It might have been easier if he had not been thinking about their coupling in the cell only moments before. It certainly didn’t help that, except for that, he hadn’t touched a woman in nearly two months.
When he finally managed to get his mind off of fucking her brains out, it dawned on him that he had stumbled on what might be the only opportunity, short of torturing her, of getting reliable information from her. He lay pondering that for a while, trying to think of questions he could ask that would give him answers. Somehow, he doubted she could handle any question that was too complicated at the moment.
As far as any of them had been able to determine, the conspirators hadn’t figured out how to record real memories and implant them in the clones. They usually managed to put together and implant a pretty impressive background package--which meant they had access to the entire security net which missed damned little--so even though they didn’t actually remember the incidents because they hadn’t been there, they did know about a lot of the same events the real person knew.
“Do you remember meeting me?” he asked finally.
She nodded.
“Where did we meet?”
Her face crumpled. “Morrisplace.”
Dax frowned thoughtfullybut realized after a moment that that still didn’t tell him anything. He’d been in the apartment to scan for surveillance cams and ‘spike’ them. They’d learned very quickly that simply deactivating them didn’t do much good. The very next time they went to a place they had to do another search and destroy. If they left them, though, planting a false feed, they could be pretty sure the goons wouldn’t be back to check on them.
The problem was, the cams might have caught his visit. He’d been as careful as he could about spiking them, and thought he’d made sure he had erased everything directly before the tampering, but he couldn’t be a hundred percent certain that they didn’t know that was the time and place he’d first encountered her. And even the real Lena wouldn’t know that he’d known about her for years.
The real Lena would know what hadn’t happened, though.
“You were happy to see me. It had been years, after all.”
Her brow wrinkled in confusion.
“I was glad to see you, too. That’s why I kissed you.”
She looked even more confused. “Didn’t,” she said finally.
“You kissed me back.”
She moved restlessly, as if wrestling to extract that from her memory. “Did? Doan ‘member.”
Dax frowned in irritation. That didn’t tell him a damned thing, and unfortunately he couldn’t tell if she was being deliberately evasive or if he’d just confused her because she did remember the incident but couldn’t remember something that hadn’t happened.
“Fucked. Din kiss me.”
Dax stiffened. Catching her jaw and tipping her face up for his inspection, he studied it searchingly. “When?” he asked sharply.
“While ago.”
“Where?”
“Bed,” she responded reasonably.
He was tempted to shake her. She might be thinking about the time in the cell, and she might not be. It was just as possible that she was faking the whole damned ‘asleep’ thing and thought something had happened at Morris’.
The line of questioning wasn’t doing him any good otherwise either. Pushing her onto her back, he rolled up onto one elbow to stare down at her for several moments. She lay sprawled as she landed, bonelessly, showing no sign at all that he could see of tension. Finally, he settled his chest against her, pinning her to the bed with his body and tried to focus on relaxing enough himself to sleep.
* * * *
“Captain Morris?”
The voice jerked Dax rudely from sleep, yanking his head upwards as if someone had grabbed him by the hair and lifted it.
“We’ll be docking at Antaria in about twenty minutes.”
Dax stared down in bemusement at the breast he’d been using for a pillow for several moments and finally rolled off the bunk and strode to the com. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
Struggling to shake off the dregs of sleep, he looked around for the uniform he’d discarded and finally spied it hanging from the corner of the mirror mounted above his shaving basin. Recalling, vaguely, that he’d wadded it into a ball and tossed it at the wall when he’d discovered his bed was occupied, he retrieved the jumpsuit and pulled it on, studying Lena as he pressed the front seal together.
