by Jack Archer
Before the door clicked shut behind them, Rystar was already in the mini bar, grabbing drinks for the both of them.
“Come on, we can’t get too drunk,” Shea feebly protested as she pushed a small bottle of a dark liquid into his hands. “We still have work to do tomorrow.”
“If you can’t work with a hangover, you’re not cut out to be a bounty hunter,” Rystar slurred at him, downing her drink and tossing the empty bottle into a bin.
“Pretty sure that’s not true,” Shea chuckled and finished his own tiny bottle before setting it on the counter and pouring himself a glass of water. He downed it in one go and set the cup down before turning around to see Rystar inches from his face.
“Brave enough yet?” she breathed, bright green eyes flickering down to his lips.
“I think so,” Shea squeaked, letting his hands slide around her waist as she stood up on her tiptoes to press their lips together.
It was a mess, as all drunken kisses were expected to be. Rystar’s hands slid up his chest as he pulled her closer and tilted his head to kiss her deeper. She moaned when his hand found its way to her hair and pulled, making his knees shake and threaten to fall out from under him. It wasn’t his first kiss, but he could die happy if it were his last.
Her hands slid under his jacket and pushed it from his shoulders, and let it drop to the floor with a flutter. Shea let his free hand fall to cup her ass and squeezed, eliciting another moan from Rystar as she smiled against his lips and chuckled darkly.
“I like brave Shea,” she whispered before kissing up his jawline. Shea hummed and tilted his head back for better access.
The sound of a comms tablet ringing made them both jump. Rystar hopped back and coughed, straightening her shirt out and furrowing her brow. “That’s you, I think.”
“Yeah, sorry,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair and stepping across the room to his bed where the comms tablet lay ringing away. “Must not have put it on silent.” He picked it up and slid the screen open to answer the call. “Jorge, what’s up?”
“Did I catch you at a bad time, kid?” Jorge’s voice came from the tablet, and Shea sat down on the bed, painfully aroused and horribly drunk and definitely in no state to talk to his boss.
“No, everything’s fine here. What’s going on? Everything okay?” he asked, very nonchalantly if you asked him.
Rystar rolled her eyes and sat on the bed opposite, smirking and fixing her hair as she fiddled with her Cortijet in between puffs.
“Everything is fine, just wanted to check in and see how you were faring all the way in the Lalande systems,” Jorge said, and Shea’s shoulders relaxed. Not that he didn’t think Rystar didn’t care about him on his first mission beyond the Sol System, but Jorge was somewhat of a father figure, someone he looked up to. It meant a lot that Jorge called to check on him, and Shea smiled.
“It’s different out here,” Shea admitted, scratching the back of his head. “Never met a Horoth before.”
“They’re certainly something, aren’t they?” Jorge chuckled. “Met a few guards of theirs a couple years back, surly bunch of bastards they are.”
“Their leader is no different,” Shea said and flicked his eyes up to Rystar, who chuckled along with him.
“Is Rystar there?” Jorge asked.
“She’s here,” Shea responded.
“How’s it going, old man?” Rystar slurred, leaning back on her bed and flicking through her own comms tablet.
“Drinking on the job again?” Jorge’s voice was stern, but Shea could hear the smile.
“I’m not on the damn job,” Rystar grumbled, “I’m scrolling through vids. Leave me alone.”
“I wanted to apologize to you both,” Jorge said after a few moments of silence. Rystar’s eyes narrowed, and she sat up on her elbow, facing Shea’s comms tablet.
“You alright?” she asked.
“Shut up,” Jorge dismissed, and Shea heard him sigh. “I know I kept a lot from you on this mission, and for that, I apologize. I had to keep a lid on things while you were back home because the higher-ups don’t know about the details of this bounty either.”
“They don’t?” Rystar asked, her eyebrows shooting up. She fixed Shea with a look that made the hair on his arms stand up.
“I don’t think the agency head here would appreciate us getting involved in an alien kidnapping, especially one that involves the Terran Intergalactic Bureau,” Jorge grumbled, keeping his voice down even though they were the only ones in the room.
“You mean you didn’t tell him?” Shea burst out, unable to keep his emotions in check at this stage of drunkenness.
“Rystar introduced you to Charlom, didn’t she?” Jorge sighed, and Rystar let out a snort.
“Let the kid live a little,” she said with a wave of her hand, leaning back on the bed and continuing to scroll.
“I knew I shouldn’t have let you ride with that delinquent,” Jorge said. “I’m sorry, Shea. If I could have given you to someone less drunk and idiotic, I would have.”
“Rystar’s been great, actually,” Shea said, his eyes softening as he looked over to her. “She’s been a big help, showing me the ropes and how to speak with royalty. Really, she’s great.”
“You sound like you like her too much,” Jorge muttered. “I’ll have to separate you two when you get back.”
“You don’t have to—” Shea began.
“Relax, kid, I’m joking,” Jorge said. “Anyways, I don’t know what time it is there, and I don’t care. But I’ll let you go so you can sleep. I’m sure you two have your work cut out for you these next few days.”
“Thanks for the call, Jorge,” Shea said with a small smile.
“Talk to you soon.”
The line went dead, and the background on Shea’s tablet winked up at him, a new Mach IV Panther LASSO, one of the new sleek black ones the Space Force had just released that year. The Mach IVs had come out only 12 years prior, but they came out with new designs and floor plans every year or so. The latest model could house a crew of 25 easily, complete with a dining hall, bedrooms with a bathroom in each one, and even housed a library. Shea would love nothing more than to at least take a ride in one.
He realized Rystar had been speaking to him, and he shook his head, looking up at her. “What’s up?”
“I asked if you were alright?” she repeated. Rystar was sitting up on the bed now, her legs hanging off the edge and her tablet forgotten next to her. Her foot tapped to nothing, and she had her lips pursed, one eyebrow lower than the other. If Shea didn’t know any better, he’d think she was nervous.
“I’m fine, really,” he assured her, throwing her a small smile for good measure. He was worried about how he would fare the next few days as they tracked an alien criminal down to free from Terran jail, but he tried not to let that show. Either Rystar was too out of it to notice, or she let Shea have his moment to simmer by himself.
“If you say so,” she said and swung her legs back on the bed. “Listen, let’s get some sleep for now. We can talk in the morning, okay?”
As much as Shea wanted to crawl in bed with her and taste her again, he nodded, biting his lip and setting his comms tablet on the bedside table before stripping his shirt off and tossing it to the floor. He laid back in bed and tried to ignore the heated stare he convinced himself Rystar was giving him from across the room.
Chapter 5
Rystar Umara: Cliamond, Chantakor, Lalande System
Rystar didn’t get hangovers anymore. What she did get that morning, however, was a massive urge to crawl under the covers of Shea’s bed and give him something nice to wake up to. She sat on the edge of her bed, waking up, letting her eyes trail over his bare chest as he slept soundly.
With a shake of her head, she got up and headed to the shower, washing up as best as she could with hotel soap before stepping out to towel off. Back in the bedroom, she rooted around in her bag for some clean clothes while she dripped on the carpet, holdi
ng the towel up as best as she could.
“Good morning.”
Rystar turned to see Shea propped up on the pillow, staring at her with dark eyes. Now that just wasn’t any kind of fair. His lip ring glinted in the low light, and she wanted to bite it, but with her sudden onset of sobriety, she stood up straight, clothes in her arms.
“About last night, Shea,” she began, heading to the bathroom before his looks could seduce her anymore, “I shouldn’t have come onto you like that. I’m sorry.”
She stepped into her pants and pulled her shirt on, running a comb through her hair and making sure she looked alright in the mirror before letting out a sigh at his silence. Rystar exited the bathroom and leaned against the wall to look at him with sad eyes.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, still shirtless and looking at her with a small smile. “It takes two, you know.”
“But I’m in a position of power, I’m older, wiser, yadda yadda,” she explained as best as she could, looking down at the ground near the end of her speech. “I shouldn’t have made you drink so much, and I shouldn’t have come onto you. I’m sorry for that.”
Shea stood up and made his way towards her, painfully slowly, until they were a foot apart, and she had to look up at him. Shea lifted a hand and pushed the hair from her face to tuck it behind her ear. “I’m not sorry. I had a good time last night. A better night than I’ve had in a long time. You make these distant, alien worlds seem bearable.”
Rystar let a smile creep onto her face, and she looked down to chuckle. “You’re too kind. And you need to get out more.”
She stepped around him to her bedside table to grab her comms tablet and began to swipe through her onslaught of emails. Apparently, the day on Earth had come and gone before she could get into the shower on Chantakor. The spray of water came from the shower, and Rystar sat down, opening an email from her boss. “Jorge is bugging us again, wants to know what our next move is.”
Shea called from the shower. “What is our next move? You really want to go to the TAHQ?”
“I don’t see another choice, do you?” Rystar asked.
Rystar-
Thanks again for taking the kid out with you. It’ll do him some good to get off of this dusty ass rock for a bit. I’ve set up a meeting with a Terran Ambassador at the Courts in Cliamond, a city on the day side of Chantakor. Give your Cougar some air travel. I know she hasn’t had any in a while. She’ll start to get rusty, you know.
Speak with the ambassador and tell him I sent you. He’ll know what you’re there for and what to do.
-Jorge
Along with the email were coordinates and a password, presumably to get through the locked gate of the Courts. How Jorge had procured it was beyond her, but Rystar wasn’t about to ask too many questions. The shower spray stopped, and she heard Shea moving around in the bathroom, the door of which was still slightly open. Rystar averted her eyes quickly to look back down at her tablet.
“So, what’s the plan then?” Shea came out of the bathroom, still shirtless for some reason, and running a comb through his hair.
“We go to the Chantakorian Courts and get a pass to meet with—” she looked down at her tablet again, swiping through the bounty Jorge had sent her “—Na’gya Vasilev, charged with leading an insurgency on a Terran outpost on Bufefu.”
“The Horoths can’t be too happy we’re holding one of their own, can they?” Shea asked, pausing his grooming to fix Rystar with a strange look.
“From what I understand, the Horoths don’t care for their hybrid offspring very much,” Rystar said with a shrug. “They might not care.”
Shea fell silent and finished his hair before moving to rummage around in his bag.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” he muttered, and Rystar looked up at him with a furrowed brow. Shea didn’t normally have bad feelings about anything. “I have this strange feeling that something bad is going to happen. Like we’re being followed or set up or something.”
“Relax, Shea,” Rystar soothed, getting up to pat him on the shoulder. “There’s two of us on the case, no one’s sneaking up on us, and no one is setting us up. The Horoths are many things, but they stay true to their word. I’ll admit, the human husband surprised me, but for the most part, the Horoths are transparent. Even their government is out on full display for all to scrutinize.”
Shea frowned for a moment and stood up straight, holding a shirt in his hand. Finally, he sighed and gave Rystar a furtive smile. “Alright, I trust you.”
“As you should,” Rystar clapped him on the shoulder and moved to grab her backpack from her bed. “Now get a damn shirt on. It’s time to go.”
The Mach III LASSO Cougars and Pumas had been discontinued in 2110, two years after the creation of the MACH IV LASSO Panthers. Rystar’s beat-up Puma was old even by Mach III standards, her specific model having been discontinued in 2086. Rystar couldn’t bear to part with it, even if the newer Cougar models were shiny and bigger and didn’t sputter after two border gate jumps.
As Land, Air, Sea, and Space Operatives, the LASSO models varied widely since their creation in 2030, just before the second LASSO War. The first LASO War, before it had received its second ‘S’, was primarily fought with the Mach I LASOs. The Mach I Sphinxs were giant mecha suits that housed the Space Force and were able to break the stratosphere without actually going into space.
By the time Rystar’s mother, Gloria, had left her trusty Puma in Rystar’s name, she was gone from this world, leaving Rystar nothing but a dilapidated house in the sticks of Alabama and an even dustier old LASSO. It was this LASSO that flew across the Chantakorian sky now, racing as fast as she was able to the other side of the planet.
Chantakorian flight laws were strict, and the journey was long, even for being so high in the air. Sure, she could have jumped out of one border gate and into another, but the lines alone would have pushed back her travel time by hours. So, she sped across the night and into the twilight zone of Chantakor and wished her radio worked out here.
The comms buzzed and snapped both Rystar and Shea from their stupors before Rystar slapped at the button and rubbed her face with her hand. “Yes, Jorge?”
“Are you at the courts?” he snapped.
“No, I am not at the courts yet,” she mumbled, checking her fuel levels and trajectory.
“What’d you do, take the damn bus?” he snorted.
“I’m not hopping gates on the same planet. That’s insane,” Rystar said with a scoff and tapped on the dashboard. “You seen how much fuel costs?”
“I don’t care how expensive it is out there,” Jorge hissed, and Rystar flinched at the sound, “if someone else gets to Na’gya before you idiots do, you won’t hear the end of it. Actually, you might, because they’ll shut us the hell down.”
Rystar rolled her eyes. “Aren’t they doing that anyway?”
“Not if we plop a fat wad of cash in front of them,” Jorge said.
“Who else is looking for Na’gya, Jorge?” Shea asked, leaning forward in his chair and speaking into the receiver.
“Could be anyone,” Jorge replied. “The Terran government, the Horoths, even some other… interested parties.”
Rystar cocked an eyebrow and let her head fall on her shoulder to gaze at the receiver. “Interested parties?”
“I’ve said too much.”
“Oh, stop being so damn cryptic and tell us,” Rystar grumbled.
“Just get there, grab the guy, and bring him back to his parents, alright?” Jorge snapped, and the comms shut off with what sounded like a curse. Jorge was normally grumpy but rarely did he actually get mad. Rystar pursed her lips and hummed.
“He doesn’t usually get upset like that, does he?” Shea asked, even though it didn’t sound like a question.
“He’s just stressed,” Rystar responded. “I’d be stressed, too.”
The rest of the journey passed by without event and Rystar couldn’t have been happier for it. So many thing
s could go wrong on this mission. It was almost as if Shea was right and something huge was going to happen. Rystar shook her head to clear it of paranoid delusions and continued to fly on, eventually passing through the twilight zone and into the daylight side of Chantakor.
“What’s this place called?” Shea asked, shielding his eyes from the bright white star in front of them.
Rystar pushed a few buttons on the console to bring up a map of Chantakor, complete with day, night, and twilight zones. She pointed to the day side. “Illastin. The night side is Echando, and the twilight zone is Takk. Which is also Icelandic for ‘thank you,’ fun fact.”
“Hey, that is pretty fun,” Shea said, giving her a sideways glance and turning the corner of his mouth up. She grinned, wondering if he would ever stop pulling at her heart. They had only been on a handful of runs together, but this one was millions and billions of miles from home and ten times more dangerous.
At long last, the Courts came into view, and they were blinding. A massive, white marble palace gleaming in the sun, Rystar banked down towards the hangars next to it and studying the place as best as she could. It was much like the Jurat Prime’s palace but much more government-looking, if that were a descriptor. Pillars wound up to the second, third, fourth floors, all the way up to the sky. It sat near the edge of a bustling city that twinkled at them from far away.
Rystar was guided into the hangar by day-side Horoths, not too different from night-side Horoths, except their wings were several shades darker and their eyes a little wilder. The Mach III Gloriosum was shuttled into the hangar, and Rystar powered down the engines when they were in their designated spot.
“How are you feeling, Shea?” Rystar asked as she powered down the rest of the ship and stood up to stretch.
“Feeling alright,” he responded, standing up and having to duck slightly. Big as the ship may have been, its ceiling was still no match for Shea’s height. Rystar sat a little shorter than him, but not by much. At least she didn’t bump her head on doorframes the way Shea seemed to.