Deep Claim

by Elsa Jade

  Under other circumstances, the dense, metallic core might’ve spun to molten life—a real planet with its own atmosphere and liquid water. But the unnamed planetoid had instead tumbled through space unnoticed until a survey crew had assayed the rock and declared it valuable. Humans had always appreciated sparkly rocks, but the discovery of qubition that made interstellar travel possible had sealed the tumbling asteroid’s fate.

  Hauled into a more stable orbit and named Ydro-Down, the planetoid was crudely and incompletely terraformed, granted just enough atmosphere to improve the return on investment. Despite the rough charms, it went without saying that QueCorp wanted its investment back and not for the tranquil sweeps of hills and valleys.

  Which was why Nazra had been hired. Still up for debate was how to defend Ydro-Down long term from everyone who wanted the Q. Kemet and Grey had discussed negotiating a more permanent solution. Nazra Company had been finding work in troubled systems before Fenn had seen his first vid of star pirates and the princesses who loved them. Didn’t seem likely that Kemet would ever give up that freedom, but Fenn doubted she wanted to walk away from a guaranteed gig either.

  For a few thundering heartbeats, he wondered what a permanent posting on Ydro-Down would look like.

  Slowly he straightened. Probably it would look like this. Wild, perilous, vast, secretive terrain, hiding riches beyond imagining.

  And death too, which his wind-bleached bones would attest to if he didn’t make his way out of here before the next unpredictable katabatic storm of toxic gas rolled across the surface.

  The Nazra crew had been warned to always keep an air filter at the ready, and the pockets of his fatigues were loaded with the usual emergency supplies that had kept him alive on more than one occasion. He had a map, and he had his comm, which he could use to summon the Nazra if he got to a high point with less interference or close enough to a relay to piggyback on the signal. But he didn’t relish the thought of returning a failure, Jashanna still out in the field without him.

  Dragging a deep breath into his aching lungs, he started running again.

  He wasn’t sure if she knew he was still following her. She made no attempt to speed up or hide the runabout’s tracks. Of course, she knew he knew their destination, so maybe she just didn’t care.

  Considering the other likely possibility—that she anticipated he would die before catching up with her—her ignoring him was preferable.

  He ran on.

  At first he thought his vision was dimming with exhaustion, but then he realized the meager daylight was fading. The pale star at the center of this unremarkable system didn’t offer much in the way of light or comfort, and now he was losing even that when he should be nestled down in the runabout, maybe even bunked at the relay station by now.

  Maybe even bunked with Jashanna…

  He blew out an aggrieved breath. And instantly regretted that moment of annoyance as he wheezed painfully on the inhale. Should he bivouac here? He’d slept in worse places, although he couldn’t precisely bring them to mind at this moment.

  Despite the fact it had been Jashanna’s hands tossing him out onto this plain, he could only blame himself for his predicament. He’d known she was strong enough to eject him, but he hadn’t anticipated how quietly she’d stalked him before that. He’d imagined he’d have a chance to show her his mastery of various fighting forms. Instead, she hadn’t even yelled her displeasure, just handled him.

  Though all the muscles in his body, especially his legs and the stretchy bands between his ribs, were screaming in complaint at this unexpected exertion, one muscle twitched with new life.

  Grimacing, he rearranged his sweaty crotch. It wasn’t necessarily an indication of a failure of the procedure. Could be just a side effect of friction and lubrication.

  And of remembering Jashanna’s hands on him.

  Not to mention that kiss…

  With a groan, he ran on through the gathering darkness.

  As he alternated between walking and running, he decided the nicest thing he could say about this impromptu tour of her track was that it was very flat. He didn’t need the emergency light in his kit or even the lume stick headlamp that all the miners carried with almost fanatical zeal along with spares. He checked his map occasionally, but once he set his sights on a particular star, he ran until he was tired, dropped to a walk to check his bearings, and then kept running.

  About the time he switched from more running and less walking to the opposite, he realized the sunrise he’d been expecting thanks to the small planetoid’s speedy rotation hadn’t yet made its appearance. Unless his chronometer was off… But when he checked his comm, everything seemed to be in working order with the unfortunate exception of a clear connection to his company or the outpost.

  At the sight of the blinking light that warned of no signals in reach, the sweat down his spine iced. He hadn’t been alone since he joined Kemet’s crew.

  A phantom pang pierced the points on his skull where the surgeon had placed the lasers…

  He tipped his head back, breathing slowly through his nose, trying to drown the surge of adrenaline with thin, sharp air. But the thick tang of ozone threatened to choke him.

  Though the atmosphere right above him was crystal clear, the mountain range that ringed the reach had disappeared. As if he were at the bottom of a large, featureless hole. And the walls around him were rising.

  Clouds, he realized. And not rain clouds since all the liquid water on Ydro-Down was extracted from water-retaining minerals. These were clouds of dust.

  He ran faster. Since Nazra’s mission was to patrol near space around Ydro-Down and secure the outpost, his mission reading on the surface conditions of the moon had been brief. But they had been explicit. And the section on the deadly force of the katabatic storms had made an impression on him with just a few sentences.

  Not unlike the message those silica-laden winds would inscribe on his flayed bones: get out.

  As pointedly as Jashanna had expressed the same when she threw him out of the runabout, even her wordless fury couldn’t compete with such a storm.

  And he couldn’t outrun it.

  Even in the wan light, the clouds boiling over the peaks glinted with silica particles. His temporary shelter might hold out for a few minutes, but after that, the glass dust would bite into his fatigues and his air filter. And then into his skin and lungs.

  His best chance was to submerge himself in the loose sand, although he suspected he’d just be making the storm’s murderous task that much easier…

  No, he’d never let himself be buried before, even when he’d deserved it.

  The first puff of stinging dust were already swirling around him when he turned to run again—

  —And almost knocked himself unconscious on the runabout that loomed out of the storm.

  Chapter 5

  “Get in,” Jashanna roared at the dusty figure hunched against the wind. “The storm will flay your skin from—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard.” His voice was faint over the rising hiss of sand and howl of churning air.

  The sullen grumble almost made her reconsider turning the runabout around. He’d heard about the storms, had he? Maybe he needed to feel them.

  But could she live with her pique etched on his abandoned bones?

  Before she could let spite get the better of her, he leaped up the gangway next to her, and together they tugged the hatch closed against the hungry suck of the wind. Even with the door sealed, the metallic tang of dust and the clink of pebbles clattering against the hull made it impossible to ignore the storm.

  But at least there’d be no flaying.

  With her own grumble, she stalked back to the cockpit. As the merc followed, a dark shadow at her heel, she wondered again how she hadn’t noticed the stowaway. The runabout had spacious storage, but surely she should’ve felt his lurking presence then as she did now.

  Well, it wasn’t her fault she’d spent most of her time in the d
ark bashing at rocks.

  Shortening the shocks so the runabout hunkered as low as it could, she closed up the vents.

  Fenn watched quietly until she powered down the engine. “Is suffocating better than flaying?”

  “We can last a few hours with the onboard purifier. Storm should be over by then. We’ll dig out and you’ll walk home.”

  “Can’t go home.” He swiped a hand over his eyes leaving wild streaks through the dust on his face, and she noticed his hand was shaking. She stiffened against a surge of sympathy. And a smidgen of guilt. She’d told him she didn’t want him along. So it was his fault that he’d nearly been flayed.

  Slouching back in the pilot’s chair, she crossed her arms over her chest. “I told you to stay home.”

  “I just wanted to see the Salty Way.”

  She slanted a glance at him, alarmed by the dreamy drift in his voice.

  “Fenn? What are you—?”

  “I just wanted to be a sky pirate, to kiss a princes…”

  She choked on a startled breath. “Kiss a princess?” No wonder he’d been so shocked when she kissed him.

  “I didn’t know. They didn’t tell me.” Another sweep of his fingers left more marks around his eyes, like the tracks of tears. “At first it seemed like just a game, like I saw on the vids. We took things and they chased us. And we ran. No one could catch us. But then… It wasn’t a game anymore. They started shooting at us. They laid traps we couldn’t resist. And they almost had us. We had to fight…” When he closed his eyes, the silica on his skin glittered brighter than gold. “No,” he murmured, seemingly to himself. “We could’ve stopped. But we didn’t want to. The things we did… It wasn’t a game anymore. Never to them. And then not even to us. We swore we’d die rather than get caught.”

  At the fatalism in his tone, Jash swallowed hard. From his disjointed tone and the dilation of his pupils, she guessed there’d been more than trace amounts of Q in the dust he’d inhaled. Qubition stabilized the quantum state of wormholes to allow interstellar travel, but in its raw form, exposure could cause all sorts of strange effects, from the euphoria and paranoid of the deep-creeps to the relatively minor effects no worse than a couple sips of sunshine.

  Fenn Alexos seemed somewhere in the middle, and she should probably just let him sleep it off now that he was no longer exposed.

  But if he was a monster of a merc as she’d first suspected, Gavyn needed to know what kind of company he’d brought to Ydro-Down. So she prodded, “Nazra did these terrible things you remember?”

  Facts and timelines could get muddled under the confusing influence of Q, but truth was harder to bury.

  Fenn shook his head. “Before that,” he mumbled, much to her relief. “She’s the one who caught us in the end. She killed half of us, imprisoned the rest. I was the youngest of that crew, and the newest. I wasn’t on any of the lists yet. Me… She gave me a choice.”

  Though she hadn’t met the Nazra boss, Jashanna could image the kind of woman who commanded the people who fought pirates and scavengers and QueCorp. Whatever choice such a woman offered was likely one that demanded careful and serious consideration.

  Captivated by his tale, she leaned forward. “What were your choices?”

  “She offered to take me home.”

  Jashanna pursed her lips. After all that… “You just went home?”

  When he bowed his head, the control panel lights tracking the storm caught a cluster of scars on the back of his skull, just visible through his short hair. Not brutal like battle wounds, but deliberate, like surgical marks. “I couldn’t go back. Not after… I couldn’t. I refused.”

  “So what then?”

  “She promised to take me to the most civilized of the systems where we’d marauded. She said I could face what I’d done and be forgiven. Or…” When he opened his eyes, the black holes of his pupils had nearly eclipsed the tarnished silver. “Or I could fight against what I’d been alongside her crew.”

  Jashanna let out a stunned breath. “She forced you to become a mercenary? That’s wrong.”

  He leaned his head back with a hard thump against the seat headrest, but the confession kept coming. “I couldn’t go home. If they ever found out what I’d done, it would’ve killed them. People like me had killed people like them. And it was just a matter of time until I would’ve done it too. Kemet didn’t force me. She gave me choices. If all of them were bad, I brought that on myself.”

  Though she couldn’t see the scars at his nape from this angle, she placed her fingers together to erase the imagined sensation of the small raised marks under her calluses. “Did Kemet make you get the procedure?”

  “No, never.” He clamped his wide palm to the back of his neck. “I wanted… I wanted to prove to her that I wouldn’t go back, that I wouldn’t make those mistakes ever again.”

  Horror sank through her skin like cold, relentless sand. “Is there… Is there a controller on you?”

  “Not a device. The procedure silenced the part of my brain that had chased pleasure and other uncontrollable emotions.” He let his hand fall into his lap, his empty fingers curling upright as if reaching for something that wasn’t there. “I left home against my family’s wishes because I thought the Rim had so much more to offer than a boring ag planet, all civilized and self-sufficient.” He let out a bitter laugh, his hands curling into a fist. “Plenty of water and food. All that law-abiding peacefulness. Of course I ran away as fast as the first cruiser with the worst security could take me.” A mocking smile was aimed at himself, and for a moment she could see the vacuum-brained boy who’d carelessly rejected everything that Ydro-Down aspired to be.

  “Would they take you back?” she wondered.

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “If they knew I was alive. And that’s why I stay out here on the fraying edges of the Rim with Nazra.”

  “Punishing yourself,” she murmured. “And how long until you’ve paid enough?”

  “How much does QueCorp owe you?” he countered.

  “A lifetime,” she said with even less hesitation than him. “The life of my brother lost to the deep-creeps. The life of my mother killed in a gas explosion. The life of my father who wasted away from lung rot that one round of nanite meds would’ve cured if Overseer Scraff had been so inclined.” Her throat tightened.

  “So many lives,” Fenn whispered. “And that is how long I’ll fight.”

  Jashanna knew she needed to stop her interrogation. When she’d had too much sunshine, Fenn had put her to bed and fetched her a restorative drink. And here he was, overcome by Q exposure, and she was using his vulnerability to judge him. He would hate sharing his past as much as she’d hated being slung over his shoulder and carried away.

  She was not a princess, after all.

  Fenn had followed her because he’d been told to, and that was his job, and it was how he justified his continuing existence despite the mistakes he’d made. While she couldn’t exactly relate, since she hadn’t chosen this job or this life, she knew about following orders.

  “I’m sorry I left you behind,” she said. “I’m sorry you almost got eaten by the storm.”

  He rolled his head against the chair headrest and gave her a crooked smile. “No one has ever apologized for trying to kill me before.”

  She shrugged. “I think it’s only fair that if I want you dead, I do it with my own hands.”

  His gaze shifted down to where her hands rested in her lap. “Caveat noted,” he murmured before letting his head thump back against the seat.

  With a grunt of amusement, she levered herself out of her chair. “We’re stuck here for a little while since I don’t want to clog the intake vents if we don’t have to. Shouldn’t be too long though, since the last reading of the storm before the comms went down showed it wasn’t a big one.”

  He huffed out his own breath of disbelief. “If this isn’t big, I’d hate to see what qualifies.”

  She patted his shoulder as she angled past.
“You’d only see it for a moment before the glass sands flayed your eyeballs—”

  He groaned. “So much flaying. I’m almost sorry I came after you.”

  “Too late now.” Wedging through the tight interior space, she made her way to the center module. Although the runabout wasn’t intended for long away missions, the fold-down storage shelves made a bunk not much worse than the outpost’s quarters. She’d only made up one bunk—attending to housekeeping chores was easy enough with the runabout on autopilot on the flat, smooth plane—and just an arm’s reach away was the small pantry stocked with nonperishables. She grabbed a canteen, filled it from the potable water spigot, and added an electrolyte tab, leaving out the energy additive that helped with stamina and focus. It wasn’t like they were going anywhere soon.

  She returned to the cockpit where Fenn was listing sideways in his seat. “Come on,” she rumbled. “Time for bed.”

  He lifted his head as if it took all his strength, and his pupils were still blown wide. “Jash, I told you I can’t go to bed with you.”

  Despite the blunt rejection and the use of her nickname, she didn’t feel the urge to bristle. “Just bed, merc. Not sex.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You ran all night, nearly died, and probably have a touch of Q exposure.” When he just stared at her, the silver twin halos of his irises like the accretion disk of torn energy circling a black hole, she shook her head. “You’ve gone wormy,” she clarified.

  His lashes fluttered. “But I haven’t been through a wormhole in a while.”

  “You were exposed to raw Q in the dust,” she explained. “The effects can be unpredictable.”

  “Poison,” he whispered.

  She snorted. “Just for a little while. You’ll sleep it off.”

  “But I’m here to guard you.”

  She laughed, not exactly kindly. “Do I look like I need guarding?” She narrowed her eyes. “Unless you mean guarding like QueCorp did.”