gaian consortium 03 - the gaia gambit (6 page)

And yet…

Something about the situation didn’t feel right, didn’t smell right. He’d pondered the situation, in those few rare moments when his time was not occupied by some demand, some new situation to learn from and absorb. For one thing, the political currents he encountered here on Syrinara were far different from those he had dealt with while patrolling the farther reaches of the Stacian Federation. Some days, he thought he was expending more energy on keeping track of whom to curry favor with and who could be safely ignored than on actually running his ship.

Even so, he had stolen minutes here and there when he could be alone in his quarters, when he could sit and think about how he had gotten here, and the woman who’d been the casualty of his new success. Learning where she had gone proved to be more difficult than he’d thought; after all, he couldn’t make outright inquiries through regular channels. But a man he’d had dealings with years before when securing a few black market items for his parents’ comfort said he might be able to track her down, given enough time, and Rast had to be content with that for now. At least he knew for a fact that she wasn’t dead.

Given all that, he should have allowed himself to push the matter aside until he had more concrete information as to Lira’s whereabouts. That proved impossible, however. He kept ticking the timing over in his mind, and something about it didn’t seem to add up. Unless Admiral sen Trannick had those five cruisers poised in exactly the right position, they could never have reached the Chlorae system in enough time to intercept and destroy the incoming colonists before they even had a chance to land on the planet’s surface. No, it was almost as if he had known the
Valiant
would be withdrawn.

And how was that possible? He would have had to receive some sort of intelligence from within Admiral Horner’s office that Captain Jannholm was about to be discharged from service. Rast was willing to believe many things, but somehow he couldn’t believe that two such sworn enemies would have colluded to make sure the Gaian colony on Chlorae II was destroyed before it had even begun. Such treachery would make Lira Jannholm’s perceived disloyalty pale into nothingness. No, there had to be another explanation.

It could have been luck — if one believed in such things. Once upon a time he might have said he didn’t, but he’d seen enough over the years to think there had to be some underlying force at work, one that sometimes seemed to have a capricious capacity to play havoc with the plans of sentient beings, or to bring unexpected favor at a roll of the bones. Admiral sen Trannick had had enough inspired guesses and turns of fortune during his career that one could call him lucky.

Better that — better to think that it was the work of the old gods some still believed in — than to think Stacian and Gaian were working together toward some goal whose motivation he couldn’t begin to guess. Because if that were true, it meant everything he had been told, everything he believed, was a lie.

“And how long do you intend on staying?” Her mother’s tone, brittle in its casualness, told Lira everything she needed to know about her welcome here. Not that she had expected much different.

She wanted to make an airy comment about staying here on Ganymede indefinitely, of enrolling in some sort of coursework at the moon’s one rather mediocre college, but she didn’t feel quite brave enough for that. For a second or two she didn’t answer, but only concentrated on chewing the mouthful of eggplant strata she had just taken. At least the food was good; some of the best hydroponics setups in Gaian space were located right here on the Jovian base.

“Not long,” she replied. “I just need to explore some options. In fact, I’ve already had a few offers from independent shippers and charter companies.”

This was a bare-faced lie. While one might have thought the skills she’d obtained in the navy would be in some demand, no one had come forward to claim them. Blacklists weren’t just for the military. At this point, Lira was fairly certain no one respectable would touch her with a ten-meter cattle prod.

The tight lines around her mother’s mouth seemed to relax slightly. “That sounds promising.”

“Oh, it is.”

They lapsed into a tense little silence. Although Lira had expected her father to be here, he was conspicuously absent — a last-minute emergency had called him away, according to her mother. That was possible, but Lira thought it rather more likely that he wasn’t quite ready to face his disgraced daughter, and so manufactured a crisis that would keep him safely away for some hours. And luckily her younger sister and brother were long gone, her sister with the GEC, and her brother a climatologist working on the ongoing Gaian rehabilitation project. At least the human race’s home world wasn’t quite the polluted mess it had been several centuries earlier, but there was still some ways to go before it began to approach even a semblance of its former beauty.

Her siblings seemed the safest subject to broach, and so she inquired about Janna first, then Liam. Lira guessed her mother knew exactly what red herrings these lines of conversation were, but of course she gave no hint. Marta Jannholm had never been one for confidences, and Lira knew she wasn’t about to start now.

The conversation lurched this way and that until the food had been consumed. A gleaming mech came to clear away the empty plates. The machine was a new addition; her parents must have been doing better than she thought.

Glad somebody is
, flitted through her mind, and she chided herself for the self-pitying thought. No one had held a gun to her head and demanded that she sleep with Captain sen Drenthan. No, she’d brought that disaster on herself. The Stacian would have to live with his treachery, though. That might be cold comfort, but better than nothing. Although Admiral Horner and everyone around her might think differently, she knew, at bottom, that she had tried to do the right thing.

Still, as she murmured to her mother that she was tired and only wanted to go to bed, she knew this refuge — such as it was — could only be a temporary one. She didn’t know where home was, but she realized now it wasn’t here.

CHAPTER FOUR

Rast set down his handheld and rubbed his forehead. This was one of those days when it felt as if the
trinials
hanging down his back weighed twice as much as they normally did, and the news his source had just delivered hadn’t done anything to improve matters.

Ganymede. Might as well be right in the heart of old Gaia for all the good the information did him. Perhaps somewhere in the back of his mind he’d had some wild notion that he could go to Lira, speak with her, tell her the five cruisers that had attacked Chlorae II and its people had nothing to do with him. But while a Stacian and a Gaian might meet face to face in the wilder hinterlands of the galaxy, such a thing was completely impossible in the heart of the Gaian system.

For a second or two he entertained the notion of having his source pay to hire a Gaian to approach Lira on Ganymede, but that was just as foolish. For one thing, he knew the more people he brought into his confidence, the greater the chance that one of them could betray him to his superiors. A tumble sanctioned by the admiral was one thing. Openly pursuing the woman he’d been told to forget was quite another.

It was time to let her go. She was safely back home, and it comforted him somewhat to know she had gone back to her family. Even in their brief acquaintance she had seemed so fiercely independent that he found the move unexpected and yet oddly heartening. On Stacia, family was everything — it had to be, to ensure that one’s bloodlines survived even in face of that world’s less than ideal environment. Indeed, some of Admiral sen Trannick’s patronage probably stemmed from Rast’s mother being the admiral’s distant cousin by way of their great-grandsire’s numerous offspring.

Unwelcome as the idea might be, perhaps Admiral sen Trannick was right. Perhaps it was time to forget Lira Jannholm, late of the GDF
Valiant
.

For what felt like the hundredth time that night, Lira rolled over, attempting to find a more comfortable spot in the bed. It seemed too soft after the hard, narrow sleeping accommodations in her quarters on the
Valiant
, the adjustable foam too accommodating. And it didn’t help that every time she closed her eyes, she seemed to catch a ghost-trace of the spicy scent that surrounded Rast sen Drenthan. Her mind playing tricks on her, of course; there wasn’t a Stacian within parsecs of Ganymede, and even if there were, the recyclers and scrubbers and myriad other components of Dome 3’s ventilation system would have made sure that every trace of alien aroma had been thoroughly erased.

This had happened once or twice during her journey here: thinking that she had sensed him somehow, shutting her eyes at night and imagining the heat of his body next to hers. Ridiculous, really. No human male had ever made such an impression on her, so why the hell was she letting this Stacian infest her memories?

She wished there were a way to flush her brain cells the way one might wipe a computer after its memory had been hopelessly compromised. Then she wouldn’t keep replaying those images in her mind, of his hands touching her, his tongue between her legs, the heat of his flesh inside her. Somehow her body didn’t seem to understand what her brain knew — that he had tricked her, betrayed her. That he wasn’t worthy of another thought, let alone this obsession that seemed to have taken hold on some deep, atavistic level she hadn’t even known existed before now.

Her body ached with need. Without even realizing at first what she was doing, she reached lower, touched the damp heat between her legs. Stroked, and stroked, bringing at last the release she needed, even as she acknowledged that this was a counterfeit, a pale substitute for the thing she really wanted. And once it was over, she turned her head into the pillow and wept, crying as silently as she had climaxed, hating Rast sen Drenthan, and hating herself for what she’d allowed him to do to her.

There had been a formal reception on Syrinara, hosted by the planetary consul, to honor the new commander of the defense force. Strong wine had flowed — Syrinara had begun experimenting with hybridized Eridani grapes — and Rast found himself not quite as steady of head as he might have preferred. The woman who sat next to him at dinner laughed and flirted and made it quite clear that she’d be more than pleased to have him accompany her to her apartments afterward. So he’d gone, thinking in his half-drunken state that it would be a good chance to banish the ghost of Lira Jannholm forever. Surely a night spent in the arms of a Stacian woman should be enough to convince him of where his true interests lay.

But although he’d managed to rise to the occasion, he found his level of enthusiasm not quite what it should be. Oh, he performed well enough, but all he could think of was how different Lira had felt in his embrace, how different she had tasted. How the silk of her hair had trailed across his chest and set him throbbing all over again.

This woman — Rast couldn’t even recall her name — fell asleep soon afterward, and he eased himself out of bed and went to the windows, which functioned more as doors, opening onto a balcony that overlooked a moonlit garden. So unlike their home world, this first colony of Stacia. No, Syrinara had the stamp of Eridani all over it, from the architecture to the manner in which the gardens that surrounded the house had been planted. One might say the Eridanis were generous with their knowledge, but others complained they wanted to make everything over in their image.

In that endeavor they had met their match in the Gaians, who had also developed a cruder form of the subspace drive that allowed starships to travel the galaxy and which also permitted the wide-flung colonies that had sprung up in the centuries following those first thrusts toward the stars. The Gaians possessed their own advanced technologies, while the Stacians, he had to admit, had lagged far behind. This was not a popular viewpoint, and most Stacian histories emphasized his people’s resourcefulness in surviving after the meteor forever changed their planet’s climate. However, one couldn’t argue with the reality that living in caves and hunting by night did not exactly produce the correct conditions for developing computers and spaceships and mechanoids.

At any rate, Stacia did not want to lag behind, and so eagerly took the Eridani technology as it was given, unlike the Gaians, who tinkered with it as it pleased them. These days, most new starships were being built with the Gaian-engineered Gupta drives, which achieved speeds even the Eridanis hadn’t been able to manage. The irony that those drives also powered the Stacian cruisers which had headed off the Chlorae II colonists was not lost on Rast sen Drenthan.

“Why so wakeful?” came a throaty voice from behind him.

He turned to see the woman he had just bedded sitting upright, watching him. She had not bothered to cover her bare torso, and the smooth golden skin of her breasts was turned copper by the ruddy hue of Syrinara’s oversized moon.

Normally such a sight would have made him harden immediately, but now he only gazed at her with dispassion, wondering what sound he had made that had woken her. More of Lira Jannholm’s influence, he supposed, somehow making every other female seem to be a pale imitation of her.

“The moonlight,” he lied. “It’s very bright.”

“True,” she said, nodding. “Your first time on Syrinara?”

“Yes.” He paused, then added, “I believe I told you that at dinner.”

A hesitation of her own, and he had the sudden impression that this hadn’t been a chance encounter, that she had been placed carefully to catch his eye and engage him in conversation. Too bad she hadn’t done a very good job of taking notes.

“So you did.” She smiled, as if at her own foolishness. “I suppose I had a little too much wine.”

Rast didn’t believe that for a second. Oh, he had drunk a good deal, but not so much that he hadn’t noticed she took only one glass for every two of his, and the last one she had left at the table more than half full. Abruptly, he asked, “Who sent you?”