The Spiral Path (10 page)

Was she really doing this? Getting so scary-close to Mitch Yoshida again could just be setting her up for another disappointment.

It didn’t matter. Leaving without Mitch all those years ago had haunted her since. If this was her only chance, she would take it. This time he might leave her.

One hand cupping her behind and the other clasping her shoulder, Mitch lifted her up and settled them both back on the chair. He settled between her thighs and hovered there, so close. He met her eyes.

“I wish I’d gone with you. If I’d understood just what it meant—”

Lara crushed her lips to his and pulled him home with her legs wound around his hips. She clutched the lean muscles of his back. For a second Mitch froze and then started to move as he kissed his way up her neck to her lips.

They quickly found each other’s rhythm and, after that, all logic fled, replaced by sensation. The taste of his skin, the warmth of his body, the fine hairs of his chest on her breasts.

Mitch came apart first, but the throb and pulse of his motion set Lara off seconds later. Her whole body tightened around him and then exploded until every nerve ending vibrated.

Of all the homes Lara possessed across the universe, in Mitch’s arms was the only place she wanted to be.

Rafe floated on a cloud and let the Revenant queen take him away.

Calendra rose above him, naked, her long hair a curtain that blocked out the rest of the world. Her slick heat slipped over him again as Rafe took one pale nipple into his mouth. He understood now that they were evenly matched in this haven. He need not fear hurting her. He pulled her into a kiss as the sensual release scattered them far from the prison they both lived in. Calendra fell on top of him where they collapsed on the couch in the remnants of Mitch’s captain’s lounge.

Relics his friend left behind lay spread about the room. An ancient paper book sat next to the couch, a gift from Rafe. An extra uniform jacket hung in the gaping wide closet. An old photo of Lara lay in the top desk drawer. Would Rafe ever see either of them again?

The rest of the room had not endured so intact. In fact, entire parts of the ship were just…missing, as if some ancient monster had taken a bite out of the
Interlace’
s hull. In the distance the broken blue shell of the wormhole rippled, negative matter waves leaking through it.

All Rafe’s training told him they should be dead. However, neither he nor Calendra needed the ship to survive any longer. The concept of life depended on a heartbeat, on respiration, and none of them,
Interlace
or Revenant, possessed either anymore. He still sensed the shifting phases in his body, though, which had grown in strength as his command of the exotic-matter tendrils increased.

Calendra sighed, and Rafe couldn’t really discern where he stopped and she began. If they stayed here long enough, maybe they would meld together permanently. With each passing minute, his body faded a little bit more. Clinging to Calendra provided a few moments of relief. If he disconnected so deeply after only existing in the wormhole for this short a time, how had Calendra managed to survive a thousand years? Only a hollow semblance of a human being could have possibly survived in her form and yet he sensed so much more.

She kissed her way up his throat and then gazed out to the chaos beyond him. “Look at it.”

Rafe narrowed his eyes, open now to the world in ways he’d never been before. “We’re being pulled closer.”

Ionic tentacles pushed into the maw of the ship and whipped around them. Calendra sat up straight and let one entwine her arm in a bizarre caress. “Soon we must leave this place.”

Rafe pulled them both away from the opening. “Do you remember what caused the rift in the first place?”

Calendra frowned and traced the angles of his face as she tried to recall. “The rift that sent us here closed shortly after we arrived. This one is new.”

Telling her what Creed had since said of her history might push her back into madness. Her thoughts only whispered in the back of his mind at the moment. Calendra seemed more rational for the time being, but Rafe had no idea how long that would last.

She cocked her head at an angle, heard his mind. “When you share yourself with me, like this—” she caressed his chest, “—I can think more clearly. The waves out there…” She pointed to the rift. “Those waves don’t feel a part of me right now. I don’t know how long this coherence will last. Tell me what you were doing in your experiment.”

Rafe slipped on his shirt. If only he had access to his research, maybe he could solve their problem. “Like you, I was looking for new ways to generate a wormhole. I altered the proportions of exotic matter used in your tests. We both failed to find a new dimension, but maybe the rift is our way out.”

She stood and nipped his jaw. “I should tell you to go. To at least try to take the ship through the rift, but I don’t want you to leave me here in this place. If I could bind you to me, I would.”

Rafe couldn’t leave Calendra behind. Before falling into the rift, the woman had been a gifted scientist. She could be that again. “Come with me.”

Calendra pulled away and picked up her shift from the floor. “I can’t. My people can’t. We’ve been here too long. Out there, we don’t exist. We have no cohesion. When you came here, when I sensed you, I realized you were different. I hoped you might help us, but you can’t.”

He slouched back on the couch. “You can’t just give up. My sister will come for me. She won’t stop until I’m free. We can count on that.”

Calendra closed her eyes and beckoned the wispy vines to her. They clustered behind her like wings. “You’re putting everyone at risk. Why?”

“There’s risk no matter what we do. Would you rather continue existing this way or risk making it to the other side?”

The vines lifted Mitch’s old jacket from the closet and carried it to Calendra. She slipped on the garment. “Very well. Send a message, if you can, through the rift with our coordinates. I don’t know how long the ship will last. It probably won’t make it through.”

Rafe rose and cradled her face in his hands. “After I do that, take me to your ship. Take me to the
Revenant.
”

“Not much is left of it. The wormhole has been eating away at it for so long.”

“I need to compare what we each attempted. Discover where we both went wrong.”

Calendra pulled Mitch’s jacket closed tight and shivered. “For you, I can try.”

Mitch still tasted Lara on his tongue. Her musky scent infused him, engulfed him. It didn’t hurt that the woman in question lay curled up next to him, naked.

Soft morning light filtered in from the window above and soothing but unfamiliar bird sounds twittered outside. At some point during the night they’d moved from the chair to the bed. Mitch had no idea what time exhaustion finally claimed them. Lara shifted and her curvy backside settled deeper against him, transforming his early-morning mellow excitement to a full-scale hard-on.

He nuzzled the back of her neck and slipped one hand around to cup a breast. Lara squeezed his thigh and moaned. One small shift and—
oh gods, yes
—her warm, slick heat enveloped him.

They settled into an easy rhythm like years before, their bodies syncing up well together even when emotionally they might as well have lived on different planets. Mitch didn’t want to think about the mistakes they’d made back then, couldn’t think about them right now.

He would never let Lara walk out on him again.

Mitch kissed her shoulder and smirked when the orgasm took her over. He’d never tire of watching the formidable Captain Lara Soto splinter apart and lose control. She cried his name as her body shook and then gripped him tight. The sensation sent him following Lara over that cliff. He ground deeper and dropped his face into her neck. Bodies liquid, they settled into the mattress in a dreamy otherworld state, a tangle of limbs and glistening skin.

Tender words, words of love, swirled around in Mitch’s mind, but he couldn’t voice them yet. He didn’t want to risk ruining this moment, an event he had craved for over a decade. Later. The sentiment could wait.

Lara rolled onto her back and pushed wavy, bed-head hair out of her eyes. She quirked an eyebrow at him and kissed him on the lips. “Coffee?”

Sadly his attempt at speech came out a grunt, but Lara took it for the assent it was and hopped out of bed. She snatched up a stray T-shirt and tossed it on as she crossed the room, that curvy backside again in full view.

Her commlink pinged from the main table.

Lara caught his gaze across the bungalow as she answered. Guess that sentiment would really have to wait until later.

“Soto here.”

“Captain.” Rossa’s voice filled the quiet house. “We received a message from Commander Soto, ma’am. He’s sent us the coordinates of the
Interlace.
”

Lara paled. At one point last night she told Mitch more about meeting Calendra on the
Calypso.
Rafe had managed to relay their coordinates. Was he now suffering for it?

Or was this a trap?

Lara cleared her throat. “Acknowledged. Assemble a crew and ready the
Gryphon
for departure. We’re heading out in two hours.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Lara clicked off the commlink and without a word headed for the sani-unit off the bedroom.

“Lara, wait. This is too easy—”

She held up a hand. “Don’t even—Mitch, I don’t care if it’s a trap. I can’t let this opportunity pass.”

He crossed the room, cradled her face in his hands. “You’re not leaving without me.”

Lara sighed and leaned in closer. “No, not ever again.”

Rafe’s knees buckled as they materialized onto the one-thousand-year-old
Revenant.
His flesh was not even human anymore, not even living, but still the transport wracked his molecules and pained him. Every muscle ached. No living thing could scatter themselves into particles, travel vast distances and recombine them at will. But that was exactly what he and Calendra had just achieved.

So weary, he gave in to the inertia and let his body jumble to the floor. Or what was left of the floor. If parts of the
Interlace
were missing, then only parts of the
Revenant
remained. The mist had long ago devoured the bones of the ship. The floor directly beneath him was solid, but how far that ranged Rafe didn’t know.

He sank his head into his palms. Calendra hummed a tune and floated away from him, her delicate touch fleeting across his shoulders. Mitch’s jacket hung loose on her narrow frame, but its weight did nothing to slow her drift around the room. Then, in a nanosecond, she sped across the room and her image seemed to be in multiple places at once. When she stopped, Calendra faced off a large cloud of mist and reached into it.

Rafe gulped down his unease and flexed numbed fingers. “I expected to arrive on the bridge. What is this place?”

Everywhere around them the wormhole’s foggy tendrils seeped, its hazy reach turning matter indistinct. That is, until Calendra touched it. Her wraithlike hands caressed a mass of mist and it hardened into a desk. She cupped a palm-sized cloud and it transformed into a picture frame.

“This is where I died. And lived, briefly. My private quarters.”

Now Rafe understood what damage a thousand years of wormhole infiltration could do. No structure had been left unscathed. Every molecule had been altered by the ionic winds, buffeted until its very nuclei had been ripped apart and transformed. His own body told a similar tale.

Around them the room as it once was coalesced. Her sleeping pallet lay to the right of the desk and a breakfast table sat across from it. A viewport above the desk showed him the chaos of the wormhole. Calendra roamed the room reliving her past, but her memories would have to wait.

Rafe had a promise to keep and it made him mercenary. “Can I access the ship’s database from here?”

Calendra smoothed the pads of her graceful fingers over the image of a young girl in the frame. “We lived here for something like five hundred years before we could no longer separate ourselves from the ship. We deserted it to find ourselves again, to distinguish ourselves from this place and each other.”

“Calendra.” His voice pitched low. “The database.”

She sighed and clutched the frame to her heart, then swiped her hand through the mist hovering over the desk. A computer console solidified.

Joining her side, Rafe molded his hands over the smooth crystalline surface of the ancient device. All the formed pieces of the room were made of a similar material. “How do you manage this?”

“All of the molecules here, we are all one. I command the mist with no more effort than you blink your eyes.”

“You form all of this from memory after so long? How can I trust the data I find, then?”

“I designed the experiment, Rafe, and led the crew to this ghostly existence. I sentenced even my daughter to it. I shall never forget the data that damned us all here.”

As much as he yearned to, there was no consoling that kind of pain. Rafe bent over the console and tabbed through the familiar modern interface. His own mind must be influencing the process, so he questioned anything gleaned from it. With no other choice, he had to trust Calendra’s memory.

Calendra drifted close and sat on the edge of the desk. “Do you ever fear where this inquisitiveness of yours will lead? Because you should.”

“Curiosity is the only way we learn.”

“Curiosity is what trapped me here.”

“No, a mistake is what trapped us both here, and curiosity is the only way we’ll get ourselves free.”

Calendra laughed, a throaty whisper of which he never imagined such a frail body was capable. “A few hundred years ago I sounded much the same as you do now.”

“Science has learned so much since your experiment, Calendra. I have to at least try to find a way out of this. Even if I don’t have the right equipment here, I can transmit the information to my sister. Maybe she can make something of it.”

Rafe skimmed through the ancient documentation, which was much more detailed than anything he had gleaned from one-thousand-year-old myths and fables.

He smirked. “You’re a legend, you know.”

“I’m a what?”

“On Creed. The Journey of the
Revenant
has been told in children’s stories, in plays and songs. People think you discovered the Spiral Path that leads to the Eternal Forest. That you found paradise.”

“Would they consider this place a paradise?”

“I never believed that. Of course, I never believed you would still be alive either. I simply wanted to follow the path you forged first.”

“I should have been content with my life on Creed. I should never have tried—”

“We’ve gone to another dimension, Calendra. We could not have ever managed that if you hadn’t also tried. Even if your last experiment failed, your previous ones helped us all find the path to Terra.”

Calendra eyes widened. “Tell me about this Terra.”

“Well, you’ve already encountered Terrans on the
Interlace.
Terra is a world very similar to our own and yet very different. My father is Terran. My mother is of Creed.”

“Ah, but which one is your home?”

“Neither. I am considered a Chimeran because we can live in either dimension indefinitely. My sister fears how both Terra and Creed will use us and has created safe havens for our kind.”