Yet Leeza intrigued him. She went to bed with Harbin easily enough; she even seemed flattered that the commander of the growing base on Vesta took enough notice of her to bring her to his bed. She was compliant, amiable, and energetic in her lovemaking.
Don’t get involved with her! Harbin warned himself sternly. Yet, as the weeks slipped by in the dull, cramped underground warrens of Vesta, he found himself spending more and more time with her. She could make him forget the past, at least for the duration of a pleasant dinner together. She could make time disappear entirely when they made love. She could even make Harbin laugh.
Still he refused to allow her into his private thoughts. He refused to hope about the future, refused even to think about any future at all except completing this military base on Vesta and following Martin Humphries’s command to hunt down Lars Fuchs and kill him.
But the new orders superseded the old. Grigor told him that Humphries wanted an all-out attack on Astro Corporation ships.
“Forget Fuchs for the moment,” Grigor’s prerecorded message said. “There are bigger plans in the works.”
Harbin knew he was becoming addicted to Leeza when he told her how dissatisfied he was with the new orders.
She lay in bed beside him, her tousled head on his bare shoulder, the only light in the room coming from the glow of starlight from the wallscreen that displayed the camera view of deep space from the surface of Vesta.
“Humphries is preparing to go to war against Astro?” Leeza asked, her voice soft as silk in the starlit darkness.
Knowing he shouldn’t be revealing so much to her, Harbin said merely, “It looks that way.”
“Won’t that be dangerous for you?”
It was difficult to shrug with her head on his shoulder. “I get paid for taking risks.”
She was silent for several heartbeats. Then, “You could get paid much more.”
“Oh? How?”
“Yamagata Corporation would equal your salary from HSS,” she said.
“Yamagata?”
With a slight, mischievous giggle, Leeza added, “And you could still be drawing your pay from Humphries, at the same time.”
He turned toward her, brows knitting. “What are you talking about?”
“Yamagata wants to hire you, Dorik.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I work for them.”
“For Yamagata?”
Her voice became almost impish. “I do the job I was hired to do for Humphries and draw my HSS salary for it. I report on what’s happening here to Yamagata, and they pay me the same amount that HSS does. Isn’t that neat?”
“It’s treason,” Harbin snapped.
She raised herself on one elbow. “Treason? To a corporation? Don’t be silly.”
“It’s not right.”
“Loyalty to a corporation is a one-way street, Dorik. Humphries can fire you whenever he chooses to. There’s nothing wrong with feathering your own nest when you have the opportunity.”
“Why is Yamagata so interested in me?”
“They want to know what Humphries is doing. I’m too low in the organization to give them the whole picture. You’re the source they need.”
Harbin leaned back on his pillow, his thoughts spinning.
“You don’t have to do anything against HSS,” Leeza urged. “All Yamagata wants is information.”
For now, Harbin added silently. Then he smiled in the darkness. She’s just like all the others. A traitor. He almost felt relieved that he didn’t have to build an emotional attachment to her.
SEVEN MONTHS LATER
HUMPHRIES MANSION
“How is she?” Martin Humphries asked, his voice tight with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension.
The holographic image of the obstetrician sitting calmly on a chair in front of Humphries’s desk looked relaxed, unruffled.
“It’s going to take another hour or so, Mr. Humphries,” she said. “Perhaps longer. The baby will arrive when he’s good and ready to enter the world.”
Humphries drummed his fingers on the desktop. First the brat is three weeks premature and now he’s taking his time about being born. “There’s nothing to do but wait,” the doctor warned. “Mrs. Humphries is pretty heavily sedated.”
“Sedated?” Humphries was instantly alarmed. “Why? By whose order? I wanted a natural childbirth. I told you—”
“Sir, she was sedated when your people wheeled her in here.”