Chapter 16
Chee
Heava Yu was a stunning planet. Beautiful in a way that didn’t at all seem real. Looking around at the stunning landscape, it almost felt unfair.
There were two landing shuttles onboard the Vainglory.
They took the first one down to the planet, leaving behind only Goldie and Alred.
The latter because he couldn’t leave the ship.
Well, he technically could, but his core wouldn’t be able to appreciate anything.
And the former stayed because the latter stayed.
Alred tried to insist that Goldie enjoy the planet, that he wanted her to do so.
But she denied him absolutely and completely.
“I’m not enjoying it without you,” she told him in no uncertain terms, glaring at his light form with a stubborn set to her jaw.
And that was all there was to it. He couldn’t force her to go, so she stayed with him as the rest of the crew all gathered on the shuttle and made their way down.
Including Chee.
While she really wasn’t in the mood to enjoy a vacation planet, this was work related. The person who owned Hyde’s cup was on this planet, and since Chee was in charge of negotiations for said cup, she had to go down with the others.
But she stood on the opposite side of the shuttle from Trove and did her best not to even look at him on the way down.
It was kind of easy, since the girls were all around her, each of them talking excitedly about the fun they were going to be having. Not all of them needed to be involved in meeting their target or doing the negotiation, but they weren’t missing out on the vacation world.
Sway was the pilot, taking them down to the surface. There were two windows in the body of the shuttle, big enough for Chee and the others to gather around to watch the planet approach. And she let the beauty transfix and distract her.
Heava Yu was a pink planet. It had some large land masses, but it had a lot more islands, like the continents were breaking apart like comets, leaving a trail of progressively smaller and smaller islands all around the equator of the planet.
The land masses were maroon with purple shades.
The ocean was pink – like happy, pretty cotton candy pink.
The ice at the poles was also pink, but the icy pink had been tinted blue, making them glitter like opal.
More than that, there was a ring around the planet, a single ring that shined and shimmered like diamonds, sparkling as it swirled around.
And as they got closer, it only got prettier and prettier.
The ‘island’ they were going to seemed too big to warrant the name.
But it appeared to be ‘broken off’ from the larger, continental mass beside it, so maybe by their definition, it was an island.
It was definitely a tourist area, however, as it had its own space port, allowing for ease of travel for offworlders to come enjoy the beauty.
And as they breached the atmosphere, she could truly appreciate that beauty.
The ocean was even prettier as they got closer, the bright pink broken by white foam that, like the polar caps, had an opalescent shine.
The pink water then gave way to a golden beach, filled with sand that shimmered and shined.
It sparkled for the brief moment they flew past, aiming for the public landing docks.
Since this place was made for tourists, the entire landing process was well controlled, quick, and easy.
They weren’t the only landing shuttle coming in.
They were directed to land not on the ground, as she would have expected, but instead on a platform that came out from a tall, hexagonal building.
It was like a parking garage, she realized.
Instead of them going in, however, platforms came out and offered an easy landing place.
The platform then took them inside before the wall shut.
And also unlike a parking garage, this place was lovely.
Someone had clearly put a lot of money into it to make sure it wasn’t a simple concrete structure, meant just for parking.
This was a place to welcome tourists, and it was clean and beautiful exactly how she would expect such a place to be so that their guests would be instantly comfortable.
There was also a native female who stepped through a door in the back to welcome them.
The natives of the planet were beautiful too.
This female had maroon skin, dark and satiny, and a willowy body that flowed like waves.
The clothes she wore were bright, sky blue – Earth sky blue, anyway – with golden shimmers like stars embossed in the fabric.
The sarong style skirt and tube top were definitely tropical in style, then she’d adorned herself with flowers.
Not as in she had a crown of them or had them placed like jewelry.
No, instead, it seemed like she’d used the hover technology of combots to have brightly colored, golden tropical flowers floating around her in some reverse bee situation.
She had two eyes that were very thin and heavily slanted, creating a slash of dark blue on her face, over a flat nose with no ridges like her own. Her lips were similarly thin but brightly painted with a golden pigment that shined like the stars on her dress.
Most unusual, however, was her… hair?
Chee didn’t know that she’d call it hair.
It looked more like a veil. There weren’t individual strands but instead filaments coming off her scalp that faded into a membrane that, at first glance, took the shape of long, straight hair as it flowed down her back to her waist. It was bright white, opalescent like the sea foam of the cotton candy ocean.
It even seemed to glow in the low light at the back of the parking garage.
She didn’t have eyebrows, but she did have a similar membrane in the place of eyelashes that also seemed to glow.
She also had a long tail, thin and slender, that ended in a bulb that definitely glowed.
Like the ball at the end of an angler fish’s antenna.
She didn’t have claws at all, nor nails.
The skin was smooth and unblemished, however, suggesting that, unlike Trove, her clawless state was a natural one.
She instead had a couple golden bands that sat at different knuckles on her fingers, one of which was at the tip of her nail-less hand.
“Welcome, guests, to Barbarda, jewel of Heava Yu. I am Krista, part of the welcoming services committee, and it’s my pleasure to help you find your way to your accommodations or, if you don’t have them yet, to help you obtain them.”
Grace stepped forward to take over the conversation.
Tanin was their leader, but Grace was the one who did the talking.
She’d already made reservations for a place to stay.
Not only that, she made an appointment to speak with the collector they were here for.
She was in charge of the logistics of the crew, and she did it well.
Chee tried to grab her bag out of the shuttle while Grace spoke to Krista, but before she had a chance, Trove did so for her. He had his own bag in one hand and now hers in the other. He offered her a smile, but she couldn’t look at him.
“I can take that,” she said, offering her hand.
“It’s fine. We’re going to the same place,” he said.
He wasn’t the only one to do so. Tanin and Sway and Vytln had all grabbed their mate’s bags.
And she wondered if he was doing it because she was his mate, or just because he thought he should.
She didn’t want to think about it, so she didn’t and instead walked ahead to stand closer to Grace.
The two of them followed directly behind Krista, the others behind them, as they walked out of their parking spot – docking spot?
The inner core of the parking garage was a series of three lifts that went up and down, taking people and welcoming committee members up and down as they came and went. Krista took them onto an empty lift and used the console to activate it, sending them down.
The entrance of the parking garage was more like a welcoming desk at a hotel. There was a desk where two more people like Krista – Chee realized she didn’t know the name of their species, but it felt rude and wrong to call them aliens on their own home planet. She was the alien here.
As she stood there, waiting for Grace to get them transportation, she tried her very hardest to not be hyper aware of Trove standing just a few steps to her side.
Not close enough that she could ask him to get away from her and not be considered insane, but definitely close enough for her to be aware of him in her periphery.
But, of course, the harder she tried not to notice him, the more he took up the entirety of the forefront of her mind.
She did have her attention completely diverted, however, when they stepped outside. She couldn’t help it, because now she was seeing the planet directly, and it was breathtaking.
It was midday, the golden sun hanging almost directly overhead.
But the sky was alive with a stunning swath of colors.
The area around the sun was all hot oranges and yellows and pinks, like a sunset, bold and beautiful.
However, the further from the sun the sky went, the more those colors faded into the soft, airy pinks and purples and pale blue of a sunrise.
Like an artist had painted the sky in every color a sky could be painted.
And streaked diagonally across it, like a milky way of diamond dust, was the ring that circled the planet.
It glittered, it sparkled, against the vibrant sky.
The fluffy white clouds that hovered overhead broke up the color and shine in a way that seemed artistic in and of itself.
It was stunning. It took the entirety of her mind to just take in the view.