In official reports, it had been described as a Syndicate victory.
The first drink didn’t douse the fires in his memories. He went back to the bar for a second. That was better. But recollections of old battles and dead friends still kept crowding in to destroy the tranquillity he sought, and that undefined sense of discontent with events at Taroa still troubled him, so Drakon got a third. He rarely did this, rarely drank so much, but that night he understood Gaiene better than usual. Even thinking about that new battleship, which might be a year away from being completed and operational, didn’t help. If he couldn’t find temporary tranquillity tonight, temporary oblivion would have to do.
He was well into the third large drink when the door alarm sounded. Nobody could have gotten to that door without passing a lot of sentry posts, so Drakon called out “open” and watched the locks release and the portal swing wide.
Morgan walked in like a panther fresh from a kill. The light from the fire glimmered on her black skin suit as the door swung shut again. Instead of being absorbed by the dull fabric, the firelight seemed to pick out every curve visible under the tight garment. “Hey, boss.” She looked around with a comically puzzled expression. “I expected to see lots of ravaged women lying around here.”
Drakon made a face. “That’s not my style, Morgan.”
“General, I know you like women.”
“I do. But I don’t force women. Never have. Never will. That’s for weaklings and cowards.” He finished the third drink in a single swallow while the little monkey in the back of his male mind made excited noises as it watched Morgan move a few steps closer with lethal grace.
“You could hire a woman. Or two or three,” Morgan suggested with a sly smile. “Malin could get them for you. That man is a born pimp if I ever saw one.”
“I don’t need to hire women,” Drakon said with some heat.
“Of course you don’t. You can have any woman you want. They’d come to you willingly. Because you’re a winner, General.” Morgan had stopped a few feet from him, smiling down at Drakon where he sat. “And if you listen to those who want you to win, you can do anything.”
Drakon tried to silence the jabbering alcohol-fueled monkey that was bouncing around so wildly in his head that he couldn’t focus on the warnings his common sense seemed to be trying to get across. “Sure. Look. I’m tired and stressed. Why don’t you—”
“I know you’re stressed. How long has it been, General? I know men. I know how you get. A man needs certain things, and the bigger the man, the more he needs.” Her smile had widened and taken on a quality that the monkey really, really liked. “You need a strong woman. A woman as strong as you are.”
“Morgan—” Drakon began, then the thought of whatever he was going to say vanished from his mind as Morgan reached up and started unsealing her skin suit.
She ran the seal open from shoulder to thigh with one long, languorous motion, then slowly peeled off the suit. The firelight shimmered on her body, Morgan’s eyes glinting with a muted red glow in the reflected light of the flames. “Let’s celebrate your victory,” she said.
He tried to say no, but the drinks had given the monkey enough power to silence any other voices in his head. And the monkey wanted her more than anything. Morgan pounced across the remaining distance between them, tearing at his clothes, and he could see nothing, know nothing, want nothing but the feel of her.
When he awoke the next morning she was gone, leading to a very brief flash of hope that the whole thing had been an exceptionally vivid, detailed, and extended dream. But then he spotted the torn sheets, felt some bruises and scratches that hadn’t been there the night before, and realized that he never could have imagined some of the things Morgan had done with him.
It wasn’t the hangover that made him punch the wall hard enough to splinter the fine wood paneling.
Drakon did not want to reenter the former CEO’s bedroom suite once he had cleaned up and dressed. The office next to that set of rooms, though, had an impressive set of security equipment and would do fine for any work he had to accomplish. And there was definitely something that he had to do. “Colonel Morgan, I need to speak with you privately.”
She arrived a few minutes later, outwardly acting normally. Normally for Morgan, that was. But he probably wasn’t imagining the ghost of a smile that kept appearing whenever she looked at him. “Yes, General?”
He stayed as unbending as he could manage. “I wanted to ensure that you understood that the events of last night would not be repeated.”
“Last night?” Morgan did smile openly this time. “Wasn’t it worth repeating?”
He hoped his reaction hadn’t shown. I’ve never had a night like that, and I want it again, and again, but I won’t. “You know how I feel about sleeping with subordinates. I’m disappointed that you didn’t respect that.”
She looked puzzled. “Did I force you?”
“No.” Arguing that she took advantage of his being drunk would sound silly as well as weak. “I made a mistake. It won’t happen again.”
“That’s your decision, General.”
“Do you mind telling me what you hoped to accomplish?”
Morgan grinned once more. “I think it was pretty obvious what I was trying to accomplish last night. And I succeeded. More than once.”
Memories of that night warred with his desire to remain angry. “And that was it? That was all you were after?”
“Oh… yeah.” Morgan’s smile changed, and her voice grew serious. “General Drakon, everything I do is in your best interests.”
“Then respect my wishes. I won’t speak of this again.”
“I like a man who doesn’t boast about his conquests.” Morgan pretended to flinch at Drakon’s expression. “I understand, General. One-night stand. It’s over.”
“That’s all.”
Several minutes after Morgan left, Malin arrived. Was it just his imagination, or did Malin seem more formal than usual? Drakon had no illusions that no one else was aware that Morgan had spent a good, long time in his private quarters. Few besides Malin would fault him for that, and for some reason, that aggravated him even more. “What?” he asked Malin.
Malin paused at Drakon’s tone of voice. “I have an update on the ‘wounded’ that Colonel Gaiene sent up to the orbital docks, General.”
“Oh.” The world went on, despite his own failures and discomfort. “Have they completed interrogating and screening them?”
“Yes, General. Full-scale interrogation, and none displayed signs of having been trained to mislead that.” Malin checked his reader. “Of the eighty-seven who surrendered to Colonel Gaiene’s brigade, six are confirmed as having actively participated in atrocities against citizens. Nineteen more witnessed such atrocities but did not participate themselves. The remainder belonged to subunits whose commanding officers evaded orders to carry out atrocities against Syndicate citizens. They neither witnessed nor participated in such actions.”
Drakon sat back, trying to focus on those numbers. “Did any of those subunit commanding officers survive and surrender to us?”
“Two, General. One executive and one subexecutive are among the eighty-seven.”
“Offer them comparable positions in our forces. I want the nineteen soldiers who witnessed atrocities rescreened. Make sure they didn’t participate in doing things like that to our own citizens because they wouldn’t, not because they just weren’t personally asked. I want to know what soldiers in my command will do instead of wondering what they’ll do. Offer positions in our forces to the soldiers who didn’t commit or witness atrocities, but spread them around through the brigades, and if they accept, I want their service records altered to indicate they belonged to one of the units the Free Taroans said didn’t commit atrocities.” He didn’t bother adding that such alterations should be undetectable. Malin was very good at such things and would make sure that no one could tell that the service records had been changed.