Page 52 of A Delicate Conquest

Now, he used Zharek’s genetic information to search for a perfectly complementary match.

A one-in-a-billion.

Or more.

As it turned out, Zharek’s odds were worse.

One in about three billion.

Three matches had come up.

One was merely a child—that ruled her out of the equation.

The other was well beyond reproductive age, and she’d already had two male sons—now adults.

That left one.

In the entire Universe, onlyonehuman could activate Zharek’s Mating Fever.

The computer had created a precise match.

Her name wasMarieSimon.

She was thirty-eight revolutions of age.

Where is she?

He asked the machine to find her location on Earth.

Present location not found.

Strange.

He asked the machine to search all known human locationsoutsideEarth.

Present location not found.

Even stranger.

A dark thought entered his mind. What if she was deceased? What if Zharek had zero chance of ever finding his mate?

Is she dead?

No official record of her death can be located.

That was a mild relief. Mavrel thought for a moment, then decided to explore a highly unlikely scenario.

Well, itshouldbe unlikely, but it was Zharek he was dealing with here, and therefore anything was possible.

Before now, has any data relating to her presence ever been detected onboard any of the Darkstar Fleet’s vessels.

TheSylthalmost seemed to hesitate for a moment. The logical part of Mavrel’s brain understood that she was no longer sentient—she was merely the remnants of the consciousness of a ghost that had been imprinted on the fleet’s vast artificial intelligence.

Ever changing, ever evolving.

Controlled once again, now that Lodan the hyper-synchroniser had dealt with her.

But sometimes, heswore…

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