Jewel (6 page)

When Erik stepped out in the corridor in front of her, Jewel
immediately turned around and started back the other direction.

“Don’t do that, Jewel,” he pleaded. From the increasing
frequency of his footsteps she figured he was running after her.

The last thing Jewel wanted to do was talk to him. No, the
last thing she wanted to do was to be seen talking to him, but Erik clearly
didn’t care what she wanted right now. Just before he could grab her arm and
force her to turn about, she sighed and pivoted to face him. “What is it, Mr.
Gunnarson?”

Erik’s face fell. “What is it? A day ago we were talking
about you moving in with me and now you’re doing everything you can to avoid
me—and we both know how difficult that is on a ship the size of the
Euripides
.”

Hot rage filled Jewel, building off the soul-wrenching pain
that had infused her since Ana had first turned on her yesterday. “A day ago I
thought we had something special. Now I’ve found out that I’m just another girl
in your black book—a virgin spacer to add to your list of conquests.” She’d
waited a long time to give away her virginity and she felt really and truly
stupid that the man she’d finally surrendered it to proved to be the Casanova
of the space lanes. How could she have been so foolish? She may not like her
parents, but when she’d risked their fortune she’d thought she was doing it for
love, not to be that bastard’s latest girl. Kole Delling might not have been
anxious to marry her before, but now he had legitimate grounds to call off the
wedding, terminate the partnership between her cartel and his house and beggar
the lot of them.

“You were a virgin?” Erik asked. The idea seemed to surprise
him. “I didn’t realize. I wish you’d told me. I’d have handled things
differently.”

Jewel harrumphed and tried to turn away, but Erik pulled her
back around to face him. “But it ultimately wouldn’t have mattered. You’re not
like any other woman I’ve been with, Jewel. There was nothing routine or casual
about what we did yesterday, or about how I feel for you now. I won’t pretend I
wasn’t attracted to Ana when we were together, but once I met you, I knew that
what she and I shared wasn’t what I was looking for.”

His answer only stoked the anger burning inside of Jewel.
“But you thought what you had with Ana was real, didn’t you? Just like you
thought it was real with Captain Kiara and the Stars alone know how many others
before her.”

Erik clearly would have preferred that the captain not be
involved in this conversation. “Having a relationship with the captain was a
mistake. I already told you I find powerful, capable women very attractive. I
mistook that for something deeper than it was. Surely you can understand that?
I was just searching for what I’ve finally found in you.”

Spacer Alfonse Arico appeared at the far end of the corridor
and stopped when he saw the two of them arguing. A grin twisted his lips from
ear to ear and remained even after Erik turned on him. “Get out of here, Arico,
or I’ll make you sorry.”

“Yes, Sir, Mr. Exec, Sir,” Arico said through his grin. He
started moving again, but with glacial slowness.

Erik turned around and grabbed Jewel’s wrist. “Come on.
Let’s go finish this in my cabin where we can talk in private.”

Jewel had no intention of going anywhere private with this
man. “I’m not going to your cabin.” She pulled back hard, trying to get him to
let go of her arm. She had to tug twice before he released her.

Erik was breathing hard and his white face had flushed an
unhealthy shade of red. “Look, Jewel, please. You’re the best thing that’s ever
happened to me. Don’t throw it away because Ana lost her cool and went psycho
on us.”

“Psycho?” Jewel retorted. “Is that what you call it? The woman
is obviously in love with you.”

“And I’ve fallen in love with you,” Erik told her. He
stepped up against her, grabbing her face in both hands and kissed her.

Jewel shoved him away despite the treacherous wave of heat
that flushed through her body. “What in the Stars do you think you’re doing?”

Behind Erik, Alfonse Arico was still watching and grinning,
adding further humiliation to Jewel’s rage.

“I’m trying to show you I love you,” Erik told her. He
stepped close against her again. “And trying to remind you that you have
feelings for me too…”

She shoved him away again. “What is wrong with you? Do you
have any idea how impossible you’ve made my life on this ship? You’ve had
relationships with the captain and the engineer. How am I supposed to work with
both of them hating me?”

“They’ll get over it,” Erik told her. “We have a right to
see each other if we want to.” He stepped in to kiss her again. This time he
was ready when Jewel tried to push him back. He blocked her feeble effort
easily with a martial arts move and got his arms around her body and his lips
on her mouth.

She struggled for a moment, but her body betrayed her,
reminding her of how good it had felt when Erik held her in the shower. She
began to relax into Erik’s kiss, but then remembered Spacer Arico was still
watching them and shoved Erik away, not as violently as the first time, but
seriously just the same. Her heart pounded painfully in her chest and a
frightening yet delicious heat roared between her thighs. Her face felt just as
flushed as Erik’s looked.

He stepped forward as if he planned to kiss her again.

Jewel shook her head to clear her thoughts and thrust one
arm out between them. “That’s enough of that,” she said. Her voice wasn’t
nearly forceful enough, but it slowed him down a little. “I can’t talk now, I
have to think and…” What was she doing before Erik interrupted her anyway? She
remembered with sudden clarity. “And I have to get to the bridge.”

Erik backed off a step, apparently satisfied that she’d
stopped completely rejecting him.

Pulling the tattered shreds of her dignity together, Jewel
pushed past Erik, gaining confidence as she walked. She almost thought she’d
escaped when the exec called out again from behind her. “Wait up, Jewel. I have
to go there too!”

* * * * *

The bridge remained a mess forty-one hours after the crash
translation that had dumped them in this star system. The vomit had been
cleaned up and the personnel had showered and donned fresh uniforms, but the
atmosphere was a second disaster waiting to happen. Part of the problem was
mental—the crew was angry over its circumstances and the knowledge that their
pay for this trip was going to be atrociously small at best. But the other part
of the problem was physical—like everything else on the
Euripides,
the
air filters needed replacing. While they were still technically viable if the
ship’s crew carried out regularly scheduled maintenance cleaning, they’d long
ago lost the ability to make the air they circulated smell fresh and clean.
Taken together the atmosphere on the command deck was reminiscent of a
terminally ill beast snapping at its handlers when they tried to bring it
water.

“What’s our status, Warrant?” Erik asked as he entered the
bridge behind Jewel. He couldn’t even let a few minutes pass between their
entrances. No, he had to emphasize the fact that the two of them were
together—even though Jewel had just tried to make it clear that that wasn’t the
case anymore.

“Tried” being the operative word. Not kicking Erik in the
balls when he kissed her in front of witnesses probably supported the still
together argument pretty well.

“Unchanged since our last update,” the Deck Officer told
him. “We’ve received an automated message from Brynhild Station instructing us
to assume a parking orbit, but no human has responded to any of our queries.”

“I see,” Erik responded. There was an odd tone of
disappointment in his voice that had nothing at all to do with their plummeting
chances of fixing the
Euripides
’ problems.

Behind him, Captain Kiara entered the bridge. The
scuttlebutt had it that she hadn’t been here at all since those first minutes
after entering the system, working from her cabin where the air smelled cleaner
and leaving the day-to-day chores of operating the vessel to the exec and the
deck officer. But now that she was here, she obviously intended to reassert her
direct authority. Her eyes immediately picked out the odd element on her
command deck. “What are you doing here, Aurora?”

“I’m waiting to observe first contact,” Jewel told her. She
kept her tone level, trying to display no sign of worry or tension. “If all
goes according to your plan, I’ll be negotiating with someone on that station
soon. The more I can learn about them, the better I can do my job.”

Kiara considered that for a moment, then reluctantly nodded.
Then she turned to Erik. “Mr. Exec, those are your people on that station.
What’s going on here? Why won’t they talk to us?”

“I don’t know,” Erik admitted, “but I think we have to
consider the possibility that the station is deserted.”

“What possibility?” Peron cut in. “It’s obvious no one is
home.”

Based on the captain’s slow and thoughtful nod, it was
evident that she agreed with the navigator. Jewel didn’t like to see Peron get
ahead in anything, so she voiced her own question. “What are the other
possibilities, Erik—Mr. Gunnarson?”

Erik raised an eyebrow at her formal address.

“Well, Mr. Exec?” Kiara prompted him.

Erik prevaricated. “It’s just speculation at this point.”

“That’s all any of us can do right now,” the captain pointed
out.

“Well I’ve tried to put myself in the position of anyone who
might be living on that station,” Erik said.

Jewel figured that was the whole point of asking him. As the
captain had said, they were his people, after all.

“Go ahead,” the captain told him.

Erik began to warm to his topic. “Assume, if you will, that
they know the Armenites took over our home world twenty standards ago. Armen
now claims all territory that once belonged to my people. That means that Armen
now claims this star system. If you don’t wish to belong to the Armenite
Hegemony you have two choices—you can abandon Valkyrie for non-Armenite space
or you can…duck your head and try not to be noticed.”

The captain was starting to get impatient with Erik. “So
we’ve noticed them, what now?”

“Well by appearing deserted, the inhabitants of this system
could conceivably suck any visitor in close enough for them to deal with.”

“And by deal with you mean?” the captain asked.

“If I was on that station and I wanted to remain independent
of the Hegemony then I would try to make myself look as harmless as possible
until the visitors were close enough to blow out of the space lanes.”

Everyone fell silent for a minute as they considered this.

Finally, Jewel broke the silence. “I’m not certain that
makes sense, Mr. Gunnarson. If the inhabitants of this system are that worried
about the Armenites finding them, why didn’t they change their buoy signals so
they wouldn’t identify Valkyrie as a Ymirian system?”

Warrant stepped into the discussion. “Jewel’s making sense,
Gunnarson. It’s certainly possible that they’re laying low like you suggested.
I can even see why you’d want to think that’s what’s happening. But Gunnarson,
it’s been more than twenty standard years. Occam’s Razor says they’ve abandoned
the station. We’ve had no sign whatsoever that anyone’s at home.”

Captain Kiara shifted about in her seat. “Let’s be overly
cautious for a moment and assume that the exec is right. Can we see any
offensive capability?”

Warrant shook his head. “No, we can’t. There are no obvious
weapons. It’s a civilian station top to bottom. Honestly, the only thing
unusual in the system apart from the station’s silence is an antique starship
parked against it.”

“A what?” Kiara asked. The captain looked as confused as
Jewel felt.

“It’s an antique starship—pre-slide drive,” Warrant
explained.

“Pre-slide drive?” the captain repeated. “You mean one of
the old generational merchant vessels?”

“No, it’s a colonizer,” Warrant clarified, “an honest to
God, old-style colonizer.”

In the days before the faster-than-light slide drive was
invented, ships spanned the void between stars by cranking up to a significant
fraction of the speed of light and spending dozens of standards making the
voyage. Large extended families crewed these vessels, making their living
trading between the gravity wells. The colonizers were variations on this
theme—ships designed for one-way journeys out among the stars. The initial
journeys might take decades or more as the colonists sought unsettled planets
and at the end of the journey, the vessels themselves would be cannibalized for
materials needed to establish the colony. This sort of venture had quickly died
out after the introduction of the slide drive, but there had to be hundreds of
old style colonizer ships still out there making their way toward star systems
that as likely as not had already been settled by people with newer technology.

“It’s strange they didn’t dismantle their ship,” the captain
mused.

“Not strange at all, if you think about it,” Peron said.

When Kiara offered him a blank, uncomprehending stare, he
offered a follow-up observation. “Something must have happened to them too.
There’s no sign that they’re in this system either.”

* * * * *

“Full stop, Ms. McKenzie.”

The helmsman hit the appropriate buttons on her instrument
panel and the
Euripides
slowed to a halt some ten feet off one of the
principle air locks of Brynhild Station. It was a nice piece of flying, above
the basic competence level that Jewel was coming to expect of the crew of the
Euripides
,
but then pilots really did have to be top notch wherever they were working.
Starships couldn’t go banging into every space station they docked with. The
casualty count would simply be too high.