Desire Disguised Read online

  “It’s hot, but our suits will manage it,” Officer Rand yelled back as he hopped up the side of the ship, slipping on the wet surface as he climbed. Ben shook his head. Rand was energetic and prone to choosing the most challenging approach to everything. So far it had landed him in medical twice after parkour misjudgments and once when he approached an uninterested woman for sex.

  Ben watched the crews operate their cutters for a few moments and approached the team that had made the most progress as they clamped on a pull and tugged at the metal. The ship’s skin groaned as it buckled and bent apart, allowing atmosphere from the inside to escape in a puff of what seemed to be steam. Not a good sign if the interior had heated that intensely. The officers parted as Ben approached the opening. Better for him to assess it on his own. Too many of his people were relatively unseasoned. He suspected none on this crew had seen a victim of violent death yet. A rancid stench of hydraulic fluid filled the dank and smoky air, and he breathed deep before leaning in and activating his hand light.

  The interior of the ship was chaotic. Wiring and debris littered every surface. It looked as if they’d cut their way into the far rear of the hold. With an echoing groan and squeal, Rand’s crew peeled back a layer at the top and sunlight filtered in from overhead. That’s when he spotted the activated crash pods. Three foam lumps attached to the walls of the hold, and the dark, humanoid shapes visible within indicated the passengers had time to activate them before everything fell apart.

  Watching his step in the deep drifts of debris littering the deck, he made his way in and approached the first crash pod. Whoever was inside had been alone on that side of the ship. The monitor glowed red indicating the pod was experiencing failures, and the readings for the health of the inhabitant blinked erratically. The occupant was in serious medical trouble. He peered in the visor and saw an elderly man who was pale and comatose.

  “Trin, get in here with a carry cot. We’ve got someone alive but not for long.” Ben heard the people outside shout orders at each other as he turned to inspect the two pods attached to the other bulkhead. One contained a boy, perhaps ten or so years old. His pod was functional, and his monitor indicated he was unconscious but essentially stable. The next pod’s monitor glowed green, and Ben breathed out with relief. Two survivors, possibly three. He had to check on the pilot next, but first, he glanced in the faceplate to get a visual on the third passenger. A young woman, stands of wet hair plastered across her forehead, bruises under her closed eyes. Someone yelled behind him, and the woman inside the crash pod woke, her blue-green eyes fluttering open, and her confused gaze met his. He tensed as if someone had punched him in the stomach.

  Chapter 2

  Cara ached in the dark. All she could sense was pressure and pain. There was a loud noise, and she jumped, frightened the ship was crashing again. She opened her eyes, expecting to find darkness and danger, but instead, she saw a man’s angular face. He had on a bright yellow helmet and peered at her with the darkest eyes she’d ever seen, long black lashes curving around them. His caramel skin seemed to glow in some sort of diffused light from overhead. How could there be light inside the ship? Did that mean they’d survived?

  “Mat!” Cara called out for her brother, and the man narrowed his eyes.

  “You’re safe,” he assured her as he moved to let someone else, also in a yellow helmet, duck beside him. “What’s your name?”

  “Mat!” Cara wanted to hear her brother’s voice. She didn’t care if he cried or screamed she just wanted some indication he was alive.

  “You’re going to be fine, Mat. All your vitals are steady and within normal parameters.” The man didn’t quite smile at her.

  Cara tried to shake her head, but the foam held her too tightly. “No, my little brother, he’s next to me. Where is he? Is he…” She couldn’t say any more, speaking her worries aloud had never eased any of them.

  The dark eyed man glanced away from her and looked in the direction of the pod where she’d fastened Mat what seemed like hours ago.

  “His vitals are fine. He’s out, no, he’s awake.”

  “Mat!”

  “Cara, what happened?” Mat sounded croaky and tired. No wonder, the boy had just survived a suborbital crash.

  “We crashed. We’re alive.” Suddenly the constriction around her head and throat eased as the foam moved from her body. The cool air hitting her skin was a relief, but as she tried to turn to Mat, her body collapsed, and she slid forward. Arms encased in yellow armor reached out and held her up as she pressed against the man who’d spoken to her. She twisted her head and saw Mat’s foam cushions fall away. He looked for her and smiled as another person in a yellow suit propped him up. He was as pale and sweaty as she was, but she couldn’t see any injuries. Thank it all.

  “Soren!” Cara tried to push at the person holding her tightly, but she was too shaky to make much of an impact on the hard plates of armor.

  “He’s the one across from you?” that same deep voice asked, and she nodded her head, unable speak because her throat was so dry. A hard lump rose up in her stomach, and she shivered as cold clenched her limbs.

  The man holding her said something else, but she didn’t catch it as a roaring filled her ears, echoing the terrible sounds of the ship as it had fallen. She felt someone wrap muffling fabric around her, but she refused to cooperate when hands tried to lift and move her. Cara tried to call out to Mat. She could barely see him as the other armored person bundled him in a bright red and blue blanket and hoisted him up. She got one look at her brother’s thin face before he disappeared through a hole smashed through some part of the ship. The hard arms still held her, and she tried to push away again, hampered by her weakness and the muffling folds of the blanket. Wrenching her head around, she looked for Soren, but there were too many rescuers clustered around his pod, all speaking quick gibberish and moving their hands.

  Ben shook his head as he inspected accident-prone Rand. They’d managed to reach the crash site, rescue the passengers, collect the pilot’s body, and return home in a few hours with no problems other than this young man’s mangled hand. He’d been climbing down from his perch at the top of the crumpled ship, slipped in a combination of moisture and fire retardant foam, and sliced himself open in an amazingly destructive way. The doctor was doing her best, but repairing nerves, capillaries, and micro fissures was tricky work at best. Rand didn’t help the process along by continually watching and then jerking away every time he saw a drop of blood as the nanoclippers did their work.

  “So, Chief Zashi, a pretty eventful day off if you ask me,” Doctor Deval Polin murmured as she supervised her tiny mechanical assistants.

  “Suppose so.” Ben glanced from the room into the hallway of the medical clinic, wondering how the passengers were doing. They’d brought the survivors in and deposited them in rooms. The old man, Soren, was in a bad way, and there were too many people working in that room for him to interrupt for an update. The boy was groggy but asking for something to eat by the time they’d hovered over the settlement, while his sister had drifted in and out of awareness for the whole flight. She’d revived enough to insist on sharing a room with her brother, and he’d left the siblings to specialized care in order to check on Rand. He knew the survivor’s weakness and disorientation was due to the trauma of the crash and the compression effects of the crash pods, but he still worried.

  “Your man is going to be fine if you want to go check on something else,” Polin said. “He’ll be on the disabled list for a few days, but all the repairs are proceeding successfully. Something to be said for patching up the young and vibrant. Not like that poor man from the crash.”

  “True. I need to start interviewing our other victims and putting together what happened. With the pilot dead and most likely not recording accurate information into his log, I’m dependent on the passengers.” Ben nodded at the doctor, scowled at Rand, and left the room.

  He stood in the hallway and took a deep breath as he tr
ied to remember what he needed to do next. Right, see if he could interview the woman, Caraline Belasco. He’d overridden the security features on a low-end datpad they’d found in the wreckage and managed to identify the pilot and passengers but not much more than that. Not nearly enough information to satisfy all the waiting lines and fields of his pending incident report.

  As he walked down the hallway, he thought about seeing Citizen Belasco again. Forget how he’d seen her before. Unbidden, a vision of her swam up in his imagination like a dream. Her frightened eyes, her limp body damp with perspiration. He’d played his part in plenty of rescues, but something about her made him feel as if she was still in peril. It was enough to distract him again, and Ben ground his teeth together in an attempt to get his brain on point and do his job.

  The quiet corridor suddenly filled with the sound of raised voices and then an echoing crash. Without thought he ran. Bursting through the exam room doorway, he took in a strange tableau. Caraline Belasco was crouched in a corner of the room, her brother pushed behind her as she glared at the medtech holding a scanner and staring open mouthed at her cowering patients. Caraline’s brows were furrowed even as she placed a shaking hand back to steady her brother who seemed weak enough to slide to the floor without her support.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Chief Zashi, I was just going to get a dna-print for our records and she…she reacted.” The medtech made a whirling gesture with her hand. “Jumped up and grabbed the young man and yelled at me.”

  Ben turned to ask Citizen Belasco her side of things and found she was inching along the wall to the door where he stood. She held his gaze, and he lost his breath at the desperation he saw in her wide hazel eyes.

  “Just let us go. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “You aren’t prisoners. We just want to input your data so we can keep track—”

  “No! We’re fine. I just need to get us to the nearest terminal.” She tilted against the wall, and he could see her legs shaking through the loose pajama trousers one of the medtechs must have provided to replace her ruined flight clothing. Her brother, Mat, was also wearing thin sleeping garments, entirely unsuitable for travel anywhere except in the halls of the clinic.

  “Impossible. You aren’t well enough to travel.”

  “And there isn’t a ship out in days,” the medtech piped up, and both Caraline and Ben stopped staring at each other long enough to glance at her, and then their eyes locked again. She had figured out he was the only real obstacle in the room.

  “I want to leave. We need to go now.”

  Ben shook his head and motioned for the medtech to leave the room. She sniffed and rushed out, probably irritated because she’d been stopped from completing a task on her list. Ben could appreciate the feeling of frustration. Caraline watched as the other woman closed the door, and she whistled out a soft breath before tightening her shoulders again. Still fighting.

  “If we aren’t under arrest you have to let us pass.”

  “Technically, the docs can keep you here for thirty hours.” And I can think of something in the meantime to keep you around even longer.

  Caraline’s chin jerked up. As she opened her mouth to speak, her brother let out a small sigh and slid to the floor. Ben ignored the training that demanded he keep a non-threatening distance between himself and an anxious person, and reached for the boy. He gathered him up in his arms, amazed at how thin and light he felt. Caraline pulled at him and stumbled along as he lifted the boy to a bed and laid him down. She was thin too, her narrow hands pushing at him as she peered at her brother with concern apparent on her strained face. Something about this tickled his intuition. She was far too determined to flee despite her clear sense of responsibility for Mat, who obviously needed rest and food. As she did. What was she so frightened of?

  Taking in some deep breaths, she smoothed Mat’s hair and turned to stare at him. All the defiance she’d shown a moment before seemed to have leached away, leaving a frightened and vulnerable young woman behind.

  “Please. We have to go.”

  “You need to rest and recover.”

  She shook her head and closed her eyes for a second. “What about Soren?”

  “I haven’t received an update on his condition yet.” Ben tried to piece together as much as he could about her with very little information. Since the ship had tagged into the jump ring unauthorized, there was no flight plan for it, and the incompetent crew at this end of the ring hadn’t bothered to collect a data scan on the ship until it was out of range. So, other than the scant material he’d gathered from the lone datpad, he had no idea where they’d come from or intended to go. The personal device was suspiciously uninformative. Only the basics were there like name, age, and homeworld. No messages, no feeds, no images, or media of any sort. It all stunk of aliases. Her determination not to be physically scanned indicated she wanted their actual identities kept out of the official loop, which raised all sorts of interesting possibilities.

  “Let’s start with something easy. I’m Bendix Zashi, Chief of Safety Services here.”

  She swallowed and flattened her hands protectively against Mat’s bed. The boy watched quietly from behind her and offered up no commentary. Ben waited a moment for her to return the courtesy and introduce herself, but she remained silent.

  “I know you’re Caraline Belasco, and your brother is Mat. You and your travel companion, Soren, were on a ship that did an illegal hitch to make it through a jump ring undetected. If I were the suspicious sort, I’d guess you were up to no good.” Ben tried to smile, but his muscles didn’t work right. Everything in his body felt too tight to project any sort of relaxed mood at her which was what the tense situation needed. He had the feeling she’d have bolted for the door already if her brother hadn’t collapsed. He spared a glance at the boy and found he followed the conversation with bright eyes.

  The older Belasco shifted her feet, and he didn’t know if it was because she was unsteady or thinking again of escape.

  “Our pilot did that. We can’t be arrested for what he did with his ship.”

  Ben tried not to react to her quick legal wrangling. It smelled of someone who’d spent a lot of time wandering in the grey areas of society. “Well, your pilot’s dead, and your friend is in poor shape, so I’m going to need to talk with either you or Mat about it.” Despite his wish to relax the mood between them, that sounded threatening. Caraline must have thought so too, because she glanced again at the door and reached behind her to grab her brother’s thin arm.

  “You leave Mat alone.”

  “I’m not going to harm your brother. Or you.”

  A skeptical scowl twisted her lips. They were still pretty even when tight with repressed emotion. Ben winced when his subconscious added that bit of commentary, and Caraline reacted to his expression.

  “Pardon me if I don’t believe that.”

  Ben desperately needed to restart this encounter. Time to make some concessions and get her to relax before she collapsed. Mat had watched this terse exchange with an attentive air but was still curiously quiet. Ben didn’t have much experience with boys, but he thought they would normally be more talkative and willing to add an opinion here and there. This one was as self-contained as a wise old philosopher.

  “You’re here for thirty hours at least. Probably more. So, rather than push things until you fall on the floor, just tell me where your intended destination was so I can inform whoever is waiting for you that you’ve been delayed. No more details than that.”

  “There’s no one waiting for us. We can’t be printed and registered,” Caraline whispered and glanced around the room as if she thought she was being monitored.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re in danger.”

  “From what?”

  “People who want to kill us.” Her shoulders slumped, and her head ducked down.

  Ben took a quick moment to take that in. This was either the elaborate set up for a
sympathy play by a skilled grifter, the sad delusions of someone with a mental imbalance, or the last effort at maintaining anonymity from someone in genuine fear. She might be irrational and not in peril from any actual threat, but Ben could certainly sense her desperation. He hadn’t missed the way she’d bitterly accepted she needed to tell him something. The young woman swayed on her feet.

  “Let’s come back to that later. How about I promise not to send any information about the crash out on a datadrop for the next thirty hours, and you agree to stay still and let the med people do what they need to do to get you and your brother better.”

  “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

  “Because I’m trusting you not to inform my superiors I’m not following proper procedures.”

  A gust of breath that was almost a laugh left her in a huff. She narrowed her eyes and gave him a considering look. He was impressed she was this formidable after everything she’d been through. “You’d get in trouble for doing this?”

  “I would.”

  “What would they do? Make you sit in the corner for an hour? Take away your stunner for a day?” Caraline swung out her hand and pointed at his waist.

  Ben glanced at his belt. He’d forgotten he even wore it. “I doubt it. They’d reprimand me.”

  “Oh. Harsh.” She breathed in deeply and gripped the edge of the bed as her eyelids fluttered. Her brother reached out to pat her back.

  “Come on, Sis, it’s thirty hours. We can’t go anywhere if we get out of here. We don’t even have shoes.”

  Ben wanted to shake the boy’s hand for his complicity. But before he could press his point, Caraline’s knees gave out, and she sank into an awkward crouch. Ben lifted her thin, shivering body and carried her over to the room’s other bed. She was a ghastly shade of white, and as he laid her down, he checked the monitor that sprang to life as soon as her body hit the padding. As her vitals began to scroll, he was reassured that everything seemed to be within normal parameters. Normal parameters for someone who’d survived a reentry crash and was dehydrated. He had to remind himself to remove his hands from her, and when he did, her eyes met his for a moment. She looked at him as a cornered animal would, all immobilized fear and keeping still, hoping not to be noticed. What had happened to make her this afraid?