Star Bright (Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides #22)

Chapter 4

She’d never named anything before, no kids or pets, not even a houseplant. But Caye looked like a Vash so Darcy was relieved he’d gotten that piece of himself back at least.

But to find out he was more than a hundred years old? While she got the concept of suspended animation, and there’d been a lot more weird stuff than that, to be insensate for that long must be disconcerting. And his children were still stuck in their high-tech coffins without even a window in the sleek metal. His distraught hold on the two struck her hard.

“Cryopreservation is intended for long-term use, obviously,” Kong noted. “The units appear undamaged except for the timing issue.”

The drakling man lifted his head, his eyes wild with flames. “I don’t understand what happened.”

Ug growled, and Kong rolled forward and back. “With your permission, Ug will check the rest of the ship and attempt to identify the problem.”

When Vash bowed over the pods again, Darcy just nodded at Kong and Ug. They quietly departed.

She crouched beside the drakling man. “There must be a process for emerging from stasis that’s a little easier than a crash. I’m sure your children—fledglings—will be fine if we just go slow.”

“I can’t lose them.” He pressed a shaking finger against the unblinking lights. “My memories are still…shattered, and I’m still confused by the pieces. But this I know in my deepest fire: I cannot lose them.”

His deepest fire. Like his heart. Swallowing hard, she put her hand over his. “I’m just a temporary caretaker here, but my friend is part of the executive team, and I know she’ll want to help however she can.”

Caye—Vash—looked at her, the flames in his eyes dulling. “How could I have a contract here, for an Earther bride? I already have a mate. Her name is Shanya.” His voice roughened, almost a growl. “Where is she?”

Like all the other novelties dumped on her in the last few hours—spaceships, robots, aliens—the word mate made sense in her head but felt so impossible. “Your memories are getting clearer,” she reminded him. “You’ve just had another terrible shock, but it will all come back to you.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

She had no answer for that. “Maybe I should go check on Ug and Kong.”

He twisted his grip on the pod to grab her. “Stay, please.”

She squeezed his hand. “Of course.”

She had never felt so helpless. Her parents’ estrangement and eventual divorce when she’d been a teenager had been more relief than grief, and even caring for her older sister through hospice, there’d always been something to do . Just sitting here was hard, and she couldn’t imagine how he wasn’t tearing apart the pods with his bare hands.

“Memories keep crashing together in my mind,” he murmured. “Yadira hatching into my hands, Atsu barely walking but reaching for me as he stumbled, laughing. And then I remember putting them in the pods so they could rest. So I could just rest.” When he looked at her, his miserable eyes were cold and gray. “Why would I want them away from me?”

“Ug and Kong will find out everything they can,” she assured him. But even as she said it, she knew there was a chance whatever they found out might be its own sort of crash. “How’s your head?”

He touched the gauze still taped to his forehead. “I keep forgetting that too.”

“Let me see.” She leaned in to peek under the gauze, the tape peeling up without pulling at his skin. “At least the lump is gone.”

And apparently the space age had managed to come up with an adhesive bandage that didn’t hurt worse than the wound—but it still needed help with dating?

“Draklings pride ourselves on toughness,” he murmured. “Yet a trifling bump to the head has all but wrecked me?”

This close to him, she couldn’t help but notice the heat of his body, almost feverish. Draklings need hot . So the little robot had said. A Montana winter night really didn’t offer much of that, so she moved a little nearer yet toward him.

“Well, there was a spaceship crash too,” she reminded him. “And apparently a hundred years with no dreams, so maybe don’t be so hard on yourself.”

He gazed down at her, a flicker of light in his gray eyes. “I may have dreamed.”

She almost asked what a drakling dreamed about but managed to bite her tongue. Really, this had nothing to do with her.

The bandage might not cling, but she seemed strangely stuck on him.

They waited in silence, though she felt the tremors that wracked his body when his shoulder brushed hers. Probably this wasn’t helping his own recovery any, but of course he wouldn’t leave his children.

Now that he’d remembered them. Oh, how he was going to hate himself for that when this shock was past.

The whir of Kong’s wheel announced their return, and Darcy stiffened as Vash spun around, eyes blazing again. “What did you find?”

“Ug was able to retrieve some data from your ship’s logs. The manifest indicates you and your two offspring were scheduled for a journey from the drakling homeworld to this closed planet. This corroborates with the expired IDA contract. But according to the recovered time stamps in the ship’s log, you programmed a brief rest cycle in the stasis chambers. A not uncommon practice in a smaller ship like yours, to conserve resources and reduce crew friction.”

Vash twisted his mouth in a snarl. “I would never ice my fledglings because I was tired of them or wanted more for myself.” With obvious difficulty, he eased upright, but his tone was even colder when he asked, “Did you find my mate’s pod?”

Kong hesitated. “There are no other stasis chambers aboard, and nothing in the manifest suggests other passengers besides yourself and your two offspring.” The robot spun its wheel in a nervous circle. “It seems that shortly after you three entered stasis, the ship encountered an interstellar storm. Shielding deflected most of the radiation, but some of the systems went through a reset. And apparently the chronometrics recalculated improperly, affecting both the stasis chambers and the ship’s routing schedule.”

Leaving the ship to wander slowly across the galaxy with its slumbering prisoners for a hundred years. Darcy winced at Vash’s simmering tension. “Maybe we need to concentrate on the children now. Kong, you said they aren’t in any danger, correct? The pods are working all right now?”

“With most of the outpost’s services offline for the closure, deeper scans aren’t possible, but the life support components seem unaffected by the timing reset. Standard procedure for exiting cryo involves in-unit revivification, with gradual warming, electrical stimulation, and basic cellular supportive therapies all handled by the stasis chamber itself. Also, more natural sleep phases, including dreaming, will be resumed. At the end of that sequence, the younglings will wake without the mental and physical debilities inflicted by a more abrupt transition.”

No dreams for a hundred years? That seemed so sad. Darcy glanced at the drakling man. “So we just push a button to start the process?”

“No.” Vash let out gusting breath. “Wait. I need to remember everything before…” His hand fisted on the pod lid. “I can’t let them see me like this.”

Ug grunted, a disapproving sound, but Darcy nodded. “You’re already much stronger, and your memories are coming back. If waiting won’t hurt your children, you have time. It’s not like we have anything else going on.”

He looked at her. “Thank you.”

She pointed at Kong. “I know getting a signal out of Sunset Falls can be tricky because of the alleged unique local geology that I’m now suspecting is partly extra terrestrial in origin. But you must have some way of getting in touch with Brin and your bosses.”

“Ask him.” Kong wheeled around toward Ug.

Darcy lifted an eyebrow. “The guard dog?”

“You don’t think a clueless closed worlder was left solely in charge of an alien outpost, do you?”

Ug growled, and this time the not-dog sounded amused.

They went back to the lobby—Vash leaving the pods only reluctantly—and got the big drakling man settled in the half-dismantled pillow fort. Then Ug led her to a door set discretely behind the welcome station. The not-dog pressed his nose to what Darcy had thought was a keycard reader, and the door opened.

Inside looked like the coolest gaming station ever, with screens and consoles all around. Most of the screens were dark, which disappointed her, and the rest showed standard security angles of the grounds and buildings. One was focused on the ship. Probably should do something about that in case anyone had seen a blaze of light across the sky and hoped to do some meteorite hunting.

Ug reared up at one console and growled at the screen. It flashed with some strange symbols, and he growled again. The symbols settled into a steady blink.

“I knew you weren’t a dog,” Darcy muttered.

With a glance at her, Ug let his tongue loll out in a very doggy grin.

The screen went dark for a long minute then flickered erratically, apparently the universal sign of a crap connection.

After another minute, Brin’s face appeared between the streaks of interference. “Darcy? How did you…? Ugly, what have you done?”

“Don’t blame him,” Darcy scolded. “A spaceship crashed on the front lawn, and there was literally nothing he could’ve done to explain that—especially since I thought he was just an ugly dog. Anyway, we barely got a signal through, so listen up.” She quickly explained the circumstances, not adding anything about how her fingers had tingled with wanting or anything like that. After all, Vash wasn’t just an alien; he had a whole alien family and apparently all sorts of alien baggage.

Indistinct figures moved behind Brin, and she waved them away. “Darcy, I suggested you as caretaker because I trusted you.”

Darcy arched one eyebrow. “Just not enough to tell me about the existence of aliens.”

“You were only supposed to be there to handle any random Earthers who might accidentally show up. Not crashing spaceships. And yet you’re even dealing with that like a champ. Which is why telling you was on my to-do list as soon as we got back.”

“You’re not on a holiday team-building retreat, are you?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t lie to you about vacationing. We’re just not doing it on Earth.” Her friend’s grin was bright even across the lightyears. “But that means it’ll be a while before we can get someone there for you.”

“I don’t know that we need more people”—Darcy glanced at Ug—“uh, or whatever. But if you could unlock some of the facility, like the med bay and maybe a repair shop for busted spaceships? Oh, and some extra bedrooms.”

“I’ll put a rush on the cleaning cycle, but I’m still sending support back to you.” Brin wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way. You were always a great friend to me and my show. Once I discovered I might’ve been a little overzealous in my ‘nothing’s out there’ beliefs, I wanted to tell you. And okay, maybe I was hoping you’d join my marketing and limited-edition hoax-crafting crew now that we’ve relaunched the Big Sky IDA. But you seemed happy with that weaselmeister Chris, and there’s nothing in the world that would make me break up a loving couple.”

“Nothing in the universe, you mean?”

“Yeah, that too.” Interference scattered Brin’s image for a moment. “If you could just hold down the fort a little longer, we’ll owe you, big time.”

Darcy pursed her lips. Her pillow fort had been seized by an alien. What was the pay scale for that?

“You could unlock the good liquor locker too,” she suggested.

“Key is under the bar. That was the only room that wasn’t infested with void vipers.” Brin laughed.

“What the hell are void vipers?” Darcy demanded.

But her friend scattered into a bunch of pixels.

Darcy glared at Ug. “What are void vipers?”

He only grunted.

Oh yeah, owed her big time.