Cyberevolution Book One: The Awakening: Fifty Shades of Dark Kaitlyn O'Connor by Kaitlyn O'Connor, Kimberly Zant, Marie Morin, Stacey St.James, Goldie McBride (2)

The belt, she discovered, was looped through it on the back. She had to unfasten his belt to slip it off. Dimly aware that Dax was still trying to bellow instructions at her, she ignored him because it took every ounce of focus to figure out how to remove the thing.

When she’d finally gotten it loose, she turned around and looked for Dax. Dozens of arms were thrust through the bars, though, grabbing at the thing she held in her hand. She curled into a ball, holding the thing to her chest protectively.

“The key code! Key in the code!”

“I don’t know the code,” she yelled at him.

“Give it to me!”

She tried, but the men around him were also jostling to get their hands on the control and she wasn’t about to give it to them. Dax meant safety. Dax meant help. She had no idea whether the other men would help her, stampede over her, or decide to drag her in and rape her as they’d tried before.

She still had the taser, though, she realized. Gripping it firmly, she swung at the men trying to reach through the bars and grab her. When they leapt back, she shoved the control into Dax’s hands. Like a wave, the men surged forward again. Again she swung at them. “Hurry!”

Gritting his teeth, Dax pressed the buttons, trying one combination after another.

Lena had just begun to think it was hopeless when the door abruptly opened.

Dax wasn’t the first one out. The moment the door opened, the men inside charged, bottlenecking the small opening. Black Stew waded through them, pitching several through and knocking others to either side of him.

The stampede of men out of the cell galvanized Lena into moving faster than she would’ve thought she could. She leapt to one side, plastering herself against the bars. The din, already enough to rattle her eardrums, grew nearly deafening as the men penned in the cell across the way began yelling and cussing and demanding, or begging, to be released as well. Dax, exiting at last, tossed the control toward the waiting hands. The men instantly fell upon one another like a pack of dogs, snarling and struggling to get their hands on the control unit.

The men who were already free had split up and were racing toward either end of the corridor. Dax halted next to her. “Are you alright?”

“Compared to what?” Lena gasped, unable to keep the indignation from her voice.

For just a moment, she thought she saw a glint of humor in his eyes. It vanished so quickly she wasn’t certain, though.

“We’re not out of the woods yet. You think you can make it?”

She didn’t know if she could or not but she damn well meant to try. Either way, she wasn’t about to voice any doubts. She thought it more likely his concern was that she would slow him down than empathy for her state. She nodded.

“Good girl!”

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Lena glanced up and down the corridor worriedly. “Which way?”

“Up,” he responded without hesitation, heading toward the group piled around the lift tube.

There were only a half a dozen or so men waiting now, Lena saw as Dax led her a little further along the corridor. The men in the cell on the opposite side of the corridor hadn’t managed to get out. Either they’d broken the control fighting over it, or they hadn’t figured out the release code yet. One group waiting near the lift had already piled on and disappeared. The men who’d charged off in the opposite direction had also vanished from sight.

“Quiet!” Dax bellowed, his voice so commanding that all of the men within the sound of his voice instantly fell silent.

Faintly, far in the distance, Lena heard a popping sound.

“What’s that?” she whispered.

“Gunfire! Those idiots must have headed for the ground floor. Either they’ll lock down the lifts or the car will be full of guards when it comes back and they’ll be crawling all over us,” he muttered, glancing around at the ceiling as if he could see through the panels above them.

A wave of nausea went through Lena. She should’ve known it was stupid to think they could get out!

After a moment, Dax turned away from the lift and trotted down the corridor a short piece, staring up at the ventilation shaft. Without a word, he climbed the bars and began yanking and tugging at the cover. Dust and debris began to rain down in the corridor. Finally, he managed to break the cover free on one end. He turned then and held out a hand for Lena. “In here.”

Ignoring the hand he offered, Lena handed him the taser she still held, scrambled up the bars, and leaned out to grip the edge of the shaft. He ‘helped’ her as she began hoisting herself into the shaft by planting one hand in the middle of her ass and giving her a shove. As scared as she was, that hand did more than give her a boost by lifting some of the weight off her arms. It sent a jolt of adrenaline through her that gave her the strength to pull herself up.

She heard the scramble of feet as the prisoners waiting near the lift charged back to jockey for position to go next. The sizzle of the taser sent the smell of burning hair into the shaft behind her. A moment later, Dax appeared in the opening and clambered in behind her. “Move!” he commanded. “They’ll be on us any minute.”

The prisoners? The guards? Both? “Which way?”

“Up!”

She didn’t argue, but going up sounded as insane as going down to meet the guards waiting for them below. Without another word, she crawled down the shaft as fast as she could, pausing only when she reached the first intersection opening above her head. She stood up, then, wondering how the hell she was supposed to climb the thing.

“Use the seams to get a finger grip and brace yourself across the opening,” Dax said, almost as if he’d read her mind.

The seams? Good god!

Do or die, she reminded herself, digging her fingers into the seam just above her head and lifting one foot to brace it against the side of the vent shaft. She was sweating so profusely with effort by the time she reached the next intersection her hands and feet kept slipping. Shaking like a leaf, she parked her rump on the ledge of another intersecting shaft and struggled to catch her breath. “How far are we from the top?” she gasped out in a breathless whisper.

Dax didn’t even look up. “Three levels.”

“More?” Lena asked in dismay.

“You want to go back?”

Gritting her teeth, Lena wiped her hands on what was left of her tunic and felt around for another seam. Her heart leapt into her throat as her foot slipped along the slick inside of the shaft the moment she tried her weight against it. Dax caught her foot before she slammed it into his face, forcing her leg upward until she could plant it firmly against the shaft wall again.

Fear rode her all the way up, as she slipped over and over, clawing at the seams that were little more than bumps until her fingers began to bleed, adding to her difficulties. When she’d made it to the next intersection, she tore a strip off the bottom of the tunic and wrapped it around her fingertips, tying it. The little spots of blood seeping through the thin fabric seemed to give her a little more traction. When she paused at the next intersection, she tore off two more and wrapped the strips around her toes.

She wasn’t going to make it, she thought glumly, even while she continued to go through the motions. She was going to make a misstep somewhere and slam into Dax and take them both down.

It became a litany pounding in her skull as she struggled on and on, ignoring the shaking in her muscles at the fear and strain. She was ready to admit defeat by the time she’d finally reached another intersection. “I don’t think I can do much more of this.” In fact none.

“We’re there.”

Lena blinked, her head popping up automatically as she glanced toward the top of the shaft. She couldn’t see anything but more shaft and then a blockage of some kind. “We are?” she asked doubtfully.

“Wait here.”

Lena moved further back into the horizontal shaft as Dax climbed past her. She watched him until he reached the end. Bracing himself carefully, he began kicking at the piece blocking the top of the shaft. She’d just begun to think he couldn’t get the leverage he needed to knock the thing loose when it fell to one side and a gust of air whipped past her, freezing the sweat on her skin. Before she could blink, Dax was over the side and out of her sight.

“Dax?” she called in a quaky, frightened voice.

He leaned over the opening, holding a hand down. “Come on, baby girl.”

Lena’s chin wobbled. Abruptly, all she could think of was that she wanted Morris. He’d always made everything alright. She needed Morris and he was gone. He was never going to be there for her again.

“Just a little further. Come on.”

Swallowing with an effort, Lena scrubbed a hand across her eyes to dry the tears that had puddled in them and moved shakily to enter the shaft again. Her heart seemed to stand still in her chest as she looked down.

“Don’t look down! Look at me!”

Too late! She didn’t think she could’ve made it this far if Dax hadn’t been behind her all the way, blocking her view of the miles of shaft below her, giving her the reassurance that he was there to catch her.

Never mind that she hadn’t actually believed he would, that she’d been afraid the whole time that if she fell she was going to take both of them down.

She needed the illusion of safety he’d given her.

“Lena! Get your ass up here!” Dax bellowed abruptly.

Stiffening her spine, still quaking like a leaf, Lena moved into the shaft and began struggling upward again. A jolt went through her when she felt a hand brush one shoulder. He caught her arm as she slipped, heaving upward. She managed to grip one side of the top edge. Her feet sought traction, slipped and she pedaled upward. Relief so potent it made her absolutely limp went through her when she tumbled to the roof in Dax’s arms.

She didn’t really have a chance to enjoy the sense of security, though.

He pushed her off almost at once and got to his feet.

More slowly, wondering what they were going to do now, Lena gathered herself into a ball and looked around to see what he was doing.

Without hesitation, he loped across the roof to what looked like a water tower, or perhaps some sort of electrical maintenance box. After feeling around the thing for a handful of moments, he pulled a small object from it. Glancing upward, he went still, as if waiting.

Lena looked up too. She could see nothing but blackness, the slightly paler black of clouds against the night sky and winking stars.

As she watched, however, one star seemed to detach itself from the others and shoot downward.

“Make it quick!” Dax muttered, drawing her attention.

It took more of an effort to push herself to her feet than she’d thought it would, Lena discovered as she gathered herself and tried to stand. She managed to get to her knees, wobbled for a moment and then, dragging in a deep breath, stood. Even with her legs braced apart, she almost fell down again when she looked up at the bright spec of light shooting toward them.

Staggering, catching her balance with an effort, she glanced at Dax questioningly.

“We’ve got company,” he growled warningly. “Quit fucking around and get down here!”

Lena felt her jaw go slack. Who was he talking to, she wondered blankly? The warning ‘company’ hit her right between the eyes just then, however, and she whirled to look around the roof for the threat as Dax charged across the roof toward a boxy looking protrusion.

He’d barely reached it when a door opened in one side, disgorging guards. Four men carrying automatics charged past him without seeing him, heading straight for her. She didn’t wait to see anything else. Letting out a shriek, she whirled and ran.

“Get down!”

Lena reacted instantly to Dax’s bellowed command, slamming into the roof top and plastering herself against it even as the scream of laser blasts filled the air above her head. Cringing, without any place to run to even if she was near enough to reach any kind of shelter, she covered her head with her hands. Around her, she heard yells, the sizzle of the taser, laser blasts, and then above that, drowning out all of the other noises, the shrill whine of an engine. Heat seared her, blown away from her almost before it touched her by a hard blast of air.

Pulling her hands from her head when the sounds of battle diminished, Lena turned her head first one way and then the other to see what was happening. Hovering just above the roof ledge was an enormous deep space craft. A dozen men had spilled from the gang way extending from it and were running across the roof. The four guards she’d seen, like her, were plastered face down on the roof, their arms above their heads.

Dax knelt beside her and hauled her to her feet. “That’s our ride.”

Stunned, Lena got up with an effort and allowed him to lead her across the roof toward the waiting craft.

“Bring them,” Dax yelled above the roar of the ship’s engines. At once the soldiers prodded the guards to get on their feet, herding them toward the gangplank with the tips of their guns.

“Hustle it!” Dax barked as everyone began pouring on board again, his hand tightening around Lena’s arm as he pulled her to one side to allow them to pass.

Still stunned and bewildered by the turn of events, Lena stood docilely beside him, trying to figure out how it was that a ship had been waiting for them. The troops filed in, disappearing down a narrow gang way and through an air lock. The whir of the gang plank being retracted caught Lena’s attention, and she turned, watching as it disappeared into a crevice, like a tongue into a mouth, and the outer door closed.

“The prisoners have been secured, Captain Morris,” said a male voice.

Lena’s head snapped around so quickly a bone in her neck cracked. A shockwave washed over her as she stared at Dax in wide eyed disbelief. “Morris?”

He turned to look down at her. His blue eyes were as cold as ice. “Good. Take this abomination down to Mel. When she’s patched it up, secure it in the brig. We’ll see what information we can get out of it.”

Abomination? It?

One shock after another rolled over Lena, making it impossible to do anything but gape at Dax. She didn’t even try to resist when someone seized her arm and led her away.

* * * *

An unaccustomed sense of doubt plagued Dax as he watched the guards escort Lena below. The problem was that reason and instinct were in conflict where she was concerned. Statistically speaking, they’d discovered that the gov had a 1-0 batting average when it came to replacing people with their cloned copies, which made it highly unlikely that Lena had escaped the fate planned for her.

On a gut level, everything in him was telling him she was the Lena, the one and only.

Tamping the vague sense of uneasiness plaguing him, he strode briskly along the gangway and climbed the tube to the bridge.

“Captain on deck!” an enthusiastic recruit announced the moment he appeared through the opening, clicking his heels smartly and saluting.

Discipline was necessary to form an army that was worth its salt, but Dax wasn’t particularly enthused about the rigid ceremony of the traditional army, partly because it made him uncomfortable since he wasn’t regular army, and partly because it reminded him too much of the people he’d come to despise.

Nevertheless, he returned the salute.

“Captain! It’s good to have you back in one piece--sir!” Rodriguez said as he spied Dax.

“It’s good to be back in one piece,” Dax responded somewhat dryly.

Rodriguez grinned, relaxing when he saw that Dax didn’t mean to stand on ceremony, but shook his head. “We’d begun to worry you wouldn’t be able to pull it off.”

Dax glanced at his pilot speculatively a moment before he turned his attention to the map the navigator had pulled up. “How much did you lose?” he asked, his voice tinged with amusement.

Rodriguez chuckled. “Naw, man! I won! I told them you’d have her out by the end of the week.”

Dax nodded, but his amusement vanished as he focused on the screen. “Plot an evasive course to this point.”

The navigator glanced at him sharply. “She’s carrying?”

“We have to assume she is. Either that was the most incompetent sons-of-bitches ever brought together in one place, or we’ve been set up.”

* * * *

Lena was scarcely aware of the sights and sounds of moving along a narrow corridor and through one air lock after another, climbing down a tube, traversing yet another corridor. Throughout most of it, her mind was pure chaos.

It wasn’t until she’d been shoved down on a gurney and strapped to it that she even began to emerge from the shock and by then it was too late. A woman approached her, stabbed a needle into her arm and almost at once she began to drift away.

Light was flicked into her eyes. Someone grabbed her eyelid, turned it inside out.

“This isn’t the clone,” a woman’s voice said sharply.

‘Abomination’ suddenly made sense, but Lena didn’t have the chance to muddle through why it made sense or what difference it might make to her. Her sight dimmed and the sounds around her dulled and finally flickered out.

“She’s out,” Mel muttered. “Let’s get her cleaned up. She’s such a mess, poor thing, I can’t tell where she’s hurt. Wait! The Captain said to scan her first for a locator.”

A tech moved a scanner into position and keyed in the command. Slowly, so slowly it was hard to detect the movement of the thing, the machine began its trek down her body. Mel moved to the screen, frowning. “Her vitals look a little shaky. I’m seeing borderline malnutrition and dehydration. Tom! Get a needle in her and start a drip. Let’s see if we can’t get her plumped up a bit.”

When she saw him swipe her arm and insert the needle, she returned her attention to the scan read out. “Somebody beat the hell out of her, and more than once from the looks of it. Looks like she’s got fractures everywhere. We’d better take care of those first--assuming we don’t find anything internal that takes priority--bath next and then we’ll have a look at the cuts and see if any of them need sealing.”

They would’ve missed the locator if it had been left to the human eye to catch. The scanner paused, however, when it reached her chest, setting off an alarm as it pinpointed what looked like little more than a black speck near her spine. Drawing the scanner back, they released the restraints and rolled her over. Using a micro-viewer, Mel removed the tiny sensor carefully and used a laser to close the wound.

Dropping the locator into a metal receptacle, she left her assistants to turn Lena over again and moved to the com. “We got one, Captain.”

“Make sure it’s only one, and not just a decoy.”

“Sneaky bastards. We’ll start another scan.”

The scanner had located five more by the time it reached her feet. Mel was already starting to feel fatigued and she hadn’t even gotten to patching yet. Dropping the last locator in with the others, she glanced up and saw Dax on the other side of the viewing window. “I think that’s got it. Tom, get the laser out and start on those fractures--not her face, though. I’ll take care of that when I get back.”

Scooping the locators into one hand, she headed out of the surgery. “Six all together. They knew we’d come after her,” Mel said grimly, opening her palm.

Dax barely glanced at her. “I thought it was too easy.”

A faint smile curled her lips. “You thought that was easy?” she murmured but then frowned. “She isn’t the clone.”

That comment caught his full attention. He glanced at her sharply. “You’re sure?”

Mel sighed. “Almost a hundred percent. All the others had a code in the eyelid. Unless they decided it was too risky. My money’s on her being the real deal, though. She’s got fractures from head to toe. They beat the hell out of her, repeatedly, and I just can’t imagine they’d risk that much ‘realism’ if they wanted to make a plant. I don’t know how she even managed to climb out of that fucking hell hole.”

A speculative frown drew Dax’s brows together. “You don’t think that points to the likelihood that she’s a clone? You think she bested the one they sent for her, managed to live through their interrogation tactics, and climbed that shaft and she’s human?”

Mel shrugged. “People can do amazing things given the right incentive.”

Dax’s lips tightened. “And yet all my father, or her brother, could talk about was how fragile she was,” he pointed out.

Mel turned to study the young woman through the viewing window. “Morris loved her. Her brother loves her. Men are inclined to think women are weak anyway. Maybe she’s got a lot more strength than they give her credit for.”

“And maybe she’s a fucking clone.”

Anger surged through Mel. “Suit yourself, but I don’t buy it.” Catching his hand, she slapped the locators into his palm. “You didn’t say what you wanted me to do with these.”

He closed his hand around the tiny bits of electronics.

“I need to check you out, too. Looks to me like your face stopped a few fists.”

“Later. Right now I’m going to get rid of the stench of prison.”

Irritation washed over Mel as she watched him go, but after a moment she dismissed it. Maybe he was right. She didn’t think he was, but she supposed she was inclined to hope for the best. It was hard to accept that they--whoever they were--could simply replace people at will and nothing could be done to stop the bastards.

“Is there a point to this?” Tom muttered without sparing more than a glance in Mel’s direction as she returned.

Anger washed over her. “Give me the damn laser!” she snapped. When he’d handed it to her, she glared at him. “Yes, there’s a point. Until and unless we find out otherwise, this is a human being and she needs care.”

Tom stepped back. “She was riddled with the things. You think they planted them on her without her knowledge? Even if she’s human, and not a clone, she’s on the wrong side if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you!” Mel snapped, uncertain of why she felt so protective of Lena but unwilling to examine it. “Look at the drug readouts and if you still haven’t figured out how they managed to get the implants into her without her knowledge, go take a fucking refresher course on medicine, ok?”

Tom glared back at her, but after a moment he merely moved out of her way, studying the read outs while Mel finished mending the multitude of tiny fractures she located.

The bastards had been using her for a punching bag, Mel thought angrily. Whatever Dax thought about it, and she knew the clones were stronger and healed better than ‘real’ humans, she still didn’t think they would’ve gone so far to convince them Lena was authentic. The clones cost money, big money, and regardless of how miraculous their research was, it would have to take a lot of time to generate that much tissue--right down to every little hair follicle.

When she’d finished, every muscle in her body was aching, but she felt euphoric. Lena’s face was going to look as good as new once the minor cuts healed. After running another scan to make certain she hadn’t missed anything, she moved away from the gurney, watching critically as Tom and her other assistant, Risa, cleaned the young woman up. When they’d finished, she moved up once more and examined each cut carefully, using the laser to seal the worst of them.

She wasn’t nearly as happy once she was done, though, and she remembered Dax had ordered that Lena be taken and secured in the brig. They were holding four guardsmen in the cell already. She wouldn’t have bet her next meal that they’d leave Lena in peace to heal.

Shrugging, she stalked to the com unit and summoned a couple of troopers. “Take her to the captain’s quarters.”

The two men exchanged a glance. “We were told we were supposed to take her to the brig,” one finally responded.

Mel waved that away. “I just talked to Captain Morris.”

Shrugging, the men moved to each end of the gurney and guided it out of the surgery.

Mel had mixed feelings as she watched them leave. She dismissed her qualms. If Dax wanted to send her down to the brig, he could tell them. She wasn’t about to, not when she’d just spent the last two hours patching her up.

Dax hadn’t returned. She wasn’t surprised. She’d known even when she suggested he let her check him out that nothing short of a gun to his back was going to get him into her infirmary.

Dismissing Tom and Risa, she removed her steriles as she moved to the com unit.

“Captain Morris?”

She leaned against the wall while she waited for a response. She was just wondering if he meant to ignore her when his voice broke the silence. “Yes?”

“I’m done. You want a report now? Or can it wait?”

“I’ll be right down.”

Shrugging, Mel found a stool and plopped down on it, her thoughts veering off abruptly to Lena’s brother. Nigel wasn’t going to take it well if he found out they’d rescued Lena’s clone instead of his sister, Lena.

Chapter Six

“What’s the verdict?”

Mel shrugged tiredly. “Which one?”

“How is she?” Dax asked irritably.

“Like I said, beat all to hell. I’ve mended everything, though. She isn’t going to feel wonderful for a while, but there won’t be any lasting damage--not physically, anyway. Otherwise, it’s a little more tricky. That sort of experience isn’t something people put behind them easily, especially when they’ve managed to make it to adulthood without seeing too much of the ugly.”

Dax frowned. “Lena’s seen the ugly.”

Mel studied him for several moments but finally, instead of reminding him that he’d already made up his mind the real Lena, the one who’d had those experiences, was gone, she merely shrugged. “From what I heard, she wasn’t much more than a baby. I doubt she remembers too much about that. I meant since your father took her in. Anyway, she’ll get over it. The drugs--it’s going to take a little while to get all that nasty out of her, but I’m going to keep her out for a while to give her plenty of time to heal up. She’ll sleep most of the withdrawal off. She won’t be really lucid for at least thirty six hours.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Make it forty eight. We’re headed for Antaria to lose the trackers. Once we’ve pulled that off--if it goes smoothly--I can focus on questioning her.”

A twinge of guilt flickered through Mel, but she dismissed the temptation to confess that she hadn’t sent Lena to the brig. She was out and would be for a while. Even if it turned out that Dax was right about her, it wasn’t like she was going to be in any condition to try anything. “Are you going to let me check you out?”

Dax arched a brow at her. “You are always so anxious to get my clothes off, doc.”

Mel chuckled. “You got me. I just can’t resist using that tight little ass of yours for a pin cushion.”

Dax’s smile flat lined. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Don’t be such a baby! Jeez! Your face looks like somebody was using it for a punching bag and you’re worried about a needle?”

Uttering a long suffering sigh, Dax caught the front of his uniform and gave it a tug, unsealing the opening from neck to groin. When he’d shrugged out of the top, he peeled the one piece suit down his legs and dropped it to the floor. Giving him an irritated glance as he climbed up onto the examination table, Mel snatched the uniform from the floor and dropped it onto the stool she’d vacated.

He was a gorgeous specimen of manhood, top to bottom, but he could be a real pain in the ass!

It dawned on her abruptly why she’d felt so badly for Lena. It wasn’t just that she could tell the poor girl had already been through hell. It was the fact that she’d managed to get on Dax’s bad side and that was a really unpleasant place to be.

The scan revealed bruising--a lot of it--and several cracked bones in his right hand. When she’d mended the damaged bone with the laser, she shoved the scanner out of the way and told him to get dressed.

“No needles today?” he asked as he bent down to step into the uniform again.

Mel checked his ass out. “It’s oh so tempting, but I couldn’t find an excuse. You must be made out of titanium.”

His lips curled wryly as he sealed the front of his suit again. “I felt every one of those damned bruises.”

“Want something for pain?”

He shook his head. “All I need right now is a few hours sleep.”

Mel sent him a startled look, but he’d already stepped out of the med lab before she recovered enough from the jolt of that announcement to consider saying anything. After a moment’s thought, she decided against trying to head him off.

Retreating to her quarters, Mel grabbed her toiletries and headed for the shower. She’d just lifted her foot to step into the chem bath when she heard the captain’s voice over the com unit. “Mel!”

Jumping all over as if he’d sneaked up behind her, she whirled to stare at the com unit for a moment and finally leapt to answer it as he bellowed into the speaker again. “Sir?”

“Where did I tell you to put the prisoner?”

Mel grimaced, glad the ship was too bare bones to have a vid com unit. “I wasn’t told to treat the prisoners, sir,” she hedged.

“Lena!”

“Uh … I thought we were rescuing her. Is she a prisoner?”

“Are you anxious to check out the brig, doc? Because I can arrange it.”

“No, sir. I’ll send someone down to remove the prisoner from your quarters right away, sir.”

There was a noticeable pause before he responded. “I’ll handle it.”

Mel slumped weakly when he said nothing else.

“You’d be wise to spend a little less time worrying about what Nigel might think and a little more worrying about me,” Dax retorted finally. “I don’t know if he will thank you for putting her in my bed, but I do.”

Mel’s eyes widened at that subtle threat, but although she was tempted to ignore the order to leave well enough alone she didn’t dare meddle any further in the captain’s business.

Dax leaned against the bulkhead beside the com unit for several moments and finally turned to study the woman sleeping in his bunk thoughtfully. He was dead tired, and he’d been looking forward to sleeping on something that wasn’t crawling with bacteria from dozens of other occupants.

He was in no mood to deal with this kind of problem at the moment. The last thing he needed was to climb into bed with a piece of ass he wanted but didn’t dare touch.

He found that the longer he stared at her, though, the more reluctant he was to summon the guards to remove her to a holding cell.

His irritation finally waned.

Crossing the cabin, he placed a knee on the bunk, scooped Lena up, and deposited her against the edge of the bed nearest the bulkhead. As small as she was, and as wide as the bunk ordinarily seemed, it still looked too crowded for comfort--his comfort--but he shrugged the thought off after a moment, slipped beneath the cover and settled beside her, rolling away from her.

It took less than five minutes to answer the question of whether or not he was too exhausted to have to worry about arousal being a problem. Just knowing she was in the bed behind him was enough to make him acutely aware of her, but he began to think he could smell her delicate scent weaving through the faint odor of decon-cleanser on his own skin and hers. He began to think he could feel her warmth radiating into his back, hear the soft sigh of her slow, even breaths. All of it together brought up a mental picture he’d been trying real damned hard to get out of his head.

The mental image of that animalistic coupling between them in his cell shouldn’t have been something to arouse him. It should have made him sick to his stomach, but the unavoidable truth was that he was a sick son-of-a-bitch because it made him hard as a rock every time he remembered it.

He had reacted instinctively to the threat to Lena when she’d been thrown into his cell to be raped to death. It hadn’t been planned. It hadn’t even been part of the plan, but his instincts were rarely wrong, and he hadn’t had time to question it anyway. The guard had ordered up a rape for his entertainment and he provided it.

Nothing else would have appeased the bastard. He knew that.

But he also knew that, even without penetration, even though he’d done everything he could to try to make it as easy on Lena as he could, drugs or no drugs, desperate situation or not, he’d probably scared the living hell out of Lena and thoroughly traumatized her.

The wonder of it was that she’d trusted him enough to help him out of the cell after that so that they could make the escape.

Except it wasn’t a wonder to him. The incident sure as hell wasn’t something he was proud of or wanted to talk about, which was why he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone and still had no intention of doing so. He was relieved he’d managed to give it enough realism by coming to convince the guard, but at the same time uneasy that he had managed it under those circumstances.

The main thing that bothered him about it now, though, the thing that had been plaguing him from the moment she managed to help him get out of that cell, was that Mel was right about how tenderly brought up and protected Lena had been. Between his father and her brother, she’d been shielded most of her life from the ugly things people did to each other.

Lena, the real Lena, he felt certain, would have been terrified of him after that. She wouldn’t have trusted him enough to let him out of that cell. She sure as hell wouldn’t have followed him blindly when he’d told her they were climbing up to the roof.

The only reason he could think of any of the time that would account for it was that she wasn’t Lena at all.

He supposed he should have told Mel. She was a woman and a doctor. She would know better than anyone else he could think of what the likelihood was that Lena’s reaction had been normal--or at least normal under the circumstances.

To his way of thinking it was the most solid proof they had that they’d pulled Lena’s clone out of that fucking prison.

Maybe her brother would know--and maybe not.

From what he’d been able to tell, Lena had spotted his father’s counterfeit right off. He’d trailed her to warn her, uncertain of just how much Morris had told her about him and about the movement and how much danger she presented to the conspirators, because her own danger was directly proportionate to just how threatened they felt by her.

She didn’t have a poker face, that was for damned sure. Every time she’d glanced at Morris she’d given away every thought and emotion that was going through her.

He deeply regretted the fact that he hadn’t managed to pull her out before they got to her. But she’d managed to elude him at the station and he hadn’t expected them to move on her so quickly, hadn’t thought they would’ve had time to clone her.

They were getting better at their acceleration techniques. There was no doubt about that. It wasn’t taking them months anymore. Nigel had only pulled her DNA a matter of weeks before the switch.

Of course Nigel hadn’t known, then, that he was collecting for them. Right up until Nigel had turned his sister’s code over to the bastards, he’d suspected Nigel was working for them, and well aware of it.

There was no doubt in his mind that Nigel had been an unwilling participant. He’d flown into such a rage when he discovered he’d turned Lena’s DNA over to them for replication that they’d had a hell of time holding him back long enough to convince him that he could do more to bring them down by playing stupid a while longer.

He would’ve given a lot to know just what had transpired when Lena got back to her apartment the day he’d gone to pick her up, but the security tapes had already been fixed by the time he’d managed to break into the system.

Frustration gripped him. They were going lose if they didn’t get better at this, because they were trailing dangerously behind.

Beginning to feel cramped from the tension in his body, and from lying on his side so long, Dax rolled onto his back to stare up at the overhead in the darkness.

He wasn’t certain whether the movement had aroused Lena from her deep sleep, or if she was merely seeking warmth, but she moved closer, throwing one arm and one leg over him.

The curling thatch of hair on her mound tickled his hip and the arousal that had only just begun to abate from before rolled over him like chain ball lightning until his cock was so engorged it was trying to erect a tent.

“Hell,” he muttered, grinding his teeth as her knee nudged his testicles and they drew up in a hard knot against his belly in reaction.

“Bad word,” she muttered, the words only slightly slurred by sleep.

Startled, Dax glanced at her sharply, wondering if she was feigning sleep after all. Mel had said she’d given her something to knock her out, though.

Grasping her chin, he pushed her face up to study it suspiciously. It was dim in the room, but his eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he saw nothing to indicate she was awake and only pretending to be asleep.

He decided to test her to find out. He sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to sleep in the same bed with her if there was even a chance she wasn’t asleep.

Lifting her palm from his chest, he moved her arm down and cupped her hand around his erection, watching her face. She didn’t so much as flinch. She did, however, curl her fingers around it tightly enough he thought for several moments he was going to pass out.

He’d expected, if she was awake, that she’d either try to slap the shit out of him, if it was Lena, or play coy and try to pretend she wasn’t aware of fondling him if she was the decoy.

Instead, she’d merely gripped it as if she thought she was supposed to hold on to it.

“Bad idea,” he muttered, trying gingerly to uncurl her fingers.

They tightened instead of relaxing, sending a sensation through his belly that was not unlike being punched in the gut and he let out a grunt of sharply expelled breath.

“Mine,” she murmured.

He didn’t like to argue about it, especially when she had him in a stranglehold. After a few panicked moments, he decided to try to focus on taming the beast. It wasn’t easy, all things considered, but, after a moment, he felt the blood ease from his member.

Unfortunately, the moment it began to go limp, she decided she’d dropped whatever it was she thought she’d had hold of. He knew this because she began to shake it. “Broke.”

“It will be if you don’t stop,” he ground out.

“S’not broke?”

“Just give it to me,” he hissed.

To his immense relief, she let go of him.

Grasping her hand, he moved it to his chest again, holding her palm over his frantically pounding heart until she relaxed and went limp.

He lay perfectly still for a while, struggling with his private demons, which had taken that really inappropriate time to prompt him with temptations he knew he had no business considering.

She was putty in his hands at the moment, though, completely compliant--almost completely--and it took all he could do to shrug off the temptation to take advantage of her and assuage his needs knowing she would probably yield without argument.

It might have been easier if he had not been thinking about their coupling in the cell only moments before. It certainly didn’t help that, except for that, he hadn’t touched a woman in nearly two months.

When he finally managed to get his mind off of fucking her brains out, it dawned on him that he had stumbled on what might be the only opportunity, short of torturing her, of getting reliable information from her. He lay pondering that for a while, trying to think of questions he could ask that would give him answers. Somehow, he doubted she could handle any question that was too complicated at the moment.

As far as any of them had been able to determine, the conspirators hadn’t figured out how to record real memories and implant them in the clones. They usually managed to put together and implant a pretty impressive background package--which meant they had access to the entire security net which missed damned little--so even though they didn’t actually remember the incidents because they hadn’t been there, they did know about a lot of the same events the real person knew.

“Do you remember meeting me?” he asked finally.

She nodded.

“Where did we meet?”

Her face crumpled. “Morrisplace.”

Dax frowned thoughtfully but realized after a moment that that still didn’t tell him anything. He’d been in the apartment to scan for surveillance cams and ‘spike’ them. They’d learned very quickly that simply deactivating them didn’t do much good. The very next time they went to a place they had to do another search and destroy. If they left them, though, planting a false feed, they could be pretty sure the goons wouldn’t be back to check on them.

The problem was, the cams might have caught his visit. He’d been as careful as he could about spiking them, and thought he’d made sure he had erased everything directly before the tampering, but he couldn’t be a hundred percent certain that they didn’t know that was the time and place he’d first encountered her. And even the real Lena wouldn’t know that he’d known about her for years.

The real Lena would know what hadn’t happened, though.

“You were happy to see me. It had been years, after all.”

Her brow wrinkled in confusion.

“I was glad to see you, too. That’s why I kissed you.”

She looked even more confused. “Didn’t,” she said finally.

“You kissed me back.”

She moved restlessly, as if wrestling to extract that from her memory. “Did? Doan ‘member.”

Dax frowned in irritation. That didn’t tell him a damned thing, and unfortunately he couldn’t tell if she was being deliberately evasive or if he’d just confused her because she did remember the incident but couldn’t remember something that hadn’t happened.

“Fucked. Din kiss me.”

Dax stiffened. Catching her jaw and tipping her face up for his inspection, he studied it searchingly. “When?” he asked sharply.

“While ago.”

“Where?”

“Bed,” she responded reasonably.

He was tempted to shake her. She might be thinking about the time in the cell, and she might not be. It was just as possible that she was faking the whole damned ‘asleep’ thing and thought something had happened at Morris’.

The line of questioning wasn’t doing him any good otherwise either. Pushing her onto her back, he rolled up onto one elbow to stare down at her for several moments. She lay sprawled as she landed, bonelessly, showing no sign at all that he could see of tension. Finally, he settled his chest against her, pinning her to the bed with his body and tried to focus on relaxing enough himself to sleep.

* * * *

“Captain Morris?”

The voice jerked Dax rudely from sleep, yanking his head upwards as if someone had grabbed him by the hair and lifted it.

“We’ll be docking at Antaria in about twenty minutes.”

Dax stared down in bemusement at the breast he’d been using for a pillow for several moments and finally rolled off the bunk and strode to the com. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

Struggling to shake off the dregs of sleep, he looked around for the uniform he’d discarded and finally spied it hanging from the corner of the mirror mounted above his shaving basin. Recalling, vaguely, that he’d wadded it into a ball and tossed it at the wall when he’d discovered his bed was occupied, he retrieved the jumpsuit and pulled it on, studying Lena as he pressed the front seal together.

She’d rolled over onto her belly when he got up, exposing a long shapely back and heart shaped buttocks that tempted him to explore the cleavage with his face.

Shaking the thought, he grabbed the edge of the cover and tossed it over her before leaving the cabin.

The smell of coffee led him to the galley. Grabbing a steaming mug full, he downed a mouthful before he was clear headed enough to think better of it, scalding the inside of his mouth, his esophagus, and his stomach. The burn more than the caffeine jolted him into alertness, and he headed out again. When he reached the bridge, he could see the busy space port in the forward viewing screen. They’d already been caught by the tractor beam and were gliding in for hookup.

He settled a hand on the docking pilot’s shoulder. “Stay put. We won’t be here long. When you check in with the dock master, tell him we’re headed to Andromeda to pick up a load of ore.”

Stepping to the com unit, he touched the pad. “Marx, Johnson, Gracia, and Vang--meet me at the main airlock--NOW!”

Vang and Johnson were the last to arrive, and they looked like he felt, glassy eyed from too little sleep, their hair standing on end, and their uniforms fastened crookedly. He glared at them. After staring at him stupidly for several moments, both men looked down at themselves and began trying to tidy their appearance. “Each of you are to take one of these locators, find a ship ready to leave that has a deep space destination, and make sure you get the thing on board without getting caught--and move your ass. If we stay put too long, they’ll be all over us.”

Saluting, they held out their hands for the locators, tucked them in their chest pockets, and hustled out the airlock the moment the door opened. Dropping the last two in his own pocket, Dax followed them. Walking briskly along the docking arm until he reached the main dock, he scanned the vessels lined up on either side. He’d just decided to try his hand at a freighter near the center when he spied Johnson talking to one of the crew members.

Changing course abruptly, he continued down the main concourse until he reached the furthest end and took a right along a secondary docking arm. He was in luck. He found a deep space rescue vessel that was loading supplies. Hailing one of the dock workers, he told the man he wanted to make sure the meds he’d sent over had reached the dock safely, gave him a fake name, and set him off to look. Wandering casually among the crates while he was waiting, he removed one of the locators and dropped it into the open crate the man had been trying to secure when he arrived.

The dock worker looked worried when he came back. “I didn’t find it. You sure it was supposed to be going out on the Mabel?”

Feigning surprise, Dax stared at the man a moment and then craned to get a look at the vessel. “Hell! Wrong ship! Sorry.”

The man glared at him irritably but kept his thoughts to himself.

Satisfied, Dax turned and strode purposefully away. The man would no doubt remember him if questioned, but that hardly mattered. Vids were everywhere. One could hardly take a leak without being examined thoroughly. He was just hoping the trackers wouldn’t stop to question anyone at this point or examine the surveillance vids.

When he reached the main concourse again, he considered what to do with the last of the locaters. Five ships would be leaving port with Lena on board--six if he planted the last one. Were they more likely to follow the six carrying her, figuring she must be on one of them? Or more likely to ignore the six, figuring they were all decoys?

Deciding to see just how clever they were, and how many were trailing them, he returned to the ship with the last locator and headed for the bridge. “Set a course for Andromeda,” he told the navigator as he settled into his chair.

“Yes, sir!”

His pilot, Rodriguez turned to look at him questioningly.

Dax returned the look in silence for several moments. “After we pass the seventh buoy, change course and head for the dead system and settle the ship into orbit around the sixth planet. We’ll wait there for a few hours and see if we’ve got company. If nobody shows, we can head back to main base.”

Rodriguez frowned. “They’ll pick us up right away if we deviate from the flight path we charted.”

“They won’t. Trust me. They won’t know until we don’t pass the eighth on schedule that we took a detour. That will give us a good three days lead on them. We’ll be home before they notice we’re missing.”

“The seventh buoy?”

Dax nodded. “It’s currently inoperable. I’m going to my cabin. Call me immediately if you pick up anything we need to worry about.”

Once he’d entered his cabin, Dax simply stood over the bed for several moments, wondering if it was even worth the effort of trying to get some sleep. It was only the reflection that he wasn’t likely to fare any better, for other reasons, in the crew quarters.

More than a little tempted to roust Mel out of her quarters and take her bed, he considered that option for a few moments and finally discarded it. Nobody, including him, wanted a med working on them that was dead on her feet.

What he needed was pain killer--some of the stuff doc had given Lena would do the trick.

The only problem with that was that he couldn’t afford to take anything that might make it hard to get his head straight if he only managed to get a few hours sleep.

A whole lot of Lena would work even better, but that wasn’t an option, be she ever so comfortably ensconced in his bed.

Muttering a curse under his breath, he finally decided on option number three--a stiff drink. One wasn’t likely to impair his judgment, but it would relax him.

Settling in his desk chair, he poured himself a couple of fingers of whiskey, chilled it in the freeze unit and sipped it slowly, allowing his mind to drift where it would as long as it didn’t drift in Lena’s direction.

He’d spent a lot of years resenting Lena and her brother Nigel for ‘usurping’ his place with his father. It was unreasonable, of course, and he’d been old enough to know better, but that sort of thing rarely touched on logic.

He couldn’t recall that he’d ever really gotten along his father. About the only thing he remembered with a lot of clarity about his childhood was that his father was hardly ever around--too busy saving the world to spend much time with his family. And pretty much all of his memories from when he’d been a youth were about fighting, mostly his father.

He’d been nearly thirteen when he’d decided to take off and find his mother. The old man had always sworn the feds had gotten her, but he’d never believed that. He figured she’d just gotten tired of him and his father and left. One day, she’d just left him a note that she had gone to look for food and never came back, and he’d figured, because that was what he really wanted to do, that she’d just kept going.

By the time he’d turned twelve, he had outgrown his father in size and decided he’d outgrown needing somebody to tell him what to do, too. His father had been training him as a rebel pretty much as far back as he could remember. Mostly it was just talk at first, but it wasn’t long before he began showing him how to make war, how to fight, how to kill quickly and quietly, always teaching him the art of warfare.

His mother had hated that. He supposed, in the back of his mind, he’d thought that was probably the main reason she’d left, because her husband was a conspiracy fanatic and her son was a budding killer.

As it turned out, he wasn’t as ready to take off as he’d thought. The first time he decided to take his old man on, Morris had beat the hell out of him in about two seconds flat.

The second time, he’d had time to add weight and muscle to his height and he’d put Morris down.

And then he’d left.

And it turned out that Morris was right. The gov had gotten his mother, rounded her up in the middle of a food riot, hauled her off to one of their camps, and kept her there until she died.

He’d cried like a baby when he had finally tracked her down and only found a grave that didn’t even have a name marker on it--just a fucking number.

He hadn’t gone back, though. He’d hated Morris then almost as much as he hated the gov and for the same reason.

He’d spent a lot of time trying to decide the best way to pay them both back for his mother and finally ended up focusing on the gov. They were the real villains, after all. It was because of them that his father hadn’t been around to protect his mother.

He’d been seventeen the first time he’d gone back, the first time he’d set eyes on little Lena. She’d been just about as big as a minute, spindly arms and legs and not much to her besides huge blue eyes.

She’d hidden behind Nigel and stared up at him like he was the boogie man until his father had gathered his ‘baby girl’ up and cuddled her protectively.

And she’d still peered at him over his father’s shoulder, her eyes as round as saucers.

He’d been torn, because he could see why his father wanted to protect her and her brother, because neither one of them had been much more than breath and britches, and at the same time he resented the fact that his father, who’d never treated him like a child in his life, had found the nurturing side of fatherhood with two children that weren’t even his.

Maybe Morris had needed them as badly as they needed him. By that time he no longer had the family he’d been fighting the great battle for. He was still in the game, thick in the middle of it, but he didn’t participate in actual operations any more, and he didn’t do undercover, and he didn’t handle any of the leg work. He was too old, he claimed, to be any good anymore. He’d gotten slow and become a liability to his fellows in arms. He was a coordinator, nothing more.

That job kept him in the know, but it also kept him on the sidelines so that he could devote himself to raising Lena and Nigel.

Dax, his father had made it pretty damned clear, had also become a liability. He was already a wanted man, pretty high up on the gov’s hit list, and Morris didn’t want to take any chances that Dax might lead a hit squad to his door.

It had rankled. He couldn’t help but resent that his father favored Lena and Nigel above him, but he also couldn’t help but see Morris’ point. He was grown. He was used to taking care of himself. Lena and Nigel were still just kids and they needed somebody to look out for them.

She’d grown into those eyes since the last time he’d seen her, but they were as wide and innocent and vulnerable now as they’d been when she was little more than a baby.

The body that went with those baby blues was another matter all together.

Setting his empty glass down on the desk, he got up, shrugged out of his uniform and sprawled face down on the bed bedside her before his body had a chance to catch up with the direction his mind had taken.

His last thought before he dropped off was that he hoped to hell he’d managed to save Morris’ baby girl, because if it turned out the woman he’d rescued was a forgery, he didn’t think he could handle the termination.

Chapter Seven

Truly bizarre dreams haunted Lena’s sleep. Some of them were distinctly unpleasant dreams about Morris, or a man that looked like Morris but wasn’t. Some of the dreams were scary, because she kept trying to climb this thing that seemed to go on forever and she knew if she fell she would just keep right on falling.

She dreamed even scarier dreams than that, though, where she was running from something in the dark, something she knew was evil, terrible, even though she didn’t really know what it was, but she couldn’t run because suddenly something was holding her down. Sometimes the things that scared her hardly even seemed like a dream at all, because there was nothingness and then a man would leap out at her from darkness, just burst into her mind like a jack-in-the-box popping out of a box.

Pleasant dreams mingled with the unpleasant, though. She would feel a man’s weight, hear his harsh breath as he drove into her body, feel heat and need surging through her blood--and then everything would stop, leaving her feeling horribly let down and disappointed.

A woman kept appearing in the dreams, too, a complete stranger who always bullied her, dragging her up from her bed and sending her to relieve herself, or making her eat or drink and then stabbing her with something sharp and smiling at her and talking to her as if she was a child. “Good girl!”

Lena wasn’t certain what had wakened her, but she awoke with a clearness of mind that seemed almost as strange as the dreams that began to dissipate from her mind as soon as she opened her eyes. Oddly enough, even though she felt completely alert, nothing looked the least bit familiar to her as she stared up at the ceiling for several moments and finally rolled over to look around at the room she found herself in. Maybe she wasn’t as awake as she thought she was?

A faint sound caught her attention and she went still, closing her eyes.

When she opened them again, she discovered that she was looking straight at a naked man that was looking straight at her. She’d surprised him. He’d frozen in the act of drying the water off that was running in tiny rivulets down his chest and legs.

He didn’t look the least bit perturbed to discover she was watching him, just surprised to find her awake.

She frowned faintly. “Where am I?”

He studied her intently for a moment. Finally, frowning, he focused on drying himself. “You don’t remember?”

She might remember if he wasn’t distracting her with that damned towel, she thought a little irritably. When she managed to drag her gaze from his thoroughly--she was certain--dried genitalia, it was to discover that he’d slanted a glance at her through half closed eyes, his brows drawn together over the bridge of his nose. She blinked as recognition hit her almost as forcefully as a physical blow. “I know you. I remember.”

The frown vanished. His dark brows rose upward, but something flickered in his eyes that looked more like concern than irritation or relief. “Somehow, the way you say it doesn’t comfort me. What do you remember?”

Lena sat up abruptly. “I met you at Morris’. You came there one time.”

He studied her, still with that puzzled, concerned look, slowly balling the towel he held into a tight ball and then tossing it carelessly across the room. “You don’t remember anything after that?”

Lena blinked at him, stunned by the question. “Of course I do!” She thought it over, wondering why he had asked such a strange question. Abruptly, she realized she had been so surprised by the sudden memory that she hadn’t been very clear about what she remembered. “When I was a little girl.”

When he said nothing, she studied him carefully, wondering if she’d been wrong after all. “You’ve changed. Your hair was longer then, lighter than it is now. You seemed so tall.”

“You remember all that?”

She nodded.

“Just like that? I come out of the shower naked and suddenly your memory is jogged?”

She frowned at the sarcasm, watching him as he crossed the cabin and opened a panel in one wall. Pulling a uniform from it, he stepped into the legs, tugged the suit up his hips. He left the upper half of the uniform dangling from his hips, but Lena found him slightly less unnerving half dressed than completely naked. When he turned again, he was adjusting his package.

Lena looked down at her hands, discovering in the process that she was as naked as he had been a moment before. Grasping the sheet, she pulled it up self-consciously and tucked the edges beneath her arms, blushing when she caught his wry glance.

Why was she naked? In his bed? And why did she not remember getting there?

If they’d done what she thought they might have done, she was going to be really pissed off. Because she didn’t remember a damned thing!

Without a word, he stepped to the bunk, picked up a jumpsuit similar to the one he was wearing off the foot and dropped it in her lap.

Lena stared at it a moment and finally shrugged mentally because there hardly seemed any point to worrying about her nakedness when it was obvious she’d been sleeping naked in his bed since she’d come onboard. Moving to the edge, she pushed a foot into first one and then the other of the legs of the jumpsuit, working the snugly clinging fabric upwards.

“It was the way you looked at me,” she said, struggling to sort through the flash of memories that began to flood into her mind.

“Then? Or just now?” he murmured, his gaze moving over her as she stood up to tug the jumpsuit over her hips and then thrust her arms into the sleeves.

When she glanced up at the question, she saw he’d moved to a small basin supported by a pedestal and filled one palm with a foaming substance from one of the taps.

Fascinated, she watched as he covered the lower half of his face with the foam, wiped the excess from his hands, and reached for a hair removal appliance. Working with both hands to hold his skin taut, he began raking the remover slowly over his face.

Thoroughly mesmerized by the process, Lena’s mind just seemed to shut down. It wasn’t until she caught his gaze on her from his reflection in the mirror that she realized she’d completely lost the thread of the conversation.

She couldn’t pick it up again either, couldn’t remember what she’d been talking about before.

Frowning, she looked down at the suit she’d pulled on and studied the closure that went all the way from the neck to her groin absently, trying to figure out how to work it. She didn’t realize he’d moved toward her until he pushed her hands from the closure and pulled the edges together himself.

An electric current seemed to sizzle through her at the light brush of his hands as he worked his way up the closure. Her belly spasmed.

She looked up at his face, wondering if he’d noticed the effect he was having on her. “You’re Morris’ son, aren’t you?” she said, suddenly remembering when they’d come onboard the ship the soldiers had called him Captain Morris and wondering why it hadn’t occurred to her before when she could see now the strong resemblance between father and son.

Instead of answering, he uttered a nonspecific grunt. A distressingly uncomfortable sensation washed over her. She’d been fantasizing about Dax since the first time she’d set eyes on him--or at least the first time she remembered seeing him. Before that--the very first time, when she’d been nothing but a kid, she’d thought he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. She could still remember how awestruck she’d been. Had he been thinking of her all that time as a younger sister? “I guess … that sort of means you’re my brother?”

His head came up abruptly. Gripping her upper arms, he yanked her up on her tiptoes and covered her surprised mouth with his own.

Lena’s heart slammed against her chest wall so hard she almost blacked out from the painful concussion. Heat scoured her as he thrust his tongue into her mouth and explored the exquisitely sensitive inner surfaces of her mouth and tongue with a thoroughness that made it impossible for her even to remember to try to breathe. His taste and scent mingled with her own like a potent liquor, flooding through her veins like liquid fire and draining away every ounce of strength and willpower until she was intoxicated, dizzy, lethargic and her entire body began to tremble with weakness and need.

He released her almost as abruptly as he’d seized her.

She wilted weakly to the bed.

“Not even sort of.”

Too stunned even to gather her wits about her, Lena merely stared at him as he moved to the wall and punched it almost viciously. The door of another locker popped open. Pulling a pair of boots from it, he crossed the room, plopped down on the chair behind a desk, and shoved his feet into them.

When he stood up again, he caught the upper half of his uniform and dragged it upward, shoving his arms into the sleeves. “Just a suggestion,” he murmured when he paused at the door. “Find another place to sleep. The next time I find you in my bed, naked or otherwise, I may do something we’ll both regret.”

A shudder went through her when the door closed behind him, breaking the spell at last--sort of. She still felt rather as if she’d been blindsided. Lifting a hand, she touched her swollen lips gingerly with the tips of her fingers, tasting him as she licked the dry surface. It was enough to send another wave of need through her. Swallowing convulsively, she dropped her hand to her lap again.

Was he laboring under some strange misconception that she wouldn’t welcome anything he wanted to do to her, she wondered?

That thought brought her crashing back to reality.

What was she thinking? She didn’t know anything about him--except that the man was dangerous. Images flashed in her mind of the fight in the cell when the guard had thrown her in with him and the other men. The one the guard had called Black Stew was a mountain of a man, taller and broader even than Dax, and Dax was a monster--every bit of six foot three or four and as solidly muscular as a tank--and Dax had beat the man into the floor as if he’d been no more than a ninety pound weakling after Black Stew had mopped the floor with the others.

Men didn’t just naturally know how to fight like that. It took practice. If that wasn’t evidence enough, Dax’s body was a road map of violence. There were scars on his legs and arms, his back, his chest, even several small scars on his face; a long thin one on one cheek and two tiny, barely noticeable ones on his upper lip and chin.

Unbidden, the memory of Dax heaving and thrusting over her washed through her mind. Another shudder went through her, but she didn’t even try to lie to herself. Maybe, if she hadn’t been too drugged up to hardly know where she was, that incident would have scared her out of her wits, disgusted her. She wasn’t certain of it, though, because the moment she had finally realized it was Dax the entire complexion of the situation had changed, radically. Some part of her had relished it. Some part of her had felt nothing but frustration that the circumstances prevented him from doing more than he had.

Her belly clenched almost painfully at the memory of his flesh gliding along her cleft, her body instantly recalling the pleasure that had heated her core.

Covering her face with her hands as if she could block out the memory, she got up abruptly.

Morris hadn’t wanted her anywhere around his son--hadn’t wanted Dax near her. She remembered that from that time, so long ago she didn’t know why or how she still remembered it--except maybe because she had been terribly confused, disappointed, and scared. Dax couldn’t have been much more than a kid himself then, but to her eyes he was a man, and she’d never seen anything quite like him. He’d seemed almost god-like to her, a warrior god, a wondrously beautiful creature that was almost as scary as he was fascinating.

But then he and Morris had had a terrible fight. She couldn’t remember anything specific about the argument, only that Morris had told Dax he wasn’t welcome, that he wasn’t to come anymore and Dax--Dax had been hurt and furious because he was hurt. She remembered that, remembered seeing it in his eyes and wanting to cry for him.

He’d changed, and it wasn’t just that he was older, brawnier. There was no longer any sign at all of that vulnerability that had been in his eyes then.

He was a rebel. There was no longer any doubt about that, and he’d brought her into the middle of the conflict.

She didn’t want to be here. She wasn’t a rebel. She didn’t want to be one. She wanted the life back that she’d had before, but there was no way in hell she was ever going to get it back now.

Maybe there never had been. Most likely there never had been, because she’d seen something she should never have seen, the proof that the rumors weren’t just rumors. That didn’t mean she was ready to throw in her lot with the rebels, though. She didn’t want any part of fighting a war that there was no hope of winning.

Dax had made it pretty clear he was going to consider her lingering in his cabin as an open invitation. She took that to mean that she was free to leave, and she still felt really uneasy when she left the cabin. After standing just outside in the corridor for several minutes, looking around, she followed the corridor. The first door to her right opened into a large room with bunks stacked two tiers high and with little more than two feet between them on either side or at the foot where the narrow space formed a walkway.

There were maybe a half a dozen men sprawled on the bunks. Several of them glanced her way and looked her over with interest. Embarrassed to be caught gawking at them, she moved on.

On the left side of the corridor there seemed to be smaller versions of the captain’s cabin. Most of the doors were closed and she didn’t want to open them, but she caught a glimpse of one through a partially open door.

When she reached the end, she found a ladder leading up through a tube to another level. After hesitating for several moments, she climbed up it until she reached the next level. The smell of food wafted to her and her stomach growled painfully. Deciding to see if she could find something to eat, she stepped off the ladder and into the corridor, following the aroma.

This level seemed to be a collection of storage rooms, a gym, what looked like it must be a recreation room, and a large dining hall, or mess, and kitchen.

There were people grouped around some of the tables. Apparently, the crew worked and slept in shifts.

Lena stepped into the doorway uncertainly.

A woman that looked vaguely familiar looked up, spied her, and immediately got to her feet. “I’m Mel--or Doc,” she said, smiling as she extended her hand.

Lena felt herself relaxing fractionally. “I’m Lena.”

Mel’s smile widened. “I know. Nigel’s sister.”

Lena sent her a startled look. “You know Nigel?”

“Come on. You look like you could use something to eat,” she said, tugging at the hand she held to urge Lena inside before she released it. “Not really,” she answered the question once she’d pointed out to Lena where to get a tray and utensils. “I’ve met him though.”

Lena swallowed a little thickly. “My brother was supposed to meet me at my apartment the night the home guard picked me up. I don’t know what happened to him.”

Mel sent her a look of sympathy. “He’s all right.”

Relief flooded Lena. “You’re sure? They didn’t get him, too? You wouldn’t … just say that, would you?”

Mel grimaced. “I might. But it just happens to be true.” She thought it over. “At least, he was alright the last I knew. You’ll see him soon. I promise.”

Still not completely convinced, Lena nevertheless relaxed enough to return her attention to the food spread along the buffet.

She was starving. By the time she’d gotten to the end she discovered she’d put a little of everything on her tray. It looked like enough food to feed a small army. She stared at it with a mixture of embarrassment and dismay.

Mel chuckled. “You do have an appetite!”

“I think I got more than I need,” Lena responded with a grimace. “I didn’t realize I’d put so much on the tray.”

“Don’t worry about it. Come on. Sit with us and I’ll introduce you around.”

They were a rough looking bunch. If Lena had seen them anywhere else she would have turned around and walked the other way or crossed the street. She discovered they were all very pleasant and polite, however.

It was still one of the most uncomfortable meals she’d ever sat through, mostly because her arrival seemed to have deprived everyone of any ideas for conversation even though they didn’t seem to be having a problem before her arrival. She had always been pretty reserved around people she didn’t know well and couldn’t come up with any ideas that might get a conversation of some kind going.

All in all, she was glad when she’d eaten all she could swallow, which wasn’t nearly as much as she’d taken out on the plate, or even nearly as much as she might have been able to eat if she hadn’t felt that she’d created a strain in the atmosphere.

“Done already?” Mel asked, her voice tinged with disapproval.

“I can put it up for later,” Lena said uncomfortably. Food wasn’t wasted. She doubted even the wealthy wasted food, because it was still pretty damned hard to come by, and it occurred to her that she’d either given them the impression that she was criminally wasteful, or, almost as bad, greedy, grabbing more than she could eat to make sure she got her share even if it deprived others of getting theirs.

“I’ll show you where to store it,” Mel volunteered. “You’re just not used to eating what you used to after being out so long, and then the time in the jail. I’m sure you didn’t get fed much in there.”

Lena smiled at Mel gratefully. “I guess that’s it. I was just so hungry I didn’t realize I’d gotten so much. This will probably hold me for three or four meals.”

She couldn’t tell that the soldiers’ opinions toward her had improved that much but at least none of them glared at her when she got up and followed Mel into the kitch/galley to wrap the food and store it.

“You’ll be better off eating small amounts at first anyway. Feel like walking down to the med lab with me so I can check you out?”

She didn’t, but she could see Mel wasn’t actually asking. She was just trying to be polite about it. She nodded, following Mel from the mess hall and up another level.

“They think I’m a clone, don’t they?” Lena asked as she stripped and climbed onto the examination table.

Mel frowned over the chart she was studying on her screen. “What makes you think that?”

“I don’t remember things very clearly about what happened when we got on the ship, but I know Dax thinks I’m a clone,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “I’m not,” she added as Mel moved to the head of the examination table and set up the scanner.

“I’m convinced,” Mel retorted a little absently.

Lena studied the woman’s face. “You aren’t.”

Without responding, Mel moved to the computer again and set the scan cycle. “Actually, I am more inclined to think you’re Lena. I didn’t see anything to convince me you weren’t. But I did see a lot to convince me you were.” She was silent for several moments, studying the read out as the scan began. “You have to understand that, around here, people are pretty jumpy about it. We’ve seen it--enough times to find it really scary--and mostly we’d rather err on the side of caution.”

A sense of hopelessness invaded Lena and a touch of anger along with it. How was she supposed to prove she was the real Lena? She knew she was. She remembered things from her childhood and the clones didn’t have a childhood, couldn’t.

The thought reminded her of her conversation with Dax. Why hadn’t he accepted, when she’d told him about her memory, that she was who she claimed to be?

It was because Dax didn’t believe, she realized, that everyone else doubted her. They respected him. She knew that from just the little she’d seen him with his crew.

“I remember my childhood,” she said tentatively. “A clone wouldn’t have had one.”

Mel sent her a sympathetic look. “They didn’t, but they don’t know that.”

Lena sent her a startled glance. “How can they not know? They can’t--give these creatures memories. They certainly wouldn’t be able to give them the memories of the person they were cloning.”

Mel looked uncomfortable. “The human mind is so programmable it’s downright scary,” she said finally. “It’s done all day, every day, without people even being aware of it.”

Lena smiled with a mixture of disbelief and sadness. “That sounds like something Morris would’ve said.”

“But you didn’t believe it?”

Lena shrugged. “I guess I could see he was right in a way. I just never believed it was like a conspiracy against people.”

“Most of that isn’t a secret conspiracy. It never was. It’s right out in the open. People just don’t see it. It’s the determination of different factions to control people, not a covert operation designed to take over the world. In the old days, before half the population of the planet died and most of the food supplies were destroyed, everybody with money and power was fighting over the little people. All day long they were subjected to vids, sound waves, signs--buy this, buy that, you need this. Even the pharmaceutical and medical professions were in on the free-for-all to gobble up the biggest share of the money. Headache? Take this, or this, or this. Stomach ache? Sleepless? Need to stay awake? And on and on until probably three quarters of the population were obsessing about their health or stoned out of their minds because they were told hundreds of times a day that it was all right to take any drug for any problem, because the drugs were going to cure it. And the medical profession invented a catchy phrase--preventive medicine--to get their share of the money. Convincing people that they had to dash to the hospital or doctor’s office all the time, whether there was anything wrong with them or not.”

Lena stared at her frowningly. “That isn’t programming. It’s marketing. It’s good for the economy.”

“Some of it is. Some of it isn’t. Any time people are convinced to buy something they don’t need, don’t really want, can’t use, shouldn’t have, or just to spend money they can’t afford to spend, it isn’t good for them and it isn’t good for the economy. The government just didn’t try to control it like they did everything else because as long as people were spending like maniacs the economy was ‘healthy’.”

“So you’re saying influence is programming?”

“Isn’t it?”

Lena frowned. She didn’t agree with the doctor, but she decided not to argue about it. “I still don’t see what this has to do with clones.”

“Nothing and everything. The same principles I was just talking about can be applied to programming people and have been for centuries. The technique was first developed during the twentieth century--one of the world wars. Basically, if you’re told something enough times you believe it.”

“So--you’re saying they tell the clones about their childhood?”

“As far as we’ve been able to discover, yes.”

Lena frowned. “They couldn’t know everything.”

“They don’t have to. Every day, everywhere you go, throughout your entire life, you’re being watched and recorded. All they have to do is track down the records, and they have the basics to program with. You graduated here, at this time, these people were with you, etc. They feed all of the information they’ve gathered on a specific subject to the clone while the brain is developing, project images they collect into the mind. By the time the thing comes out of the cooker, it thinks it actually experienced all of those things. They’re memories. And, yes, it’s got glitches, but nobody’s memory is perfect either so most of the time people just think ‘faulty memory’.”

It was scary how believable that sounded, how possible. There were things that had happened when she was a child, incidents, that she’d heard about over and over until even she wasn’t sure whether she remembered the incident or just remembered being told about it.

She knew she was Lena, not a clone. She wasn’t so certain anymore, though, if things had happened differently that she would have known.

“Morris was different. I mean, his personality was all wrong. I knew the moment I saw him it wasn’t really Morris.”

“That’s because they didn’t know enough about Morris. He’d spent most of his life underground, off the grid. And the things that happen to people change them. It affects their personality, so if they don’t experience them, they turn out differently. I don’t think they really intended to clone Morris. He wouldn’t go near a clinic, and I can’t figure out how they could’ve gotten his DNA to develop the clone. I think they took him in to question him and....” She broke off when she saw the look on Lena’s face. “Sorry.”

Lena shook her head, fighting back the urge to burst into tears. “I think it would’ve been easier to take if I hadn’t had to look at that thing that looked like him and sounded like him but wasn’t. And the worst of it was that I wasn’t there when he needed me. I didn’t get to tell him bye. One day, he was just gone.”

Mel said nothing, focusing on fiddling with the scanner, which had completed its cycle, to give Lena time to get her emotions under control.

“I know,” she finally said quietly. “It’s like that for all of us. That’s why most of us are here, because someone we loved was replaced.”

Lena lifted her head, staring at Mel as that slowly sank into her mind. “Why would they do that? What could they possibly have to gain by replacing people that were just … ordinary people? Politicians, I could understand. Maybe even executives of powerful corporations but just plain ordinary citizens who have no power?”

“Truthfully? I don’t know. But I’m guessing, control. They need the ordinary people. The whole country rests on the shoulders of the ordinary people. They provide the labor that makes the money, and they spend money to support the economy. You weren’t around during the food riots or the riots that came before that. I wasn’t either, for that matter. But when the gov lost control of the people, they lost the whole country. Everything went down the tubes.

“I think they are replacing politicians--and anybody else in key positions of power, but they’re also replacing anybody that presents any kind of threat at all. Even if the only influence they have is on the people around them. All they have to do is make a little wave, and whoever is behind this makes them disappear.

“But they can’t just eliminate them. People would be in an uproar over that, and, besides, there’s the labor problem. They need laborers.”

Lena stared at the woman, realizing it made a terrible kind of sense and hating the fact that it did. “It was because I noticed Morris and they were afraid I’d start digging?”

“Probably.”

“But--who’s doing it?”

“If we knew that, we’d know how to stop it.”

Lena frowned. “Morris always thought it was the gov. I can’t see it. In the long term, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference to the president. He won’t be in office much longer anyway.” She thought that over for several moments. “You think he’s planning on making himself a … dictator?”

“It’s possible. It’s also possible he doesn’t even know about it.”

Realizing the examination was over, Lena sat up, massaging her temples absently. When Mel started to move away, she caught her arm. “I know who I am. I know I’m not a clone.”

She could tell from the way Mel was looking at her that Mel didn’t believe she would know.

“The thing is,” Mel said finally. “The clones are usually stronger and heal faster than their counterpart and the thing that’s bothering everybody is that you managed to overpower yours. Statistically, the odds are against the real Lena having survived. We all know that. Dax knows that. That’s why he doesn’t believe you are really you even though I think he wants to.”

Lena stared at her in frustration. “I didn’t overpower her. It wasn’t me that killed her. It was the home guard.”

Mel’s brows rose. “What did happen?”

Feeling more hopeful when Mel seemed open to at least listening to her side of the situation, she very carefully related every detail about that night that she could remember. She was disappointed by Mel’s reaction. She looked thoughtful but not completely convinced.

It took an effort to contain her anger and frustration. She could see Mel suspected that she’d made up the entire story to cover her butt, and she supposed she couldn’t really blame her for not taking the word of a complete stranger, but how was she supposed to clear up the misconception if no one would even listen to her?

“Dax didn’t believe me either,” she said dully.

“He’s afraid to. We all are.”

“Why did he even bother to help me escape?” she said irritably.

“To stop Nigel from going in after you.”

Lena glanced at her sharply, horror flooding her at the idea of Nigel trying anything that crazy. It warmed her that her big brother wanted to take care of her, but he was a tech, for god’s sake. He wasn’t a soldier. How could he even have considered doing something like that? It wasn’t just hard to imagine. It was impossible. “Oh god!” She covered her mouth with her hand.

Still shaken by the idea of Nigel risking his life to do the things that Dax had done, Lena climbed off of the table, discarded the towel sized ‘sheet’ she’d covered herself with and picked up the uniform, slipping her feet into it. She’d already pushed her arms into the sleeves before it dawned on her that Dax had no more reason to care about Nigel than he did her.

When she’d first realized that Dax was Morris’ son, she supposed, in the back of her mind, at least, she’d thought the reason he’d rescued her was because of his affection for his father, because he’d realized Morris would have tried if he’d been able to. If that wasn’t the case, though, then it couldn’t be the reason he’d decided to help Nigel either.

“Why? And why Dax?”

Mel sent her a questioning look.

“He doesn’t care anything about Nigel or me. Why would he risk his life to help either one of us? And why do it himself? Why not just send someone?”

Mel glanced away uncomfortably. “Because there’s a chance Nigel can help us track the data,” she said finally. “He wouldn’t agree to try it unless we got you out.”

Lena was too stunned at first to feel anything at all, but fury washed over her when she realized that they’d used her to get her brother to risk his life for their damned cause. Nigel was no rebel. He was an academic. They were going to get him killed!

As much as she wanted to tell Mel there was no way in hell she was going to just stand by and let Nigel do what they wanted without making a hell of a push to talk him out of it, she realized now was not the time to address that--and Mel wasn’t the one she needed to talk to about it anyway. Mel wasn’t in charge.

Maybe Dax wasn’t either, but he made a better target.

“Why Dax? Why not send someone else in after me?”

“Because he never sends someone else to do a job he wouldn’t do himself. Maybe because he felt like he owed it to Morris. I don’t know. I’m not sure he knows, either, but I do know no one was expecting to see you on that roof and it’s the first time since I’ve known the captain that he failed to do what he went in to do.”

Lena frowned at her questioningly.

“He went in to terminate you. It’s what we do. It’s all we can do, because we don’t know who’s behind this or how else to try to stop it. We terminate the clones we locate.”

Chapter Eight

A coldness washed over Lena even before her mind fully grasped what Mel had just told her. It took many moments more for Lena to really assimilate the information.

She was living a nightmare! How could it be that she’d spent her entire life doing everything she was supposed to, never doing anything she wasn’t supposed to, and then wake up one day to find out that everybody wanted to kill her?

“I guess that explains why nobody wanted to get to know me,” she murmured through lips that felt strangely stiff.

Mel’s face creased in distress. “I shouldn’t have told you. I could go to the brig for it, but I believe you, and you need to know your life’s on the line here. This is a deadly serious game we’re playing, and we play for keeps. If you can think of a way to prove your identity beyond the shadow of a doubt, you need to do it before it’s too late.

“Captain Morris must have seen something that gave him pause, because if he’d been certain you were the clone he would have taken you out.”

Lena just stared at the woman, trying to master the wobble in her chin. “How? I saw the way you looked at me when I told you what happened. You say you’re on my side, but you didn’t believe it. I told Dax about something I remembered from when I was little, and he didn’t believe that--because you all have that all figured out. If she was my clone, then we were identical. How the hell am I supposed to prove I’m Lena?

“What could I say? What could I do? What could possibly be different between me and a duplicate that would prove it, and who would believe it anyway? It seems to me that everyone here has already decided.”

When Mel said nothing more, just stared at her sympathetically, Lena whirled and fled the med lab. She was halfway down the corridor to the tube before she realized she had no idea where she was going, no destination in mind, nowhere to go even to be alone and think. She couldn’t escape. She was on a ship, in space, and she had no place on board that was her space. She found herself in the deserted gym with no memory of even heading for it and simply stared at the huge room for several moments before she skittered into a dim corner and curled into a tight ball, tucking her chin against her knees and covering her ears with her hands.

She hadn’t done it since she was a child, but when she’d been very young making herself ‘invisible’ had made her feel safer. She didn’t give much thought to the fact that her fear had driven her to such a mindless, useless attempt to protect herself by reverting to her childhood habit of finding a dark corner to hide in. She couldn’t think at all for many moments.

The act itself seemed to bring back a flood of memories she’d tucked away long ago and refused to think of since, but then it had been years since she’d felt so completely vulnerable, so lost, so alone. The last time she’d felt even close to the way she felt now she had been barely four.

She couldn’t remember her mother. She had spent years trying really hard to dredge up even a tiny little flicker of an image of her mother and found she couldn’t. All she knew about her mother was what Nigel had told her. She’d gotten sick when Lena was two or maybe three and died because there was no medicine to help her get better.

Even Nigel wasn’t certain of when or anything beyond the fact that she’d been sick because he’d been so young himself.

She’d been four when their father was killed. She remembered that--not how old she’d been--his death. She had tried just as hard not to remember that day as she’d worked to remember something about her mother. But she’d never been able to successfully erase that horror from her mind.

Her father had brought them to the city, hoping to find her mother’s sister so that there would be somebody to look after them while he went off to try to find work. They hadn’t found her, but they had found a place to stay, briefly, until the people that claimed it was theirs came. They claimed the food their father had found was theirs, too, and they’d killed him because he’d taken it to feed himself and her and Nigel.

He’d tried to reason with them at first, offered to find food to replace what he’d taken, and then tried to fight them when they’d ignored every attempt to placate them and attacked. She’d been paralyzed by the sight, unable to do anything but watch, wanting to run to her father to try to help. She had tried. She’d finally managed to shake off the paralyzing fear and run toward them, beating at them with her fists until she’d been struck by a flying arm, or leg, or body and knocked flat, trampled by the heaving mass of bodies rather than intentionally struck. Her father had seen, though, and he’d yelled at Nigel to take her and run, to hide.

He’d said he would find them. It was the last thing he’d said to them, that he’d find them.

They had run. She could still remember how hard she’d run, how scared she was. Even when Nigel had found a place for them to hide that was too small for a grown person to get into, she’d been terrified, too scared even to cry. Her and Nigel had curled up tightly together and stayed that way all night and the next day because their father hadn’t come for them like he’d promised, they had gone back to look for their father. They’d found him lying in a pool of blood, battered almost beyond recognition, and naked because they’d taken everything he had, right down to his shoes.

For a while, they’d tried to make him get up again. When he wouldn’t, they hadn’t known what to do. They’d stayed for a while, waiting, hoping, but after a time they’d been driven by hunger and thirst to try to find something to eat, something to quench their thirst.

Morris had found them after that. It had always seemed to her that it was a very long time after that. That there had only been her and Nigel for weeks, maybe months, but she knew that had to have been only because they were both scared to death, hungry, and lost, and too young to have any real concept of time. It seemed doubtful, now, that it could have been much more than a few days or they’d have starved because Nigel had been barely six and had no more idea of how to find food than she did.

She could remember, almost as if it had only been yesterday, looking up to find the big man squatted down in front of the pipe where she and Nigel had hidden. At first, she’d been afraid of him, too. There’d been something about his eyes, though, the way he looked at her and Nigel, that had made her feel safer than she could remember feeling since their daddy had died.

Abruptly, she knew why. She’d seen the same pain, the same empathy in eyes just like his--in her mother’s eyes.

Her chin wobbled at the realization. Tears stung her eyes.

All this time, and she’d never really known why she had trusted Morris enough to go to him when he’d called to her.

She wondered if Nigel had ever realized that, or maybe it hadn’t been that at all for him. Maybe he’d gone simply because he was cold, hungry, and tired, and Morris was the only adult who had even seemed to notice them, certainly the only one who’d told them he was going to take them home and take care of them.

Those thoughts dried Lena’s tears. Nigel would know her! Even if they tried to convince him that she was only a clone, she remembered things that only she and Nigel could possibly know! Morris had never even known the full story because they hadn’t wanted to talk about it, and he hadn’t pushed once he’d asked about their parents and they had told him that both of them were sleeping.

The spark of hope died almost as quickly as it had ignited. She might not live long enough to see Nigel. What if they decided it would be better if Nigel just thought she’d died in prison?

That thought resurrected the memory of the prison but also another memory. Dax had told them to put her in the brig when they’d first boarded the ship. She didn’t know why she hadn’t been locked up, but it suddenly seemed like a better place to be than roaming a ship full of people who wanted her dead.

It couldn’t possibly be any worse than where she’d been and she’d endured that for weeks. Surely, where ever they were going, it wouldn’t be a very long trip? And she would be safer if everyone was locked away from her.

Surging to her feet, she wiped the lingering moisture from her eyes and hurried from the gym.

The brig would be in the bowels of the ship, she knew.

Heading for the tube again, she climbed down the ladder to the lowest level. It was dark, for there were only a few dim lights along the narrow corridor that ran between the clutter of equipment and machinery on that level, but she could see an area that was more brightly lit at the opposite end.

There was only one guard on duty. When he saw her approaching him along the corridor, he virtually leapt from the chair he’d been sitting in. “This area is off limits, ma’am.”

Lena stared at him in dismay. “But … I’m supposed to be here. The captain said I was to be put in the brig after Mel took care of my injuries,” Lena said, feeling stupid for demanding to be locked up, and fearful at the same time that he would refuse now that she’d convinced herself she would be safe, that no one would feel threatened enough to feel like she had to be terminated, even if they still thought she was a clone, as long as she was locked away.

He gaped at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Nobody told me,” he responded suspiciously. “And why would you be down here without an escort?”

“Just put me in a cell, and then you can call and ask the captain about it.”

“They’re full, ma’am,” he said with the same mixture of indignation and surprise as a desk clerk would of someone demanding a room when there weren’t any available.

She hadn’t thought of that. “Well, can’t you put some of them together?”

Again she received the, ‘this woman’s crazy’ look. “I’m the only one on duty right now. We don’t move prisoners unless there are three men down here.”

“But I need to be here!” she exclaimed in distress, feeling all of the fear she’d managed to fight down crowding back into her like water over a burst dam.

* * * *

“You think it’ll work?”

Dax sent the security chief, who was hovering over his shoulder, a narrow eyed glare.

The man stepped back uncomfortably.

Returning his attention to the quad-screen, he saw that Mel had just looked up at the vid. Mouthing the word ‘asshole,’ she turned away.

Dax’s lips thinned, but he ignored her insubordination, switching from vid to vid, tracking Lena as she raced from the med lab. His frown drew his brows tightly together over the bridge of his nose when she stopped at the gym and went in. Taken totally by surprise, he watched in confusion as she scurried into a dim corner and crouched into a tight ball, covering her ears with her hands.

For many moments, he simply stared at her, too stunned to figure out what she was doing. Abruptly, an errant memory surfaced. It might not have if she hadn’t mentioned the incident to him earlier, but in any case, he did remember even though it was the only time he’d been around her when she was little, the only time he’d tried to go home after he’d left.

He and his father had gotten into an argument about the waifs his father had brought into his home. It hadn’t taken much for the argument to escalate into bellowed accusations and recriminations about his mother, because he’d always blamed his father for his mother’s death and, to him, it had only seemed to add insult to injury that his father had pretty much ignored his own family and then taken in someone else’s.

When they’d finally exhausted every curse they could fling at each other, his father had looked around, discovered Lena and Nigel had vanished, and promptly gone into a panic. They’d found Nigel quickly enough, hiding under his bed, but they’d turned the apartment upside down twice before he’d finally discovered Lena in the back of a closet behind a stack of boxes in a space so small he wouldn’t have thought she could squeeze into it. She’d been curled into a tight little ball, her tiny hands over her ears to shut out the angry bellows of him and his father and he’d felt so shamed by his behavior and the things he’d said, it was that that had kept him away more than anything his father had said.

“What’s she doing?”

“Hiding,” Dax said grimly, just like she had when she was a baby--like Lena had. No clone would have ‘remembered’ the things she did, the things that had driven Lena to try to protect herself in the only way she knew how whenever she felt threatened.

“Not very well,” the security chief said, chuckling.

He took a step back at the look of rage in Dax’s eyes when he surged to his feet.

“Is there something about terrorizing people that you find amusing, soldier?” he growled.               “No sir.”

“Good, because I don’t keep sick fucks around me. We do what we have to do. Nobody enjoys it.”

“What’s eating him?” the man muttered when Dax had disappeared through the access tube.

“You’re lucky he didn’t stomp the shit out of you and throw your broken, bleeding carcass in the brig,” Rodriguez retorted when the man turned to look at him.

“What did I say?”

Rodriguez shook his head at the man. “You are stupid, man. Either he’s right and you are a sick fuck or you just haven’t had the pleasure of watching somebody you care about replaced by a stinking clone.”

* * * *

She’d vanished by the time Dax reached the gym. After glaring at the empty room for several moments, Dax moved to the com. “Cline, where is she?”

“She’s in the hold, Captain.”

“Fuck!” Dax growled. Striding from the room, he sprinted down the corridor toward the aft tube, hooked the heels of his boots on the vertical bars and slid down the three levels to the hold.

She was arguing with the guard when he landed. Shaking his hands to cool the friction burn, he headed toward the bow where the brig was located.

She whirled to face him when she heard his boots clicking along the metal tiles of the corridor. For several moments, she merely stared at him, as if she was trying to gather her wits.

“You bastard!” Lena snarled when she saw that it was Dax who’d come up behind her and the soldier, her fear and frustration instantly transformed into rage. Launching herself at him, she swung at him with her fists, landing blows at wild random, mostly on his hard arms and shoulders. “Why didn’t you just leave me there? You’re as bad as they are!”

It only fed the flames of her fury that he made no attempt to evade her or to block the punches she slung at him. It only made her more determined to hurt him.

“Damn you!” she screamed at him hysterically when she’d beat at him until her fists and arms were bruised all over and she could hardly lift them to swing at him.

He caught her wrists. “Finished?” he snarled at her through gritted teeth, giving her a hard shake.

“No!” she screamed back at him, fighting the sudden wobble in her chin. “I’ll kill you if anything happens to Nigel because of you! Why did you drag him into this, damn you?”

“You dragged him into this,” he said tightly.

The statement was as effective as a slap, knocking the hysteria out of her like a stunning physical blow. She stared up at him in dawning horror as the image flickered through her mind of her and Nigel at the diner and her trying to hint of her fears about Morris.

“Or, if you need somebody else to blame besides yourself, blame Morris. But don’t blame me, lady. I came into this on the tail end.”

“You want me to lock her up, captain?”

Dax’s head swiveled toward the guard. “No!” he snarled.

Grabbing Lena by one arm, he shoved her back down the corridor toward the access tube. Halting when they reached the tube, he jerked her around to face him, grasped her jaw, and lowered his own face until they were almost nose to nose. “I owed you that. I know you’re scared, and I’m used to pain, but that doesn’t mean I like it. Don’t ever try that with me again, especially not in front of one of my men. Understood?”

Lena gaped at him in sudden fear, realizing she must have been completely out of her mind to attack him. She’d never done anything like that in her life before, and deciding to pick a huge brute like Dax for her first victim was not the act of someone with a sound mind. Numbly, she nodded at him. “I’m sorry,” she said weakly.

Releasing her abruptly, he pushed her toward the ladder. “Climb.”

Swallowing with an effort, Lena grasped a rung and began to climb. “Where are we going?” she asked worriedly when they’d passed two levels and he’d said nothing more.

Instead of answering her, he glared at her when she glanced back at him.

When they reached the level of the crew quarters, he told her to get off. Feeling extremely uneasy, she did, waiting until he’d climbed off and grasped her arm. She made no attempt to resist as he led her along the corridor, until she saw the destination he had in mind. She hung back then, for all the good it did.

He simply yanked her forward and continued as if he was completely unaware that she was trying to resist.

If he hadn’t still looked as black as a thundercloud, she might have been able to find enough of her spine to complain. As it was, her tongue felt as if it was glued to the roof of her mouth.

When he’d opened the door to his cabin and shoved her in, she stumbled toward the bunk, tried to catch her balance and finally sprawled across it on her side, staring up at him wide eyed.

He stared back at her for several moments and finally looked away. “Damn it to hell, Lena. Don’t look at me like that!” he growled, moving away finally and throwing himself down in the chair behind his desk.

After searching the drawers, he pulled out a tumbler and a bottle and poured himself a drink.

Lena sat up slowly, licking her dry lips to moisten them. “You said....”

He sent her a narrow eyed look.

“I’m not … I’m not … I won’t...,” she stammered.

His lips thinned. He transferred his gaze from her to the brown liquid in his glass, studied it a moment, and downed the liquid in one swallow. “I think I might be able to contain myself,” he retorted dryly.

Embarrassment flushed Lena’s face and throat with heat. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not that he’d remembered the ‘threat.’ On the one hand, she was almost surprised that he did and that she hadn’t had to say anything more to remind him that he’d told her he would consider it as an invitation if he found her in his bed again.

On the other, his snide rejection stung.

Of course she had threatened to kill him, and she had tried to beat him down.

Obviously, he hadn’t considered that a turn on, or a come on, she thought wryly.

Despite her uneasiness about his temper, she found she felt immensely more secure in Dax’s cabin than she thought anybody with any sense should have.

She wasn’t all together certain she would have objected all that strenuously if he had taken it as an invitation. In fact, she was fairly certain objecting would have been the last thing on her mind.

It was a good thing she’d managed to thoroughly piss him off, because she was a complete moron. “You want me to stay here?” she asked, proving to herself and Dax that, yes, she was an idiot.

He sent her a look. “Not especially,” he growled.

There was nothing quite like a warm welcome, Lena reflected miserably, but at least she didn’t have to worry about anybody else trying to kill her. Just Dax.

“Nigel will know me,” she said abruptly.

He said nothing, merely staring at her speculatively.

“I knew right off when they … when they....” She broke off, struggling against the sudden urge to burst into tears. “They killed him, didn’t they? There’s no chance that they just imprisoned him?”

His face hardened. “None.”

She wanted to cry. She hadn’t really had the chance to let go of her grief over losing Morris. She’d been too scared at first to let on she knew it wasn’t the real Morris, and too busy since the attack trying to stay alive. She saw that Dax wasn’t just angry. The knowledge hurt him, too, and it didn’t seem right to inflict her own sorrow on him when he was struggling so hard to contain his. She’d loved Morris like a father, but he had been Dax’s father. That had to wound him deeply, maybe more so because he’d seen so little of him in years and there had been a tremendous barrier between them that they couldn’t seem to bridge.

“I’m so sorry,” she said shakily.

He sent her a surprised look and then frowned, pouring himself a second drink. “About what?”

Right up until he asked, she hadn’t realized that she had so much she should apologize for. Guilt swamped her. “About … everything. About Morris, about hitting you, about blaming you when it was all my fault.”

He sent her a searching glance and finally shrugged. “Like I said, I figured I had it coming.”

She saw with a touch of relief that he merely sipped the second drink. “It wasn’t really your fault, you know.”

She tried not to look too hopeful.

He scrubbed his hand over his chin tiredly. “Mostly, you were just caught up in the middle of things completely out of your control. Nigel would’ve been dragged in even if you hadn’t gone to him for help. They would’ve still gone after you, and he would still have felt the need to try to help you.”

Lena thought that over. She knew that much was true, but she also knew that she’d set the entire thing in motion by deciding to try to talk Morris into coming to live with her. “I led them to him, didn’t I?”

He shrugged. Leaning back in the chair, he lifted his long legs one at the time and stretched them out on the desk top, crossing them. “Maybe.”

Lena got off of the bed, looked around for someplace else to sit and finally sat down on the edge of the bunk again. “I’m pretty sure I did. He said something was going on at the clinic where Nigel worked, and I went to see him not long after I’d been.”

Dax’s gaze flickered over her. After a moment, he drained his glass, set it down carefully on the desk top, and got up.

As she watched, he rounded the desk and moved toward her. Her ass came up off of the bunk as he neared her. He sent her a wry glance as he dropped down on the edge of the bunk, tugging his boots off.

Lena put a little more distance between them, eyeing him uneasily.

“They were already on to Morris,” he murmured, lying back against the pillows and draping an arm across his eyes. “That’s why I was there the day you came. He’d sent for me, because he didn’t trust anybody else with what he had to say.”

Stunned by his revelation, Lena moved back to the bunk to stare down at him and finally perched on the edge. “They were? You mean … I didn’t lead them to him? It wasn’t my fault?”

He sat up so suddenly Lena merely gaped at him, too surprised to consider what the purposeful gleam in his eyes might mean. She gasped as he caught her and rolled, pressing her to the mattress and pinning her down with his weight.

A faint smile curled his lips as he gazed down at her startled expression. “Don’t look so hopeful,” he murmured, snuggling his head next to hers on the pillow. “I’m dead on my feet. I wouldn’t be of any use to you if I tried anything.”

It took many moments for indignation to usurp her stunned surprise. By the time it did, Dax was breathing the heavy, even breaths of sleep.

Chapter Nine

After her second attempt to wiggle out from under Dax failed, Lena decided to leave well enough alone. The first time she tried, his hand merely tightened on her arm. The second time, he lifted his head and very causally threw one leg across her lower body, grinding his pelvis into her hip and proving beyond a shadow of doubt that, regardless of what he’d claimed to the contrary, there were parts of him that were very much alive.

She subsided, staring at the ceiling for a while, trying not to think about the warmth of his body against hers, and especially trying not to think about the very different kind of warmth that began to hum through her.

He didn’t trust her. That fact seemed unavoidable, that, as tired as he was, knowing he had to sleep, he figured the best way to do so was to make sure he didn’t have to concern himself about where she was or what she was doing. She didn’t delude herself into thinking it was anything else, even if his body said differently.

Sighing, she tried to angle her head enough to look down at him.

There was an angry red welt on his neck that would probably be a bruise before long.

She’d done that. Remorse filled her. She didn’t know what had come over her to fly at him like that. She’d never thought she was a violent person. She would never have believed she was capable of such a thing.

She’d been scared, and she’d felt threatened, but neither of those emotions were an excuse for behaving like a complete savage. It had been different when the clone had attacked her, mostly because the clone had attacked. She hadn’t been doing anything but trying to defend herself.

She had attacked Dax, though. He hadn’t done anything to her to warrant the attack.

Feeling his fingers grow lax on her wrist, she pulled free and lifted her hand to gently stroke the spot.

“I’ll live,” he murmured.

Lena glanced at him sharply, discovering his eyes were open a slit. She wondered how long he’d been watching her.

“Go to sleep.”

Lena sighed. “I’m not very comfortable.”

“You’re a real pain the ass, baby girl,” he growled, lifting away from her and pushing at her shoulder until she rolled onto her side facing the bulkhead.

She felt a lot more comfortable, for all of five seconds, but he merely scooted up behind her, threw one arm and leg across her and snuggled his groin against her ass.

She rather thought she’d been more comfortable with that beast of his against her hip. Having it nudging the cleft of her ass was a lot harder to ignore.

So was having his heated breath drifting over her neck and ear.

She wiggled, trying to get a little more comfortable.

The effect was immediate.

His cock grew hard as a rock. Angling her head around, she slanted a suspicious glance at his face and didn’t know whether to be relieved or irritated to see his face was completely relaxed.

Settling again, she laid perfectly still, waiting for her body, and his, to cool, and somewhere in the rounds drifted off to sleep.

* * * *

“Hungry?”

Lena stretched, allowing her eyes to drift open at the question.

Dax was studying her from across the cabin, one hip propped on his desk. His hair was tousled as if he’d just gotten up himself and his eyes looked nearly as tired as they had when he’d lain down.

Still more than a little disoriented, Lena pushed herself upright. “I’d like to bathe.”

He jerked his head in the direction of the door to his private bath. “You’ll have to put on the same uniform, though, unless you want to borrow one of mine.”

She could imagine how well that would fit. He was at least a foot taller than she was. “This is fine,” she murmured, wondering how long she was going to have to live in it. It seemed doubtful she would be seeing any of her own clothes anymore and clothes, like everything else, were hard to come by.

The bath didn’t have a lock. As unsurprising as that was given the fact that it was Dax’s private bath, attached to his cabin, it was still disconcerting. Shrugging it off after a moment, she struggled with the self sealing closure that ran down the front of the suit and shimmied out of it. It wasn’t easy because the room was tiny and the shower took up almost half of it. She might have been inclined to climb into the shower to undress except for two circumstances. It was no bigger than the area outside the shower, in fact smaller, and it was made entirely of crystal clear acrylic, which meant it offered no more privacy.

After placing the suit carefully on a hook behind the door, she stepped into the shower, studied the control a moment and finally pressed the decon button. Foaming, decontaminating lather immediately began to spray from a nozzle overhead. The first glob hit her right on top of the head, punctuating the fact that the shower had either been adjusted for Dax, or built to begin with for a tall man. Arching her back and holding her hands out palm up, she caught the stream, scrubbing it over her neck and breasts and belly with her hands and then filled her palms again with the lather and leaned down to lather her feet and legs and genitals. She’d just straightened when she happened to glance toward the door.

Dax was standing in the opening, one shoulder propped negligently against the frame, watching her with unabashed interest.

Lena jumped all over, throwing lather into her face.

His lip curled up at one corner. “When you’re done, we’ll go down to the mess.”

Lena glared at him indignantly.