Shades of Empire (ThreeCon)

by Carmen Webster Buxton

  She smiled as if it was all a very simple matter. “That’s all right, Peter. I don’t mind if the Princess has your name so long as I have your heart.”

  Peter felt his resolve weaken. “That’s not the only problem,” he said, trying for a stern note. “I’m thirty-six and you’re seventeen. I can’t let you tie yourself to me—with no hope of marriage—when you have your whole life ahead of you.”

  This time she looked angry. “Who are you to tell me I can’t decide for myself what I want to do with my life?”

  He shook his head. “Listen to yourself. You sound like a girl arguing with her father about her curfew. I’m too old for you, sweetheart.”

  She made a rude noise. “Lots of men older than you come back from the army and marry girls my age.”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe men who have finished their enlistments marry younger women, but not usually girls of seventeen. You’re too young to marry anyone, Marie, and that means you’re too young to make a decision like this.”

  She looked as if she were about to cry at this pronouncement. “I’m not too young to fall in love with you. I’m not too young to break my heart.”

  He smiled at her. “You’ll find someone else—someone nearer your own age. Look in your mirror, sweetheart. You won’t lack for suitors.”

  Her eyes blazed, and she crossed the distance between them to confront him. “Stop it!” she ordered, clenching her hands into fists as if she wanted to strike him. “Stop looking at me like that! You were different, and now you’re just like all the others.”

  Peter took her by her arms and held her still. “What’s wrong? What have I done wrong?”

  She sobbed one quick, convulsive sob. “You’ve seen me now. Before, you really cared about me, but now all you can see is my face. I wish I were ugly! I wish I could lie in the dark again and feel you next to me and know you cared about me without ever knowing what I looked like.”

  Peter pulled her close and folded her into an embrace. “I’m sorry, Marie. I’m only a man. It’s difficult for me to look at a beautiful woman and not be stirred by that beauty. But I do care about you. I care about you too much to let you ruin your life for me.”

  She ducked her head as if to hide her face, and then she held him just as tightly as he was holding her.

  “You’ve never lied to me, Peter,” she said, her voice muffled in his chest. “Will you tell me something now, and be completely truthful?”

  “I’ll try to be. What is it you want to know?”

  She pulled away enough to look up into his face. “Do you love me?”

  He hesitated, torn between what he thought he should say and what he wanted to say. Finally, he decided that he owed her the truth. “Yes.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “Is my age the only reason you won’t let me stay with you, then?”

  “Yes. I can’t take advantage of you, sweetheart. You’ve never had a chance to fall in love normally. Your innocence was already stolen from you. I can’t compound that crime by stealing your youth.”

  She looked at him steadily, her chin held high. “What if I have the chance and don’t want it?”

  He was taken aback by the question. “What?”

  “What if I go home—go back to my family’s farm and live as a farmer’s daughter again? What if I stay there for a whole year, and don’t meet anyone I want to be with? What if I come back here when I’m eighteen and tell you I tried making love with someone else, and it was never like it was with you? What happens then, Peter?”

  He stood indecisively for a moment, his head full of the implications of her proposal. It was difficult for him to sort it all out, to imagine what it would be like in a year if she were standing in front of him and saying she still wanted him. But if she could do it—if she was mature enough to wait a year for what she wanted—didn’t that mean she was old enough to decide for herself?

  “I won’t make any promises,” he said, “but if you wait a year and still feel the same way, then we can talk.”

  She smiled with triumph. “That’s good enough for me.” She reached up to take his face in her hands and kissed him passionately.

  When she let him go, Peter felt rather as if he had been through a hurricane. Marie gave him a sympathetic smile.

  “Poor Peter,” she said kindly. “You haven’t got a chance, you know.”

  “I hope not. My only fear is that you’ll change your mind in a year.”

  “I don’t think I will,” Marie said. “I had to grow up very quickly, you see, and I’ve had a lot of time to think since I came here—almost too much time. I know what’s important now, and I know you can give it to me.”

  Peter could only hope. “Time will tell.”

  “Yes. It always does.”

  • • •

  The Sunspot appeared much the same as it had the last time Madeline visited it. If anything it was even less respectable looking, as a number of the patrons seemed to have been celebrating rather determinedly.

  Thad sat alone at a small table in the corner. He stood up when Madeline approached.

  “Hello, Maddy,” he said, his eyes warm. “It’s good to see you.”

  “So why did we have to meet here?” Madeline demanded as she took a chair. “Why couldn’t you come to the Bee?”

  “I’m afraid Gus won’t let me set foot on the Queen Bee again,” Thad said as he sat across from her. “I don’t know if it’s you he doesn’t trust or me, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “So you’re working for him, now?”

  “For the moment. I’m expecting orders out any minute now.”

  “Orders out?”

  He nodded. “ThreeCon is reassigning me. The situation has changed a lot in this system. I don’t think ThreeCon will continue to provide covert assistance to rebels until they see if the new government can succeed in bringing about peaceful change.”

  “I don’t know that I’d support them, either,” Madeline said aggressively.

  He seemed relieved to hear it. “If you really feel that way, you might be stuck. It’ll be hard to make a living on the Rim to Degollado run without the credits the rebels paid you.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll get by.”

  “Smuggling?”

  “If necessary.”

  “There’s another way,” Thad said. “ThreeCon always needs eyes and ears. Merchant ships are good cover—especially merchant ships that have an established history and a just a little bit of a shady reputation.”

  Madeline was intrigued. “What does it entail, to be ThreeCon’s eyes and ears?”

  “Not that much. You report in on your schedule—maybe take a different route if they need you to be somewhere in particular. You might have to carry a passenger or two occasionally, usually hidden in the crew, rather than openly. And, of course, they might want you to sell certain merchandise to specified individuals, without ever revealing where it came from or who paid for it.”

  “It sounds reasonable. In fact, it sounds a lot like what I was doing before.”

  “The big difference is,” Thad said deliberately, “you have to keep your nose clean. ThreeCon would keep you solvent, but you’d have to stay legal. No more ignoring import laws and tariffs when it suits you—and no more helping yourself to cargo if you stumble over a stranded ship.”

  Madeline was annoyed. It sounded suspiciously like one of his lectures. She gave him a hard stare. “Is this whole deal an effort to reform me, Thad? Am I your personal social work project?”

  He met her gaze but shook his head slightly. “I’d say it was more of an effort to make sure you stay out of jail. I worry about you.”

  She gave a contemptuous snort. “Save it for someone who needs it. I can take care of myself.”

  “I know you can. It’s how you choose to do it that worries me.”

  “I’ve done okay so far, haven’t I?”

  “Maybe,” Thad said. “How did you get your ship, Maddy?”

  “What?” she said, su
rprised by the change of subject.

  “How did you get your ship? We looked into you pretty closely, and we couldn’t tell where the money came from.”

  “I inherited my folks’ business when they retired.”

  “I know that,” Thad said. “But it wasn’t nearly enough to buy a Nissan class freighter and refit it, let alone hire a crew. You would have needed twenty times that amount, and we did find out that you own the Queen Bee outright. There’s no lien and no co-owners.”

  She lifted her brows appraisingly and grinned at him, miffed and amused at the same time. “What? Are you worried I murdered someone to get the Bee?”

  “No,” he said, not entirely convincingly. “But I need to know.”

  “All right. I’d have told you any time if you had asked me. I never expected my folks to give me their business like that, so it was found money. At the same time, it wasn’t enough to get me what I really wanted, so I took the whole lot into one of the casinos on Decos and I bet it all on one symbol on a gifha sphere. I hit it, and I won big time. I bought the Bee the next day.”

  Thad sighed, his relief evident, but shook his head. “You’re nuts. I’m in love with a crazy woman.”

  She chuckled, still conscious of a warm glow when he said the words out loud. “I won, didn’t I?”

  “Why did you name her the Queen Bee?”

  It had never occurred to her that, as a native Terran, he would know where the name originated. “I didn’t. That was her name when I bought her. I asked the previous owner what it meant, and when she explained it, I decided it was perfect for my ship.”

  “I always thought so,” Thad agreed.

  “So,” Madeline said, returning to their earlier conversation, “when do I get to hear some specifics on this possible deal with ThreeCon?”

  “I’ll report your interest to Gus. Someone will contact you soon and give you hard numbers.”

  “Someone else? Not you?”

  “Definitely not me,” Thad said. “ThreeCon doesn’t like to mix personal feelings with business, and I made no secret of how I feel about you.”

  “Where will you be, then?”

  “Well,” he said, sounding almost rueful, “I’m most likely going to get a reprimand—not so much for blowing my cover as an agent, but for telling you about ThreeCon’s selling weapons to the rebels without clearing it first. I think my new orders will be in line with that reprimand. I doubt it’ll be anything exciting or even tolerable. I’m expecting my last three years in ThreeCon to be either a deep space assignment or some planet where I can’t step outside without protective gear.”

  “But you’re going to go anyway?”

  “Of course.”

  “So,” she said, her tone assuming a certain belligerence as she realized she might never see him again, “this is goodbye?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I would have liked to have a little more time, but this was the best I could manage.”

  “You’ve got one hell of a nerve, Thaddeus Jenner,” she said, letting her bitterness spill out. “You come aboard my ship and pretend to be an idiot while you spy on us, and then you make me care about you, only to go off and never see me again.”

  “I’ll be out in three years. I could meet you wherever you are then.”

  A guarded hope burned in her chest, but she said nothing.

  “If you want me to,” he said, “and if you’ll wait for me.”

  “Wait?” The word sounded ominous to Madeline. “How do you mean wait?”

  “I mean,” Thad said gently, “that I don’t hold with lists, and I don’t hold with two people making a commitment to each other and then screwing other people. It’s all or nothing with me, Maddy. Which is it to be? All or nothing?”

  “Three years?” Madeline said, horrified at the thought.

  “Yes. Three long years.”

  “I suppose you’d be faithful the whole time?”

  He smiled at her fondly. “I waited the whole time I was aboard the Bee, until you found me out. I never had anyone else—not on board ship and not on shore leave. I didn’t want anyone but you.”

  “My god,” Madeline said with feeling.

  Thad maintained a solemn demeanor. “Celibacy is rarely fatal.”

  “Celibacy.” Even the word left a bad taste in her mouth. She gave him a sharp look. “Does that mean no fun at all, or just no fun with anyone else in the room?”

  Thad couldn’t hold back a laugh. “I don’t care what you do all alone in your cabin—so long as you’re truly all alone.”

  “I suppose I could bear it,” she said slowly looking him up and down appraisingly. It would be a long wait, but on the other hand, he was worth waiting for.

  Thad sat silent, looking hopeful, as she thought it over.

  “Okay, Mister All Or Nothing,” she said, making up her mind abruptly. “Let’s see if you really mean it.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s see if all really means all. If I’m going to go three years without so much as a quick cuddle from anyone, I want total commitment. We get married, or it’s no deal.”

  “Married?” Thad said, looking thunderstruck.

  “Yes, married. People do get married, you know.”

  “People who can say they love the other person get married.”

  “Jesus, are you back on that again?”

  “It just seems a little incongruous to me. You can’t bring yourself to say you love me but now you want to get married?”

  “I don’t particularly want to get married,” Madeline said in exasperation. “It’s just that you have this crazy idea about interstellar monogamy, and I’m telling you the only way I can do it is if we get married. I can’t stay faithful to you unless I know you’ve made the same kind of commitment to me that you made to ThreeCon.”

  “If I agree, will you promise to take ThreeCon’s deal and stay legal?”

  “Sheesh, you don’t give up,” Madeline said, annoyed and pleased at the same time. Sure, he was persistent, but on the other hand, this was a good quality in someone who cared about her. “Yeah, I will. I suppose if I’m married to a ThreeCon officer I’ll have to watch my step.”

  “Okay, then.” Thad drained his drink and got to his feet. “I’ve got a few minutes, and ThreeCon’s got a traveler’s aid office on D level. It can handle any admin stuff like registering a marriage. Let’s go do it now.”

  She stood up and looked him in the eye. “But it’s a three-year wait for the honeymoon, right?”

  “Right.”

  She shook her head dolefully. “You were right. I must be crazy,”

  Thad just laughed. “I’m feeling a little irrational myself. We must be in love.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Very good, Maddy,” he murmured in her ear. “Maybe in three years you’ll be able to say it straight out?”

  “Maybe,” Madeline said. “But don’t put any money on it.”

  • • •

  Alexander stared out the shuttle window as it lifted from the surface. He might never see Gaulle again.

  They gained altitude swiftly, and he could see the city of Montmartre spread out before him. In the distance, the marble walls of the Emperor’s palace gleamed in the sun. The palace would have looked beautiful if he hadn’t known what was behind the walls—the steel screens, the courtyards that were virtual prisons.

  All at once he remembered Celia. She never got to leave the palace, never got to go back to the Aquitaine. He leaned back in his seat and pictured his family’s farm in his mind. Hopefully, Junia’s family would take it over, and their children would one day work the soil without fearing press gangs.

  Cassandra took his hand. “What are you thinking?”

  He turned his head to look at her. How could she ever have though she wasn’t beautiful? “I was thinking,” he said, “that if it’s a boy we should name him Thaddeus, and if it’s a girl, we should name her Celia.”

  She nodded. “I
think so, too.”

  Alexander squeezed her hand and closed his eyes. He was leaving home to become human again. In some ways, he was very lucky.

  Acknowledgements

  As usual, there are many people I have to thank. First, the members of the Writers Group From Hell who critiqued this, my copy editor Risa Stewart, and my proof reader Chandra Kendrick. Without all those people’s help, this book would have been much less than it is.

  And thank you, reader, for sticking with the story. If you enjoyed it, please consider posting a review on the online bookstore where you bought it, or a social networking book-lovers site like GoodReads or Library Thing. Comment is free, after all!