by Jade, Elsa
Her gray eyes had lost that look of the turbulent sea. Now they were as cold and flat as mudstone. “It doesn’t matter what I want anymore,” she said, her voice as dull as her eyes. “There’s something wrong with me. There’s always been something wrong with me.”
Feeling her crumbling away from him, he tightened his grip. “That’s not true. You told me how you used to swim, how you were on track to be part of your world’s diving elite.”
She hunched her shoulders, curling toward him. “Even before that,” she said, her voice muffled by the resigned bend of her neck. “My mother didn’t want me enough to fight to keep me. None of the foster families I stayed with over the years wanted more than the monthly dollars that came with me. Even the Navy had no use for me in the end.” She let out a harsh laugh that collapsed her closer to his chest. “I couldn’t even keep scraping barnacles on a safety leash of oxygen. There is nothing left of me worth saving.”
“Nothing left of you?” He gave her an ungentle shake. “Would I waste precious breath if you had no worth?” He gave her another shake, and this time she glared up at him, which was an improvement. He hadn’t asked for this responsibility, leading another innocent into danger. But leaving her adrift seemed even worse. “Don’t spiral into the depths. Not without me. We did this before, together. We can do this again.”
She stared up at him, her gray eyes finally lighting with a quicksilver glimmer—the liquid crystal of tears. With an inarticulate cry, she launched herself up into his arms.
Lifting her up against his chest, he slanted his mouth across hers, tightening the seal between them. Then he fell backward into the darkening water.
With one thrust of his lower body, he propelled them out of the shallows, into the deeper water. The silvered reflection of the sky—as bright as her tears—closed over their heads as he propelled them faster across the lake. Anyone watching from the shore might see the faintest ripple between the whitecaps, but he knew even that would be lost as he dove them toward the submerged hatch of the ship.
As he breathed for them, Ridley clung to him, her tears a salty tang on the back of his tongue even as the fresh lake water passed over his gills. Her eyes were closed tight, but he couldn’t look away from her, and not just because she was so close. Maybe the rising breath of desire was affecting him more than he knew, even though he was too young to deserve a shot at any female, Tritonesse or otherwise.
Luckily, he didn’t need his eyes to find the Bathyal. Between his sense of echolocation and sensitivity to electromagnetic fields, the mimic-shielded ship might as well have been wrapped in glowing sun-weed. He aimed them toward the lowered ramp of the hatch. He’d have to just hope that Coriolis was monitoring from the bridge and Sting was lurking in his quarters as usual.
Not that luck and hope had ever gotten him very far.
He grabbed hold of the hatch struts and hauled them quickly inside, breaking through to the interior air pocket. Ridley ripped her mouth away from his with a hard exhalation that sent a backrush of pheromone and salt and an inexplicable loss over his gills before he quickly sealed down the feathery filaments, not wanting to shock her again.
Despite the violence with which she’d broken the kiss, she clung to him for another long moment, her eyes still closed. “Am I going to freak out if I look?” she asked in a husky voice.
He glanced around the small bay. “I don’t think so. It’s an old ship, very interstellar standard, nothing too exotic.”
“Except that it’s a spaceship.”
“In that sense I suppose it is rather…out of this world.”
The faintest hint of a smile quirked her lips, and she cracked one eyelid. After a moment of nervous squinting, she opened both eyes wide. “It looks like a submarine.”
The note of disappointment amused him. “Since we’re mostly underwater right now, I guess that’s true enough. If you’re not going to freak out, I need to get you to my quarters before my commander sees you.”
She quickly unwound her limbs from around him. Though the lake water had been cold compared to the ship’s climate control, he felt more of the chill without her pressed close.
Skimming her hands once down her body, she shoved away droplets of water. And somehow he thought she was sloughing off her existential angst too. “Show me the way.”
As they descended the corridor into the crew quarters, he reminded himself that he’d wanted nothing more to do with leading the way. Except… There was so much he wanted to show her, so much he wanted to learn about her, and not just because of the rudimentary gills he’d glimpsed in her slender throat.
But she wasn’t supposed to be here, and everything he showed her was forbidden.
They made it to his quarters and he palmed the door lock just as the comm inside crackled with Coriolis’s voice. “Maelstrom. That better be you.”
Mael sealed the doorway behind Ridley, grimacing at her for silence. She nodded. “It is me,” he answered. “I decided to return for rearming.”
Ridley held up two fingers, baring her teeth in a wicked smile. Mael shook his head at her, scowling, and she took a threatening breath, as if she were about to speak. He flapped one hand at her. “I’m going to take another ray gun—uh, blaster pistol from the armory.”
“Take two,” Coriolis said. “You don’t know what you’ll be up against.”
Ridley smirked at him as Mael rolled his eyes. “You’re right,” he drawled. “I have no idea what I’m up against.”
Ridley nodded vigorously.
“I’ll have Sting bring you his datpad,” Coriolis went on. “He won’t be needing it while he’s here on the ship.”
“No,” Mael said hastily. “I’m sure I can find something in storage to keep in touch when I head back to the Wavercrest house. Any ping from the datpad I left in the IDA data core?”
“Nothing.” Frustration carried clearly through the ship’s comm.
“We came up with an idea for triggering a response in these IDA tricksters,” Mael told his commander. “Let me grab my gear and I’ll come to the bridge to explain.”
“We?” Coriolis repeated. “Who is we?”
Mael winced at his misstep. “A discussion with an Earther female,” he admitted. “The Earthers, including your alleged future bride, were tricked by the IDA too. And while they don’t know any more about what’s going on than we do, they aren’t powerless in this fight.” He met Ridley’s steady gaze.
“Just don’t get yourself in trouble with them,” Coriolis warned. “You know what’s at stake.”
“I do.” A chill colder than the deepest trench rolled through Mael’s veins. “I’ll be up in a moment.” When the comm went dark, he let out a sharp breath.
Ridley watched him, a furrow between her brows. “He’s your commanding officer. You don’t think you should tell him what’s going on?”
“I’m protecting him,” Mael said, forcing himself not to take umbrage at the criticism. “I’m protecting the mission and my world.”
Her gaze rested on him like a gentle evening tide. “Just because you couldn’t do it during the war doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice yourself now.”
He struggled to keep his voice as even as hers, though her keen insight into his secret shame rocked him. He should’ve risked more, sacrificed more for Tritona. “Tell me again when it’s your planet at risk.”
“Right,” she murmured. “It’s just my life.”
He knew he was being unreasonable, but having her in this place made him realize how far he’d come—and how close they were to catastrophe. “Wait here,” he growled. “I’ll be back with your ray gun.”
She didn’t answer, which was fine. He locked the door behind him anyway. Just as well he’d left her there because when he stepped into the armory, Coriolis was waiting.
Not patiently. The fleet commander didn’t slow his restless pacing as he glanced over his shoulder. “Tell me about this plan you and the Earthers have discussed.”
Mae
lstrom quickly explained the message Ridley had suggested, leaving out the part where they’d discussed it while breaking into the abandoned IDA outpost together.
His commander nodded. “If they think we’re leaving, that will force their timeline, rush their strategy. We’ll have to be ready for whatever they do next.”
“We will be,” Mael pledged. “You always told me you knew we’d win the war because the soilers didn’t have the depths we do.”
“Did I say that?” Coriolis flicked one hand in the dismissive gesture of young warriors that meant muddying the waters—quite the Tritonyri insult. “We needed something to carry us through, something to believe in.”
Mael almost choked, as if the other male had stuffed handfuls of silt right into his masked gills. “You…didn’t believe we’d win?”
His commander unlocked the small weapons locker they hadn’t known they’d need. “We haven’t won yet. Not really.” The protective membranes clouded his eyes. “And how much longer can we fight before we go down for the last time?”
With no answer to give, Mael stood in silence as he went through the armory and picked out two smaller pistols.
“Now I have to tell Sting he was right, that we should’ve been better armed,” Coriolis said with a long-suffering sigh.
Mael grimaced. “He wanted an armada mounted with blaster cannons. Even if it meant taming a deep-sea drifteryx and wrapping the beast in plasteel to make it space-worthy.”
“That would’ve terrified the soil-suckers off Tritona for certain.” Coriolis dug out an older model datpad from among the stores. “I’ll keep this.” He tucked the oversize instrument into one of the pouches of his battle skin. “You take mine.”
Mael shook his head. “You should have a better one.”
“I should be the one out there collecting my bride,” the Tritonyri commander growled. “Instead I’ve had to send you.”
“Not to take your bride, sir,” Mael protested. The lingering pheromone in the back of his throat made his blood rush. “I would never take what’s yours.”
“Apparently, she’s not mine,” Coriolis pointed out. “And I know I need to be here to take the IDA call.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I think the battles we fought before were easier. At least we knew who we were fighting.”
As they separated—Coriolis to his lonely watch in the empty bridge and Maelstrom back to his quarters—Mael wondered if he already knew who his enemy was. Or anyway, the one who was the most threat to him now…
As he entered his room, Ridley emerged from the small sanitation chamber, wrapped in one of the uni-species mantles. She’d belted it wrong, and for some reason the small mistake reminded him how unalike they were. A strange hollowness, like the first gulp of surface air after a long passage underwater, made him lay the pistols down on the berth-side storage unit with more force than was advisable.
Her gaze flicked from the weapons to him. “Everything okay?”
“No,” he growled. “Or I wouldn’t be stealing weapons from my own commander to hunt down the unknown thieves who stole the prospect of his bride.”
She pursed her lips. “Yeah, I guess that’s not all right.” She jerked her chin at the other box he’d taken from storage after leaving Coriolis. “What’s that?”
“A med unit. Not particularly sophisticated, but probably better than anything Marisol Wavercrest had access to before now. I want to run a scan on you before we leave.”
She narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “Is it going to hurt?”
“Doesn’t everything?” He pulled a lead from the med pod.
“True.” Then her gaze slid away from him. “Except for that pheromone. The breath thing. That…doesn’t hurt.”
He paused. “What do you feel?”
She shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other, the hem of the mantle swaying uneasily. “Like the fear is gone.”
The pheromone enhanced blood flow, letting Tritonyri dive deeper and longer in pursuit of the much stronger Tritonesse. And a wafting of the pheromone could lure a willing Tritonesse up from the trenches to meet her chosen male halfway. But neither effect should matter to an Earther female. “I don’t want to keep drugging you unnecessarily,” he told her. “But if you want another hit before the med scan, we could do that.”
She scowled at him. “It doesn’t hit me like a drug. It’s more like…waking up and realizing the nightmare isn’t true.”
He rubbed one hand over his mouth. Not that he could wipe away the taste of the pheromone lingering in his gills.
Or the memory of her soft lips under his.
“The med scan has one invasive sampling,” he told her. “The rest is just tingles. Let’s save the pheromone for our return to shore.”
She huffed out a breath. “Do it quick.”
He did, but carefully too, inserting the needle probe into the muscled edge of her palm. She stared past his shoulder, gripping the awkwardly tied mantle around her while he angled the scanner over her body.
When he paused for a few long seconds at her neck, her gaze snapped back to him. “What?”
“What?” he replied innocently.
“It made a sound. Why did you stop?”
“It makes a lot of sounds.” He continued moving the scanner. “A real med pod is big enough to lie down in. This hand-held version takes longer. It’s preset with some species specs but not Earther since yours is a closed world, so I’m just giving it a chance to catch up.” He paused again at her elbow, not because he needed to but to distract her. “I’m downloading everything to my datpad to process and compare to whatever data Marisol has collected on her own, but since we’re not really sure what we’re looking for, we’ll have to hope something is obviously out of place.” Like gills on an Earther girl… The scanner chimed again. “All done.” Gently, he removed the needle and pressed a sealant pad over the tiny wound.
“Here on Earth we have stories about alien probes,” she said.
He made a noncommittal noise as he closed up the med pod, his focus on the first blips of info returning from the scan. “How did the stories go?”
“Never mind,” she mumbled.
He would’ve alerted on her sudden awkwardness, but the speculative analysis flashed back a suggestion that silenced him.
Genetic survey underway.
Comparison sample number one: Earther, closed world sentient species, refer to more comprehensive archive for improved accuracy.
Comparison sample number two: Tritonan.
Chapter 11
Ridley woke in darkness and nightmare, choking on a breathless scream.
Big hands pinned her when she thrashed. “Hush, hai-aku. Calm your winds.”
The low, deep voice should’ve been as terrifying as the void closing over her head, but… “Maelstrom,” she whispered hoarsely, her throat sore. “What…?”
“You freaked out.”
She cracked her eyes open—they’d been squeezed so tightly shut she felt as if she had to unbraid each eyelash—and rolled the back of her skull against a cradling softness. The citrusy scent of crushed pine needles prickled in her lungs with each gasp.
Mael was crouching over her, his expression heavy as a thunderhead as his long hair dripped around them both. “I thought the pheromone would get you from the Bathyal back here to the shore. Instead, you almost drowned. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
The return swim flooded back to her. Literally. How the strangeness of the spaceship—proof he was alien—had suddenly become too much, how she’d thrashed against his hold and lost her grip, starting to sink away from him, how he’d snagged her from the deeps and hauled her out of the water, the soft lap of wind-driven waves whispering just beyond her slack toes…
Panic rushed through her veins again, and a clammy sweat worse than her wet underwear slicked her bare skin. Clamping her hand over Maelstrom’s fingers, still gripping her shoulder, she held on tight, waiting for the terror to recede.
Except this time
, even with the steady hold of the earth beneath her, the terror swept back like waves in a closed system with nowhere to dissipate. Air keened between her lips, too thin to maintain consciousness, and stars behind Mael’s head blurred at the edges of her vision—a warning.
“Ridley.” His hands shifted to frame her face, and his fingers burned on her icy skin. “Close your eyes. Focus on my voice.”
“Can’t,” she gasped. “Can’t breathe.”
“You won’t drown in the air, will you?”
So easy for him to say. A simple truth that made her want to punch him. “No air,” she whined.
“All around you,” he countered. Skimming his hands down her shivering arms, he laced his fingers through hers and drew their joined hands to the middle of his chest. “Feel. I’m breathing. Follow me.”
The heavy rise of his pecs pressed into her knuckles, and his slow exhale was a tropical gust over her freezing face. His skin against her fists was hot, so hot. She wanted to wrap that heat and strength around her like a dry suit with its own oxygen.
“Breathe,” he reminded her.
She sucked in a long, shaky, lungful of air tinged with the fragrance of the nighttime forest, the mineral tang of lake water, and something wilder.
That deep oceanic aroma was him.
The scent filled her head, and she stiffened, waiting for the fright to swamp over her again. First, she’d learned to fear the enveloping touch of water, then the sight of it, now the smell…
But the panic lurked just out of reach, like a ring of depth charges awaiting her wrong move. Mael’s presence kept her still. He was just too big, too hot, too there to leave room for a silly nightmare.
She wrapped her arms behind him, squirming under his bulk to squeeze out a few droplets from her shirt and the last millimeter of space for panic.
Which brought them breast to pec, his wet hair curtaining them. Despite the darkness all around, a faint ghostly glow lit the small distance between their faces, as if the palest moonlight had found a way between them.
Or they’d summoned it themselves
She gulped. “Did you fart glitter bubbles again?”
