There probably wasn’t a square inch of her quarters that wasn’t covered by vid and sound devices.

    Lifting an arm, she draped it across her eyes. She’d thought she might be able to escape once she reached Venus. Right up until she’d realized what their situation was, she’d thought she could appeal to Anka for asylum. Now she realized that he couldn’t afford to offer it even if he wanted to.

    And she couldn’t ask it of him.

    She was just going to have to try to beat Meachum at his game if Anka came to her, she realized. She couldn’t even send him away without creating problems. If she refused to cooperate, Meachum would just have her shipped back home for trial and there was no telling what would happen to the baby.

* * * *

    Stripped to the waist to catch whatever cooling breezes happened along, Anka paused to catch his breath and wipe the sweat from his face with the dangling sleeve of the top of his uniform, staring at the great machines the Earth people had unloaded that were crawling back and forth across the plain where their base would soon sit. The machines were antiquated to his eyes and they belched stinking fumes into the atmosphere that was still too thick for comfort, but he felt a flicker of envy that they had nothing to compare to them. They could’ve used something like that-something to cut the amount of physical labor necessary and the building time.

    Expelling a heavy breath, he scanned the distant horizon a little further until he spied the tiny habitat that temporarily housed the Embassy-where Sybil’s quarters lay. There was activity there, as well. No doubt they had something grand in mind, he thought wryly. The Earth people did love ostentation.

    For all the faults he knew they had, however, a lack of industry didn’t seem to be one of them. They’d set to work with a will from the time they’d landed. Already there were signs of progress well beyond the leveling efforts.

    His thoughts leapt from the construction to Sybil after a moment. He decided he was too tired at the moment, however, to struggle with the tangle. He had to make a decision about her, and soon, but he’d discovered it was easier said than done, especially since it wasn’t merely a personal decision but one that appeared to be everyone’s business.

    He uttered a humorless snort. He’d been too preoccupied most of the day after the festival to pay much attention to what was going on around him. Myune had jolted him out of it when she’d finally managed to waylay him on his way back to his quarters that evening.

    Anger flickered through him at the memory. The only reason her ass wasn’t sitting in the brig even now was due entirely to his realization that his own behavior had left a lot to be desired. He was well aware that he’d snubbed her publicly, but it certainly hadn’t been his intention, and it was only the fact that more people were interested in his personal life than their own that it had been so widely witnessed.

    It if had been anyone else, very likely no one at all would have noticed that he’d already signaled his interest before he abruptly dismissed her to chase Sybil down.

    Regardless, a flirtation during the dance wasn’t a gods damned commitment-not of any kind!-and he was still her commanding officer. He was willing to allow her to express her anger and her disappointment, but striking him was out of bounds, particularly for what amounted to no more than poor judgment and poor manners.

    It was a sign of the times, he feared. Their culture, what was left of it, was crumbling under the stress. It wasn’t that jealousy and fights didn’t occasionally break out between disappointed suitors or slighted females and the object of their interest, but in the times before that was rare. Mating was the joy of life and everyone worked hard to keep it that way. It was one of the main reasons they didn’t live with their lovers but rather their own blood. They toiled beside their blood kin in the day to day stress and boredom of survival. Familiarity and routine had its place there, where they had no one to impress. They preserved a little mystery and a lot of the excitement of their liaisons by endless courtship.

    The disaster on their home world had severely upset the foundations of their culture along with everything else, wiping out most of the family units and making orphans of most of them with no harbor to anchor in. And, just as they’d been left with great gaps in skills, they’d also found a serious imbalance in mating partners. There was no stigmata attached to women in the military. The custom was that the eldest in every family served and quite often the eldest was a daughter. Regardless, only about a quarter of their entire forces had been female and when they’d lost ninety percent of their forces that imbalance had increased not decreased. It was the same with the scientific community, the second largest segment of survivors and the end result was that one of the most important resources they were deficient in was women.

    That being the case, it made Myune’s behavior all the more incomprehensible to him. She was young and beautiful and had endless choices among the men. Why she’d singled him out when he wasn’t even young anymore was beyond him!

    Not that he considered himself old-although he was beginning to feel far older than his solars-but he was five and thirty solars!-nigh old enough to have fathered the spoiled, evil tempered bitch! He’d had a daughter barely five solars younger

    Pain pierced his irritation at the wayward thought but, to his relief, it was a milder pain than he usually felt whenever he inadvertently allowed the past to slip the frantic rein he held on it. The sense of loss followed as it always had but that, too, was more bearable.

    Sucking in a deep breath past the constriction of his chest he turned away from his memories both figuratively and literally to stare at the progress of their current project. The engineers, he saw, were still scratching their heads over the force field. It had been the first order of business when they’d returned from the peace talks-erecting a protective shield. In part it was to protect their future colony from the forces of nature. Mostly, it was to protect their people from the Earth people building a military base within sight of their colony.

    It still wasn’t fucking working properly and he’d begun to wonder if it ever would!

    The soil and water purification units, fortunately, were doing their job, but they were going to have to scale up production by a hundred percent if they were ever going to reach a point of not living on the verge of disaster. In time, nature would take care of purification. Already they’d discovered signs of indigenous plant life. Water had begun to collect on the ground and stay and brought dormant life out to feed, and those simple, primitive organisms were cleansing Venus to make way for more complex life, but they didn’t have the time to spare to wait.

    Processed soil already filled the containers inside the greenhouses they’d built and purified water snaked along the planting beds to nurture the seeds they hoped would flourish-if they’d balanced everything as carefully as they thought they had.

    On that thought, he left the men he’d been working with abruptly and strode to the nearest of the growing houses, moving slowly along the walk between the beds and bending to peer at the dirt for any sign of fresh sprouts. He’d more than half expected to discover that the seeds the Americans had brought with them would either be no good or simply couldn’t be cultivated on Venus. To his relief, he’d discovered he was wrong on both counts. Many of the seeds began to sprout within a couple of days and he discovered as he walked along examining the troughs of dirt that there were new ones today, tiny sprouts with nearly microscopic leaves, but life. Hope and pleasure filled him.