Last Flight of the Ark (7 page)

He left his quarters and started toward the deck. As he walked by Melissa’s room, her door slid open. She stepped up and walked alongside. He hadn’t seen her in her dress uniform since they’d first boarded the
Ark
. In a skirt and heeled boots, her legs seemed even longer. He’d forgotten how hot she looked in it. “You clean up nice.”

“Not too shabby yourself, sir.” Melissa glanced sideways at his rank and medals and smiled. “Love the bling. Always makes me hot.”

He rolled his eyes. “Call it military GQ. Gotta look the part.”

“I’ll call it something.” She mimicked his throaty growl. “Can you smell my panties?”

Understatement. “Ease off, Melissa. I don’t need a hard-on for this meeting.” The first difference he’d picked up was her scent. It beckoned to him. No. Demanded he take her, fuck her, ride her. Pheromones rolled off her body like steam, encouraging the blood to rush to his dick. Damned little vixen. No question now. He’d infected her.

“Then you probably don’t want to know that I’m not wearing any.”

“Damn.” They turned the corner and came face to face with Jessica and the envoy. Jessica’s gaze landed on him for a heartbeat, then traveled over to Melissa, where she held it. She opened her mouth as if she had something to say, then snapped it shut and looked away.

What Jessica did to her uniform made him commit every carnal sin known to mankind in his head. Damn good thing she wasn’t a mind reader. He reached over and pressed his hand into a gel pad that opened the conference room.

“After you.” He swept his hand toward the door. A tall woman in a black uniform decked out with twice the medals he wore, strode toward the door, followed by two giants, who wore arrays of medals just as impressive. “Commander.”

She nodded and brushed past.

He walked over to the table and pulled out a chair. She continued by and took one at the head of the table.
This’ll be fun
. He groaned internally.
Like tap-dancing barefoot in a nest of scorpions
.

“You’ll have to excuse the informality of this meeting. I wasn’t expecting you for a week, Colonel.”

She raised a brow. “You’ve had eight months to prepare.”

Be-yotch
. Kaleb leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. He laced his fingers together and stared over them. “I’ve had eight months to manage a large ship with more than eight hundred cryo-cells and only two staff members to help. Please excuse me, Colonel, if I didn’t spend every waking moment preparing your brief.” He waited for her to look away.

She didn’t. He inhaled. Something wasn’t right. Her smell was all wrong. He couldn’t pinpoint what, but one other thing really bugged him. He’d expected a man. He’d been briefed that the commander of the
Genesis II
was male and Kaleb retained information like a computer processor. He seriously doubted he could put it down to bad memory or the accident.

“Do you have the drop schedule prepared?” Her mouth drew up tight in displeasure. Pale hair, light blue eyes. An attractive woman; however, a bit cold, impersonal, and not very military. Not once had she addressed him by his rank or recognized him as her equal, which he was.

“I had it prepared before I left Earth.” The hair at the back of his neck stood on end. If she was the true commander of the
Genesis II
, she would’ve had that schedule before she disembarked on the mission. He’d transmitted it before launch. Nothing was making sense. Her scent permeated his nostrils and it hit him.
Predator
.

“Excuse me while I retrieve it.” He rose from his seat and shot Melissa and Jessica a look of warning. He prayed silently they could read the body language. Melissa rose from her seat.

“I locked the drop schedule in the vault, sir. You’ll need my assistance.” Her face gave nothing away. She sincerely looked like she’d locked it in a vault.

Jessica silently mouthed the word “vault” back to him and gave him a confused look. Kaleb nodded. They didn’t have a vault on this ship. It was a stock hauler. There wasn’t anything of significant value to lock up. The envoys might claim to be from the
Genesis II
, and they might have flown the ship here, but they sure as hell weren’t from Earth.

They were encroachers.

Melissa stepped through the door and Kaleb followed. As soon as it closed, he pulled her down the hall. “They’re not who they appear to be.” What the hell had happened to the crew of the
Genesis II
? Were they being held hostage? Dead? Whatever it was, he needed to find out.

“Sir?”

“They smell wrong. They’re not from Earth.”

“What do you think they want?”

“Our planet and stock.” He tugged her around the corner. “That’s the only feasible thing I can think of. You need to get on board the
Genesis II
and find out what happened to the crew. If they’re being held captive, try to free them. I have a feeling we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll stall them. If I’ve learned anything from the military, it’s hurry up and wait. I can drag a meeting out so long my posterity will be in the history books by the time it’s done.”

She nodded and spun to head for the bay. Kaleb snagged her wrist and brought her back into his arms. He pushed her against the wall. “One other thing.” He lowered his mouth and kissed her, wishing he had hours to take it further. But duty called.

Slowly he pulled back and pressed his forehead to hers. “I have to stay here. They expect my presence and I can’t let them see anything is off. It’s why I’m asking you to do this. I don’t like sending you over there, so be careful.” He pressed a laser into her hands. “Keep it set to kill, and shoot at the first sign of aggression.”

Melissa nodded. “Don’t worry about me. Keep them busy and I’ll take care of the recon.”

At least one of them seemed to be collected. Inside, he was torn between protecting his crew and saving another crew that might be too late to save. He’d rather be the one walking onto that ship and taking the chances.

“In ten minutes, page Jessica on the com. Have her go down to the bay and prep this ship to land on the planet. Have her get on the com and dial the Pony Express. I need a message to go out to Earth Command. They may not be able to help us, but I want them alerted to what’s going on. If they can stop the other ships, they need to do it. This is going to get ugly. We need to be prepared.”

The “Pony Express” referred to a courier that moved through a wormhole that brought them to this galaxy. The wormhole cut the traveling time to Terra II down by years, but it also made communication with Earth impossible. To solve the problem, Earth had created a station in two satellite segments and a courier system to move between the two parts.

One part of Ursus Station, Ursus Major, sat on the Earth side of a wormhole at the midpoint of the route to Terra II. The other half, Ursus Minor, a smaller segment of the station, sat on the other side of the wormhole, and due to atmospheric considerations, all messages had to be moved between the two by shuttle.

Because of the instability of the wormhole, shuttles had to wait for electrical storms inside the tunnel to calm before they could fly through. Sometimes messages could take hours or even days to reach their final destination. Earth Command officers often joked and called the shuttles the Pony Express, after the swift message delivery system of the Old West—faster, they claimed, than their own.

“Sir, it might not be a good idea to send any transmissions the hijackers might intercept.”

“Good point. Hold off until we know what we’re up against.” That was the other weakness. In order for the signal to travel the distance it needed to, the transmission was broadcast on a wide band, easy for other ships in the area to pick up. It was never considered an issue since Earth Command thought nobody but their own people would be listening. But now someone else was, and they’d failed to think of that.

“Do you think they suspect?”

He shook his head. He wasn’t getting that off them. They wanted what he had onboard and would play along nicely until they got it. He’d be damned if he let them hijack his planet and cargo. No fucking way. They’d just picked the wrong enemy to tangle with.

Melissa started toward the dock.

“Melissa?”

She turned.

“We don’t know who we’re dealing with. Get on that ship and off as fast as you can. If you can’t get to the crew, see if you can at least zero in on their location and I’ll think of a way to free them.”

She gave him a quick salute and ran down the hallway. She even looked great doing it in heels and a skirt. Damn, he loved his job. He looked over his shoulder at the conference room door.
Most of the time I love this job
.

Kaleb moved down the hall to grab a handful of papers that outlined the genetic studies he’d conducted in the last ten years. If anything would put them to sleep, and at a big blow to his ego, it would be his study. Unfortunately, not everyone loved science the way he did. Ego aside, if he could use it, he would.

If that didn’t suck up the time, he’d brief them on the microenvironments and talk about dietary requirements for the herbivores, anything to drag them along until he could form a plan. As for the drop schedule, he’d stress the importance of prepping the animals. That would buy time, too.

He scratched his head and stared down at all his work, which in the last twenty-four hours had been proven false and was now completely worthless. Man could evolve overnight. He only wished he’d figured that out ten years ago.

Hell, he’d learned a lot in the last twelve hours that he’d have liked to have known months ago, and he had a feeling the information would play into their future in ways he couldn’t fathom. Whoever these people were, their intentions couldn’t be good. They offered friendship on the surface, but there were just some things they couldn’t cloak, and they stank of deceit.

Could this be how Hector of Troy felt when the Greeks had come out of the horse? Probably damn close. He’d never anticipated this scenario. Earth had never anticipated it. They never thought someone was watching or that they’d want to steal their planet. It had been foolish to think they were the only sentient life-forms in the galaxy. Even more foolish to think what they’d built wouldn’t be noticed by someone or something out there.

Question was, were the encroachers willing to kill to get it? He’d smelled predator and he had a feeling they would kill if they hadn’t already. Those were Terran uniforms. Where were the real owners?

***

Kaleb was right. It was all wrong. Nobody challenged her approach or tried to stop her. Not that she gave them a chance to spot her. She’d slipped in through what maintenance called a back entrance, used by drones only and not something anyone who never worked with them would know about. Melissa docked the shuttle where the remotes sat.

With a little hacking, she’d mimicked one of the drones. Not hard when she was an officer on the project and had access to almost all of the drives on the
Ark
, the sister ship, and the shuttles. Only highly classified information that she didn’t have a need-to-know would be blocked, and she didn’t have to get into it to get the job done.

For all those at the controls of the
Genesis II
knew, she was an environmental drone, back from a routine scan of the planet’s surface.

The bay doors slid shut and the pressure stabilized. She opened the hatch and stared across the silent bay. The hair on her arms snapped to attention. Not a motion anywhere, and only the glow of the security lights made the bay visible. Everything appeared to be on autopilot. She swept her gaze right to left. No sign of life in any corner. Obviously the alien imposters didn’t anticipate visitors. Her first hunch had been dead-on.

Not looking good. She pulled her laser off her hip and set it to kill. She glanced both ways and exited the shuttle, running down the ramp. She stayed low, keeping along the wall and in the shadows. The lift appeared to be operable, but she’d use the secondary route and maintenance shafts. All ladders and crawl space, but she wasn’t about to take chances with the lift and alert them to her presence. Since the
Genesis II
was the
Ark
’s sister ship, the layout would be identical. She’d check the main deck first and scan the command station, get a head count on the hostiles if possible. A lot to do in the little time Kaleb allotted for the reconnaissance. She had an hour, tops, in the shafts, if she wanted to get out of there without being seen.

Melissa pulled a lever and popped a hidden panel open. Only accessed for maintenance, it didn’t have the auto doors like the rest of the ship and had been designed to blend in. Simple and invisible. She dropped down and crawled inside. She didn’t smell death. A good sign, but that didn’t mean anything. They could’ve ejected the bodies into space. It would certainly explain the silence. She crawled thirty feet to a vertical shaft and began to climb up the built-in rungs. A little deeper into the shaft and she heard voices ahead: two men, talking in hushed whispers. But the shafts were well insulated and it shouldn’t be possible.

The hijackers wouldn’t whisper unless they found out she was onboard. Melissa froze. Could they know she was on board? Unlikely. When she’d approached, she’d stayed in the shadow of their ship, navigating on auxiliary power only and drafting off the stream so her signature ghosted with the
Genesis II’s
. They shouldn’t have picked up any indication she was around.

“No. We stay put. You saw what they can do.”

English. Most likely not the choice of alien hijackers. Melissa crawled laterally from the maintenance shaft toward the vent that led to the conversation. She stopped over the room and stared down through the grates. Two men, both in regulation Earth Command uniforms, argued. She pried the vent off and slowly lowered her body behind them, dropping to the floor.