Moonsteed (11 page)

VLADIMIR...HOVSKI

GENE...GINEER. NE...VE AND UNB...

COMMODORE ...ITH

MAY SUS...OMETHING. ...OMES A PRO...WILL APPRE...

.INCERELY, ...RON.

Sincerely, Pte Aaron.

Verity grinned. Jackpot.

Verity was supposed to have assisted Vladimir with centrifuging the stallion this morning, but he hadn’t turned up and the ANT didn’t know where he was, and she’d had to take the stallion in by herself. She’d returned to the stable to find the big mare had come into estrus with Vladimir still missing and no clue as to his whereabouts.

She left a rude message for him before contacting Sergeant Black through the ANT. Verity hated having to ask Sergeant Black for help. From when she’d been first posted to Callisto, Verity had known Sergeant Black didn’t like her, perhaps because Verity had been promoted to sergeant and effectively achieved everything Black had done during her career in the Sky Forces by a much younger age. She would rather have asked the Commodore to help her, but she couldn’t find him either and she still didn’t trust him, especially after the ANT had thrown up that scrambled message.

While she awaited Sergeant Black’s arrival, she got the stallion out and took him down to the corral. Away from the smell of mares, he calmed a little, ate some grass and rolled on the turf. Verity stared at his glossy barrel-shaped chest and the way he retracted his legs as he writhed about, enjoying the feel of the grass and the sunlight streaming through the roof. She marveled at how nature made such lovely creatures, from instructions written in mere purines and pyrimidines Vladimir could pick and choose among, how nature authored such beastly urges in them to ensure they’d be certain their genes would go on.

“What seems to be the problem?”

Verity turned to Sergeant Black, who leaned against the load-bearing wall in the entrance to the corral, her fist on her hip and her knee bent, foot balanced on the toe on the wrong side of her other leg in a disdainful posture.

She ignored Black’s attitude and tried to explain the situation calmly. “This horse is part of an experimental breeding program here. The information’s on the ANT if you want to look into it. The researcher who’s supposed to be running the operation has disappeared and now the big mare’s in estrus, and if we don’t mate them now it’s going to disrupt everything. If you can bring the mare down, I think I can handle him. You just need to keep her under control while they mate.”

Sergeant Black made a grudging face, but she turned and went back to the stable block. A few minutes later, she returned with the mare. The stallion whinnied and Verity took hold of his halter to stop him from escaping while Sergeant Black opened the gate and let the mare inside.

The mare approached the stallion head on, her ears pointed forward, and Verity felt his excitement tempered by a spike of fear. That was a big mare. At close to nineteen hands, she stood almost as tall as the stallion, although not so sturdily built. He started to move away, and she followed, in a nervous chase around the perimeter of the corral.

“
Stop running
,” Verity willed him. “
She wouldn’t know what to do if she did catch you
.” She hoped the mare just wanted to mate but, without being interfaced to her, it was hard to tell. Sergeant Black’s face was inscrutable. What if the horses mated, and Verity couldn’t control herself again and she sexually assaulted Sergeant Black? A sweaty heat had built up inside her trousers. Blood pounded in her groin. The urge to get hold of someone else, no matter who, and force it down, squash out this itch on that other person, felt very strong. When she looked at Black, revulsion and dislike fought with the lust inside her. Was it bleed-back from her own fear that was making the stallion run?

Verity managed to persuade him to wait. The horses maneuvered carefully to stand neck to neck, and nosed at one another’s shoulders. Slowly, the stallion moved alongside, inevitably toward the mare’s back end, and started licking again. Verity grimaced at the taste. There was something that struck her as stealthy and devious about his tactic in this regard. She fancied it was the stallion’s own opinion that he was some sort of Lothario with an unusual talent for cunnilingus. The mare succumbed to his tongue, lifting her tail and squatting, and he turned into position and mounted. He entered her, shuffled for thirty seconds, finished, and dropped off, once again leaving Verity full of dissatisfaction and pent urges.

“I don’t feel too good,” said Sergeant Black as the mare came to her. Her pupils were dilated and a strange expression had taken hold of her face. “I’m going to put this horse away and go and lie down for a bit.”

As Verity took the stallion, following Black and the mare back to the stable block, she checked with the ANT on the location of Doctor James Standen, with whom she knew Black shared her quarters. He had just left the lab where he worked and was moving toward their billet. Lie down indeed! Lie down under
him
. The mare’s tail was still up as she walked beside Black and semen dripped from the dark skin of her vulva, but this didn’t seem to interest the stallion who had reverted to his placid Jekyll self, walking obediently beside her.

The horses back in their stalls, Verity stormed down the corridor to her quarters. This was his damn research. She hadn’t signed up to take on these extra responsibilities, to have her state of mind screwed about and thrown into disarray like this. It had been foisted on her by her employers, and she had accepted it dutifully because that was her work. This was Vladimir’s responsibility, and to shirk his obligations and hide, leaving her to cope with what he couldn’t handle alone, that was just utterly irresponsible. More than irresponsible:
aresponsible
, if that was even a word, and if it wasn’t then it should be. When she found Vladimir, she was going to...going to... She wanted to give him a piece of her mind. But more than that, she wanted to rip his clothes off and give him a piece of her body.

Vladimir’s name had been on that fragmented file she’d found, as had the Commodore’s, and she had not been able to find him since the first time she’d looked when she’d spoken to Lloyd. What if this was all to do with John Aaron?

In her billet, she switched the computer back on.

“
My, you’re in a strop today
!
” exclaimed Anthony Cornelian’s ghost.

Verity picked up the spy’s Torrmede card, studying the picture. It didn’t match with the glimpse she’d caught of the real man, just before she’d killed him, nor the mangled head she’d seen in Lloyd’s lab. She could imagine the owner of the voice in her head shaking out his collar-length hair as he spoke, raising his chin in an imperious sort of way. She put the card down, face up, on the computer, and stuck it there with a torn off piece of transparent tape.

“
My mouth tastes like a horse’s arse
,” she thought as she filled a glass with water.

“
Why, what have you been doing
?”

“
You don’t want to know.
”

Verity downed the water and set the glass on the hand basin. She rubbed her eyes, running her hands over her face. From the bathroom mirror, her reflection stared back at her. In her own face she could see Pilgrennon’s sharp, angular nose and Blake’s intense, penetrating eyes she knew so well from the history books. She willed, as she had often done before, for her ancestor’s faces to take shape from her visage, to bring her wisdom she had not inherited from them, but they did not. Her face remained her own and there was a weird tension in it. Her pupils looked much too large for the slight light the sun filled the room with. She needed to find Vladimir.

Back out in the corridor, she encountered Lloyd bounding toward the main entrance, carrying a hold-all, a suitcase, a box file and what appeared to be a telescope folded up in pieces.

“Morning, Sergeant Verity!” he called. “No time to talk today. The lander leaves in five minutes.”

“Have you seen Vladimir or the Commodore today?”

Lloyd frowned. “Not today. I did see the Commodore yesterday. Very busy with something at the moment, though.”

Verity found herself staring at him. Her breath seemed very loud all of a sudden. Lloyd stared back, and he slowly lowered his luggage to the floor. She moved closer and reached out to him. She had always wanted to run her fingers through that luxuriant coppery mane of his, and now her inhibitions fell away, she found herself finally doing it. He put his hands on her waist, pulling her close to him. It occurred to her that he was exactly her height, and the shape of his body fitted perfectly against hers. She slid one hand round his back, under the warm, furry lining of his coat, still stroking his hair with the other. When their lips touched, he slid his tongue inside her mouth, moving slowly in a way that was strangely both calming and maddening. The emotions he broadcast were so precise, so controlled. She sensed from him that he knew exactly what he was doing. He could play her body like an instrument if she’d let him, torment her to levels of arousal that were near unbearable and hold her at orgasm for as long as he willed, until she
begged
him to relent. And she wanted that. She’d wanted him for months.

He eased back and relaxed, breaking the vacuum that united their mouths. Verity breathed the smell of him, her lips tingling. “Lloyd, do you know what horses do when they have sex?”

Lloyd let out a mercurial chuckle that seemed to resonate deep in Verity’s chest. “I can quite imagine.” He raised an eyebrow, cocking his head to one side, chin down. The way he looked up at her with his soft gray eyes sent throbbing heat down into her groin.

“Come with me for a while.”

“Ah,
tempus fugit
.” Lloyd exhaled through his nose and gazed at her dejectedly. “I’m afraid I can’t. The shuttle’s leaving soon. I have to shift this stuff.” He picked up his things.

“Quickly?” Verity suggested.

Lloyd shook his head. “No, really, I have to leave. There’s always time when I come back. You’ve not seen the station before, have you? You’ll have to come up there with me one time.” He waved an arm to the view of Jupiter through the window. “I’ll see you on the first quarter.”

“See you in eight days.”

“
Ave et vale,
” Lloyd called over his shoulder as he bounded away down the corridor with his luggage.

It was going to be a long eight days. She’d have to find something to read to pass the time. Verity didn’t want to look for Vladimir anymore. After Lloyd, he would be too much of an anticlimax. That would be like turning down steak in order to eat...levigated esculents. She supposed she had better at least go through some sort of procedure. He couldn’t possibly have been in the centrifuge, because she’d been there that morning and she’d not seen him, and someone would have complained to her if he’d ignored the booking procedure. The only other place she could think of where he might have gone was outside. She supposed she ought to go to the tower and use the surveillance telescopes there.

She went to the observation block and ascended the narrow spiral staircase, feet ringing on the thin metal steps. At the top, windows all around the room’s circumference offered a full-circle view of the ice plains.

Verity immediately looked down, checking around the base of the compound. She couldn’t see anyone within the gates. Scanning the plain, she saw nothing out of the ordinary there, either.

A bright star moved against the dimmer ones still visible in the sky. That was Lloyd’s shuttle, taking him up to the main station. There was the station itself, another bright star as it passed through conjunction with Callisto on its orbit around Jupiter. Verity trained one of the telescopes on it, although it revealed little detail, looking like a reflective metal shaving rather than a star. The shuttle did have some definition to it when she looked. She made out the shape of the fuselage and the long stream of hot gases from its fusion engine.

She let the telescope wander down until its aperture brought unfocused jagged shapes into view. Verity turned the focus knob until they resolved into ice protrusions on the top of the cliff at the scarp. Surely he wouldn’t be out there. It made no sense, but she had run out of alternatives. Vladimir wouldn’t have gone to the scarp, would he? What could he possibly do there? Why would he want to go anywhere outside the base?

The roving telescope view lit upon something unfamiliar in the landscape of sharp gleaming needles. Some black object draped among the stands of ice on the steep decline down the cliff. With a sharp intake of breath, she deciphered the form of a horse--dead, obviously. None of the horses were out. It had to be the horse John Aaron had taken. She moved the barrel of the telescope frantically, searching for another body. There it was, a pathetic shape, run through the chest by the spiny palisade he’d fallen upon. Verity increased the magnification and adjusted the focus on the face. The hands were still bound. The face--it was still recognizable--Private Aaron.

He must have fallen to his death. He hadn’t been synced to the horse. It would have been so easy for him to lose control, him being unable to communicate danger to an animal unable to feel fear.

Verity stepped away from the telescope, some of the confusion in her mind smoothing away. She checked the ANT again and found a note had been attached to Vladimir Bolokhovski’s name:

Recalled to Torrmede regarding business or research
.

He wasn’t missing. He’d just had to go back at short notice for whatever reason. No doubt he’d been on the same shuttle that had taken Lloyd up.

She quickly filed a report with the base’s ANT. “John Aaron and missing horse, sighted both deceased.” Verity read the settings from the telescope. “Thirty degrees, about six miles away. Suggest recovery excursion with climbing gear when convenient.”

Slowly, Verity made her way back down and to her cabin.

Her quarters were far too hot. She stripped off, throwing her sweaty clothes on the floor. She flopped down on her back on the bed, enjoying the coolness of the air and the sheets against her skin, and slid her fingers down into the sticky blood-gorged parts of her body that had been gluing her underwear to her for the past hour or so. There was a full-length mirror on the wall on the opposite side of the room. Verity usually ignored it, but something this time compelled her to look, seeing mostly her own eyes and legs, and study the glistening, reddened bits she was stimulating with her fingers.