The Star King (11 page)

Favoring her sore elbow, Jas drifted one-handed, peering down the darkened corridor. It was a long way to the bridge, particularly if she had to use the handgrips. The generator room was closer. She’d lived through more than her share of aviation mishaps. Surely she’d be able to offer some help to Rom and the others down below.

“WARNING, WARNING. FIRE DETECTED IN SECTIONS SIX A AND SIX B.” This time an earsplitting
klaxon followed the honeyed computer-generated voice. Curiosity paled with the thought that the men were in danger. And Rom…

Adrenaline surged through her, accompanied by the need to protect him, a force as elemental and instinctive as ensuring her children’s safety. She decided not to analyze it, but to act. Hand over hand she made her way to a ladder that descended into the cold, echoing bowels of the ship. Though the air recyclers hummed loudly, an acrid stench of burning wires stung her nose and throat, and a white haze billowed near the ceiling. Gravity returned. She dropped to the floor, landing on the thick soles of her boots, and sprinted toward the bright lights at end of the corridor. The dancing reflection of flames and what she figured was an extinguishing agent flickered over the metallic flooring. The ship gave a long, controlled shudder. She stumbled. Righting herself, she kept going. Rom must have given the order to come out of light speed. Not a good sign. Finishing the voyage in zero-g was one thing, but what if the fire damaged the ship? Would they limp along until supplies ran out? Or worse, be marooned in space?

Whatever experience Rom had at squeezing out of tight situations, she hoped he would use it to get them out of this one.

To her right were two widely spaced doorways leading into the smoky generator room. Shielding her nose and mouth with her sleeve, she glimpsed Rom, Muffin, and Terz about thirty feet farther down the hall, across from the first hatchway. Animatedly engaged in a discussion, they were gathered around a panel with blinking green and red lights mounted on the wall, a larger version of the door control panel in her room. Relief washed
through her at the sight of Rom’s muscled, athletic frame and confident stance; yet her nauseating dread lingered. She’d best distract herself, or risk going crazy.

“PURGE SEQUENCE ACTIVATED. TWO MINUTES UNTIL DEPRESSURIZATION,” the computer intoned.

It sounded as though Rom was going to open the outer hatch doors to space. The resulting vacuum would suffocate the fire in an instant. But wouldn’t he have to close the inner corridor hatches first? If not, everyone and everything not bolted down would be ejected into space. The handgrips looked more enticing than ever. But as she opened and closed her hands, fighting the impulse to grab on for all she was worth, the urge to reach Rom was stronger. Awash with an unsettling vulnerability, she scrutinized the two closest doors, praying they’d hold tight during the imminent depressurization.

Zarra skipped backward out of the hatchway closest to her, blocking her path. His exposed skin gleamed with perspiration despite the chilly temperature, but his hands were steady as he gripped a bulky fire extinguisher. Squinting, he aimed it into the generator room, shooting a powerful stream at a tall metal cabinet. Smoke poured out of the charred housing, hissing as it made contact with the spray. Though the enormous overhead vents quickly sucked it away, the residual odor reminded her of burning plastic.

“Zarra, how can I help?” She shouted to be heard above the intermittent fire alarm and the sound of men’s voices boomeranging off the metal walls. He looked startled to see her. His face was flushed, his pale, whiskey-colored eyes bright. It hit her then how young he was, and what a grown-up situation he’d been placed in. The spray dissipated and he lowered the extinguisher.
“Empty. Here, hold this.” He handed her the dripping hose and heavy tank. “There’s one more inside, I think.”

“PURGE SEQUENCE ACTIVATED. ONE MINUTE, THIRTY SECONDS UNTIL DEPRESSURIZATION,” Jas heard the computer warn.

“In
there?”
Jas shot a wild glance into the room. An antifire mist rained onto glowing flames and coated the floor. On the far side, half-hidden by smoke, loomed a pair of outer doors ready to open to endless, deadly space. “They’re going to seal the room,” she warned him.

“Some of the most expensive equipment we have is in that housing.”

“Zarra, in less than two minutes they will depressurize.”

“A lot of damage can happen between now and then.”

Jas resisted the motherly urge to snag him by the collar. Masking his face with his sleeve, Zarra assured her, “Two seconds, that’s all I’ll be,” and darted inside.

A commotion dragged her attention down the hall. Muffin was waving at her, while Rom cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “Jasmine, back away! We’re sealing off the room!”

Her anxiety skyrocketed. “Zarra is inside!”

Rom looked stricken. “Terz,” he said brusquely. “Cancel the sequence.”

“Sir, it’ll take time—”

“I
know.
Do it anyway or we’ll lose him.” Rom sprinted her way. “Stay where you are, Jas! Do
not
go in after him!”

“PURGE SEQUENCE ACTIVATED. ONE MINUTE UNTIL DEPRESSURIZATION. CLOSING INNER HATCHES.”

Terz wheeled around and ran to the control panel, his hands a blur as they moved over the touch screen. Extinguisher in hand, Zarra reappeared as a vague outline in the mist on the far side of the room. Jas cried out in relief. “Hurry!” His eyes widened at her urgency, and he tried to comply, but his feet flew out from under him. Spinning over the slippery floor, he slammed hard into a post and collapsed onto his side.

There was a deafening boom and a prolonged hiss as the inner hatchway farther down the corridor slammed shut. Then the thick double doors in front of Jas vibrated and began to glide closed.

She rammed the empty fire extinguisher lengthwise into their path, keeping them apart. Muffin wedged his enormous bulk between them, and Rom drove through the narrow opening, after Zarra.

“DEPRESSURIZATION INITIATED. SECURE HATCHES. SECURE HATCHES.”

Jas had never felt such terror and emotional agony in all her life—because she could do nothing to help. “Rom!” She crushed her hands into fists and pressed them to her mouth. Her stomach muscles cramped in a painful spasm.
She was going to lose him
. Seconds extended into eternity. Then she saw Rom again, and her knees almost buckled.

Skidding over the wet floor, struggling to keep upright, Rom had one arm wrapped around an unconscious Zarra. Muffin seized Rom’s shirt, yanking him into the corridor so violently that Rom lost his grip on Zarra. Tumbling, Rom managed to recapture Zarra’s hand. Then all hell broke loose.

An explosive roar obliterated all other sounds. Fog formed. Jas’s eardrums wrenched painfully. The outer
doors had opened, and with the inside hatch still partially open, it had created a ravenous, tornadolike vacuum. Jas dove for a handgrip as Rom, on his stomach, his fingers wrapped around the boy’s hand, hurtled headfirst toward oblivion. A scream of horror lodged in her throat.

From her spot, all Jas could do was watch as, flailing one-handed for a grip on the smooth surfaces of the wall and floor, Rom tried in vain to stop his slide.

Nearby, Muffin braced his muscular legs against the wall, grabbing on to his captain’s shirt. It tore. He clawed for Rom’s arms and missed, hampered by the frigid white mist Jas knew from her old training accompanied all rapid depressurizations. Battered by the loose tools and bits of paper that sailed past, Rom blindly reached for Muffin, still maintaining his hold on Zarra, but at last the strain proved too much. Zarra’s fingers slipped from Rom’s hand.

The boy disappeared behind the closing doors, and Rom gave a cry of anguish that Jas felt resound through her heart.

“Rom…”
He heard his name being called as if from a long distance away. “Can you hear me? Wiggle a finger, blink your eyes, something. Anything.

“Please.”

This time the plaintive voice fully penetrated the blackness. A woman’s voice. Husky, familiar. Accented. He fathomed that she’d been talking to him for some time, but only now could he focus on the words. Warm hands smoothed his hair off his forehead over and over, tender yet insistent stroking.

“Heads don’t do well against doors, you know,” the voice continued. “You are lucky you didn’t crack your skull wide open. Though I think this will be one ugly bruise.” There was silence for several moments. Then the voice’s owner patted him on the cheek, beseeching him once more. “Rom, do you feel me? Hear me? Come on, I know you’re a fighter.”

His stomach twisted ominously, but an onslaught of pain centered in his head and neck shattered his queasiness. His hands clenched involuntarily, and he felt the fingers wrenched from his grasp all over again.
You shouldn’t have left him in the wreckage; you should have freed him while you had the chance.
A groan slipped from his throat before he could stop it.

The comforting hands stilled. “Muffin! He’s awake! Rom! Do you hear me?”

Rom opened one eye, then the other, squinting through a haze of pain at a blur of dark hair framing a pale face and glittering intelligent eyes that saw and understood every nuance of his soul.
The Balkanor angel.
His heart swelled with joy and wonder.

But hadn’t she abandoned him? Hadn’t
he
left there, too? Bewildered, he searched the sky above. It was dull, metallic…no stars.

Ten firm fingertips pressed lightly into his jaw. “Try not to move your neck.” She resumed her soothing caresses, her face closer now.

He heard a male voice then, and it bewildered him. “Momentum threw you into the hatch. We’re getting a stretcher to bring you to sick bay.”

“You will be fine,” the woman whispered in her accented voice. Rom raised leaden, shaking hands to cradle her face. Entranced by her sweetly curving lips—tempting, full, made for kisses,
his
kisses, and a hundred other erotic activities he envisioned all too easily—he pulled her down to him. She locked her arms to keep him away, her hands splayed atop his chest. “Oh, now look who is feeling better.”

“But this is where we kiss.” He wrinkled his brow,
concentrating hard. “Yes, I’m certain it’s what comes next.”

“No, my sweet, confused man. Wrong script.” Then she smiled through her tears.
Tears?
He dabbed at the moisture with his thumbs. Shame wrapped around his scattered wits. Of course. He’d disappointed her, failed her, as he had his family. How could he expect her—or anyone—to abide by his impulsive abdication of responsibility? “I shouldn’t have let my brother come. He should have stayed home—safe—not here.”

She stared at him blankly for a moment, then made a soft cry. She grabbed his hands and crushed them to her lips. “No, Rom; it was Zarra.
Zarra.
Not your brother. Do you understand? He’s fine—banged up like you, but you saved him.”

The male voice said, “The gravity generator’s on backup power, and Terz’s crew is working on repairs to the hull. Gann called from the bridge—the structural integrity’s intact.”

Rom knew that what he’d just been told was significant, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why. The woman laid her angel’s hands on his stomach. She spoke slowly, her speech somewhat halting. “You’re on the
Quillie.
A spaceship. You’re her captain…a very heroic captain.”

A hero? How could this be? Her statement so diverged from his view of himself that he let his eyes drift closed to hide the burning hope he feared lurked there. Agony thundered in his skull with each beat of his heart, but he floated, buoyed by an odd giddiness of spirit, something he was certain he’d never felt before.

There was a clattering, the urgent murmur of deep voices. Supporting his neck and shoulders, several men
lifted him. Pain rocketed from one side of his head to the other, ending in a strange, icy tingling in his neck, fading when a medicine patch was pressed under his chin. The woman’s magical, healing hands skimmed over his face and hair once more, then withdrew. Bereft, he tried to call to her, but the drug was too powerful, and all that emerged was a hoarse mumble.
This is where she abandons you without so much as a backward glance.
He clamped his mouth shut before he displayed anything else that might be construed as neediness.

“I’ll see you when you wake up, Rom.”

He stiffened upon feeling her breath moist and hot against his ear, laden with promises he knew she wouldn’t keep.

“Yes, I’ll stay with you…”

The inevitability of her betrayal kept him company as he began the long slide back into darkness.

He woke to an ethereal world where pain and time did not exist. A soft mattress had replaced the cold, hard floor beneath his back. Someone sponged his face and neck with a damp cloth, scented with a fragrance he recognized—one used for healing the body and the spirit, reminding him of the cloudless melon-colored skies and cool sands of a Sienna dawn. He drifted for a while amid a thousand memories, saw himself as a teenager playing Bajha with his father, then, much younger, sitting nestled with his beloved sister in his mother’s lap while she read to them. He would have laughed, had he been able, as he recalled scampering over the sands with his younger brother Lijhan, eager to catch one of the planet’s elusive green-banded turquoise quillies. The images
left him with a longing so great it that took his breath away. He missed his family.

In a jolt of self-awareness, he faced the emptiness inside him. For all his success as a smuggler, and his solid, if somewhat disreputable, standing in the frontier, he was no different from the shiftless space drifters he despised—lonely, resentful, and suffering from an inherent lack of purpose.

Perhaps his father had been right about him.

A sound distracted him from his dismal epiphany. The woman ministering to him began half singing, half humming a song in a hushed voice as she pressed a cool, damp cloth to his brow.
The Balkanor angel!
Drugged lethargy held his eyes shut, so he listened to the soft song. It sounded maternal, yet at the same time deeply sensual, and was in a foreign language that sounded familiar. Earth words.

The images of the angel and Jas Hamilton coalesced. She said she’d stay…and she had. She hadn’t turned her back on him, as his father and his family had. Astonishment and piercing relief plowed through him, as if he were a man who’d just plunged to his doom only to be unexpectedly caught.

What if she had been equally helpless within the framework of the vision? He had never considered the possibility that her departure might not have been of her own choosing, that, perhaps, she’d been allowed to stay only to give him the will to finish his task that day. Instead he’d blamed her for what might have been beyond her control.

As he succumbed to drugged slumber, he released a long-held-in mental sigh. For the first time in countless years, his dreams held hope.

Rom blinked rapidly. His sight was blurred and his eyes gritty. Hell and back, he felt like he’d spent a month drinking in a frontier bordo bar. He swallowed against a scratchy throat and eased his head from side to side, then flexed his arms. Stiffness, but no pain. No light-headedness, either, which indicated that he’d been weaned off healing drugs and painblockers, meaning he’d most likely recovered. He wasn’t alone, however.

He heard a long and languorous snuffle followed by a full-fledged snort. “Jasmine?” he queried in a raspy voice. The woman snored like a Taangori dragon.

Rom propped himself on his elbows to look around, then gave a hoarse chuckle at the sight of Muffin, out cold, slumped in a chair at the foot of his bed. The man’s head had tipped back, and his dinner plate–sized hands were splayed, one on each thigh, propping him upright.

Another shuddering snore, then a lusty sigh. Rom settled against the pillow and laced his fingers behind his head. “Muffin, if the sounds coming out of your mouth are any indication of your need, I suggest you hire a pleasure servant as soon as we dock at the Depot.”

His bodyguard jerked awake. Instantly alert, Muffin swept his cool gaze around the room. Focusing on Rom, he brightened, breaking into a grin. “B’kah.”

Rom snorted. “Some protector.”

Muffin’s smile spread. He leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs in his waistband, drumming eight thick fingers against his massive upper thighs. “Odds were against your being murdered in your bed on your own ship. Besides, you know I feel out of sorts if I miss my midday nap.” Rom also knew how quickly Muffin
could transform from contented napper to lethal combatant. The giant pushed himself off the chair. “As for the Depot, I’ll be employing two pleasure servants there, not one. Three if I can afford it.”

Rom inquired mildly, “All at once?”

“One after the other after the other.” Impervious to Rom’s chuckle, Muffin wedged another pillow under his captain’s shoulders to help him sit up. “With all due respect, B’kah, you’ve kept me away from port too long this time.” He poured water into a glass.

After Rom drank his fill from it, Muffin lumbered to the environmental control panel and adjusted the settings to those more suited for a healthy man than a sick one. Once satisfied with the lights and temperature, he related the events leading to Rom’s injuries.

In light of Muffin’s gory description of his severe concussion, Rom made a cautious but thorough inventory of the rest of his body parts. Everything was still attached and seemed to be functioning properly.

Muffin refilled his glass. “Ever since Zarra returned to duty, all he talks about is how you saved his life.”

The water Rom had just swallowed plummeted into his belly like a cold stone.

“Captain B’kah this, Captain B’kah that,” Muffin mimicked in a singsong voice. “Like saving a drowning ketta-kitten. You’ve won yourself an ally for life.”

“Redirect the boy’s gratitude. If Terz hadn’t closed the hatch, he’d be dead now.”

“But you—”

“Facts only, please,” Rom snapped.
I am no hero.
“How long have I been out?”

Muffin eyed him with something akin to pity. Rom clenched his jaw and turned away. “How long?”

“A standard week. I saw to your personal needs. Jas was with you the rest of the time.” Muffin poked his thumb at a nest of pillows piled near Rom’s bed. They held an indentation in the shape of a body, revealing that Jas had indeed stayed with him day and night. Like hunting for beads from a broken necklace, Rom retrieved the scattered images remaining from a week of drugged semiconsciousness. What few memories he could salvage formed a fragile strand of tender caresses and caring words—Jas’s. His chest squeezed tight. “Where is she?”

“On the bridge,” Muffin said casually. “Gann intended to bring the
Quillie
back to light speed this morning, but Terz wanted to inspect the door repairs first. Not the one you dented with your head, B’kah, the other one. He’s got four men suited up and outside. Then Jas asked if she could replace the pilot on duty.”

“What! She’s flying the ship?” Rom sat bolt upright. “Right
now?”
Muffin grinned, and he sagged against the pillows, muttering, “I’ve got men tethered to the outside of the ship, and an adventure-seeking, cropper-popping mother of two at the controls. A frontier woman, no less. What did I expect after sleeping for a week?” Rom peered around his quarters. There was no adverse pitching or rolling. And nothing was tipped over, as far as he could tell. “I see she had the good sense to keep the ship on the automated flier.”

“Actually, she’s manually flying.”

Rom let out a laugh of pride and surprise. The gentle, nurturing woman who had cared for him for a week was upstairs flying his ship on manual control like a seasoned space veteran. It sparked his longing to see her again. Unfortunately, his body lagged behind his spirits as he
struggled to free himself from the blanket. His muscles wobbled from lack of use as he headed into the hygiene shower with a distinctly unsteady gait. As the water hissed on, Muffin moved next to the enclosure and remarked, “I take it you’ll be making an appearance on the bridge.”

“The moment I’m presentable.” Rom aimed the sprayers at his shoulders, arching backward into the water until the kinks eased out of his knotted muscles. “It seems I’ve been tossed aside for a crate of metal and bolts. Time to size up the competition and see if I stand a chance at winning back the lady’s affections.”

“As if you ever had them.”

The big man was out the door before Rom had the chance to react.

After a fruitless search of the main part of the ship, the aft cargo storage areas, the midlevel corridors, and the Bajha arena, Rom paused by the ladder leading to the lower deck. He couldn’t fathom why she would be down there, but he sensed, somehow, that she was. His legs protested the strain of climbing down the ladder. It would take some time to bring his strength back to what it had been. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he leaned his back against the gangway and listened to the thumps of the gravity generator and the incessant purring of the air recyclers. They were the sounds of a healthy ship.

Unaware of his presence, Jas was cross-legged on the floor across from the hatch to the generator room, vigorously sketching something on the pad of paper in her lap. The sight of her, so serious, so absorbed in her artwork while sitting in the middle of the floor of a cold
and impersonal hunk of trillidium, kindled something inside him, something fundamentally warm and needed, and not unlike the yearning he experienced upon recalling his childhood. The zippers of her baggy black coverall and her silver bracelets glinted in the meager overhead light. Each time she leaned over her drawing, her long, unbound hair spilled forward like a veil. Only when she flipped it back behind her shoulders did she allow him a glimpse of her profile—a soft, expressive mouth nestled perfectly between a strong, straight nose and that stubborn chin. Her face was a study in contrasts, like everything else he’d discovered about her so far.