Sweet Starfire (3 page)

“I assume it implies a sharing of responsibilities and tasks.”

“Sweet Harmony, what an innocent. It means a sharing of bunks, Cidra. Convenience contracts are short-term sexual alliances. Contracted for purposes of sex and companionship. The six-week run to
QED
can be very long and lonely, Otanna Rainforest. Now do you understand?”

Her face grew very still as she contemplated his words. Then Cidra nodded thoughtfully. She should have realized that something like this was involved in the contractual situations she had heard about. Wolves were said to be prodigiously interested in sex. “Yes, now I understand. Well, I would not be interested in that sort of arrangement.”

“Somehow I didn’t think you would.”

“Is that the only type of contract you would be willing to extend?”

“If you had been listening carefully, you would have heard me say that I’m not even interested in a convenience contract. I told you, I tried it once and it was a disaster. I’ll stick to finding a little special handling in between mail hops. I’m grateful to you for getting this place to serve me a decent steak, Cidra, but I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to do business together.”

Cidra tried to hide her disappointment behind her mask of serene acceptance. “So it would seem. You must allow me to pay for your meal, Otan Severance. It is the least I can do under the circumstances.”

He looked vaguely irritated. “Skip it. You said you were running on short credit, and I just had a fairly decent run from Renaissance. I’ll get the tab.”

“Oh, no, I could not allow you to do that,” she protested, genuinely shocked. “It was I who approached you and took up your valuable time.”

“I was sitting in a tavern about to get drunk. You didn’t waste any of my time. I can always get drunk. I can’t always get my steaks cooked properly.” He picked up his mug and downed another healthy swallow of the potent ale. “So. What are you going to do now? Go back to Clementia?”

Cidra’s eyes widened in astonishment. “Of course not. You are only the first mail pilot I have approached. There are half a dozen more here in Port Valentine at the moment, or so the Port authorities told me. I will work my way through the list. Surely there must be someone interested in a working passenger. And if not, I will wait until other postmen or postwomen arrive. They come and go constantly from what I have been told.”

Severance regarded her coolly. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Cidra.”

Some of her anxiety bubbled to the surface and emerged in a flash of hostility that took Cidra by surprise more than it did her companion. “Still, it is my idea, is it not, Severance? You needn’t concern yourself with it or with me.”

“Isn’t there someone in Clementia who might be concerned with your notions and where they’re liable to take you?”

She put down the all-purpose fork she had been using and sat very straight in the booth. “I am not a child, Severance. I reached the age of maturity four years ago and am fully responsible for my own actions. Just as you are.”

“Far be it from me to give advice to someone reared among Saints,” Severance growled. “Good luck, lady. Just watch out what kind of contract you end up signing. Don’t forget to read the fine print.” He got to his feet. “If you’ve finished eating, I’ll see you back to wherever you’re staying.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“It is, unless you want a scene.” He slipped a credit plate into the small slot embedded in the table. When the faint glow confirmed that the meal had been paid for, he removed the plate and reached for Cidra’s arm.

She hadn’t argued, Severance thought later, after having dropped Cidra off at her hotel. But, then, Harmonics rarely argued, except about philosophical or mathematical problems. He remembered how his brother Jeude had always backed away from a disagreement, putting on the same mask of serene contentment he had seen on Cidra’s face that evening. Emotional confrontations with other people were very uncomfortable for Saints, Severance knew. Belatedly he reminded himself that Cidra wasn’t technically a Harmonic.

It was easy to forget. He could understand why others such as the restaurant personnel reacted to her as if she were indeed a full-fledged Saint. There was something very serene and innately dignified about Cidra Rainforest. Perhaps it had to do with the way she wore her long, red-brown hair in that formal coronet of braids. Or it might have been the way the elegant yellow robes flowed around a body that was as slender, graceful, and proud as that of a dancer. The clothing worn by Harmonics was naturally as dignified and graceful as those who wore and designed it. The women’s high-collared gowns, with their long, wide-banded sleeves, fit closely to the waist and then flared in an elegant line from hips to ankles. The fabric was uniformly the fine, beautifully worked crystal moss. Cidra’s gown was no exception. She was not a tall woman, but her robes provided an illusion of height. She was a young woman, probably about eight years younger than himself, but her eyes held more refined intelligence than a man usually saw in a woman that age. Of course, Teague reminded himself, if she’d been raised in Clementia, her education would have been thorough and sophisticated.

Severance grabbed a runner outside Cidra’s hotel to take him to his ship, but his thoughts remained with the woman he had just left.

The essentially gentle quality that usually characterized Saints was a part of her, too, he mused, but in Cidra it came across differently. In true Harmonics Teague had always sensed a distant, controlled, broadly humanistic compassion. In Cidra he had seen something much more immediate, a more vivid and impulsive empathy. Severance remembered the way she had stopped to help the downed brawler in the first tavern and shook his head. It had been a long time since he’d enjoyed any special handling in the arms of a woman. Too long. Chances were that his imagination was interpreting Cidra’s actions in the wrong way. He was probably just hungry for the kind of gentleness a man sometimes needed from a woman. And, for some reason, a part of him had gone ahead and decided that Cidra could give him what he needed.

A picture of her soft, slender body lying under him, her gilded nails clutching his shoulders snapped into Severance’s head before he could stop it. For an instant he knew a sense of self-disgust. Surely he wasn’t one of those perverts who were attracted to the cerebral and remote female Harmonics. Such men were only drawn by the sick need to despoil something they could never understand or accept.

No, Severance reassured himself, his brooding awareness of Cidra was reasonably normal. She was, after all, by her own admission a Wolf in Harmonic clothing. And while he hadn’t been around many Harmonic women, he had met enough to know that they didn’t project any real sense of sexuality. Cidra, on the other hand, had struck him as a very sensual creature, even though her air of serenity partially masked the raw vitality in her. He had the feeling she wasn’t even aware of it herself.

A Saint among Wolves. To a certain extent Cidra would be safe because most people felt a certain instinctive protective-ness toward Harmonics. But there were all too many exceptions to that rule. Severance could think of several offhand, many of whom were fellow mail-run pilots.

At least she’d had the sense to choose a hotel in a reasonably safe section of town. Mankind’s penchant for building cities around ports had changed little during the course of human development; nor had the basic characteristics of those cities changed. There were still good and bad sections, safe and unsafe areas. Cidra Rainforest had been wandering through some of the less desirable streets of Port Valentine when she had found him earlier that evening. Severance tried to ignore the fact that she’d be back on those same streets tomorrow evening, searching for a more helpful postman.

She would probably find one, he reflected as he sprawled in the back of the runner and listened to the faint shushing sound of the vehicle’s twin blades on the pavement. Some renegade such as Neveril or Scates would lick his chops and produce a very neatly worded convenience contract before Cidra quite realized what was happening. She would be on her way to Renaissance, only to discover that her Harmonic trappings weren’t much protection from certain kinds of Wolves.

Severance shifted restlessly as the lights of the port facilities came into view. It wasn’t any of his business, he told himself angrily. By all accounts, Harmonics were quite intelligent; someone from Clementia had the ability to make her own decisions. She certainly didn’t need Severance’s help.

As the runner hissed to a halt Teague paid the fare with his credit plate and climbed out. He stood on the glowing sidewalk, staring at the tapering, floodlit outline of his ship out on the field. Severance Pay was poised for an immediate liftoff, her stubby, swept-back wings seeming to strain at the inconvenience of being planet bound. She was always ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The competition for lucrative mail runs was stiff, and Severance had no intention of missing out on prime cargo simply because his ship wasn’t ready to leave.

Automatically he removed one of two small remotes he carried on his utility loop and punched into Severance Pay’s primary on-board computer. He queried for messages and read the response on the small screen of the remote. A couple of friends had hit port and left word that they could be reached at one of the nearby bars if Severance happened to feel like a game of Free Market. There was a fuel tab that the computer had already been authorized to pay. And there was a terse message from one of the local postal agents saying that he’d had a special request from a client.

Severance knew what that meant. A patron had asked for him and his ship by name. With any luck that meant an important run. He started for the bank of comp-phones that were housed in a nearby terminal.

“Hey, Severance, you son of a renegade, where’s the little Saint?”

Severance hesitated and then decided that he couldn’t shake Scates by simply ignoring him. The other postman grinned and waved from the terminal doorway.

“I took her back to her hotel.” Severance made to step around the man who had obviously been doing the port-strip taverns.

“Heard she was looking for a contract.”

“Not the kind you mean.”

“I’m not particular,” Scates assured him. His broken nose twisted at an odd angle when he leered. “I take it you’re not going to give her a lift?”

“No.”

“You’re missing a great opportunity, Severance. Me, I could think of plenty of things to teach a little Saint between here and
QED
.”

Severance didn’t bother to respond as he started through the open terminal door. But as the clear diazite panels slid shut behind him, he glanced back and saw that Scates was grinning more widely than ever. In the up-from-under pavement lighting his features seemed almost ludicrously demonic. Severance cursed his imagination again and turned away.

Even as he found a vacant comp-phone and punched in the postal agent’s code, Severance knew what Scates was going to do. And as he listened to the agent tell him that there was a rush shipment of small but vital robot sensors that would pay twice the usual rates, Teague Severance was visualizing Scates offering Cidra a contract of convenience. Scates’s convenience.

He shouldn’t have tried to touch her.

Cidra found herself shaking uncontrollably. Perhaps, she told herself, if the man who called himself Scates had only continued to wheedle or argue, nothing would have happened. But he had reached for her, and Cidra had seen the hot lust in his eyes. She had reacted instinctively because there had been no real time to think.

All her life her body had been kept supple and strong with the ancient exercise. The training had begun before she could walk. Cidra couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t know the essentials of Moonlight and Mirrors. Intellectually she had known, too, that the flowing, deceptively simple movements were based on an ancient form of self-defense, records of which had arrived with the First Families of Stanza Nine nearly two hundred years ago.

But no one she knew in Clementia had ever actually used it in self-defense. She was shocked by how her body had reacted to the first genuine threat it had ever known. One moment Scates had lunged for her, and the next he was lying half conscious on the floor. The instant in between had been a shifting pattern that hadn’t required any thought or preparation on Cidra’s part. She had known the basics since she was a child. But she had never known herself capable of using them so effectively in this way.

The hem of Cidra’s black-and-silver sleeping surplice was still swirling around her ankles and Scates had just hit the floor when the hotel room’s communication panel announced another visitor. Cidra tore her stunned gaze from the man at her feet and stared at the softly lit door panel. Just then Scates stirred, groaning, and Cidra stepped quickly out of the way of his hand. The door panel hummed softly, demanding her attention. Because she could think of nothing else to do, Cidra went to the panel and switched on the screen. The fine tremors in her body seemed to grow worse when she saw who stood outside her door.

“Severance,” she whispered.

On the small screen his hard, unforgiving features were etched in impatient, irritated lines, as if he didn’t approve of either his surroundings or his business in the hotel. Indeed, he did look out of place in the elegant hall, his lean, dark figure a harsh contrast to the silvered carpet and the soft, waving patterns of soothing hues that decorated the walls. Behind him the subtly concealed security monitors turned politely toward his profile and then moved on, not yet alarmed.

“Cidra? Let me inside. I want to talk to you. If you don’t open the door, the hall monitors are going to start recording my actions, and then we’ll have to explain everything to the front desk.” When she didn’t respond immediately, he went on more harshly. “Come on, lady, I haven’t got all night. I’m in one renegade hell of a hurry. I’ve got to get my ship off the ground within the hour.”

“Severance, you’d better go away.” Cidra’s voice sounded strange to her own ears. “Something’s happened. I don’t think you’ll want to get involved.”