Girl Gone Nova (30 page)

The sight of her face in the mirror shocked her, and she wasn’t easily shocked. It wasn’t just the dirt and scratches, bruises and bangs. She’d lost weight, and the bags under her eyes had reached epic proportions. Nasty gash on her temple from that flying branch. If she wasn’t already dying, she’d worry about infection.

What blew her mind, Hel, the Leader of all things pretty, had said he wanted
that
. Mister used-to-be-pretty-in-pink had slammed
that
against the bulkhead and kissed
that
face until they’d damn near burned a hole in the deck plating. Even her super brain had a hard time wrapping around the notion he liked her that much. Her brain was completely in denial about how much she liked him. It was just another thing to feel lousy about before she died.

She emptied the various pockets of supplies, and then kicked her ABUs to a corner, since a curb wasn’t available. She had to sit down to remove her weapons strapped to various parts of her body. Kind of ironic that the only item of any use during her adventure with the barbarians was the knife. Took a few recovery minutes before she could explore the shower. Something came out the showerhead, but it wasn’t water. She’d heard of ships that used a cleaning fluid to bypass the water storage problem. Their ships recycled water through a filtration system. It was efficient but best not pondered too deeply, considering where it had been again and again and again.

In normal circumstances she might have found the fluid a poor substitute for water, but her attitude had been adjusted by life in a plumbing-free zone. The fluid was warm and it was removing dirt. Enough said. She worked fast, worried it might be on a timer. She achieved squeaky clean and had time to lean against the wall for a luxurious few minutes before it shut off.

The clothes Hel had left were serviceable, comfortable and warm. They would have hugged her body four days ago, but now they hung a bit around the edges. Hel was thoughtful, but still managed to be a guy with a very good eye. Even the slipper-like shoes fit. She finger combed her hair, careful not to meet her eyes in the mirror. She didn’t want to see awareness of what she was, a dead woman walking, well, tottering.

She’d played girl, pilot, scientist, a cast of hundreds. She’d been who and what she had to be when necessary. Until today doing and being what she needed to had always come naturally. Death was as natural, as inevitable as life, but she didn’t know how to play this scene. She didn’t know how to
be
while dying. Until this week, she’d never come up against something she couldn’t go over, under, around or through.

It shouldn’t be a shock to find out she was as human everyone else, but it was.

Bad enough that the flu was waiting in the wings for her final curtain, did
they
have to be creeping on stage first? It felt like someone had turned on a blender inside her head. Thoughts spun, dipped, rose and fell with dizzying—and painful—speed.

Her control was as tenuous as her life. It had been, not easy, but less hard to give her thought processes a name:
them
. When she was young they had felt like something outside, something waiting to pounce. As she grew older, she realized they lived inside her head, were as much a part of her as her hair or eyes. She’d kept the name as useful mental image, a game she played to keep from falling into the same chaos that had taken Robert. Her parents had never understood the mental challenge they’d created for their offspring when they combined their DNA.

Both brilliant scientists, they’d easily been able to focus on their respective disciplines. Doc’s brain rejected singularity in everything. Thoughts, patterns, ideas, equations, connections—it all clamored for equal attention inside her head, like a pack of hungry, snarling dogs with her trying to play alpha. Doc couldn’t explain, even to herself, how she managed the data flow. Anything could spin her thoughts off true. The one way her brain helped her, it lusted for connections between those dots, searched relentlessly for them.

She felt it happening, felt her demons trying to take her to the place where Robert lived, his eyes blank, mouth slack, body twitching. Only instead of dogs circling, now it was a vortex with one, small, calm place she clung to, one place where her brain still tried to connect dots to other dots. And somewhere in that spinning mess was something important, something lost in all that mental clutter, the dross hiding the gold. Unless that was a trick, too. The need felt real, but might not be.

She clung to that center, knowing she was going to be sucked in, sooner rather than later. She knew Robert’s hell, had seen him go into it and could be grateful that her sojourn there would be short. She just hoped she didn’t fall in front of Hel. For most of her thirty years she’d managed to hide her fear, hide
them
from everyone but herself. The words they’d applied to Robert were haunted echoes spinning inside her head with all the other stuff: insane, mad, crazy as a loon, mentally unstable, comatose. And the worst: out of control.

Don’t let them get you, Del.
He’d said it to her, but his eyes told her there was no escape. She’d spent most of her life trying to control the uncontrollable. Every time she did the impossible, it was a message to them, a message to Robert.
I can do this, even if you couldn’t.

She hadn’t done the impossible because the Major asked her or because people needed her or even because she could. She did it to keep ahead of
them.
Had any of it meant anything? All those years of fighting them back, of staying in control and here at the end,
they
win because she couldn’t die fast enough. The irony of that didn’t escape her. It shouldn’t matter, but it did. It mattered more than dying.

Everything she had left inside twisted, turned, and searched for some way to control this final battle, but the flu had thrown in with
them
. She felt thick and slow and stupid. The ache in her temples didn’t help. She was going to fail, but there was one last thing she could do. While she didn’t have an official mission objective, she did need to report what she’d learned during her encounter with Conan’s barbarians. Having a mission objective, even a self-selected one was her mother ship. She slid into it with a sigh of relief. The space was small, like a hurricane’s eye, but it was a place to be while she waited to go out of her mind.

She heard the hum and felt the slight movement of hyperspace transport. She didn’t know what Hel had learned about her since her capture, but knowing what she knew of him, it wouldn’t surprise her to learn this ship
wasn’t
on a course for the
Doolittle.
If she weren’t about to die, it might have been interesting to see if she could change his mind, see if she could outwit him. He was devious, wickedly clever and unexpected. Ninety-nine times out a hundred, she knew who would win in a battle of wits or kicks. Hel was the one she wasn’t sure about. It was, she admitted a bit ruefully, part of his charm. He made her inner bitch want to purr.

What she minded about spending her last hours with him was the ugly coming for her like a freight train. He did like pretty.

And she was using up coherent time sitting on the bunk. She’d have given herself a shake, but she was afraid her head might fall off, so she got up instead. The ship moved smoothly through subspace, so the problem with walking had to be her. She kept a hand on the bulkhead as she stepped out into the corridor. It wasn’t pretty out there either. She looked around with interest. So this was Kalian’s world. Which, she wondered, did he prefer? Where did his soul live?

It wasn’t a big ship, but appeared well laid-out and functional. There was a hatch and ladder that probably led down to the engine room and cargo bays. Another small cabin and the galley were mid ship. The corridor most likely ended at the bridge. A smell that made her mouth water had her changing focus from the bridge, and following her nose to the galley. Everyone deserved a last decent meal. This smelled more than decent.

The galley, like the ship, was compact and practical. Doc was more interested in what it didn’t have: no fire, no nasty-looking sludge, no Conan.

It did have Hel. Doc blinked. It wasn’t a hallucination. He was
cooking
.

He had his back to her and instead of Leader garb, he wore the half-pirate, half-cowboy predominantly leather uniform of the rowdier elements in the galaxy. And he wore it very well. She tipped her head to the side, the better to study the good stuff. The guy was built from top to bottom. He made her hormones sit up and take notice, even though they’d had their trash kicked as hard as the rest of her.

She propped a shoulder against the jamb. Her knees were losing the battle with artificial gravity, but it wasn’t the flu doing it to her this time. That feeling came again, the one where her even her demons rolled over and played dead around him. Okay, bad word choice. Maybe she should talk instead of think.

“That smells good.”

He turned, and the front was even better than the rear view. He made scruffy real pretty.

“You look better.”

“I look cleaner.” She tried out a wry smile. “Better” had been crossed off her list of options when she caught the flu.

He examined the clothes he’d left for her with an earthy appreciation that went well with his scruffy. Hel was there, somewhere inside Kalian. Her body knew it, knew him, but her mind recognized differences that weren’t all on the surface. Ruthlessness and an attention to detail were the meet points between the two. And then there was their interest in her, which appeared to be mutual. What else did they have in common? Pity there wasn’t time to find out.

“You’ve lost weight.” He frowned.

Doc crossed the short distance to one of the chairs, sinking in with an inaudible sigh of relief.

“They didn’t try to starve me.” She shrugged, surprised she felt the need to defend Conan. “I didn’t like the cuisine.” And she didn’t trust them not to use it as a delivery system for drugs. The only time it had been hard not to eat was after the food upgrade. That had smelled good.

“You cut your hair.”

She touched the shortened ends. “I was trying to look less creepy.”

He might have looked puzzled by that comment. It was hard to say. So much passed so quickly over his face, not to mention through his eyes. It felt like being on a hyper-fast merry-go-round. Dizzying, but nice.

“I like it.”

She used to be better at controlling her smiles, but the escape of one was a small blip on a big screen full of big incoming problems.

Hel—no, this was Kalian, Ojemba leader, she corrected herself—set a plate of something in front of her. It looked as good as it smelled. The layout was sort of like a TV dinner, but it had a small bowl of soup in one section. Her fingers curled around a spoon-like utensil while her stomach rumbled hopefully. She dipped the spoon in, noticed her hand trembled on the way to her mouth. No clue if it was illness or anticipation. She just knew it tasted divine. As a last meal, it was batting a thousand so far. The soup flowed down her dry throat, soothing and warm and richly flavored.

She flashed him another smile as he took the seat opposite her. “It’s good.”

“I’m pleased you approve.”

His intent gaze made her want to do something girl-flirty. She didn’t. Not enough energy, even with the soup. She cleaned that up and started on the meat course. If this was the Gadi version of an MRE, their people needed to talk to the Gadi chef. The silence between them was comfortable, despite air thick with questions. She didn’t want to break it by asking where they were headed. She didn’t want to have to be anything except here. About halfway through the next section her stomach shifted uneasily. She lowered the utensil, her finger tracing its plain length so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

“I didn’t thank you.” She looked at him through a lash veil. It helped some.

Something flared in his eyes. “I recall a most satisfactory thank you.”

Color washed over her face. It kind of surprised her she could blush. Even her blood felt tired. Her smile felt, and probably looked, a bit wry.

“Your timing was impeccable.”

“I would have transported you sooner, but I wasn’t sure how the electrical properties of the storm would affect the beam. When they went after you, I knew I had to take the risk.”

“If you hadn’t, all Conan would have seen is me doing a Dorothy.” Hel looked at her uncertainly. She’d been told it was hard to be funny in a different galaxy. Fine time to find out it was true. “There was a wind vortex on my six.”

She’d felt the tree she’d been in starting to move from the force of the wind just before he transported her out of there.

“This Conan is the one who captured you?”

Doc nodded. “That’s not his name. It’s what I called him.”

“This annoyed him.”

“Everything I did annoyed him.”

Hel’s lashes veiled his eyes for a moment, then he pinned her with an intense look. “He hurt you?”

Doc shrugged. “I hurt them more.” His brows arched and she realized what he was asking. Color did a swift reappearance. “They didn’t
hurt
me.” This was so not the conversation she expected, or wanted, to have with him. “They were wife hunting.”

“Bond mates?”

“No,
wives
.”

Hel frowned. “Then they are not of this galaxy.”

“I agree.” She pushed the tray aside and leaned her elbows on the table. “Did you get a look at their ship?”

He turned, keyed something into a band on his wrist and a screen came alive in the bulkhead wall. The first shot was a recording of Conan’s ship as it dropped cloak. The screen split, giving her a view of his sensor logs scan. This one showed more detail. It was big, much bigger than she’d expected for Conan’s small band of barbarian bozos.

“Life signs readings?”

Thirty life signs appeared on the screen, so it was just the people from the encampment on board.

“It’s packing some serious fire power,” she murmured. And better-than-theirs cloaking capability.

“Does it not remind you of something?” Hel lifted an interrogatory brow.