Desperate Times (Lost Planet Warriors Book 1) (8 page)

B
ran’s face
lit up when he saw me. I was pretty sure my own matched his. After all we’d been through this past day, who could blame us? Against all the odds we’d survived the Skree attack. He smiled, and the look he gave me warmed my heart. His face was dirty with soot, his hair mussed badly. There was a hole in his golden armor near his left shoulder. But he was alive.

“You were late,” he observed with an arched eyebrow.

“Really?” I said. Annoyed, I rolled my eyes at him. “Do you think it was easy, making an impossible jump, arriving in just the right time and space to save your golden butt?”

He took a step nearer to me. The bastard was still grinning at me.

“Do you know how close to the sun I had to come in order to get a big enough wake to fry that ship? And I had to do those calculations myself. No fancy Cymtarran computer doing it for me.”

He was still smiling. Damn it. And still coming closer to me. His chest was almost brushing mine. He was taller than me, looking down at me with those catlike eyes of his. They were beautiful, like no eyes I’d ever seen.

“I…” I’d lost my train of thought entirely, staring into his eyes. He leaned in closer. Was he going to kiss me? Did I want him to? Yes. I was surprised at the answer. I’d only just met Bran, but I couldn’t deny that we were connected. We’d saved each other’s lives too many times to not be.

He leaned in and gently took my chin in his fingers, angling my face up toward his. I knew what he wanted. I could feel the energy, the pressure of his want. I was acutely aware that his men and mine were all silent around us. Mine were trying to pretend they were someplace else. His were watching us with curious looks on their faces.

“Relationships based on intense experiences never work,” I said.

“Was that a no?” he replied softly, quirking that eyebrow again. Daring me to say no. He knew that I wanted that kiss as much as he did.

“The hell with it,” I said. I reached up with both hands, putting one on each of his cheeks, and pulled his lips down to mine. He tasted of cinnamon and other spices I couldn’t recall. I kissed him thoroughly and then released him.

His men gave a good natured cheer, something in Cymtarran. I didn’t know precisely what they were saying, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out the gist of it.

“Are all Terran women so forward?” he asked as I pulled away. He was flushed. I’d knocked his socks off, and he knew it. His men knew it. I was feeling more than a little pleased with myself, and at the same time scared as hell. What had possessed me to do that?

“Not all. But a lot,” I replied. Inside I was bouncing a little.

“Your world must be an interesting place.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” I said.

There was a lot he didn’t know. Earth was something of a mess. Contact with the outside universe had been rough on us. Almost being conquered by one of the first alien races we met had been harder still. There were some factions on Earth which believed it might be better to stay out of space entirely, to give up the stars. Luckily cooler heads had prevailed, so far. Sticking our heads in the sand wasn’t going to save humanity. The only way to do that would be to get out there.

Now we had the Skree to worry about. Some of them had survived the explosion of their mothership. Our sensor read said that none of those smaller ships had jump drives. They were carried from system to system in the big ships, but couldn’t leave. Stuck in this system, what would they do? I was willing to bet they wouldn’t just give up without a fight. That didn’t seem to be in their nature.

It wasn’t in ours, either. Earth would have to battle the Skree now. But we had allies - powerful ones, who maybe could teach us the things we needed to know to survive out here.

“I can see that our time here will be an educational experience,” Bran said.

“That it will,” I said. “But just remember who pounced whom.”

His men got a chuckle from that. I’d won them over with my daring - apparently rushing in with a kiss was just as important to these people as rushing in with a plasma rifle. I could get behind that.

What would the future hold for Bran and I? I didn’t know for sure. But looking up into his eyes again, I was eager to find out.

W
ant
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B
eing
a celebrity wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Oh, sure, the awards and accolades were cool for the first five minutes. But then I had to deal with the photographers and interviewers chasing me around. The speeches. The award ceremonies. It never seemed to end, even though I knew the furor would die down a little sooner or later. I was doubly famous, an overnight sensation, and the political machine was using that to push their agendas hard. I didn’t like being in the limelight so much, but there was little I could do about it.

It was so good to be back in space again, even if I was just at the UN spaceport at L5. Lagrange point five was where all the action was happening those days anyway. I peeked out through the window and not too far away I could see the faint shimmer of sunlight off girders. That was the spacedock which had been hastily assembled to house the Cymtarran battle cruiser, Nova Song.

The sofa I was sitting on must have been specially designed to be as uncomfortable as they could make it. That was the only possible excuse for the lumpy surface and not-quite-right angle of the back that left me sitting less straight than was comfortable, but unable to really lounge back either. I checked my watch. I’d been waiting here twenty minutes for my appointment. What the hell?

A door opened, and a blonde woman’s face peeked out from behind it. “The Admiral will see you now,” she said.

I shivered a little. It wasn’t every day that you were going in to see Admiral Dana Stein, the Defender of Earth, the one person who’d been able to do anything to stave off the Kyrelian invasion. She was a living legend. I stood, shaking my dress blues a little to straighten them out. The new medal for valor in combat hung awkwardly over my left breast. For the hundred thousandth time this month I wished I was back in the golden armor Bran had made for me. That wouldn’t have been suitable attire for this meeting. I was already in enough trouble over kissing him. No need to rub it in.

I walked into an office that was small and spartan. The admiral was sitting behind her desk, three computer consoles active in front of her. She saw me enter, smiled thinly, and pushed two of the console screens away from her. They glided away from her desk a bit, hovering suspended in the air just out of reach. She kept the third one close at hand, angled so that I couldn’t see what was on the screen. I had a hunch it was something about me.

Her silver hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail against the back of her head. Her uniform was crisp, but undecorated by anything except her rank. Her eyes sparkled with the deadly intelligence that the woman was famous for. Admiral Stein had been one of my heroes as I was growing up. I wanted to go all fangirl, meeting her at long last, but I couldn’t afford that. I didn’t know where I stood with her.

“Please, sit,” she said, gesturing to a chair across the desk from her.

I did as she ordered, settling myself into the seat as gracefully as I could manage. That was far better than it had been a month ago. I was infused with alien nanites now, and they were happily making every system in my body run at maximum efficiency. I could run faster, lift heavier loads, react more quickly, and generally just do more things better than I could before. It still took a little getting used to sometimes. During the last fight with the alien Skree, I’d been able to run at one of the monstrous, crab-like monsters, turn the run into a slide along the deck so that I came right between its legs. Firing up into the thing, I finished the slide on the far side of the alien’s body as it crashed to the deck behind me. It was the sort of thing you saw in movies, but I’d been able to do it for real. That still scared me a little.

The admiral sat there across from me, drumming her fingers on her desk. She was waiting for me to speak. I didn’t have anything to say - not yet, anyway.

“You’ve given us quite a set of pickles,” she said, finally breaking the silence.

“How so?” I said.

“Really?” she asked, giving me an incredulous look. “You risked your crew and ship to engage an unknown alien species, essentially declaring war. You allowed yourself to be compromised by an alien technology we still don’t entirely understand. And then there’s your…relationship…with the Cymtarrans.”

“With one Cymtarran in particular, you mean?” I asked.

“He’s only just started to agree to negotiations with our ambassadors without you in the room, damn it,” Stein said. “A lot of powerful people are pissed that they need to share diplomatic space with a starship captain. Even one as famous as you are right now.”

“I didn’t ask him to do that, Admiral. It’s not like I control him!”

“No,” she said, glancing over at her console. “And as near as we can tell he’s not controlling you either. Medical scans say there’s no transmissions being emitted by those little robots he injected you with.”

I knew I’d been scanned to a fare-thee-well during the medical checks when I returned to Earth. I figured the nanites were being studied in detail. That process seemed to have been complicated though. I caught wind of it from one frustrated doctor. The nanites died and broke apart shortly after being removed from my body, so the blood samples they’d taken hadn’t been able to teach them much about the tech. It must be some sort of safeguard the Cymtarrans built into them. My nanites had come from Bran’s own bloodstream. He gave them to me to save my life after suffering injuries aboard his ship. There was a way to transfer them without deactivating the things, but the Cymtarrans were being highly reticent about revealing the how of it.

“Are you sleeping with him?” Stein asked me. The question shocked me. I wasn’t expecting her to be so direct. Oh, I’d had reporters asking me similar questions for weeks, but that was the press. I’d thought an admiral would show more discretion. My face flushed scarlet.

“No,” I said. After that first passionate kiss Bran had dropped back to a more leisurely approach. His idea of courtship reminded me more of 18th century Earth than the 22nd century. Then I’d been taken away for a whirlwind tour of the planet, being shown off by politicians who wanted to use my crowd appeal to show themselves off. Bran was still on the Nova Song, overseeing repairs and meeting with various dignitaries from Earth.

Stein scanned my face for a moment. Whatever she was looking for there, she apparently found it. She snapped a quick nod. “Good. I don’t know if Earth is ready for that news yet.”

“What news?” I asked.

“That the Cymtarrans and Terrans are biologically compatible. And as near as we can tell, genetically compatible as well.”

The news rocked me. I’d wondered a little what being in love with an alien commander might mean for my future sex life. From what Stein was saying… Wow. I felt my flush deepening a little more.

“I’ve been fully briefed on their species,” Stein went on. “Not a single female Cymtarran aboard their entire vessel. They apparently liked to keep their women out of the military,” she said, her face twisting in scorn. I more or less agreed with her there. Women belonged in space at least as much as men did.

“They had reasons. Their species was more like one third female, instead of being fifty-one percent like humans are. But it worked out badly for them this time,” she said.

“The Skree destroyed their planet,” I said. Bran had spoken of it a little. His ship was disabled in the final battle to defend their home system. He’d been helpless, unable to protect his world, arriving too late to do anything but watch it be destroyed.

“You can understand our frustration then with your having unilaterally decided to declare war on a race that can blow up a planet?” Stein asked.

“Begging the Admiral’s pardon,” I said, heat filling my tone. I wasn’t really begging anything here. I was pissed. “But what the hell would you have done? The Skree weren’t going to just take out the Cymtarrans and then wave goodbye. That wasn’t in their nature. Earth would have been their next stop.”

“If I had it to do again, I’d have made the same damned decisions,” I snapped. “And they were the right ones to make.”

She sighed and waved her hand at me, looking down at her desk. “I would have done the same thing you did. If you recall, I did do something similar once upon a time. Sometimes the commander in space has to make calls that have a big impact on everyone.”

“You pass,” she looked back up at me, smiling.

“A test?”

“Yes,” she said. “I needed to know if your little adventure was a one time thing, or if you were still capable of making the hard decisions even when under fire.”

She turned the screen she’d been peeking at around to face me. The data there wasn’t about me at all. It was images of Saturn. Specifically, it looked like close-up imagery of one of Saturn’s moons.

“We aren’t the only ones working our asses off this past month,” she said. “The Skree have been busy too. I need you to figure out what they’re up to.”