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Feeling helpless, Tom watched as Becca’s anger slowly faded
and she started smiling again. She was a cheerful woman, but now her smile was
for Da’shay. “We could go to that hot springs…the one that people say makes
women get pregnant.”

“Sperm gets women pregnant,” Da’shay answered, her gaze
still focused on Tom.

“Yep, but we can pretend and talk about which man we would
choose.”

Tom wondered if he looked as horrified as Ramsay did at that
thought.

“I would pick Paulou Giocondo,” Da’shay said without even
batting an eye. Then again, she was part
genta
, so Tom wasn’t all that
surprised that she’d want an Olympic athlete.
Genta
had a preference for
that sort. “Or Tom,” Da’shay added.

Tom was so shocked that he couldn’t even get the words out
of his brain and into his mouth. It was as though they were stuck somewhere in
the middle.

“Tom?” Ramsay’s eyes went wide and then laughter erupted
from him. Curling his hands into fists, Tom looked from Ramsay to Becca, who
looked about ready to choke, to Da’shay, who was watching him with the same
calm expression. A tech on the second level looked around the edge of the blast
wall to see what was so damn amusing and Tom could feel his insides turn to
rough, jagged shards of ice.

“I’d cut off my prick before I’d let you touch it,” Tom
growled.

Da’shay frowned. “Sperm is produced in testicles.”

“Yeah, Tom. You cut your prick off and she can still get
what she wants.” Ramsay finally got himself under control enough that he was
only chuckling. Walking over, he slapped Tom on the arm. “Oh cheer up. Lots of
men would love to catch a
genta
’s eye. You notice she isn’t setting her
sights on me.”

“Well I ain’t one of those fools that actually want some
alien to take some sort of freaky interest in them.” Tom pointed a finger at
Da’shay, his right hand on the butt of his gun. “You keep clear of me or I’ll put
a bullet in your brain stem.”

“Tom!” All the laughter vanished from Ramsay’s voice as he
stepped between them. Tom took a step back and looked at all three. He didn’t
know how she’d done it, but Da’shay had twisted both of them around until they
were willing to back her. Six years he’d been flying on the
Kratos
—and
still they were siding with her. “That’s enough,” Ramsay said firmly.

Tom looked at Da’shay. She was still gazing calmly back at
him, no sadistic glee at having gotten her way, just that same damn alien
blankness. And Becca. Tom couldn’t hardly look at her. She was staring at him
with this horror that made him want to puke, and the whole time she was
clinging to the arm of a monster who had not only killed but cut up a whole
smuggler crew. Those weren’t small crews what with all the need to care for the
slaves so they weren’t dead before getting delivered. But she’d slaughtered
every single one, and now she was standing there behind Ramsay with Becca
hanging on her as if she were some school chum. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t
right and Tom didn’t know how to fix any of it.

“She’s a killer,” he blurted.

Ramsay crossed his arms. “I think we’d better check the
thruster seals while we have the chance. We’re looking at a long-term
assignment on a part of the map where we aren’t going to find convenient
shipyards. Tom, I want a full report by tomorrow morning, oh-six-hundred.”

“But…” Clenching his jaw, Tom looked at the captain.

“You got that?” Ramsay demanded, making it perfectly clear
that he was Tom’s captain, and he wasn’t going to listen to any more. If Tom
had the pictures, maybe he could have reached Ramsay, but right now the captain
was pissed as hell and not about to back down.

“Yes sir,” Tom agreed since he couldn’t do much else.
Checking seals was back breaking work. He figured with the hip slowing him
down, he’d be lucky to get two or three hours sleep if he wanted to meet
Ramsay’s deadline.

Becca looked at him with wide eyes and Tom’s body sagged.
Hell, maybe it was better. He sure didn’t know what he was doing with Becca and
at least he couldn’t fuck anything up if he was working all night. “I’ll get
right on it,” Tom said. He went over to the control panel and hit the button
for the dock ramp. The floor planks started to rise up and Tom didn’t even wait
until they locked in place before he headed for the open hatch. He needed to
change and get equipment if he wanted to do the job right.

Footsteps followed him, but Tom ignored them. Crew quarters
were small but private, and Tom punched in his personal code outside his
assigned room.

“You want to tell me what that was about?” Ramsay was
standing right behind him, but Tom shrugged and headed into his quarters. One
thing he liked about the
Kratos
—everyone considered private quarters
sacred. Inside, Tom sat on the edge of his bunk and stared at his wall. He had
four sniper rifles and an old pulse gun hung there. His palms itched. If
someone would ask him to do something he fucking understood, Tom would be happy
as a pig in the mushrooms. But Ramsay wanted him to ignore the fact that
Da’shay was dangerous and that little man wanted him to help spy on crew and
Becca…well, he had no idea what she wanted. She’d been all smiles every time he
showed up in the engine room, but today had not been a success.

Tom dropped his head into his hands. Who the hell knew what
Becca expected? She was going to the hot springs with Da’shay to talk about
getting pregnant. Tom never could have guessed that. Instead, he was offering
to take her for a nice, romantic trip to the junkyard.

He really was a fuck up.

Well, like his ma always told him, spilled milk stayed
spilled, but if you didn’t clean it up, it turned into sour spilled milk. Tom
pulled off his shirt. It was his best one and he didn’t want to tear it on some
loose panel in the thrusters. A corporal’s salary wasn’t so grand that he could
afford to ruin his shit.

“You planning on coming out?” Ramsay called from the
corridor.

“Soon as I change, yeah,” Tom answered. Moving faster, he
pulled out work clothes and stowed his others away. When he pulled his pants
off, he retrieved the silver disk, fingering the smooth edges. He’d sworn to
himself that he wasn’t going to bring this on the
Kratos
, that he’d keep
it in an electronic safe, but here he was. Technically the thing shouldn’t be
able to transmit until it threw out threadlike legs that acted like
transmitters, but Tom could imagine a way to jury-rig the thing, so he figured
others could too. There was a chance that someone on the other end had heard
the crew rip him a new asshole. Tom shoved the tiny disk into the pocket of his
work pants.

Tom hit the panel and his door opened. Ramsay was still
standing there, but Tom ignored him as he headed for the equipment locker.
Ramsay was probably right. It took a shipyard to get the calibrations exactly
right on thruster seals and most ships didn’t want them disassembled if they
were in hostile territory.

“You plan to talk to me about this?” Ramsay asked, still
following. “You’re not acting like yourself, Tom, and I’m finding it a little
disconcerting. When you threaten to shoot people, you do have a bad habit of
following through on that threat.”

Tom stopped outside the equipment locker. “I had my say. I
don’t want Da’shay on the ship. I don’t trust her and I don’t want her thinking
about me. But I won’t shoot her unless she tries doing something. And if she
does try something…” Tom let his voice drift off.

“I don’t think any of us get a choice about what someone
else is thinking,” Ramsay said slowly. “But I told her that she couldn’t go
collecting anything or taking what you weren’t offering.”

Tom closed his eyes as anger swept through him. “Cap, I
don’t need you to fight my battles.”

“And I don’t need you trying to shoot a
genta
. In
case you ain’t noticed, Tom, Da’shay is stronger than both of us put together.
I’m not sure a bullet would stop her—not unless you managed to get a direct hit
on the brain stem first shot.”

Leaning against the mesh of the equipment locker, Tom
thought about those images of Da’shay standing in a bullet-riddled uniform, her
whole body covered in blood. One picture perfectly captured a drop of blood
sliding off the end of her black braid. If he was going to take a shot, he’d
get the stem the first time.

“Six years, Tom,” Ramsay said slowly. “I figure after six
years I know you about as well as anyone, and I know you don’t always use a
whole lot of sense when you feel threatened. I’d rather you transfer out than
have you do something terminally stupid, but there aren’t too many captains who
would have you with your record.”

“None, you mean,” Tom said. Reaching in, he pulled out a
scanner.

“Maybe not,” Ramsay agreed. “That means you’d lose your
pension, your benefits and the protection being in the Corps has offered you. I
suspect that if you weren’t on this side of the law, you would have been in
prison long ago.”

After flipping the scanner on, Tom ran through the settings.
Focusing on the task kept him from strangling the captain with his bare hands.
“Most likely,” Tom finally answered. His stepfather had certainly told him that
often enough, so it’d be ironic if Tom ended up making the old man’s prediction
come true after so many years. “Permission to leave so I can get my work done,
sir?”

Ramsay moved so that he was actually blocking Tom’s exit.
“What has you convinced that Da’shay is so dangerous?”

Tom stared at the captain, struggling with a thousand
thoughts at once. He wished the captain would just take his word for once and
he wasn’t sure this was the best time to get into some long, drawn out conversation.
He could feel his anger like a wild cat curled in his belly and the wrong word
was going to cost him this job. He knew that. He also knew that he had to get
Da’shay away from the
Kratos
. “Saw something,” Tom admitted.

“Something? What sort of something?”

Tom sighed. “Pictures. Da’shay. Before she joined up with
us.” Tom pressed his lips together as he remembered the look of murderous glee
on her face. “Her fighting.”

Ramsay blew out a heavy breath. “Command nearly exiled her
because she went after some slavers when she was ordered to wait for
reinforcements. I know that. But I also know that’s classified material and you
don’t have that level of clearance. Tom, where did you see the pictures?”

Ramsay knew. He fucking knew that Da’shay was a time bomb
and he hadn’t warned any of them on the crew. About the only way that made
sense was if Command had ordered him to leave the rest of them in the dark.
Without answering the question, Tom shrugged and slipped a hand in his pocket
to finger the small disk.

“Official channels?”

“No. A guy found me last night at the
Golden Absolute
.”

Ramsay snorted and leaned back against the wall. “First,
that place is on the restricted list. You aren’t supposed to be there unless
you’re arresting someone.”

“Had lots of chances to,” Tom said as he thought about the
drugs dealers and smugglers exchanging ship berths over drinks.

“I bet. But second, you can’t go believing pictures from
some stranger. Have you seen the pictures Becca has? She has pictures of
Einstein riding in the hover finals and you can’t tell it’s a patch job. Well,
except the part where Einstein’s been dead for a few centuries.”

“These weren’t,” Tom said firmly.

“Tom, I’ve seen them do patch jobs on vid. Hell, they say
that the government has the technology to patch live feed video, so don’t tell
me you can look at something with the naked eye and know whether it’s real.”

Tom stood there, not sure what to think. Maybe Ramsay was
right, but Tom had seen the pics. It wasn’t Da’shay’s face on someone else. That
was her body…the odd way she arched her back, the way her two feet never quite
seemed to be doing the same thing at the same time. His gut knew those were
real pictures of Da’shay.

“Just get the scans done by Thursday,” Ramsay said wearily.
Tom nodded and headed for the hatch. He’d have them done before he went to bed.
Maybe if he totally wore himself out, he could get some sleep without thinking
about Da’shay.

It was close to oh-two-hundred before Tom finished and sent
the full report to Ramsay’s unit. Unfortunately, he still couldn’t get his mind
to quiet down. “Well, fuck.” Tom leaned against the
Kratos
and looked
out over the docks. The blast wall blocked most of his view; the huge curve
provided the solid foundation for the ship to thrust against to escape the
thick atmosphere, and each berth had its own. That meant all Tom could see was
a line of ship noses, all sticking out from the shelter of their individual
walls. The small, yellow moon gave the impression that the whole world had
jaundice.

Tom preferred worlds with white moons. When he’d been
growing up, he used to wait for the full moon before going running along the
creek and pretending he was never going to go back. His father had been one of
the first settlers on
Beauteous
, a huge, fertile world with an enormous
white moon, but disease had taken him, and his ma had taken a new husband.

Shaking off the unhappy thoughts, Tom headed toward town.
Most places would be shut down by now, but there would still be plenty of opportunities
to find a little trouble and get a lot drunk. Tom didn’t even bother changing
out of his work clothes with their long streaks of carbon soot and dirt. Unlike
Becca, doxies didn’t need to be impressed. He only had to tell them what he
wanted.

The docks echoed Tom’s footsteps as he headed for the
transports. At the small wait station, a short man with a round face gave Tom a
once over and Tom glared back, daring the little shit to try to pick his
pocket. The guy hurried down the tracks. If he wanted an easy mark, he’d just
have to look elsewhere tonight. Tom had never been a particularly easy mark.
He’d been tough enough to take care of himself even when he’d been seventeen
and stick thin because he kept growing up faster than he could grow out.

He took his first job shipside on a freighter at seventeen
and gotten into the granddaddy of all dock fights. Him and about four hundred
other men and women ripped the guts out of most of the
Cassidy
dock
complex. He’d tipped over a refrigerator unit to protect a door where a group
was hiding in a store room. When the arresting officer had figured out that Tom
had protected them, he’d invited Tom into Corps. Since that day, surviving and
shooting a gun were the two skills he brought to every single ship he’d ever
served, and that’s what he had to focus on now. Problem being—Tom couldn’t
figure out whether Da’shay was a threat to his continued survival. Captain
Ramsay seemed to think she wasn’t, but Tom had his doubts.

Fact was, when it came to women, Ramsay was all kinds of
stupid. The only person to ever talk their way into the ship and the classified
computer system had been some woman playing the captain with her sweet little
smile and fluttering eyelids. Tom had told the captain she was trouble. Women
who tried that hard to distract a man with how they looked…well, Tom’s ma
always said those sort were trying to keep men from noticing something deeper
down. In all his years, Tom hadn’t ever met a woman to prove his ma wrong. But
wave a helpless woman in front of Captain Jonathan Ramsay and you were likely
to fry most of the man’s logic circuits.

But it wasn’t as if Da’shay was a woman…not exactly anyway.
She looked like a woman, mostly. Some days, that long, black hair and those
dark eyes would pull Tom toward her like a moth, but then her arms and legs
were a little too long and her face had these small features that made her look
like an elf or a little doll. She stood tall enough to look him in the eye,
which Tom appreciated on a woman, but the whole package was disconcerting.

She’d reach out and catch his arm as she went twirling by,
and her fingers would close with the sort of strength Tom normally expected to
find in a man. More, actually. She’d sailed into the middle of a firefight her
first month on the
Kratos
, but instead of firing a gun, she’d snuck up
behind the gunhands and started tossing them around like bits of trash. They’d
ended up with broken arms and legs and a few cracked ribs, but the
Kratos
crew had come out without a scratch.

And that brought Tom’s mind back to those pictures. She’d
enjoyed killing and that was something Tom couldn’t abide.

He loved shooting, whether he was shooting targets or people
didn’t really make much difference to him except that people were harder to
hit. He liked protecting crew and showing off his skills. He liked putting his
strength up against another man in a fair fight and walking away knowing he was
stronger, and if they had to call medics for his opponent, that didn’t really
bother him. Tom never pretended that he was a good man. He wasn’t the sort of
ethical man his ma would like him to be—that was one reason he avoided writing
her. However, he never hurt someone who was unarmed, he never took out
bystanders in a fight and he never took any sort of sadistic glee in the
killing of a human being. He might not care about people as much as others told
him he should, but Da’shay…she’d been reveling in her kill. That just wasn’t
right.

The train’s tracks gave a low-pitched hum that told him that
the train was close and Tom moved toward the ramp, reaching for his money. His
fingers brushed over the small metal disk he still had in his pocket. Looking
over at the trash can, he tried to convince himself to drop it in, but he
couldn’t. If Ramsay was going to go all kinds of girl-stupid on him, he
couldn’t turn a blind eye to that.

Twenty minutes later, Tom slipped off the train and into the
dark streets without any answers. Someone had broken the lights around the
station and the city had clearly given up trying to fix anything around here.
This was the kind of place where Tom felt most at home. Here, no one looked at
him and wondered what the hell he was doing. They just wondered if Tom was
likely to kill them if they tried robbing him. He was.

Tom wanted a particular kind of place…some place the younger
ones avoided. He wanted a place where only the most dangerous men and women
went to drink, where trouble was least likely to start because any hothead
would get shot before he could do too much shit-stirring. If he was lucky, he
might even talk a woman into bed. Some of the women gun hands appreciated a man
who could fuck ‘em without ever forgetting that they were killers for hire.

Most bars gave themselves names like “The Mercenary” to
attract the young idiots, but Tom eventually found a place with narrow windows
about perfect for shooting out of and no front light. A chipped sign simply
stated “Carla’s” in plain lettering. This was what Tom had been searching for.

He pushed the door open slow, studying the room to see if
there was anyone inside who would be likely to take offense at the fact Tom was
breathing. He’d made enemies, and he’d learned to keep an eye out for ‘em. A
dozen men and five or six women studied him back. Hands rested near gun belts.
Avalon
was close enough to the colonies that plenty of people still wore guns, but it
wasn’t the norm. Every person in this room was not only wearing a gun, but they
looked ready to use it. This place was trouble.

“What can I get you?” a woman asked from the side of the
room. A stainless-steel bar server with a government certified seal stood in
the corner, so Tom wasn’t going to have to put up with watered down drinks.

“Rye whiskey.” The tables along the walls were taken and Tom
didn’t want to sit in the center of the room right in front of the door, so he
wandered over to the stairs and leaned on the banister. This way, any doxies
who were working the place would know he was interested.

Two men in the corner challenged each other on a marksman
game that Tom knew he could beat. Another day he might make a few wagers and
take these people’s money away from them. Smugglers and thieves made a lot more
than a corporal, so Tom considered that a fair way to supplement his income.

He made eye contact with a woman sitting at a small table nearest
the door. Even just leaning on the table, he could see the muscles in her arms.
Tom was big in all sorts of ways and he really did prefer a partner than he
didn’t have to worry about hurting. She met his eye and looked him over before
slowly looking away. Not disgusted, but not interested.

“You need some company?” Tom had heard soft footsteps on the
stairs, so the voice wasn’t a surprise. He looked up at her and immediately
looked back at the crowd.

“Yep,” he agreed. “No offense, but not in you.”

She finished coming down the stairs. “No offense taken. So,
what are you interested in?” She was so young that she didn’t even have womanly
curves yet—nothing for Tom to hold onto except hip bones. Her long brown hair
was nice and she wasn’t wearing too much makeup. He reached up to run his
calloused hand through her hair. It was silky smooth and smelled of lilacs. Tom
pulled his hand back before she smelled of soot and exhaust.

“Older,” he answered.

“I’m legal.”

“It’d help if you looked it.”

She smiled and shrugged. “Fair enough. Most guys like young,
but plenty want to check my ID to make sure I’m not too young.”

“Don’t care about legal, you still ain’t old enough.”

She pulled back, a frown on her face, and that was one more
woman unhappy with him. “So, what do you want?”

“Experience. Someone with hips I can really grab.” He
thought wistfully of Becca with all her curves. He bet her breasts were huge,
but at this point, he didn’t think he’d ever get a chance to see for himself.
“Someone who doesn’t giggle.”

“You sound like a man who knows what you want.”

“Ain’t got time for playing games. I say what I want and,
that way, no one has to walk away frustrated.”

“Okay,” she said slowly, as if she was trying to figure him
out. That was ironic since Tom took less figuring than most, but he ignored her
as she headed back upstairs. The two men in the corner finished with one
cursing a blue streak and the other laughing and demanding payment. They gave
each other shit the way friends did—without keeping a fighting distance between
them or watching what they said.

“There a problem here?”

Tom looked upstairs. The woman didn’t even bother coming
down to meet him. She was older, in her late thirties or early forties maybe,
so near enough Tom’s age. Her dark blonde hair was pulled back into a severe
ponytail, and she had a hard look about the eyes. Tom figured she’d come up
through playing doxy, and she was probably the business manager of the upstairs
now. Her clothes were loose and her pants wrinkled in a way that spoke of sitting
at a desk.

“Not any more, you’re more like it.” Tom started up the
stairs. “I’m not going to feel like I’m bedding a child with you. Besides, you
look strong enough to gut the man who fucks with you.”

She blinked for a second, and then she smiled. Tom smiled
back. Yep, he was going to blow half a week’s salary tonight, but he had a
feeling it was worth it. “I do believe that’s the best compliment I’ve had in
years.” She lifted her arm to invite Tom to walk down the hallway. Someone had
gone out of their way to try to make the hall look fancy, but the wood veneer
was peeling off the small table with the vase of fake flowers.

“Just saying the truth as I see it. I’m not trying to sweet
talk you.”

“Which is why it’s such a compliment. So, you seem like a straight-talking
man. What are you looking for tonight?”

She opened a door onto a room. It was small, but the bed was
so big it took up most of the space. “What are the rates?” Tom asked.

She studied him. “You planning on doing anything that’s
going to make me reach for pain pills in the morning?” Her voice stayed even,
so Tom figured that was an option if he wanted to pay for it, but he’d never
hit a woman who hadn’t been trying to hit him at the time.

Tom took off his gun belt and set it on the small table wedged
in next to the bed before sitting on the edge of the mattress. “I’m looking for
sex…something to make me forget how shitty my day was.”

“Aren’t we all?” the woman asked. She walked over and
started unbuttoning Tom’s shirt for him. Tom dropped his hands to the bed and
watched her. He didn’t even know her name, but he felt a lot more comfortable
talking to her than he did Becca. Sometimes it felt as if Becca was the
alien…or maybe it was him. Either way, they didn’t seem to be able to
communicate. It was like a
genta
who spoke the language, but just put
ideas together in a way that made understanding even more difficult. Or maybe
it was like a
casslit
who only communicated through actions. Working
with aliens was like one big game of charades and Tom felt that same
frustration trying to tell Becca two simple things; he liked her and he
respected her.

“Any preferences?” She slid his shirt off and then ran her
hands over Tom’s shoulders. Tom sat up a little straighter and reached up to
rest his hands on her waist and pull her close. He smelled her stomach. Soap.
Good clean soap. It smelled about perfect.

“I don’t want to do anything that’s going to make you fake
your way through. Can’t stand seeing a woman slip and let her boredom show in
the middle of sex,” Tom admitted.

The woman laughed. “Well, that might explain what you have
against the younger girls. Trust me, I don’t get so much anymore that it’s a
big bore. Of course, even when I worked the rooms regularly, I was good enough
to hide my feelings.”

“I figured you would be.” Tom ran his hands up under her
loose blouse, feeling her hot, soft skin under his hands. “So how much?”

“Twenty credits.”

Tom grunted. That wasn’t as much as he’d been expecting.
“There something wrong with you?” he asked, leaning back to study her.

“Excuse me?” She put her hands on her hips. “If you don’t
like what you see—”