Chapter Twenty-Seven The Fuel
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Fuel
The planet was a pink-and-green marble, no bigger than a moon, in a dense black pocket of space.
I checked the map, searching for anything else nearby, but it really was in the middle of nowhere.
Veebee noted, “It is smaller than I would have imagined.”
Sian shifted to the edge of his seat, looking out the viewport at the strange-colored marble.
“It hasn’t changed,” he said hesitantly, as if the place were a mirage and could disappear at any moment.
“Take us down over there, toward the middle of the continent. There will be a ravine with a river cutting through the middle. The research outpost should be on the west side.”
“If it is still there,” VB-35 said.
I took hold of the flight controls. My hands were clammy. “Let’s hope it is.”
As the lander entered the atmosphere, we sank into the pillowy pinkish clouds.
The wings began to rattle, and the controls shook.
I held them tighter, planted my feet, and eased the ship down through the atmosphere.
The asteroids had knocked a few things loose after all.
For a brief moment, all I could see was pinkish cotton, and then the ship broke through the clouds.
The sun blazed, bright and golden, across a landscape of deep orange and cider rocks, the soil a rich purple.
Sian pointed to the ravine in question and the line of bright blue water cutting through the middle, and I followed it as he’d instructed. After a few minutes of flying, the shuttle shuddered again. The left side dipped.
I quickly pulled it back level, adjusting the thrusters, and checked the console.
“I guess we got hit harder than I thought,” I said, tapping a warning light just to make sure it wasn’t malfunctioning.
Sian grabbed ahold of a handle above him. His knuckles were white. “Is it bad?”
“Nothing worse than the trouble we’re already in,” I supplied, flipping two switches to divert power. At least, nothing I couldn’t handle for now. When we landed, N2-0 needed to check on the ion accelerator. “Where’s the facility?”
“It should be coming up soon—there. Over there, the building with the glass dome,” he said, pointing toward a rather small building eaten almost completely by the yellow-and-green foliage around it.
The research facility looked more than just a few years abandoned, and a sinking feeling tugged at my gut.
It didn’t seem like anything was left here, either.
I circled the building to find somewhere to land and then eased the shuttle down at the edge of the ravine.
I hoped I was wrong.
Sian was the first one out of the ship. The droids ambled down the ramp after him, both appalled that he hadn’t even checked the atmosphere.
It could have been poison for all we knew, but I wasn’t concerned about that.
Sian wouldn’t take us somewhere without breathable air, and Noola absolutely would not have gone running out if she couldn’t breathe. Poor thing. She was stir-crazy.
I rifled through the crates for a flare gun and tucked it into my belt.
It wasn’t a blaster or anything, but it’d do in a pinch, and I wasn’t going to get caught empty-handed again if the wildlife decided to eat us.
Even though the planet was deserted, there were still creatures and plants and other dangerous things.
Deserted didn’t mean dead and definitely didn’t mean safe.
“Arie, are you coming?” Veebee called from outside.
“Right behind you!” I hurried out of the shuttle and closed the ramp behind me.
The air smelled sweet and fresh, mixed with the crispness of salt water that blew up from the ravine below.
The atmosphere was so different from the arid plains of Tatooine and Geonosis, not just in smell but also color and sound.
It was a breath of fresh air to be somewhere not dusty for once.
Nature had overtaken most of the research building, covering it in creeping vines of yellow and green, the underbelly of the leaves a deep shade of indigo.
There was forest as far as the eye could see, spotted like fungus on the purple dirt.
The planet was beautiful—breathtaking.
“How could a place like this be abandoned?” I asked, feeling the ground. Even the soil was soft and smelled sweet.
Veebee replied, “For good reason. We just have not found it yet.” As Sian went to work prying the strange flowering vines away from the door, she turned to me and said a little quieter, “I do not trust this.”
“This planet or…” I shifted my gaze to Sian.
Veebee shook her head. “None of it.”
I sighed. “I know. Well, if we die, then it’s your job to make sure someone writes a very smutty version of my story someday. I want it steaming. I’m talking the kind of smut that’ll make Daaric blush.”
“Daaric cannot bl—oh, I see. Well, now I kind of want you dead so I can read that smutty version.” Then the droid paused. “Would these scenes be with Sian?”
My mouth dropped open. Oh. “Well—I—um…”
“Ah.”
“Are you two talking about me?” Sian called, and with a grunt, jimmied open the door. “Because that’s rude.”
“No!” I quickly replied while Veebee—the traitor—said, “Yes.”
I glared at her. She shrugged.
He stuck his head inside. “Well, let’s all talk about me in here, yeah?”
“We weren’t—fine,” I mumbled, begrudgingly grabbing a glow rod from my belt and shining a light into the dark building. “I hope something’s in here.”
He let me go first and then followed me inside. “You and me both, Starlight.”
Inside, the air smelled stale but still somehow sweet.
My glow rod caught the motes of dust, and they glittered strangely.
Vines grew between the cracks in the walls, letting in strokes of golden light where small pink flowers sat, basking in it.
A thin line of dust coated everything—the desks, the consoles, the strange research contraptions in the center of the room.
The technology was all clearly dated by at least fifty years, but amid all the obsolete junk were other things much more recent—
Two cots, a spent cooktop, wrappers from ready-meals.
“My mentor and I came here once in search of an artifact,” Sian said by way of excusing the wrappers. “We found this place and set up camp for a few nights. We didn’t want to stay longer, though.”
I turned my glow rod to him. “Why?”
His eyes were caught in the light, black sclera glimmering with pinpricks of quickly shrinking white irises. “It’s nothing dangerous.”
“I’d still like to know.”
He shrugged and slipped up beside me, between the beams of sunlight. I shuffled back, my heart jumping into my throat, until I bumped up against one of the dead consoles. The droids hadn’t followed us in here, I realized. We were alone. The vines tickled the back of my neck.
He raised his hand toward me, and my heart quickened—
He plucked a pink flower from the vine by my head and twirled it between his fingers. “The pollen from these flowers was used as a truth-telling drug once.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in. Then with a gasp, I covered my mouth with my free hand. “That’s not not dangerous!”
“We’ll be fine,” he went on, stepping away from me with a shrug. “Maybe a little too blunt for each other’s comfort, but I’m sure we don’t have any deep dark secrets, do we?”
“Depends on what you count as deep and dark.”
He shrugged. “We’ll find out. The bad part about the pollen is not the truth-telling. It’s the fact that it corrodes most metals very quickly, so your droids can’t stay planetside long. Neither can the ship, honestly.”
“And that’s why this place is deserted,” I realized.
“Exactly. See? Not dangerous.”
Except truth was very dangerous in certain situations—and so were lies. And lies weren’t tools we had at our disposal at the moment.
“But if the pollen corrodes metal,” I said, following him deeper into the building, “how are we supposed to find fuel here?”
“Fuel isn’t metal, as far as I know.” He shrugged, and instead of getting rid of that awful flower, he tucked it behind his ear.
Like a madman. “My mentor and I almost didn’t make it off this planet.
We realized a little too late that it almost ate through our entire fuselage.
This way.” He motioned through another doorway, following thick tubes on the ground.
I stepped carefully after him. “You were after an artifact here?”
“The opposite, actually.”
“But aren’t you studying to be an archeologist?” I asked, confused.
“I am an archeologist,” he stated.
“Well, then—ah!” My foot caught on a vine. With a yelp, I stumbled, but Sian planted a hand on my shoulder to steady me. Blushing, I righted myself. “Sorry. I’m usually not this clumsy.”
“It’s because of me, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said before I could stop myself, and gasped, slapping my hand over my mouth. “I mean—because you brought us down here! To this planet! Not because—because…”
“Mm-hmm,” he purred, letting his hand fall slowly from my shoulder, his calloused fingers trailing down my arm as he snaked deeper into the building, his touch begging me to follow. “I know what you meant.”
And if he had to tell the truth, like me, then what did he think I meant? That I was distracted by him or that it was because of the planet or—
Stop thinking about it, I scolded myself, glad that the building was dark so he couldn’t see the blush raging across my cheeks.
“With my mentor, we studied long-dead places and people and committed them to memory. And sometimes, when we could, we returned artifacts to the places they were supposed to be.”
I carefully worked my way across a rather thick section of vines on the floor, refusing to trip over them again. “So you steal things?”
“Is it really stealing when it’s not theirs to begin with?”
“That’s a fair point,” I acknowledged. “Is that how you got the lightsaber?”
He cocked his head. “Yeah, actually. My mentor wanted to deliver it back to where it belonged, and we just got caught up in something too big.” He sounded regretful, and I wanted to reach for him and pull him into a hug.