I had Xavier’s backing, and both he and Vex wanted to start a life with me. We had the whole galaxy to choose from, so why did I suddenly feel as if the bottom was about to drop out of my world?
* * *
Hope lulled me to sleep that night, but I slept alone. I’d left Xavier and Vex playing cards. Xavier was on night shift, monitoring the ship, and the Trad had offered to keep him company.
The sound of alarms dragged me from sleep. I threw back the covers, instantly alert, and then Xavier was in my cabin.
“Rogue, come on, we have to go. Now.”
The ship shuddered, and then the constant hum that had been a background noise for weeks cut off, leaving us floating in an unnaturally thick silence.
I looked up to the ceiling as if the answers would be written there. “What is that?”
“A malfunction. We’re losing fuel, and so we’ve dropped out of hyperdrive. There’s a satellite planet not far from here. We need to take the shuttle to it. We can send a signal from the station there.”
“Where are the others?”
Tide appeared in the doorway. “We need to move. Now. Before we lose essential systems and can’t detach from the main ship.”
His face was dark with anger, and his eyes were flints of ice. “Move.”
Tide led the way through the ship toward the shuttle bay.
I jogged to catch up to his long-legged stride. “Where’s Vex?”
“Lore went to get him,” Xavier replied for Tide. “They’ll be along shortly.”
Tide opened the shuttle and ushered us inside. The shuttle was one large space with six seats, a control bay and window to the stars up front.
“Buckle in,” Xavier instructed.
Vex and Lore appeared a moment later, and once everyone was aboard, Xavier sealed the doors. Vex slid into the seat beside me and clipped in. His gaze flicked to Xavier, but the Athion was busy at the flight panel with Tide.
And then the huge hangar bay doors to the main ship were opening outward, and we were rising into the blackness of space.
There was tense silence as we flew away from the ship. It floated below us, lights winking out one by one until it was merely a dead husk floating in space.
Tide’s movements were jerky as he flipped switches. Xavier sat tensely in his seat. There was a definite tension in the air, and it was like a live wire threatening to shock us.
I looked to Lore seated on the other side of me clutching a case of what were probably samples of my blood. “What happened?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“We’ll reach the satellite planet in five hours,” Xavier said softly. “Get some sleep.”
With so much tension in the room? Unlikely.
Vex reached round and nudged my head onto his shoulder so I could use it as a pillow.
“I’m fine.” But my eyes were already closing. “Damn, I was tired.”
* * *
“—did you do, exactly?” Tide’s voice was low and lethal.
“I thought we were done with this?” Xavier snapped.
“Well you thought wrong,” Tide said.
I sat up and opened my eyes. “What the fuck is going on?”
Vex was stiff as a board beside me.
“Xavier was on night duty,” Lore said. “Tide is just trying to find out what happened.”
Xavier kept his gaze ahead. “For the hundredth time, I didn’t do anything. I fell asleep, okay. I must have dozed off, and when I opened my eyes the controls were going crazy.”
“Bullshit!” Tide said.
“Why?” Vex asked. “Why would it be bullshit? Do you think he’d deliberately sabotage the ship?”
The shuttle filled with silence.
What the heck was the subtext there. “Tide? That’s ridiculous, what possible motive could he have?”
“Yes, Tide, what motive could I have?” Xavier sneered.
Tide’s shoulders heaved. “Fasten up, we’re approaching Limira X.” A bright orange planet came into view dotted with spots of green and blue.
“Is the air breathable?” Vex asked.
“It’s a satellite planet,” Lore said. “It was selected by the Athion government because it’s viable. We have a station on there for emergency stops. We just need to make sure we land in the right spot.”
Convenient that it was close by when the ship gave up the ghost. My gaze tracked Xavier as he flipped switches in preparation to land. There was no reason for him to have sabotaged the ship. We had a plan; him, me, and Vex.
Tide was being Tide.
The planet loomed below us, and then we were burning through its atmosphere. Hurtling down through flames. The shuttle shuddered and jolted, and I gripped Vex’s hand and Lore’s thigh.
The Athion made a strangled sound, but then there was nothing but the roar of our exit from the stratosphere and into the atmosphere of the planet. Orange-tinged skies gave way to blue as we descended.
“Fuck!” Tide cursed some more in a language I didn’t understand.
“What is it?” Lore asked.
“The fucking coordinates were off. We’re miles from the damn station.”
There was a huge expanse of orange and yellow land beneath us.
“We’ll go in buggy mode,” Xavier said.
“Which will get us halfway across the damn dustlands before we run out of fuel.” He gritted his teeth. “Coming in to land.”
The shuttle expelled a jet of fire, slowing our descent, and then we touched down on the dusty ground as light as a feather.
Xavier hit some buttons, and the shuttle began to whirr, and then we were in motion, rolling across the land toward the horizon. The tense silence was back until Tide broke it.
“I don’t understand how the systems could have gone down like that,” he said. “I checked everything last night before handover. We were at full power. We were fine.”
“Yes, well, a hull breach can fuck things up,” Xavier snapped.
“We’re in hyperspace,” Tide said. “There are no meteor showers in hyperspace. No debris can move fast enough to touch us.”
“Then it was an internal malfunction.” Xavier turned on Tide. “If you’re going to accuse me of something, then just fucking do it. Otherwise, shut the fuck up and steer.”
Tide clamped his mouth shut. From my vantage point, his profile was stiff and stern. He was pissed and blaming Xavier.
I sat forward in my seat. “Enough. It doesn’t matter why the systems went down. Dwelling on it won’t change the fact. We’re here now, and we need to focus on the present. On getting to that station and sending a signal to Athion.”
“It’s not that simple,” Lore said. “The signal bounces to the next station and so on, and we wait and hope that an Athion ship tuned in to the frequency picks up the distress signal.”
“But there is somewhere we can wait, right?”
“The station is stocked with supplies,” Xavier said, one eye on Tide’s profile. “We’ll be fine.”
A vein in Tide’s jaw ticked. “Right.”
I sat back and shook my head. “You’re telling me this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”
Xavier snorted.
Lore let out a bark of laughter, and then Tide’s tense jaw eased. “There was that one time we were surrounded by Trad ships …”
“Ha, the maneuvers we had to make,” Lore said.
“Or Gannet V,” Xavier said. “Remember the snitch we did on that planet?”
The guys chuckled.
The tension was relieved.
Thank God.
Vex leaned in and whispered in my ear. “Nice move.”
I shrugged. “Just survival. Every time something bad would happen on Vesper V, I’d remind myself of something worse or imagine how the situation could be worse. Believe me, there was always a worst-case scenario, usually ending in death.”
“How many miles can the buggy get us?” Lore asked.
“Sixty,�
� Tide said. “We have an hour of fuel left, and then we have to go on foot for thirty miles.” He glanced at me. “Which with rest breaks would take us all day.”
I leaned forward in my seat. “You don’t have to worry about me. I have enough stamina to keep up with you all.”
His smile was smug. “I doubt that very much.”
“Rogue has trained and fought every day of her life for the last few years,” Xavier said. “She can keep up. But the nights in the Limira dustlands are freezing, and it’ll be dark in a few hours, and then it will stay that way for fourteen hours. We’ll need to camp out for the first eight, and then when the temperature rises, we can continue using the star lamps we’ve powered during the day to get us to the station.”
“There’s only one thermal tent,” Lore pointed out.
“We’ll have to make do,” Tide said tersely. “There are a couple of thermal blankets, and we can rotate using the tent until the temperature begins to rise enough to continue our journey.”
Vex hadn’t spoken for the longest time, but when he did, it was with a question that hadn’t even entered my mind. “What about predators?”
Once again, silence loomed, and then Lore answered. “The majority of Limira X is unexplored. The satellite station is in a walled and secure squad with a landing pad for shuttles, so …”
“You have no idea,” Vex finished for him.
“No.”
Oh, great. “Please, tell me you have weapons.”
The silence said it all.
Well, this was going to be fun.
6
The dustlands were hot, as in perspiration-on-your-brow hot and sweaty-thighs hot. The shuttle buggy had given up on us three miles back, and we’d been walking ever since. The guys carried packs with supplies, and even though they’d insisted there was no need, I’d snagged a pack too. It was heavy but not unmanageable. However, the air was a little on the thin side here, and my chest ached from exertion. The guys seemed unaffected by the heat, and there was no way I was going to be the one holding them back. My lungs would have to adjust to the atmosphere.
There was nothing but more dry land and dead-looking shrubbery as far as the eye could see. As the minutes passed, breathing became easier, and my stride lengthened.
“We should take a break,” Vex said.
“Tired, Trad?” Tide asked.
Xavier shot Tide a lethal look. Oh, God. The animosity between those two was getting worse. I’d obviously missed something.
“I think Vex was asking for me.” I smiled. “But I’m fine. I can go for a bit longer.”
Tide frowned and then nodded. “We keep going for a bit longer.”
The sun beat down, and there wasn’t a breeze in sight, and then the terrain shifted slightly and mountains came into view in the distance to the east. We continued for another mile before the sky began to darken to a deeper blue.
“Damn it,” Lore said. “It looks like night is catching up to us. We have an hour, if that, before it gets dark. We need to set up camp.”
The guys broke into a jog toward the denser thatch of shrubbery up ahead, and then packs were pulled off and supplies pulled out. I had the tent, and Xavier took it from me. He and Lore had it set up in no time. They’d obviously had practice.
“You and Tide take the first shift in the tent,” Xavier said to Lore. “Rogue can fit in there with the two of you. Vex and I will take the thermo-blankets. We can switch every hour.”
Lore looked like he was about to protest, but Xavier cut him off. “Rogue is staying in the tent until the temperature rises. She’s human, and the human body won’t be able to cope with just the thermo-blanket when the temperature plummets. The tent is the only option.”
In other words, there was no getting out of sharing a tent with me.
“I don’t bite.” I grinned to showcase my teeth to Lore. “Not unless you want me to.”
He blinked down at me, his golden eyes ringed in inky-dark lashes flaring, and then he took a step back. “I’ll set up the lamps.”
Xavier crossed his arms. “Tide is doing that.”
But Lore was already turning away, one hand rubbing the back of his neck in a gesture that told me he was uncomfortable.
I winced. “He really doesn’t like me, does he?”
Xavier looked at me in surprise. “You don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
“Sleeping bags,” Vex said, and handed two bundles to Xavier. His jaw was tight. “You’ll be okay with those two?” he asked me.
I gave him a teasing smile. “Are you seriously asking me if I can handle myself?”
He sighed and shook his head. “No, because that would be unwelcome.”
“I’ll save my cuddles for you guys.”
Xavier’s smile was wicked. “And kisses?”
Vex gave him a sharp look. “Not while I’m in the room.”
“Ah, so you share, but you don’t share,” Xavier said.
Now my cheeks were burning at the thought of them both in the tent with me, naked and hard and … Okay, no more. There’d be time enough for all that once we’d found our own home.
A chill brushed my cheek as the light began to dim. “Shit, that’s coming on quick.”
“In the tent.” Xavier unzipped it and ushered me inside. Vex locked gazes with me for a beat before the zip came up to block him out.
The sleeping bags were rolled up, so I unrolled them and laid them side by side. The tent wasn’t small, but it wasn’t built for three; two at the most, and those two were entering now.
Lore crawled to my left and Tide to my right. Their huge bodies ate up space and oxygen, or maybe that was just me affected by their proximity. I breathed through my mouth so as not to inhale their scent, but my body heated regardless. Damn this time of the month. This was a bad idea. I should take my chances outside with the thermo-blanket. But even as I thought it, I discarded the idea. It would be stupid to risk my life because I was worried I’d be unable to control my libido. The guys weren’t interested in me that way, so that would be enough to dampen the heat inside me.
“You stay between us, and you’ll stay warmer,” Tide explained as they flanked me.
Lore had zipped up the tent, but cold stung my cheek. “I thought this was a thermal tent.”
“It is, “Lore said. “So, you can imagine how cold it must be outside. Get in the sleeping bag.” He held it open and stared at me steadily until I crawled in.
Okay. Warmer now. “Will Xavier and Vex be okay?”
“The thermo-blankets are surprisingly lightweight but large enough to envelope them and be worn as suits. They’ll be fine for an hour, and then we’ll switch out.”
“And how will they change out of the blanket-suit?”
“They’ll take turns getting in the tent with us, then they’ll strip off the blanket so we can don it and switch places.”
Yeah, that wasn’t going to work. “There’s barely room in here for the three of us. How in the world will Vex or Xavier fit in too?”
Tide reached for me and lifted me up onto his body. “Like this.”
The taut, muscular length of his body was pressed to mine in contact that was too intimate. His breath brushed my cheek as his hands flexed at my waist. I caught his eyes and noted the dilation of his pupils and the stutter in his breath, but then he was lifting me off his body and back to my spot between them.
Lore kept his gaze down as he slipped into his sleeping bag and pulled the covers up around his waist, but my heart was pattering so loud I was sure they could hear it.
But a quick glance at Tide showed he was unaffected, and Lore was busy picking at the seams of the sleeping bag. Oh, God. Awkward much? Damn, what was wrong with me? It had to be the heat cycle making me react this way to them. I slipped back into my sleeping bag, and the silence stretched between us.
“Do you have cats on Athion?” It was the first thing that popped into my head.
“What?” Tide asked.
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“Cats? You know, furry little critters that go meow?”
“No, but I know what they are. We’ve studied enough about Earth to know what a cat is. You keep them as pets. Smaller versions of the larger predators.”
“It never fails to fascinate me how humans have managed to take the wild creatures of their planet and tame them,” Lore said. “Wolves to dogs and prairie cats to house cats. You even get dolphins to do tricks in special aquatic zoos called aquariums.”
Wait a second … “You don’t have aquariums?”
“We don’t have any kind of zoo,” Lore said softly. “There aren’t a huge variety of animals on Athion, and the ones we do have, we leave be. We respect the natural order of things and the cycle of life. An animal’s habitat is sacred. We take only what we need to survive, which is why Athion is lush and green. There is a balance to Athion.”
Except for the fact that their women were dead.
But saying that would be mean, so I bit it back. “We’re doing the best we can to conserve what’s left of the animals on our planet. Yes, we’ve made mistakes, but we’re working hard to make up for them.”
“Please, don’t be offended,” Lore said. “Of course, there is a lot we can learn from humans, one of which is farming. The Athion government is implementing a farming system similar to the ones you have on Earth.”
“Our worlds have a lot to offer each other,” Tide said.
I gave him a skeptical look. “More than human females and Athion protection?”
“Much more,” Tide said. “Even if the Tradacyh threat is diverted for good, our world has much to offer Earth.”
“Like what?”
“Like an extra home,” Lore said. “Your planet has become overcrowded, and years of abuse will require years of nurture to heal it. By offering a percentage of your population asylum, we could alleviate the stress on your planet.”
“You mean the women.”
“For now,” Lore said.
Would they give humanity a home if needed? If our planet fell prey to global warming? Would they save us then? But would humanity learn from its mistakes, or would we visit the same fate on Athion?
Rebel: Survivors Heart book 2: Planet Athion Page 3
