Freefall_The Great Space Race

by Elsa Jade

  True to her promise to herself, Amy managed not to scream when the hatch opened to reveal this new planet. However, she did gasp at the hot, dusty air that swirled in through the doorway. An acrid stink, like a fading smoke bomb, singed her sinuses.

  “Atmospheric conditions are suitable for sustaining present lifeforms,” the computer announced—seemingly a little late, to Amy’s chagrin.

  Luc lifted his head. “Smells like home,” he murmured.

  “That’s auspicious.” She took a step forward, and the dry wind hurtled stinging grains of sand in her cheeks. “This planet looked small on the map, but it seems much bigger when we have to find one lone gem.”

  He nodded. “Perspective is a strange thing. But I don’t think Octiron would make the quest too hard. They’re hungry for the ratings, after all.”

  Strange to think that an alien megacorporation was as desperate in some ways as she was.

  A spurt of sympathy for the whole universe made her sigh. Was every being doomed to forever seek a measure of happiness as small as a single gem on an entire dusty planet?

  Ooh, maybe she should say that aloud for the cameras too. She was getting as wise as Confucius, really.

  She pulled her pair of safety goggles over her eyes just as Luc did the same beside her, and they descended the gangplank to the powdery surface. The dust puffed up around their ankles and she was glad of the protective lenses that polarized the bland red-brown dirt to sharper tones. Not that there was much to see.

  Luc held up a device like a large cell phone. “The Yestrian aquari crystals are renowned through the galaxies, and the hives don’t share. That a drakling queen had one—and a red one no less—is remarkable. Not that it really happened,” he hastened to add.

  She wasn’t sure even the most glorious red-yellow gem would show up against the red dirt. “Where do we start looking?”

  “The ship’s systems aren’t strong enough to precisely scan the whole planet, unfortunately, but it got us this close. From here, this dat-pad has a sensor that will find anything with the drakling homeworld molecular signature.”

  She stumbled on a rock invisible under the dust. Or maybe it was the insanity of their quest that tripped her up. “A…molecular signature? Based on poetry?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Draklings have hidden depths that aren’t always apparent at first glance.”

  While she had zero insights to offer him. Her excitement over the quest wavered at the realization that she was once again deadweight.

  “Our storms are rather severe,” he continued as he held up the dat-pad, “and leave a mark even on plasteel and cerametal. A gemstone-quality aquari crystal that spent any time on my world will be scarred on a microscopic level.”

  Nothing so blatant and unappealing as losing a finger, not for a queen’s crown.

  “If the gems are fake,” she wondered, “why would they be marked?”

  Over the reflective lenses of his goggles, his brow furrowed. “I asked Rickster—the Octiron assistant producer—about that. But he said we should race as if the prism gems truly exist and follow my calculations. I suppose Octiron wants us to act as if it’s all real.”

  She glanced around the desolate landscape. “Well, I hope we find it before the commercial break.”

  As they trudged through the sand, he showed her how the dat-pad pinpointed him by his drakling molecular signature as a large glowing orb. But the rest of the sensor was blank. He muttered to himself and poked at the screen, but it stayed stubbornly empty.

  Yeah, she knew how that felt.

  The Blissed disappeared behind them as they topped anther rise studded with the spindly dead trees. The hot wind blew past them, singing faintly through the branches with a high-pitched, almost musical chime.

  She reached out to touch the nearest twig—

  “Ouch!” She flinched back as the twig snapped and pierced her finger like broken glass.

  Luc whirled. “What—? Ah, larf it, Amy. I should’ve warned you. The aquari crystal veins are too brittle to touch.” He tucked the dat-pad into a pocket of his trousers and reached for her. “Come here.”

  “It’s nothing…”

  “You’re bleeding.” His nostrils flared. “You bleed red.”

  Like they needed more red in this landscape. She grimaced. “If only that could help us find the queen’s gem.”

  Taking her elbow in a firm grip, he tugged her down to sit on a relatively flat rock under the tree that bit her. “Let’s take care of you first.”

  His abrupt and total refocus on her unexpectedly brought tears to her eyes. Which was silly, because even though a ragged tear marked her hand from the tip of her forefinger down toward the base of her thumb, it didn’t hurt that much.

  She tilted her head back to keep the tears from leaving her eyes and stared up at the aquari “trees”. They weren’t dead limbs but branching veins of crystal. The twig she’d broken off glimmered at the shattered end. “That’s amazing.”

  He followed her gaze as he dug through his satchel. “The veins are more impressive underground where the minerals pool into larger and more valuable concentrations, suitable for mining.” He stiffened. “Underground… Of course. That’s why the sensor isn’t finding anything. We need to go into the mines.” He shook his head. “Lost, the Heart’s Flame, drowned in its old, deep sea of stone. Unneeded, now the bright queen was no longer alone.”

  The short recital left her weaker than any blood loss. Maybe he thought his drakling kin were looked down on for their alleged disorderly behavior, but she wondered how much of that rowdiness was just another expression of the pure passion she heard in his voice. And she suspected at least some of the judgment from others was actually envy.

  As his words faded, she shook off their hypnotic effect. “You’ll have to tell me the rest. Maybe there are more clues in the words, not just in the computations.”

  Now that they had another clue, she half expected him to jump up and resume their search, but instead he removed a hand-sized container from his satchel and popped it open. The sterile scent that wafted out told her it was a first aid kit. He balanced a small spray bottle, a smaller tube, and a bandage on his thigh and then took her hand in his.

  His long fingers wrapped around her wrist, he turned her hand upward toward the light. “The wound isn’t deep, and I don’t see any shards. Which is good. Sustained, penetrative contact with this kind of raw aquari crystal can have… peculiar effects on some physiologies.”

  Sustained, penetrative contact… And she’d thought his poetry voice was distracting. His touch was gentle but firm, and her whole body listed helplessly toward him even though he was just holding her hand.

  “What…what kind of effect?” Did the buzzing in her blood count? Or the quiver between her legs? “Like…coffee on draklings?”

  “No.” He aimed the spray bottle at her finger and released a short burst. “More like draklings during the hunger seasons of old: makes some beings aggressive and bitey.”

  She jumped as the cool liquid coated her finger and dripped down, flushing out the jagged line of the wound. “Oh, well then. I can totally see why a suitor would get such a crystal for his would-be queen.”

  Luc chuckled. “Some beings like biting as much as they like coffee.”

  She couldn’t imagine. Would she like to bite?

  Or be bitten.

  With smooth, efficient gestures, Luc spread gel from the tube over her finger and down toward her palm. “Sealant and healing ointment.” He wrapped the bandage once around her finger and then around her whole hand to secure it. “I thought Earthers were bilaterally symmetrical, at least on the outside.”

  She blinked. “What do you…? Oh, my hand.” She looked down and made a fist against the stiffness of the bandage. “I’m left-handed, and I guess it’s obvious I’m always touching things I shouldn’t.” She forced a little laugh.

  He didn’t reply in kind. “It’s scarcely noticeable.”

  “
It happened when I was very young. Ye-ye—my grandfather—prided himself on homemade fireworks. And rightly so. They were beautiful. When I was little, I thought they were like flowers, so pretty. At a new year celebration, I grabbed one—I wanted to hold it—and no one was close enough to stop me. Blew my finger right off. Whenever Ye-ye told the story afterward, he said I didn’t even cry.” She shrugged. “As if shock was bravery.”

  “A burning flower,” he mused softly. “That would’ve enticed a drakling child too. But we have the tough skin to take the fire.”

  “I could’ve used scales,” she agreed. “I just got scars.”

  “The crystal cut is very fine, and the ointment is powerful. It won’t scar.” His jade eyes were hooded. “Don’t let it stop you from touching beautiful things.”

  She’d told him the drakling fire in his eyes was beautiful. But he’d been under the influence of coffee at the time; did he even remember her saying that?

  Did he think she wanted to touch him again?

  Their one kiss had been so breathless and hot. Was she willing to maybe get burned reaching for him again?

  Before she could do what any interstellar explorer worth the name would do, he repacked his satchel and stood. When he reached down for her right hand, his touch had gone from gentle to impersonal.

  “We’re losing light,” he said. “We need to get down into the mines before the hive-mites are released.”

  “Mites?” When she fell into step beside him, he dropped her hand. “Ugh. I hate itching.”

  He slanted a glance at her, his eyebrows arching over the rim of the goggles. “It’s not so much the itching as the full-body acid attack.”

  She blanched. “What? How big are these mites?”

  “About half the size of the Blissed.”

  “That’s…concerning.”

  His lips quirked in a half-smile. “Not if we get underground before they find us. They were engineered by the Yestria to guard these smaller, undeveloped planets at night when raiders might be more inclined to sneak in, but the mites aren’t fast or smart, just relentless.”

  She grimaced as she hastened her steps. “You’re not exactly selling me on their good points.”

  “Octiron wouldn’t actually let us be melted into a pile of protoplasmic goo.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Unless it was good for ratings, I suppose.”

  “Can we walk faster? Maybe even run?”

  Following the dat-pad map, they backtracked slightly to a shorter hill in the range where the Blissed was parked. There was nothing to distinguish this hill from the others except for a low, dark slit in the dusty rock.

  “It’s a ventilation shaft,” Luc said, “not a formal entry. But it should give the sensor access to find any drakling molecular signature.”

  She peered at the opening. “I’m smaller. I should go first.”

  “Not a chance.” He shouldered past her. Those shoulders, broad and partially exposed by the leathery vest, bumped the walls on either side, but he managed to wedge himself through the opening.

  “The real famous interstellar explorer would’ve gone first,” she muttered to herself. Except that woman wasn’t here, and Amy was. While Luc scanned the opening, she glanced back over her shoulder warily. Mites, eww. Presumably she’d be able to see anything half the size of the Blissed come across this barren landscape, but she hadn’t been much interested in seeing grizzlies or cougars in Montana either. She’d always thought it was better to just let the wildlife stay wild. Except now she was supposed to be the wild one.

  “I’m not getting a clear reading,” he said, his voice echoing hollowly ahead of him. “We need to go deeper.”

  “Of course we do,” she muttered. But she pushed the goggles up on her head and plunged in behind him when he disappeared into the shaft.

  The shaft was roughly oval, taller and higher than Luc’s head although narrow enough they had to walk single file. He reached back to hand her a flexible lighted band that brightened as they left the light of the tunnel’s entrance. She wrapped it around her wrist.

  He kept his gaze on the dat-pad in his hand. “With the airflow through the tunnel system, this should be a good place for the sensor to catch a sign,” he muttered, mostly to himself, she thought. “Unless I’m wrong about the whole thing.”

  Oh, she knew that feeling so well. She put her bandaged hand on the middle of his back. Even through the wrapping and the numbness of the spray he’d used, the tension in his spine thrummed through her. “How many times did you run the calculations?”

  He glanced back at her. He’d removed his goggles too, and his jade eyes reflected the dat-pad glow eerily. “Many. But for half of them I was still drunk at the bar with my colleagues.”

  She smiled. “I’d trust your half-drunk calculations more than any computer.”

  “That would be foolish of you.”

  She shook her head. “You mixed poetry and math in a way apparently no one thought of in a thousand years, if that’s how long the queen’s prism has been lost. No wonder they picked you for this race.”

  His slow blink extinguished the light in his eyes for a moment before he cleared his throat. “The map shows a confluence of several tunnels ahead. That would give us an even higher sampling rate. Follow me.”

  He said it like she had any intention of doing anything else.

  They plunged deeper into the mine, her light band and his dat-pad carving out only the smallest bubble of light around them.

  “How is the show going to get any footage down here?”

  He paused, although she couldn’t tell if he was waiting for something with the sensor or thinking about her question. “I’m not sure. I suppose they have cameras somewhere.”

  She glanced around surreptitiously. Getting cut on a twig wasn’t exactly primetime material. She was going to have to do better. Entire galaxies of people were watching her and judging Team Prism by her incompetence.

  The thought was more ghastly than spaceship-sized bugs and just as capable of reducing her to a pile of—what had he called it?—protoplasmic goo.

  “Luc,” she whispered, the tight walls of the tunnel seeming to press ever closer. “I need to do something.”

  “What?”

  “Anything. Just…don’t think I’m useless.” Even if she was.

  “I don’t think that. You’re just small and vulnerable and innocent—”

  “Not that innocent,” she hissed. “Use me.” Oops, that sounded a little too aggressive and bitey. “I mean, if there’s something I can do, anything…”

  “Amy—”

  Before he could continue on about how innocent she was, the dat-pad beeped imperiously.

  She gestured at it. “What did it find?”

  After a long heartbeat, he dragged his gaze down to the screen. “The sensor is picking up a drakling marker.”

  They stepped out into a wider space, and she took a steadying breath of the cooler air flowing around them. She lifted her light band and turned a slow circle, shining the beam across the oblong mouths of five tunnels, including the one they’d emerged from. Several of the new tunnels had stalactites dripping from their ceilings with corresponding stalagmites below.

  “Like standing at the center of five screaming mouths,” she muttered. “With teeth.”

  He glanced at her. “How poetic. I think you’re getting a feel for this race.”

  The feelings she wanted… She clamped down on her wistfulness. “Which way?”

  He did a slower spin than she had, aiming the dat-pad toward each corridor. “The sensor is inconclusive. There’s a clear molecular signature, which means the airflow is coming from one of these.” He looked at her. “You choose.”

  “Me?” she squeaked.

  “You wanted to do something.”

  “Taking a wild guess isn’t what I had in mind.”

  “Calculations won’t be any more likely to get us there,” he pointed out. “And I’m unlucky. Since you came here by mere chance, wi
th a statistical improbability at that, I think you’re more qualified to guess.”

  She stuck out her tongue at him.

  He observed her, his expression intrigued. “Is that…you want to kiss again?”

  Never mind a hive-mite’s acid attack. She was going to melt from sheer humiliation. “That’s not what—”

  She thought he was just confused by the differences in their cultures, or maybe teasing her. But when he stepped toward her, the artificial light from her band flared in his eyes, turning the jade to a shining gold. “I want to kiss again too.”

  Oh, well. In that case…

  The melting in her bones this time was only the good kind as he took her into his arms. She didn’t need to hold herself up, not with the strength of his steely hold around her. The muscles in his shoulders, bared by the vest, flexed under her grasping fingers. Maybe he didn’t have wings, but the power in his embrace was enough to send her desire soaring.

  She hadn’t wanted to take advantage of him when the coffee was confusing him, but now, when he lifted her up against his chest, she brought her mouth crashing down on his.

  He groaned and his grip tightened behind her, one forearm under her ass lifting her higher. She speared her fingers through the twists of his hair, anchoring them both together as their tongues fought, yielded, tangled, caressed.

  Their breaths seethed back and forth, eroding her thoughts of anything but him. Whatever with alien mites or queens, with risks or riches. With his hands on her, his tongue in her mouth, she felt that finally someone wanted her for only what she was: however little that might be.

  When she lifted her head, his eyes flickered with flames. “Choose a path.”

  The one with him… Wait, that wasn’t what he meant.

  Swallowing hard, she relaxed her furious grip on his shoulders and closed her eyes for a moment. It was the Great Space Race, not the Mediocre Space Meandering… Of course the adventure would be whatever frightened her most. “That one.” She pointed, then opened her eyes to make sure she was pointing the right way. “The one where the teeth are almost closed.” Like fangs bared in a wicked grin—or about to tear its victim apart—the stony outcroppings had nearly sealed the opening of what had to be the oldest tunnel. Maybe not thousands of years old like the Firestorm Queen’s legend, but old and creepy enough to make for good television.