Loving a Stranger Read online

  Reeve stared at the pulses. A handful would easily fit in the pocket of the spare uniform he was wearing (Viceroy had been right, Harryx did keep a spare in his office) without even leaving a bulge. The remote was scarcely bigger, he could hide it in his other pocket—no problem.

  Reeve scooped out a bundle of the pulses and examined them critically. For all of their megalomaniac, misogynistic ways the Hascions had good tech. If he was correct about the little devices, setting one off near any kind of computer equipment would fry it like a jarva egg in a hot-wave skillet. It would scramble the data and ruin any delicate tech too—just like a solar flare from space would.

  In fact, he might even be able to blame the resulting chaos on a solar flare and get away clean. If he could take Harryx’s body with him when he went back to the Mother Ship, he could be certain the bastard wouldn’t wake up and try to come after Nallah while collected his own body and went back to Hascion Five to get her.

  If she’ll even come with you, whispered a little voice in his head but Reeve pushed it away as he methodically pressed the red switches on the tiny devices, arming each one. He would make her understand, he told himself. He would prove to her that he loved her and beg her to come with him. He would—

  “Parokk, where are you? We’re about to enter the lab,” called a voice from the far end of the hall. “Hurry unless you want to be left out. I haven’t had time to add your retinal scan to the security clearance yet so you’ll need to come in while the door is open.”

  Shoving the armed electromagnetic pulses deep into his left pocket and the remote into his right, Reeve walked rapidly to the door and looked out to be certain no one saw him exit the armory. After he relocked the door, he called out, “Coming!” and made his way back to the Inner Circle conference room.

  It was time to do what he had come for.

  Chapter Twenty

  “So you see, this is where we keep all of Dr. VanProkk’s research.” The chief scientist, a young scientist named Dr. Delbokk patted the ancient comu-monitor with its cracked screen reverently as he gave them the tour of the lab. “Of course, we have it backed up on the main storage banks…” He nodded at the glowing bank of computers behind him which ran along one wall. “That goes without saying.”

  Considering they had developed wormhole tech, Reeve thought, the Hascions’ information and communications technology was fairly primitive. Still, that was fine with him—it meant the equipment was that much more vulnerable to sabotage.

  “Isn’t Dr. VanProkk the one who came up with the idea of Temporal /Spatial Displacement Avenues in the first place?” he asked the scientist, while unobtrusively placing one of the armed pulses right behind the old comu-monitor.

  “He was.” Dr. Delbokk nodded eagerly. “Without him, none of this would have been possible. Of course…” He gave Grand General Viceroy an uneasy look. “He was very adamant that his discovery should be used for exploration only, not conquest.”

  “Well, that’s why you leave the strategy to the professionals.” Viceroy laughed heartily. “You scientists just keep coming up with the concepts and the tech and leave the implementation to us.”

  The other males laughed as well and Reeve pretended to join in but inside he felt even more justified for what he was doing. Even the scientist who had invented their wormhole tech knew it was dangerous in the wrong hands! He was certain that if Dr. VanProkk was still alive, he would condone what Reeve was doing. What he was about to do, anyway…

  He had already placed dozens of the tiny pulses in unobtrusive hiding places as Dr. Delbokk led them around, giving them the tour of the lab. He had at least fourteen or fifteen saved back, however, for the moment when they saw the finished wormhole drive, which was supposedly housed somewhere in this lab. Once he placed those and pushed the remote control, all the Hascions’ hopes of going forth to despoil the universe would be fried along with their equipment. He hoped.

  “Well, gentlemen—are you ready to see the drive itself?” the young scientist asked, as though reading Reeve’s mind.

  “Yes—yes of course!” Viceroy was already rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Let’s see it, Doctor! Lead the way!”

  “Through here.” Dr. Delbokk led them through a thick metal door and into a small antechamber. “Now, gentlemen,” he said as they filed in. “You might want to put on some protective glasses before we proceed. Otherwise the drive may injure your vision.”

  He gestured to a table where rows of protective glasses with dark lenses were lying. Reeve picked up a pair and put them on like everyone else. He might not care if he made Harryx Parokk go blind from staring at the wormhole drive but it would look odd not to wear the glasses.

  “All right—if everyone is protected, let’s go in.” Dr. Delbokk gestured them through yet another thick metal door and into a room the size of a sports stadium back on Earth. Hanging in the middle of the room and pulsing with a soft green light was what looked like a young star.

  It was only about the size of a soccer ball from Earth, Reeve thought, but it gave off an intense heat and light. Despite the heat shields around the perimeter of the glowing green ball, he could feel his host’s body breaking into a drenching sweat.

  “Behold—the Temporal/Spatial Displacement Device!” Grand General Viceroy exclaimed, as though he had built the damn thing himself. “With it we can rip holes in the Space/Time Continuum and place our ships anywhere in the known universe. Our conquest has begun!”

  “Amazing,” several of the Inner Circle murmured.

  Reeve made the correct noises of awe himself as he walked around the perimeter of the vast floor, pretending he was examining the wormhole drive from every angle. In actuality, he was placing his remaining handful of pulses at intervals all around the small, green star. By the time he got back to the place where he had started, he had only the remote left, still hidden snugly in his right hand pocket.

  The question was now, when should he trigger the pulses? Ideally it would be good to wait until he was far from the offices of the Inner Circle but he didn’t know the range of the remote he held. Looking at the thick metal doors, he wondered about the shielding in the room. Possibly the remote wouldn’t even work once he left the wormhole lab. Reluctantly, he decided he’d better do it now and then try to get out in the ensuing confusion. He would have to trust to his luck that it would work.

  Reeve felt pretty good about that. He’d been lucky so far—Goddess-damned lucky in every respect. Though he’d been forced to spend the night with Harryx’s odious boss and the rest of the Inner Circle, at least coming in with Viceroy meant he hadn’t had to get a retinal scan to enter the building. Likewise, he had been able to go into the lab without being scanned, so Harryx Parokk was still slumbering in the back of his mind, oblivious to the events going on around him.

  If his luck would hold just a little bit longer, Reeve reflected, he could fry the Hascions’ tech and get his host body out to the docking bay around the side of the Inner Circle headquarters. Once he grabbed a ship and was up and away from the planet, he could fly back to his own body leaving Harryx’s comatose body stranded in space.

  Normally, he would have felt bad about leaving a host to die like that but after seeing what the bastard had put Nallah through, Reeve thought he was letting Harryx off lightly. If anyone deserved a slow death of comatose starvation and dehydration, it was the abusive asshole whose body he was currently inhabiting.

  After retrieving his own body he could get in his own ship and come back to Hascion Five to sweep Nallah off her feet while everything was still in confusion. As long as she would go with him, that was. But Reeve wouldn’t allow himself to consider any other possibility. He would convince her to come, he told himself. He had to.

  He straightened his shoulders. All right—he had a plan in place: fry the tech, make an escape, come back for Nallah. And he needed to get moving. Some of the members of the Inner Circle were tugging at their collars and wiping sweat from their brows. It was cl
ear they were going to want to go back into the much cooler part of the lab very soon.

  “Well,” Grand General Viceroy remarked, in a manner of speaker winding up his remarks. “Now that we have seen the Temporal/Spatial Displacement Device and have been assured that it works, I really think—”

  Taking a deep breath, Reeve clutched the remote in his pocket and mashed his thumb down on the button, activating all the electro-pulses he’d positioned around the lab at once.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  All the lights went out at the same time. The vast room was plunged into darkness lit only by the greenish glow of the tiny, wormhole generating star.

  Though the wormhole generator was still bright, the dark glasses cut down its glare, making the room seem almost black—at least Reeve thought so.

  “What—what’s going on?” a voice that sounded like Grand General Viceroy exclaimed.

  “I don’t know.” This sounded like Dr. Delbokk, whose high, reedy voice was stunned and worried. “It seems like we’ve lost power everywhere. Ow—hey, watch out!”

  There was a scuffling sound and then someone stumbled against Reeve, knocking his dark glasses to the ground. He moved to find them, only to hear a crunch under his feet.

  Great, just fucking great! He had knocked out the Hascions’ computers and equipment but not the most important thing—the wormhole generator itself. They were still going to be able to invade their neighboring planet and the rest of the universe if it remained active.

  Angrily, he mashed the remote button in his pocket again. Come on…come on… Everything in this room ought to be vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses, including the wormhole generator! But still, nothing happened.

  “Well,” he heard Grand General Viceroy remark. “At least the Temporal/Spatial Displacement Device is still functional.”

  “It sure as hell is.” Reeve stared at the glowing ball, unable to keep the disgust out of his voice.

  Just as the words left his lips, the wormhole generator dimmed for a moment, then pulsed with brilliance—a glaring, blinding flash that blinded him for a moment and made all the males around him cry out and throw their arms over their eyes.

  Then the light died as suddenly as it had come, leaving the room in pitch blackness this time. The wormhole generator was dead.

  Reeve would have been ecstatic but he had a new problem to worry about. The blinding pulse of light had penetrated all the way to the back of his host’s brain, rousing its sleeping occupant.

  Arch-General Harryx Parokk was awake… and he was angry.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “Where the hell am I? What’s going on? Where is this? Why is it so dark in here?”

  The questions came thick and fast and it was all Reeve could do to keep them from coming out of his host’s mouth.

  “It’s all right,” he sent, trying to soothe the other male. “This is all just a bad dream. Better go back to sleep.”

  “Back to sleep?” Harryx’s mental voice still sounded slightly dazed.

  “Yes, sleep…just sleep,” Reeve sent, hoping desperately it would work.

  Then someone stepped on his foot and someone else elbowed him in the ribs.

  “Where’s the damn door?” bellowed Grand General Viceroy’s voice. “And what the hell just happened? What’s wrong with the Temporal/Spatial Displacement Device?”

  “I assure you Grand General, I’m going to find out,” Dr. Delbokk’s voice replied.

  The shouts of confusion and the jostling in the dark had a bad effect on Reeve’s host.

  “Hey, what is this?” He was beginning to sound suspicious. “This is no dream! Who are you and what are you doing in my head?”

  Reeve didn’t waste time answering or trying to soothe his host back to sleep again. It was useless—Harryx was awake and he was going to stay that way.

  Also, from the feel of him, he was one of the strongest hosts Reeve had ever snatched. Every minute from now on was going to be a struggle and he was already weak from being out of his own body for so long. He needed to conserve his energy and use it where it counted—getting Harryx’s body out of the Inner Circle offices and into a ship headed out of Hascion Five’s orbit.

  Marshaling his strength, he made his host’s body shove brutally through the milling crowd, not caring who he had to elbow or stomp on to get free. If he could just get in a shuttle and head for the Mother Ship before Harryx kicked him out…He needed to get his host somewhere secure—like locked up in the brig of the Mother Ship. He couldn’t risk him getting loose and going back to Nallah.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Harryx demanded. His mental voice sounded stronger now—filled with fury. “Get out of me—leave me the hell alone.”

  Reeve’s seeking fingers found the door handle and he pulled, finding himself once more in the small anteroom. He pushed through another door and was back in the lab proper. He was glad to find it was pitch black too—not a single computer beeped or flashed—clearly the pulses had fried everything, just as he had planned. The only thing he could see was the afterimage of the huge, bright pulse of light the wormhole generator had emitted before it died, still blinking in the back of his eyelids.

  If it wasn’t for Nallah, he would have considered his mission complete. The damage was done and it was permanent. Now was the time to leave Harryx and fly back to his own body on the Mother Ship. But if he left now and his host went back to Nallah…

  “What about Nallah? What the fuck have you been doing to my wife?”

  Apparently his host had heard him—Harryx’s voice in his head was an angry roar. To Reeve’s horror, the other male suddenly began pulling up memories of the past several days.

  “No…stop, you bastard!” he protested.

  But his protracted absence from his own body had left him too weak to hold control of his host’s body and mind at the same time, and Harryx was growing stronger all the time. Reeve watched helplessly as scenes of his time with Nallah flashed in rapid succession inside his host’s head.

  Holding her hand…protecting her from the Punishment Gang—which was no more than a rape gang in Reeve’s estimation…walking home with her…letting her slap him when she was upset…

  “You did what? You allowed my wife to strike me?” Harryx’s rage was a towering inferno, as baking hot as the wormhole generator had been before Reeve had put it out permanently.

  “How dare you allow a woman to strike me? And what else did you do?”

  “Stop it! Those memories aren’t for you! Leave them alone!”

  But Reeve was helpless to stop the other male from plundering his recent past. Harryx dug angrily into the last few days, watching as Reeve taught Nallah to touch herself…as he held her close and kissed her…went down on her and tasted her sweet pussy…

  At this the rage flared even higher.

  “How dare you? You let me lower myself—submit myself to a female!”

  “It’s called making love, you son-of-a-bitch,” Reeve snarled back. “As opposed to holding her down and raping her, which was all you ever did. I should have killed your body when I had the chance!”

  “Oh, I see…” Harryx’s rage had suddenly turned cold, a freezing hatred so deep it was bottomless. “I see, you care for her. Some might even say you love my Nallah.”

  “She’s not your Nallah so keep her name out of your mouth you raping bastard,” Reeve growled. “She’s sweet and kind and innocent and beautiful and you don’t fucking deserve her!”

  “Nevertheless, she is mine.” Cold amusement was growing in Harryx’s mental tone. “Though it appears she has betrayed me with you.”

  “She thought I was you,” Reeve protested. He was beginning to get a bad feeling about this—a very bad feeling. “She never would have done anything if she’d thought I was another man.”

  “Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it,” Harryx informed him coolly. “It seems to me my little wife has some sins to atone for. And it appears that the best way to pun
ish you for your interference in my life is to punish her—thoroughly.”

  “Don’t you touch her, you son of a bitch!” Reeve struggled with his host but it was no use—Harryx was too strong.

  Suddenly he knew what he had to do—he still had control of the body—just barely. He had to alert everyone to what had just happened—had to make Harryx appear to confess to the act of sabotage and espionage he had just committed. That way maybe he would be detained and unable to reach Nallah. He even had the remote still in his pocket to use to prove Harryx’s guilt.

  “Grand General Viceroy!” he shouted at the top of Harryx’s voice. “I have something to say—a confession to make!”

  “Oh no you don’t!” he heard Harryx snarl and then his host was fighting him tooth and nail, doing his best to kick Reeve out of the body they were sharing.

  Grimly, Reeve hung on.

  “Grand General!” he shouted again. “I want to tell you—”

  One of Harryx’s hands came up and clutched at his throat, cutting off his voice.

  Shit! He had lost control of the left side of the body, Reeve realized. He was like a man trying to drive a speeding shuttle with one hand on the steering yoke while half his body hung out the window. At any minute he might lose his grip and go tumbling away, back to where he had come from.

  “Grand…General…” he tried to say again but the words came out in a hoarse, choking cough that was nearly unintelligible as Harryx’s left hand tightened further on his throat. To his horror, Reeve realized that the other male was quite willing to choke himself to death if he had to. He didn’t mind dying as long as he thought he was going to take Reeve with him.

  Which was a distinct possibility. If he died in his host’s body, Reeve knew his spirit would be snuffed out—unable to get back to his own body back aboard the Mother Ship. Harryx’s threat was not an idle one. Still, he was unwilling to give up.