by Frost, E J
Kez nestles into my chest. Hugs me tight. “I don’t know. I get so angry at her.”
I got that. “Alive ‘n’ angry’s better than dead ‘n’ angry.”
“I guess.” She doesn’t sound convinced. Maybe I’ve underestimated how angry she is.
“It is, kitten.” I kiss her earnest little face. Tuck the blanket in around us. “Trust me.”
“I do.” She nuzzles into me sleepily.
I know she does. It’s still funny, her trust, but I don’t think it’s fragile anymore. Kez and I are solid. More solid than I ever imagined I could be with another human being.
I kiss her again and lie back to watch the sunset.
Chapter 31
A wet brush against my cheek wakes me. I smile before I open my eyes, thinking it’s Kez’s lips on my skin. There are worse ways to wake up. But when I trail my fingertips up her neck, I find her head still resting on my shoulder. I wipe my cheek with my free hand. Wetness. It’s on my bare shoulder, too, and in Kez’s hair.
I blink up at the night sky. The stars are shining brightly overhead. No clouds. It’s dew. We’ve slept for hours. It’s after three in the morning by the chrono in my eye, and the dew is falling.
I shift Kez carefully off my shoulder. She murmurs and rolls over. I smooth the thermoblanket over her so she doesn’t get cold. Spend a minute tossing everything scattered around the hammock into my bag, and then tossing my bag inside. I return to the hammock to untie Kez, wrap her in the thermoblanket and carry her into the house.
She settles into my bed without waking, but when I return to the bed after emptying my bladder and washing the worst of the various fluids we’ve produced off my skin, she holds her arms out. I slide into bed beside her and cuddle her to me. “This isn’t where we went to sleep,” she murmurs.
“Nope. We were gettin’ wet out there. Figured we’d better move inside.”
She grumbles. “I like sleeping outside with you. I was watching the stars. I don’t mind getting wet.”
I give her a kiss. Tuck her head into my shoulder when I get a blast of tiger breath. “I mind.”
“Well, your bed is awfully nice.” She stretches, wriggles. “Mmm. And, oh, look. I’m still tied up.” She tosses the loop of the belt still knotted around her wrist toward the headboard. It falls short, but it would only be the work of a few seconds to change that. She could be restrained in half a minute.
“Yeah?” I’m not too sleepy, and I’m not sore, so I wouldn’t mind another go. “Well, there would have to be a few rules.”
“I love rules.” She tucks her hands behind her head and wiggles her ass deeper into the bed.
“Rule one is you gotta clean your teeth.” I want to kiss her without the deterrent of that tiger breath.
“Fuck!” She bolts out of bed before I have a chance to stop her. “I’m getting implants in my teeth after this!” she shouts over her shoulder as she dives into the ‘fresher.
I lie back in the bed and chuckle to myself.
When she returns, mouth fresh, skin cool from a quick wash, I untie her wrist, roll her under me and make love to her. No more rules. No games. Just me on top, my mouth on hers, her legs locked around my hips, the sweet slide of flesh into flesh. A slow build to a mutual orgasm that leaves us gasping into each other’s mouths, looking into each other’s eyes to watch the waves of pleasure peak and ebb. I love this about Kez. That she gets off from the roughest play, but also the gentlest lovemaking. She kisses my neck and shoulders through the aftermath, the way she likes to. When we’re both on the edge of sleep, I withdraw and roll to my side. Bring her with me so she’s cradled against the length of my body.
Neither of us says anything beyond a few whispered goodnights. We don’t need to.
I wake Kez an hour before dawn. She rouses with her sexy kitten murmur and snuggles against me. I cuddle her for a few minutes, enjoying her closeness. Finally, the numbers in the corner of my vision grow large enough to worry me and I remind Kez we’re on the clock.
She climbs out of bed with a sigh. Strips off her night-dress. Reaches her fingertips toward the ceiling, then bends over and touches her toes.
I check her over carefully while she stretches. The derms have done their work. There’s a green shadow on her lower back where the worst bruise was, but that’s all. She’s healed, except for the marks I put on her last night.
She twists, stretching her sides, catches me watching her and grins. Goes back to stretching with a wiggle of that beautifully bruised ass. Totally unselfconscious now. That makes me smile as I climb out of bed. So does the way she folds up her night-dress and leaves it in a neat pile on the pillow. I don’t mind sleeping at her place, but I like the assumption she’ll be sleeping at mine.
While she showers and dresses, I make breakfast. She bought enough sugar to rot out all my augmented teeth. We need something a little tart. While I’m whipping fresh citrus juice into soyumilk, Kez emerges from the ‘fresher, hops up onto the kitchen counter and watches me. When it’s ready, she holds out the plates I’ve prepared with warm slices of sweet bread. I scoop the citrus foam onto the top. Kez garnishes it with some of the mixed fruit salad she bought, pops open the bulbs of self-heating susu and sets it all on the lacquered tray we ate our dinner on. She rolls her eyes when I add several slices of crisp-fried auro to my plate.
“Oh, look, meat.” She grins at my grunted responses. “Can we eat on the deck?”
“Sure.” There aren’t a ton of choices. I’ve never bothered with a table and chairs because Kez is the first company I’ve had. I use the dining room as a workshop.
We eat on the hammock, with the tray between us to avoid any temptation towards renewed stickiness. Kez compliments my cooking, and teases me a little more about my need for meat with every meal, but otherwise we’re quiet, enjoying each other’s company and the very early morning. The sky has just begun to gray towards pearl when the Multi I’ve tucked into a pocket of my fatigues buzzes.
I pull it out and show it to Kez. The code on the display doesn’t tell me anything other than there’s been a delivery for the Marie. “Gotta be the rat-food arriving.” I’m not scheduled for anything else for another two days.
“Do we need to hurry?”
“No, it’ll have to clear security first. We got time.”
“Good. This is too good to rush.” She takes another bite of the bread. Washes it down with a sip of susu. “What’s your favorite food?”
“Hard to name just one. That rendang the other night has to rank up there, though.”
Kez nods. “It is good, isn’t it? That’s my favorite.”
“You ever had gesper?” I ask. She shakes her head. “Big fish, native to Yrillo. They roast it in a sand pit with leaves and this special red sauce. Sweet, but spicy. Right up your alley. When I outed Tol Seng, I hid on a transport and had to listen to the guards talk about it for hours. I was sittin’ in a puddle of drool by the time we finally cleared atmosphere.” I chuckle at the memory. “We’re definitely gonna try some of that.”
She smiles, sharing my humor, then watches her susu swirl around in her cup for a moment before looking up at me again. “You were serious about that? Going to Yrillo after all this is over?”
“Deadly serious.” We both need some down-time.
“I’ve never been off-planet,” Kez says slowly. “I don’t even have a Multi.” She nods at my pocket.
“We’ll get you one.” I guessed she’d never been off-world when she said she’d never been on a spaceship. “High time you went.”
I’m rewarded with her brilliant grin, which lights up the gray morning.
Even at dawn on a sixday, Nock’s spaceport is bustling. A sharp contrast to New Brunny’s sleepy start. Port workers in their blue and yellow unis scurry between berths, like a swarm of bees. Probably loading for runs to the Bauz Cycler, since that’s due to pass Kuseros today on its way to the outer system planets. As I move towards the office, I nod to the few workers whose fa
ces I recognize. I don’t know their names, and I’ve been careful to make sure they don’t know mine. That’s not going to change. To everyone but Kez and her crew, I need to remain a ghost.
Thea, unfortunately, does know my name, or at least my pseudonym, and she greets me with a cheerful, “Snowy!” as we walk through the office block’s sliding doors. Behind me, Kez muffles a snort.
Thea’s smile dims a little when she notices Kez. “Who’s your friend?” she asks. She doesn’t snarl, but her cheerfulness is forced.
“This is Kez. Kez, Thea.”
Thea looks Kez up and down, decides that Kez’s assets are inferior to hers, and leans over her desk to emphasize the point.
Kez walks over to the desk and offers her hand to Thea. “Snow’s told me a lot about you.”
Thea considers Kez’s hand for a second before shaking. “None of it good, if I know him.”
She doesn’t, but I refrain from commenting. Kez leans on the edge of Thea’s desk and smiles. “Actually, he says you take really good care of him.”
Bullshit, I’ve never said anything like that. But Thea doesn’t know that and she beams. “I take care of all my boys.”
I bet she does. “Thea, something come in for me?” I hold up the flashing Multi.
She nods and hands a slip of flimsy to Kez. “Consumables, right? They’re just clearing. I’ve scheduled them for delivery straight to your berth.”
“Thanks. Would you file a flight plan for me? Kuus and back.”
“Of course. Fly safe.”
“Will do. C’mon.” I hold my hand out to Kez. She slides off Thea’s desk, takes my hand and follows me out.
As we cross the port, Kez holds the flimsy out in front of us. “What do these symbols mean? I don’t recognize most of them.”
I identify them for her. “The line at the top, those are ship and port codes. Second line is shipment arrival time and who logged it. Third line is shipment type. Each port on Kuseros uses its own shipment codes, so don’t bother learning those. You can always get the ship’s computer to give you a translation.”
Kez nods as she scans the flimsy again. “Got it . . . Snowy.”
I elbow her. “Kitten.”
She giggles, intent on the flimsy. I get the sense she’s memorizing the codes, even though I told her not to bother.
“Not that I give a fuck,” I say. “But what was that shit your sister was slinging about you failing v-school?”
Kez hunches one shoulder. “She wasn’t lying. I was bad at school.”
“Didn’t like it?” I put my arm around her.
She shrugs. Leans into me. “I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t remember things. It got better after I went to the House. But I still had to repeat another year. I dropped out as soon as I could. That’s when Liv took me on full-time.” She slides the flimsy into one of her bag’s many pockets. “My memory’s gotten a lot better since then.”
I reach up and ruffle her stubble. Tuck her head onto my shoulder. “There’s nothin’ wrong with your memory. Or your brain.” School isn’t for everyone, but that aside, she’d lost half her family and was trying to survive on her own. No wonder she was distracted. I keep her tight against my side until we reach the Marie. “In you go. You’re flying us to Kuus, so prep the ship, Captain. I’ll load the cargo when it gets here.”
She tilts her head to look up at me. “Does being Captain mean I get sixty-five percent?”
“Fuck, no.” I push her up the Marie’s ramp and swat her ass. “This is a flying lesson. Five hundred plus expenses.”
“I paid for the paddle and the vibrator and the lube,” she says over her shoulder.
The little monster stirs at the reminder of what we did last night. Even that faint rumble stings. Fuck, I’m sore. “I’ll make you buy me a whip if you don’t get your ass in gear.”
She wiggles that saucy ass at me as she sways up the ramp and into the ship.
I haven’t known many rat-men, and my acquaintances haven’t been of a long duration, but it seems to me that they don’t do things by halves. Rat One wasn’t fucking around when he tried to kill us, and Acker isn’t fucking around when he sends us fifteen crates full of food. Each crate weighs over ten metric tons, and the fifteen of them fill two of the Marie’s cargo holds. Even with the funnel, it takes me a half-hour to load them all and by the time I swing into the pilot’s chair next to Kez, the Twins are up and she’s polarized the viewer against their bright morning glare.
“How many fucking rats are there in Kuus?” I ask as I check Kez’s pre-flight, which is perfect.
“At a guess, maybe a hundred. I don’t know. Why?”
“Acker sent enough food for a month.”
“Is that what was taking you so long? I thought you’d gotten lost back there.”
“Just givin’ you time to prep the ship. In case you had to do somethin’ over.”
It takes her a moment to process, then Kez sticks out her tongue at me, a gesture I see reflected in the central viewer.
I smile back at her, both because I enjoy teasing her, and because I’m pleased she accepts my teasing for what it is. “We’re good to go, kitten. Take her up. Make sure to give that fucker a big kiss when you rotate the pods.” I nod at the Starflare sitting in the next bay, which is considerably less shiny than it was a day ago.
Kez wasn’t kidding about the drop-off. I hover the ship over a hole that looks like it descends to the planet’s fucking core. I’ve never heard of this pit and looking down into the drop, I can see why no one uses it. The pit walls are sheer. They widen out slightly near the top, and there’s a shadow at the bottom of the pit that suggests a bulge in the crumbling rock. The pit’s shaped like a flask. No wonder the govvies abandoned it. The whole thing looks on the verge of collapse.
I flick my eyes across the readings from the Marie’s sensors. She’s designed for space, but she’s got a cortex scanner. It tells me that the ground is a mix of calcite and Bresford stone, a decorative native rock so soft you can carve it with a knife. Definitely not the ideal place to land.
“Can you see anything down there?” I ask Kez. I can’t see anything in the shadow, but the cat’s eye doesn’t do much for me when I’m looking from bright light into shadow, and my kitten has good eyes.
She shakes her head.
“Let’s hope this doesn’t drop a ton of rock onto the rats’ heads.” Better them than us, though. I rotate the Marie’s secondary engines and point them at the walls of the pit. Give a quick thrust that bounces us up a hundred meters into the clouds. A plume of dust rises out of the pit.
“Fuck,” Kez says. I hear her swallow hard. I take a deep breath to settle my own stomach and drop us down slow while I watch the infrared scan. The blast from the engines has triggered some minor rock-fall, but I don’t see any serious cave-ins.
“Here we go,” I tell Kez. I take it slow, easing us down into the pit. Ready with the secondary thrusters to bounce us out if any big rocks start falling on us. The engines kick up more dust as we lower into the pit, leaving me relying on the infrared to maneuver. A nerve-rattling pinging begins on the canopy overhead. I flick down the shutters to protect the viewscreens. If the infrared goes, I’ll be flying blind, but I’ve got her lined up nice and tight now, and better a blind drop than a cracked viewscreen. Those fuckers are expensive to repair.
A proximity alert pops up on the central display a moment before I expect it to and I ease off on the controls just a fraction. Nerves making me tweak the juice. I take another deep breath, tap the landing cushion, and settle the Marie onto the uneven floor of the pit.
Kez begins to unstrap herself, but I hold out a hand. “Give it a moment. She’s self-leveling.”
The ship, and the fluid in my inner ear, rock. Almost worse than our bounce into the clouds. I wait until the ship and my stomach are both good and level before I flick off the flight harness.
Kez climbs out of the co-pilot’s chair slowly. She’s gone
an interesting shade of green. Her mouth is compressed to a tight line.
“If you’re gonna puke, use the passenger ‘fresher,” I tell her. There’s a fresher in the cockpit, but it’s built into a wall of instrumentation. It takes a couple of minutes to unfold and is a bitch to clean.
She scowls at me. “I’m not going to puke.”
I chuckle. I love how easy she is to tease. “You gonna play meet-and-greet with your friend Diamond while I unload?”
“He’s not my favorite person.” She suddenly brightens. “The rats seem to like you. How about you shake paw while I unload? It didn’t look that hard.”
I sling my arm around her shoulders. Rub my fingertips over the slick neopoly covering her triceps. She’s wearing another of her black tops, this one with longer sleeves since today is cooler than yesterday, over a pair of leggings snug enough to show off the musculature of those runner’s legs, patterned with an abstract pattern of interlocking circles. Each circle is burned out so her pale skin shows through. I like the way she dresses. And I love that she dressed today especially for me. “Only thing you should be doin’ in that outfit is dancing ‘round a pole.”
“Are you saying I look like a stripper?”
I tilt my head. “Maybe a vloop dancer.”
She kicks me in the ankle. “How would you feel about dancing around on a bunch of broken toes?”
“Ow.” I give her a retaliatory nip on the ear, pinkly exposed now that she’s lost her hair. “C’mon, let’s go meet your furry little friends.”
But there’s no one to meet us. Just a utilitarian gray container, spattered with dust and dented by a few falling rocks, sitting at the mouth of a tunnel that leads out of the otherwise empty pit. I pull Kez up at the bottom of the Marie’s ramp and wait for several long seconds, watching and listening. There’s nothing but the occasional rattle of falling stone. After I’m sure there’s nothing lurking in the shadows, I release Kez and start unslinging the cargo funnel.