by Elin Wyn
“Thought you said you weren’t a pilot,” she muttered.
“I’m not,” Dojan smiled. “But I am a navigator, so I picked up a thing or two from our pilot.”
“You’re the navigator?” Stephine asked dubiously. Even she had trouble reading the maps that Sherre was always pouring over.
“Oh, you wound me!” Dojan laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t get us lost. If you lived on a planet with a thousand oceans that all looked the same, then you’d get good at memorizing the details, too.”
Stephine frowned at him. “What planet did you say you were from again?” she asked.
“The Thagzars called it Sipsocee. It was their word for water,” he said. Then, grinning, he told her, “We renamed it Saros, after the god of moons and dreams.”
“Moons?” she asked.
“Saros has a dozen moons,” Dojan smiled. “And all of them with a name.” As he startled to ramble about their history and orbits, Stephine just barely kept herself from drifting back into her own thoughts.
This was going to be a long trip.
Dojan
His friends could say what they would about the unfriendly looking human, but Dojan quite liked this Stephine of Earth. She was fierce, yet cautious, and, above all, curious. He didn’t miss the way that her eyes kept darting back to the pod’s controls, or the way that her fingers tapped along with the way that his own flicked the controls.
She didn’t miss anything.
Well, except maybe what he was saying.
“Umbra is the brightest,” he explained, moving his foot in time with the ship. He’d seen Stephine control her pod with handheld controls while her feet had remained flat on the floor, and he wondered if it was more convenient. “It’s actually the moon that I was born under. My mother said that the reflection transcended Luna’s Bay and lit up the streets that night, but I guess all parents see stuff like that when their kid is born, huh?”
Stephine just nodded, her brown hair catching the artificial light as the slightest movement of her head sent the soft strands dancing. He wondered if she kept it short for her profession – as an engineer, surely she had to crawl into dingy places to fix her machines. Or, perhaps she did it for appearances sake. She certainly dressed the most gender neutral of all her comrades, even the captain. While the other women wore their uniforms thin and form fitting, Stephine had hers covered in black pants full of pockets that were tucked into her clunky heavy boots. In fact, the most revealing thing about her was the way that her loose flannel shirt seemed to slide around over her bust when she’d walked.
“But what a moon to celebrate every new year under,” he grinned, dropping one hand into his lap as he relaxed. He was feeling good, for being stuck in a pod ship for the unforeseeable future. Well, two days, give or take. “It’s hot, when Umbra’s cycle is upon the water. The fish are plentiful, the days are quick, and the nights are long. It’s perfect.” He smiled just thinking about it – the cool night air, the breeze carrying the smell of salt water.
“It sounds like you lived on the water,” Stephine commented absently, her eyes on the screen.
“Of course,” he said, nodding. “Everyone lives on the water in Saros. The surface is only about twelve percent land, so the first thing that the Thagzars did when they invaded was build up the bay colonies. I mean, that’s what they say, anyway. But maybe our ancestors were already in the middle of construction, and they were the ones to give the Thagzars the idea. Anyway,” Dojan said, shaking his head. “No one lives on the islands. We use them for festivals, or ceremonies.”
“The sea on Earth takes up seventy percent of the planet,” Stephine said, glancing at Dojan’s face. “But we still live on land.”
As she looked away, Dojan found himself wishing that her stare would linger. He hadn’t noticed it until now, but her eyes were the oddest shade of green – a deep color that he’d only ever seen in blades of grass or seasoned leaves. Not that green was an unnatural eye color for his people; his own eyes were green, but they were the common emerald, the shiny shade of a fish scale. Hers were a lively pine, betraying nothing as they looked back.
“Dojan?” she asked.
Fuck, he’d been staring. “Uh,” he said, laughing nervously to fill the silence. “My sister gave me this under the last Umbra moon,” he said awkwardly, pointing to the blue stone on his bracelet.
Stephine glanced at him. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
“Thanks,” Dojan smiled sadly. “It was the last gift I’ll ever receive from her.” When Stephine just gave him a sympathetic face, he shook himself. “You said your planet was called Earth, right? Your eyes reflect it.”
“Oh,” she said, her black eyelashes fluttering as she blinked. “Thanks.”
Beep!
Dojan turned to the screen as the computer screeched a warning, and he was thankful for the sudden interruption.
“What is it?” Stephine asked, leaning forward.
“It’s detecting a ship nearby,” Dojan said, typing away as he frowned. The pods weren’t programmed to sound off just because they were passing another ship.
They only beeped like that when an enemy was closing in.
“Look,” he pointed at the screen. A small red dot was in the right hand corner, approaching fast. “Thagzars.”
“The snake men?” Stephine asked, standing up to lean over the controls with him.
“Yeah, the—” He stopped, staring at her. “Hang on. How did you undo your seatbelt?”
She blinked at him with big, innocent eyes. “Do you not know how?”
“Of course I know,” he said, furrowing his brow. “But how the hell do you?”
“I’m an engineer, remember?” she said, crossing her arms. “You do the math.”
“Ha,” he grinned. It was a weak laugh, but it was the most honest one that he’d had in weeks. “Okay.”
“Should we be worried?” she asked, drawing his attention back to the task at hand.
“Nah,” he said, flicking the sapphire stone on his bracelet. “We’ve got a good luck charm. Besides,” he said, turning back to the screen. “Their ship is about a hundred clicks out, so I wouldn’t worry about that, not unless they decide to throw the warp drive on—”
“Warp drive?” Stephine repeated, concerned. “The snakes have that?”
“Well, yeah,” he said, shrugging. “How do you think we have it?”
“Had it,” Stephine corrected him. “We’re on a pod ship. If they chase us, we’re done.”
Dojan frowned. “No,” he said slowly, watching her face closely. “Our pods have warp.”
It was the most interesting thing that Dojan had ever seen play out across someone’s face. At first, Stephine just frowned – distrustful, disbelieving. But then she seemed to recognize his honesty, and her expression went from muddled to surprised, finally lighting up into excitement. At least, her eyes did. They were surprisingly telling for being so dark.
“This pod,” Stephine said, tapping her finger on the arm of his chair. “Right here, that we’re on, has warp capabilities?”
Dojan bit back a laugh. “Yes.”
“Show me.”
“What?” he asked, wondering if he should be afraid as cold determination hardened her face.
“The warp, show me,” she demanded. “Which button—”
“Nope,” Dojan covered the controls, shaking his head. “Nope, not happening. We aren’t wasting the warp just so you can—”
“So there’s only enough for one warp,” she muttered to herself, her eyes flickering around the controls as if she could dissect it visually. “That’d make sense, given the small power source. But for a boost that big, it’d need additional energy to burn…”
Dojan watched as she silently walked herself in mental circles, her knowing eyes raking over the interior of the pod. When she suddenly stopped, her eyes still, he glanced to where she was looking.
The red dot on the screen was steadily moving towards them.
“They’re getting closer,” Stephine said, watching it warily. “Do they have trackers to their old pods?”
“No, no,” Dojan shook his head, manually zooming in on the Thagzar coordinates. “It’s been decades since the rebellion, and those antiques have long since been retired. No, they aren’t after us…” Cross-checking the Thagzar’s trajectory with their own route, Dojan’s heart sank in his chest as the assumed coordinates for where they would intersect popped up.
It was right where their mothership was.
“Fuck,” he cursed, immediately typing a series of codes into the computer. In the next instant, the emergency system went off and the ship slowed while simultaneously sending out a communication block.
“What’re you doing?” Stephine asked, her eyebrows raised as the sound of static filled the air. Good, that meant it was working.
“Setting up a secure line,” Dojan muttered. “The Thagzars are headed for our ship. They found it, and I’ve got to stop the others from flying straight into their hands.”
“Wait, I thought that we had all agreed to fly in opposite directions,” Stephine frowned. “Why would we all be flying back to the same ship?”
“For supplies,” Dojan said simply, his hands flying over the keyboard as he typed, ‘Stay away from Eiztar-nine. Dangerous snakes.’ It was code, probably the worst that Dojan had ever written, but his worry was clouding his wit. He just needed to get the word out as quickly as possible.
Almost immediately, replies started popping up on his screen.
‘Eighty clicks away. Any ideas?’
‘What’re we supposed to do about supplies?’
‘How many?’
Within a minute, the other four pods had responded, and Dojan was beyond relieved to have them all accounted for. Yet out of all of the messages, the three words from Captain Kanthi demanded the most attention.
‘Do not engage.’
The captain wanted them to stay out of harm’s way, and, consequently, let the ship get taken. Their ship, and every single item that they’d carefully packed away on board over the course of their two-year journey.
Dojan’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, and he licked his lips as he tried to think of the most polite way to disagree with his captain.
As if he knew what he was thinking, Kanthi sent, ‘Close the chat.’
Dojan clenched his jaw. They ran the risk of the Thagzar, or any other enemy, breaking into their chat the longer that they kept it up. He closed out of the secure line reluctantly, and the static sound stopped the moment that he did.
“So,” Stephine said, standing quietly beside him. “What did they say?”
“The captain said to leave the Thagzars to their raiding,” he said, a bitter note to his otherwise carefree tone.
“But, we need supplies?” she asked.
Dojan just nodded. “We do. The pods are meant for scouting, you said it yourself, and this one was only given enough fuel for what was supposed to be a quick flight to the Thagzar’s base and back. They all were.”
Stephine sat back in her chair, thinking. She seemed to be observing him, and he wondered if she had expected him to be different under pressure. Finally, she looked up at Dojan properly, meeting his eyes. “And what’re you going to do about it?” she asked calmly.
“We,” Dojan gave her a look, “Are making a stop.”
The Tabanari’s space station was the biggest in five hundred clicks going in any direction. It was an artificial structure built entirely out of meteor glass and nebula brick, a shining square that had been rumored to catch the light of over a hundred suns.
Stephine had obviously never seen it before.
“How the hell…” she muttered, leaning forward in her seat while they both stayed buckled in for landing. She was staring at the screen, eyeing the digital hologram reanimating the station before them.
“The Tabanari are well known for their technological ingenuity,” Dojan grinned, easily following the lights to land the pod. “They have a number of space stations set up in the different star systems.”
“Did they also rebel?” Stephine asked idly. “From the Thagzars?”
“Uh, not exactly,” Dojan laughed good-naturedly. “They traded with them.”
He glanced at Stephine as he fit the pod between what he recognized as a Yhaeser merchant slip and a Gorganal recruiting ship. She was thinking, her face calm except for her eyes. The swirling intelligence there betrayed her as she considered the new information.
“But you are not bitter at them?” she finally asked.
“Of a species taking advantage of a powerful neighbor? Nah,” he said, flicking off the pod with a satisfying downward slam of the controls that opened the door and turned off the lights. “They were supplying us with weapons too, anyway. A secret rebel supporter, at least for the rebels that had money.”
A spark of something seemed to flicker across her face, and Dojan wondered if she’d ever experienced a relationship built on secret promises and tentative allies before. If nothing else, she’d obviously experienced betrayal.
They left the ship and stepped down the bridge into the oxygen-pumped air. It tasted odd to Dojan, as if there was a metallic aftertaste, and the wonderful mood that he’d been in all day suddenly plummeted. He closed the pod door with a touch of his hand and sighed.
“Okay,” he said, speaking out loud more for Stephine’s benefit than his own. “We should grab the basics, some food, some water, and get a couple of energy tanks.”
Stephine raised an eyebrow. “You think we’ll need it?” she asked.
Dojan shrugged. “The flight to the lab could be two days or thirty, depending on who or what we do or do not run into, if you get my drift.”
“The Thagzars,” Stephine said. Then, glancing up at him, she asked, “Do they usually come this far?”
“Eh,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that they’re unwelcome, but…”
“But they’ve made some enemies,” Stephine finished for him.
“A lot of enemies,” Dojan agreed.
The station lot of landed ships and parked pods was quiet, but the moment that Stephine and Dojan walked through the double doors and into the marketplace, they were bombarded with sights and smells. Hundreds of aliens were shouting and pushing, bidding and buying, and the scents of hot spices and vanilla oils were just as loud as the voices.
“All right,” Dojan said, standing up a little straighter as he watched the thick crowd argue and move as one. He was used to this type of traffic – hell, he was used to worse, with markets made of boats and narrowed floating docks acting as the only walkway where one wrong step would land you in the water. Even now, he could see six different paths to take between the mass of bodies, though none of them would be easy with Stephine in tow. “You’ve got to stick very close to me,” he said, “Or we’ll get separated. You got me?” he turned to look at her, and he was transfixed by the new emotion that he saw there.
Fear. Pure, raw fear was dancing in her eyes, making her whole body rigid. The only thing on her that was moving was her hands in her pockets, and he wondered if she was fisting the fabric to dry her sweaty hands. Humans did sweat, didn’t they?
“Stephine,” he said, bending slightly to her level. She really wasn’t that much shorter than him, not like most of the women on his planet. They also had a different smell, like a fresh opened calyder berry growing high on a tree limb, but Stephine smelled oddly like the water herself. Dojan could almost hear the gilly birds and see the fish, and it brightened his mood immensely. “Stephine, we’re going to get through this crowd, okay? I know the exact vendors we want, so we’ll be in and out like that,” he snapped his fingers for emphasis.
“Okay,” Stephine said, her voice the same level of calm and indifference that it’d always been. “Let’s go.” But she wasn’t taking a step forward.
“All right then,” Dojan said kindly, and he put a small hand at her back to urge her forward as he moved. S
he didn’t push him away like he’d thought she would, but stepped along quietly.
As they walked up to the crowd and Dojan tried to slip between a Grogron and a red-faced Harpine, it became very obvious very quickly that walking side by side just wasn’t going to work. “Here,” Dojan growled, yanking Stephine up to stand directly in front of him. He placed his hands on her dipped shoulders and started directing her.
It worked, for a moment or two. He pushed Stephine along and she crossed her arms and walked, glaring at everyone who hesitated to move. But as they traveled farther into the thick crowd, it became very obvious that Stephine was growing more and more uncomfortable by her tensed shoulders and halting steps.
“Get behind me,” Dojan ordered, pulling her back to step in front of her. He kept a hold of one of her hands, awkwardly half-turned as he walked, and couldn’t help but grin when he felt her other hand grip the back of his shirt. It made his chest swell, to think that she trusted him like that at her most vulnerable, and he wondered what else he could do to be that person she depended on.
Wait, what?
Dojan shook his head at his own thoughts, his bun bouncing against his neck as he moved. This was a teammate, a comrade of his captain’s friend, and someone that he’d probably never see again after they made it to the lab. Why should he care so much?
“Clabaine!” Dojan called, raising a hand in greeting as he spotted his favorite fruit vendor.
“Do’jan!” The vendor called back, his black eyes wide as he waved him over. “Come, come my friend!”
Skirting over to Clabaine’s booth, Dojan stepped beside Stephine and introduced them. “This is Clabaine Warrizi,” he said happily. “He’s a produce vendor who sells the finest rions from Saros.”
“Rions?” Stephine asked, glancing at the tabletop full of nature’s harvest.