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

as she murmured to her mother that she was tired and only wanted to go to bed, she knew this refuge — such as it was — could only be a temporary one. She didn’t know where home was, but she realized now it wasn’t here.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Rast set down his handheld and rubbed his forehead. This was one of those days when it felt as if the trinials hanging down his back weighed twice as much as they normally did, and the news his source had just delivered hadn’t done anything to improve matters.
    Ganymede. Might as well be right in the heart of old Gaia for all the good the information did him. Perhaps somewhere in the back of his mind he’d had some wild notion that he could go to Lira, speak with her, tell her the five cruisers that had attacked Chlorae II and its people had nothing to do with him. But while a Stacian and a Gaian might meet face to face in the wilder hinterlands of the galaxy, such a thing was completely impossible in the heart of the Gaian system.
    For a second or two he entertained the notion of having his source pay to hire a Gaian to approach Lira on Ganymede, but that was just as foolish. For one thing, he knew the more people he brought into his confidence, the greater the chance that one of them could betray him to his superiors. A tumble sanctioned by the admiral was one thing. Openly pursuing the woman he’d been told to forget was quite another.
    It was time to let her go. She was safely back home, and it comforted him somewhat to know she had gone back to her family. Even in their brief acquaintance she had seemed so fiercely independent that he found the move unexpected and yet oddly heartening. On Stacia, family was everything — it had to be, to ensure that one’s bloodlines survived even in face of that world’s less than ideal environment. Indeed, some of Admiral sen Trannick’s patronage probably stemmed from Rast’s mother being the admiral’s distant cousin by way of their great-grandsire’s numerous offspring.
    Unwelcome as the idea might be, perhaps Admiral sen Trannick was right. Perhaps it was time to forget Lira Jannholm, late of the GDF Valiant .
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    For what felt like the hundredth time that night, Lira rolled over, attempting to find a more comfortable spot in the bed. It seemed too soft after the hard, narrow sleeping accommodations in her quarters on the Valiant , the adjustable foam too accommodating. And it didn’t help that every time she closed her eyes, she seemed to catch a ghost-trace of the spicy scent that surrounded Rast sen Drenthan. Her mind playing tricks on her, of course; there wasn’t a Stacian within parsecs of Ganymede, and even if there were, the recyclers and scrubbers and myriad other components of Dome 3’s ventilation system would have made sure that every trace of alien aroma had been thoroughly erased.
    This had happened once or twice during her journey here: thinking that she had sensed him somehow, shutting her eyes at night and imagining the heat of his body next to hers. Ridiculous, really. No human male had ever made such an impression on her, so why the hell was she letting this Stacian infest her memories?
    She wished there were a way to flush her brain cells the way one might wipe a computer after its memory had been hopelessly compromised. Then she wouldn’t keep replaying those images in her mind, of his hands touching her, his tongue between her legs, the heat of his flesh inside her. Somehow her body didn’t seem to understand what her brain knew — that he had tricked her, betrayed her. That he wasn’t worthy of another thought, let alone this obsession that seemed to have taken hold on some deep, atavistic level she hadn’t even known existed before now.
    Her body ached with need. Without even realizing at first what she was doing, she reached lower, touched the damp heat between her legs. Stroked, and stroked, bringing at last the release she needed, even as she acknowledged that this was a counterfeit, a pale