by Elsa Jade
She wrapped her arms around her chest, her nipples beaded against the flesh of her inner arms. Just the cold, compared to the hot tub water, she told herself. Nothing to do with the giant male watching her silently. How desperately she wanted to ask him what more he knew of fire-witches. How desperately she wanted him…
No, being lonely was no excuse to try to cling to impossibilities; it never had been even though she’d surrounded herself with crystals and psychedelics and intermittent tantric chanting hoping to prove that weirder things could happen than being wanted.
Wanting to believe had taken her all the way to another planet where mermaids were real…
Only to be rejected again.
Yet here she was again, back on this stolen spaceship, even though she’d accidentally done her worst to crash it. But as much as she might be tempted to think this was a second chance—or was it third by now?—to find what she’d been looking for all her life, maybe it was time to just admit that what she wanted didn’t exist.
And even a merman with some sort of x-ray eyes wouldn’t be able to find what she was missing.
Chapter 5
Though the little Earther female showed no signs of fleeing or zapping, Sting found his attention locked on her for a long moment.
As they’d dived to the Diatom, she’d held on tight, just as he warned her, her fingers wrapped around the bindings of his battle skin and her fists pressed into his chest. Though he’d been cross-engineered with armored skin and conditioned to feel nothing, strangely the heat and pressure of her touch lingered in his muscles even after she let go.
Fire-witch. If she could stab and burn through Titanyri flesh, she was even more dangerous than the Tritonesse feared.
The churn of his blood quickened, rising to the threat. But when she averted her face, her gaze dropping away from him, the racing of his pulse stumbled. Why did she not seize her moment to kill him and return to her quiet sanctuary unbothered?
Because she didn’t want to be a threat.
What an odd choice; he would have to think about that. But later. First, he rattled off the Diatom’s activation code. The lights brightened and a puff of warmer air wafted through the ventilation system.
“Welcome back, Phantom,” the AI said.
That made Lana glance up again at him. “Phantom?”
“So the Cretarni called me during the war,” he explained.
“Why?”
When he didn’t answer, the AI piped up instead. “Because the Cretarni believed the Phantom coalesced out of nothingness and left only nothingness behind.”
Instead of looking properly impressed, Lana gazed at him with that furrow between her brows. “But the war is over. Shouldn’t you have a name that isn’t…you know, all death and destruction?”
He squinted back at her. “What name?”
“I don’t know.” Her vague gesture reminded him of how she’d knocked him backward off her house the night before with a burst of power. “Something less…nothingness-y.”
“Why would I lie?”
She opened her mouth and then shut it again before shaking her head. “You got me there.”
Yes, he had gotten her here. And as soon as he repaired the ship, he’d get her back to Tritona. Turning back to the ship interface, he tapped in a series of commands.
The AI chirped back. “The requested status report has been sent to the bridge.”
Sting stalked through the ship, visually inspecting every corridor and system as he went. But he was more aware of the little nul’ah-wys trailing in his wake.
She was so small that her presence should not have interfered in the aerodynamic flow of his progress, but she seemed to take up an inordinate amount of space for her actual displacement value. Maybe it was because she was a fire-witch, whatever deep, secret perils that entailed. Or maybe it was the uneasy churn of her Tritonan and alien blood interfering with his flow.
Or maybe it was just the exact configuration of her curves that seemed to flash back his sonar to disrupt the impassive silence of his existence.
Lana. That word was as small as the rest of her. But before the Tritonesse had forcibly schooled the passage of air through his mouth and speech into his tongue, he would not have been able to say her name aloud, small as it was. Before he’d been disciplined, he might’ve eaten the little female in one gulp.
“You could call me something else,” he said. “If you want.”
He’d stopped abruptly so she had to sidle a step around or walk right into him. “What?”
“What.” He tested the word. “That name is even shorter than yours.”
“Wha…” She shook her head, her wet hair flicking. “I can’t just give you a name.”
“Why not? You got a name from someplace.”
She hesitated. “My mom. She used to tell me she’d known what my name would be the first time she felt me move inside her.”
“Would she name me if you won’t?”
The sudden drop of her lashes over her eyes was almost as much a shield as a Tritonan’s nictitating membranes. “She’s…not around anymore.”
“She left the planet?” How was that possible when the descendants of the Atlantyri had only recently learned of their origin? Abruptly he reconsidered. “Or you mean she descended on the Last Tide?”
Lana glanced away. “Dead? I don’t know. I lost track of her a long time ago.”
“I track things. Shall I find her for you in return for a name?”
“That’s not…” She blew out a hard breath. “Why do you want me to name you?”
“Because the Tritonesse never bothered, and the Cretarni named me after nothing.” When she hesitated, he prodded, “You called to the seahorses by their own names.” He half-closed his eyes, remembering. “Aphrodite. Ursula. Moana.”
“Those were just silly names from stories I love. But you’re not a pet.”
He considered. “No.” Wheeling away from her, he continued onward.
For a moment, only silence followed him. Then the soft thump of her bare feet caught up. “I… Wait. Sting—”
“I find no significant structural damage,” he announced, “despite you crashing, although the ship is not designed for submersion and long-term neglect.” He walked faster. “Unlike me.”
She tucked her chin down between her hunched shoulders. “I didn’t mean—”
“I should be able to leave this place without too much time or effort,” he said over her excuse and over her head. Perhaps he should throw her in the secured hold now while he had her here, let her expend her electrical energy before he went to all the effort of repairs. Likely he’d take some damage himself, but how much power could she really draw?
He pursed his lips. That was the kind of question a thoughtful commander would’ve asked and, more importantly, expected answered before the parameters of the mission were decided. Perhaps he should channel some of Coriolis’s strategic cunning before he tried to tackle the little nul’ah-wys.
The thought of tackling her sent an unexpected tingle through him. Somehow electrical in its own right although he wasn’t even touching her.
Yet.
Brooding silently, he finished their tour at the cockpit. The comm—still powered down to emergency levels—flickered with a single light for the status report sent from the AI. He settled in the captain’s chair and toggled the indicator.
The panel lit up with error codes and the AI rattled off another long list as he scanned through the report.
“That’s a lot of lights,” Lana said. “What else did I break?”
Sting glanced over his shoulder at the second row of seats where she had settled. When he gestured at the copilot chair beside him, she pursed her lips then moved up.
“Nothing beyond fixing,” he said. “Your electrical charge seems to have triggered a protective subroutine in the ship’s main systems. The AI didn’t have a protocol for zaps like yours, so it did its best to protect the ship and you as it came down.”<
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She tilted her face upward. “Thank you, Diatom. I’m sorry I scared and hurt you.”
“Thank you,” the AI intoned. “Your concern is noted.”
Sting cranked his jaw to one side. “It can’t really be hurt or afraid,” he told her. “It’s just a construct with enough neural connections to approximate sentience for smooth interaction with its users.” With extra focus, he prioritized the error codes. “Like me.”
“Sting—”
“According to the status report, several specific relays were fused and are now inoperative. Navigation, command, life support.” He summoned up a chart of the affected parts. “Some very specific relays. Almost as if you were targeting those systems.”
With a huff of affront, she swiveled her seat to scowl at him. “I don’t have any control over my zaps.”
He made a sound under his breath, deliberately echoing her.
Her frown deepened more obstinately. “You think I wanted to crash? Why would I do that? Why would I go to all the effort of coming back here when the Tritonesse seemed like they were half a breath away from offing me themselves if I looked at them funny.”
“You were escaping,” he murmured. “First you were willing to leave Earth because you thought Tritona would have your answers. When the Tritonesse rejected you, you took off again. Only this time you were getting away from yourself.”
The stricken expression on her face reminded him of the fighters who’d died near him during the war—some beside him, some in front of him, depending on whether they were Tritonyri or Cretarni. In the end, death left them all looking the same.
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she said in a choked voice. “I crashed because I didn’t know how to fly a spaceship and I panicked, and the zaps got away from me.”
“If you don’t want to hurt yourself or others, control your power,” he told her. “Otherwise it’s just a matter of time.”
She hissed out a harsh breath. “Oh, and what about you? Like you’re so pure and strong? You had a spaceship all to yourself, one you knew how to fly, and you still ended up going back to the place that made you, abused you, calls you a monster.”
He blinked at her. “But I don’t mind hurting myself or others.”
For a long moment, she stared at him, her glistening dark eyes churning like a maritime landslide. Would it bury or reveal?
Then another breath burst out of her, this time a harsh laugh. “Oh, sure, if you claim you’re a happy monster it doesn’t sting as much, does it? You got me there.”
“I don’t got you,” he said flatly. Yet. “And I sting the same no matter what you call me. Even if you call me nothing.”
She bit at her lip. As she often did, he’d noticed. And he wondered what she tasted like…
“You…actually sting?” she asked softly. “Like me?”
He had to drag his attention from her not-very-sharp teeth. “You zap,” he reminded her. “Not the same.”
“But…the sting is part of you, not just something you do?”
“Is that different?”
When she didn’t answer—and since he wasn’t interested in comparing the depths of their monstrousness—he returned his attention to the comm panel. Transferring the prioritized list of replacement parts and repairs to his battle skin datpad, he authorized the AI’s task list to attend to their eventual launch.
In the seat next to him, Lana stared at his hands, although he had the feeling she wasn’t really watching him. Just as well since he didn’t want her to think that watching him would give her the expertise to flee again with the Diatom.
Although missing expertise clearly hadn’t stopped her before.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured finally. “I shouldn’t have called you a monster.”
He looked at her hands, clenched hard in her lap. The hands that had blown him off the ledge of the Wavercrest abode. “Does this word monster mean something more to you in your language? To me, it sounds accurate enough.”
She wrinkled her nose in a way that made her mouth pucker as if she’d sucked unripened pixberries. “It’s not usually a good thing.”
“Maybe good doesn’t mean the same thing either, at least not when you’re at war.”
Now when she gazed at him, the water moved across her dirt-dark eyes like a salty tide. “I read the histories that the Tritonesse had to file with the intergalactic development council regarding Tritona’s trade status. The war sounded brutal, terrible.”
“A proving ground for monsters,” he agreed.
“And for heroes.”
“I don’t think any of those words mean much in the midst of war or its aftermath.” He returned his attention to the comm panel. “Save them for the trade council.”
He finished locking down the AI’s new commands and was just about to leave the neural net to its assigned tasks when an anomaly in its scans caught his attention.
He played it back. As the Diatom had been in-bound, it had defaulted to passive sensor mode, both to preserve power after the zaps and for closed-world protocols to avoid detection. But even so, it had caught the presence of another ship.
If the Intergalactic Dating Agency had still been in operation, the presence of other ships might’ve been expected. But since the IDA’s closure, there was nothing else of interest to the intergalactic community in the vicinity of Sunset Falls, Montana, Earth.
So who else was here?
He had fought enough battles to not take on one that didn’t belong to him, but with the exodus ship Atlantyri still embedded in the planetary crust not far from here, he doubted the randomness. The universe was very large, after all.
With the Diatom damaged and the Wavercrest abode lacking even the most rudimentary of Tritonyri battlement tools, he had no way of identifying or tracking the intruder.
Nothing except himself.
Since that had all too frequently been the way of things, he didn’t flinch as he contemplated how he might fight any invaders. He had not even his Tritonyri brethren behind him… But that had been the case on Tritona often enough as well.
Phantoms weren’t known for friendliness, just the fatalities.
“What are you looking at?”
He angled a thoughtful stare toward her. How had she picked up on his interest? He hadn’t made any betraying noise or gesture to reveal the surge of bloodlust. “Checking the sensor logs,” he said, not lying. “That’s all I can do for now until I get the relays to make repairs.” He pushed to his feet. “We can go.”
She looked up at him. “You’re not going to try to keep me imprisoned here on the ship until you’re ready to leave?”
Another strange sensation fizzed in his blood as if he’d been injected with the sparkling gases that bubbled from the deep-sea vents. “No.” He peered at her. “Did you want me to?”
“I… No!” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to have to zap you when we leave.”
His gaze dipped to the new curves and hollows she’d made of her body with the tightness of her embrace around herself.
If he wrapped his own arms in those places on her, what other curves and hollows might he find?
With a certainty, he would find himself zapped.
Rather than grab her or taste the lingering mark she’d left on her lower lip, he pushed to his feet. How annoying to suddenly have to make good, thoughtful choices about his mission when his wartime commander wasn’t even around to appreciate it.
Returning to the hatch, always conscious of her padding steps behind him, he stood staring down at the dark water. “I need to go to the Atlantyri,” he told her. “Shall I take you back to your vehicle so that you might return to the estate? Or I can leave you here.” He slanted a quick glance at her. “Not imprisoned, just waiting until I return.”
She stared at him. “Why are you going to the exodus ship?”
“Maelstrom and Ridley were not able to retrieve all the specimens from stasis. And since I�
�m here, I should check on the status anyway.” No sense bothering her with the question of intruders when he didn’t know the answers. “But I’ll be traveling via the aqueducts. It might not be comfortable for you.”
She lifted her chin. “I’m not afraid of the water or allergic to it like Ridley and Marisol,” she reminded him.
“You’ll have to hold on tight,” he warned her. “Even tighter than before. And we’ll need to go faster, so I won’t be able to keep the water as warm for you.”
“The Diatom has some emergency e-suits. That should be protection from the cold and water.”
Why did she want to go with him? She didn’t trust him not to abduct her, so why did she even care if he left unannounced? Maybe she just wanted to see the lost ship from whence her ancestors had come.
Without waiting for his agreement, she opened one of the hatch lockers, her obvious familiarity with the layout a reminder that she’d stolen the Diatom off Tritona as easily as he’d taken the Cretarni ship. Truly, she was a worthy threat.
She grabbed one of the simple environmental suits used in the case of ship damage. As she wrestled with the tight material, he reached out to steady her.
“Don’t touch me,” she warned.
“I’ve touched you several times,” he reminded her. “You haven’t killed me yet.”
“Yet,” she said darkly.
Strange how he kept thinking yet too.
Deliberately, he closed his hand around her elbow while she struggled into the suit. No zaps. Maybe because she was distracted. Maybe because she wasn’t feeling threatened.
Maybe because she appreciated the support, even if she rejected it with her words?
The dark gray material was not as sleek and supple as his battle skin, but it would protect her well enough for their journey. He gave her a short nod as she straightened, letting his hand fall away. He flexed his fingers to empty the sensation of her soft warmth that somehow reached him even through the artificial texture of the e-suit.
