Wilson Avenue choked with black smoke and flames. They probably never found out the cause of the explosion, she thought sadly. Zadbac and Pitro must have used something from their time. It was the sole piece of information she had found detailing her disappearance, and instead of relief, she felt sick.
She dug further into the datatab’s files. Surely an explosion of that magnitude had made international headlines. There had to be something from the CBC or the New York Times. But there wasn’t; it was just that little news clip from a Toronto TV station.
She sighed and set the datatab aside. Her mind wandered to Rian and last night, and with that, a twinge of guilt when her spirits picked up. In the morning, she thought Rian might have gone back into his professional captain mode and dismissed the night together as a mistake, but he hadn’t had an attack of misplaced conscience in the morning. She wanted to see that side of Rian again, and had no doubt she would. Even though she was unsure what to call their relationship now. It was a very bright spot in this upheaval.
She picked up the datatab again. She had more research to do. She and Rian weren’t going anywhere away from this ship.
She opened a file on the Nym. A highly intelligent alien race of sociopaths, one of many in space but the only ones close to the Commons and the Kurran Empire. Many had low-level empathic talents, making her think of Taz’s story. The Nym’s devotion to science and technology and their pursuit of power was legendary and far surpassed any other culture in space. They were a fairly small group, usually keeping to themselves on their home planet outside the Fringes between trying to invade one world or another every few years. They had tried to annex several quadrants over the centuries with varying levels of success, defeated only because they were outnumbered. They were rumored to keep their population at less than twenty-five thousand, killing infants deemed imperfect and adults when they reached old age. One document claimed that they had auto-destruct chips implanted into their bodies; another said they simply took a lethal overdose at the appropriate age. But since none of them had ever been successfully captured and interrogated by a Commons or Kurran authority, no one knew for sure.
Their world was protected by a treacherous asteroid belt, reinforced with a Nym-designed force field that could incinerate even the most intrepid of battleships. Outside intelligence was conducted safely out of the Nym atmosphere, and random pieces of data collected. The Nym had been strangely quiet for several years now, which Lily knew worried some of Fleet. They weren’t a people known for simply minding their own business, like most of the worlds in the Fringes. If they weren’t regularly monitored, one might assume that they had simply died off. That happened in the Fringes sometimes; planets could destabilize and stop supporting life. It was a downside that made living in Commons space more attractive.
Unstable planets...that was something. Lily’s fingers scrolled through her datatab and came up with a short list of planets known for instability, whether it was changing air quality or rotation or a whole list of five-dollar words she couldn’t make out. Vu’saar, Taz’s home planet, was on the list. Irregular changes to the atmosphere caused mutations in its inhabitants, often resulting in telepathy. She remembered his story in the mess. Vu’saarns considered non-telepathic offspring to be second-class citizens, even when they were born into their nobility, like he and his ex-wife were. His home planet and his lack of telepathy were clearly a touchy subject for Taz, so she wouldn’t ask him about it. Rian would probably know more about the planets in the Fringes, anyway.
Rian. She had stayed behind in his cabin in the morning, waiting for the shift change to take place before she darted back to her own room without anyone seeing her. Rian had been apologetic, but Lily had understood. Right now wouldn’t be a good time to make their relationship public, if that’s what they had. Thank God she had forgotten her comm badge in her cabin. The crew would never let Rian live that down if someone looked up their locations.
She closed the files on the datatab and reviewed her notes for her upcoming test, again to be proctored by Dr. Ashford, but she couldn’t concentrate. She finally set aside her datatabs and turned on the TV. She had two episodes of Lightning’s Luck to get through before the new season started. She had taken a coffee break with Mora and a couple of her counterparts in engineering late in the morning, who told her about the speculations and hype surrounding the season premiere.
The show was a nice diversion from her current situation, despite Mora’s friends, who scoffed at the impossible storylines and technology. “You mean warp drive doesn’t exist?” Lily had asked.
One of them had gone into a long, detailed technical speech detailing the need to get a ship into hyperspace to achieve the level of speed the show’s namesake reached. Lily took his word for it and joined Mora in mocking them for watching it, too.
Ten minutes into the episode, as the shirtless captain of Lightning’s Luck fought what looked like a giant Gila monster using a couple of twigs, her comm badge beeped from its spot on the coffee table. “Captain to Stewart.”
She paused the TV and picked it up. “Stewart here.” He sounded crisp and professional, so she tried to as well. Still, her heart leapt a little at the sound of voice. “What can I do for you, Captain?”
He gave a low, throaty laugh that made her shiver. “I can think of a few things,” he murmured. “But coffee right now would be good. I have to talk to you.”
She had come back from a break with Mora not two hours ago, but this was Rian. She was going to take seeing him wherever she could. “Five minutes,” she said, breathiness creeping into her voice.
“I’ll see you there.”
She turned off the TV and clipped her comm badge to the collar of her blouse. She checked her hair in the mirror and gathered her datatabs before leaving her cabin.
He was waiting for her, sitting at their usual table. There were a coup
le of crew members milling about, and they raised eyebrows at the sight of them together again. Lily ignored them and took her seat. Rian kept his hands firmly around his coffee cup, and Lily’s gaze flicked between him and the starfield out the window.
“It’s good to see you,” he said softly. He looked up, and the look on his face made Lily’s breath catch. “But I have some bad news. Unrelated to that,” he added quickly.
“What is it?” Lily asked, alarmed.
“We received word of Nym activity just outside the Commons borders. One of their ships was spotted, and a patrol ship followed it.”
“And?” Lily leaned forward.
“It disappeared.”
“Maybe it’s just faster than the patrol ships. Everyone says that Nym technology is eons ahead of yours.”
“No, Bishop’s Pride caught up to it, and it just evaporated,” he said tersely. “The captain and her crew saw it happen, and then their sensors confirmed it. It shimmered, she said, and then it was gone. There are no hypergates there, or vortex activity. It’s just empty space, not even any habitable planets.”
“I don’t know what a hypergate is.”
“Nature’s way of letting a ship into hyperspace,” he clarified. “Energy currents. We can force our way into it on a patrol ship with hyperspace engines, but smaller crafts, like freighters and passenger transports, use them if they don’t have that kind of equipment. It lets a vessel move faster through space.”
Lily nodded. “Could the Nym ship have imploded? Or maybe a hull breach?” She had read up on the dangers of space travel and couldn’t help but notice the lack of oxygen masks available in an emergency. Not that they would do much good in the event of a hull breach.
Rian’s upraised eyebrow told her he noticed her research, then he shook his head. “Ships don’t simply implode without warning. The Pride’s sensors would have picked that up. A ship blown to pieces would leave debris behind, anyway.”
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