The Gilded Cage (3 page)

“Thank you, sir.”

Javier considered things, smiled.

“Cavalry will be three days behind you,” Zakhar said firmly. “Tamaz is not someone I would miss. Nor would the galaxy.”

Zakhar turned and found Wilhelmina close.

He started to say something, but she engulfed him in a hug. Zakhar had forgotten how much taller she was until she leaned down and kissed him on the cheek.

“Thank you, Captain,” she whispered in his ear.

Zakhar smiled at her and walked to the airlock door. He glanced back and watched the emotions in the room swirl.

Being a pirate was so much easier.

Part Four

Wilhelmina considered the scene after Captain Sokolov departed, leaving her and Javier alone.

Javier was far too nervous around her. Had been, from the first moment she could remember anything after waking up from a nap that had lasted four hundred and eighty–eight years.

She considered approaching him, initiating physical contact. She knew he found her attractive. Most men and many women did: tall, vivacious, and redheaded.

But there was an air of cold reserve around the man, like a fog, shielding him.

They locked eyes across two meters of space. Whatever it was, that remoteness, that coldness went all the way to the bottom of his soul.

In the end, she retreated, ceding him the field of battle. This was too important. The captain’s chair beckoned, warm and protective. She moved next to it, but didn’t sit.

Javier had taken up a spot next to the bench where Sokolov had sat by the time she had turned around.

The silence stretched, uncomfortable and taut in ways she hadn’t been expecting.

Wilhelmina had spent nearly six weeks aboard
Storm Gauntlet
, recovering herself and preparing. She still felt like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, but the crew had treated her well, far better than she had expected, especially once she’d realized they were pirates, at least in their spare time. Six weeks had been a lot of time to recover, and to prepare.

After all, how often do you lay down to sleep, and wake up five hundred years later, hale and hearty? But the crew had accepted her, almost adopted her.

Javier had been goofy and witty, but also protective. He had seemed to like girls, but kept the space between them carefully professional, not that she hadn’t considered making the effort. He was a good looking fellow, dark and well–built.

But there was a gulf now. And she hadn’t said or done anything, except return.

She
had
returned without Djamila. And the wars between those two were almost legendary, to hear the crew tell it. Especially Javier’s assistant, Ilan Yu.

Wilhelmina considered the emotional chasm between them.

“Did I make a mistake?” she asked finally, leaving all the linguistic options open to interpretation. He was one of the few men she had ever known who could use it as an artistic palette.

“No,” Javier replied, his tone flat and hard, but not angry at her. “You did what was appropriate. What comes next will be
necessary
.”

The emphasis on that last word sent a chill up her spine. This wasn’t the Javier she’d known. He wore the man’s shape, but there was another soul there. Something deeper, unseen. Almost malevolent.

Wilhelmina considered the fairie tales her grandmother had told her once upon a time, in the dim recesses of history. Javier struck her as a Doppelgänger now. The shape was right, but there was a stranger sitting before her. He reminded her of no other man so much as Sokolov.

Perhaps that was what it meant to be an officer of the
Concord
Navy now. Hard men, facing a hard universe.

Had she turned Javier back into the man he used to be? Before he was happy?

“I need your help,” she said finally. “Tamaz is a bad person, surrounded by bad people. I wanted to gather good men to my banner.”

It almost sounded like a recruiting speech, but five months ago she had still been Shepherd of the Word, assembling good men and women in the cause of civilization. That everyone who had heard her speak that last night had been dead for hundreds of years didn’t change anything. There were still monsters in the darkness, and civilization needed paladins to protect it.

Even the most unlikely of paladins.

She smiled at Javier. He had puffed up a bit, as if he could read her mind.

“The Word has been forgotten,” he replied softly, almost apologetically.

“No.”

She shook her head in harsh negation, eyes locked with his.

“The speakers have been forgotten, Javier,” she replied, moving slowly closer to the man. “The Word will never be lost.”

“Why me?”

She let go some of the tenseness in her back. They had just moved past the hard part. Javier was willing to help, to go on this quest. Wilhelmina felt like Queen Isabella, or Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Elizabeth One.

She could do this.

“Two reasons. First, Tamaz doesn’t know you, and I’ll be in disguise. We can get closer to him than anybody else on the crew could. Second, I wanted someone I could trust with my life.”

She watched one of his eyebrows arch, rather eloquently.

“It took more than a week to get to
Meehu
in that old ship, Javier,” she said. “Djamila and I had a
lot
of free time to talk. You came up a lot.”

His face got even more distant and cold. He understood
what
the two women had discussed.

She sighed inside.

“I wanted to say thank you, Javier,” she continued. “For letting me live. For giving me the chance to continue my mad quest. For sending me on my way with your share of the treasure, when it could have bought your freedom from
them
.”

Them
was obvious.

He said nothing.

Wilhelmina cursed inside, unsure how to break through, to reach him.

Moments of emptiness passed.

“Are you ready? Time is wasting, Javier,” she said hopefully into the vast, emotional space.

They were close enough to dance, if he would just relax.

Some mad fire finally lit in the back of his eyes.

“If we’re going to rescue Sykora, I don’t even had an overnight bag, madam,” he smiled up at her finally.

“I stole enough clothes for both of us, you know” she tried to leer back at him. “You won’t have to slut walk home.”

“That works,” he said as he turned and moved away from her. “I need to grab a couple of things from the ship. Fifteen minutes and we’ll be in free–flight.”

It felt good to flirt with the man, even if there was some manner of icy bulwark between them. Wilhelmina would just have to figure out how to melt it.

Djamila had never once suggested anything other than hard fire between she and Javier, and Wilhelmina knew there were no other crew members he was more than occasionally involved with. She had checked.

Could a relationship based on hatred be as fulfilling as one based on love?

Javier paused at the airlock hatch and studied her face.

He nodded to himself, turned, and disappeared through the opening.

Wilhelmina let her long legs collapse, dropping her butt into the captain’s chair with an explosion of air from her lungs.

She’d had men reject her advances before, for a variety of reasons, but never once because it might get in the way of his vengeance.

She would need to work on that.

Part Five

It was the dead of night shift.

Sleep eluded Javier. Or rather, the dreams would not let him sleep. And there was no booze aboard the little vessel that could help him relax enough to pass into darkness and stay deep.

The lights were low.

Javier didn’t need to be awake. The ship was in the middle of a jump that would finally drop them at the far distant edge of the
Meehu
system, one or two jumps out from their target, but not for another three hours. If they missed the alarm clock, the ship would just sit there, waiting for someone to tell it what to do next.

It wasn’t intelligent, not like Suvi, but the vessel was automated enough that someone with no experience could figure out how to make it fly. If she was as smart as Wilhelmina.

Javier sat in the pilot’s seat, spun around backwards to he could rest his feet on the edge of the inflatable bed that had been hidden inside the sofa. Where he could watch Wilhelmina sleep.

Where he could brood.

With the bed inflated, there was no other room in the space, so they had ended up sharing it. It was like sleeping with your sister when you were kids. Even dead asleep, his lizard–brain kept him from rolling over and snuggling himself up against her bottom. That she slept nude didn’t help. He was wearing orange sweat pants and a purple t–shirt with
Surat Thani Angels
printed on the front. Apparently, they were a professional, minor league skyball team from a far–distant sector.

Javier watched her chest rise and fall as she breathed. Even her nudity barely distracted him, which said a lot for his state of mind.

None of it good.

More than once, he considered their next hop. It would be simple enough to bypass
Meehu
, make a hard run lateral across the sector, and get back to the civilized part of the galaxy in just over a week. He wouldn’t have his chickens, or his trees, but he had Suvi. They could start over, fresh.

But to do that, he would turn into the thing he despised most: a pirate.

Javier had given that man, Sokolov, his word. All Javier had now, besides Suvi, was his honor, hard–fought coin of the realm. He wasn’t going to just throw that away, even in his own mind. Not for those people.

Wilhelmina had at least backed off, sensing his troubles with her feminine ways. Not that he was much more complicated than a mud puddle, according to his second ex–wife. But he wasn’t himself.

They had made it through two full days of each other’s company, living in each other’s pockets. As honeymoons went, not bad.

Now the hard part.
Meehu Platform
.

Something woke her.

Wilhelmina rolled onto her side to look at him. The change from her normally red hair to a dark chestnut brown was jarring. It made her look like someone else, which was the goal, but it also made them strangers, sharing a bed and nothing more. That might not have been the worst choice.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

For what was left unsaid. It could cover any multitude of sins, real or imagined. Who knew what Sykora had told her? Or rather, how much?

He nodded. It wasn’t her fault he was being like this. She was just the reminder. How far they had fallen from imagined glory. What he had become. What still awaited him when he got back to
Storm Gauntlet
.

Some of the cold bled out of him. He felt his shoulders lower.

Wilhelmina patted the empty spot beside her. She stretched in distractingly–interesting ways. He noticed. She noticed.

“Come to bed,” she said in a tone that left little ambiguity.

“I’m still not sure that’s a good idea,” he replied.

“This isn’t about you, mister,” she said, iron steeling her voice. “I haven’t gotten laid in either six months, or five centuries, depending on how you want to count it. I have needs and you’re going to help. I have no interest in anything more serious than a good roll in the hay, right now.”

Javier nodded. He even smiled a little as he stood up and started to strip off his t–shirt.

This was a woman who got him.

BOOK SIX: NAVARRE

Part One

Abraam Tamaz smiled at the view, laid out before him like a buffet.

The room was plain. Gray walls, fluorescent lights, metal floor.

Sterile. Antiseptic.

The woman before him was not beautiful in the classical sense. She was 2.1 meters tall and built more like a man, with broad shoulders and muscles and thighs that masked the lovely, small breasts and trim waist in a cloak of false masculinity. A strong jaw and boring nose were redeemed by a spray of cute freckles. He could count nine holes in her left ear, where bangles had been removed. Her hair was the unmistakable hue of mud, clipped very short on the sides and normally standing upright in a vaguely–stylish mohawk.

Today, it was slicked back with sweat and pain.

Tamaz stepped back to get a better look at this woman, this prisoner, his prize.

She had been carefully, lovingly strapped to a modified hospital bed, her feet on his left and her head below his right hand. An intravenous drip in her left arm kept her hydrated and mildly hallucinating. Not bad, just enough to keep her tractable.

A strap was across her mouth. Not to keep her from screaming. She would never show pain. No, this was to keep her from unknowingly biting her tongue off in her agony. She might need it later.

Enough straps had been employed to keep even Djamila Sykora from moving more than two millimeters, to say nothing of getting free. He would have it no other way. Were she to escape, they would probably be forced to kill her, if for no other reason than to keep her from killing all of them.

Still, her angular, nude form was perfection itself. He paused to marvel at the taut, rippling stomach. The only men he knew with abs like that were professional models. Even the identity tattoo on the side of the ribcage closest to him was the beautiful statement of a powerful, independent woman.

She seemed to be composed of nothing but formidable muscle. Abraam Tamaz prided himself on being strong and fit, but he knew that she could out–lift him in any method, any machine he chose, as well as outrun him in full pack, and probably out–shoot him with any weapon, although that would be a matter he would have liked to test, if he could have trusted her with a loaded pistol.

Still, he lusted over this woman, all the more so because such perfection was denied to him. Oh, he could take her, but she would never know, right now. And while there were drugs he could introduce that would allow her conscious thought while he did so, she would still not give herself willingly.