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Tom stared at the captain, struggling with a thousand thoughts at once. He wished the captain would just take his word for once and he wasn’t sure this was the best time to get into some long, drawn out conversation. He could feel his anger like a wild cat curled in his belly and the wrong word was going to cost him this job. He knew that. He also knew that he had to get Da’shay away from the Kratos. “Saw something,” Tom admitted.

  “Something? What sort of something?”

  Tom sighed. “Pictures. Da’shay. Before she joined up with us.” Tom pressed his lips together as he remembered the look of murderous glee on her face. “Her fighting.”

  Ramsay blew out a heavy breath. “Command nearly exiled her because she went after some slavers when she was ordered to wait for reinforcements. I know that. But I also know that’s classified material and you don’t have that level of clearance. Tom, where did you see the pictures?”

  Ramsay knew. He fucking knew that Da’shay was a time bomb and he hadn’t warned any of them on the crew. About the only way that made sense was if Command had ordered him to leave the rest of them in the dark. Without answering the question, Tom shrugged and slipped a hand in his pocket to finger the small disk.

  “Official channels?”

  “No. A guy found me last night at the Golden Absolute.”

  Ramsay snorted and leaned back against the wall. “First, that place is on the restricted list. You aren’t supposed to be there unless you’re arresting someone.”

  “Had lots of chances to,” Tom said as he thought about the drugs dealers and smugglers exchanging ship berths over drinks.

  “I bet. But second, you can’t go believing pictures from some stranger. Have you seen the pictures Becca has? She has pictures of Einstein riding in the hover finals and you can’t tell it’s a patch job. Well, except the part where Einstein’s been dead for a few centuries.”

  “These weren’t,” Tom said firmly.

  “Tom, I’ve seen them do patch jobs on vid. Hell, they say that the government has the technology to patch live feed video, so don’t tell me you can look at something with the naked eye and know whether it’s real.”

  Tom stood there, not sure what to think. Maybe Ramsay was right, but Tom had seen the pics. It wasn’t Da’shay’s face on someone else. That was her body…the odd way she arched her back, the way her two feet never quite seemed to be doing the same thing at the same time. His gut knew those were real pictures of Da’shay.

  “Just get the scans done by Thursday,” Ramsay said wearily. Tom nodded and headed for the hatch. He’d have them done before he went to bed. Maybe if he totally wore himself out, he could get some sleep without thinking about Da’shay.

  Chapter Five

  It was close to oh-two-hundred before Tom finished and sent the full report to Ramsay’s unit. Unfortunately, he still couldn’t get his mind to quiet down. “Well, fuck.” Tom leaned against the Kratos and looked out over the docks. The blast wall blocked most of his view; the huge curve provided the solid foundation for the ship to thrust against to escape the thick atmosphere, and each berth had its own. That meant all Tom could see was a line of ship noses, all sticking out from the shelter of their individual walls. The small, yellow moon gave the impression that the whole world had jaundice.

  Tom preferred worlds with white moons. When he’d been growing up, he used to wait for the full moon before going running along the creek and pretending he was never going to go back. His father had been one of the first settlers on Beauteous, a huge, fertile world with an enormous white moon, but disease had taken him, and his ma had taken a new husband.

  Shaking off the unhappy thoughts, Tom headed toward town. Most places would be shut down by now, but there would still be plenty of opportunities to find a little trouble and get a lot drunk. Tom didn’t even bother changing out of his work clothes with their long streaks of carbon soot and dirt. Unlike Becca, doxies didn’t need to be impressed. He only had to tell them what he wanted.

  The docks echoed Tom’s footsteps as he headed for the transports. At the small wait station, a short man with a round face gave Tom a once over and Tom glared back, daring the little shit to try to pick his pocket. The guy hurried down the tracks. If he wanted an easy mark, he’d just have to look elsewhere tonight. Tom had never been a particularly easy mark. He’d been tough enough to take care of himself even when he’d been seventeen and stick thin because he kept growing up faster than he could grow out.

  He took his first job shipside on a freighter at seventeen and gotten into the granddaddy of all dock fights. Him and about four hundred other men and women ripped the guts out of most of the Cassidy dock complex. He’d tipped over a refrigerator unit to protect a door where a group was hiding in a store room. When the arresting officer had figured out that Tom had protected them, he’d invited Tom into Corps. Since that day, surviving and shooting a gun were the two skills he brought to every single ship he’d ever served, and that’s what he had to focus on now. Problem being—Tom couldn’t figure out whether Da’shay was a threat to his continued survival. Captain Ramsay seemed to think she wasn’t, but Tom had his doubts.

  Fact was, when it came to women, Ramsay was all kinds of stupid. The only person to ever talk their way into the ship and the classified computer system had been some woman playing the captain with her sweet little smile and fluttering eyelids. Tom had told the captain she was trouble. Women who tried that hard to distract a man with how they looked…well, Tom’s ma always said those sort were trying to keep men from noticing something deeper down. In all his years, Tom hadn’t ever met a woman to prove his ma wrong. But wave a helpless woman in front of Captain Jonathan Ramsay and you were likely to fry most of the man’s logic circuits.

  But it wasn’t as if Da’shay was a woman…not exactly anyway. She looked like a woman, mostly. Some days, that long, black hair and those dark eyes would pull Tom toward her like a moth, but then her arms and legs were a little too long and her face had these small features that made her look like an elf or a little doll. She stood tall enough to look him in the eye, which Tom appreciated on a woman, but the whole package was disconcerting.

  She’d reach out and catch his arm as she went twirling by, and her fingers would close with the sort of strength Tom normally expected to find in a man. More, actually. She’d sailed into the middle of a firefight her first month on the Kratos, but instead of firing a gun, she’d snuck up behind the gunhands and started tossing them around like bits of trash. They’d ended up with broken arms and legs and a few cracked ribs, but the Kratos crew had come out without a scratch.

  And that brought Tom’s mind back to those pictures. She’d enjoyed killing and that was something Tom couldn’t abide.

  He loved shooting, whether he was shooting targets or people didn’t really make much difference to him except that people were harder to hit. He liked protecting crew and showing off his skills. He liked putting his strength up against another man in a fair fight and walking away knowing he was stronger, and if they had to call medics for his opponent, that didn’t really bother him. Tom never pretended that he was a good man. He wasn’t the sort of ethical man his ma would like him to be—that was one reason he avoided writing her. However, he never hurt someone who was unarmed, he never took out bystanders in a fight and he never took any sort of sadistic glee in the killing of a human being. He might not care about people as much as others told him he should, but Da’shay…she’d been reveling in her kill. That just wasn’t right.

  The train’s tracks gave a low-pitched hum that told him that the train was close and Tom moved toward the ramp, reaching for his money. His fingers brushed over the small metal disk he still had in his pocket. Looking over at the trash can, he tried to convince himself to drop it in, but he couldn’t. If Ramsay was going to go all kinds of girl-stupid on him, he couldn’t turn a blind eye to that.

  Twenty minutes later, Tom slipped off the train and into the dark streets without any answers. Someone had broken the lights aroun
d the station and the city had clearly given up trying to fix anything around here. This was the kind of place where Tom felt most at home. Here, no one looked at him and wondered what the hell he was doing. They just wondered if Tom was likely to kill them if they tried robbing him. He was.

  Tom wanted a particular kind of place…some place the younger ones avoided. He wanted a place where only the most dangerous men and women went to drink, where trouble was least likely to start because any hothead would get shot before he could do too much shit-stirring. If he was lucky, he might even talk a woman into bed. Some of the women gun hands appreciated a man who could fuck ‘em without ever forgetting that they were killers for hire.

  Most bars gave themselves names like “The Mercenary” to attract the young idiots, but Tom eventually found a place with narrow windows about perfect for shooting out of and no front light. A chipped sign simply stated “Carla’s” in plain lettering. This was what Tom had been searching for.

  He pushed the door open slow, studying the room to see if there was anyone inside who would be likely to take offense at the fact Tom was breathing. He’d made enemies, and he’d learned to keep an eye out for ‘em. A dozen men and five or six women studied him back. Hands rested near gun belts. Avalon was close enough to the colonies that plenty of people still wore guns, but it wasn’t the norm. Every person in this room was not only wearing a gun, but they looked ready to use it. This place was trouble.

  “What can I get you?” a woman asked from the side of the room. A stainless-steel bar server with a government certified seal stood in the corner, so Tom wasn’t going to have to put up with watered down drinks.

  “Rye whiskey.” The tables along the walls were taken and Tom didn’t want to sit in the center of the room right in front of the door, so he wandered over to the stairs and leaned on the banister. This way, any doxies who were working the place would know he was interested.

  Two men in the corner challenged each other on a marksman game that Tom knew he could beat. Another day he might make a few wagers and take these people’s money away from them. Smugglers and thieves made a lot more than a corporal, so Tom considered that a fair way to supplement his income.

  He made eye contact with a woman sitting at a small table nearest the door. Even just leaning on the table, he could see the muscles in her arms. Tom was big in all sorts of ways and he really did prefer a partner than he didn’t have to worry about hurting. She met his eye and looked him over before slowly looking away. Not disgusted, but not interested.

  “You need some company?” Tom had heard soft footsteps on the stairs, so the voice wasn’t a surprise. He looked up at her and immediately looked back at the crowd.

  “Yep,” he agreed. “No offense, but not in you.”

  She finished coming down the stairs. “No offense taken. So, what are you interested in?” She was so young that she didn’t even have womanly curves yet—nothing for Tom to hold onto except hip bones. Her long brown hair was nice and she wasn’t wearing too much makeup. He reached up to run his calloused hand through her hair. It was silky smooth and smelled of lilacs. Tom pulled his hand back before she smelled of soot and exhaust.

  “Older,” he answered.

  “I’m legal.”

  “It’d help if you looked it.”

  She smiled and shrugged. “Fair enough. Most guys like young, but plenty want to check my ID to make sure I’m not too young.”

  “Don’t care about legal, you still ain’t old enough.”

  She pulled back, a frown on her face, and that was one more woman unhappy with him. “So, what do you want?”

  “Experience. Someone with hips I can really grab.” He thought wistfully of Becca with all her curves. He bet her breasts were huge, but at this point, he didn’t think he’d ever get a chance to see for himself. “Someone who doesn’t giggle.”

  “You sound like a man who knows what you want.”

  “Ain’t got time for playing games. I say what I want and, that way, no one has to walk away frustrated.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly, as if she was trying to figure him out. That was ironic since Tom took less figuring than most, but he ignored her as she headed back upstairs. The two men in the corner finished with one cursing a blue streak and the other laughing and demanding payment. They gave each other shit the way friends did—without keeping a fighting distance between them or watching what they said.

  “There a problem here?”

  Tom looked upstairs. The woman didn’t even bother coming down to meet him. She was older, in her late thirties or early forties maybe, so near enough Tom’s age. Her dark blonde hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail, and she had a hard look about the eyes. Tom figured she’d come up through playing doxy, and she was probably the business manager of the upstairs now. Her clothes were loose and her pants wrinkled in a way that spoke of sitting at a desk.

  “Not any more, you’re more like it.” Tom started up the stairs. “I’m not going to feel like I’m bedding a child with you. Besides, you look strong enough to gut the man who fucks with you.”

  She blinked for a second, and then she smiled. Tom smiled back. Yep, he was going to blow half a week’s salary tonight, but he had a feeling it was worth it. “I do believe that’s the best compliment I’ve had in years.” She lifted her arm to invite Tom to walk down the hallway. Someone had gone out of their way to try to make the hall look fancy, but the wood veneer was peeling off the small table with the vase of fake flowers.

  “Just saying the truth as I see it. I’m not trying to sweet talk you.”

  “Which is why it’s such a compliment. So, you seem like a straight-talking man. What are you looking for tonight?”

  She opened a door onto a room. It was small, but the bed was so big it took up most of the space. “What are the rates?” Tom asked.

  She studied him. “You planning on doing anything that’s going to make me reach for pain pills in the morning?” Her voice stayed even, so Tom figured that was an option if he wanted to pay for it, but he’d never hit a woman who hadn’t been trying to hit him at the time.

  Tom took off his gun belt and set it on the small table wedged in next to the bed before sitting on the edge of the mattress. “I’m looking for sex…something to make me forget how shitty my day was.”

  “Aren’t we all?” the woman asked. She walked over and started unbuttoning Tom’s shirt for him. Tom dropped his hands to the bed and watched her. He didn’t even know her name, but he felt a lot more comfortable talking to her than he did Becca. Sometimes it felt as if Becca was the alien…or maybe it was him. Either way, they didn’t seem to be able to communicate. It was like a genta who spoke the language, but just put ideas together in a way that made understanding even more difficult. Or maybe it was like a casslit who only communicated through actions. Working with aliens was like one big game of charades and Tom felt that same frustration trying to tell Becca two simple things; he liked her and he respected her.

  “Any preferences?” She slid his shirt off and then ran her hands over Tom’s shoulders. Tom sat up a little straighter and reached up to rest his hands on her waist and pull her close. He smelled her stomach. Soap. Good clean soap. It smelled about perfect.

  “I don’t want to do anything that’s going to make you fake your way through. Can’t stand seeing a woman slip and let her boredom show in the middle of sex,” Tom admitted.

  The woman laughed. “Well, that might explain what you have against the younger girls. Trust me, I don’t get so much anymore that it’s a big bore. Of course, even when I worked the rooms regularly, I was good enough to hide my feelings.”

  “I figured you would be.” Tom ran his hands up under her loose blouse, feeling her hot, soft skin under his hands. “So how much?”

  “Twenty credits.”

  Tom grunted. That wasn’t as much as he’d been expecting. “There something wrong with you?” he asked, leaning back to study her.

  “Excuse me?” She put
her hands on her hips. “If you don’t like what you see—”

  “Like it plenty,” Tom interrupted her. “I’m wondering why you aren’t charging more. If you’re planning on trying to rob me after you’re done, you’re out of luck. I brought enough for one drink and one fuck.”

  She dropped her hands to her side. “You think I’m undercharging?”

  Tom frowned, trying to understand why she looked amused all of a sudden. “Unless there’s something wrong that I’m not seeing, yes.”

  She shook her head and ran her fingers over Tom’s short, thick hair. “You have some sweet under all that dirt, don’t you? I’m just out of practice. I don’t overcharge men, so if we finish and you think I’m worth it, you can pay me the full thirty-five credits. So, what would make you want to pay full price for someone who is a little rusty?”

  Tom reached up and unbuttoned two of her buttons so he could reach up inside her shirt more easily. He spent a second feeling her skin under his hands. He knew what he wanted, but he rarely made a connection with a doxy that made him feel safe enough to ask for it. However, this was the sort of place where a woman would think twice before taking advantage because the sort of men who came here wouldn’t go looking to the law to get justice. They’d get their own revenge. And this woman didn’t seem the sort to start any trouble, although he figured she could end it.

  “I don’t want to do anything,” Tom whispered. He ran his hands up under her shirt until his thumbs slipped under her bra and between her breasts. “I don’t want to think about what’s right or what’s going to piss you off. I want to lay there and let you do the work—tell me what you want so I don’t have to play any guessing games.” His fingers slid under her bra so that he could feel her soft breasts under his hands. He gently kneaded the flesh, pushing the bra up and out of his way. She let him explore the texture of her nipples and the softness of her skin. Her breasts were heavy in his hands, and his fingers found a tiny scar that ran below her left breast.