Desperate Glory (Morningstar, #4), page 18
She sagged, falling on top of him a moment later. Leo was too dazed, too drained, to think clearly. His thoughts were slow, sluggish ... it felt like hours before he became dimly aware that he was still inside her, his flaccid penis held within her. She seemed as stunned as himself, lying on top of him as if she were a blanket rather than a living person. Her uniform felt grimy to the touch ... he wondered, numbly, if his felt the same way to her. It was quite likely.
Fuck, he thought, numbly. Now he was drained, it was all too easy to wonder if he’d made a mistake. No. He had. Fuck!
Madeleine stared down at him, then rolled over and sat upright. Leo stared at her, feeling his manhood start to stiffen again. Her hair had come loose, black ringlets spilling over her shoulders, and her face was flushed ... her bare legs, leading up to a dark tuft of hair between her thighs, were strong and supple, absolutely perfect. There was nothing fake about her, he thought numbly. Her years of naval service had worked well for her.
She muttered something in a language Leo didn’t recognise, then looked at the hatch. “Did we think to lock it?”
Leo shook his head. The chamber was fairly soundproofed, but ... he swallowed hard. It wasn’t as if he’d bothered to test the soundproofing. Was there someone outside? He staggered to his feet and hurried over to the hatch, carefully locking it before anyone could come into the chamber. His legs hadn’t felt so bendy since ... he bit down on that memory too. It wasn’t something he wanted to relive.
Madeleine stared at him for a long moment, making no move to cover herself or to draw him back to her. Leo couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Had she enjoyed herself or did she think they’d gone too far? Or both? Leo had felt her orgasm – it had pushed him over the edge – and yet, all the pleasure in the universe would turn sour if it cost them their careers. If anyone knew what they’d done ...
You do keep letting the little head get you into trouble, a voice said, at the back of his mind. It sounded a lot like Flower. And now the big head has to find a way out of it.
“I need a shower,” Madeleine said. She stumbled to her feet and removed her jacket, undershirt and bra in one smooth motion. Leo tried not to stare and failed miserably. Her breasts were small yet perfect, the smooth skin marred by his fingernails; her arms were muscular, her stomach smooth, utterly flat. “Join me?”
Leo nodded and removed his own tunic, impressed by her complete lack of concern about her own nudity. There was no such thing as privacy in the navy, not even at the academy, but there were limits. Most cadets had looked away, granting what privacy they could to their comrades; the rare creep got a dose of barracks-room justice that rarely, if ever, needed to be repeated. It was supposed to get easier when you were onboard ship, but ... Leo hadn’t needed to share a cabin, at least at first, and when he had it had been with an older male officer. Here ... he stared admiringly as she turned and walked into the washroom, then followed her. The chamber was larger than a washroom onboard ship, with plenty of room for two.
Madeleine turned on the shower and stepped inside. Leo followed, relaxing slightly as the warm water ran down his body, washing away their mingled juices. She turned to face him, her breasts brushing lightly against his chest. Leo lowered his lips to hers, kissing slowly and delicately in stark contrast to their earlier kisses, then gripped her waist and turned her around, bending her over slowly. She grunted as he pressed his penis against her womanhood, then slipped inside ...
Afterwards, when they were washed, dried, and changed into fresh uniforms, he found himself unsure what to say or do. Should he forget it, pretend it had never happened? Or ... should they continue the relationship ... did they even have a relationship? It had been sex born out of frustration and misplaced rage, not ... it wasn’t the first time he’d slept with someone who wanted to displace her feelings, but still. It could easily blow up in their faces.
He met her eyes, wishing he knew what she was thinking. Did she have regrets? Or did she regret nothing?
“I ...” Leo swallowed hard and started again. He could have walked away from most of his relationships, but this one would be tricky to escape. They had to work together to get the fleet up and running, then take it to war. “What do you want to do? I mean ...”
“Smooth,” Madeleine said, sardonically. “What do you want to do?”
“We can pretend this never happened,” Leo said. He’d had hate sex once. The aftermath had been far more hateful than the sex. “We can leave this office separately and ... resume our professional relationship. I won’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”
“Really?” Madeleine cocked her head. “That’s odd, for a young man.”
Leo flushed. He’d never really been into bragging about his bedroom conquests ... even when he’d been too young and ignorant to understand what bedroom conquest actually meant. The older boys had bragged endlessly about girls they’d slept with – they’d used a very different term – and if they’d done a tenth of the acts they’d sworn blind they’d done, Leo would eat his uniform jacket. And when he grew up a little, he’d learnt that discretion was very much the better half of valour.
“I will respect your decision,” he said, stiffly. The girl had the right to make those choices. Or so his mother had said, as part of a lecture he preferred to forget. “Whatever you choose, I will accept it.”
“Outside, we’re co-workers,” Madeleine said, indicating the hatch. “Inside, that’ll be a very different story.”
Leo nodded, although her tone was odd. She seemed more interested in getting laid than in him personally, as if he was nothing more than a glorified toy. He supposed it was more honest than some of his other relationships, and besides he wanted to get laid too.
“Got it,” he said. “I’d better sneak out now.”
Madeleine giggled. It sounded unnatural, coming from her. “Better put your socks on first.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Why am I not surprised?”
Leo didn’t bother to play dumb. “It just happened.”
“It just happened,” Flower repeated. She made a show of looking around the office. “Your clothes just happened to fall off. Her clothes just happened to fall off too. You just happened to fall into her and she just happened to let you?”
Her lips twitched. “Really?”
Leo couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah. Something like that.”
Flower gave him a long, considering look. “You do realise this is going to turn into a major headache, don’t you?”
She went on before Leo could muster a response. “Gayle was a civilian. So was Ruth. Sun might have been a naval officer, but as a spook she was technically outside your chain of command ... not that you couldn’t have issued her orders, if the shit hit the fan. Commander Madeleine Chevallier, by contrast, is in your chain of command. You’re her superior officer even though you share the same rank. If someone realises you’re sleeping with her, it is going to give them a clear shot at your hull.”
Leo gritted his teeth. “It isn’t uncommon for two officers of the same rank to be sleeping together.”
“We’re not talking about a pair of lieutenants on a fully-manned battleship, where they’re ninth or tenth in the chain of command,” Flower said. “That might be overlooked, if there’s no reason to think one will wind up in command shortly. We’re talking about a commanding officer on a base sleeping with his immediate subordinate, his second in command. That’s going to be a great deal harder to overlook.”
“Madeleine isn’t going to let our new relationship get in the way when she wants to tell me I’m being an idiot,” Leo pointed out. “She made that clear to me.”
“That may be true,” Flower countered. “But first ...”
She leaned forward. “Word will get out. It always does. You’re not in a place your comings and goings will pass unnoticed. The crew will wonder if she can be trusted to represent their concerns to their commanding officer if she’s sleeping with him ... and they’ll be right. How can she?”
Leo winced. The XO was supposed to defend the crew against a tyrannical captain ... not, he remembered with a flicker of dark amusement, that the academy had put it in quite those words. It was rare, almost unknown, for an XO to be promoted to replace his previous captain; normally, he’d be transferred when he received his promotion. He would be considered too close to the crew to command them properly ... Leo wasn’t sure he agreed with that logic, particularly on a smaller ship, but it wasn’t something the navy would change in a hurry. Not that it mattered. He knew Madeleine well enough to be certain she wouldn’t hesitate to tell him if he was stepping well over the line.
“And second, the officers back home, the ones who’ll read your file, won’t know you and they won’t know her,” Flower continued. “Not personally, at least. They’ll judge you by actions that are technically against regulations, regardless of your actual thinking. This could blow a hole in your career. Again. Do you really want to take the risk?”
Leo hesitated, unsure of himself. He liked and respected Madeleine. She was a good officer who really should have been promoted into the command chair, an officer who had been cheated out of a place she’d earned through the actions of someone who wasn’t even from the same fucking world. Sun had screwed Madeleine – and countless others – without ever knowing them. And ... he was honest enough to admit, at least to himself, that the sex was great. She’d channelled her frustrations and his into a passionate and yet violent encounter. His manhood twitched at the thought. He wanted to do it again.
“We will be discrete,” he said, glancing at his terminal. Boothroyd and Madeleine were due to arrive shortly. “And ...”
“They’ll be watching both of you,” Flower warned. “If her career gets a boost, they’ll wonder if it happened because she was sleeping with you.”
Leo shook his head. He had little to offer Madeleine when it came to promotion, not when he was only a mere commander himself. His patron was unlikely to take her on, given the political situation, and Leo couldn’t really give her patronage himself. A decade or two down the line ... maybe, if he continued to rise without derailing his career beyond repair, but now ... he felt a sudden flash of hatred and envy, directed at Francis and his wretched family. The bastard was no higher-ranked than Leo himself, yet he could still offer patronage on a scale Leo might never be able to match.
“I doubt it,” he said. “What can I give her?”
His lips twisted, as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Being associated with me is more likely to harm her career than help,” he added. “You know it.”
“You might be surprised,” Flower said. “Your former officers haven’t done badly for themselves.”
Leo shrugged. Very few of his former officers had been chosen by him personally. Reginald had signed off on their transfer to Waterhen, or so Leo assumed, and whatever paperwork had been done had been completed well before he’d been caught in bed with the commandant’s wife. The crew could hardly be blamed for serving under his command – they could hardly be expected to desert or mutiny – and Admiral Blackthrone, to be fair, had probably not held it against them. They’d served under Francis’s command too. If they returned to more regular roles within the navy, their brief period under his command would be nothing more than a footnote in their files. Leo wished them well. They’d been a good crew.
“I hope so,” he said. “And ...”
“You’re not going to be dissuaded,” Flower said. “That’s a shame.”
Leo nodded, although he knew she might well be right. One brief tryst might be overlooked – there was some precedent for brief relationships being ignored – but a long-standing affair was quite another. Common sense suggested he should end it now, blame the whole affair on passion and frustration finding an outlet; he knew, even as he considered possible arguments, that he wouldn’t do it. He scowled as the hatch bleeped, then opened. Why was it that he was a brave man in space, willing to put his life in danger time and time again, and yet a coward when it came to ending a relationship that wasn’t even a day old? Could it even be called a relationship?
Madeleine looked no different from normal as she stepped into the compartment, her hair neatly tied up and her face scrubbed clean. It had been a few hours ... he guessed she’d gone back to her cabin, showered again, and then gone back to her duties as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Her manner was stern, businesslike ... if he hadn’t known what they’d been doing, only a few short hours ago, he would never have believed it. Her uniform was loose and yet ... he bit his lip hard to keep from thinking about the body underneath. She was fit and healthy, muscular without being too muscular ...
“Thank you for coming, Commander,” he said. It was hard to keep his face under control. “I’m afraid it is only basic fare.”
“But with some fresh ingredients,” Madeleine said. Her voice was unchanged. Leo had to admire the act, if indeed it was an act. She seemed utterly unaffected by their brief tryst. “It’ll be better than nothing.”
Leo nodded, allowing himself a moment of relief as Boothroyd joined them, followed by a steward pushing the food trolley. His mouth watered as the steward laid out the meal and departed as silently as he’d arrived. The stew was very basic, prepared in vast quantities by the base’s cooks, but it was so much better than ration bars and mass-produced slop that there was really no contest. Fresh beef and vegetables, cooked up in a pot and served with mashed potatoes and greens ... he made a mental note to check everyone on the base received at least one serving. It wouldn’t be the first time something had slipped through the cracks, when there were so many crews serving so many disparate ships, and it tended to breed resentment. There was so little real food on Morningstar Base that he could hardly blame them.
“I hear you had an eventful trip,” Boothroyd said, once starvation was no longer threatening. “Did you learn anything useful?”
“Nothing new,” Leo said. Morningstar Base didn’t have a proper analysis section, no team of tactical experts trying to decipher the data in real time, and he hadn’t been able to glean anything new from the data he’d studied himself. Everything had been forwarded to Yangtze, where the admiral did have a whole team of analysts under his command, but Leo had no confidence the results would be sent back to him in a hurry. If indeed there were any. His own assessment hadn’t turned up anything he hadn’t already known. “The ships were old and outdated, but refitted by a crack team.”
“Mostly,” Madeleine pointed out. “They left a heavy cruiser with a truly shitty cloak.”
“Probably the result of an engineering cock-up,” Leo said. “If they were trying to get the ship into service quickly enough to add her firepower to the fleet, they might have skipped some of the more intensive tests regular shipbuilders carry out as a matter of course.”
“Or they might have assumed the freighters didn’t carry modern sensors,” Boothroyd said. “Or even that they weren’t going to be escorted at all.”
Leo frowned. The freighters had been largely empty and very few pirates would have considered them a reasonable target. The ships themselves weren’t worth that much, and the crews wouldn’t have brought in a ransom, if their relatives chose to break the law and pay. Better to let them fly home, get reloaded and then try to capture the ships along with their new cargo. But the rebels weren’t pirates. If the ships were captured, they came out ahead; if the ships were destroyed, they still won. No wonder the commodore had insisted on the convoy being escorted. The normal understandings had changed, and it was now a priority target.
“They had to expect something,” Leo mused. “Perhaps they thought we would either miss their arrival or charge them.”
“Or pretend not to see them long enough to recycle the drives and run,” Madeleine offered. “It might have worked.”
Leo mentally reviewed the engagement. It might have worked. Might.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We killed a handful of outdated ships, but ... the rest of their fleet remains intact. What are they doing?”
“Trying to grind us down,” Boothroyd said, bluntly. “I saw it before, back during a long drawn-out conflict neither side could win decisively. The bad guys kept up the pressure, forcing us to fire off our ammunition constantly, while never getting anything like enough sleep ... here, just forcing us to keep up the patrols is draining our strength, putting immense amounts of wear and tear on our ships as well as our crews.”
“And it keeps us from being able to look for their bases,” Leo added. “But surely they know this game cannot go on forever.”
“It’s never easy to beat an insurgency,” Boothroyd said. “The insurgents move through the local population like fish through water. You can’t easily protect the people from the insurgents, and as long as you can’t guarantee their safety, they’ll side with the insurgents in self-defence, because the alternative is being killed. The only real ways to win are to convince the locals you can protect them, which can include teaching them how to protect themselves or relocating them to safer quarters that can be kept under careful control, or destroying the local community in order to save it, which tends to make more enemies down the line.”
“I wonder why,” Madeleine said, with heavy sarcasm.
Boothroyd nodded. “You – we – have the same problem, on an interstellar scale,” he said. “You can’t defend every possible target. The enemy can pick and choose targets weak enough to be destroyed easily, or back off when it’s clear they bit off more than they can chew. They can harass worlds and populations that might otherwise side with you – and, frankly, you haven’t treated them well enough to convince them to take risks on your behalf. Even on Yangtze, there are secessionists who want to leave the republic and go their own way.”
