Chapter 6 #2
Leaning in beside him meant getting close, and my whole body trembled when I inhaled that same savory-sweet scent.
I wracked my brain trying to figure out what it reminded me of, but all it did was make my mouth water.
He looked way too competent with his hands on all those controls, too.
The whole bank of computers reminded me a bit too much of the interior of the Future’s cockpit to fully get my libido revving, but it was a close call.
“It’s… well, you’d better have a look. It’s hard to explain,” Levant said, and he pulled up a very advanced camera feed on the screen.
Despite the absolutely icy temperatures outside, it worked just fine, and contrary to what he’d implied, it was not buried beneath snow.
I wasn’t sure what I should be looking for in the darkness outside, during what appeared to be a raging blizzard.
Levant was peering at the images with the same focus I had, a frown creasing the strange, nubbed and spiked ridges of his brow.
His golden eyes hunted for something in that blizzard, and he expected that seeing it would explain everything.
Staying on task suddenly wasn’t hard at all.
My brain switched into a survival mode I was very familiar with—the kind of high-speed thinking that made me so suited to being a test pilot.
It wasn’t a love of flying or a desire for adventure, though I had those too.
It was my brain needing to run under high pressure for me to feel alive.
This situation fit the bill, and I felt like a junkie getting a hit: adrenaline soaring, pulse racing, my mind spinning.
I felt like I was about to be confronted with a monster, a beast—something huge to battle—but there was nothing there.
“I don’t see it,” Levant said. “Which means the sensors are malfunctioning again, damn it. I have to go outside to fix them.” He rose higher on his tail and swung away from the desk with the computers to head straight for the tent flaps.
There, on a rack, furs were hanging, and they did not appear entirely dry yet from a previous trip.
He began strapping himself into them anyway, and then he hissed when he grabbed for a pile low to the ground and it turned out to be Auby.
“Pardon me,” the cute cow robot said, and he flicked his long ears back and fluttered his black lashes over his huge, lavender eyes.
“My sensors indicate a spiking energy signature as well. I do not think yours are malfunctioning.” Levant’s eyes flicked from Auby to me, and his mouth grew tight.
Then he cocked his head, and his green-and-black hair slid over his shoulder, now covered by a long-sleeved fur tunic.
“I see, then it must be Felicia’s ship,” he said, and my heart thumped even louder in my chest. That was it.
If this was my ship powering up somehow, I needed to be the one to do the inspecting.
I shrugged my foot free from the loop of Levant’s tail and then headed for the rack to locate the tunic I’d worn before to pull on over my flight suit.
I’d need extra layers to stay warm in the subzero temperatures outside.
Levant assisted, but it was a little clumsy as he pulled a tunic over my head and started lacing a hood around my ears.
My body was jittery for all kinds of reasons, but mostly it reminded me of pre-flight nerves.
“Auby, can you safely go outside? Do you have sensors that can lead us in the right direction?” I asked as I brushed Levant’s hand from my face and began searching for my socks and boots.
To my dismay, the laces on my shoes had all been cut; what remained of them was a wet, soggy mess of knots.
“Affirmative,” Auby chirped cheerfully. I hadn’t even realized he was speaking the same language as Levant now, though it was still perfectly understandable to my brain.
Apparently, Levant’s ability to facilitate our communication extended to others when we touched, and Levant hadn’t stopped touching me once.
Even when I shook him off, he just found another spot to hold on with his tail or a hand.
Right now, my handsome Exile was curled low at my feet, not kneeling because he didn’t have knees, but close.
His hands moved quickly as he slashed away the remains of my shoelaces and redid my shoes with lavender leather strips from one of his supply crates.
It barely took a moment. I was impressed he knew how, when he didn’t have feet and thus probably had never even seen shoes before.
Auby distracted me from the disturbing surge of pleasure I felt at having Levant do such a menial task for me, happily.
“I have been built in a Vakarsa’s image for its thick pelt.
I am perfectly insulated. My sensors are designed to pick up energy signatures exactly like this one, too.
I can find the source.” The little cow calf looked like it should be awkwardly bumbling around his mother’s six legs, not cavort across an arctic ice field.
I was going to take his word for it, though.
I was pretty sure that, out of the three of us, I was going to be the one hating it the most to be outside.
It appeared that Levant had a big backpack of supplies ready and waiting, possibly always prepped for tasks like this.
When the three of us went through the first set of tent flaps into the temperature gate, he strapped it on.
It was almost as big as I was, with poles strapped to the side, so I assumed it held a tent.
Clever, because you couldn’t risk being trapped outside without being able to take shelter.
It was so cold outside that I nearly froze in place as I took my first step.
The air burned as I breathed in, and I hurried to adjust my fur collar with clumsy, mitten-clad hands.
Without goggles to protect my eyes and aid my vision, I could barely see a thing at all.
Unfairly, it appeared Levant had an adaptation that aided him here: a pair of semi-transparent eyelids that slid protectively in from the corners of his eyes.
“Nictitating membranes,” he said when he saw how I was wiping snow from my eyes.
“They are really a desert adaptation, but they work for a brief while here, too.” He hesitated, his hand catching my shoulder and squeezing, his large body towering over mine on the thick coils of his tail.
I knew that kind of posture well. This was when the big men would patronizingly assure me there was no shame in backing out now.
The weather was extreme, the journey tough, and I was just a tiny woman.
Levant lowered slowly, strands of his hair whipping in the icy winds, and he tucked them carefully into his own hood with fingers wrapped thickly in fur, just like mine.
“Felicia, you set the pace. I am unfamiliar with your limits,” he said after a long moment.
Then he tilted his head, which I saw mostly because the angle of his chin horn changed. “Auby, you take point. Watch Felicia.”
All that affronted anger, that easily hurt pride, fizzled and went out.
Huh, I was certain he’d been about to tell me to stay behind.
Why hadn’t he? I didn’t want to immediately think he was different, or that he simply didn’t think I was strong enough because we were different species.
Something had gone on inside his head in the span between when he cupped my shoulder and when he actually spoke.
Whatever it was, I wasn’t going to let him change his mind.
I set out briskly through the snow, at a pace that would keep me warm from the heat my muscles generated and that I knew I could easily sustain.
I was a highly trained athlete. Before stasis, my job as a test flight pilot had demanded that I keep myself in peak form at all times.
If I didn’t, I couldn’t sustain the g-forces a ship or a jet could generate, and I’d be outcompeted by my male colleagues.
Still, it was tough; I wasn’t used to walking in snow, and I wasn’t as strong as I was used to being, thanks to stasis.
It should have maintained my muscle mass perfectly, but if it was true that I’d been out for a thousand years, it was no wonder it hadn’t gone perfectly.
Had stasis even been designed to last that long?
The snow layer was only a few inches thick; below that, the snow had frozen into hard-packed ice.
That made my footing surer. Auby’s dark purple fur was also easy to keep track of.
It might be night out, but it was not dark exactly.
There was simply too much white everywhere for that, so it felt more like a dark, gloomy gray.
The dark hole that abruptly appeared ahead of us was like a gaping maw in the dark.
For a horrible moment, I thought it was a mouth, and then I wrongly assumed it was a hole in the ice that led to the water below.
It wasn’t until Levant went right up to the edge and laid hands on what appeared to be some kind of winch that I realized where we were.
This was the hole that led toward my ship.
They’d been right, the energy signature Levant and Auby were picking up came from the Future.
“Down?” I asked. Auby sounded muffled by the snow when he confirmed our direction.
Levant did not even seem to need that kind of instruction; he was already readying ropes along the pulley system.
I eyed his setup carefully, worried it wasn’t safe, but it all looked in order.
Crude, made of rope, bone, and leather, but definitely built exactly the way I’d expect a winch to look.
“I will hold you, Auby,” Levant said, and to my surprise, the little cow trotted over immediately.
Any fear of Levant deactivating him was clearly gone.
Levant looked sweet with the calf in a one-armed hold against his left shoulder.
“You hook up like this, Felicia. We will go down, all three of us together. It is deep. You must let me steer.” I didn’t like trusting someone else to do that, but I was very anxious to get down to the ship.
I discovered it wasn’t hard to trust Levant as he hooked me up with straps to his.
It wasn’t until the three of us swung out over the hole and began lowering steadily that I realized how intimate this was.
How did I keep ending up in situations that reminded me—and my crazy libido—how attracted I was to him?
But hanging over a hole as deep as a skyscraper, held steady with his tail, and guided by his impressive upper-body strength… yeah, it did the trick.
Damn if it wasn’t both terrifying and hot to trust a man and his biceps to guide us safely to the bottom.
Of course, Auby seemed oblivious to the sexual tension and the way Levant kept staring into my face like I was the most precious thing he’d ever seen.
The little cow-bot was babbling about the winch design and the depth of the hole as we progressed.
Typical robot-like utterings, but they were interjected with much more humanoid humor and glee.
Stuff like: The snow tastes weird. I should analyze its contents.
Do humans have snow fights? I love snowballs! They crunch funny in my maw.
I was extremely grateful Auby was there, or I might have pulled Levant close and fatally distracted him by kissing his dark mouth.
Thank God we reached the bottom of the long tunnel that went nearly straight down.
It wasn’t until we were near the bottom that it curved and became a bit of a slide we rolled down.
Tangled in tail and arms, with a mouthful of snow and fur sticking in weird places on my face, we landed.
For a moment, neither of us moved. Then Auby wriggled out from between us and trotted away with a casual, “This way, friends. We’re getting close!
Oh, this is so exciting!” He was oblivious to why I remained sprawled on top of Levant a little longer, and why Levant didn’t move a muscle but lay there watching me.
This probably went into the category of: if it pleases you, you may do as you wish.
It was much more of a turn-on seeing that in his pretty eyes when all I wanted was to lie on top of him.
We were definitely not going back to that moment where I puked on his tail. Nope.
A short while later, we were both up and hurrying after Auby.
Our clothing was covered in snow, and Levant was still trying to dust it off me as we walked, using a coil of his tail and a large hand.
His huge backpack of supplies was dusted with the most snow, so it looked kind of like he was carrying an entire fridge on his back.
It would be comical if it wasn’t so impressive.
I did not recognize the section of tunnel we were moving through, but when something in Auby’s pace changed, I knew we were getting close. The Future was nearby.