“Why she went to Miko’s bed. She’s remarkably competent to have played Miko the way she did. Of course, he knew she was using him for her own advancement, just as he was using her to sate his rather perverse sexual appetites. I suspect he’d have had her murdered eventually. If he hadn’t, she would have ruined him. Left him trailing in her wake like broken flotsam.”

Talina considered him. “Tough world you folks have back in The Corporation. And I thought quetzals played rough.”

The breeze cooled his naked legs. “Where are my pants?”

“Folded yonder. I had to be able to pull the gotcha spines out. Can’t do that through coveralls. I think I got them all. Just for good measure, I shot you up with an antibiotic along with Dya’s anesthetic to keep the pain at bay. Still, if I’d known the stuff would shut off any good sense you might have had, I’d have considered letting you scream.”

“You don’t like me, do you?”

Again she gave him that intense inspection, the firelight playing on her face. “Yeah, Dek. I like you.” She patted him on the thigh before rising. “And that’s probably not a healthy situation for either one of us.”

“Why not?”

She paused where she’d headed for her aircar, turned, looking back in the firelight. He thought she looked marvelous in the flickering yellow glow. Her raven hair, the slim body in its form-fitting black fabric, the muscular poise and almost feral balance. And those eyes, those marvelous eyes that stared right down to his soul.

He was adrift in his mind now, feeling a euphoria as he asked, “I wonder what it would be like to hold you, love you?”

She retrieved something from the aircar, walked back and knelt beside him. As she slipped the needle under the skin of his arm and injected the fluid she said, “Think it through, Dek. I’m a sort of hybrid freak. And you? You’re a Taglioni.”

“That doesn’t . . .” He was falling into gray clouds, eyes closing . . .

“Good night, sweet prince,” he heard her say from some incredible distance.

6

In a very real way, the children were the heart and soul of the Maritime Unit. Michaela had understood it from the very beginning. That Kevina Schwantz had been pregnant had figured into Michaela’s calculus clear back when she’d ordered her people not to participate in the Unreconciled’s attempt to seize Ashanti. Thinking of her people as family, she’d ordered them off Deck Three the moment the insurrection failed. She had directed them to throw their lot in with Captain Galluzzi and the crew.