The Last Enemy, page 8
part #3 of A Time Traveller's Best Friend Series
Testingly, he added, “You haven’t even given me a kiss since the ceremony. A husband might take that in a bad sort of way.”
Arabella chuckled suddenly, a small, warm thing in the back of her throat. “Are you telling me that your Core password can be purchased for a kiss? How would your superiors feel about that?”
“They don’t try to kiss me,” Mikkel said, grinning. He edged forward again, the coffee cups comfortably out of the way, and nudged a small kiss just below her ear. “So they’re not likely to find out.”
She cleared her throat very slightly. “I suppose that’s something, then,” she said. To his delight, her breathing had quickened just slightly; nor, he saw, had she tried to back further away from him. Instead, she leaned forward and planted a small, hesitant sort of kiss on his cheek.
Mikkel didn’t give her a chance to pull back: he ducked his head and kissed the lips that were so close, aware of the two hands that presently grasped his shirt-collars.
If he had entertained any doubts at all about which Arabella it was he was kissing, that kiss would have allayed them thoroughly. Arabella, Mikkel had learned very quickly, was alert under any circumstance whatsoever. This included those circumstances in which she might be forgiven for having her thoughts focused otherwhere: up to and including a certain stiffness while occupied in kissing, due to an apparently innate need to keep an eye on her surroundings.
The Arabella he had married that morning no longer had any stiffness whatsoever. For all Mikkel knew, she maintained that alertness in a less noticeable way; however, these days, she seemed to trust Mikkel enough to at least allow him to take some share of the watch during an embrace of any sort, and it had consequently become easier to kiss her.
“No one is going to come through the hatch or the portholes,” he said to her. “The hatch should be locked by now, and if the portholes are open, we’ll have more issues than a couple of interlopers.”
“I wasn’t particularly worried about people coming through the hatch or portholes,” said Arabella, her eyes flickering around the room.
Mikkel managed to suppress the grin that was trying to form, and leaned a little closer to the younger version of his wife. “I’ve got the feeling that no one will disturb us for a little while yet,” he said. “Everyone knows there are ten digits to a Core password, and I’m sure they expect an exchange for every digit.”
Arabella looked momentarily taken aback. “They?”
“My men don’t expect us back on the Slider for at least another hour or so,” explained Mikkel, enjoying himself very much. “In fact, I’ll be very surprised if they expect us in less than three hours.”
Arabella’s eyes began to dance. “Oh, is that how it works? A kiss for every digit?”
“Yes,” said Mikkel, very firmly. “And if it’s not tradition, we’ll make a new one.”
“I’m shocked,” Arabella said, somewhat piously, “that I’ve given the impression as a wife that I’ll be less than forthcoming with kisses.” She kissed him beside the mouth. “It’s not—” a kiss on the other side, “—at all representative—” a third kiss by his ear “—of me.”
His face cupped in two small, capable hands, Mikkel gazed down at Arabella and was surprised by a fourth kiss that fell squarely on his lips.
“That makes five,” said Arabella, sitting back with a laugh in her eyes and a flush still over her cheeks. “Seven, if you count the one you stole first and the one after that.”
“We’re not counting those two,” Mikkel told her.
“Very well,” said Arabella, capturing one of his hands between hers. In quick succession, she kissed that hand four times, the last kiss landing on the inside of his wrist before he pulled himself away.
Reproachfully, Mikkel said, “That’s cheating.”
“Last one,” said Arabella, eyes alight with laughter, but mouth rueful.
“Then this one is mine to take,” he countered. If he was only going to get one last chance to kiss this adorable version of his wife—that Arabella he had so often wanted to kiss in the past—Mikkel was going to make sure he did the thing thoroughly.
“Flaming heck,” said Marx, drawing in a breath through his teeth. “I nearly forgot about that.”
That particular incident had been about a year ago, if you went by his and Kez’s particularly fractured timeline: they had desperately needed a Core password to stay one step ahead of the Time Corp, and since their timeline interacted sporadically with Mikkel’s—and in increasingly disparate parts of that timeline—they had been aware of the marriage for at least the last two years. It had made sense at the time to use Arabella to winkle a Core password out of Mikkel without anyone being the worse for it, and without Mikkel feeling that he had to report the breach.
Marx had always wondered how much Mikkel understood of what happened that day. Their timelines had been reversed for the events that led up to the stealing of the password; what was and wasn’t known, and by whom, had been a bit hard to gauge by the time everything was done. Only Kez seemed to be completely unfazed by it all, though Marx had never been sure that she would know how to deal with a strictly linear timeline anyway.
“That’s today, is it?” he said. “That makes it a year and a half that we’ve been running around together, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Kez. She had a mouthful of something, and Marx had a momentary flash of the same instinct that would have prompted him to scruff a dog and force its mouth open to get rid of whatever disgusting object it had found beneath a bush somewhere.
Fortunately for the both of them, the scent of raspberry hit his nostrils a moment later.
He sent a hard look in her direction. “You’ve been visiting Tuan again, haven’t you?”
Kez stopped chewing. “Ay?”
“I already saw you chewing. I told you not to go visiting the kid until later on: if we go to see him too often, they’ll get the idea that he’s a bit too close to us. We’ve apparently already had to repair a Fixed Point to make sure you meet up with him.”
“Got these from ’im last time,” she clarified, through a mouthful of gummy frog. “He gave me a whole packet.”
“Wonderful,” muttered Marx.
“Oi,” said Kez. “You’re pretty flamin’ nice for a bloke who didn’t remember to say summink when you’d had me for a year.”
“You want me to celebrate the one year anniversary of picking up a feral little girl who keeps kicking me and steering my ship into goat houses?”
“It was only one goat house,” mumbled Kez. “An’ it looked nice sittin’ up there on our nose.”
“You didn’t remember, either,” Marx pointed out.
“Did so too! Gave you a present an’ everyfink!”
“A prese—are you trying to tell me that letting a full-size twenty-first century anaconda into my bunk was an anniversary present?”
“It was just a baby,” complained Kez. “An’ it just wanted to ’ave a bit av kip next to ya all warm like.”
“It was measuring itself up against me when I woke up,” Marx said, without mincing matters. “Straight as a ruler. And what’s more, it was twice the length of me.”
“You didn’t ’ave to go caperin’ about the ship because o’that!”
“Listen, kid; when a snake measures itself up against a person, it’s because it’s trying to see if it’s big enough to swallow that person. Where did you get it?”
“Some bloke in an ’at.”
“Well, stop consorting with blokes in hats. And stop introducing creatures into—kid.”
“Yeah?”
“Did you send Mikkel and Bells a wedding present?”
“Wot you lookin’ at me like that for?”
Marx leaned forward and looked directly into those glittering black eyes. “Kez.”
“Well,” said Kez. “Figgered I should get ’em somefink.”
Mikkel had wondered, somewhere in the back of his mind that wasn’t occupied with kissing, exactly what Arabella would use as an excuse to get away once he had told her his Core password. She couldn’t very well make an exit straight away without looking as though she really had been there only for the password, but she couldn’t very well stay much longer without going beyond the scope of what she had come to do. Mikkel was also very much aware that the longer Arabella stayed, the harder it was to stop at merely kissing her: it was one of the reasons he had told her his Core password before he kissed her for the last time.
It was much to his mixed regret and relief, therefore, that a ship-wide, all-comms call went out for Arabella to attend the engine room, somewhere between the time he began to kiss her for the last time and the point at which he would have thought it good to stop.
“What in the Twelve Known Worlds do this think they’re playing at?” demanded Mikkel, sitting up again in wrathful surprise. They weren’t even aboard their own ship: moreover, they were only waiting for clearance for their transporter. “Stay where you are; I’ll ask them what they think they’re doing.”
“Never mind,” Arabella said, scooting away from him and rising from the love-seat with some haste. “I think I’d better go see what they want. If I don’t think they’ve a good enough reason to bother us, I’ll give them a good talking to, you can be sure.”
“I’ll expect more kisses when you come back!” Mikkel called after her, regret and delight vying for prominence. Had she set it up previously, or could he thank Kez and Marx for that as well?
He sat back on the couch, laughter making a warm ball in his chest, and waited for the hatch to open once again. It opened less than ten seconds after it closed behind the younger Arabella, a pleasant surprise that also afforded him a great deal more amusement than it should have.
“You’re back!” he said affably, as the hatch closed and emitted a short beep to indicate that the transporter had been cleared for departure. “To stay, this time, I should hope!”
Arabella crossed the room and hit his shoulder with a sharp, short blow that sounded much worse than it was, and Mikkel was surprised into laughter.
“Is that something you should be doing to your brand new husband?” he protested, in spite of that.
“My darling,” said Arabella, making the breath catch in his throat, “might I remind you that I have all of the memories of what you’ve been doing while I’ve been gone?”
“I wondered,” Mikkel began, bright and exhilarated, “I always wondered who it was that had made you so flushed when you went off to get that code. And I was almost certain it was my code you went to get.”
“Now you know,” she said, divesting herself of her uniform jacket and settling herself on his lap.
“The cheek of it,” he said virtuously, slipping his arms around her so that she couldn’t go away again. “Seducing a married man on his wedding day!”
“I actually thought until today that you didn’t know it was the younger me,” Arabella said, grinning. The transporter began to move with a slight jar, and she steadied herself against his shoulders. “I thought I’d done so well to get your code in a way that couldn’t come back to hurt you! Of course, as soon as I walked back in here and saw you looking so happy and pleased with yourself, I knew otherwise.”
“You were so adorable,” he said.
“I felt dreadful about it!” she protested. “It didn’t occur to me that you would put it all together like that. If you knew then, why didn’t you…?”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Not certainly enough to make a report about it. And I didn’t know for sure until you came in just before with the older soft hat instead of this year’s.”
Arabella laughed again. “That dreadful little child! No wonder she was so happy with herself! She knew about the hat, but she didn’t tell me: all she would tell me was that I’d eventually marry you and that I needed to pretend to be your wife for long enough to get the code. Of course, I already knew that, but—”
“One moment,” interrupted Mikkel, rising and drawing her toward the couch instead of the love-seat. There was more room on the couch, and he didn’t think Arabella would be trying to edge away from him this time. “What do you mean, you already knew that?”
“My employers know a great deal about the future that even Kez and Marx don’t know,” she said, allowing herself to be drawn and sitting down within a pleasing proximity. “I’ve known since I came to work with you. I hadn’t made up my mind, of course, but I was open to the possibility.”
Mikkel put his arm around her and bent his head to trail a series of soft kisses from her collar-bone to her ear. “What made you open to the possibility?”
“Your delightfully broad chest, naturally,” she said, turning a little in his arms to lay a warm hand on that chest. “And your golden curls, of course.”
She touched one of those, too, but dropped the hand back to his chest where it created a swiftly growing patch of warmth.
“Didn’t they give you a picture of me to win you over?” he asked her.
“Of course,” she said. “But it’s one thing to see it in a picture, and quite another to experience the grandeur of it in person for the first time. Distracting, one could say.”
“I didn’t notice that you were particularly distracted at the time,” Mikkel said. “You sent me to the mat without a blink.”
“Pure shyness, sir.”
There was an awful pause before he said incredulously, “Did you just sir me again?”
“You were the one who told me to think of a pet name!” she protested, but Mikkel was quite sure her protests were spurious.
“I preferred it when you were calling me my darling,” he said.
“Kez,” said Marx, his mind rebelling from the immediate idea that had presented itself to him. “That bloke in a hat—he wasn’t doing a two for one sale, was he?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Got Bells an’ Golden Boy a present at the same time.”
“You put an anaconda on the wedding gift table?”
“Nah,” said Kez, at first relieving his mind considerably. Then she added, “Put the present straight in their room. Didn’t want anyone else to pinch it.”
Marx closed his eyes. “You put an anaconda in their quarters?”
“Nah,” she said again.
“You’re a rollercoaster ride, kid,” said Marx, opening his eyes. He didn’t dare to hope.
“Said ’e didn’t ’ave two snakes, but he gave me summink else instead. Summink just as good.”
“At this rate, one of us has to be put out of our misery,” Marx said, at the ceiling. “Kid. What did you put in Golden Boy’s room?”
“Dunno,” said Kez. “But it ’ad a lotta tentacles an’ a nice smile. And it don’t need water so they can keep their bath. Marx! Where you goin’, Marx?”
Incursion Report, Date:
Other Zone Animal Incursion, Level Four.
The incursion occurred Onboard Relative Time
Fortunately for Captain Mikkel and his new wife, who removed the animal from his vicinity by use of a sedative and a pair of tongs, the beast was too small to have drawn anyone other than a small child back into the Other Zone. The animal was ejected from the ship via the nearest safe porthole, where it was picked up by Incursion Specialist Team #3, who expedited its return to the Other Zone.
Witnesses to Incursion: None
Witnesses to Source of Incursion: Two; both human
Witnesses to Retrieval: None
Risk Assessment: Negligible; animal was never identified
Recommended Action: Check all marketplaces twice a month to prevent the sale of such Other Zone Animals to unsuspecting customers; ensure that all such animals are returned as promptly as possible to give no chance for said animals to infiltrate Time Corp Vessels
Incursion Report, Date:
Spork Included
“It sez,” said Kez, “spork included. Lookit. Right there. An’ if it sez that, it should be in there.”
“Don’t know what to tell you, kid,” Marx said, without turning away from the console. “It’s not there. What are you going to do about it?”
“Well, I fort we might go and visit ’em at the factory. Got a bit av that plastic explosive left, an’—”
“We’re not blowing up a tuckbox factory because they didn’t give you a spork in your tuckbox.”
“Not all of it,” protested Kez. “Just the bit wot does the recon-reconstitutated plastics. They gotta learn that they can’t go pinchin’ someone else’s spork.”
“If somebody pinched your spork, I doubt it was some poor sap in the factory,” Marx told her. “Kid, if you kick my chair once more—!”
Kez glared at him, and as if he felt the molten influence of that stare, Marx finally looked across at her.
“I’m concerned,” Kez told him. “If they ain’t doin’ a proper job includin’ the sporks, wot else are they gunna do?”
“At the very least, I doubt they’re likely to blow anyone up,” Marx said. “Listen, kid; we’re neck deep in trying to avoid Time Corp and the Core’s gone mucky enough to make me think that someone’s messing with us—”
“Make a nice ’oliday, eh?” Kez said persuasively. “Summink fun to do to clear the cobwebs out, right?”
