gaian consortium 03 - the gaia gambit by Christine Pope Read Free Book Online Page A

begun. Such treachery would make Lira Jannholm’s perceived disloyalty pale into nothingness. No, there had to be another explanation.
    It could have been luck — if one believed in such things. Once upon a time he might have said he didn’t, but he’d seen enough over the years to think there had to be some underlying force at work, one that sometimes seemed to have a capricious capacity to play havoc with the plans of sentient beings, or to bring unexpected favor at a roll of the bones. Admiral sen Trannick had had enough inspired guesses and turns of fortune during his career that one could call him lucky.
    Better that — better to think that it was the work of the old gods some still believed in — than to think Stacian and Gaian were working together toward some goal whose motivation he couldn’t begin to guess. Because if that were true, it meant everything he had been told, everything he believed, was a lie.
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    “And how long do you intend on staying?” Her mother’s tone, brittle in its casualness, told Lira everything she needed to know about her welcome here. Not that she had expected much different.
    She wanted to make an airy comment about staying here on Ganymede indefinitely, of enrolling in some sort of coursework at the moon’s one rather mediocre college, but she didn’t feel quite brave enough for that. For a second or two she didn’t answer, but only concentrated on chewing the mouthful of eggplant strata she had just taken. At least the food was good; some of the best hydroponics setups in Gaian space were located right here on the Jovian base.
    “Not long,” she replied. “I just need to explore some options. In fact, I’ve already had a few offers from independent shippers and charter companies.”
    This was a bare-faced lie. While one might have thought the skills she’d obtained in the navy would be in some demand, no one had come forward to claim them. Blacklists weren’t just for the military. At this point, Lira was fairly certain no one respectable would touch her with a ten-meter cattle prod.
    The tight lines around her mother’s mouth seemed to relax slightly. “That sounds promising.”
    “Oh, it is.”
    They lapsed into a tense little silence. Although Lira had expected her father to be here, he was conspicuously absent — a last-minute emergency had called him away, according to her mother. That was possible, but Lira thought it rather more likely that he wasn’t quite ready to face his disgraced daughter, and so manufactured a crisis that would keep him safely away for some hours. And luckily her younger sister and brother were long gone, her sister with the GEC, and her brother a climatologist working on the ongoing Gaian rehabilitation project. At least the human race’s home world wasn’t quite the polluted mess it had been several centuries earlier, but there was still some ways to go before it began to approach even a semblance of its former beauty.
    Her siblings seemed the safest subject to broach, and so she inquired about Janna first, then Liam. Lira guessed her mother knew exactly what red herrings these lines of conversation were, but of course she gave no hint. Marta Jannholm had never been one for confidences, and Lira knew she wasn’t about to start now.
    The conversation lurched this way and that until the food had been consumed. A gleaming mech came to clear away the empty plates. The machine was a new addition; her parents must have been doing better than she thought.
    Glad somebody is , flitted through her mind, and she chided herself for the self-pitying thought. No one had held a gun to her head and demanded that she sleep with Captain sen Drenthan. No, she’d brought that disaster on herself. The Stacian would have to live with his treachery, though. That might be cold comfort, but better than nothing. Although Admiral Horner and everyone around her might think differently, she knew, at bottom, that she had tried to do the right thing.
    Still,