Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (27 page)

“Now that is a tragedy.”

Somewhat to his surprise, she laughed. “Perhaps, but everything has a price.”

He wanted to ask what she meant, but that question lay several steps further away in their precariously thawing relationship. Instead he gestured at the table. “What you got?”

“Full-spectrum scans of the Metis interior, at least as far as my instruments were able to penetrate before…well it wasn’t as far as I’d like. The nebular dust is maddeningly dense, particularly when you consider how old its supernova is. Nonetheless, I picked up some unusual readings.”

“How so?”                           

She flared her palm and one of the graphs zoomed in. It showed a single line exhibiting multiple, regular peaks. “This is the pulsar beam. Firmly in the gamma spectrum, and with a spin of 419 revolutions per second it’s clearly a millisecond pulsar. So question one, where’s its companion?” She worried at her lower lip. “If the companion’s radius is small enough, its signature might be hidden in all this dust or on the other side of the pulsar, but…anyway, so that’s curious.”

She nudged the graph off to the top right corner and magnified another graph to the center. It overflowed with data, multiple overlapping waveforms of differing widths and colors.

Two fingers reached into it and pinched the thickest waveform, a line of deep purple. “So this is the gamma synchrotron radiation. It’s by far the strongest reading.” She flicked it off to one side where it shrank into a small square, then pinched a more diffuse but thick line blue in color. “The pulsar wind, gamma bleeding into x-ray.” It landed above the purple square.

After their removal a pear-colored line dominated the graph. She spared a quick glance at him; he studied the graph with interest and didn’t acknowledge it. “Ionized particles left over from the supernova. This is the glow we see.” A flick and it minimized below.

The graph was now virtually bare. She pushed away two thin lines of dark and light orange. “Random infrared and microwave readings from whatever.”

A single, tiny line of dark crimson remained. Thin and semitransparent, it marked a nearly horizontal path across the graph. She crossed her arms over her chest and rested on her back leg. “Then we have
this
.”

He kept his tone scrupulously neutral. “Radio emissions I presume?”

“Tremendously Low Frequency—TLF—technically, but they don’t even have a proper term for a wavelength this long. This wave is propagating at a frequency of 0.04 Hz.
Nothing
emits at so low a frequency.”

A soft breath fell from his lips, and the response with it. “Not 0.04 Hz. 0.0419 Hz.”

Her eyes shot to him and flared a lustrous argent hue. “What?”

He focused on the graph, difficult though it was. “Can you expand the period shown?” A glance at the top right corner of the spread. “Say to ten hours?”

“
Okay.
” Her stare bore into him as her right hand slid along the graph. The crimson line now undulated in long, smooth waves.

“Now superimpose the pulsar beam on top of this one.”

“No fucking way.”

“If you don’t want to it’s fine, I—”

“I mean
no fucking way
.” She yanked the pulsar beam graph out of the corner and dropped it in the center. It wasn’t a surprise to him, and he assumed no longer a surprise to her, when the pulse spikes lined up perfectly on the crests of the crimson line.

“That’s why I’m here.”

She still stared at him instead of the graph. “Explain.”

“Last month we sent in a prototype, state-of-the-art probe for testing. Among a few other things, it returned this congruence. My government would like to determine what it is.”

“But you’re not a scientist. Why send in a black ops agent?”

“Well, the thought was the level of precision strongly suggests it’s artificial, and thus it might be hostile….” He sighed.
Shit
. “I never said I was a black ops agent.”

She gave him a wicked grin. “Not until now.”

She had managed to fit in manipulating him in between sophisticated data analysis. Impressive.

He brought a hand up to run through his hair, still damp from the shower. “Well played. Anyway, given the concern it might be hostile they were reluctant to send civilian researchers. And while I’m not a scientist, I know my way around spectrum analyses and whatnot better than the average
black ops agent
.”

Her gaze had finally returned to the graphs, and his returned to her. “Is this what you’re here for?”

Her voice was soft, almost whimsical. “Maybe.”

“Look, you don’t have to tell me, but there’s no reason to hide it.”

She half-smiled. “Not what I meant. The Nebula caught my eye. I knew there would be something to find…I didn’t necessarily know what it would be.”

Her expression shifted even in profile. “Did you learn what it was? You know, before you tried to shoot me down.”

“No. I had only been here a few hours when you
blew my ship out the sky
.”

“Right.” She rolled her eyes a little. “I’m sorry about that, by the way. In the same circumstances I’d do it again, but I
am
sorry.”

He looked at her askance. “Um, thanks?”

“Certainly.” The graphs abruptly vanished; the cabin darkened in the absence of the holographic images. “I’d like to get an early start in the morning, so good night.”

“Good night….” He frowned, taken aback by the sudden shift in tone and quick exit. In a few brief seconds she had waved the lights dim, descended the stairwell and disappeared.

Then he was alone and unrestrained on the main deck of her ship.

He noted the previously identified stations, controls and junction points. While the security on them was doubtless more complex than his restraints had been, he suspected he could hack at least some of them.

But he didn’t need to, and gained nothing by doing so. The repairs weren’t complete; if he tried to fly away now he’d just get himself and her killed. And given their ‘relationship’—if one wished to call it such—was improving, odds were decent once the repairs were complete she would in fact drop him on an independent world and be on her way.

So instead of hacking her ship he unfolded the cot from the wall, pulled the privacy screen over, took off his shoes and lay down. The cot wasn’t too bad; he’d slept on far worse.

He laced his hands behind his head and pondered how she had managed to get him to tell her his name, his profession and his mission, all in less than a day.

It went against one of the mandates of his job: never reveal anything more than is necessary to finish the mission. On the other hand, he was in a compromised position and reliant on her to get out of it. In such a situation exceptions could be made.

Even so, he should get on his game.
Though…
.

As long as he didn’t kill her and she didn’t kill him, this would likely end with him making it back to settled space in one piece. Therefore, other than ensuring she felt enough goodwill toward him to not throw him out the airlock—which seeing as she had gone out of her way to rescue him in the first place, he suspected was a fairly low threshold—he really didn’t need to play her.

He had been trained to always be looking for an opening, for a weakness he could use to his advantage to cripple the enemy and complete the mission. But she wasn’t an enemy. She wasn’t even a mark.

So he decided he was marginally comfortable with her knowing a few truths. Which was interesting, seeing as he allowed very few people to know many truths at all about him.

Special circumstances and all.

Alex crashed onto her bed, relishing the sensual, almost carnal feel of her head sinking into the silky pillow.

After several deep, luxurious breaths she glanced up, and promptly scowled. The viewport above the bed often revealed twinkling stars or occasionally a glowing nebula, but at the very least the blurred shimmer of superluminal travel. Tonight it revealed a thick haze of sickly amber dust and little else, serving as a stark reminder she lay stranded on a nasty uncharted planet with a broken ship and a confounding…she didn’t even know what he constituted now.

Why had she let him see the scans? Worse, why had she
explained
them to him?

Because he was putting on a very convincing act of being friendly and nonthreatening? Of course he was convincing. It was his job to convince people he could be trusted until he was ready to kill them or arrest them or dispense whatever justice he fancied upon them.

Because he was a good cook? While a rather nice surprise, it hardly qualified him for ‘friend’ status.

Because he was disturbingly good looking, with hair as black as the void between stars which sent her pulse aflutter when it fell across his brow? Because he had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen—the color of the uncut natural sapphires they displayed in geology museums—which sparkled from a thousand facets when he made a teasing remark?

Yep, that was probably why.

She groaned and rolled over to bury her face in the pillow. “I’m waxing poetic about a man. Kill me now….”

In a world of cheap genetic enhancement before and even after birth, handsome men were a dime a dozen. They’d never distracted her or done much of anything in particular for her, at least not from looks alone.

No way was she going to be led astray by a pair of pretty blue eyes. Especially not when they belonged to a Senecan, and a Senecan black ops agent at that.

She possessed enough self-awareness to realize her view of the world was slightly jaded and
perchance
cynical. Nonetheless, objectively she recognized being born on Seneca did not automatically make him an evil monster. Granted, hardly a galaxy-altering revelation. Seneca was an adversary, one toward which she bore deep-seated animosity for her own personal reasons. But most people living there were no different from everyone else, spending their time doing the things most people did and not torturing puppies or sacrificing virgins.

And even being a black ops agent didn’t automatically make him an evil monster, though it did make him dangerous. Her mother was and her father had been military; Richard, Malcolm and a number of her acquaintances were military—and thus trained killers. She had no right to judge him for engaging in activities those closest to her would do, and had done, if asked by their government.

The experience of the day seemed to bolster the decision she had made this morning. He appeared to be a smart, rational guy and not a zealot or fanatic or psychopath. As such, he presumably realized getting along and not causing trouble for her would result in him getting out of this situation alive and unharmed, and anything he did to actually help would speed up said resolution.

Thus, she came to the conclusion that while she definitely couldn’t
trust
him, she could perhaps ‘trust’ him a little for now.

She went through the reasoning two more times to make certain it was sound, logical and had nothing whatsoever to do with a pair of pretty blue eyes.

19

DEUCALI

E
ARTH
A
LLIANCE
C
OLONY

L
IAM ENTERED THE PUB
as unobtrusively as possible. His tall, stocky frame placed a lower limit on his ability to be unobtrusive, but he did try.

The pub was located many kilometers from the base, in an upper-middle yet not quite upper class neighborhood. He had dressed out of uniform, wearing navy slacks, a crisp white button-down shirt and a navy blazer. Well, perhaps not far out of uniform. But he wore an unadorned navy cap over his distinctive ginger hair so as to avoid being recognized.

When one was a Regional Commander of the Earth Alliance Armed Forces, one possessed no ‘peers’ in the region—no one it was appropriate to go out with for a couple of beers, or watch the game or barbeque with on the weekend. No one to assemble with to watch the tides of war gather.

Maybe it was better this way, lest he give something away in a careless laugh or knowing nod at a crucial moment, but a man such as him did not have friends. Subordinates, professional colleagues, rivals and enemies. But not friends.

If he stopped to give thought to it, there did exist a time when he
had
had friends…teammates in primary, a few worthy cohorts in university ROTC. But that had been
before
. Before the war against Seneca, before his mother had returned home in a flag-draped coffin and gutted his father’s spirit. Before he had sworn a vow to his mother’s eternal soul and the God who shepherded it that he would have vengeance.

As an only child, since his father died in a construction accident seven years earlier he had no family of note either. He’d never married, unwilling to let another person inside his private affairs much less his private emotions. His spouse was the Alliance military, which was all he’d ever required. And it worked out for the best, as it meant the chance of bringing shame to his family had not needed to be a consideration in his decision whether to collude in recent events, and events soon to come.