Hercules 500 Read online

  Days.

  It seemed longer, she thought, because she’d been miserable the whole time, or most of it anyway, and that always seemed to slow the clock.

  She dragged her feet.

  Most of the colonists had already arrived by the time she got there, which was what she’d thought she wanted until she discovered that, by doing so, they had an audience of almost the entire group. Nobody that came in after them attracted even half as much attention.

  Thankfully, they were still able to find a place to sit, which made it harder for the others to stare.

  And the captain arrived with her crew.

  “Who’s flying the ship?” someone muttered just loud enough to be heard when silence fell.

  The captain sent him a sour look. “The computer at the moment. Not to worry. She’s fully capable of manning the ship.”

  She looked out over the assemblage, as if committing their faces to memory and finally met Anika’s gaze.

  She’d found a seat in what she assumed to be the very back, but it turned out to be front row.

  Somehow, she got the feeling, though, that the look wasn’t that casual, maybe not casual at all.

  She introduced herself as Captain Amanda Lee and then her pilot, co-pilot, and navigator—strange to think it took such a tiny crew to fly something as big as a football field. The porters were introduced next. As they were introduced, they explained which cabins and what areas of the ship were their personal responsibility and invited everyone in their area to find them for any questions they might have or any needs. They were to report any malfunctions directly to the mechanical department.

  This announcement was followed by directions to the life-pods on either side of the ship. The passengers of each cabin had a pod designated specifically for them and the information to reach their pod was on the back of the cabin door. The pod instructions were posted inside the pod itself.

  In the very unlikely event that they were told to abandon ship, they were to proceed to their pod in an orderly fashion and follow the instructions—both written in a quick, pictorial guide, and verbal from the onboard computer.

  They were reassured that it had been decades since any event that had required the use of the pods.

  It was enough to completely divert Anika from her private sorrow for the first time since she’d lost her ‘family’.

  That was when she noticed a very large man, who seemed to be alone, propped against the wall at the far end of the lounge area.

  He seemed to be staring at her, but she thought he was probably just staring at the captain and crew.

  He looked handsome enough to make her heart do a little tap dance in her chest.

  She dragged her gaze away and returned her attention to the captain with an effort.

  She saw, though, that Chance had noticed the direction of her gaze. He, too, looked and she didn’t doubt he zeroed in on the man, but she was at pains to pretend she was completely unaware of the whole thing.

  She wasn’t actually listening, though, and she had no clue why everyone stood up. She thought, at first, that they’d been dismissed, but then she discovered the traffic was all flowing in one direction—directly toward the hunk she’d spotted—following the porters, who were leading the way.

  The captain moved closer to her, but she didn’t think anything of it until the woman spoke to her.

  “We had the strangest incident just before take off,” she said, almost conversationally.

  Anika glanced at her questioningly and then looked around to see if the captain was talking to someone else. “A cop showed up at our … uh … doorstep, breathing fire and brimstone and making dire threats.”

  Anika felt the blood rush from her head. A wave of cold followed it. “Really?” she asked a little faintly.

  “Yes. He demanded that I allow him to search the hold for contraband seedlings, but he couldn’t show me a warrant.” She shrugged. “He claimed he could stop the launch and make us wait till he got a warrant. I knew better, but I decided it would just be easier to let one of the porters show him the way.

  “Unfortunately for Detective Parker he somehow got locked in and it wasn’t until we reached intergalactic space—well outside his jurisdiction—that we discovered it. Fortunately for him, we were short nearly a dozen colonists on this trip—due to various difficulties—so we have plenty of supplies to cover an … uh … unexpected addition and, of course, several unclaimed cabins.”

  “Really?” Anika asked faintly. “Soooo … we’re outside his jurisdiction now? And he isn’t really a cop anymore?”

  The captain shrugged. “Well, I suppose he is, but … powerless.” She smirked. “We … uh … defanged him. Honestly, he had no jurisdiction to start with. He just thought he could bully us into accepting that he did—that I was ignorant enough to believe his bullshit. But I was happy to discover we had three more colonists traveling with us than I’d thought we had.

  “I think, if I was the woman who’d gotten that seed, I’d make sure to plant it while we were about … say halfway? That way she’d be far enough along by the time we get to Beauterre that there wouldn’t be anything he could do about it even if he found somebody on the other side to listen.”

  She patted Anika’s shoulder then and pushed her way through the crowd they’d been following.

  The tour was a blur. Anika looked at everything that was pointed out, but she hardly registered anything that was said. Near the conclusion of the tour, when they stopped to examine the bathing facilities and listen to instructions about using the showers and rules of usage, she discovered that the hunk she’d spotted was right beside her.

  Her heart instantly leapt up and started galloping.

  Her eyes hadn’t failed her even at the distance she’d been from him when she’d first seen him.

  He was a hunk.

  A really big hunk.

  If he wasn’t as tall and broad as Chance, he didn’t miss it by much.

  She caught a glimpse of a thin scar along his left cheek as he turned to look at her. “Hi,” he said, grinning at her in a way that made her heart trip over itself.

  Totally besotted, she grinned back at him mindlessly. “Hi yourself.”

  She was cute as a button! Cole thought absently, struggling with visions of ‘hand’ delivering a sample of his seedlings right to her ‘door’. He held out a hand. “I’m D … Cole Parker,” he said.

  Anika blinked at him, wondering why that sounded vaguely familiar when she was sure she hadn’t met him before, trying to remember her own name. “Uh … Anika … uh ….”

  “McNeal,” Chance said in what could only be described as a growl.

  She glanced at him in surprise and felt that deepen when she discovered that he was wearing an expression that clearly denoted dislike and disapproval. “Chance?” she said questioningly.

  “He your husband? Or just your domestic partner?”

  Anika whipped a sharp glance at ‘the hunk’.

  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him Chance was neither. He was a domestic robotic worker, but there was something in the stranger’s eyes that finally penetrated her attraction trance.

  Or possibly Chance broke it when he abruptly shifted her to one side and wedged himself between her and the hunk.

  Cole.

  “Partner,” he said succinctly.

  Anika gaped at him, so stunned that he’d told an outright lie that her mind went perfectly blank for many moments.

  Robots couldn’t deliberately lie, could they? She was sure that wasn’t supposed to be possible.

  Maybe he just hadn’t fully understood the question?

  Cole shrugged. “From the look on her face, I’d say that comes as a surprise to her.”

  Then he tripped and sprawled on the deck, landing against it so hard it looked like he’d been grabbed by the ankles and body slammed.

  Anika looked back, but Chance hustled her away too quickly for her to get more than a glimpse of Cole.

/>   From the furious glare he had aimed at Chance’s back when he lifted his head, though, she suspected he hadn’t tripped over his own feet.

  “Did you …? Did you …?”

  The look he sent her unnerved her.

  She decided not to voice her suspicion aloud.

  “I may have stepped on his foot,” Chance responded after a long moment. “Accidentally.”

  Chapter Five

  Chance hadn’t been acting just right, Anika decided, since that cop had bashed his head with his own head. It took her a while to conclude that—mostly because of the automatic denial response of anything that a person just didn’t want to accept. But also because she hadn’t actually had him long enough to really get used to behavior ‘typical’ of him before that incident. She thought, though, that there was nothing that really surprised her about his behavior before.

  She wasn’t particularly pleased when he disposed of his clothing out the window or the language he used to refer to sex, but that was easily explained and understandable considering the people who’d sold him to her. He had AI. He was bound to have picked up a few things from them.

  And the language—well, it made her uncomfortable but truth was truth. He certainly wasn’t proposing that he could make love to her! And she couldn’t honestly think of another word for it that sounded better to her.

  At least fucking implied animalistic passion—which he also couldn’t feel, but he might be able to emulate convincingly.

  His AI might make it possible for her to ‘teach’ him how to emulate making love, she supposed, and that was tempting in a way, particularly since it was a sort of comfort she wasn’t likely to get otherwise. But she was already having trouble keeping an emotional distance from an inanimate object—or, at least, a machine. She needed to try to hold on to her marbles.

  She might need them to survive on the new world.

  She debated whether to do a little research on the Hercules 500 or not to try to assuage her anxieties that something was wrong with him or at least not entirely right. One never knew when a search might end up biting you in the ass, however, and that made her leery.

  She was uneasy enough, though, that she finally decided to just do one quick search when the opportunity arose, and got the shock of her life.

  Chance was not a Hercules 500 as she’d been told! He bore some resemblance to that model—but only in the sense that it was a humanoid design, as well. However, the Hercules 500—discontinued, she discovered, a decade earlier because the model wasn’t particularly appealing to consumers—would never have fooled anyone into believing it was real. He looked more like a doll, a mere representation of a human and although they claimed they had very real looking and feeling ‘skin’ made of a special vinyl, it had the shiny look of plastic.

  Chance’s skin felt like real, human skin—over muscle.

  She still didn’t know what he was after her search, but she definitely knew what he wasn’t.

  So maybe that explained why he didn’t perform like she expected him to? Maybe there was nothing wrong him? It was her expectations that were faulty?

  * * * *

  “Hi, Mom,” Anika said, pasting an uneasy smile on her lips when her mother’s image appeared on the screen.

  “Anika! Thank god! I was starting to get really worried when you didn’t return any of my calls.”

  Guilt smote her. So she was a coward and hadn’t really wanted to have to tell her mother what had happened! She hadn’t wanted her mother to suffer over it! “I am so sorry! But it really was pretty frantic for a while. I had almost no time between notification and take off and then orientation and settling in after I boarded and you know there’s a communications blackout for passengers until the ship is fully underway.”

  Belinda shook her head. “No. That’s ok. I understand. It’s just …. Well, no insured privacy for calls made from the ship. I’d hoped you’d be able to call before you boarded.”

  Anika was almost able to breathe a sigh of relief.

  “I heard that … uh … shop closed down. Did you manage to get that package I sent you to pick up for me before they closed?”

  Anika smiled weakly. She tried to feign a chuckle, but it felt as insincere as it was. “Yeah, uh, that was what was a little frantic. There was some kind of big police operation going on in the area and we had to leave pretty quickly.”

  “Really!” Belinda gasped, managing to sound completely believable. “But … uh … did you get the package before you had to … uh … run?”

  “I have it,” Chance volunteered from behind Anika, stepping into view of the monitor camera.

  Belinda gaped.

  Anika whirled around and glared at him. “Damn it, Chance!”

  “Who is this?”

  “I am called Chance. I am her domestic partner.”

  Belinda gasped with delight! “Oh my god, Anika! He is gorgeous! No wonder you’ve been busy.”

  “I believe you are suggesting that we have been busy fucking. But we have not fucked yet,” Chance volunteered. “I am convinced that is what is needed, however, to retrieve the seedlings that I swallowed inadvertently. I believe that my nanoes collected the contents of the vial and stored it in my jewels so that I could inject the seedlings into Anika with my cock.”

  Belinda blinked at him in fascination. “Jewels?” she echoed.

  “Cods?”

  Anika thought for a horrifying moment that he was going to show her mother. She gritted her teeth. “Don’t you dare explain anything else to my mother, damn it! Or show her what you’re talking about! And I don’t believe it for one minute anyway. You’re just saying that because you want to get in my damned pants!”

  Chance stared at her in confusion. “I do not want to get into your pants. I am convinced they are not big enough for me.”

  Belinda snickered. “She means fucking.”

  Chance looked at Belinda. “She does not like that word.”

  “Mom! Don’t encourage him!”

  She discovered that Belinda was studying Chance thoughtfully. “He’s damned convincing. I thought at first that he was real … although why I can’t imagine. I’ve been around a very long time and I’ve never seen that kind of perfection in a human male. That’s the flaw in his design if you can call it that—too perfect.” She studied Anika a moment. “We’re just going to have to postpone an in depth discussion until we’re face to face.” She smiled. “I am so thrilled you’re on the way out, honey! Keep me updated!”

  Anika studied Chance in tightlipped silence for a long moment after she’d broken the connection. He looked down at her uneasily.

  “You are angry?” he guessed.

  Her eyes narrowed. “You are perceptive! Which makes me wonder how it is, when you’re so damned perceptive, you could have baldly informed my mother that you’d swallowed the seedlings she paid a thousand credits for!”

  “I deduced that you did not want to inform her of the situation yourself because you feared that she would be angry with you. So I told her so that she would be angry with me instead.”

  “Like you saved me when you swallowed the damned vial to start with?” Anika snarled, and then turned away and stalked off.

  Chance followed her as she left the privacy booth in the communications center, but he made certain that he gave her a wide berth.

  Just until she had a few minutes to regain control of her temper.

  They were halfway across the lounging area with no particular destination that Chance could see when a furtive movement at the far end of the room drew his attention. He zeroed in on it just in time to spot the cop, Cole, as he paused to look around and then stepped out of the lounging area and into the corridor that bisected the ship.

  Chance frowned.

  If it was nothing more than a trip to his cabin or the toilet or showers, he could think of no reason for such furtive behavior. Logically, it seemed he must conclude that Cole was up to something that he did not want anyone to know about.
<
br />   It might have nothing to do with Anika at all, but he had followed Anika to the ship. It seemed logical to assume that any secretive behavior somehow had to do with Anika, he decided.

  That conclusion was enough to redirect him. He strode down the length of the great gathering room and paused at the doorway where Cole had stood. When he peered out, it was just in time to see the cop step onto the lift and, since he had already discovered that Cole’s cabin was on the same level as Anika’s, he felt that that confirmed his suspicions.

  Glancing back to where he had parted ways with Anika, he discovered that she had realized he was no longer with her. She was glaring at him across the distance, her hands on her hips.

  He hesitated, but he knew if he returned to her to explain he would not be able to catch up to Cole so as reluctant as he was to anger her further, he shrugged and followed Cole. Standing under the floor indicator, he saw Cole had headed directly to the hold—where he had been before searching through the lockers for the evidence he clearly still believed he would be able to find.

  Chance knew for a fact that he would not find the evidence, but he was curious to know whether he had surmised correctly or not so he took the next lift down.

  Cole had vanished by the time he reached the hold level, but he could hear movement in the locker area.

  Again, he hesitated. He could not think of any mischief that Cole could manage, but he finally decided that he must be certain and he moved to the entrance.

  He had just stepped through the door when a faint whistle of air alerted him. He caught the bar Cole swung at him mid-air, stopping it so abruptly that Cole, who had clearly put his weight behind it, lost his balance. When he gave the bar a jerk, it brought Cole stumbling forward. Surprise, confusion and then anger flickered across Cole’s face as he was yanked off his feet.

  “You bionic bastard,” Cole growled. “I knew you had bionics when you managed to knock me out!”

  It was Chance’s turn to feel surprise and then outrage. “I did not knock you out,” he snarled. “You tried to brain me with your skull and knocked yourself out!”