A Solid Core of Alpha by Amy Lane Read Free Book Online Page B

Anderson blush. Now, it just made him want to cry. Anderson captured Bobby’s fingers against his skin and said, “It’s okay, Bobby. I’m fine. I’m going to be fine. He knows my limits, right?”
    “God, I hope so,” Bobby snapped, yanking his hand away to dash at his eyes. “Dammit, Anderson, if he kills you, he kills us all, you realize that, don’t you?”
    Anderson nodded and swallowed. “I get it. He gets it. He wants to live as much as you do.” He wasn’t sure if it was true or not. He thought it might just be a hope living in his own mind.
    Suddenly Kate surprised him by going over his back for a hug. “What about you, Anderson?” she asked, rubbing her cheek against his. They’d experimented some more with scent on the holodeck a few years back, right after Alpha had been introduced, in those heady first few months when Anderson had been trying to make an impression. He hadn’t been able to make anything that smelled real for Alpha and had given up. Kate had kept up with those experiments, and she smelled like something yummy—jasmine and vanilla, maybe—and she was suddenly inexpressibly dear.
    “I want to live too,” he said softly, and her cheek rubbed against his.
    “We want you to want to,” she told him, and he nodded and tried hard not to bawl like a baby, there on the bridge of the shuttle, as they tried to figure out how to keep the shuttle from going up against some minor planetoid and completely bursting into powder.
    “Wait,” Anderson said suddenly, something catching his eye. “Wait. Oh shit. Bobby, is that what I think it is?”
    Bobby turned his fulminating gaze from the bruises on Anderson’s throat and the one on his cheek—Alpha did like to slap—and actually looked at the readouts on the screen.
    “Oh God,” Bobby said, and for a moment, Anderson’s shitty relationship was completely forgotten, and it was all about the beeping on the screen.
    “Hermes-Eight. Christ. That’s the star system with the station. It’s got three occupied planets and a goddamned space station! We can dock there. Oh… oh, God. How long?”
    Anderson’s heart was beating faster, and his mouth was dry. People. Other (not real, other) people. For a moment, just a moment, he felt the excitement of a little kid. For a fraction of a second, he remembered what it was like, hand in hand with Melody, pushing the baby in her stroller and talking to Jen as Mom and Dad took them for ice cream.
    His hand rose to the swollen bruises on his throat, and that moment died, just like they had, and he was suddenly very much afraid. “Should we go?” he asked, wanting Alpha there to ask. Alpha’s not here. You’ve managed to keep him off the bridge. That’s probably a good idea.
    Bobby gave an exasperated snort. “Are you insane ? Of course we should go!”
    Anderson swallowed and looked at him, trying to find words. “But… Bobby. You and Kate… do you think they would understand? They… they might try to….” He couldn’t say the word, and Bobby frowned.
    In the past six years, Bobby’s chest and face had filled out, but he’d remained fit and wiry. In spite of the deterioration of things with Alpha, in spite of the strain Alpha kept putting on Anderson’s relationship with… with anybody else on the shuttle, Bobby’s primary emotional reaction was joy, and Anderson loved him for that. It showed in the way his eyes crinkled and his soft, full lips quirked up. It showed in the looks he sent to Kate on an almost minute-by-minute basis. A frown was still an unlikely expression on Bobby’s smiling face.
    “Might try to delete our programs?” Kate asked bluntly. She’d moved and was sitting in her console chair, the one in the center. Her no-nonsense scowl was aimed out of the shuttle, and she deftly steered them around some space debris that might have hurt, bouncing off their hull shields. Many holodeck programs had been sacrificed to maintain those shields after they came out of