Chapter Three

Anya’s alarm was sounding, but she was so deeply wrapped up in the alarm racing through her body that moments passed before she realized what the ungodly racket was that was making her skull pound and setting her teeth on edge.

“Off!” she snapped as the realization sank in and dropped heavily back onto her pillow as the sound vanished and blessed silence returned except for her labored breathing.

She felt as if she’d woken from a nightmare, distressed. Closing her eyes, she struggled to grasp the threads of her dream that were rapidly vanishing from her mind. She frowned when the memories eluded her except for thin wisps that she could scarcely put together.

Giving up finally, she pushed herself upright again and thrust the covers away. The light brush of her hands over her body sent nearly agonizing sensations through her and gave her pause. She felt the dampness of her sex then and was even more puzzled.

She rarely had what most people described as wet dreams, but when she did she certainly didn’t awaken with the sense that it was a nightmare she’d had.

Vaguely, she remembered something about an alien world, but she couldn’t produce the images, only the sense that she’d dreamed of an alien world.

That wasn’t that hard to figure out. She’d had nothing on her mind when she’d retired beyond the sense of frustration she felt about being forbidden to examine the alien artifact they’d found.

She was the chief science officer. Mostly her duties were as medic to the crew members because there was little call for a science officer. But that didn’t change the fact that she was qualified to serve in that capacity and required to when and if the need arose.

When she’d performed her morning ritual and changed out of her nightwear and into a fresh uniform, she left her quarters and headed toward the mess hall.

She was sore from the unaccustomed exercise the day before, not only from the running and tugging at Melanie and the others, but from the work that had had to be done to seal the breach in the hull before they could pressurize the bay once more and get inside the station.

The day crew was in the mess hall when she arrived. Except for the occasional scrape of fork or spoon to plate and the faint chink of crockery against the tables, the room was silent. No one, it seemed, was much in the mood for talk. In fact, a survey of the room’s occupants produced the information that everyone, without exception, looked to be suffering from a hangover. Russo and Mitchner sat at a table alone, glaring at their plates as if the sight of the food was repulsive, their steaming coffee mugs clutched in their hands as if to ward off any attempts to snatch them away.

Wondering if it was merely their hangovers, or if they’d been apprised of the fact that they’d been left behind when everyone else abandoned ship, she moved to the food unit and, as was her habit, carefully selected a balanced breakfast even though she felt vaguely nauseous at the prospect of actually eating it.

Melanie was sitting at a table alone and after she’d collected eating utensils, Anya joined her.

She didn’t feel much like talking and she could see from the vague, glazed look in Melanie’s eyes that she was of a similar bent, but, mentally shrugging, she took the plunge anyway. “How are you feeling?”

Melanie lifted her head and stared at her blankly for several moments. Finally, she blinked as if coming out of a trance. Slowly, color seeped into her cheeks. A shiver skated down her spine. “Better than I should be, I expect.”

Resolutely ignoring her disinclination to eat, Anya nibbled half heartedly at her food. “I could give you something to help with the hangover if you want to come down to the med lab when we’re done here.”

Melanie shrugged. “I had the wildest dream last night,” she finally said, leaning closer and speaking in a low voice.

Anya felt a jolt run through her. “Did you?” she prompted.

Melanie nodded, but then frowned. “Not that I can remember a lot of it.”

Anya stirred the food on her plate. “What do you remember?”

Melanie dragged in a deep breath and let out a sigh. “There was this absolutely gorgeous man. And, this is weird, he was blond. I remember that.”

Anya failed to grasp the logic of the ‘weird’ part, but she felt her stomach tighten as Melanie’s word’s instantly stirred her own memories and an image appeared before her mind’s eye. “What was weird about him being blond?”

Melanie gave her a look. “You know I go for dark men,” she said irritably. “I just can’t figure out why I’d have a wet dream about a blond god when I don’t usually find fair men attractive.”

Anya choked on the sip of coffee she’d just taken, nearly snorting the brew through her nostrils. Her eyes watered. Her nose stung. Grabbing her napkin, she covered her mouth and nose and coughed until she’d managed to bring up the liquid she’d inhaled.

“You ok?” Melanie asked sympathetically.

Not really. She managed a thin smile, though. “It just went down the wrong way,” she said a little hoarsely. Frowning, she took a careful sip and swallowed with equal care. “So … you dreamed this hunky blond guy made love to you? Maybe you were thinking about somebody you’ve known?”

Melanie shook her head. “That’s what’s weird. Somehow, I knew he wasn’t a man at all, not human anyway—but, god!—the guy was built like a dream. Fucked me six ways from Sunday and I swear I’ve never experienced anything like it! It was better than the real thing, better than anything I’ve ever experienced anyway. It was like he … he controlled the pleasure centers of my brain.”

The jealousy that coiled in Anya’s belly was both surprising and sickening. “You … he … y’all did it?”

Melanie snickered and covered her mouth. “Your accent’s slipping. You ok? Seriously, you haven’t gone all southern gal in a while. I thought you’d ditched the accent for good.”

Anya sent her friend a narrow eyed glare. “What’s wrong with my accent?” she asked stiffly.

Melanie held up her hands. “Don’t be mad. I always liked it. You were the one that decided you needed to ditch it because nobody took you seriously.”

Correction, everyone tended to equate the slow drawl with stupidity and ignorance regardless of the honors she’d accrued. Realizing Melanie had a point, Anya struggled to tamp her anger, but it dawned on her fairly quickly that she wasn’t really angry about the remark about her accent. The ‘slip’ into her normal speech patterns was evidence of her distress not the heart of it. Unaccustomed as she was to feeling jealousy at all, she still recognized it. It didn’t matter that it was crazy to feel it. The emotion was still coiled like a poison serpent in her belly.

She tried to shrug it off, but finally excused herself and left the mess hall. There was little to do in the infirmary to distract her. More than half expecting crew members to pop in and ask for something to soothe their hangovers, she was surprised when they didn’t and disturbed for no reason that she could completely fathom. It occurred to her after a while that it bothered her because it didn’t seem typical of the behavior she’d come to expect of the crew. Even Melanie hadn’t come to request a painkiller and although she wouldn’t have categorized any of the crew members as drug heads, they were certainly accustomed to popping pills for whatever ailed them.

Truthfully, that was about the only purpose she served. It was required that anyone going into space be in peak physical condition. Except for an occasional accident or illness, she had more time on her hands than she knew what to do with and no one was the least shy about dropping by to ask for something to ease aches and pains, something to help them sleep, help them wake up, soothe their nerves, pep up their sex lives.

Why hadn’t anyone at all come to the infirmary when she knew at least a few had to be suffering the aftereffects of the booze they’d had the afternoon before?

That wasn’t the only thing puzzling or disturbing her, however. Fending it off as long as she could, her mind eventually returned to the discussion she’d had with Mel at breakfast. It wasn’t just bizarre that they’d had the same dream, or two damned similar dreams, it was scary.

It was almost as scary that she felt like Melanie had trespassed.

The thought flickered through her mind that nothing had changed except the acquisition of the alien artifact, but it seemed too farfetched to associate the dream, and the variation in behavior she’d felt, and sensed in the others, to what appeared to be nothing more than a stone.

She resolved, though, to tamp her strange sense of possessiveness and try to delve Melanie’s mind a little more closely.

Melanie looked at her a little warily when she joined her for lunch. “Still mad?”

Anya managed a strained smile. “I wasn’t really mad to start with.”

Mel gave her a look. “You could’ve fooled me,” she murmured, then looked Anya straight in the eyes. “I was so unsettled I forgot to thank you for saving my ass yesterday.”

Anya reddened, but she felt pleasure lift her spirits slightly. “You’re welcome.”

Mel seemed to relax. “That’ll teach me to unwind with booze, right?”

Anya shrugged. “We’ve been away from home a long time. I guess we’re all long overdue for letting loose.”

“Very,” Mel agreed, “but I think I’ll just wait until I get home to try it again. I’ve just gotten so used to being on this chunk of metal, I’d forgotten how really dangerous it is out here.”

“I think we all have—or had. Yesterday was a real eye opener.” She shivered. “Do me a favor?”

“What?”

“If I ever volunteer to space walk again, knock me out. I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified in my life. I don’t know what possessed me even to suggest it.”

Melanie grinned at her. “And here I’d been admiring your balls, lady!”

“If I had any before they were about the size of peas by the time I got to the station.”

Melanie chuckled, but sobered almost at once. “Jokes aside, and I don’t know if everybody realized what you’d done, it took more than I have to offer yourself up as a sacrifice.”

Embarrassed, Anya felt her face heat up. “It was hardly that,” she said dryly.

“Not that you knew, and I know you took the risk to give the rest of us a better chance, even if nobody else realized it.”

Anya pushed her plate aside and clasped her hands in front of her on the table, staring at them meditively for several moments. “Tell me more about that dream,” she said finally.

Mel regarded her uneasily. “Are you going to get mad at me again?”

Anya managed a tight smile. “I’ll try not to.”

Frowning, Melanie seemed to be working to dredge up the memories. Her first words confirmed it. “Oddly enough, I don’t remember it as clearly as I did this morning. The thing that seems to stick in my mind most is pleasure and uneasiness—feelings, not too much I can visualize. I found myself in this alien landscape. I do remember that, and oddly enough Carol told me she had almost the exact same dream.”

Anya’s eyes widened in stunned surprise. Her heart lurched almost painfully. “She did?”

“Yeah, weird, huh?”

“I’d say unbelievable except for the fact that I’m pretty sure I had the dream, too.”

Mel looked as stunned as Anya. “What do you think it means?”

Anya shrugged. “Not portents,” she said dryly. “I think it’s that thing down in the bay.”

Melanie’s jaw sagged to half mast before a sound roughly reminiscent of a laugh erupted. “You can’t be …. You’re serious, aren’t you?”

Irritated more because Melanie had confirmed her suspicion that she was letting her imagination run away with her than because she felt her friend was ridiculing her suggestion, Anya felt her lips flatten into a thin line of irritation. “I’m open to your suggestions,” she said testily. “Why do you think at least three people had, from what we can tell, almost exactly the same dream?”

Except he hadn’t fucked her six ways from Sunday. He hadn’t done anything but kiss her!

Her body instantly stirred at the memory. Viciously, she tamped her wayward libido.

Mel shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d be more inclined to think it was something we ate, though,” she responded cattily. “You’re not going to report something like that, I hope? They’ll think you’ve got space dementia.”

“That was going to be my next guess,” Anya said with rising ire. Turning her head, she stared stonily at the far wall of the mess hall for several moments before it dawned on her that the conversations she sensed around her and Mel had a similar thread.

Instantly distracted, she focused her gaze from one table to the next and discovered there wasn’t a single agreeable conversation going on in the room. All the faces within her view wore scowls.

A puzzled frown drew her dark brows together. “Is it just me? Or does everyone seem particularly moody?”

Surprise flickered over Mel’s features. Turning, she surveyed the other crew members as Anya had. “I guess you figure this is because of the rock in the bay, too?”

“It isn’t a rock!” Anya snapped testily.

Looking first taken aback and then angry, Mel snarled back at her, “What is it with you, anyway? That time of the month?”

“Excuse me,” Anya said tightly, getting up abruptly and leaving the mess hall.

She slammed into Laine as she rounded a corner. They both fell back a step and glared at one another. “I’m surprised you’re not wearing a big cat-that-ate-the-canary grin,” he growled.

“What the hell are you talking about, asshole?” Anya demanded indignantly.

He blinked, but his scowl returned fairly quickly. “They gave you a go on examining your pet rock.”

A mixture of emotions roiled through Anya so rapidly she couldn’t identify the half of them. Finally, she pasted a feral grin on her lips. “Better?” she asked.

His lips pinched. “More like I’d expect out of you!” he retorted and turned on his heel, heading back toward the bridge. “Keep me in the loop!” he called over his shoulder.

Anya was still angry when she reached the med lab and she had no idea why. She paced for a time, irritated that the obelisk hadn’t already been delivered to her. She was on the point of striding to the communicator and demanding to know why the hell Laine had told her she was to be able to examine the alien artifact and he still hadn’t delivered it to her. What was she supposed to do? Go down to the bay and fetch it back by herself?

The unreasonableness of her attitude abruptly struck her forcefully, however.

Stopping with her finger suspended over the button, she drew her hand back. After a moment, she moved to the stool that sat in one corner and settled on it. Melanie was right, she thought irritably. She was behaving as if her hormones were in flux and she had no reason to be in that state. It wasn’t even nearly time for her courses, because she had had her period only the week before.

She was tired, but she didn’t think that could explain her agitation and irritability, unnerved by their near brush with disaster the day before—unnerved by the alien artifact for that matter, but even so it just wasn’t like her to be so mercurial. She was usually so cool headed, so laid back.

What had gotten in to her?

She’d snapped at Melanie for nothing.

She’d been nasty to Laine when she should have been ecstatic about his news.

Closing her eyes, she began to work on relaxing the tension in her body, breathing slowly and deeply, focusing her mind on each part of her body and consciously forcing the tension from it.

It would have been better if she could have lain down, but she found it worked after a fashion anyway. She felt far more like herself when she’d finished, less like she would explode.

She heard the men quarreling before they reached the lab with the object. Opening her door, she watched them as they maneuvered the eerie black obelisk down the corridor.

It had never seemed narrow to her before, but the artifact made it so, dwarfed the men struggling with it. She stepped back out of the way as they reached the med lab, glancing around belatedly to see where she wanted them to put it. The examination table could be moved. The scanner couldn’t.

Moving to the table she tried to shove it out of the way and discovered she couldn’t. When she knelt to examine the bottom, she saw why. It was bolted to the floor. Embarrassed, wondering why she hadn’t realized immediately that it would be, she came erect again as the men began struggling to maneuver the flat cart carrying the thing through the door. They fought it for several moments before it finally dawned on them the obelisk was too wide for the door.

Settling to measuring it, Vance finally stood. “We’ll have to lift the heavy son-of-a-bitch and turn it on its side!” he growled.

“I need it here so I can run a scan on it, but the table’s bolted to the floor.”

She saw that he was sweating with effort as he stared at her, examined the table, and then stared at her again. “We’ll put it on the table,” he responded tersely.

She was about to tell him that wouldn’t do at all because then she wouldn’t have an examination table for potential patients besides the fact that she’d need a ladder to get high enough to look down at the top. She thought better of it after she’d examined the men’s faces. “Sure.”

It took another fifteen minutes for them to turn the thing on its side and manhandle it through the door that wasn’t wide enough for both them and the object. When they’d left again, she stood staring thoughtfully at the door, wondering if Melanie had been closer to right than she was. Was it possible they were all beginning to suffer from dementia? And if so, what had triggered it?

More importantly, she supposed, did she have enough medication on hand to deal with the problem?

Turning finally, she surveyed the black obelisk, feeling a shiver work its way down her spine. It looked more like a coffin than ever and she wondered if there was any possibility that that was what it was—that whatever was inside it had been ‘buried’ in space and then had dropped in their laps.

That didn’t explain any of the strange things already associated with it, however. It had changed speed and trajectory. It had even managed to almost maneuver right into their landing bay without mishap—almost. Without guidance or propulsion, however—if it was a coffin it certainly wouldn’t have either—how had that happened?

Emptying her mind of suppositions with an effort, she bent to the task of extracting data. When she’d set the scanner to work, she went to her medical supply cabinet to examine it for any medicines that would be suitable for treatment of dementia if, in fact, that was what she was seeing. To her relief, she found a couple of medications she thought would help. There wasn’t a great deal of the medication generally prescribed for it, but she had several different types of sedatives, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics, enough, surely, to deal with the problem if there was one.

The big question was how was she going to administer the drugs if she found it necessary? Nobody had even been down to the infirmary for so much as an aspirin.

Locking the cabinet again, she turned to watch the progress of the scanner while she pondered the problem.

The scanner had covered maybe half the obelisk when the lights winked out. She scarcely had time for an indrawn gasp of surprise when they came on again, but then irritation surfaced as the scanner automatically reset itself.

“Damn it!”

Sighing, she stood with her arms crossed, tapping her foot as the scan began again. The scanner nearly made it all the way to the end of the thing before the lights winked off again.

“Shit! Damn it! Damn it! What the hell’s going on!” she exclaimed, stalking toward the door as the backup lights kicked in. The door opened sluggishly. As she stepped into the corridor, she saw Laine stalking toward her, his face eloquent of frustration to match hers.

“What’s up with the lights?”

He stopped and looked at her. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.” Glancing past her shoulder, he stared at the obelisk for a moment and finally stepped inside. “What have you found out so far?”

Anya frowned at him. “Nothing. Not a damn thing! I haven’t managed to get a full scan yet. I get part way through and the lights flicker and the scanner resets. What’s wrong with the power?”

He shook his head. “We’re leaking.”

“What?” Anya demanded, completely mystified.

He glanced at her absently. “Power drain. It seemed localized in the bay. I figured it was from the damage yesterday, but we finally got everything working ok down there. Now we’re having a problem on this level.”

Uneasiness wafted through Anya. “How bad?”

“Bad enough,” he said curtly.

“Life threatening?”

“Hopefully we’ll track it down before that becomes a concern.”

“Hopefully?”

He glared at her. “What do you want me to tell you, Rambo? We don’t know what’s causing it and until we do I can’t say whether or not we can fix it. You think it could be the scanner?”

“I don’t see how,” Anya responded, lifting her head to stare at the equipment. “It was working fine before.”

“You’ve used it?”

“I used it on everyone when I did a six month check up, remember?”

“You haven’t used it since then, though?”

She thought it over. “A couple of months back when Russo fell and we thought he’d broken his leg.”

He nodded. “I need to get the techs in here to check it anyway.”

Irritation surfaced, but Anya resolutely tamped it. It wasn’t like she was going to make any progress with the lights going off every few minutes. “Give me a minute to see if the scanner got anything at all. If it did, I’ll upload the data to my personal computer and look it over in my quarters.”

Curled up on her bunk in her quarters a few minutes later, Anya waited tensely for her computer to bring up the data the scanner had managed to record before it went down the second time. Disappointment filled her, however, when it finally did come up.

It looked corrupted. “Damn it!”

She studied it anyway, trying to see if she could glean any data from among the garbage. She had already deleted a full page before it dawned on her that it wasn’t garbage. It was data. It was their onboard computer trying to decipher information it found completely indecipherable. The material the artifact had been fashioned from didn’t conform to any known materials, manmade or natural. It contained elements of a few recognizable minerals, however.

Feeling a headache coming on after a while, she decided to close her eyes for a few minutes and try to will the tension away.