Out of Bight, Out of Mind

by Tymber Dalton

  “We need to discuss this situation,” Dr. Graymard started. “You four are under contract to the DSMC, but with the circumstances, we would release you if you asked it. But then we also have Ambassador Raoulx’s offer to consider. It would be a huge boon to our knowledge base to have personnel placed with the Beyant, if you were open to them joining yours. Not to mention it would help strengthen the Beyant relationship with the Interstellar Treaty Coalition.”

  “Would the DSMC allow Yanna and Pabo to join our crew?” Emi asked.

  Graymard nodded. “Because they are now a treaty race, you could even add them to your bonded crew status.”

  “Whoa.” Aaron held up a hand. “Can we please back up a few steps?”

  Emi filled him in. Ford nodded. “I’m for it.”

  Caph looked puzzled. He was still woozy from the sedatives. “I’m not sharing her with them. And I’m damn sure not doing them!” He pointed at Yanna.

  Emi laughed. “Calm down, big guy. That’s not what he meant.” She translated what Caph said to Yanna, who hadn’t understood the phrase.

  “Do not worry, Caph,” Yanna assured him with a smile. “You are not my type. Also, I have no desire to sleep with my sister or my sister’s husbands.”

  “Bonded crew status would make the paperwork easier,” Graymard assured Caph. “Bypass diplomatic red tape. It’s not just for romantically involved couples, but families, too.”

  “Oh. Okay. I didn’t think about it like that. Yeah, sure. If you guys are okay with it. But that means a retrofit to add a new cabin for them and stuff.”

  “That wouldn’t take long,” Aaron said.

  “First, she needs to recover,” Graymard said. “We need to treat her, see if we can recover her memory. The four of you need time together to emotionally heal. We may need to bring her back to Earth to the base there for intensive treatment in the sim unit.”

  Ultimately, as captain, Aaron had the final say. “I don’t mind. If Emi wants Yanna and Pabo with us, then they’re welcome.”

  “Then that’s settled,” Graymard said. “I will coordinate with Ambassador Raoulx and get the paperwork started to make it official.”

  * * * *

  Caph really needed a shower and shave, but he didn’t want to leave Emi’s side. With her surgical wounds bonded and safe to expose to a shower, she reached for Caph’s hand and sat up. “Help me up, big guy. You can take a shower with me.”

  More than a shower, he needed time alone with her. Aaron would need that time, too, but in this way, she sensed Aaron was stronger and could wait.

  Caph needed her attention immediately. She needed to reassure him she was healing despite her pain. The surgeon had removed several fibroid tumors from her uterus and abdomen during the surgery. Apparently they’d formed due to what she’d been drugged with. They’d administered some of the antidote and noticed immediate changes in her reproductive system as it responded to the medication. The general consensus had been to close her up and monitor her progress with abdominal scans to see if her healing continued.

  Caph looked down at her, his green eyes full of sadness. “I missed you so much, baby. I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “I know. It’s okay.” She shrugged off her hospital gown and stepped into the shower. He stripped and stepped in with her. He wanted to bathe her, but she made him sit on the fold-down seat. “No, I want to do this.” She slowly washed him, holding him as she did. He draped his arms around her hips and rested his forehead against her chest as she stroked his hair. “I’m back for good. You won’t lose me again.”

  That was when he started sobbing. As the bathroom steamed up, she held him, soothing him, rocking him to comfort his grief. After several minutes he finally pulled himself together. He gently touched her stomach, where the faint pink line from the surgical wound was visible.

  “Maybe we should quit the DSMC.” He kissed her tummy. “Stay on Earth, get a house. We’ll get a big house, and Yanna and Pabo can live on the other side and study Earth from Earth. We can sleep late every day and raise a houseful of kids.”

  “You wouldn’t be happy on Earth.”

  “Yeah, I would. With the three of you, I’m happy no matter where we are. That’s all that matters to me is you three. You all are my home.”

  After a while he stood and she shaved him. Then he bathed her. Nearly an hour had passed by the time they dressed and emerged from the bathroom.

  Her hospital room was empty, but she sensed Pabo’s protective, watchful presence guarding the door outside.

  Caph helped her back into bed and once again took up the chair on her right, holding her hand while they watched a Martian news program about her return and the Beyant treaty signing on the vid screen.

  The ambassador and Yanna showed up a while later. The ambassador carried flowers and scowled a little at Caph until Yanna explained who he was.

  The ambassador’s English wasn’t very good, so he preferred to speak to her in Beyant. “I was told this is a Terran tradition,” he said as he leaned in to place a kiss on her forehead. “To bring flowers to the ill.” A nurse brought a vase in for her, then left again after taking her vital signs.

  Emi smiled as Yanna arranged the flowers on the dresser. “Thank you, rah’tein,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”

  Yanna sat on her other side and tipped his head toward Caph. “Does he always look at you so intently?” he asked.

  She smiled. “He has since I’ve been here.” Her smile faded. “He’s very sad about the baby.”

  Ambassador Raoulx agreed. “Even I can see it. He loves you very deeply.”

  Caph rested his head on the bed again and stared at her. He brought her hand to his lips, kissed it, then cupped his other hand around it, too.

  “Do you need to translate for him?” the ambassador asked.

  “I don’t think he honestly cares what I say or what language I speak as long as he can sit here and listen to me.”

  The ambassador laughed. “I would concur with that assessment.”

  Yanna nodded. “He would sit there all day long and listen to you, I’m sure.”

  “I think I like him,” the ambassador said with a decisive nod. “He seems worthy of you. I believe you are in very safe hands with him. And the others, of course.”

  Emi smiled and turned to Caph. “He likes you,” she told him in English.

  “I don’t care if he likes me or not. Who the hell is he?”

  “Your father-in-law, Ambassador Raoulx. Yanna’s father. You can call him rah’tein.”

  Caph blushed a little. “Oh. Tell him it’s a pleasure to meet him.”

  She translated. The ambassador smiled as he extended a hand over the bed toward Caph. Caph reluctantly let go of Emi’s hand and shook with him before taking her hand again.

  “Is it normal for a Terran male to be so…clingy?” the ambassador asked her.

  “I think he will be clingy for a while, rah’tein.” She squeezed Caph’s hand and smiled at him. While she still had no clear memories of him, her heart and soul did remember the feelings she’d had for him. And without a doubt, she knew how much he loved her. “And that’s fine by me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Emi was never left truly alone. If one or all of her men weren’t in the room with her, then either Yanna or Pabo were. If given privacy, at least two men guarded the door of her room. And Aaron, Caph, and Ford usually all spent nights crammed in the room with her, taking turns on the pullout sofa and sitting in a recliner chair next to her bed.

  On day three of her stay in the medical unit, Aaron arrived with an older man and woman Emi knew from Ford’s pictures were Markkus and Delaney D’ambroise.

  Kelsey’s mother and father.

  Aaron introduced them anyway. “Em, they really wanted to come see you.”

  She sensed his worry, that she would be overwhelmed, and she offered him a smile. “It’s okay. Thank you for bringing them.” She also knew he had a lot to do, between catchi
ng up on overdue maintenance on the Tamora Bight, as well as paperwork, filing incident reports, talking to tribunal representatives over Kayehalau’s attack on her and his subsequent suicide. “If you have a lot to do, it’s okay.”

  He kissed her. “I’ll be back in two hours for lunch.”

  Emi felt a wave of parental concern from both of them as they leaned in to hug and kiss her. Tears glistened in Delaney’s eyes. “Sweetie, it’s so good to see you.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” It did feel a little odd calling her that, but she knew that like everything else, she would grow used to it. “I’m sorry I don’t have any memories of you. Ford told me all about you, though. And Kelsey.”

  Markkus was easily as big as Caph. “We know. They warned us.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. His eyes looked red, as if he’d been crying. “It’s so good to see you alive. You have no idea.”

  She wanted to cry for them, for their joy as well as their renewed grief over losing their daughter. Her ordeal had dredged up a lot of memories for them, and not all of them good ones. “I wish we were getting together under better circumstances.”

  Delaney patted her arm. “These are fantastic circumstances. You’ve come back, alive and…well.”

  Emi didn’t miss the slight hesitation in the woman’s voice, the way she skipped, nearly tripping, over the subject.

  “It’s okay. Dr. Graymard says we’re going to be transferred back to Earth for a while. They’re going to see if they can restore my memories.”

  Delaney opened her purse. “I brought pictures and videos with us, if you’d like to see them.” She withdrew a handheld.

  “Yes, please. That would be wonderful.”

  Markkus and Delaney helped her out of bed and over to the sofa, where they sat flanking her. They were still sitting there when Aaron returned. Emi had laughed and cried with the couple, asked them countless questions about her men as well as Kelsey, and even felt the slightest glimmer of recognition when retelling events involving her.

  “Do you want to have lunch with us?” Aaron asked them. “Caph and Ford are on their way, too. Caph would have blown off the tribunal wonks if I hadn’t ordered him to talk to them.”

  Emi grabbed their hands. “Please, stay?” She felt eager to talk with them, thirsty for more details and memories.

  Learning about herself and her past through her men wasn’t bad. But hearing about them from someone else’s point of view was priceless.

  Not to mention the longer she stayed with them, the more loved by them she felt, and she wasn’t ready to relinquish that yet. In a world where her life had, in essence, started only months ago, she felt desperate to fill in the gaps, even if it was just in emotions and not in actual memories.

  Feelings also served to feed her soul.

  * * * *

  They stayed not only for lunch, but through dinner as well. Emi felt a little guilty about that, keeping them there all day, but the sincere reassurances Markkus and Delaney gave her soon eased those concerns. And that Delaney was the first other empath she’d met also gave Emi reason to not want them to leave.

  “So when is the hearing?” Markkus asked Aaron.

  “In two days. It’s just a formality because at least the guy left a confession.”

  “I want to go,” Emi said.

  Everyone looked at her.

  “What?”

  “Are you sure?” Caph asked. “They aren’t going to call you as a witness because your memory isn’t intact. They’re using the logs recovered from the data buoy. All they need is for us and a DSMC technician to confirm it’s your voice.”

  She firmly nodded. “I want to go. I want to be there for all three of you. Besides, we’re family as well as crew.”

  Delaney patted her hand. “If you want, we’ll come sit with you in the audience.”

  “I’d like that a lot.”

  * * * *

  Although Emi had been briefed on what to expect, she still felt nervous, both from her own anxiety and the tension she picked up from her men the morning of the hearing. As the tribunal assembled in the small conference room, they sat at one end of the table while Aaron, Ford, and Caph sat at the other. Dr. Graymard joined Emi, Markkus, and Delaney, the only spectators in the gallery of twelve chairs.

  As the tribunal convened and the men were walked through their testimonies, Emi kept her eyes closed and welcomed the protective energies of Markkus and Delaney, who sat on either side of her and kept firm grips on her hands.

  When the audio recording she’d made of the attack was played, she closed her eyes. Her pulse quickened as she listened to her voice and the calm, emotionless tone of her attacker. Fear trickled through her, faster, as the events unfolded, until she was reminded of the initial feelings of terror embedded in her soul upon her arrival on the B’autachia.

  Even worse, she remembered the dark, ominous cloud she used to feel around Kayehalau after he joined their crew.

  As the tape of his confession played, she kept her eyes closed and focused on the support of Markkus and Delaney, their warm love.

  Her adopted family.

  By the time the hearing finally ended three hours later, she felt weak and exhausted, physically and mentally.

  Delaney handed her over to Aaron, Caph, and Ford. “Take her back to her room and let her rest. She needs it.”

  Emi felt a flash of irritation from Aaron, directed at Graymard. “Why can’t we take her home, to the Bight?” he asked the man as he stepped in close.

  “Because we need to closely monitor her for the next couple of days to see what effects the antidote has on her.”

  “It’s okay, Aaron,” she said.

  As they returned to the medical center, she noticed how Aaron stroked her knuckles with his thumb.

  Something stirred in her memory, a thought, a feeling, too brief for her to grasp.

  But as they walked, she also realized the motion soothed him, comforted him. She laid her head against his arm as they walked and felt his energy shift even more, calming, settling.

  Happy to have her home, and still not quite satisfied that they couldn’t take her back to the Bight yet.

  “It’ll be okay,” she whispered to him. “Just another couple of days.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Before finally being discharged from the medical center once Graymard was satisfied that her physical healing was progressing as well as could be expected, Emi was refitted with a chip by Dr. Graymard. Then her men escorted her, Yanna, and Pabo to the hangar.

  Even though she’d seen pictures and vids, the size of the vessel staggered her. “I’m going to get lost.”

  Caph laughed, a sound that, when combined with the lightness returning to his soul, uplifted her. “You used to say that all the time, but you learned your way around her.”

  Ford smiled. “You also used onboard maps a lot.”

  While some feelings teased her mind, no true memories returned during their walk to the crew area. Yanna and Pabo left them alone to continue on to their quarters.

  She moved around the cabin, examining things as her men watched. She put her hand on one dresser. “This was mine?” On top sat a horrifically ugly rubber spider.

  Caph hurried over, smiling, and picked up the spider. “This is Bucky. He’s your good luck charm.”

  That teased another item somewhere in the dark, swirling recesses of her conscious. As she fingered the toy, she concentrated, but the item swam out of reach before she could latch onto it. “Is this what I used to win the fight on Kal’moran?”

  “Right,” Aaron said. “You scared the shit out of her with it.”

  Without putting it down, she turned to the room. It was late, and she was tired. “Will we have dinner soon?”

  “Whenever you want, babe,” Ford assured her.

  She nodded. “Thanks.”

  * * * *

  Emi felt comforted that Yanna and Pabo’s cabin lay a few yards down and across the corridor from
theirs. Not because she worried about her men, but because she’d grown to depend on Yanna’s presence for feelings of security.

  I will have to allow my men to take that role back. And she felt confident that one day they would.

  But for now, she’d gladly take all the comfort she could get.

  Dinner was a cheerful affair even though she sensed how desperate Caph was to get her back to their cabin. Not even for sex, she knew, but for another step in the return to normalcy, to have her back where she belonged, setting their world right even if she still had a long walk ahead of her in her recovery.

  They could all spend the night together because their launch wasn’t scheduled to happen until the next afternoon. So after cleaning the galley and Yanna and Pabo bidding them good-night, Emi and her men retired to their quarters.

  She kicked off her shoes, but left her sweatsuit on, and stretched out on the bed. “Oh, it’s really comfy.”

  All three men watched with renewed anxiety. Ford took the first step, literally, going to sit next to her. “Yeah, nothing but the best.”

  She looked at Caph and Aaron and waved them over. Once all three men sat in bed, still dressed and surrounding her, she felt their tension begin to wane a little. She sensed what they wanted, and what they feared.

  She also couldn’t deny the delicious demands of her own healing body to have all three of them to herself. If Ford was just a sample of how wonderful their sex had been together, she couldn’t wait to experience all three of them at once.

  “Ford told me he didn’t think you two would let him get close to me when we were all together again,” she tried by way of joking.

  After seeing the confused looks on Aaron’s and Caph’s faces, she tried again. “That you’d hog me.”

  That finally earned her a gorgeous smile from Caph. “Yeah, he always did bitch about going last. Stingy bastard had you all to himself. That should count for something.”

  “Well,” Aaron said, his tone playful, “he is still listed as first officer and you’re listed as mate. Technically, you’re now the one who has to wait.”