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EMERALD TWILIGHT
By
Celia Ashley
© copyright by Celia Ashley, January 2008
Cover art by Eliza Black, January 2008
ISBN 978-1-60394-124-2
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
The door slid open noiselessly, three triangular sections withdrawing into the wall. Burke Conlan stepped through, ducking slightly out of habit. Unfastened at the collar, his cotton shirt hung open at the throat. A thin track of perspiration darkened the cloth between his shoulder blades. Tan trousers and dark gray boots were spattered with a fine dust. With an eye to the woven rug at his feet, he resisted the urge to stamp his soles clean. A voice spoke briskly into the stillness.
“Sen Conlan, please be seated. Someone will be along momentarily.”
Sen was an informal address used for those with unknown title or who possessed none. The use of it in his own case irritated Burke. He found a chair and sat down, impatiently running his fingers through the black hair curling along the nape of his neck. Flicking his collar into place, he eased back into the cushions, mouth curving into a grim smile. The scar marking his face from cheekbone to jaw line flared in a brief, angered red. He drummed his fingers together between his knees.
Waiting, Burke Conlan studied the etched patterns in the pale walls, his gray eyes disinterested as he listened, in a wariness of long habit, for any sounds which might indicate approach. Caution was a necessity in his line of work. Those who resorted to the hiring of a Drifter were in some manner or another a desperate lot. Then again, so was a Drifter. Or so the tales went.
The impulse sheathed in a detection-proof shield inside his left boot was a small weapon, easily accessible, and could fire a rapid series of pulses that were quite effective at close range. He shifted in his seat, thumbing his chin as he rotated his head in the direction of a narrow door opening opposite the one in which he’d entered. Calmly he leaned forward to rest his right hand over his left knee.
A female perhaps ten or twelve years his senior--it was hard to tell, even with desert dwellers--leaned out, signaling for him to follow. She had the high cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes of a Talian, the combination red and gold hair peculiar to many of their women. This one bore a lavender family mark in her elaborate coif. Burke stretched his long limbs and stood up, all his movements deliberate and designed to keep the woman’s eyes occupied as he palmed the weapon.
He followed her down a barely lighted corridor to another trisected door at the far end, footsteps echoing. The woman’s, he noted, hardly made a sound. She stopped him.
“One moment, Sen Conlan,” she said. “The Revered Arad Sterne is within. When you hand over your weapon, you may go in.”
Burke started. Too late he saw the tiny red light flashing on the thick decorative band surrounding her wrist. Drawing a quick breath through his nostrils, he gave the woman the impulse. She acknowledged his action with a slight nod of her head and a brief smile, almost seductive. He smiled in return.
“I’ll get it back, won’t I?”
“Of course. You may go in now.”
“Thank you.”
She nodded again, deactivated the door lock with her fingers in a sequenced pattern on the grid beside the door, then walked away down a side corridor. Burke watched her go, then turned his attention to the sliding panels and the illumination seeping through the widening cracks. He stepped back, waiting. The corridor filled with light, coloring the pale walls with an orange glow. Burke shielded his eyes, cursing under his breath. The light was keeping him from seeing what lay beyond the threshold. Suddenly, as if the source had been shut down, the light vanished.
Burke blinked, dropping his arm. Inside the open door he caught the movement of a lowering screen, recalling him to the time. The light had been that of Arias setting over the western sea beyond the dunes. It was customary for citizens of Talia to observe its descent.
“Good eventide, Burke Conlan. Sit down. Would you care for a drink?”
Burke stood on the carpet, searching casually in the dimming illumination for the man who had spoken. He found him leaning against a large white table, a tall man, nearly as tall as he, but more broadly built, perhaps a strong man once, now tending toward weight more than muscle beneath his robes. He wore his hair pulled high on top of his head as befitted his office, a silver band encircling the crown. The metal winked as he nodded.
“I am the Revered Arad Sterne,” the man introduced himself, voice still pleasant, conversational. “Is it too dark in here for you? I’ll change the lighting. Better?”
“Yes,” Burke responded stiffly. “Thank you.”
Already the man was putting him on edge. Finding a chair, he sat, studying the Revered openly. The man was wearing the official robe, but he wore it thrown open, revealing a white onesuit underneath, the fabric stretched taut over a stomach paunched with easy living. His fleshy face hinted at a handsomeness that might have been his half a lifetime ago, but the skin was darkened and creased now by the sun, making him look older than Burke suspected he was. The man’s mouth was slack, disdainful, proud, his eyes shrewd and calculating.
Those eyes narrowed as Arad Sterne watched Conlan observing him. “Drink, Conlan?” he asked again with something of a command, a threat, in the repeated offer. It was apparent to Conlan that the man did not care for him, a Drifter. Didn’t know him, didn’t trust him, but he needed him. That was a dangerous combination.
“No, thanks,” said Burke, stretching his long legs and crossing them at the ankle, arms folded loosely across his chest as if they had all the time in the world. “But don’t let me stop you.”
“I won’t.”
Sterne thumped a glass on top of the table, proceeding to pour liquid from a narrow, four-sided decanter. Amber fluid splashed over the rim of the glass onto his hand. Taking a steadying breath, he swiped his fingers across his sleeve, then lifted the glass to sip the beverage before turning to Burke with a cold smile.
“Straight to business, Conlan?”
Burke bared his teeth in an expression equally as cold. He did not know the Revered, although he had heard enough about him in the last day and a half to form an opinion. But even had he not, he had always been one for first impressions and instinct, and both were sending out alarms.
“Why not?” he agreed.
“Fine.” Sterne strode across the floor to a huge desk, lowering himself into the chair behind. He balanced his drink on the very corner as though compelled to take the risk of letting it fall, then folded his hands on the laminate top.
“Your reputation precedes you, Drifter.”
Burke said nothing. That statement was a double-edged sword.
“Cool. Efficient. You perform your jobs discreetly and well, which makes you worth the credit paid you.”
Still Burke said nothing. He watched Sterne spin in his chair, punching a numeric into the screen on the wall behind. A series of monetary figures flashed into view. Sterne ran through them several times before affecting to make up his mind. “There. Does that figure interest you, Conlan? Will that suffice?”
Burke spared a brief glance for the screen before replying. “Depends on the job, Revered, naturally.”
Sterne threw back his head and laughed.
“Cool head. I said that, did I not? But you’re not fooling me. That figure represents a fortune, even to you.”
“Could be so,” Burke admitted conversationally. “Nevertheless, I am not in the habit of discussing my fee until I know the job.”
With an angry expletive, Sterne smacked the control grid, eliminating the picture. “Would you like to know, Sen Conlan,” he murmured, “what I can have done to you? You’re not exactly within Code, are you?”
Burke shrugged.
“You asked me here for a reason,” he countered with a mirroring implication. “What is it?”
Sterne spun in his chair again, bringing another image onto the screen. Raising his eyes to it, Burke sat up with an involuntary hiss through his teeth. Sterne had accessed information on every assignment he had ever worked, for whom, the fee, what the job had entailed. Burke could not begin to imagine how the man had been able to twist this information from the people he had worked for, but there it was.
“What’s all this?” Burke asked, voice controlled.
“Insurance,” Sterne answered. “Never trust a Drifter, isn’t that what they say?”
And never trust a man who hires one, Burke thought, gritting his teeth. He leaned back in his chair again, but he knew the High Official was aware of how much he’d been taken by surprise. “Why not get to the point Sterne?” he said.
“Revered,” Sterne reminded him.
Burke ignored the rebuke with silence. He wasn’t a Talian. He didn’t really care about their politics and Orders. Shifting in his seat, Sterne leaned forward, pulling at his eyebrow with thumb and forefinger. Suddenly the man moved, bringing a new image to the screen, one that took Burke as much by surprise as the list of assignments had done. Sterne’s teeth appeared between his lips in a malicious parody of a smile.
“My bond-wife, Conlan. Look closely at her.”
Abandoning his relaxed posture, Burke sat forward, elbows on his thighs and his hands between his knees as he inspected the image of Arad Sterne’s wife. She was lovely, and although he’d heard she was Talian, he suspected from the image that there was mixed blood. Like many Talian women, the Revered’s wife possessed bi-colored hair, but hers was mostly golden, glossy and hanging in a thick, long braid over one shoulder. The family mark delineating noble lineage was a pale frosty blue. She possessed the Talian’s tawny skin and slanted eyes, but her cheekbones were not quite as uncommonly high. And her eyes, he suspected, were not dark, but might be green. He could not tell. They were quite obviously surrounded by the double growth of lashes that kept out the ever-present desert sand. She was smiling at something she was holding in her hand. He knew he had looked too long at that smile when he began to feel his reaction in the pit of his stomach.
Sterne cleared his throat. “My wife,” he repeated.
“Your wife,” Burke echoed. “What about her?”
“Her name, the name I chose for her in the bonding ceremony when she was a child, is Resa Andrea. Her birth name, which of course she used until the actual ceremony of marriage when she reached age, is Hallandra. Hallandra Irese, of the Ser Irese. You have heard of them?”
Burke shook his head.
“No?”
“No.”
“Do you think she’s pretty, Conlan?”
Burke, who knew when he was being baited, refused to answer. Soon enough Sterne would get to the point. Most likely he wanted his lady followed. Probably suspected her of infidelity. Burke’s eyes strayed back to the screen. He wished he could see what it was in her hand. He wanted to know what was making her smile like that.
Conlan noted that Sterne had seen the shifting of his gaze. The Revered looked again at the image himself with a bland curiosity, as if wondering what it was that drew the other man’s eyes.
“A cold, deceitful woman, my wife. Soon to be my wife no more, if you do your job. I want be rid of her for good. Do you understand what that means?”
“If it means murder, you’ve got the wrong boy, Sterne,” Burke said icily.
Sterne rose from behind the desk with a rough laugh and a placating gesture. “No, no. I’ve toyed with the idea, but only in extreme anger. It makes no sense, no sense at all. No, what I want is an annulment, but as a High Official I cannot obtain one and still retain my position. Except if she commits adultery. The laws here in Talia are very strict concerning that, as you may or may not be aware. Even in Citadel Code ….”
“I know about Citadel Code,” Burke interrupted. “But if you’ll check that little record you have of my past history, you’ll note that prostitution is not my game either.”
“I’m aware of that,” said Sterne. “And that is not what I am suggesting. You don’t have to sleep with my wife, just give testimony to that effect.”
Burke said nothing. A faint flare of red hazed his vision, then faded.
“Sen Conlan,” Sterne began, rising to pace in front of his wife’s portrait, “the deal I wish to make is this, and it will be a bargain well struck, well worth your while. Within the hour, you will give testimony of adultery with information I supply. The transmission of the recording will be delayed and will not coincide with your appearance here.”
“So why give it now?” Burke asked quietly.
“I wouldn’t want you to change your mind once you leave,” said Sterne, pausing to smile at the portrait. “Not only that, but I will arrange for you to meet my wife at an appointed time where you will be, ah, ‘discovered’ to support this testimony, which will appear to be a confession made later on. You do understand, naturally.”
Only too well, Burke thought. “And then you will see that I am also punished for my part in this little affair? Excuse the pun.”
Sterne slammed his fist down on top of the desk. The glass teetered and fell, darkening the weave of the carpet with liquid. “I am making a bargain with you, Conlan! If I release what I know about your past to certain peer authorities you could be paying for the rest of your natural life. As it is, I am asking something very simple of you, for which you will receive a small fortune in payment. Your apprehension will be short-lived, and you will not be punished. You have my word on that.”
Which, Burke thought, is probably worth no more than a bovine’s front tooth. He frowned. In all his career he had never performed any action which he felt was morally wrong. Dangerous, yes, illegal, yes, but not which he felt degraded him as a man.
“Why choose to do it this way? I am aware that the penalty for adultery is more severe here on the Talian Peninsula than anywhere else on Citadel.”
Sterne tossed his head on the verge of laughter. “I know when to be magnanimous, Conlan. I will graciously choose to allow the bitch to return home to her family. Only then can I divorce her. My position will not permit it otherwise. Her family will likely know the truth, of course, but there will be nothing they can do. On the other hand, they might not believe her.” He seemed delighted by the idea. Burke stood up, facing him. Sterne’s eyes were veiled, hooded by their heavy lids.
“You can’t pay me enough, Sterne,” he stated.
“Is that so? Based on what I know of you, I could arrange for your arrest now.” He seemed to be waiting for Conlan’s reaction, his hesitation and eventual agreement, but Burke turned and walked slowly toward the door.
“However,” Arad went on hastily, when it was apparent Burke was not going to tumble to his threat, “I haven’t the time to find another Drifter with a history like yours. That doesn’t mean you have me, Conlan. I’ve got you. Right up against the wall.”
Burke kept walking, only pausing when the door didn’t open. Without moving his dark head, he glanced around for the key pad. Behind him, Sterne poured himself another drink. Glass chattered against glass.
“You’ll strike this bargain or lose your freedom. You couldn’t stand that, could you? Here.”
Despite himself, Burke glanced over his shoulder in time to see Sterne yank open a drawer and remove a small notebook.
“Primitive, but I couldn’t afford to have any of this floating around in data banks. It’s the information you’ll need to make your testimony. Take it. Take it! You haven’t any choice, Drifter. None at all.”
Burke walked back across the room with his hand extended, received the book into it, then tossed it aside onto the desk unopened. “I’m not interested, Sterne.” Pivoting on his heel, he strode back to the door. If he had been able to hold onto his impulse he might have blasted the lock open. Sterne’s next words, however, drove all thought of departure from him.
“What about Lese, Conlan? What about your daughter?”
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