Chapter 40
Cyra slammedopen the door to the office. Something had exploded. In her mind, The Treasure was in pieces, permanently destroyed. Men in parkas erupted from other doors. A vehicle with a red strobe and alarm raced across the landing pad, its spiked tires churning up the ice and snow. Her contact, Derrain, caught up to her, grabbing her shoulder.
“What?” She wrenched out of his grasp.
“Return to your ship. Run a safety scan. Now.”
She turned from where the vehicle was headed to find The Treasure standing solid, exactly where she’d left it. A ship streaked overhead.
“Unauthorized departure.” A mechanical voice echoed the announcement three times. More uniformed men appeared on the launchpad in vehicles and on foot. A dozen of them surrounded her ship, their weapons held upright, close to their chests.
She stopped, facing the one who had taken position at the base of her reopening ramp. “Cyra Maejzur, Captain of The Treasure. I was told to return to my ship.”
The ramp touched ground, the guard turned sideways. Cyra marched up the ramp. Her crew stood shoulder to shoulder, the five dogs at their feet, concern wafting from them like smoke.
“Security scan is running. Nothing so far,” Rhysa said.
Veda clasped Cyra’s forearm. “Where’s Dez?”
“Clear,” Blaize said as she pressed the button to close the ramp.
“Wait.” Cyra spun to the quickly closing ramp. Bodi’s arms wrapped around her before Cyra could throw herself back into the chaos. “I have to get Dez. He was in the offices. I left him there to talk to the contracting agent. He should be here.” Cyra begged Veda with a look. “Please tell me he made it back here.”
Veda shook her head. Bodi tugged Cyra out of the bay and back to the galley.
“I’ll make tea,” Veda said, pulling items from the cabinet.
Cyra sagged into one of the chairs. Dez was okay. He had to be. He’d probably gone with the mining personnel to help with whatever had happened. Of course he did. That was so Dez. In a few minutes he’d be knocking at the door.
Bodi’s wings flittered rapidly. “Maybe he sent a message.” She rushed back into the corridor, presumably headed for her station on the deck.
It was too soon for Dez to call. He’d be busy helping for a while. Cyra sipped her tea and told herself she was overreacting.
“I’m going to check the scan.” Rhysa left.
Blaize sat beside Cyra. Veda set cups on the table and took the seat on the opposite side of Cyra. The hot liquid settled Cyra enough to recall what she’d seen before the explosion. “I saw Varik. At least I’m pretty sure I did.”
“What?” Blaize thumped her cup down, a bit of hot liquid splashed over the edge. “What is that fork tongued devil doing on Kolben? Did he follow us? Did he set the bomb? I wouldn’t put it past him. There’s no low he won’t go to?—”
Cyra interrupted. “If it was him, he got here before us. The only other ship was already on the tarmac before we landed.”
“Wormhole?” Blaize’s voice was low as if she was asking herself. “But how would he have known?” She left her seat. “I have to run another scan. That bastard has to have another tracker on this ship somewhere and I’m going to find it and kill it, since I can’t kill him.”
Veda swiped up the spill and cleaned Blaize’s cup. “The dogs were unsupervised. They came up the ramp alone.”
That meant Dez had led them off-ship and somehow lost control? Cyra stared unseeingly, sipping the tea. With every minute that passed, her confidence in Dez’s safety winnowed away.
“Captain?” Bodi’s voice brought Cyra back to the galley. “They’re asking to speak with you.”
Cyra set her cold tea down and went to Bodi. “On the comms?”
“Derrain is waiting for you outside.”
“Right.” Cyra blinked as she processed the words. “Dez?”
Bodi shook her head. Veda took Cyra’s hand. “I’ll go with you.”
Cyra nodded and let Veda guide her out of her ship. The mining company contact sat in a sheltered vehicle. Cyra took the front passenger seat and Veda sat behind her.
“We apprehended a suspect.”
What did that have to do with Cyra and her crew? Unless it was Dez? But they couldn’t think Dez would so something like this. “Who?”
“The name Jarn Ardkin sound familiar?”
Cyra shook her head.
“He’s admitted to planting the bomb on your ship.” The man steered away from the large office down a narrow road that had been recently scraped clean. He sped faster than such a narrow road warranted.
“The bomb didn’t hurt my ship.” Nothing made any sense.
“Your, um, crew member. Dez?”
Cyra grabbed the man’s arm. “You know where Dez is?”
He swung the control hard in the opposite direction, bringing them back on the road.
Veda gripped Cyra’s shoulders. “Don’t kill us before we find Dez.”
“Sorry. But?—?”
Derrain rubbed the back of his neck. “Your man, he removed the bomb from your ship and tried to dispose of it. Crazy shit really. There was no way?—”
“No.” Cyra closed her eyes and wailed from deep in her soul. “Please no. Please don’t tell me?—”
“He’s not dead. Not yet.”
Cyra sucked in a ragged breath, tears streamed down her face. “Yet?”
“He was hurt pretty bad.” Derrain pulled up in front of a long low building with windows spaced symmetrically out from the double door that occupied the middle.
Pain radiated from every cell in Dez’s body. He couldn’t be dead. There was no way dead would hurt like he did. He tried to open his eyes to see if he was alive, but even his eyelids hurt. He groaned involuntarily and could have screamed from the pain in his throat. Apparently, he’d tried to breathe fire recently. What happened? Had The Treasure crashed? Where was Cyra? He was breathing too fast but could do nothing to stop it.
“Dezmuhnd? Dezmuhnd, can you hear me? You need to calm down.”
The man’s voice wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.
“Sedate him.”
“No,” he croaked despite the shards of pain that sliced through him. “Where’s Cyra? What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
Dez shook his head a tiny amount, choosing to torture his aching muscles instead of testing his throat again. He must have been near death because he’d never felt so bad before in his life.
“Do you remember the bomb?”
There had been a bomb? The last thing he remembered was Cyra crying and turning him away from staying with her. A straw slipped between his lips and he sucked the cool liquid down, swallowing hurt like hell, but the moisture let him speak again. “Where am I?”
“Med center? On Kolben? Do you remember landing here?”
Cold. He recalled being cold. He had to open his eyes. His arms didn’t move. One was lashed to a hard plane, tubes rested against his skin.
“Try to stay still. You’ve been through a lot. You saved the mine and the spaceport from a bomb.”
Dez took a moment to process what he’d been told. A mine, they must be at Kolben. A bomb. He wrinkled his brow at the man who must be a doctor of some sort.
“We had a ship land with an emergency mechanical failure, but we suspect it was a lie. I’m not sure why they would want to bomb us.”
Fuck, if he was injured. What had happened to—“Cyra?”
“The captain of The Treasure?”
Dez nodded.
“She’s fine. No one else was injured but you.”
His mate was alive and uninjured. Dez passed out from relief and pain.
Cyra paused in the hallway, swallowing down the bile that had risen in her throat. Dez hadn’t moved the entire time she’d been in his room. He didn’t know she was there. She taken note of every single wound to his face, his chest, his arms. The gaping holes that crossed his tattoos. The arm that ended in a stump. She cupped her hands to her mouth to hold back the sobs as she folded in half.
Veda emerged a few minutes later. “Oh, Cyra. He’s going to be okay. It will take time, but he will heal.”
“He lost his hand.” The hand that had cooked for her, caressed her, carried her through climax after climax.
“They have a very good prosthetics department here.”
So they were good at saving people from horrific injuries. Ones that he would be at risk for after she left.
“But he won’t be fitted for weeks at the soonest.” Veda patted her arm.
“It was Varik, which means it was my fault.”
“You can’t know that. And even if it was, his actions aren’t your fault.”
“I want to speak to the man they caught. I want to know.” Cyra pushed away from the wall to find Derrain.
Derrain was in the office building where Cyra had originally spoken to him. “Ardkin is being interrogated by the security officer. So far he hasn’t said much.”
The door Darrain led her to had a biometric lock, he held his palm to the sensor and looked into a small round sensor. A heavy click indicated the lock had released. He pushed open the metal slab but stopped Veda from entering. “I only have authorization for one, Doctor.”
Veda took a step back. “If you don’t return her to me?—”
“Yes, ma’am.” Derrain ushered Cyra into a long, narrow, empty space. White walls, white flooring, bright white lighting. The door clicked closed behind her. “This way.”
Cyra followed Derrain through the hallway. They passed several dark offices that had a single window and door into the hallway. After they passed five, Derrain stopped. “He’s in here. There’s a glass wall. He won’t be able to see you unless you go into the inner cell. But if you do, I’ll have to scan you for any objects that could be used as a weapon.”
Cyra bit back the question of whether that was for Ardkin’s safety or hers. It was for his. “Fine.”
She didn’t recognize the man who was much younger than she’d expected. He was pale and blonde. Muscular but lean. She couldn’t see his eyes. He stood facing a side wall, his forehead resting against it. He arched back and banged his head. “Let me talk to him.”
“I’ll go in with you ma’am.”
Cyra jumped. She hadn’t noticed the large figure in black sitting in a chair in the far corner.
“I’ll wait for you out here,” Derrain said.
Cyra took a deep breath. The scan had been unnerving. Almost intimate and included being swabbed in various places for chemicals. She trailed the shadow man, the name she gave to the security officer since he hadn’t offered one, past the glass wall that had slid back to provide a narrow opening. It closed behind her. If the Kolben Mining Company decided to keep her there would be nothing she could do deep as she was into their lair, but she had to talk to the person who had hurt Dez.
“Jarn Ardkin, do you know who I am?”
Ardkin barely turned his head. With a squeak, he leapt backward. “Don’t kill me.”
“Do you know who I am?” Cyra used a stronger tone.
“Your the thief who stole Varik’s ship.”
Cyra explained how that wasn’t true and who she was. “Do you know where Varik went?”
Jarn’s blue eyes became watery. “He left?”
Cyra nodded.
“What about me?”
“What about you? You nearly killed my…a very special man.” Her mate she’d been about to say. Because that’s what Dez was to her. Her mate. And she’d been planning to leave him on this godforsaken planet like Varik had left Jarn. So what did that say about her?
“Varik told me no one was on the ship. I was supposed to place it and leave, but then I heard barking and I panicked. I ran around the entire office building, trying to lose him. The bomb exploded before I could get back to the ship, and he left me.” He stared at Cyra as if she would feel sorry for him.
“You don’t feel bad about this at all, do you?” When he didn’t respond, just blinked at her blankly, she turned on her heel. “Get me out of here,” she told the shadow man.
“What will you do with him?” she asked Derrain as he drove her and Veda back to The Treasure.
“There will be a trial tomorrow. He’s admitted his guilt, so it’s simply a cursory procedure to get the documentation correct.”
“He’ll be punished?”
“He’ll spend the rest of his life in the mines.”
Good nearly came out of her mouth, except Dez was spending the rest of his life in those very same mines and he’d done nothing to deserve it.
The rest meal sucked. The crew was upset that Dez had been injured and was going to stay on the planet and the food was terrible. The fact that Jarn had been caught instead of Varik only added to the heavy remorse.
“Are we prepared to leave once the investigation is complete and we receive authorization?” Cyra asked.
“The fuel stores are full,” Blaize told her with no excitement in her voice.
“I have a path back to Cassan charted. We’re using a wormhole.” Rhysa crossed her arms and glared at Cyra.
“Why?” Cyra didn’t want to, but she didn’t have a good reason besides it made her feel icky.
“We don’t have any appointments to make. If we encounter a time cost, it will be irrelevant. The mining company uses this wormhole constantly. They haven’t had any adverse results.”
“Fine.” Who cared if the experience made her feel horrible, she already did. It couldn’t get worse. “Bodi, please arrange authorization to leave as scheduled.”
“Yes, Captain.”
They sat quietly for a few more moments, the air heavy with unsaid words. Cyra left the galley and went to her water chamber.
The chamber wasn’t as restorative as she hoped. Every time she let her mind drift, Dez filled her thoughts. The caress of the water reminded her of his hands on her body. Her lips tingled with the echoes of their last kiss. Her heart ached with an unexplainable pain. She would miss him deeply for a long time. She wasn’t sure when she’d become so attached to him, but it had happened. She missed him more than she had ever missed Captain Auvi and Dez wasn’t dead. It was a shocking surprise. The water wasn’t helping her. She got out quickly and hid in her quarters hoping sleep would provide the escape she was seeking.
Cyra found no rest. Her sleep was hijacked by disturbing dreams that made no sense. She dreamed of Captain Auvi dying. But it wasn’t Captain Auvi, it was Dez. He was in the Captain’s quarter and she was the one who was putting a poisonous spider in the room with him. He was lying in her bed, dead. He didn”t have the injuries from the bomb. But he was an unnatural blue grey color and his yellow eyes were open and cloudy, staring at nothing on the ceiling of the room. She woke to the sounds of her screams.