Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  “You could say that.” The unguarded, beautiful expression lingered for another breath before fading away behind the mask.

  He stood, plate in hand, and headed over to the sink as well. “You’ve obviously put a lot of time and money into it.” He leaned in to stow his plate right as she reached across to grab the hand towel.

  For a solid two seconds they both froze in place, shoulders touching and faces centimeters apart, too close to even focus on the other. He was suddenly consumed by the thought of how damned hot the air felt for a supposedly climate-controlled room.

  She snatched the towel off its hook and stepped back, and the spell broke. He busied himself with stowing his plate…and slowing a racing pulse.

  As the afternoon faded into evening, she gradually started talking, responding to his casual inquiries in a more conversational tone and even volunteering information from time to time. What she was doing and why, details on the mechanics in the engineering well and other parts of the ship.

  He responded by sharing where appropriate. He talked about what his experiences had and hadn’t taught him about ships, some of the more interesting designs he’d seen and so on. Building rapport with his captor.

  It was late in the evening ship-time when she sank against an undamaged section of the wall and looked at him. Damp strands of hair had glued themselves to flush cheeks; grease had smudged along her neck.

  “Can you cook?”

  He shrugged in careful nonchalance. “I’ve been told I’m not half bad at it, yeah. Why?”

  She climbed to her feet and wiped her hands on by now filthy pants. “I’m going to take a shower. You can cook dinner.”

  “You realize in order to cook I’ll have to touch something.”

  “I grant you a specific, limited exception.”

  “Fair enough. But how do I know how to work the stove, or where the food is?”

  She shot him an odd look as she passed him and climbed up the ladder. “You’re a smart guy, and seeing as you’re apparently already familiar with my kitchen, I assume you’ll figure it out.”

  And he did figure it out, because he was a smart guy…and was already familiar with her kitchen. By the time she came up the stairwell the aroma of steaming vegetables and roasting potatoes filled the cabin.

  He glanced over upon her arrival and nearly dropped the wok mid-toss.

  She wore flimsy little gray shorts and a black tank top. The tiny straps exposed a sculpted collarbone and delicate hollow at the base of her throat. She was toweling dry her hair, which turned out to be quite long when it wasn’t tied up in a ponytail or knot or whatever she did to it. Burgundy locks fell in soft waves to frame those remarkable cheekbones, then down along her neck to tease alabaster shoulders before draping midway down her back. Beneath the shorts slender but toned legs seemed to go on forever.

  He swallowed and promptly gave up on ignoring any and all attractive traits of hers; it was far too much work. It had been some time since a woman had legitimately taken his breath away.

  “Um, stir-fry okay? I wasn’t sure….”

  She smiled, and for yet another moment her expression was genuine and unguarded and easily as beautiful as before. She appeared completely unaware of the effect she was having on him. “Definitely. It smells delicious.”

  He tried to match the tenor of her smile. “Excellent.” The steam started stinging his eyes; he returned his attention to the stove and hurried to make sure the potatoes didn’t burn while mentally berating himself for getting all goo-goo eyed and flustered like he was fourteen.

  He sprinkled pepper on his vegetables. Thanks to the flash freezing they had retained much of their flavor, but Senecan dishes tended toward spicy, and he had acquired the taste. “Caleb.”

  Her fork paused at her lips. “Hmm?”

  “My name. It’s Caleb.” Why was he telling her?

  The corners of her mouth rose a fraction. “Better.”

  That was why. Shit.

  She took a sip of water. “I knew a Samuel in elementary school. He was a bully, tried to beat my friend up.”

  “What happened?”

  “I beat him up instead.”

  “Naturally.”

  She shrugged. “It worked. He left us alone from then on. Caleb what?”

  “Marano.”

  Surprise flashed across her face. “You’re just telling me?”

  Apparently. “I could be lying again.”

  “True. But you’re not.”

  Was it painted in neon letters on his forehead? “No, I’m not. You fancy yourself good at reading people?”

  “Hell, no. I’m terrible at it.” She continued eating, but her motions slowed as her eyes unfocused. “Caleb Marano: Born June 3, 2283, Cavare, Seneca. Father: engineer for the Senecan Civil Development Agency. Mother: freelance industrial architect. Younger sister Isabela, age thirty-two: professor of biochemistry. Parents divorced in 2301. It says you’re an assembly line manager for Terrestrial Avionics—which is a lie, of course.”

  Her gaze sharpened back on him. “And that’s it. There’s no public record of what you’ve spent the last twenty years doing. But there wouldn’t be, would there?”

  “How did you access the information? I assumed your communications were down as well.”

  “They are. There’s an exanet backup in the ship.”

  “The entire exanet?”

  “No, not the entire exanet, don’t be ridiculous. Merely some repositories I find useful.”

  He nodded and speared a potato wedge. “Well, now you know as much about me as I do about you, Alexis Solovy.”

  She studied her glass of water with a startling intensity. “It’s Alex.”

  His voice softened as hers had. “Better.”

  No response followed, and when the silence verged on uncomfortable he ran a hand through his hair. “So, what’s the state of the repairs?”

  She grimaced a little, her body language shifting subtly. “Full power’s restored to the impulse engine, and I’ve replaced all but one of the conduits to the plasma shield. Probably another half-day on the smaller problems before I can turn to the hull itself. I’m going to try to weld it back together. Hopefully sufficient material is left, plus whatever I can scrounge up, to close it.”

  “I can help with that—I mean I’m not bad with a welding torch and a metamat blade.”

  She regarded him with a guarded expression. “We’ll see.” Then she stood, grabbing both their plates and taking them to the sink. “Dinner was very good, thank you.” She glanced over her shoulder. “You can use the shower if you’d like. I’ll clean up.”

  “Thank you. I am feeling a bit ripe at this point.”

  “Just—”

  “I know.” He laughed lightly as he started down the stairs. “Don’t touch anything.”

  She was standing at the data center when he returned. A number of screens floated above the table, bright with graphs and visuals. Actually, he realized, there were no screens, only the data. The table itself must be a conductive medium.

  Her focus on the information displayed, she didn’t notice him. He took advantage of the opportunity and paused at the top of the stairwell to watch her.

  Her right hand reached up and three fingers glided fluidly over one of the graphs. The lines shifted color and position in their wake.

  Now he could see. Starting at her fingertips and running along the inside of her arm, across her shoulder blades and up to the nape of her neck where they disappeared into her hairline, wove a pattern of elaborate, intricate glyphs. They pulsed a vibrant white glow when she touched an image or data point and faded after her fingers lost contact.

  Most people who had extensive glyphs brandished them like a badge of honor, tattooing them in bright glittering colors to declare the extent of their cyberization for all to see. Hers, however, vanished when not in use; until now he had been unaware they existed, and he was a rather observant guy.

  He smiled as he watched her blow u
p a waveform to dominate the space above the table. The glyphs indicated not only was she absorbing the data into her cybernetics, she was likely manipulating it internally and sending it back to the table. Her movements displayed a seamless connection between her and the information she studied. He suspected he was witnessing her in her natural habitat.

  Best for her not to catch him watching though. He cleared his throat and ascended the last stair. She glanced at him but didn’t clear the displays.

  He joined her but kept a respectful distance by leaning against the nearby worktable. “Thank you for the shower. To say it was needed would be a colossal understatement. I, uh, couldn’t do anything about the clothes. I don’t suppose you have any…?”

  She shook her head, a hint of a twinkle in her eyes. Though in fairness it may have simply been the reflected glow of the graphs. “Sorry, no. Haven’t had any boys sleep over recently.”

  “Now that is a tragedy.”

  Somewhat to his surprise, she laughed. “Perhaps, but everything has a price.”

  He wanted to ask what she meant, but that question lay several steps further away in their precariously thawing relationship. Instead he gestured at the table. “What you got?”

  “Full-spectrum scans of the Metis interior, at least as far as my instruments were able to penetrate before…well it wasn’t as far as I’d like. The nebular dust is maddeningly dense, particularly when you consider how old its supernova is. Nonetheless, I picked up some unusual readings.”

  “How so?”

  She flared her palm and one of the graphs zoomed in. It showed a single line exhibiting multiple, regular peaks. “This is the pulsar beam. Firmly in the gamma spectrum, and with a spin of 419 revolutions per second it’s clearly a millisecond pulsar. So question one, where’s its companion?” She worried at her lower lip. “If the companion’s radius is small enough, its signature might be hidden in all this dust or on the other side of the pulsar, but…anyway, so that’s curious.”

  She nudged the graph off to the top right corner and magnified another graph to the center. It overflowed with data, multiple overlapping waveforms of differing widths and colors.

  Two fingers reached into it and pinched the thickest waveform, a line of deep purple. “So this is the gamma synchrotron radiation. It’s by far the strongest reading.” She flicked it off to one side where it shrank into a small square, then pinched a more diffuse but thick line blue in color. “The pulsar wind, gamma bleeding into x-ray.” It landed above the purple square.

  After their removal a pear-colored line dominated the graph. She spared a quick glance at him; he studied the graph with interest and didn’t acknowledge it. “Ionized particles left over from the supernova. This is the glow we see.” A flick and it minimized below.

  The graph was now virtually bare. She pushed away two thin lines of dark and light orange. “Random infrared and microwave readings from whatever.”

  A single, tiny line of dark crimson remained. Thin and semitransparent, it marked a nearly horizontal path across the graph. She crossed her arms over her chest and rested on her back leg. “Then we have this.”

  He kept his tone scrupulously neutral. “Radio emissions I presume?”

  “Tremendously Low Frequency—TLF—technically, but they don’t even have a proper term for a wavelength this long. This wave is propagating at a frequency of 0.04 Hz. Nothing emits at so low a frequency.”

  A soft breath fell from his lips, and the response with it. “Not 0.04 Hz. 0.0419 Hz.”

  Her eyes shot to him and flared a lustrous argent hue. “What?”

  He focused on the graph, difficult though it was. “Can you expand the period shown?” A glance at the top right corner of the spread. “Say to ten hours?”

  “Okay.” Her stare bore into him as her right hand slid along the graph. The crimson line now undulated in long, smooth waves.

  “Now superimpose the pulsar beam on top of this one.”

  “No fucking way.”

  “If you don’t want to it’s fine, I—”

  “I mean no fucking way.” She yanked the pulsar beam graph out of the corner and dropped it in the center. It wasn’t a surprise to him, and he assumed no longer a surprise to her, when the pulse spikes lined up perfectly on the crests of the crimson line.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  She still stared at him instead of the graph. “Explain.”

  “Last month we sent in a prototype, state-of-the-art probe for testing. Among a few other things, it returned this congruence. My government would like to determine what it is.”

  “But you’re not a scientist. Why send in a black ops agent?”

  “Well, the thought was the level of precision strongly suggests it’s artificial, and thus it might be hostile….” He sighed. Shit. “I never said I was a black ops agent.”

  She gave him a wicked grin. “Not until now.”

  She had managed to fit in manipulating him in between sophisticated data analysis. Impressive.

  He brought a hand up to run through his hair, still damp from the shower. “Well played. Anyway, given the concern it might be hostile they were reluctant to send civilian researchers. And while I’m not a scientist, I know my way around spectrum analyses and whatnot better than the average black ops agent.”

  Her gaze had finally returned to the graphs, and his returned to her. “Is this what you’re here for?”

  Her voice was soft, almost whimsical. “Maybe.”

  “Look, you don’t have to tell me, but there’s no reason to hide it.”

  She half-smiled. “Not what I meant. The Nebula caught my eye. I knew there would be something to find…I didn’t necessarily know what it would be.”

  Her expression shifted even in profile. “Did you learn what it was? You know, before you tried to shoot me down.”

  “No. I had only been here a few hours when you blew my ship out the sky.”

  “Right.” She rolled her eyes a little. “I’m sorry about that, by the way. In the same circumstances I’d do it again, but I am sorry.”

  He looked at her askance. “Um, thanks?”

  “Certainly.” The graphs abruptly vanished; the cabin darkened in the absence of the holographic images. “I’d like to get an early start in the morning, so good night.”

  “Good night….” He frowned, taken aback by the sudden shift in tone and quick exit. In a few brief seconds she had waved the lights dim, descended the stairwell and disappeared.

  Then he was alone and unrestrained on the main deck of her ship.

  He noted the previously identified stations, controls and junction points. While the security on them was doubtless more complex than his restraints had been, he suspected he could hack at least some of them.

  But he didn’t need to, and gained nothing by doing so. The repairs weren’t complete; if he tried to fly away now he’d just get himself and her killed. And given their ‘relationship’—if one wished to call it such—was improving, odds were decent once the repairs were complete she would in fact drop him on an independent world and be on her way.

  So instead of hacking her ship he unfolded the cot from the wall, pulled the privacy screen over, took off his shoes and lay down. The cot wasn’t too bad; he’d slept on far worse.

  He laced his hands behind his head and pondered how she had managed to get him to tell her his name, his profession and his mission, all in less than a day.

  It went against one of the mandates of his job: never reveal anything more than is necessary to finish the mission. On the other hand, he was in a compromised position and reliant on her to get out of it. In such a situation exceptions could be made.

  Even so, he should get on his game. Though….

  As long as he didn’t kill her and she didn’t kill him, this would likely end with him making it back to settled space in one piece. Therefore, other than ensuring she felt enough goodwill toward him to not throw him out the airlock—which seeing as she had gone out of her way
to rescue him in the first place, he suspected was a fairly low threshold—he really didn’t need to play her.

  He had been trained to always be looking for an opening, for a weakness he could use to his advantage to cripple the enemy and complete the mission. But she wasn’t an enemy. She wasn’t even a mark.

  So he decided he was marginally comfortable with her knowing a few truths. Which was interesting, seeing as he allowed very few people to know many truths at all about him.

  Special circumstances and all.

  Alex crashed onto her bed, relishing the sensual, almost carnal feel of her head sinking into the silky pillow.

  After several deep, luxurious breaths she glanced up, and promptly scowled. The viewport above the bed often revealed twinkling stars or occasionally a glowing nebula, but at the very least the blurred shimmer of superluminal travel. Tonight it revealed a thick haze of sickly amber dust and little else, serving as a stark reminder she lay stranded on a nasty uncharted planet with a broken ship and a confounding…she didn’t even know what he constituted now.

  Why had she let him see the scans? Worse, why had she explained them to him?

  Because he was putting on a very convincing act of being friendly and nonthreatening? Of course he was convincing. It was his job to convince people he could be trusted until he was ready to kill them or arrest them or dispense whatever justice he fancied upon them.

  Because he was a good cook? While a rather nice surprise, it hardly qualified him for ‘friend’ status.

  Because he was disturbingly good looking, with hair as black as the void between stars which sent her pulse aflutter when it fell across his brow? Because he had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen—the color of the uncut natural sapphires they displayed in geology museums—which sparkled from a thousand facets when he made a teasing remark?

  Yep, that was probably why.

  She groaned and rolled over to bury her face in the pillow. “I’m waxing poetic about a man. Kill me now….”

  In a world of cheap genetic enhancement before and even after birth, handsome men were a dime a dozen. They’d never distracted her or done much of anything in particular for her, at least not from looks alone.