Salvage Rights (Distant Worlds Book 2) (7 page)

“Where did you say you
lived before this?” he asked, his hand going to the small of her back when
people started to look their way and gawk.  To say he was rarely seen on this
deck was an understatement.  Even when he had trade negotiations to make, he
transported the partners to the trade area and met them there.  Rarely did he
show his face to the public deck of the island.  That was a good way to get
killed.  It was interesting to him that Danika took the public route rather than
his private one when she made her unexpected route.  If it was not him she was
reading for the data, who was it?

“I did not say,” Danika
said, absently as she watched a small Furgarian child flutter on its wings
around a palm flower.  About half the size of his hand, the Furgarian were
native to PortSea and had adapted to both air and sea with their naturally
camouflaged blue skin and diaphanous wings that pulled close to their bodies
when they dived.  They were unbelievably good at both crystal pearl salvaging
and weaving, making him a sizable profit every year with their delicate
creations that he sold to rich outlanders for a share of the profits.  They had
hid from the new outlanders until Luc had stumbled across them in his initial
survey of the island.  He had been quick to recognize their worth and, thus,
had begun a most advantageous alliance on both sides.  They frequented the
market under his protection seemingly to watch and play among the outlanders. 
Rarely did they interact with anyone, except on occasion the village children.
More than once they had warned him of a visitor up to nefarious purposes.  Luc
had quickly taken advantage of that as well.

While the Furgarian
jewelry was the main moneymaker on PortSea, there were always worlds in need of
water, and he traded sparsely with them for sea water they could filter into
fresh drinking water.  Because he made sure PortSea was self-contained and self-sufficient,
growing their own food on the farming deck and fishing for their protein, they could
ask for any price they wanted for the goods they sold off-world.  Thus, he had
turned a downtrodden pirate stronghold into a flourishing community where no
one went hungry and slavery was abolished.  He did not have to allow anyone on
planet that he did not want to deal with.  It worked out well for everyone, and
it also insured the loyalty of the populace, which he considered a smarter
tactic then his family’s usual practice of blood and death.  Of course, that
had its place, and he was not averse to using those tactics on anyone stupid
enough to try to take what was his.

The small Furgarian
flittered close to Danika, and she laughed, drawing others their way.  In
seconds they were surrounded by a blue swirl of whispering Furgarians and
Danika was laughing in outright open joy at their play.

Luc stepped back from
the swirling cloud as her hair came undone under busy hands, and more
Furgarians than he had ever seen in one place played in its bright glory,
weaving strands and giggling the tinkling bell-like laugh they were known for. 
Luc was so surprised by what was happening, it took him minutes to realize they
were drawing more attention than just the flying Furgarians.  Everyone in the
market had stopped their bustling and was watching Danika with awe and delight.

She must have sensed
his unease because she turned from her play and looked at him, her smile fading
a bit. Then, a moment later, as if she had commanded it, all the Furgarians
glittered away as fast as they had come, leaving a smiling Danika with
priceless crystal pearls and gold thread woven in hair that shone like blood
rubies in the sun.

Luc momentarily lost
his breath at the sight of her.  Even wearing that ridiculous drab ship suit
she shimmered.  He shook his head and strode forward, nudging her along again,
while he lifted cold eyes to their audience.  Everything started back up
immediately and they continued on, Luc more determined than ever to find out
what the hell was going on. It seemed every moment in her company brought more
questions, not less.  He just hoped Avia could shed some light on whom or what
he had brought into his home.

Danika sent the last of
the little Furgarians away with a grateful thought.  Of all the beings she had
met since she awakened, they were the purest energy she had ever felt.  They
exuded joy and revved up her energy until she felt bursting with warmth. 
Somehow, in a small amount of time, they had warmed all the cold places she had
not recognized were empty.  In the pearls they strung through her hair, she
felt the echo of that warmth and joy and carried it with her, even after the
last little being had flown off. The echo of them dinged against her mind
through the pearls, keeping a connection to the makers that soothed her jagged
nerves.  It allowed her to keep her calm when the doors of medical opened in
front of her and she was hustled in with a hand at her back.  Even through her
clothes and his leather gloves, she could feel Lucan’s heat sear her, but it
was nothing to the feel of his emotions that seemed to surround and contain
her.  It was stronger when he was closer, and the suspicions in his thoughts
came through the loudest of all his emotions, except maybe desire.

A tall woman in white
with golden hair and strangely alien lavender eyes walked out of a far door,
and right away Danika could feel the nerves.  She projected calm on the
outside, but on the inside, she was a bundle of excitement and not a little
fear, and all of that when she looked at Danika.  The rest of the large area
was deserted of people.

“Avia,” Lucan said
quietly, his eyes on the doctor.  “You wanted to run some tests?”

She had to drag her
eyes away from Danika to look at Lucan.  “Yes, sorry.  The transport scan was .
. . strange.  I need a true read.”

“Strange how?”

Since she had once
again turned to stare at Danika, she had to pull her eyes away again to
answer.  “I would rather get a true read before I even attempt conjecture at
this point.”

“Then stop staring at
the woman and get one.”

“Yes,” Avia turned red
and looked flustered as she backed up and turned to the exam table.  “Of
course.  Please put her on the table.”

“My name is Danika,”
she said, the steel in her voice obvious even through the soft, her chin
rising.  “And if you would like to talk to me, I can get myself on the table.” 

When the doctor turned
back to them, she had such a look on her face you would think a dog had spoken
in her presence.  “Again, I am a little keyed up.”  She bowed her head briefly
to Danika.  “My apologies.  Please strip and get on the table.”

Danika looked
momentarily nonplussed.

“Is that a problem?”

“May I ask what you
plan on using on me for these tests?”

“My eyes, first off,
then I will also be using a more advanced sensor than you are probably familiar
with.  Then I would like a full blood work and a DNA sampling.  Is that a
problem?”  Since her eyes had gone hard, and her suspicions leaked around the
room, Danika assumed there had better not be.

“No, I am just trying
to understand.”  She stripped and it did not occur to her to worry about
modesty until she felt the burn of Lucan’s eyes on her exposed skin.  She
turned to catch his eyes shooting molten heat as he examined every bit of
exposed skin.  Danika was suddenly very conscious of the weight of her breasts,
and the heat between her legs.  She headed for the table and the small cover it
offered as fast as she could.

Dr. Avia started the
scan right away, her brows going up at the initial readings.  “Your heart rate
and pulse seem a little elevated,” she murmured.

Danika very carefully
did not look at Lucan.

“Your temperature also
seems elevated.  Is that normal for you?”

Danika kept her eyes on
the doctor.  “Let us say they are not surprising under these conditions.” 

Her careful answer had
the doctor looking up from the device.  “Conditions?”

She nodded her head
toward Lucan and the doctor looked over and caught the heat raging in his
look.  She blinked, looked away, and cleared her throat.  “Point taken,” she
said.  Pulling the blanket over Danika’s form, she went back to the sensor
readings, her own cheeks warming.  “Can you tell me your age?”

Danika took a deep
breath.  “Not with any surety.”

The doctor looked up
again, and Danika was conscious of Lucan going utterly still as he listened.  “I
beg your pardon?”

“I do not have any
recollection of my life before I woke up in an abandoned pod eight days ago.”

“Care to explain that?” 
Lucan spoke, his voice hard in the silence of the room.

She met his hard gaze,
and lifted her chin.  “I was found by a space salvage crew eight days ago in
stasis.  The vessel they found me in was from the twenty-third century, but my
pod was of a much newer origin.  From what they could tell, I was placed there sometime
within the last two hundred years.”

“That would explain a
few of my findings,” the doctor said mildly, while Lucan just continued to
watch, a look of intense cold on his face.  She could practically feel the
frost.

Danika drew comfort
from the crystal pearl energy surrounding her while she went on.  “I was also
told that I am using more of my brain then most people do, which accounts for
my retention of information, language skills, truthsayer abilities, and the
fact that I can read most people.”

“Can you read me?” the doctor
asked, stepping toward her feet to continue the scan.

“You are excited and
scared of what you are seeing, and you have some doubts as to whether I can be
trusted.  From what I am feeling from you, it is as if you expect me to
detonate like a bomb.”

“That is an accurate
way of putting it; I suppose I am concerned that you are some type of saboteur
here to cause trouble.  It does not help that you have unknown off-the-chart
abilities, and that according to my scans, you are genetically tampered with.” 
At the last, she turned and looked directly at Lucan.

“Explain that,” he
grumbled, his eyes narrowing.

“I cannot until I do
further analysis,” the doctor said.  “I would like to take some blood the old-fashioned
way and add that to the scans.  In the meantime, I recommend quarantine stasis,
until we can determine what she is and why she was sent here.”

Danika felt the blood
leave her face.  “I do not want to sleep again.”  Both the doctor and Lucan
turned at the strained sound of her voice.  The lights in medical began to
flicker.  “I will wait here for your tests, and answer your questions until you
are satisfied you are safe, or you can send me away and I will find another
place to live, but I will not sleep in the cold again.”

Lucan looked around
them as machines began to beep erratically and the secured doors to the room
opened and closed irregularly.  “No you will not.”

“But . . .” the doctor started,
her face losing its color as a bone drill started up in the next room.

Lucan interrupted her
flatly.  “No.  She stays with me.”

“
That
she most
certainly should not do!”  She met Lucan’s eyes and flinched beneath the cold
promise there.  Her voice dropped back to normal. “Sir, if she was sent here to
do damage, you are the most likely target.  If you will not do stasis, then the
next logical choice is to have her under guard, here, in the infirmary.”

“She stays with me.” 
He practically growled it, and the ice of his anger flowed from him to coat
everything in the room, at least to Danika’s senses.  She shivered and wondered
why the doctor seemed to be untouched by it.  Physically at least; mentally,
she was wilting before their eyes even as she fought to get her point across.

“Sir, with all due
respect, you asked me for my opinion . . .”

“And you have given
it.  She stays with me.  We will not discuss this further.”

“She is right,” Danika
said, and had both pairs of eyes flashing her way.  “Not that I am a danger to
your people, but I am a type of trap.”  Now that she had their attention, she
was hesitant to speak, so she raised her chin and pulled the warmth infused so
lovingly in the pearls around her like a cloak.  “I was found in a salvage, you
know this, you know that I was in stasis for hundreds of years; what you do not
know is that my genetic manipulation was an imprinting at the cellular level. 
According to what the doctor was able to find on the ship that rescued me,
sometime in the past, a Warrung tampered with me so that I would imprint on
only him, or in this case, one of his genetic descendants.  When the captain
found out, he feared that I would end up with Cor Warrung no matter where he
took me initially.  He did not see this as acceptable because of that man’s
character.  And given what I have seen, I would agree.”

“So Captain Tyber
thought to play me instead?”

“No.” She shook her
head.  “The idea was that I would be an employee here as a truthsayer.  You
assured the captain that you were not interested in a bed partner; as long as
we do not touch we will not imprint.  I will be safe from your brother, you
will have a valuable employee, and no one will face Tokan for harboring me.
That was the logic behind me coming here.  There was trickery involved, but no
one went into it with the idea that you would suffer for it.”

“If you did not, then
Tyber would have stated the case plainly, and not attempted deception.”

She firmed her lips.  “You
have a valid point, but if you had said no . . .”  She shook her head.  “I did
not wish to be anyone’s slave, and they did not want to take the chance.  It
was selfish of me and unfair to you.  I am sorry for that; I will understand if
you wish me to leave your home and make my own way, but I would ask that you
allow me to stay.  I can keep my distance well enough, but for the times you
need my services. You need not ever see me if that is your wish, and I will
earn my keep without you being in any danger of imprinting on me.”

“That is not going to
happen, little Bruha.  You stay with me, and when I say that I mean you stay
where I can keep an eye on you.”  He turned to the doctor again.  “Run your
tests.  Let me know everything you discover, as soon as you discover it.”  He
took Danika by the arm.  “If you need anything else from her you know where to
find us.”

Danika caught the
doctor’s sour expression, but she was smart enough not to make any further
comments.  Feeling the simmering anger under Lucan’s cold words, Danika knew it
was the right decision.  Looking back at the doctor as they left medical, she
had the brief wish that she was also staying behind.  What she was feeling from
Lucan was rolling along her skin and prickling her nerves.  She had the thought
that he was gearing up to explode.  The door swished shut behind her and he led
her a different way than the one they had taken.  “Where are we going?”

“Back.  The
conversation I want to have is better done in privacy.”

“This is not the way we
came.”

“This is the way to my
private transport pad.  You took us along the public route.  Which leads me to
the question, how did you know which way to go?  And how did you work the
transport without using manual or voice control?”  He pulled her along closer
to his side, but he did not look at her.  “And how did you leave the island at
all without my voice authorization to do so?  These are all questions I would
like an answer to when we return to my quarters.”

“I’m not sure I can
answer your questions adequately.  I just did what felt right.”

“I see.”  Even knowing
a lie when she heard it, his dark tone would have told her he did not see.  Nor
did he like it.

She sucked in a much
needed breath when they hit the transport and he allowed her to move away
slightly.  She went as far as she could, which was not much and had her
pressing her back against the cold metal of the lift.  She could feel the
tension building around them.  No matter how calm and cold he appeared, under
the skin he was raging, and she felt like she was drowning in it.  “I do not
know how else to answer your questions.  I did not realize I was doing anything
wrong.”

He turned with a flash
and slammed his fist into the transport wall beside her head.  She gasped, but
did not move feeling his hot breath against her cheek, and the sudden feel of
his hard body all along her length. 

“Who sent you here?” 
There was no give in him.  Not in the cold frost of his eyes, or the hard
length of him.

“No one.  Not like you
mean.”  She flinched when his fist lifted and fell with another pound against
steel.

“Who do you work for?”

“You.”  She winced at
the next pound, but held his eyes regardless of the fear coursing through her. 
“I told you the truth.  I came here to work for you and to keep myself safe. 
That’s all.”

“What else is the doctor
going to find in those tests?”

Danika sucked in a
breath and closed her eyes.  “I don’t know.  I have told you everything, but .
. . I don’t know what else was done to me. I only know what has happened since
I woke up, on a salvage, with no memory of my past, or who I am.”

Something she said must
have gotten through to him because she could feel the rage and suspicions
pulling back.  She opened her eyes to see his were on hers and, while not
devoid of his suspicions, at least he looked like he was considering her words. 
“You have no memories?”