Stowaway (Star Line Express Romance Book 1)

by Alessia Bowman

  “Of course you won’t,” Cole says as an evil smile spreads across his creepy face. “You’ll be dead.”

  “Think about it for a second, Cole,” Niklas says. “I’ve got no love for this ship or its crew. They locked me up, accused me of sabotage. The last thing I want to do is have any contact with any of them. And the Chorynean here is wanted for crimes on Choryn. She doesn’t even have time to turn you in.”

  I wish Niklas would quit calling me the Chorynean, but now is a very bad time to mention it.

  “Why did you do this?” I say to Cole. He seems to want to talk, and what’s the only thing a schemer really wants to talk about? His schemes, of course. Everyone on Choryn may not be a schemer, but the ones I’ve known do love detailing their process.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Cole says.

  He looks dreamily at the EQSS array.

  “When I first took this post,” Cole says, “I was deeply insulted. Me, a first-class engineer, running the oldest setup in the Seven Galaxies. But after a while I came to appreciate it. Came to know it. Came to understand that the ship is really mine. That it rightly belongs to me. Because, as you’re witness to right now, I’m the only one who understands how it works.

  “Even this clever-seeming Chorynean can’t figure it out.”

  “How does it work?” I say, hoping to hell that he’ll tell us this part first so that Nik can overcome him or something and then I can fix the ship.

  But it’s not to be.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” he says. “Can’t give away my secrets, now, can I?”

  I tighten my fists and realize I’m still holding a handful of wires. I throw Niklas a look, move my right hand so he can see it—it’s behind my back hidden from Cole’s view—then say, “I wish you would. It must be so interesting.”

  “It is interesting,” he says. “But these are my secrets. In fact—”

  But he doesn’t get a chance to finish. I yank as hard as I can on the clutch of wires, the ship turns over on itself, Cole loses his balance, screams, and falls onto the deck. The weapon slides out of his hands.

  “Nik!” I say, but the Big World Terran needs no direction or encouragement. In an instant, he’s all over the ship’s real saboteur, the nefarious earthling Arbin Cole.

  “How dare you!” Cole says to either Niklas or me, I’m not sure.

  The ship is lurching wildly now, and I watch as Arca tries to restrain Cole, who, as slight as he is, is quite slippery. And then I realize Cole’s now regained possession of the weapon, which has slid back toward him during another of the ship’s violent movements.

  “Watch it!” I say, warning Niklas.

  Then there’s a loud sound, a flashing streak of light, and I hear a whooshing grunt.

  “Nik! No!”

  Niklas

  The weapon was between us, and as it goes off I see the blood spewing on my shoulder. Mine? Cole’s? I can’t tell, although I feel quite fine.

  Yet I’ve heard that when you’re dying, you do feel quite fine. Maybe because dying is much better than what we think it is. Maybe it’s pleasant or even wonderful. Maybe it’s a relief to be rid of all the problems of living.

  The problems of having your brother take your fiancée away from you. Of working as the first officer on a shitty cargo ship. Of falling in love with a Chorynean menace.

  But at least she isn’t the ship’s saboteur. I congratulate myself for my good judgment right before I black out.

  Aymee

  “Nik, wake up!”

  I’m shaking him, but it’s hard to know if it’s having any effect. The ship is throwing around everything in it by now, including me, including Nik, and yet none of that seems to be rousing him.

  “Damn you, Arbin Cole!” I say to the body lying just beside where Nik and I have ended up. “Couldn’t you have at least told us how to fix this damned thing?”

  But it’s no use talking to a corpse. And it’s not much more use talking to a Big World Terran who slammed his stupid head into the corner of the base of the EQSS array right after he killed Cole.

  Although I’m not completely sure what happened. One second the weapon was in Cole’s hand and the next second it was in between him and Arca and going off. And then Niklas made the idiotic mistake of letting his head contact the nearest sharp corner.

  “Wake up, Nik!” I say.

  He grunts a bit but he won’t wake up.

  “I don’t want to die alone,” I say, as stupid as that sounds.

  But it would be nice to have some company while the ship self-destructs. Because even if I could’ve figured out how to fix the equatorial stabilizer before, now it’s hopeless. I have no clue what I did when I pulled on all those wires, but it seems to’ve made the situation we’re in even more dire. More immediate. More final.

  The ship isn’t lurching anymore. It’s catapulting itself in a hundred different directions simultaneously.

  “You broke the fucking thing,” says First Officer Arca, awake at last. He’s looking up at me like he feels about me something close to what I feel about him. Whatever way that is.

  It’s intense.

  “Yeah,” I say. “This time I did break it. To save our lives. Even if it is just for a few more minutes.”

  “Ow. Damn. Hell.” Niklas tries to sit up, fails, then looks over at Cole.

  “Dead?”

  “Completely,” I say.

  “Do the Choryneans have some special way of getting information out of a corpse?” he says.

  “I wish,” I say. “No.”

  “Damn,” Nik says. “Every time I get too close to you, I crack my head open. There must be a message there, but so far I haven’t figured it out.” He rubs the back of his skull and winces, and I wince along with him.

  “Stop bothering with me,” he says. “Fix the equatorial stabilizer. We have to save the ship.”

  “We’re not going to save the ship,” I say. “It’s impossible. I couldn’t hope to fix it before, and since I pulled all those wires out—and can you believe this thing has wires?—it’s hopeless.”

  “Of course it has wires,” Arca says, half sitting up. “Everything from the Dawn of Civilization was made with wires.”

  “It’s that new?” I say. “I thought it was prehistoric.”

  He rubs the back of his head again, winces some more, and says, “You really can’t fix it?”

  “Maybe if I had, you know, a month.”

  The ship now makes a very disturbing noise, a cross between the bleatings of a herd of desperate sheep and the death call of an insane, trapped stegosaurus.

  “Damn,” Nik says. He sits up completely. “Are we sure Cole’s dead?”

  I glance over at the inert corpse, his chest still steaming from a combination of the exudations from his moldering organs and the last flickers of the spark ray that killed him.

  “If he’s alive, he’s got a very strong constitution. Extremely strong.”

  “Why did you have to pull on those wires anyway?”

  “You’re blaming me for saving our lives?” I say, indignant. I’m caring less and less about First Officer Arca’s new head injury. Although I wonder if it’s the cause of his asking this useless question.

  “I’m saying you might’ve picked a different method, that’s all.” He grimaces as he fingers the back of his head.

  “He was about to kill you!”

  The ship turns us over as it turns over and now I bang my head on the edge of the stabilizer console.

  “Hell!”

  “See?” the self-righteous Terran says. “It hurts.”

  I nod and feel the back of my head, mirroring the man I’m going to spend my last moments with. Kind of like spending the rest of my life with him. Well, exactly like that.

  “It does hurt,” I say, because it does, and also because I don’t want to be outdone in the hurt department. “What about thanking me?” I say.

  “For what?”

  I glare at him.

  “Oh. F
or killing our only hope of survival. Thank you.”

  “Nik, is there really no way out of here?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  Then he smiles that grin of his, the one I can’t resist.

  “Unless . . .”

  Chapter 21

  Niklas

  “Remember that scene in Joston Parst?” I say to Joston’s fellow Chorynean and my partner in certain doom.

  “I wouldn’t watch that vid if it were the last thing standing between me and certain death.” Aymee Desryx isn’t even looking at me, she’s so busy staring at the equatorial stabilization system that she’s destroyed beyond repair.

  “Well,” I say, “in a way, it is standing between you and certain death. But, lucky for you, I did watch it. In fact, I’ve seen it several times. You Choryneans are a hellish lot.”

  “Nik! That’s complete garbage! It’s fiction! Don’t you know that? And it has nothing to do with Choryn. Absolutely nothing.” She says all this while running her hands over the array and frowning.

  “Aymee, my girl, you’d better hope that it has something to do with Choryn, because we’re going to use one of Joston’s tricks to get there.”

  “I liked it better when you were Captain Harlan and I was Salana,” she says, harking back to our first meeting and the unpopular Helmsman’s Mate.

  “That’s right,” I say. “I was preparing to execute you, if I recall. That can certainly still be arranged. I’ll just leave you here while I rescue myself. Okay?” I push myself up to standing, which isn’t easy on the buffeted-about Centreale.

  “Fine,” she says. “Do what you want. Maybe I can fix this relic.”

  She turns away from me and stumbles back over to the EQSS as the ship pitches her, me, and everything else that isn’t secured here, there, and back again.

  Then the ship chokes out a sound that makes the last horrifying sound seem gentle in comparison. This is the sound that only a dying ship would make.

  “Nik!” Aymee’s shrieking now and I feel like joining her but I’m a Big World Terran male and there’s no way I would shriek. Ever. I didn’t shriek when I found Minda and Rej in my bed together so I’m certainly not going to shriek now.

  I grab Aymee’s wrist and say, “Let’s go. We’ve got a chance of getting out of here, even if it is a terribly small one.”

  I pull on her, but she’s fixated on the EQSS, her forehead creased in concentration.

  “Wait,” she says, holding her other hand out to stop me. “Just wait a second.”

  “One second is about all we’ve got,” I say as something that sounds like the ship is breaking up into a hundred thousand pieces fills our ears.

  Then I just pull on her wrist and start running. We don’t have time for her to fix the equatorial stabilizer. We don’t have time.

  Even though seventeen months and nearly four days ago I was not at all pleased that I’d gone into shipbuilding with my brother, Rej—it’d been his idea—right now I’m glad that I did. Because without the intimate knowledge of this ship that I’ve got, since I worked on its redesign three years ago, I wouldn’t know all the shortcuts I know.

  I’m racing now, and Aymee can run with the best of the Big World athletes. She keeps up with me without even a hard breath.

  “Aymee,” I say, “can Choryneans breathe in a vacuum?”

  “Are you kidding me?” she says. I’m impressed that she’s not even slowing down while she says this. “You can’t mean that is our plan for survival.”

  “It’d be helpful,” I say, because it would be helpful. Although that isn’t how Joston did it.

  “No!” she says. “Can you?”

  “Of course not,” I say.

  Then I start laughing. Because this is absurd.

  The ship is falling apart around us.

  And I’m about to use the same method that the notorious Joston Parst used in a vid in order to save our necks. And the rest of our bodies as well.

  We have to stop for a moment while the corridor to our left—fortunately we’re taking the one to the right—collapses in on itself and we protect ourselves from the flying debris.

  But I can’t stop laughing, even though Aymee is ordering me to stop.

  “Stop laughing right now,” she says. “This isn’t funny!”

  “It is funny,” I say.

  Then, as we stand still, waiting while the last of the disintegrated hallway to our left falls into a clamoring heap, I look at Aymee Desryx and notice that my feelings for her have escalated.

  Maybe it’s the situation we’re in. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s the only female I’ve had sex with in seventeen-plus months. Maybe it’s the way those huge gray-green eyes are looking at me.

  Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m just in love with her. Not because she’s the most interesting, most slyly brilliant, most alluring, most desirable, most, well, everything, female I’ve ever encountered—although she is. And not because I’ll never have the chance to love anyone else—although I probably won’t.

  In fact there’s no reason at all that I’m in love with her. It’s just that my heart is full of this pulse of pure energy that she’s brought to the surface. And I don’t want to let go of that, or of her.

  Aymee

  The way First Officer Niklas Arca is looking at me is working its way into my heart.

  He’s hanging on to my wrist—the very wrist he used to drag me away from the equatorial stabilizer even though I felt I was about to have a breakthrough idea to fix it—and it’s like my entire body is filled with a sensation whose name is Niklas Arca. A sensation that is Niklas Arca. Or that’s the synergy created between Niklas Arca and Aymee Desryx.

  The last piece, or what I hope is the last piece, of the collapsing hallway huffs to a halt and suddenly it’s eerily quiet on the Centreale. Even the persistent hum that I noticed the moment I came on board and stowed away is absent.

  It’s really over.

  It’s the end.

  I couldn’t save us and Nik isn’t going to be able to either.

  Nik and I are staring at each other and I try hard to remember what the fuck Joston Parst does in that despicable vid, but I can’t remember.

  And then I remember that I never saw the whole thing. I turned it off halfway through because the Chorynean stereotypes were cruel and, sadly, often true. But they weren’t me. Or anyone I know. Weren’t almost anyone I know.

  “Aymee,” Nik says, and he strokes the side of my face with the back of his free hand.

  “Nik,” I say. I put my free hand on his chest. His heartbeat sounds like the work of a passionate drummer.

  “I—” he says, then he leans down and kisses me with more passion than there exists in the Seven Galaxies.

  I kiss him back with even more passion. I want this Big World Terran. I close my eyes and feel his lips on mine, feel his tongue as it flicks at the corners of my mouth, as it searches inside.

  He lets go of my wrist and holds me close to him and I wind my arms around his torso, savoring the feel of his flesh under his torn shirt. I want to hold on to him for as long as I can. For as long as our diminishing time here on this wreck will allow. I want to have these last moments with him.

  He breaks the embrace for a moment. “Aymee,” he says. “I never thought I’d say this again, but I’m in love with you.”

  Then he crushes me with more kisses, these even more passionate than the last ones.

  “We have to try to live,” he says between kisses.

  “I love you, Nik,” I say, scaring myself. Loving this Big World Terran is even scarier to me than the ship falling apart around us. “I wish you were my life mate.”

  He pulls me even closer to him and looks down at me with those steamy yellow-gold eyes, lit from within by an intense force. His golden hair has loosened from its military severity and I reach up to caress it.

  “Aymee Desryx,” he says, then it seems like he’s about to say something else, but instead he k
isses me more and harder and with even greater passion and intensity. And I return the kiss with intensity and passion of my own. And with the surge of love I’m feeling for First Officer Niklas Arca, my real match, a match made not by the Chorynean lottery but by the lottery of life, of this wild and unlikely set of circumstances, of two beings whose needs and desires can be satisfied only by the other.

  When we come up for air, I say, “What did Joston Parst do?”

  “You must remember that part,” he says, smiling.

  “Not if it was past the halfway point,” I say. “I stopped watching.”

  “Then it’ll be a surprise,” he says.

  “I hate surprises.”

  Chapter 22

  Niklas

  No one hates a surprise more than I do, but I’m not going to tell her what I’ve got up my torn sleeve. Because there’s a chance this won’t work. And it has to work.

  “Come on. It’s just a bit farther.”

  “What is?”

  “The emergency raft,” I say.

  “Right,” she says. “Of course.”

  We start walking a bit faster. She says nothing for a while, then she can’t stand it any longer.

  “You mean we could have done this all along and instead we went to the engine room?” Aymee is clearly not thrilled by what I’ve done.

  “I had to try to save the Centreale,” I say. “We’re carrying a lot of cargo that’s going to be destroyed.”

  “You can’t mean that,” she says. “You’ve risked our lives for cargo?”

  “I’m part-owner of this ship,” I say. And I’ve already lost so much, I didn’t want to lose any more if I didn’t have to.

  “You risked our lives for money?” She punches me on the upper arm. I hardly feel it. “The captain of this ship abandoned it! And you stayed!” Her face is bright red.

  “The captain of this ship abandoned us, if you remember,” I say, and I remind myself to give Zav what-for when I see him again. And if things work out the way I think, I’ll be seeing him again in the near future.

  Although I do understand why he did what he did. He had the crew to save.

  “I thought you were going to fix everything,” I say. “Since you fucked it up.”