Collateral Damage (6 page)

Not wasting any time, Waryd bit the nape of her neck. She jerked against him, inflaming him even more and her hot musky scent hit his nostrils with a crash, overriding his already shaky control.

“I…can’t…” he ground out.

He didn’t even know what exactly he was trying to say. Can’t resist? Can’t wait? He moved a finger between the creases of her buttocks, then used his hand to force her legs apart. Meyal tried to accede but her movements stopped well short of satisfaction.

Those damned pants!

With a curse, Waryd crouched, dragging Meyal’s inconvenient trousers with him. She stepped out of each leg obligingly and he flung the garment away without hesitation. His gaze settled on the dark triangle at her groin. If he nuzzled her there, breathed in her intimate scent….

He knelt, cupping her buttocks in his hands, pushing her forward against his face. Her fingers tangled in his hair in an effort to find balance, and his tongue darted forward.

She was so wet! He curled his tongue and captured some of her cream, savouring its marine tang. Above him, Meyal’s voice became rough with lust.

“Oh god,” she moaned. Her fingers tightened, pulling at his hair, but he didn’t mind. He used a hand to stroke her engorged clitoris, then his tongue returned to flick at the small nub of tender flesh while he inserted two fingers into her cunt. Her legs trembled as she spread them, spasming against the digits that explored her passage. He quickened his assault.

Meyal came in sudden convulsions, jerking against him with powerful thrusts. He didn’t wait for them to subside. In one smooth movement, he rose, carrying her with him and impaling her upon his impatient cock while she still trembled. She was so slippery, so ready, that he drove himself into her with minimal resistance.

Waryd threw back his head and closed his eyes. One thrust into the sweet heat that was Meyal Lit and he felt as if he was home. He even managed another thrust before the abstinence of the past seven months overcame him. With ragged shouts, he emptied himself into Meyal, clutching at the firm cheeks of her bottom with tense fingers, driving himself again and again into her luscious heat with guttural cries, while he dripped sweat on her overheated skin and thought he was in heaven.

“Oh. My,” she murmured.

At her words, Waryd came back to reality with a thump. He looked into her face, blinked, and managed a sheepish smile.

“I’m really sorry about that,” he apologised, cringing inside. She probably thought he was the crassest kind of oaf, the kind who took another woman without the slightest bit of consideration for her. “It’s just…you know, seven months….”

She giggled then, startling him. “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

He lowered her gently to the floor and was inordinately proud of himself when she had to clutch at him to steady herself. Coming to a decision, he scooped her up in his arms and headed for the bathrooms.

“What did you mean?” he asked.

“I meant that that was some of the hottest quick sex I’d ever had.”

Really? She
liked
it? The tension bled away from Waryd, as his mind filled with scene after scene of erotic fantasy. He hadn’t counted on anything like this happening when he was first assigned to Falcin V. His plans had been cold, clear-cut. But now….

He put Meyal down in one of the shower cubicles and turned on the jets, coming up behind her and spooning himself against her back as the steam-filled water hit their sated bodies.

The night was still young, he thought to himself. And he was full of ideas.

Meyal woke to the blare of an alarm. She blinked as her brain tried to comprehend the words blasting out through the room’s speakers.

“Illegal entry, Hatch Two. Illegal entry, Hatch Two.”

Shit! What was going on? She reached out a hand, expecting the firm surface of her mattress, but felt something else. Warm silk over steel, rhythmically beating against her palm. Gods, it was Waryd! Meyal wanted to grin at her recollections of what they had got up to last night, both before
and
after their heated shower, but the warning continued to sound.

Beside her, she heard a male groan, but levered herself up and was half-dressed before Waryd had time to ask the inevitable question: “What the hell is that?”

Meyal was about to answer but, at that moment, the door to her bedroom slid open. She froze, one foot still stuck halfway in the leg of her trousers, and looked up.

Her first thought was that she had been boarded by pirates. The suit the intruder was wearing looked bulkier – and more lethal – than her own. The subdued lighting in her room flashed across its solid metal finish, highlighting a mass of fine criss-crossing score marks. Meyal didn’t think she wanted to know where those marks had come from. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Waryd sit bolt upright, the thin blanket slipping from his body to show a bare torso.

The intruder stood still in the doorway and, with the visor reflecting the light, no face was visible. But Meyal couldn’t mistake the surprise and anger in its voice when it said, at the same time as Waryd, “What the
hell
are you doing here?”

Meyal paced the length of the Space, occasionally looking at Waryd and the young woman who had finally deigned to remove her imposing-looking helmet. Waryd was seated at the dining table, while the woman was leaning against the kitchenette counter.

“So you’re Waryd’s
sister
?” she asked, for the second time.

“The only person who knows how to crash a wonderful party,” Waryd added, clearly unhappy. “Meyal, may I formally introduce my baby sister, Callin Gosin.”

The woman called Callin threw her arms into the air. “Excuse me for busting all thrusters to get here,
dearest
brother. The minute I picked up a missile coming in hot from outside the system and extrapolated its trajectory, I knew you were in trouble. I thought I was rescuing you from a certain death, only to find your orbital so much charred shrapnel and you, on the other side of the planet, engaged in Happy Time with a complete stranger.”

Meyal didn’t know whether to die of embarrassment or get fired up with righteous anger.

“It happened then?” Waryd asked, his tone serious. “My orbital was destroyed?”

Callin referred to a display built into the forearm of her suit. “Only eight hours and forty-seven minutes ago.”

Waryd had the grace to look abashed. “Ah. Well. We, er, appear to have missed that.”

Meyal raised her voice. “What is going on?” she demanded. “You,” she pointed to Callin, “how did you know Waryd’s orbital was going to be destroyed? And you,” she pointed to Waryd, “what does all this mean?”

Neither answered for several long seconds, then Waryd beckoned to a chair. “Sit down and I’ll explain,” he said.

Meyal looked at the encouraging smile on his face, the grim features of his sister, and slowly approached the table, gingerly pulling a chair a little farther away from Waryd than was polite.

“All right,” she said, seating herself, “you can explain now.”

“My sister and I run a small, um, operation, out near the edges of the established creases. We dabble mostly in tradeable tech, stuff that usually only the big guys have. And we make a good living at it.” He shot a quick glance towards the counter, but Callin remained silent.

“You’re freelancers,” Meyal stated.

“That’s right. We’re freelancers. About a year ago, we decided to go for something big. Something nobody had attempted before. Mineral analysis.”

Meyal frowned. “Mineral analysis? You mean, like what we’re doing here?”

Waryd nodded. “Up till now, we’d only dabbled in small stuff, like thruster modifications and shield algorithms. It brought some money in—”

Callin snorted. With an angry look in her direction, Waryd raised his voice and continued.

“—but it wasn’t enough to support us long-term.”

“We were doing okay,” Callin interrupted.

“We were stuck in the baby leagues,” Waryd shot back, “hardly making more than hand-to-mouth, and you know it.”

He turned to Meyal and calmed his voice. “So, a year ago, I got the bright idea to…step up. Try something that had a better profit margin.”

“The problem was,” Callin added, “by now, everyone who was anyone in the Republic business world knew the names of Waryd and Callin Gosin, and they also knew my brother had a record as long as a crease from Earth to Alpha Centauri.”

“But,” he held up a finger, “I also knew that XeGeTech was about to fund a major expansion of its operations, and that its rivals would have to follow suit in order to stay competitive.”

“So you applied to XeGeTech for a job?” Meyal asked, trying to keep up with the flood of information.

“XeGeTech had very strict entry requirements,” Waryd demurred. “I knew I didn’t stand a chance with them. But, if they were pushing ahead, I thought that ExoSystems might get more than a little desperate.
Their
screening procedures had holes big enough for me to slip through.”

“What my brother’s trying to tell you, Ms. Lit, is that he bought the answers to several technical exams and, together with Exo’s security gaps, scammed his way to Falcin V as an exo-geologist.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Waryd declared to the room.

“Yeah,” Callin drawled. “Worked so well they sent you a missile as a quarterly bonus.”

“Hmmmm.” Waryd scratched his head. “I’m not sure what went wrong there.”

Finally, Meyal felt she had something to contribute to the conversation. “Well, we did take over ExoSystems,” she pointed out. “And my supervisor, Lewaya Phoenix, told me that the staff from ExoSystems had been run through the company’s screens a few days ago.”

Callin clicked her fingers. “That must be it. When they ran the Exo staff through their databases, it must have screamed ‘blue murder’ when it got to your name.”

“I am deeply misunderstood,” Waryd mourned, but there was a mischievous glint in his eye. Meyal couldn’t help but grin in response.

“They probably thought you would be stealing their tech,” Callin continued, “so they sent you an incendiary present.”

“But Meyal was smart enough to put two and two together and came and rescued me in time. Unlike,
ahem
, you, my larcenous sister.”

“Speaking of which, did you manage to get anything of value? Or,” Callin flicked a glance in Meyal’s direction, “were you preoccupied?”

“I only got their latest operating system, search algorithms, data archives for several sectors
and
a couple of their proprietary sensors.”

“So this whole operation isn’t such a bust after all.” Callin pursed her lips. “Well done, bro.”

“But there’s more,” he said. “ExoSystems has caveman technology next to XeGeTech.” He eyed Meyal. “And we happen to be on a XeGeTech orbital.”

Meyal shook her head. The movements began as slow shakes of her head, then gradually got faster. “Oh no. You’re not going to drag me into this piracy scheme.”

Waryd caught her gaze. “Think about it, Meyal. What’s going to happen once your supervisor gets the quarterly reports and sees that, not only have the inventory levels gone down faster than normal, but there were multiple exits and entrances to your orbital? How are you going to explain that away?”

“We could scrub the files,” she replied, but her voice was hesitant. The truth was, deleting the chat-sex sessions held in the Rec Space was one thing, but attempting to track down all the systems that recorded resource usage or orbital mechanics was a much more complicated task. She looked at Waryd and knew by the expression on his face that he had reached the same conclusion.

“Come with us,” he said, into the pool of silence that gathered.

“What?” That was Callin, jerking herself upright. She glared at her brother. “What did you just say?”

“Meyal comes with us,” he told her calmly. “We copy all the tech, grab some inactive probes, just like I did at the Exo orbital, and then take off.”

“Like hell,” his sister replied. “I didn’t work my arse off, buy a ship, and spend time and money cruising the creases just to let some freeloader join the team.” She suddenly stopped and had the grace to look abashed. “Er, no offence, Meyal.”

“I can understand your position,” Meyal said faintly, but her mind was on other things. The most pressing image was one of financial stability receding into the distance, followed closely by approaching scenes of her impending imprisonment. A small part of her brain registered that Waryd and his sister were bickering, but that wasn’t what was important. Meyal knew she had to think of herself. Herself and her family.

She didn’t want to turn Waryd in to XeGeTech. For one, it would be a waste of a damn good lover. But she didn’t want to go to prison either. And what about her family, struggling away on the home planet? Was there any way she could satisfy
all
her needs?

It took several minutes of furious thinking before she looked up. “I have a proposal,” she said, her voice cutting through the sibling quarrel.

Both Waryd and Callin spun to look at her.

“We take the tech and, yes, we can take a couple of probes,” Meyal told them, “but they remain
my
property, just as the ExoSystems stuff remains Waryd’s.”