Jewel

by Veronica Tower

  “Seventy-five percent?” Peron complained, making Jewel wonder if he’d even read the contract that defined his terms of service and compensation.

  “That’s right,” Kiara said. “And we divide the rest up according to the share schedule in our contracts. Basic crew gets one share each while those of us gathered around the table get more.”

  More was an understatement. The share schedule had developed as a bonus system to encourage efficiency. It gave all crew a share in the profits of a voyage based on ten percent of profits for normal trade and twenty-five percent for salvage, which was often both time-consuming and dangerous. The captain picked up the lion’s share of the crew portion at thirty-three percent. Jewel, as the woman in charge of selling their cargo, shared the next third with the Executive Officer, the Deck Officer and the Ship’s Engineer. The remaining third was divided out among everyone else, but still benefitted those around the table over the basic crew.

  “So we’re not talking about anything like thirty-two million,” Vega, Jewel’s roommate, observed.

  “No,” Jewel agreed, “we never were. We might be talking about eight or ten million, but we were never talking about thirty-two.” Actually, they were probably talking about five times that amount, but Jewel didn’t want to encourage their greed by getting them focused on a number that high.

  “Maybe you weren’t,” Peron grumbled, “but the rest of us sure were.”

  “And there may be a way in which we still can be,” the captain announced.

  Every eye focused on the captain. It was interesting, Jewel thought. Kiara had always been a terrible leader, but she’d finally found a way to motivate her crew.

  The captain posed for a moment until she had everyone’s undivided attention. “I find myself asking, where did this armenium come from? Do you realize that Mr. Exec and Ms. Aurora discovered more than five hundred chambers prepared for storing armenium ore, but only twenty-two of those chambers had been filled? Obviously the Ymirians who settled this system were expecting to mine much, much more.”

  “Mine?” Vega asked. Suddenly Jewel’s misanthropic roommate seemed to understand why she’d been included in this briefing. Obviously there was an armenium mine somewhere in this solar system and Vega was the ship’s liaison to the twenty-five professional miners they were transporting back to Arch.

  “Yes, of course,” Captain Kiara said. “I propose that we locate the Ymirian mine and liberate whatever additional store of ore they might have stockpiled on the surface. I further suggest we come to terms with the professional miners in our passenger births to evaluate the mine to determine whether or not they would be able to work it to harvest more.”

  “We’re playing with fire here,” Jewel warned them. She could see the glint of greed in too many eyes to believe she could persuade them away from this course, but perhaps she could instill a sense of caution into their activities. “Think about how the Armenites are going to respond if they discover us working this site.”

  “How would they find out we’re here?” Warrant asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jewel admitted, “but it seems pretty obvious to me that what we’ve discovered in the Valkyrie System today explains why the Armenites invaded Erik’s home world twenty years ago.”

  She met Erik’s eyes without blinking. “They simply weren’t willing to tolerate any competition. Their armenium monopoly is the cornerstone—no, the whole foundation—of their economy and of their influence in the galaxy.”

  Ana Yang returned the conversation to practical matters. “There are definite limits on how much more ore we can transport anyway. Our cargo holds are already full, so we’d have to store the ore in other parts of the ship and with our current fuel situation, that’s problematic.”

  Jewel was impressed that the woman’s brain was still working despite the dream of all of these millions floating around the table.

  “I realize that, Ms. Yang,” the captain said. “But we can swap out less valuable cargo for the armenium and we don’t have to take all of the ore now. We can do exactly what the Ymirians did, which is load any ore in excess of what we can transport ourselves in the Genesis and pick it up on a return trip.”

  If anything, the light of greed began to burn brighter around the table. Aside from Jewel herself, the only person who appeared in anyway unenthusiastic regarding this latest development was Erik. He looked thoughtful, as if he were taking all the information in and trying not to make a rush to judgment. It increased both her respect and her affection for him.

  “And then there is the mine itself,” the captain continued, “a potentially limitless supply of future wealth, all of which we will have rights to if we play our cards right on this.”

  “You mean if word of our discovery doesn’t break out and draw the Armenites in?” Jewel asked. “It will break, you realize. Too many people will know about the armenium in this system to possibly keep it secret. It frankly boggles the mind that the Armenites aren’t here already but they’ll definitely come after we get back to civilization. This isn’t fire we’re playing with, it’s plutonium.”

  That stopped everyone for a moment. No one in their right mind wanted to mess with the Armenites. They were tough, ruthless and very frightening.

  But the thought of near limitless wealth drove out any semblance of good sense again. “So we need to use absolute secrecy,” Kiara said.

  Jewel successfully kept from rolling her eyes. There was no chance that even the people in this room would keep quiet about this discovery. If anyone realistically expected the rest of the crew to do so, they were insane.

  A knock on the briefing room door sounded and the panel swished open revealing Glorious Strongheart, the leader of the team of miners Euripides was transporting to Arch.

  “So much for secrecy,” Erik muttered.

  Kiara shot him a nasty look before rising to address the miner. “What may I do for you, Mr. Strongheart?”

  Strongheart was a short, squat man with truly impressive shoulders. He had deep black hair and an easygoing smile—a politician’s charm. Jewel had instantly liked him from the very first moment they had met—which he had doubtless hoped she would.

  “There’s a rumor circulating the ship that you and your crew have discovered an armenium mine,” Strongheart said. He shrugged his shoulders as if to suggest the rest was so obvious that he shouldn’t have to say it, but he did anyway. “You are planning to take advantage of it, aren’t you?”

  At that moment Jewel decided she wanted nothing to do with the mess in the Valkyrie System. There was no way to keep this discovery secret. And when the story broke it was likely to go galactic. Then it was just a question of who would get their hands on her first—the Armenites or her parents and the Cartel. Not that the two might not end being the same thing, because with this sort of fortune on the line, the Cartel Worlds would likely hand her over to the Armenites in an effort to placate their most important business partners. She didn’t even want to think about what would happen to her after that. Her only chance to keep her freedom was to run before the story broke.

  “That we are, Mr. Strongheart,” the captain confirmed. “Perhaps you and I should discuss arrangements privately.” She returned her attention to the rest of her people. “Mr. Exec, I want you to develop a plan to search the structures the Ymirians built on that island in the North Sea. Mr. Peron, I want you and the Deck Officer to work out a plan to top off our fuel reserves from the Genesis and then take the Euripides around this system so we can pick up all of the navigational buoys that are just waiting to announce that this space once belonged to Ymir. The rest of you are dismissed. This meeting is adjourned.”

  The excited buzz of conversation immediately picked up again as people rose from their seats to return to their responsibilities. Not one of them, save Erik who wasn’t talking, seemed genuinely concerned about the possibility of the Armenites coming after them.

  Sometimes Jewel wished that she could still be that naïve.
>
  “I don’t believe you, you know,” Dr. Brüning said as he stepped up beside Jewel.

  She kept her face impassive as she answered him. “Don’t believe what?”

  “Your little fairy tale,” Brüning answered. “I don’t know for certain what your real story is, but it’s no coincidence that a Cartelite is on this voyage when a navigational error brings us to a star system with unclaimed armenium deposits.”

  “You said you’ve scanned my implants,” Jewel reminded him. “You must know that they’re inert. You’re the one spinning fairytales.”

  “I’m tired of making my living on tramp freighters on the Fringe,” Brüning told her. “You’d better think about what you’re going to do about that.”

  He walked away without further fortifying his threat.

  He didn’t have to. Even though he was wrong about most of his suspicions, he already knew enough to destroy her.

  She was going to have to do something about that.

  Chapter Seven

  Jewel sat at the small desk in her cabin, unlocked the bottom drawer and took out a small box that she had carried with her since she’d run away nine months ago. She opened the case, revealing an assortment of specialized tools that she used to quickly disassemble the desk lamp, rewiring the device so that anyone touching the base of the lamp would receive a long and sustained electrical charge. Then she reassembled the lamp and replaced the tools—all except a long, slender wand topped with a thin needle covering a wire thinner than a single strand of her hair.

  The bell on the cabin door sounded, startling her. Moving quickly, Jewel replaced the wand in her tool case and stuck the container back in the drawer. She rose as the bell chimed again and hurried to answer it.

  Erik stood in the doorway with all his weight uncharacteristically on one foot. “Do you have a minute?”

  Jewel couldn’t fully suppress the urge to look back over her shoulder at her desk before she stepped back and let her lover into her room. She didn’t want to hide things from him, but there was no way she could tell him that her bioware chips were real. How could she explain she needed to turn the software back on to help her deal with Brüning, but would have to risk killing herself to turn it off again?

  “Sure, come on in,” she told him. She didn’t like the fact that her voice sounded uncomfortable even to her own ears, so she added a little joke to warm the atmosphere. “I didn’t expect it to be you. I didn’t realize you knew how to use the doorbell.”

  Erik smiled and for a moment looked like himself again—the man she’d first been attracted to. The officer she’d met before they’d discovered that some of his people had escaped the Armenite net, only to disappear in this far-off system. “I only use my master key when I’m coming to seduce you,” he teased.

  It suddenly occurred to Jewel that if she went through with her plan to reactivate her bioware, then she wouldn’t be able to make love to Erik until she got it shut down again. The thought disturbed her. She didn’t know how to explain it to him. She didn’t know how to explain any of it. Maybe she should wait to find out what Erik wanted before she spoiled the mood by talking about depressing things. “Do you want to sit down?”

  Erik looked around and seated himself on her mattress. It was not, as she’d half expected, a sly come-on. He just needed to find a place to sit and she was between him and the desk chair.

  She wished he had been coming on to her. It would be easier to handle than conversing just now.

  “Are you going to keep standing?” Erik asked.

  Jewel wanted to sit next to him, but Erik looked so serious that she thought she better sit apart so she could focus all of her faculties on navigating through his questions. She sat behind the desk, turning the chair to face him, being very careful to keep her hand well away from the base of the lamp she had sabotaged. “What’s on your mind?”

  Erik licked his lips, a completely uncharacteristic nervous gesture. “Is there any truth in that story you told the captain and Brüning in the meeting earlier today?”

  Jewel had expected the question but was still unhappy to hear it. She didn’t want to lie to Erik but she also didn’t want to confirm the vast differences in their social status. If they were to run away together—and she really wanted them to—her status couldn’t matter. They would both be spacers on the Fringe. But in Jewel’s heart of hearts, she didn’t believe that Erik, or anyone else for that matter, could treat her the same after learning she was the heiress to a fortune measured in hundreds of billions of solars. Not even Brüning could guess just how wealthy her family really was.

  She shrugged and tried to feign embarrassment. “Unfortunately, it is,” she lied. “I’m from the Cartel Worlds. I’m just not one of the genuine Cartelites.”

  Erik considered that for a moment. As executive officer, he was responsible for discipline on the Euripides. Jewel figured he had heard just about every lie imaginable during the course of his career. He had to be good at reading people. He had to suspect that she wasn’t telling the truth and that distrust would hurt him. The question was what would he do about it?

  “You know it doesn’t matter to me if you were lying,” Erik told her. “You don’t owe those people anything. I’d understand if you weren’t telling the truth.”

  All of which meant that he didn’t believe her, Jewel figured. No, she reconsidered, it meant that he feared she was lying to him, which meant she was right to have lied because he was obviously uncomfortable with the idea that she was a wealthy Cartelite.

  She had to do something to turn Erik from this line of questioning, but she didn’t know what that something was. Her girlfriend, Hathor, would tell her to suck Erik off. Apparently there was nothing quite so distracting as a good blowjob when a man started asking difficult questions. Except Erik wasn’t like the spoiled young men Hathor dated. He was an adult with serious responsibilities and Jewel could easily imagine him picking up his troublesome questions again a minute after he came.

  With physical distraction unlikely to help, Jewel tried to put her lover on the defensive. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m embarrassed by my past. It hurts me to think of the way my parents tried to use me. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life paying for their decisions.” All of those things were true, she reflected, but not in the way Erik likely interpreted them.

  She’d succeeded in putting him on the spot and she could see him trying to figure out how to ask a follow-up question without accusing her of more lying or appearing insensitive. He leaned forward and touched the jewels implanted in her temple with the tips of his fingers. “And the Cartelites will really chase you across the Fringe over these?”

  Jewel covered his hand with her own and closed her eyes. “They’ll chase me,” she told him. Again, that was no lie. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to run with me. Even out here on the Fringe they have the power to make our lives hell.” All true, even if it wasn’t the whole story. She wondered if Erik really understood the power of a credit chip full of solars. Once her parents caught the scent it would be almost impossible to get away from them again.

  That was why she needed her bioware spy activated again. She needed to erase all trace of her from the Euripides so that there was nothing left to help them start their search. Then she needed to short out her spy again before they reached another system and it could begin actively calling for help. Dangerous, but workable, so long as the bioware could be fooled while it was active into thinking matters were not nearly as wrong as in actuality they were.

  “I don’t care who’s chasing you,” Erik told her. “I love you, Jewel.”

  Her fingers tightened on his hand. “I love you too, Erik.”

  The mattress crinkled as he got up. Both his hands cupped her cheeks, gently turning her face up so he could kiss her again. His warm lips sent a tingle straight to her heart from which it spread out to her breasts, stomach, pussy and thighs. Her lungs sped up their pumping as they tried to keep pace with h
er racing pulse.

  “It’s going to be hard getting to spend time together if we find that mine down there,” Erik whispered.

  Jewel touched his chest, letting her fingers could search out the now-familiar contours of his chest.

  “I think we deserve a little time to ourselves before the madness begins,” Erik said.

  Jewel liked that idea. She stood up so she could get her hands under Erik’s shirt while she used her tongue to explore his mouth. He was every bit as eager to explore her own body. His hands dropped from her face to her sides where he stroked her through her uniform blouse, sparks flew inside her and her flesh yearned for more.

  Erik’s abdomen was smooth and tight beneath her hands, but his still fastened shirt resisted her efforts to explore higher. Frustrated, she removed her hands so she could quickly open it, pushing it back off his broad shoulders so her hands could explore his upper body free of barriers.

  Erik returned the favor, slipping her shirt off and dropping it on the desk perilously close to her sabotaged lamp. But there was no time to worry about that. As he cupped and squeezed her breasts, Jewel maneuvered him backward until they met the mattress and Erik fell back on to the bed.

  Jewel landed with him, laughing with pleasure before kissing him again. They lay side-by-side, which allowed them to explore each other’s mouths with their tongues while their hands caressed each other’s bodies. Jewel loved the feel of Erik’s fingers on her flesh, featherlight as he raised goose bumps on her too-sensitive skin. He didn’t just play with her breasts or nipples, instead he traced wide circles on her stomach and side, and flirted with moving below her pants and panties to explore those secrets as well.

  Except that Jewel’s pussy was no longer a secret to Erik, was it? She’d already given him her prize and he was showing her now that it was a treasure he wanted to return to again and again and again.