by Elin Wyn
Stephine assumed that the man made his crew do it, until Kanthi suddenly grabbed Dojan by his shirt and hauled him back upright, hissing, “Knock it off.”
Dojan laughed, and he patted his captain on the back. “One last joke before we say goodbye.”
Kanthi scowled and shook his head. “We’ll see each other soon,” he said gruffly, giving Stephine a small nod before he turned back to where Taryn was.
“He’s a good man,” Dojan said. “It’s nice to see him happy.”
“That was him happy?” Stephine muttered, watching the Eiztar touch her captain on the arm. Taryn smiled and turned into him, taking his hand.
“Your captain makes him happy,” he shrugged.
“So about this pod,” Stephine said quickly, glancing around the junkyard. “Are you parked nearby?”
“If sixty clicks is nearby. We’re taking yours to get back to ours,” Dojan said with a yawn, stretching his arms until something popped. “They’re back at the captain’s camp. We’ll fly to them, while he and your captain walk. It’ll give the Thagzars two trails to chase right out of the gate. Well, before we all split up and give them five.”
Stephine understood the plan, she really did – if evading the Eiztar’s foe on their own planet was the name of the game, then they’d have to be clever. But that still didn’t change the fact that the pods from her ship were only big enough for one.
“Verdomme,” she cursed, glancing at the four pods all chained up in a row. Then, to Dojan, she said, “There isn’t room.” There was only one seat in each pod, and a cramped amount of leg room that hadn’t saved even her knees from banging into the opposite wall.
“What? No,” Dojan grinned. His stride was confident as he stepped past her to join the crewmates already standing near the pods, no doubt waiting on Lyra, the ship’s medic, to finish checking everyone over one last time.
As Stephine caught up to Dojan just as he stopped to peer into one of the pods, she smirked at the way that his arrogant smile faltered.
“Still think it’s big enough?” she asked.
Dojan glanced down at her before looking back into the pod again. Laughing softly to himself, he patted his thighs. “Just think of me as extra cushioning while you steer,” he grinned.
Stephine scoffed. “While I steer?”
At that, Dojan frowned. “I’m not a pilot. Plus, it’s your spaceship. Don’t you—”
A laugh cut him off. “Don’t let her fool you,” Taryn rolled her eyes, coming up to stand beside Stephine. “She’s the third best pilot we’ve got, after our actual pilot, and then me. Willovitch is our engineer, our officer of sciences, and she can control anything with a motherboard.”
“You flatter me, captain,” Stephine said dryly. Taryn just placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Be safe, out there,” she told her. When Stephine only nodded, Taryn sighed. “I mean it. Work as a team, and don’t do anything rash.”
That made Stephine’s eyebrow twitch. “I haven’t done anything since—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Taryn rolled her eyes, pulling Stephine in for a stiff hug. “Be good, okay?”
“Of course, captain,” Stephine raised her hand in a salute when they pulled apart, and Taryn moved hers in reply.
“All right, men!” Kanthi called, his arms crossed. “We have the toxin, which means we hold the cure. Let’s see about getting it into the hands of our people!” His men roared, and thumped their chests in response. “Now get in those pods.”
“Me first, I suppose,” Dojan smiled, putting his foot up onto the sled. Pushing off with it, he gave himself a boost to step up next to the pod ships.
“Mine’s the second from the right,” Stephine called, walking towards it on the ground beneath him.
“They all look the same,” Dojan observed, following her as he peeked inside the pods that he passed.
“My captain says I just spent almost two days in one of those pods,” Stephine said. “I don’t plan to use a pod that one of my crewmates also lived inside for the past thirty-six hours.”
“Fair enough,” Dojan grinned, stopping at hers. “This one?” he asked.
“That one,” Stephine agreed, glancing at the end where Kanthi was unfastening the chains.
“Oh yeah, I see what you mean,” Dojan said, sticking his head inside. “This one smells like you.”
Stephine bristled on the ground below. “I beg your—”
“I kid, I kid,” Dojan laughed, his hands raised in mock surrender. “But it does seem like a very nice little pod.”
“Emphasis on ‘little,’” Stephine muttered, crouching as she prepared to jump onto the sled.
“Oh, here,” Dojan said, leaning down to extend a hand. “I’ll pull you up.”
Stephine didn’t even spare him a glance before she kicked off from the harsh desert ground and latched onto the sled, lifting herself up the rest of the way. Dojan stood there, still kneeling with his arm out as she stood up, and he nodded to himself with both eyebrows raised.
“Yup, okay,” he said, standing. “Good to know.”
Stephine almost thought about thanking him for the offer, but quickly changed her mind. The last thing she wanted to do was encourage that kind of behavior.
“Wow,” Dojan said, stepping into the circular pod. “It’s even smaller on the inside.”
Stephine looked in and saw what he meant. For scouter ships, pods came outfitted with the bare essentials: one pilot computer in case they were ever deployed and separated from the mothership, and one long bench that could double as a torpor bed or a seat.
As minimalistic as the pods were, Stephine had still seen Jeline and Sherre pouring over maps in the quiet space of a pod enough times to know that two human women could fit snugly onto one of the benches. Alas, Dojan was neither woman nor human, and he took up the seat all by himself.
“Come on,” he invited her over warmly, his legs spread to indicate the tiny bit of couch available between his thighs.
“Verdomme,” Stephine hissed. She walked inside and immediately had to step over one of his legs, and she soon found herself standing directly in front of him. She looked down at where he wanted her to sit and crossed her arms. “Close your legs,” she said stiffly.
“Oh, okay,” he said, and he had to sort of angle himself so that his high knees wouldn’t hit her crotch. Stephine took full advantage of it and sat down on his lap, using his legs like an extra chair.
“This’ll do,” she commented quietly, already reaching for the pilot controls.
“Nice,” Dojan said, and as he shifted underneath her, Stephine realized very quickly that the man’s so-called ‘padding’ was all bone and muscle, making for a rock solid seat that had her ass going numb before she’d even hit the switch to close the pod door.
As it slid into place and the internal lights clicked on, Dojan’s arms fell onto his legs. Stephine stared pointedly at them, feeling more than a little surrounded. “Comfy?” Dojan asked, his breath hot on her exposed neck, and for the first time in a long time she regretted her short haircut.
“Something like that,” she muttered back, her voice loud in the cramped pod.
Dojan chuckled, and she was alarmed to feel his chest vibrating from it at her back. “Don’t worry,” he promised. “Eiztar pods are nothing like this.”
“For someone your size?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder at him. “I should hope not.”
A sudden bang on the outside of their pod had both Dojan and Stephine tensing in their seats, the worry of enemy gunfire putting them on edge. But then Taryn just shouted and said, “You’re good to go!”
“Whoa, exciting,” Dojan laughed, obviously relieved. Stephine just typed in the code and grinned when the pod whirled to life, the three engines igniting one after the other.
“Uh,” Dojan said, his arms hovering uselessly in the air as if he was looking for something.
“What’s wrong?” Stephine asked, and for a moment she worried that he’d
lost his vial of the toxin. She wasn’t very clear on the details, but she knew that it was some sort of virus that targeted women. A bioweapon, from the sound of it.
“Does your pod have any safety straps?” he asked, a touch of anxiety bleeding into his voice.
“What, you mean like a seatbelt?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “The only ones available are meant to secure a single passenger half your size. They won’t be of any use to you.”
“Great,” Dojan said glumly, and he dropped his hands back to his lap. Then, in a happier tone, he asked, “I don’t suppose I could hold onto you…?”
“Don’t even think about it,” Stephine said, deadpan.
“Right, right,” Dojan smirked. “Of course.”
As the third engine hummed and the screen cleared them for takeoff, Stephine hovered her hand over the flight pad and raised her arm, raising the ship itself into the air. “Where’re we going?” she asked, her eyes on the markings indicating the other three pods on the screen. Lyra had never left the medic bay long enough to learn anything on flying, and the last thing she needed was for her to crash into her. “Dojan?”
But he wasn’t paying attention. She could see, just out of the corner of her eye, the man holding his wrist up against his mouth as he muttered the softest of prayers to it.
“East,” Dojan said, finally dropping his arm to point a thumb behind them. Stephine didn’t comment, but set some coordinates in that direction and they took off.
As they flew across the planet and Dojan tapped his fingers on the sides of his legs while he hummed to himself, Stephine worked quietly to keep them from running into the various boulders and tree husks. According to the pod’s computer readings, Peshdushdar had not always been a wasteland, and she wondered if the Thagzars had anything to do with the current state of it.
“Keeping us low to the ground?” Dojan asked, peering around her shoulder to look at the screen.
“Better than putting us up high and making ourselves an easy target,” she said, typing away.
“Ah,” Dojan said, and Stephine wanted to elbow him in the stomach as his hot breath blew into her ear. Luckily for him, the screen had just picked up on five large devices only twenty clicks away, and she slowed the ship to get a better scan of them.
“Oh, that’s it,” Dojan pointed, his finger smudging the screen. “Our four pods that we landed this morning, and the one that Kanthi originally touched down in for the mission.”
“Tell me,” Stephine said slowly, her attention on prepping the pod for landing. “If you’ve got a crew of five, then why did only one man land? Wasn’t finding the toxin supposed to be of the utmost importance to your planet?”
“For all of our home planets, yes,” Dojan agreed. “We’ve been in the search for the toxin for two years, but you have to understand – this was the first time that we actually found an active Thagzar base, and a poorly guarded one, at that.”
When he didn’t say anything else, Stephine glanced at him over her shoulder. “So?”
“So,” he sighed, “The captain more or less forbade us from breaching the planet. He said that he’d go alone to ‘scout ahead’ and ‘check things out,’ maybe even disable some defenses. We only let him do it because he’d promised to call for backup in a day or two. But then he somehow got captured.” Shaking his head, Dojan said, “He wouldn’t admit it, but we all know that he tried to steal the toxin himself.”
“What, is he a glory hoarder?” she asked.
“Captain? Never,” Dojan laughed. “He’s just one man who puts more stock in his men’s lives than he does his own.”
“Funny,” Stephine muttered, remembering how Taryn had ordered them all into the safety of the ship’s escape pods while she’d stayed on the bridge and taken the ship offline, piloting it out of the meteor storm herself. “My captain’s the same way.”
It was with a slow descent that she gradually eased the pod down onto the planet’s surface. They hadn’t been very high above it, but that just made landing it all the more complicated.
As Stephine clicked the release and hopped off of Dojan’s lap and out onto the Peshdushdar soil, Dojan stood up with a stretch and a sigh of relief. “Finally,” he breathed, stepping out of the cramped pod and into the heavy sun.
“What? Was I too heavy for you?” Stephine asked as she ventured forward.
“Nah,” Dojan assured her, stretching. “Just don’t like feeling like a pickled abala.” At her questioning look, he shrugged. “Like a small fish.”
Stephine just turned back around, furrowing her brow at the closest of the black circular ships. It was huge, shining like a rock of polished obsidian under the harsh sunlight. Stepping closer to it, Stephine couldn’t help but blurt out, “That’s an Eiztar pod ship?”
It was twice the size of any pod that she’d ever seen.
“Yep,” Dojan came up to stand beside her, his hands on his hips. “Now do you understand my discomfort in your smaller model?”
“It’s perfectly suitable for one person,” Stephine muttered, crossing her arms.
“True,” he admitted easily, glancing at her. “I did not mean to say that you are not an intimidating size, but our pods are built for two. Tell me,” he said, looking down at her with interest. “Do you fight with the sciences that you were in charge of on your ship?”
That made Stephine crack a smile. “More or less,” she said, striding forward. “I had this case of tools that could hack me into anything.” Kicking a stray blue rock with her shoe, she wondered if the Thagzars had ever seen snow on this planet.
“Is it with you now?” Dojan asked, keeping conversation.
“Gone,” Stephine said, regret making the word taste bitter on her tongue. “Left on the bridge when the captain ordered us into the pods and destroyed with the rest of it.”
“Your captain was very worried when she saw the Thagzars destroying the ship,” Dojan remembered. “I think she panicked that the pods, and all of you, were still on it. But then she saw them carrying you away—”
“I know,” Stephine cut him off. She could still hear Taryn’s voice when she’d yanked her out of the pod and hugged her close – she didn’t need an alien to tell her how terrified her own captain had been. “So,” she said, changing the subject. “How does one open this thing?”
“Ah,” Dojan said, rushing forward. “Here.” He ripped off one of his gloves and placed his palms flat against the side of the ship. Stephine stared at his silver fingernails, short but sharpened like claws, and jumped when the door suddenly hissed open. “There we are,” Dojan said, pulling his hands away.
“Nice,” Stephine said, pretending not to notice the way that he scrambled to cover his hands back up. She purposefully put her back to him and peeked up inside the pod, taking a tentative step onto the small bridge that’d unfolded once the door had slid open properly.
Sure enough, there were two seats split by a thin middle console, and a curved flat screen spanned the large opposite wall. Stephine was surprised by the sheer luxury of it.
“Your military does know that pods are meant for scouting, or escaping, right?” she asked, running her hand over the soft blue material of the chair.
“We don’t really have a military,” Dojan said sheepishly, stepping up the small bridge behind her. When Stephine just stared at him, he coughed out an awkward laugh and explained. “Not one with a lot of rules yet, anyway. We didn’t rebel from the Thagzars all that long ago – I mean, I don’t remember the war, but it happened within the last generation. My father still talks about the thousand Thagzars drowned in Luna’s Bay.”
“Is that why they mixed up a toxin for you? Because you rebelled?” Stephine asked, taking a look at the ship controls. They seemed complicated, but not impossible.
“More or less,” he shrugged. “We were their main slave force for who knows how long. It was only a matter of time before we outnumbered them, six to one. We rose up, and they got trampled.”
“And
now they want you to die,” she guessed, straightening up. She was sure that she could fly the pod in an emergency, at least.
“No,” Dojan said sadly. “Now they want us to suffer.”
Stephine took the left seat, leaving Dojan to take the right and sit at the major controls. As she got comfortable in the plush chair that put her thin pod bench to shame, Dojan flicked a number of switches on and pushed a button on the floor with his foot. With a low buzzing, the pod came to life and lifted them into the air before Dojan had even finished with his control check.
Out of nowhere, a thin slice of leather shot out over Stephine’s lap and clicked into the other end of her chair, cinching her in.
“Automatic seatbelt,” Dojan explained at her cry of outrage. “Safety first,” he said happily. Raising his foot up slightly, he dipped it back down over the button, and the pod flew forward, the screen lighting up as they sped off.
“If you don’t have a military,” Stephine asked, running her hand over the fine leather. “Then how do your people afford all this?”
“Oh, we mostly just took the ships that the Thagzars left behind,” he said simply.
“Left behind?” she repeated. “How did they leave without a ship—”
“All right, the ones that we liberated from their cold, dead hands,” he shrugged. “By the time that the rebellion was over and it was clear that we’d won, there was a lot of stuff just sitting around, up for grabs. Things that we’d never been allowed to look at before, let alone touch.”
Stephine wondered about that – about how they’d been able to learn how to turn the technology on, to fly it. Just how far along had their planet been before the Thagzars had taken over? Had Dojan’s people looked up at the invaders from caves with sticks, likening the snakes to gods?
“Stephine. Stephine.”
She snapped out of her own thoughts to find Dojan staring at her, his face devoid of its usual smile. Stephine silently cursed herself – she’d been doing it again.
“How’d you learn to fly?” she said quickly, avoiding his eyes.
Dojan pursed his lips, as if in thought. Then he cracked a smile and turned back to the screen, flicking a switch as he pressed harder on the button at his feet. “My people had a few years to figure it out before I came along. Plus, most of us can read and speak Thagzar, since it’s littered all over the planet. We were able to translate instructions and practice flying from there.”