For my, uh, nipple. You know.
A sense of amusement lightened his darkness.
I won't hold it against it.
We don't have to do anything.
His lips quirked with his old mischief.
Then again, maybe we do.
Encouraged, I rubbed the muscles of his back in that way he liked. After a while he sighed and slid his hands along my sides. We took it slow, relearning each other after our separation. His ragged emotions were like gravel, and he touched me with a rough urgency, as if to prove he had lost nothing. As we came together, his intensity swept us both, no longer rocky, now instead a fire consuming dry tinder.
Later, I drowsed in his arms, Eldrin on his back with me stretched along his side. My palm rested on his muscled chest. I felt the deep satisfaction I had only ever known with him, even more so because I had so feared he would never come home.
He stirred, moving his large hand over my arm. "It's always like this with you. Like we're… I don't know. Intoxicated with each other."
"Yes," I murmured, drowsy. I tickled his navel. "Beautiful, sexy man."
Fond amusement came from his mind.
Men are handsome, Dehya. Not beautiful.
I thought of telling him how his eyes reminded me of the twilight sky after a glorious sunset, but I knew it would embarrass him.
Eldrin laughed softly.
Probably. But my eyes thank you for the compliment.
He shifted me in his arms.
Think we're still alone?
I think so. Laplace would let me know if anyone had breached its systems.
Stretching, I added,
You said you had an idea about Roca and Eldrinson.
I don't know if it can help.
What is it?
Taquinil is still in psiberspace.
Yes.
I refused to believe otherwise.
Perhaps we can reach him.
I've tried. I may have made contact. I'm not sure.
If we could, perhaps he could help us make a psiberweb.
I grasped at that thread of hope, as much for the opportunity to draw Taquinil back as for the chance it could help us reach Earth.
By himself, he's probably too isolated. But if I could form a specific enough purpose to make my thoughts peak more in psiberspace, it might draw him out.
I considered possibilities.
Perhaps he could help us make links with Earth's webs.
Eldrin ran his hand down my arm.
Saints willing, he will come home.
Yes.
If only. If
only.
* * *
"I don't like it," Jon Casestar said.
He was standing next to the telop control chair where I sat in a Node Room on the battle cruiser. Eldrin stood on my other side, a silent support.
"Jon, this is what I do." I gestured toward the banks of consoles in the room. Operators monitored them, waiting for us to proceed.
"You work in Kyle space," Jon said, intransigent. "Right now Kyle space doesn't exist."
"Of course it exists." I crossed my arms. "I fail to see the point in protecting me from the very thing you all so zealously protect me so I can do."
"You're being deliberately obtuse," he said. "Suppose you phase out again? We can't risk it."
"Everyone says that to me, all the time. 'We can't risk it.' And why?" I thumped my palm on the arm of my control chair. "Because if anything happens to me, you won't have anyone who can do
this.
So let me do my job."
"She's right." The gravelly voice came from behind us.
Eldrin turned with a jerk. Ragnar stood in the entrance of the room, spare and craggy in his black uniform.
"Admiral Bloodmark." Jon nodded, formal and reserved.
"Admiral Casestar." As courteous and correct as Ragnar made his response, he still sounded as if he were poking fun at Jon. He addressed Eldrin in a smooth voice. "You look well this morning, Your Highness. I'm glad you're feeling better today."
Eldrin's expression plainly said,
Go to hell.
But he didn't rise to the bait.
My voice cooled. "Did you want something, Admiral Bloodmark?"
He glanced at me as if taken aback by my unexpected frost. He had his "injured-party" look down to perfection, but I wasn't fooled. I had seen him pull this act with several truly insufferable officers in ISC, and also with broadcasters who criticized the Ruby Dynasty. In those cases, I had enjoyed his style, even if I couldn't say so in public. But when he turned the sharpened edge of his intellect on Eldrin, I wasn't amused.
"Actually, Pharaoh Dyhianna," he said, "I was offering support." His voice was a subtle parody of my own, but also with humor. He had always been a master at the nuances of human tone and under-tone, a talent he had honed in the rough urban landscape of his childhood, parlaying it into personal gain.
I smiled slightly. "Thank you, Admiral. Your support is appreciated."
Jon considered Ragnar, his gray-eyed gaze missing nothing. "You think the Pharaoh should use the telop chair?"
Ragnar joined him at the side of my chair, across from Eldrin. "Her Highness is uniquely qualified to discover what, if anything, remains of the psibernet, and to rebuild it. She is also the one most capable to determine if it is safe to work in psiberspace, and what would make it so if it isn't now."
"And if we lose her?" Jon asked quietly.
"You always run that risk," I said.
Jon shook his head. "These aren't normal times. We don't have normal safeguards."
I leaned forward. "All the more reason for me to investigate the web."
He frowned, then glanced at Ragnar. "And you concur."
Ragnar didn't hesitate. "Yes."
Jon turned to Eldrin. "What do you say?"
Although Eldrin revealed little in his expression, I felt his mood. He feared that instead of recovering Taquinil, he might lose me. He answered with difficulty. "I agree with my wife." Then he spoke to me. "I can anchor you here. If you slip, I'll bring you back."
I touched his hand where it lay on the arm of my chair. Watching us, Ragnar stiffened.
When Jon cracked his knuckles, I felt certain he would refuse. But then he said, "All right, Your Highness. Let's do it."
"Excellent!" I sat up straighter. Finally we were going to act.
He spoke into his wrist comm, and the techs went to work at their consoles. When I activated my chair, its exoskeleton folded around my body, clicking prongs into my neck, spine, wrists, and ankles. Its silvery cage sheathed my body, flickering with lights.
Eldrin walked around my chair to the console on my other side, near the two admirals. Trying to ignore Ragnar, he sat in the command chair of the console, which faced mine at an angle. As he fastened himself into its exoskeleton, the web techs ran tests on the system like a ground crew checking out a spacecraft. Then Eldrin winked at me. When I gave a startled laugh, he grinned.
Ragnar stood on the other side of the console, staring with that brooding gaze of his. Despite his barriers, I picked up his mood. Beneath his sardonic exterior he was actually worried about Eldrin— but he would never admit it, especially after last night. I wished I knew how to smooth the friction between them.
Closing my eyes, I let my mind drift, settling into the receptive state I needed to explore psiberspace. The EI brain of
Havyrl's Valor
rumbled in the background of my thoughts like a great heartbeat. I wondered how Eldrin's brother Havyrl felt about having a battle cruiser named after him. ISC often used Ruby Dynasty names for its big ships. The Pharaoh's Army had one called
Eldrin's Majesty.
It embarrassed Eldrin. He once told me that if they had to use his name, he would have preferred a reference to his prowess as a fighter.
In his youth, Eldrin had been more interested in sword practice than schoolwork. He was very much a son of Lyshriol. During its five thousand years of isolation, the Lyshriol colony had slid back to a more primitive culture, and much of that remained today, seventy-three years after we had rediscovered it. When Eldrin was sixteen, he rode to war with his father and ended up killing several men, one with his bare hands. His people praised his courage, none realizing the experience had scarred him. He became violent at home, fought with men in the village, and trained all day instead of going to school. By Lyshriol standards, he had become a warrior of strength and bravery; by Skolian standards, he had turned into a deadly juvenile delinquent.
Roca and Eldrinson couldn't even agree if he was misbehaving, let alone what to do. But when Eldrin smashed up the school, pulled his sword on his tutor, and fought his own brother, his parents quit arguing. They sent him to a school on the Orbiter, with the hopes that exposure to Skolian culture would help him find balance in the conflicting demands of his life. The school specialized in students with learning disabilities, such as the Lyshriol genetic predisposition to illiteracy that Eldrin had inherited. His inability to read and write well had caused him constant frustration, especially because most of his siblings had no problem learning.
Eldrin and I were married during his first year on the Orbiter. Angry and confused, he rebelled against everything, especially the Assembly. In their inflexible intention to force our marriage, regardless of the cost, they seemed to Eldrin like nightmare authority figures gone berserk.
For a while Eldrin had wanted to take up fencing on the Orbiter, but he couldn't use the standardized swords required in competitions. The Lyshrioli weapons he had trained with were designed for a hand that hinged down the back and had four opposing fingers but no thumb. Most of his siblings had five-fingered hands with a thumb, as did our son, Taquinil. It came from my side of the family. Eldrin had inherited his father's hands.
Then he discovered that his teachers valued his magnificent singing voice. The opposite had been true on Lyshriol, where the culture had survived for thousands of years on the prowess of its warriors rather than the voices of the bards who recorded its history. He had suppressed his interest in singing there, but on the Orbiter he plunged into voice studies. Always fascinated with music and its mathematical beauty, I loved to listen to him practice. It was one of the first times I had seen him truly happy.
I still remembered his puzzlement at how Skolians treated him. He came from a culture with well-defined roles for men and women. Although it descended from a colony established by the matriarchal Ruby Empire, it had changed over its millennia of isolation. Aspects of the matriarchy survived, but they had become subsumed in the male-dominated culture, with the role of warrior shifted from women to men. In contrast, modern Skolia had never lost its origins. The overriding culture was egalitarian, for the most part, but the surviving remnants of its early history were solidly matriarchal, especially among the noble Houses, including a sexist tendency to value and objectify physical beauty in men above all other qualities. It had bewildered Eldrin that people praised his handsome face and well-built body yet never mentioned his martial skills.
But regardless of anything else in the rest of his life, he had been a wonderful father to Taquinil. It had always pleased Eldrin that he, who couldn't even read or write until he was seventeen, had sired such a genius.
My thoughts intensified with the affection stirred by my memories. Now, as an adult, Eldrin had a sophistication that contrasted with the wild, brash innocence of his youth.
Brash innocence?
Picking up the tail end of my thought, Eldrin sent a mental snort.
I was an insufferable, arrogant kid with only one thing on my mind.
No, you weren't.
I smiled
At least not insufferable or arrogant.
He sighed.
Dehya, you see me through a rosy filter.
I do not. I'm very pragmatic.
Logical, yes. But you are, and always have been, a dreamer.
His mood softened.
I hope you never change.
I watched him in his command chair, encased now in an exoskeleton, with a visor ready to lower over his face.
You look like a starfighter pilot.
He gave a mental laugh.
Are you ready to go in?
All set.
Then I thought,
Ship attend.
ATTENDING.
The answer thundered, coming from the EI that controlled the massive brain of the battle cruiser.
Activate psi-gate.
ACTIVATED.
A psicon appeared, an elegant script
