Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  She didn’t even hesitate. After all, ‘I’ve been thinking’ meant she had previously identified the parameters and analyzed all the branching considerations. “Yes.”

  His response was also quick, though she suspected for a different reason. “You mean it? Why?”

  She returned to the still-ragged edge of the salvaged material. “Because I don’t gain anything by keeping it from you. You’ll know what the phenomenon is, at least in general terms, because you’ll be there. I suspect unlike my typical clients, your bosses won’t demand detailed scientific analyses and spectrum charts before acting on the information, so you’ll already have everything you need. I won’t gain any advantage by being a bitch and I’ll lose….” Her hand paused two centimeters from the shard.

  “You’ll lose what?”

  Asshole, as if he didn’t know the answer. “Comity.”

  He choked back a laugh. “Comity?”

  She scowled at the torch. “Yes, comity. Goodwill. Friendly relations. You not trying to kill me. Call it whatever—” She yelped as the flame grazed her fingertip, and quickly extinguished it lest she set the ship on fire.

  “Alex, you have to know by now I’m not going to kill you.”

  She sucked on the scalded finger to buy a second or two. “Of course I do. I was trying to be humorous. Failing miserably apparently. Not a huge surprise, it was never one of my strong suits.” He didn’t comment further, and she flicked the torch back on and turned to the hull—

  —then realized he had come over and crouched on the balls of his feet against the wall beside her. Damn he could move quietly.

  She eyed him without actually looking at him; a corner of his mouth tweaked up in response. He was entirely too cute for his—or her—own good when he did that…. Surprised at her own reaction, she wondered when precisely it was his smirk had stopped being annoying and started being cute. The evening before? This morning with the muffins? Just now?

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She blew out a breath, flicked the torch off again and rolled onto her back. “You understand why, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Because it’s my job to be a chameleon, to become whatever I need to be in a given situation in order to complete the mission—or at least get out alive, as the case may be. And I’m very good at my job, which I imagine you have surmised. Therefore, you have no way to be certain whether or not I’m simply acting the part of the easygoing, agreeable, helpful, funny, charming stowaway and will slit your throat the minute it benefits me to do so.”

  She shrugged, and didn’t bother to deny he was all of those things. “Kind of sums it up, yeah.”

  “And I don’t see how there’s any way for me to convince you otherwise…especially when I’m not even sure myself.”

  “Not helping.”

  He cringed visibly. “That came out wrong—I’m sure I’m not going to slit your throat. I meant…it’s been so long since I’ve truly been myself around someone else, I’m not sure I even remember how to do it anymore.”

  She frowned. “That’s kind of tragic.” The frown deepened. “Unless this is just another layer of the act, designed to win my trust when the easygoing, agreeable, helpful, funny, charming routine wasn’t getting the job done.”

  He groaned and sank the rest of the way down to the floor. “Totally valid point. It’s impossible for me to talk my way out of this.”

  “Yep. Sorry.” She shifted onto her stomach and activated the torch. Again. “Okay. Thought experiment. If you weren’t in dire straits, if this wasn’t a ‘situation,’ if it had nothing to do with a mission and instead you were on vacation, what would you be doing right now?”

  “Kissing you.”

  Fuck.

  His voice had dropped in pitch and volume, and its lilting tenor washed gently over her like a lover’s caress. She bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood, but did her damnedest to not display any reaction. Her tone remained casual and nonchalant. “Oh, so the real you is a modern-day Casanova, traversing the galaxy and wooing a damsel in every port?”

  She glanced over to find his eyes twinkling devilishly and his mouth wearing a far too kiss-worthy smirk again. Fuck.

  “That’s not what I said.”

  She nodded and focused on the hull, the metallic tang of blood stinging her tongue. “My mistake. And what would the real you do when I said ‘in your dreams’ and shoved him on his ass?”

  He sighed loudly, doubtless for dramatic effect. “He’d return to his post and help you finish the repairs so we can go check out this anomaly….”

  She looked back at him, an eyebrow arched, and gestured toward the other end of the hold expectantly.

  He rolled his eyes and pushed off the floor. “I’m going, I’m going.”

  Fuck.

  *

  Caleb prepared dinner while she ran through the preflight checks—twice for good measure by the looks of it—then at last they departed what had been, all things considered, a rather unfriendly planet. The atmospheric traversal was rough, but on such a small planet it took only minutes.

  The ship held together, everything stayed in the green, and he saw a wave of tension leave her even in profile. Her posture relaxed and her jawline softened markedly as she spun the chair around to face the cabin.

  “I’ll engage the sLume in a few minutes once the impulse engine builds up some negative mass. We’ll run superluminal overnight, and when we drop out in the morning we should be close enough to the pulsar to get far more definitive readings. What’s for dinner?”

  “Seared salmon with wilted spinach and lemon rice. You genuinely do have a fine selection of food aboard.”

  “As much time as I spend out here, hell yes I do. Is it ready?”

  “Two seconds. Impatient much?”

  She smacked her lips and danced her toes along the floor, impatiently. But she seemed more at ease than he had ever seen her. And why not? She was flying again, which he suspected meant a great deal.

  The blatant flirtation earlier had been a gamble, though not necessarily a failed one. Time would tell. He had worried it may backfire and push her away, but it appeared not. Why had he done it? Because it felt…right. The situation was now quite a bit different from his initial assessment on his first day of freedom. Quite a bit.

  He positioned the salmon on the plates and served them up with great formality. “And now it’s ready. Oh Great Starship Captain, your dinner is served.”

  “Smart ass.” But she wore a smile as she came over, gestured to dim the lights and settled into the chair. Now the smile did reach her eyes, and the result took his breath away.

  “Well, yes.” He buried his reaction in a chuckle as he joined her. She had already dug into the spinach. “And how is it?”

  “Ymmmm.” Her eyes closed, a blissful expression spreading across her face, and he found himself wondering if she looked this way when she…. Wow. Best save those thoughts for when you’re alone behind the privacy screen.

  “It’s delicious, which I’m sure you know. I suppose being multi-talented is a job requirement for becoming a spy.”

  “I—” He paused, fork in midair, his brow furrowing up a little. “Not cooking skills necessarily, but yes, I suppose it is.”

  “How did you? Become a spy I mean.”

  Hmm. Test time was it? His instinct told him to spin a web of half-truths around the truths and lies; it was his modus operandi.

  He recalled their earlier conversation. He hadn’t been lying—much—when he said he wasn’t sure how to be himself around someone else, but he was fairly certain it didn’t involve lying when the truth would suffice. She knew what he did for a living. So long as he refrained from revealing state secrets, talking about it held no danger.

  He finished his bite of salmon and smiled the slightest bit. “They found me. I was about to graduate from university with degrees in history and engineering physics. I was going to build orbital communications arrays. See, I had this idea for a new k
ind of adaptive array which could intelligently shift its orbital distance depending on the signal load and transient needs. It would require coordination of—it’s not important. Anyway, a week before graduation a—” not that, not yet “—man representing the Intelligence Division approached me.”

  He shrugged mildly. “Something I had done, or maybe everything I had done, had attracted their attention. And I said yes.”

  “Why?” She was observing him rather intently, bright gray eyes dancing in the dim lights. It might have felt like an interrogation, except he wanted to tell her.

  “I didn’t want to end up stuck in a corporate job for the next eighty or a hundred thirty years. I enjoyed engineering well enough, but I also loved the outdoors and working with my hands. I had good people skills, and orbital hardware construction isn’t known for its vibrant social scene. This though, it offered adventure. New places, new goals, new challenges on every mission. I would never be bored.”

  He paused to take a bite of rice. “And before you ask, I don’t regret it. There are downsides I didn’t foresee at the time, but I’m not sorry I chose this life.”

  “Hold that thought.” She slipped away in the direction of the cockpit, he assumed to activate the sLume drive. It occurred to him he was busy spilling forth his life story to her…but he found he couldn’t summon up the urge to stop.

  A few seconds later he felt the almost imperceptible shift in the purr of the engine beneath them and the glow of the Nebula blurred outside the viewport. She didn’t return to the table immediately, and he sensed her move behind him to the corner of the kitchen area.

  It came as a pleasant surprise when she showed up at the table holding a bottle of wine and two glasses. “I think escaping that godforsaken planet is worth a little celebrating. Want some?”

  It was so easy to get lost in her eyes, and for a moment he let himself. “I’d love it.”

  She broke the gaze to sit the glasses down and pour the wine before returning to her chair. “What about your parents, your sister? It wasn’t difficult having to lie to them?”

  He took the time to enjoy the first sip of the wine. A chardonnay, chilled to the perfect temperature. Deep golden in color, it drew in the light until a glow emanated from within. Also, it tasted delicious. Then again it would.

  “We weren’t close—I mean my sister and I are fairly close now, but she was still a young teenager then. And my parents…well, they weren’t a consideration.” He sighed. “Probably sounds cold and heartless, doesn’t it?”

  She had finished her dinner and settled back in the chair, legs comfortably crossed and the glass of wine in her hand. Her hair, damp from her shower, cascaded messily across her shoulders. She grimaced at the glass; it didn’t appear to be vicariously directed at him.

  She took a long sip, then contemplated the wine as it swirled languidly in the glass. “Perhaps, but I understand how it can happen. My mother and I don’t exactly get along, and haven’t for years.”

  His head tilted a fraction. Curiously, but nonthreatening. “Why not? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  She glared at the ceiling. “What does it matter why not?”

  He flinched at the sudden sharpness in her tone. Goddamn but her parents were a touchy subject.

  “It matters to you.”

  He almost frowned, taken aback by the intimateness of the words coming out of his mouth, not to mention the sincerity of them. He had fallen so far off his game it was laughable. Except he wasn’t actually playing the game any longer, was he? Nope, apparently he was not.

  She didn’t seem to notice his mental gymnastics; her words dripped with bitterness, but again it didn’t appear to be directed at him. “It really doesn’t….”

  He nodded slowly and sipped his wine, letting the silence linger. Finally he sat the glass on the table and idly ran a fingertip along the rim. Already shared far more than you meant to, might as well go all in. What the hell. “My mother’s a nutcase.”

  “I thought your mother was an industrial architect?”

  “The two are mutually exclusive?”

  She merely shrugged in response.

  “She is—or was anyway. Had a decent career and several prominent buildings to her name. Then one night, out of the blue and after twenty-four years of marriage, my father walked out on her. Said he simply didn’t love her anymore and needed to find some happiness for himself.

  “She had always tended toward the emotional side, but so long as he was there she stayed stable and fully functional. But…I don’t know. I guess she viewed him as her whole world. When he left, she just…broke.”

  He stared at the bottle a moment, grabbed it, refilled his glass and took a lengthy sip. “She quit working, quit sketching, quit doing much of anything at all. Even now, she mostly sits in the house and waits for him to come back.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  “After twenty years? No.”

  “Well, what does he say?”

  “Don’t know. Haven’t spoken to him since the night he walked out.”

  Her eyes creased at the corners as she regarded him over the rim of her glass. “I’m sorry.”

  She sounded like she meant it, but he supposed he carried a bit of parental baggage himself. “I’m not. He showed his worth when he left.”

  Upon first being given the advice to ‘never have anything you can’t walk away from,’ he had been skeptical. After all, wasn’t it the very thing he hated his father for? He had resolved the matter by developing a corollary rule: Never let someone get close enough to depend on you. That way they don’t get hurt when you walk away.

  He didn’t share any of those thoughts aloud, of course, and they fell silent again. He watched her without watching her. It was evident she struggled with something. Her gaze drifted around but failed to focus on anything while she absently twirled the stem of her glass between two fingers. Her lips pursed together as if to prevent words from spilling forth without prior approval.

  He hoped she viewed his confession for what it was: an honest, unpremeditated sharing of a less-than-pleasant part of his life—because apparently he intended to spill forth his entire damn life story to her—rather than a manipulative feigning of vulnerability to get her to open up in return. He had done such on more than one occasion; this wasn’t one of them.

  She refilled her glass and appeared to come to a conclusion. Her gaze finally settled on him.

  “The answer to your question yesterday is yes. My father and I were very close. He taught me to fly, he taught me to love the stars. Work took him away a lot, but he always came home with some new adventure for us to embark on. He was….” Her voice drifted off, but then she blinked and straightened her posture.

  “After he died, my mother shut down emotionally. She had never been a particularly affectionate or doting mom, but she became a robot, a cold automaton throwing herself into her work for eighteen hours a day. At a minimum.”

  She took a deliberate sip of wine. “Looking back, I realize she was grieving and it was the only way she knew how to deal with the pain. But I was thirteen years old and I was grieving, too, and she wasn’t there to comfort me, to tell me it would be okay. She wasn’t even there to silently dry my tears. She wasn’t there at all.”

  Her shoulders raised in a half-hearted shrug. “I rebelled. She reacted harshly. I rebelled more. She tried to exert military-style control over my life, and did not succeed.

  “And that’s it. We tolerate one another, but we never really made up. We never talked about it. And we most certainly never talked about my father.”

  “Maybe it’s not too late.”

  The laugh she gave rippled with cynicism. “I tried once. Before I left for the job on Erisen, I took her to lunch one day. I apologized for some of my more…extreme behavior in the wake of Dad’s death. I told her I understood now she had been grieving as well. And though I was only a child, it had been selfish of me to act as I did, and I was sorry if I had made her life m
ore difficult at an already difficult time.”

  She stared into her glass, but her gaze seemed focused on someplace very far away. “She responded by saying I was still a child—note, I was twenty-five at this point—and I should never presume to believe I was capable of understanding anything she had gone through or anything she had or had not felt.” A quick gulp of her wine. “And as for my behavior, while it was disappointing as she had expected better from me, it amounted to nothing of real consequence.”

  “No…” her head shook with an air of finality “…I’m afraid it is much, much too late. Whatever emotions the woman may have once possessed, they departed the premises long ago.”

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve such a reaction.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I was quite the recalcitrant teenager.” She took a deep breath and slid her chair out, leaving the nearly full glass of wine on the table. “And on that lovely downer, I’m going to call it a night. But….”

  Her eyes found his. “Thank you.”

  He met her gaze with his full attention. “For?”

  She gave him an almost wistful half-smile. “Being honest.”

  He had told her she probably couldn’t tell the difference, but perhaps she truly could. He didn’t know whether the possibility comforted or terrified him.

  He instinctively leaned forward, his hand moving toward hers. It paused halfway to its destination.

  She hesitated halfway to standing, her expression now completely unreadable to him. “What?”

  Stay.

  He withdrew his hand and eased back in the chair, though his attention didn’t leave her. “Nothing. Good night, Alex.”

  CHAPTER 24: Seneca

  Cavare: Intelligence Division Headquarters

  It was one-thirty in the morning when Michael, freshly showered and wearing pressed khakis and a crisp forest green shirt, walked in the incident command center at Division HQ. His wife was a saint, and as soon as this crisis passed—if it passed—he owed her a nice dinner out, if not a weekend getaway.

  He smiled at an agent who handed him a steaming mug of coffee and let his gaze run calmly across the room. Most of the Summit delegation had been brought directly here from the spaceport upon their arrival; a few lower-level staffers cleared of involvement or knowledge were allowed to go home for now.