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 t
o 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.”
* * *
The Sirocco flew in low, skimming over night-dark forests and lakes that glittered under the light of Zhoraan’s two moons, both of them thin crescents. Even though Gabriel had assured her that the little ship’s stealth technology could beat any sensors the Zhore had, Trinity couldn’t help wondering what would happen if they were detected. Would the Zhore shoot them down?
No, that didn’t sound right. They were a planet of pacifists, from what she’d been told. They didn’t believe in war, in weapons. Why the Consortium hadn’t attempted to overrun Zhoraan, she didn’t know for sure, but she had a feeling it was because the Eridanis would be sure to step in if Gaia ever attempted any hostile maneuvers in that direction. And while that race of lavender-skinned aliens might seem too cultured to get its hands dirty in an inter-system conflict, Trinity had her doubts. As, most likely, her government’s leaders did as well. They wanted to keep expanding their areas of control, not get locked in a wasteful battle over a planet that, in the Consortium’s eyes, probably wasn’t worth all that much.
Her destination was a small transit station some twenty kilometers from Torzhaan, her home for the next few weeks, or months…however long it took to achieve the mission objective. From the station she could take a maglev train to the provincial capital, then slip into the apartment Gabriel’s people had procured for her. What kind of hacking that had involved, she had no idea, but it was probably along the same lines as giving her a false identity and being able to insert that identity into a new life and a new place of business on this alien world.
The Sirocco dipped lower, heading for a small wood about a kilometer away from the transit station. By now it was getting late in this part of the planet, around twenty-two hundred local time. But there was one last train that was supposed to come through in approximately half an hour.
Trinity had to be on that train.
She reached down and retrieved the bag she had stowed under her seat. It carried two changes of clothing and assorted undergarments. That was all. She’d have to purchase everything else she needed in Torzhaan. Her handheld was already supplied with the credit voucher she would use.
“No money on Zhoraan,” Gabriel had told her. He’d worn a faint sneer at the time. On Gaia, money was power. Most likely he didn’t know what to make of a world where currency wasn’t required, where everyone was taken care of despite what they did or didn’t contribute to society.
Trinity hadn’t bothered to react to his obvious disdain. And now she was only relieved that she wouldn’t have to work with unfamiliar currency as well, could simply wave her handheld over the reader at a shop or restaurant and have everything more or less magically handled.
“Almost there,” he murmured. “Get ready.”
Nodding, she got up from her seat. The Sirocco wouldn’t even stop, but would only come in to hover a meter or so off the ground. The hatch would open, and she’d jump out. No one should be around to see the maneuver, and then she’d go on to the transit station and wait calmly there for the maglev, thoughts shielded and giving no indication that the Zhore now had a stranger in their midst.
Here, she would be the alien.
The bag felt heavy in her hand, even though in reality it contained very little. She walked over to the hatch and grasped the handle embedded in the wall next to it. Gabriel rose from his seat as well, and stood a half-meter or so away from her. Why, she wasn’t sure. Maybe he thought she’d lose her nerve at the last minute, and so waited there to give her a final shove off the ship if necessary.
That wouldn’t happen, though. She might be terrified, but she wasn’t about to let him see it. Not that he could…not with her covered from head to toe in those stifling Zhore robes.
A buzzer sounded, and the hatchway opened. They were just skimming the ground, low bushes and grasses seeming to shimmer in the pastel moonlight. She had no idea who the pilot was, but he had to be a master, to hug the ground like this in a ship designed to travel the spaces between the stars.
“Now!” Gabriel said.
She didn’t stop to think. He’d already shown her how to make her jump and then roll with it so she wouldn’t sprain an ankle or bruise an arm.
The ground was surprisingly soft. Trinity heard her bag land with a thump a few feet away from her, and then she was rolling in the grass, coming to rest within a second or two, her gaze fixed skyward. That was just enough to reveal the Sirocco skimming away, picking up speed as it rose. A few seconds passed, and it had already disappeared into a bank of low-hanging clouds.
She was alone.
For some reason, her legs were shaking. She ignored them and got to her feet anyway, brushing at her robes as she did so. Bits of grass and dirt — both of which appeared eerily similar to their Gaian counterparts — fell away with magical ease. Was the fabric treated somehow, or were the fibers it was woven from somehow impervious to soil and other grime?
That was one thing Gabriel hadn’t told her; maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he’d simply decided that particular detail wasn’t important. Whatever the case, she was glad
she wouldn’t show up at the transit station looking like someone who’d been rolled by a mugger. Not that there were probably any muggers on Zhoraan.
She went and retrieved her bag, then fished the handheld out of her pocket, using her free hand. A few swipes, and the navigation display popped up, indicating that she should move to her left and then walk approximately .43 kilometers to reach her destination.
All that was written in Zhore characters, of course. But because of the language conditioning she’d been given, her mind processed it as easily as if she’d been reading Galactic Standard.
The night air was cool but not cold, and smelled sweet. Had she ever smelled air like that? She didn’t think so. That required acres and acres of green growing things, and there hadn’t been much that was green in Barstow. Maybe once, before it became the new capital of the western region after the rising oceans swallowed half the West Coast, but now it was just like any other city, kilometers of pavement and glass and steel, with only a few half-hearted parks here and there to break up the urban sprawl.
Her new boots were surprisingly comfortable, and now she was glad of the warm cloak she wore. Yes, it did drag in the grass a bit, and once or twice got caught on a bush and had to be tugged free. Even with all that, Trinity relaxed into the garment as she walked, glad now of the chance to acclimate herself with no one watching or judging.
In no time, it seemed, she saw the outlines of the transit station appearing through the darkness. All the lamps around it were turned downward, as if to prevent too much stray illumination from traveling upward into the night sky. The building itself had smooth, curved lines, and a dome of pearlescent glass that seemed to glow from within. It was surprisingly beautiful.
Pretty fancy for a transit station, she thought, then shrugged. The Zhore were supposed to be great lovers of beauty, of harmony. Probably they didn’t want some squat, functional-looking structure cluttering up the countryside.
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