Free gaian consortium 03 - the gaia gambit by Christine Pope

over the planet, as well as under the base on Iradia’s smaller moon, and he needed someone to take him wherever he needed to go.
    “Someone he can trust,” Istafa Morain, the lavender-skinned man, told her.
    How he’d determined that trustworthy person was her, Lira didn’t quite know. But after a few days in Gared Tomas’s service, she realized he made it his business to learn everything he could about the people he considered hiring. Probably his agents had hacked into her file with the GDF to steal her personal history and slipped back out again with no one the wiser.
    Tomas could have been anywhere between forty and sixty. Hard to say, with the shaved head and the smooth warm brown skin. His eyes were a startling green against that mocha complexion. Some women might have found him attractive. Lira didn’t, but mostly because she knew better than to have any type of feelings for a superior besides respect.
    Tomas didn’t have the same scruples, and made no secret of the fact that he would have liked her to be something more than just a pilot. By that time she’d worked for him for the better part of a standard week, and knew a little more of his temperament and moods.
    “You can have a pilot, or a mistress,” she told him. “But not both…at least not both in the same woman.”
    Maybe that had been taking her life in her hands, speaking so boldly. But she found she didn’t much care. Hadn’t she already hit bottom, working for the sort of man who treated people’s lives like trash and who she would’ve vigorously hunted down if she’d still been part of the GDF?
    To her surprise, he’d only grinned and nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “I know I can always trust you, Lira, to speak the truth.”
    And she hadn’t known whether to be relieved that he’d spared her, or disappointed that he hadn’t ended her sad existence then and there.
    So now here she sat, staring into the brandy’s amber depths and wondering how long she’d hesitate this time before taking that first sip, and whether she’d be able to stop when she reached the bottom of the glass.
    “Captain Jannholm.”
    The voice shouldn’t have been familiar. After all, she’d only heard it a handful of times. But it haunted her sleep, filled her dreams…that burnished baritone with the foreign edge to its pronunciation. He couldn’t be here, though. Why would he be here, in the ass-end of nowhere?
    One part of her wanted her to stay rooted in place, to ignore him, ignore that insidious voice. She’d never run from a fight, though, and she wasn’t about to start now.
    Slowly, she climbed off the stool and turned to face him. She was going to do this on her own two feet, and not sitting on a barstool like the local lush.
    He looked different somehow. Then she realized it was because he wore civilian clothing, the high-collared tunic and slim-fitting pants favored by the Eridanis and popular throughout civilized space. His trousers were tucked into tall boots instead of the typical sandals or low shoes. The hair was still the same, in all its barbarian glory. And the face, whose features she’d thought must have been blurred by faulty memory. But no, the face hadn’t changed — those shining copper eyes, the strong nose and defiant chin.
    She’d expected a rush of anger, or even hatred — after all, Rast sen Drenthan was a large part of the reason she’d ended up here on Iradia, servant to a man who thought of all life, human or otherwise, as a commodity to be traded or sold, or disposed of when no longer necessary.
    What passed through her mind, however, was a single traitorous thought.
    God, he’s handsome.
    Which was just ridiculous, because his looks shouldn’t have mattered one way or the other, and since when had she even been capable of seeing a Stacian as handsome?
    Self-disgust hardened her tone. “What the hell are you doing here?”
    Probably not the reception he had wanted or expected, but that didn’t seem to faze