His last relationship had been with Michaela Hailwood. A couple of years back. On Ashanti before she’d turned her attentions to First Officer Turner. Ed and she were really more suited to each other, and in the end, even that hadn’t worked for Michaela. Maritime Unit had been that way. In the few instances when he’d been in a short relationship with one of the women, Kevina, Vik, Casey, or Michaela, they always went back to the “family.”

Dek reached up to rub his eyes. Wondered at the ache deep behind them. When he blinked, a rainbow-like shimmering made a haze at the edges of his vision. He tried to focus on the colors, how they seemed to pulse, only to have his vision splinter as if a thousand stars were falling around him and his body had become weightless. Had to be the drug messing with his senses.

He gritted his teeth, raised himself up to a sitting position on the aircar’s bench so that he could see past the white duraplast sides. Ahead the Wind Mountains blocked the horizon, their tall summits jagged against the sky. The highest peaks were spinning threads of cloud that trailed out with the wind. White patches of snow dotted the slopes up above the four-thousand-meter mark, and contrasted with the mixed grays, blacks, and reds of the up-thrust metamorphic and igneous rock.

Talina was headed straight for Best Pass, the lowest and most direct route to Port Authority.

Her lips on his? Wish it had been a lover’s kiss. She’d given him mouth-to-mouth. Hammered his heart back into beating, had breathed life into his lungs. Too bad he’d been dead at the time. As exotic and alluring as she was, he’d have loved to participate, savor her lips working on his, run his tongue . . . A sudden flood of saliva filled his mouth with a taste that he associated with astringent peppermint. What the hell was in Dya’s drug that it would screw with his sense of taste so?

“Oh, Dek, get real,” he whispered to himself.

But for Talina, at this very moment, his dead body would be swarming with invertebrates as they ate their way through his skin, devoured his muscles and organs. And nothing, no appeal to the heavens that he was a Taglioni, would have saved him. But Talina had come. Not because of his family, but because of him. Who he was as a man.

“That’s a considerable achievement,” he told himself.

“Yesss,” a voice hissed.

What the hell? He blinked, shook his head, trying to clear the sudden ringing in his ears. He caught fragments, as if disjointed voices were trying to form in his hearing.

“God,” he muttered, “I might be glad for the pain-dulling effects of this stuff, but the side effects are sure crazy.”

Talina turned, looked back. “You’re awake. How you feeling?”