gaian consortium 03 - the gaia gambit (7 page)

The smile faltered a little, but she managed to tilt her head and give him a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”

“Who made sure you were seated next to me at dinner tonight? Admiral sen Trannick?”

At that question, her smile disappeared altogether. She pursed her lips and looked away from him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do. You’re very attractive, but you’re not a very good liar.”

“I don’t see what the harm is. I would have gone with you even if — ” And she broke off, her flush made more pronounced by the reddish moonlight.

“Even if he hadn’t asked?” Rast finished for her. “And what was the incentive? Did he pay you?”

“I’m not a whore!” she flashed. “There are many women who would have gladly taken my place, but the admiral’s wife is my mother’s sister-daughter. I had the first right.”

“Right to what?” he asked, although he thought he already knew the answer.

“To Rast sen Drenthan, new defender of Syrinara.”

“And that is all?”

“‘All’?” she repeated, her tone innocent — but, as he had already noted, Rast didn’t think much of her skills at prevarication.

“No direction to school me in the attractions of Stacian women? No admonishment to do whatever was necessary to make me forget a certain Gaian female?”

She started a little at that, then stared down at the bedclothes. They, too, were Eridani, he noted absently, fine of weave, intricate in pattern, bits of metallic thread throwing out errant sparkles under the light of Syrinara’s moon.

“Ah,” he said then. Her silence told him all he needed to know.

Without further comment he went to the chair to retrieve his discarded uniform and began to pull it on.

“That’s all?” she demanded, pushing the covers aside and going to stand a few paces away from him. He noted that she had planted herself directly between him and the door. “You would throw this aside for some
slaindar
?”

The word, directly translated, meant “white meat.” A slur his people used for the Gaians, even though, strictly speaking, not all Gaians could be described as white. But for the Stacians, the word also meant insipid, useless. He knew the woman standing before him had used it on purpose to wound, to provoke him into some sort of response.

He would not allow himself to become angry. Lira Jannholm’s honor was so clear to him that defending it to this female would be a waste of breath. Besides, if he did not acknowledge the remark, then she would have less ammunition to take to the admiral, less proof that Rast truly was still interested in Lira Jannholm.

After fastening the last button of his jacket, he said, “Step aside.”

She didn’t move. In a way, she was magnificent, the fall of her
trinials
glittering with copper and silver and the dull red sheen of unfaceted carnelian, her breasts rising and falling in angry breaths. A month ago, he would have reached out and taken her again, this time on the floor, against the rug of woven Iradian silk.

Now, though, he only repeated, “Step aside.” A touch of steel entered his tone. “Now.”

Finally she faltered, and moved a few inches to her left. “The admiral will not be pleased.”

“No, I suppose he won’t. But that is my problem, not yours.”

She looked as if she wanted to say something else, but the expression on his face must have been enough to stop her. In silence she stood as he passed her by and went out the door.

Cool night air surrounded him. He stopped under the spreading branches of an unfamiliar, alien tree, and lifted his head to watch Syrinara’s blood-tinged moon for a moment or two.

It was very possible that he had just made a huge mistake. On the other hand, all he felt at the moment was an overwhelming sensation of relief. It would have been too easy to fall into the admiral’s trap. Already Rast was past the age when he should have married and begun his own family. Pressure had begun to increase on him from all sides — parents, sisters, brothers. With the admiral flinging an eligible female of good family at him, he might have succumbed…if it weren’t for Lira Jannholm.

Odd, though, that only a few weeks ago sen Trannick had been so eager for Rast to bed Captain Jannholm, and now seemed equally eager to make sure the two were kept as far apart as possible.

Or perhaps not so odd at all…

The base on Ganymede was too regulated, too clean and proper to have the equivalent of the spaceport dive bar Lira had seen on tens of other worlds, but the Big Dipper would have to do. Located in Dome 2, next to the shuttle pad that ferried people back and forth from the mining outposts on Io and Europa, it had its share of what Marta Jannholm referred to as “colorful characters” — meaning they made their living by getting their hands dirty. In a figurative sense, of course, as out-system miners used automated equipment to do most of their work. And even if they did use their hands from time to time, those hands would of course be protected by the gloves of an EVA suit.

The miners often traveled from world to world, following the next big strike. In that way, they weren’t much different from the prospectors of old, although the equipment modern-day miners used would have probably made the “forty-niners” Lira had read about in her history texts fall over in their well-worn shoes.

Anyway, since she had to find something to do with herself, and since the legitimate avenues seemed to be closed — a few carefully worded messages to former classmates at the academy had been enough to convince her of that — she decided her next course of action would have to be pursuing some less-than-legitimate avenues. And that meant hanging out at the Big Dipper and looking studiously at loose ends.

It didn’t take too long. After five minutes or so of nursing a reduced-alcohol ale while seated at the end of the bar, she saw a burly character with a week’s worth of stubble on his jaw rise from his own table and amble toward her. He nodded at the barkeep, then remarked, as if to the air in general, “I hear there’s a transport in need of a pilot.”

“That so,” she responded, staring down into the wan suds at the edges of her cup as if they were the most important thing in the world.

“Yeah.”

The stranger was silent as the bartender handed over another pint and then wandered off to the other end of the bar, where a hard-faced man sat a little too close to a pretty redhead who had to be at least two standard decades his junior. They were both drinking watered-down white wine and not looking very happy about it.

“Last pilot got his arm broke in a fight the other night. Owners want that transport gone ASAP. You interested?”

Of course she was, but Lira knew better than to display too much interest. “What’s the cargo?”

The stranger let out a rusty chuckle. “Do you care?”

“I care if it’s going to land me in the MaxSec on Titan.”

“No worries. Spare drive parts, farm equipment. Harmless.”

On the surface, sure. She guessed that “harmless” cargo was hiding some contraband the owner had bribed the proper authorities to make sure was never discovered, but that was just the way these people did business. Once upon a time, she might have cared. Now, all she cared about was getting off Ganymede, away from the no-longer-family that had given her very little refuge after all.

She didn’t even bother to ask the destination. What did it matter, as long as it was away from here?

In the end, Rast had given in to his curiosity. It was dangerous, and foolish, but he had to know more of her situation, get a message to her somehow. His source assured him that all would be kept confidential, that the message would be directed through so many different channels no one could possibly guess at its origin.

But then the response came back with one simple word.

Gone
.

Left Ganymede some five standard days earlier, apparently piloting a rundown freighter with the ludicrously grandiose name of
Star of Madrid
, whatever a Madrid was.

Destination: Iradia.

He’d frowned at that piece of intelligence. Iradia seemed the last place he could imagine Lira Jannholm. It was a desert world, much like his own, but blessed with oases scattered across its surface. Those oases had given rise to the moon moth, a huge specimen whose caterpillars produced the fiber woven into some of the galaxy’s finest fabrics. In the oases, life was more or less orderly, but the planet’s expanses of desert provided safe harbor for a good number of the sector’s worst crime lords. If you didn’t have business with the silk bosses, it was best to avoid the place. And yet Lira had gone there, flying an old ship that should have, as far as he could judge based on its build date, been scuttled years ago.

The manifest had listed various piece of equipment required for the farming of the sandleaf trees that provided sustenance for the moths. He guessed there was a good deal more on that ship not listed on the manifest, and wondered if Lira had realized the same thing. Probably — she was far from stupid. But what had led her to abandon the safe haven of Ganymede for the dubious honor of flying contraband to Iradia?

That way lay a headache, and Rast’s scowl deepened. He’d spent the last week making sure everything he did and said was by the book, so as not to attract any more negative attention from Admiral sen Trannick. The admiral had been less than pleased by Rast’s dismissal of the young woman who was his wife’s relation, but he hadn’t said anything openly. No, his disapproval had been displayed in the coolness of his tone, the way he had saved his heartiest laughs for those under his command who hadn’t dared to thwart his wishes.

Rast almost wondered if the admiral might find some way to rescind his gift of Syrinara’s defense post, but so far things had moved along unchanged. And that was why Rast had done everything in his power to avoid provoking any more of his superior officer’s wrath. By maintaining things as they were, perhaps that small bump in the road could be forgotten, put aside.

The last thing he should do was make any further attempt to locate Lira Jannholm. Bad enough that he had gone as far as he had already. If she had, for whatever reason, decided to put aside all her training and throw in her lot with less-than-savory merchants, there wasn’t much he could do about it. She was a grown woman, capable of making her own decisions.

And yet…

He had been to Iradia, just once, newly commissioned on his first posting, eager to see the galaxy, to explore the stars that had glittered so brightly in the clear skies of his home world. As a first impression of those faraway planets, Iradia hadn’t been all that inspiring. His ship’s crew had been admonished to stay within the safe confines of Aldis Nova, the site of the main spaceport and the planet’s largest oasis, spanning a good two hundred kilometers across. But of course he and several other of the junior crew members had laughed at the warnings and ventured outside the safe zone. After all, they were from a harsh desert world as well. They’d been confident they could handle anything Iradia or its denizens threw at them.

Eighteen standard hours later, the group had limped back into Aldis Nova, missing two of its members. The bosses that controlled the desert just outside the oasis hadn’t taken kindly to a contingent of Stacian interlopers entering their territory, and made it clear through an ambush in a canyon some ten kilometers beyond the safe zone. Despite all his training, it was Rast’s first firefight — and his last. Not much need for that sort of thing on board a starship, and he found he liked it that way. It wasn’t cowardice to know he’d be a happy man if he never had to see a compatriot bleed out in his arms again.

Those bitter recollections did not do anything to improve his mood. And if he’d found Iradia so hostile, how would it treat Lira Jannholm, she of the upper-crust Ganymede background and the spotless record?

Well, spotless until she had met him, anyway.

That seemed to decide things. He wouldn’t call it a rescue — he had a feeling Lira wouldn’t appreciate being thought of as someone who needed protecting — but he knew he couldn’t abandon her to Iradia’s tender mercies.

It was time to take a leave of absence.

Lira stared at the captain of the
Star of Madrid
in consternation. “You’re leaving me here?”

He seemed unmoved by her distress. “I told you the job was only temporary. You been paid. You can get your own passage off-world.”

So she could…at a cost that would eat up more than half what she’d just been paid for bringing that garbage scow of a freighter safely here to Iradia. And hadn’t that been a picnic, what with blown coolant coils, a balky nav-computer, and a ship’s engineer with roving hands.

When they’d landed, she’d been overwhelmingly relieved that she could get off the ship for a few hours, walk around in Aldis Nova, and breathe air that didn’t stink of stale coolant and bodies that weren’t quite as fastidious about keeping clean as she was. However, she hadn’t thought she’d be barred from returning once she’d had her fill of fresh air.

“People come in and out of Iradia all the time,” Captain Marquez said, with a shrug of his fat shoulders. “You shouldn’t have too much trouble getting another gig.”

That might be true. Too bad she wasn’t all that keen on picking up another piloting job, considering how well this one had turned out. Not that she had much of a choice at this point.

“Sure,” she said, and bent down to pick up her satchel, which contained pretty much everything she owned. A few odds and ends had been left behind in her old room on Ganymede, but she somehow doubted she’d be going back there anytime soon to retrieve them.

A hot breeze ruffled her hair, loosening a few strands from the tight coil she wore at the back of her neck. The wind was coming from the west. It seemed as good a direction as any.

She turned away from Marquez and strode off into the swirling crowds of Aldis Nova. She wouldn’t let herself think about what might happen next.

To say that Admiral sen Trannick was angry would probably be an understatement. Rast had somehow doubted that his request for a leave of indeterminate length would pass by unnoticed…but he’d rather hoped it would.