Shooting the Rift - eARC Read Online Free PDF Page B

her neck, slipping inside her gown; taking the movement for encouragement she probed harder for a moment, until I poured the contents of my glass down the opening I’d made. Carenza yelped, and I found myself wishing I’d asked for more ice.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She broke away, and glared at me. “Have you any idea how much this dress cost?”
    “Defending my honor,” I said, “and I couldn’t give a toss. In that order.”
    Her expression soured a little more. “This hard-to-get routine’s all very cute, Simon, but you’re really starting to push it.”
    “It’s not a routine,” I retorted. “I’m just not interested.” Which wasn’t the most tactful thing I could have said, but, as I’ve already pointed out, subtlety was a long way from being Carenza’s strong point.
    She flushed. Anyone saying no to her, let alone a man, wasn’t something she was used to. “Fine,” she snapped. “It’s your loss.” Then she looked me up and down, in an uncanny echo of her father. “You’re nothing special, anyway. And you never will be.”
    “But you will, I suppose.” Stupid of me to rise to it, but I’d had just about enough of her for one evening. Several months worth of evenings, actually.
    “Damn right. I’m going to be a naval officer. Probably have my own ship by the time I’m thirty.”
    I suddenly knew exactly how she’d felt when I dumped my drink down her back.
    “You’re going to the Academy?” I asked, although when I came to think about it, it wasn’t that much of a surprise. The Devraies were Navy through and through, just like the Forresters, and knowing how Mother must have felt about Tinkie choosing a different path for herself, Alice would have jumped at the chance to rub her nose in it by packing her own daughter off to the fleet at the earliest opportunity.
    “Isn’t that what I just said?” Carenza looked at me scornfully. “If you can’t follow a simple conversation, no wonder you flunked out of Summerhall.”
    “I didn’t flunk,” I said, without thinking, and a calculating look entered Carenza’s eyes. Most of the time she was moderately pretty, if pale skin and too much makeup was your kind of thing, but right then she looked like a war drone deciding which weapon to deploy. I nudged her datasphere with my sneakware, and, sure enough, she was trying to mesh into the house node, looking for correspondence from the college.
    That stuff’s private! I sent, slapping her connection away with a burst of security protocols. Hardly anything in her ‘sphere was protected, and I snagged copies of it all before disengaging: call me a hypocrite if you like, but she started it, and the Forresters have always been big on knowing your enemy.
    “You were expelled, then,” she said, going straight on the attack. She couldn’t have known that for sure, but it was a reasonable deduction, and shifted the focus of the argument away from her attempt to pry; something I’d be equally keen to do in her expensively impractical dance pumps.
    “A baseless slander,” I said, “which, if you repeat to a living soul, I’ll gladly repudiate. Just as soon as I’ve passed copies of these files to your mother.” I kicked the appropriate idents back to her ‘sphere, and Carenza went a couple of shades closer to puce. I actually had no idea how Alice would react to the virtuals of pretty boys kissing one another (among other things), but I was pretty sure Carenza wouldn’t be keen to find out.
    “You wouldn’t dare.”
    I shrugged. “I won’t have to. Will I?”
    “You’re despicable.” Carenza glared plasma at me. “I don’t know what I ever saw in you.”
    “That’s the whole point,” I said. “You never bothered to look past the seat of my pants.” All you saw was a breathing version of this. I pinged her one of the more anodyne virtuals from her collection, which she instantly deleted in a fit of pique. I braced myself for another onslaught,