Siren

by Blaze Ward

  Ξ

  Vo knew she was coming. Partly, he was that keyed up. Partly, the floor squeaked enough.

  He had gotten four chapters into the book while he waited for her. It was pretty good. He might ask to borrow it, or buy his own copy.

  He heard her let out a deep breath in relief from the door. Apparently, she hadn’t been expecting him to still be here.

  He looked up at her from the end of the big, comfy sofa closest to the fireplace.

  She had gotten cleaned up, and relaxed. She was wearing baggy blue sweat pants and a green t–shirt, possibly with a sports bra underneath. Her long, brown hair was still a little damp and tied back in a simple tail.

  She had stripped off all her makeup. He only noticed it by the absence.

  “You stayed,” she said softly with relief.

  “Someone insisted I owed her a glass of wine,” he smiled back.

  “And you do,” she said firmly as she moved past him. “Stay there. I’ll be right back.”

  Rather than stare at her bottom, Vo stuck his nose back in his book and let his ears track her.

  Into the kitchen. Grab an old–fashioned glass bottle off the rack. Open two drawers looking for the tool to remove the cork. Finally get it open. Locate two glasses. Pour. Cap the bottle with some sort of siphon pump. Return.

  She was holding two faintly–blue goblets of a dark purple liquid when she returned. It was probably extremely expensive, very nice, and totally wasted on a guy like him. Like the rest of the joint.

  Phoebe handed him a glass and retreated to the other end of the couch, curling her feet up under her in a way that reminded him of a ship’s cat.

  He took a sip. Yup, utterly wasted on his palate.

  Vo wondered if he should learn to appreciate good wine. He had done the same thing when he first encountered proper coffee, after Command Centurion Keller had gotten everybody aboard Auberon hooked on the good stuff.

  “Feeling better?” he asked as she settled in.

  “An hour ago, I thought I would never move again,” she replied with a groan. “Now I feel like I’ve slept all night and could do for a long run.”

  “Good,” Vo said. “That means I did something right.”

  “You did lots of things right, Vo,” she said with a warm smile as she took a sip of wine. Something changed in her eyes. “But you aren’t staying, are you?”

  He took a drink of the wine to order his thoughts. Reorder.

  “Was it something I did?” she continued.

  He could hear the emotion underneath her syllables. Nervousness, but tinged with pain. He might have never picked the word out, but the best way to describe her right now would be fragile. Like handling delicate glass.

  Not exactly a task for a bull in a china shop.

  “Nothing you did,” he replied slowly.

  “Something I didn’t do?”

  “No, it’s not that either,” Vo said.

  The proper gentleman and big brother wanted to stop there. Leave it vague and ambiguous. Let things slide.

  Something in her eyes drew him. The voice was off. The hands weren’t right. The head was tilted the wrong way. The million little clues they teach you about interrogation technique were screaming at him.

  He could almost see the indicators on the training tape. Look here. Watch this. Etc.

  The wrongness almost soured the wine in his mouth.

  “What?” Phoebe whispered.

  “You make me nervous,” Vo said, honestly.

  She laughed. It was a trifle off. Nervous relief. Inappropriate for the situation.

  “I make every man nervous,” she replied, maybe with a touch of anger underneath.

  He could see her shoulders come down a little. Those wonderful, long muscles in her back unknotted.

  “No,” Vo disagreed. “You intimidate them. That’s different.”

  “And nothing intimidates you, Vo?” she asked quietly.

  He shrugged. That was actually an entry in his personnel file. Navin the Black had showed it to him, once.

  “Is there someone else?” Phoebe continued. “Another woman?”

  Again, the shrug. No. She deserved more of an answer. It might make things easier. Maybe harder. At least cleaner. He already felt the need for a shower, himself.

  “Kinda,” he said quietly. “But I’m not sure she even knows I exist.”

  “Oh,” Phoebe said. “That, I understand.”

  Vo was pretty sure the look of disbelief on his face was enough words.

  “Vo, they see the boobs, or the butt, or the pretty face,” Phoebe continued. “They see my parent’s money, or their connections. If anyone ever looks at me, they see me as a means, or a notch on a bedpost. I honestly can’t remember the last time I dealt with a gentleman.”

  Gentleman. Right. The thug from the streets of Anameleck Prime. What the hell am I doing here? Oh. Right. She still hasn’t come clean. She’s up to something, wants something. Has danced around it. Continues to dance.

  He would just have to keep probing, keep pushing, until she came clean. Or his paranoia got the better of him.

  The interrogator wanted to unravel her psyche. By now, he had a pretty good idea where her buttons were. Everyone had them. Not everyone realized it. Something to drive you to a sudden rage. Something to shatter you like a dropped glass. Something to make a pretty girl purr.

  Vo felt like the greater of two evils. Any two evils. Pick one.

  She was close to coming apart right now under unknown paired stresses, pulling her two opposite directions at once.

  Vo had a lovely sword in his hands. And he couldn’t bring himself to use it.

  He settled for a shrug. There were no safe words at this moment.

  “She’s a fool,” Phoebe said darkly.

  Suddenly, she was close enough to touch. She reached out her left hand and just touched the back of the hand holding his suddenly–empty wine glass.

  Where had the wine gone?

  “Can I ask a favor?” she said softly.

  Vo wondered if she had found his buttons. This was one he hadn’t realized was there until now. Tomorrow, he would have to do something about it. Tomorrow.

  “Sure,” he replied, just as softly.

  She was close enough to breathe on, but didn’t have that look in her eyes like she wanted a kiss. There was a lot more pain when he looked. More than had been there before.

  “Hold me?” she whispered.

  He nodded.

  With a shift, she was in his lap, curled up almost like a cat, with her head on his chest.

  Carefully, he found the side table and set the empty wine glass down and then wrapped his arms around her. She was clean and lovely and warm. This much he could do.

  She still hadn’t told him anything.

  Ξ

  The sound of the front door lock quietly surrendering brought Vo from dozing to combat–drop readiness in less than a heartbeat. Too many years on active duty. Trouble came in the dead of night. Marines who wanted to survive got there first.

  He started to surge upright, realized he still had a sleeping cat of a girl on his lap, and twisted sideways to deposit her safely and softly on the couch. There wasn’t anything heavy close, but he was confident enough in his unarmed combat skills to handle whoever would be sneaking in this late at night.

  Sneaking?

  He hadn’t seen any evidence of a roommate. The other bedroom had been converted fully to an office. Hopefully, Phoebe hadn’t forgotten to mention a boyfriend. It might get a bit touchy in here.

  Vo was in the entry hallway, quickly, behind where the door would open, as silent as possible. Phoebe was stirring on the sofa, but not quite coherent yet. She had been deep.

  The door opened. At least a little bit. Enough to see that the lights were still on in the living room.

  “Phoebe?” a man’s voice called quietly.

  So, not a burglar. Or, at least not a stranger. Someone expecting her. Probably not expecting
him. Vo stood perfectly still.

  A man came into view. Short. Really short. Shorter than Phoebe. Pudgy. Bald but for a ring of gray hair around his skull. Vo would have said mousy, but the face reminded him of a vole.

  He was dressed in corduroy pants and a tweed jacket, the kind with leather patches on the elbows that seemed to be a universal identification badge of a professor of social sciences. Vo wondered if they all shopped from the same catalog. The stranger carried a large leather briefcase in one hand.

  “Phoebe?” he called louder.

  In vino, veritas. In wine, you find truth.

  Fear and surprise are also useful tools.

  Vo reached out and pushed the door closed with a hard palm after the man entered. It made a satisfying thump as it slammed.

  “Hiya,” Vo smiled his best predator–in–the–night look.

  The look on the vole’s face was utterly priceless. It was almost a cartoon moment from his youth.

  The tiny man turned, looked up in a total panic, and nearly wet himself cringing. He didn’t say anything, but Vo was almost sure the intruder mouthed the word Arlo as he gasped and dropped the satchel in the middle of the hall.

  Papers went everywhere when the latch failed.

  Phoebe was finally awake enough to enter the fray. She appeared at the mouth of the hallway, hair slightly messed but otherwise finally back in the land of the living.

  “Dr. Demir?” she asked in soft shock. “What are you doing here?”

  The man ignored her. He had dropped to his knees and was frantically gathering pieces of paper up and sliding them back into the briefcase as fast as he could.

  Vo couldn’t move without stepping on something, so he stood perfectly still and watched the little man like a hawk. And, after a moment, Phoebe as well.

  You never knew, with some folks. There were only so many ways to spin a situation like this when you were trying to do damage control.

  Vo had learned a long time ago that if you tried to live your entire life aboveboard, you didn’t have to spend any time trying to remember which lies you had told to what people. It was not a lesson many people ever seemed to learn. At least he could sleep nights with a clear conscience.

  “I’m sorry, Phoebe,” the little man, apparently a Doctor Demir, stammered. “I can explain.”

  Vo realized he could reach his boots without moving, and his butt was against the hall closet where his jacket was hanging. He pivoted enough to open the door and grab it, and then reached for his boots.

  “Phoebe,” he said softly, but with a warm smile. “I think this is my cue to leave. Thank you for a lovely day.”

  She started to say something, but Vo had the door open, slid through, and pulled it shut behind him. He could get to the ground floor via the fire stairs, and out into the night. The buses were still running, so he could get home and figure out what the hell had just happened.

  III

  Date of the Republic October 10, 394 Quinta City, Quinta

  Even on a remote and kind–of backwater planet like Quinta, there were gossips. Vo hadn’t expected mankind’s better virtues to overwhelm their normal behavior, just because they had colonized the galaxy.

  Quinta hadn’t let him down.

  If anything, being so far off the beaten path, so insular, worked to his benefit. A planet this remote wasn’t constantly aping the styles and mannerisms of the more core worlds of the Republic of Aquitaine. Or, if they were, it was from decades or generations ago.

  They tended to be more blinkered here. It was the kind of place where your great–grandchildren might still be called immigrants to their faces a century from now. People chattered like chickens, neighborhood style, rather than maintaining a big–city reticence.

  With a little looking, you could find almost anything. You just needed to know how to ask the search programs.

  Aeolus Demir, PhD. Fifty–three years standard. Tenured professor of political science, Quinta Colonial Institute. Expert in comparative political institutions with a specialization in the Fribourg Empire’s Planetary Governance systems. Nineteen papers published in peer–reviewed journals. Six books. Dry, boring, and technical. At least the three Vo had sampled with nothing better to do on a Sunday morning.

  Never married. No scandals. Only 1.65 meters tall, so short, pudgy, balding.

  And on good enough terms with the prettiest girl in school that he could let himself into her apartment very late on a Saturday night and she didn’t scream or threaten to call the police.

  While she happened to have the biggest rugby prop in school handy.

  Interesting.

  Vo had been expecting a boyfriend when a man’s voice came through the open door. For no other reason than she was a pretty girl, he had been expecting someone tall and athletic. Lean. Probably blond. Someone like a younger version of Command Centurion Kigali off CR–264, except one that preferred girls.

  A short, mousy, dumpy, middle–aged professor was just about the last thing he had expected.

  And vice versa.

  Except.

  Arlo played the scene back in his head again. He would be willing to put money that Demir had recognized him. Which made no sense, since he didn’t have a class with the man, and had only been on planet a little over eight weeks.

  And Phoebe’s response hadn’t rung the right bells at the time, but he had been gone, maybe a little too quickly, to follow up.

  She hadn’t been surprised that the man could get in, only that he was there late on a Saturday night without calling first.

  What would Phoebe see in a man like that?

  He flashed back to her on the sofa. Lovely, and warm, and vulnerable. Under the eye of a trained interrogator already keyed up.

  What had she said?

  “If anyone ever looks at me, they see me as a means, or a notch on a bedpost. I honestly can’t remember the last time I dealt with a gentleman.”

  So let’s assume the relationship between them isn’t physical. She could have any man in school, just by batting her eyelashes.

  Vo blushed.

  Almost any man.

  Still.

  Maybe it isn’t what she wanted from Demir, but something the little professor wanted from her? A means?

  What could he offer to a pretty girl with her parent’s connections and wealth?

  Excitement? Phoebe didn’t strike him as a rush–junky–type, like some of his marines frequently were, until they got that knocked out of them by one of the Yeomen or Centurions.

  She didn’t need money. Her parents were loaded and that flat had cost more to decorate than he made last year.

  He doubted a physical relationship.

  And Demir obviously hadn’t registered on Phoebe as a gentleman, so whatever they had wasn’t a particularly nice relationship.

  Did he have something on her?

  Vo’s brain clicked so hard it nearly hurt. It had that same implacable feeling as the locks on a howitzer dropping into place, just before you pulled the lanyard and belched death skyward.

  If she was being compelled by someone, someone with something dark and extremely embarrassing on her, most of her behavior suddenly made a lot more sense.

  So, you have something to blackmail the prettiest girl in school. Throw this pretty girl at the dumb marine. Have her convince him to do something stupid, to impress said pretty girl. Most marines would, especially for a pretty girl. Suborn said dumb marine. Blackmail him. Blackmail them both.

  Every bad thriller Vo had ever read rolled out of the darkness and laughed at him right now. Every bad computer gaming fantasy, where he got to save the galaxy as the big, damn hero. Everything.

  And yet…

  Vo reached back to the ancient classics, literature that predated starflight, and would outlive empires. A man had once said that once you eliminated everything else, whatever remains, no matter how strange, must be the truth.

  Nothing else made a damned lick of sense.

  For a moment, the evi
l conscience on his left shoulder nearly won out.

  It would be remarkably easy to contact the appropriate authorities on this world and whisper the correct specific key words into the right paranoid ears. On Auberon, he had spent the last three years being those ears.

  They would quietly round up the mousy little professor and disappear him into the deepest hole imaginable, while they dismantled his entire existence to look for crimes. The little gremlin on his shoulder smiled.

  Nobody was as pure as the driven snow. Nobody.

  Once the authorities started looking, they would find something. Everybody had secrets. If the Fribourg Empire didn’t own him already, Republic Intelligence would when they were done with Dr. Demir.

  That kind of power was dangerous.

  The good conscience on his right shoulder looked remarkably like a six–centimeter–tall ogre version of Navin the Black. Senior Centurion Crncevic, Auberon’s Dragoon. His boss.

  The ogre just cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow at Vo.

  There was a pretty girl who would be sucked up by such an investigation. She would never get away from those kinds of people, either. Then she would discover what a small fish she really was.

  Had she done anything at all to warrant being disappeared into a small gray box, besides try to flirt with a man whose job entailed professional paranoia?

  Vo wrestled back and forth for nearly an hour before he gave up. The risk/reward ratio just didn’t justify bringing the big guns to the party. And she hadn’t done anything to piss him off that much.

  It was all speculation on his part. Occupational hazard.

  He was just about finished fixing his lunch when the doorbell rang.

  It was probably automatic that his hand reached out and touched the block of wood with all his kitchen knives in handmade slots. His brain wasn’t really that deep in the dark and foreboding places, right?

  The soup was done. He turned the heat off and left his sandwich on the counter.

  It was all of four steps to the door. He hadn’t bothered to bring any firearms with him to this planet, which was good, or one would be in his hand right now. The cricket paddle by the door was within easy reach, and easy enough to explain, if someone had ever come into his apartment.