Verwandte Artikel zu Shades of Dark

9780553589658: Shades of Dark
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553589652 ISBN 13: 9780553589658
Verlag: Bantam Dell Publishing Group, Div of Random House, Inc, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Can love alone save the day? Award-winning author Linnea Sinclair returns with a vibrant interstellar thriller of romance and adventure in which two lovers are tested in the crucible of deep space, where there are only…

Before her court-martial, Captain Chasidah “Chaz” Bergren was the pride of the Sixth Fleet. Now she’s a fugitive from the “justice” of a corrupt Empire. Along with her lover, the former monk, mercenary, and telepath Gabriel Ross Sullivan, Chaz hoped to leave the past light-years behind—until the news of her brother Thad’s arrest and upcoming execution for treason. It’s a ploy by Sully’s cousin Hayden Burke to force them out of hiding, and it works.

With a killer targeting human females and a renegade gen lab breeding jukor war machines, Chaz and Sully already had their hands full of treachery, betrayal—not to mention each other. Throw in Chaz’s Imperial ex-husband, Admiral Philip Guthrie, and a Kyi-Ragkiril mentor out to seduce Sully, and not just loyalties but lives are at stake. For when Sully makes a fateful choice, changing their relationship forever, Chaz must also choose—between what duty demands and what her heart tells her she must do.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Winner of the prestigious national book award, the RITA, science fiction romance author Linnea Sinclair has become a name synonymous for high-action, emotionally intense, character-driven novels. Reviewers note that Sinclair s novels have the wow-factor in spades, earning her accolades from both the science fiction and romance communities. A former news reporter and retired private detective, Sinclair resides in Naples, Florida with her husband, Robert Bernadino, and their two thoroughly spoiled cats.

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Chapter One


Third shift and I couldn't sleep. I loved the big wide darkness—it's been said I was born for a stellar helm—but I usually don't love it enough to give up a warm bed and an even warmer man after the normal aggravations of onboard duties. Yet that's exactly what I did, slipping out from under the sheet, away from the heat of Sully's body so I could stand in the crisp recycled air at the back of the Boru Karn's bridge and wonder what felt so terribly, horribly wrong.

Besides the obvious. We were fugitives with a high price on our heads, largely due to the man whose bed I'd just left: Gabriel Ross Sullivan, a rare human Kyi-Ragkiril whose secret telepathic and telekinetic abilities were hated, even feared. However, thanks to the rather large amount of honeylace he'd indulged in earlier, those abilities were dormant at the moment, or I'd not have the luxury of being on his ship's bridge at this hour, unquestioned, watching the starfield spatter elegantly across the forward screens, watching Verno's large furred hands move with surprising grace over the glowing control screens, and listening to the soft beeping and trilling of the ship's systems—sounds that were almost as much a part of me as my own breath, my own heartbeat.

My breath had lately become a little too tight, my heartbeat a little too rapid. So I needed to stand in the shadows of the bridge and I needed to do so without Sully's knowing I was here. And why.

"Are you sure I can't call up some tea, Captain Chasidah?" Verno's voice, like most Takas', was a rumbling growl, guttural without being harsh.

"I'm just a bit restless. It's okay." Those emotions that swirled through me were one of the downsides of being Sully's ky'sara. He sensed all my thoughts and emotions, and could transmit his. It had been almost three months since I'd granted him permission to become so intimately a part of me. It wasn't that I didn't love him. I did, beyond all measure—words he often used to describe his love for me. It just took some getting used to.

A stream of red data on a blue-tinged screen to my left snagged my attention. We were on the outer fringes of an Imperial GA-7's signal—a data relay drone normally not accessible to renegade ships like the Karn, and definitely not at this distance. But this was the Karn, Sully's ghost ship that routinely defied government regulations and just as routinely ignored ship's specs. So I slipped into the vacant seat at communications and executed the grab filter with an ease that even Sully would have been proud of.

Captain Chasidah Bergren. One-time pride of the Sixth Fleet and staunch defender of the Empire, illegally hacking into a GA-7 beacon.

Verno glanced at me, a thin-lipped, knowing grin carving a half-circle in his dark-furred face. "Sully-sir is anxious for those scores in the Baris Cup finals, is he?"

Sully's penchant for gambling was well known among his crew, as were his losses to Ren—something I still hadn't quite figured out. A telepathic Kyi-Ragkiril losing to a blind empath? It made no sense, but that wasn't what puzzled me at the moment. My issue lay much deeper, something I couldn't define except that it was a haunting, disturbing feeling.

Stress, my rational mind informed me. Sully handled the stress his unusual talents put on him by numbing them now and then with a glass or two of honeylace. That same amount would put me flat out on the decking. I always handled stress by doing something quantitative. Like downloading ship advisories, fleet movements, and the latest news.

"Sully gave Ren the Walker Colonies and four points," I told Verno. Being on third shift, he might not have heard Sully's latest betting strategies, expounded upon several hours ago in the galley. It also kept us off the topic of what I was doing here on third shift, while Sully slept alone.

"Ren should have asked me about Walker's team." Verno's voice almost held a purr. His vocation as an Englarian monk—that is, when he wasn't helmsman of the Karn—had done nothing to quash his love of sports, especially zero-G racquetball.

"You want in on the bet?"

"Not me, Captain Chasidah." Verno's sharp chuckle rumbled around the bridge, vibrating loose a few screws, no doubt. "Ren's the gambler in the family."

Intraship trilled. Aubry, I saw from the small icon on the screen before me. A routine update from engineering. Verno answered it and I returned to my pilfering, Verno's gravelly voice and Aubry's higher-pitched one fading to the back of my mind. I shunted three news reports on the first round of the Cup finals to Sully's and Ren's in-boxes, headlines of "Celebrations on Walker" telling me all I needed to know. Sully would not be pleased, yet I could almost hear him intone, "It's not where you start but where you finish." The series wasn't over yet.

Then I snagged a packet of ship movements through Calth and Dafir. In spite of Sully's passion for sport, these were infinitely more interesting and the real reason for my perusal of the data stored in the Imperial drone. We were hunting a ship breeding monsters before those monsters started hunting us.

Humans weren't the only ones threatened. Takas—Verno's people—were being slaughtered in an attempt by two very powerful men—Hayden Burke and Darius Tage—to secretly re-create mutant beasts banned decades ago in the Empire. These beasts were called jukors, a name that was an amalgam of science terms I no longer remembered. But I could never forget their rotting-garbage smell, their strong wings that looked like brittle glass, their razor-clawed talons. Their towering hideousness. Loosely fashioned in the image of mythical soul-stealers, they were developed during the Boundary Wars by Imperial leaders fearful of the intrusive telepathic talents of Stolorth Ragkirils. A jukor's primitive yet structured mind couldn't be controlled by Stolorth Ragkiril methods. It was the one last thing the Empire needed to ensure that Stolorths—like humans, yet in their six-fingered, blue-skinned way, so not like us—could be licensed and controlled.

The fact that there were also human Ragkirils was never even considered—at least not by any expert I'd known at Fleet HQ.

But there were human ones. I'd left one sleeping in my bed.

After three months of searching—and listening and bribing—we'd uncovered a source of information on the illegal gen-lab ship and its whereabouts. That's what brought us here to the Empire's edge, not quite a shipday past the Calth-Dafir border, heading for Narfial Starport.

"I'll tell Marsh to bump up that port grid on the repair schedule."

Aubry's thin tones over intraship broke into my thoughts and made me realize I'd been staring at nothing for several minutes, while information continued to download into the Karn's secured file storage.

"Noted. Will do," Verno answered.

There'd been some brownouts in the port section of a secondary power grid that fed the galley and the recyc system. A fairly routine occurrence on a ship composed of refurbished parts. That's why Verno and Aubry's conversation hadn't fully snagged my attention, though it had registered. Anything about a ship always does.

I waited until Verno closed intraship before glancing over my shoulder at him. "Walker took game one."

The shaggy head jerked toward me. "Ah! Ren will be pleased. But Sully-sir . . ." The rumbling groan that followed was the Taka's version of a theatrical sigh.

I turned back to my data and started the grab-filter's disconnect sequence. A subject tag in a final news feed caught my eye. A name....

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Verlag
Bantam Dell Publishing Group, Div of Random House, Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553589652
ISBN 13 
9780553589658
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
410
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