The Ruins of Karzelek (The Mandrake Company series Book 4) (32 page)

“
Picking up mining ships on our sensors,” Thatcher said.

“
That mean the company’s gas cloud or whatever it was wore off?” Tick said.

Sedge barely heard the words, not caring about anything more than Kalish’s delicious attention. His hips rocked of their own accord, straining with each stroke of her hand. She cupped his balls again, rubbing gently and teasing, even as she kept pumping up and down his shaft with her other hand, grazing his head. The pleasure welled inside him, and he was on the verge of bursting when Tick stood up.

“
Got to take a piss.”

Kalish heard it too. She leaned back, picking up her tablet, at the same time as Sedge tugged the alien artifact over his lap, hoping Tick would not notice the sweat running down his chest or the flush to his face or the way his trousers sagged about his hips. Shit, there was no way he was
not
going to get caught. Tick would tell Thatcher, and then what? At the least, he was being derelict in his duty. At the worst, Thatcher would lecture him about getting a hand job from their boss and tell the captain.

Tick came out of the aisle and veered straight toward the lav without looking at them. The door closed, and Kalish leaned back into him, slipping her hand beneath the plate and around him again.

“
Wait,” he gasped as softly as he could, “for him to go back.”

“
You’re ready now,” she whispered.

As if he didn’t know. She encircled the base of his penis with one hand and stroked upward with the other, cupping him, not letting him escape. As if he wanted to. He bucked into her hand, his muscles taut as he strained toward her.

“
I want the rest of you later,” she growled lowly, her eyes burning into his, the desire there taking him to the edge. Her other hand came up, joining the first, pumping him until he came with a huge shuddering release that left him slumped against the wall, every fiber in his body melting into a pool.

The lav door opened. Cheeks redder than cherries, Sedge pushed himself up, all too aware that he had blasted the back of a ten-thousand-year-old artifact with semen and that the shuttle probably smelled like sex. He made a desperate stab at moving some icons around on the tablet’s holodisplay even as he hoped that Tick returned to the cockpit without so much as a glance in their direction.

“
Thank you,” he whispered when they were alone again, or as alone as they would get in the shuttle. “That was wonderful.”

“
You’re easy to please. I thought it was awkward.” She grinned at him and patted his chest. “And you just defiled that ancient artifact. I’ll get a towel.”

Kalish rolled to her feet, and he watched the sway of her hips as she headed for the lav. Quite lovely hips. He looked forward to exploring them—all of her—at some future date. A not-too-distant future date, he hoped.

He grabbed his shirt and extricated his handkerchief—fortunately, it had survived the attack better than the rest of the scorched, bloody garment. Next, he used his sanitizing wipes on the artifact. Then, feeling
much
better, he fastened his trousers and focused on the runes and the translation program. He had quite a pile of notes by the time Kalish returned, her cheeks flushed. He had been engrossed in the work, and it wasn’t until she handed him some paper towels and settled wordlessly beside him, tugging her own tablet onto her lap that he realized she had been in there a while.

At first, he decided to say nothing, but then, reminded of how much she had teased him, he whispered, “You’ll agree with me then that the lav is a small and inconvenient place to relieve one’s urges?”

“
Oh, yes,” Kalish said, unflappable. “I’ll agree to that.” She glanced toward the front, then leaned in to whisper in his ear, her lips so close that they brushed his skin. “I couldn’t help myself. But next time I want
you
to touch me.” She sucked on his earlobe before pulling back, her eyes full of promise.

A flutter of anticipation teased his belly. He licked his lips and whispered, “I can do that.”

“
Good.”

A thick fog smothered the view screen, with little more visible than drops of water pattering onto the nose of the shuttle. The three ships were bedded down for the night next to a pond fed by a waterfall with lush green vegetation carpeting the rocks outside. A strange place to exist in the stygian darkness of the caverns.

Kalish could have returned to her own ship, but she and Sedge were still working on deciphering the runes, so it had made sense to stay in the same shuttle.

Sure, girl,
that’s
why you want to stay here with him.

She smiled from her spot in the middle of the shuttle, stretched out across three seats. After they found a ship and got Dad back, she resolved to kidnap Sedge from his company and take him to some romantic and private spot. Where that might be out here in the hind teat of the system, she wasn’t sure, but she would find it. Hell, if everyone else disappeared, this serene underground pool might be nice. Assuming that the man-eating monsters stayed away.

A shadow fell across her. “Got it,” Sedge said, waving his tablet in one hand and the lid in the other.

“
Already?”

Kalish couldn’t quite keep the frown off her face. She had suggested the contest, fully expecting to decrypt the message first. Even though the only thing that truly mattered was finding out what the artifact said, she couldn’t help but feel disgruntled at losing. She blamed it on the fact that she had overly distracted herself by spending that naughty time with Sedge. She had been delighted to realize he found her closeness so arousing, and it had been fun to help him find his release, something deserved after the grief she had given him, especially when all he had wanted to do was help her. Of course, she hadn’t meant to become so aroused herself from handling him. That interlude in the lav had not been terribly satisfying, and as he beamed a smile down at her, she found herself looking at his bare chest instead of at the items in his hands. What would he say if she suggested they step outside and see if they could find a bare patch of rock without anything allergy-inducing growing on it?

“
Already,” Sedge said, then smirked wryly. “A mere four hours after we started. Thatcher fell asleep waiting for us to solve the problem.”

Kalish sat up. “Let’s make sure it’s solved. I had about ninety percent of it translated.” She wasn’t sure why she mentioned that, other than a need to let him know that she had been
almost
as swift as he. “Shall we compare?”

“
Absolutely.” Sedge bent over the seat, holding his tablet so they could both see the display. He laid the lid down on the seat next to her.

She twitched an eyebrow at it. “That’s been thoroughly cleaned, I trust.”

He held up a case she recognized from outside of the refinery, the one that held his moistened wipes. For when a handkerchief just wouldn’t do. “Yes, but I’m concerned that my supply of wipes is growing low. I should have known that crawling around in caverns would result in hygiene emergencies.”

“
I don’t think we can blame the cavern for
this
emergency.” She tapped the artifact.

“
No.” Sedge grinned mischievously. “That was clearly
your
fault.”

“
Would you two keep your sexual innuendoes down back there?” Tick asked from the pilot’s seat, where he had his tablet out, some kind of spaceship combat game hovering in the air before him. “It’s hard to pretend nothing’s going on when you’re so obvious about it.”

Sedge flushed. Kalish shrugged easily. She had been fairly certain Tick had guessed what they were up to back when he had gone to the latrine, but had not been that worried since Sedge outranked him. Thatcher was the one who could reprimand Sedge, and he seemed oblivious.

“
All right,” Sedge said, lowering his voice. “Here’s what I have. Bowshen crystals: twenty. Titanium filaments: one hundred. Tripytarium plug nozzles: ten...”

As he continued to rattle off a long list, Kalish checked off the ones she had figured out. On some of the parts, she had concluded that there wasn’t an equivalent term in GalCon Standard—or any other of the human languages still spoken in the system. But she had grown excited nonetheless, guessing from what she had decoded that this had been a list of small parts used in the creation of spaceships.

“
That would have been thousands of aurums worth of parts,” Sedge said when he finished reciting the list. “It’s too bad Thatcher grabbed the lid instead of the box.”

“
No, it’s not.” Kalish turned over the big plate. “Not when this is on the back.” She tapped the map of the cavern etched in the back, lingering over a small dome on a plateau, one similar in design to the refinery buildings. “We can’t know for sure, but I’m guessing this is where they were going to ship those parts. And I’m
hoping
that it’s their shipbuilding facility.”

Sedge traced the outline of the map, perhaps admiring the detail of the etching. Somehow the craftsman—or the factory that had stamped out the lids—had managed to capture the three dimensions of the caverns in a two-dimensional form. Looking at it had a tendency to make one’s eyes cross, but at the same time it conveyed the area around the dome in far more detail than should have been possible on such a compact surface. The miners’ birds-eye-view maps were ridiculously simplistic in comparison.

“
That looks familiar, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“
Does it?” Kalish switched programs on her tablet, pulling up the miners’ maps.

Sedge prodded one section, and it enlarged in the air over the lid.

“
You’re right. That’s crazy though. That’s in an area less than five miles, as the shuttle flies, from the entrance of the compound. If there was a shipyard or any kind of alien ruins so close, the miners would have had to find it over the years.”

“
True, but the edges in that lower cavern there match up.” Sedge shrugged. “Maybe it’s a coincidence and there are other identical caverns in this system.”

“
This isn’t one of the spots your program identified, is it?”

Sedge shook his head. “Those were all deep in the complex, like the spot we just visited. Dozens of miles from the mining compound, and those two that were off the map were hundreds of miles away.”

“
I would hate to waste days or even weeks exploring back here if the answer is right up there, but it seems impossible that the miners could have been flying by this cave entrance—” she traced the map, which had an opening in the side wall of the familiar cavern, one that led through a twisting tunnel before opening up into another chamber, “—for decades without noticing it or thinking to explore it.”

“
Agreed.”

“
So if this is the same place, why isn’t this side tunnel on the miners’ maps?”

Sedge gazed at the fog outside of the view screen, then poked their map and zoomed into the wall that should have held a tunnel opening but did not. He followed the base of it with his finger and tapped a couple of times at roughly the spot where the cave should have been. “They didn’t label much, did they? Is that thick smudge an accidental pencil mark? Or is it supposed to denote some rock formations? Or—” he glanced toward the view screen again, “—is it possible there’s a pool there?”

Kalish stood up so quickly she almost pitched over. “Water, yes, I hadn’t thought of that. What if, in the intervening centuries, a new pool formed? Unless the miners fancied some summer swim parties down there, they would never know of the other cavern because the access is underwater.”

“
You’ve located the destination of the ruins you seek?” Thatcher asked from the front of the shuttle. He must have heard the excitement in their voices and woken up.

“
Maybe,” Sedge said. He summarized their findings and musings for his commander. “What do you think, sir? Go check it out, or continue to investigate the points my pattern-seeking program identified?”

“
Your program was based on specific ore concentrations, is that right?” Thatcher asked.

“
Ore such as we believe the aliens used in crafting their ships, yes.”