gaian consortium 06 - zhore deception Read Online Free Page A

the room the entire time, looking like the planetary equivalent of a very bad bruise, switched over to a dark human form lying on a gurney.
    No, not human, Trinity realized. Zhore .
    He — and it was a he, despite the long silky black hair that had been arranged to lie neatly on either side of his head — was definitely alien. The skin was black as well, but seemed to gleam faintly with the sort of rainbow reflections you might see on an oil slick. Looking closer, she saw that those reflections came from thousands of tiny scales, much smaller than anything she’d seen on a snake in a zoo. The Zhore male’s nose was long, his chin proud. His hands, lying next to his still body, were also covered with scales, the nails black and flat.
    Alien, but oddly, strangely beautiful. That shimmering skin couldn’t obscure the finely honed planes of his face, just as the shapeless hospital gown someone had put on the corpse couldn’t hide the width of his shoulders, the strong muscles of his legs and arms.
    And staring at him, knowing that he’d died far from his world, from his family, Trinity felt pity stirring in her chest. She knew he was dead, his mind and spirit long gone, but something in her wished she could go to him and hold him, whisper that it was all right and that he would be sent home to sleep in the earth of his home world, rather than kept as a specimen in a lab for all eternity.
    The door to the conference room opened, and a young Asian man probably close to Trinity’s age walked in. Without looking at her, he said to Brant, “Empathy. Compassion. This is risky.”
    Blinking, she glanced from the stranger over to Gabriel. “Excuse me?”
    Without missing a beat, he said, “Trinity, this is Blake Chu. He’s our…well, you could say he’s our resident psychic.”
    What the…. She refocused her attention on Blake. Now that she was looking a little more closely, she realized he was probably a few years older than she, maybe as much as thirty standard. His hair was cut so short it bristled all over his head, and he wore glasses — an affectation, she knew, since everyone these days had corrective surgery to repair minor defects such as myopia.
    Didn’t your mother ever teach you it was rude to stare? he thought at her, and she jumped. She’d never had anyone directly invade her thoughts like that before. She’d always been the one reading other people, not vice versa.
    I don’t know…didn’t yours ever teach you that it was rude to barge into someone else’s brain without permission?
    He grinned, then said aloud, “No, she didn’t. But then, you’re doubly guilty, since you’ve made a career out of reading people’s minds without them knowing it.”
    “I have not — ” she began, then stopped herself. Quarreling with this stranger in front of Brant couldn’t be a good idea.
    Apparently not, since he smiled thinly and said, “Children, behave.” Then his eyes narrowed, and he appeared to study Trinity, his head cocked to one side. “Blake seems to have picked up on something just then. What were you feeling when you looked at that dead Zhore?”
    Her first impulse was to lie, since she guessed that Brant would see any evidence of compassion as a weakness. But with Blake Chu standing there and watching her thoughts, lying was an impossibility. He’d know she was trying to hide something before the words even left her mouth.
    “I felt sorry for him.”
    She’d thought her response would annoy Gabriel, but instead he nodded, appearing pleased. “Excellent.”
    Blake had the opposite reaction. Scowling, he slanted a look up at the handler. “I don’t see how being a weak, romantic fool could possibly be excellent.”
    Weak and romantic she could handle. But fool? Trinity planted her hands on her hips and opened her mouth to speak, but Brant was too fast for her.
    “You’ll have to forgive Blake for his candor. He doesn’t have much of a filter. Which makes him well-suited to some tasks,