4. Chapter 4
Marissa really didn’t want to like Cooper. He was right about her training, right about what she was supposed to be doing now that she’d found herself captured, and he was making it hard to do any of it. Not just by keeping her immobilized, but by being charming and funny enough that she didn’t think about it.
This was going to cause problems. She could already tell.
It didn’t help that whatever he’d done to her head when she hit him had shaken her confidence. She hadn’t even seen the blow coming that knocked her flat on her ass and made her see stars. And she didn’t believe for one minute that it had anything to do with some kind of bond.
Humans might pack bond with anything, but that psychic stuff was a bunch of nonsense.
She enjoyed talking to him, though. If he thought they were supposed to have some kind of psychic connection that would make them better friends, she was willing to let him keep thinking that until she could figure out how to get away from him.
“What did you do to the engine to make it run with no gas?” she asked.
“Ah, my people have developed an additive that works to stretch your fuel,” he said. “It doesn’t work forever but it about doubles the capacity of the fuel tank on your vehicles.”
“I thought you said your people don’t know this planet exists,” she said.
“They don’t,” he said. “It’s not for fuel sources, strictly speaking, but for oils and substances that act like oils. I brought a lot of it with me and it worked so I didn’t see any reason not to use it.”
“What oils would you need to stretch?” Marissa asked, her curiosity piqued.
“Oh, just, you know, various kinds.”
Cooper was evading her questions and she could swear he’d started to blush.
“Lube? Do you use oil-based lube? Did you plan to spend your entire mission oiling your pole?” She grinned at his discomfort and realized she’d gotten closer than she’d actually expected.
“The environments required for space travel are very dry,” he protested. “And oils transport better than creams. Do you make fun of people for using lotion?”
“Um, when they get the really slick ones and go through a bottle a week? Yeah, I do,” she said and laughed. “Especially when they combine it with a stash of sketchy pictures. There’s nothing wrong with a little self-love but some of them need a hobby.”
“Agreed,” he said, and the disgust in his voice made her giggle. “I understand that it’s a biological necessity for human males, but some of them didn’t think of anything else. It was all I could do some days not to shake some I was trying to listen to and tell them to get a girlfriend. A boyfriend. A sheep!”
“Dude, the sheep don’t deserve that.”
She giggled again at the look he gave her.
“And serves you right for eavesdropping. Couldn’t you have waited until they were done or something?”
“How would I have known without checking? And some of them thought about it while they were working on other things. How they got anything done sometimes is a mystery for the ages.”
“Then you got what you deserved,” she said. “How were you eavesdropping anyway if you could hear that but not when they were done?”
“I told you, I was scraping their minds.”
“What does that mean?”
“Skimming might be a better word for it but it always feels like I’m trying to take the top, kinda loose layer of the skin off their thoughts. The ones they’re thinking on purpose and almost broadcasting to the world in general. It’s how I learn languages and some basic customs.”
“Humans don’t broadcast their thoughts.”
“Humans don’t know that they’re broadcasting their thoughts,” he argued. “Because most of the other humans can’t pick them up. Some can, of course, and I don’t know why. There’s nothing that I’ve found so far that gives an actual answer.”
“Have you tried asking them?” Marissa asked.
“A couple,” he said. “Though it was easier when I could broadcast to them and skim the answers rather than try and ask outright.”
“What did they say?”
“That they just knew,” he said. “A couple of them had ideas but none of them had taken the time to build the discipline necessary to do it when they wanted to. Which meant they thought it was intuition and not something they had conscious control over.”
“And you do?”
Cooper nodded. “Part of being a Chelion. Hell, it’s part of the training to be a scout. I can’t imagine doing this without being able to read the thoughts of the people I’m trying to blend in with.”
“Did you ever listen in on my thoughts?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“What do you mean ‘not really’? Either you did or you didn’t.”
“I tried,” he admitted. “I tried and I didn’t get the ones I was looking for. Instead, I got the stuff that triggered a secondary maturation and a bond that I’m still not entirely sure what to do with.”
“You don’t know how second puberty works?”
“I don’t know how a kinetopsychic bond works with someone who has a wildly different anatomy than I learned about as a nymph. And how that’s going to impact my ability to work in enemy territory.”
Marissa’s cheeks flushed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“My people did and they built in enough safeguards that what happened with you should be impossible.”
“If it’s impossible, then maybe it will go away? Maybe it was a false positive or something and it will fade after a few days?”
Cooper laughed and it sounded bitter. “There’s no going back from this and, as much as I could wish everything else would be easier, I wouldn’t want to reverse it.”
There was something in his voice that made her want to get a better view of his face but she couldn’t move enough. She hated the thought that her questions hurt him and she didn’t know why she was certain they had.
They drove in silence for a while longer until she blinked at the shimmer in the distance. It gave her vertigo when she tried to focus on it.
“You’re going to want to close your eyes for this part,” he told her. “It can be unpleasant if you’re not used to it.”
It was already unpleasant so she closed her eyes and concentrated on taking deep breaths until the nausea went away. A sound so discordant that she pulled her hands out to cover her ears rang through the cab of the truck then disappeared. It left an eerie silence in its wake that made her grit her teeth, until it was replaced by the sound of the truck tires rolling to a stop.
“What the hell was that?” she demanded, her eyes still screwed shut.
“Security system,” he said. “You can open your eyes now. It’s only like that from the outside.”
Marissa opened her eyes and stared at the giant egg sitting in front of her.
“What’s that?” She couldn’t bring herself to point but she wanted to. It felt like the appropriate reaction to the giant, pale green, egg.
“It’s my ship,” he said. “Well, it’s my ship with the security system up and blaster barriers in place but I think it looks nice like that. What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s an egg,” she said. “Why is your ship an egg?”
“Because a curve on the blaster barrier is more effective, with less power, than a flat surface?”
“How effective is it against bullets?”
“More likely to deflect and send them off at an angle than directly back at the person who shot it. Which is a pain in the ass, really, because if someone is shooting at my ship, it would be a lot less complicated if they shot themselves at the same time so I didn’t have to track them down to create and then dispose of a body.”
He said that with such nonchalance that she had to see if he was joking.
“Seriously?”
“Enemy territory,” he reminded her. “If my ship falls into the wrong hands or is damaged beyond what I can repair, I’m in a lot more trouble than just being stuck here for a few months. And so are you if you think about it.”
“I get the feeling that ‘the wrong hands’ means something different to you than it does to me,” Marissa said.
“Maybe,” he allowed. “But maybe not. There are a lot of people on your side who could do a lot of damage if they had unfettered access to my ship.”
“And the security system keeps people away from it until you take it down. How long will it stay active?”
“Until the power systems on the ship fails,” he said.
“I thought you were already out of fuel.”
“Different systems. The power runs on a different type of engine than the propulsion does. That means that, if I run out of fuel, the ship will remain intact and traveling on its original trajectory until pulled into the gravity well of a large star or planet. Conceivably, I could live the rest of my life comfortably as long as all the other moving parts continued working and die of old age lost in space.”
Marissa shivered. “How long would that take?”
“A couple hundred years,” he said with a shrug. “Longer if I decide to hibernate. Which would increase my chances of being rescued, but would also increase the likelihood of waking up completely insane.”
“Really?”
Cooper nodded. “There have been studies. As solitary as my people are, social interactions are necessary for our physical and mental health. Messing with that causes problems.”
“How old are you?”
He looked like he was in his mid-twenties, maybe pushing thirty, but that might be part of his disguise. She needed to see him without it and didn’t even want to think what that might mean.
“That’s a complicated question for interstellar travel,” he said. “My planet’s cycle is more than a little different from yours, and they did not choose me for maturation early in my cohort.”
“I am so confused,” she said.
He laughed. “Imagine how I felt learning about human life cycles. Especially since my first exposure to it was from people who were trying not to breed.”
Marissa opened her mouth, then snapped it shut and shook her head. “Yeah, I have questions.”
Cooper killed the engine on the truck and turned to look at her. A grin played at the corners of his mouth, and he winked at her. “Come in to my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”