Nara Read online

  “Sir?” The man’s voice was not steady.

  “Dock yourself a month’s pay for not closing whatever loophole a speeder used to land outside my office.”

  “Sir? Shall I send a security team?”

  Here was the moment.

  He opened his mouth, she could see the leading edge of an affirmative. At his pause, he glanced toward her, she did her best to sashay over to one of the oversized leather armchairs that were grouped together at one side of the room.

  Watch my ass, Bryce. It’s a nice one, and I know you want it. She swung it around and flopped back into the chair, fixing him with her gaze, willing him to let sleeping dogs lie. Lie right through their teeth if that’s what it took to survive.

  “Close off this wing. No one enters without my command. And no one leaves.”

  “Yes, si—” His voice chopped off as Bryce released the switch.

  “To what honor do I owe this visit?” he leaned back against his desk, strong arms crossed over his chest.

  “To a little mistake you made two nights ago.”

  “I recall no mistakes.” But the tightening of his arms belied him a moment later as he put together that the party had been two nights before.

  “You checked James for a recorder. Don’t deny it. I watched you.”

  He nodded his head. No hesitation. No taking a moment to think. He already knew that gambit was blown and would be rapidly building the next. The speed of his mind was another thing she admired. It was the way he chose to use it that gave her foul chills in the night. She’d have to be damn careful with him.

  “But you didn’t check me. Nor his pocket after he joined you on the patio.”

  She reached down into the low neck of her dress and removed the micro-recorder.

  She tossed it to him and he caught it.

  “Still warm from a woman’s breasts,” Bryce tossed it lightly trying to look at ease, but she knew him too well and could read the tension there. “Who knows what secrets lie therein?”

  “I know. I’ve listened to that chip.”

  “And you bring it here to me.”

  “I do.”

  “And you are wondering if it will buy your life.”

  “You were always quick, Bryce.” Too damn quick. She crossed her legs the other way and the material slid aside leaving a dark triangular shadow of thigh, dress, and thigh. She had studied the effect in the mirror and turned slightly to offer him the most intriguing angle. Yes, Bryce, I’ll buy my life with my body if needs be. Look at the interesting darkness and think upon it.

  He didn’t even have the decency to stare, he would be even harder to control than she’d first thought.

  “And is this the only copy?”

  “Yes. What is it worth to one such as you?”

  He deliberately dropped it into his document vaporizer and it was gone with a brief flash.

  “Precisely nothing.”

  Cheap bastard. But he was right. The recording by itself was worth nothing by itself and he knew it as well as she.

  He moved from his desk now. A growing bulge in his pants explained exactly what was on his mind. Make love to the woman even as you make her a widow. Perhaps, if you’re lucky Bryce, you can do both in the same orgasmic moment. But she didn’t dare give him the chance. Yet. Once relieved of his hormonal burden, she’d be discarded upon the same heap as her husband’s corpse.

  “What troubles is the WEC heaping upon my poor little Bryce?”

  That brought the man up short. Suddenly the alpha-male bull was gone and the next master of the planet stood before her. This was the man she must beat, the one she must win to her side.

  He practically threw himself onto a sofa across from her. White shirt, salt and pepper hair, and dark, dark eyes framed in a tanned face. Those eyes no longer studied her. Their lust was no longer for flesh, now it was for power.

  “The damn Economic Council wants more control than they should be allowed. Their next planetary session is closed to the World Premier, even in the charming person of James Wirden. It is a closed session in world management as if James—”

  “You mean you by this time tomorrow.” Why couldn’t she sorrow for James? How could she write him off so glibly, even adding a laugh at the end? Because if she didn’t, she’d be dead the next day in a tragic flitter accident.

  “Yes,” Bryce smiled his shark-like smile, “yes, they would keep me from my proper place.”

  “Did you ever discover that I was untrue to James?” The sudden change in topic shifted his attention sharply. The political man switched back to the alpha-male uncertainly. That was exactly where she wanted him. Nicely off balance. But be quick, he won’t stay there long.

  “Just once.”

  “With?”

  He actually smiled, “A chambermaid.”

  She leaned forward to adjust the hem of her dress. The front of her dress billowed forward offering him that top-down view of her breasts that most intrigued men. When she leaned back, her dress fell into place and her legs were covered to the calves. Let him think about forbidden wonders.

  “Did you ever find out her name?”

  “No.” His wry grin revealed just how much that failure irritated him.

  “And what would be the worth of that name?” This card had better play well. It was a calculated risk to play your highest card first. If it failed to trump the game, the rest of your hand was proved worthless.

  He laughed. A great roar that bounced about his office and wrapped its fingers around the sparse furniture and closed about her neck in a stranglehold.

  “You look to buy your future with the name of a chambermaid fifteen years gone. That’s sad, Celia. Very sad. I expected better of you.”

  “Ah, but you should be interested. It was not a single tryst, but a relationship, a deliciously wild one, that I nurtured over all those years. Does it bother you that you didn’t know of more than the one time I wished you to discover?”

  The collapse of his smile into a frown with furrowed brow was sufficient answer. Time to play turn that precious card, please let it be good enough.

  “She was really quite hedonistically bull-dyke, though you’d never think it to look at her. As you’ve done hundreds of times. Does the name Melissa Chang mean anything to you?”

  His eyes nearly popped out of his head as his body jerked upright on the couch with no conscious intervention.

  “Council President Chang? Small woman. Gray hair. Surely you’ve met her, Bryce. Doesn’t look the part does she? Lots of energy. Lots. And not a single gray hair below. I pluck them for her.”

  Bryce’s lower jaw was desperately groping for some place to perch.

  “Now what was this problem you were having with the Council?” She rose languorously and eased onto the couch beside him. She leaned forward until their lips were separated by just a whisper.

  “And what is the solution worth to the next World Premier?”

  # # #

  Suzie Stevens wanted to bury her head and cry or scream as they kissed. Suz Jeffers switched off the viser, because it was true there were certain things she didn’t wish to witness.

  One thing at least was absolutely certain. The world would be run from this house. From that room. By those two… words failed her. Snakes were not a sufficiently vicious analogy. Great White Sharks. That was more on target. Voracious with the power to back up even the most idle of threats.

  There might be no way to stop them head-on, but perhaps she could sneak in little derailings or sabotages at crucial junctures. But only from this room, the sanctuary of power her mother had bequeathed to her and she had refined in self-defense into a world-class node of power and force. All the more powerful because none knew of its existence. Only from here could she fight back. The center of world power was barely a hundred meters away. They would never
look so close to home for the center of dissent.

  An emergency flasher burst to life on her public access terminal.

  News of James Wirden’s death by stroke flashed into view casting a spectral light upon the darkened glass.

  # # #

  “Go! Run!”

  Jaron’s mother flipped him out of the hammock before he was awake. He landed hard on one knee against the wooden flooring smoothed by years of his family’s feet tracking back and forth. He began searching for his shoes.

  “No time!” She forced something into his hands and pushed him out the back door of their bunkhouse wearing only the light shorts and the shirt he’d slept in. He grabbed a machete and slung it over his shoulder. As he emerged outside the ecological station’s main building, the pre-dawn heat hammered against him. His sister was running from the lab toward the house and waved him on into the jungle.

  Then he heard it. The chorp, chorp, chorp of the WEC’s transport. The troops of the World Economic Council would be landing in the center of the station even now. He bolted across the rough-hewn clearing, all that kept the buildings from being inundated by the Venezuelan jungle.

  He plunged into the brush and cool shade of the towering canopy. The only sound was the slapping of the machete’s sheath against his back. He ran blindly, jamming his bare toes several times, but slowing only to regain his balance. Something long and cool slid across his face. He twisted away from it, knowing if it was a snake, he was too late to save himself from the bite.

  Jaron crashed into a Ceiba tree and lost his balance. He flipped over an exposed root and lay on the moist, yellow earth of the jungle floor gasping in its loamy scent as he struggled to fill his lungs. When he dared look, he saw no snake, but rather the belay harness they used to research the upper canopy. They’d never look for him up there. He glanced toward the research compound, but he’d delved too far into the jungle to see the bunkhouse or even any hint of the station.

  He snapped the sack his mother had forced upon him to the machete’s strap and groped his way through scattered leaves to the harness. He hauled himself upright, clipped in, and silently ascended.

  A blast of powershot roared through the jungle like an angry panther. Jaron froze halfway up the tree. A moment of dead silence stretched into an eternity and he wondered if he would ever hear again.

  Then the jungle roared awake with a thousand voices crying out in alarm. Jackdaws, spider monkeys, even a wild pig somewhere in the bush below, all howled in unison. The noise redoubled as the jungle’s denizens flew, ran, and swung away from the brutal shattering of the quiet dawn which trickled down through the leafy canopy far above. They were unerringly headed away from the station.

  Jaron hung for a moment in the balance, knowing it was foolhardy to descend, yet equally unable to climb. His mother and sister had just bought his life with their own. He could make no sense of the fact, but he was certain of it.

  A flash of blood-red slashed through the air inches from his face. He almost lost control of the ascender. It was only long practice that kept his hand firmly clamped around the cold metal of the hardware’s tongue.

  He checked his chest, but there was no blood and his hand came cleanly away from his face. He looked up and saw the source of color. An Ara macao circled his head once more. The brilliantly-colored scarlet macaw circled with a steady facing eye watching him, not in fear, but in question. It disappeared upward into the canopy.

  Another burst of gunfire. The wild pig’s squeal became a scream which ended far too abruptly to be natural.

  It galvanized him into action. He ascended to the first traverse wires and slid silently away. He climbed and moved eastward for the better part of an hour through the rigging his mother and father had placed in the trees to aid their research. He had spent untold hours as a boy following them on the ground, sending aloft supplies as they were needed. Many more hours as a teen and then a young man following them through the air. Now they were gone. Now he was alone.

  He moved perhaps a kilometer and a half through the various treetop wire systems until he had reached the easternmost extent. Rather than sit on the small platform, high in the sticky heat, he slid beneath it, attached his harness to the support structure, and lowered himself down a few meters into a high crotch of the Diplotropis.

  From here, if he could just still his breathing, he would be nearly impossible to detect either from above or below. Yet he had a view of the jungle floor for a wide area around the trunk.

  Even after he heard the transport lift and go, he didn’t dare move. For hours he sat numb, at a loss without his family. At long last he leaned back against the trunk of the tree. A lump pressed against his sweat-soaked back.

  He reached and drew forth the sack his mother had given him. He’d forgotten about it. The first item he removed was a bundle of papers. They all bore the stamp of the World Economic Council.

  They were the results of the mandated gene testing on his family. Raised by scientists and having completed his online doctoral schooling in botany just last week, it did not take long to unravel the story the data told.

  Everyone was tested by the WEC. For years, it was quietly discussed how certain people disappeared without a trace, and here was the evidence of why. His father’s latent potential for violent anger, though Jaron had never seen any sign of it, had sentenced him to death. He had not fallen from a broken harness as his mother had claimed. He was exterminated by the WEC four years ago.

  An older brother he had never known, carried genes for a number of anti-social disorders, including the potential for premeditated murder. He was exterminated at the age of four, shortly before his parents had come to the jungle.

  The damning pages finally explained what had happened to his dwindling family, but it didn’t make any sense. His father had been a quiet man who had taught Jaron the love of the high trees. He remembered games of tag his father had taught to a group of spider monkeys who resided near the station. Every now and then, some old-timer would still sneak up and tag you when you weren’t watching. And now his mother and his sister had been killed.

  The WEC chose to ignore the vast array of information regarding genotype versus phenotype. Whatever genetic predisposition was stored in their bodies, his parents taught him to appreciate the balance of nature and to champion its survival.

  Jaron stared at the last two pages. Neither sets of data were about him. He stared at them until they were blurred by the shaking of his hands. They were clean bills of health for his mother and sister. Why had the Council’s troops come for them? The heated air of the upper canopy scorched in his lungs. He didn’t dare descend into the cool twilit jungle floor even though it had long since quieted.

  The Council hadn’t come for them. He choked for air but only inhaled more superheated, midday air. They’d come for him. He remembered the few occasions his mother had sent him into the jungle on short notice. Only now did he realize that he’d never had the WEC’s blood test. He’d never met an outsider.

  Jaron took the online doctorate course in his sister’s name. But last week, unable to wait for her return from Caracas, he’d turned in his final thesis. And they’d known something was up. They’d come looking for the answer to how his sister could be logged in from two places at once. And they’d killed all available targets.

  He grabbed the machete and slung it once again over his shoulder. He had to see what had happened. Had he killed his own family with his education as a trigger? As he jammed the papers back into the bag, something caught on the tip of his middle finger.

  When he extracted his hand, hooked on the end of his finger was his father’s wedding ring. He held the shimmering circle of beaten gold in the flat of his palm. It caught a narrow shaft of sunlight that had reached down through the upper story of leaves, and seemed to radiate with the heat of shame. Had he stayed, his mother and his sister would be safe and he would k
now the truth about himself. The WEC’s test would either have shown him clean, or he would be dead.

  The light glittered and shifted along the simple band of gold. His father claimed that the slight crosshatching which covered the surface helped his heart get traction when trying to figure out what was important. He’d told Jaron that no matter what, he was certain of the love of Jaron’s mother, and that always gave him a clear starting place.

  It was the first time his father had spoken of anything beyond science, and it was the last words they ever had together. Jaron had left that day on his first, solo field trip up the Orinoco River. The WEC had murdered his father a week later.

  As Jaron studied the ring, he became aware of a breeze across his cheeks. The scarlet macaw, over a meter long from bill to tail, settled on a nearby branch. It squawked loudly and reached out for the ring with its powerful hooked beak. Jaron waved it away, but it merely shuffled along the branch. The ring was out of range now, but it kept a close watch. Other parrots gathered on various nearby branches until he was the center of a small flock made up of several species. Holding the ring safely to his chest, Jaron rocked in his harness as the pains of the day overwhelmed him.

  He’d lost his mother and his sister and a brother he’d never known. His father had died all over again, the last remnant of his existence now curled in Jaron’s palm.

  An hour later, or half a day, the parrots took to the air with a burst of flight. Jaron climbed slowly out of his grief and crept back to the platform to see what had disturbed them. The platform had an observation ladder that reached above the canopy. He ascended until he could see the jungle rolling far and wide over the rangy, worn-down hills that had been the mountains of central Venezuela in some earlier age. No sign of man reached this haven.

  The sun was setting. The whole day lost in the shadow of his grief. Upon the rays of the fading light, the parrots swept and soared through the sky. The flocks, his own that had watched over him through the long day, and a hundred others, swooped back and forth, combined and separated and joined once again. The colors of their feathers shifted with the flight and the darkening of the sky.