Starbound: Eleven Tales of Interstellar Adventure Read online

“I’ve made your favorite,” Haliene said cheerfully, setting a plate on the table in front of her.

  It was an omelet. Aja hated eggs. She had always hated eggs.

  But Pa used to eat omelets every single morning before going out to work the farm.

  Aja’s mouth was incredibly dry as she sat down, scooting her chair in so that her belly was pressed to the hard edge of the table.

  “Thanks, Ma,” she said.

  Her mother wasn’t eating, as she never seemed to do these days. She stood beside the sink. The basin was filled with soap and dishes—far more dishes than a single omelet should have required to make.

  “You’re welcome,” Haliene said, a strange light in her eyes. “Is it good?”

  Aja forced herself to take a bite. The eggy texture almost made her gag. “Much better than anything I ate in the military.” That much was true: the Alliance hadn’t fed its drivers particularly well, and even the worst meals made from farm fresh supplies were superior to whatever they’d dished up at the Station.

  She made herself eat another bite, and another, while her mother watched.

  Haliene probably didn’t even realize that she had made Aja a meal that only Pa used to eat.

  “You’ve gotten mail,” Haliene said. “Notification about it popped up this morning.” She gestured to Aja’s handheld mochila, where it was charging on the counter. The alert light was flashing.

  Aja choked down yet another bite. “Who from?”

  “Didn’t look. You’re a grown girl now. Wouldn’t be right, getting into your mail.”

  Something thumped against the other side of the wall to Aja’s bedroom. The wall separating closet from kitchen.

  Aja stood so quickly that her chair fell backwards.

  “I forgot something,” Aja said.

  Haliene looked alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

  Aja cast her mind about for an excuse. “The cows. The fence. I saw a hole in the fence last night. I need to fix it before I do anything else.”

  “Oh.” Haliene’s disappointed eyes fell to Aja’s plate, where half an omelet remained.

  That sad look was too much for Aja.

  “I’ll be working most of the day,” Aja said. She kissed her mother on the cheek and took the mochila from the counter. “Don’t wait for me to have dinner.”

  * * *

  The dragonet simply could not sleep in Aja’s closet anymore. It was far too big for a space so small. And Aja couldn’t bear the thought of Haliene sleeping only two doors away from the offspring of a murderous race.

  She took the dragonet out on the Gelding to inspect the fence. The Gelding was a small vehicle designed for flight at low altitudes; it was little more than a speeder which Aja straddled, leaning her chest forward on the pommel so that she could reach the reins. The dragonet settled on the posterior of the Gelding, large enough now that its tail drooped nearly to the ground as Aja skirted across the fields toward the fence.

  She hadn’t been lying about the fence. It truly needed repairing in a couple places, representing hours of work to come. Days, perhaps.

  Aja despaired after her initial inspection, zooming around the perimeter on the Gelding.

  Okay. The fence needed repairs in more than a “couple” places.

  The Skytoucher farm hadn’t been doing well in recent years. Things had gone downhill since they’d lost Pa to the Tractor crash. Aja had kept up as much as she’d been capable in the days that followed, but then she’d gone into the military, leaving Haliene with no help but a couple of lazy farmhands.

  It seemed like nobody had maintained a single thing around the farm since Aja’s departure. Not the fence, not the weedy edges of the property, not even the Gelding that bucked between her legs.

  Aja stopped at a remote stretch of fence separating their property from the Volkmann farm to the north. It was so far into the mountains that neither farming family had use for it; the ground was both uneven and rock-hard, not to mention barren of the kind of plants that livestock liked to eat. It was too difficult to reach in order to haul feed out, too. So mostly it was empty. Private.

  Perfect place to take a dragonet who was the size of a small cow.

  “Here we are.” The engine of the Gelding made her steel-toed boots hum.

  She reached up to pull the dragonet down, but it flared its wings and leapt past her. It drifted to the earth.

  Aja felt a little bit sick, watching that thing trundle about on feet tipped with diamond-sharp claws. It stuck its nose between the roots of trees. It snuffled loose patches of dirt. It trilled questions at piles of boulders that had no response.

  It was so big.

  “I was thinking you might be more comfortable out here somewhere,” Aja said. “We’ll be out of mice soon, and there’s other stuff for you to snack on this way. Rabbits and the like.”

  The dragonet snuffled around in the grass, leaving claw imprints where it walked. It was too interested in inspecting its new territory to listen to her.

  Well enough. Aja had other worries.

  She sat on a fence post and activated the mochila.

  The message was from Emalkay. Aja wouldn’t have minded going the rest of her days without hearing from her fellow driver, especially since his enthusiastic news today was about a lucrative assignment he’d been given in the Expanse. Something low-risk that would have him out of the core planets for a solid three years, and only returning with fat purses.

  “Bully for you,” she muttered, keeping the dragonet in the corner of her eye. It was now nosing through the saddlebags on the Gelding.

  Emalkay’s prerecorded message went on, unresponsive to Aja’s negativity. “Since I’ll be out of the system for a few years, I want to see you before my assignment begins. Thank you properly for everything that happened during the raid on Drakor III. Buy you dinner, maybe? I’ll be on New Dakota on the seventh, so I’ll swing by that farm you always talked about.”

  Aja’s thought process came to a screaming halt.

  She was momentarily stuck on the repulsive idea of Emalkay buying her dinner. But her mind jittered past that to the truly alarming news he’d delivered.

  He was going to be on New Dakota soon.

  The man who had slaughtered the dragonet’s nestmates.

  If he saw the dragonet, he’d surely report it.

  “No,” she said.

  A crunching noise made her gaze snap up to the dragonet. It had pulled a large screwdriver out of the saddlebags and was gnawing on it.

  “No!” Aja said, louder than before. She set the mochila aside and leaped to the ground. “What are you doing, dragonet?”

  It trundled away with the screwdriver, trying to keep her from prying the tool out of its mouth. Aja leaped onto the dragonet, pinned its head under her arm, and wrenched the tool free.

  Too late. The metal bar already had deep tooth marks, deep enough to render the tool useless.

  The dragonet was teething.

  “Good Lords,” Aja groaned.

  It gave her big, innocent eyes as its tongue slid out of the corner of its beak to loop around the screwdriver and tug it back into its beak. She released her grip. The dragonet happily hunkered down with the screwdriver and continued to chew.

  “That can’t taste any good.”

  The dragonet chewed hard enough to snap the metal.

  Aja sighed, dropping to sit beside the dragonet’s flank. When her side brushed up against its scaly ribs, she could feel a humming inside, very much like a purring cat. The dragonet rolled onto its back at the contact, head falling onto her lap. It gazed at her adoringly as it continued to chew one of her tools.

  “Yes, I get it, you’re cute.” She scratched its throat. The purring intensified. “Don’t think I’ll let you eat more screwdrivers, though. I’m not flush with cash. Stick to chewing on farm pests, please.”

  Its tail flicked her chin gently. Aja couldn’t help but chuckle.

  There was no way that she could let Emalkay visit the farm
. He couldn’t know what she was doing.

  And she couldn’t let him report the dragonet to the Alliance.

  * * *

  Aja worked on the fence through the day, keeping an eye on the dragonet to ensure it wouldn’t chow down on anything else she needed. It didn’t. It did, however, spend a lot of time dragging large rocks around in its mouth—much larger than Aja would have ever expected a dragonet of its size to shift—so that it could pile them around the base of a tree.

  By the time the sun was touching the horizon, the dragonet had constructed something that resembled an igloo made of stone.

  “Impressive,” Aja said, wiping her forehead dry with the back of her arm.

  The dragonet shoved the shards of metal remaining from the screwdriver into the rocks, then wiggled in after them. It had made a den.

  Aja crouched in front of the opening, peering inside to watch as the dragonet walked in a tight circle, then flopped down in comfortable shade.

  “I have to go back to the farm,” she said. “Ma’s gonna be wondering where I am. Lords, I’m not looking forward to talking to her.” Not just about Emalkay’s impending arrival, but about anything. The idea of suffering another minute of the protracted silences they’d shared was excruciating.

  The dragonet moved forward, as if to follow. Aja put her hand in front of the entrance to stop it.

  “I can’t let you get discovered. You’ve got to stay out here. Don’t fly anywhere. Don’t come out if you see anyone—not that anyone should come out this way, I don’t think. Stay hidden until I come back for you, okay?”

  It trilled and looked questioning.

  “Soon,” Aja said. “I’ll be back soon, little dragonet.”

  She hesitated to leave.

  “I need a name for you. I can’t keep calling you ‘dragonet.’ Do you have a preference?”

  Of course, the dragonet couldn’t respond. It likely wouldn’t have bothered even if it had been capable; it was merrily chewing on the screwdriver again.

  Aja rested her chin on her fist, watching the happy dragonet in her new lair.

  She used to read adventure books when she was a little girl. None about dragons—by the time she’d learned to read, they were already the enemy, and so they hadn’t been popular as heroes in fiction—but she recalled one about a great serpent who had driven among the stars with hot rods. His name had been Chromearrow.

  That was what she suggested. “Chromearrow?”

  The dragonet lifted its head. Its tail flicked with pleasure, eyes warming. It liked the name.

  “Chromearrow,” she said. “It’s from a story. I’ll read it to you another time.” She surprised herself by saying it. The idea of reading books to a monster was ridiculous, no matter how cute the monster was. But even more surprising, Aja truly wanted to do it. “I’ll bring the book with me when I come back.”

  The dragonet continued to chew on the screwdriver.

  “Stay here,” Aja said again, more pointedly than before.

  It ignored her.

  Worried about leaving it alone—but far more worried about Emalkay’s impending arrival—Aja picked up her mochila, boarded the Gelding, and buzzed back to the farmhouse.

  * * *

  Riding the Gelding was unlike driving a Carriage, or even the Chariots of her youth. It was a thing that she straddled like a horse and left her exposed to the elements, meaning that she couldn’t climb higher than a few feet above the surface of New Dakota. The speed was nice, but it made her miss breaking out of atmo desperately. She missed the days of calculating apsis and periapsis and doing hard burns to leave orbit.

  It had been easy to push such longing from her mind in recent days. Care and feeding of the little dragonet—Chromearrow—had been distracting enough.

  Now that Emalkay was planning to visit, she could think of little else.

  She didn’t miss life being deployed with the man. She just missed deployment.

  More than that, she missed thinking that deployment was the right thing to do.

  Haliene was waiting outside the barn when Aja skidded to a stop on the Gelding. She dismounted, heart speeding. Haliene had seldom been outside the farmhouse since Aja’s arrival, and Aja felt like she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.

  “You’re due a visitor,” Haliene said.

  “I know, Ma. I was coming this way to tell you that Emalkay let me know on the mochila. Said he’d be here the seventh.”

  “It’s the seventh today. Got word from Intercolonial Transport that he’ll be in next hour.”

  Aja had been halfway to the farmhouse. Her mother’s words stopped her cold.

  Today is the seventh?

  “Lords,” she said. Time had really run away with her.

  Emalkay was going to be there that day.

  “What are you doing with a young gentleman paying visits, hmm?” Haliene asked. “Now, I know it’s no business of mine, but—”

  “We were deployed together,” Aja interrupted, preventing her mother from taking that train of thought somewhere gross. “He’s about to be deployed again. He wants to see me first. And he didn’t ask my opinion. I’m not keen on it.”

  Haliene twisted her apron strings together. A little of the life had faded out of her face, as though Aja had just kicked dirt over a dream. “Ah.”

  “I’m not seeing him,” Aja said decisively. “I’ll go to town and send him back.”

  “You can’t do that. It’s not how we treat guests.”

  “Uninvited ones, we do.” She remounted the Gelding. There was only an hour before he arrived. Thal be blessed. If she’d been a little slower coming home, she might have gotten to the farmhouse after him.

  He might have gone looking for her in the fields.

  Emalkay could have seen the dragonet. Chromearrow.

  “Aja, please,” Haliene said. “Can we talk?”

  Aja kicked the spurs. The engine groaned, spewing dust from under the thrusters. “I’ll be back to put the farm to bed.”

  It looked like Haliene had more to say, but she simply closed her mouth and nodded.

  * * *

  Aja tore down the lonesome dirt roads between farms. Even at maximum speed, the lights marking town were slow to grow before her, and the Skytoucher farm was one of the less remote settlements on New Dakota.

  Though she was the only one on the ground crazy enough to plow through the absolute blackness of New Dakota night, there were others in the sky, burning hard as they entered atmo. A mighty transport, probably a Bus, was streaking red against the navy-and-diamond sky.

  Emalkay would like as not be on that Bus.

  “Moron,” she muttered to herself, bending lower to the pommel of the Gelding. “Stupid idiot moron.” Aja generally had reserved such words for Emalkay in the past, but she wasn’t certain that she didn’t refer to herself this particular time.

  What had she done to make the man think she had anything but disdain for him? She’d clubbed him on Drakor III to prevent him from murdering Chromearrow, Lords above. Sure, Em thought he’d been struck by falling debris, but that had only been her cover story.

  He’s dumb enough to believe you saved him, she thought to herself.

  I beat the half-wits out of him! I don’t even like him!

  He doesn’t know that.

  The argument with herself was going nowhere.

  She arrived at the Bus station among the sleepy town of North Fargo. There were a few stores around, a couple of restaurants, nothing that was open so late. The towns on agrarian colonies were only intended to smooth delivery of supplies and export of goods. They were not destinations for locals or travelers.

  Still, there was definitely a Bus landing, its thrusters firing and legs deploying. It made a steady touchdown on the concrete pad. In North Fargo, there was no gangway for helping people off of the door high in the passenger compartment, so an employee of the Bus station was hurrying to push wheeled stairs to the side among the smoke.

 
; Aja momentarily entertained the idea of clubbing that employee so that he wouldn’t be able to let the passengers out.

  The moment passed. Emalkay appeared at the top of the stairs. He descended.

  “Aja,” he said, opening his arms as if for an embrace.

  She glowered at him. “What are you doing here?”

  His smile faded. It made his young but sagging face look even more pathetic. Aja had always thought Emalkay bore more than a passing resemblance to those dogs with the long ears and stubby legs. “You must have gotten my letter on the mochila.”

  “I didn’t invite you.” Aja pointed to the Bus, from which people continued to disembark. There weren’t many. Few people ever got off New Dakota and even fewer ever returned. “Go back.”

  “I don’t have enough time to go anywhere else.”

  “Shame,” she said.

  “Your mother invited me to stay on the farm.” He hitched his bag higher on his shoulder. “I’ve nowhere else to go.”

  “She did what?”

  “Is that your Gelding? Lords, I haven’t seen anything so old except in museums!” Emalkay ran over, nimbly shedding Aja’s rejection.

  All Aja could do was stare.

  Haliene had invited him. Emalkay. To her farm.

  Where Chromearrow was hiding.

  * * *

  Waking up to find Haliene serving Emalkay in the kitchen was as close to a nightmare as Aja had experienced since departing Drakor III. He was eating one of those rubbery omelets with great enthusiasm. “This is great, Mrs. Skytoucher!” he said, shoveling it into his mouth. “They never serve anything so good to us in the Alliance!”

  Haliene was glowing. “So I’ve been told.” Her glow faded when she saw Aja brooding in the hallway. “I’ve made breakfast for you too.”

  Emalkay looked over his shoulder. “Aja! Good morning!”

  The greeting made Aja’s spine stiffen. “I’ve work to do.” She stuffed her feet into her muddy work boots. “Nothing good about that. It’s just life.”

  “Look at you, dressed like a farmer,” Emalkay said. “Funny seeing you like this. I’m used to all the, you know, body armor. Helmets. Plasma cannon. Pew, pew.”