Chapter 3
SEBASTIAN
I didn't know which of my father's programmers was out to get me, but it wasn't Gunnar. Even he wasn't foolish enough to shit where he ate. The two-person shuttle launch went according to my meticulous plans, but midway to the space station, everything jagged sideways, changing our trajectory.
It almost seemed like the shuttle had been programmed to skip the space station and launch us at the moon.
The hurricane had changed some of our plans, but we'd had time to switch our programming to match.
Instead of a three-day moonshot mission, we were now stopping at the international space station for a day before returning to the shuttle, swinging around the moon, and reentering the earth's atmosphere.
While I was still trying to access the program on my console, Gunnar cracked open the front panel of his. He unzipped his flight suit and dug around in a zippered pocket my suit didn’t have. Then, he removed a flash drive and plugged it into the motherboard before it could float away.
"What the fuck?"
"Back door," he said. "I thought things were screwy as fuck yesterday, so I made a backup drive, just in case."
"Sebastian?" My dad's voice sounded tinny and far away.
"You're turning away from the space station.
We're figuring the new coordinates now." We were still too close to earth, where our signal was jammed by the satellites orbiting beneath us.
We could hear the folks at Paskal Space Command, but they couldn't hear us, not even if we were screaming for our lives.
"You caught it before they did," I whispered. "Nice job."
Gunnar scoffed as he continued to type coordinates on his console.
"Like you aren't in on it." He pointed at his screen, where the original coordinates had been three degrees off, just as he said.
"They knew the moment we took off. I should have, too, but I trusted them.
" The glare he gave me said he didn't trust me, not one bit.
He refreshed our coordinates, and all I could do was double-check his math. He'd accounted for the earth's gravity, the speed of the space station in orbit, and our misaligned trajectory.
"You're fast," I said. "Faster than I am."
"The simulation's built into the hard drive," he said. "I'm not the math whiz here, genius. I'm the guy who nobody will mourn if I blow up in space, so I'm doing my best to stay in one piece."
"Well, I appreciate it," I said. "I'd like to stay in one piece, too."
He looked like he wanted to argue, but another crackle came over the comm.
"Nice job, son." Dad's smile sounded forced, the way it always did when he expected me to fail and I succeeded instead. "You've only missed a half-hour at the space station."
"Thank you," I told my copilot, not caring if I got another scoff.
His chin bobbed, but his gaze never left his monitor as the simulation played out. When it finished with a green checkmark, he pocketed the flash drive again. "Thank me when we dock without incident."
An hour later, the space station came into view.
I angled the shuttle to the docking bay, and we began the extensive and highly choreographed docking dance.
Forty minutes later, we were shaking hands with the two astronauts currently living aboard the space station.
They'd already been up here for two of their six months' stay.
"Your suits are … interesting." The Italian, Dominico, tapped my oversized helmet. "You look more like deep-sea divers than astronauts."
I removed my helmet, placed it on an empty hook where it vastly outsized the others already hanging, and shrugged. "What can I say? My dad's got a big head. He wanted headgear that would fit him."
The two astronauts laughed, but Gunnar glared at me while he removed his own oversized helmet. Was it designed to match mine for looks alone, or would it serve a greater purpose, allowing us to breathe after shifting into wolves?
Oblivious to my concerns, the astronauts gave us a tour and pointers on how to eat in zero gravity. We spent a couple of hours listening to tales of spacewalks and rover malfunctions. Then it was time to trundle back to our bunks.
We would be sleeping standing up, if you could call it that.
They'd placed Gunnar and me on the opposite end from their lived-in sleeping quarters.
Our vertical cubicles faced each other, though we could anchor our sleeping bags to any of the three walls.
Thankfully, all I could see of Gunnar was his face once he zipped himself inside his foam cocoon.
I did the same, eager for a nap. After being awakened by a knock at my cabin door earlier in the night, I'd started the day long before dawn. Now, all I wanted was rest.
I had the best sleep of my life for the next eight hours.
I woke to find Gunnar asleep in his bunk, his bag still anchored to the side of the shuttle facing mine.
If he were even a little less hostile toward me, I'd think he did it because he wanted to ogle me.
This was even more disturbing. Maybe he wanted to murder me in my sleep.
The thought was completely at odds with the peaceful, almost sweet, grin on his face while he slept.
It was a welcome change from his usual glare.
Gunnar was attractive in a severe way, all sharp angles.
Even the hard line along his scalp added to his beauty.
He shaved most of his head bald, leaving only a gelled cap of dark hair too short to curl at his crown.
He'd gotten a fresh trim on the ship, the only amenity charged to his room beyond the complimentary food and drink budget.
I'd read his file along with his expense sheet, but he was nothing like what I'd expected.
I'd worked with foster kids through my charity, Tomorrow's Hospitality Today, which funneled less fortunate kids into my endless supply of service jobs.
Those kids were meek and mild, tired and trampled.
They'd never been given a chance before they met me, and they craved it like their next breaths.
They didn't question me. Hell, they didn't frown in my general direction.
They had nothing but smiles and positive attitudes for their benefactor.
Gunnar treated me like his most worthless coworker, even though I was the one with the aerospace degree, and he was the lowly coder along for the ride.
I'd met other foster kids who lived out of spite, but I'd never had that spite directed at me.
Here was a man who would bite the hand that fed him, and he'd gloat about it.
If my assumption about him was correct, he had his genetics to thank for his place on the shuttle, not his brains.
It was my duty to prevent my dad and his cronies from sending the shuttle off course.
If we skirted around the moon in a predictable orbit, always staying within the Lagrange points' influence, we would be fine.
If not … Gunnar would discover whether he could get as hairy as I did on the far side of the moon.
Gunnar's eyes snapped open and the glare returned. "Take a picture. It'll last longer."
"What are you, five?" I asked. "I zoned out, thinking about the mission."
"That's not my name." He sneered.
I sighed. "You are not the mission."
His eyebrows flicked up and down. "That's not what your mom said."
I'd heard it plenty of times before. Mom jokes were everywhere. I'd expected better from Gunnar, though. He'd been taken away from his own mom, and surely, he'd met orphans in his time in foster care.
Something in my frown must have told him he'd taken it too far. "Shit. I'm sorry. I forgot."
I unhooked my sleeping bag from the wall and unzipped it, eager to get away before my unchecked emotions got the better of me. My mom's death was an old wound, but the Band-aid over it came off so easily, especially when everyone knew about it.
After we'd returned to the U.S. after our fateful trip to Ukraine, Dad's Hollywood producer friend had made a documentary about our summer in Chernobyl.
I spent hours watching the raw footage, wondering if he'd captured the exact moment our radiation levels had tipped over from safe to unsafe, and when my mother's uterine cells had started growing unchecked.
I shoved against the wall a little too hard. Instead of gliding into the hallway, where I could change direction, I went right past it and into Gunnar's personal bunk.
"Shit, man! I said I was sorry!"
"I didn't mean to—" My body collided with his, shoving him against the memory foam.
"I …" His scent filled the small area, same as when we were in the shuttle.
The air was thinner on the space station than it was on earth.
I shouldn't have been able to smell him at all, but, "You smell good," I whispered.
"So do you," he forced out through clenched teeth. Something hard poked against my hip through the fabric of his sleeping bag. "I mean it. I'm sorry I mentioned your mom. I should have known better."
I settled my chin against his shoulder and sniffed his neck, trying to place where I'd smelled that exact flavor of sunflowers and sage before. I pawed at the back of his head, pulling him closer to me.
"What are you doing? This is inappropriate."
"Oh? Who's the one with the boner?" I ground my hips against him, and he hissed.
"Look, I apologized. Now, I'd like you to get the fuck off me, please."
The please did it for me. He'd never once addressed me with any amount of politeness. I shoved off him, flying back toward my own cubby until my back hit the wall. "Ow."
"I'm … I'm truly sorry, all right?" Gunnar zipped himself out of his sleeping bag and dropped his hands to his waist, grabbing the flashlight at his hip before it could float away. He caught me staring at it. "Yeah. Not a boner. I fell asleep reading, and this got stuck in my sleeping bag."
Sure, it did. But hey, I wasn't going to embarrass him or myself any further by dwelling on it.
His scent lingered, even as I stripped down and ran a wet towel over my sweaty skin in the bathing area.
It reminded me of that summer, living near Chernobyl.
They'd planted sunflowers to try to soak up the radiation, and their delicate scent wafted to us on the wind.
I remembered sitting on our host's backyard patio with their herbs and spices growing all around us.
I shivered more from the realization than the cold water. If I could smell the sunflowers in the safe zone, we hadn't been as safe as Ivan had promised. It should have been obvious, since my mom got sick soon afterward. I was only a child, but maybe if I'd spoken up, said something …
I sighed. I'd grown up, but I'd never gotten past the constant guilt.
My mom had died, and I'd lived. Not only that, but it had healed me.
I'd been a sickly child when we lived in Florida, plagued by asthma and eczema, not to mention every virus and bacterial infection a child could catch.
I'd been downright ill until we touched down in Boryspil.
My nurse couldn't explain it. At first, everyone, including my mom, thought I was faking not needing my inhaler, but when they saw my skin clear up after a few days, they sent my nurse away.
Dad even took me with him to inspect the radiation zone.
I'd donned a little yellow suit with hazmat markers.
He and his friends wore similar outfits.
For the first time, I felt like I belonged in my dad's world.
But he wasn't my dad. He was Ivan Paska, the ruthless businessman who put money over family. I'd learned that lesson the day my mom was diagnosed with cancer.
I floated back to my cubby and pulled on shorts and a t-shirt over my compression garments. I overheard Gunnar talking with the Italian astronaut. As always, they were talking about me, or around me, as though I wasn't there.
"Yeah, I've always been a huge fan of the company. Ivan built it from the ground up. I can't wait to see what he does in space."
I shook my head. Gunnar didn't like me, that much was clear, but I wouldn't let him end up like all the other casualties in Ivan's path.
If he turned into a wolf, same as me, he would become a lab rat tucked away in one of Paskal's pharmaceutical labs in Europe.
He would probably never see anyone he cared about again.
He said he had no one to mourn him, but I doubted that.
I'd done my own reconnaissance on his former aeronautical department.
The trainees there looked up to him. He was smart, efficient, and somewhat of a goof.
Several of his coworkers said he made them laugh, which was important to have with such a stressful job.
Well, nothing was more stressful than flying a space shuttle. He could make me laugh any day now …
I sighed. I was persona non-grata, the asshole son who had usurped his father's companies.
If Gunnar only knew. Ivan gave me his failing companies so he could write it off on his taxes and spend the money the government gave him on space exploration.
Then, he sent me to space so I wouldn't have time to turn any of those shitty companies around.
And somehow it was my fault my cruise line was finally paying its fair share of pollution quotas.
Fine. Gunnar could blame me for that. He knew nothing about me, and he sure as fuck didn't know my dad.
I wanted to keep it that way, but the other presence inside me, the one clawing at my insides since my first trip into space … he wanted Gunnar. Worse, he wanted out.