A Prison Unsought (66 page)

And so we approach my
second question. The first has been answered: he will stay with the Panarchists.
His days of the Riftskip are over.

“If we are too late?” she asked.

He looked up, his blue eyes intense. “Jaim asked me that,”
he said finally. “No one else has quite dared. And I can’t answer it, except to
say that we must get my father back. He has never been more needed than he is
now.” His gaze wandered past her, past the dyplast bulkheads and the landing
bay—past time and space.

Vi’ya sat quietly, trying without success to block the
vertiginous divarication of his emotional spectrum. Foremost in her own mind
was the memory of his having cornered her at the splat-ball tourney; at the
time she thought it accidental that he managed it when Jaim was not near, but
she had since then suspected that he had always known of the telltale in Jaim,
even though Jaim himself didn’t seem to know.

Will you take me to
rescue my father?
he had asked.

Which meant he knew,
somehow, about her secret escape plans. So what about those plans? To ask
directly might force him to take official notice. It was too early, anyway, and
in any case she had to return to Ares for Lokri.

And then . . .
and then . . .

And then I find out
the answer to my third question.

He said, “No one knows this, either, but during one of those
interminable nights after I took the nav tests, I released a worm into the Ares
DataNet. If it gets past the scavengers and phages, and the safeguards my
trusting brother undoubtedly built around those already extant protecting the
Aerenarch’s prerogatives, it might clear up some of the anomalies. And
incidentally afford me some freedom of action.”

She already knew that he was adept at questioning, and
answering, obliquely.
So if he’s saying
he will contrive my freedom, then he is asking if I will leave.

She stood up and
turned away, her hands finding employment in laying aside Omilov’s compad and
stylus.

That depends on how
you answer me at the last.

But the time was not yet right for speech; it was at once
too early and too late.

He set aside his drink, rose, and walked to the lock. With
her back turned she could feel his gaze and his question.

For a suspended time neither spoke. Then she heard him tab the
lock console to life. The hatches closed; she heard the brief tapping of a
code.

She led the way to her cabin.

They faced one another once again, standing eye-to-eye,
their gazes locked and blended. She felt the force of his desire and braced
against it, iron fighting an increasingly potent magnetic charge.

Finally he smiled, no more than a deepening of the corners
of his lips, and she could breathe again. “You wouldn’t make the first move,
would you.”

It wasn’t even a question. With Markham, her mate, the first
move had ceased to carry responsibility: the future, they’d thought, belonged
to them both.

“No,” she said.

And then sensed, in the dizzying alteration of his emotional
spectrum, that he somehow knew it.

“A request,” he said, his voice so
soft she could just hear him. “That holo you made, of the garden on the
Mandala.”

She dropped her hand to her console without removing her
eyes from his steady blue gaze; her fingers touched the keys, familiar through
years of work, and tabbed the accept.

The cabin disappeared, replaced by the astounding view of
sky-brushing sequoias. Birds trilled, darting from the greenery to the branches
overhead. The tianqi changed, sending a loam- and pine-scented breeze to ruffle
over her heated skin.

He drew in one long, unsteady breath, looking around with
eyes that seemed blinded, then took a step, and another.

He reached. She moved past his hands, sheathed her fingers
in his curling dark hair, and surrendered to his devouring kiss.

A kilometer away, Manderian, once rahal’Khesteli, now simply
a follower of the Sanctus Lleddyn, fought back the disturbance in his dreams
and woke up.

When he identified the source of the disturbance, he slid
out of bed and knelt on the cold deck plates of his cabin, still in the
darkness, and slid his hands over his face in silence.

Emmet Fasthand hunched over his console, watching with
increasing fascination the fight between half-naked Moob, blood-streaked, teeth
bared, knife at the ready, and a ferocious gray-clad Dol’jharian male.

The night had started out disappointing; after taking great
care to lock the crew out of the Panarchist telltales, Fasthand reluctantly realized
that the Dol’jharians had no interest in the prisoners as sex partners,
unwilling or otherwise. The old and weak, it appeared, held little appeal, so
all his care went for nothing. Fasthand would not have let Sundiver broadcast
the rape of the Panarch over the hyperwave to entertain the Sodality for free,
not when exclusivity could have afforded riches on Rifthaven.

Then his crew got restless, for none of the Dol’jharians
came out of their section. The slow realization that they seemed to prefer
their own kind for their savage fun and games had made the twistier members of
his crew indignant. Fasthand had feared a general riot until Hestik apparently
conceived the bright idea of foraying into Dol’jharian territory.

To Fasthand’s surprise, although the imagers within remained
locked down, for the first time he knew of, the hatches were not. He had shivered
at the implications of this new revelation, then smiled at the looks on the
crew’s faces as their confidence suddenly faltered for the same reason. Mockery
from Moob pushed them through. Despite having announced her intention to seek
out Anaris, Sundiver was nowhere to be seen.

So far, only one of the hunters had come back out.

Moob and the gray fought their way down a corridor, each
cursing and snarling as they feinted and grappled. Long smears of blood marked
the walls. Fasthand shuddered, checking his door again, as he had throughout
the evening, to make certain that the small plasma cannon he’d rigged up was
still in place.

If worse came to worst, he knew where the three Bori were
hiding, and he could sic any attacking Dol’jharian on them, but he really
preferred them alive. Tat, at least. She was the only one in the crew who might
be able to break into Morrighon’s codes.

He watched the Dol’jharian trip Moob and land on top of her,
his huge hand mashing one of her bare, tattooed breasts. Fasthand shifted
uncomfortably on his chair, watching in fascination as she writhed from beneath
him, then kneed him in the crotch.

Or tried to. He grasped her ankle and sent her sprawling,
then again was on top of her, fighting for dominance. A little groan escaped
Fasthand, and he sneaked a slightly guilty look around him, as if he’d be able
to see any narks.

He was pretty sure he’d found them all, but he couldn’t
know. The captain who’d had the
Samedi
before him had not only been extraordinarily suspicious even for a Rifter, he’d
also had his own cabin wired for multiple imagers to record his depravities with
wooly, cloven-hooved mammals, apparently to be reviewed when he suffered a
dearth of the preferred ruminant.

Fasthand grimaced. After he’d seen those images, he’d
bundled up all the blankets and knitted wall hangings in the cabin and spaced
them. He was pretty broad-minded, but even Dol’jharians didn’t make a practice
of killing and eating their sex partners.

It was Tat, shortly after being hired on, who uncovered
those coded vids, which Fasthand had neglected to secure under his own codes,
and promptly turned them over to the crew. It had made her instantly popular
with them, or at least popular enough that they refrained, until the novelty of
bestiality wore off, from tormenting her and her Bori relatives in their usual
“initiation” games. That had been somewhat of a relief to Fasthand; he’d gotten
tired of having to hire several new secondary crew at almost every stop.

But her very competence always made him a little
uncomfortable. He was afraid she might crack his own codes.

Well, at least she couldn’t possibly be watching him now,
even if she had found imagers he’d missed, for she and the two brothers or
cousins or whatever they called themselves—since they all slept together, he
found the notion of familial relation repellent—were hiding out somewhere along
the kilometer-long catwalk in the missile tube.

He licked his lips, forgetting his fears as the Dol’jharian
managed to flip Moob over onto her stomach. Fasthand thoroughly enjoyed seeing
Moob’s increasingly frantic struggles to avoid a humiliation unthinkable to a
Draco. But then she slithered out of her opponent’s grip, and the fight
resumed.

Presently he flicked over the other corridors: nothing. He tabbed
a search. There was Sundiver outside the Dol’jharian section. She sagged as the
gee-pad in front of the hatch brought local acceleration up to 1.2 gees, then
she braced up and stepped through.

He settled back, hoping to see her come running back out,
pursued by a Tarkan or two, like Moob. Too bad couldn’t spy into the
Dol’jharian area because Morrighon had locked out all the imagers—but he’d wait.

Beyond his view, Sundiver hesitated as Dol’jharian gravs
pulled at her insides, damping her enthusiasm. Being chased in this
acceleration would not be fun, but maybe she could lure her target into her own
cabin.

She knew where Anaris’s cabin was, and she also knew from
something Morrighon had said that two Tarkans stood before it at all times.
Except now, she was hoping.

She rounded a corner, pausing when she heard a series of smashing
thumps, then a long, gurgling scream. Blood smeared the wall across from her. A
hank of hair stuck to it. Her heart hammered, but she forced a grin. The hunt
was on!

She was sure that Anaris slept in this section’s biggest
cabin. She hoped he wasn’t busy with any of those blunge-brained Tarkans.
Hestik had promised to sidetrack Dhestaer, the Tarkan second-in-command, and
Kedr Five had smugly announced that he’d corner all the rest of them.

She slid past the last corner, straightening her shoulders.
The damn grav made smooth walking hard; if she wasn’t careful, her teeth tended
to click together. But when she saw the door unguarded, fresh energy zipped
through her and she grinned with fierce pleasure.

We’ll have to
introduce Karusch’na Rahali as a new fashion at Flauri’s on Rifthaven. Amazing
no one had thought of it before—chatzing the way the conquerors like it.

Bunny with no consent—and no consequences. The idea was so
seductive, she was amazed it was not more widespread. But then, it took someone
strong to scorn consequences, to not give in to the attempts of the weak to
bind by sentiment.

Her lip curled in scorn as she approached Anaris’s door.
He
would never demean himself with talk
of love and mates and trust.

As she’d hoped, there were no guards. She had come armed
with several override codes for forcing doors, but first she tried it—and when
it slid open, the astounding arrogance of an unlocked door unsettled her.

A quick glance about showed a neat room, no signs of
revelry, and Anaris seated at the console, his height and breadth of back
dwarfing a workstation built for someone much smaller.

His head turned sharply. A tingle ran through her nerves as
the dark eyes appraised her.
His
eyelashes are longer than mine!

“What’s the matter?” she taunted, lounging in the doorway.
“Why aren’t you out having fun? No balls?”

“My father has them mounted on the bridge of his flagship,”
Anaris said, standing up.

His sheer height was somewhat intimidating; the grav and her
racing pulse made blood sing in her head.

The door gouged into her hip, so she shifted her stance, and
the door slid shut behind her. She tensed, readying—but he only leaned against
the back of his pod and regarded her with pronounced amusement. “Any other
questions?”

So she would not be able to provoke him with the usual
insults that got men going. It only made him more of a challenge. “Why aren’t
you out there with the rest of them?” She waved behind, misjudged, and the back
of her hand struck the door, sharply painful. Damn the acceleration—this was no
fun!

“Not every Dol’jharian heeds the old superstitions,” he
said.

“Superstitions?” she repeated, massaging the back of her hand.
It was already bruising.

He lifted one shoulder. “What else would you call a belief
that you make stronger children by fighting, or that waiting for lunar
alignment will prolong your performance, or that your war skills will improve
by remaining celibate between times? Superstition.” A sardonic smile briefly
revealed the edges of strong white teeth. It was a smile that did not promise a
sharing of humor. “I prefer to choose the time, the place. And the partner.”

It was a not-quite-veiled insult—the first she’d ever
received. She flushed with anger, and to hide it, glanced past him with a show
of carelessness. The screen displayed a star map, with glowing lights and lines
lancing in one direction.

She recognized it immediately: Fasthand had one much like it
in his ready room, where he was laboriously plotting what little they’d gleaned
of Eusabian’s fleet movements. From the looks of it, Anaris had access to far
more codes.

He shifted position, faint interest briefly lifting his
brows. He knew she’d recognized it.

But instead of explaining, he reached effortlessly and shut
down his system. Then he took a step toward her.

His cool expression assessed her without a hint of ardor.
Threat? Her hand throbbed; this was no place for a fight. “I won’t say anything
to anyone,” she burst out.

“No, you won’t,” he agreed.