by C. Gockel
Miala awoke in the dim reaches of the night, tears still wet on her cheeks. Never before had she felt so alone. At that moment she would have welcomed Eryk Thorn’s presence—anything to keep the darkness at bay. But of course he slept somewhere in his own room below her, and she knew she would never go in search of him. To do so would be a display of weakness, and she could never allow that. So far she had earned at best a grudging respect from the mercenary. She was not about to jeopardize that because of a silly nightmare.
Hugging the lumpy pillow to her, Miala turned over in bed, willing herself to breathe deeply. You only need him for one thing, she thought, and that’s to get off-world. And he only needs you to get Mast’s treasure. Beyond that, you mean nothing to one another.
But even as she slipped back into the shadowy edges of dreams once again, she knew she was lying to herself. Perhaps she might mean nothing to him, but she feared he had begun to mean more to her than she wanted to admit.
6
“Rafe Darlester,” Eryk Thorn said, not bothering to turn from the viewscreen.
“What?” Miala hesitated at the entrance to the chamber, caught off-guard by Thorn’s cryptic comment.
With that he swiveled halfway toward her. Then he gave a slight inclination of his head in the direction of an image frozen on the screen behind him. “Our friendly visitors from the other evening. Think I finally got a lock on ’em.”
Again, his simple, matter-of-fact attitude was immediately reassuring. Although she had spent a considerable length of time in front of the dressing-room mirror this morning berating herself for her foolish thoughts of the night before, Miala had still been anxious at the thought of confronting Thorn once more. What if he could read some of her internal turmoil in her face? But she saw nothing in his own features save a slight satisfaction at finally solving the mystery of their attackers.
“So who’s Rafe Darlester?” she asked, hoping that she hadn’t paused too long before replying.
“Typical Mast wannabe,” he replied. “Maybe not completely typical. He’s pretty well-backed. Let’s call him the number-two or -three fish in this small pond.”
For a second she stared at him blankly, not comprehending the reference. Then she recalled a few of the things she’d read about Gaian biology, including the creatures that actually lived in water. Trying to assume a sage expression, she said, “Got it.”
His response was the same slightly lifted eyebrow, as if he knew all too well that she didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. “He was in a lot of the same stuff as Mast—smuggling, racketeering, slaving. Looks like Mast got the better of him once or twice, which would have given him a reason to come sniffing around—as if just picking at the leavings in the compound wasn’t enough reason.”
Despite herself, she moved farther into the room, pausing only a few feet away from the screen that showed the aforementioned paragon. The image from the security camera was grainy and small, but she made out a human male of about her father’s age, only built on a far grander scale. Lestan Fels had been a slim man of middle height. This Rafe Darlester would have topped her father by almost a head and was proportionately broad, though not fat. He wore dark, elaborate robes that were ridiculously inappropriate for the Iradian climate and was surrounded by a group of thugs only marginally larger than he.
“Nice,” she commented. Then she noticed the empty pot of coffee sitting on the desktop next to a stained mug and a plate decorated with a few scattered crumbs. “Have you been in here all night?”
He shrugged. “You need to be alone to work, and I wanted to finish this up. Seemed like a reasonable allocation of resources.”
She tried to estimate how many hours he’d been up straight without rest. At least thirty-six, as far as she could guess, which was far too long for a man who should have still been convalescing in bed. She knew better than to remonstrate with him, however, and said only, “Well, I’m up now, so if you want to catch a few hours’ sleep, go ahead.” At his brief hesitation, she added, “Don’t worry—I promise I’ll come get you if any other wandering thugs come by.”
The dark eyes watched her carefully, and Miala felt a small flush start to her cheeks. She could only hope that her desert tan would hide most of it. What he saw in her face she couldn’t begin to guess, but he gave a small nod and stood. Positioned so, he was very close to her—closer than he had ever been, and Miala remained frozen in place, wondering what he would do next and trying not to notice his peculiarly male scent of soap and clean sweat.
Then, without another word, he left the room.
Miala hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until he was gone. Then she let it out slowly, wondering if she would ever be able to completely control her reactions around him. That brief second when he stood—when he had been so close to her—had been enough to start her heart pounding. Again he had given her no encouragement, no reason to think he had meant to do anything but rise and exit the chamber. But still—
Stop being a girl and get to work, she thought, grimly pulling out the chair that faced the main computer console. You don’t have time for this romance-vid bullshit!
To her relief, however, this time she was able to concentrate well enough. Whatever the reason—whether it was the fact that Thorn had absented himself before she began to work, or whether he had at least put a name and a face to the threat which had confronted them two nights ago—she could feel that familiar sensation of sliding into the endless numbers, feeling them almost like a living force as she picked through one data stream after another, searching for the anomalies, looking for the one microscopic piece of data that seemed out of place.
To her surprise, after a few hours of this Miala actually found something. It was tiny, only one letter, but it was not where it should have been. She pushed herself back in her chair, staring at the screen, then leaned forward and tapped a few keys. The data flowed past, again with that tiny blip in the center of the complicated stream of numbers and symbols.
“What were you up to, Father?” she murmured. It had to mean something, of course. This was often how her father programmed in his back doors, by putting in random word associations known only to him and his daughter. These combinations had ranged from arrangements as simple as the letters of her own name to the name of her favorite vid-star, spelled backward. All she had to go on now was one letter, which she had to admit wasn’t much. Still, it was more than she’d had a few hours ago.
“B,” she said aloud. She did that occasionally, usually while trying to solve a particularly difficult puzzle. Her father had teased her for the practice, but somehow the sound of her own voice was reassuring. Besides, it wasn’t as if anyone could hear her now anyway. “Well, you put that in every possible combination with every other letter in the alphabet and get, what? A few hundred million possibilities?”
Still, she refused to be deterred. Of course, it wouldn’t be something random out of those hundred million possibilities. It had to be something of importance to Lestan Fels...or possibly his daughter.
She tried to think of things that started with “b,” hoping all the while that her father hadn’t reversed the order of the letters or turned the entire word inside out. Otherwise, she’d be here forever. “Box, bacteria, Bethany—” Miala smiled briefly, thinking of the kind-faced older woman who had run Aldis Nova’s one reputable dining establishment. The smile faded, however, as she remembered how Bethany Larsen had been pushed out of business by several of the seedier cafés, probably with the backing of Mast’s thugs or people connected with them. At any rate, she somehow doubted her father would have used a woman they barely knew as the code word for the back door into Mast’s security system. “—Box Canyon, Barris Jax—”
Now that was even more unlikely, although the irony of having Mast’s right-hand man as the key was not lost on her. She scrolled through more data, looking for an i or an e on the simple assumption that the word had to have a vowel in it somewhere. It didn’t take lo
ng for her to locate the e.
Big deal, she thought, only the most used letter in English. But she could tell she was getting closer.
It had to be something important. So who or what had been so significant to Lestan Fels that he had used the letters of their name as the code-breaker for the toughest piece of security he had ever written?
The answer came to her suddenly, in a piece of insight as blazing as the first rays of Iradia’s sun when it broke over the horizon each morning.
“Belissa,” she breathed. Of course, who better—what better—to be the hidden piece of code than the name of the woman who had betrayed him and left him here on this barren piece of rock twenty years ago?
With fingers that shook only a little, Miala brought up the login screen for Mast’s private security system. At the prompt, she typed in Belissa, and watched the login screen fade away, to be replaced with a graphical interface that allowed her access to the vaults, Mast’s personal files, his off-world accounts—everything she’d pursued relentlessly for the past few months and had begun to think she would never find.
She wasn’t sure where to start, but the vaults seemed the best bet. After all, even with the codes that allowed her access to Mast’s off-world accounts, it would take some work to do anything with the funds—she would have to set up her own accounts, come up with plausible reasons for the transfer of large sums of money from one account to another, and who knew what else. But the vaults were here, and they held tangible goods. And it was really a half share of the contents of those vaults that she had pledged to Eryk Thorn.
Thorn, she thought, and glanced up at the chrono on the wall. A little more than three hours had passed since she had begun her work, which meant it would be scorching high noon outside and far too soon to comfortably rouse the mercenary. She doubted, though, that he would appreciate her solicitude in letting him sleep while she went to inspect the contents of the vaults. The last thing she needed was for him to suspect her of hiding any goods from him.
She unlocked the vaults remotely from her workstation and then rose, leaving the security station and heading upstairs for the guest room on the second floor of the compound where Eryk Thorn slept. Of course the door was locked, but it had a courtesy page system, and she pressed the button and waited.
He was at the door sooner than she would have thought possible. “What’s the matter?”
He must sleep in that jumpsuit, Miala thought irrelevantly, and then wondered whether she was disappointed that he hadn’t been a little less...clothed.
She cleared her throat. “I did it.”
“Did what?”
“Broke the code. The vaults are open.”
For a long moment he only stared at her, almost as if he wasn’t quite sure he could believe her words. Then he said, “Show me.”
So she led him down the stairs, past the security station, past the kitchens, and then down another flight of steps, this one narrower and more dimly lit. They were now in a sub-level of the palace, not far from where Mast had once kept his prisoners. The air still stank slightly of stale sweat and another darker, more subtle smell—the scent of fear.
At the end of a short corridor was a set of three heavy doors composed of overlapping metal plates. Next to each of the doors was a control pad where one could type in the access code if necessary. Since Miala had already unlocked the doors from her workstation in the security chamber, the light on each control pad glowed green.
She stepped forward and palmed the lock to the center door. It slid open, and the contents of the vault were revealed to them.
Secretly, Miala had harbored visions of some glistening golden cave filled with treasure uncounted—visions inspired no doubt by some of the more lurid vids she had watched as a child, of space pirates and interstellar buccaneers. The truth was much more drab, yet no less rewarding. Inside the vault were neatly stacked storage containers and crates. Thorn walked up to one and opened the lid, revealing glistening silver-gilt units. Miala had never seen so much money in her life.
Eryk Thorn turned toward her, and the look of approval on his face seemed at that moment just as priceless to her as the riches contained in Mast’s vaults. “Good work,” he said.
“Thanks,” she replied carelessly, but inside she was rejoicing. Was he actually smiling at her?
“We’ll need to get some powered carts down here,” he went on, surveying the contents of the vault with a practiced eye. “Have you seen any?”
Miala didn’t hesitate. After all, she’d spent enough time here that the compound was as familiar to her as her own home. “There are two in the garages, and another one down near the back gates.”
“Good,” he said. “Why don’t you get the cart by the back gate, and I’ll bring in the two from the garage. It’ll take a few trips, but we should be able to get everything into the Fury.”
Nice, friendly name for a ship, she thought, although she knew better than to say anything aloud. At least she was reassured that he had said “we” and didn’t appear to be planning to kill her any time soon.
Of course, she thought wryly a while later, as they both returned with the carts and began loading the contents of the vaults onto them, there’s no point in him doing away with me now. He’d just have to do all this work by himself.
It was soon evident that it would take far more than one trip with the carts to load everything. Thorn had seemed sanguine about being able to haul away the contents of all three vaults, but Miala found herself wondering just how much the cargo hold of his one smallish ship—a highly modified Eridani Vector-class—could really carry. But once they had deposited one load in the Fury’s hold, it appeared there was still plenty of room left, and she trudged back down to the vaults with him, even as she wondered whether he was going to work her until she dropped from hunger or exhaustion.
Miala tried to remember how many hours it had been since her meager breakfast. At least six or seven, which normally wouldn’t have been so bad, but moving the various crates and caskets was backbreaking work.
“Thorn,” she said finally, after they were midway through the third load. “I have to stop for a while.”
He deposited another crate on the cart closest to him. “Why?”
She reached back to rub the part that ached the worst, right at the base of her spine. “Because, unlike you, I’m not some sort of machine! I’m starving, and my back is killing me!”
“Your back,” he repeated, eyes narrowing slightly. He considered her for a moment, and Miala felt herself grow tense. Was this it, then? Would it be now, when she revealed her weakness, that he would decide she was of no further use to him and would rid himself of her once and for all?
Still, she refused to let him see her fear. “Yes, my back!” she snapped. “I appreciate the need to get all this loaded on your ship, but we do need to take a break every once in a while. Besides, you wouldn’t have had any of this if it weren’t for me!”
She had expected some sort of argument. Instead, he nodded and said, “True.” Then he took a step toward her. Then another.
Not knowing what else to do, Miala stood her ground. He was close—so close she could practically sense the heat radiating off his body from his exertions. Slowly he reached out, his hand descending until he touched the small of her back. Then she could feel his strong fingers begin to knead at the aching muscles, as if he could dispel her exhaustion merely with his touch.
Of all the ways she had dreamed of him touching her, this was one she had never considered. Still, she was afraid to protest, afraid to try to move away—and it did feel good, she had to admit to herself, especially when he brought down his other hand and began to rub her back in earnest, powerful fingers digging into her flesh.
A small moan escaped Miala’s lips. Once she had let it out, she wished beyond anything that she could take it back, but the sensations rushing over her now were too strong, too unlike anything she had ever felt before.
“Better?” Thorn asked, a
gain with that quirk at the corner of his mouth. He paused, but kept his hands placed firmly against the small of her back.
A wave of fury rushed over her then, and she opened her mouth to fling back some sarcastic retort, some insult, anything—but he was too fast for her. Before a word could escape her lips, his mouth was on hers, and he pulled her against him, holding her so tightly there was no hope of escape. There was nothing except the feel of his mouth touching her mouth, the sensation of his body pressed up against hers, the strange roaring in her ears as she realized what was happening.
It wasn’t her first kiss. No, she had given that up years ago, as so many other girls in Aldis Nova had—out near the lean-to behind Alt the mechanic’s shop in a place that afforded shelter both from prying eyes and the glare of Iradia’s sun. The boy had been in her class and had been called Drix, and that was all she remembered of him. At any rate, that kiss compared to this one roughly the same way Thorn’s small ship compared to a Quasar-class troop ship. Drix, she recalled, hadn’t seem to know what he was doing at all, whereas Eryk Thorn obviously did. He seemed to fill her universe, the taste of him, the clean smell of his sweat, the slight rasp of his unshaven cheek against her skin, and she knew she was lost. She could no more tear herself from his grasp than a starship could free itself from the gravitational pull of a black hole.
Finally, though, he lifted his mouth from hers, although he still held her closely, as if he were afraid she would turn and bolt if he let her go completely. He watched her, even as she stared back up at him, into those dark eyes that seemed black as the depths of space, the thin-lipped mouth that just seconds ago had been pressed so firmly against hers.
Miala took a breath, then another. It required a conscious effort, as if somehow the autonomous systems regulating her heartbeat and breathing had somehow been disrupted by that kiss.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for a while,” Thorn said at last.