Zero's Heart - Mina Carter Page 0,58

it was…”

Her words came back to haunt him just on the edge of sleep, and he winced at the crude phrasing. They hadn’t just fucked. There had been a real connection. He’d felt it all the way down to the soul he wasn’t sure he had.

No, he knew he had a soul. He had to because otherwise, how had he felt such a connection between them? How had mere fucking made him feel so alive and near to heaven? How did her smile and the mere fact she existed make him, a creature who believed in facts and figures, in data and code, believe in the existence of something as intangible as heaven?

But… she’d said it was good. He’d argue it was better than good… but good he could work with. A smile curved his lips as he cheated and used his onboard to trigger a sleep cycle. His last thought as his body went lax and he drifted off was that he would make pancakes again in the morning after Eris came and apologized to him…

“Wake up, Zero! We’ve got a problem!”

A heavy fist hammering on his door yanked Zero out of sleep abruptly. He gasped and jerked upright, almost slamming his head into the metal panel of the bunk above.

“What the fu…?” He scrubbed at his eyes and checked the time. Shit. He’d overslept. They were only ninety minutes out from the moon lab.

“I’m up,” he yelled back, opening the door remotely as he tumbled out of bed, reaching for pants at the same time.

“Oh jeez…” Red recoiled. “Underpants, Zero. They’re a thing.”

“The seams rub,” he growled and hauled his combats on over his bare ass.

“Whatever. Nice package,” she commented, but without the usual sass and bite. An automatic response. “Get your ass up to the bridge. The humans are gone.”

He froze, still shoving his feet into boots, his blood running cold. “What?”

“Humans? You know… kinda small,” she waved a hand about shoulder height where Eris came up to on her. “Talk back a lot. Remember them? Yeah? Well, they fucked off in the combat shuttle with a couple of power suits.”

“Shit.”

Zero finished dressing and reached the bridge in record time to find the rest of the Warborne already assembled. T’Raal’s face was grim.

“How? When?” was all Zero could get it together enough to ask.

“An hour ago.” The Warborne leader’s face was not a happy one. “Somehow they managed to disable the internal alarms and launch without anyone being any the wiser. They took two of the combat power suits from the locker and went dark just after launch.”

“So we can’t track them?”

T’Raal leaned on the edge of the holo-table and looked up at him, long hair framing his face. “Track the combat shuttle? Our combat shuttle?”

Yeah… he knew better than that. The combat shuttle was designed from the nuts and bolts up for stealth insertion. Great. They were completely dark.

Then it hit him. She’d left him. While he’d been wrapped up in happily ever afters in his own head about the morning, Eris had had other plans. He’d told her she wasn’t on the team to rescue her brother and she’d taken matters into her own hands.

And why shouldn’t she? She was a soldier like him.

“You won’t allow it? Tell me, when did what I do become your decision?”

He groaned as the truth hit him like a sledgehammer. He’d cast himself in the role of white knight rescuing the damsel in distress, but she hadn’t needed or wanted that. She’d needed a comrade in arms, not a rescuer.

“Shit.” He blew out a breath and looked at T’Raal. “Okay, when are we leaving to go after them?”

15

The moon that housed Eric’s Lab was so small it didn’t even warrant a name, just an identification code.

MD-892-A.

“Charming place, huh?” Sparky asked, his voice loud in her ear as they exited the shuttle airlock. She winced and nudged the volume down with the rocker button near her jaw. The suits they wore… “borrowed” from the Sprite just like the shuttle… might have been designed by and for an alien species, but they were so intuitive to use, she might as well have been in her Scorperio unit. Well, apart from the lack of bloody big guns.

“Scientists. They don’t care much for views. Or anything apart from their work,” she commented, her rifle held loosely as they jogged lightly over the surface of the moon toward the lab. The gravity was a fraction of Earth normal, but just enough they could use