Not something that felt safe, that was for sure.
Why did her heart hammer in her chest when she saw him? Why did her face feel hot, and her hands feel cold?
She needed to figure this out before they came face-to-face again. Before they had to leave for their next mission.
She’d dreamt about him last night. She’d been in the hangar bay waiting for him, just like so many times before. The door had slid back and he’d stepped through it. Not the robot. The man.
Their eyes—his human eye—had found her and she’d rocked back on her heels. There’d been a question in there, and he’d held out his hand to her. She’d walked to him, surprised to find she could move. Surprised at how eager she’d been to take his outstretched hand.
His so very human hand had closed around hers and she’d been flooded with a feeling that felt so right that tears had pricked her dream eyes.
She’d woken up shaken and disoriented to find herself alone. She’d flexed the hand he’d held, still feeling the tingle in her skin from the dream contact.
She had thrown back her coverings and gone to get water to drink. It had helped. A little. She’d leaned her head against the cold wall, trying to regain her composure.
Riina was a scientist and she’d always prided herself on her command of her emotions—both before their long sleep and now in this unsettling future she’d landed in.
She liked Tim, the cyborg. Her mind and his had…meshed. They’d made a good team. He could both think logically and break things when things needed to be broken. A smile had flickered on her lips at this thought. She had been mildly infected with the way the people of the Earth Expedition talked.
She should have realized she might have caught other things from them. They were a people who were unabashed about who they were and what they felt a situation required. Their belief in themselves extended from breaking things to, well, romance.
She was sincerely happy for those of her kind who had found happiness with those from the Earth Expedition and others of the former cyborgs. She just didn’t know how to reconcile who she’d believed she was and this…surge of emotion that had been infiltrating her mind even before Tim made the decision to migrate from mostly robotic cyborg to mostly human cyborg.
And then there was the other factor.
Tim.
What did he think? What did he feel?
Just because she’d lost her mind, didn’t mean he had. Just because he met her halfway in her dreams didn’t mean he would when he was released from medical and cleared to return to duty.
Duty.
What did duty dictate for either of them?
She wasn’t new to fear. Fear had sent them into their long sleep. But this fear, which was obviously less life threatening, felt worse than that fear.
Why?
Tim lifted a towel to his glistening face and rubbed it, his body turning in her direction. She stepped back quickly, then slipped away, afraid of what she’d see in his eyes when he saw her.
And afraid of what she wouldn’t see.
“We have a problem,” Delilah “Doc” Clementyne avoided looking at General Halliwell as she began the process of delivering this new round of bad news. She couldn’t even play the good news, bad news card. So far, there was no good news card in her deck.
In the wall’s reflection, she saw him turn around. And she heard his sigh.
“What now?”
“Do you remember that geologist the Garradians borrowed?”
There was a short silence. He was pretending to think, but she knew he didn’t need to. He had every person’s name they’d loaned to the Garradians on mental speed dial.
“Dr. Walker.” Another pause. “Dr. Miles Walker. What did he do? Oh wait. Let me guess. He made first contact.”
“It was probably a given,” Doc said. It was an unexpected that she’d pretty much expected. So technically, not unexpected. “There seems to be a woman in the mix.”
She knew the general wanted to rant about it, but it was difficult for him. He’d gone on a mission and come back involved with an alien. It was also almost a given that anyone who went out on an expedition came back in love with an alien.
