by Lauren Esker
"Tap it again, but wait 'til we're off this planet." His voice came out absent as he initiated the takeoff sequence. The ship was flown through a combination of physical controls, via handles in the pilot cradles, and mental commands through his cuffs and the pilot implants in his brain.
The concentration required for piloting meant that he had never been the world's best pilot. He could, however, concentrate for short bursts of intense effort, such as that needed to get them airborne and out of the planet's gravity well.
Claudia exclaimed again as the ship lifted off and the black view of trees through the forward viewscreen was replaced with a tilting nighttime panorama. The darkness was spangled with the lights of cities, replaced by cloud-wreathed stars as they climbed.
"We must be going up so fast," she exclaimed. "But it hardly feels like we're moving at all."
"You'd be crushed like a kopu egg when we accelerated to lightspeed if the ship wasn't shielding us from inertia. You'll feel it sometimes," he added, "especially sideways, if we make sudden moves."
Belatedly, he remembered that she probably hadn't been off her planet much, or possibly ever, so he rotated the screen's view to show the planet dropping away beneath them. They were high enough now that the planet's curve was visible, along with a sliver of its day side.
"Oh, my God," Claudia breathed. Skara glanced over and saw her face radiant with wonder. He could have watched her like this all day, if he'd been able to spare the attention. "That's—that's Earth, it's really Earth, we're in space. Oh wow, is that a satellite?"
"Indeed. And we're going to use it for a minute."
He slowed the engines and dropped his ship into the satellite's orbit, matching pace with it.
"What are we doing?" Claudia asked, craning to see the satellite as they caught up to it and settled into a tandem orbit.
"We're pretending to be space junk. Large space junk, admittedly. The issue here is that your entire planet is under the guard of the Galatean military, and we don't want them to notice us."
"Wait a minute, who the what now?"
"Long story." He leaned back in his chair, slid his hands out of the pilot cradles and flexed his fingers. He could relax a bit now that the ship was in a stable orbit, with the engines at the lowest idle he could manage without shutting them down completely. "Let's just say, hypothetically, that the Galatean Empire has claimed your planet but haven't actually done anything about it yet, and there's a Galatean military cruiser stationed on the dark side of your moon."
"What?"
"Allegedly they're there to prevent your planet from being overrun with people like those bounty hunters." And me, he thought, though his inward twinge was slight. "As you can see, it's easy to slip past them if you know they're there. They can't keep track of everything in the entire sky, so we're just going to match pace with a known object until we're on the far side of the planet from the moon, and then we'll break away."
The moon by now had fallen astern and was no longer visible, but Claudia twisted around in her seat as if she could see it through the bulkhead. "There is an alien ship behind the moon?"
"Sometimes two or three of them." The moon was behind the world's curve now, the dayside below them. Skara slid his hands back into the pilot cradles and gripped the handles. "Here we go."
With a short burst from the engines, he accelerated away from the planet. The screen darkened automatically as he oriented the ship toward the planet's star.
"We'll fly toward your star because it'll help mask our presence from their sensors. After that ..." He closed his eyes briefly, information from the pilot implants scrolling through his brain. "We need to find somewhere to hide out for a bit. I drained my jump engines getting here, so this ship is going nowhere until they have a chance to charge up again."
"Wait, you mean we can't get away?"
The trapped feeling reasserted itself. "We need to find somewhere to hide," he said rather brusquely, and consulted the readouts in his brain again. "Looks like your system's second planet has heavy cloud cover and is uninhabited. We'll go there."
"Venus?"
"Is that its name? Sure."
Claudia's face reflected wonder again. "We're really going to Venus?"
"It doesn't sound that great, not from the readings I'm getting. The surface is hot enough to melt lead, and it rains acid. Not exactly a vacation spot."
"Yes ... but ... no one's ever been there."
"You've never been? Well, don't get too exited. It looks dismal."
"No, no," she protested, leaning forward in her restraints. "No one's been there. We're going to be the first."
"I can see why. There's not much there."
Claudia huffed and turned back to the viewscreen. "You're impossible. I can't believe I'm about to be the first person on Venus and I can't tell anyone."
With no other traffic in the area, the approach to the cloud-swirled planet was simple, complicated only by his desire to keep looking over at Claudia's face to soak up the wonder there. It was ridiculous, really, the amount of pleasure he took from vicariously experiencing her joy and delight.
Don't get used to it, he told himself grimly, clutching the controls tighter. As soon as he found some way of getting the symbiont out of her without hurting her, he'd go back to his footloose and fancy-free lifestyle, and she'd go back on Earth. In all likelihood she'd want nothing to do with him once she found out more about him anyway.
Eleven
Claudia watched the glorious orange-and-white-swirled marble of Venus growing in the ship's giant viewscreen. Half the planet was cloaked in night, with the dividing line between the night side and its creamsicle sunlit half as clear as if someone had drawn it.
Venus. Venus the planet. She still didn't think Skara quite got the point that Earth didn't have space travel yet.
She had been braced for queasiness, because she got sick on boats and sometimes even on planes, but so far she felt fine. Whatever it was that the ship did to stop them from feeling its forward motion made it perfectly stable underfoot. She might as well have been standing on the ground.
With that being the case, the growing curve of Venus seemed like a special effect from a movie. It didn't start to feel real until the deck jolted slightly under her seat as they sank into the clouds. Then the clouds covered them, and the view got a lot less interesting. It was exactly like being in a jet flying through heavy cloud cover. You couldn't really see anything. As they sank deeper, the dense cotton-candy clouds darkened to twilight.
"There we go." Skara pulled his hands out of the holes in the console that he seemed to be using to fly the ship, and stretched his fingers. "I've set the ship to keep us under here and keep moving. There's really nothing to run into up here, so the autopilot can handle it."
"What about those guys?" Claudia fumbled with her seatbelt until she figured out the right way to tap the disc-thing and make the harness retract. "They have a ship too, right? Can they find us again?"
"I ... don't know," Skara said thoughtfully. "I'm not sure what her range is. At the very least, they won't find it easy to pin us down while we're moving. The jump drive will be recharged in, oh, a few of your hours, it looks like. That might be enough time to give them the slip if they can't get a fix on us before then."
"How are they finding us, anyway? You said 'her range.' Range on what?"
"My people are finders," Skara explained. "It's how we've managed to survive for all these years, since there aren't very many of us and we can shift into any shape. We always recognize another of our kind up close, and if we imprint on someone, we can find them again."
"Imprint?"
"Imprint." Skara held out a hand, the creased purple palm turned up. It was a blatant invitation, but she refused on principle to reach out and take it, no matter how much she wanted to feel the touch of his skin again. Skara only smiled slightly and closed his hand. "I imprinted on you the other day, when we made love. I didn't really intend to. It's quite strong, much st
ronger than usual, probably because of the symbiont."
"So that's how you found me today," she said slowly. "Er. Yesterday." It was an odd feeling to know he could find her anywhere. She wasn't sure how she felt about it.
"It'll fade if it's not renewed," Skara said, and she wasn't sure how she felt about that, either. "As for our persistent friend—you know, we can't keep calling her that. I don't suppose you caught her name?"
"She called the guy something ... uh ... Kriff, I think, or something like that. I didn't hear him call her anything."
"Kriff doesn't sound like a Galatean name. It must be short for something, or maybe a nickname. In that case," Skara declared, "we'll just call them Squonxface and ... you can name the other one."
She had to choke on a laugh. "What's a squonx?"
"A burrowing animal on some of the Galatean worlds. Shaped something like a mobile penis with a face that looks like the kind of face you'd expect to find on a penis." He held his hands about a foot apart. "About so long. What do you want to call the other one?"
Inspiration deserted her, mostly because she was trying not to laugh. "Uh ... if that's the guy, then the woman can be Mrs. Potato Head, maybe?" The mental image of that terrifying, shape-changing bounty hunter with big removable lips and jug ears finally brought out the giggle she'd been trying to stifle. "It's a children's toy," she tried to explain. "You can put pieces on and take them off to make different faces."
"Sounds appropriate. Squonxface and Mrs. Potato Head it is. And now, before they find us, what do you say to a tour of my ship?"
She almost missed it because she was getting up as well, but when he rose from his seat, he swayed slightly, steadying himself on the seat back. "Are you okay?" Claudia asked.
"Fine," he said shortly. "It's been a long day. Come on, let's begin with a tour of ..." He waggled his eyebrows at her, and flashed her a bright grin; the change was so sudden she sensed he was forcing it. "The bedrooms."
"Oh, don't even."
Skara laughed softly, and she wondered if she'd even been imagining that darker mood. Skara seemed like a guy who flitted from one entertainment to the next, from one woman to the next. Was he even capable of deeper emotions at all, she wondered as he held out a hand to her. This time, with a small sigh, she took it, and his grin brightened.
"Come, lady. Let me show you my ship."
"Lovely" wasn't an adjective she would have thought to apply to a spaceship, at least not the ones she'd seen on TV, but the colors dazzled her all over again in the hallway. The bridge was somewhat more subdued, as was the medbay with its sterile white walls. But the hallway was an explosion of color: brilliant purple and yellow, orange and teal, fuchsia and mauve. Claudia found it delightful, a feast for the eyes. It reminded her of the colorful designs of the Southwest, or the Mardi Gras parades of her childhood, and she wished she had a camera to capture these bright, unique patterns.
"Does this have cultural meaning for you?" she asked, brushing her fingers across a teal swirl on a purple ground.
"Not really. I just like bright colors." He touched a door with wild geometric shapes in a dozen colors, and it slid open onto a small, somewhat cluttered cabin with gold and purple walls and a colorful bedspread. There were boxes on the bed and barrels crowded into the small amount of floor space. "I've only one guest cabin, so this is yours unless you want to share." He sounded hopeful.
"I'll take this one, thanks. Though it looks like it could use some cleaning up."
"Er, yes. I'm transporting cargo."
Claudia reached for a box. He shook his head. "Let's get some grapples from the cargo bay so we don't have to strain ourselves, and then clean it up. Oh, wait. Let me see your hand."
She held out her hand nervously. He took it gently in his own, and rolled his wrist across her palm, brushing her skin with the gold metal of his bracelet. Then he grasped her hand by the wrist and planted it firmly palm-first on the door. "Okay, it's keyed to just you and me now. Only you and I can open it."
"How do I open it?"
"Just touch it with your hand and think 'open' or 'shut'."
Claudia tested it, planting her hand on the door. It swished open and shut. "So this is like ... locked to other people besides me."
"That's right."
"But you can open it."
"It's my ship; of course I can. You'll find that most of the rest of the ship is keyed to me. I don't like people getting into my stuff."
He did not, she noticed, offer to give her personal access to the rest of the ship.
They went down the hall, past the lounge and medbay and a tiny gym, into a small elevator that took them down a level. It opened onto a large, shadowy space packed to the gills with crates, boxes, and barrels.
"What is all this stuff?" Claudia asked. Since she could barely even step out of the elevator without tripping over boxes, she could see why he'd stored some of it in a spare cabin.
"Cargo," Skara said vaguely, peering around into the dim interior. "I'm a smuggler. I smuggle. Do you see cargo grapples anywhere?"
"I don't know what they look like."
"Aha." He extricated what looked like a pair of large handles, not attached to anything, from under a mess of rope and tools. "Here, you take these. There's another pair in here somewhere ... ah, there they are."
"What do these do?" she asked, holding them up. They made her think of the handle on a pooper-scooper or a trash-picker, but big and rugged.
"They grapple." Skara demonstrated by touching the handles to a barrel. Then he lifted it effortlessly off the ground, as if it weighed nothing, and set it back down. He detached them with the touch of a button. "Come on, let's get your room cleaned out."
Claudia tested it for herself, touching them lightly to an enormous crate and pushing the button as Skara had done. Then she staggered backward and nearly landed on her ass, because the crate came up off the floor as if it weighed nothing. For some ridiculous reason she found herself thinking of upsidaisium, the made-up floating mineral from the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons she used to watch with Naomi as a little kid.
She set it down and touched the button to release the grapples, then nudged at the crate with her foot, and finally leaned her shoulder against it. It didn't feel like it was full of upsidaisium anymore, more like ordinary rocks. It didn't budge.
"Coming?" Skara asked from the elevator, looking amused.
Claudia hurried after him. "These are amazing." She tried touching one to the side of the elevator. "Can you pick up anything with these? People?" She turned to point it at him. "You?"
Skara snorted and pushed it away. "You need a smooth surface to adhere it to. You can also reverse the charge and repel something—Don't do it in here!" he added urgently as she began fiddling with the buttons. "Not unless you want to paste us both all over the inside of the elevator."
Claudia quit messing with the buttons and meekly lowered the grapples. "That seems like a bad idea. Don't your people have any concept of safety features?"
"You do have to disable a safety protocol to do it." He grinned. "But it's easy. I taught my siblings to do it, so we could have crate-fights."
"You have siblings?" She imagined a room full of pint-sized Skaras, a half-dozen energetic kids with bright green eyes, scrambling all over each other. "Your poor parents."
"Yeah," Skara said, and something changed all over his face, an expression that was dark and almost frightening. "Poor parents."
Claudia opened her mouth to ask, then closed it. That expression warned her off. "How does it work?" she asked instead.
"Same principle as artificial gravity," he said brightly, "except the other way around."
"That's real helpful, Skara, thanks."
They began hauling the contents of the bedroom down to the cargo bay. The crates and barrels were awkward to maneuver in the narrow hallways because of their size, but Claudia couldn't stop marveling at how it felt like there was nothing at the end of the grapples except thin air.
> "A smuggler, huh?" she asked as they dropped off another load, trying to find places to pack it into the stuffed cargo bay. "What kinds of things do you smuggle?"
"Lucrative things. Useful things. Whatever's hot on the black market. In between bouts of space piracy, of course."
Claudia gave him a narrow-eyed look, unsure if he was bragging or trying to scare her or what. At least he looked the part, a lot more than he had in her skirt; he was wearing a pair of tight-fitting brown pants that looked like they were made of something in the general "fake leather" category, and a loose white shirt that did, in fact, have a piratical air.
"You are not a pirate. A real pirate?"
"Depends on how you define 'pirate.' I steal things. I smuggle things. Harass Galatean shipping lines. That kind of thing. They certainly think I'm a pirate."
"Galateans are the ones who have a ship behind our moon because they think our planet is theirs?"
"Yeah, that's them."
"Okay, you can pirate from them as much as you want," she said, and he laughed.
But as they collected another load of crates, she wondered how safe she really was. Pirates were romantic in fiction, but not so much in real life.
And yet, he'd rescued her. He'd protected her, and helped her use the symbiont. She could still feel his arms around her, guiding her, grounding her.
He'd effectively kidnapped her from Earth ...
"Skara," she said, as she tried to get a good grip on a rough-sided crate with the grapples. When it moved, she could hear something shifting around inside, like rice or marbles. "If I asked you to take me back to Earth, would you?"
"Sure. But you'd just have the same problem you had before."
"Those two," she sighed. "What are we going to do about them?"
"Once you get the symbiont out, they won't want you anymore. It's me they're after."
"Great! When can we do that?"
"We're going to need better medical facilities than we have on my ship," he said, somewhat evasively. "Oh hey! I just thought of something I haven't shown you yet."
