Chapter 4 #2
Toren, prince of Dobromia, lay on the stone floor of a cave on an alien planet and stared at the stars through the entrance and thought about a woman with red hair, and he didn't fight it.
He let it land.
*** Auren ***
The mineral survey the next day produced two useful discoveries and one disaster.
The first discovery was a vein of titanium alloy in the cliff face about a mile northeast of the ship.
Rowan examined the samples with barely contained excitement.
"This could work," he kept saying, turning the chunks of dark metal in his careful hands.
"If the composition holds deeper in the vein, I can fabricate a coupling. Not elegant, but functional."
The second discovery was a freshwater spring.
Not water by human standards. It was heavy with dissolved minerals and had a faintly sulfuric taste, but Dr. Vasquez confirmed it was safe to drink after processing.
The crew's water recyclers had been running at capacity since the crash.
A natural source took the pressure off considerably.
The disaster was Auren.
They were crossing a thermal plain south of the spring when Auren, walking in near-human form beside Athena, attempted to demonstrate his fire-breathing in what he apparently considered an impressive fashion.
He inhaled, turned to face the open terrain, and exhaled a plume of flame that was, admittedly, spectacular.
It was also aimed directly at a nest of tube worms that nobody had noticed.
The worms exploded. Not metaphorically. The acid stored in their bodies reacted with the heat and the tubes burst like organic grenades. Acid sprayed in a ten-yard radius. Everyone dove for cover.
"Get down!" Athena shouted, tackling Peter behind a rock. Marina dropped flat. Toren threw a wing over Dr. Patel, who'd frozen in place.
Auren stood in the middle of the acid rain, gray scales hissing where the droplets hit, looking as though the ground had personally betrayed him.
"I didn't know they did that," he said.
"YOU DIDN'T KNOW THEY EXPLODED?" Athena was on her feet, acid smoking on her jacket, fury radiating from every pore. "You breathed fire at an unknown organism on an alien planet without checking if it was EXPLOSIVE?"
"In my defense…"
"There is no defense! There is no universe in which breathing fire at something you don't understand is defensible!"
"Athena," Marina called from the ground. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine. My jacket isn't. And this idiot is going to replace it." She jabbed a finger at Auren, who had the grace to look genuinely apologetic.
"I will replace it. I will get you ten jackets. I will get you the finest garments on Dobromia"
"I don't want Dobromian garments. I want you to stop setting things on fire without asking first."
"To be fair," Peter offered from behind the rock, "he also set the Drog on fire yesterday, and nobody complained about that."
"The Drog was trying to eat us, Peter. The tube worms were just sitting there."
Toren helped Patel to her feet. The biologist was pale but uninjured, her data tablet clutched to her chest like a life preserver. "Are you all right?" he asked.
"I'm going to need a much larger sample container," Patel replied, staring at the scattered remains of the tube worm nest with the wild-eyed fascination of a scientist who'd just witnessed something unprecedented and was already composing the paper in her head.
Auren approached Athena with an expression that mixed genuine contrition with the desperate hope that she'd stop yelling. "I am sorry," he said. His voice was lower now, stripped of the performance. "I was trying to impress you. It was stupid."
Athena stared at him. "You were trying to impress me by breathing fire."
"Yes."
"That's the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever done in my presence, and I once watched a recruit try to juggle live grenades."
"Did it work?" Auren asked. "The impressing, not the grenades."
"Absolutely not."
But Marina, watching from a few yards away, noticed that Athena's fury had dimmed by several degrees, and that the look she was giving Auren contained something that wasn't entirely anger.
It was closer to the exasperated fondness you developed for a dog that kept knocking things over; annoying, destructive, and somehow impossible to stay mad at.
*** Toren ***
That night, Toren sat with Marina near the ship while Rowan's team worked on the titanium samples. The twin suns were down, and the temperature had dropped enough that Marina had pulled on a thermal jacket. She was reviewing data on her tablet, her face lit by the blue glow of the screen.
"I've been thinking about your invitation," she said without looking up.
"To Dobromia."
"Yes." She set the tablet down. "I want to go. But I need to be honest with you about why."
"Scientific curiosity?"
"Partly. Also, because my ship is broken, your planet might have the resources to fix it, and sitting here waiting for a rescue signal that may or may not reach anyone feels like a slow way to die.
" She met his eyes. "And partly because I want to see where you come from.
I want to understand who you are. That's not scientific.
That's personal, and I should probably be more professional about it, but I'm stranded on an alien planet and professionalism feels like a luxury I can't afford right now. "
Toren felt something shift in his chest. Not the bond; he didn't think humans could trigger the bond, and the medical data on cross-species connections was nonexistent. Something simpler. Something that felt like hope.
"I want you to see Dobromia," he said. "I want you to meet my people. I want you to see the bioluminescent caverns and the crystal arrays and the waterfalls that power our cities. I want you to see everything beautiful about my world before you see everything that's dying."
"That's not a very reassuring pitch."
"It's an honest one. I'd rather give you honesty than a sales pitch."
Marina looked at him for a long moment. The starlight caught the red in her hair, and her green eyes held that quality he'd come to recognize; the one that meant she was making a decision she'd already made and was just confirming it with herself.
"Okay," she said. "When do we leave?"
"Three days. Rowan needs time to process the titanium. The crew needs to prepare. And I need to warn Auren to stop breathing fire at things."
Marina laughed. It was quiet and genuine, and it was the best sound Toren had heard on any planet.
Three days. And then Dobromia. And then his father. And then whatever came next.
He couldn't wait. He was also terrified.
Both feelings, he was learning, could be true at the same time.