Rock Rift, page 5
Maybe he should seduce her for her own safety. While the women of the mines were more than capable of defending themselves, when he’d become foreman, he’d demanded strict policies for internal policing. It was one thing to steal from and plot against their oppressors, but he’d allow no such misbehavior against their own. Still, some of the less disciplined, more violent crew might consider her property of the company, to be dealt with accordingly. If he marked her symbolically as his own, they’d leave her alone.
He gave his head a shake, hard enough to knock his eyeballs off her ass. They hadn’t even gained ownership of Ydro-Down yet; he was no would-be king to claim a consort.
In the comm center doorway, she turned abruptly. “Grey, would you—”
His very undisciplined eyeballs had wandered back to her ass and so he wasn’t able to halt himself as quickly as he might’ve. He had to grab her arms, walking her backward a step, in order to not knock her over with his bulk.
She blinked up at him, the tip of her tongue darting out to wet her lower lip. “Sorry,” she murmured.
His gaze seemed as helplessly locked on her mouth. Like some unseen chunk of magnetic rock dragging a whomper abruptly off course, his attraction to her was a hazard. He needed to stay focused on their rebellion, not on this burgeoning desire.
Despite the cold common sense yelling in his brain, it took all of his considerable strength to loosen his fingers wrapped around her upper arms. And yeah, he’d been right about the unexpected firmness of the muscle there. But he wouldn’t have guessed at the softness of her tawny skin, so soft he knew he must let her go immediately to avoid marring her tender flesh with the heavy calluses on his hands. The ancient miners who’d first sought gold must’ve felt this same obsession to purify something so soft and precious he didn’t want to ever let go.
She didn’t pull away. Tilting her head, she gazed up at him. When she licked her lips again, he swore the phantom caress swept down the midline of his body, wrapping around his shaft, sending a jolt of energy through his thighs and his tightening sac—a dark, dangerous attraction.
“That message,” she said in a husky voice.
What message was she sending? That she wanted him as much as he wanted her?
The ridiculousness of the thought jolted him where nothing else had, blowing open his fingers and letting him put another step of distance between them. “Give me—” He cleared his throat. “Give me your tab.”
She handed over the small data tablet, and the warmth from her hand seemed to linger on the metal. If Arjay were here, they could’ve pulled any info from her tab at the same time he was uploading her message to the station. Gavyn didn’t have that expertise. The best he could do was surreptitiously copy one of the viruses Arjay had left on the main comm to her device. Maybe that would be enough for the engineer to open a window into her communications with the company.
She wandered around the small room while Gavyn sent the message via the line hardwired through the elevator cable up to the station. Her attention elsewhere gave him a chance to transfer the virus without her noticing. Or so he hoped. When he was done, he handed the tab back to her. “So how are your first days at work?”
“Well, I haven’t fallen into any open pits or gotten run over by any whompers. I don’t think I’ve convinced any of your crew that I’m not the enemy, but I suppose it’s a little early for that.” She gave him a winsome smile and a shrug. “I never did find out what happened to the previous intercessor.”
He studied her. “You really want to know?”
She wrinkled her nose. “From some of the mutters, I figured it was either amusing or gruesome, possibly both.”
“Not amusing, certainly not to him. But perhaps ironic. We’d asked for a new whomper boost unit. It wasn’t drawing enough power to adequately recharge the machines, which meant we had to bring them all the way back from the working areas, cutting down on production time and putting us behind our quotas. He told us there was nothing he could do since our elec-tech wasn’t ‘kind’ to him. One night, he assaulted her, told her she didn’t know anything about boosters. He struck her and then struck the machine. It discharged.” Gavyn lifted one eyebrow. “Apparently the machine had some power after all.”
The new intercessor regarded him gravely. “It wasn’t the electrical technician who killed him?”
Gavyn shrugged. “She stopped his advances, not his heart. Not that he’d been offering that part of his anatomy anyway.”
Yumi inclined her head. “I’ll review all previous requests and see if he ever issued a work order for repairs or replacement of the recharging unit.”
Shielded by his lenses, Gavyn watched as she studiously made notes in her tab. Unable to stop himself, he asked, “How did you end up on Ydro-Down? You seem too… That is, anyone with a choice goes somewhere else.”
For a long moment, he thought she’d ignore him, but then she made some sort of final notation and glanced up at him with shadowed eyes. “I made a mistake on my last assignment. Because of me, a child was injured and traumatized.” She looked down at her tab again, though it was powered down. “I tried to shield her, but it was too late, and I…” Her finger traced an arcane pattern on the dark screen of her tab, and he wondered what she was seeing reflected there. “I failed. I failed the child and my duties both. And so I am here, requisitioning lightbulbs and chargers.”
But he still wasn’t sure if she meant Ydro-Down was her penance or her purgatory. “Do you really think it matters what you ask?”
“As much as anything matters here on the Rim.”
“That wasn’t an answer,” he murmured.
Her gaze shifted past him to the command console that showed the location of the mining crew and the tons of ore they had yet to process to meet their quota that would earn them another meager ration of nutrient slurry. The dark haze of occlusions in her amber eyes seemed thick enough now that he suspected she didn’t see any of it. “We’re trapped here, aren’t we? Not just locked into debt in the belly of a hollow asteroid, but all of us imprisoned between the sorrow of what was lost in the wars and a fear of the void beyond the galactic boundary. We’re stuck holding on to the Rim, and all around us is death, held at bay with only a thin skin of artificial atmosphere and scavenged water.”
The constrained fury in the explosion of words shocked him into saying, “And hope.”
Her head swiveled toward him, and she glared. “What?”
“Hope,” he repeated. “That’s what keeps us alive.”
She tucked her chin down with a grunt of disbelief. “We have to artificially mix the raw elements to breathe, and we recycle our own piss,” she said with savage emphasis. “That isn’t hope. That’s staving off the inevitable.”
He hated that she’d reduced his life to a fragile bubble about to pop. Ydro-Down wasn’t much—and less with every scoop of the whompers—but it was the only home he could really remember.
And it wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go.
He slammed up his goggles to properly glare back at her. “Maybe where you come from there’re other options, but down here we make our own hope even if we gotta 3D print it from radioactive scrap and water it down to mere atoms so everyone can have a taste.”
When she pivoted to square off with him, her eyes glinted with a touch of that tempting gold. “How deep do you need to dig to find it?”
The challenge in her tone pulled him up short. He was supposed to be a simple miner, staring down a lifetime of indentured servitude, likely to die in the dark. He shouldn’t even dream of hope. He gave her a thin smile. “I suppose it’d be radioactive too.”
She snorted. “I’ll check the latest commodities report, but I’m fairly certain there’s no market for hope. Definitely no return on investment.”
“It’s all about risk and reward,” he needled, even knowing he shouldn’t respond.
But that brightness in her eyes was something like enjoyment, and to his surprise he felt the same way.
It must’ve hit her at that same moment, because she glanced away. “I should get back to my review of all unresolved and potential service requests. I’m trying to rank them by importance.”
“Maybe I can help with that.” He wasn’t just saying that because of Arjay’s sly suggestion reverberating in his brain—and pants. All the resources they could get before cutting contact with the company would be welcome. Not that QueCorp would ever pay them everything they were owed, but any bit could tide them over while they became self-sustaining.
She slanted a glance at him. “I’m sure you have more important things to do. Like digging.”
Ah, a reminder of exactly what she, as company representative, thought he was good for. As if he needed the prod. Protective disdain settled over him like a skin of ice. “Let me know if Scraff responds to any of your suggestions,” he said in a tight voice. “I can’t wait to hear everything you win from them.”
The operative words, of course, being can’t wait. They had to keep the transport ship docked at the station until they could take control. But it wouldn’t be long before the overseer realized that the slowdown of ore production was deliberate. The intercessor’s company-issued pistol would go a long way toward overpowering the lackadaisical but well-armed guards that were garrisoned in their own pod connected to the outpost buildings. They rarely interacted with the miners directly, and Gavyn had cracked down on complaints from and fights between the miners for the last turn in order to encourage complacency in their overseers on site. But one sweep of their pulse rifles could take out half his crew and a good chunk of the tunnels. Arjay had spent the last half turn slowly drawing down the energy on their crowd-dispersion cannons; if that were discovered prematurely, they could always blame the power drag affecting the outpost as a whole. To gain access to the cannon controls, Arjay had cultivated a clandestine relationship with one of the guards. He’d “accidentally” revealed to the guard that Tillerson kept an illicit still refining the nutrient slurry into an alky the engineer slyly called sunshine. “Much stronger than moonshine,” he liked to say.
In return for sunshine and sex, the guard looked the other way when they smuggled in some components that they couldn’t 3D print. Arjay said the pieces were for creating a short-range antenna to steal the pornography channel from the station’s entertainment system, which he gladly shared with the guards. The extra components of the antenna did as he’d said, but it also sent a looping uplink to the station in place of the actual security feeds that might have captured proof of their nascent revolt.
The guards would likely be the first victims of their insurgency, and Gavyn might’ve felt at least a moment of pity for them. They were not much better treated than the miners, though their pay scale was slightly higher. But when Arjay had demanded a spot on the team that would breach the security pod and neutralize them, the look in his eyes had withered Gavyn’s remorse.
He tried to pull the engineer off his self-assigned role as harlot spy, but Arjay had vehemently objected.
“I’ll see it through. To the end.” As if suddenly aware of the nihilism in his voice that played at odds with his usual demeanor, he’d flashed a grin. “Besides, this way I get all the sunshine I need.”
They all needed more sunshine, plus fresh air and clean water and more food. And freedom. The Oblivion Wars had made all of that impossible, but maybe one more small, private war would win it back for their little world.
Chapter 5
Grey’s brooding set off Yumi’s internal alarms. Back in the Order’s training compound, such ominous silence usually meant she was about to receive punishment for some infraction. Or another failing like when she’d rescued that one terrified child caught in her crossfire. She’d still terminated her target, but her handler had been furious at the break in her conditioning.
She pushed aside the memories—freeze it, why were her mission meds failing her so badly?—and focused on what she needed from Miner 488.
She needed him to trust her, or at least ignore her, so she could move around the outpost freely. Grey didn’t seem the sort to ignore what was going on directly under his nose, so she’d have to win him over. He’d tensed when she brought up his digging, although that should’ve been an easy opportunity for him to share his expertise with her—and reveal useful secrets, hopefully. But if he didn’t want to talk about work, she’d have to find some other topic of interest to engage in.
And of course there was always the stultifying, stupefying effects of sex.
She studied him as he fiddled with the comm board. Her handlers had noted that her skills at seduction were imperfect at best. Blunting all of her emotions made it hard for her to respond properly to the cues and responses of even a simple physical relationship. But she’d gotten through that portion of her training with adequate marks. Besides, there were plenty of other ways to kill.
An image flashed through her brain of him naked. The image was…not unpleasant.
Then, just as quickly, the thought of his naked flesh streaked with blood and viscera, burned almost beyond recognition, made her recoil.
His gaze snapped to hers, as if he felt the change in her energy. Yes, she should forget right now the option of sneaking under his attention. “Did you need something else from me?” he asked brusquely.
What even was trust? How could a person like her pretend to understand any of the human emotions? She’d lost everything to trauma in an unwinding galaxy where empathy, like starlight, was spread too thin. She’d been uplifted by loving strangers…only to find that they wanted her for the cruelest of tasks. Before her dulling meds, she’d longed for a way to not feel.
And yet here she was.
“You hate me for working for the company,” she said, groping her way as blindly as if all the corridor lights had gone out. “You hate that I’m willing to do anything to try to have a better life.”
He angled his face away. “I work for the company too.”
She nodded. “And I think maybe you hate yourself more than you hate me.”
He snapped around again to face her. “You think you can know everything about someone in a day?”
“Every world spins at a different speed,” she pointed out. “What does a day matter?”
He huffed out a breath. “If I hate you or myself, it’s only because of what QueCorp makes us do. We don’t have many choices.”
She tilted her head. “And yet it still makes you mad.” She’d had no choice about joining the Candlers, not when she’d been just a starving, homeless child. Did she have the right to be angry? As if her directives would allow such a thing.
“Not having a choice is what makes me angry,” he said through gritted teeth. As soon as the words emerged, he seemed to regret them. He gave his close-shorn head a hard shake and took a step away from her. “The universe doesn’t care about anyone’s problems, right?”
“I care,” she murmured. “That’s why I’m here.”
“I guess we’ll see if the company cares that you care.”
He seemed to be getting ready to push her away, and she struggled for another way to connect. “Actually, at my last posting to the Earth Conservatory, I learned a little bit about hydroponics. With the right lighting, I think you could rig up a small cover for a biri-biri patch.” She shrugged and glanced away from him. “We’d have to salvage some of the seeds from the recovery system before it’s composted or incinerated. But the little seeds are hardy things.”
From her peripheral vision, she knew he was still facing her, and her skin prickled as if a few hundred joules of heat from the decaying atomic structure of the scrap ore were beaming directly at her from his concealed gaze.
In a low voice, he said, “QueCorp doesn’t want us to waste time on gardening.”
“We wouldn’t have to ask Citizen Waller or Overseer Scraff or anyone else. We don’t need anything you don’t already have or can print yourself. We even have the seeds.”
“You’d go digging around in waste reclamation for a few seeds to start a garden?” He crossed his arms over his chest, every muscle in his body hard with defiance.
“I’ve had to do worse things,” she admitted.
As the tight clench of his arms and his closed expression eased, she realized the truth must have rung in her words. Enough truth anyway to crack through that frozen veneer. “So here’s the thing with our hydroponics system,” he said slowly. “We already have all the water we need. There’s enough carbonaceous regolith on the surface that we can break down for dihydrogen monoxide—water. But it’s mineral laden, too hard for the plants we’ve tried to grow.” He grimaced. “Everything is too hard on Ydro-Down.”
She pursed her lips, trying to hold back her elation that she’d broken through to him. “That’s a problem on a lot of the Rim worlds that were always considered suboptimal for human habitation. Until the wars pushed humanity out to the edges anyway. The trick is, you need to prime your closed system with something a little tougher. And more forgiving. There are strains of engineered rice and some greens that will thrive on the mineral-heavy water. And as part of their respiration, they give off cleaner water, so you aren’t drawing down power for intensive reverse osmosis.” She shrugged. “It’ll take a little longer to get sweet berries, but rice and greens make a nice alternative to nutrient sludge every night.”
After a long silence from him where her confidence faltered and she wondered if it would be more expedient to just shoot him now and try to explain to the other miners later what happened, he edged past her to the comm board. His big shoulder brushed hers as he bent down to cue up a schematic.
