Enemy Games Page 8

  “Your father had no right to say what he did to you,” her mother had said. “You grew up here, surrounded by family, trained in the ways of our people. You’ve shirked your responsibilities to the Temple and to the people who love you long enough. When you enlisted against my wishes, I said little.”

  In the log replay, Jayleia propped an elbow on her panel and rested her forehead in her hand.

  “Young women deserve to make their own way in life for a little while before the dictates of duty and obligation weigh upon them,” her mother had continued. “I wanted that experience for you, even if I disapproved of your decision to endanger your life to get it. You’ve made remarkable contributions to the people of Tagreth Federated and to the war effort, Jayleia. It is time to pass that burden to a new generation. All I have to offer is my love and the adoration of your extended family. Come. Take your place . . .”

  “Mother,” Jayleia had finally burst out. “I was exiled!”

  “You would give up so easily?” the woman had asked. “That misunderstanding can be remedied with a tactful apology. Or is this your way of telling me your father has won you away from me with promises I cannot hope to match?”

  Suspecting that Jayleia’s official file didn’t tell the real story regarding her banishment and disturbed by the emotional blackmail her mother employed, Damen had finally shut off the replay. While he’d seen signs of strain in both of Jayleia’s parents, he hadn’t seen or heard anything to help him find Zain Durante.

  He’d gone to look in on Jay yet again. He’d lost count of which peek at her it had been, but he’d realized that the subtle, sickly scent of decomposing flesh he’d smelled when she’d collapsed had vanished.

  That had been hours ago. Why wouldn’t she regain consciousness?

  He craved another shot at her defenses. Shoving aside a surge of anticipation, he activated the stretcher’s anti-grav unit and reminded himself he didn’t have time to indulge his appetites. His first order of business would be verifying her cure.

  The sooner she was healthy, the sooner he could strip her defenses and find out what she didn’t want him to know. And get to her father.

  The makeshift bed, bearing Jayleia, rose to his hip. Damen took the head of the unit and steered the stretcher out of the Kawl Fergus’s cargo door, out of the docking bay he’d been assigned, and through the halls. Miners and stationers passed with little more than a glance at his passenger. A turn into a main corridor leading to the station hub meant more noise and more people. Jayleia didn’t flinch.

  He frowned, concerned, and sped his steps.

  “Hold the lift!” he commanded a group of four miners as they piled into the elevator.

  They ignored him.

  “Medical priority, damn it,” he shouted, sprinting the last distance. He stuck a foot into the closing door, drew his gun, and shoved it into the closest gap-toothed grin.

  “Baxt’kal. Medical. Priority,” he gritted.

  The doors opened. Damen gestured. “Out.”

  The men glowered at him. “You got balls of solid Isarrite, boy,” one of them grumbled.

  Damen didn’t bother answering. He backed into the lift, his gun still trained to ensure their safe passage. The lift doors closed on the miners’ anger-reddened faces. Only then did Damen relax, punch in a destination, and turn to his prisoner.

  “Jayleia?” he murmured, holstering his gun. “Please tell me you’re awake.”

  She opened her eyes, and squinted, discomfort in the crinkles in her forehead. Her eyes closed again.

  “Jayleia?” he said, leaning closer, and brushing her hair from her face.

  She drew an audible breath and turned into his hand, a faint smile on her lips.

  Heat skittered down his body. He froze, caught off guard by the strength of the response. He cleared his throat and dismissed his taut nerves as nothing more than concern for his prisoner’s well-being.

  “I need you to wake up,” he said, opening the cuff he’d never locked, and smoothing the skin of her right wrist.

  She sighed in response to his touch.

  Twelve Gods he needed her to regain consciousness, to remember that he was the enemy, and to erect her defenses between them, again. Every breath he drew flooded him with her intoxicating wine and chocolate scent—no longer tainted by any hint of illness.

  He hadn’t had anything like professional detachment regarding Jayleia Durante from the moment, a year ago, that he’d surprised her prepping experiments in the shadow of the Sen Ekir and taken her prisoner. Her crewmates had been angry and scared. She’d done an impressive job of masking her fury. She’d studied the team of four men who’d taken the ship as if making plans to take them all on single-handedly. She’d looked like a Myallki bitch poised to protect her spawn, all shining black hair and supple beauty, but hiding poisonous fangs.

  Damen smiled at the memory.

  Her eyes opened. As her gaze focused on him, she frowned. She lifted a hand, hesitating for a split second as the neural cuff dangling from her left wrist caught her eye.

  Confusion clouded her expression.

  “To pacify security,” he said.

  Her gaze returned to his face and concern etched lines into the corners of her mouth. She laid her fingers against the ridge of bunched muscles in his jaw.

  Electricity raced along his nerves. Soothing him, he realized. She’d barely awakened and she was trying to offer him comfort?

  Her brown eyes darkened and she smoothed the skin of his jaw. The faint rasp of his whiskers slowed the stroke.

  White-hot desire shot straight through him. His heart rate took off at supralight. Biology. Nothing more than hormones and the six long months since he’d taken anyone.

  Damen choked back a groan.

  “You’re still half out of it, aren’t you?” he asked, his voice gruff to his ears.

  Her gaze lowered to his mouth as her beautiful lips parted. Slipping her hand around his neck, she urged him closer.

  Longing raked his insides. He resisted for a moment, then gave in. It would build rapport. Might even make her believe they were on the same side. It had nothing to do with his need to taste her.

  “Jayleia,” he murmured against her lips.

  She arched into the kiss.

  Damen’s nerve endings lit from head to toe.

  She wrapped her left hand around the back of his neck.

  The pressure of the free cuff cupped in her palm spilled cold awareness down Damen’s spine. Reality wrenched him out of the fog shrouding his brain and body.

  He’d let the spymaster’s daughter get the drop on him. He broke contact.

  “Jay. Don’t . . .” he growled as her right hand found the restraint control at his hip.

  She hit the switch. The neural disruptor fired. A bolt of pain shot up the base of his skull straight to the top of his head. Damen blacked out.

  CHAPTER 10

  CURSING, Jayleia tried to catch Damen as the neural disruption field interrupted signal processing between the brain and the spinal column. He slumped unconscious across her body and spilled to the floor.

  Heart pounding, she sat up, jumped to her feet, and then fumbled for the restraint control so she could restore feeling to her left arm. That done and the cuff removed, she checked him. Respiration regular and even, color good, pulse slightly elevated. Relief flooded her. He’d wake soon. She didn’t have much time.

  Tucking his gun into the waistband of her trousers, Jayleia rose to examine the elevator controls. They weren’t just going up or down. The lift was cutting across a central station hub. To medical, he’d said.

  She wanted the docks. Damen had taken her handheld as she’d entered trance, she recalled. With any luck, he’d loaded translation, as well as data regarding her father’s disappearance. Once she had access to the Kawl Fergus’s control panels via her handheld, chances were, she could steal the fast, little spy ship.

  She eyed the elevator panel lock and automatically reached for the wr
ench she’d used assembling kuorl cages on Chemmoxin. Her tool belt was gone. Of course. Damen had removed it so she could sleep, just as sometime during the past twenty hours, she realized, he’d removed the regen unit from her now-healed right arm. He’d put her expedition boots back on her feet, but he hadn’t restored her belt.

  Fine.

  One well-aimed kick and the elevator panel swung open. She tripped the emergency stop. The compartment skidded, stopped, and slipped a few meters before the brakes caught and held. An obnoxious alarm blared. Hull breach survival masks dropped from a panel beside her.

  She ignored them. Kneeling on the wobbly stretcher, Jay used the anti-grav unit to lift her to the escape panel in the ceiling. It refused. Overrides kicked in with the stretcher one and a half meters from the floor.

  Cursing, she reached up, pushed the removable ceiling panel out of the way, and gingerly rose to her feet. As she got her arms and shoulders through the opening, the stretcher shot out from under her. She came down hard on the support bars with the undersides of her arms. It wrung a cry of pain from her as she dangled, feet kicking in midair.

  It took a moment before she could get her hands positioned to hoist herself into the emergency-red-lit lift tunnel.

  Damen groaned.

  Panic spiked through the guilt gnawing at her. More to slow down pursuit than to prevent it, she dropped the ceiling panel back in place. No one would be fooled. She just didn’t like the notion of a hole at her back, a hole through which, she imagined, a pissed off and headachy Damen Sindrivik was going to emerge shortly.

  Picking a direction, she climbed onto the narrow maintenance walkway and took off jogging. Someone shut down the audible alarm and she heard tezwoule squeal below her. One hoary specimen, his long, scaly tail gleaming in the emergency light, leaped from the middle of the walkway into the tunnel depths as she ran past. The furry creature shrilled harsh cries of reproach in her wake. Anyone in these tunnels would be able to mark her passing by the chiding tezwoule, if not by the racket she made running.

  Jayleia slowed, trying to quiet her footfalls while still making time and distance. A rush of wind against her face and the impression of fluttering wings suggested that arets inhabited the rank tunnel system. She wondered what the winged mammals fed on, insects presumably. The thought made her snap her mouth shut and slow her pace further.

  She hit a junction, where several tunnels converged on a central traffic exchange core. It was there that she discovered what ate the tezwoule and arets.

  A sickly, pale bug twitched in midair in the center of the walkway. As she approached, she realized that the “bug” was actually a lure dropped on a translucent appendage by an ooze. This one looked well fed, judging from the sizeable splay of its pod made up of proteins, polysaccharides, and what looked like lift grease.

  She edged around the lure. Oozes used venom-laden stinging cells to incapacitate their pray. Like she’d sucker-stunned Damen. She shoved away guilt.

  Still, some oozes had venom that could paralyze to the point of suffocation. She didn’t want to find out the hard way that this was one of them.

  Picking up her pace again, she kept a sharp eye out. She couldn’t afford to blunder into the nematocysts of a hungry ooze. It would hurt if it didn’t kill her, and if it did kill her, she was too heavy for the ooze to reel her in as a snack. She hated that kind of waste.

  She scanned the tunnel juncture. If the mining station followed standard protocols, they would shut down the lift tunnels surrounding the emergency stop site. Computers would route traffic around the stuck compartment. If she could find her way out of the emergency buffer zone, she could hop another compartment, or she could pry open a set of lift doors and walk away into the crowds.

  No matter which she picked, she’d need to move quickly and hope that security teams hadn’t yet made it to every single lift door. Sure, she had Damen’s gun, but she had no desire to hurt anyone unlucky enough to be in her way.

  What she wouldn’t give for her handheld so she could access the station system. She needed a schematic. She had no idea how to get to the docks.

  Stop it and think.

  Given: she was lost in the bowels of Silver City. In any deep space station, however, atmospheric controls, power generation, water processing, and medical bays clustered at the core of the structure. Docks lined the exterior rims where malfunctioning ship thrusters and breakaway cargo containers couldn’t collide with the station and destroy vital functions.

  The core and the docks would be most heavily guarded. Could she find her way back to the Kawl Fergus’s docking bay by retracing Damen’s path with the stretcher in reverse? Almost. She could almost trace her way back, save for the time spent in the lift when she couldn’t be sure how many decks or sections they’d traversed. Damn.

  She could give up on stealing the Kawl Fergus and find living quarters where she could hide unnoticed for days. Population and traffic levels would be lower. From what she knew of the station, drifters and itinerants were common and unremarked. It would take longer to find legitimate transport off station that way, but it would attract far less attention than stealing a Claugh spy ship.

  She hated the idea. In the search for her father, she’d already lost twenty-six hours. Since she’d just added the Claugh nib Dovvyth major to her growing list of problems, she suspected time was on his side, not hers. If she couldn’t steal the Kawl Fergus, she’d find another ship, but she had to get off station. Now.

  She dodged a few more ooze lures before noticing trash on the walkways, signs that squatters inhabited the tunnels. The walkway narrowed and she blundered into a boy hunting tezwoule with a makeshift sling. He’d already killed three and carried them by draping their scaly tails over one shoulder.

  He yelped, dropped his catch, and sprinted down the walkway.

  “Wait a minute!” she yelled. “I just . . .” She broke off and sighed. “I just want directions.”

  Several meters down the walkway he vaulted over the railing and dropped out of sight. He screamed, the sound high and scared.

  Jayleia’s breath froze in her chest.

  The sound of a body dropping to the deck echoed down the tunnel.

  She gritted her teeth. Leave it, Jay. It’s an extortion scam. You know it is.

  She should mind her own business. First unwritten, but well-known rule for “How to Survive Silver City.” She should keep going. From his clothes and his presence in the tunnels, she could assume the kid was a native. He could take care of himself. Right?

  “Damn.”

  She tore down the walkway and peered over the railing.

  He’d fallen so that she could see only one out-flung hand. His sling lay in a jumble.

  Resisting the urge to pound her forehead against the metal railing in frustration, Jay climbed over and dropped to the deck plating three meters below.

  Something sticky and wet struck her right cheek. She yelped in surprise and stumbled back, her hand automatically coming up to wipe the slime away.

  An ooze.

  She huffed out a breath. It had tried to sting her and failed, meaning it had stung someone within the past few minutes.

  She offered the uncaring ooze a dirty look before kneeling beside the child. Dark brown hair tangled on his damp forehead.

  Her heart squeezed tight. The boy was sweating. His respiration was rapid, audible, and shallow. She could see the sting site, an angry, red bull’s-eye, the flesh swelling as she watched.

  She rubbed her cheek where the ooze had tagged her. What kind of luck was it that she’d scared the life out of a little kid, he’d run right into an ooze, and then turned out to be allergic?

  If this had started as a bid to collect a payoff, it had turned deadly.

  Jay blew out a shaky breath. Even if the boy had intended to guilt her out of money she didn’t have, he’d gotten more than he’d bargained for. His reaction would kill him unless he got treatment. Fast. Even then . . . she stopped the thought, shook her h
ead, and scooped him into her arms.

  She jogged for the docks. Any ship with medical facilities aboard couldn’t legally deny her emergency access. Of course, on Silver City, “legal” didn’t often play well unless it benefitted the Mining Guild.

  A figure dropped into Jay’s path, gun in hand, pointed right at her. “Hold it! Put the kid down!”

  Jayleia paused.

  A young woman, rage overlaying fear in her eyes, faced her. Curly hair poked out from under a filthy cap. A lush figure filled out her motley assortment of spacer’s coveralls, a threadbare vest from the long-disbanded Gaustoron Space Force, and mismatched shoes.

  “If I put him down, he’ll die,” Jayleia said.

  The rage heightened in the woman’s face. “What did you do to him?”

  “He’s having a reaction to ooze venom. I don’t have time for twenty questions. Do you have access to antihistamines?”

  “Ooze?” The muzzle of the gun drooped. “Show me.”

  Jay eased sideways, turning so the woman could see the puffy red mark on the boy’s neck.

  She swore, then eyed Jayleia’s cheek. “You were chasing him. The ooze got him, and then tried to hit you.”

  “I startled him,” Jay corrected. “Do you have meds or not?”

  The woman pressed pretty, sculpted lips tight. “Do I look like I got the credits for drugs? No. Where were you taking him?”

  “Docks.”

  “What ship?”

  “I don’t care. Any ship in the lanes will respond to a medical emergency,” Jay replied.

  The child groaned.

  The woman tucked her gun into a holster concealed by her too-long vest. Fear won out. It sounded shrill in her voice. “You ain’t in the lanes. They won’t help.”

  “And this child is dying while we do nothing,” Jayleia shot, striding past.

  The woman ran to catch up.

  “Give him to me!” she demanded, grabbing Jayleia’s arm.

  Swearing, Jay swung around, her teeth bared in rage.

  Tears flooded the woman’s eyes. “He’s mine. My son. I heard him scream . . .”