Paige tyler, p.1
Paige Tyler, page 1
Valuable Cargo
Paige Tyler
(c) 2009
Valuable Cargo
Paige Tyler
Published 2009
ISBN 978-1-59578-577-0
Published by Liquid Silver Books, imprint of Atlantic Bridge Publishing, 10509
Sedgegrass Dr, Indianapolis, Indiana 46235. Copyright © 2009, Paige Tyler. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Liquid Silver Books
http://LSbooks.com
Email:
raven@LSbooks.com
Editor
Ansley Blackstock
Cover Artist
April Martinez
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.
Blurb
Tanna Aldrick is the captain of a deep space salvage ship in the twenty-ninth century. When she and her all-female crew stumble upon an ancient ship floating in the middle of nowhere, they figure they might be able to find a few valuable tidbits left on the decrepit spacecraft. But what they discover is more valuable than anything they could have ever imagined finding—a gorgeous hunk of a man from the twenty-second century, perfectly preserved in cryogenic suspension. Mankind has changed a lot in seven-hundred years, and six-foot-four, blond-haired, blue-eyed guys like him aren’t just rare; they’re nonexistent.
From the moment they revive him, Tanna finds herself falling for their handsome passenger. As logical as her reasons for not getting romantically involved with him are, however, she still finds herself inviting him into her bed.
Garrick Carlisle wakes up after seven-hundred years in hypersleep to find that everything and everyone he knew is gone. Lost and disconnected, the only thing that keeps him from completely losing it is the beautiful and sexy, dark-haired ship’s captain who rescued him.
Tanna isn’t the only person interested in Garrick, though. A man like him would bring a high price on the slave blocks on any number of planets and there are a lot of unscrupulous people in the galaxy willing to do anything to get their hands on him.
How far will Tanna go to protect her valuable cargo and what will Garrick do to stay with the woman he has come to love?
Chapter One
Year 2850, An’Ailorous System, Approximately 35,000 Light Years from Earth From her position on the bridge, Captain Tanna Aldrick stared out at the derelict ship drifting in space. Small and not exactly what one would describe as sleek, it was like nothing she had ever seen before. She frowned as her pilot ran a scan against the computer’s database.
“Anything?” she asked, glancing down at the dark-haired woman seated at the console.
Ena Daas shook her head. “Nothing, Captain. It doesn’t match anything we have in our database and the markings are too worn to help us. But it definitely looks old. Five or six hundred years at least.”
Standing beside Tanna, her first officer, Malana Randrick, let out a snort of disgust.
“Which means it’s probably already been stripped and gone over half a dozen times.”
Tanna nodded in agreement. Even if they cleaned all the cargo out years ago, there could still be some valuable parts they could salvage, though.
“I know it’s silly to even ask, but are there any life signs aboard?” she asked Ena.
Since there weren’t any other spacecrafts in the immediate area, Tanna didn’t think there would be anyone on board, but it was standard salvage protocol to confirm a ship was completely abandoned before taking possession of it.
From her chair behind the console, Ena pushed a few buttons, then waited for a read-out before giving Tanna a shake of her head. “Inconclusive, Captain. The sensors are picking up something faint, but there’s no way to tell what it is. It could just be a thermal battery still giving off power or a glitch in one of the computer systems.”
“Could we just bring it on board?” Malana suggested. “It’s small enough to fit in the bay.”
Tanna considered that. “I don’t want to bring it on board until we know for sure what’s on there. It could have hazardous cargo.”
“I’ll take a team and go check it out then,” Malana said.
Tanna shook her head. “You went last time. I’ll go. Have Vi and Leala meet me in the airlock.”
Without waiting for a reply, she turned and left the bridge, ducking her head under the low-hanging doorway as she did so. Once in the passageway, she headed in the direction of the airlock, her lug-soled boots clanking rhythmically on the metal floor.
Tanna had owned the salvage ship for the past five years and loved every minute of it. Not only was the business profitable, but the crew was the best any small-ship captain could want. Ena, Vi, and Leala had been with her from the beginning. The others, like Malana, had signed on over the years. But whether the women had been on board for a week or five years, she considered them all family. Work on a salvage ship was hard and dangerous, and most ships had high turnover rates when it came to the crews. However, hers was the lowest for any salvage ship she knew of, mainly because she genuinely cared about her people, and they knew it. Sure, the girls complained sometimes, but they all worked hard and none of them ever caused her any trouble.
When Tanna got to the airlock, she found Vi Newl and Leala Wester waiting for her.
The women, tall, slender, and dark-haired like her, were already putting on their envirosuits and life-support packs. Five years ago, Vi and Leala had been working on a merchant ship for a captain neither were too crazy about when they had heard Tanna was looking to put together a salvage crew. Tanna liked both girls right away and had immediately hired them. A couple of years younger than Tanna, they treated her more like their big sister instead of their captain, but she didn’t mind. She thought of them as sisters, too.
Securing her long, straight dark hair back in a low ponytail, Tanna reached for her own suit, pulling it on over her snug-fitting breeches and curve-hugging tee before zipping it up. Picking up her life-support pack, or LSP as they all called it, she shrugged it onto her shoulders. The LSP provided air and kept her warm, as well as allowed her to maneuver in the weightlessness of space.
Grabbing her helmet, she looked at the other two women before putting it on. “Let’s be careful over there,” she advised. “It’s an old ship and there might be some stuff on it that we’re not used to seeing. So keep an eye on each other.”
Though Vi and Leala had taken part in hundreds of initial entries over the years, Tanna knew from their nods that they had taken her words to heart. While lucrative, salvage work could also be deadly, and she took pride in the fact that there had never been a fatal incident under her command.
Opening the airlock, they moved slowly across the space between their ship and the derelict craft. Even clipped together and tethered to the salvage ship, Tanna still got that same little queasy feeling in her stomach she always did. Some irrational part of her couldn’t help but think about what would happen if the tether lines broke and they tumbled off into space. Of course, the tether lines weren’t going to break, and even if they did, Malana would just send a shuttle to come get her and the other two women.
Even so, her paranoia didn’t stop there. As they continued to move toward the other ship, Tanna had to fight the urge to constantly keep checking her suit for tears. Every time the cold material touched her skin, she panicked for a moment, thinking she had missed a tiny hole that was even now releasing all of the warmth and pressure in her suit out into space. Which was silly, of course. The crew always inspected the suits multiple times after each use, and there was no chance the reinforced material could suddenly tear.
That knowledge didn’t keep her from shivering inside her suit anyway, however. She always kept her fears to herself, though. She was the captain and her crew expected a certain level of bravado from her, after all. Of course, it didn’t help that Vi and Leala thought floating in space was the greatest thing in the world. Unlike her, they were completely comfortable with being out here.
Maneuvering by releasing little shots of pressurized air, Tanna crossed the distance between the two ships as quickly as she could. Once she and the other girls had reached the derelict craft, they immediately began looking for a way to get on board. While it didn’t take them long to find the door to the airlock, the thing was so ancient that they couldn’t get a computer signal through to the locking mechanism. After several attempts, Tanna finally decided Leala should simply cut a hole in the hull on one side of the door and open it manually by applying power from her LSP to the door actuator circuit. As Tanna had suspected, it was completely dark inside the ship, and she and the other women automatically turned on their envirosuit lights so they could see. As their beams played around, she saw they were in the cargo hold of the ship.
To her surprise, the derelict ship hadn’t been stripped at all. There were two old looking satellites in the hold, as well as dozens of containers. They were all marked with a series of numbers and letters that didn’t mean anything to her, so there was no way to tell what was in them.
Taking out her radiac, Tanna scanned the hold for radiation. If there had been anything really dangerous, the sensors on her ship would have picked it up, bu
“This looks like old test equipment of some type,” Vi said from behind her.
Tanna turned to see that Vi had opened one of the containers and was looking at a collection of metal instruments. Tanna didn’t have a clue what any of it was, but it was ancient, which meant it was going to be worth some money.
Curious, Tanna made her way over to the box Vi had opened while the other girl and Leala went off to explore the control room. She had barely started investigating when Leala’s voice came through the speaker in her headset.
“Um, Captain, I think you should see this.”
Her brow furrowing at the odd tone in her engineer’s voice, Tanna immediately set down the piece of equipment she’d been holding and headed for the control room. Seeing Vi standing just inside a doorway on the opposite side of the room, she quickly made her way over to the woman.
Letting the light from her torch play about the inner room, Tanna saw that it was a joint galley and med-bay.
“What did you find?” she asked as she stepped into the room. “Something valuable?”
Leala was standing in front of a glass-enclosed container of some sort. From her vantage point, Tanna couldn’t see what was inside it, but there was a series of brightly colored blinking lights at the bottom of the unit.
The engineer turned to her with a smile. “Oh, yeah.”
Frowning at the woman’s cryptic answer, Tanna walked over to where her engineer stood, only to stare at the pod in stunned silence. Leala had wiped off the light coating of frost from the upper portion of the pod, and through the glass, Tanna saw that there was a man inside. A completely gorgeous—and from the parts she could see—very well built man who, shockingly, appeared to be in perfect health. The pod container must be some type of hypersleep chamber, she thought. She had heard of those, but no one had used them in over five-hundred years, not since the invention of the faster-than-light Tachyon drive. That meant the ship was even older than they had thought, back from the days of sub-light space travel.
The fact that the man was still alive after so long wasn’t the only thing that made him unusual. Not only was he all beautifully sculpted muscle, but he was also unusually tall as well. The hypersleep chamber was at least seven feet long and the guy did a pretty good job of filling it up. That meant he was at least six-four or six-five. At five-ten, Tanna was as tall as any man she’d ever met, and taller than some, but this guy would clearly tower over her. She let her gaze run over his broad shoulders and muscular chest appreciatively. Damn, the guy was built. The hypersleep chamber must be equipped with some type of electro-stimulation to keep him in such great shape for so long.
Her gaze went to his face. His body distracted her so much that she hadn’t really spent much time looking at his face, but as she took in his square jaw and chiseled features, she decided he had to be the most attractive man she’d ever seen. She stared at his dark-blond hair, fascinated by the color. She hadn’t seen that many people with blond hair in her life. And most of the people she had seen had artificially colored it. She had no doubt his was the real deal. All at once, she found herself wondering what color his eyes were. They had to be blue, she thought. That would match his hair perfectly.
Glancing at the other two women, Tanna saw he equally entranced them, and she watched breathlessly as Vi began to wipe more frost off the front of the glass to reveal a washboard stomach and lean hips.
“Vi, that’s enough,” Tanna ordered abruptly, pushing the other woman’s hand away when she started to move lower.
Vi frowned. “I just wanted to see if he’s built like that everywhere.”
Tanna wouldn’t have minded seeing more of him herself, especially since the only men she had seen naked in a while had been the computer-generated ones conjured up in the holo-chamber on their ship. And they definitely hadn’t looked anything like him. But ogling a man while he was in a hypersleep pod just seemed wrong.
“Try to control yourself.” She glanced at Leala. “Do you think he can be revived?”
Leala chewed on her lip as she eyed the equipment. After a moment, she shrugged.
“The chamber’s really old, but everything seems to be functioning properly. Sela would probably know more, though.”
Sela Fanaday was the salvage ship’s resident bio-system engineer, but she also served as their med-tech when they needed one.
Tanna turned her gaze back to the handsome man asleep inside the pod. “Is this ship safe enough to bring on board?” she asked Leala.
The girl shrugged. “I don’t see why not, Captain. The sensors didn’t pick up any hazardous cargo and I haven’t seen anything dangerous. There’s isn’t even any fuel left.”
Still gazing at the man, Tanna flipped over to the ship’s frequency on her radio and spoke into the headset. “Malana, we’re bringing the ship aboard.”
“Did you find anything valuable?” the first officer asked.
Tanna only smiled. Oh yeah, they had definitely found something valuable.
Dear God, he was absolutely perfect, Tanna thought as she gazed down at the sleeping man an hour later. The blanket that Sela had carefully tucked around him left his chest and shoulders exposed to her appreciative gaze, and she had to fight off the almost irresistible urge to reach out and run her hands over his smoothly sculpted muscles. How many hours a day would a guy have to work out to look like this?
After bringing his ship aboard, they had transferred his hypersleep chamber to their own med-bay so Sela could examine him, which the woman had done once she had gotten over her shock at seeing their cargo. Since no one used stasis chambers like his anymore, Sela had to do some research in the computer archives to figure out how to revive him. Following the procedure, she had found on the computer, Sela had slowly brought him out of hypersleep. Tanna had expected him to come awake right away, but the other girl told her that wasn’t how it worked. It could take hours for him to wake up.
According to the med-tech, though, his vitals were strong, which was a good sign. That didn’t stop Tanna from worrying, though.
Getting her crew to focus on anything but the man laying in the med-bay had been almost impossible since then. Especially after Sela had hurried to the shuttle bay and briefed everyone in great detail about her patient and those parts of his anatomy they hadn’t seen yet. Her description had brought the rest of the crew running to the med-bay so they could look for themselves. Sela was just about to pull the blanket down for a little show-and-tell when Tanna finally pulled rank and tossed the other women out of the med-bay, sending them back down to the shuttle bay to take a closer look at his ship and the salvage it contained. Anything to distract them.
A few minutes ago, Malana had called on the ship’s intercom to let her know they had located the class and ident-number of his ship. According to the database, it had disappeared in the year 2104. Other than that, the computer didn’t know a lot about it. Or him. Malana had found some uniforms in a storage locker, though, with the name Carlisle on them. There was a shoulder patch of a flag with red and white stripes and stars in the corner on one sleeve. There was another patch underneath that, this one with the letters ISEA. A search of that acronym had turned up the name International Space Exploration Administration, an Earth-based government agency that had conducted space research in the early part of the twenty-second century. Tanna shook her head. Well, whoever he was, he was going to be in for one hell of a shock when he woke up. If he woke up.
Tanna was just wondering if she should call Sela so the other girl could check on him again, when the man’s eyelids suddenly fluttered open and she found herself gazing into the most incredible pair of blue eyes she had ever seen. She’d been right about the color, she realized a little breathlessly. And they did go perfectly with his blond hair.
He gazed up at her for a moment, and then glanced around the med-bay, confusion on his handsome face. “Where am I?” he asked slowly.
Damn, even his voice was sexy as sin. Which was surprising, considering he had just spent the last seven-hundred years in hypersleep. She would have thought it’d be more dry and raspy after so long. Apparently, Sela was damn good at her job. There should probably be a bonus in this for her.
