by Hana Starr
And he was, mounting up her entrance steps to the cockpit only a few seconds as she’d turned the engine on. It whirred but otherwise ran smoothly. The funny little grimace of disgust that crossed his face was so amusing that she had to smile.
He smiled back though, and came over to her with a handheld, portable screen. He synced it up with her screens, and began to transfer over a handful of quick, small documents and data sheets.
Harris spoke as he did so.
“I am giving you all the coordinates for the base. It is Yellow Giant 205, out at the 500th junction of Killoquit. Big, bright, and yellow as the goddamn sun. You can’t miss it, and your autopilot will get there just fine since it’s a bit of an older station. I know they discontinued map updates on these old ships but you’ll at least be within sight by the end of it.” He paused, seeming to think. “They have a port just like this and will be expecting you, so don’t hesitate or radio before landing. They’ll have it all covered. And here are the coordinates for the waypoint, Blue Sparrow 10…”
The barrage of coordinates was quickly absorbed in the back of her mind, but Beatrice was glad that all this would be available on her screen so she wouldn’t have to do any of the tricky memorizing on her own.
“These are the best routes to take. You’ll avoid most heavy traffic and obstacles by taking this route all the way through.”
Ah. There’s a problem.
“Wait,” she said, and pointed. “What is this? Commercial lines aren’t allowed to go through this channel.”
Harris looked at her gravely. “You’re not commercial for this mission, Noble. For just this one, you’re the same as the rest of us.”
Beatrice pulled in a deep breath and contemplated that for a long moment. Only a handful of hours ago she’d been thinking about how she was only average, and now she was good enough to be assisting the Peace Federation in a mission of life and death. Fate changed so quickly, and she had no idea what to do except bow her head over her hands.
“I won’t let you down. What about updates?”
In response, Harris flicked another piece of data over to her screen. “This will automatically remind you to update us each morning and night. Progress, outlook, current situation and immediate impending situation are required. No other information to be given, and even then try to be as bare bones about it as you can. Your ship’s radio will be intercepted so fast.”
“Don’t I know it,” she said, and rolled her eyes.
That seemed to be all that the man had of her, so he stepped back outside the cockpit. Distance didn’t matter though because his dark eyes continued to bore into hers.
“We’re counting on you.”
“I won’t let you down,” she swore again, and then pushed a button to seal off the stairs.
Her heart was humming and her thoughts were rejoicing. Celebration was a silent affair though, because she had to concentrate on maneuvering the little ship through the air locks to get back out into space.
As she slid off the runway, withdrew her landing gear, and settled in for a long flight all the way to Pluto, she couldn’t help but to wonder at what kind of guard would be waiting for her at the waypoint. Human or alien?
Only time would tell.
Chapter Three
Today was the day!
Or, at least, that was what Jax had been telling himself all morning. For the past “week” he’d been trapped on this base waiting for a human with a supply ship to come by and pick him up. It was infuriating, especially having to adjust to a standard set of time keeping rules that made absolutely no sense to abide by –but the human with the ship would measure everything by it, so he needed at least a basic understanding of it.
Command hadn’t told him to do anything about it but they rarely told him anything so specific at this stage in his training. Jax was a self-sufficient warrior and he had been taught to look at every point in each individual operation in order to figure out how to go about…well, everything.
Which meant he’d pestered many of the other supply-ship pilots and had memorized their daily routines down to the letter because every single company followed the same pattern for absolutely no reason at all. Still, he’d done his best to live his own life according to that schedule for quite awhile now but it was very hard to deal with an enormous gap of time in which a pilot would be busy piloting and Jax was busy doing…nothing in particular.
He wasn’t really looking forward to this but he had to go through with it. Not only was there a base out there needing these medical supplies, this was the last step in his official training for the position he wanted. There was a special tactical unit of Peace Federation known as Dark Peace. They were so underground and undercover that many normal members of the Federation thought they were just a rumor, but they’d come asking to recruit him specifically after seeing how quickly he rose through the normal ranks.
Dark Peace was basically an assassination force. There were never two of them in the same place at any time and they communicated through heavily-encrypted messages. They ran stealth missions only, plotting and performing the silent takedowns of major enemy figures; a member of Dark Peace had never been caught, dead or alive. They needed to be top-notch, and better than the best.
Jax was all of these things and more.
He was of the Ula tribe, from planet Ulahee. Theirs was a storm-torn world and he and his brethren had as a resulted mastered manipulation of such lightning itself. That deadly talent was another reason he had been chosen. His intimidating appearance was another, though only his targets would ever see him –in the instance before they died.
As it was, this was indeed the final leg of his training before he would be initiated into Dark Peace. He had to successfully guard a supply ship to the end of its route. That was it. So mundane, and so incredibly in his way.
But, he was supposed to meet his pilot today and then they could finally get going after he’d had his layover.
So, he laid off on the structure today and hit the gym for most of it.
Gravity was always increased in the exercise room. His arms bulged with dark, jagged veins as he bench-pressed twice his own weight up and down. His muscles screamed and he was gasping in the thick air, pulling in shallow breaths of air, but still he worked and worked at it until he’d completed 200 reps. That done, he set the weights back down in their holster and then just lay flat on his back while his lungs caught up to him.
He was soaked in sweat, his body caked in it from head to toe. He’d ignored his full uniform for this exercise and as such was wearing only a pair of bottoms provided to him from a dispenser in the shower room nearby.
As Jax lay there, he contemplated on what to do next. When would the human arrive? He wondered if he would have time for some more lifting, or perhaps running, or climbing, or if he should hit the showers now and be done with it.
His thoughts were broken by the doors suddenly swinging wide open and a little chunk of brain-shaped Hukite hustled towards him on three stiff legs.
The receptionist.
“What is it?” he asked, fighting not to be impatient.
“Your…companion!” the chunky little alien peeped in a high-pitched little groan.
Jax groaned as well and stood up. Damn. He’d have to show up like this. It was customary for a guard to be one of the first to greet their clients and he would be damned if he broke that tradition. Dark Peace clung to unbreakable routines in much of their dealings and their eyes were all over. If he screwed up any small thing, they would know about it even before he did.
“Alright,” he replied shortly. “Thanks.”
And then he hustled away, thickly-muscled thighs taking him out of the gym in a few measured, but effortful, strides. Mostly nude and decidedly indecent for this sort of thing –he reassured himself by thinking that Dark Peace would rather he respect his duty than hit the showers- he headed down the lift and into the gigantic garage.
There.
He blinked, take
n-aback. Was that the ship? Why, it was nothing more than a rock! It was ramshackle, dimpled, and utterly worthless. No, it wasn’t even a rock; it was hardly a pebble. How did it even move? There didn’t look to be enough room for an engine inside. At least, not any engine that he’d ever known of before. Worst of all, it was tiny. Was he really meant to be cramped up in that for entire days?
Then, his gaze shifted and he saw her.
She was speaking to the inspector as he nodded over her paperwork. Jax hardly even noticed the inspector in his watching. She was tiny and slender and boyish. She had no chest to speak of and her hips were anything but properly womanly and attractive. In fact, as far as he could tell, the only true sign of her gender was in her rounded facial features and long, straight brown hair that fell down to her shoulders.
He shouldn’t have, but he felt something immediately: disappointment.
If disappointment had a body, this was it.
If her ship was a pebble, this human was a grain of sand. She was rough and unpleasant to look at. The feel of her on his eyes was grating. He supposed the slight slant to her eyes might be attractive but it just couldn’t make up for the fact that she was a human, and a rather pale and ugly one at that.
I am dreading everything about this mission, Jax thought, looking her over grimly. After another three passes and nothing changed or else jumped out about her, he knew this was going to be a disaster. Stuck in that ship, with her?
There was no way he would survive that!
Only then did he realize she was watching him as well.
Then, to his astonishment, this girl broke away from the inspector and was walking towards him with her dark eyes bright and her thin little lips pursed with excitement. His electric-pulse heart sank as he watched her stop in front of him, and then stick her hand out.
Control over lightning was a bit of a stretch, really. The lightning, the static, often acted unpredictable and simply did as it chose to do. That was why most Ula were completely bald from head to foot: all their hair was burnt away. His was no exception, and he noticed that his skull looked phenomenally huge in the image her eyes projected back at him.
The point was that with the way he was feeling right now, his palms were glowing and hot. Anything he did to accept that offered hand was only going to end in electrocution. The last thing he wanted was to have himself be the cause of her untimely death.
So, he bowed over her outstretched hand instead. She seemed to immediately realize her mistake, which was more than he’d expected, and she settled for flashing him a wide smile. Over her little shoulder, he saw the inspector chuckling to himself inside the cockpit.
He probably just wanted a good view of this catastrophe. Damn. I wasn’t prepared for this.
This woman wore bright orange and was clearly not a member of the Federation as he had been assuming all this time, which sucked. She was a civilian. He was a warrior. What on earth could they have in common?
Well, that wasn’t required for his mission but it would have been a whole damn lot better.
“Hi,” she said softly. He was impressed, though. Her Chip had been in enough Ula conversations to have a pretty good mastery of their words. Which meant maybe she’d seem more than he thought she had at first. “My name is Beatrice Noble. Um, you can call me Bea.”
“It’s a pleasure,” he replied shortly. “My name is Jax and I will be your guard upon this voyage. I hope that’s okay with you?”
“Of course it is!” she said quickly, though her eyes flickered up and down his bulk. He knew exactly what she was thinking, that he could rip her head straight from her shoulders if he wanted, but that wasn’t what she said next. “Are you always going to be this sweaty?”
A dark blush of violet heated his face. He growled irritably, turned on his heel, and left her sputtering behind him in the garage while the inspector laughed up above.
There was no calming his blush or the crackling of static racing up and down his body. His sweat vaporized instantly, leaving him covered in a sticky layer of dry salt that flaked from his muscles every time he moved.
He knew it had been a joke but he had no idea how humans were able to joke around so often as they did. It was maddening, really.
Well, she could figure some things out on her own because he was done and tired of her attitude already. And Yellow Giant 205 Base was incredibly far away. He would be with her for weeks, if not a whole month. He had no idea how he was going to survive that, but in the end it would be worth it.
Having calmed himself down enough to get people to stop looking at him for his electricity-covered body, and to have them once again noticing his state of undress, Jax merely returned to the gym and pushed himself through even more paces than before, soaking him in another layer of sweat.
After that, he hit the showers, pointedly avoided looking at any other guy’s dick, and then stepped out as he was dressing. He shuddered upon leaving, as he always did. Communal accommodations just didn’t suit him all that well.
He figured that the girl would be fast asleep by now but no, there she was in the common’s. And it looked like she’d been waiting for him.
Great, he thought, and rolled his eyes. Rather than letting her bounce over to him again, he crossed the space between to her on his own.
“Hello,” he said shortly.
There was such utter earnestness in her eyes as she looked up at him. It was startling and he looked away, uncertain what that level of intimacy meant from her own culture.
“I’m sorry if I offended you earlier, Jax,” she replied quietly, getting right to the point. “It was just a bit of a…surprise.”
He glared at her, aware that his eyes crackled with electricity. “I interrupted my exercise to come greet you. I did not have the time to make myself presentable because I was uncertain at what time you would be here today.”
“Right.” Her voice lowered even further. “Are you going to be angry with me the whole time because of this? I know a lot of species don’t like humans because we’re uncouth and rude to them but you know, I’ve always tried to learn as much as I can. Let me learn from this mistake? Don’t hold it against me?”
When had an uncouth human learned to acquire such poetic words? What had she been doing on all her flights, been reading? He wasn’t much of a reader but he did recognize the sound of someone who enjoyed it.
“Fine,” he huffed. “But you better learn fast. And get some sleep, what are you doing up right now?”
“Waiting for you to put things right,” she said simply and then stood. “I’ll see you in a couple hours, Jax.”
And then she was gone, her too-large uniform dragging on the floor around her feet.
Jax sighed and put a crackling hand to his head, effectively vaporizing one of his budding eyebrows. This was going to be a nightmare.
Chapter Four
Oh God, he was dreamy.
She had no idea what to expect in the form of a guard on her ship but damn, this guy Jax was completely not it, okay? She knew all about the Ula tribe and their control over electricity, so she was beating herself up for ages over her stupid faux pa by trying to offer him her hand. That made her look disrespectful, assuming like a human that everyone she met was always doing to want to be touched by her standards. Well, she knew how wrong she’d been now and she was never going to let it happen again.
It was just…She’d been flustered.
Jax was almost twice her height, which probably wouldn’t have meant as much if she wasn’t so damn tiny. He was three of her broad, and as dense as twenty of her! Those muscles…he had muscles on his muscles. They were mountains, from his buff shoulders to his head-crushing thighs. His skin was violet and his veins looking like lightning, and his eyes were just so vibrant, like the sky on Earth was in paintings and old pictures. He has bald and it worked for him, and those glowing hands.
Just like that, she’d formed a crush on him. It wasn’t like she’d never experimented a little in her time
on Earth but that had been years ago now and she was inexperienced and probably desperate for a little intimacy without having known it was possible for her to feel that way. Which meant spending a month-long voyage with him was going to be insanely rough and way too enjoyable.
A drop-dead gorgeous man forced to be in the same area as her? Oh, it was a dream come true, basically.
That was why she’d apologized to him even though he had been the stuffy and unapproachable one at their first meeting. She really wanted things to start off better, even if it meant costing her a bit of sleep to wait up on him.
Well, it wasn’t like she hadn’t had a harder time sleeping on other occasions. She had long since mastered the ability to doze on and off in 30-second increments. She’d heard other pilots boasting about their own techniques for dealing with untimely sleep deprivation, so it wasn’t just her problem.
