gaian consortium 06 - zhore deception (30 page)

Alexa sent a rueful glance in the direction of her swollen midsection and chuckled. “No, I don’t think I would be very effective. And obviously neither you nor Zhandar are going to pass muster, either.”

“I don’t care anything about ‘passing muster,’” Zhandar protested. “But if you think I am going to stay here when I should be going to Trinity — ”

“Hold your horses,” Jackson broke in. “I know some people who can help. I’ll set up a rendezvous just outside Zhoraan’s system. You can meet there, and they’ll take you in the rest of the way.”

“People?” Zhandar wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. Yes, Alexa had said they could trust Jackson, that he was no longer a servant of the Consortium. Even so, he didn’t like the idea of completely handing the rescue mission over to a group of strangers.

“Trained professionals who’ll be able to extract your girl. You ever attempted a rescue of someone held in a Consortium facility, Zhandar?”

“Of course not,” he replied, liking even less the aura of subtle sarcasm that seemed to pervade Jackson’s words.

“Well, then. I’m not saying you can’t go along, but you’ll have to keep yourself safely hidden until the time is right. Last I checked, the GDF didn’t have any Zhore on its duty rosters.”

The hacker had a point. As much as he hated to admit it, Zhandar knew he was more than conspicuous. Even if he sacrificed his privacy, rid himself of his bulky robes, and put on a stolen uniform, he could never pass himself off as a Gaian.

“I understand,” he said stiffly.

“Great. Then I guess we’re all good to go. I assume you can arrange passage from Zhoraan to the coordinates I’ve given you?”

“Yes,” Alexa replied. “I’ve passed the word along to those in the government here who are helping us. They’ll have a ship standing by.”

“Okay. Twenty-two hundred hours their time gives you” — a pause while Jackson apparently did a few calculations — “a little more than twelve standard hours to get to your destination. You have a little slop time, but not much. So don’t waste it.”

“We won’t.” Alexa paused, then added, “Thank you, Jackson.”

“Thank me later, after you’ve gotten your girl back. In the meantime, give ’em hell.”

The transmission seemed to end there. Alexa swiveled her chair back toward Zhandar and Lirzhan. “All right, we have three hours. Nalzhir is already on his way here with a shuttle, and there’s a ship at the base on Kelzhar that’s being fueled and readied as we speak. They’ll take you to the rendezvous point.”

“You were able to coordinate all that already?” Zhandar supposed it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility, but something about Alexa’s smooth efficiency was a little intimidating.

“Well, most of it was Nalzhir’s doing. I just sent him the latest updates, and he got things moving along the proper channels.”

“Still — ”

She waved a hand. “It’s the least I could do. Anyway, there’s no time to waste. As Jackson said, it’s time to give ’em some hell.”

Trinity knew they had surveillance cameras covering every inch of the suite where she was confined, and so she had to make sure she didn’t do anything that would attract any particular attention. Whoever was watching the feed wouldn’t see much right now, since she was merely sitting on her bed with her legs crossed, eyes shut and her hands resting lightly on her knees.

To an outside observer, it would simply look as if she was meditating, but anyone who knew her well would have also known that she didn’t meditate. Then again, no one did know her well. Not even Zhandar. He loved her, or thought he did, but he didn’t truly know her.

That was all right. Some days, she didn’t even want to know herself.

This was something she used to do back when she was first coming to terms with her gift, with what it could and couldn’t do. Most days, all she’d wanted to do was push it as far back in her mind as she possibly could, because it was all too overwhelming. All those thoughts, all those minds, beating at her. What person could possibly put up with that?

But she’d also learned that if she sat very quiet and very still, didn’t fight those intruding thoughts but instead allowed them to flow through her mind, she could learn a great deal. That was how she’d discovered that her mother truly didn’t know who Trinity’s father was — she’d thought it was a man named Dominic Alton, but it could also have been Roman Cole, since their coloring wasn’t dissimilar, and….

Trinity had shut down that particular thought tendril, because the last thing she’d wanted was to discover any more sordid details than she already had. Since she resembled her mother except for her coloring — Acantha Knox was blonde, with hazel eyes — Trinity knew the particulars of her features wouldn’t provide any clues as to who her father actually was. She could have tried to track down those two men and attempted to learn for herself after her mother was gone, but in the end she’d decided it didn’t matter. Neither of them had been around to see her grow up, so why should she bother now that she was an adult?

It wasn’t just her mother’s thoughts she’d sensed in that moment, though, but everyone in their building: the Tsao family next door, the Garcias down the hall, the McKenzies and the D’Ambrosios and everyone else. Tom D’Ambrosio was cheating on his wife. The oldest McKenzie girl, who was a year older than Trinity and always seemed impossibly worldly and glamorous to her, was two weeks late for her period and freaking out that she might be pregnant, even with the hormone shots. And so on.

The intensity of the experience always wrung Trinity out, and so she tried to avoid casting her thoughts so widely unless it was absolutely necessary. In fact, she hadn’t done it for years, more out of self-preservation than anything else. Most of the time, there wasn’t much useful to be gleaned from delving into so many people’s minds, unless discovering sordid details about their lives was something a person like Blake might find amusing. Trinity never found it amusing, though. Sad and scary and overwhelming was more like it.

Now, though, ranging through the station and attempting to learn where everyone was and what they were doing might offer Trinity her only chance of escape.

She caught the echo of someone who had to be Blake. His thoughts were impenetrable; clearly, he kept his guard up at all times, not just when he was in her presence. That discovery didn’t surprise her too much, since she did more or less the same thing. It was the only way to stay sane when you were gifted — or cursed — with psychic abilities.

And then there were the medical techs, including the doctors who’d operated on her. It seemed they were in the process of analyzing her blood. Trinity didn’t even remember giving a blood sample, but she’d been knocked out for a good long while when she was brought here. It could have easily been taken from her then. There were ten in that group, from what she could tell, but it also seemed as if they generally didn’t venture far from the level, three down from where Trinity now sat, that had been designated as the med center.

Guards, too. She’d never seen any of them, but there were twenty assigned to the station. A small support staff — two people working in the kitchen, three technicians whose jobs entailed making sure the systems regulating the station kept operating efficiently. Since she couldn’t sense anyone else, she guessed that all other duties, including janitorial, must be handled by mechs of various types.

And then…Gabriel. He was on the level above hers, but almost on the opposite side of the station. At the moment, he didn’t appear to be doing anything to mask his thoughts, probably because both she and Blake were far enough away that Gabriel must have decided they couldn’t offer any kind of threat.

Right then, Trinity wished he still had his barriers up, because her handler was thinking about her. And not in a logistical sort of way, such as contemplating the details regarding the surgery that would hand off her child to the surrogate who was about to arrive, or how long the recovery time afterward would be. No, in that moment he was indulging a fantasy of forcing her to her knees, then holding her by the hair while making her suck his cock.

Bile rose in her throat, and her eyes opened. The concentration — the trance, or whatever you wanted to call it — was gone. She made herself take a breath, and then she unfolded her legs and got up from the bed. A glass of water certainly wasn’t enough to erase that image from her mind, and yet right then, it was the only thing she had.

So she fetched a plastic tumbler from the small cupboard above the sink, and poured herself some water. It tasted tinny and strange after the pure, sweet water she’d drunk on Zhoraan, but at least it was wet. Also, the act of getting herself the water helped to steady her nerves a bit. Yes, if she allowed herself to dwell on it, the bile would resurface, but she could control it by not allowing that hideous image to resurface in her mind.

It wasn’t the oral sex. She’d always sort of enjoyed that. Certainly she’d loved doing it to Zhandar, feeling those delicate, tiny scales slip against the surface of her tongue. Her disgust now arose from the realization that Gabriel was just as aroused by the thought of forcing her to do something sexual to him —
anything
sexual to him — as he was by the physical act itself.

I have to get out of here.

Of course she already knew that. Now, though, the need for escape seemed so much more urgent. She had to save her child, but she also had to save herself. Maybe she’d been fooling herself by thinking that all Gabriel wanted was merely sex. She could have handled that. She might not have enjoyed it, but she could have lived with it. But now that she’d seen he wouldn’t be satisfied with simply bedding her, that he’d need to debase her first in order to show who had the power here…well, she knew she wouldn’t be able to survive that. It might not take a day, a week, or even a month, but sooner or later, after being continually used in such a way, Gabriel would break her. And then she, Trinity, would be gone, and the only thing left would be a shell of a body that he would continue to use as he wished.

She would die before she allowed that to happen.

Certainly Zhandar had never imagined his first trip into space would be like this. To be fair, he’d never really imagined going into space at all, because he loved Zhoraan and saw no need to leave his home world, but even so….

A shuttle had come directly to Lirzhan and Alexa’s homestead to retrieve him. On board were Nalzhir and several silent men Zhandar assumed must be guards. Why Nalzhir had them there, Zhandar wasn’t sure, because they only accompanied them to another, much larger ship that they docked with in the dark spaces just outside Zhoraan’s solar system. Zhandar was handed over to the newcomers, and then Nalzhir and his escort departed in the shuttle, presumably to return to their own world.

The new ship was manned entirely by Gaians, but they clearly had no official loyalties to anyone. Their vessel was unmarked, and they were dark gray jumpsuits with no badging, no patches, none of the various identifying accoutrements he had heard the Consortium military and its adjuncts so loved to place on their uniforms. Their leader, a man with skin almost as black as Zhandar’s own, had introduced himself only as Ejiro, informed Zhandar that they would reach the space station’s system in approximately eight and a half standard hours, then disappeared back into the cockpit.

There were fifteen of the soldiers or commandos or whoever they were. None of them seemed inclined to speak, although Zhandar noticed one or two giving him sideways glances when they thought he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t blame them; he doubted either of them had seen a Zhore this close up before. Not that there was much to see. Even so, behind a layer of steely self-control that was admirable for a human, he could still sense ripples of curiosity, and even unease. Not about the mission, per se, but merely to be involved in something that involved such secretive aliens. Apparently infiltrating a secret Consortium base was all in a day’s work for them, but to have a Zhore on board their ship? That was something else entirely.

Conversation with any of the men seemed to be out of the question, so Zhandar had to content himself with merely looking out the window, which was interesting at first. The stars had never seemed brighter, and the other planets in the Zhoraani system were like gleaming jewels in shades of gold and pearlescent white and rusty red.

Then the ship shifted into subspace, and the colors outside the window were no longer quite so lovely, but seemed to shift and shimmer into shades that made his stomach want to turn. He pushed the button to lower the shade. Across the way, one of the soldiers cocked an amused eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

Well, I suppose you are used to going into space, but I am not.
And though Zhandar had read brief accounts of what travel through subspace was like, those accounts did not come anywhere close to describing what it was actually like when experienced for yourself. For many reasons, he would be very glad when this journey was over.

Oddly, he dozed, probably because he had only slept for half the night the evening before. Just as well, because otherwise the journey would have seemed twice as long as it already did. The shudder of the ship as it dropped out of subspace woke him. All around, the soldiers seemed to have gone on the alert, checking and double-checking their weapons, eyes now hard, intent.

Zhandar wished he had similar preparations that he could occupy himself with. But he was only a passenger here, allowed to come along because apparently no one thought he would be too much in the way. Well, and probably because Alexa had insisted on it. Even a squad of mercenaries might be intimidated by a woman like her.

The next moment, Ejiro emerged from the cockpit. Now he wore a flat black cap on his bald head. His hand rested on the sidearm in the holster he wore, but he looked relaxed and calm, with no hint of worry about what they were facing.

“We wait here,” he said.

“Wait?” Zhandar demanded. “Wait for what?”

“You think we were going to go in there all guns blazing?” Ejiro returned, looking singularly unperturbed. He had a soft singsong accent, one that under other circumstances, Zhandar might have found soothing. Now it just seemed to grate on his nerves. “They’re sweeping the system. This ship has no clearance. We’ve got to wait for the supply shuttle to show up. It’ll come out of subspace close to here, outside the gravity well and beyond the range of their scans. We take the shuttle and use that to go in. It’s already got the clearance. Understand?”