Chapter 1 #3
Strange that he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Where were we? Above him was a dark gray metal hull much too large and undamaged to belong to my little crawler.
Slowly—very slowly—my fuzzy brain started to make sense of my surroundings.
I lay in a hammock sling between rows of seats in the passenger area of the station’s six-person crawler.
The large engine thrummed powerfully and reassuringly as the vehicle trundled over the ice.
My helmet and survival suit were gone, and I was in an emergency thermal bag that enclosed my entire body except for my face.
I wasn’t cold, but I wasn’t warm. I was mostly numb. At least my shoulder didn’t hurt.
“Elena.” Arron passed a medical scanner over my head and upper body and studied the screen. He set it aside and caressed my cheek again, his dark brown eyes peering into mine in a way that was far more medical officer than lover. “Are you with us?”
“Yes,” I croaked. My throat was painfully dry. “I didn’t die.”
“No, you did not die,” he said with an audible sigh of relief. “You’re in a crawler with Gavis and me, and we are on our way back to the station. We’ll be there in about ten minutes.”
“I think I’m missing some time,” I told him. I was having trouble thinking, so my thoughts just came out my mouth. “And I feel very fuzzy.”
“I know.” His eyes tightened. “When I saw your broken helmet and all the blood, I thought you might be concussed or have internal injuries. Thankfully, your condition is mainly due to shock and hypothermia. You do have a badly fractured clavicle and damage to muscles and tendons in your right shoulder. Nothing we can’t heal at the station. ”
What he didn’t say—that if whatever had hit my shoulder had been a few more inches to the left, I would be dead—hung in the air almost as visibly as my breath would in the station’s transport bay.
Arron found my hand and rested his on top. I couldn’t feel his warmth through the thermal bag, but the weight was reassuring. “You did very, very well to survive,” he said. “I’m proud of you. You fought like hell.”
“I’m stubborn,” I said with a ghost of a smile.
He returned my smile. “Thank all the gods above and below for that.”
The rumbling of the crawler through my hammock sling was surprisingly soothing. I’d never found anything about a crawler the least bit comforting before.
“You didn’t tell Forux about this, right?” I asked.
“No.” Arron rubbed my hand. “Jakva distracted him with meat while we suited up and got away. But he’s an empath, so I’m sure he knows by now you ran into trouble. He’ll be waiting for you at the airlock.”
My poor little Forux. I couldn’t take him with me to Pod Seven because I had no way to protect him if something went wrong—which it had—so he would have been unhappy and clingy when I got back even if I hadn’t just almost died.
Now…well, I’d have a worried arval stuck to my side for the foreseeable future.
“And my samples?” I asked.
“I wondered when you’d ask,” he said with a chuckle.
“Right next to you, along with your travel case. Good thing you strapped them down in the cargo area. The case is in bad shape, but the pack of samples is fine and still temperature-controlled. Your discoveries made it back with you. You’ve set a record for the most new species discovered during a six-month stay at Inga Station. ”
He’d said it to distract me, but I didn’t mind. I’d rather focus on my achievement than the grim reality of my close brush with death.
Warmth blossomed in my chest. Amazing to be able to feel personal and professional pride while lying in a medical sling, pumped full of painkillers and cocooned in an emergency thermal bag with only my face sticking out like an Ngaran moth larva.
“Well, there’s another item for the Awards and Accolades section of my academic credentials,” I said wryly. “So, what’s the prize for setting the record?”
He tilted his head and pretended to give the question serious thought, though his eyes twinkled.
“Well, it’s not a formal award per se, but the very least we could do is take up a collection from the team and buy you and Forux a cabin upgrade on the cruiser from Aloris to Havel Prime.
Give the little fluffball more room to run around during the journey. ”
“He would probably like that, but I’d settle for an extra coffee ration tomorrow.” And nighttime company tonight and tomorrow night. Not that I said that aloud, given we weren’t alone in the crawler.
Arron squeezed my hand as if he knew precisely what I was thinking. I managed to smile.
In all honesty, I doubted our habit of spending nights in each other’s quarters was any kind of secret, but the unspoken rule at the station about relationships between researchers was that everyone pretended not to notice who slept where as long as it didn’t interfere with our work.
Arron planned to stay on Aloris for a long time.
A human born and raised on Earth, he’d left humanity’s planet of origin after medical school to explore the farthest reaches of Alliance space.
He loved Inga Station and everything about this planet.
His field of research was thermophysiology.
When he wasn’t acting as the station’s medical officer, treating hypothermia and the occasional broken bone or illness, he studied the effects of extreme temperatures on humans and nonhumans.
He was staying, and I was going. Once we’d established that, we simply enjoyed our time together without needing to worry about the future.
“Speaking of your imminent departure,” Arron said, squeezing my hand, “a message came in about an hour ago from the director of research you’ll be working with on Hyderia, a Dr. Husiorithae.”
“Really?” I raised my head, then regretted it when pain flared in my shoulder and my vision swam.
“Really.” He nudged me to lie back in the sling. “And it will be waiting for you in your quarters when you get released from the medical bay.”
In other words, stay put, rest, and focus on recovering before worrying about Dr. Husiorithae’s message.
“Thank you,” I said, my voice soft.
We rode quietly for a few minutes. He alternated between comforting touches and checking the readouts on the medical equipment around my sling.
He should be wearing his helmet. The station’s policy was to wear a full survival suit at all times when outside the facility.
No exceptions. This rule had been drilled into me from the moment I arrived—by Arron most of all.
And yet he was breaking it because he knew I needed to see his face and kind eyes.
We might have been good together if things were different.
This wasn’t the first time I’d parted ways with someone I cared about because our needs and wants and professional goals didn’t align.
Most of the researchers I knew faced the same dilemma more than once in their careers.
We’d chosen a nomadic life, with all its joys and sorrows.
One of the few sensations in my numb body was a familiar twinge of heartache. The best cure for it was a cuddle with Forux when I got back to the station and then two final nights in Arron’s bed.
I took a shaky breath. “I wouldn’t have made it back to the station without you coming out to meet me, would I?”
“Probably not,” he said, with a grim tightening of his eyes that said No, you wouldn’t have survived.
“But that’s why the station’s policy is always to have a crawler on standby and at least one driver ready to go at a moment’s notice anytime someone’s out on the ice.
We’ve never lost a researcher due to a vehicle accident, and that wasn’t going to change today.
” He rubbed my hand. “I wasn’t going to let it. ”
He glanced toward the front of the crawler.
“We’re approaching the station now. As soon as we’re secured in the transport bay, Gavis and I will carry this sling to medical.
You need to stay in the thermal bag until we get to the emergency medpod.
” He raised his eyebrows. “You’re not going to argue about walking there on your own, are you? ”
The prospect of being carried through the station raised my hackles, but even I had to admit I didn’t think I could stand up, much less walk.
“No.” I sighed. “I just defied death, so I’m all out of defiance for the day.”
He chuckled. “Knowing you, I seriously doubt that.” He braced himself with one hand on the back of the seat as the crawler rumbled over the threshold of the station’s enormous transport bay.
When he met my gaze again, his expression had turned serious once more.
“Hang on to that defiance, Elena. It saved you today.”
My defiance had enabled me to achieve almost everything I’d done since childhood, but I didn’t say that aloud. We didn’t have that kind of relationship, and that was perfectly fine with both of us.
When we came to a halt and the engine powered down, Arron rubbed my hand one last time and rose. “You made it. We’re safe and home.”
I managed a smile, but it faded quickly. Safe was relative, especially on this planet.
And home? Maybe for him, but not for me. I didn’t know where home was, but it wasn’t Aloris.
Maybe it would be Hyderia.