The readout on her Hazer’s tiny screen showed it to be a Level-2 Defensive, stronger than the one around Sem. Gritting her teeth, she checked fire—he was too close to Tam, the two fields intertwining. A familiar Devastator maneuver, where an attack on the Tresh agent kills the hostage.

“Lieutenant—no, forgive me, Commander Mikkalah.” Davin Prow gave a slight nod of his darkly handsome, square-jawed face. “A pleasure to see you again.”

Jorie took her eyes off Prow—and the small laser pistol in his hand—only to glance down for a few seconds. Tam was alive. Bruised but alive. There was no sign of Rordan or Trenat. She couldn’t think about them now. She had to concentrate on getting Tam out of here without getting them both killed by Prow.

She’d done it before.

Though where’d they go— no, don’t think about that. Don’t think about the ship. Just get Tam and get out alive.

“What do you want?” she asked him, her finger lightly on the trigger button of her rifle. Prow was a top agent, but she doubted he could tell by looking at her Hazer that it had been modified and could punch holes in damned near any shielding he erected—even an L-2, though it would take several shots. But until he moved away from Tam, she was forced to hold back. “I’d say I’m flattered you came all this way, after all this time, just because of me. But I very much doubt that’s why you’re here.”

“Judging from the tech you’ve transported down to this structure, I’d guess you know very well why we’re here. Your being here, however, is the added honeyfroth on the pudding. It makes my mission that much sweeter.”

She watched him, assessing him while he spoke. She’d always been fast with her pistol. So had he. It had been ten years, but she was willing to bet his reflexes hadn’t slowed any more than hers had.

So why hadn’t he fired on her when she kicked in the door? She was unshielded. Then she saw why. His pistol—a newer configuration of the powerful Slayer 6-1—would create too much backwash if fired through a Level-2 personal defensive shield. He’d have to drop the L-2 to fire.

So he wasn’t here as an assassin, like Cordo Sem. He hadn’t drawn her in here to kill her. Yet.

Interesting.

“What do you want?” she repeated, only then realizing they’d been conversing entirely in Vekran—a language the Tresh were rarely integrated for.

That told her something else. Prow and the Tresh had been on this planet for at least as long as the Guardians had, if not longer.

“You’re alone on this nil world. I’m sure that fact has come to your attention.” Did you destroy my ship? The question was on the tip of her tongue, but she held back. Prow would lie, or, rather, he’d tell her whatever would make her easier to manipulate. Which was, yes, that the Sakanah was gone.

“I’ve worked solo or with a small team before.”

“They’re not coming back for you, Mikkalah.”

Because they flashed out or because you destroyed them? She shrugged. “Someone will. I can wait.

I’ve waited in worse places.” Like your prison compound.

“Waiting is a waste of your time and considerable talents. Talents we recognize and could use.” He smiled at her, and killfrost spun its way up the crevices of her spine. “I have an offer.”

“I’m not interested.”

“You haven’t heard it.”

“I don’t have to.”

He stepped to his left, his L-2 undulating as he moved. Jorie could hear Tam’s harsh, strained breathing.

Hang on, Tam. All Jorie needed was for him to take two more steps. One might even do. Her modified Hazer packed one hell’s wrath of a punch he wouldn’t expect. Hopefully it would get to him before he had time to respond.

She could also use Theo’s bed between them for cover and, if Prow was still standing, her Hazer could keep him away from Tam while she set off another earsplitter—all that Tresh beauty came with a price—from the MOD-tech behind him. Tech he hadn’t destroyed because he hadn’t had time? Or because he knew what she knew about the zombies? And he needed it like she did?

“Respectfully, I disagree,” he was saying. “You do need to listen.” Respectfully? Jorie would have laughed out loud, but that would require her closing her eyes, however briefly. She couldn’t do that.

“Your charm overwhelms me. Release my lieutenant. That might put me in a more blissful frame of mind.”

“I fear it’s a bit too late for that. And her.”

No, don’t look down. He wants you distracted.

She saw him tap a small band on his wrist. And she heard a corresponding thin, keening wail from Tam, followed by a harsh panting. Then a short, very soft two-tone chime.

Bile rose in her stomach. She knew that sound. A Devastator restrainer implant recycling up to the next power level. If her hands had been free, Jorie knew one would already be clasping the scar near her neck.

“Kill her and you’ll have nothing to bargain with,” she said harshly.

“Isn’t that like negotiate? Sorry, not in my vocabulary.” Prow touched his wrist.

Tam screamed.

“Stop it, Prow!”

“The memory never fades, does it? You know exactly what she’s going through.” He moved his fingers to his wrist again as he stepped toward her. Away from Tam. “Are you ready to listen to me now?” It was the only chance she had. She had to let him touch the implant signal. She had to pray that, in that microsecond, he’d be focused on the implant, and his reflexes with his pistol would be just that much slower than hers.

Head shot. The rifle would lose a little after breaking through the shielding, but a head shot was her best chance. She watched his fingers. Forgive me, Tamlynne. But it’s going to hurt for a little longer.

“Go to hell,” she told him through gritted teeth.

Prow’s shield suddenly flared bright red and he staggered back, body twisting at the waist, iridescent eyes wide in surprise.

Out of the corner of her eye Jorie recognized Theo, his large projectile weapon clutched in both hands.

Theo moving steadily toward her out of his bathroom doorway.

Prow stumbled, one hand now clutching his shoulder. Blood gushed between his fingers as if he’d been stabbed. No, not stabbed—shot by Theo’s nil-tech pistol. How and why that was, she had no time to consider. Prow raised his weapon.

Jorie darted sideways and fired, Hazer energy boring a yellow ringed hole in the already disintegrating L-2 shield. Prow ducked, twisting again. Another loud crack from her left. Another red flare.

Prow screamed something into his transcomm, and before she could get him in her sights again, he was gone.

The restrainer field around Tamlynne Herryck evaporated with his departure.

“Tam!” Jorie dropped to her knees, pressing her hand against her lieutenant’s pale, damp face. The woman shivered, convulsions starting. There was no time to deal with them. The Tresh could be back at any moment. She had to secure the structure.

“Theo—”

But he was already there beside her, on his knees.

“She’s going to convulse,” she told him quickly. “Keep her stable. Don’t let her hurt herself. I have to set shields around your structure. Then I can help.”

She sprang to her feet, lunging for the row of tech along the wall. She pushed her mouth mike into place, and with three words she segued her scanner to the larger tech units and continued to work voice commands while her fingers keyed in overrides.

Theo’s structure wasn’t large. She could lock it down for now. The Tresh might eventually unscramble her shielding, but it would buy her time. Time to get help for Tam. Time to search for Rordan.

“Grid One in place. Grid Two.” She spoke out loud, hoping Tam could hear her and would know what her commander was doing, why she wasn’t at her side. “Grid Three. Holding, locking. Grid Four. Almost there. Locking now. Grid Five. Synchronizing. Holding. Locking.” She took one last look at the security pattern, checking for breaches. “We’re secure.”

She sucked in a long breath and pulled her hand away from the screen. It was shaking.

She turned around. Theo had wrapped a blanket around Tamlynne and was holding her head back, keeping her airway clear. He glanced at her.

“The Tresh can’t beam back in?”

“Not now,” Jorie said, crouching down beside them, scanner out. She picked up the resonance of the unit Prow had injected in Tam almost immediately. “He put an implant in her,” she told Theo as the scanner searched through hundreds of combinations to find the right code to neutralize the implant. “Like yours. Except—”

“Much worse.”

“Much.” A series of numbers fell into line, then vanished. No. Close, but not the code. Vomit-brained whore spawns!

“You had an implant,” Theo said. “A Tresh one—not one like mine.” She pulled her attention from the screen and looked at him. He must have heard her conversation with Prow while he was in his bathroom. How had he gotten in there? And how had he destroyed an L-2

shield? Questions she needed answered—later. “I was taken prisoner by the Tresh during the war. They put an implant in me, yes.”

He just nodded, his eyes darkening with emotion.

She went back to her screen. She didn’t want his pity.

More numbers lined up. She held her breath. Could it be…? Yes. Yes. The implant’s power field dropped down three levels. Tam’s shuddering halted, and her cries of anguish were replaced by soft moans. Jorie couldn’t shut down the Tresh restrainer completely. But she could at least make the pain somewhat bearable, until a med-tech…

“Will she be okay?” Theo touched Jorie’s arm.

“I…For now.” There were no Guardian med-techs here. And, depending on what kind of signal she could rig from whatever tech remained, it could be months, even a year, before a Guardian ship could find them. Damn you, Prow!

“What’s wrong?” Theo asked softly.

Damn you, Petrakos, she wanted to say. Sometimes I swear you read my mind.

“Can you put her on the bed? If she’s warm and she sleeps, it will be better.” Theo lifted Tam gently, Jorie unwrapping the blanket as he did so. Then she tucked it around Tam again as Theo pushed a pillow under the lieutenant’s curls. Tam whimpered, but exhaustion and pain took its toll. Her eyes fluttered closed.

Jorie ran through the codes two more times but found nothing better. She put her scanner on the bedside table. Its signal would block the implant as best it could until she could rig a dedicated unit out of what was left of the tech in the spare room.

“It’s still hurting her.” It wasn’t a question. Theo seemed to know Jorie couldn’t shut down the implant.

“That’s not the only problem.” She ran both hands through her hair, her muscles suddenly taught with anger. “It will kill her. Two, three days. If we don’t disengage it, it will kill her. And the ship, my med-techs, aren’t here to help. Damn it!” She spun away from him, from Tam lying helpless in the wide bed, and headed for the hall, chest tight, eyes blurring.

Theo caught up with her at the doorway, one arm circling her waist, the other around her back, gathering her and her rifle against him, hard. For a moment she stiffened, wanting to pull away, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Theo’s face—that very good face—was in her hair. He whispered her name, telling her, “Hush, it will be all right.”

It would not be all right. Her ship was gone. The Tresh were here. The zombies were in Tresh control.

She was stuck on a nil world. Her top lieutenant and close friend was dying. And she had no idea if Kip and Jacare were even alive.

So she clung to Theo, her good friend Theo, just for a moment. Clung to his reassuring warmth and hard-muscled strength and closed her eyes, tucking her face against his neck.

It would not be all right. But at least for the next few moments, she was not alone.

“Hush, Jorie.”

She raised her face. “I have more problems. And work to do.”

He brought his hands to rest on her shoulders. “We have work to do. And we’ll solve these problems together. But first,” and he grinned sheepishly, “I have to rescue my laser pistol. It, uh, got wedged behind the toilet when I climbed through the bathroom window to try to sneak up on Prow.”

“You climbed through…?” Jorie shook her head distractedly at his embarrassment and at the mental picture of Theo’s large form squeezing through the small opening. “Why didn’t you use the Tresh rifle?” It was still draped across his chest.

“I’ve never shot it.”

She’d forgotten, again, that he was a nil. “I’ll show you later,” she said, and stepped into the hallway, her mind already sorting through plans, options. A bit of bliss luck: they’d acquired two more weapons. But their locale was her immediate concern. Theo’s residence was small enough; she might be able to set the shields in a randomizer pattern that would baffle the Tresh for a good long while. That would provide her with a secure base of operations but would also limit her movements.

A lot also depended on how large a base the Tresh had here. They must have more than that house she’d found. Obviously the Guardians had underestimated them. Interrogating the Tresh female could—

She stopped in the main room. The female wasn’t on the floor. Hell’s wrath! She flipped the Hazer back to stun, turning quickly. “Petrakos!”

Quick footsteps from the hall behind her. “Here. What—”

Jorie glanced over her shoulder at him. “Where is she?”

“She?” He had his G-1 out now. “Fuck.”

Jorie understood the emotion behind the word if not the meaning.

Theo crossed the room and stopped at the galley doorway, his weapon angled against his chest. Jorie sprinted behind him, listening for the same thing he was: a Tresh female, waiting for them.

She heard nothing. She checked the readout on her Hazer, looking for the possible resonance of an L-1

or L-2 shield—the best she could hope for without her weapon pointed at a target. Nothing again. She signaled her lack of information to Theo with a shake of her head and a slight shrug, then flipped her oc-set into place.

“On three.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “One. Two—”

He swept into the galley, moving right. She followed, going left. The galley was empty. They both spun slowly around one more time, then lowered their weapons.

“Shit,” Theo said through tight lips. Jorie held back from pointing out that while a spoor trail would certainly be helpful in finding the female, the Tresh didn’t routinely leave behind excrement in their wakes.

She’d begun to figure out that references to deities, excrement, and certain other bodily functions, when uttered in anger, were a sign of intense displeasure on this world.

“Let’s recheck the house.” Theo pushed past her, out of the galley. Jorie hurried after him. Five minutes later they were in the galley again.

Theo leaned against the counter next to the water dispenser and shook his head. “My fault. I take responsibility. She was out cold. I even cuffed her.” His eyes narrowed. “Bitch has my best cuffs.

Unless…”

He was reaching for the door to go outside when Jorie grabbed his arm.

“Don’t! Your structure’s shielded.”

He shot her a puzzled look, brow furrowing slightly. She stepped in front of him and pulled at the door.

“Here.” She took his wrist and brushed the back of his hand against the faint haze visible through the ocular over her right eye.

He jerked back with a short yelp. An alarm wailed briefly from the bedroom, then silenced. “That could be a problem if one of my neighbors comes over unexpectedly. Is there any way we could set it to only zap the Tresh?”

“No, but I can reset the security perimeter to within your structure’s wall. Or only around specific rooms,” Jorie told him, again damning the fact she had to operate in a nil environment and not a military one. “But then you’ll have to be more careful.” He didn’t have an ocular and couldn’t see the shield as she could.

Theo gingerly pushed the door closed. “I can deal with that better than I can deal with an innocent neighbor getting fried. Besides, if that Tresh woman does come back in, she’s not going to be much of a threat with her hands cuffed behind her back.”

Jorie sagged back against the galley table, perching one hip on its edge. “I don’t think she’s out there.

Sem’s body is gone. The Tresh must have transported them while I was confronting Prow.” And before she’d locked the structure down in a grid shield. Damn! Hell and damn. Eight years of hunting zombies with the Guardians and she’d gone soft on tactics against the Tresh.

Theo had been staring out the door’s viewport. He turned to her. “Tell me about Prow and the other two Tresh.”

“They’re Tresh Devastators. An elite force. You understand—”

“Elite. Yes. Just go on. If I don’t understand something, I’ll ask.” Both their language skills had improved. One less thing to have to compensate for.

“I only recognized the two males: Cordo Sem, the one we terminated in the main room. And Prow.

Davin Prow. He’s Sem’s superior, or was. I have no reason to think that’s changed. Their presence tells me this is a very serious operation. It also tells me they’re close to completion or the Devastators wouldn’t be here. They’re not an advance team. You noticed Prow spoke Vekran?”

“I heard him speak English, yeah. No offense, but he has no accent. I understood him better than I do you.”

“He’s integrated—the Devastators can do that.”

“Integrated?”

Yes, of course, was on the tip of her tongue, but she stopped. The way Theo moved, the way he handled weapons, the way he almost unconsciously seemed to pick up on what needed to be done kept lulling her into a false sense of who and what he was. A male from a nil planet who knew nothing of the past several hundred years in the Chalvash System, who’d never heard of the council or the Tresh Border Wars.

She sought the words she needed in Vekran, then simplified them as best she could. “It’s like another kind of implant, but one that enhances his brain’s natural abilities. A Tresh agent qualifies for this implant when he reaches Devastator status.”

“A built-in translator?”

“Yes. Among other functions.”

“Like?” he prompted.

She shrugged. The variations were so vast. “It depends on the parameters of the original bioprofile.” A slight drawing down of dark brows. “You’re telling me the Tresh are biologically engineered?” Ah! “You have that technology here, then?” There’d been nothing on that in Danjay’s reports. But perhaps Theo’s security status afforded him access to that information.

“Rudimentary. Cloning of farm animals, that kind of thing. But it’s not common. And it’s never used with people. Humans.”

“It’s very common in most technologically advanced systems. To the Tresh it’s—how is it said on Vekris?—the highest art.”

Theo nodded slowly. “They’re all perfect. By deliberate design.”

“Devastators most of all. If there’s a lack—as in linguistic abilities—it’s augmented biomechanically.” She watched his face. He was still nodding.

“Got it,” he said after a moment. “So these Devastators came here already programmed to speak my language.”

No, he hadn’t quite acquired knowledge, and she told him so. “Programmed to learn your culture and your language—which is very similar to Vekran, as you know—at a faster rate. From his fluency I’d say he’s been here longer than Danjay was. Which now also makes me question the zombie attack that killed him.” Something hovered at the edges of her mind again. She tried to focus and articulate it. “It didn’t seem right somehow. Danjay wasn’t stupid. We flew together. He was my gunner and—” And Prow knew that as well. Prow had had the files on her entire squadron and had taken great pride in showing them to her. And had no doubt integrated them into his memory.

“And?” Theo prompted.

“And Prow knew that if I was on the Sakanah, Danjay’s death would bring me dirtside.” She’d been so blind, so very blind. Like everyone else, she viewed the Tresh problem as solved. What else had she missed?

“You mean you specifically? Or the Guardians?”

“We’ve been here for almost four of your months. The Tresh could have called their ships in to confront us at any point.” And they hadn’t. Another puzzle. “But Danjay’s death…” She shook her head, her mind still sorting through everything. “I think that was aimed at me specifically.” She looked up at him, wondering how he’d perceive her when she told him why. Yes, he was in his planet’s security force. But he’d explained that his duties were protection. She’d been an assassin. “I killed Prow’s brother.”

“Because of your war—”

“Nikah Prow wasn’t a Devastator. He was a med-tech who designed the restrainer implants the Tresh use. It was happenstance my team came across him during a raid on a Tresh station. We were after their data. We had no indication he would be in the lab complex. I made the decision to take him with us. That was my error. It cost us time to subdue him. The Devastator team almost caught us. So I needed a diversion and decided he was it. I put him—bound—into an airlock and rigged a small explosive to the outer hatch. I knew his brother would stop to rescue him. They were”—Jorie put her index fingers side by side—“twins.”

“Go on.”

“I knew his brother would try to rescue him. I knew about how long it would take for them to open the door we’d jammed. At six seconds to go, I blew the outer hatch and spaced him.” She watched Theo’s face and then, when she saw little change, remembered where she was. His people might have more technological experience than she’d first surmised, but Theo most likely had no direct experience with what happens to a live body when it’s sucked into the vacuum of deep space.

“It is,” she continued, “a very horrible way to die. A horrible thing to witness. I’m not proud of what I did. But it bought us time. And…” She closed her eyes briefly. “And I kept thinking of all my people who’d been tortured by the device he’d perfected. I was angry. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted his brother to suffer.”

“That saved the lives of your team, allowed you to escape.”

“We would have escaped anyway. Using Nikah Prow as a diversion gave us the time we needed. I had no reason to space him other than”—she drew a short breath—“other than I wanted to.”

“Was this before or after his brother took you prisoner?”

“Before.”

“And he didn’t try to kill you for that?”

A faint smile twisted her lips. “Personally, Davin hates me for killing Nikah. But he’s a Tresh Devastator.

Professionally, he appreciates a job well done.”

Theo was silent for a long moment. “And now he wants you to work with him.”

“Believe nothing a Tresh says, unless it’s ‘I’m going to kill you.’” She shoved herself away from the table.

The condemnation she’d halfway expected to hear from Theo over her actions hadn’t materialized. That made her feel marginally better, but she still wasn’t sure he fully understood what she’d done. Though he seemed to grasp why. “I have to check on Tamlynne.”

“Jorie.” His voice stopped her in the doorway. She turned, expecting a question about Nikah Prow’s death. “Your ship’s gone. All we have is you and Tammy. If you accept his offer, will that protect my city, my world?”

His words jolted her. She stared at him hard, part of her recognizing it was merely a question. He was a nil. Security trained or not, he didn’t know. But another part of her wanted to lunge at him and plant her fist in his face.

She could face his condemnation for being an assassin. She could not live with being a traitor.

She flexed her right hand. “I have to check on Tamlynne. And reset the shields.” She spun away from him and this time ignored the sound of her name—and the pain in her heart.

16

The shields were easy to reset within the structure’s walls, taking less than five minutes of her time. But the scanner hadn’t been able to devise a better combination, even after twenty minutes of intense concentration on Jorie’s part. The implant in Tamlynne’s shoulder still pulsed pain—with spikes of death—into her system.

Tamlynne’s eyelids fluttered briefly, then closed again, when Jorie lay her hand on Tam’s forehead. Sleep was a good escape. But eventually even sleep would fail to provide respite.

Jorie sat on the edge of the bed, fighting waves of exhaustion and frustration. Right now she’d gladly trade all her weapons for a med-tech’s JS-6-4. Then she’d have a chance of removing the unit. She was wondering if she could somehow modify her scanner into even a basic JS-6-1, when Theo appeared in the doorway.

“I had to ask about Prow’s offer,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “I have to explore all options.” Jorie adjusted the blanket around Tamlynne without looking at him. She didn’t know what she’d see on his face—suspicion? Dismay? Or perhaps neither, just a basic devotion to duty, something she was supposed to understand. Most times she did, except when it came to Theo Petrakos. Being with him set off a chain of unsettling emotions she did not want to— could not—deal with at the moment. “I cannot make decisions for you or your people, Petrakos. Perhaps that best be said now. But the Tresh are not and will never be an option for me or any Guardian.”

Tam uttered a soft moan, then shivered. Jorie’s throat tightened. She’d lost team members before. She didn’t know a Guardian—or a marine—who hadn’t. But there was something different about dying in the heat of battle, leaving this existence kicking and screaming, and succumbing slowly, helplessly, to pulses of unending pain.

And something was even worse about losing Tam after just losing Danjay. She was still trying to process his death, going over and over in her mind if she’d done something wrong. Or if she hadn’t done something that might have kept him alive.

And then there was Kip Rordan. What limited scans she could perform gave no hints of his whereabouts or his fate.

“What are the Tresh doing here?” Theo’s question brought her out of her dark ruminations.

“Prow didn’t share that information with me. I can only guess.”

“Then guess. ” Theo’s voice was insistent. “It’s crunch time, Jorie. Do or die.” She did look at him this time and saw the intensity in his dark eyes, the taut line of his mouth. “I need data in order to formulate my guesses.”

She stepped away from Tam’s still form on the bed, then hunkered down in front of her array of MOD-tech on the floor. She pulled up her mouth mike and spoke soft commands in Alarsh. Data rose and merged, scenarios and probabilities appeared. Her tech continued to pick up energy streams even after the Tresh had destroyed the main units in the other room. Why Prow had left these untouched…

It may have been simply that their return interrupted his plans. Or it might be something else.

She went back to her data, peripherally aware of Theo prowling about his structure—but evidently remembering her warning about the structure’s shielding, because she heard no curse-filled yelps or jangling alarms. Which was just as well. She didn’t want to think about Sergeant Theo Petrakos, because when she thought about him, she felt things. And she couldn’t afford that luxury now. Her worries about her ship, about Tam, Kip, and Jacare could overwhelm her if she let them. Her disappointment in Theo Petrakos— If you accept his offer, will that protect my city, my world? —threatened to choke her.

For no reason! He was a nil, a damned nil. Nothing more.

Except…

A soft nudge against her arm. Th—Petrakos with a glass of ice water. “You want something to eat? It’s almost seven. Dinnertime.”

She accepted the water and sipped at it.

Then her scanner emitted three strident tones.

She dropped the water glass, aware of its thud against the floor, aware of the slosh of the precious, invaluable liquid against her skin. She didn’t care. The harsh tones signaled a medical emergency.

Tamlynne Herryck had stopped breathing.

Jorie shot to her feet, heart pounding, and was at Tam’s side in three long steps. She grabbed her scanner, saw the ineffectual codes, and damned the fact she had no functional med-kit in the structure.

Her skin chilled in spite of the anger welling up inside her as she worked frantically to reset the codes and block the implant.

“What’s the matter?” Theo clasped her shoulder.

“Respiratory failure! And this unit won’t—”

Theo shoved her aside and grasped Tamlynne’s face, one hand over her lieutenant’s nose, his mouth covering hers, forcing his breath….

Manual resuscitation. It was such an antiquated method that it took Jorie a few shocked seconds to process what she was seeing. She’d seen teachtapes of the method but never used it. With med-’droids or med-techs everywhere—even during the war—there’d been no need.

Until now.

She prayed it worked. She tore her gaze away from Theo breathing life into Tamlynne and concentrated again on the scanner. She had to weaken the implant, decrease its output. The jamming codes the scanner had produced weren’t sufficient. She needed a damned JS-unit. Unless she could somehow bypass the units codes altogether and—

“Keep her alive!” she rasped at Theo, and lunged back at her tech stacked along the wall. There had to be something in the emergency datafiles, even though this was all Guardian tech—Guardians who were concerned only with destroying the zombies. Not with confronting the Tresh. If she could access the ship…

But she couldn’t. She barked search terms into her mouth mike, barely waiting for the results of one query to appear before demanding the next. Ten, twelve years ago she’d have had this information at her fingertips. But she was no longer in the marines, with intelligence data on the Tresh coming in daily.

If she didn’t find those Tresh overrides, Tamlynne would die.

“She’s breathing on her own.” Theo sounded hoarse but elated.

Jorie glanced at him over her shoulder, relief rising, then waning. “It won’t last. This is the first of many attacks. It just happened sooner than I expected.”

Theo dropped down on the edge of the bed, hands against his thighs, head slightly bowed. His shoulders sagged, then he turned and seemed to study Tam’s still form. Jorie shared his frustration. The anger—and helplessness—inside her seethed so virulently, she felt that if a zombie were to appear in the room right now, she was perfectly capable of tearing the thing apart with her bare hands.

But that wouldn’t help Tamlynne.

“I thought that buffered the pain,” he said, turning back and pointing to her scanner on the bedside table.

“Only temporarily. I told you—”

“Yeah. It will kill her.” He wiped one hand over his face. “So what do we do?”

“I’m trying to find override codes. The Guardians were never involved in the war with the Tresh. They don’t archive data on them like the Kedrian Marines do. If the ship were here, I could access its library or link to the military libraries at Central Command. But—”

“Can we remove the implant?”

“Remove?”

“Your med-tech put one inside me. How does it come out?”

“With a JS-Six-Four,” and as she said it she knew that meant nothing to him. “It’s essentially a miniature PMaT. I don’t have one.”

“How about surgically?” Theo made a cutting motion with his hand down his shoulder.

“The JS-Six-Four is used in surgery.”

“No. With a knife. Or your laser on low power.”

Jorie stared at him, grotesque barbaric visions of sliced flesh oozing blood coming to her mind. “We haven’t used those methods in hundreds of years. I wouldn’t even know how—”

“I know someone who does. It’s the way things are done here all the time. She’s a doctor. And an EMT—an emergency medical technician. The wife—she’s spoused to Zeke Martinez.”

“A nil?”

“A doctor. ”

“Theo, to involve a nil med-tech would reveal our presence—”

“Damn it, Jorie!” He shot to his feet, hands fisted at his sides. “If you don’t get that thing out of Tammy’s shoulder, she’s going to die. Is that what you want?”

A soft, pained whimper came from the bed behind Theo.

Jorie closed her eyes for a moment, her training and all the platitudes about a Guardian’s duty warring inside her, battling against what she knew she had to do.

“No.” Jorie rose and faced Theo. Captain Pietr and the entire council could strip her of her rank one hundred times over for violating gen-pro regulations if they wanted to. If it came to that, she would face them. She would accept their punishment, their censure.

She’d already lost Danjay. But she was not going to let her lieutenant die.

Theo punched in Zeke Martinez’s cell-phone number as he trotted down the street toward the park where he and Jorie had left his SUV. Twilight was edging into night, the air cooling but still warm for late December in Florida. He tried to remember if Zeke and Suzanne went to her sister’s for Christmas Eve dinner. Maybe it was New Year’s. All he did know was this was a bad time to call and ask for a favor.

He had no choice. And it wasn’t just Tammy’s condition that forced him to take action. It was that Jorie was alone on this mission. He wasn’t going to have her lose her life too, for his world.

Not if there were options. He felt there were.

He put the cell phone to his ear and waited for Zeke to answer.

It didn’t take long—third ring. With caller ID, Zeke already knew who was calling.

“Yassou, amigo. What you got?” Zeke asked, mixing the Greek word for hello with Spanish.

“Unofficial business. You and Suzanne with family or something?”

“Business? Man, it’s Christmas Eve. You’re supposed to be on vacation.”

“Un official, Zeke. And it’s actually Suzanne I need.” Theo could hear voices, laughter, and the clatter of dishes in the background. “You at her sister’s?”

“The neighbors’. You were invited, if you remember.”

He did now. Zeke had mentioned it last week. Before Liza Walters offered her cousin Bonnie to him.

Before his one-woman war machine came into his life and turned everything upside down.

“So what do you got, a sick cat? You don’t even own a cat, Theo.” Suzanne’s voice was faint but audible: “People don’t own cats, cats own people.”

“Suzanne says—”

“Yeah, I heard her. Listen, when will you two be freed up? You know I wouldn’t ask unless it was important.”

“We haven’t even had dessert yet—ow!”

Theo could envision Suzanne smacking Zeke on the arm. He’d seen her do it enough times. Especially when he heard, “Zeke, ask Theo what he needs.”

“I need Suzanne to meet me at her clinic as soon as she can,” Theo said, before Zeke could repeat his wife’s instructions. And because Jorie couldn’t unequivocally discount that the Tresh might track—and respond to—the implant’s removal: “I need you to bring your Glock and rifle, and it’s probably not a bad idea to wear your vest.”

“My—what do you got, some kind of wild dog? Sure you shouldn’t be calling animal control?”

“No wild dogs. No cats either.” Theo searched for the right words to at least alert Suzanne she’d be dealing with a human, utilizing her EMT skills as well as her veterinary ones. “I’ve got an illegal military operative with a time bomb in her shoulder.”

“A spook?” Zeke dropped his voice to a harsh rasp. “CIA?”

“Something like that.” He’d reached his car, blessedly still where they’d left it. It beeped twice as he unlocked it with the remote. “I need to keep this totally below the radar. When can you break free?”

“Sure you’re sober?”

“Completely.” Though when this was all over, a three-day binge might be a great idea. If he had any vacation time left.

“Hang on.”

Theo slid in and started the engine, then backed out of the tree-shaded space.

He shifted to drive and Zeke came back on. “Forty-five minutes okay for you? Quarter to eight?”

“Quarter to eight is great. And thanks, Zeke. I really mean this. I didn’t want to get you two involved, but our backs are against the wall here.”

“Our? Wait. This operative. Is that the gal I met? Jorie?”

Theo hesitated. “She’s one of them,” he admitted as he pulled down his driveway. “But not the one who’s injured.”

“There are more?”

“I’ll explain when I see you.” He flipped the cell phone closed, climbed out of the SUV, and locked it.

Jorie nudged open the back door—she must have turned off those sizzle shields. When he pulled the door shut behind him, she was busy making peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches. She stopped just long enough to tap at her scanner. Shields back on, he assumed, as he grabbed a can of orange soda from the fridge. Jorie had her usual glass of water. Helluva Christmas Eve dinner. No vasilopita, no lucky coin. But they had to eat something. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a real meal. He didn’t know when they’d get the next chance to eat one.

“We leave in fifteen minutes,” he told her, snagging half a sandwich from the plate as they stood together at the kitchen counter near the sink. That gave them plenty of time. It would take, max, twenty minutes to get to Suzanne’s veterinary clinic. Less if he ran Code 3.

“You remember what you thought when you were on the Sakanah? When you understood exactly who the Guardians were, why we were here?”

He bit into the sandwich, nodded, swallowed. “Yeah, I know—”

“Revealing our existence never goes well with nils. I accept this is necessary to save Tam’s life. I’m grateful. But you need to be prepared. This will not be a blissful experience, Theo.” That, he mused, finishing off the rest of the PB&J, was probably the understatement of the century. But at least she was calling him Theo again. He took another swig of soda, then reached for his second sandwich half. “Zeke and I go back a long time. He trusts me. I trust him.” He wondered for a moment how Jorie would react when she found out Suzanne was primarily an animal doctor, not a people one, her years as an EMT notwithstanding. He shrugged it off as the least of his worries.

Right now it was more important that he and Jorie start working as a true team. “Tell me what guesses you’ve been able to come up with about the Tresh’s presence here.” She stared past him for a moment, and he was aware of the shadows under her eyes. And he was aware, once again, of what Commander Jorie Mikkalah had to be feeling, facing. When that Tresh agent, Prow, had pointed out how alone she was, she’d said—with a chin-raised confidence Theo tagged as pure Jorie—that someone would be back for her.

But pure Jorie, Theo had learned, didn’t always tell the truth. And he doubted she’d tell a Tresh how frightened she was.

He didn’t know if the Guardians would come back for Jorie. He didn’t think Jorie knew that answer either.

She turned to him. “Once I factored in the Tresh presence here and factored in what I know they’re capable of, it all became clear. Or more clear.” She shook her head slightly. “One never completely knows with the Tresh. But my best guess, and I think you can take that as almost a certainty, is that they’ve been using your world as a breeding ground for an altered zombie. A more perfect one.”

“Like the Tresh themselves,” he put in. And then, because he’d been a cop too long and making light of a serious situation was second nature to him, he added, “Are they at least going to make them prettier?” She shot him a narrow-eyed look, mouth pursed.

He held up both hands, one of which contained his half-eaten sandwich. “Guilty as charged. Go on.”

“I originally thought they might have acquired the code. Now I think they’ve programmed around it.

Bypassed it somehow. My tech”—she waved one hand toward his bedroom, where Tammy lay asleep—“picked up duplicates of everything Lorik transmitted while we were out. It didn’t appear he knew what he was looking at but sent it for my input because he recognized—finally!—that he might have been wrong in his primary assessment. His report didn’t state the Tresh were involved. But he did agree that someone was tampering with the zombies. He delineated some tests to run on the next zombie we encountered. Lorik always has to be more than one hundred percent sure on everything,” she added, almost as much to herself as to him.

Theo pushed away his unease at the fact that Lorik no longer appeared to be on Jorie’s shit list. “Why do the Tresh need a more perfect zombie?”

“Not perfect so much as obedient only to them. And this is a guess. But it’s one I’m fairly certain of, one I’ve told you before: to control the Hatches—our ships’ gateways through space.” He remembered that. The zombies had been built to maintain and guard the Hatches and check incoming ships for potentially deadly infections. Then something had gone terribly wrong, turning them rogue, wreaking havoc on various planets. It all had meant little to him the first time she’d explained it—was it only yesterday? Now it was all too real. And personal. The Tresh were using his world. And they would, if they could, kill his Jorie in order to keep on doing so.

“How do we stop them?” He put the empty plate in the dishwasher. It was almost time to bundle up Tammy and put her in the SUV’s backseat, along with whatever other gizmos Jorie decided they’d need.

“We can’t stop the Tresh. Even with your friend Zeke Martinez…even with your full security force.” She let out a short breath, then raked one hand through her hair. “Our only choice is to stop the zombies.

Destroy any chance the Tresh have of altering them for their use.”

“All of them?” Last he asked her, she said there were over three hundred. Theo didn’t know how many more parks he could close under the guise of a wandering rabid raccoon just so they could turn the zombies into fooshing green circles.

“That’s what the Tresh would expect a Guardian to do: terminate the herd, starting with the juveniles. It’s standard Guardian procedure. And that’s exactly why we won’t do that.”

“Then what—”

“We must locate and terminate the C-Prime—who will be heavily guarded by the juveniles and the mature drones.” Jorie shoved herself away from the counter. “If Lorik’s last summations are correct, we only have one replication cycle—roughly six of your days—in order to do so. Or else the mutation the Tresh have programmed will progress to the next generation. Six days after that, the next. Once the hatchlings are out, nothing short of a full Guardian attack force will be able to stop them. And that’s something we no longer have.”

He followed her back to his bedroom in silence, his mind working over the import of her words. Then, while she gently woke Tammy and prepped her for the ride to the clinic, he grabbed his tac vest, heavy-duty boots, sweatshirt, and his ankle-holstered backup gun, and ducked into his bathroom to change.

Theo waited for something to go radically wrong—in keeping with everything else that had happened so far—on the drive to Suzanne Martinez’s veterinary clinic, with Tammy lying on the backseat and Jorie talking softly to her in her own language. But other than his aunt Tootie calling on his cell phone, sounding forlorn that he was working and might not make Christmas dinner tomorrow, the twenty-minute drive was uneventful. No Tresh zoomed by in X-wing fighters, firing starburst lasers at them. No zombies materialized in the intersection, slashing at the overhead traffic lights.

Traffic was sparse. He didn’t have to hit his lights or siren once.

That gave him too much time to think and only made his nerves worse when he pulled around the back of the L-shaped white stucco clinic and saw Zeke’s unmarked Crown Vic in the parking spot marked D

OCTOR S. MARTINEZ. Lights shining through the low palm trees shading the clinic’s rear windows told him his friends were inside and waiting.

Well, here we go.

He had no idea how Zeke would react to the news that outer-space aliens resided in Bahia Vista. No, he did. Every cop on patrol had had more than his or her share of Signal 20s who claimed to be the galactic emperor from Alpha Centauri or who believed that FBI agents lived in his refrigerator and Martians were camped out in his attic—which was the reason for lining his baseball cap and his underwear with aluminum foil.

And shooting BB pellets at the neighbors.

All Theo had were Jorie, her gizmos, and his Paroo cube. The latter of which, he realized as he put the SUV into park, wasn’t all that much unlike one of those high-tech toys found in a Sharper Image catalog.

Or on eBay.

But helping Tammy was his main priority right now. Let Suzanne get that damned thing out of Tammy’s shoulder—he’d talk to her later about the one in his. Let Tammy be, if not overly mobile, at least able to work with Jorie on the zombie problem verbally.

Maybe that would take some of the pinched look out of Jorie’s golden-hued eyes. God knew she had enough to worry about.

So did he. Zeke was going to Baker-Act him for sure.

“How’s she doing?” he asked over his shoulder as he turned off the engine. Jorie had spent the entire trip on the floor wedged between the front and rear seats, her scanner gizmo doing whatever her scanner gizmo did to keep Tammy alive and as pain-free as possible.

“I be…okay.” Tammy’s voice was strained, weak.

He looked at Jorie. She was shaking her head. “No change.”

“Wait until I come around to help you with her.”

The back door of the clinic swung open when Theo’s boots hit the ground, the muffled sounds of dogs barking flowing out. The separate kennel wing—rebuilt to hurricane-proof specifications two years ago—was off to the right but attached to the main clinic a few feet from the back door. Zeke appeared in the doorway, silhouetted by the light behind him, rifle in one hand.

“Does Suzanne have a stretcher, a gurney?” Theo called out.

Zeke ducked back inside and reappeared moments later, pushing a gurney.

Tammy tried to sit up. Jorie moved up on the seat behind her and held her upright until Theo could slip his arms under her legs and around her back. He placed her carefully on the gurney.

“Ay, madre mia, so young,” Zeke said as he secured the straps around Tammy’s body. She tried to smile, but then her eyes fluttered closed.

Theo had no idea how old Tammy was. He had no idea how old Jorie was. So he only nodded and stepped back, letting Jorie go ahead of him inside.

The barking became louder, a cat meowed, the sounds filtering through the metal crash-barred door that led to the kennel wing.

“Theo!” Suzanne Martinez, in powder-blue scrubs dotted with frolicking kittens and puppies, hurried to his side and brushed a quick kiss across his cheek. She was a stocky—pleasingly plump, Aunt Tootie often said—brunette with a heart-shaped face and upturned nose. Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail and tied with a gold bow—incongruous with her outfit and obviously a remnant of their aborted evening plans. Theo again felt a pang of regret for taking them away from their party—and quite possibly risking their lives. But not only had he not known what else to do, he truly felt this was the best thing to do.

He heard Zeke lock the door behind them.

Suzanne was already stroking the hair out of Tammy’s face. “Hi. I’m Suzanne Martinez.” She looked back up at Theo. “Zeke said she has something in her shoulder? Shrapnel?”

“A small device. Like a microchip, I think. Jorie can—Jorie.” He touched Jorie’s arm, taking her attention from Tammy. She’d been hovering over her lieutenant like a nervous mother hen ever since they’d arrived. He’d probably be the same way if he was in a hospital with Zeke on the gurney. “You remember Zeke Martinez? This is Suzanne, his wife. Doctor Suzanne Martinez.” Suzanne nodded. “I hope Theo told you—”

Theo held up one hand, halting Suzanne’s words and explanation, he believed, of her status as a veterinarian. “Suzanne, this is Commander Jorie Mikkalah.”

“Commander?” That from Zeke, now standing next to his wife.

“And this young lady?” Suzanne asked, looking back down at Tammy.

“Lieutenant Tamlynne Herryck,” Jorie supplied.

“I be…okay,” Tammy said softly.

Jorie patted her hand, said something Theo couldn’t understand. Tammy closed her eyes again.

“Is she in immediate danger?” Suzanne asked.

“She had a small seizure about an hour ago, but she’s stable right now,” Theo said.

Suzanne looked troubled. “I assume there’s a valid reason you brought her here instead of to a regular hospital. And requested that my kennel staff be kept out of this. After all my years being a cop’s wife, I’m used to not asking. Or rather, not getting answers when I ask. But I want you to very clearly understand the difference in my skills here.” She glanced at Jorie. “He did tell you that I’m a veterinarian?”

“No,” Theo said, before Jorie could answer. “English isn’t her native language.”

“Inuktitut,” Zeke told his wife.

“Eskimo?” Suzanne’s eyes widened.

“No!” Theo said again, forcefully enough that both Zeke and Suzanne turned abruptly to him. “Zeke, I’ll…I’ll explain in a bit. But first let’s get that thing out of her, okay?” A parrot—at least, Theo assumed it was a parrot—chose that moment to let out a raucous shriek. A cat meowed loudly in answer.

“You have companions here?” Jorie asked.

“Companions?” Theo and Suzanne said at the same time.

Jorie spread her hands, delineating something small, then something larger. “Creatures of feather and fur for emotional comfort and guidance. You use them to heal your patients?” Suzanne eyed Jorie quizzically. “No—that is, yes. I’m a veterinarian. A…companion doctor.” Jorie nodded solemnly and Theo saw relief spread over her face, her shoulders relaxing. “That’s the first blissful news I’ve had since—well, thank you.” She turned to Theo and laid her fingers on his hand.

“Accept my regrets for doubting you.”

“Doubting me about what?”

“When you said this female was a med-tech. I was afraid the skill level…Regrets.” Jorie nodded to Suzanne again. “I was afraid she’d not have the skills because of the low level of technology on your world. But a med-tech who heals companions is the most skilled of all. Thank you.” The blatantly puzzled expressions on Suzanne’s and Zeke’s faces would have been funny if the situation weren’t so serious.

Suzanne was the first, however, to catch on. “On our world?” Theo was saved from answering by a soft whimper of pain from Tammy. Jorie immediately had her scanner out. Suzanne stared over Jorie’s shoulder, eyes wide.

“The implant.” Jorie pointed to an image on the screen.

“Is that a…handheld MRI?”

“It does a lot of things,” Theo told her. “Jorie will explain as much as she can later. But right now can you remove that thing?”

Suzanne reached for the scanner. “May I?”

Jorie handed it to her, and for the next few moments, the blue-walled back room of the clinic was filled with the soft sounds of the two women’s voices, the staccato barking of a dog, and the occasional shriek of a feathered companion.

Theo leaned against a grooming table, feeling useless.

“Theophilus.” Zeke flanked Theo’s right side. “What in hell is going on?”

“I could tell you, Ezequiel, but you won’t believe me.”

Suzanne raised one hand, catching Theo’s attention. “I’m going to take her into surgery. We’ll call you boys if we need anything.”

“How long?” Theo asked.

Suzanne exchanged glances with Jorie. “I want to run some tests first. That shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes. Then, if we don’t encounter any complications, half an hour to forty-five minutes. That…thing is fairly close to the surface. But I’ll want to monitor her in recovery for at least two hours after that. I suggest you two find the coffeemaker in the staff room and get it brewing.” With that she turned and, with Jorie on one side, wheeled Tammy down the short hall.

Theo watched them go. He could feel Zeke staring at him the entire time.

“You won’t believe me,” he said before Zeke could repeat the question.

Zeke rocked back on his heels. “Try me.”

“Make some coffee. I refuse to be Baker-Acted without sufficient caffeine in my veins.” 17

It took Theo over half an hour to explain—or try to explain—about Jorie and the zombies and the Tresh.

Then he sat in silence, sipping a cup of Zeke’s wonderful black-as-mud coffee, as his friend and former partner examined the Guardian laser pistol, Hazer micro-rifle, and, lastly, the cube showing holographs of Paroo.

“Looks like Tahiti,” Zeke said.

Theo leaned forward and pressed an icon on the side of the top screen. He’d figured out the zoom feature yesterday after returning from the confrontation with the zombies in the park.

“Tahiti with the cast from Star Wars, ” Zeke amended. “Means nothing.” He handed the cube back to Theo, who pressed two sides to flatten it, then shoved it back in his pocket.

“I know. But that and the weapons are all I have right now.”

“If it was anyone but you—”

“I know.”

Zeke picked up the rifle again, hefting it. Theo glanced at his watch. Almost nine o’clock. And this wasn’t a residential neighborhood. “Okay,” he said, knowing what Zeke wanted and might finally take as proof.

“One shot. Outside in the parking lot. But I’m going to turn on my strobe so we don’t get any funny calls from any passersby or Suzanne’s kennel staff reporting a strange blue flash.”

“I’ll call Nina on the kennel intercom and tell her not to worry about the strobe.” Zeke was grinning, clearly excited about seeing the rifle in action.

The air outside was still warm, muggy. Zeke propped open the clinic’s rear door with a folding chair while Theo unlocked the SUV and hit the switch for the blue strobe behind his rearview.

“Two settings,” he said, angling the Hazer so that Zeke could see the small buttons. “Stun.” A yellow light pulsed down the side of the rifle. “And dead.” The light turned blue. “You got something you don’t need?”

“Suzanne remodeled the nurses’ station last week. There are two old metal desks behind the Dumpster.

They’re heavy bastards. I’ll give you a hand.”

Theo looped the rifle’s strap over his shoulder, then pushed while Zeke pulled. Theo turned the desk so the file drawers faced Zeke and were in line with the Dumpster. If the charge kept going, the Dumpster should stop it.

Then he trotted to the far end of the parking lot, Zeke by his side. “Ready?”

“Fire at will.”

“Poor Will.” Theo shouldered the rifle and took aim. “He’s always getting shot at.” He punched the trigger button.

Blue light bored through one side of the desk with nothing more than a low hum, then flared brightly against the front of the Dumpster.

“Damn!” Zeke broke into a trot, heavy-duty flashlight in one hand, and stopped to kneel in front of the smoldering three-inch hole in the desk. “It went completely through both file pedestals. Hot damn.” Theo shut off the strobe, then walked over to the blistered, buckled section of the Dumpster. “If Suzanne catches any shit about this, let me know. I’ll kick in some bucks for a new one.” He looked at Zeke.

His friend sighed and shut off the flashlight. “Okay, so you’ve got some really sweet weapons there. But we’ve got lasers. That doesn’t prove she’s an outer-space alien.”

“I told you.” Theo grabbed the edge of the battered desk and pulled it toward the Dumpster. “I’ve been on their ship.”

“Beamed up, yeah.” Zeke pushed, grunting. “You’ve seen The Wizard of Oz. Little girl gets smacked by a tornado and dreams all kinds of things. You say you were out in the yard when the tornado hit—”

“Zombie,” Theo corrected.

“Tornado. Microburst,” Zeke countered. Together they shoved the desk back up against the Dumpster.

“The whole thing is just a hallucination.”

“Jorie’s real. This rifle’s real.”

“She could be some kind of terrorist. Or superspy.”

“Who just happened to be in my backyard at the exact moment this supposed microburst clocked me?” Theo kicked at a stone and sent it skittering across the asphalt as he walked back toward the clinic’s open door. “And who then set up an elaborate video display of fifteen-foot-tall monsters, not only in my backyard but in the park by the mall? And, oh, the ones in my house where people beam in and out like a scene from Star Trek? Why, Zeke, why?” They’d reached the doorway. Theo crossed his arms over his chest. “If these are high-tech terrorists from some third-world country—who couldn’t afford this kind of technology to begin with—why me? Why a Homicide cop in a small Florida city? Why not a police chief in Miami? Or an FDLE lieutenant who would have access to far-more-sensitive information than I do? Why go to all this trouble for me?”

“Did you run NCIC on her?”

“I didn’t think NCIC included starship pilots’ licenses.”

Zeke stepped inside. “Fingerprints.”

Theo followed and closed the door. “You’re not going to find Jorie or Tammy in our databases.”

“Outer-space aliens don’t have names like Tammy.”

“Tamlynne,” Jorie’s voice said behind him. “Her name’s Tamlynne.” Theo turned, quickly reading her face. No tears. No sadness. Hope rose that Jorie would at least be spared this heartache.

“She’s in recovery.” Suzanne was walking toward them, surgical mask loose around her neck. “She’s doing very well.”

Theo reached for Jorie. “You got it out? She’s okay?”

She took his hand. “Yes and yes. And it’s fully disabled. The Tresh have no way of tracking it.” Finally, a small smile. “Dr. Suzanne is excellently skilled. Companion med-techs always are.” He stood staring at her, aware of the warmth of her hand in his, aware that Zeke had come to stand beside him. He didn’t care. He gave her hand a small squeeze.

“Contact lenses,” Zeke said.

“Zeke, what are you babbling about?” Suzanne sounded annoyed.

“Her.” Zeke gestured at Jorie. “She has Theo believing she’s from some other planet. The hair, the gold eyes. Has to be contacts.”

Jorie glanced at Theo. “Nils,” she said quietly, pulling her hand out of his. “I warned you.”

“Zeke,” Suzanne said, but Zeke had flicked on his flashlight and aimed it at Jorie’s face.

“But you can always see the lenses in an oblique light.”

“Zeke.” Suzanne, again.

Jorie blinked.

“Look that way.” Zeke pointed to the wall.

Jorie shrugged and turned in profile to him.

“Zeke!” Suzanne had lost patience. Theo heard that clearly. He wondered what had happened in surgery, what Jorie had told or shown her. Something, obviously. Because Suzanne didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by Zeke’s mention of “another planet.”

Suzanne—in a very familiar move—smacked Zeke on the arm. He stopped squinting at Jorie’s eyes.

“Suzy—”

“I believe Jorie is who she says she is.”

“What?” Zeke straightened.

“So is Tamlynne,” Suzanne continued. “Though whether they’re actually from this Chalv, Cal…”

“Chalvash,” Jorie said.

“Thank you. Chalvash System—that, I don’t know. But I do know that small scanner of hers is far beyond any kind of medical equipment we have. Nothing I’ve seen even comes close.” Zeke looked at his wife. “You can’t really think that—”

“I do. I watched Jorie sonically seal my incision. I do know what I’m talking about, Zeke. Nothing we have here—nothing—can do that.”

Zeke switched a look from his wife to Jorie and back to his wife again. “So she’s not wearing contacts?” Suzanne angled her face around toward Jorie’s. “Nope. Interesting eye color, almost feline. Do you know if it’s a dominant or recessive gene?” she asked Jorie.

“It’s what my parents chose,” Jorie said.

It took a moment for Theo to realize what she said, and then it startled him. Evidently the Tresh weren’t the only ones who played with biological engineering.

Zeke shoved the flashlight back in his duty belt, disbelief playing across his features. “This is crazy.”

“I so know that feeling,” Theo intoned wryly. He clapped Zeke on the back. “Now that we have that settled, let me give you the bad news: Jorie and her people aren’t the only outer-space aliens here. And the zombies aren’t the only issue. We’ve got problems, big problems, amigo. Go fire up that coffeepot.

We need to tell you about the Tresh.”

Zeke was skeptical. No, more than skeptical. He could not, did not want to believe Jorie was a Guardian who’d come to Florida via a spaceship right out of Star Trek. Theo could see it in the way the detective leaned back in the chair in the staff room, arms across his chest, eyes narrowed.

“C’mon, Theo,” Zeke said, when Jorie paused in her recounting of the Tresh Devastators showing up in Theo’s house. “Don’t you think NASA or NO-RAD or one of those agencies would notice a bunch of space cruisers hanging out up there?” He waved his hand in a circle over his head.

Theo rested his elbows on his knees and scrubbed his hands over his face. It was almost eleven o’clock.

The end—or what should be the end—of another grueling, confusing day.

Another hour and it was Christmas.

Christ.

“We take considerable efforts not to be noticed by nil-techs,” Jorie said. She too had her arms crossed over her chest and leaned back in her chair across the small staff room from Zeke.

This was not going well.

“I know it’s hard to believe,” Theo said finally. “I’m still having a difficult time processing what I’ve seen.

But I can’t change the facts: these zombie things are here, the Tresh are here, and Jorie’s ship and crew are gone. We need help. But if you don’t want to get involved, I understand. Suzanne’s removing that implant from Tammy is above and beyond the call. We really have no right to ask for anything more.” His own implant could wait. He shoved himself to his feet. “If Suzanne says it’s okay, we’ll take Tammy back home now.”

Zeke grimaced, his mouth twisting slightly. “You really believe all this shit, don’t you?”

“I wish I didn’t,” Theo answered honestly.

“Let me print her,” Zeke said. “Her and her friend. I want name, DOB, everything. Run them through NCIC.”

“You’re not going to find anything.”

“Then what are you worried about?” Zeke replied smoothly.

Shit. Standard interrogation setup, and he’d walked right into it. He would have laughed out loud, but he was too tired. “You got a kit in your car? Go get it.”

Zeke strolled out and Theo explained the procedure to a frowning Jorie.

“Why would there be a record of my biological signature in your criminal files?” she asked.

“There won’t be. That’s why I’m saying it’s no big deal. Not important,” he amended. “But he’s a friend.

And friends double-check each other sometimes.”

“He thinks I’m deceiving you.”

“He thinks it’s a possibility, because he hasn’t seen what I have. So he has to gather his own information, to be sure.”

“Nils,” Jorie said softly as Zeke returned, but a corner of her mouth quirked up in a grin and she let Zeke take her prints. She had no idea what a Social Security number was. Her response to his request for date of birth was equally perplexing.

“Esare three nine seven Tal one Nifarris,” she told him, and even obliged by writing it down.

“Which makes you how old?” Zeke asked.

“My age on my world? Thirty-nine.”

He’d thought she was younger, but then, he didn’t know if his years were the same as Chalvash System years, or wherever in hell she was from. She could be thirty-nine or nineteen or seventy-nine. He had no way to know.

“And you have no driver’s license, no identification?” Zeke was asking.

Jorie pulled her scanner out from under her long sweater and flicked through several screens. “This.” Theo stepped forward, craning his neck, and saw a small head-shot image of a very serious Jorie with shorter hair, and then lines of squiggly or angular characters to the left of the image. Characters like the ones that had scrolled down the screen of Mr. Crunchy’s laptop and had graced the corridor walls of her ship.

“Can you translate that to Vekran?” he asked.

“Trans…ah!” She tapped the screen a few times. The angular letters shifted until Theo saw a somewhat recognizable alphabet.

Not totally English. But, damn, he could almost read it.

COMMANDER JORIE MIKKALAH, GUARDIAN FORCE HUNTER STATUS C7-1.

He saw the word Sakanah and recognized it as the name of her ship. Then there were lots of numbers that meant nothing and a couple of symbols that meant even less.

Zeke made some more notations on his pad, then left to find out if Suzanne was ready to give Tammy medical clearance.

“You see why we don’t work with nil-techs?” Jorie asked as Zeke’s footsteps faded.

“You worked with me.”

“You’re…” And she closed her eyes briefly. “Different. Special.” He almost asked her to define special but didn’t want to get his hopes up that she meant something personal. It was safer to respond as a cop. “And that’s why you came looking for me?” She sighed. “Unlike what Zeke Martinez believes, I did not come looking for you. I wanted my agent’s T-MOD, which you had. Had you relinquished it when you should have, we would not now be having this conversation.”

Okay, score one for Jorie Mikkalah. Yes, he had hoped to catch her off guard and get her to admit she’d targeted him. Listening to Zeke had opened that small, worrisome doubt. Illogical because he’d seen the zombies, the Tresh, her ship.

But he also saw himself starting to care very much about what happened to her, and not just because heat roared through his body when she did that head-tilt thing. It had moved beyond that—he didn’t know quite when and where, because the past two days were now becoming a serious blur.

Like all cops, he was trained to never become emotionally involved with an investigation—especially not with the subject of an investigation.

With Jorie Mikkalah, he’d broken that rule, big-time. And that scared him almost as much as being Baker-Acted to the psych ward.

It would be so much easier if Zeke was right and Jorie Mikkalah was some kind of foreign superspy with James Bond–like toys. He could arrest her, turn her over to FDLE, which would in turn send her off to the FBI. He could forget her. And they could deport her back to…the Chalvash System.

Except that not the FBI, the CIA, hell, not even NASA would know how to send her there.

Which was just as well. He didn’t want her to leave. He wanted her here, with him.

And that scared the hell out of Theo Petrakos even more.

Tamlynne should, would be fine. Jorie let that one worry drift away from her as Theo guided the white land vehicle—the Essuvee, she corrected herself—back to his structure. Her fears for her ship, for Captain Pietr, for Rordan, Trenat, Lorik, and everyone else plagued her. Maybe she should have asked Prow if the Sakanah had been destroyed. Not that she believed he’d have told her the truth, but perhaps she could have inferred something from his tone, the shift of his eyes. Then, at least, she’d know.

Not knowing was eating her up inside.

Once Tamlynne regained full consciousness—Jorie checked on her lieutenant with another glance over her shoulder at the rear seat—she might have some answers to a few of those questions. But up to this point, with the pain from the implant lacing through her body, Lieutenant Tamlynne Herryck had been able to provide little coherent information about the Tresh attack in Theo’s structure.

Jorie didn’t discount that the Tresh might have interfered with Tamlynne’s memory of their arrival and subsequent actions. She doubted Dr. Suzanne Martinez—as skilled as she was—would have any way of restoring that. Her tech, like most everything else on this ball of dirt, was rudimentary.

Peculiar world, this planet named for dirt. So many large gaps in technology. Yet some of the nils—the inhabitants—she’d met were so…special. Extraordinary.

She turned back to find Theo watching her, though in the vehicle’s dark interior she felt his gaze more than saw it. The vehicle was stopped, idling, because of the colored-light edict. Foolish and unnecessary, as there were no other vehicles in the immediate vicinity. She shifted in her seat, but Theo didn’t move his gaze. She couldn’t read his expression, but, oddly, what she felt more than saw pulled at her. Heat blossomed on her cheeks, and she was suddenly very aware of his presence mere minmeters from her.

His strength. His warmth.

“Theo?” she asked softly, not wanting to wake Tamlynne. Suzanne Martinez had given her a medication to encourage a healing rest.

He said nothing for a moment, then shook his head and turned away. The vehicle moved forward again.

She shook off the sensation. She was stressed and tired. That was all.

When Theo pulled behind his structure, she already had her scanner out, verifying shield integrity before she temporarily disengaged it. No breaches. Whether any had been attempted she wouldn’t know until she went inside and checked her tech.

“I’ll take her,” Theo said, after Jorie had hopped out of her seat and was opening the rear door. He pushed that metal ring he always carried into her hand, then picked out a short object from the bunch.

“To open the kitchen door.

“It’s a key,” he said, when she held it up in his back porch light to examine it.

“Ah.” She nodded.

“Key to my heart.” His tone was light, but his voice was soft.

Heart? She knew he referred to his structure as a house. She shot him a puzzled glance and was about to ask for an explanation when he shrugged.

“Never mind. It’s…it’s just a joke.” He gathered Tamlynne’s limp form into his arms.

They’d reached Theo’s bedroom door when a possible problem occurred to Jorie. “I’ll need to work in there. And she needs someplace quiet to rest. Best I move my tech—”

“It would be better to open the sofa bed in the spare room. Let her stay there. That way I don’t have to bother her to access my stuff.”

“Sofa bed?”

Theo set Tamlynne down on his bed. “I’ll leave her here for now. Come with me.” The sofa bed turned out to be a colorful couch with a bed folded within. Not unlike the recessed bunks on Kedrian troop ships but much nicer. Jorie ran her hand over the mattress, then helped Theo secure the sheets and blanket he’d pulled from a corridor closet.

She moved the broken remnants of the Guardian MOD-tech to the corner behind his exercise machine.

Theo brought Tamlynne in.

“Nice, so nice,” her lieutenant murmured in Alarsh as she snuggled against the blanket. Jorie pulled off Tamlynne’s boots and loosened the top of her uniform. They would need clothes, clean clothes, soon.

There was nowhere to get supplies. The ship…

She pushed it away.

“So nice,” Tamlynne whispered again.

Jorie sat on the edge of the mattress and brushed the curls off Tamlynne’s forehead. “Nap, Tam.” Whatever medicine Suzanne gave Tamlynne must be working. Her skin was less clammy.

Tamlynne sighed, her eyes slitting open for a moment. “Theo is…so nice.” Theo? Yes, Theo. Even Tamlynne wasn’t immune to his very good face or his delicious grin, it seemed.

Though it had been a while since Jorie’d seen the latter. “Yes, he is, Tam. Now nap. I’ll be in the next room, working.”

“You work too much. Sir.” Tamlynne smiled dreamily. “Theo likes you.”

“And you’re hallucinating.” Jorie smiled back.

“Do you…like him?”

Did she like Theo Petrakos? Her body heated in answer. “Of course.”

“A lot?”

“Yes, a lot,” she admitted, surprised by her own truthfulness. But less surprised at the reasons why she felt that way. Images of Theo handling her weapons with ease, firing on the zombies, escorting her all over his city without question, breathing life into a failing Tamlynne filled her mind. Yes, he had the Guardian implant in his shoulder, but she knew that wasn’t what motivated him. It wasn’t why he brought her glasses of precious water or showed her how to make peanut butter and bread meals. It wasn’t why he pushed himself as hard as she did.

There was an uncommon courage and dedication in him. It made her feel stronger just being with him.

“Good,” Tamlynne whispered. “I think you two—”

“Close your eyes and your mouth.” She tapped Tamlynne teasingly on the nose. “That’s an order, Lieutenant.”

“Sir. Yes…sir.” The last word was muffled as Tamlynne turned her face into the pillow.

Jorie smoothed the blanket around Tam, then got slowly to her feet. Tamlynne would be more herself by sunwake. And if the Tresh hadn’t tampered with her memories, she’d be able to provide answers as to Rordan and the Sakanah. She’d be functional, coherent, not babbling silliness about—

Theo. Standing just behind her, leaning against the edge of the doorway. He’d removed his security vest.

His tight-fitting black shirt clung only too well to his broad shoulders and defined, only too well, the outlines of the muscles on his chest and arms.

Her breath caught, embarrassingly so. He was looking at her. She could see an intensity in his eyes that she’d only felt before in the darkened vehicle.

Had he heard…? But no, she and Tam had spoken only in Alarsh.

Hadn’t they?

“Everything okay?” His voice was a deep rumble.

“A good nap will help,” she said, moving away from the sofa bed. “I need to…” and she waved one hand in the direction of his structure where her tech still gathered data. But she couldn’t think of what he called that room or even how to describe what she needed to do. Because the way he was looking at her incinerated every sensible thought in her head.

Theo curled his fingers around her wrist and pulled her toward him. She went without resistance, as if she were a ship caught in a tow field. He stepped back into the corridor and she followed, his gentle pressure on her arm guiding her closer. Then he reached behind her and shut the door.

“Jorie.” His arm slid around her waist. The fingers holding her wrist raised her hand to his mouth. He brushed a lingering kiss across her palm. The incinerator in her brain unleashed a flash of heat that rushed down her body and flared between her thighs.

Trembling, she uncurled her fingers. She traced the rough line of his jaw, then her thumb found the softness of his lower lip.

He pulled her more tightly against him. He lowered his face but she was already raising hers, her mouth seeking his, not with the hard, desperate intensity of their earlier feigned kisses but more gently. Carefully.

Something was happening, changing between them. It made no rational sense. She knew with the same, unerring clairvoyance that had kept her alive all these years that what she was doing was dangerous.

Theo Petrakos was dangerous.

She didn’t care. But she would be careful.

His mouth brushed hers, the warmth of his breath flowing across her face. She answered with the smallest of kisses, the slightest meeting of tongues. She dropped her hand from his face and splayed her fingers against his chest. She could feel his heart beating rapidly.

It matched her own.

He rubbed his face against hers, his mouth touching her cheekbone, her jaw, and, as she angled her head, trailing down her neck. A soft heat, gentle and searing at the same time.

He took another step back, bringing her with him as he leaned against the wall. She went willingly. His hand at her waist pressed her to him, clothes and weapons—bulky—merging.

His light kisses were sheer torture, but she didn’t push, didn’t ask for more, because his restraint was as much of an aphrodisiac as his touch. A powerful man controlling his power.

A passionate man willing to take his time.

Her own desire teetered on the edge of exploding. It would be so easy to tear Theo’s clothes off and blank her mind, lose her worries in a hard, driving sexual encounter with this man whose body trembled under her fingers.

But that wasn’t what he was asking for. And it wasn’t what she wanted.

She was very aware that what he wanted and what she wanted might never come to pass. There were the Tresh and the zombies. There was a city about to be under siege. There was the very real problem of survival.

And if— when—the Sakanah returned, she would leave. It was her duty. Just as it was his duty to protect his city.

A low chuckle rumbled in his chest as he ran his hands up the length of her back, as if he too suddenly realized this was a desperate foolishness. His voice was a husky whisper in her ear. “You make me crazy, agapi mou.”

Jorie understood crazy—especially as it related to Theo Petrakos—only too well, though his other phrase was lost on her. She turned her face, brushing his mouth with hers, then moved away. His arms loosened around her, but he didn’t let go.

She sighed with more forcefulness than she wanted to and, when she looked at him, saw a sadness in his smile that echoed her own.

She touched his mouth with her fingers one more time. “We have work to do,” she told him.

He nodded, then draped one arm over her shoulders. She wrapped her arm around his waist and headed for his bedroom, where her blinking array of MOD-tech was now their only lifeline, their only hope.

18

Agapi mou. My darling. My love. Theo knew the phrase because he’d been raised speaking Greek, but he’d never before said it to any woman out loud. Not through his high-school years, not through college or the police academy. He’d never said it to Camille.

To speak those words in the language he’d heard from infancy was too intimate. It exposed his heart.

Yet he didn’t give a damn that it had been only two days. He’d touched Jorie, kissed Jorie, argued with Jorie, and fought by her side. There was no doubt. Agapi mou.

It was just another bit of damned irony that this was the worst possible time for him to feel that way.

He sat on the edge of his bed and watched her tap requests into the yellow-green screen, listened to her utter soft commands in Alarsh. It was almost one-thirty in the morning, officially Christmas. Children everywhere were snug in their beds, dreaming of Santa Claus and sugarplums or however the old poem went. Yet zombies and the Tresh were more likely to land on their roofs than eight tiny reindeer.

Helluva Christmas present.

Jorie stopped tapping at the screen and rubbed tiredly at her face.

“Anything I can help with?” he asked, because he felt so useless and because he wanted her to know she didn’t have to carry the burden alone.

She looked over her shoulder. “No, but thank you.” She went back to her computer with a soft sigh.

He stood, restless energy unsettling him. He wanted to stay awake in case she needed something, but to just sit there and listen to his mind think—and his heart break—was driving him crazy. Hurry up and wait had never been his strong point, which was why he liked detective work. He could always find something to do.

But here, too much had happened, and so much of it had been out of his control. He needed to refocus…yes. He grabbed his guitar case. Duty belt and weapons were carefully placed on his nightstand. Boots came off. He propped his pillow against the wrought-iron headboard and brought his guitar into his lap. The well-worn Brazilian rosewood was smooth and cool under his fingers—and very familiar. He dug out his slide, then picked aimlessly at a few strings until a blues refrain he’d been toying with came to mind. Zeke had been busting his butt for over a year now about his reclusive ways since his divorce. You still singing The Down Home Divorced Guy Blues? was Zeke’s constant taunt.

So Theo actually started writing the song. He closed his eyes and let himself sink into the sassy notes of the music, keeping time with one foot against the blanket. He hummed the melody softly—he was still working on the lyrics.

The tension leached from his neck and shoulders. He went through the refrain twice, then something made him open his eyes. He realized the room had grown quiet. He no longer heard Jorie’s voice or her tapping on the screen just on the edge of his hearing. That’s because she’d turned, her eyes wide in question.

Skata. He should have asked if playing his guitar would bother her.

“Sorry. I’ll stop.” He shifted forward to put the guitar back in its case.

“No. That’s blissful.” A small smile played across her lips.

“I don’t want to disturb what you’re doing.”

“I’ve done all I can for now,” she said, and rubbed her hand over her face again. “Until the zombies take a new action, I can only watch and wait.”

“And the Tresh?”

“I’m no threat to them until the zombies wake again,” she continued. “And since they know more than I do about the Sakanah, they may not consider me a threat at all.” Theo could hear the strain in her voice at the mention of her ship. He wished he had answers for her, but that too was out of his control.

She motioned to his guitar. “Please. It sounds so nice. And I need something else to think about for a little while.”

Was that why she let him kiss her? Was that part of the playacting they’d started— he’d started—earlier?

And he had started it, he admitted ruefully.

But somehow, no, he didn’t think she was toying with him. And he hoped it wasn’t only his male ego making that claim.

He glanced at his watch: two-ten. He pulled another pillow against the headboard, then patted the mattress. “Come, sit with me.”

It would be temptation, Jorie next to him on his bed. But playing his guitar would keep his hands occupied. Because after what had happened in the hallway, he knew if he touched her again, he wouldn’t be able to stop.

She pulled off her boots, then climbed across his bed on all fours, looking almost childlike, an impish smile on her face. She settled next to him and drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them.

He found himself playing Traveling Ed Teja’s “Blue Light,” because it was soft but upbeat at the same time. Somewhere in the middle of the song, Jorie’s head came to rest on his shoulder. He smiled to himself and kept playing, going through the song a second time, then segued into Teja’s “Blue Dime.” He plucked the last few notes softly. She’d curled up against him, her knees resting against his thigh.

He put his guitar and case carefully on the floor, tucked the G-1 under his pillow, then turned off his bedside lamp and drew her into his arms. She murmured something unintelligible. He smoothed her hair back from her face and she settled into slumber again.

Theo listened to her breathing, the muted clicking of her computer, and the rustle of the night breeze through the fronds of the palm trees outside.

It was Christmas, and somewhere, sweet voices were singing, Silent night, holy night…

While all of unholy hell waited just beyond his door.

Jorie woke to a dim, shadowed room and a man’s arm draped over her waist. She recognized the intermittent click-whir of her tech and saw the green glow of a nil-tech timekeeper on the wrist lying across her forearm.

Theo. His breath ruffled her hair. Everything he was tugged at her heart.

She glanced at his wrist again—she knew how to interpret the symbols to this locale—and then at the pale light filtering through the covered viewports. It was just before sunwake. She—they—had been asleep for a little more than four sweeps. Hours, she corrected.

With no emergencies, no Tresh transporting in, no zombies crashing past—bliss, that.

She slipped out from under his arm.

“Jorie?” His voice was thick with sleep.

She thought of the last few times she’d slipped out of a man’s embrace in bed. She hadn’t heard her name whispered, but another female’s. She touched her finger to his lips. “I’ll look in on Tam and be back.”

She would. She desperately needed rest, and if the zombies were in an inactive phase—she checked her readouts as she padded by, and they were—then she wouldn’t look a gift fermarl in the ears. She needed all her strength for when the next spur hit.

Her scanner showed Tamlynne to be resting comfortably, her shoulder healing with only a little swelling.

But some of the clamminess had returned to her skin. Jorie remembered that well. The nightmares she knew so intimately weren’t over for her lieutenant yet. The implant’s removal only halted further damage.

Suzanne Martinez had no way to correct what had already been done.

The med-techs on the Sakanah could help, she thought, as she slipped back into Theo’s bedroom. But her ship wasn’t here.

She sat slowly down on the edge of the bed, not wanting to wake him. She was fully capable, as her brother often reminded her, of worrying enough for the both of them.

Galin. How long before a Guardian officer delivered the news of the destruction of the Sakanah and the death of his sister? Just after he’d learned of the loss of his longtime friend? It wasn’t that Galin wasn’t strong—he was. It pained her that she would be the cause of such suffering….

“Hey.”

Theo’s arms went around her and Theo’s warmth encompassed her as he sat behind her on the bed.

And only then did Jorie realize she was shivering, her breath coming out in small hiccuping gasps. Hell’s wrath. Would the damage the implant caused never grant her peace? Or had seeing Prow and Sem reawakened old horrors?

“Hey,” he said again, his voice a low rumble. He drew her back against him. “Come here.” She turned in his embrace and let him lower her to the bed, fitting herself tightly against him. She couldn’t stop shaking.

“Is Tammy okay?”

She nodded under his chin. “Fine.”

“What is it, agapi mou?”

“Nothing.” She buried her face into his shirt and bit her lip to try to refocus her body’s reaction. It didn’t work. “It’ll pass.”

Strong hands massaged their way up her spine and down again.

“You’ve had a very stressful few days,” he said.

“Yes.” But she’d had worse. She should be able to handle this. That too made her weary.

He worked the muscles on the back of her shoulders with a gentle pressure. She sucked in a series of long breaths, tried to focus on the sound of Theo’s heartbeat. Focus on the fact that Cordo Sem was dead. Davin Prow, she thought, might have been wounded. There was something about that encounter she felt she was missing, but she couldn’t bring it to mind now. The last thing she wanted to see in her head was Prow.

Slowly, the knife-edged insanity that wore a Tresh Devastator’s face slipped back into the depths of her mind where it belonged. Thankfully she’d only gotten the shakes and not awakened screaming from a nightmare. She felt limp, a little boneless. Theo’s fingers slowed.

“Better?”

“Thank you.” She pulled her face off his chest with a sigh, then rolled away from him, onto her back.

He leaned over her, his lips touching hers with a light kiss, then pulled back. “You’re welcome.” He propped himself up on one elbow and watched her. “You want to tell me now what happened?” he asked after a long moment of silence, during which she was far too aware of the heat of him next to her.

She laid her fingers on the edge of her sweater near her collarbone. “Bad memories.”

“The implant the Tresh put in you.”

“Yes. Ten years past.”

He folded his hand over hers. “How long before it was removed?”

“Forty-four of your days.”

He uttered an unfamiliar series of harsh words. “But you still remember the pain.”

“It has nothing to do with remembering. The Tresh device is insidious,” she continued. “You know that word?”

“It causes collateral damage.”

“Even Tamlynne, with the few sweeps it was in her body, will have resultant issues. It’s good, then,” and Jorie realized it was, “that I’m here. She may have small episodes, and I can help her work them through.”

He was nodding but frowning slightly. She thought she knew why. “Guardian restrainer implants are noninvasive. Not like the Tresh one. There’s no neural interface.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “So mine just gives me a zap if I piss you off.” She owed him the truth. “Yours does nothing. I neutralized it.”

His eyes widened. “When?”

“When I did my funny stuff.” She gave him a small smile. She liked that phrase he used. It was so very much Theo. “Before we went to capture the juvenile zombie at your park. Kip Rordan…” She forced from her mind the question of whether he was dead or alive. “I was worried he had some issues with you.”

“You mean an intense mutual dislike?”

“He had the command codes when I wasn’t here. And his understanding of the mission, his goals, were different than mine.” She sighed, her mind coming back to the one fact she couldn’t push away. “If they’d only listened—”

“Hey.” He kissed her lightly. “You can’t change the past. Let it go, Jorie. All you can do is what’s here and now.”

“But—”

“I know. Believe me, I know. When you beamed me up to your ship, I thought I’d lost everything, everyone. I reacted stupidly, getting angry, going over all the mistakes I’d made that brought me there instead of thinking and looking at what I had where I was. What I could work with. What I could do.” She remembered his bursts of temper and his subsequent, not always successful, attempts at self-control.

“And last year when Camille and I split up—”

“Camille?”

His mouth pursed wryly. “I was married. Spoused.”

“Oh.” There was a female he loved. Jorie’s heart wilted.

“Was,” he repeated. “I fell into the same stupid trap. Remember you told me about the guy who cheated on you? Loren?”

“Lorik.”

“I went through the same thing.”

“She had you and chose someone else?”

“That was only one of the wonderful things she did, yeah.”

“Vomit-brained slut bucket.”

Theo barked out a laugh. “What?”

“It’s an expression. Sadly, it doesn’t render well in Vekran.”

Still chuckling, he dotted her jaw with kisses.

She turned her face and found his mouth. His mirth abated and he sighed against her lips.

“We should get some sleep,” he said.

“Yes.”

But he didn’t move and she didn’t move.

His mouth brushed hers again. “You should have kept that zapper implant in me working,” he said, his voice rough. “Keep me under control. Make me leave you alone.”

“I don’t want you to leave me alone.”

His breath fanned her cheek. “Last chance. Say, ‘Go away, Petrakos.’” She ran her hand up the side of his face, then through his short hair. “No.” He closed his eyes, leaning into her touch, his capitulation sending a wave of desire through her. She knew he was aware of how dangerous this was. It could only cause them both heartache.

But she might not live so long. All she had was now. Wasn’t that what he said? Here and now. And right here and now, she wanted Theo Petrakos very, very much.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and brought his face back down to hers, letting him lead with kisses and answering with caresses of her own. His body was taut muscle that yielded to her fingers. She arched up into him and he groaned.

“You’re making me crazy, babe.”

“I think that’s good.”

“Do you?” He watched her through hooded eyes dark with passion.

“Yes.” Her fingers found the waistband at the back of his pants and pulled his shirt away. She needed the heat of his skin under her hands.

“Oh, babe.” He kissed her hard, then pulled back. “You’d better be very sure what you want—”

“I want,” she told him, more than a little breathless because her fingers weren’t the only ones now doing the exploring. His hand had slipped under her sweater and sleeveless tracker shirt to cup her breast and tease her nipple. “Theo, I want you.”

She felt his body throb in response even as he said her name, his kiss deep and desperate. He tugged at her sweater, and she pulled away from him just long enough to sit up and yank it and then her shirt over her head. Bliss, when she rolled back to him, his own chest was bare and they were heated skin to heated skin.

Her shorts came off next, his pants, their socks, clothes flying into the dim corners of the room. Then hands were replaced by mouths, kissing and nibbling and leaving hot, wet trails. His touch left her panting, damned near delirious with pleasure. She murmured to him in Alarsh because her brain couldn’t find any Vekran words.

He moved up her body to claim her mouth again. “Tell me what you’re saying is good,” he rasped against her lips, the touch of his hands and the feel of his body throbbing against hers intoxicating.

“Very good. Oh—”

He thrust inside her, hot and hard.

“—yes!” she gasped, heat and tingles of ecstasy spiraling through her as she moved in rhythm with him.

His kisses deepened as he took her over the edge with him. Sparks of pleasure raced again through her veins as he groaned her name, shuddering into her. Then, even spent, his fingers threaded into her hair and he nibbled on her ear, her neck, and back up to her mouth.

Their bodies were hot, sweat-slickened. He turned on his side, gathering her up against him, curving his body around hers as he drew the sheet and blanket over them. He murmured something exotic-sounding in her ear. It wasn’t Vekran or his English.

“Hmm?” she asked, his warmth lulling her into sleep.

He kissed her shoulder. “I’ll tell you in a few hours. Sleep.”

“Is it good?”

Laughter rumbled in his chest. “It’s good, agapi mou. ”

“What does that—”

“I’ll explain that too. Hush now. Naptime.”

Jorie didn’t remember falling asleep. But waking up again was a blissful experience, with Theo trailing kisses down her neck. She didn’t know the time, but the room was brighter. “I should look in on Tam.”

“Just did.” A strong hand slid slowly down her hip, pleasure radiating in its wake. “Brought her some water.” He nipped her ear. “She’s a little weak, but I think she’ll be okay.” Decadent. Wanton. Jorie dutifully chastised herself as Theo shifted his body on top of hers, his hands and his mouth working magic. She surrendered willingly, let herself stay in the here and now just for a little while. She’d have the rest of the day to ruminate about her problems.

And there might not be a tomorrow.

She returned his magic with some of her own, mesmerized by the heat in his dark eyes and by that delicious, feral grin that had captured her from the moment she first saw it. He was a man who loved life.

He was a man who was not afraid of duty—or death. She felt as if she’d known him forever. And knew that no matter how long she would know him, it would never be long enough.

She explored him more boldly as the morning’s soft light intensified, inexplicably pleased by the way her touch made his breath hitch. But when his teeth nipped the soft flesh of her inner thigh and his tongue traced every intimate corner of her body, she was the one twisting the bedsheets between her fingers, coherency once again fleeing.

“We’re good together,” he whispered huskily, when heartbeats finally slowed and she was cradled in his arms.

Yes, they were.

Later, while Theo was in the—wasteful!—freshwater shower, Jorie borrowed his soft blue robe and, scanner in hand, slipped into Tam’s room to take the next set of medical readings. Her lieutenant was sitting up, but her gaze and her concentration wandered if the conversation went on for more than three or four sentences.

And the only answer Tam could provide about the ship or the crew’s whereabouts was that Commander Rordan was in Theo’s galley, getting a glass of water. Wasn’t he?

It was as if time had stopped for Tamlynne Herryck.

Suppressing a shiver, Jorie remembered seeing the half-empty glass on the galley counter when she and Theo had returned.

When she walked back into the bedroom, Theo was dressed in faded blue pants and a dark-green shirt.

Being decadent and wanton, she indulged in a wasteful freshwater shower—the water felt so blissfully better than the ship’s recycled synthetic liquid—and once again sorted out problems and priorities in her mind.

It all came back to one thing: she had to terminate the C-Prime. It wouldn’t stop the Tresh. But it would stop the Tresh from using the zombies to destroy this world’s inhabitants and—ultimately—control the Hatches.

She didn’t discount that the Tresh could move their entire experiment to another remote nil-tech world.

But at least this one—with Theo Petrakos on it—would survive.

19

Theo was standing in his living room, taking the first few sips of coffee and flipping through channels to find the news, when he saw the bright purple horror heading at a determined clip straight for his front door.

“Shit!” He hurriedly put the remote and his cup on the end table, sloshing hot coffee over his hand, then bolted into the bedroom. He prayed Jorie was out of the shower. He had no idea how to work her scanner gizmo, and frying Sophie Goldstein would not win him any brownie points with Aunt Tootie.

Jorie was standing naked near the end of his bed, small drops of water still beading on her tawny skin.

She turned, head tilted, and eyed him quizzically.

In spite of impending doom, Theo stopped dead in his tracks, his breath hitching as his body heated.

Sweet Jesus and Mother Mary. She was…incredible. And unless he’d missed something important in the past few hours, she was his.

Sweet Jesus. And Merry Christmas.

“We have company. My neighbor,” he stammered out. “The house shields?” She leaned over to retrieve her scanner from the nightstand.

Nice ass.

God, he was hopeless.

“Disengaged,” she told him.

“Thanks.” He stared at her a few more long, worthy seconds. “You might want to get dressed. Mrs.

Goldstein’s”—his doorbell rang—“here.”

When he opened the front door, Sophie was already shoving a plastic food container past the screen door that was propped against her shoulder. She had on a purple tunic-type blouse with silver embroidery on the round neckline, purple pants, and—Theo noticed with a quick glance down—purple flip-flop sandals.

“Working during the holidays! Tootie is upset. I told her I’d bring you some butter cookies and fried honey puffs. I’ve been making them since Hanukkah. It was no trouble to do up another batch.” He leaned against the doorjamb, blocking any attempts by the purple horror to enter his home.

“Thanks—”

“So you got some kind of big case? You want some latkes or brisket? I can make that too. You can’t fight crime on an empty stomach.”

It wasn’t quite ten in the morning yet, but Theo’s mouth watered at the mention of Sophie’s brisket. The honey puffs, little bits of fried dough drenched in honey and flavored with orange and cinnamon, were a nice treat too. And potato latkes—no. He had to keep Mrs. Goldstein—he had to keep everybody—away from his house.

“I really appreciate this. But, yeah, I’m working, and I have no idea if I’ll be home later or not. But thanks. I mean that.” He nodded and smiled down at her.

She nodded and smiled up at him. And made no move to leave his front porch.

“Thanks,” he said again. “Uh, happy holidays.”

“You should really at least try to see Tootie and Stavros. Not that I’m trying to tell you how to run your life, Theophilus. But your uncle always managed to spend some part of Christmas with you and Tootie, even if he had to sit in his patrol car in the driveway.” She pinned him with a hard stare. “They were always there for you, especially after your meshuga mother decided her life’s calling was to be a craps dealer in Vegas.”

Well, yes. The four months he’d spent living in Sin City were certainly memorable ones for a twelve-year-old boy. Then his father and Uncle Stavros showed up with a court order. And the jingling sounds of slot machines and “Place your bets! Ante up!” were replaced by the familiar cries of the seagulls down at the sponge docks and Aunt Tootie singing Greek hymns very off-key in church every Sunday.

Life was—if not as interesting—better.

“I’ll try to cut some time out and see them,” he told Sophie. So what if the fate of his planet teetered on the brink? The zombies were in nap phase again, according to Jorie.

But the truth was, he didn’t want to leave Jorie alone. Not that she wasn’t capable of kicking serious ass.

The last time they left the house, however, the Tresh showed up and Rordan went missing. Two events that Theo wasn’t sure weren’t somehow connected.

And then there was Tammy. Not rowing with both oars in the water yet. Which only made him wonder even more what Jorie had gone through as a prisoner of war with the Tresh. And made him admire even more her sheer determination to survive.

“I’ll call Tootie and tell her to expect you.” Sophie Goldstein reached up and patted him on the cheek.

“Merry Christmas.”

There was a little spring in her step as she returned to her house. Sophie Goldstein, Problem Solver and Amateur Ann Landers, had made everything right again.

If only everything else was so easy.

Theo locked the front door, then, container of sweets under one arm, stuck his head through his bedroom doorway. No Jorie. He found her dressed in her sleeveless top and funky shorts, sitting on the bed with Tammy, scanner beeping softly as colors swirled over the screen. He pried open the container’s lid and plucked out a sticky honey puff. They were still warm. “Take a bite. You’ll like this.” She did. He waited. A rapturous expression crossed her face. He grinned and handed one to Tammy, whose coloring was still too pale. She chewed, then leaned back against her pillows with an appreciative sigh.

Both women were licking their fingers when Theo’s cell phone trilled. He handed the container to Jorie and dug the phone out of his pocket.

Zeke. He flipped it open. “Amigo. What’s up?”

“You home?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I’m five minutes out. Don’t go anywhere. I have to talk to you. Now.” Theo watched Zeke roll up around back, nosing his sedan just behind the white SUV. House shields were off. When Theo saw Zeke tuck a manila case folder under one arm as he shut the car door, Theo’s personal shields went up.

Zeke had found something in FCIC or NCIC on Jorie. Even though he knew, logically, there was no way that was possible, that’s the first thing that jumped into his mind. Jorie was not who she said she was. Their growing closeness, their growing intimacy, was a sham. It was Camille all over again.

He was cursed, just like his old man.

Stop it, Petrakos!

Zeke climbed the short steps to the porch, his short-sleeved button-down shirt tucked into dark slacks, his detective’s shield and gun clearly visible on his belt. This was no social call. Theo shoved the kitchen door open before Zeke could reach for it.

“Jorie here?” Zeke asked. No greeting. No perfunctory off-color joke. Not even “Merry Christmas,” and, Christ, it was.

Fuck. “Yeah.”

“Go get her.”

Theo stepped back, then something warred within him. He had to know the truth before he faced her.

“Tell me why.”

Zeke tossed the folder on the kitchen table and flipped it open.

Hands clenched at his side, Theo stared at the photographs on the table. Relief and fear tumbled through him. Three parchment-wrapped, wet-eyeball mummies stared back. He grabbed the photos. “I’ll get her.”

Jorie stood at the galley table, Theo’s hand lightly on her shoulder, Zeke Martinez’s flat photographs at her fingertips. She would have preferred holographs, where she could examine the bodies in more detail.

But this nil world made that impossible.

This nil world also affected her MOD-tech. Zombies had fed and she hadn’t known about it. When Theo brought the photos into the bedroom, she’d immediately run a scan and a backup data grab. There was no trace of any craving spur in her data, which still assured her the zombies were in a negative phase.

Napping.

Obviously they weren’t.

“Tell me again why you think zombies did this.” Martinez leaned both hands on the back of a chair.

He still wasn’t convinced that what she and Theo had told him at Suzanne’s med facility was true. She could hear that in his voice, see it clearly in his stance. But he had come here asking for her input. That seemed to matter to Theo.

She outlined as simply as she could how the zombies used the portals, how, in their now-perverted quest for viral infections, they were drawn to the warm, humid environment, the high rate of electromagnetism, and, under the right stimuli, the life force of soft-fleshed sentients. How his world, his city, provided them the perfect haven, enhanced by the fact that it was so far off the usual spacelanes that no civilized fleet would think to come here. Except the Tresh.

But whether or not they were civilized was debatable.

Martinez puffed out his lips and blew a sigh of exasperation. Frustration. Disbelief. Then he shook his head and raked one hand through his dark curly hair.

“The lieutenant’s going to Baker-Act us both,” he said to Theo.

A cryptic comment. She’d ask Theo later what the act of making bread had to do with the zombies. She also wanted to ask him what he’d said in those odd, softly lyrical phrases when they were in the heat of passion. But that definitely would have to wait.

She went back to the photographs. “This happened yesterday. You’re sure?” she asked Martinez.

“The bodies were discovered yesterday by the SO—the Sheriff’s Office. Two down at the east beach on Fort Hernando. One by the Gandy Bridge.”

The locales meant nothing to her. “All by water?”

Martinez nodded. “We won’t know time or date of death until we get the ME’s report.”

“Medical examiner,” Theo added when she looked over her shoulder at him. “Med-tech who investigates dead bodies.”

Then it could have occurred the day before, when she’d captured the juvenile in the park. Or it could have been…anytime. It was one of a tracker’s worst nightmares: insufficient data due to tech failure.

“Let me run the data one more time.” She headed for the bedroom, Theo and Martinez on her heels. She folded herself down on the floor and slipped her headset over her hair. “Voice system activate, confirm ident,” she said, and then stopped, realizing she’d spoken in Vekran. She repeated the command in Alarsh and ignored the impulse to smack herself.

But there was nothing in the data. She even recalibrated search parameters to double their usual grab rate. Nothing. It had to be the lack of input from the ship’s seeker ’droids that was hampering her. When the Sakanah disappeared, so did the ’droids. It was like working with one eye blinded.

Maybe that’s why Prow didn’t destroy these units. He knew they were ineffective. He—

Prow. Prow had been in here with Tamlynne. And she didn’t know for how long and doing what. A chill clamped around her heart like a graknox’s jaws on its luckless prey’s head.

Theo hunkered down by her side. “What did you find?”

“It’s what I didn’t find. And what I, stupidly, didn’t even consider. Prow was in this room with my T-MOD.” She initiated a diagnostic but was fully aware that Prow might have assumed she’d do so and taken countermeasures. She would have.

“Ass-faced demon’s spawn!” She shoved herself to her feet. Theo moved up with her but stepped back as if he knew she had an overwhelming urge to hit something, hard.

She spun away from him and Martinez and strode into the spare room, which now functioned as Tamlynne’s bedroom. Her lieutenant was sitting in the middle of the foldout bed, rocking back and forth.

“You work too hard, sir.” Her voice was dreamy.

Jorie’s anger spiked, then dissipated. Oh, Tamlynne. “Merely the usual problems, Lieutenant. It will be okay,” she told her in Alarsh.

“Theo likes you.”

“I know, Tam.” Sometimes a flower grows in hell. It was an old, overused Kedrian saying, but the truth of it hit Jorie as it came into her mind. In this hell, she’d found Theo. The only positive thing in the midst of all this. Even Tam, as disordered as she was by the effects of the Tresh implant, recognized that.

With a sigh, Jorie squatted down and sorted through the broken remains of the MOD-tech. It was time to get creative.

She brought what she deemed salvageable back to Theo’s bedroom. Theo and Martinez’s voices filtered in from the structure’s main room.

“I agree with you, Zeke, but I don’t think we have the luxury of time here,” Theo was saying. “The brass will want to set up committees, research teams. They’re not going to just take Jorie’s word for this. I still don’t think you believe her.”

Jorie tuned them out as she stripped out the components from the secondary T-MOD and inserted the salvaged ones. All house shields were disengaged, except for the roof. PMaT transports were primarily vertical. If the Tresh transported into the backyard and came through the door, rifles flaring, she’d have a battle on her hands.

But her two MOD units couldn’t maintain the shields, continue to scan, send out a scrambled seeker signal, and continue to interpolate data while she swapped out components. It was as if she were working under battlefield conditions again. Except this was Guardian MOD-tech, not Interplanetary Marines. And, yes, that meant there were crucial differences, including the lack of necessary redundancy and a reliance on a correlative data source—the ship, now unavailable.

She resealed the units and restarted the tech programs, holding her breath for the ubiquitous program-failure warning screen. The blue screen from hell. When none appeared after five minutes, she relaxed somewhat. First hurdle cleared.

But it would be another ten minutes for the units to completely synchronize and another ten for the diagnostic to initialize and complete.

She pushed herself to her feet. She was thirsty. And perhaps a spoonful or more of that glorious peanut butter. And a honey puff if Theo and Martinez hadn’t eaten them all.

She clipped her scanner to her utility belt. It erupted with a screech, sending her pulse racing. She jerked it up, noted coordinates, then spun and grabbed her Hazer from the bed, damning herself for dropping the shields.

Theo heard the familiar screech, dropped the plastic container of honey puffs on the kitchen counter, then pulled his gun out of the hip holster under his shirt. Only as he lurched toward the living room did he realize it was his Glock. Not the laser pistol. Too late. Something was already oozing out of the green glow on his living-room wall.

“What the fuck?” Zeke rasped from behind him.

Theo knew Jorie had to be on the way in here, but he couldn’t take a chance. He fired rapidly three times, center mass.

The zombie screamed, its cry grating on his ears. A juvenile, he realized. Razor-clawed appendages thrashed, neck twisted—damn! His new leather couch!

He saw the pinpoint of white and fired once more.

The head jerked back. Four arms flailed outward. The creature slammed against the wall and, with a violent shudder, crumpled to the floor.

A stream of Alarsh curses reached his ears. He shot a glance to his left. Jorie, double-stack rifle in her hands.

“Is it…?” he asked her.

She angled the rifle down, then whipped up her scanner. She nodded. “Dead.” She turned to him, eyes widening. She stared at the Glock in his hand. “You terminated it with…that?” He looked down at his gun. “Yeah. But it didn’t disappear.”

She trotted over to where the zombie lay, serrated jaws agape, some kind of yellow liquid spilling onto the floor. The worms writhing on its surface were slowing, spasming. She squatted down, ran the scanner over the hideous length of the thing, then rose.

“Hell’s wrath,” she whispered, and raised her gaze as he stepped next to her. “We just might have a chance.”

A gagging sound behind Theo made him turn. Zeke, hand over his mouth, looking decidedly green. The detective’s eyes were wide as he bolted for the kitchen doorway and then—judging from the sound—proceeded to lose his honey puffs in the sink.

Theo had never liked the yellow curtains in his spare bedroom, anyway. Camille had picked them out.

He yanked them down and handed them to Tammy, who carried them without comment or question to the living room. Jorie was explaining the different functions of the zombie’s appendages to a thoroughly embarrassed Zeke Martinez as they awaited Suzanne’s arrival. If they had to move the zombie—and Theo suspected Suzanne might want to take it back to her clinic—the curtains would come in handy. If they didn’t move it, they would still come in handy. Just because he didn’t puke his guts out like Zeke did when he first saw one didn’t mean he enjoyed looking at that thing on his living-room floor.

“Why didn’t the shields stop it?” he asked. Tammy was on his leather couch next to the pile of curtains.

She gave him a smile as he walked toward Jorie.

“I disengaged the shields when Martinez arrived,” Jorie said, and Theo nodded, remembering now. “All but the overhead. I couldn’t reactivate them and repair my tech, so they stayed off. But I forgot that I’d reduced their dimensions to fit within this structure’s walls. Because of her.” She pointed toward the front window and, ultimately, Mrs. Goldstein’s house. “That left a gap. A slight one, but enough that a vertical insertion could occur.”

“You’re saying the Tresh sent the zombie?”

“The Guardians have worked with the fact that the zombies’ appearances were at random locales even when spurred by a craving. That no longer appears to be true. The Tresh now can control them. It’s almost as if they’ve returned to their original programming.”

“You sound pleased about that.”

“I am. Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed. Our problem has been that the zombies defied programming for all these years. But there’s something that pleases me even more.” She glanced up at him, head tilted, mouth slightly parted.

Oh, hell, yeah. He knew what pleased her more. Same thing that pleased him, and they’d done it twice since early this morning. But he had a feeling that wasn’t at all what she was talking about.

Down, boy. Heel.

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“The Tresh sent this zombie in shielded. Another reason I know the Tresh now control them. I told you about the shields the Devastators used here, the L-One and L-Twos.” He nodded, grateful for all those years watching Deep Space Nine and Next Generation. He wouldn’t even begin to guess what she was talking about if he hadn’t.

“This,” she pulled at the rifle strap slung over her shoulder, “is the only thing I have that can penetrate those shields. Devastator shield technology utilizes extremely complex phase patterns.”

“But you modified that Hazer, right? We don’t have any more of those.”

“We don’t need them. We have that.” And she pointed to his hip and his gun’s holster peeking out from under the edge of his T-shirt.

He pulled out his gun and held it in his palm. “This?”

“Very basically, the shields are high-level energy fields used to counter high-level energy weapons. Not a nil-tech projectile weapon that no one has seen, let alone used, in hundreds of years.” He slid the gun back into his holster. “But the house shields reacted to my hand.”

“Because they’re patterned to counter denser, physical intrusions. A body. An asteroid. They also require a larger generator and a much larger energy source. Ships and structures can maintain them. A single individual’s personal portable shield generator cannot. It would be”—Jorie lifted her scanner—“at least five times this size. It takes both my MOD-tech units in your bedroom to generate a basic shield around this structure, and that’s working them at capacity.”

Theo stared at her, trying to grasp all she said. It sounded like good news, though he wasn’t totally sure why.

“How does this help us defeat the Tresh?” he asked as he heard the sound of a car pulling down his driveway. The edge of a red roof moving past his side window told him it was Suzanne’s Jeep Cherokee.

“It doesn’t, not exactly,” Jorie said. “What it does tell me is that I can get to the C-Prime with far less problems than I anticipated. The drones and juveniles guarding it will all be L-One or L-Two shielded.

With only one modified Hazer, there was no way I could defend myself on all sides. Even the Hazer takes several concentrated shots to dissolve a shield. But if we have help,” Jorie glanced at Zeke sitting on the arm of the recliner, listening, “and sufficient projectile weapons, we have a damned good chance.” That sounded encouraging. “But why is its body still here?”

“First guess, without studying data? Same thing. Your projectile weapon simply punctures, thereby ceasing the zombie’s functions. But it doesn’t utilize energy as an implosion catalyst the way a G-One would.”

His porch door clanked closed and then there were quick steps across his tile kitchen floor. Suzanne arrived in blue jeans and a red T-shirt bearing the image of a scowling orange tabby cat wearing fake fuzzy antlers on its head. Paw-Humbug! was in white lettering across the top.

“What do we have—” Suzanne stopped and stared down at the dead zombie lying against the wall. Then she put her hands on her hips and, with a shake of her head, turned to Theo. “That’s the most butt-ugly thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

As Suzanne Martinez examined the zombie, Jorie checked on both MOD-tech units and, satisfied they were functioning, reinstated the house shields. Then she keyed in another diagnostic, looking for anything Prow might have left behind. The program would run slowly due to the power drain from maintaining the shields. But now that she had a possible solution close at hand, she was willing to wait for the results.

She returned to the main room and touched Theo on the arm. “House shields are activated.” She looked at Martinez, then at his spouse. “You understand? Don’t exit, don’t open a window, without telling me first.”

“No more zombies, no Tresh?” Theo asked.

“In this room, no.”

“How’d they know we were here?” Martinez asked.

“They’re not sensing us.” Jorie gestured to Martinez, then to Tamlynne. “They’re sensing the resonance of Guardian equipment. They may have been monitoring the shields, looking for changes. Or they may have simply been taking a routine sweep of the area, knowing we’ve been here in the past. Either way, when I changed shield patterns, they knew.”

That was why repairing tech in the field was so risky. She’d thought she’d secured the locale—it was secured by Guardian standards. But not by marine field-combat standards. She had to work that way in the future or it could cost lives.

Damning herself, she walked over to Tam on the couch and repeated her instructions about the shields in Alarsh. Tam nodded. “Understand, sir.”

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Martinez offered, evidently figuring out what she’d said to Tamlynne. He looked a little less pale, but Jorie noticed he was keeping his distance from the zombie. “How is she?”

“There’s some memory loss, some disorientation,” Jorie told him, moved by his concern. “I’ve seen it before. If we weren’t in this situation, it wouldn’t be an issue.”

“You really are from outer space.”

Jorie grinned wryly, in spite of her consternation. Martinez’s earnest amazement was almost endearing.

“It’s not outer space to me. The Chalvash System, the worlds of the Interplanetary Concord, and the spacelanes that connect them. That’s home to me. To us.” She nodded at Tamlynne.

“What are you going to do if you can’t get back?”

Jorie opened her mouth, then hesitated. It was the one thing never out of her mind, and yet she had no answer. Then she felt Theo’s hand brush her shoulder and come to rest against the back of her neck.

“She’ll be fine,” Theo said.

“Sorry.” Martinez splayed one hand outward in apology. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“The Guardians never abandon a team member,” she said finally. But they couldn’t rescue her and Tam if they didn’t know they were alive.

Yet if they did, that would mean she’d never see Theo again. She wouldn’t let them send him to Paroo.

She’d tell whatever lie she had to in order to prevent that. His life was here: his friends, his neighbor, his duty, his aunt and uncle he spoke so fondly of. She could never ask him to make that sacrifice. No, the pain would be hers alone.

She pulled away from the warmth of Theo’s fingers—and the growing ache in her heart—and knelt down next to Suzanne. “There are some components I need extracted from its chest. It will have to be invasive.” Next nil world she visited, she would make sure a JS-6-4 was standard equipment in all field packs. “There may be fail-safes, autodestructs. The Tresh are famous for that. Can you do an extraction here, or should we take this to your clinic?”

“The clinic. I have access to all my equipment there. Nina’s on duty again, but she won’t come in from the kennel wing unless I ask her to, and I won’t. Plus, I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave this in Theo’s living room. The neighbors might object when putrefaction sets in and it begins to smell.”

“God, Suzy, please!” Martinez looked pained.

“Ezequiel, my love, I’m still baffled how you ended up in Homicide.” Martinez waved dismissively at Theo. “His fault.”

“I’ll drop the rear structure shields,” Jorie said as Theo, behind her, tried unsuccessfully not to laugh.

“Which vehicle?”

“Mine’s larger,” Theo said. “I’ll fold down the backseats. Zeke can ride with me—”

“I’ll ride with Suzy, thank you,” Martinez said quickly.

That feral grin Jorie loved so much played over Theo’s lips. “Okay, Jorie rides with me and the zombie.

What about Tammy?”

“She can come with us,” Suzanne offered. “You won’t have room.”

That was probably for the best. Until Jorie was very sure of shield integrity, she wasn’t comfortable leaving Tamlynne alone in Theo’s structure, even though physically she functioned well. She hadn’t panicked when the zombie appeared, and she’d assisted Theo with removing the viewport draperies with no problems. In those ways, the lieutenant seemed to be healing.

Her conversations, however, were still disjointed. And there were no answers on the Tresh’s appearance or Rordan’s disappearance.

“Let’s wrap this thing up.” Theo nudged the dead zombie’s shoulder with the toe of his boot. There was a gurgling sound, and another gush of yellow liquid ran through its jaws. “Zeke, give me a hand?” But Martinez’s hand was over his mouth. And he was moving as fast as he could out of the room.

20

“I told you before. We don’t have that kind of time.” Theo paced the back hallway of Suzanne’s clinic.

Zeke had hoisted himself up onto a metal grooming table and sat, palms planted against the top, keeping out of Theo’s way in the narrow corridor.

Smart move. Theo’d had a feeling this conversation was coming and, on the drive over, had done a lot of thinking. His amusement over Zeke’s reaction to the zombie had faded in light of the very real problems the creature portended. So he’d run through a few scenarios again, just as he had when he and Jorie returned to his house after the confrontation with the Tresh in Gulfview.

But this time, he caught the one big mistake. The downside to his answer to all their problems. He just hoped it wasn’t too late to fix it.

He’d also made some very big decisions. And now that he had, he wanted to act on them. Stalling was driving him crazy. There was too much at risk.

“Seeing that zombie thing will speed up the process, I think,” Zeke said.

“Negative. The chief will want FDLE called in, and FDLE will want the feds. Then there’ll be the usual fight over who heads the Zombie Task Force and who gets to staff it. Us? County? The National Guard?” He understood Jorie’s objections so much more clearly now. “And where’s the funding coming from? By that time the Tresh will have the whole herd in the ‘new and improved’ aisles and we’ll be in really deep shit.”

“We’re already in deep shit, amigo. She said there could be three hundred of these things. There are only three of us. Those are not good odds.”

“Yeah, I know.” Theo stopped pacing and ran one hand through his hair. Okay, so he hadn’t worked out all the kinks in his plan yet. “Plus, Tammy’s not much help.”

“Even if she could be, four is not good odds. We need to request at least a couple SWAT teams. For starters.”

Theo shot a glance at Zeke. Yeah, he remembered thinking that was the answer. “I’m not dragging Jorie into the chief’s office the day after Christmas.”

“I don’t think this can wait until tomorrow. You said yourself it’ll take a couple days to set things up.

Sooner the better. Besides, Brantley knows how to play the game. If anyone can cut through the bureaucratic bullshit the feds can generate, the chief can.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is? Face facts. We’ve got a potentially catastrophic situation about to erupt here. Okay, there’s going to be red tape, there’s going to be politics. But do you really think they’re going to drag their feet if hundreds of people could die? If nothing else, they’d be crucified by the news media. It’d be the Hurricane Katrina fiasco all over again.”

“And what do you think,” Theo asked quietly as his friend voiced the one downside he’d overlooked and now feared, “the news media will do to Jorie?”

Zeke’s mouth opened, then closed quickly.

“A freak show, Ezequiel. It’d be a fucking freak show.” Everyone would want a piece of Guardian Commander Jorie Mikkalah. The National Enquirer. The Jerry Springer Show. And worse. Bile rose in Theo’s throat. How could he have been so stupid as not to realize what would happen? All this time he’d seen the Guardians’ reluctance to reveal their presence as a selfish act. And he’d ignored what Jorie told them the Guardians learned from experience: nil-tech worlds routinely acted illogically—sometimes even violently—when faced with someone from another galaxy. “I’m not putting her through that.”

“The feds will never let that happen. They’ll put her under lock and key.” Another scenario he’d come up with and feared. “I’m not letting that happen either.”

“Theophilus. I don’t think you have a choice.”

“Like hell I don’t.” Theo spun away from him and resumed pacing.

“What are you going to do, risk hundreds of people’s lives because you don’t want a bunch of scientists in some basement room of the Pentagon asking Jorie questions? I think she can handle that. She’s probably been trained to handle that.”

Theo could see the tight, pained expression on Jorie’s face as she told him about her captivity with the Tresh. He could feel her shivering against him. He could see her fingers trace the rough scar on her shoulder.

He could see her getting into a black government sedan with darkened windows, knowing he’d never see her again.

His breath shuddered out. This was the only scenario he’d agree to. And it too had flaws. “I’ll give them the zombie, the weapons.” They had both Guardian and Tresh now. “I’m not giving them Jorie.”

“You can’t hide her in your spare room the rest of her life. She has no Social Security number, no ID.

She can’t even get a job.” Zeke raised his arms in an exasperated motion. “Talk about an illegal alien!”

“I’ll get her an ID. A whole identity.”

Zeke stared at him. “Be serious.”

“I am.”

“You know what that costs, a good fake identity?”

“I can take equity out of my house to pay for it.”

Zeke barked out a harsh laugh. “Brilliant, Einstein. Traceable funds. There goes your career.”

“I’m not going to write a fucking personal check.” Theo glared at him. “I’m not that stupid.”

“Then listen to yourself, damn it! You’re talking felony jail time. Your life down the shitter. You do know what they do to cops in the Graybar Hotel, don’t you?”

“You’re assuming I’d get caught.”

“No, she’d get caught, suddenly surfacing in all the databases.” Zeke ticked the items off on his fingers.

“She’d have to get a job, buy a car, rent an apartment—”

“Not if she’s living with me, she won’t.”

“Living with—what’re you going to do, Theophilus? Marry her?”

Theo raised his chin and met Zeke’s question with a hard stare. This was one of the decisions he’d made driving through the bright Florida sunshine in the middle of Christmas Day with Jorie by his side. And a dead zombie behind them. “Yes.”

“You’re— Ay, Jesucristo. ” Zeke dropped his head in his hands, then lifted his face slightly and peered up at Theo. “You got a thing for women with fake identities?”

The not-so-veiled reference to his disastrous marriage hit him like a sucker punch. Theo looked away, keeping his temper in check. But he couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice when he turned back. “I’m sorely tempted to kick the shit out of you for saying that.”

Zeke straightened slowly, eyes wide then narrowing. “You want to take it outside, Theo? We can take it outside.”

Theo needed to hit something. He really did. But Zeke Martinez wasn’t whom he needed to hit. It was Rordan and Lorik and Jorie’s captain and all the Guardians who, by their reluctance to consider the threat of the Tresh, got him and Jorie to the point where they were now, backs against the wall and nowhere to go. And it was the Tresh and this guy Prow. Oh, how he needed to hit Prow. Get him in a choke hold and watch the life drain from his iridescent eyes.

But Zeke wasn’t Prow or Rordan or the Guardians. Zeke was his partner. His best detective. He ran his hand over his face.

“You got your fancy clothes on, amigo. ” He looked at Zeke out of the corner of his eye. “Suzanne will kill me if you get them dirty.”

Zeke studied him for a few heartbeats, then snorted. “You ’fraid of my old lady?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“Me too.” Zeke brushed invisible dirt off his thighs. “I probably should have changed after Mass this morning, but when Barrington—we were talking in the parking lot after church—when he told me about these weird mummy bodies one of his deputies had found, all I could think of was getting to the SO to see what they had.”

On Christmas. The bad guys never take a holiday, Uncle Stavros always said. Theo nodded. “Thanks.

And, hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—”

“She’s got you all wrapped up in knots, doesn’t she?”

Actually, his feelings for Jorie were one of the few things he had no problems with. “This situation has me wrapped up in knots. It’s not only Jorie. There’s Tammy. Jorie’s more worried about her than she says, and I know she feels responsible for what happened. Both of them are suffering in their own ways.” He shook his head. “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and it’s all a bad dream.” Except for Jorie. He wanted to wake up and find her beside him.

“There’s only one way to end the bad dream, and you know it. We contact the lieutenant and he contacts the chief. Bring ’em here to see Big Butt-Ugly—”

“Baby Butt-Ugly,” Theo corrected.

“—and we go in loaded for bear.”

Theo’s brain knew Zeke was right. But Theo’s heart was afraid he’d lose Jorie in the process.

It was a damning discovery. One made possible, Jorie told Theo and Zeke as they stood in the doorway of the brightly lit examining room, only because Lorik’s final report had pinpointed what she needed to do to find proof of the mutations. Doing that had taken Jorie and Suzanne almost two hours.

Theo listened intently as she went down the list: a zombie with an embedded personal shield. A zombie with an accelerated growth rate, a maturity beyond its stated numerical age. A zombie that not only took data and guidance from the C-Prime but was now able to regenerate a portion of what it used and send it back.

Making the C-Prime stronger. Making the C-Prime able to control a megaherd.

No longer a parasitic relationship, with the herd draining the C-Prime until the herd was forced to split, but almost trophobiosis: a feeding, a mutual protection.

Jorie put her scanner down on a nearby metal table. “Questions?” From down the corridor, Theo could hear Suzanne’s soft voice and a low squeal of excitement from Tammy. Suzanne had said she wanted to try something to help Tam focus, and judging from the glimpse of fluff a few moments ago, she’d brought a kitten out of the kennel and placed the creature in Tammy’s arms.

Just as well. Tammy didn’t need to hear about these new and improved zombies, anyway.

“How many are there, total?” Zeke was asking.

“Last count was three hundred eleven,” Jorie told him, “but we terminated a few. If they’ve regenerated those, they’re still in the egg stage.”

Egg? Theo did not want to see what zombie eggs looked like.

Zeke nodded. “How long from egg to zombie?”

“In your planetary terms?” Jorie closed her eyes for a moment. “Two weeks, your time, egg to hatchling.

They grow quickly after that. Three weeks to primary juvenile. Another four to six, depending on availability of foodstuffs, to full juvenile.”

“But that’s the old zombies,” Theo said, remembering information she’d given him over the past few days. “Not the new and improved.”

“I have no idea of the time line now, other than it would be faster. And I don’t know if it accelerates all stages or just one. Egg to hatchling, maybe. Or juvenile to drone. I’d need time to determine that answer.”

And time, Theo knew, they didn’t have.

Zeke caught that as well. “In another two, three months there could be a hundred more of these things.”

“At minimum. There are no sexes. All zombies can replicate and can do so every six days when needed to expand the herd or to populate out a new one.” Jorie motioned toward an adjoining room, where the corpse of the zombie lay. “I can show you—”

“No thanks.” Zeke closed his eyes and waved his hands in front of his face. “Pass.” Theo pushed away from the wall. There was something they were all missing here. Another factor. “The Tresh know we know this. They have to know we have the zombie.”

“They also know I have no ship here, minimal weapons. They must know what I figured out—your projectile weapons can easily pierce their shields. This isn’t a flaw they’ll fix by tomorrow. But three, four days to design a correction?” She shrugged. “Another three or four to recalibrate their tech? I wouldn’t discount it.”

She’d been elated when she’d realized a Tresh shield couldn’t stop a bullet. He had too, still thinking of some kind of small, private army. Nothing official. Nothing that would put Jorie’s face in the news. Just cops he could trust. With the full understanding that if something went wrong—if the brass or the media found out about his band of zombie vigilantes—he would take the fall. No question. He accepted that.

But putting together his vigilantes would take time, with people being on different shifts and away for vacation. Two, three weeks, he could pull something together.

“So we have a small window in which to act, both on the zombies reproducing the mutation and on the Tresh shoring up their defenses,” Theo said. “Do we have two weeks, at least? One?” New Year’s Eve?

Could he pull this off by New Year’s Eve?

“The more we delay, the more we give the Tresh the chance to reconfigure for projectiles,” Jorie said.

“Two weeks from now there will be more zombies, and two weeks from now Tresh defenses will have improved. More people may die. My team and I have worked situations like that before, where we were brought in much later than we should have been. But it was only the zombies we fought, not the Tresh.

And we fought them with full squadrons of gravrippers.

“Remind me someday,” she told him with a nod as he paced to the other side of the room, “to tell you about Delos-Five. Three hundred fifty thousand people died before the Delos pritus agreed to let Guardian squadrons into their airspace.”

He had no idea what a pritus was—some kind of head honcho or group, he assumed—but he clearly heard the pain in her voice at what she must have perceived as failing in her duty. A duty he knew he was asking her to delay.

“We have a chance to avoid that stupidity, the senseless waste of life here,” she said as he paced back.

“Without a squadron of those gravrippers?” Zeke asked.

Jorie picked up her scanner and slid it into its holder under her sweater. “I don’t intend to chase down the C-Prime. I’m going to trigger a craving and bring it to me.” Bring the C-Prime to her? Panic jolted Theo. He gripped the edge of the table. “That’s suicide.”

“I’ve done it before—”

“A C-Prime? Alone?”

“No, but—”

Theo leaned closer. “With insufficient tech and no emergency transport?”

“You never transit in close proximity to a zombie. It’s too risky. Five maxmeters is the initial safe zone.”

“I saw that feeding frenzy, Jorie. I got tagged by one, for Christ’s sake. When you’re surrounded by zombies, there is no safe zone.”

“I just need one shot at the C-Prime.”

“One shot? At the heart, right? And if you miss?”

She met his gaze squarely. “I’m not going to kill it. I’m going to reprogram it.” A vision of her climbing up the damned thing and shoving a DVD in its jaws jumped into his mind.

Insanity. “Reprogram it?”

“I’m going to use the accelerated exchange rate at which the zombies now interact to spread a kind of virus among them. If I start with the C-Prime, then everyone—every one, ” she stressed, “will be infected.

The C-Prime will give it to the juveniles, who’ll give it to the drones, who’ll bring it back—multiplied in strength, unless Lorik’s calculations are in error—to the C-Prime.” She paused. “They’ll terminate themselves.”

“The Tresh can’t counteract that?” Zeke asked.

“They’ll try. If they hadn’t created a megaherd and instead worked in smaller herds with a number of C-Primes, they could isolate several of the herds and correct the problem, maybe only losing one or two herds in the process. But here, everything is tied to one zombie. Once the C-Prime’s functions begin to fail, the herd will lose cohesiveness. It can’t split for safety, because there’s no strong, healthy secondary C-Prime rising in the ranks to give that order, no uninfected secondary C-Prime to keep things under control. Once the C-Prime terminates, the infected herd will feed on itself.” The sound of Suzanne’s laughter filtered in. Theo glanced out the door as Zeke did, then he turned back to Jorie. “Couldn’t you kill the C-Prime and have the same result?”

“That would disorient the herd, yes. But it wouldn’t guarantee that a secondary C-Prime wouldn’t develop, especially with the Tresh involved. We need them all sick and dying, the stronger feeding on the weaker, ingesting their virus, weakening and becoming prey themselves. That’s the only way I can guarantee the Tresh will have nothing to work with.”

Theo massaged the growing ache between his eyebrows with two fingers. “I cannot let you take on a C-Prime by yourself—”

“You do not hear my words.” Jorie was shaking her head, as if she were chastising him for forgetting to pick his socks up off the floor, not discussing a suicidal attempt at bagging a giant zombie. “I never said I was doing this alone. I said I would be the one responsible for targeting the C-Prime. Anyone else who cares to help will have more than enough to keep themselves busy.” Anyone else who cares to help. Meaning more than just Zeke. Theo stared at her. “And your regulations that forbid contact with my people?”

“The regulations you kept demanding I break?” She raised her arms, then let them fall to her sides. “I see no other possible way to solve this. And I have to. I’m a Guardian Force commander. It’s my responsibility to protect all worlds from the problem we created. The fact that I’m the only functioning Guardian on this planet doesn’t change that. I have to violate the no-contact rule. But I will not break the one demanding I follow my duty.”

“No. Wait.” Theo held up one hand.

“What do you mean, wait?” She put her hands on her hips. “You’ve been a one-note symphony since I arrived on your world, telling me we must get your people involved.”

“And you gave me war stories of all the problems that happen when Guardians reveal themselves to nil-techs,” he shot back.

“Yes. They want our ships, our jumpdrives, our tech, our weapons. Well, there’s no ship for your people to have unless the Tresh offer theirs, and I doubt they will. I couldn’t build a jumpdrive if you held a Hazer to my head. As for tech, I’m going to have to reconfigure much of what I have in your residence just to adapt my Hazer and create the reprogramming dart with the virus. I have my scanner, of course.

And Tam’s, though I may need to use that for parts as well.” She shrugged. “I have the G-Ones and the two Tresh weapons. But there’s nothing I can give your people that will bring them up to the technological level of the Guardians or help them get off this ball of dirt any faster. I can only tell them that, yes, other civilizations are out there and, yes, interstellar travel is possible. If they even believe me.” But they would believe her. Seeing the zombies and dissecting the dead ones would convince even the staunchest of skeptics. Which meant only two things: the zombies and Jorie would be all over the news channels, or they wouldn’t—they’d be in the deepest basement of the Pentagon.

Theo couldn’t live with either outcome. He had to develop a third choice. A way to stop the zombies and the Tresh. A way to keep Jorie safe.

In less than a week.

He saw Zeke flip open his cell phone. Theo shot him a warning glance. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Just going to wish Lieutenant Stevens a Merry Christmas. And see if he wants to meet a zombie.” Theo closed his hand around the phone. “Give me a few hours.”

“Theophilus—”

“A few hours.”

“The clerk’s office is closed. You can’t apply for a marriage license until tomorrow.” He was aware of Jorie watching them and listening. He glanced over his shoulder at her while he hung on to Zeke’s phone. “How long will it take you to make this reprogramming dart?”

“If the ship were here? Two sweeps. Now?” She blew an exasperated sigh through her lips. “Earliest, two days. Moonrise, day after tomorrow. Or sunwake of the next.” Well, it beat the hell out of two hours.

“Two days.” He plucked Zeke’s cell phone from his fingers, snapped it closed, then handed it back to him. “Two days.”

“Providing we’re not attacked by any more zombies,” Jorie added.

“You know, the fun just never stops.” Theo grabbed her hand and pulled her around the table toward him. “Go find Tammy. It’s time to go home.”

Jorie went in search of Tamlynne, very aware she had no idea of what was going on in Theo’s head anymore. She thought he’d be bliss-infused to learn she was willing to work with his people. He was furious. She thought he’d want to attack the problem right away. He was hesitating.

Following the sound of Suzanne’s voice, she found Tam in the clinic’s small mess hall. It smelled of that coffee Theo so loved. Tam and Suzanne were sitting at a square table. Between them, a dancing and pouncing kitten—she was very sure that was the Vekran word—with bluish-gray fur attacked small balls of paper that Tam, laughing, flicked across the tabletop.

Suzanne looked up when Jorie entered. “This has helped,” she said softly, motioning to the kitten.

“Look, sir! Isn’t he wonderful?” Tam ran her hand over the small back.

A sentence. A full sentence in Alarsh. No hesitation. No singsong inflection. Jorie shot a quick glance at Suzanne, then back to Tam again. “He’s very handsome,” she answered, also in Alarsh.

“Suzanne say,” Tam switched to Vekran, “cute. The cat is cute.” She hesitated between each word, but it wasn’t the hesitation Jorie had heard before but rather the normal one of someone learning a new language. Vekran. English.

“Yes?” Tam continued, looking at Suzanne. “Correct?”

“That’s correct.” Suzanne nodded. “The cat is cute.”

Tam patted the table. “Table. Chair. Maga. Zine.” She touched or pointed to the different items, naming them. “Ceelink. Vindow.”

“I’ve been doing basic right-brain–left-brain exercises with her,” Suzanne told Jorie. “You understand what I mean by that?”

Jorie nodded, her throat tight. Suzanne’s compassion for Tam, a stranger, was a rare blessing. “So there’s hope?” she managed after a moment.

“Her mind and her body need time to heal. Your doctors have machines to speed that up. We don’t. All I can do is keep her exercising her brain, her senses. And hope whatever memories were repressed will surface.”

Tam cradled the kitten and placed a soft kiss on its head.

Jorie pulled out a chair and sat. “Lieutenant,” she said in Alarsh. “Guardian Force Field Regulation, Section Twelve, Paragraph Three, Subsection A.”

Tam blinked. “If…if shielding malfunctions and cannot be repaired, the T…the T…” She frowned. “The T-MOD, yes! The T-MOD must be destroyed. Sir.” She looked at Jorie and smiled.

Jorie smiled back, a small weight lifting from her heart.

“What was that?” Suzanne asked, one eyebrow lifting.

Jorie switched back to Vekran. “Something every green-as- liaso-hedges ensign would know. One of the most-quoted Guardian regulations. I gave her the cite. She replied with the regulation. She stumbled a bit, but she repeated it.”

“Are you and Theo going to take her back to his house?” Suzanne asked as Jorie heard the sounds of footsteps approaching.

“He asked that I retrieve her.”

Suzanne laid her hand on Jorie’s arm. “A suggestion. Let her stay with Zeke and me for a day or two.”

“Who’s staying with us?” Zeke Martinez came up behind Suzanne.

The dark-haired woman turned. “I’d like Tamlynne to spend a few days at our house, Ezequiel. Hear me out.” She raised one hand. “I am a doctor. Tam’s been through a traumatic experience, one her brain associates with a certain location. I think the fact that she’s improved since she came here—aside from the hour or so I’ve worked with her—is because she’s no longer having flashbacks or reacting to an implanted autosuggestion triggered by being in Theo’s house. I want to keep her out of the environment she associates with the attack.”

“But—”

“We have the room. The guest room your mother uses when she visits.”

“—it’s Christmas,” Martinez finished.

“Yes. And where’s your generosity of spirit?”

“It could be dangerous, Suzy.” Theo perched on the edge of the table. Jorie felt his hand rest on her shoulder. “The Tresh could come gunning for her.”

“Then why haven’t they?” Suzanne asked. “They haven’t come to this clinic.” Theo looked down at Jorie, one eyebrow slightly arched.

“They follow tech and PMaT trails,” Jorie said. “The Tresh knew about your residence because of the Guardian tech there. The same way I found the structure they were using.”

“I know Zeke asked you this before, but are you sure there’s no way they knew you were in my house when they sent the zombie?” Theo motioned to the corridor where the dead zombie’s body now lay secured in a cold-storage unit.

“I can’t tell you what they know,” Jorie said. “But I can tell you that if I were working a nil world and saw Guardian shields over a structure and Guardian tech trails emanating from that same structure, I’d feel fairly sure a Guardian was in that vicinity.”

Which was how they found Danjay Wain. She had no doubt of that now.

“And since I have Tamlynne’s scanner and the Tresh implant has been removed,” Jorie continued, “they have no way of tracking her specifically. If anything, they’d return to the implant’s last signal, and that’s Theo’s residence. Not here and not your residence,” she said with a nod to Martinez.

“It’s not rocket science, Theo.” Martinez punched Theo lightly on the arm. “Get it? Rocket science.

Outer-space aliens.”

Jorie frowned. “Starship propulsion has nothing—”

Theo ruffled her hair. “Don’t encourage him. Please.”

“So it’s settled?” Suzanne asked, glancing from Jorie to Zeke. “Tam comes home with us for a few days?”

“I think it’s wise.” Jorie reached over and stroked the kitten’s soft head. “I’ll tell her she has to help you care for the companion. The kitten. Her family had many when she was a child. It’s a high honor on her world.”

She translated everything to Alarsh and watched a light of happiness glow in Tam’s eyes as she enthusiastically accepted her new “assignment.”

Theo pulled Jorie to her feet. “Zeke, keep in touch with me.”

“Yes, boss.”

Jorie reached for Suzanne’s hand and clasped it, trying to convey through touch what words could not.

Then it was just her and Theo in the white land vehicle, pulling away from Suzanne’s clinic. And Tamlynne Herryck. The only other Guardian—the only other person—on this world who spoke Alarsh and who knew what it was like to travel between the stars.

Jorie had never felt so alone.

21

“Hungry?” Theo’s voice broke into Jorie’s troubled thoughts as the Essuvee rumbled away from Suzanne Martinez’s companion facility.

She took her gaze away from her scanner, where she’d outlined the initial parameters for her reprogramming virus, and—after a short conversation with her stomach—nodded. “I need to get this transferred to my T-MOD. We have more peanut butter, yes?”

“Is three hours going to make a huge difference?”

She interpreted that to mean he wasn’t intending to head back to his residence—and her tech—right now. “Overall, no.” Everything was so uncertain without the tech and a team to compile needed facts.

“But I can’t afford any more mistakes here.”

“You haven’t—”

“I have.” She recited the list of sins that were now emblazoned in her mind. “I should have alerted Tamlynne and the ship when I picked up that dead zone. I don’t know if Captain Pietr would have listened to me. Probably not, and, yes, I could have risked his questioning my competence. But Tamlynne would have listened. Acted. She would have been ready for Prow. And Rordan—” His hand squeezing hers stopped her words. “You don’t know for sure. Second-guessing yourself is going to create more mistakes, because you’re not going to trust your instincts when you need them.”

“My instincts say I need to get this program started.”

With a sigh, Theo turned the vehicle around. “Okay, get it started. But my instincts say you need a break.

You’ve immersed yourself in this for too long. We have an old saying about not being able to see the forest for the trees. You understand that?”

She did. “But—”

“We’ll stop home. You get your computers working on this thing. Then I want to get you out of the forest for a while. Plus,” he paused and glanced at her quickly, then back to the traffic ahead, “I’ve been thinking about how the Tresh hone in on your tech. The more we’re there, the greater risk we have of a confrontation with them.”

He had a point. Still…“You’d rather return to find a zombie has sliced up your main room?”

“Than confront it? Yes. Every confrontation distracts us—distracts you—from what needs to be done.

Every confrontation risks lives. Something happens to you, Jorie, and we have no hope of stopping these things. You’re the only one who understands how they function.” He slowed the vehicle as the dangling lights changed to red. “If we could all go live at Zeke and Suzanne’s for the next week until the zombies are stopped, I’d be a lot happier.”

“The shields are secure,” she argued.

“The shields tell the Tresh where you are,” he countered.

But the shields were necessary to protect the tech, and the tech was necessary to stop the zombies. She understood his concerns but saw no options. She went back to her calculations on her scanner, not raising her head until Theo guided the land vehicle behind his structure.

Armed, they both exited the vehicle and—as she temporarily dropped the back sector shields—entered his residence. But nothing challenged them. She gave him an “I told you so” nod as she headed for his bedroom. Once on the floor, she segued her small scanner to the larger of the two MOD-tech units.

She was peripherally aware of Theo moving about his residence. At one point he changed his shirt, buttoning up a new one, then brought her a glass of water.

“Done yet?”

“Almost.” She wondered how long she could keep saying “almost.” Once the programming began running, it didn’t need her input. But working with the familiar MOD-tech, speaking Alarsh into her oc-set’s mike, was comforting.

Then Theo was kneeling behind her, hands on her shoulders. “Now, Jorie.” It wasn’t a question. She sighed and stood. She had a feeling she knew where he wanted to go, and she fully understood. But it made her nervous—and not only because she’d be away from her tech. “Two, three sweeps,” she told him as they entered his kitchen. “Then I must get back here.” The back door clanked shut behind her. She sealed his residence’s shields and followed him down the porch steps.

“I want to see my aunt and uncle. It’s Christmas. You understand what that means?” he asked as he backed the vehicle out of his residence’s narrow paved accessway.

“Only that it’s a day of observation for you. An important one.” She glanced at him. Moonrise was approaching, the world’s natural light dimming. It was an experience that still struck her as odd. Shiplight was so much better. More consistent.

Plus, moonlight meant night, a time the Tresh preferred to move. She shook off her unease and went back to his question about his Christmas. “You’re also thinking you might not see them again.” He looked over quickly. “You reading minds now?”

She’d known that’s where he wanted to go because it’s what she always did before she left on a dangerous mission: see the people most important to her. “I’ve spent most of my adult life either targeting a sentient or being a target. Every time I see Galin, I always treat it as if it’s the last one.”

“Galin?” Theo’s voice had a strained note. “Don’t tell me. Another concord?” She frowned at him. “Not with my brother!”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

Sadness trickled past her heart. “Yes.” It had been three galactic years since she’d seen him.

“Is he a Guardian too?”

She shook her head. “He designs starship jumpdrives. The thing that makes—”

“I understand jumpdrives. Hyperspace.” He lowered the pitch of his voice. “Warp Factor Ten, Mr.

Data.” He pointed one finger. “Engage.”

Warp factor? How did he know the term? “Warp Factor Ten is fiction and, besides, denotes an infinite velocity and therefore is impossible.”

They were stopped due to the edict of multicolored lights. Theo stared at her. She stared back. She felt that for some reason her comment had startled him. The vehicle moved forward again.

“What size do you wear?” he asked.

His question made so little sense in the current conversation about her brother and jumpdrives that she tried translating it in a few other galactic tongues. It still made no sense. She gave up. “Size?” He plucked at his shirt. “Clothing size.”

“What does that have to do with jumpdrives?”

“Nothing. But it has everything to do with Aunt Tootie and Uncle Stavros.” He slowed the vehicle again, then turned left into a large paved area. “God bless Walgreens. They never close.”

“Never clothes?”

Theo disengaged the vehicle’s engine and twisted in his seat. “The shorts, sweater, boots”—he tapped her arm, then her leg—“won’t pass muster with Tootie on Christmas. But I stopped here last week to get a soda. It amazed me what these places sell now.”

“Soda?” Jorie was very lost.

That feral smile played over his lips. “You’ll see.”

What Jorie saw, as she followed Theo into the establishment, was a commissary. A decent-size one with a wide selection of items, most in brightly colored boxes. He threaded his fingers through hers and brought her to an aisle that contained…clothes. Not many. Most appeared to be shirts of the type Theo favored—short-sleeved and round-necked. But these were lettered: Life’s a Beach. And What Happens in Bahia Vista Beach Stays in Bahia Vista Beach.

“Just some touristy stuff,” Theo said. “But this might work.”

It was a slender sleeveless dress, ankle length, deep green in color splashed with large white flowers. The material was very lightweight but soft. It looked like something worn in Paroo, and she said so.

“Hawaiian,” he said.

Another nonsensical word.

“Flip-flops,” he said, dropping a pair of white sandals dotted with lots of tiny gold beads on the floor next to her feet. “Women wear them everywhere these days.”

Dress and shoes were chosen in the proper size. A colorful satchel with a shoulder strap was added, along with a soft, long-sleeved light-blue shirt—sweatshirt, Theo termed it—with Bahia Vista, Florida on the front and a matching pair of shorts. Jorie followed Theo to the front of the commissary and watched him hand greenish pieces of paper to a pale-skinned female with purple streaks in her short dark hair and a line of gold hoop earrings draped over the outside curve of her left ear.

“Wow, who does your hair?” the female asked her.

“She’s not from around here.” Theo draped one arm over Jorie’s shoulder. “Somewhere she can change into this dress?”

“You guys going to a beach party? Customer restrooms are in the back. Go down the vitamin aisle and you’ll see the door.”

“Thanks.” Theo nudged Jorie forward. “Merry Christmas.”

Jorie felt silly changing her clothes, but she understood. In many civilizations, mode of dress was indicative of stature. Theo was taking her to see cherished elder family. When in Vekris…

She put her tracker clothes, socks, and boots into the plastic bag provided by the commissary and her scanner inside the satchel. She took a moment to scrub freshwater—so delightfully plentiful here—over her face and run wet fingers through her hair. Then she pulled the dress over her head. It was rather nice, narrow at the waist and flaring slightly over her hips. Slit up both sides. Good. If she had to run or kick out in battle, she could do so. She slipped her feet into the sandals—definitely not battleworthy.

Then she marched out of the small room.

Theo was leaning against the wall. His eyes widened. For reasons she couldn’t quite explain, she blushed.

Theo stared at her as if she were the last morsel of peanut butter in the universe and he was starving.

“Hot damn.”

Hot? She did feel a little warm.

He slipped his hand into hers. “C’mon. Aunt Tootie can’t wait to meet you.”

“So nice to see you got dressed up, Theophilus,” Aunt Tootie said in mock sternness as Theo opened the back door and stepped into her kitchen. Savory, mouthwatering aromas of meat juices and the yeasty tang of baking assaulted him immediately.

This was the house that he’d always thought of as home—a rambling pale-yellow stucco Florida ranch with the ubiquitous barrel-tile roof, on a corner lot filled with scrub palm, orange, and grapefruit trees.

The house was within a few blocks of the bayou—a site of much boyhood mischief—but it was Aunt Tootie’s kitchen that held the most memories.

He swept the small, silver-haired woman into his arms, chuckling. Tootie was laughing too. She’d been a cop’s wife since she was twenty years old and was well used to her husband appearing in all manner of dress when he was working, and she believed Theo—in jeans and a black silk camp shirt that covered his gun on his hip—was working today.

Jorie’s outfit, however, was another matter. The shorts and long sweater would have been an immediate negative in Tootie’s eyes.

He kissed her cheek. “Kala Christouyenna,” he told her, wishing her a Merry Christmas.

Tootie stood on tiptoes to frame his face with her hands and kissed him soundly on both cheeks. “Kala Christouyenna! S’agapo.”

Theo watched dark-brown eyes twinkle. “Love you too. Now…” And he turned her slightly. Here it comes. Tootie had hated Camille on sight. “Titania Petrakos, this is Jorie Mikkalah.”

“Jorie.” Tootie extended her hand, her face and tone completely unreadable. She would have made an excellent detective. “How nice to meet you. Welcome to our home.” Jorie took her hand. “Thank you. Theo said”—she glanced up at him, and he saw an unexpected sadness in her eyes—“this is a family time for you. I’m honored that you permit me to share it.” The first flicker of emotion crossed Tootie’s round face. A softening? Theo wasn’t sure. “It must be difficult for you to be away from your family. Theo said you’re from—”

“Up north,” Theo put in with a wave of one hand, delineating some distant place. Real distant. “Way up north.”

Tootie patted Jorie’s hand. “You’ll get to experience your first Greek Christmas, then.” Thank God it was a Greek Christmas. Had it been one with a turkey and green beans on the table, there would have been a lot more explaining to do when Jorie didn’t know what those dishes were.

But hungry people eat instead of talk. Theo and Jorie ate, and ate well. Jorie’s fondness for peanut butter quickly extended to his aunt’s cooking, and the obvious delight on her face as she tasted each offered dish and treasured each morsel gave a whole new meaning to the word savoring.

Still, Theo could tell she was nervous. The small macramé tote bag with her scanner and G-1 was never out of her reach, and several times he saw her touch it, as if for reassurance. And he suspected her trips to the bathroom were more to check her scanner than to powder her nose.

At the end of the meal, Theo helped Tootie and Jorie clear the table and put back the traditional wooden bowl of water with the basil-wrapped cross—a Greek tradition to keep the evil Kalikantzri at bay. He hadn’t seen a zombie since this morning. Must be working.

Then he left the two women discussing Sophie Goldstein’s honey puffs and headed for the living room.

He was a bit concerned leaving Jorie with his aunt, but not overmuch. Jorie’s mastery of English was—except for her accent, which was something of a cross between French and British—damned near perfect now.

Besides, if she blew it, it didn’t matter. He hadn’t been so insistent on seeing his aunt and uncle only because it was Christmas. He was going to tell Stavros the truth.

In case he was killed. He hadn’t ruled out the possibility, because he knew Jorie was bound to try some wild scheme. And he knew he’d be there, right beside her.

Theo settled on the blue-and-yellow tropical-print couch in front of the television—a nice wide-screen plasma. Couple years old but still had a good picture. A basketball game was on. He watched disinterestedly for a few minutes while Uncle Stavros brought back his second plate of syrup-covered melomakarana.

Stavros Petrakos—a bear of a man with a full head of thick gray-streaked dark hair and eyebrows to match—sat down with a grunt. “Want one?”

“No room.” Theo waved one hand. “Well, okay. One more.”

Stavros snorted. “Cops and doughnuts.”

“Pot calling the kettle…”

“How’s things on the job?”

“Job’s good.” It was. Theo couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do more than being a cop. “Got some budgetary wranglings coming up, but they’ve already approved the new MDTs.”

“How did we ever do the job without computers in the cars? Ha!” Stavros licked his fingers. “Pretty gal you got there. How old is she?”

Theo knew the answer to that one now. “Thirty-nine.”

“Doesn’t look a day over thirty— Skata! You see that foul?” His uncle pointed to the television. “Illegal elbow if I ever saw one.” He paused. “She divorced?”

Theo was ready with the recitation. “Never been married, though she was engaged once. Broke it off because the guy cheated on her. No kids. Has a lot of responsibility in her job—she’s fairly high up the food chain. Well liked, well respected. Real team leader, you know? And, oh, she was in the marines.” A melomakarana stopped in midair. “Marines?”

“Flew combat.”

“For Canada?”

“Multinational force, actually.”

“You’re pulling your old uncle’s leg, right?”

“Nope.” And it’s going to get worse. “Remember that UFO sighting out over the Gulf when I was a kid? I was out with you and Dad night-fishing on the Tsavaris’s boat?” Stavros shot him a narrow-eyed glance, but nodded.

“You told me later you’d seen others but said the stories would have to wait until I was older. Well, I’m older.” Like thirty years older. He wondered now—given his longtime dedication to sci-fi and things Star Trek–ish—why he’d never asked his uncle for the rest of the stories before.

Stavros was silent for a moment, chewing his melomakarana and darting glances between Theo and the game on television. Then: “This is because your gal’s a pilot, right? They see those things all the time. She saw one of those UFOs and no one believed her.”

“No.” Theo waited until Stavros swallowed the piece of cookie. “She is one of those UFOs.”

“Theophilus, you’re talking nonsense.”

Theo rubbed one hand through his hair. “This is not going to make sense. But I want you to know what’s going on, because I want you to understand if something…happens.”

“Something—look, the job’s stressful. No one knows that more than me. I did thirty years on the streets.

But they have people who can help you.” Stavros laid his hand on Theo’s arm. “Counselors and such.” Theo ignored him. “Jorie’s part of a group called the Guardian Force. They wouldn’t have bothered with our planet except that these monster guard-dog things they created—they call them zombies—ended up here. Looks like another nasty outer-space group, the Tresh, are messing with these zombies’

programming. But, unfortunately, these Tresh attacked Jorie’s ship, and now it’s just her and me and Zeke and maybe a few others to stop the bad guys.”

He glanced at Stavros. His uncle was wiping one hand over his broad face. “I’ll get you all the help you need,” his uncle said. “If it takes every dime I have. It doesn’t matter. You know Tootie and I love you.”

“I love you too,” Theo said, leaning forward and pulling his cell phone from his back pocket. He flipped it open and hit a number on speed dial. “Yassou, amigo. Listen, Uncle Stavros is about to Baker-Act me.

Will you talk to him? Thanks.” He handed the cell phone to Stavros. “It’s Zeke.” His uncle took the cell phone gingerly, as if it might bite him. “Zeke? What kind of skata is my boy…Okay.” Silence. Longer silence. “What?” he bellowed. “Mou espasas ta arheedia!” Theo knew from experience that when he heard Stavros accuse someone of busting his balls, Stavros was not quite convinced but getting close.

Evidently, so did Tootie. “Stavros! Watch your language, please!” came from the kitchen.

Finally Stavros nodded, wished Zeke and Suzanne a Merry Christmas, and handed the phone back to Theo. “Tis Panagias ta matia!”

Now it was the Virgin Mary’s eyes being invoked. “Yeah, I know,” Theo said.

“If you’re playing a game on the old man—”

“I’m not. We’re not.” He filled his uncle in on the rest of the details, including the problem with Jorie’s lieutenant and the unknown status of the rest of her team and her ship. He could tell some of it simply didn’t register with the old man. He’d seen too many Signal 20s in his day. But there had been those UFO sightings he’d been tight-lipped about for decades. Theo asked about them again now.

Stavros shook his head. “The one with your father and you wasn’t the first, not by any means. But I’d stopped talking to anyone about them by that point. No one believes you, and you get a reputation—I had Tootie to think about. And you.”

“You ever get taken on board, like I was?”

“Skata, it was enough just seeing these things zipping around the sky at night. If one grabbed me, I’d probably start shooting.”

“That was my initial reaction too. But then you start thinking about where you are and who could get hurt, all the while telling yourself this is not really happening.”

“But it did.” His uncle studied him. He wasn’t one hundred percent convinced. But Theo was family.

“What do you need me to do?” Stavros asked.

Stavros Petrakos had been one damned fine shot in his day, but he was seventy-eight now. A robust seventy-eight who mowed his own lawn and trimmed his own fruit trees, but seventy-eight. “We’re putting a task force together. But this is strictly under the radar. If anything should…happen, what the news media gets and what actually went down might be two different things. I just wanted you to know the truth.”

Stavros’s gaze didn’t waver. “I still hope this is some kind of a joke.”

“Wish it was too.”

“When?”

“By New Year’s, I’m thinking.”

Stavros nodded. “The chief knows?”

“I’m trying to keep the brass and the news reporters out of it right now. I don’t think they’ll be able to move quickly enough. And I don’t want to make a media spectacle out of Jorie.”

“Poor kid. She’s basically all alone in this.”

Theo patted his uncle on the shoulder, then stood. “She’s not alone. She has me.” He wandered back into the kitchen, which was empty, then, hearing a familiar tinkling sound, followed that to the spare bedroom in the back of the house, where his aunt kept her music-box collection. A thoroughly enthralled Jorie was holding a miniature palm tree in her hand as it played a tinny rendition of the Beach Boys’ tune “Kokomo.”

Yeah, that’s what he needed to do. Run away with her to the Keys and a little place called Kokomo.

“Bliss!” she said when he stepped into the room.

He smiled. “Time to go.”

“So soon?” Tootie plucked a music box in the shape of two intertwined cats from one of the shelves that ringed the small room. “Jorie’s never seen these before. I guess there’s not a lot of use for them in those Eskimo villages.” She shook her head.

Theo took the palm tree from Jorie and put it back on the shelf where it belonged. He knew where each one belonged. He’d helped his uncle build the shelves as his aunt’s collection grew over the years. “You know I’m working, Thia. ”

“I know, I know. But if I didn’t make a fuss, I wouldn’t be a good aunt.” She shooed him and Jorie toward the living room, where Stavros was waiting. “Maybe around New Year’s or after, you’ll come for dinner, yes?”

His uncle’s face didn’t betray a thing. Man was a damned good cop.

“Sure.” He hugged his uncle, then his aunt.

“She’s a nice girl,” Tootie whispered in his ear.

He bussed her cheek. “Told you so.”

Stavros was holding Jorie’s hand and patting it. Tootie pulled her away and gave her a hug, then put a bag of leftovers in Jorie’s hand as they went through the kitchen. “Something to nibble on later,” Tootie said.

Nothing like homemade Greek cooking to fuel a fight against zombies.

The bright moonlight and the glow of the porch light bathed Theo’s back steps in a white glow. But Jorie let Theo handle the physical inspection of a structure he was more familiar with than she was. She studied her scanner. Residence shields were intact, with no attempted instrusions. Still, both she and Theo entered the back door with weapons out—and she kicked off her sandals as she came across the kitchen threshold. There was no way she could run in those things.

Only after they cleared the residence did Theo go back out into the warm night air to retrieve the bag with her clothes and Tootie’s offerings from the vehicle’s rear seat. Theo had a lovely family, Jorie realized as she leaned against the kitchen counter and slipped her sandals back on. It made her miss Galin all the more.

“Somebody left this on the back porch steps.” Theo came though the kitchen door, bags and Tootie’s containers bundled in his arms. And something else.

Jorie automatically reinstated the residence’s rear shields as she stepped toward him. He put the food containers on the small table, the clothing bag on a chair, and turned as she approached, a squat silver cylinder in his hand.

Jorie froze, her throat closing, a tremor shaking her body so severely she almost dropped her scanner.

“This was tucked to the side, I almost missed—Jorie?”

“Where did you get that?” Her voice was a hard rasp.

“This?” He angled the metal cuplike object away from him. “It was on the steps.” Jorie sucked in a harsh breath and inched back.

“Babe, what’s the matter? It’s just some kind of capped soup mug with a built-in spoon thing—”

“A feeder. It’s a feeder.” She could make out the markings engraved on its side now: Detention Compound 3 Ovzil. Her heart pounded and she felt light-headed. She let the scanner slide from her hand to the tabletop, then gripped the back of the closest chair.

“A feeder?”

Vekran, English words fled. She had to close her eyes for a moment and focus, seeking the explanation in Alarsh, then in Vekran.

Theo’s fingers curled around her arm. “Honey?”

The…thing was inches from her body, still in his hand. With a strangled cry she struck out at it, hard. It flew from his grasp and clattered to the floor, rolling back and forth a few times before it wobbled to a halt.

She watched in sick fascination. How many times had she thrown hers against the cell wall?

“Jorie!” Both hands were on her shoulders, and Theo’s breath was warm on her cheek.

“A feeder.” Her voice was rough. She raised her face to his. “It holds a liquid-and-powder protein mix.

You slide the spoon down to stir,” she pushed her thumb against nothing, yet she could feel the cold metal feeder in her hand, “then take a scoop and swivel it to eat. It’s the only thing you get to eat when you’re a prisoner of the Tresh.” Foul-tasting. Even now, she wanted to gag.

“Fuck.” Theo’s face blanked, then hardened. “Shields are up?”

She knew they were. But she grabbed the scanner off the table, because her whole world suddenly tilted to one side. She nodded.

“You’re sure that’s what it is?”

Her gaze found the feeder on the floor. “Don’t you see…?” But Theo couldn’t read Supi, the Tresh language. “Those letters. Detention Compound 3 Ovzil.” Ovzil Rok Por. A prison compound run by the Devastators at the base of the Ovzil Neha mountain range. The wind never stopped there. She could still hear its shrill moan through the ventilation system of her cell.

She shook her head, pushing away the memory. Theo released her shoulders and dug his weapon out from under his shirt.

Her own hand shook as she studied the scanner again. “No sign of any shield breach. They—someone left it here, knowing I’d find it.” That someone had to be Prow. And he knew what finding it would do to her.

“Was Compound Three where you were?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“With Prow?”

“Yes.”

“They’re playing mind games with you, Jorie. Psychological warfare. Because they can’t get to you directly.” He moved back to her, one large hand on her shoulder once again. Warm, reassuring, steady.

“Don’t let them win.”

Jorie slid the scanner back into the small bag and palmed her G-1, forcing down the bile that threatened to surge up her throat. Forcing the memories away. Forcing herself to remember she was a Guardian Force commander.