Corso Deynah, captain of the Asphodel, was dreaming of space—of nothing, really—when the sharp buzz of an incoming priority one signal rattled the wall comm. He hated the convenience of two-way voice activation in equal parts for the laziness and the intrusion, so he’d disabled it in his stateroom a nanosecond after making the light cruiser sheership his own. Which meant he had to haul his ass out of the berth to answer.
Naked, he staggered through the darkness to the wall unit, secure in the knowledge he had left nothing to trip over. He slapped his palm over the comm to silence the buzz. Thumbing the light meter up a notch brightened the austere room from stygian to gloomy.
“What’s the thrice-tangled emergency, Patter?” The question sounded harsher than he intended. Dreams of nothing sometimes had that effect on him.
But instead of his first’s outer-system drawl coming through the speaker, the screen blazed to life with the vivid face of a woman. A stranger to him.
Less of a stranger now, he supposed. Judging by the way her citrine-bright gaze flicked up then down, his glitching comm vid had provided a wide-angle view and she’d already seen more of him than had any females of his intimate encounters recently. Recent in cosmological terms, anyway. This stunning female eclipsed those distant memories like the Asphodel’s powerful proton afterburners would obliterate an antique light bulb.
At least now he’d have something to dream about.
His finger hovered over the disconnect. “Wrong number, eh?”
She cleared her throat, a husky sound. “Captain Deynah?”
His brows rose in surprise. “Yeah?” He might answer the comm more often if Patter sounded like this. Low, warm, and just a little rough. Her voice matched the visuals nicely. She had the opulent coloring of a hydro orchid: white skin, root-dark hair in myriad looping braids around her round face, and vermillion lips that lured him in with the promise of nectar. In space, of course, flowers were rare and insanely expensive. And pests like him were kept far, far away.
Her yellow-green gaze drifted downward and paused. He didn’t bother hiding himself. When a man got up, well, sometimes he got up.
“Good morning, Captain. I’m sorry to…rouse you so early.”
The amused quirk of those red lips, wrapping with a purr around the words, roused him more. The tug in his groin ached. Unused muscles were like that. He ignored the twinge and leaned toward the screen. “How did you break my ship’s secure thread?”
Her lips thinned, bleaching some of the wild color from their seam, and a hint of the red reappeared in her cheeks. Anger or remorse? Not that he cared, not when she’d broken into his ship.
“I have a proposition for you, Captain. Of the business sort. Perhaps you would be more comfortable in uniform.”
This time, he couldn’t stop himself from crossing his arms, but he straightened his shoulders too. “No uniform. I’m not military.” Not anymore.
Fighting the tight stance, the scars across his shoulder blades pinged a reminder that the past might be behind him, but never all that far. And some memories, even an afterburner’s scorching plasma flare couldn’t wipe out, though his sweet Asphodel did her best.
On his screen, the gemstone sparkle of the woman’s eyes flickered behind a rapid blink of long dark lashes. “Maybe you’d like a robe then?”
Was that desperation in her raw honey voice? The thought bothered him more than he cared to admit. He didn’t want to be bothered, not by anyone—definitely not by anyone whose lips reminded him of nectar.
He snagged the gray coverlet off the bed and yanked it around his waist, knotting the ends at his hip. “I’m not a business man either.”
“An independent business man, shall we say?” Now she definitely sounded desperate.
“Say mercenary. That’s the naked truth.” He returned the quirk of lips she’d given him earlier, though he knew his smile lacked the velvety allure of hers.
She inclined her head so the looping braids brushed her high collar. “Very well, Captain Deynah. What I propose—”
“And you are who, again?”
Though the onscreen view was cropped tight to her face, the tips of her fingers crept into the frame when she touched her throat. The collar of her tunic camouflaged what she was reaching for, but from the placement of her hand, he guessed she was wearing a necklace, something she caressed for comfort, or as a reminder of her own. Like his scar, but probably prettier.
“I am Benedetta Galil of Qv’arratz. Due to an unprovoked attack, we find ourselves in need of immediate armed defense.”
A burst of adrenaline surged through his blood, but he squelched the instinctive reaction. “Didn’t I say already I’m not military? Contact your system representative.”
“I very much fear covert forces operating under Universalist Union orders may be the ones who attacked us.” Her fingers, still curled at her throat, moved when she swallowed. She was right to be afraid if planetary jurisdiction put her at the mercy of her own marauding government; no one else would help.
The innocent vulnerability made his hand fist in the coarse fabric around his waist, as if he could reach out and wrap his big hand around hers to smooth away the fear.
But he wasn’t looking for a fight right now, he reminded himself. And he never wanted that particular fight ever again. Vulnerable innocents might be saved—but only for a while. In the end, innocence died and vulnerability was forever. “You aren’t in danger at this moment.” He pitched his voice between a question and a statement.
“There was one high-orbit volley from outside our sensor range and an anonymous ultimatum delivered. We can’t hold off another assault with the resources currently at our disposal.”
The Universalist Union was generally considered civilized and orderly. It controlled access to numerous threads through sheerspace. And—like all the federations, alliances, and coalitions that had divided most of the known sheerways—the UU was always interested in acquiring more. The four hundred years since the discovery of the sheership biotech that provided access to the stars hadn’t been enough time to teach humanity to share. “Give them what they want.”
“We can’t do that.”
“And you think I will do what?”
She lowered her chin a notch and her clenched hands dropped out of the picture. “Dissuade them. You’ve done it before.”
The twinge across his shoulders sank deeper into his chest, toward his heart. That burned-and-bloody turn of fortune on L-Sept wasn’t a secret—hard to keep secret the total destruction of a planet; the orbiting body count in the Lasa system now went directly from L-Sext to L-Octo—but he didn’t want to be reminded of that either. “The price was high.”
“And we’ll pay you a matching price this time.” Her citrine eyes suddenly glittered. “Since you are a mercenary now, the terms will no doubt be adequate. You could buy a bed wide enough for more than one pillow. Perhaps even a robe.”
A weaker man in his state of undress might have withered at the astringency of her words, which seemed less vulnerable and innocent than a moment ago. Corso hardened his smile. “Send me your adequate terms. Obviously you already have my secure comm link.”
She nibbled at her lower lip, and for the first time, he noticed she was young, barely out of her second decade. The poise with which she held herself—not to mention those lips—had distracted him. “I don’t want my name sent across every—”
“You hacked my ship, Etta. I think we’ve already skipped the proprieties.”
Her gaze locked on his and narrowed, as if she wanted to read something written across his pupils. “I am called Benedetta,” she reminded him tersely. Then she glanced down and in a moment text scrolled across the lower half of his screen.
His attention fixed on the credit balance column. “You’d need double this amount to hire a private patrol—triple for an active engagement force. This wouldn’t cover armament or probable-kill bonuses.”
“The credits are not all we have.” Her tone wobbled then steadied again though her face in the screen was stiff and still. “Please continue.”
He scanned onward. “You’re giving me…a l’auralya?”
“A treasure beyond compare. To sell to the highest bidder for riches enough to make you a king. Or to keep for yourself to become the envy of kings.”
He lifted one eyebrow. “And if I keep scrolling down, is there a unicorn on the next page?”
The riot of color that had chased around her face blazed higher in her cheeks. Definitely anger this time. “Certainly even a mercenary such as yourself has heard of the l’auraly.” Gone was the lilting, almost poetic tone she’d used a moment before to peddle her alleged treasure.
“I’ve heard of unicorns too, but I still don’t believe in them.” He admired the way his amusement turned her yellow-green glare to sharp tarnished copper.
“You think the elected head of the joint Tiangu worlds imagined his l’auralya? You think the Priestess of Eldaq V was tricked into presenting her l’auralyo as her sacred consort?” She leaned in. With the closer focus, the gold flecks in her eyes blazed like miniature suns. “L’auraly have attended the births of nations and the deaths of emperors. They have inspired epics in every art form and breakthroughs in every branch of science. They have started wars and ended them. That is the payment—the extraordinary gift—I am offering you in exchange for a bit of armament and a few kill bonuses.”
Her vehemence startled him, almost disrupting his smirk. But he persevered. “I’m not saying they don’t have a clever story, or that the universe isn’t dim enough to buy it, but…”
She surged to her feet. For an instant, before the image reoriented to her new position, his screen showed a lascivious scan of her from throat to thigh in her close-fitted tunic, and his pulse heaved as if the Asphodel had tangled between the sheerways. In the confused blur, he caught a glimpse of the torque around her neck. The heavy necklace was out of proportion for her slender frame but it flashed with a brilliance that briefly blanked the screen.
When it refocused, she stood with her back to him, the silky folds of her tunic undone and draping low over her hips to expose her bare back.
His interest, which had waned with the sorry review of her credits, roused again.
His high res screen found no flaw in the orchid white skin from her nape or across the fine musculature of her arms and shoulders. And those flared hips… Just the right width for a man to dock himself like a ship come safely home to port.
She glared at him over her shoulder from where she’d yanked the loops of her dark braids over her breast. “Now do you see?”
“Oh, I see all right.” Except he hadn’t really absorbed what she’d meant to show him. Without thinking, he raised his hand to the screen and traced his fingertip along the marks that allegedly identified the l’auraly.
He recognized the markings from popular vids. One long-running drama had even purported to count a genuine uncommitted l’auralyo among its players. The man had been kidnapped and his body was recovered not long after with his skin flayed and the word fake carved in the flesh above his severed penis.
Benedetta had the markings. In her pale skin, the iridescent silvery lines glinted with her agitated breath. The graceful curls mirrored each other on both sides of her spine, rising up the slender column of her neck, swirling at the junction of her shoulders, and pouring down to pool in a glimmering pinwheel at the small of her back. Only half the pinwheel was visible, the rest hid tucked below the folds of her crumpled tunic. If he put his hand there, the pinwheel would just fill his palm…
He clenched his fist against the phantom warmth and dragged his gaze back to hers. With effort, he manufactured a dismissive shrug. “What use would a mercenary have for a pleasure slave?”
She pulled the sleeveless tunic up around her shoulders and turned to face him again but did not reseat herself. The screen blasted him with the full erotic effect of her body. He gripped the knot of his sheet to strangle the heavy pulse in his groin. He wouldn’t be controlled by his cock, not when her kind had been created for exactly that reason.
According to gossip—or was it mythos?—the colonists who’d arrived in the Qv’ar system during humanity’s second expansion through the sheerways had intended to follow the usual planetary domestication progression: a few generations of dangerous mineral extraction, followed by genteel agricultural export, leading to the more lucrative tech.
Instead, they’d found qva’avaq.
The crystalline element—unique to the habitable fourth planet, Qv’arratz, and found in only one location even there—had no worthwhile industrial properties, but it was unusually beautiful. The quicksilver translucence of qva’avaq refracted even the faintest light in subtle rainbows. The crystals spars, which grew in mirrored pairs, or infrequently in triads or quads, oscillated harmonically with their matched components, resulting in a compellingly intimate song.
Unfortunately, when carved into sparkling ornamental jewelry, the crystal tended to kill its bearers.
The wasting deaths were preceded by strange periods of lust and longing and sexual madness, and thus the stories began. Those who wore the stones and survived exuded an odd intensity of allure, as if the stunning crystal had been absorbed into their beings and shone out through their erogenous zones.
A few dissections confirmed the element had indeed merged with their bodies. The metallotropic liquid crystal infused the nervous system and surfaced through transdermal rivulets where the concentration of nerve endings was high. The qva’avaq threaded over the survivors’ skin in silvery whorls, permanently marking them with shining, mysterious sigils.
The l’auraly—the “light clad”—were exquisite, vital and evocative. Extraordinarily sensitive, responsive and empathic, they would have been remarkable as physicians or artists or many other callings.
But above all, they made unspeakably excellent lovers.
The resonating qualities had given the crystal its name—qva’avaq, meaning “the still water that reflects the mountain”—and the ability to perfectly mirror the deepest desires of their lovers gave the l’auraly an undeniable glamour. Their rarity made them valuable.
Qv’arratz had found its commodity. Promising children were exposed to one half of the twinned crystals and raised to become l’auraly. To spare patrons from the high mortality rates of qva’avaq exposure (and thus preserve the spiraling demand) the other matched halves of the crystals were processed and carefully sealed. Each buyer received a lovely piece of jewelry, a necklace, bracelet or ring with the crystal light and song muted—but no longer lethal. And each also received a male l’auralyo or female l’auralya, afire and trembling with the full force of the qva’avaq—and utterly, intimately attuned to the keying crystal in the buyer’s hands.
Benedetta left the tunic unfastened, and the oversized torque—reflecting the same crystalline shimmer as her markings—rested heavily on the delicate ledge of her collarbones. The rounded finials of the incomplete circle angled downward, casting faint glints of color into the soft shadow between her breasts.
The necklace was too large for her, too dominating and masculine for her slender throat. But it would be just right for a man’s thicker neck: the neck of her future owner. Was that much of the aphrodisiac crystal coursing through her body?
Corso swallowed hard, his groin as heavy as if that torque were hanging off his sac.
“I am not a slave,” she said, her tone calmer than it had been.
He noticed that her self-control seemed inversely proportional to his; the more she flustered him, the more she seemed to find her confidence. “That is simplistic thinking.”
“L’auraly are sold to whomever can buy them. That’s slavery.”
“Not just anyone,” she corrected. She looked down to stroke the necklace, her oval nails ticking quietly over some texture too subtle for even the high-resolution screen to capture. “We take as a patron the one who best pleases the qva’avaq.”
He ignored the itch down his spine that matched the topography of her finger over the torque. “It’s a rock. How are you supposed to please a rock?”
She didn’t lift her face, but nevertheless speared him with a steady stare through long dark lashes. “It seems I will be discovering an answer to just that question.” When he opened his mouth to object to her oblique insinuation—he was not a rock, regardless of how part of him currently felt—she interrupted. “I am the only one of my kind until the keying ceremonies for the younger l’auraly. It will be years before anyone else in the universe, however far along the sheerways you might go, has this chance we are offering you.”
“‘This chance’ meaning you, pleasuring me.”
“Save my planet and the fire of suns will be as mere embers to the pleasure I will unleash upon you.”
Was that a promise or a threat? Or both? He swallowed, glad he’d grabbed the sheet when he had the chance. Her dance between innocence and smoldering anger provoked him in ways that would not enhance his bargaining position.
Not that he intended to bargain. “Not interested.” Though his voice was tellingly hoarse and evidence to the contrary raged behind the sheet, he wasn’t going to be pleasing cocks or rocks. “I’m not a slaver. Find someone else.”
“There is no one else. We’ve chosen you.”
He shook his head. “Then I’m sorry but—”
She raised her chin. “You must come to Qv’arratz and intervene with our attackers.”
The arrogant tilt of her head raised his hackles. “Why am I hearing an ‘or else’?”
“Perhaps your lonely years in the silence between the stars sharpened your hearing. The ‘or else’ is that you will lose the Asphodel.”
A chill that had nothing to do with his sheet-only attire spread through him as if the bulkhead had begun to disintegrate, letting in the deadly cold of space. “No one can take my ship.”
“The Asphodel is registered out of New Drakko, isn’t she? It would be a shame if she were scheduled for decommissioning by Drakko Federation edict. We can ensure such an edict never comes to light. But only if you help us.”
“You can’t—”
“Yes, by all the shining stones of Qv’arratz, we can.” She wrapped her long fingers over the blunt finial of the torque. “Did you know the recently deceased Federation sheerways commissioner paired with a l’auralyo? And did you know l’auraly come home after their patrons die? With the right incentive from a certain l’auralyo who fostered the new sheerways commissioner as a youth, we can make sure Asphodel’s papers are flawless.” Her voice hardened. “But that l’auralyo will expire, along with your ship, if you don’t get here now and save him. And the rest of us.”
The scars across Corso’s shoulders tightened. “Don’t threaten my ship. Do not.”
She held herself with the poised tension of a wild creature backed into a corner, on the edge of flight…or attack. “You won’t give me a chance to explain, so we won’t give you the choice to say no. What lies at stake is not only Qv’arratz, but perhaps the free will of every mind in the universe.”
“You talk about free will and then say I have no choice.” Incredulity—and a touch of fear—sharpened his tone. “The Drak Fed doesn’t own all the sheerways. I can stay ahead of them.”
When she shrugged, the blunt finial of the torque twinkled at him like a mocking eye. “You are free to do that. The Asphodel gives you that, doesn’t she? She gives you your freedom.”
And if he ran, he’d lose access to legitimate Federation business, making it that much harder to keep the Asphodel aloft. He swallowed hard, anger burning in his throat like the stench of spent fuel. “What do I have to do?”
“Come to Qv’arratz. We will show you more when you get here.”
His fists clenched. He’d already seen more than he ever wanted to of the fabled l’auraly.