Orion: Star Guardians, Book 1 Read online

  He lifted a hand to Juanita’s face, bumping her chin in the dark. He didn’t want to have to flatten his hand to her mouth to keep her from talking—he hoped she would sense the trouble they were in and not speak out—but he did find her lips with one finger. He pressed it gently against them, a silent warning for quiet.

  She nodded, and he found himself pleased again at how willing she was to go along with him. He didn’t know why she was, but he was grateful that she was a help instead of a hindrance.

  He lowered his hand from her lips, and it brushed her shoulder. He decided to let it rest there. A protective gesture, he assured himself, and nothing else. Nothing that would be inappropriate.

  A ping sounded, a comm channel opening.

  “What’s the status, engineering?” the captain asked, his irritated voice coming over a speaker above Orion’s head.

  He hoped none of the men would look toward that speaker—and the dark corner where he and the women hid. It might be shadowy now, but all it would take was someone flicking a light beam in this direction to reveal them.

  “It’s a complete mess down here, sir,” someone said.

  “How? We didn’t take any direct hits to engineering.”

  “Sabotage. We got five men dead down here, and another unconscious.”

  The captain cursed, and the thump of him hitting something came through the speaker.

  “Can you get the shields up?” Cutty finally asked.

  “Working on it, but someone shot the shield generator. I was thinking it was the rookie.”

  Another thump came over the speaker.

  “Get it fixed, and then find his treacherous ass. I’ll flay him alive and make a bedspread out of him. My cabin’s in need of some new decorations.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sir?” the man at the generator asked. “How long do you think we have? Won’t the Star Guardian ship be right on our asses?”

  “Not if we’re lucky.” The captain sounded smug, and a tendril of worry snaked through Orion’s gut.

  What did that mean?

  “That gate is a four-way from the Gaia end. Unless he gets lucky, he’s not going to guess right. I don’t think this system we’re in now is even on the Confederation’s map. And we’re going to hightail it over to the next gate and disappear for good from any Star Guardian’s radar.”

  The comm channel clicked closed, and Orion leaned his head against the bulkhead. A four-way gate? He knew there were a handful of three- and four-way gates in the system, but they were extremely rare. As far as he knew, modern science said they were impossible. But modern science also didn’t know who had built the original gates or how. Humans had been exploiting them since gaining spaceflight capabilities a few centuries ago, and there were tons of guesses about where they’d come from, but nobody truly knew. At least nobody human.

  “You heard him,” one of the men said. “We’ll handle repairs. Socks and Jaslok, you find that traitor. And kill the bastard. The captain wants a fresh bed covering.”

  7

  Juanita stood still in the dark cubby, Tala to her right and Orion in front of her, their chests pressed together. She could have shifted around and kept her boobs from jamming against him, but she didn’t want to make noise. The alarm had been silenced, and she had no trouble hearing men talking and clanking tools against machinery. They would definitely hear her if she moved around much.

  It was a miracle the three of them hadn’t yet been discovered. Men had been coming in and out of engineering with flashlights that came out of the wristwatch devices they all wore. Maybe a compact version of a smart phone with different apps? She felt a wistful longing for her own missing phone. She would love to be recording her adventure up here. Not that she would have been able to plug it in to charge once the battery ran out. It wasn’t likely that alien spaceships came supplied with 120-volt outlets.

  Not that alien was exactly the right word. Orion’s chest felt very human pressed against her, as did the rest of him. Very impressively human.

  She bit her lip, remembering his fighting prowess, and wondered if he would mind if she rested her hand on his arm and let her fingers do a little exploring. She blushed at the presumptuous thought. She would never do that, not without an invitation. Maybe not even then. She’d always waited for guys to ask her out, not the other way around. Ever since that one time, freshman year in high school, when she’d asked Brad Lewiston to Homecoming, and he’d laughed in her face and told her he didn’t date chubby geeks.

  Since then, she’d matured a bit, shedding a few pounds and not wearing Buffy the Vampire Slayer T-shirts quite so often. She’d also begged her parents for laser eye surgery as a college graduation present, and she’d been so tickled that the restaurant had been doing well enough that they’d been able to give her that. She hadn’t realized how much she’d hated her glasses until she hadn’t needed them anymore.

  Even with all those changes, she was still a geek through and through, and it was hard to get over those past embarrassments, to believe she had anything to entice the Brad Lewistons of the world. Or the galaxy. She wouldn’t want to entice them, anyway, if it meant giving up her passions.

  She did briefly entertain the idea of her new friend—Orion wouldn’t mind if she thought of him as that, would he?—punting stupid Brad Lewiston down the football field and through a set of goalposts. Judging by the way he’d side kicked that one man, it could be a possibility.

  And it tickled her that he liked to read in addition to being able to punt people. She wasn’t positive that had been the equivalent of a comic book, but there had been words floating there with that picture. And it definitely hadn’t looked like non-fiction, not with that muscular man rushing into battle against strange-looking furry enemies while riding a flying chariot. No way had that been a history book. She’d practically been able to see the bam, boom, pow! in dialogue bubbles next to the guy.

  Juanita smiled and leaned into Orion, resting her head against his shoulder. It couldn’t hurt. He would just think she was being forced to do so by the close quarters.

  His head turned toward her, his face tilting so he could look at her. Other than that, he did not react. He stood completely still. Maybe she had presumed too much.

  She started to lean away from him, but, leaving one hand on her shoulder, he lowered his other arm to slip around her waist. It seemed to be an invitation to lean against him all she wanted, and she laid her head against the front of his shoulder. He was probably just trying to comfort her, maybe sensing that she needed that after all she’d been through. Oh, well. Comfort was fine. It wasn’t as if they were going to stand here and lock lips while people were hunting for them and Tala was a foot away.

  Besides, Juanita shouldn’t want to be in Orion’s arms, especially not after seeing him kill people. That had been as alarming as hell. People didn’t just kill other people.

  Even if those guys had been assholes and were a part of the crew that had kidnapped her and the others, that didn’t mean… Well, she didn’t know what it meant. Were there police you could turn to out here? How many other civilizations were out there? Just humans? And how had they gotten out here? Where did they live when they weren’t visiting Earth? And were they capable of faster-than-light travel? Science fiction authors had been dreaming up ways that FTL drives could work for ages, but everything was so far-fetched. And if there had been civilizations out there on other planets circling other stars, wouldn’t the scientists on Earth have discovered them by now? It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been numerous projects for sending out radio signals and—

  Orion lowered his hand from her shoulder, distracting her from the thoughts zipping through her brain.

  His arm brushed hers as he reached for something. He leaned down, and the side of his face touched hers as he moved his lips toward her ear. The bristles of his goatee scraped her cheek, the sensation surprisingly intimate, and a weird little tingle went through her body.

  He whispered
two words, his voice rising at the end to indicate a question. Or so Juanita assumed. She had no idea if those kinds of language rules were universal among humans.

  She shrugged, not knowing what else to do. By now, he knew she couldn’t understand him. Could he understand her? He had seemed puzzled when she’d tried speaking to him in the corridor.

  Orion found her hand in the dark, holding it. No, he was turning it so that her palm lay upward. He touched something to the tip of her finger. It was too small for her to have any idea what it was, but it seemed smooth and flat.

  He asked the question again, and she shrugged again.

  He lifted a hand to the side of her face, pushing her hair back behind her ear, and the earlier tingle returned, her body responding to his touch as if they were lovers in the bedroom and not complete strangers stuffed in a corner of an engineering room on a spaceship.

  She decided her body was just being stupid—hypersensitive—since she hadn’t had a boyfriend or any sex at all since she’d gotten out of college. And it wasn’t as if her previous boyfriends, Arthur, Lloyd, and Yoon, had been quite the same as this man. They’d been geeks, like her. Geeks were safe. Geeks were who asked her out. Yes, there had been some tingling with them, but she didn’t remember her body ever being this sensitive around them.

  Orion gently took the back of her ear between his thumb and forefinger.

  All right, this was getting weird. And yet, there went her body again, tingling all over the place at his touch. What did it think? That ear fondling was a prelude to sex when it happened on a spaceship?

  His other hand came up, first patting her on the shoulder, and then touching her ear.

  “Did your alien just turn into an otorhinolaryngologist?” Tala whispered.

  Juanita blushed. She hadn’t realized it was bright enough for Tala to see them, but supposed that from her point of view, she and Orion were silhouetted against the light in the room, the two flashlight apps of the people working on equipment.

  “I’m not sure if you asked if he’s an ear doctor or if you have something stuck in your throat.”

  Orion made a sound very much like a traditional “Ssshh.”

  Whoever these people were, Juanita had a hard time believing they hadn’t come from Earth. Just because she didn’t recognize the language didn’t mean it wasn’t of Earth origins. Weren’t there something like 6,000 spoken languages left in the world?

  Orion touched the smooth thing she’d felt earlier to the inside of her ear, and she resisted the urge to squirm away from him. What was he doing?

  He let go, and she started to sigh in relief, but the thing he’d left in her ear slithered deeper, as if it were a bug. It entered her ear canal, and she jerked her hand up to pick it out. It seemed to bite her inner ear, and it was all she could do not to scream. The knowledge that there were enemies in the room, not more than twenty feet away, kept her from doing so, but her heart thundered against her rib cage as she had flashbacks of that scene in the original Star Trek II where Khan put that disgusting bug thing into Chekov’s ear. She’d only been six or seven when she’d seen that movie, and she’d had nightmares about that. Those nightmares returned in full force now as she imagined that Orion had done something similar. That the bug thing would control her until it grew inside her brain and killed her.

  Orion patted her shoulder as if he’d done nothing out of the ordinary. What the hell, dude?

  She was on the verge of hyperventilating. Again, it was only the presence of enemies that kept her from springing away from him. And punching him.

  He leaned close again, and she tried to jerk away. She wasn’t in the mood for ear fondling now, and there was no way she was going to tingle for him this time.

  “Can you understand me?” he whispered, the words so soft that she first thought she’d imagined them. Then she thought she’d misunderstood him. Because she wasn’t supposed to understand him.

  “What?” she whispered.

  He hesitated, then spoke again. “You should be able to understand me now.”

  And she did. She could tell he wasn’t speaking her language, but somehow the words that sounded in the ear in which he’d put that thing were altered. She heard English at the same time as whatever he was speaking. It should have been confusing, but oddly, it wasn’t.

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  “Good.” He squeezed her shoulder.

  With visions of Star Trek II still swimming in her head, she didn’t do anything to acknowledge the statement—or the squeeze. But slowly, as tools clanked and men grunted with irritation, it occurred to her that she could now ask Orion questions. Like where he came from. And where this spaceship had come from. And why they had come to Earth, if they weren’t originally from Earth. And why they had kidnapped her. And where they were taking all the women. And whether that was one of his dagger scabbards jabbed against her side or if he was having naughty thoughts while they were trapped in here.

  Before she could voice any of those questions, an abrupt jolt ran through the ship. It knocked Juanita back against the machinery behind her. If she hadn’t been stuck between it and Orion to start with, she might have flown several feet.

  Curses came from the men in engineering, along with the sound of someone crashing to the deck. A new alarm went off, a localized beeping rather than the all-ship wailing from before.

  The jolt wasn’t the same as before, when they had seemed to be under attack. This had been more like riding in a car through the woods when the driver had to throw on the brakes to keep from hitting a deer.

  Orion let a soft grunt escape, the sound somewhere between enlightenment and a short laugh. He released her and shifted so that he could leave their hiding spot in a hurry if necessary.

  “What was that?” one of the men by the engine asked, and Juanita understood the words.

  A clunk sounded. “I don’t know, unless the Star Guardians guessed right.”

  Footsteps pounded across the deck, and a voice came over the speaker again. “Engineering, you better get us out of this. And any time you want to get the lights back on, we’re done krucking in dark corners up here.”

  Krucking? Maybe the translation device didn’t know an English word for that.

  “We don’t even know what it is yet, Captain.”

  “You don’t have access to a sensor panel down there, you idiots? Look out a porthole. Some kind of energy field in front of the next gate came out of nowhere and wrapped around us. A damned trap. It was completely hidden because we didn’t see it until we flew into it and it activated. But it wasn’t here two days ago.” The man—the captain—cursed a long string of words that the translator had trouble keeping up with.

  “Uh, we’ll work on it, sir.”

  That pleased grunt or maybe that was a rumble escaped from Orion again. “My brother,” he whispered. “I’ll wager gold dollars on it. He figured out ahead of time about the four-way gate, and he knew which way the slavers would go.”

  Dollars? That had definitely been a translation, though the idea of the dollar being reserve currency for the rest of the galaxy as well as Earth amused Juanita.

  “What—” she started to ask, but the sconces all around engineering flared to life, brightening every corner of the room. Including the one where they hid.

  She found herself looking up into Orion’s brown eyes. Concerned brown eyes.

  8

  Barely thirty seconds after the lights came on, someone noticed Juanita and the others. A man walking out of engineering saw them out of the corner of his eye, glanced once, then looked again, his eyes bulging.

  “The rookie,” he yelled and reached for a weapon at his belt.

  Orion sprang into action, leaping toward the man and engaging him even as he maneuvered into a position where the others in the room couldn’t fire at him without hitting their colleague.

  “Who is that loon?” Tala asked.

  “I don’t know, but he’s on our side.”

  “
That would be more comforting if he didn’t seem to be against everybody on this ship.”

  Juanita had stuck the hypospray into her pocket, and she withdrew it again. Could she continue using it? Or did it have a limited number of charges?

  “We should get out of here,” Tala said. “While they’re distracted by him. We can go get Angela and any other women we can round up and find a better hiding place. A much less busy hiding place.”

  One of those blue energy blasts slammed into the bulkhead a few feet away.

  Juanita swallowed. It was hard not to agree with Tala’s logic, but she felt it would be a betrayal to abandon Orion. What if he needed help? What if, after the battle, he would be willing to answer all her questions? Who else here had shown any inclination that they would do that? Who else had cared if she could communicate or not?

  “He put a thing in my ear,” Juanita said, “and I can understand their language now.”

  “Yeah?” Tala sounded skeptical. “What are they saying?”

  “They’re calling him a traitor a lot and ordering each other to kill him.”

  Tala snorted. “Maybe you can understand them.”

  “I told you I can.”

  “Incoming weapons fire,” someone said tersely over the communications channel that was still open. “Brace—”

  The ship heaved, as if it were some sailing vessel that was capsizing. Juanita was thrown out into the open. Then gravity disappeared, and her feet left the ground. Her stomach twisted in a queasy protest as she floated free. There was nothing to grab on to, nothing to anchor herself to. Two seconds later, the lights went out again.

  She groaned. This had to be the worst spaceship a person could ever get passage on.

  Thumps and grunts continued to come from the center of the room. Was Orion still fighting those men? How could anyone fight without gravity?