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“Slavers?”

“I can’t believe slavers would be ballsy enough to attack a company facility. Particularly not one so well guarded, or populated ... And that’s another thing. As precious as that ore is, I know they had to have had a full company of security officers on the habitat. So why are there virtually no signs of a struggle? Except for a couple of laser burns on the flight deck, we saw nothing else.”

“It happened too fast for them to get the chance to fight?”

“But not so fast that—some of them at least—didn’t have the chance to bolt every access door on the way down, block the elevator, and pile everything they could get their hands on over the access pool?”

“So, if we eliminate pirates, slavers and competitors, what have we got left?”

Victoria thought on it for some moments before anything occurred to her. “Something indigenous?”

Chapter Four

Without invitation, Raphael joined her on the bed. Taking up a position about halfway down, he propped his back against the adjoining bulkhead. Victoria was still staring at him in surprise when he reached over and grasped one of her feet. After a brief tug of war for possession, he settled her foot in his lap and began massaging it.

The pressure of his hands on her throbbing feet was almost unbearably pleasurable. Caught by surprise, a moan escaped her before she could prevent it. She made a self-conscious effort to pretend she’d been clearing her throat. “I’d prefer you didn’t do that.”

He studied her a long moment. “No you wouldn’t.”

Victoria would have liked to argue the point, but he was right. If he was of a mind to do it, she was certainly of a mind to allow it. She knew she shouldn’t. It was far too intimate, and despite company policies regarding sexual intercourse between crew members, she’d found that participating in it herself had a way of creating discipline problems for her. Men tended to think sexual favors should extend beyond the bedroom to special consideration regarding work, time off, and bonuses.

The best way to avoid complications that might have unpleasant repercussions on her work record was simply to refuse to take a lover at all except on those few, rare, occasions where she was assigned to a duty where there were officers of equal or higher rank than herself.

She placed her other foot in his lap, hopeful he wouldn’t just stop at massaging one.

A faint smile curled his lips.

No doubt he considered this a triumph of some kind—a battle of wills? Annoyance touched her, but she decided it was worth allowing him a small sense of victory to get her feet rubbed.

She found, however, that she was having trouble redirecting her thoughts to the previous subject. “According to the reports compiled from the probes, Kay has no indigenous life forms to speak of, certainly none that are intelligent. In fact, nothing much above multi-celled micro-organisms.”

Raphael shrugged. “Which means nothing. A couple of probes could have missed far more than they recorded.”

“It took over a year to construct the habitat and set up mining operations. You’d think, in all that time, if there was anything dangerous here somebody would have seen it and reported it to the company.”

Raphael gave her a look. “And, if they did, and they had, and it put the operation in jeopardy, do you think it would’ve appeared in the reports?”

Victoria’s heart skipped a beat. Anger surged through her as it occurred to her that he was right. Before she could say anything else however, the com unit let out a burst of static. Snatching her feet from his lap, Victoria leapt from the bed and moved around the desk. Leigh Grant’s transparent image appeared above the holo-port. “Did you get through?”

Leigh shrugged. “I’ve got a connection. There’s a lot of interference, though. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold onto it.”

“Patch me through.”

A wavering image of Wilhem Marks, Chief of Domestic Operations for NCO replaced Grant’s image. “Anderson? .... That you?”

“Anderson here,” Victoria responded. “The habitat’s in pretty rough shape, Marks. The ground crew’s missing. No clue what happened here, but whatever it was, it was big.”

“ ... hear you ... crew missing?”

Unconsciously, Victoria raised her voice. If she’d thought about it, she would have realized the absurdity of trying to yell at a man all the way across the galaxy. “The whole damned ground crew’s vanished, presumed dead. There’s damage. Mostly on the flight deck and the lower level. Nothing that can’t be fixed—I think—but we’ll have to delay operations until we can investigate the incident thoroughly--Raphael’s here to report what he found at the mine.”

She moved aside and allowed Raphael to take her place. He’d no sooner begun speaking, however, than the connection was lost.

Victoria stared at the speaker in consternation, then glanced at Raphael. After a moment, she moved around him once more. In the tight space, particularly since Raphael was a large man, passage became an intimate dance of brushing bodies and hands groping for balance. Victoria was more than a little flustered by the time they’d negotiated the second pass.

“Grant?”

“Lost it. Sorry.”

“Shit!”

“I’ll keep trying.”

“When you get them again ... if you do ... tell them I need to get my crew off this damned rock until there’s been a thorough investigation of what happened here.”

Grant’s eyes widened. “They’re not going to go for that.”

“Tell them anyway. It’s worth a try.” It was a useless gesture and she knew it. God only knew how much the trip out had cost the company, but if it was more than five credits, they weren’t going to listen to any appeals to remove the crew before the crew had earned that five credits back a thousand million times over.

Still, it was possible they would consider the risk of losing another crew versus losing more money—not that human life had a lot of value to them, but the potential for lawsuits by family members would multiply substantially if her and her crew disappeared as well.

After a moment, she shook her dark thoughts off. Raphael, she saw, hadn’t moved. He’d lifted his arms over his head, propping against one of the exposed beams that crisscrossed the overhead of her compartment and was staring at the dead com unit as if deep in thought. Realizing he had no intention of moving out of her way, she brushed past him again.

“What now?” he asked when she was chest to chest with him.

When he spoke, she looked up at him automatically and directly into his eyes. It was a mistake. Her mind went perfectly blank, caught up in the zen meditation that tended to seize hold of her whenever she looked directly at him. It was almost as if he had the ability to mesmerize.

This time her reaction was more pronounced than usual, however. She was far closer to him than she’d ever been before, unprotected by a glass wall, and mere inches separated them. Her heart pounded suffocatingly against her chest wall as his body heat and scent invaded her senses. With a mental shake, she brushed past him, putting some distance between them.

Her mouth and throat were as dry as dust. It took an effort to gather moisture and swallow. “As I said before, we wait.”

Before she could say anything else, the com unit erupted once more. This time it was Captain Huggins. “You going to get some crew up here to start off loading?”

“Not until I hear back from NCO about the situation here.”

“You know they’re going to expect you to proceed as planned.”

“I don’t know that. And you don’t know that, either. We’ve got a serious situation here, Huggins. I don’t want to be stranded here until we have some answers. And there’ll be hell to pay if we off load and leave all the supplies behind—which we might have to if we’re forced to evacuate quickly.”

There was a slight pause. “You’ve been working for the company long enough to know they’re not going to whistle this much money down the tubes, Anderson. They’re going to expect you and your crew to pull this together for them.”

“If they leave us here and whatever happened to the previous crew happens to us, they’re going to be losing a lot more money,” Victoria snapped.

“You might have been able to convince them of that—in person—if they’d found out before they launched the newest mission. You’re already here now. I’m telling you, they’re going to expect you to go forward.”

“It’s going to go down as a matter of record, however, that it was not my decision to endanger my crew!” Victoria snapped. “No way am I going to be a scapegoat for them.”

She switched the unit off before he could think up another argument. “I’m going down. Maybe I can find something in the work logs. You should go check the crew’s progress.”

Raphael followed her out of her cabin. “You said no one was to be left alone. I’ll go with you to check the logs.”

Victoria glanced at him, tempted to countermand, but he was right. Until they knew what was going on here on Kay, they needed to stick to working in groups. Instead of heading out immediately, however, she turned her steps toward the brig.

“You’re going to release Roach?”

His voice was carefully neutral. Nevertheless, Victoria suspected there was more than a hint of censure in the comment. She nodded grimly. “I see no reason to allow him to sit on his ass--in safety--while everyone else has to work--at risk. Do you?”

“I can’t argue with that reasoning. On the other hand, he strikes me as a fairly useless human being, and one prone to creating problems besides.”

“My assessment exactly, but I didn’t pick the crew. I was assigned, just like everybody else. Any way you look at it, we’re stuck with him now, and as much as I’d like to keep him locked up, I couldn’t hold him more than twelve hours for insubordination anyway without the union coming down on me and the company.”

“We’re a little out of their reach at the moment,” Raphael pointed out dryly.

“I’d like to go home someday, though. Besides, he’s not worth the credits I’d have to pay out in fines,” Victoria responded with a tight smile.

Roach was sprawled on the bunk in the cell, apparently asleep, when they reached the brig. He didn’t so much as twitch when Victoria opened the cell door. She stalked across the room and kicked the metal railing of the bunk. “Up! Beauty sleep’s over, Roach. You’re needed down on the underwater access level to help with clean up.”

Roach rolled to a sitting position. He didn’t look like someone who’d just been awakened. Victoria’s eyes narrowed.

He grinned at her. “Sure you don’t want to join me here for a little recreation first?” he asked, patting the bunk beside him suggestively.

“As tempting as that is,” Victoria said dryly. “We’ve got problems at the moment. Get below. Now.”

He favored Raphael with a challenging glance before he swaggered out.

Raphael’s expression was stony as he followed her out of the cell.

* * * *

Victoria heard Roach clattering down the stairs ahead of them as she and Raphael started down the stairs toward main operations. He made more noise that both of Raphael’s men put together. The heavy issue, steel toed boots might have had something to do with it, but Victoria was inclined to think it was a little more than that—grace for one thing. Then, too, the deep water crew had been developed in pressurized water tanks. It seemed to follow that their muscles were accustomed to more resistance than air.

“Just what is Roach’s specialty—besides being a pain in the ass?”

A sense of deja vu went through Victoria. She glanced back at Raphael as she recalled thinking much the same thing about Roach. There was nothing in his expression, however, to indicate that he was being deliberately provocative. Perhaps it was only coincidence that he’d voiced her earlier thoughts? Or, just maybe, it wasn’t too difficult for any number of people to reach a similar assessment?

“His records show a good deal of off world experience—acceptable job foreman skills. Between the two of us, I think he was just fortunate enough to be born in the right family.”

“He was placed?”

Victoria shrugged. “You and I both know it happens. The government can legislate as many fairness laws as they want, but they’ll never eliminate corruption altogether. People in positions of power are going to use their power whenever they feel it’s necessary—and my feeling is that someone was anxious to get Roach as far away as possible.”

“Lucky us.”

“Exactly.”

They’d reached the main operations deck. Victoria hesitated once she’d gained the main corridor, glanced to the right and left and finally strode toward the first door along the corridor. The accounting office might have been the best place to start, but Victoria was more interested in the most recent logs and it seemed to her that the chances were good that those had never made it to accounting.

They found Pittman’s--the man she was to have replaced—office without too much trouble. They encountered an unexpected problem, however. The password she’d been issued failed to open the files.

Raphael had remained by the door. He was propped causally enough against the door frame, but he was alert. “It would require voice id, wouldn’t it?” he asked over his shoulder, sparing a glance at her.

“Unfortunately, Pittman didn’t get the chance to turn it over to me. It was supposed to be set up when I got here, though. So, either the chip was corrupted when it arrived, it never arrived, or Pittman never got the chance to install it. The computer’s not accepting the override either.”

“They would keep physical copies, though, right? In case of equipment failure?”
Victoria shrugged. “Maybe. It’s standard procedure on this kind of operation. Too many chances of equipment failure. But a lot more personnel ignore that little rule than follow it.” She gnawed her fingertip thoughtfully for several moments. “Let’s have a look, shall we? We might be able to break in, but I’d rather not. The company’s going to want whatever’s still in the computer’s memory.”