“Danovan…” He tugged me to him, crushing me against his chest in a forceful embrace.
“This isn’t up for discussion. When we get to the crash site, you’re going to pretend that you were searching for a way back to Christian. He is going to be the man you love, you are going to marry him and have lots of babies and be happy, all right? He’s going to fund your research and you’re going to go on to do great things.”
I struggled to get out of his arms, to protest, but he just held me quick. “See, I have to get used to the idea of losing you, and you have to get used to the idea of losing me.”
I pushed him away with all my might, and he let me go, even as I felt hot, angry tears pool in the corners of my eyes. “You don’t get to do that,” I said, my voice thick as it struggled to squeak out over the knot in my throat. “You don’t get to decide how this all goes down. You don’t get to tell me to get used to being without you.”
“Ara—”
“No. You don’t get to do that.” He stood stoic and tall, the daylight shining against his skin like brushed nickel. The ridges of his brow were a stern line as he looked at me, the black shirt that he wore clinging to the contours of his musculature. He was a strange and beautiful sight, and I loved him beyond measure. “I won’t be pushed away,” I said, a choked sob emanating from my lips. And even as I felt I might collapse with the force of what I was feeling, he caught me in his arms; he held me steady.
“Ara, please, it’s the only way.”
“No, we have to find another way.”
“I can’t—”
“No. I love you, and I don’t think I can do this if it means losing you.” He bent forward and caught my mouth in a kiss then, and I kissed him back, full of all the desperation I had been trying to convey. He lifted me into his arms, and I wrapped my legs around his waist as he turned me around and pressed my back against the rover. We kissed and kissed like we were looking for answers. We found none, but we looked again and again.
“Me rey hah,” he whispered between kisses. “I love you, I love you.”
When we finally came up for air, my lips were sore and he was smiling at me, like maybe there had been a break in the storm clouds that had circled him since the attack on Hiropass. “Tell me there’s another way,” I said as he set me slowly down onto my feet.
“We’ll find one,” he said. “We’ll find another way.”
***
Back in the rover, we began to formulate our plan. I would pretend that I had been searching for Christian, just as long as I could figure out what he knew, if anything. Then, before the ruse was broken, Danovan would prerecord the broadcast, and we would play it even as we made our escape. To where?
“We’ll wing it,” he said, grinning faintly. “Like Thelma and Louise.”
“Danovan, those were two women, and they died at the end.”
“Well,” he said, considering, “so, not exactly.”
We drove on, the tension broken between us. That is, until the smoldering corpse of the great galactic vessel began to loom large on the horizon. The Leviathan did look like a great dead beast on its side, concave in places and bloated in others, amid the glitter of broken glass in the field around it. It was a sight unlike any other I had seen before, like a skyscraper on its side, obliterated in an open field.
As we got closer, we could see the crew working to put out the fires that were still burning. With a nuclear engine, it’s no wonder that it had raged for days on end. There were tents set up some yards away from the great dead ship, but the place was altogether much emptier than I had hoped.
“Are you ready?” Danovan asked slowly as we pulled to a stop outside one of the tents, even as a squadron of men in military garb came forward, weapons at the ready. I felt my heart began to race in my chest; I wished I’d thought to kiss him before we’d gotten to the camp. The soldiers, clad in traditional army camo and sporting C97 laser pistols, approached.
“I’m ready,” I whispered, and he shut off the engine of the rover and put his hands in the air. I did the same, and the military took the liberty of opening the rover doors and escorting us out.
“What is your business here?” one of the men asked me. With hands raised, I took a few tentative steps forward. I could hear the other men behind their protective visors, murmuring that they recognized me: That’s the girl from the newsfeed; Isn’t that Ward’s wife?
“My name is Dr. Araceli Cross,” I said. “And Christian Ward is my fiancé.”
Part 5: The Carpathian
Chapter 20:
Dr. Araceli Cross
“That’s her, all right,” one of the soldiers said from behind the cover of his visor. “That’s Dr. Cross.” Danovan and I held our hands up defensively as I tried not to count how many pistols they had trained on us. My heart was a piston motoring at top speed in my chest, and I tried to steady myself by breathing deep into my diaphragm, but I couldn’t keep from trembling. Maybe it was the irrevocable violence I had experienced over the course of the last few weeks, but staring down the barrels of those guns made me go cold to the bone.
I tried to think of what it might feel like to be shot, as though I could ward it off somehow, or at least prepare myself for it. I closed my eyes and thought about the laser tearing through my soft tissue; I tried to imagine what that kind of pain must feel like. Burning, and a puncture wound, but deeper, hotter.
After a moment’s hesitation, the soldiers began to lower their weapons one at a time. I cast a nervous glance back to Danovan, whose expression was impassive as one of the soldiers began to pat him down, hard but perfunctory. Finding us unarmed, they flanked us on either side before marching us toward the nearest tent with a curt “Follow me.”
There were lines of tents that, I assumed, acted as temporary lodging and office space for the military and emergency services crew. And the site should have been a bustle of activity, medics and firemen and reporters and soldiers, but the entire place had the feeling of somewhere somber. There were fire crews trudging to and from the crash site, trying to extinguish the still-burning fires that raged in the bowels of the Leviathan, but you could tell that the spirits of these workers had been crushed underneath the realities of their work. Medics clustered, idle, on the sidelines, waiting to be called in to do their jobs. But their loitering presence, inactive and downtrodden, was an indicator of the thing no one was willing to say aloud: there had been no survivors to save.
The soldiers led us to the nearest temporary structure. It was large and looming, made of white canvas that bubbled out from the pressurized entrance that separated it from other similar white canvas structures. This wasn’t a mere tent, this was a pressurized habitat.
The soldiers led us into the airlock and closed the door behind us. I felt the pressure in the cabin shift with a whoosh of air around me, until everything became lighter. The gravity was comparable to that on Earth, and I realized, suddenly, that I’d gotten used to the increased gravity of Galatea, and I felt like I might float away from the surface of the planet. The second door opened, and we were granted admittance into the hab.
The soldiers moved deeper into the space, and we followed. I allowed my gaze to rove over the hab, outfitted with sleek metal and white plastic furniture and workstations. It had GenOriens written all over it—literally, in some places. The LCD screens were emblazoned with the logo, rotating around a clear blue planet.
The perimeter of the hab was all workstations with computer screens and tablet docks, but there were two white sofas and a glass coffee table in the center of the room. They even had bottled water with GenOriens logos on the label, set up in neat little rows in one corner of the coffee table.
There was a darkened hallway at one end of the room, and I could barely make out his form as he emerged from it. Christian Ward, in shirtsleeves with a five-o’clock shadow, a tumbler of bourbon held loosely aloft in one hand.
He froze in his tracks when his eyes landed on me
, the color draining from his face as though he’d seen a ghost. It dawned on me then that he hadn’t actually thought I was alive.
“Araceli,” he said, his eyes two wide brown saucers, sunk deep in a sleepless expression. His jaw trembled even as it hung agape, and he let the glass drop from his hand and shatter against the metal flooring before he raced over to me and encircled me in his embrace. “Good Lord,” he said, hugging me to him and swaying me back and forth, “you’re alive.”
“I’m alive,” I confirmed, for lack of anything better to say. I lifted my arms out of habit and hugged him back, admittedly comforted by his strong familiarity. I could feel a bulge at his lower back where he’d tucked a pistol into the back of his pants, and I wondered about the circumstances that had necessitated an executive being thusly armed. But as I hugged him, I could feel Danovan stiffen behind me; I could feel him suck the air out of the room as his heart dipped into his stomach.
Christian smelled of booze and sweat and aftershave, and I was startled—though perhaps I shouldn’t have been—when he lifted his hands to my face, cupped my cheeks in his palms, and tilted my head back to kiss me.
My body tensed, and I recoiled without giving it a second thought. I wasn’t his, and my body knew it even though I was trying to construct a lie to convince him that nothing had changed. But in that first fledgling moment, I couldn’t help it. I pulled away.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, even as I averted my gaze. My cheeks burned as I tried to come up with something, anything, that would sound convincing. My mouth went dry, and my hands went clammy, and my mind was and endless stretch of blank canvas.
“I think,” Danovan gently intoned, saving me from this horrible moment, “that she’s been through a great deal of trauma, and she’s overwhelmed.”
Christian looked over at Danovan, and took a moment to register his presence at all, before he gave a vague nod of his head. “Of course,” Christian said, stepping aside to extend a hand to Danovan. He clasped it firmly, gave it a solid shake. “Thank you for keeping her safe, tel’Darian.”
“I’m just relieved that she survived,” Danovan replied. “I’m happy that I was able to reunite you.” But I could hear in that simple sentence what Christian could not: the thick weight of falsity that must have made it taste like acid on his tongue.
“You all can go,” he said to the soldiers, who turned on their heels and went out again through the airlock.
“Please,” Christian said, his beautiful dark skin coated in a sheen of sweat, “both of you. Come in. Sit down.” He directed us to the couches, and I took the lead, grateful for any bit of business that kept me busy, that kept me from having to meet Christian’s searching eyes.
I took a seat and Danovan sat across from me, and I could feel his longing radiating from his body. Or, I thought I could, but maybe it was just my own. I snatched a bottle of water from the table and drank it down in three desperate gulps as Christian moved to sit beside me. Close, but not too close.
“Tell me what happened,” Christian said, “tell me everything.”
I looked up at Danovan then, and his eyes told a story that we couldn’t repeat. Not to Christian, not yet. But it was my turn to save us from the silence, so I spoke.
I told him about being knocked unconscious during the attack on the Leviathan. I told him about how Danovan had carried me to the escape pod, how he had saved my life in that moment, and how we’d been rocketed to the Galatean surface. I told him about watching the Leviathan fall, about heading to the GenOriens base, and about the slaughter we had seen there. I told him about the Ribomax attack, how Danovan had saved me a second time when he brought me to his family home in Hiropass. I told him about how we had planned to journey to Pyrathas, when we saw Christian’s image on the newsfeed, when we saw that he was looking for me. I told him about how Hiropass had been attacked—but I didn’t tell him why. I told him only that Danovan’s mother had been gunned down, and that we had set out that very day to see what we could find out about the nature of this ceaseless violence. The story spilled out, largely intact, word over word over word, until I had run out of air, until I simply came to a stop.
But I hadn’t told him about the fact that I knew that they were trying to round up anyone who was pregnant with a hybrid. I didn’t tell him that I had seen that first beautiful hybrid progeny, and I didn’t tell him any of my darkest theories about the GenOriens involvement in the slaughter of its own people. No. Instead, when my story concluded, and it was left to hang there in the air between us, I asked, “Did Cat survive?”
Christian had been attempting to process everything I was telling him, and he looked stunned out of his rumination when I asked the question. I saw him make a decision, saw him hesitate, but ultimately, he swallowed hard and gave a slow shake of his head.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “We haven’t found her.”
“From the looks of it,” Danovan interjected, “you haven’t really found anyone.”
Christian looked over at him bobbed his head, his lips parted, a sort of vacant look in his eyes. “I’m aware,” he said, and I was wondering just how much of that bourbon he’d imbibed before I’d shocked the glass right out of his hand. “We haven’t found anyone,” he said. “Until you.”
“But you made it off,” I said, suddenly dubious. How had that happened? Who had been with him?
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“That’s… a stroke of good luck.” I was trying to sound grateful, but I think it might have come out a little accusatory. “Who was with you, in the shuttle?”
But Christian just shook his head before rubbing his face in his hands with surprising vigor, like he was trying to will himself to wake up. “That’s just it,” he muttered, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
Danovan and I locked eyes then. Maybe Christian wasn’t on the inside of whatever bizarre conspiracy this was shaping up to be. Maybe he was as innocent a bystander as we were.
“I was knocked unconscious in the blast,” he went on, “just like you were, Ara. And the next thing I knew, I was alone in an escape pod, planetside. Not far from where we’re sitting at this very moment.”
“You remained in orbit until after the Leviathan fell,” I remarked, bewildered.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “I didn’t see it fall, but when I woke up, it was the smoldering wreck you saw when you drove in.”
“Do you have any idea who attacked us?” I asked him, turning to face him. He was shaking his head from side to side, so I reached out and grasped his hands, and brought him back to me. “Christian,” I asked again, “do you know anything about the attack on the Leviathan, or the attacks on the GenOriens base or on Hiropass?”
“No,” he said, meeting my gaze. “No, Ara. I have no idea what in hell is going on. All I know is that I want to get off this godforsaken planet. I want to turn my back on it, go home, and never think of it again.”
“Christian—”
“So I am going to send for a shuttle that can take us into orbit, all right?” He was rising to his feet, pacing back and forth in front of the coffee table. “I am going to get us into orbit and onto the next intergalactic vessel, and then I am going to get us back to Earth, and you and me? We’re going to settle down at… at… some ranch house somewhere. No, somewhere with picture windows overlooking the ocean, yeah? And then, Ara, you and me? We’re going to start making babies and I’m going to step down at GenOriens and you’re going to stop… doing whatever it is that you do. You’re going to give up your post as the head of the Nova Genus project, and we’re going to live a quiet, simple life where giant unsinkable vessels don’t sink.”
“Christian,” Danovan calmly interrupted, “I think you’re in shock. I think you should sit down, take a few deep breaths—”
“Due respect, tel’Darian,” he said, and I saw the resurgence of Christian Ward’s sharpness, his keen intellect, his raw power. “Due respect, but this has nothing whatsoe
ver to do with you.”
“On the contrary,” I said, “he’s the reason I’m standing here at all.” I fumbled trying to find the right words that would keep us all here until this mystery had been uncovered, until Danovan could broadcast the truth far and wide. “And his home was attacked. His mother was killed. We owe him everything—I owe him everything.”
Christian glanced between Danovan and myself and nodded vaguely. “Fine, yes, fine. We’ll… do… something. My mother is in orbit aboard the Carpathian, and she comes planetside once a day, so we’ll… maybe she can help us.”
His mother? Lucille Ward? The woman who had pioneered so many of GenOriens’ programs, who had stepped down to let her son take over? Why was she in Galatea’s galactic neighborhood? “In the meantime,” Christian went on, “I want to have the medics inspect you.”
“Really, I’m fine,” I protested.
“She isn’t,” Danovan interrupted. “She was burned by a Ribomax. We used herbal remedies in Hiropass, but those burns could use the intervention of modern medicine.”
He was right, though the burning had been reduced to a dull ache that was easy to forget about, what with all this insufferable intrigue.
“I don’t need to be examined, I’m fine,” I went on, but the men were having none of it.
“Just… let them check you out, Ara, would you?” Danovan asked, and I could deny him nothing, so I acquiesced, however begrudgingly.
“Danovan, we’ll put you up in the soldiers’ quarters, if that suits you—”
“No,” I interjected. “I just mean… I would feel better if he were… here. To do his job, right? To protect us, to protect you.”
Christian swallowed hard and proffered a faint smile before nodding his consent. “Very well. There are two bedrooms attached to this hab; we will have one and he shall have the other.” He bent at the waist to press a kiss to my forehead before holding a hand out to me. I took it, and he helped me to rise to my feet. “But before anything else—we shall see the medic.”
Alien Survivor: (Stranded on Galatea) An Alien SciFi Romance Page 18