Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  Haberville and Ta’foulou set up alternating six-hour shifts to pilot the ship, and DeBayaud and Adams set up their schedules to correlate. Luka had already introduced Mairwen as his assistant, which exempted her from a security shift.

  Adams, it turned out, was an excellent cook who cheerfully volunteered to make all their meals, which she and the others promptly agreed to. She didn’t used to care about food until she met Luka. Her grumbling, cautious brain insisted that he continued to be a bad influence.

  After the meeting, Luka went back to his room, and DeBayaud, an avid redball fan, hooked into a trid of one of the dozen prerecorded games he’d brought with him. He leaned his whole body into each play he watched, but kept any vocalizations to himself. Mairwen thought it made him look like a demented mime.

  She went to see Haberville in the navigation pod for her turn for the personalized safety briefing. While everyone else on the ship was dressed in old, comfortable clothes, Haberville looked like she was going to a party, though to be fair, perhaps wearing tight, shiny outfits counted as comfortable to her.

  Most safety briefings were prerecorded holos, so Mairwen was impressed that Haberville took their security so seriously. However, she turned out to have a disconcerting habit of crowding personal space and touching often, most of which Mairwen managed to subtly evade. When she would have made her escape, Haberville asked her to stay and chat a minute.

  “How long have you been with Foxe?”

  She was still standing and was wirejacked into the navcomp from her unobtrusive skulljack, so she was multi-tasking the realspace conversation with whatever the nav and engine comps were telling her.

  “Two weeks,” said Mairwen. It seemed a lot longer, like she’d known him for years, but they’d been an eventful set of days.

  “Throbbing as a pulsar, if you like your partners lean and wiry.” Haberville said with a wink and a lascivious smirk. “From what I’ve seen, half the women and some of the men at La Plata would hot-connect with him if he flashed the ‘go’ light.” She made some adjustments to a holo readout of the light drive’s flux. “Have you had him yet? Is he as good as he looks?”

  Mairwen affected selective deafness to Haberville’s personal questions, the same way she’d done with Malamig’s similarly inappropriate inquiries over the years. It was oddly unpleasant to think of others wanting Luka as a lover. Or more accurately, to think of Luka wanting them. Logically, it shouldn’t matter if he engaged in sex with multiple other partners, but logic wasn’t very comforting.

  Haberville apparently took Mairwen’s expressionless silence to mean she was offended.

  “Don’t mind me, I’m just naturally nosy. Gets me in all sorts of trouble.” There was little contrition in her tone. “So, how’d a good-looking woman like you end up here?” she asked, and managed to briefly touch Mairwen’s upper arm. Mairwen twisted out of range quickly. The only person she wanted touching her was Luka.

  Mairwen drew breath to answer, but Haberville held up a hand and closed her eyes a moment, signaling she was communing with the navcomp.

  Mairwen was glad of the interruption, finding the thread hard to follow and not sure what Haberville was asking. She already knew about the investigation, and probably wasn’t looking for a recitation of Mairwen’s history. The personal flattery was meaningless, so she ignored it.

  When Haberville opened her eyes again, Mairwen said, “I’m usually a night-shift guard. I’m temporarily assigned as Foxe’s assistant for this investigation.”

  “Lucky you. You’re better with Foxe than Velasco is.” The way she said Velasco’s name suggested she didn’t like him. Mairwen wondered when Haberville had met him. Knowing Velasco, he’d drooled when memorizing Haberville’s generous breasts.

  “I have no basis for comparison,” said Mairwen, relieved she’d answered the earlier question without engendering further probing.

  Haberville laughed. “You definitely belong in the Investigation Division. You fit right in.”

  Haberville was distracted by the navcomp again, and Mairwen took the opportunity to escape. She was perplexed by the whole conversation. Haberville the pilot was sharp and competent, but Haberville the person was uncomfortable to deal with. Mairwen felt a momentary pang for her old days on the night shift, where the only interaction required was with comps and equally anti-social co-workers.

  She drifted through the common area, where Luka was discussing cooking techniques with Adams. They were of similar height and coloring and, from a distance, might have been mistaken for cousins, but Adams’ dark hair was short and well behaved compared to Luka’s riotous spikes, and Adams had the noticeably more muscular build of a dedicated weightlifter. She decided she liked Luka’s long-distance runner’s build better.

  She went to her room and changed into running shoes and a long-sleeved, thin pink T-shirt and navy knit pants that covered her knives, then went through to the exercise room. Luka smiled briefly at her as she passed by, and she nodded. He looked better after having slept, and smiled a lot during his light conversation with Adams, but there was still a brittleness to the edges of him. Had they been alone, she might have touched him in reassurance, though whether it would be for Luka or herself, she wasn’t sure.

  She engaged the treadmill unit, then disabled its monitoring functions. She’d rather not leave a record of anything that might be different from normal human behavior. The unit was high quality, but still didn’t feel the same as running on stable ground, regardless of the manufacturer’s claims. She remembered something Luka had said about preferring to run on a planet surface, and she had to agree. Planets smelled of a million living things, while exercise rooms smelled mostly of stale sweat and machinery, even with her senses dulled to practically dead.

  Luka’s request to teach him control had her dredging up memories of her first months after surviving the final alteration procedure. She tried to analyze them objectively.

  CPS trainers introduced the candidate trackers to pain and brutality on day one and never let up. The first few weeks, when the candidates didn’t know how to ignore sensations, all it had taken was loud sounds, powerful smells, or a simple bruising pinch. The better the candidates got at handling the painful input, the more creatively savage the trainers got, all to make sure the CPS owned them, mind and body. Some trainers loved their jobs. Those that loved their jobs too much sometimes suffered fatal accidents once their trainees acquired useful skills.

  Pain wouldn’t work for Luka, even if she could bring herself to suggest it. Physical pain would just feed the emotional trauma his talent and imagination were already creating. Pleasure required time and relaxation, usually in short supply in situations when his reconstruction talent was needed. All she had to go on was that he regained some control over the talent and the talent-reinforced memories when she touched him, or at least when she was close. She couldn’t very well be at every violent scene he saw. He needed a way to stop the cascade before it started, whether or not she was there, but she couldn’t think how. She wished she was as clever as Luka.

  She heard footsteps approaching the exercise room and identified them as Luka’s. She looked at the clock and realized she’d been running for over an hour. Thinking he’d probably like some time on the ship’s only treadmill, she slowed to a stop just as he entered the room. He was wearing running clothes and a towel draped around his neck, so she’d guessed correctly. And universe help her, he was wearing shorts that displayed his perfect hips, thighs, and calves.

  She pulled at the front of her tank top where it was plastered to her chest from sweat. As always, his smile fluttered something in her heart. The first hint of his woody scent reached her and curled up into her thoughts like a caress. Images and ideas blossomed in her mind as he strode toward her. She dismissed the ones that started with licking him and stepped closer so she could speak quietly.

  “You use pacing and running to help you think. Perhaps it could help you with... what we talked about earlier.” Desp
ite her flattened senses, the welcome full scent of him gave her a floaty feeling. She could almost feel the hormones flooding her system when her body was near his. It was hard to make herself remember that she needed to keep her mind on his security.

  “I’m game.” His eyes were looking down at their almost-touching chests, and his breath was shorter. “Tell me what to do.”

  Mindful of audio that might feed to the pilot’s console, she kept her voice low and her phrasing oblique. “The… possibilities seem to overwhelm you with everything at once, like overload flux in a light drive. Start running, slow, and draw out a single piece of one of your memories at a time. Maybe isolate only the sounds, or only the strongest image. When you feel the overload coming, focus on the feeling of running—the flexing of your feet, the pumping of your lungs, the impact on your hips, the burn in your legs.” She briefly touched his chest, his hip, and his thigh as she spoke. “Once you’re back in your body, try the same isolation again.”

  He looked dubious but nodded. He handed her his towel, stepped onto the treadmill, and adjusted the settings for his stride. He started running, and she had to force herself to look away to keep from staring at how stunningly graceful he was. She hung his towel on the nearby rack, then crossed to the weight bench closer to the door, needing the distraction.

  “Please stay,” he said, not looking at her.

  “Yes,” she said. Even if she’d been planning to leave, the subtle desperation in his tone would have kept her there.

  She set the weight machine for light repetitions, snapped her arms in, and began smooth, controlled anterior lifts. She was relieved that the shoulder she’d dislocated was performing as it should, with only minor residual pain. The healer had wanted to do more, but Mairwen couldn’t risk discovery of her alteration abnormalities. The CPS drummed into all trackers the absolute imperative to only use designated CPS minder healers, meaning there were noticeable differences to be found.

  She wished she could see Luka’s face, to know if he was in trouble, but her selfish desire to keep him from harm wouldn’t help him develop the internal controls he needed. She switched to diagonal dorsal pushes and poured her unnamable emotions into the physical effort, letting them energize in and flow out with each repetition.

  The first time Luka stumbled, she froze, only relaxing when he picked up the rhythm again. The second time, she was up and in front of him in a flash. He focused on her. He didn’t smile, and he looked uneasy, but he didn’t look like he was in over his head yet. She caught his eye. “Just run.”

  He nodded and she relaxed. She was tempted to simply stand guard and wait for him, but she suspected he’d feel guilty about it and cut his run short if she did.

  “I’ll be in my room,” she told him. With one last glimpse of his glorious backside and thighs, she went straight to the fresher.

  After her shower, she finger-combed and smoothed her hair back away from her face and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was muscular, lean, and not curvy, though she’d become more rounded in the last four years, since she hadn’t been using tracker mode and constantly taxing her body’s resources. Active trackers often looked like famine victims. Her skin and coloring were night-shift pale. She doubted the rest of her scars, from where she’d removed the other tracers with her own knife, plus more recent scrapes and bruises, added to her appeal. Luka was the first person who’d ever caused her to worry about it. She wondered if he preferred his lovers to look less battered.

  She found Luka attractive because of all of who he was, not just his seductively masculine form and unique scent and taste. She could only hope he was similarly inclined.

  Luka finished his run, which was shorter than usual because he disliked treadmills and, if he was honest, because he wanted to be with Mairwen. After stopping by the kitchen, he showered and put on a T-shirt and sweatpants. He went around through the hallway to Mairwen’s door, which she’d left partly open. He knocked very lightly for the sake of politeness, knowing she already heard him coming. It made him smile as he poked his head in.

  “Adams says dinner will be served in an hour,” he said. “Got a few minutes?”

  “Yes,” she said, waving him in. She was sitting on the far corner of the cushioned platform, currently configured as a couch, while she fiddled with the small in-room clothes sanitizer. He sealed the door behind him and sat.

  She was wearing form-fitting dark knit pants and a thin, sleeveless, white tank that barely counted as covering. Her skin was even paler than the light tan wrist sheaths she wore, and he wondered what it would look like when flushed with the heat of desire. He clasped his fingers together in his lap and focused on them instead of her, or there wouldn’t be any talking.

  “I think it worked, somewhat,” he said, circumspectly referring to his experience in the exercise room. “But I started easy, and I still needed y... an anchor.” He had tried an older memory, less ferocious than most, and nothing similar to recent events. Even so, he’d nearly face-planted the first time the memory started saturating his thoughts, and the second time, he’d needed to force his talent to focus on Mairwen to cool it off.

  “It’ll take practice.” She followed his lead in speaking quietly.

  He knew he had to learn not to depend on her, because if he didn’t, he was afraid she’d pull away from him for his own good, and that was the last thing he wanted.

  “I can’t run at a...” He stopped, frustrated at the lack of privacy. Another reason he didn’t like traveling on ships with strangers. Fortunately, she got the drift.

  “Memories of a physical experience can help with… overloads.” She started the sanitizer, and a quiet humming filled the room. She drew one foot up to the couch and rested her elbow on her raised knee. “At least they do for me.”

  The neckline of her tank gaped open, exposing the top swell and tip of one high, firm breast. Coherent thought was leaching out of him as he felt arousal start to rise. He looked away and down, and found his hand gripping the sweater next to him. His desire for her was surging high, and he thought she wanted him, too, but anything other than slow and easy could hurt her. Besides, he wanted their first time to be more than a frenzied coupling in a rented ship’s stateroom.

  He made himself let go of her sweater and stand up. “I’d like to try again after dinner, if we can.”

  “Yes.” She looked up at him, and he saw subtle hunger in her expression. Her ice-blue eyes were hypnotic.

  “Ah, hell,” he said under his breath, and pulled her up tight against his chest for a heated, open-mouth kiss.

  He wrenched himself away and left quickly before he lost control altogether.

  To Luka’s delight, Adams’s culinary skills lived up to his claims. He served excellent fish with a light sauce and several side dishes. Ta’foulou took his plate to the nav pod, relieving the more sociable Haberville so she could join them for the meal. She chatted easily and wittily, making the meal almost feel like a party. Adams and DeBayaud enjoyed her open flirting, DeBayaud especially.

  Luka, disliking her habit of constant touching, strategically placed himself well away from her when they sat at the table, with Mairwen as a buffer. It was cowardly of him, but he rationalized that, as his personal security detail, she should be protecting him from all dangers, including grabby women.

  He almost felt sorry for Haberville when she tried to engage Mairwen in several personal topics, but found it heavy going with Mairwen’s mostly monosyllabic responses. Mairwen was also skilled at seemingly accidentally avoiding being touched. Haberville became increasingly ruffled by Mairwen’s bland indifference. It was petty of him, but he thought it served Haberville right.

  Luka noticed that Mairwen tried tastes of everything first, then ate everything except the spicy parsnips. When she’d told him she’d led a sheltered life, she wasn’t exaggerating, at least food-wise. He made a mental note to discuss some options with Adams to give her more opportunities to try new things.

  He c
ouldn’t begin to imagine her life as a death tracker, or why someone so amazingly competent and skilled would keep herself so locked down, even after escaping the clutches of the brutal program. It satisfied his masculine pride that he’d been the one to tempt her out of the shadows, and he wanted to keep giving her reasons to stay in the daylight. To stay with him.

  He wanted to be alone with her, to ask her what she was thinking. The nature of the talent he’d focused on her in his stateroom might be a variant of telepathy, but he’d never had conscious insight into anyone's thoughts, just their overall emotional outlook and essence, and it always felt uncomfortably like prying. Except with Mairwen, when it had felt stimulating and soothing at the same time. His talent had never before been soothing.

  After helping Adams clean up after dinner, Luka went to the exercise room to try the control technique again. Mairwen came in a few moments later and sat, reading a portable display. Instead of running, he set the treadmill to a brisk walking pace, but it didn’t go well. Maybe he was trying too much too fast. Or maybe he was spending half his time wanting to pluck the display reader out of Mairwen’s hands and take her right there on the weight bench.

  It was just as well that he was interrupted when Adams came in to use the free weights, or Luka might have completely exhausted himself. Mairwen left the room, and he found himself wanting to follow her like a puppy, which would be pathetic.

  He lasted ten minutes more, doing cool-down stretches to relieve the tightness and chatting briefly with Adams, then went to his stateroom. Mairwen was already in hers. It was bittersweet comfort knowing she was so close, even if he couldn’t have her in his arms or bed.

  He was cold, even though he jacked up his stateroom’s temperature several degrees. He despaired of ever getting control of his talent. And if he couldn’t, what good was he to anyone?

  13 * Interstellar: “Berjalan” Ship Day 02 * GDAT 3237.039 *