Quantum (4 page)

She crossed her arms and leaned down for a closer look. The admiral’s story made her feel a little better. If he could survive conditions like that, surely they could survive a couple of hours until a rescue ship came for them. Plus the ease and naturalness with which he’d related the story spoke of genuine experience…at least it seemed to. A point in the human column? She studied his profile, her head beginning to throb as she once again questioned her sanity over agreeing to this craziness.

Within a few minutes, the captain admiral had a fire lit and moved to help Jaren shift closer. After he had the younger man settled, he came over to sit on the log next to her.

“Without those emergency transponders, we’ve got no way of knowing how long it will take a rescue team to find us.” He kept his voice low, probably not wanting Nazari and Jaren to hear the truth of their situation.

“And before we came down, the ship’s emergency beacon was one of the systems that failed,” she replied.

Graydon nodded and picked up a stick to poke at a log in the bottom of the fire. “I noticed that, too. There’s a good chance the authorities have no damn clue where we’ve gone down, or that we even crashed in the first place.”

“The crew of the
Swift Brion
will know by now that something’s not right. When we don’t arrive, they’ll send out a search team.”

He glanced at her, his expression grim. “I know they will. But Tocarra isn’t exactly a small planet. Even by calculating our probable trajectory, it leaves a lot of ground to cover.”

Apprehension tightened across her shoulders. “So what are you saying?”

The admiral dropped the stick and clasped his hands between his knees. “We’ve got two choices. We either stay here and set up a permanent base camp, prepared for a long stay of possibly a week or more. Or we organize what supplies we have and hike out.”

She nodded once and then stared into the fire. With Nazari and Jaren both injured, hiking out would be slow going. Plus, what if they left the ship and the rescue team found the crash site sooner than expected? The rescuers would have no way of finding them if they hiked off into the wilderness. On the other hand, sitting around waiting could prove fatal for Jaren, if her suspicions about internal injuries proved to be correct.

The admiral continued, “We’ll give it tonight and see how things look in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

He leaned to the side and picked up one of the survival packs. “Now, what’s your favorite MRE? So far I’ve found Samaran beef medley, Mazatlan spiced rice and chicken, or spaghetti with meat sauce.”

She screwed up her face as she glanced down at the packets of meals ready to eat that the IPC inflicted on their soldiers when food was scarce. Yeah, they had all the required nutrition, and a small amount filled a person up as if they’d eaten a big meal. But…
ick
. “What’s the point in choosing a flavor when they all taste like stewed boots and five-day-old leftovers? Might as well surprise me.”

He laughed and tossed her a packet, which had
spaghetti meat sauce
printed on the front.

“It’s not all bad.” He held up another packet. “I found some grape jelly.”

“Tell me there’s peanut butter somewhere, and I won’t complain for at least the next twenty-four hours.”

He nodded toward the MRE she held. “Eat your dinner and then we’ll find out.”

She ripped open the packet reluctantly as the admiral stood and brought food and water to Nazari and Jaren. They all settled in silently for a late-afternoon meal…unappetizing as it was.

A glance up at the surrounding trees and sky showed they probably had a few hours of light left before nightfall. When they’d first climbed out of the shuttle, the forest had been deathly silent—no doubt the local wildlife had been scared into hiding by their unceremonious arrival. But since then, the scuffling sounds of small creatures moving about in the underbrush and the tweeting rustle of birds flitting between the trees had returned.

Tocarra had a population of native gray bears, which weren’t aggressive unless threatened. If they managed to stay out of one another’s way, then the rest of the planet’s fauna shouldn’t pose a threat.

Now that she’d taken a moment to stop and think, tension crept along her spine and into her shoulders. No emergency transponders, no one knew their location, limited essential supplies, the possibility that Graydon wasn’t human, and the question over who had been the target of that obviously-not-accidental crash and why… She tightened her hand around the MRE.

Mae didn’t want to sit around and hope for the best. Especially when her commanding officer might not be who he was supposed to be and someone had clearly orchestrated this situation.

No, she never had been good at letting things unfold. One way or another, she’d find some way to get herself out of this situation—sooner rather than later.

Chapter Three

Onboard the
Imojenna
, in orbit around Nadira

Rian checked the onscreen readouts of the planet below him one last time. Exactly what he’d been hoping for. No official spaceport, no intergalactic trade center, and so little IPC presence, it verified the government didn’t give two scum rats about this out-of-the-way rock.

When he’d noted the list of planets in this quadrant of space earlier, something about this particular rock had tugged at his shadowed memories. Usually he went out of his way to avoid anything that risked dragging him back down into that particular darkness. But if he was ever going to get anywhere against the frecking Reidar, he couldn’t spend the rest of his life running from any clues or places that reminded him of those lost years.

They’d been in need of a supply stop, so he’d ordered Lianna to take them down on Nadira. Maybe once he arrived, he’d recognize something that would tell him why this planet had set his Reidar senses tingling.

“What kind of backwater world have you brought us to now?” his sister, Zahli, asked from where she stood just behind his chair.

He rotated his seat to face her. “A
safe
backwater world. We’ll land, re-supply, get some fresh air, and then we’re back onship in twelve hours. We’ve still got a few weeks until we reach Barasa.”

“
Only
twelve hours?” She arched a brow at him, the same way she always did when she was about to launch into an argument. At least these days he wasn’t the only one who ended up on the receiving end of that look. He’d seen her direct it at her fiancé, Tannin, a handful of times. Unfortunately for his ship’s tech analyst, the guy hadn’t quite worked out what that look meant yet.

“We’ve already been traveling for weeks, Rian, taking the most convoluted, ridiculous route to Barasa I’ve ever seen. We could have been there by now if—”

“If we wanted to make it easy for the Reidar to follow us and blow our collective asses out of the ether.” He stood and tugged on the thick wristband of beads he wore. “Feel free to take your boyfriend and leave any time you want. If you’re onship, you do things my way. And my way is the one that keeps us alive.”

She huffed a sigh and spun, stalking out of the bridge and then clomping down the stairs, her muttering drifting back up to him as she went.

“Lianna, put us on a trajectory to land somewhere near the markets in Liese. It’s the biggest trade center on the planet.”

“Yes, Captain. But can I just say, Zahli might have a point. We’ve come a fairly roundabout way toward Barasa. I could plot a more direct route from here. It’ll cut the remaining travel time in half—”

“I know we need to get to Barasa to find out what happened to Tannin’s friend, but we won’t be doing anything if we get caught by the bad guys. And flying in along the usual routes, announcing ourselves as we go, will result in exactly that. The travel plans stay as is—we stop here for supplies, take the long way, and land somewhere discreet.”

She nodded and turned her attention to the navs onscreen in front of her.

He swallowed over a sigh as he escaped the bridge, leaving his nav-engineer to take them dirtside.

Not for the first time, he questioned just how much new information he was likely to get out of exploring the Reidar lead on Barasa. His crew thought he was being all kinds of benevolent by promising Tannin they’d follow up on the disappearance of his childhood friend. Truthfully, he could give less than a freck about the guy. He was probably dead as a black star.

Hell, maybe he was being too careful. But the damned aliens had a habit of popping up when he least expected it, and they were frecking hard to kill. Not to mention, they had the IPC authorities and UAFA on the
Imojenna
’s ass for that whole inconvenient wanted-intergalactic-terrorists thing—thanks to one of the head scum-bastard aliens putting a warrant out on them for
allegedly
hacking into some data stream. Okay, yeah, they’d hacked the data stream. But since the Reidar weren’t exactly human, the laws of man didn’t apply.

Maybe he’d be less pissed if they’d finally uncovered the Reidar’s base of operations. But the last location they’d discovered had been a waystation where the aliens stopped after coming through a black hole, presumably from their own alternate universe. He’d since come up with a new theory that wherever the chief scumbag was holed up, that was the bastard’s HQ. All he had to do was find it and destroy it…the same thing he’d be trying to do since before the Assimilation Wars ended.

The sweet scent of moon jasmine reached him as he approached the galley and common room.
Jezus.
Ella and her frecking Jasmynah tea again. Ever since the priestess had gotten his sister to buy the stuff for her, half his damned ship smelled like some Arynian temple.

The scent had a way of seeping into his pores, tendrils drifting deep within him, making him wake in the small hours of the morning with the taste of it in the back of his throat.

Would she taste just as sweet?

The question haunted him in his weakest moments. But he didn’t want to know, didn’t really want
her
. She had enchanted him from the first day he’d met her. But that didn’t mean he had to let it affect him. He didn’t have room in his life to feel anything. Having Zahli on the
Imojenna
already made him vulnerable, and he didn’t plan on exposing himself any more than that.

His steps shortened as he crossed the hatchway into the galley, but he didn’t allow himself to slow in the slightest. At the large table in the middle of the room, Ella sat across from Nyah, a family friend who, until recently, had been looking after his family’s house. Both women had mugs of gently steaming tea in front of them.

With Nyah onboard, the
Imojenna
was at full capacity for the first time ever—more than full, since to make room Tannin had moved into Zahli’s cabin, which Rian had been just
thrilled
about. Okay, he was glad his sister was happy, but he didn’t need to see the two lovers being all mushy and getting heavy with the PDA every day.

“Don’t get too comfortable, we’re about to land.” He opened the coldstore but didn’t find anything to drink besides water. “I’m giving the crew twelve hours offship and then we’ll be on our way.”

“I’d really like a week offship.” Nyah glanced at the viewport running the length of the galley. “But I’ll take what I can get.”

Ella sipped at her tea with graceful, measured movements. “Thank you for the offer, but I will remain on the ship.”

He crossed his arms and stepped closer to the table. “You stayed on the ship the last two times we stopped for supplies. You need to go out and get some fresh air, see something other than the
Imojenna
’s bulkheads. We’ve still got a few weeks of traveling, and I don’t want you flipping out because you’ve gone shipbound crazy.”

She shot him an even look over the rim of her cup. “The concept of ‘fresh air’ is a psychological one. There’s nothing wrong with the air on this ship. And I assure you, I am not in danger of
flipping out
.”

“Do you have some weird phobia about going out in unfamiliar places?” He leaned down and braced his hands against the surface of the table in a way that would have intimidated anyone else. But apparently it did crap-all to unsettle Ella. “Are you going to make me order you to leave my ship for a few damned hours,
princess
?”

She inclined her head. “It is your prerogative to do so if you feel it is strictly necessary.”

Always so damned correct.
She never said a thing wrong, her words and tone designed to soothe and beguile whatever poor moron she was talking to.

He straightened and crossed his arms. “The weather where we’re going on Nadira is a balmy eighty-five degrees, so when we land, you’re going to go for a nice long walk and take in some of that fresh air you don’t need.”

Ella inclined her head, expression serene as though she didn’t care either way…which just jacked his temper like usual. He spun and stalked out of the galley, back up to the bridge without the drink he’d intended on getting. Not that it mattered; he wanted something hard-core, and water just wasn’t going to cut it.

“Any messages?” he asked Lianna as he slid back into his seat and glanced over the landing data displayed on his screen.

In his peripheral vision, he caught the exasperated look she sent him.

“No, Lieutenant Marshal Mae Petros has not contacted us yet. If she had, I would have told you right away. Just like the other half dozen times you asked.”

Goddamn.
He leaned back in his chair, shoving his hair back from his forehead and then dragging a hand down his face. Mae was several hours overdue for contact. He didn’t even know if she’d made it to her fake posting on the
Swift Brion
.

Had something happened to her already? Maybe he shouldn’t have sent her after Graydon. Mae was good—the woman could definitely take care of herself and then some. But the Reidar weren’t exactly a rogue soldier, black-market trader, or pirate. They were a whole other level of psychopathic. They’d proven that time and again, especially when they’d recently tried to steal his ship. Which just so happened to be when Zander had been onboard for a short passage.

At the time, he’d taken it for coincidence and nothing more. But after finding Zander on the Reidar list of names, he’d started thinking and hadn’t liked what he’d come up with.

Sure, Zander had stood shoulder to shoulder with him and held the line when the group of aliens had stormed the ship to kidnap Ella, but had the guy been placed there by the chief Reidar scumbag to gather information? But if that had been a fake Zander alien, why not snatch Ella? The guy had stayed on the ship for another entire rotation after they fended off the attack. An entire rotation when he could have gathered jezus knew what intel on Rian and his crew.

He took a breath to shove the futile rage back down.

The lack of perspective was starting to do his head in. Which was why he needed Mae to come through and deliver Zander to him. And if she didn’t contact them soon, he was going to have to make some hard choices. Forget his plans for Barasa, turn the ship around to go after Mae, and piss off his sister—and probably the entire crew—when he broke his pseudo-promise to Tannin about following up on his friend’s disappearance? Or hope Mae had a handle on things and stayed his course?

With people disappearing all over the place, was this unofficial war he’d declared costing too much?

He could count on one hand the number of people outside his ship he trusted, and Mae was one of them. If it wasn’t for her, if she hadn’t cared about him so much, he wouldn’t be sitting on the
Imojenna
today.

And Zander…well, after thinking basic training was a special kind of torment, they’d spent nearly a year together surviving the dead zones on Minnea. Their brotherhood had been forged in blood and misery.

The
Imojenna
plunged into the planet’s atmosphere and the engines roared as they switched over to heavy-air thrusters. Wispy vapor cleared from the viewport as they got lower and the landmass came into view.

Lianna finalized their landing position, and a few minutes later they were setting down in a dirt field designated as the intergalactic spaceport for the capital city, Liese. There were no other ships present, and the only security was a small box of a gatehouse, which seemed pointless since there was no gate, and the fence around the spaceport was made out of uneven lengths of wood.

They got the ship offline and then made their way down to the cargo hold, where the rest of the crew were waiting. He brushed by them to hit the hatch release and turned to survey his people.

At least it looked like Ella had decided to follow his orders. She stood next to Nyah, waiting just behind the others to disembark. The two women seemed to have become close since Nyah had joined them. And he couldn’t work out why in the goddamn hell that made him feel tight under the collar.

“You know when I say twelve hours, I mean twelve hours,” he said over the low grind of the hatchway lowering. “If you’re even a minute late, I will take off without you. So unless you plan on making a living on this boondocks of a world, I suggest you get your asses back here in time.”

There was a chorus of “yes, Captain” as the hatchway hit the ground with a slight
clunk
. Rian waited for most of the crew to pass and then fell into step beside Lianna.

Callan rubbed his hands together as they stepped out into the sunshine. “Let’s go see what kind of trouble we can get us in the next twelve hours.”

Trouble was exactly what he
didn’t
want. But where Reidar were found, problems soon followed. And as he stepped off the end of the ramp, Rian’s shoulders tightened up, his senses telling him there was something here.

Whatever his damaged mind was trying to tell him about Nadira, he had twelve hours to work it out.