Chapter 5
*** MARINA ***
The three days before the trip to Dobromia were the busiest of Marina's life, and that was saying something for a woman who'd survived a crash landing on an alien planet.
Rowan and his team worked around the clock on the titanium samples.
The alloy wasn't a perfect match for the Vulcana's broken coupling, but it was close enough that Rowan stopped saying "maybe" and started saying "probably," which was the engineering equivalent of a standing ovation.
He needed more material than they'd found at the initial vein, but Toren had mentioned that Dobromia's underground mines were rich with compatible metals. Another reason to make the trip.
Dr. Patel had turned the tube worm explosion into a full research project.
She'd set up a containment lab in cargo bay three and was spending her days cataloging Ceylara's biology with the obsessive energy of a scientist who'd been handed the discovery of a lifetime.
Marina checked on her twice a day, partly out of professional responsibility, partly because Patel's enthusiasm was contagious.
"The acid isn't just defensive," Patel explained, her eyes bright behind safety goggles. "It's a digestive enzyme. They dissolve rock to extract minerals. The entire ecosystem on this planet runs on acid chemistry. It's brilliant, Marina. It's completely unlike anything we've seen."
"Brilliant and terrifying aren't mutually exclusive," Marina replied.
"They rarely are. That's what makes biology fun."
Marina added Patel's findings to the growing database of Ceylara research and tried not to think about Toren.
She failed.
*** Marina ***
Peter found her sitting on the cargo bay ramp and watching the twin suns set. She'd been doing this more often lately; finding quiet moments at the edges of the day when the heat dropped and the light turned soft and the planet looked almost beautiful instead of relentlessly hostile.
"Mind if I sit?" Peter asked.
"Go ahead."
He sat beside her. He was holding two cups of the instant coffee that had become the crew's reluctant staple. He handed her one without asking if she wanted it, which was very Peter; attentive without being pushy, kind without requiring acknowledgment.
"How are the preparations going?" he asked.
"On schedule. Rowan's confident about the titanium. Patel wants to bring half her lab to Dobromia. Athena's already packed, which means she packed three hours ago and has been cleaning her weapons ever since."
Peter laughed. "She cleaned them twice yesterday. I counted."
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment. The smaller sun dropped below the horizon first, leaving the amber glow of the larger one to paint the sky in shades of copper and rust.
"Can I say something?" Peter asked. His voice had shifted. Still gentle, but there was something underneath it. Something he'd been holding.
"You can always say something, Peter."
"I'm worried about you." He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the sunset. "Not about the trip or the aliens. About Toren specifically."
Marina's chest tightened. She'd been expecting this conversation, in the same way you expect a storm when you see the clouds building; you know it's coming, you just don't know when.
"What about him?"
"You like him." Peter said it simply, without accusation. "I'm not blind, Marina. I've watched you with him. The way you talk to him is different from the way you talk to anyone else. The way you look at him when you think nobody's paying attention. It's different."
"Peter…"
"I'm not jealous. Well." He paused. "I am, a little.
But that's my problem, not yours. I've liked you for a long time, and you know that, and we've never talked about it because we're both professionals and there's never been a right moment.
I'm not bringing it up now because I think there's a right moment.
I'm bringing it up because I care about you, and I'm worried that you're making decisions with your heart instead of your head. "
Marina took a slow breath. Peter deserved honesty. He'd always deserved it, and she'd always given him almost-honesty instead; the kind that acknowledged his feelings without addressing them, that kept the door neither open nor closed. It wasn't fair. She knew it wasn't fair.
"You're right," she said. "I do like him. I don't know what that means yet, and I don't know where it goes. He's an alien prince from a dying planet, and I'm a scientist with a broken ship. The logistics are insane."
"The logistics aren't what worry me. What worries me is that you're the person everyone on this crew depends on.
Forty-seven people, Marina. If something goes wrong on Dobromia; if this alliance falls apart, if his father doesn't like us, if it's a trap, you need to be thinking clearly.
Not thinking about how his scales look in the starlight. "
The comment was so accurate that Marina almost laughed. She'd been thinking about exactly that last night, and the fact that Peter had noticed made her feel both seen and exposed.
"I hear you," she said. "And you're not wrong. But I've thought about this, Peter. The trip to Dobromia makes strategic sense regardless of how I feel about Toren. We need their metals, they need our food, and both species benefit from cooperation. The personal feelings don't change the math."
"They change the risk tolerance. You're more willing to trust him than you would be if he were ugly."
"He could look like a Drog and I'd still trust his data. The alliance argument holds."
Peter turned to her for the first time. His expression was complicated. It was sad, fond, resigned, and fiercely protective all at once. "Just be careful, okay? Not for my sake. For yours. And for the forty-seven people who need you to come back in one piece."
"I'll be careful."
"And if he hurts you, I'm going to punch an alien prince in the face, and the interspecies diplomatic consequences will be your problem."
Marina smiled, it was hard not to. Peter was good. Genuinely, uncomplainingly good, in a way that made her feel guilty for not wanting him the way he wanted her. She couldn't make herself feel something that wasn't there. But she could respect what was.
"Noted," she said. "For the record, you're a good man, Peter."
"I know. It's my curse." He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast. "To terrible decisions made on alien planets."
"To terrible decisions," she agreed, and they drank their bad coffee, and they watched the last sun set, and neither of them mentioned that the conversation had changed something between them that couldn't be unchanged.
The morning of the departure, Marina briefed the crew.
"I'm taking a team of four to Dobromia," she announced in the cargo bay.
The entire crew had gathered. Forty-seven faces were looking up at her with expressions ranging from excitement to terror.
"Myself, Athena, Dr. Patel, and Peter. We'll be traveling with the three Weredragons.
The purpose is diplomatic and scientific.
We're establishing formal contact with their government and surveying their resources for materials we need to repair the Vulcana. "
"How long will you be gone?" asked Rowan.
"Three days. Maybe four. If we're not back in five, Dr. Vasquez is in command, and you follow the emergency protocols we established on day one."
"And if the aliens aren't friendly?" someone called from the back.
"Then we leave," Marina said firmly. "This is a diplomatic mission, not an invasion. If at any point we feel unsafe, we abort and come back. Nobody's dying for a handshake."
Athena stepped forward. She'd strapped on every weapon she owned, which was considerable. "For those of you who are worried, I'll be there. And I've been told by our Weredragon hosts that the worst thing on Dobromia is the food."
"That's not reassuring," Rowan muttered.
"I wasn't trying to be reassuring. I was trying to manage expectations." Athena smiled, and the crew laughed, and the tension in the cargo bay eased by a few degrees.
Marina looked out through the cargo bay doors.
Toren was waiting on the rock plain, already in his partial-shift form.
His wings were extended, his tail out and his scales were gleaming in the early morning light.
Auren stood beside him, bouncing on his heels with the barely contained energy of someone who'd been looking forward to this moment for days.
Khrelan stood apart, arms crossed, expression neutral.
He'd agreed to come, but he hadn't agreed to be happy about it.
Marina shouldered her pack. Data tablets, medical supplies, water and protein bars; the terrible kind that Toren had described as "functional." She'd also packed a small container of instant coffee, because if she was going to visit an alien civilization, she was doing it caffeinated.
"Let's go," she told her team.
She walked out of the Vulcana and into the red morning light, toward the prince who was waiting for her, and she didn't look back but she did look sideways.
because Toren was doing something she hadn't seen before.
He was kneeling beside a flat rock near the landing site, arranging objects on its surface with the careful attention of someone setting up a display. Marina slowed her approach and watched.
There were six items on the rock. A scratched DVD case which she could just make out the title, something with a whale on the cover.
A photograph, curled at the edges, of a city skyline she didn't recognize.
A paperback book so worn the cover was barely legible.
A small glass bottle, a folded piece of fabric that might have been a flag, though the colors had faded beyond identification.
And a pair of earbuds, the wired kind that hadn't been manufactured on Earth in decades.
"What is all this?" she asked.
Toren looked up. For the first time since she'd met him, he looked embarrassed. "My collection. I mentioned it once. Artifacts from your world that drifted through the system. I've been gathering them since I was young."
Marina crouched beside the rock. She picked up the DVD case carefully. The plastic was warped from exposure, but she could read the title now. "Free Willy," she said. "This is the movie about the whale."
"The movie about the man who taught a whale to jump over a wall," Toren corrected.
"It was the first human artifact I ever found.
I was twelve. I didn't have a way to play it.
I had to build a device from salvaged components.
It took me three months. And when I finally watched it, I didn't understand most of what was happening.
The language was unfamiliar, and the visual conventions were confusing.
But I understood the ending. The boy loved the whale, and he set it free, and the whale chose to come back. "
He said it with a simplicity that made Marina's throat tight.
This wasn't small talk. This was someone showing her the origin point of his entire worldview.
It was the moment a teenage alien had watched a cheesy human movie about a whale and had drawn from it the radical conclusion that love didn't require sameness.
That you could care about something utterly different from yourself and have it mean something.
"Why are you showing me these?" she asked.
"Because I want you to understand what you represent to me.
Not as a diplomat or a scientist. As a species.
" He picked up the worn paperback. "I learned your language from this book.
It took four years. I don't know what half the words mean in context, because I had no one to ask.
But I read it over and over until the sounds made patterns, and the patterns made meaning, and the meaning made me want to know more. "
Marina took the book gently. The title was too faded to read, but when she opened it, she recognized the text. It was a children's novel; something about a rabbit and a garden. A book you'd give a seven-year-old.
"You taught yourself English from a children's book," she said.
"It was the only book I had."
She looked at him. He was kneeling on the red rock of an alien planet with his collection of human junk spread out in front of him like sacred objects, and his blue eyes held a vulnerability she hadn't seen before.
He wasn't showing her artifacts. He was showing her himself.
The part of himself he'd hidden from his father, from Khrelan, from everyone on Dobromia.
The part that loved humans before he ever met one.
"Thank you for showing me," she said.
"Thank you for being worth showing."
The moment stretched. The twin suns beat down. Peter, Athena, and Patel waited near the Weredragons. Somewhere behind them, forty-seven people watched from the Vulcana's viewports.
Marina stood up. "Pack these," she told him. "Bring them to Dobromia. If we're going to convince your father that humans are worth knowing, this is your evidence."
Toren smiled. The full smile, the one with teeth, the one he didn't seem to realize he was doing.
"You think a children's book and a whale movie will convince the D'Karr of Dobromia to form an interplanetary alliance?"
"I think they convinced his son. That's a start."
He packed the artifacts carefully into a pouch at his belt. Marina turned and walked to where the team was waiting. Her heart was doing things she'd specifically told it not to do, and it wasn't listening.
Peter was watching her from behind Athena. His expression said everything his words that evening had already said. Be careful. Don't lose yourself. Come back in one piece.
She gave him a small nod. I hear you. I'll try.
Then Toren spread his wings, and the morning light caught the rose-gold scales, and Marina stopped trying.