He could tell immediately she didn’t like his suggestion. He’d only been thinking of the camaraderie they’d shared on her ship. She was remembering, probably, what he’d done to her primaries.
She stood, dismissed his suggestion with a shrug. “Dallon’s using the ready room. Go work with him.”
Dallon. So Patruzius was Dallon now. Or had been for a while, judging from the teasing going on in the corridor. He reached for his lightpen. Tap. Tap. Tap.
She leaned over the desk, snatched the pen from his fingers. “Get out of my chair, Tivahr. I’ve got work to do. And I don’t need an amateur drummer in my ear when I do it.”
He saw his chance, wasn’t about to let it pass him by. He stood, feigning a grab for his pen. His hands found her shoulders instead. He pulled her onto the narrow desktop as he sat down on it, covered her mouth with his own when she started to protest.
She wrenched her face to the side. “Damn you!” She swore softly at him, tried to pull back from his kisses, but was off-balance and ended up sprawling awkwardly on one hip on the desktop. He yanked her against him, one arm solidly against her back, the other threading into her hair.
He had no intention of letting her go until he wiped all thoughts of Dallon Patruzius from her mind, until he branded her once again with his own heat, his own scent. He kissed her through her squirmings, through her hands pushing ineffectively against his shoulders, trying to break his hold on her.
Then her struggles ceased, her body arching against his. Her scent of powder and flowers intoxicated him. She nuzzled her face into his shoulder. He held her tightly, trailed kisses down her neck.
“Trilby-chenka … ow!”
She bit him, hard, sinking her teeth right through his shirt into his shoulder.
He jerked backward just enough to see her grin of triumph.
He was about to kiss that too, when the office comm pinged.
She twisted abruptly out of his arms, leaned in front of him, and tapped the flashing box on the desk screen. “Elliot.” She sounded more than a bit breathless.
“Farra here. I, oh—!” Farra Rimanava’s face tilted on the screen to match Trilby’s odd angle.
“I’m on the other side of the desk. Wait.” She swiveled the screen around. “What’ve you got?”
Rhis rested one hand on her waist, out of Rimanava’s line of sight. She tried to push it away but he caught her hand, held it, knowing she wasn’t about to get into any further wrestling match with him as long as the screen was on.
“I am checking through this septi’s freighter schedule at Saldika. The data is now just in. Logs show a GGA wide-body scheduled in depot. First time”—Farra glanced back at her data—“in four months.”
Coincidence? Rhis looked over Trilby’s shoulder. Gods, he hated coincidences. “On-loading or off?”
“Off-loading, sir. But I do not know what. She is Conclave. Manifest details are not public—”
“Resource code,” Trilby cut in. “Two alphas, one numeric. Right after their docking-bay assignment.”
“EV-Seven.”
“Spare or replacement parts for enviro systems,” Trilby said. “Could be anything from link cables to containers of filters. Not a real profitable item for a wide-body. Short-haulers usually get those small runs. Or they piggy-back them to something else.”
Farra nodded. “Very true. Does not feel right to me either.”
“Send the whole schedule to the ready room.” Rhis slid off the desktop, turning the screen with him as he did so.
“Aye, sir.” Farra’s image blinked off.
He held his hand out to Trilby. She flashed him a narrow-eyed look and hopped down from the desk. There was a telltale blush of color on her cheeks. She may not have wanted to respond to his kisses, but her body had.
He took that as a small point in his favor, for now. Changed the subject to the more pressing concerns. They had time, yet, for personal things. A deuce, then a trike.
He palmed open the office door. “Why would GGA use a wide-body for enviro parts?”
“They don’t. Wide-bodies have a lot of mass, use a lot of fuel. Bulky as hell.” She followed him into the corridor, her hands clasped firmly behind her back, as if she didn’t want to chance brushing against him. “They’re for moving big things. Prefab housing domes. The military likes them for moving armored ground tanks, like P-Ninety-fives.”
He knew what the Conclave’s platoon tanks looked like. Massive, turreted, heavily plated. He could house four fighters in the same bay as—
He stopped, grabbed her arm. “How many cargo bays does a GGA wide-body have?”
She shook him off, stepped back. “Six, if it’s B-class. Four, if it’s F-class. Why?”
“You tell me. How many ’Sko fighters could a wide-body haul?”
He saw her eyes widen, saw her mouth open in disbelief then close quickly, as if to let the words escape would damn them all.
“No,” she said finally, sounding clearly unconvinced by her own denial. “They couldn’t. Someone would notice on off-load. Customs inspectors, dockhands. Come on, Tivahr, you can’t believe they could sneak—”
“Who said they’re off-loading them on Saldika? Or any port? Why not drop them into the lanes, those lanes that Herkoid loved to use, and then continue on to their scheduled destination with the small, easily movable cargo of enviro parts?”
“Shit.” She said the word softly, almost under her breath, then bolted down the corridor and squeezed through the parting doors to the ready room. “Dallon!”
Rhis strode after her. He stepped through the still-open doors. Trilby was in a seat at the end of the table and already had Farra on screen.
“Both of you, listen to me. I don’t want to repeat it twice.” She glanced at Rhis as he sat next to her. “Three times,” she amended. “Yavo, you listening?”
“Here.” Yavo’s voice came from behind Farra’s image. They were both on bridge duty.
“GGA might be hauling something other than enviro parts in that wide-body. Farra, pull from Saldika all GGA wide-bodies that logged through there in the past four—”
“Six,” Rhis said.
“Six months. Then, Yavo, I need the same from your people on Balara. I also need arrival times and, especially, any delay advisories.”
“Anything else, Captain?” Farra asked.
“Not for now. Thanks.” Trilby tapped off the screen, looked at Rhis.
“They could also just figure their delay for the drop-off into the ETA,” he told her. It’s what he would do. Consistently late arrivals would eventually raise someone’s curiosity. If GGA were doing what he suspected they were, they couldn’t afford questions.
“Someone want to clue me in?” Patruzius asked.
Rhis swiveled toward him. “Grantforth’s using wide-bodies to transport low-volume cargo across the border.”
“Unprofitable.”
“Unless they’re transporting more than cargo.” Rhis explained his theory briefly. Patruzius’s previous experience with the freighter industry didn’t require more than that.
Trilby tapped her fingers on Rhis’s arm, drawing his attention. “Bogus arrival times. You said they’d just schedule later ETAs …”
That’s where their discussion had left off when Patruzius interrupted. He nodded.
“But they can’t alter their departure. I know—we know,” she made a small gesture toward Patruzius, “pretty accurately how long it would take a fully loaded wide-body to go from Rumor, or even Quivera, to Saldika. Or an empty one, for that matter. I should be able to pick up departure times, or at least out-system transits at the border beacons on my side of the zone. Then compare that to their arrivals.”
“Without alerting the Conclave government?” Patruzius leaned forward. “You can’t be positive Grantforth doesn’t have someone watching for a pull on that data.”
“The government,” Trilby told him, folding her hands in front of her screen, “isn’t the only one who tags that
data.” She arched her eyebrows slightly, looked at him with a patient expression, as if waiting for comprehension to dawn.
“In the Empire, the border beacons are all military,” Rhis said, puzzled.
But Patruzius was nodding in agreement with Trilby. Rhis damned his own lack of familiarity with the commercial freighter industry. And the too-slick supply-ship captain’s experience in it. It put Patruzius and Trilby on the same side of the fence, if only for a moment. He didn’t like that at all.
Patruzius rapped his fist against his forehead. “Sorry. My lapse. Your Intersystem Commerce Department—”
“Sends all their data to the Freight Traders’ Union as well. And as a member of IFCA—”
“Independent Freighter Captains’ Association,” Patruzius told Rhis.
“I’m aware of that,” he snapped, fingers drumming lightly on the table. He’d just recently paid Trilby’s outstanding dues, amending her license to Vanur Transport.
“As a member,” Trilby continued, “I have a right to that data. For marketing purposes, of course.”
“What’s the downtime?” Rhis knew that if ships’ movements across the border were collected only once a month, it might not be useful at this point. At least, not for this current “coincidence.”
“A cycle,” she said. “Twenty-four to twenty-six hours, depending on how you define your day. The FTU harvests the lists every shift change, then it’s massaged and sent to their offices at all the ports and depots. At the worst, we’d be a deuce behind realtime if someone’s late in posting it.”
“Posting it?” The Zafharin military was an integral part of the Imperial government. Rhis wasn’t used to the idea that what he considered government data might be hanging out there for all to see.
“Posting it,” she told him. “FTU has a link in their grid. But I can get IFCA’s link easier, hit their archives, backdate my autograb command. I should be able to get the past four to six months in a couple hours.”
“Do it,” he ordered, but she was already saying another word. A word that he didn’t like.
“If …” She hesitated.
Bloody hell. What now? “If?”
“If the Venture’s comm pack still has my authorization codes. If they were lost in my little encounter,” she smiled thinly, “then I’ve got to pick up a link from someone else through their code.”
“Patruzius, get what you can from Rimanava and Mitkanos.” Rhis stood. “Captain Elliot and I have to go perform some last-minute surgery.”
Trilby recognized the tangled mass of data on her office screen as something that used to be her main comm-pack structure. Programs filled with direct links and passwords that facilitated the flow of information every time she made port or accessed a major beacon in transit. And that uploaded to her, simultaneously, everything she needed to know to get to her next run: changes in transit schedules, alerts on ion storms, new tax structures for certain classes of freight. Everything IFCA and the government thought she should know.
All, at the moment, totally unreadable.
She pointed her lightpen at the screen. “How’d you grab this?” She thought she knew but wanted to hear Tivahr’s explanation. Wanted to keep him focused on the problem at hand and not that they were alone again in her office.
He leaned against the edge of her desk, one hand on the back of her chair. “Remember that invasive filter we discussed?”
So. Imperial technology wasn’t flawless. She suppressed a grin of satisfaction and nodded. “That’s what I thought you did. Tried it through an internal link, right?”
“Obviously it skewed a few things.”
“Obviously you forget that competition for contracts is tough in my neighborhood. That same captain that’s buying you beers is also pumping you for information on your runs, your agent’s setup. And probably has some jumpjockey trying to tap into your ship’s logs at that very moment. Which is why he’s got you off ship and buying you beers in the first place.” She shot a narrow-eyed glance up at him. “You’re military. You’re supposed to be used to espionage.”
“You had a trap set?”
“We all have traps set. And we change trap keys at random. You never know who some dockhand’s sister-in-law might work for.” She tapped at the keypad, segued in a line of alphanumerics. The data on the screen shifted but was still muddled.
“But I had your primaries—” Tivahr began.
“Which I changed after I left Degvar. Of course.” She scanned for a familiar line in the data, saw it, froze it with a tap of her lightpen. She entered the final sequence and this time permitted herself a wide grin at his hushed “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“We can pick up that FTU data now.”
Or rather, Trilby knew as she entered the request into the ship’s systems, she could reactivate her link to the grid. Hopefully they’d have something to work with in ten to twelve hours.
For now it was back to a waiting game. And Tivahr seemed intent to spend it by her side. She didn’t want him there, didn’t want to be with him any more than she absolutely had to. “Why don’t you check and see if Dallon’s got something more?”
“Patruzius knows where to find us if he needs us.”
He wasn’t taking the hint. “I’ve got work to do, now that I know you rescued my old files.”
“I can help.”
“No. Leave me alone, Tivahr.” She jerked her chair around, tried to unsuccessfully to dislodge his hand.
“What are you so afraid of?” There was a quiet note in his voice that didn’t match the tension in his body, the rigidness of his arm that kept her facing him.
You! She wanted to throw that at him. I’m afraid of you. But that wasn’t quite the truth. More so, she knew that admission would open a flood of other questions, requests for clarification on her part.
She didn’t want to say out loud why she was afraid of him. It was hard enough dealing with that in the relentless litany in her mind. And in her heart.
Something about Khyrhis Tivahr reached her, touched her deeply. She thought maybe it was because she still saw flashes of Rhis Vanur in him from time to time. But over the past few days she discovered it was more than that.
It wasn’t the Rhis she saw in Khyrhis, but the Khyrhis in Rhis.
He’d always been there. Remote, aloof, in control. That was the unwavering dedication she’d seen in Rhis from the beginning, the competence. That rock-solid something that said to her, Lean on me. I’ll never fail you. I’ll always be there.
No jumpjockey gossip ever tagged Senior Captain Tivahr as unreliable. Or a quitter. Or a coward. If anything, it was acknowledged that Tivahr the Terrible didn’t give up. Impossible wasn’t in his vocabulary.
It was Khyrhis—not Rhis—who’d sidelined his physical pain to get the Careless Venture up and running. It was Khyrhis—not Rhis—who had flawlessly, expertly avoided the attacking ’Sko fighters.
And it was Khyrhis—not Rhis—who’d admitted to her that no one would believe he’d taken Trilby, a beautiful air sprite, to bed. Or rather, that such an air sprite had gone, willingly.
Mitkanos thought the Razalka’s captain had forced her into his bed. Dallon, Lucho, and Leesa assumed he took her ship by force as well. That fit with the image of the Captain Tivahr. He entered a briefing room or officers’ lounge and chatter died, shoulders straightened, faces became serious.
The competent, dedicated, tireless Tivahr the Terrible. He wore those traits like impenetrable armor.
But Trilby’s gotten through, and that’s what scared her. She’d gotten through, and when she did, it was Rhis who had taught her to say yav cheron.
She avoided looking at him. “I’m not afraid. I’m busy. Now go away.” She reached for the screen, tabbed down a line of data.
She heard his deep growl of frustration, like a rumbling sigh, then her chair shook slightly. He pushed himself to his feet.
She stared blankly at the screen after her office door slid closed behind him. A deuce t
o go to Saldika. Another trike at least after that. And then who knew how many more runs until they uncovered what GGA was doing with the ’Sko?
The last thing she needed was all that time with Tivahr. The last thing she needed was to fall in love again.
21
Saldika Terminal was noisy, crowded. So she didn’t know he was there until he grabbed her, clamping his mouth, hot and wet, on hers, his tongue thrusting like some kind of convulsing snake. She heard Tivahr’s harsh growl come up behind her, a string of untranslatable Zafharish words that questioned everything from Jagan Grantforth’s lack of legitimate parentage to the location and inadequate size of his reproductive organs.
Only much more graphically.
She pushed him away and fought the urge to wipe her mouth on her sleeve. “Jagan. What a … surprise.”
The sandy-haired man grinned lopsidedly down at her. “I’ve always loved surprising you, little darling.”
Little darling. She’d forgotten he called her that. It used to bring a thrill to her senses. Now it only chilled her, colder than the snowy landscape outside the terminal’s wide-spaced windows.
It had just started snowing when she brought Shadow’s Quest in on approach, not quite an hour ago. Cargo Hangar 47-L was covered and heated, a necessity on a frigid world like Chevienko.
Customs inspectors, thanks to Mitkanos’s connections, were almost as warm as the large hangar. Ten minutes later they’d hopped a pod to the main terminal, intent on finding out what Grantforth Galactic Amalgamated was up to.
But it looked as if Grantforth had found them. A trike earlier than anticipated too.
“I didn’t expect to find you here,” Trilby said. But maybe she should have. Admiral Vanushavor’s message detailed an unexpected move by Secretary Grantforth and the ’Sko. Yet she still had a hard time believing Jagan was in on any kind of conspiracy. Flirtations were more his style than political machinations.
Jagan’s gaze traveled past her shoulder, then up and down. Tivahr was behind her. That would be the up. Mitkanos was next to him. A slight down in height. Off to her right, she heard Farra’s lilting laugh over the chatter of freighter crew and dock techs moving hurriedly through the terminal corridor. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Farra and Dallon standing in line at a nearby newsstand that displayed local newsdisks the Imperial grid often didn’t carry.
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