Tempted by Celestial Bodies

Chapter 2

chapter two

kerian

I am dying.

From the depths of an unconsciousness darker and more abyssal than I’d ever experienced before, I struggled to reach the surface and wake. My chest heaved as I gasped for air and my body ached down to the bones.

Instinct told me to move, to get away from whatever caused me pain and stifled my breathing. But when I reached out, my hands struck something solid about thirty centimeters from my face. I saw nothing but pitch black, though I felt sure my eyes were open.

What was right in front of me felt like a glass window. When I rapped on it with my knuckles, the sound confirmed it. Everything else around me smelled like metal. A metal cocoon. But with a window?

My wheezing breath brought in no air.

Thinking was difficult, but even in my foggy brain, the links of evidence formed a chain: I had woken in a stasis pod. A stasis pod that was about to become my coffin.

Fumbling, my fingers and toes numb from what I now recognized as the effects of long-term stasis, I searched the interior of the pod for an emergency release and found none.

I drew back my fists as much as the pod would allow and punched the glass with all my might. Now that pain I felt very clearly. I had no breath with which to curse. The window creaked but didn’t break. The ringing in my ears grew louder. Unconsciousness was moments away and death right behind it.

I had not survived the horrors of genetic manipulation on my home planet and ten years of service as a spy in the Gandarian army to die in this gods-damned pod.

With darkness closing in, I hit the window one last time with my fists, my feet, everything I had. I felt the door give, but I thought it was probably lack of oxygen or wishful thinking?—

—Until my shuddering breath drew in a lungful of stale air and I began to cough. The ringing in my ears cut off abruptly. An alarm of some kind? I couldn’t think about that now. All that mattered was breathing.

To my sensitive nose and antennae, the air reeked of machine parts, industrial solvents, and recycled ventilation, but I had seldom smelled anything sweeter.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself staring at the business end of a pulse gun pointed directly at my face. Holding the weapon was a human woman in a captain’s jumpsuit. She had long blonde hair in a braid, the physique of someone who worked hard every day of her life, and a smear of what appeared to be engine coolant on her forehead.

She also had the coldest eyes I had ever seen that weren’t in the mirror looking back at my own.

“Who. The fuck . Are you?” she demanded. Each word promised death.

I recognized the tone, the look, the way she held her gun and the kinds of blades she wore in her thigh holsters. She might be a ship’s captain now, but at some point in the very recent past, we’d been in roughly the same business.

With numbness in my extremities and my brain still muddled by long-term stasis, I couldn’t move fast enough to disarm her—not when her finger was already on the trigger.

On the other hand, she had opened my pod before I asphyxiated and hadn’t shot me on sight. That meant I had a chance to survive.

“I’m Kerian Nos, Captain.” My voice sounded hoarse. I coughed. My throat and lungs hurt from gasping for air. “Permission to come aboard?”

Behind her, through the open door of this shipping container, I saw a large cargo hold full of identical units. I had no idea how I got here, or where here was, other than the amount of cargo, thrumming of engines, and smell of recycled air indicated a freighter traveling at hyperspeed.

I had no memory of where I’d been before this except hazy impressions of sitting in a bar on the planet Erzia and meeting a woman with red hair and a scar on her shoulder. After that…nothing. Not a gods-damned thing.

It occurred to me then, very belatedly, that I was naked.

The sight of my body tended to elicit one of two reactions: amazement or disgust. The captain’s gaze never left my face, however, and I saw no reaction to my body at all—revulsion or otherwise. I might have been as human as her or as bizarre as a Hardanian lava squid or anything in between for all she cared. All she apparently saw was an enemy.

When my cramped and aching wings fluttered and changed colors and my antennae leaned toward the captain, her index finger moved on the trigger. I tucked my wings back into the pod at my sides.

She studied me, reading my eyes, face, and body language in the same way I looked at others: as a trained killer assessing a threat and deciding whether to ask questions and then shoot, or just shoot. “Give me one reason not to kill you now,” she said.

“I’m polite?” I rasped.

She scoffed. “I’ve killed a lot of polite men.”

“Fair enough.” I wanted to massage my aching limbs but figured any movement would get me shot, so I stayed perfectly still. “Well, I didn’t put myself in this pod. I think we’d both like to find out who did, so we can kill them.”

“We are not a we .” Her icy blue eyes narrowed. “If you have no information for me, I see no reason not to shoot you.”

“I didn’t say I have no information,” I countered. “I just don’t know yet who put me on your ship. It’s got to be someone who wanted me gone. Without me, you’ll have no chance to figure it out. I doubt I’m here because of something you did.”

In the middle of that sentence, the shape of her eyes changed. That look activated my every cell and flooded my body with adrenaline.

My offhand comment about not being aboard her ship because of something she’d done had the opposite effect than I’d intended and made her think that was exactly why I was here. She must have already suspected I’d come to kill her.

A millisecond before she squeezed the trigger of her pulse gun, I launched myself out of the pod with a desperate leap. My legs and wings had recovered just enough to help me avoid the blast. The bolt of plasma sizzled under me and hit the stasis pod, leaving a smoking hole right where my chest had been.

I landed on an enormous food waste processing machine next to the pod, flipped off of it, and dropped on top of the captain. As we fell, I grabbed the gun to keep it pointed away from my body. She grunted and fired again when we hit the floor. That shot barely missed my torso. The plasma left a white-hot burn on my left side, singed my wing, and melted through one of the legs of the machine, causing it to wobble.

I smashed the captain’s right hand twice against the container’s floor to loosen her grip. The gun went skidding into a dark corner. She already had a blade in her other hand. With astonishing dexterity, she spun it and drove its point straight up at the center of my primary heart like a highly trained killer. She recognized my physiology and knew where to stab, though my kind were extremely rare. Who was this woman?

Before she could plunge the blade into my heart, I forced the knife’s point away from my chest and toward her throat as I pinned her lower body with my legs and feet.

The captain’s fiery gaze locked on my face as her chest heaved against mine. In this position, my bare cock pressed into the warmth between her thighs.

I couldn’t tell how much of her fury resulted from being pinned down with a knife at her throat versus the unfortunate location of my dick. I wanted to apologize for the latter, but our position was an accident. And it wasn’t like I’d asked to end up on this ship.

She smelled of grease and her ship and hard work and anger. Whether it was my years of army service, or my brief foray into life as a mercenary, or just my own peculiar tastes in women, I found myself breathing in her scent and enjoying it. I liked how she felt beneath me and wished I did not have a knife in my hand.

Unfortunately, judging by her glare, she understood that nothing prevented me from slicing her throat other than my decision not to. I’d bested her in three moves. Given the chance, she’d likely gut me like a Pallasian mettlefish and toss my corpse out the closest airlock.

“I don’t want to kill you,” I said, holding her knife above her jugular. “I just want to find out where I am and why I’m on this ship.”

“Fuck you, Kerian Nos,” she said coldly. “You’d better kill me now or you won’t get another chance.”

Alarms split the air. The cargo bay plunged into darkness except for red emergency lights.

An ominous rumble rolled through the ship. The deck shuddered and heaved violently, throwing us roughly against the base of the food waste processing machine damaged earlier by the pulse gun blast. I took a painful blow to my ribs and lost my grip on the captain. She rolled away from me toward the container door.

The enormous machine’s other front leg buckled. It toppled over, nearly crushing my stasis pod. The pod held up just enough to keep the machine from killing me outright, but I ended up trapped between the machine and what remained of the pod.

From somewhere to my left, the captain cried out as all the small shipping crates stacked on top of and around the machine fell in a potentially deadly avalanche. Her scream cut off abruptly.

My stomach clenched. Oh no .

As the shaking stilled, more emergency lights activated in the bay, bathing my surroundings in hazy red. I belly-crawled from under the machine and spotted the captain pinned under a fallen crate. A rivulet of blood snaked its way across the floor from her body.

“Captain!” I shouted. “Captain, can you hear me?” She did not respond or move.

I got to my feet and staggered to the captain to assess her condition. One of the small supply crates had landed on her chest. The corner of another had apparently struck her in the head, knocked her unconscious, and left a bloody gash on her forehead.

To my relief, she was still breathing, but the sound was rough and labored. The blood on the container floor came from under the crate and not from her head. She likely had severe internal injuries.

My body ached from my time in stasis and hitting the machine, but I was no stranger to agony. I set the pain aside, picked up the crate with care, and dropped it a few feet away from the captain’s unmoving body.

“Emergency alert,” a computerized voice stated in Alliance standard, its voice echoing in the cargo bay. “Impact by debris has caused a hull breach and significant damage. Life support and other crucial systems are failing. Captain, please proceed immediately to your emergency refuge and seal the door. The ship will maintain course to its destination. Repeating. Impact by debris has caused a hull breach and significant damage. Life support and other crucial systems are failing. Captain, please proceed…”

I cursed and crouched to touch the captain’s face. “Captain, can you hear me? Where is the emergency cabin?”

She did not stir.

I had to get her to shelter. Doing so risked compounding her injuries, but it was either move her or leave her here to die.

Would she save my life if the situation were reversed? I wondered. Probably not. She did just try to blow a hole through me. Now I had to keep her from dying or face surviving this calamity and the journey to our unknown destination alone.

And I didn’t even know her name.

As gently as possible, I scooped the captain up in my arms. The scent of her blood filled my nose and made my antennae twitch. The air had already become thin. The hull breach sucked it from the ship much faster than the failing life support system could replace it.

“Computer,” I called, hoping it would respond to my voice. “Where is the emergency refuge?”

“The captain’s cabin is the designated emergency habitat,” the computer said. “Ship’s port side, aft section. Follow the lighted path. Emergency alert. Impact by debris?—”

“I heard you, Computer.” Careful not to jostle the captain too much, I ran from the cargo bay. In the corridor, the red emergency lights flashed in a pattern that directed me to my left. “Computer, what is the captain’s name?” I called.

“The ship Nebula Traveler is under the command of Captain Gen Drae. Please proceed immediately to the emergency cabin and seal the door.”

At a run, I followed the red lights down one corridor, turned right, and down another until they led me to an open doorway and what was unmistakably the captain’s quarters.

The spartan interior matched the utilitarian appearance of the rest of the vessel. The main room contained a wide bunk, desk, chair, and food preparation station. Above the captain’s bunk, a large window showed a view of stars passing at hyperspeed. To my left, an alcove led to the washroom and what appeared to be storage for clothing and other personal belongings.

Carefully, I settled her on the bunk, and then ran back the way I’d come to a door labeled Medical Bay . By the time I reached it, I struggled to get a breath.

I stuffed two emergency medical kits with everything I could get my hands on that I might need to treat the captain’s injuries, plus a couple of large medic’s coveralls I thought I could use as clothing.

My journey back to the captain’s quarters seemed to take four times longer than the trip to the medical bay. I gasped for air and pulled myself along the wall a few steps at a time. Within a minute, I guessed there would be no more air to breathe on the ship other than in the emergency cabin.

Just before I reached the captain, a ship’s maintenance robot with a half-dozen arms rolled past, presumably on its way to the cockpit to take control of the ship. If it recognized me as an intruder, it must not have been programmed to attack.

“Keep us on course and alive,” I gasped.

The ’bot’s head rotated one hundred and eighty degrees to face me as it continued without pausing. “Affirmative,” it said, and disappeared around a corner.

I staggered inside the captain’s cabin and fumbled for the door controls. They were labeled in Raxian—not surprising, since many freighters this size were built in Raxia’s busy shipyards. I pushed the one labeled Emergency Seal , hit Confirm , and collapsed to the deck.

On the bunk, the captain wheezed, her face and lips tinged blue.

The door slid closed, locked, and sealed. Immediately after, I heard and felt a welcome whoosh of air as the cabin pressurized. A ship’s designated emergency habitat typically had its own self-contained life support, climate system, stores of food and water, and power source. If the captain survived her injuries, those resources would keep us alive until we reached the ship’s destination—assuming we suffered no more calamities in the meantime.

A few fortifying gulps of air gave me enough strength to drag the medical bags to the bed. The bunk was surprisingly oversized, apparently made to accommodate species larger than humans. For all her defiance and anger, the captain was about average height for a human female. She appeared small in comparison to the bed and almost fragile—a far cry from the warrior I’d met only minutes before.

In the short time it had taken for me to get to the medical bay and back, her blood had soaked through her uniform and bedding and puddled on the floor beside the bunk. When I ripped her jumpsuit open, I let out a hiss of dismay and anger at the sight of her badly lacerated torso. The crate had come so very close to killing her instantly. Another half-meter to the right, and I could have done nothing to save her. As it was, her survival was anything but certain.

I brushed loose hair back from her face. “Stay alive, Captain,” I said.

Captain Gen Drae. Killer of polite men and stowaways and probably many others besides, who smelled like heaven and home to me.

I dumped the medical bags out on the bunk and went to work, fighting to save the life of the woman who’d just done her damnedest to end mine.