Chapter 8
Suvan had felt her go. The atmosphere itself changed without her in the engine module. But he couldn’t be distracted by the fading fragrance of her, the silence now unbroken except for the endless engine hum and Lub’s snoring.
With the same resolute focus as always, he moved among the consoles. Hands quick and precise on the controls, he tuned the plasma modulators and restabilized the load whenever Delphine’s steering—which the Tritonesse pilot called intuitive and he called irregular—drew more power to the helm.
But his fingertips tingled with the memory of reaching for Mariah when Lub cheeped an alarm, catching her before she slid right off the stool, and tucking her under the workbench.
His quill-scales hadn’t even snagged her sleeves.
He sent a private message to Felicity, asking her to check on Mariah.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
He scowled at his datpad, which he could do since he hadn’t allowed visuals in response to her immediate reply. “You are the cruise director,” he reminded her. “It’s your job.”
She laughed. “That’s your excuse?”
He thought for a moment. “She was muttering, possibly incoherent, about coffee.”
“Earthers do that after an all-nighter.” She paused, and before he could come up with another reason, she reported, “Remy says Miss Juraszczyk has obtained coffee. So I guess everything is good.” Her cheerful voice took on an extra lilt that made Suvan grit his teeth.
“Unless you wanted to know something in particular about Mariah?”
“No.” He could obtain every IDA profile from the cruise director’s records if he wanted. He wouldn’t even have to hack Felicity’s folders; he had power override on every system.
But that would be wrong.
“Anything else, Chief?”
The sound of her expectant waiting scraped on his nerves. He, who preferred silence.
“Nothing.”
Before he could stab the disconnect, Felicity hummed out a breath.
“Actually, there is something. As a thank you to Miss Juraszczyk—from all of us at the Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency—for sharing her expertise in this emergency, please authorize one of the smaller fabricators to print a gift of yarn.”
If only he’d disconnected faster. “What? Me? Why? What kind of yarn?”
“Oh, whatever you think she’d like. Thanks, Chief.” Then she cut him off.
He glared at nothing.
He didn’t have time for this. And it was a waste of resources. Also, how could he guess what Mariah would like?
How frivolous. Unless the captain ordered—
The cruise director’s formal request for a temp subcontractor compensation gift hit his datpad, followed almost instantaneously by the captain’s approval.
Which probably meant Felicity and Nehivar were together right now.
Suvan went back to his engines.
+ + +
At the next ping to his datpad, he was ready to be rude. But it was an all-hands automated message from the captain—to the passengers as well.
“The results from the vote to return to port or continue our cruise were unanimous.” Even the miniaturized hologram of the captain projected calm command. “There was not a single request to return. You all wish to continue.”
If there was a cheer somewhere, it did not reach the engine module, but Suvan felt a quiver of…something through the ship.
He swung around to the sensor console. Since he’d placed the extra monitor in the Starlit Salon to watch the anomaly in its current form, there’d been no unusual readings. At least nothing more unusual than a manifested harmonic resonance in plasmic form radiating into the quantum level.
But there’d been an energy spike at the captain’s words. Or not at the words themselves, since the captain had obviously pre-recorded the message. It was the response of everyone aboard that actuated the resonark.
And it had reverberated all the way to his engines.
The captain continued: “After serious consideration, I rescinded myself from the vote. Your welfare is my responsibility, but I’ve been told this ship is not only mine, not on this voyage.
So while I will not waver in my duties to the ship and all souls aboard, I will honor your choice to stay the course and then see us safely home. ”
There were a few more words of the conciliatory and cautioning kind, but Suvan was focused on the bar sensor and the anomaly’s impact to the ship.
He didn’t let out a breath until the readings across the board had returned to baseline.
Even without musical augmentation, it seemed the linkages remained between the resonark, the living beings on board, and the ship.
It was late—but not so late—when he finally shifted all control to his portables. Delphine claimed to have calculated the trajectories of all significant detritus in their vicinity. Until they set a new course, they were just another unruly rock.
Which meant he was out of excuses.
The corridor lumes had dimmed to afterhours levels, so at least he didn’t have to squint. He stopped at the salon long enough to confirm the new sensor had been recording accurately—and to glare at the resonark.
It did not react to his ire.
And Mariah was not there, so he continued on to the staterooms.
He’d intended to leave the package outside her door. But as he bent, the portal opened.
The coincidence seemed suspect, and he should check his datpad to see if any anomalous energy had spiked…
But he was frozen on one knee as the slight change in air pressure wafted over him with the sweetly musky perfume of her. The wide, gauzy hem of her trousers brushed his knuckles still clenched on the box before settling back around her ankles again.
Her bare toes were…rainbow-hued.
Only the nails, but that didn’t make it less fanciful.
He looked up into her slightly hazy eyes. “Did I wake you?”
“I thought I heard something. But I didn’t see you on the door monitor. Because you were…creeping around?”
The husky timbre to her voice shivered through him. “I wasn’t creeping. I was leaving this here.” With her Earther senses, she could not have heard anything through the plasteel walls. And yet somehow she’d known he was there. “Don’t ever unlock your door for mysterious sounds.”
She blinked sleepily at him. “You’re not so mysterious, Chief.” Soundless on those bare rainbow toes, she stepped back. The fine, opalescent plasilk of her sleeveless tunic shifted softly around her body. “But your package is. So bring it in here.”
“If you were in bed—”
“I wasn’t yet. Or I was, but I wasn’t asleep.” She waggled her fingers in an inscrutable gesture.
He should leave the box, but he had to admit, he was curious. “I’ve not seen the stateroom interiors. Are they all…like this?”
When she glanced over her shoulder at him, a faint line appeared between her brows. “There are plenty of empty cabins. You should take one. And no, yours doesn’t have to be rainbowed like mine.”
“Like your toes.”
Looking down at her feet, she laughed, another low vibration along his quill-scales. “I had this done at one of the port station beauty parlors. So cool, right? Reprogrammable nail polish, like these wall panels. I love all the colors. You could do black if you want. Oh, but let me…”
She’d only had the bedside table light illuminated, along with the foyer overhead, and she dimmed both.
“For your eyes,” she said. “But I still need to see what you were creeping around with.”
“I wasn’t…” She’d adjusted the lumes for him?
The realization caught him off guard, short-circuiting his denial into data sharing.
“On my homeworld, Etavis Nor, extreme plate tectonics created a continental mountain range of silica and metal oxides. And we have severe sandstorms, which is a problem.”
“Blowing glass,” she murmured. “It must be beautiful.”
“And deadly. My Szauralithyn ancestors adapted to underground dwelling, although we now have transparent plasteel and a thriving tourism season. The light doesn’t hurt, but my visual acuity suffers.”
“Maybe I should make it brighter so you can’t see the mess.” Padding over to the big couch, she sank down under the viewport. She’d added a filter that overlaid all the tumbling boulders with prismatic trajectories and emphasized the smaller rubble with sparkles.
It turned the lethal ruins into something lovely.
He wasn’t so short-sighted and surly that he couldn’t see that.
When she patted the couch next to her, he felt the pull like the same forces holding together that icy wreckage outside the fragile plasteel skin of their ship.
But at least he might keep a little distance between them, so as not to snag her nightwear. “Turn up the lights if you wish,” he said. “But I’m afraid not even a supernova could scorch away the idiosyncratic organizational accumulation of your stash.”
She leaned toward him, as if she were suddenly having trouble seeing too. “Chief, was that…a joke?”
He held her wide, incredulous gaze. “It was not.”
She laughed anyway. “So what’s in the box?”
For a moment, he’d forgotten about the gift. He was too mesmerized by the sparkle in her eyes, brighter than the illusion she’d added to the viewport.
He wanted to ask her about their night in the engine module. She’d seemed to sleep peacefully with Lub at her feet, but when he’d heard her breath change, he’d gone to check on her.
And she’d whispered something that sounded like his name.
Earther dreams were abstract and ambiguous, she’d told him. So likely it meant nothing, if she even remembered it.
He looked down at the box still in his hands. “This seems silly now.”
She reached out, her fingers hovering close enough to his knee that he swore he felt the heat of her through the tough, tight weave of his uniform. “Isn’t it obvious I like silly?”
His gaze tracked up her bare arm. Despite the looser drape of her preferred clothing, he’d been able to extrapolate the general shape of her.
But the soft curves of her were revealed now—the padded muscles in her forearm from her craft and in her shoulder from carrying her craft, the dimpled point of her elbow.
Through the thin tunic, her breasts were a heavier curve, half hidden.
She’d plaited all her hair into one thick braid that rested over her shoulder. The bristle at the end was tied with the ribbon entwining the dark locks, the pale silkiness matching her nightwear. When she breathed, the little bow knot swung above her veiled nipple.
His quill-scales prickled with painful awareness of all those delicate materials—and that tender flesh, so close.
He thrust the box at her and sat back, crossing his arms over his chest. If he held tight enough to drive the bristling spikes into his palms, pinning himself in a solitary embrace…
Better that than reaching for her.
Instead of opening the box, she merely looked at him, her brown eyes gone dark in the ambient glow of the viewport. For an aching heartbeat, he wondered if she saw through his illusions, the protective filters he projected over himself that had none of her whimsy, only warning.
If she said anything…
Finally, she dropped her piercing focus to the box. Worse than silly, he agonized; providing her with more yarn that would be lost in her stash was like pouring energy into a raging quantum anomaly.
Not a black hole, because a black hole would compress the mess into essential nothingness which would at least be efficiently tidy.
And he should’ve tied a ribbon around the box. That she could use.
Too late. She was already lifting the lid.
“Oh! Yarn!” She reached for the ball of filament.
The moment she touched it, the threads ignited with shimmering light.
“Oh oh! Glowing yarn!” With a delighted giggle, she lifted the ball. “It’s amazing, Suvan. This is the best yarn ever. Thank you.”
She leaned in…and hugged him.
Just as quickly, she sat back, admiring the yarn again, as if nothing had happened, chattering about fiber optics and photonic cabling, and more obscure references like stockinettes and bobbles.
It happened so fast. Maybe nothing had happened? Was it his imagination? A wish…
There were no snags in her flimsy nightwear or fragile skin. So maybe it had been a waking dream.
Except, for an instant, the ball had shone between them, dazzling him.
Although not as much as her fleeting touch.
“It’s so soft and workable,” she was saying as she gently pried the single filament from the center of the ball.
“I can imagine a million and one things to do with this.” When she rolled the thread between her fingertips, tiny sparks danced within the light.
“Oooh! It’s sooo pretty. And it matches my toes. I am seriously in love.”
She meant the yarn. He knew that. But his pulse rocketed at distressing speed through every part of him.
Trying to hold onto his self-control, he focused on the yarn. “Lumi-lace works the same as Felicity’s so-called feelings buttons,” he explained. “The filament is powered by movement and bioelectricity, but it is not suggestive of any emotion.”
Mariah grinned at him. “If I make you a sweater from it, the only thing anyone needs to know is you feel fabulous, right?”
Fabulous? He felt…
He had no reason to consider that further. Even though her eyes shining with the lumi-lace threatened to kindle all sorts of feelings in him.
Deliberately averting his gaze to his datpad, he recited the memo he’d drafted. “Please accept this yarn ball from the Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency in gratitude for your cooperation with our high-priority vessel aesthetics re-optimization project.”
She blinked slowly at him, her lips quirking. “Did you write that all by yourself?”
“No.” He paused. “Lub helped.”
Her laughter sparkled through him like she was braiding his bones with luminous threads. “I really do love it, Chief. And I told you, I’m happy to work with you anytime.”
That was his cue to get up, thank her one last time—with less of that excruciatingly awkward phrasing that he’d cobbled together himself out of the Big Sky employee manuals, although Lub had been next to him, chewing on an imitation larf bone—and return to his engines.
Instead, he said, “To you, I could be just Suvan.”
She gazed at him, the amusement tempering. “That works for me too. Suvan.”
Now he should leave.
But he didn’t.