Mercenary’s Star: The Gray Death Legion Trilogy, Book Two by William H. Keith

Author:William H. Keith [Keith, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

This far north, Verthandi’s large moon never rose much above the southern horizon. Late in its third quarter, it hung like a ragged-edged orange sickle in an unusually cloudless sky just hours before dawn. The light of Verthandi-Alpha carried only faintly through the window where the man and woman lay in the dark.

The man’s fingers trailed across the woman’s belly, tracing a delicate line from navel to sternum to throat, then circled down again to capture one smooth breast in a lingering caress.

In the darkness, Sue Ellen Klein moaned softly. “Hold me, Vincent,” she whispered. “Just hold me, please…”

He drew her closer into his embrace. “What is it, Sue Ellen?”

“N-nothing.” Her face was wet, the tears glistening by the light of the moon. “You’ve…all of you…have been so good to me.”

“And why not? We’re scarcely the monsters the Lyran Commonwealth makes us out to be.”

“Oh, I know all that. It’s just…oh, Vincent! I killed him!”

He held her tight, his hands exploring the hollows of her back, whispering into her ear until her sobs subsided. When at last she quieted, he said, “Darling, it wasn’t you! You know that. But you’ve got to let go! Jeffrie was killed by that bastard Carlyle…abandoned in a shot-up fighter and left to fry on re-entry. You saved him, Sue Ellen! You kept him from dying a horrible death! Tell me, what if it had been you in the crippled fighter, with your ship melting around you? Wouldn’t he have done the same for you?”

“But it’s all so confusing. I keep having dreams…”

“About Jeffrie?”

“Some. Mostly, though, I am in the fighter, and Carlyle is outside, watching me burn. And Jeffrie is with him, pleading with him, but Carlyle just crosses his arms and laughs. Or I’m all alone, hanging from a rock ledge, and there’s this vast, empty blackness beneath and all around me, and I’m losing my grip…”

She shivered in his arms. “That’s the way it feels when I’m awake, like I’m just clinging to the edge, hanging on…and my fingers are giving way and I’m falling into the dark…and now I’m getting it in my dreams, too.”

“I’ve heard you moaning in your sleep.”

She drew back far enough to place her hand against his chest, to stroke the mat of black hair there. “Vincent, if it wasn’t for you, I think I’d have gone insane. I mean it. I…I couldn’t live with myself for…for a while there. I’m grateful.”

He kissed her lingeringly. “And I love you,” he said, when their lips parted. “You know, I’m glad to just…listen. If there’s anything you want to get off your chest.” He dropped his eyes, and smiled. “Such a lovely chest.”

In reply, she snuggled closer. “I wish I knew some deep, dark military secret I could get off my chest,” she said after a time. “Something I could give to you to help bring Carlyle down for good!”

He stroked her short hair. “I wouldn’t mind that myself. Maybe if we could trap him—you and I—it would lay to rest some of those ghosts for you.

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