A Solid Core of Alpha (18 page)

Besides, all the kids are calling her “Mandy Mum” and, well, it’s incredibly cute, even for the seventeen-year-old.

Seriously, sitting down to write these letters is a good thing. They remind us that life is short and nothing is guaranteed. I have no idea what my children are sending into posterity with the archives, but I know that I am happy, grateful, and content. My husband is kind—not ambitious, but kind. My daughters are radiant and my son is brave, and as corny as that all sounds, it’s what is in my heart. If our world should end tomorrow, is it so much to ask that the universe at large knows that here, in our tiny house, we lived in joy? I hope not. Because we did.

Now, on to practical matters, should this archive be found, these messages need to be sent to….

“Jesus, C.J., what were you looking for, the lost treasure of the Sapphire caves?”

“No,” he said gruffly, trying to keep his breathing even. “Just… just something… just the last of the files from the mining families.”

He heard a noise then. The room had two doors, one to the shuttle bridge and one to the rest of the house and the backyard, which took up the entire shuttle when that was the program. He had the feeling that the computer had called up this program so much that it would default there naturally if left alone, and he was very comfortable in this illusion of a house. He could hear the others—Kate, Bobby, Henry, Risa—out in the backyard gardening, so the opening of the door leading to the house caught his attention. There was a weather algorithm, of all things, and seasons. God, poor Anderson. How he must be dying to go planetside!

C.J. looked up instinctively and caught a glimpse of terrifying, intense blue-gray eyes glaring at him from a lowered brow, and then the door slammed, and Cassie came in through the other way.

“C.J., can we get a move on? We want to get this part done before Anderson decides to come back today, all right? Hey, what’s that?”

C.J. was reluctant to hand it over. It felt… private. “It’s the records from Anderson’s family,” he said quietly, keeping his grip on it. “He put them into his school tablet, I guess so they couldn’t be erased, even accidentally.”

Cassidy let go of a breath that might have been an exasperated sigh. “C.J., honey, here. I’ll just put them into the records and give it right back, okay? Take a minute, pull yourself together—”

“I’m fine!”

“Sure you are. Be out on the bridge in five minutes.”

C.J. glared after her, because she was officious and a pain in the ass. The door shut, and he was about to follow her when he looked at the other door. Moving quickly and silently on non-regulation, soft-padded shoes, he grabbed the handle of the other door and yanked.

The man who stood there was beautiful, for a monster.

He had blue-gray eyes and tanned skin and fair hair that was buzzed close to the scalp on the sides and not much longer on top. His jaw was strong, and his eyes were set a little close together for prettiness, and he had a bold nose and lean lips, a wide chest and narrow hips, thick, muscled arms, and thighs the size of tree-trunks, the muscles bulging against the ubiquitous gray and orange jumpsuit. He was like every pinup C.J. had ever seen—every objectified picture of a powerful, strong man—and the expression on his face made C.J.’s blood run cold.

“You think you’re doing him a favor, don’t you?” hissed Alpha, and C.J. squinted at him, confused.

“By what?”

“Taking that picture to him? Those people make him weak. He’s weak. He needs to be strong.” Alpha shouldered his way into the room, leaving not enough space and not enough oxygen.

God, he was beautiful. He was electric and magnificent and absolutely possessed of his own worth, and he advanced on C.J., who felt, to his horror, the urge to back up against the bed to make room for those bulky shoulders.

“He survived for ten years,” C.J. said. “He’s strong enough.”

“Survived?” Alpha barked, curling his lip. “He survived because of me! He’s alive because I
made
him make those decisions. He would have curled up and
died
the first time he had to kill off a bunch of holograms if I hadn’t made him do it. I
made
him do it. I
kept
him alive. And now you’re killing him.”

With each word, Alpha pushed himself forward, and although C.J. kept his ground, he felt like he couldn’t breathe. God, the guy was a freaking leviathan—a brutal pulse of testosterone throbbing against C.J.’s senses, and his cock was responding, tingling, filling, even as goose bumps sizzled across his skin. “At least we’re not beating him, you bastard!”

Alpha pulled up a corner of his mouth then, and his contempt filled the room. “You think I’m horrible because I beat him? Yeah, you do that. You blame me. You think I’m a real motherfucker. Go ahead. Enjoy it. But you remember one thing….” Alpha’s eyes sparked, and he looked levelly into C.J.’s. He knew, C.J. thought, sweating. He knew about that breathless zing that was charging C.J.’s skin, making his nipples tingle, making his cock swell and harden. Alpha
knew
what he did to a body that responded to men.

“What’s that?” C.J. panted, resisting the urge to lean forward, to make it intimate and sexual, to yield to anything that would make this more than intimidation.

“He’s me. I’m the part of him that he didn’t have the sac to own.”

“No,” C.J. said, floundering and uncertain. “If you’re a part of him, you’ve been warped… twisted… the things you did to him….”

“It’s only what he thought he deserved,” Alpha sneered. “And you? What do
you
think you deserve?”

“I deserve to not be raped by a hologram,” C.J. snapped, putting his hands up on the chest and trying not to marvel that it was warm and the fabric felt slightly moist under his palms, like the man wearing it had been sweating. With a swallow and an act of will, he shoved and felt a completely irrational surge of triumph when that perfectly imagined body stumbled slightly backward.

“Stay away from him,” C.J. snarled. “Stay away from him, stay away from me, and stay the fuck away from my sister. We
will
delete you when we know enough. The others are going to survive, but we
will
delete you!”

The look on Alpha’s face was complicated—anger, jealousy, triumph, surprise, rage—twisting the handsome features, warping him, making him ugly.

What came out of his mouth, though, was… surprising. “I didn’t mean to hurt your sister,” he said, and then he spun out of the room and slammed the door so hard the simulated physics of the holodeck made the house rattle.

“C.J., what the hell was—” Cassandra’s voice was muffled through the simulated wall, and C.J. made a little note to ask Julio about holographic acoustic dampening even as he interrupted her to answer.

“Don’t worry about it, Cass,” he snapped, unsettled and irritated. “I’m moving. I’m moving, just don’t get your panties in a fucking bunch.”

He came out of the room with the muscles in his back clenched and knotted and a jaw sore from grinding his teeth.

“Jesus, C.J., what in the hell happened?”

“Alpha,” C.J. growled, and then shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it, Cass. Not now. We’ve got a fucking job to do. Can we do that? I’ll write up Alpha later.”

Cass nodded soundlessly. C.J. usually made it a point to be professional while on the job, even if he was pissing her off—apparently that cut him some slack at the moment, because she punched some buttons and the larger monitor that she’d been installing in the front of the bridge came online.

“Are we queuing up from the beginning?”

Cassie nodded, her hands sure on the controls. “Yeah, from what I can see, the video monitors were activated around the ship for routine maintenance about twenty-four hours before it launched. The shuttles were all out of the bay and near the launch strip, waiting to be washed and monitored. These people knew their shit. Anyway….” Cassie’s chin nodded toward Anderson’s tablet, which was on the console between them, the picture of the family called up as a screen saver, just the way Anderson had fixed it. “The oldest girl, I guess her class was part of the maintenance, like a field trip or something. She’s sitting in on the classes at the beginning, here. You can see her.”

C.J. did, and she was beautiful. Her long blonde hair was tied up neatly in a French braid, but strands of it had loosened around her oval-shaped face. She listened carefully to the officer who was giving maintenance instructions and made notations on her tablet very seriously. The boy next to her—possibly the kid who
didn’t
get worms in his hair—said something to her, and she slanted a look from her green eyes as her full lips curved into a smile.

C.J. swallowed against a sudden tightness. It was the same smile Anderson had given him in the dark the night before.
Definitely
not the kid who ended up with the worms in his hair.

The monitors on the ship—eight outside and four inside—all showed the various stages of the ship being worked on. They watched for an hour or two and then sped through the footage. No one seemed to be worried about meteors or an attack of any sort. Their last day alive, and it was all routine.

C.J. wondered if it wasn’t better that way.

The shuttles stood vacant for much of the next day, and then, about the time that maybe, say, pre-university school would get out, there was movement immediately beyond the ship.

There was the girl again, and she was talking animatedly to a boy next to her—not the boy without the worms, but a smaller boy, one with blond hair like hers and dark eyes and a narrow face with high cheekbones.

Anderson.

“Do we have audio?” C.J. asked in a choked whisper. Cass pressed a button, and suddenly it was like he was there, listening to the two of them.

“Did you really get to work on the bridge?” Anderson asked excitedly. “Wow, Mel, you’re awesome! Can you show me?”

The girl worried her lip. “Anderson, I could get into a lot of trouble. Part of maintenance meant having the remote out and entering the codes, so it’s ready to launch.”

Anderson rolled his eyes. “I’m not a cartoon character, Mel. I’d just look. Do they really have holodecks and everything?”

The girl nodded. “They’re made so they can take thirty people one light-year.” She wrinkled her nose. “Which is dumb, because they’re programmed for ten light-years away.”

Anderson giggled. “Oh God, that would be awful! A big ship, full of skeletons all wasted away!”

“Ewww! Anderson! Really?”

“Here,” Anderson said with awe, forgetting he’d just tried to gross his sister out. “I want to touch it. It’s so shiny.”

He must not have realized he was near one of the outer sensors, because he came up close to it, by the door, and put out a long-fingered hand. “It’s so smooth,” he marveled. “It doesn’t feel sturdy enough to go up into the atmosphere.” He turned to his sister then, frowning. “Isn’t there someplace closer they could go?”

Mel nodded. “Yeah, they’re going to all be reprogrammed tomorrow. There’s a space station on Arachnos-Twelve that’s less than a light-year, but it’s really small—the council isn’t sure it could hold everyone in the colony.” She rolled her eyes. “But still, no skeletons in the ghost ship. Won’t that be nice?”

Anderson grinned at her. “But it wouldn’t make such a good vid, right? Where are they programmed for now?”

“Hermes-Eight-Prime. It’s about ten light-years away, but they’re trying to find a space station between the two. I guess, in a pinch, we really only need to put fifteen people on a shuttle. With some recycling and reclamation….”

“Zzzzzzzz….” Anderson was pretending to sleep, and his sister was midway to smacking him on the back of the head when something caught her eye.

There was a sudden flash of light across the sky, and both of them turned. “Oh God,” Mel muttered, almost instantly terrified. “What’s that?”

“Was that a ship landing? I didn’t think there was one scheduled.” Anderson was younger—twelve. He wasn’t nearly as conscious of his own mortality. “Hey, look
—
there’s another one. It’s closer!”

“Oh God,” his sister repeated, and their eyes fixed in horror to a far off mark beyond the censor’s scope.

“Oh God,” Anderson echoed hollowly. “God… Mel… was that the school?”

She didn’t answer him. Instead, she grabbed his arm and hauled him to the door of the shuttle. There was a change then, as the censors aligned themselves to both indoor and outdoor footage.

“Can we focus on the in and the out, Cass?” C.J. asked tensely, and the image on the monitor split into two sections, one showing six different directions outside the shuttle and the other showing the four quadrants of the ship.

Inside the ship, Anderson was unceremoniously thrown through the door by his sister. “Don’t touch anything,” she snapped, and then, looking up, her eyes narrowed and she made an instant decision. Without hesitation, she reached across the bridge console and grabbed something oblong and shiny.

“What was that?” Cassie asked, and C.J. squinted at the object in Mel’s hand.

“That’s the remote launch control,” he muttered, and he heard Cass gasp.

“Where are you going?” Anderson was asking, his voice shrill. “Mel, don’t leave me!”

“I’m going to go get our family!” Melody said, her voice so certain that it left no room for doubt. “Stay here. I’ll be back, okay?”

“Mel, don’t leave me!”

 “I’m going to get Jen and Mandy and Mom and Dad if I can! Stay here!”

Melody took off, and the shuttle door closed behind her. Anderson watched her go through one of the windows by the seat she’d all but thrown him in. He was having trouble tracking her with the limited scope of the tiny window when something caught his attention.

Cassie and C.J. watched her go through the fisheye of the outer sensor. She took off running and was almost out of range when suddenly she stopped.

“What’s that?” C.J. muttered. “Cass, can you pull back and see what stopped her?”