Chapter 30
Carmen crouched in the cramped access tube in Engineering, her aching shoulder jammed against a coolant conduit vibrating with the ship’s wounded heartbeat.
Grease smeared her tank top, her knuckles were raw from wrestling stubborn access panels, and the pervasive, cloying sweetness of Mila’s pheromones hung thick in the air, a constant, unwelcome caress against her skin.
It wormed its way past her defenses, a low purr of arousal beneath the gnawing dread that had settled like lead in her gut.
She was wedged opposite Carmen in the narrow tube, her eyes luminous in the dim work-light, focused intently on a nest of multicolored cables she was untangling. Her furred arm brushed against Carmen’s as she worked, a fleeting touch that sent a jolt of unwelcome heat straight down Carmen’s spine.
“The original pathway is wired for Zed’s direct neural interface,” she said. “We need a physical bypass.”
“Efficiency often sacrifices accessibility,” Mila agreed softly.
Her clawed fingers moved with unnerving precision, stripping insulation and splicing wires.
“But necessity breeds adaptation. The auxiliary coupling here—” She indicated a heavy socket recessed into the bulkhead.
“—requires a manual hardline jack. The one you’re holding. ”
Carmen shoved the thick connector into the socket. It clicked home with satisfying finality.
“Done. Now what?”
“Initiate the power transfer sequence from the secondary console,” Mila instructed, nodding towards the small, flickering screen embedded in the tube wall nearby. “Authorization code Zed provided. Then monitor the thermal bleed-off. We don’t want to overload the junction.”
Carmen punched in the complex string of characters Zed had drilled into her. The screen flickered, then displayed scrolling lines of status reports. Power levels climbed. She watched the thermal readout like a hawk, her jaw clenched. Every spike felt like a premonition of disaster.
She turned her head, meeting Mila’s steady green gaze. The proximity was unbearable. The scent, the warmth radiating from her furred body, the quiet intensity in those eyes – it all pushed against the walls Carmen had spent a lifetime building.
Mila didn’t flinch. Her gaze held Carmen’s, deep and knowing.
“We’re done here,” she said, her voice soft, lilting. “Why don’t you climb out and test the control board? I’ll close up the access panel.”
She didn’t want to. She wanted to keep staring into those mesmerizing, green eyes. She wanted to drink in the scent of her, let it sweep her away from all this chaos, all this responsibility.
But she couldn’t. Too many people depended on her. And that was always the way. Carmen Díaz took care of everyone else. No one took care of her.
With a heavy sigh, she forced herself to break the spell and climb out of the tube.
Outside, the air was cooler. Mila’s scent still hung in the air, but it wasn’t as immediate, didn’t fill her mind and strip away every coherent, mission-focused thought.
Here, it was grease and engine oil – familiar, comforting, safe.
She wandered over to the control board. They’d had to reinstall it; Zed had ripped it out long ago and replaced it with interface ports and wireless transceivers.
It hung at an imperfect angle. Carmen hadn’t been able to get it back into the housing properly. Mila had told her it was fine as long as it functioned, but Carmen’s need for control, her zero-tolerance for anything out of order, grated at the sight of thing.
“Control what you can, Carmen,” she said with a deep breath. Then she called to Mila, “Ready?”
“Yes, go ahead and switch it on.”
Carmen pressed the red power button and held her breath as she watched the boot. Lines of code ran across the display screen, interspersed periodically with words like, “Initiating …”, “Connecting …”, “Scanning …”, and more. At last, the readout spit out the words:
Interface complete. Enter passcode to initiate control access….
“All right, we’re online,” she called.
“Great,” Mila replied. “I’ll be right out.”
Carmen stood back and tried not to think about what they were about to do. She was going to send her most valuable crewmember on a suicide spacewalk. Even if he was successful, she wasn’t entirely sure how they were going to recover him.
And meanwhile, she and Mila were making their broke-ass ship less efficient. No matter how good Mila or Carmen were at starship engineering, they weren’t as fast or as knowledgeable as Zed.
The stress of the situation threatened to break Carmen in half.
No one wanted this mission. The whole crew objected to it on some level – even Letitia, whose idea it had been in the first place.
She may have wanted to rescue Mila, but she was convinced Carmen was doing it all wrong, drunk on their Xena refugee’s pheromones.
And wasn’t she? She wanted things she couldn’t have, thought about things she could never seriously consider.
Stop being distracted. Control yourself.
The familiar command echoed in Carmen’s mind, the bedrock of her identity. But the dread was a rising tide, and Mila’s presence, the scent, the memory of that kiss in the other tube – it was eroding the shore.
Mila crawled out of the access tube, a grease stain on her cheek. It was insanely cute.
Forcing herself to ignore her, Carmen started putting the passcode in to bring the board fully online. It responded immediately:
Invalid entry.
Carmen frowned in surprise. She checked the code Zed had given her and typed it again.
Invalid entry.
“What the fuck?” she swore aloud.
“What’s the matter?” Mila asked.
Carmen ignored her. She tapped the code in slowly, stabbing the keys one at a time. Her face flushed red. She ground her teeth.
Invalid entry.
She screamed like she’d been burned. She cursed the machine, spitting out a guttural string of expletives so foul, she hardly knew what she was saying.
“Captain,” Mila said, worry in her voice.
“Not now, Mila!”
She turned her rage back to the board. Tapped in the code, practically slamming the keys.
“Now, you listen to me, you hijo de puta, you will do what I goddamned tell you,” she growled. “I am the captain. This is my ship, and you will take my fucking command.”
Invalid entry.
“FUCK YOU!”
Tears sprouted at the edges of her eyes. Her vision washed over red. Her blood turned to fire.
“Carmen!”
Mila snatched her wrist in mid-air and held it fast. For a moment, she thought she might kill the Xena.
But then she realized she’d been about to punch the display screen. Mila had stopped her, prevented her powdering her knuckles against the glass and potentially damaging the unit.
What the hell had she been thinking? What was the matter with her?
“Carmen,” Mila said again, her voice softer, soothing. “Calm down. The sensor calibration interface is still slaved to Zed’s wireless command frequency. That’s why the keyboard isn’t taking the code. We need to rewire it for manual input.”
She pointed to a cluster of delicate fiber-optic lines lying at their feet beneath the control board. Carmen blinked at them in stupefaction.
Yes. Of course. They’d had to hardwire the board into the system from the access tube, to bring it online. But they had one more step before they could finish the job. She’d forgotten.
“May I?” Mila said.
Carmen realized Mila was still holding her wrist. Angrily, she snatched it back.
“I’ve got it,” she rasped, grabbing the micro-tool kit clipped to her belt. Her heart thudded in her chest. The touch lingered on her skin, a brand.
Control. You need control.
She fumbled with the tiny fiber-optic connector, her fingers suddenly clumsy. Her vision blurred slightly. A tremor ran through her hand.
“Captain?” Mila’s voice was soft, closer now. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine,” Carmen snapped.
She tried to slot the connector. Missed. Tried again. Her breath hitched, ragged.
“Carmen, stop.”
That was the third time Mila had said her name. And every time it was a command.
“It’s time for you to let someone else take the burden,” Mila went on. “You’ve got nothing left. You’ve used up all the control you’ve got.”
No. How dare she?
“You don’t know shit about what I’ve got left,” Carmen spat. “You don’t know what I need.”
She tried to muscle her way past the Xena, but Mila put a hand on her shoulder. Her grip was like a vise. Carmen couldn’t break it. Mila drilled her with an emerald gaze that sent fire to Carmen’s loins.
“What you need,” the Xena Harimi whispered, her voice the very essence of command, “is to surrender. I’ve been observing you for days, Captain Díaz. I’ve watched as you’ve tried to control every detail, manage every problem, yourself.
“You can’t do it anymore. You’re spent. The situation is too large for you to handle by yourself. No one could deal with all this on their own.”
Carmen refused to listen. She wouldn’t let this woman who’d thrown her entire world into chaos tell her what she needed. She couldn’t!
“No, I—”
“Quit fighting this, Carmen. Let go. Abandon your control, so you can be free.”
“I need control!” Carmen cried.
Why couldn’t Mila understand that? Without control, the world disintegrated. Mistakes were made. Illegal aliens ended up in the cargo hold. Smuggling vessels got boarded by the COPS. Preventable mutinies murdered good captains.
“No, you need to surrender,” Mila said, her voice hard. “You’re overwhelmed, and you need to let go.”
“I—”
“You need me to take your little bitch-ass down and fuck you right here, right now – fuck you so hard, you scream loud enough for your cries to carry through the stars.”
Carmen’s eyes went wide. She’d never heard Mila curse before. And the things she’d said …
“Admit it,” Mila growled. “Admit you need me to fuck you, Carmen. Remember that Letitia’s right: you think better after you’ve been laid. Remember and tell me you need me to take your control. That you need to surrender.”
Surrender.