Adrift (3 page)

Jasmine's eyes widened when she realized how this situation would play out.
The man was nuts, she decided.
She looked up at Patrick's trigger finger and saw it tighten, as if in slow motion.
Determined not to be completely helpless she twisted around, grabbed the man's genitals and squeezed, hard.
She threw every muscle she had into it.

Patrick's arm jerked up and the shot went high.
Norik continued forward and ran the knife into the shooter's stomach.
He turned, shifted his grip on the hilt and jammed it upwards into his ribs.
Patrick staggered backward and Norik's forward motion left him with no choice but to follow.
Jasmine, who still had her hands clamped around Patrick's privates, was dragged along with them.

Norik's shoulder screamed at him.
Adrenaline had kept him going but he knew that would soon wear off.
He also knew that there was still another man to deal with.
Where he was, Norik didn't know yet.

Something wriggled underneath him.
Norik was on his back on top of Patrick and he seriously hoped it wasn't Patrick moving, because that meant he'd have to kill him again.
The bastard had taken a lot of strength to get down the first time.

Something touched his inner thigh, so he tilted his head up to see.
It was a hand.
Not Patrick's hand, he decided.
It was too small and feminine for that.
He quietly watched it grope around until the hand became more frantic and tried to pinch him.
Alarmed, Norik rolled to his right and landed on his injured shoulder.
This time he did cry out.

Jasmine came up gasping for air.
She'd been trapped in between Patrick's legs and underneath what she could only guess to be Norik's ass.
She pushed her hair out of her face and stared straight at the knife sticking out of Patrick's lifeless body.
A dead body.
She was on a bridge with three dead bodies and of those, one was a bad guy.
That left two more bad guys who wanted her still loose on the ship, along with a handful of passengers, an engineer, herself and Norik.

"Norik!"
she exclaimed as she suddenly remembered her rescuer.
She clambered over Patrick's body to him.
"Norik?"
she said again more quietly, worried when she touched him and her hands came away wet and sticky.

"That," he gasped, "is my name.
He dead?"

"I know it's your name," she said slightly annoyed with him.
"You killed him."

"Good," Norik grunted and rolled onto his back.
"Where's the other one?"

"I...
I don't know," said Jasmine.
She looked over her shoulder at the door.
He didn't appear to be on the bridge.
The only thing that seemed to be amiss, aside from the bodies and a head, was a strange sound coming from the ceiling.
"What's that noise?"
she asked.

Norik tilted his head to the side to listen.
He closed his eyes briefly and groaned, "Hull breach.
We have to get out of here."

"There's a hole in the ship?"
said Jasmine.
"Holy fuck!"

Norik's left hand darted out and grabbed the front of her shirt.
He pulled her closer to him and said in a very clear voice, "Get the knife.
Get the plasma blaster, then help me up.
Got that?"

"We're gonna get spaced!"
Jasmine freaked out.

He shook her and repeated his instructions again.
This time his order seemed to get through to her and she did as instructed.
Plasma Blaster first and then the mucky job of retrieving the knife, which seemed to be stuck.
Jasmine shuddered as the blade finally shlurped free.
She pulled a face and wiped the blood off on Squeezey's shirt.
When she turned back to Norik he gave her a funny look.
"What?
You're supposed to look after blades," she told him.

"Help me up," said Norik.
He held out his left hand for her and she helped him sit up.
He used her as leverage to get to his feet.
Norik had lost a lot of blood and felt dizzy.
Jasmine ducked under his good arm and took some of his weight as she carefully picked their way around the bodies and consoles to the door.

The hissing had only increased in volume.
Norik glanced up at the ceiling as they skirted around it.
It tugged on their clothes and a tablet rattled on the console that they had just passed.
Judging by the thickness of the hull versus the intensity of the plasma blaster's energy beam, the hole had started out tiny, but it had grown and would soon be big enough to suck not only the air from the bridge but everything else as well.
Norik wondered what kind of an idiot fired a plasma blaster on a ship in the middle of space.
Patrick, obviously.

Jasmine helped Norik through the manual hatchway and then sealed it behind them.
She turned back to Norik and gasped.
"Your blood is orange?"

"I am half Lyrissian," he reminded her.

"Yes, of course," she said and mentally slapped herself for being stupid.
"Well, you seem to know what you're doing, so what next?"
It was strange, he did seem to know what he was doing.
He didn't seem fazed in the slightest by what had just happened.
It was as if this happened to him all the time.
Sometimes it happened to her, it came with the job and why she carried around a small personal weapon.
Nothing though could compare with what had just happened on the bridge.

"We get you back to the lounge," he told her as they made their way down the stairs.
"You will stay there with the rest of the passengers."

"And what will you do?"
she asked.
"Other than bleed all over the place?"

"You are very annoying," he told her.

"Thank you," she said and smiled at him.
She was still concerned about the amount of orange blood he was losing.
"We should patch you up before we go any further."

"I will be fine," he assured her, although he made a noise like the hull breach had and she wasn't so certain.

"A bandage.
Won't take a minute," she told him and pushed him against the wall.
"Just need something to wrap around it."

Norik put his hand on her shoulder, wrapped his fingers around the fabric of her shirt and pulled on it.
The long sleeve came away easily and he smirked at the momentary look of shock on her face.
"You want the other one too?"
he asked.

Jasmine eyed his gaping wound and decided her shirt was going to a good cause.
After all, the man had saved her life and she needed him alive if he was going to take down the other two bad guys.
She nodded and he quickly transformed her shirt into a tank top.
"You owe me a new shirt," she informed him as she bundled up one sleeve and used the other to tie it tightly against his shoulder.

Norik raised an eyebrow and said, "I think you owe me."

She looked from the makeshift bandage into his dark, smoldering eyes.
Even though the man was clearly in pain, his eyes teased her.
He wasn't as brooding as he pretended to be.
"If we survive this, my employer will reward you for saving his best reporter," she told him.

"I just want to get back to my ship," he told her.
"Preferably in one piece."

"That's a good goal," she said and helped him to the lounge.

"Hello?"
Jasmine called out.
She scanned the lounge with the torch, tilted her head at Norik and said, "I thought you said there were passengers here."

"There were," he said and pulled the plasma blaster from the back of Jasmine's trousers.
Norik gestured for her to get behind him with the light as they slowly entered the room.

Jasmine frowned.
"Are you OK to use that with your injury?"
she asked.
She also wondered if it were smart for him to fire considering the small problem with the hull breach on the bridge.

"Left handed," he told her as they crept forward.

"Oh," was all she could say.
Left handedness was a very rare thing in today's society, with less than one percent of Humans with a vague degree of it.
Lyrissians were supposed to be ambidextrous.
It seemed that this one was full of surprises.

Norik suddenly stopped and Jasmine, who had been lost in thought, bumped into him.
She felt guilty for not paying attention when she heard him hiss.
That injury needed a medical professional to tend to it otherwise he might lose his arm.
The thought made her feel even worse.

"Sorry," she said and meant more than just for bumping into him.

When he didn't reply she tried to look around him but he held her back.
"We don't have to worry about the passengers," he said and turned to her.

"They're dead?"
she asked.

The grim look on his face answered for him.
He glanced around the darkened room and decided they would need to get to engineering.
Power needed to be restored and if it had been him in charge of whatever this was, he would hole up there.
He looked down at Jasmine who was worrying her lower lip between her teeth and wondered how she fit into this.
Was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time or was there more to it than that?

Jasmine looked up and caught him studying her.
If the situation had been any different from the deathly one they found themselves in now, she would have flirted with him.
Maybe stick out her tongue.
Instead she bluntly asked, "What?"

"Talk," he said.

"About what?"
she asked innocently.

Norik had to admit she made quite a convincing innocent but he had heard some of the things the missing man had said to her.
It was obvious that they knew each other, or at least, of each other.
"Talk," he ordered.

Jasmine shivered.
He had a more authoritative voice than even her boss had when he had tried to warn her off her current assignment.
Nothing made an investigative journalist more determined than when someone told them to back off.
She opened her mouth to start spinning him stories but the look he bored into her, told her he was a man used to having his orders followed.
Squeezey was a perfect example of that.

"OK, but sit down.
You're making me worried that you'll faint," she said and dragged him to a couch.

"I have never fainted," Norik said but obliged and sank down into it.
A groan escaped his lips.
Jasmine flinched at the sound.
She settled onto the coffee table directly in front of him and waited for him to get comfortable.
He rested the plasma blaster on his thigh but kept his hand on it, just in case.

"Always a first time for everything," she said with a wan smile.
"I take it you're Space Corps?"
she asked.

He nodded but didn't reveal anything further about himself, like his ship or rank, instead he just sat there and stared at her.

Jasmine shifted uncomfortably under his gaze.
Even though her eyes had adjusted to the dark there were still shadows and they hooded him like a cowl.
She let her imagination run free for a moment and likened him to Death.
The knife next to her on the table could have been his scythe.

"What does the Corps have to do with this?"
Norik asked her.
He was afraid now that the adrenaline rush was fading, shock would set in.
Not afraid for himself, but for her.
The only injury he could see on her was the rather nasty bruise flowering on the left side of her face, there were no doubt more bruises on her body, hidden under her clothes.
He lowered his gaze to her bare arms and visually checked those while he waited for her to continue.

"Intel specifically," she said and felt herself blush.
Had he just checked her out?
Flustered she blurted out her explanation faster than she had intended.
"I'm an undercover investigative reporter.
I'd heard stories of genetic manipulation experiments, all illegal of course, from very reliable sources.
My editor told me to back off, but the harder he tried the more I just had to get the story.
I could practically smell the cover up.
I turned up some clues that pointed to a Corps General, supposedly retired but secretly contracted by Intel to lead their not-so honest activities.
I'm not talking their special and covert ops, I'm talking about the really bad stuff.
I'm talking about how to get powerful weapons into enemy territory without anyone suspecting."