The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  She turned on the air scrubber first. If there were any error signals, the whole trip was off. There was no way they’d have enough air to make it to the return ship without the recirc filters working. After a long moment where both of them held their breaths, green light filled the tiny space. Her butterflies settled just a bit.

  Now it was time to figure out whether they could save the human race.

  Three

  Did she have the right stuff to pull off this mission? Rand didn’t know. Admittedly, Grayson had surprised him by staying cool under fire when he’d locked her out of the ship. But she shouldn’t have admitted a weakness. It had almost been as though she was asking him to test her. Or had she expected it? Had she lied about her fear of being crushed? She didn’t seem particularly upset. Was she playing him?

  I just can’t tell. And that bugged the crap out of him. It also bothered him that he couldn’t find any evidence that she wasn’t El Tyler. He had checked every record the night before they left, asked everyone he knew without actually mentioning Grayson’s name. But while everybody presumed Tyler was male, nobody had ever officially seen the pilot without a helmet. “Like it’s glued on,” said his best source when he’d asked if Tyler’s face had ever been seen. “Never outside the Joint Chiefs chamber, and maybe not in there either,” the head of the Captain Tyler fan club claimed. Asking her would do no good. He’d already made the accusation and she’d insisted she was the man himself. Worse, Berell had insisted it too, and he respected the hell out of Berell.

  So, fine. There were ways to learn the identity of a pilot. There were certain flying techniques that nobody had ever mastered as well as Tyler. He just had to figure out a way to force her into the maneuvers.

  The add-on timer glued to the panel a scant meter from his nose flickered on and started the silent countdown from a hundred seconds as they plugged their grav suits into the vital sign monitors and adjusted the visual feeds into their helmets. When it reached zero, the lower hold doors opened and they fell into black, unforgiving space, where no human fighter ship had ever been. As they floated in the wake of the gravity fields of four planets, he watched as the grain ship’s bay doors closed. The moment they latched, he knew the captain had pulled a level to release the air from the bubble. The wheat had probably already collapsed into the space where they’d been, leaving no evidence of their presence in the hold but a plastic floor liner that wouldn’t be looked at twice when they offloaded.

  There was no going back.

  Well, at least not until they met up with the ship again on the return trip . . . if they lived that long.

  He held his breath as the passive scanners pulled in signals from ships of all sizes as they brought supplies to the starving Stovian people. The war with Earth had taxed resources probably more than the emperor would like. Rumors had begun that food was being rationed on Stovia for the first time in the home planet’s history.

  A green light signaled the all-clear and they could speak again. He raised the face shield and his eyes adjusted to the darker space of the cabin. “Okay, so what’s the plan?” He turned his head and still whispered just because it was habit. “We’ve got enough fuel for about fifteen hours.” When he breathed in again, he caught a whiff of shampoo and sweat from the heavy helmet.

  Grayson likewise raised her face shield, so her voice was back to a pleasant alto. “From the maps I’ve reviewed, take a course of 190.818 at sixteen degrees for about three hours. I’ll be using the grav fields to steer as much as I can. That way we can save fuel and also not have the thrusters appear on scanners. Your job will be to keep us on course, so stay sharp.”

  He barely managed not to choke. She was insane. Absolutely crazy. “We’ll use the thrusters more by trying to navigate only on gravity fields. Every time you move the stick, you’ll go a thousand feet farther than you planned and have to hit the engines. We’ll run out of fuel before we even get there. You planning on committing suicide?”

  She reached backward awkwardly and pushed down his face shield. “Look in the lower left corner of the display.”

  He did. There was an object there, about ten times the size of their ship. “So? What am I looking at?”

  “Asteroid. When I first met with the transport captain, he said there was a small asteroid field that circled Stovia, similar to Saturn but not as wide. He suggested that if we stayed in the wake of the biggest one, we could get within a few thousand kilometers of the planet and we’d look like just another dead rock in the sky.”

  So . . . crazy like a fox. “That’s going to be a tricky bit of flying. You’ll have to be within a few football fields of the surface of the asteroid to pull it off.”

  She turned her head and smiled. The white of her teeth turned green under the lights from the dash. “I can fly it if you can nav it. Easier than the Sirian belt firefight in April.”

  But the closer they got to the asteroid, the harder this whole mission looked. The asteroid appeared smooth and quiet from a distance, but close up was a tumbling, shifting mass of spiked ice and rock. Pieces the size of an aircraft carrier would occasionally break off and collide with a dozen other bits of rock before settling into an uneasy orbit around the planet. Yet the closer they got, the more stable Grayson’s vital signs were. Her heart rate was slow and steady, her blood pressure what he would expect from a person sitting in a rocker with a cat in their lap.

  She abruptly cranked the stick up and to the left and simultaneously hit the left thruster. Left on left caused the ship to spiral, and then another deft movement of her wrist caused them to do a neat flip around a frozen rock the size of a house. They landed back at nearly the exact spot they had started. The “Tyler Tip” – the one move that couldn’t be faked. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t just experienced it. “You really are El Tyler.” There was awe in his voice, and damned if he couldn’t figure out how to keep it out.

  “Yep.” It was all the gravelly voice uttered before she went back to twitching the stick in ways that looked effortless, but Rand knew better. He was the one navigating, fingers moving on the antiquated keyboard to enter directions on the fly. Nothing about the Javelin was effortless. It was a heavy, cludgy ship that few pilots would even take on. The gravitational fields were affecting it in weird ways.

  He started swearing quietly under his breath as another small stone hit the ship’s hull. “There are just too many of them, El. All I can do is get out of the way of the biggest ones.”

  The next words out of her mouth stunned him. “I think we’re going to have to land this beast.”

  “Land? Land where?” They were in an asteroid field. There weren’t a lot of stable spots to navigate to. He turned his head as much as he could and stared at the side of her head.

  She raised her hand enough to point out the front port. “Right there. It’s not the biggest one, but it’ll have to do.”

  He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Good one. Of course, landing sort of requires that you’ll remain in one place with the power off.”

  “Oh, we will. Just steer me to the flat surface on this rock when it comes around again and I’ll do the rest.” She dropped her face shield. Her vital signs might be stable, but he wasn’t so sure about her brain.

  Still . . . the one thing that made Tyler a legend was thinking outside the box. He (or she) managed things that normal people wouldn’t even contemplate. And hey, if he had to go out of this life, it might as well be doing something very cool. And riding an asteroid was something nobody had ever done.

  He watched the screen in front of him while tapping on the keyboard to line up the ship with the correct pitch of the rock.

  Tyler’s gravel bass came over the mic in his helmet. “You don’t make notes, do you? Most navigators I’ve met scribble with one hand and enter the numbers with the other.”

  He responded without looking up. “It’s all eyes and fingers for me. I don’t know that it actually goes through my brain. I see and my fingers just star
t moving. Always been that way, even when I was a kid.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” she said. “For me, my eyes sort of convert images into numbers. I was a master at paint-by-numbers. I even used to make them for my friends. I knew a guy in grade school who could sketch outdoor scenes, and I’d add numbers based on what I saw. Got in trouble for it when a girl who couldn’t paint won the talent show with one of our paint-by-numbers. The principal considered it cheating.”

  “Why didn’t you become a navigator, then? Or why don’t you do your own navigation?”

  She gave a little laugh. “Because I can’t both navigate and fly at the same time. I can do one or the other. Just not both . . . at least not fast enough to handle all the vectors. What about you? Why don’t you fly?”

  A snort erupted from him, sounding like a sneeze in his ears. “No dexterity, I’m afraid. I crashed the simulator so often that the techs banned me from the unit. I was actually messing up the software. I don’t have a light enough touch. I go through keyboards pretty fast too. I even—”

  “Hold that thought. We’re coming up on our point. Bring me in flat so my nose is pointed toward the sun.”

  “You sure the nose is the best thing? Shouldn’t we have the port wing toward the sun?”

  Her voice snarled back. “Don’t distract me! Just give me the figures.”

  He could see this ending badly, but his fingers flew over the keyboard to create the directions to land the ship. “Okay, start the touchdown in fifteen seconds, and . . . mark.”

  Rand’s world narrowed to the sensation of movement from delicate blasts of the thrusters and the image of the rapidly approaching asteroid, lit only by the reflection from the nearest planet. They were about to touch down when something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. A large rock was breaking off from the asteroid. It wasn’t big enough to hurt them by itself, but it could definitely throw their trajectory off enough to crash. “Wait! Veer off. We’ve got a bogie to the left.”

  “No. We’re too close. There’s nowhere to go where we won’t hit something. I can do this.”

  Crap. She was right. The closer they got, the more small objects were traveling in the wake of the asteroid that they hadn’t noticed further back. His fingers hit the keys so hard as he typed that he could feel the vibration of the panel on his legs. Left, then right, up, over, twist. El moved the ship in ways he didn’t know it would travel – totally dispelling the ‘cludgy’ rap the Javelin had from other pilots.

  They hit the flat surface with a bounce and scrape and El scrambled to stop their forward movement before they shot right into an outcropping the size of an apartment block. “This isn’t the way I wanted to do this!” Her voice was about an octave higher than normal. She reached forward in a rush and opened a panel he hadn’t noticed. She slammed her fist down on the blue button underneath and he heard a muffled explosion underfoot. “Hang on!”

  He was so tightly packed into the navpit, he couldn’t imagine he could move. And yet he did. The ship made such a sudden stop that his head whiplashed against the inside of his helmet when it hit the neck support, making his teeth slam down on his tongue. “Ow!”

  They had stopped, and he wasn’t quite sure how. He watched the view port as their aspect shifted, turning the ship upside down. But they didn’t drift. Then it occurred to him. “Harpoon anchor?”

  She nodded. “Modified. It’s an unstable platform, so we had to make it a tripod with quick-release breakaway.”

  Rand grabbed at his keyboard as it started to drop to the ceiling. He was starting to notice his head trying to keep up with the movements of the ship. “Upside down is going to be a problem. Another ten or so rotations and we’re both going to be too dizzy to fly out of here if we need to.”

  “Agreed. We need to shut down and turn off the gravity. Then we’ll be in the middle, and the ship can turn around us. It’ll save on fuel – maybe enough to be able to take a second run at the weapon if we miss the first time.”

  He nodded, anxious to get out of the cramped navpit and move his legs. “We should try to get some sleep in the zero-g bags. It’ll probably be four hours before we’re close enough to the planet to risk charging the weapons.” And five hours until what would be the most challenging nav job of his life.

  Damn, what a rush . . .

  Four

  “It must be here somewhere!” She reached up and clenched a flashlight in her teeth while she dug through the tiny cabinet, turning over every box, and every container with one hand, keeping her balance with the other. Nothing.

  She moved to the next one, tossing things behind her to float in mid-air.

  Miflin’s voice held both amusement and resignation, in nearly equal parts. “Give it up, Grayson. They only packed one zero-g sleep sack. They’re bulky. We would have found the other by now.”

  She grabbed the flashlight to shine it into the very back corner of the space. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is a two-person ship. They wouldn’t pack only one sack.” Nothing in cabinet number two. She pulled her way to the third.

  He continued to connect the hooks to the wall latches, with near indifference to her growing panic. “Hey, here’s a clue. Did you notice there’s only one set of wall latches?”

  She stopped and turned her head, her arm still deep in the bulkhead. “What?”

  He pointed to the wall, and then patted above and below the single sack before batting away a rolled-up length of rope that floated near his head. “Only one set. Just one plug for a heater, too. I guess we’re supposed to sleep together.” He grinned. “Unless that would bother you, of course.”

  It was hard to deny her discomfort with a dozen containers of food and medicine, along with fluid packs, floating around the room. “Hardly. They probably expected the pilot and navigator to sleep in shifts. Someone is normally supposed to watch the position of the ship, after all.”

  “But normally the ship isn’t attached to a hunk of ice in space with the power off. If we sleep in shifts, one of us won’t survive the trip. Want to flip coins to see which of us freezes to death?”

  It was sad that freezing to death was a viable option to crawling into a heated sleep sack with Rand Miflin. “You sleep first. I’ll get the rest of these supplies stowed and go over the maps again.”

  He waggled a finger and kicked off from the wall, keeping a free hand up to protect his head. He wound up inches from her, close enough that her heart started to pound. “Oh, no. You forget – I’m not a pilot. I’m not going to get stuck out here after you freeze, not even knowing how to release the anchor from this rock. I swear I’ll keep my hands to myself. We can even bundle up back to back. But we are both going to get in that bag. Even if I have to tie you up to do it.”

  The amusement had left his eyes. He was dead serious. She’d never met a navigator who truly couldn’t fly. She’d presumed he was just downplaying his skills, but maybe he wasn’t kidding. And, admittedly, she didn’t want to freeze. A quiet, anonymous death wasn’t something she’d ever envisioned. “Fine. But I’ll hold you to your promise.”

  Stupidest thing he’d ever agreed to. The sensation of her legs twined around his as she snored softly made him crazy. Yeah, they’d started with their backs touching. But he hadn’t been asleep for twenty minutes before he’d felt her hands all over him. He’d been both aroused and delighted – until he’d discovered she was sound asleep.

  Damn it.

  Apparently her subconscious mind was the only one willing to act on what she felt. Even helping her into the bag had made her crazy. She would make a low noise at the lightest touch but then deny she had. He’d presumed she’d give up on the charade once they were zipped in, but all she did was turn her back and not respond to a single thing he said.

  If only she could keep her hands to herself. He’d been accused more than once by dates of being all hands. But he had nothing on El. Her hand slipped out of his again to travel toward his belt. He gasped at the sensation. Crap. He grabbed her ha
nd again, and held it tight in sheer self-defense.

  Stupid agreement.

  Oh, the hell with it. That was it. He let go of her hands, raising his arms until his palms were under his head. One of her hands slipped under his shirt, started lightly scratching nails down his skin. He had to steady his breathing and interlock his fingers to keep from pulling her against him. When her other hand reached around his neck to tickle his ear, he let out a small moan.

  He waited, enduring the torture until her hand left his chest, moving down until it was snugly locked over his raging erection.

  Now.

  “Grayson,” he whispered. When she didn’t respond, he said it louder. “Grayson!”

  She woke with a start but the sack was tight enough against them that her hands didn’t immediately move. “Huh? What?! What’s wrong?”

  He moved his head down until he was whispering in her ear. She shivered visibly. “Unless you plan to ravish me, move your hands.”

  She froze, consciousness finally arriving as she realized her position. One leg was wrapped around his, her arm around him, finger skimming his ear, other hand fondling him. And he was absolutely innocent of wrongdoing. “This isn’t how it looks.”

  He chuckled and she winced. “Oh, don’t worry. I can’t see a thing. But the things I can feel are amazing.”

  She struggled to move to a safe position, but there was nowhere to go. He finally turned in the bag until he was facing her, nose to nose. He wormed his hand until he could push the hair away from her panicked eyes. He whispered softly. “Give it up, Grayson. Just let it happen.” He leaned forward, pressed his lips against hers and she let out a little squeak. But she didn’t stop him and he pushed forward, opening her mouth with his, letting their tongues tangle. God, she tasted amazing.