by Jody Wallace
Briar pressed a hand to her heart. “Oh, but it struck me somewhere deep. The way he searched for her for so long…”
“Not a romance,” he repeated. “Good story, though. And I liked the dancing.”
She risked a glance up at him, and a smile tugged the corners of her lips. “Let’s agree we’ll never discuss the past ten minutes ever again, or any babbling, crazy things I said because I was embarrassed and you are so… Well, it made it worse. Like I shouldn’t sully you.”
“Sully me?” The way she looked right now with the pink cheeks and happy little grin, as if she was almost glad Mighty had exposed her secret, he was definitely getting ideas about sullying her. In this tiny room. That they would be sharing for hours.
But it could wait, and should wait, until this was over. Until the cats and their people were safe and he could focus on the future instead of the immediate crisis. Knowing that Briar had naked fantasies about him was not a crisis.
It was a gift. And he’d unwrap it in due time.
“No, we’re agreeing not to discuss it.” She slowly but firmly placed her hand on his knee and squeezed like a grandparent might do a child. He remembered one of his grandfathers doing the exact same thing. “It’s official.”
“I don’t think you should be embarrassed,” he told her, wondering what she’d do if he covered her hand with his. If he joined their fingers and rubbed his thumb across her soft skin. “It doesn’t make me mad.”
“Officially. Not. Discussing. It.” She squeezed and then patted kind of hard, as if she could flatten the whole knee down into a pancake.
Well. He liked pancakes. And he guessed he liked Briar pretty well, too.
Chapter 8
Briar had never in her life been as mortified as she had when Mighty had announced that she had sexual thoughts about Lincoln. Why had she stupidly rattled off that nonsense about being a pervert who constantly thought about sex to cover for herself? She’d made it so much worse. And then all that talk of sullying him, which, yes, she wanted to do. Real bad.
At least Lincoln had quit talking about romance holos and how she shouldn’t be embarrassed. Instead, they’d researched what little they could about Selectstar on her chrono along with a bunch of other galactic businesses to cover their tracks. Lincoln knew more than expected about how cheaters bilked their victims and how one might whisk away gen ship parts intended to go other places. Had he been involved in schemes in his past? Had he been a criminal, a pirate?
He didn’t seem like one now, and the cats liked him. People could change. No matter how this disaster had shaken her, she was still an excellent judge of character. She’d known Steven was up to something. She’d known Han-Ja wanted to help her. She’d known Lincoln wouldn’t be that upset to discover she had spicy fantasies about him.
That didn’t mean she wanted it out in the open. It put pressure on her to do something about it, and she had about as much time for romance as the Catamaran had for its cryopods.
The Express picked up speed in the Long Mire, the section of the equatorial band where there was little reason for waystations. There was only the one, and it handled a lot of traffic. This geographic zone had the highest average temperatures on Trash Planet, but the marshy, unstable ground made it challenging to build. This was also the newest section of the Express line, replacing an older, longer route around the Mire. The best thing about the Mire was that this was where the mota plant grew. Hence the steady traffic at the single waystation.
Mota might not get exported due to preservation issues, but it was a popular crop on Trash Planet for sure.
Today the Mire was speckled white with hail, giving credence to the hailstorm Mighty claimed had disrupted travel ahead. Briar checked her chrono, but it didn’t predict that the hailer was a dangerous one.
Just dangerous enough that a human wouldn’t want to be out in it. Or a cat.
When the Express halted at the waystation, Lincoln and Briar ventured outside to investigate. The area smelled of swamp rot and sweet smoke, and Briar could see why this was a good place for anonymity. The building that protected passengers from the elements was huge. Bustling. Crowded.
And everyone was stoned.
Good thing Mighty Mighty had skipped out before they arrived here, or he’d never have wanted to leave.
Once the Express deposited and picked up passengers, it increased in speed, busting through the light hail on the tracks. Ice continued to fall, loud enough to hear on the outside of the curved train cars. The Express, like the crawlers built by Tank Union, could withstand all but the worst hailers, and this was hardly the worst. There wasn’t even any lightning, so it was practically a drizzle that added to the gloom of dusk.
They soon reached the boundary of the Mire. If there was a blockage, it wouldn’t have halted just their segment of the Express. A number of trains traveled the global route every day. The clatter of hail on the train increased, turning into a hiss.
“Something’s up ahead,” Lincoln confirmed as she craned around his big body and a bunch of boxes to see out the window. A jagged crack of lighting in the distance spoke of a worse storm that had passed—or was to come. “We’re slowing down.”
Footsteps in the corridor outside the private compartments preceded a rap on a door. A voice spoke, muffled by the walls and the clamor of the hail, then more footsteps and another rap. The person outside eventually reached their door.
Briar opened it before the person knocked. It was a frazzled Express employee in yellow coveralls, an older man with grey hair. “Passengers are to remain in their seats.”
The employee wasn’t in his seat. “You couldn’t announce it over the intercom?” Briar asked.
The employee reached around to rap on the next door. “The hail took it the rest of the way out.”
“The intercom is on the inside of the train. How is that even possible?” The twilight outside revealed a consistent layer of white, nearly blotting out the landscape. But everyone on Trash Planet, everything they did, accounted for the chance of erratic weather. All the train had to do was slow to a crawl or a stop and let the particles roll off its specially designed roof. “The hailer doesn’t even seem that…”
The train’s brakes eked out an ear-splitting squeal as the cars lurched and rattled. The employee yelped and staggered past their open doorway. Screams sounded up and down the car. Before Briar could utter a single curse, Lincoln jumped into her space, wrapped himself around her, and yanked her head against his chest.
The stack of luggage in the opposite seat pitched into them, bouncing off Lincoln, who grunted in pain. The train canted to the right, and the plastene boxes slid off Lincoln into the corridor.
“Oh, crap,” Briar finally managed as the car’s incline mashed them against the interior wall. They’d derailed. “Are you okay?”
“Nothing a few nanobots can’t fix,” Lincoln said in a strained voice. “I hope.”
“Stay seated! Stay seated!” urged the panicky attendant outside. “Everything is fine.”
“I don’t believe him,” Briar said breathlessly. Lincoln had sheltered her in his arms just in time, but the slope of the jacked up car meant he was also wedged against her—and he was heavy. She wriggled around until she could see something besides the racing pulse in his neck, only to find blood trickling down his temple. “You’re hurt.”
“Yeah,” he agreed groggily, before collapsing onto her with his full weight.
“Medic!” Briar yelled at the top of her lungs. All Express trains had one or at least a full kit and a robo-doc. Then again, they were supposed to have functional intercoms, too. “Cabin eighteen!”
Lincoln startled back into consciousness and squinted. “You are damn loud.”
“When I have to be.” She tugged her blue padded sleeve over her hand with her teeth and pressed it against the wound on his head. “How fresh are your bots?”
The wound, a surface tear in his brown skin, started to heal. “Fresh,” he said, “b
ut they can’t do much if it cracked my skull.”
“I don’t think it did.” She pressed gingerly, slipping her fingers free of her sleeve to test if the damage was worse than it looked. She’d had first aid training, like many on Trash Planet. Since hardly anyone could afford nanobots, it just made good sense. “Nothing is shifting or crooked or poking out.”
“Still hurts.” He winced when she squirmed her right arm loose to check the other side of his body, or what she could reach.
She ran her hands across his neck, shoulders, and spine. His coveralls were intact, but they hadn’t protected his poor head. The cut area swelled into a painful bump. “Anything else hurt?”
“Only bruises.” He stared into her eyes, and she paused in her exploration of his body. When his gaze dropped to her lips, she found herself acutely aware of the fact that he knew, thanks to Mighty, that she’d like for him to kiss her. “Look, I’m too heavy, let me…”
He placed his hands on the seat and the door frame and heaved himself off of her. By the tightness of his lips, it must have hurt him to do that, and she resisted the urge to pull him back into her embrace. All things considered, it wasn’t comfortable for either of them munched into the corner of the tiny cabin on a half-sideways train.
“Easy,” she told him when his skin went a little pale around his eyes. “You feel woozy?”
“Bit,” he admitted, angling himself into the other tilted seat, now empty of luggage. He leaned against the wall with a sigh.
This time Briar leaned out of their car and stuck her head into the corridor. The emergency lights flashed, and a couple other doors had slid open, passengers inside peeking out to see what was going on. Her luggage was mostly outside her door, but some had slid further away.
“Medic!” she bellowed again. “Head injury. Make it snappy.”
All the people whipped around to stare at her, and Briar gave them a sweet smile.
“Honey, are you okay?” asked an elderly lady two berths down. “My wife is a medic if we can get her up there. Her legs don’t work too good anymore.”
Another old lady popped her head out beside the first one. “What is wrong, young lady? Are you hurt?”
“No, my friend is,” Briar said. “Do you have a kit?”
“I have the kit!” The older man who’d knocked on everyone’s door came limping down the tilted hallway, holding onto the door handles or grab-straps near the ceiling to keep himself from falling. The angle of the train wasn’t so ferocious that Briar was worried about their safety or the integrity of the reinforced hull, and the corridor was narrow. If you fell, you wouldn’t fall far.
The attendant navigated the hallway and stopped at the women’s berth to help the medic out of her cabin. Her walker wouldn’t balance on the tilted surface, so the employee and the wife supported her until they reached Briar. The medic sat down on one of Briar’s crates with a gusty sigh. Other passengers started to clamber into the corridor, asking questions and checking their chronos.
“Oh, my patient is a big one,” she said, peering into their berth. “Baby boy, you’ll have to come to me. Can you help him?”
A man from another berth—a more agile guy—trotted down the hall, and he and Briar got a lightheaded Lincoln seated on a crate next to the elderly medic, both of them braced against the wall behind them. Medics tended to live long and productive lives on Trash Planet since absolutely everyone valued them and treated them as close to Trash Planet royalty as it got.
The medic checked Lincoln’s vision—clear enough—and his skull—not cracked—and his neurological function—slow, which Briar assured her was normal. She gave him an injection from the kit for the pain and to encourage his nanobots to heal him faster. She used the robo-doc scanner inside the kit to confirm, but Briar suspected she’d already made up her mind.
“Mild concussion,” she surmised. “Don’t let him sleep right away, and once he does sleep, wake him every two. Keep him in bed and resting as long as you can. Reckon a big guy like this won’t like you telling him what to do, so you’ll have to say it twice.”
“She can tell me,” Lincoln said, using a moist towelette from the kit to wash the blood from his scalp. “Might even listen.”
He already looked better. Briar was so glad his skull was intact that she felt a little lightheaded herself. He’d gotten hurt protecting her, caring about her, and that was a first in her life.
“Like that, is it?” the medic’s wife said with a cackle. “You remember when we was like that, Isadore?”
“Remember? You still don’t listen,” Isadore said. “Now who else is hurt?”
“The front two cars didn’t derail like this one, but a lady in the first car is seven months pregnant and she’s real worried about her baby. Can I bring her to you?” the attendant asked. Blood speckled his yellow uniform pants, and Briar wondered where it had come from.
“Please do,” the medic said. “Dearie, I’ll just keep using your luggage as my office, all right?”
“How did you know it was mine?” Briar asked.
The medic smiled, her eyelids crinkling so much her eyes nearly disappeared. “Why, it matches your pretty blue coveralls.”
“I suppose it does.” Briar did like it when things harmonized. Meshed. Made sense. Lincoln with his calmness and his deliberate ways made sense to her, and suddenly she understood why she felt so comfortable with him. Why she’d fantasized about more than his handsome face and body, about more than sex. He harmonized with the world around him and didn’t even know he was doing it.
“And have them turn off these infernal emergency lights,” the wife called to the attendant when he and the agile guy headed toward the front of the cabin car, which was the tail end of this Express segment. “We already know there’s a dang emergency, and it’s giving me eye strain.”
“You two get back in your cabin and try to get comfy,” the medic instructed. “It’s important he rests and doesn’t risk another injury. Good thing he’s got nanobots. That ain’t typical around here.”
“I’m new to Trash Planet,” Lincoln said.
“Baby boy, anybody looking at that pretty face knows that,” the medic said, patting Lincoln’s cheek. Her dark, knotty, capable fingers matched his skin tone, while her wife was nearly as pale as Briar. Pale skin was less common on Trash Planet than dark skin, but that wasn’t one of the things that got you judged. More like, what union you were in and whether people could depend on you to do your job. “Guess she snatched you up as soon as you landed, huh?”
“He looks like Trevor,” Isadore’s wife said. “That’s our son. But he’s a right asshole.”
“Lincoln’s not an asshole,” Briar assured them. “Thank you so much for your help. Can I pay you?”
“No, you just take care of your softie.” The medic clicked some settings on the robo-doc, running it through a test sequence. Lincoln huffed at her latest nickname for him but didn’t argue. “And some day you help somebody who needs it, too.”
If Briar had her way, she and Lincoln would be helping thousands of somebodies in two days, and this train wreck threatened to erase their planning period. She’d wait and see how efficient the Express employees were before calling anyone for a ride, though.
So far, not bad. Case in point, the yellow-clad attendant and his helper were already returning with the pregnant lady, so Briar gathered up the luggage that wasn’t needed as chairs and stuffed it back into their berth before she and Lincoln, too, got out of the way.
“I can’t believe this happened when we need to get to the factory so badly,” she told Lincoln after fussing over him and folding up her overcoat for him to use as a pillow. “Express trains don’t derail that often.”
Their windows were on the high side of the train, facing upward into the near-dark sky. Hail particles—small ones, which meant this storm was almost over—began to build up in the concave pocket.
“What happens when one does?” Lincoln asked.
“You get o
n another train,” she said. “I don’t know why we couldn’t stop in time if they knew it was coming. I guess it’s worse than we realized.”
“Do you ever hitch a ride in some other kind of ground transpo?” he asked. “Like a crawler?”
She couldn’t get situated in the angled, hard seat, her butt stuffed into the crack between the bench and the wall. A not-so-flat surface made for a not-so-comfortable chair. “Why do you ask?”
“There’s a bunch of ground crawlers out there. You can tell by the lights. Saw it before I sat down.”
“Crawlers? They’d have to be from Tank Union,” she said, startled. She climbed higher in the seat, grabbing the strap to peer out the window toward the front of the train. Lights illuminated both the track and the cars. The two cars in front of them were upright, but ahead were more segments that had completely derailed due to the ice. And in front of that, rumbling from the direction of Green Port, was a line of sturdy, flat ground crawlers, headlamps and spotlights blazing, probably from the Greep Garage. A rescue unit.
Uh-oh. She knew a lot of people at the Greep Garage. They would no doubt have heard about her departure from Tank Union by now, in all its gory details. Was there any way between now and when they were rescued that she could don a disguise and become someone else entirely?
All she and Lincoln wanted was to get back to Su’s factory and figure out how to stop Steven Wat from stealing the Catamaran’s future…by stealing it first. Now they were stuck in an icy swamp waiting on her former coworkers to save them. To make matters worse, Greep Garage was one of Steven’s sites, which meant their efficiency was forty percent lower than the revised corporate standard.
They might be better off trying to save themselves.
Chapter 9
Lincoln might not be the kind of man who’d led teams or made important decisions, but he hadn’t been the kind of man who’d needed to be rescued, either. The wait for Tank Union to clear the tracks and unload all the passengers gnawed at him worse than the nagging headache.