Stardust Dreams (22 page)

"You
son-of-a-bitch!" She pounded her fist against the door. "Let me out
of here! I swear I'll make you regret this until the day you die,
Voyager." As she stood there waiting for some kind of response to her
threat, she heard the unmistakable sound of boot heels walking toward the exit
door.

She had underestimated him.
Again. Only this time, perhaps he had also underestimated her… or at least her
acting ability. She gave him ten minutes to be well on his way, during which
time she set aside her anger and concentrated on becoming a helpless,
near-hysterical woman.

In a high-pitched,
frightened voice, she whined, "Gallant? Please don't do this to me. I
can't stand it. Please talk to me. Mar? Dot? Somebody? Oh, dear God," she
cried a little louder. "Don't tell me they left me alone in here!"

"You're not alone,
Cherry," Mar-Dot said close to the door. She couldn't tell which was
speaking, but she guessed it would probably be Dot.

"Please, Dot, let me
out of here before it's too late." She wailed pitifully and scraped the
door with her fingernails.

"Cherry? Are you all
right?"

"It's… it's happening
already. The walls are moving! They're closing in on me.
No-o-o!"

"Cherry, are you
claustrophobic?"

Wheezing and gasping for
air as loudly as she could, she knocked over a chair, then waited silently
beside the door.

"Cherry? Are you hurt?
Say something!"

Exactly as planned, Cherry
heard the click of the seal being removed and the door slid open. The second
Mar-Dot appeared, Cherry used her robotic arm to yank them into the room, over
her extended foot. As Mar-Dot stumbled to the floor, Cherry snatched the seal,
and hopped out the door. Before they could right themselves, she had locked
them in.

"I'm sorry," she
called through the door. "I hope I didn't hurt you, but I had no choice. Say
good-bye to Gallant for me, and… and I hope his mission is a success. Well,
take care." When she didn't get a response, she had to stop herself from
reopening the door to make sure they were all right, but guessed that they were
probably only trying to turn her trick around on her.

Seconds later she was
outside of the ship, surveying her surroundings. She had observed the landing
carefully and knew that they were parked at the edge of a sprawling city beside
several other ships of about the same size. A few hundred yards away there was
a large building where a number of people were moving about and an air shuttle
bus had just floated in. Since there was nothing else nearby, she decided that
had to be a terminal or greeting center of some sort, and set off for it.

"Could you help
me?" she asked the first woman she encountered inside the building. "I
need to arrange some transportation." The woman directed her toward
several uniformed people standing behind a long counter. It looked like she had
found the ticket counter without much effort at all.

She approached the man with
the friendliest face. "Hi. I'm trying to get to Terra. Can you take care
of that here?"

"Sorry. This is strictly
a local commuter station. The only ships leaving the planet from here are
privately owned. Of course, the owners occasionally take on passengers. In
fact, someone just landed who said he'd be departing again within an hour or
two. You could wait here and check with him. Let's see." He scanned the
monitor in front of him. "His name is Captain Voyager."

"Oh, I've already
spoken to him," she said, not hiding her disappointment. "He's going
in the opposite direction. Where would I be able to catch a regular
flight?"

He pointed toward the other
end of the building. "The D shuttleway will take you to the main transport
center. Someone there should be able to help you."

Cherry thanked him and
hurried away. She wanted to be as far away from there as possible before
Gallant returned.

She was about halfway to
her destination when a very familiar person walked past her going in the
opposite direction. It was so unexpected she continued walking for several more
steps before she realized who she had just seen. Whirling around, her gaze
immediately latched on to a statuesque woman with a gorgeous mane of silver
hair.

"Aster?" she
asked herself, then called the name aloud. But the woman didn't turn around. Cherry
had heard the saying that everyone has a twin somewhere, but this woman was
also pregnant and wearing a dress exactly like one Aster owned. It didn't make
any sense, but her eyes told her Aster was here, on Norona. Her transportation
problems were solved!

She called Aster's name
several times as she tried to catch up, but apparently her voice wasn't
carrying far enough. For a pregnant woman, she was walking incredibly fast. In
desperation, Cherry broke into a run as Aster exited the building.

Racing toward the parked
ships, she never took her eyes off Aster, but all of a sudden the woman was
gone—vanished into thin air. Cherry halted in midstride and blinked at the
vacant space in front of her, half expecting Aster to reappear again.

"Get back on the ship,
Cherry."

She gasped at the sound of
Gallant's voice behind her. The shock of his catching her on top of what she
had just seen… or imagined… froze her in place long enough for him to come
alongside of her. He had a grip on her neck before she could think to defend
herself.

"Don't try it,"
he warned in a flat voice. "Before you could use that arm, you'd be
unconscious." He gave her a nudge and they started walking toward his
ship. "How far did you think you were going to get without a travel visa
or proper identification?"

She was so frustrated and
angry, she couldn't have answered if she'd been willing. A sideward glance at
him let her know he wasn't wearing his eye patch, and he was at least as
furious as she was.

"I'll tell you how
far. To the first administrator, who would have listened to your story and sent
you to his superior. Eventually, you would have ended up in the one place sure
to get you in trouble—some Con rep's office. And with my luck lately, it would
have been the spy!"

The door to the ship opened
and Cherry grimaced at the irate expression on Mar's face as he lowered the
stairs to them. When she hesitated, Gallants fingers tightened on her neck, and
she immediately retaliated by stomping on his toes with her heel. "Take
your hands off me, and I'll go up by myself. I know when I'm outnumbered."

He released her, but
remained close behind as she climbed the stairs.

As soon as the door closed
behind them, Gallant said, "I'm getting out of this suit. Mar, take us out
of here."

Cherry was about to go
after Gallant when Mar turned to go to the cockpit and she saw Dot's face. Her
eyes were downcast and a hot pink bruise marred her cheekbone. "Oh no. Did
I do that to you?"

"It is nothing,"
Dot said quietly.

"Nothing?" Mar
asked, spinning toward Cherry. "We disobeyed a direct order because we
thought you were hurt. For our consideration, we received an injury from
you."

Dot faced her with a sad
smile. "Mar will get over his anger. I understand why you tricked us. The
cage was always more terrible to me than it was to him."

"I really am
sorry," Cherry said. "But that man had no right to lock me in." The
guilt she was feeling over hurting Dot was instantly obliterated by cold logic.
She may have knocked Mar-Dot down, but it was
his
fault. "And
somehow he's going to pay for that!"

Marching to the facility
chamber, she noticed the seal that had locked her in was nowhere in sight. He
probably hid it, suspecting that she might lock him in for revenge, but that
would be much too kind. She wanted at least a pound of flesh! She pressed the
door opener, but it was sealed from the inside this time. Knocking didn't get
her any results either.

"Come on,
Voyager," she shouted and gave the door another thump. "Open the
door. It doesn't take you this long to change."

His deep voice came to her
clearly from the other side. "No, but it takes this long to cool
down."

"What do
you
have to cool down from?" she challenged in a voice much louder than
necessary. "
I
was the one that got locked in.
I'm
the
one whose whole life has been turned upside down.
I'm
the one that
missed her one chance to get back home before her whole career goes down the
tubes."

"Can't you ever think
about anything more important than your career?" he yelled back.

"As a matter of fact,
I can think of a lot of things more important than my career… when someone
explains them to me, calmly and rationally. You just keep throwing me into
situations where all I can think to do is fight back! You want me to cooperate
with you and care about what you're doing, but half the time, you're lying and
the other half you're evading. You've got more secrets than the Sphinx."

"I tried your way, and
look how that turned out. I calmly and rationally explained why you had to stay
on board. But you never had any intention of obeying my orders."

"Obeying!
Listen up,
Captain. I am
not
your slave. I'm not even your employee. You have no
right to give me orders of any kind. So what if you explained one little thing.
What about all the rest? Maybe I'd be more agreeable if I had the whole
picture. What really happened to Frezlo and the disappearing bug? And speaking
of disappearing, did I or did I not see Aster a few minutes ago? Does any of it
have to do with your wearing that stupid eye patch? How about telling me how
you caught up with me so easily? And then, for a big finish, you can explain
why you rejected me like some cheap one-night stand!"

For a long moment Gallant
was silent, and when he finally answered, Cherry could tell some of his rage
had dissipated. "It wouldn't serve any purpose for you to know everything."

Something vulnerable in his
voice cut through her own anger. "Open the door, Gallant. You're safe
now."

Another pause. "What
do you mean?"

"You know very well
what I mean. Every time one or both of us gets worked up about something, we
end up groping each other. For some reason that frightens you. That's why you
don't want to argue without this door between us, isn't it?"

She thought she heard him
groan, but she couldn't be certain. "You may as well give it up. By
dragging me back here, you just consigned the both of us to close quarters for
who knows how long. There's no way we're going to make it if you don't start
being honest with me. You've got a choice. Either you fill me in… on
everything
… or I make the rest of this trip a living hell for you. Think about that,
Captain, and you know I can do it if I choose to.

Abruptly, the sharp edge
returned to his voice. "Then you think about this, woman. You're wrong
about one thing. I'm not safe now. And neither are you. In fact, you're the
furthest thing from safe. When Mar-Dot signaled me about what you had done, I
was so infuriated, I could barely see straight. It took every ounce of my will
to control myself when I found you.

"I wanted to punish
you, force you to beg for mercy. And more than anything, I wanted to strip you
naked and use you over and over again until the fire inside of me died
out."

Cherry immediately felt
that fire burning right through the door, but in spite of his harsh words, she
felt no fear. Instead, much to her shock, desire was getting all mixed up with
her anger.

He took a deep, audible
breath. "I keep telling myself I am a civilized man, not a barbarian. But
when I'm around you, I seem to forget that. I can't open the door, because I
still want you so badly that I might hurt you."

She closed her eyes and
hugged herself against the onslaught of need his declaration incited. How could
this be? How could she want to strangle him and make love to him at the same
time? "You know, Voyager, sometimes you can be such an ass. I don't understand
where this hang-up you have about hurting me comes from, but you're hardly the
first male who thought of using his sex organ to control me. The fact that you
realize it and control yourself is what counts. I have bad news for you,
mister, regardless of how dangerous you imagine yourself to be, you don't scare
me in the slightest.

"If it's any
consolation, I'm not real crazy about how confused you make me either. But I do
know you're not going to be able to keep a locked door between us indefinitely.
Of course, you have a perfectly reasonable solution minutes away. Just tell
Mar-Dot to set us back down on Norona where you can personally escort me onto a
ship back home."

The door slid open and
Gallant murmured, "I can't do that."

Cherry's fingers curled
into her palms to keep from reaching out to him. The only thing he had changed
was his hair, which looked as though he had been caught in a windstorm. Since
he was still wearing the jumpsuit, the proof of his arousal was blatantly
evident.

"I warned you,"
he said in a husky voice.