gaian consortium 06 - zhore deception (10 page)

“That — that was a
test?
” she finally spat out.

“Of course,” he replied, voice calm. “You couldn’t think that I would actually
want
you as you are now?”

She stared at him, shocked to speechlessness. Nothing she could say seemed sufficient to the occasion, so she only remained as she was, glaring at him as he came closer to her once again, then bent toward her ear and murmured,

“But after this is all over…once we’ve returned you to your natural appearance…then I think I will want you very much.”

CHAPTER SIX

Whether out of stubbornness or merely a desire to see how long the strained relations between them might continue with no resolution, Leizha did not go on leave, or request a transfer, or do any of the things Zhandar hoped she might. They continued to work side by side, acting as if nothing had happened, as if nothing could happen.

And if he had his choice, nothing would.

Several times a week, Jalzhin would send communiques to Zhandar’s private account, asking if he had yet made a decision, or passing along a new batch of candidates for him to consider. Not that there was anything much to see. Their interests and ages and educational backgrounds might vary slightly, but otherwise those messages contained only another parade of dark hooded shapes.

Perhaps that was Jalzhin’s subtle way of pointing out it truly didn’t matter all that much which woman Zhandar ended up choosing. The drug the Ministry’s scientists had concocted would create chemistry where there was none, and once a child was conceived and brought to term, then…what? Jalzhin had never explained that part of the plan very clearly. Would the child be raised by its mother? By Zhandar? By the two of them together, even though they had no true bond to seal them as a couple?

He had a feeling Jalzhin and his superiors didn’t much care, as long as the child was healthy and lived to ensure that there truly would be a new generation to carry on their way of life. But would that way of life really continue, when such a child would have been conceived in a way so completely antithetical to the tradition the Zhore had followed for millennia?

It was the end of the day…yet another in a long series of very long days. He knew he would have to make some sort of decision soon. And then everything would change.

Leizha entered his office, tablet in hand. He always left his door open, so that she and the others who worked in their department could come and go as necessary. Even though it was late, he assumed she had come in to get his approval on the modifications to the rooftop garden on the Tranzhir Tower in the Ranizhar District.

But she waved her hand over the controls, and the door closed quietly behind her.

Even though he knew she couldn’t see them, Zhandar’s eyebrows lifted. “What is it, Leizha?” He might have instigated their last conversation on the topic, but he found himself hoping they would not be going over the same ground again this evening. All he wanted to do was go home. He was tired.

His assistant stood there for a long moment. Then she set the tablet down on his desk and backed away. A long pause, and her hands were reaching up to the clasp of burnished metal at her throat.

No…she wouldn’t….

But she did. The clasp was undone, and then she grasped the edges of her hood and pushed it back.

The cloak fell to the ground in a slither of fabric. Underneath, she wore a close-fitting tunic and leggings, neither of which left much to the imagination when it came to divining her true form. Green eyes blazed at him, both triumphant and yet somehow desperate.

“This is what I came here to show you, Zhandar. Look upon me now, and then decide whether you want me or not.”

She was beautiful. No question about that. And her body was both slender and lush, curved, entirely female. Zhandar wished then that he was Gaian or Eridani or Stacian, so her physical beauty would be enough, that it wouldn’t require an echo in his soul for him to desire her.

But he wasn’t, and he didn’t want her. He wanted to be able to want her, but that was impossible. At least, not without the intervention of Jalzhin’s drugs.

“You are very beautiful, Leizha,” he said sadly. “If only that were enough.”

Her mouth tightened, and long silky lashes swept over her eyes. Just once, as if she couldn’t bear to look at him right then.

Then she bent and picked up her cloak, and shrugged back into it. Shaking fingers fastened the clasp at her throat. Quietly, she said, “I think it is time I went on that retreat after all.”

And then she was gone.

They left the space station in a heavily modified Sirocco-class starship. Trinity had only read about the nimble little ships; she certainly had never thought she would ever travel in one. Then again, even the Sirocco’s original designers had most likely never imagined that one of their ships, designed for swift and luxurious passage between star systems, would be modified with extra shielding, hidden cannons, the very latest in stealth technology, and a host of other upgrades that Gabriel Brant hadn’t bothered to explain in detail.

Gabriel. He sat across the cabin from her now, acting as if nothing had happened between them. Maybe in his mind, it hadn’t. That kiss was only a test, after all. She’d done her best to wipe it from her mind, but she couldn’t forget what he’d said afterward. The horrifying promise he hadn’t even bothered to hide in roundabout words.

Even if by some miracle she managed to survive this insane mission without the Zhore discovering who she really was, he would be waiting for her at the end of it. She would never be free.

She supposed it was foolish to have thought she would be able to reclaim her life once this was all over. Her gift was a prize the Consortium would never willingly relinquish.

They’d fitted her with the proper wardrobe of a Zhore — close-fitting tunic and pants underneath, shining black boots, a heavy hooded cloak that seemed as if it weighed fifty kilos, although she knew part of her discomfort had its source in her own anxiety. She was used to the trim, serviceable clothing worn on Gaia and its colonies. How on earth did the Zhore wear these things day after day without tripping over something? And what about in the summertime? Trinity already felt as if she was stifling in those garments, and she knew the cabin temperature was a perfectly calibrated 22 degrees Celsius.

“Your identity,” Gabriel said, giving her a small black handheld. In design, it was not so different from the kind she’d used every day of her adult life, and she raised an eyebrow.

“The Zhore have an interesting approach to technology. They are not great innovators. Most of what they use was given to them by the Eridanis, and then modified as they saw fit. Just as they didn’t have subspace travel before the Eridanis supplied them with the tech.” Gabriel leaned back in his seat, looking almost lazy, although she knew him well enough by now to realize it was all a pose, and that he was wound almost as tightly as she was. He must have a lot riding on this mission, although of course he had never told her what his personal stake in its success might be.

“Anyway, you already know the basics. Your name is Zhanna. We had already planned to place you in Torzhaan, in the office that manages procurement of the various plant species for their gardens, but our intelligence operatives just contacted us to inform us that the administrator’s assistant has left her position, for reasons unknown. So you will be the one replacing her, rather than taking the empty botanist’s post as we’d originally intended.”

Trinity supposed she should be relieved. After all, even after some intensive training, she knew she was ill-equipped to pretend to be a botanist, especially on an alien world whose plant life was completely foreign to her. But she’d worked as an admin herself, back in Barstow. It would be different, but not horribly so. She’d still have to keep track of appointments, set schedules…fetch her boss the Zhore equivalent of coffee. It shouldn’t be quite as nerve-wracking as she feared.

The device she held now would contain everything she needed to know about this “Zhanna.” Place of birth, parents, education…a life carefully pieced together based on intelligence the Gaians had been gathering for decades. No, the Zhore had never allowed any aliens to set foot on their planet’s surface, but that didn’t mean the Consortium — and, she assumed, the Eridani Hegemony and the Stacian Federation — hadn’t been collecting data from elsewhere in the system. It wasn’t the same as boots on the ground…hence the importance of her current mission…but the government definitely knew a great deal more than the Zhore probably guessed.

Or maybe the aliens did know, and hadn’t bothered to put a stop to the information-gathering, simply because making a fuss about it would have let the watchers know that they were in turn being watched. After all, it wasn’t as if the Consortium government had been sharing its knowledge freely. She’d learned more about the Zhore in the past few days than she’d known her entire life.

“Who is this administrator?” she asked.

“His name is Zhandar. He’s held the post for seven years now. Their year is close to ours — 345 days. So he’s roughly thirty-four standard.”

Almost ten years older than she was. But what was a decade compared to being from two completely different races? Not that this Zhandar was necessarily her target. Even her handlers might have decided it was far too risky to put her in such close proximity to the man she was supposed to seduce.

Gabriel’s next words seemed to kill that hope, however. “He lost his wife about a year ago. Death in childbirth.”

Trinity shivered, even though a few minutes earlier she’d been thinking she was far too warm. What an archaic way to die. “They don’t have good medical facilities?”

“As far as we’ve been able to ascertain, Zhore medical science is on a par with anything you’d find on Eridani or Gaia. No, her death seems to be tied to the same issues they’ve been having with fertility in general.”

What was there to say but “oh”? That was the only syllable to leave Trinity’s mouth. She didn’t want to think about this Zhandar’s wife dying while trying to give him a child, not when Gabriel expected her to go down to Zhoraan, ingratiate herself with the man…or some Zhore male, if not Zhandar…and get pregnant. What if she suffered the same fate as the wife of the man who was about to become her immediate supervisor…what if there was something wrong with his sperm?

“It’s almost always the Zhore women who have the problems,” Gabriel remarked then, appearing to note her unease. “We still haven’t been able to discover exactly why, although it’s not anything directly related to the environment on Zhoraan or anything else you’d be directly exposed to. Anyway, you were checked thoroughly by our doctors. You’re fine. And there’s no reason to think you won’t survive the whole experience. Zhore and humans are roughly the same size. It’s not as if we’re expecting you to push out some Stacian’s child.”

Far from reassuring her, his comment only made her shudder. She’d never seen a Stacian in person, of course — that warlike race couldn’t come within a parsec of Gaia’s solar system — but she’d seen the vids. Stacian males averaged easily two meters tall, and were proportionally broad. She couldn’t begin to imagine how painful trying to have a baby with one of them must be.

But Trinity would never allow herself to voice her concerns to Gabriel Brant, of all people. She tucked the handheld he’d given her into a pocket of her cloak, and deliberately hardened her voice. “Anything else?”

“Nothing beyond what we’ve already gone over. The implant we gave you will record everything and send it back to our operatives on Kelzhar, the planet’s second moon. It’s a way station for off-worlders, since the Zhore don’t allow any ‘aliens’ on their home world itself. Those agents have already established their cover there as the owners of a café on the moon base. They’ll be the ones analyzing the raw data and then sending it on to my division.”

The implant had been injected into the base of her skull just the day before. If Trinity ran her fingers over the spot, she could feel a faint lump. But her long hair concealed it, and if this Zhandar or someone else decided to kiss her there, well….

Did the Zhore even kiss? Their sexual practices were the one thing about which Gabriel had absolutely no information to give her. They were humanoid, obviously, and the male Zhore the Consortium’s spies had bought from that mercenary clan on Bathsheva had been built like a man, right down to his genitalia. So it had to be some variation on tab A and slot B, but anyone who perused the offerings on the upper bands of the vid channels knew that there could be a bewildering number of variations when it came to those basic positions.

The Zhore, however, did not make entertainment based on their sexual practices. No vids. No books. No still images. Nothing. They seemed to mate for life, but other than that, even Gabriel’s spies didn’t have any information at all.

Well, they will soon, if you succeed in attracting one of their males,
she thought grimly.
That horrible little device embedded in your skull will record the whole damn thing.

That was the worst of it. This entire mission was a nightmare, but knowing that Gabriel and his team would see her having sex with an alien sent the scenario to a truly transcendent level of awfulness.

Thank God Blake Chu wasn’t here. He’d stayed back at the base. Trinity was having a hard enough time keeping a grip on her roiling emotions without having to block them all from Gabriel’s pet psychic. But she’d have to block them soon, and keep blocking them. Only a few more hours, and she’d be dropped on Zhoraan to make her way as best she could. At least they seemed to have an excellent public transit system in the cities, so she wouldn’t have to manage the controls on an unfamiliar vehicle while navigating an alien road system.

“Any last questions?” Gabriel asked. The nasty smile was back on his lips. She hated it even more now that she knew what those lips felt like pressed up against hers.

“No,” she replied, glancing away from him and out the window, although she could see nothing but the stomach-churning non-colors of their passage through subspace. “I know what I have to do.”