Ariston_Star Guardians

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  The lantern offered some light but not enough to see through her faceplate, so he couldn’t gauge her expression.

  “For what?”

  “Being snippy and sarcastic with you. It’s my first inclination when I’m grumpy, tired, dealing with idiots, or suspicious of someone’s intent.”

  “And this night has given you all of that?”

  “How did you guess?” She leaned in to weld the seams.

  “What brought you on this mission?” he asked casually, as if he were simply making conversation. He hadn’t asked her that yet. Maybe she would answer honestly, and he could stop forming hypotheses.

  “Got paid to bring these scientists out and drop them off.”

  “That’s it?” He couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth. “I thought you might be an integral part of their team.”

  “I’m their pilot. That’s integral.”

  “How did you end up being a pilot of an old hunter ship?”

  “Kapti, like I said.”

  He’d meant his question to prompt her to tell him why she’d chosen a ship favored by smugglers and bounty hunters, not how she’d gotten it, but since he hadn’t believed that story when she’d given it, he decided to dig deeper.

  “Yes, it’s interesting that you’re apparently a master of a game you couldn’t have been introduced to until you came out into the galaxy. Recently.” He was fairly certain the game wasn’t two thousand years old and couldn’t have had its origins on Gaia. It was based solidly off features of the ranching planet that it had come from.

  “We have a similar game on Earth. Poker. And I’m a good bluffer.”

  He chewed on that as she worked her way around the corner of the panel.

  “I learned Kapti easily enough,” Mick continued, “and after practicing with my sister’s friends, I beat some guys at the space base who thought I was some dumb girl without a clue. Made some good money, enough for a down payment on a ship. This one was available and in my price range.”

  “It’s the kind of ship that bounty hunters usually buy,” Ariston said, going back to his original train of thought.

  He didn’t really want to learn that she had stolen the ship. He decided to believe her story, even though that was a lot of money for a novice to win—how would she have been invited to play in such a high-stakes game?

  “That’s what I figured I’d be,” Mick said.

  He blinked, surprised by the admission. It wasn’t considered an honorable profession, by criminals or law-abiding citizens alike.

  “Why?”

  “What’s with the Twenty Questions, buddy?”

  “Sorry, I’m curious about you.” And he would like for her to be someone he could be friends with in the future, not someone he needed to arrest. But her admission to being a bounty hunter wasn’t promising.

  She didn’t respond to his comment—maybe his curiosity made her uncomfortable—and they worked in silence, fighting the wind and replacing panels.

  The wind continued to grow stronger, the gusts threatening to rip the free panels away and send them flying. Ariston wondered if it would get strong enough to send them flying.

  When they had two more panels left to replace, hail started falling, angling in sideways, driven by the wind.

  “I’m starting to think anyone who thinks colonizing this planet is a good idea would have to be drunk and stoned to make that decision,” Mick said randomly.

  Or at least it seemed random to him. “It can’t be colonized.”

  “Why not?” She sounded surprised. “Not the haunting thing again.”

  With hail pelting the side of his helmet, he barely heard the words.

  “It’s a protected planet,” he said as they lifted the last panel, trying together to maneuver it into place. “Your ship isn’t supposed to be—”

  A huge gust of wind ripped through, tearing at the panel. Ariston tightened his grip, but he was too slow. The wind ripped the panel free, and it clanked off Mick’s helmet before flying off into the darkness.

  “Damn,” she snarled and sprinted after it.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She sprang atop a boulder and leaped into the darkness, heading in the direction the panel had gone.

  “We don’t have any extras,” was her only answer.

  Ariston ran after her, flipping on the headlamp built into his helmet. The wind gusted hard enough to blow small boulders around, and dust clouded the air, but he spotted her ahead of him and raced to keep up. She was almost as fast as he was in the armor, and he remembered struggling to run her down in the ruins.

  He rounded a boulder and spotted her kneeling atop the panel in the dust, using her weight to pin it down. Hail slammed down all around them, bouncing off the ground and their armor. If they hadn’t been wearing the protective gear, some of those ice pellets might have been large enough to give them concussions. Snow flurries now mingled with them.

  “I’m here,” he yelled to be heard over the roar of the storm.

  He knelt beside the panel, intending to grab the edge so they could carry it back together.

  She shook her head and pointed to a house-sized boulder a few meters away. As close as it was, he could barely see it. The visibility had dropped to nearly zero, and he would be hard-pressed to find the way back to the ship. His sensors showed its location, but even they were flashing off and on, accuracy affected by the storm.

  Together, they dragged the panel into the shadow of that boulder, to the leeward side of it. Mick dropped it down in the dirt and sat atop it with her back to the rock.

  “Guess we’re staying here for a while?” Ariston sat next to her, their combined weight pinning down the panel.

  He also placed his back against the boulder. It sheltered them somewhat from the wind and hail, though snowflakes made it down, covering them in white. His temperature monitor showed that it had dropped drastically in the last half hour, to well below freezing. Fortunately, his armor, designed to protect a man in the frigid vacuum of space, kept him comfortable inside.

  “Captain,” a man’s voice said over their channel. “The storm has arrived.”

  “No shit, Safin. How long is it going to last?”

  “As I mentioned, without satellites, I can’t get a good look at the cloud coverage from above, but I’d say several hours, at least. You better come inside.”

  “We will. After we finish the repairs.”

  Though Ariston couldn’t see her face inside her helmet, he imagined her wearing a mulish expression, and he smiled.

  “Uh, maybe that should wait until morning,” the man said.

  “Come morning, we’ll be busy ambushing a shuttle.”

  Ariston eyed the dark sky and wondered if the storm would clear by dawn. A shuttle wouldn’t be able to land in this. He knew little of the weather patterns of the planet and hoped they wouldn’t be trapped down here for days. He didn’t think Eryx would leave his men down here if the wait dragged on, but he could envision it happening.

  The comm fell quiet, the scientist—Safin—not giving his opinion on ambushes.

  Ariston and Mick sat shoulder to shoulder, the boulder at their backs, and they occasionally peered skyward. He thought about trying to get more information out of her, but she hadn’t appreciated his earlier prying.

  “I was twenty-one the first time I saw snow,” Mick said, her faceplate tilted upward, toward the white snow and hail gusting sideways over their boulder. “I grew up in Phoenix—in a desert climate—and even though it was only a two-hour drive to Flagstaff, where we could have seen tons and tons of snow in the winter, my mom would never take us.”

  “Us?” Ariston prompted, surprised by her willingness to share something. Maybe events that were in the past were safer to discuss than how she’d acquired her ship and come to be here.

  “My sister and me. She’s a year older than I am, and we kind of raised ourselves. Mom wasn’t there a lot. I mean, she was physically there, but she wasn’t
usually present. Sober. I left home as soon as I was old enough. Joined the military. But most of the Marine bases are in the South, so I didn’t see snow there, either. Finally, I got some leave between duty stations. Didn’t know where to go, so went back home to Phoenix. Mom was high and barely recognized me, so I rented a car and drove up to Flagstaff. It was January and snowing. I sat there by myself in a parking lot at a trailhead and watched it come down. Then I went out and made snow angels like I was five.”

  Ariston smiled, not sure what snow angels were, but getting the gist.

  “Then I found out that when you get back in the car with snow all over your clothes, it eventually melts, and you’re sitting in a puddle all the way home.”

  “My wife loved snow,” Ariston said before he could think better of bringing up Zya. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about her with a near stranger. It was hard enough with his sisters and mother back home. He knew he was fortunate to have a supportive family, a point driven home by Mick’s talk of her own distant mother, but sometimes, the sympathy was too much to deal with. His father, a former space fleet admiral and an all-around hard-ass, was somehow easier to deal with. He’d offered his rough sympathy in the beginning, but the latest family gatherings had involved a lot of advice to stop thinking so damn much about it and move on.

  “What happened to her?” Mick asked after a silence so long that he hadn’t expected a response.

  “She died in battle. I was there for it. Down in engineering, doing my duty. Keeping the ship together. To do anything else would have been deplorable, but afterward, I always felt that if I’d been up on the bridge… maybe I could have saved her somehow. I don’t know how. The shields were down, and the bridge got hit head on. None of the bridge crew lived. But even engineers aren’t always rational and logical.”

  “Nobody is, not in the end.” Mick shifted, drawing up her knees and wrapping her arms around them, though she shouldn’t have been cold in her armor. “You served on the same ship together? In our military, when spouses are both in, they don’t usually get assigned to the same company. Or ship or whatever.”

  “Well, we didn’t start out married. We met each other through our work. She was my captain. We actually used to butt heads a lot in the beginning.” As he spoke about the past, the memories filled his mind, and he found he could ignore the storm, the wind, the hail, the snow. He and Mick were speaking on a quiet channel. He couldn’t have heard her words if not for the comm delivering them to his ear, but it was sort of like being in a white cocoon. Just the two of them. “That was before she realized how charming I am.”

  Mick snorted. “No doubt.”

  “Are you…” He hesitated, not wanting to cause her to wall herself up again, but he was curious. “Are you married? Or were you ever?” He admitted to himself this had nothing to do with his mission or whether he might have to arrest her. He just wanted to know.

  She didn’t answer right away, and he wasn’t sure if she thought he was prying again or if it was an uncomfortable subject.

  “No,” she said. “I had a few serious relationships over the years, especially when I was in the Marines and it was easier to find kindred spirits. But I didn’t stay in after… the stuff I was dreaming about earlier happened. I’d always figured I’d retire in the Corps, and I always considered myself tough. I’d seen people die, but somehow that was… I don’t know. Sometimes, when shit gets real, you find out you aren’t as tough as you thought you were, that you’re not unbreakable.” Her helmet shifted, facing away from him, out toward the snowy, windy expanse. “During the bright light of day, it’s easier to be tough, but at night, when it’s dark and you’re alone in the aftermath with your fears and regrets and uncertainties, you realize you’re a coward.”

  He had a hard time imagining her ever doing anything truly cowardly, but he didn’t argue. He understood what it was to blame oneself for a catastrophe, and obviously he knew what it was like to lose people he cared about. The way the mind reacted was rarely logical.

  “I’ve never met anyone who was unbreakable,” Ariston said. “Some people just hide their breaking points better than others.”

  “If you can’t count on yourself, you can’t ask others to count on you,” she said. “When it was time to decide whether to stay in or get out, I decided not to re-up. I just didn’t think I could trust myself to take the right action if a similar situation came up again. Which would mean others couldn’t trust me. And trust is everything in combat. You know that.”

  “I do.”

  “But I didn’t really want to get out. I hadn’t planned on that. I’d planned on having a long career in the Marines. Since then, I don’t know. I’ve been struggling to figure out where I belong and what I want to do with my life. I don’t know how some people get it all figured out so quickly.”

  “Yeah. I gave up my engineering career after my wife died. It was too hard to be on that ship without her. It’s strange because it was really her calling, and for me, it had always been a job. Something I was good at, but not something I thought I’d miss that much. But Zya had always dreamed of serving. And she was damn good at it. To lose her was… horrible. Not just for me, but for the service too.” Ariston took a deep breath. It was odd how intensely his emotions could still rise to the surface, even after several years.

  He realized he wasn’t sure if he was contradicting any of the stories he’d told. He didn’t think so, but it was getting to be a bit of a blur. What had he told Mick? What had he told the engineer Woodruff? What had he told Eryx?

  “It’s the people you miss the most, isn’t it?” Mick asked, speaking softly. “I mean, it’s good to have a purpose, to do work that matters, but the people make all the difference. You tell yourself that you’re your own person and independent and nobody else is responsible for your happiness, but I don’t know if I really believe that. I don’t honestly know if I’m looking for something out there or someone. I guess I’d date more and try harder if I thought I just needed a guy.” She snorted. “I don’t know… I just don’t seem to know how to be content in my own shoes. When my sister left Earth—even after knowing about the wormholes and the Confederation for two years, it seems so weird to say that—I knew right away that I’d follow her. In part, because I was way closer to her than we ever were to Mom, and in part, because this was a whole new chance to maybe find that elusive something.”

  Ariston lifted his arm to rest it around her shoulders. He wasn’t sure it was what she wanted—or that it would matter one iota when they were in armor and couldn’t feel a supportive gesture—but he didn’t know how else to respond to her honest sharing. And he did believe it was honest. He couldn’t think of any ulterior motive she might have had for sharing. He certainly hadn’t had one, not in bringing up Zya. There was just something about sitting alone, or almost alone, in the dark that prompted soul searching and honesty.

  At first, Mick didn’t respond to his touch, and he was on the verge of withdrawing his arm. But then she leaned against him.

  He wished they weren’t in their armor. He would have liked her to feel the warmth of his body next to hers, to find it comforting. And he would have liked to feel that from her too. Given that they would be dying of hypothermia right now if they weren’t wearing their armor, he couldn’t resent it, but he wished they were somewhere warm and comfortable, with far less gear on.

  His mind flashed back to their decon shower, to bare butts touching, to the glimpse he’d gotten of her gleaming body, drops of water running over curves before falling to the deck. His own body heated at the memory, and it had nothing to do with his armor’s built-in warmers.

  “How far do you think it is to the ship?” Mick asked, looking up. The wind still blew ferociously, but the snow and hail had almost stopped.

  Ariston considered his race after her, jumping over and around boulders. “Not more than a hundred meters, I’d guess.”

  “That’s not far. If we venture back and find it, we could take off ou
r armor and get comfortable.”

  “Together or separately?” he asked, not sure if he was reading more than she intended into the comment.

  Even though they hadn’t known each other for even a full day yet, he was fairly certain he would be amenable to mutual comfort at this point. Whether her crew—or passengers, whatever they were—were amenable was another matter. Did she have her own cabin, or did she have to share it with someone?

  “I was mostly thinking of stripping out of this stuff, falling into my bunk, and sleeping.” She yawned.

  He hadn’t been as tired since taking the stimulant, but it would wear off soon. Maybe his thoughts would turn in that direction too. “Together or separately?” he repeated, smiling. “Your signals aren’t as clear as they could be.”

  “What do you expect in this storm? You’re lucky you’re getting a signal from me at all.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was joking with him or telling him to back off, so he dropped it. He debated removing his arm, but she was still leaning against his side.

  “How long has it been since your wife died?” she asked.

  “Four years,” he said, realizing he should have said that earlier, so she wouldn’t think… Well, he didn’t know what she would think.

  His family and friends all seemed to think he should have moved on by now, but there were a couple of cultures in the Confederation that considered marriage to be forever, even if one partner died prematurely. Mating was for life, and there should be no others. For a long time, he’d believed that, too, that one didn’t find a soul mate twice in one’s life. Maybe a part of him still believed that, but he’d also come to realize of late that he missed being half of a pairing, and having a partner in his travels, someone who watched his back in a fight and worried if he didn’t check in. Someone whose life was made better by his presence in it. And vice versa.

  “Ah,” was all she said, and he didn’t know how to read that.

  He reminded himself that she was breaking the law by being here and that it shouldn’t matter what she thought about him or his past relationships. Maybe he should have reminded himself of that before sharing so much of his personal history with her.