Pursuit

by Val St. Crowe

  But eventually, she was betrayed by her stupid body, because it just got uncomfortable, contorted like that, and she knew she needed to move. So, slowly, she pulled back and looked at his face.

  He had his eyes closed.

  She needed to stand up and stretch, so she extricated herself from him and turned away. She peered out at the stars of space again.

  She heard him shift behind her. He was standing up.

  And then he was pressed against her, wrapping his arms around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder.

  She liked that. She couldn’t believe how much. She turned in his arms and searched his gaze. She didn’t even know how to find words for the questions she was asking.

  He smiled at her and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, like he had before, when he’d told her things were going to go back to normal between them. “You want to go to bed?”

  “Um…” She wasn’t sure if that meant that they were going to go to separate rooms and be apart, because she didn’t want that. She liked them close, and she just wished that the captain felt the same way she did.

  He looked away then, and he dropped his hand. “Is something wrong?”

  “What?” she said. “No.”

  “Because you keep getting weird every time we do this.”

  “Weird?” She really wished they weren’t talking. “What am I doing that’s weird?”

  He rubbed his forehead. “Whatever.” He looked down on the ground and then bent down to fish up his shirt. “I guess you’re doing this because you know it’s destiny, and so maybe it’s all very confusing for you. Hell, it’s confusing for me too. Let’s just maybe not talk about it.”

  “Okay,” she said in a tiny voice. She started to look around for her clothes too. She found her bust supporter, which had been thrown onto one of the consoles. She picked it up and started to put it on. “You know, I’m not just doing this because it’s destiny.”

  “No?”

  She looked back at him. He looked vaguely ridiculous because he was wearing a shirt but nothing else, and his cock was kind of bobbing around under the hem of the shirt, and she got an urge to touch it. It looked like it wanted to be touched. She bit down on her bottom lip.

  “Eve?” he said. “Why do you do it, then?”

  She stepped closer, reaching for him. Her fingers closed around him.

  He let out a surprised sound, almost a laugh, as if it tickled.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  He arched an eyebrow. “You trying to say you like me or something?”

  She grinned. “Yeah.”

  He kissed her again. “Me too,” he murmured against her lips.

  * * *

  Kerxe arrived at the coordinates the Astra 500 had been programmed to go to, but no one was there. They’d tricked him somehow. They’d fed him the wrong coordinates, maybe. He didn’t really know. The humans were clever about that sort of thing. That was one of the reasons he liked to pursue his prey on land instead of through space. On land, he could get a physical scent. Out here, he had no idea what to do next.

  He knew what he should do. He should report back what had happened to Councilor Trakh, who’d sent him on the mission in the first place.

  But Kerxe had an idea how that would go. He’d explain, and the leaders would be disappointed, even angry. They’d determine that he wasn’t the right vidya for the job after all, and they’d send someone else.

  Kerxe clenched his hand into a spiky fist. He couldn’t allow that to happen. He had marked this prey as his own, and he wasn’t going to let anyone else have it.

  So, he’d find them himself.

  And then he would kill them and bathe in their blood, just as he’d planned.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  They had sex in every room on the ship, on every available surface. Well, Gunner was slightly exaggerating. Not every room. A lot of different rooms, though. A lot of different surfaces. He didn’t think either of them had been fully clothed in two weeks.

  There were occasional attempts at getting dressed. Sometimes he would put on pants or she would throw on a robe.

  The clothes didn’t stay on very long.

  He thought it was a kind of desperation for both of them. They were making love to prove to themselves that they weren’t dead.

  They didn’t talk about the fact that the ship had dwindling provisions or that the fuel was finite. They knew they’d have to stop floating around in space and land somewhere at some point. They weren’t exactly inconspicuous in a leon ship. It would be difficult to make landing at one of the outposts. They certainly couldn’t go back to the Ceymia system.

  No, it was only a matter of time until they had to deal with those sorts of problems.

  But for now, there were no problems. There was just fucking.

  Him on top. Her on top. Her on her hands and knees. Her sitting on the table in the kitchen. Her against the wall in the shower. He had memorized the way her body looked from every conceivable angle.

  There was another thing they didn’t talk about either.

  Was she pregnant?

  He thought she had to be. He had come inside her so many times there was a statistical possibility of zero that she hadn’t conceived. Except he didn’t really understand how it worked, he had to admit. She’d said something back on Rama about a fertile time, and Gunner had to admit that was something he was pretty fuzzy on. When were women fertile? How did it work? He should know this, but he’d been young with Silvi and distracted by the war, and then he hadn’t needed to know.

  Silvi was something they talked about, however.

  He thought that would be strange, even painful, or that Eve wouldn’t want to know, but it wasn’t that way at all. She lay curled against his body in bed, resting her hand on his chest and he talked, and it was good. Somehow talking about it made it all easier. The thing with Eve was different than what he had with Silvi in so many ways, but the more that they were together, the more right it felt.

  It was funny that he’d found her so annoying before, because now they seemed to have settled in so well together that they were often in sync without speaking, knowing what the other was planning to do or say without forewarning.

  He didn’t want to think about the future, though, because it wasn’t going to be like this. They were going to be in danger again, running again, and she was going to be pregnant, and that was going to make everything harder. And assuming they didn’t die, and she actually delivered this baby, they were going to… what? Raise the kid on the run, somehow raise a champion? Was that even possible?

  He sometimes had vague thoughts about the Swallow, and he wondered if he would ever see it again.

  The leon was spacious and cushy, but it was a big ship, hard to hide, and it used a lot of fuel. It wasn’t an ideal ship, even if it did have pretty superior firepower. They couldn’t stay here forever.

  Gunner thought about these things, but he didn’t say them aloud. He didn’t know if Eve thought about it too, but she must. She was always thinking about the future.

  One afternoon, they were lying in bed, both panting and staring up at the ceiling, both naked, because it had been their third bout of sex of the day, and she suddenly started convulsing.

  He knew what it meant. He’d seen her have the visions before. But he found he didn’t like watching it happen to her now. Now, she belonged to him in some way, and he felt as if he needed to protect her, and he couldn’t stop the visions. She looked uncomfortable. He wondered if the visions hurt.

  It only lasted a few moments.

  She stopped shaking and her eyes opened. She gasped.

  “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

  She sat up, and she started pulling on her clothes.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. He was alarmed that she was dressing. They didn’t do that. They didn’t get dressed. They lived in a bubble that was about sex and willful ignorance, and he didn’t want that bubble burst prematurely. They should
have weeks left before they needed to seriously address the problem of fuel, so why bother worrying now? “What did you see?”

  “Nothing,” she said, pushing her arms into the sleeves of her shirt.

  “Nothing at all?”

  She wasn’t looking at him. “Something, but nothing new. I’ve seen it before.”

  “What?” he said.

  She got up, still not making eye contact. “It’s the vision of our son, when he’s grown up. He’s showing me all the disabled Xerkabah ships. He’s telling me we’ve won the war.” She walked out of the room.

  Gunner let out a noisy breath. He was pretty sure that was not what she’d just seen.

  * * *

  “Oh, that happened to Coss,” said the voice of Esah in Kerxe’s ear. Kerxe had resorted to talking to other vidya for help in finding the humans he was searching for. He was being discreet about it, of course. Couldn’t tell the others that these were important humans. He made it out as though they were regular space trash, disobeying the orders to stay on the Ceymia planets. The other vidya understood. No one liked to let prey get away.

  “What happened?” said Kerxe.

  “He tried to follow a ship through light speed and when he got there, they were gone.”

  “Did he ever find them?”

  “No. He found the ship. It was being fenced by human pirates. The humans he was chasing were probably long dead by then. The pirates undoubtedly took their ship and killed them themselves.”

  Well, that was of no help to him, was it? “I suppose he killed the pirates, then?”

  “Tried,” said Esah. “But they’re tricky. Any sign of trouble, and they turn tail and go right to Salz.”

  Kerxe snorted. “Oh, you can’t believe the rumors about that place, can you?”

  “Of course I believe them,” said Esah. “No one who’s ever gone to that planet has ever left it. There must be ten leon ships crashed on its surface. It’s forbidden to go there.”

  “It’s forbidden only because no one ever has any visions about the planet,” said Kerxe. “And the leadership these days, they’ve become timid. It’s the human influence. Did you know that all the leaders stay in human form constantly? There’s talk they’ve become like us, unable to shift back. If so, we are essentially being led by a pack of humans.”

  “Humans are intriguing, I suppose,” said Esah.

  “I don’t think so,” said Kerxe. “Anyway, thank you for your information.”

  “You’re not thinking of going to Salz, are you?” said Esah.

  “I want my prey,” said Kerxe. “If the pirates have already killed them, I’ll kill the pirates as a consolation prize.”

  “But the danger. What of that?”

  “Are we not vidya? Do we not thrive on danger?”

  “Truthfully, we are not vidya, Kerxe,” said Esah quietly.

  Kerxe terminated the transmission. Esah was beginning to sound like one of those whiny Xerkabah poets, those who bemoaned the lack of identity of their species, claimed there was a hole in every Xerkabah, a longing to be something.

  Kerxe only had a longing to kill those stupid humans. That was all. Nothing more.

  * * *

  Gunner had been obliged to put on clothes, since Eve had stayed dressed ever since her vision. She was avoiding him, which wasn’t easy to do when they were the only two people on the ship. She had locked herself in one of the entertainment rooms, and he had heard the strains of some documentary vid coming out of there. But she wouldn’t answer when he banged on the door, and he couldn’t figure what she was doing in there.

  He left her to her own devices until dinner.

  They had run out of dried and canned foods and now only had ration bars and spices. Sometimes they made it into a stew of sorts, but tonight, they just cut the ration bars into squares and nibbled them in silence.

  Finally, Gunner couldn’t stand it anymore. “You’re lying to me about the vision.”

  “No,” she said too quickly.

  He chewed the ration bar. It was tasteless and had an odd texture. He wasn’t fond of it. He swallowed it down with some water. “Eve, don’t lie to me. We need to be honest with each other here. All we have is each other.”

  She rubbed her face. “When I thought about my visions of the future, I thought about the idea that we were intimate and then parted ways, but I never thought of something happening to you.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “Did you know that no one who sees a vision ever sees his or her own death?”

  “No, I didn’t know that. That’s interesting, but you’re not telling me—”

  “I saw us in a firefight over the planet Salz,” she said.

  “Wait, the planet that’s like a black hole?” he said. “The one that sucks up ships and never spits them out?”

  “We were in this ship,” she said. “You were down in the cannon pit. You hit a Fabis, and it was damaged, and it went down. But our ship was bad off too. We were going down. And…” She pointed up. “The ceiling. It just collapsed and this shard of one of the air ducts, it went… through your…” She touched her neck. She shuddered.

  He was cold all over. “You saw me die?”

  She nodded.

  They were quiet.

  Gunner was trying to process the thought of all of this. He couldn’t, though. Being dead was such an abstract idea, he found, even though it shouldn’t be. He’d seen lots of people die that he was close to. He understood it, but when it was them, it was different. When it was him…

  Eve started talking again. “And then the vision cut off, which was very strange. I’ve never seen anything like that before. It was like a transmission getting cut off. Everything blinked out right in the middle of it all.”

  Gunner got up and walked over to the door. He braced himself against it, suddenly having trouble staying upright.

  “And, actually, I think I know why it did that,” said Eve. “You’re wrong, you know, Salz isn’t a black hole planet. Humans have landed on it. I went searching the nets today, and it wasn’t easy, but eventually, I found a really old vid, one of those old colony vids? You know the vids I’m talking about?”

  He turned back to look at her. His mouth was dry. He eyed his water, but it looked very far away, across the room on the table.

  “They made them back when they were trying to entice people to branch out, before we knew about the Xerkabah? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  He rested his head against the wall.

  “Anyway,” she said, “it doesn’t have much land, Salz. It’s mostly covered in a very, very salty ocean, with just these little bits of land poking up here and there. So, obviously, for the Xerkabah, it is a black hole planet. Because if they fell in that water… Well, you’ve seen what happens when they get too much salt on them.”

  He licked his lips. “What are you saying?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, but I think it’s a deadly planet for the Xerkabah.”

  “So, you’d be safe there. If we went there, you’d be safe.”

  “If we went there, you would die,” she said. “We can never go there.”

  “Right.” He swallowed. Okay, that was easy enough. Go to Salz and die or avoid it and live.

  “I think the vision cut off because of the salt. I don’t know, but maybe that planet cuts off the visions.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You’re saying that if you were on that planet, the Xerkabah wouldn’t be able to get to you, and they could never have a vision of you there?”

  “I…”

  He rubbed his chin.

  “Gunner, we’re not going there.” She got up from the table. “You’re not dying. I won’t let you die.”

  “No,” he murmured. “I’ve got no desire to die either.”

  “Good,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you about the vision. I thought it would only upset you, and there’s no reason to talk about it.” She crossed the room to him and she p
ut her palm against his cheek. “Let’s not bring it up again.”

  “Okay,” he said softly.

  She kissed him.

  He shut his eyes and felt the softness of her lips, the give of her body against his.

  She lifted his shirt and put her other hand flat against his stomach. She slid over his belly button, under his pants, all the way down to find his cock. She squeezed it lightly. She’d gotten remarkably good at knowing how to touch him in the past two weeks.

  He groaned.

  She teased him stiff.

  He sighed.

  And soon they weren’t wearing clothes anymore. They did it in the kitchen. He bent her over a counter there and he fucked her hard, like he was furious about something, like he was working something out. And she moaned and sighed and told him harder, and for a while, he didn’t think of anything except how good it was.

  But later, they were tangled up in bed together, and it was different now. He couldn’t sleep for the thoughts that were warring in his brain. He extricated himself from her sleeping form.

  He tugged on his pants and went into the cockpit of the leon. He checked the location of Salz. How much fuel they had. How long it would take to get there. There was nothing stopping them from going.

  He gazed out at the darkness of space, punctuated only by bright stars, and he felt small.

  He was nothing in the grand scheme of it all. The entire human race was nothing, for that matter. The Xerkabah were nothing. All of it. They were one tiny galaxy in a huge universe.

  But in the drama of his species, he had a role to play, and he guessed it was done. She didn’t need him around to bring the champion into the world. No, she had what she needed from him.

  He set the course for the planet and set the ship in motion.

  Then he went back to bed.

  She was lying on her back, head to one side. She looked peaceful.

  He sat down next to her and he put his hand on her belly. Was she pregnant? She had to be. He put his lips against her skin, just under her navel. “Live,” he whispered. “You need to live.” He looked up at her sleeping face. “Both of you.”