Chapter 26
Guardian Angel
“Pouting is very cute, Davik, but I still need to put clothes on.”
Fia reveled in the happy snarl she heard him retort with.
He was a bit feistier in the mornings lately, perhaps due to finally getting some proper sleep.
She knew an orgasm was not a true replacement for his insomnia medication, but he did not seem to oppose being teased and stroked until he collapsed against her.
And she adored the way he begged and groaned until she won over his attempts to resist.
“I am not pouting, I am lamenting,” Davik murmured as he buried his face in the curve of her back.
He made another noise of distress as she tugged her jumpsuit over her waist. “You don’t understand, Fi.
You’ve wooed a man with a very strong oral fixation, and you are putting clothes on the very thing I want to orally fixate on. ”
Fia let out a bright laugh, but paused while donning her clothes to lean against him. Everything felt perfect to her in that moment. His nose was nestled between her shoulder blades, and the soft heat of his breath rolled along her spine.
She felt a small tinge of regret not having dragged him to bed months ago, but she knew it was never a good idea to entertain the “what if’s.” The delicate strand of fate she was walking on now led to this moment. That is all that mattered.
It felt like selfish, indulgent bliss to be so taken with affection while en route to rescue someone who was suffering. But she wouldn’t let her guilt muddy this. Everything ahead of her was uncharted territory. A path she hoped would be full of more indulgent noises from her engineer.
My engineer.
Their relationship did not yet have precise words set to it, but she let that possessive instinct to name and claim him flutter through her mind while he trailed kisses up her neck.
“Davik,” she warned, softly but earnestly. “I think clothing is required, unless you want me to traipse around in the nude for our preparations?”
“Honestly? That’s perfectly fine.” She could feel him nodding enthusiastically. “Naked all the time. This is a revolution I will wholeheartedly support.”
“You are insatiable.”
The cargo bay was noticeably colder than usual, but the tingling glow from where Davik’s lips had been pressed offered an emotional warmth that overpowered the chill of the room.
It would only get colder the closer they got to the station.
Life support had been cut from “comfortable” to “technically livable” as they minimized their energy and heat signature to aid in their concealment.
“Do you need me to run you through the controls for the salvage tractor again?” Davik asked Theos as the two hunched over a datapad, reviewing timelines for the tenth time.
The orange-speckled Icthian shook his head.
“I think I know this ship better than my own hab at this point. Nobody has ever given me flowcharts before,” he said, chuckling.
“If we make it out of this alive, I’m going to make a concerted effort to recruit you.
We need organizational minds like this.”
Davik beamed. “Eh, we’ll see how this goes first. Cart before the colt, or whatever.”
Carissa chimed in over the ship’s speakers: “Eight minutes until we’re in scanner range.”
The three of them — Davik, Theos, and Fia — all took a shared breath.
“Alright. Be ready for the worst, stay on comms, and pray to whatever gods you keep,” Davik said, making a warding gesture with his hands.
Theos turned to head toward his post. He had taken up the mantle of manning the cargo hatch, but for now, his focus was on ensuring the observation tank was ready for her. Davik held back for just a moment, and Fia felt dread creeping up her limbs.
“Davik,” she breathed, feeling the swell of worry tighten in her throat.
He dropped the datapad to the side and pulled her into his arms. His hands clutched the back of her neck as they met in a kiss. A desperate and heated exchange of wordless need and unspoken fear.
“Be safe. Come back to me,” she whispered.
“I will, I promise. I have you playing my guardian angel,” he murmured, a little smile tugging at his lips. “And I have a very, very, very strong incentive to make it back in one piece.”
He stressed the statement with a hungry squeeze of her ass, and it disarmed the growing desire she had to lock him in his cabin and run this operation with him safe on the ship. But she let the fear wash over her, and instead they both dissolved into laughter as they clung to each other.
One last kiss. No goodbyes. Goodbyes were bad luck.
Watching eight different visual feeds was nerve-wracking, but so far, everything looked to be business as usual on the research station.
The water in the tank was crisp, but she welcomed the chill.
It kept the nervous flush of heat at bay.
With every datastream she plucked at, she worried that would be the one tho set off an alert.
But it was a necessary risk. She had to watch the path ahead. She was his eyes and ears.
With her tongue, she fished for the stimbeads she had pocketed in her cheek and rolled one between her molars.
The aid wasn’t needed yet, and Theos would protest if she indulged so soon, but she felt the urge to pop one just to quell her nerves.
Not that it would truly help. It was a stimulant.
It didn’t make stress go away. It just made everything else loud enough to drown it out.
“Alright, docked and sealed. Comms are hot. Godspeed, everyone,” Davik’s voice husked across the comms.
“Eyes are wide. Primary route is clear up to the extraction target,” she replied, sinking into the cadence of matter-of-fact observation she was trained for.
It was a strange thing to do in English, though. On the Fleet, it had been in Teelish or Pan-Francais, but never the clunky flow of Anglo.
She locked onto the visual feed of the shuttle, watching Davik do a few nervous arm circles as he readied himself at the doorway.
“You’ve got this, Davey-boy,” Theos called into the frequency.
“Ugh, God, no. Never Davey,” he retorted. Then Fia watched him step out of her sight and into the station.
It took a few moments for her to find a feed where she could watch him again, but as soon as she did, she fell into the rhythm of her role.
The path he left behind, she scrubbed into obscurity.
The path ahead, she scrutinized for potential risks.
Over the comms, she keyed him in on detours to take as Davik guided his cart full of tools and random pipes they had cobbled together from the ship.
A haphazard cover, but one he insisted would pass muster.
She held her breath and watched through a nearby camera as the guard at the entryway came over to check the falsified credentials.
“What’s all this shit for?” the guard asked, giving the cart a little kick with his boot. Fia listened intently through Davik’s comms, already feeling the edge of her worry beginning to sharpen. “They got you doing maintenance at two in the goddamn morning?” the man continued.
“Yeah,” Davik replied, letting out an exaggerated sigh. “Someone clogged up a latrine down in the D wing. I told them the after-hours rates would cost ‘em, but oh well.”
The guard just shook his head and laughed. “Figures. We’ve had a broken air-con in the service break room for six months, but KurelTec will fly in emergency maintenance to fix the shitter for the lab dorks.”
After a few more taps on his screen, the guard waved him on, and Fia lessened the tension she was holding in her jaw.
There was much more to go, but he had made it in. She continued to watch his progress like a hawk, keeping timing and trajectory updates flowing to Carissa as Davik slowly descended through the station.
Fia watched intently as he traveled. The path to the research floor had been sparse, with not a single soul paying him any mind so far.
But now came the part that she had to brace herself for.
The research wing. It was unmanned at this hour, but full of sensors and scanners and the occasional security guard that his fake KurelTec badge would not protect him from.
Fia needed to balance masking and interference to keep him undetected as he began his final trek.
“Down the hallway, left-hand side. Storage closet.”
Fia watched the grainy image of her engineer follow her guidance, and she waited for him to fade into the blind spot.
“Alright. We’re set.”
She could hear Davik, but not see him. If everything was going as planned, he was retrieving the meds stashed in the shielded compartment at the bottom of the cart and readying himself to begin his gauntlet.
He is risking so much for me. I must risk much for him, in kind.
The stimbead between her teeth split, and the surge of invigoration took a heartbeat to register before the chemical clarity snapped her vision into sharp resolution.
She gathered up the datastreams from every camera that covered this floor, preparing each one to loop a brief window as soon as her engineer would be visible.
She added a touch of modulation to delay the system from registering that it was a looped feed. But this was just a measure to buy them time. Davik had a mile of twisting corridors between him and the operative, and only fifteen minutes to get there and get out.
“They are blind. Run fast and true, my little ghost.”