The Down Home Zombie Blues (18 page)

Something else he should be concerned about. But that was also what the gun under his pillow was for.

He settled back on the lumpy pillow and stared at the ceiling in the dark, less worried about intruders outside than those making inroads from within. He’d started to trust—
wanted
to trust—Jorie Mikkalah. But that, he knew now, could be a huge mistake on his part.

He was probably correct in his earlier assessment: all women were zombies. Especially the beautiful ones like Jorie Mikkalah. They show up in your life, bite your head, suck your brains out, and leave you on your lumpy pillow to die.

Jorie contacted Captain Pietr’s office when she woke from her nap, but his message ’bot informed her the captain was in conference. Just as well. She had a number of things to do before she returned to the surface, not the least of which was indulge in a hot shower. Several issues plagued her. The shower was her favorite place to plan.

Forty minutes later—some plans already in motion—she caught up with Captain Pietr in the corridor leading to the ready room.

“Did you get sufficient rest, Commander?” he asked her.

“About five sweeps, sir. My team is still on the scene. Lieutenant Herryck—”

Pietr’s raised hand stopped her words. “You needed rest, Mikkalah. Your tendency to work yourself into exhaustion is no secret. And, yes, I’ve seen Dr. Alclar’s preliminary report. I assume that’s why you skipped first meal and tracked me down?”

Was there nothing this man didn’t know? It seemed impossible that Pietr could keep an eye on the over four hundred fifty on board the
Sakanah,
but somehow he did. More than one crewmember had remarked how little got by the Old Man.

“Sergeant Petrakos keeps a stocked galley, sir.” And something so delightful that it should have a far more magnificent name than
peanut butter.
“I’ll have first meal there when I brief him. But I wanted to go over the report with you first.”

The captain tapped the palm pad at the ready-room door. She followed him inside.

“
Brief
the nil?” he asked her as he settled into the chair at the head of the table.

“Only about necessities, sir,” she replied calmly, knowing damned well that good Guardian agents following regulations didn’t brief nils. “Petrakos’s presence insures that my team’s arrivals and departures aren’t a source of speculation in his neighborhood.”

“Of course. Sit, Commander. Tell me what troubles you about Alclar’s report.”

Jorie sat, reluctantly. She’d have preferred to stand. She really wanted to pace, but that would be an obvious sign to Pietr that she was not in control at the moment. And she was. She had to be.

“I’ll try not to take up too much of your time, sir.” She wanted to get back to Theo’s structure. Herryck had relieved Rordan on watch two sweeps ago, and the brief conversation Jorie had had with her showed the zombie herd still in a negative energy state. That was good and bad. Good that there was no immediate threat. Bad because the herd should be showing some movement, and it wasn’t. “I know there’s yet work to be done. But I’m concerned that Dr. Alclar is not pursuing the option that the zombies’ increased learning capabilities might not be a natural mutation. I think we can’t yet rule out that someone might have uncovered the code. Sir.”

There. She’d said it. And Pietr hadn’t thrown back his head, snorting with laughter at her pronouncement. Or busted her down to ensign for being a fool.

Yet.

His eyes did narrow, however. Then he sighed. “If someone—and I assume you have a certain group in mind—did uncover the code and now controls the zombies, don’t you think they’d be doing more than playing with a herd on this remote world?”

So. Captain Pietr had not only read Lorik’s preliminary report, he’d spoken to him too. That was almost word for word how Lorik had ended their conversation not ten minutes before.

“I know Dr. Alclar believes that the Tresh would have moved on the Hatches immediately, yes,” Jorie told him. Lorik’s pronouncement was no surprise; he echoed the same belief that the Guardian Grand Council had held for over a hundred years. “But what if they weren’t sure the code would work? Maybe they’re testing it, testing some changes, both here and at Lraknal.”

“Then they’d know we’d found them and uncovered their secret.” Pietr leaned back in his chair. “Commander, the Tresh—and I think you know this better than most—are far more devious than that. Aside from the fact that we have no evidence of the Tresh in this system, on the highly remote chance they obtained the code before we did, they’d not be so ineffectual as to let us get access to any altered zombies. And I think, in your heart of hearts, you know that. You need to look beyond your personal issues with Lorik Alclar. He’s one of the best. He knows what he’s doing.”

Personal issues. Jorie sat very still and kept all emotion off her face. “I have the highest respect for Dr. Alclar’s work. I have no personal issues with him, Captain.”

“I told him I was sure that was the case. Just as I assured him your previous captivity with the Tresh—and those nightmares he says you still occasionally suffer from—in no way affect your perception of this mission.”

She would kill Lorik Alclar. First chance she got. No. Better. A quick fist to his far-too-pretty jaw, bind his hands and feet, drag his body to the PMaT, and send him on at least a dozen emergency transports to the surface and back. When he was weak, retching, dizzy, and shivering, his head on the verge of exploding, she’d do it again. Make him beg, whine,
scream
for mercy.

Then she’d strap a leaking T-MOD to his ass and leave him for the zombies to chew on. The same ones he believed were undergoing a natural mutation.

She stood. “Thank you for your faith in me, sir. I won’t let you down.”

“Good. Concentrate on getting Dr. Alclar the specimens he needs, then terminate the herd. Then we have matters in the Gendarfus sector the council wants me to look into.” He sighed. “Trouble never rests, does it, Commander Mikkalah?”

“No, sir. It doesn’t.”

She saluted smartly, tapped open the doors, then headed down the corridor, every inch of her furious.

And afraid. To ignore that the Tresh might be behind this, to ignore that someone might have uncovered the code, was not only foolish, it could damned well be fatal.

It was time to take a chance—a big one. One she wouldn’t take if she felt there were any other options. She saw none. She saw only what she had to do with the one person she could honestly trust.

And that revelation scared her almost as much as breaking gen-pro regs did.

It took her a sweep to dig out what she needed, which required pulling in more than a few favors. And there would still be a lot of work to do before anything would actually be functional once she transported it to Theo’s structure.

On top of that, she had to do it all before the next craving spur hit the zombies
and
without Rordan finding out.

Pietr was right. Trouble never rests.

Theo plodded out of his bathroom the same way he did most mornings: naked, his hair still damp from the shower, a towel draped across his shoulders. Except this morning Jorie stood in the middle of his bedroom, hands on her hips, one eyebrow arched.

He yelped and whipped the towel from around his neck. Fumbling and cursing, he wrapped it around his waist.

“Don’t you believe in knocking?” he asked more harshly than he’d intended to, but his heart still pounded. And though Sergeant Petrakos would never admit to blushing, he could feel a definite heat on his face.

“Knocking?” She did that head-tilt kiss-me-now thing that made him want to turn around and head back to his shower. A cold shower.

“The door.” He pointed. The towel slipped. He grabbed it. “Before you come into someone’s room. Someone’s private bedroom.”

“I didn’t use the door.”

Then he noticed the square black containers stacked between his dresser and his guitar case. “Okay.” He took a breath. “Maybe I didn’t explain myself sufficiently yesterday. You can use the spare bedroom, the hallway if you need to. But my bedroom is off-limits. Got it?” God
damn
it, a man had to have some privacy, somewhere.

“I’ve acquired knowledge, yes, as to our permissible areas. But, regrets,” and she hesitated, an uncertainty playing over her features. “Theo, I need your help. This,” she thrust one hand toward the containers behind her, “is not permissible.”

He tucked in the edge of the towel tighter as he stepped toward her. It slipped again. He gave up and hung on to it. “What do you mean by ‘not permissible’?”

“It’s a lot—a very
big
lot—of…funny stuff. If Rordan finds out—if my captain finds out—it would be serious in a most negative manner.” She raised her arms slightly, then let them fall to her sides in exasperation, words spilling from her, quick and nervous. “They think the mutation is natural. They’re not willing to consider the Tresh might be involved. I…I don’t know what else to do. This has never happened before.”

“Your captain’s always agreed to every suggestion you made?”
Great place to work, if true,
he thought wryly.

“Of course not. But there are other things in this situation now. Things that…” She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I am so stupid.”

No, she wasn’t stupid. Theo could hear that clearly in the desperate, almost downtrodden tone of her voice. And he could see it clearly in the tightness of her mouth. He regretted his flippant comment of moments before. She wasn’t stupid at all. She knew exactly what was going on. And she was hurt. And afraid.

He had a sudden urge to put his arms around her, hold her, tell her things would be okay, except he had no idea if that was true. And worse, to do that, he’d have to let go of the towel. Not good.

“Let me put some clothes on,” he jerked his thumb toward his closet, “then you can fill me in on the situation.”

She nodded, then sat on the edge of his unmade bed, looking at him as if she expected him to drop his towel then and there.

Are the Guardians nudists?

He refused to let his mind follow that admittedly enticing thought. He grabbed clean boxers from his dresser, a pair of faded jeans and his favorite black Tommy Bahama T-shirt from his closet, and headed back into his bathroom.

Something was very wrong, he told himself as he quickly pulled on his clothes. Admittedly, he’d only known Jorie Mikkalah for about a day—
Sweet Jesus, was that all it had been?
—but he’d yet to see her exude anything but confidence.

Okay, so it had only been a day. But his job required him to be able to size up people quickly and accurately. Commander Jorie Mikkalah was no wilting wallflower. Hell, she could probably kick the shit out of BVPD’s SWAT team.

He opened the bathroom door. She was still on the edge of the bed and turned toward him as he walked up to her.

“Start at the beginning.” He sat on her right—an instinctual move guaranteeing he’d be between her and anything that tried to come through his bedroom door.

She drew a deep breath, then launched into a detailed explanation of how Guardian trackers worked on a mission. How the mission commander structured the plan, how her team followed it. How divisions on the ship acted in support with tracking ’droids and weaponry and scientific analysis.

It was the latter where things had gone wrong.

“So Lorik—this Dr. Alclar—he’s a scientist who works with zombies? And he’s the one who won’t listen to the possibility that the Tresh are involved?”

“And convinced the captain of this, yes.”

“How?”

“Lorik…revealed information that made the captain believe I discounted his conclusions for personal reasons. That I’m reacting emotionally and not logically.”

“Is it true?”

She slanted him a quick glance, a light sparking dangerously in her eyes. “The fact that I would willingly feed Lorik Alclar to a herd of frenzied zombies has nothing to do with my capabilities as mission leader.”

“Whoa, whoa!” He held up his hands. That was the first surge of energy he’d seen from her in the past fifteen minutes. It fairly sizzled. He didn’t know what poor Lorik had done to deserve her ire, but he wouldn’t want to leave the two of them alone in a room.

She shoved herself off the bed and paced several steps. “What happened between Lorik and myself has nothing to do with this mission.”

Her choice of phrase registered. And he didn’t think it was a dispute over who got the desk by the window. It was personal. Emotional. And judging from the defiant lift of her chin, it hadn’t been one bit pleasant for Jorie.

Bastard.
Theo didn’t even know who Lorik was, but he didn’t like him. Because whatever that personal emotional thing was, Lorik had run tattling to the captain, making Jorie look bad in the process. He didn’t have to be a detective to figure that out, but being a detective helped him put those pieces together that much more quickly. And helped him frame a response that would pull the rest of the information from her—information he knew she didn’t want to admit. “So Lorik used you and is now using that against you.”

Some of the anger bled from her, her shoulders dipping slightly. She stopped pacing and nodded.

“You were…” It took a moment for him to remember her term. “Spoused?”

“We had a concord. It’s not quite the same as being spoused. You understand?”

“You were serious about each other. Maybe get married someday, have kids.”

“Yes, we were serious. But children aren’t possible without a contract and removal of…” and she touched her side briefly and said an unfamiliar term. Built-in permanent contraception, he gathered.

So a concord was like an engagement? The term didn’t matter. The hurt he saw in her eyes did. “What did the bastard do?”

She sat back down on the bed, folding her hands for a moment before continuing. “Over three galactic years now, we’ve been lovers. But four months ago, that changed.”

Three years should have been the start of a decent relationship. Jorie and Lorik had a bit more longevity than he and Camille. “So Lorik ended the, uh, concord?”