Jewel (12 page)

Jewel shrugged. “As far as I know it’s never been done
before, but I’d certainly be willing to try. Of course, it’s all much more
complicated than we’re suggesting. This ship, its cargo and our salvage is
really owned by Backwater Ventures, Inc., and the final decision of what to do
with anything we find will be theirs. I doubt very much that they will want me
to be involved at all in whatever deal they end up making to sell the armenium
ore.”

“That assumes, of course, that we still have the stuff in
our holds when we report back to Arch,” Captain Kiara noted. “I have full
authority to sell our salvage before we return home so long as the company gets
it seventy-five percent.”

“Seventy-five percent?” Peron complained, making Jewel
wonder if he’d even read the contract that defined his terms of service and
compensation.

“That’s right,” Kiara said. “And we divide the rest up
according to the share schedule in our contracts. Basic crew gets one share
each while those of us gathered around the table get more.”

More was an understatement. The share schedule had developed
as a bonus system to encourage efficiency. It gave all crew a share in the
profits of a voyage based on ten percent of profits for normal trade and
twenty-five percent for salvage, which was often both time-consuming and
dangerous. The captain picked up the lion’s share of the crew portion at
thirty-three percent. Jewel, as the woman in charge of selling their cargo,
shared the next third with the Executive Officer, the Deck Officer and the
Ship’s Engineer. The remaining third was divided out among everyone else, but
still benefitted those around the table over the basic crew.

“So we’re not talking about anything like thirty-two
million,” Vega, Jewel’s roommate, observed.

“No,” Jewel agreed, “we never were. We might be talking
about eight or ten million, but we were never talking about thirty-two.”
Actually, they were probably talking about five times that amount, but Jewel
didn’t want to encourage their greed by getting them focused on a number that
high.

“Maybe you weren’t,” Peron grumbled, “but the rest of us
sure were.”

“And there may be a way in which we still can be,” the
captain announced.

Every eye focused on the captain. It was interesting, Jewel
thought. Kiara had always been a terrible leader, but she’d finally found a way
to motivate her crew.

The captain posed for a moment until she had everyone’s
undivided attention. “I find myself asking, where did this armenium come from?
Do you realize that Mr. Exec and Ms. Aurora discovered more than five hundred
chambers prepared for storing armenium ore, but only twenty-two of those
chambers had been filled? Obviously the Ymirians who settled this system were
expecting to mine much, much more.”

“Mine?” Vega asked. Suddenly Jewel’s misanthropic roommate
seemed to understand why she’d been included in this briefing. Obviously there
was an armenium mine somewhere in this solar system and Vega was the ship’s
liaison to the twenty-five professional miners they were transporting back to
Arch.

“Yes, of course,” Captain Kiara said. “I propose that we
locate the Ymirian mine and liberate whatever additional store of ore they
might have stockpiled on the surface. I further suggest we come to terms with
the professional miners in our passenger births to evaluate the mine to
determine whether or not they would be able to work it to harvest more.”

“We’re playing with fire here,” Jewel warned them. She could
see the glint of greed in too many eyes to believe she could persuade them away
from this course, but perhaps she could instill a sense of caution into their
activities. “Think about how the Armenites are going to respond if they
discover us working this site.”

“How would they find out we’re here?” Warrant asked.

“I don’t know,” Jewel admitted, “but it seems pretty obvious
to me that what we’ve discovered in the Valkyrie System today explains why the
Armenites invaded Erik’s home world twenty years ago.”

She met Erik’s eyes without blinking. “They simply weren’t
willing to tolerate any competition. Their armenium monopoly is the
cornerstone—no, the whole foundation—of their economy and of their influence in
the galaxy.”

Ana Yang returned the conversation to practical matters.
“There are definite limits on how much more ore we can transport anyway. Our
cargo holds are already full, so we’d have to store the ore in other parts of
the ship and with our current fuel situation, that’s problematic.”

Jewel was impressed that the woman’s brain was still working
despite the dream of all of these millions floating around the table.

“I realize that, Ms. Yang,” the captain said. “But we can
swap out less valuable cargo for the armenium and we don’t have to take all of
the ore now. We can do exactly what the Ymirians did, which is load any ore in
excess of what we can transport ourselves in the
Genesis
and pick it up
on a return trip.”

If anything, the light of greed began to burn brighter
around the table. Aside from Jewel herself, the only person who appeared in
anyway unenthusiastic regarding this latest development was Erik. He looked
thoughtful, as if he were taking all the information in and trying not to make
a rush to judgment. It increased both her respect and her affection for him.

“And then there is the mine itself,” the captain continued,
“a potentially limitless supply of future wealth, all of which we will have
rights to if we play our cards right on this.”

“You mean if word of our discovery doesn’t break out and draw
the Armenites in?” Jewel asked. “It will break, you realize. Too many people
will know about the armenium in this system to possibly keep it secret. It
frankly boggles the mind that the Armenites aren’t here already but they’ll
definitely come after we get back to civilization. This isn’t fire we’re
playing with, it’s plutonium.”

That stopped everyone for a moment. No one in their right
mind wanted to mess with the Armenites. They were tough, ruthless and very
frightening.

But the thought of near limitless wealth drove out any
semblance of good sense again. “So we need to use absolute secrecy,” Kiara
said.

Jewel successfully kept from rolling her eyes. There was no
chance that even the people in this room would keep quiet about this discovery.
If anyone realistically expected the rest of the crew to do so, they were
insane.

A knock on the briefing room door sounded and the panel
swished open revealing Glorious Strongheart, the leader of the team of miners
Euripides
was transporting to Arch.

“So much for secrecy,” Erik muttered.

Kiara shot him a nasty look before rising to address the
miner. “What may I do for you, Mr. Strongheart?”

Strongheart was a short, squat man with truly impressive
shoulders. He had deep black hair and an easygoing smile—a politician’s charm.
Jewel had instantly liked him from the very first moment they had met—which he
had doubtless hoped she would.

“There’s a rumor circulating the ship that you and your crew
have discovered an armenium mine,” Strongheart said. He shrugged his shoulders
as if to suggest the rest was so obvious that he shouldn’t have to say it, but
he did anyway. “You are planning to take advantage of it, aren’t you?”

At that moment Jewel decided she wanted nothing to do with
the mess in the Valkyrie System. There was no way to keep this discovery
secret. And when the story broke it was likely to go galactic. Then it was just
a question of who would get their hands on her first—the Armenites or her
parents and the Cartel. Not that the two might not end being the same thing,
because with this sort of fortune on the line, the Cartel Worlds would likely
hand her over to the Armenites in an effort to placate their most important
business partners. She didn’t even want to think about what would happen to her
after that. Her only chance to keep her freedom was to run before the story
broke.

“That we are, Mr. Strongheart,” the captain confirmed.
“Perhaps you and I should discuss arrangements privately.” She returned her
attention to the rest of her people. “Mr. Exec, I want you to develop a plan to
search the structures the Ymirians built on that island in the North Sea. Mr.
Peron, I want you and the Deck Officer to work out a plan to top off our fuel
reserves from the
Genesis
and then take the
Euripides
around this
system so we can pick up all of the navigational buoys that are just waiting to
announce that this space once belonged to Ymir. The rest of you are dismissed.
This meeting is adjourned.”

The excited buzz of conversation immediately picked up again
as people rose from their seats to return to their responsibilities. Not one of
them, save Erik who wasn’t talking, seemed genuinely concerned about the
possibility of the Armenites coming after them.

Sometimes Jewel wished that she could still be that naïve.

“I don’t believe you, you know,” Dr. Brüning said as he
stepped up beside Jewel.

She kept her face impassive as she answered him. “Don’t
believe what?”

“Your little fairy tale,” Brüning answered. “I don’t know
for certain what your real story is, but it’s no coincidence that a Cartelite
is on this voyage when a navigational error brings us to a star system with
unclaimed armenium deposits.”

“You said you’ve scanned my implants,” Jewel reminded him.
“You must know that they’re inert. You’re the one spinning fairytales.”

“I’m tired of making my living on tramp freighters on the
Fringe,” Brüning told her. “You’d better think about what you’re going to do
about that.”

He walked away without further fortifying his threat.

He didn’t have to. Even though he was wrong about most of
his suspicions, he already knew enough to destroy her.

She was going to have to do something about that.

Jewel sat at the small desk in her cabin, unlocked the
bottom drawer and took out a small box that she had carried with her since
she’d run away nine months ago. She opened the case, revealing an assortment of
specialized tools that she used to quickly disassemble the desk lamp, rewiring
the device so that anyone touching the base of the lamp would receive a long
and sustained electrical charge. Then she reassembled the lamp and replaced the
tools—all except a long, slender wand topped with a thin needle covering a wire
thinner than a single strand of her hair.

The bell on the cabin door sounded, startling her. Moving
quickly, Jewel replaced the wand in her tool case and stuck the container back
in the drawer. She rose as the bell chimed again and hurried to answer it.

Erik stood in the doorway with all his weight
uncharacteristically on one foot. “Do you have a minute?”

Jewel couldn’t fully suppress the urge to look back over her
shoulder at her desk before she stepped back and let her lover into her room.
She didn’t want to hide things from him, but there was no way she could tell
him that her bioware chips were real. How could she explain she needed to turn
the software back on to help her deal with Brüning, but would have to risk
killing herself to turn it off again?

“Sure, come on in,” she told him. She didn’t like the fact
that her voice sounded uncomfortable even to her own ears, so she added a
little joke to warm the atmosphere. “I didn’t expect it to be you. I didn’t
realize you knew how to use the doorbell.”

Erik smiled and for a moment looked like himself again—the
man she’d first been attracted to. The officer she’d met before they’d
discovered that some of his people had escaped the Armenite net, only to
disappear in this far-off system. “I only use my master key when I’m coming to
seduce you,” he teased.

It suddenly occurred to Jewel that if she went through with
her plan to reactivate her bioware, then she wouldn’t be able to make love to
Erik until she got it shut down again. The thought disturbed her. She didn’t
know how to explain it to him. She didn’t know how to explain any of it. Maybe
she should wait to find out what Erik wanted before she spoiled the mood by
talking about depressing things. “Do you want to sit down?”

Erik looked around and seated himself on her mattress. It
was not, as she’d half expected, a sly come-on. He just needed to find a place
to sit and she was between him and the desk chair.

She wished he had been coming on to her. It would be easier
to handle than conversing just now.

“Are you going to keep standing?” Erik asked.

Jewel wanted to sit next to him, but Erik looked so serious
that she thought she better sit apart so she could focus all of her faculties
on navigating through his questions. She sat behind the desk, turning the chair
to face him, being very careful to keep her hand well away from the base of the
lamp she had sabotaged. “What’s on your mind?”

Erik licked his lips, a completely uncharacteristic nervous
gesture. “Is there any truth in that story you told the captain and Brüning in
the meeting earlier today?”

Jewel had expected the question but was still unhappy to
hear it. She didn’t want to lie to Erik but she also didn’t want to confirm the
vast differences in their social status. If they were to run away together—and
she really wanted them to—her status couldn’t matter. They would both be
spacers on the Fringe. But in Jewel’s heart of hearts, she didn’t believe that
Erik, or anyone else for that matter, could treat her the same after learning
she was the heiress to a fortune measured in hundreds of billions of solars.
Not even Brüning could guess just how wealthy her family really was.

She shrugged and tried to feign embarrassment.
“Unfortunately, it is,” she lied. “I’m from the Cartel Worlds. I’m just not one
of the genuine Cartelites.”

Erik considered that for a moment. As executive officer, he
was responsible for discipline on the
Euripides
. Jewel figured he had
heard just about every lie imaginable during the course of his career. He had
to be good at reading people. He had to suspect that she wasn’t telling the
truth and that distrust would hurt him. The question was what would he do about
it?

“You know it doesn’t matter to me if you were lying,” Erik
told her. “You don’t owe those people anything. I’d understand if you weren’t
telling the truth.”

All of which meant that he didn’t believe her, Jewel
figured. No, she reconsidered, it meant that he feared she was lying to him,
which meant she was right to have lied because he was obviously uncomfortable
with the idea that she was a wealthy Cartelite.

She had to do something to turn Erik from this line of
questioning, but she didn’t know what that something was. Her girlfriend,
Hathor, would tell her to suck Erik off. Apparently there was nothing quite so
distracting as a good blowjob when a man started asking difficult questions.
Except Erik wasn’t like the spoiled young men Hathor dated. He was an adult
with serious responsibilities and Jewel could easily imagine him picking up his
troublesome questions again a minute after he came.

With physical distraction unlikely to help, Jewel tried to
put her lover on the defensive. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m
embarrassed by my past. It hurts me to think of the way my parents tried to use
me. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life paying for their decisions.” All
of those things were true, she reflected, but not in the way Erik likely
interpreted them.

She’d succeeded in putting him on the spot and she could see
him trying to figure out how to ask a follow-up question without accusing her
of more lying or appearing insensitive. He leaned forward and touched the
jewels implanted in her temple with the tips of his fingers. “And the
Cartelites will really chase you across the Fringe over these?”

Jewel covered his hand with her own and closed her eyes.
“They’ll chase me,” she told him. Again, that was no lie. “I’ll understand if
you don’t want to run with me. Even out here on the Fringe they have the power
to make our lives hell.” All true, even if it wasn’t the whole story. She
wondered if Erik really understood the power of a credit chip full of solars.
Once her parents caught the scent it would be almost impossible to get away
from them again.

That was why she needed her bioware spy activated again. She
needed to erase all trace of her from the
Euripides
so that there was
nothing left to help them start their search. Then she needed to short out her
spy again before they reached another system and it could begin actively
calling for help. Dangerous, but workable, so long as the bioware could be
fooled while it was active into thinking matters were not nearly as wrong as in
actuality they were.

“I don’t care who’s chasing you,” Erik told her. “I love
you, Jewel.”

Her fingers tightened on his hand. “I love you too, Erik.”

The mattress crinkled as he got up. Both his hands cupped
her cheeks, gently turning her face up so he could kiss her again. His warm
lips sent a tingle straight to her heart from which it spread out to her
breasts, stomach, pussy and thighs. Her lungs sped up their pumping as they
tried to keep pace with her racing pulse.

“It’s going to be hard getting to spend time together if we
find that mine down there,” Erik whispered.

Jewel touched his chest, letting her fingers could search
out the now-familiar contours of his chest.

“I think we deserve a little time to ourselves before the
madness begins,” Erik said.

Jewel liked that idea. She stood up so she could get her
hands under Erik’s shirt while she used her tongue to explore his mouth. He was
every bit as eager to explore her own body. His hands dropped from her face to
her sides where he stroked her through her uniform blouse, sparks flew inside
her and her flesh yearned for more.

Erik’s abdomen was smooth and tight beneath her hands, but
his still fastened shirt resisted her efforts to explore higher. Frustrated,
she removed her hands so she could quickly open it, pushing it back off his
broad shoulders so her hands could explore his upper body free of barriers.

Erik returned the favor, slipping her shirt off and dropping
it on the desk perilously close to her sabotaged lamp. But there was no time to
worry about that. As he cupped and squeezed her breasts, Jewel maneuvered him
backward until they met the mattress and Erik fell back on to the bed.

Jewel landed with him, laughing with pleasure before kissing
him again. They lay side-by-side, which allowed them to explore each other’s
mouths with their tongues while their hands caressed each other’s bodies. Jewel
loved the feel of Erik’s fingers on her flesh, featherlight as he raised goose
bumps on her too-sensitive skin. He didn’t just play with her breasts or nipples,
instead he traced wide circles on her stomach and side, and flirted with moving
below her pants and panties to explore those secrets as well.

Except that Jewel’s pussy was no longer a secret to Erik,
was it? She’d already given him her prize and he was showing her now that it
was a treasure he wanted to return to again and again and again.

His lips moved off hers to kiss the line of her jaw, the
nape of her neck, the curve of her collarbone, the swell of her upper breast.
Jewel tried to keep up her exploration as well, but the tremors of pleasure
Erik generated inside her kept causing her to stutter in her progress.

He rubbed his cheek against the side of her breast. He had
just a hint of the shadow of a beard and the slight roughness against her smooth
flesh was excruciatingly pleasurable. He found her ribs with his lips and wetly
kissed them while his hand opened the front of her uniform trousers so that his
fingers could slip inside and trace the contours of her sex through her
panties.

Jewel closed her eyes and let Erik make love to her, teasing
her with his fingers and his lips as he gently worked his way down her body.
This moment was worth abandoning her parents’ fortune. This moment was worth
taking any risk to preserve what she’d found here with Erik on the Fringe.

He slid her pants and panties down past her thighs, over her
knees and finally, after he removed her shoes, off to lie on the floor. Then he
patiently worked his way back up her body—kissing and licking the curve of her
ankle, the underside of her calf, the soft flesh between her thighs, the
flushed heat of her swollen labia…

“I love you, Jewel,” Erik whispered. His hot breath tickled
her pussy and she smiled as she squirmed before him.

“I know you do,” she whispered back.

“You can trust me,” he told her just before his tongue
flicked out and touched the moist seam between her thighs.

She gave herself to the pleasure and groaned.

“Whatever it is,” Erik assured her. “Whatever you think
you’ve done, whoever you think might come after you—I’ll still be right here,
sharing my love.”

He kissed her deep and long, as if her lower lips were her
upper mouth. Jewel wasn’t certain how to respond at first, but then the
pleasure took over and she squirmed joyfully beneath her lover’s touch. He came
up for a short breath before settling back down on her lips again, cleaning her
with his tongue before delving back inside of her body. His strong hands
stretched her thighs apart, which only added to Jewel’s excitement.

Her hips began to gyrate up and down as well as left and
right, not violently, not forcefully, but slow and sensuously beneath her
lover’s touch. She found her nipple and squeezed it tenderly. She found Erik’s
hand on her thigh and covered it with her own. She never remembered feeling a greater
sense of peace and happiness then she did right then. For the first time in her
life, she believed she belonged with someone—someone of her choosing, not the
man her parents wanted for her.

Erik worked his way up to Jewel’s clitoris, first working the
outside with his tongue, then unsheathing it with his lips so that he could
flirt with her most sensitive flesh.

The orgasm surprised her. Rather than crashing through her
body like the ones she had enjoyed in the shower or on the
Genesis
, it
spilled out of her pussy to roll in waves down her thighs and up through her
breasts.

She stretched beneath it as her whole body began to shudder
with increasing force. The sheer joy of Erik’s presence and attention consumed
her whole world. He pushed her thighs apart and she welcomed him as he pressed
the smooth tip of his powerful erection against her and slowly penetrated her.

Long, powerful strokes edged her passion higher. She never
quit climaxing, but the slow shudders increased in potency the deeper Erik delved
within her. She wrapped her legs around his and pulled his shoulders down so
that his chest pressed against her breasts. She circled her arms around his
back, striving to meld his body into hers and make them one.

She could feel Erik’s urgency growing within her, breaking
with the steady tempo he’d established as the frantic energy of his own need
surged within him.

She met his passion with equal energy, lifting her hips
against him as he thrust, instinctively helping her lover over the edge. She
smiled deep within her soul as her pussy tightened on his cock and Erik began
to come.

* * * * *

Jewel rolled over on the bed and looked down at her sleeping
lover. She’d met a lot of handsome men growing up as a Cartelite, but at this
moment she thought Erik exceeded all of them. His tight, muscular chest, broad
shoulders, blond hair and, when he was awake, beautiful blue eyes were so
different from the man she’d always expected to be joined to. Armenites were
dark of hair and eye. Erik, an impoverished exile from a conquered planet was
the antithesis of what her parents had planned for her—not that she thought
that had anything to do with her attraction to him.