Adrift (9 page)

Jasmine took his hand and squeezed it.
"From what you've told me and from what I just experienced I think that was her mistake, fighting back."

"It was my fault though.
I believed that since I was only half Lyrissian that it would not happen," Norik explained with a cloud of pain in his eyes that made Jasmine squeeze harder.
He turned his head and looked directly into Jasmine's eyes and said, "I never warned her.
She did not know."

Jasmine didn't have a response to that.
Nothing she could say would make any of it go away.
Still, it didn't stop her from trying.
"You're a victim of your biology, Norik," she said, "you just have to accept that there's some good things and some bad things because of it and find a way to deal with it, just like the rest of us."

"And what, Human, do you have to deal with?"
he demanded of her.

"Where to start," said Jasmine and ticked off a list, "Knocked myself up with evidence.
Gonna die in a few days.
I have no parents-"

"You have no parents?"
Norik interrupted her.
Only now did he realize he knew nothing about her.
She had so expertly extracted information from him that he never realized she hadn't given him anything in return.

"Yeah, no parents," she repeated.
"Well, I was born obviously so I had parents but I never knew them.
They supposedly died on a colony during some attack and my grandfather raised me.
He tried his best but the man was 70 when he took me in.
He's still alive actually.
I was going to visit him after this assignment.
I guess that won't be happening now."

Norik watched as her face grew more sullen.
"So we each have only one person left who is close to us?"
he asked.

"And each other," she pointed out.

His eyes locked onto hers.
She looked serious.
He considered that for a second and decided she was right.
In the eyes of his mother's people she was his.
He had her and that meant she had him.
"Why did you not fight back?"
he asked.

Jasmine shrugged.
"Any sane
Human
woman would have fought back and obviously your wife did, so I thought I'd do the opposite and see if something else happened."

Norik nodded, that actually sounded like a logical explanation.

"And I figure if Lyrissian women want to mate, they'd go along with it.
Something tells me they're built a bit better to handle it though," Jasmine said and looked at his neck.

He put a hand to his ridges.
They were hard almost like an exo-skeleton and on a full Lyrissian, both male and female, they would be tougher still.
"Yes," he agreed.
"They are stronger too.
If you had been a full blooded female I probably would not have survived, if you had rejected me."

"It's quite animalistic, isn't it?"
Jasmine asked as she pulled her knees up to her chin.
"Primal.
Is it always like that?"

"No," he said.
"First matings and when the female is at the most fertile time in her cycle."

"Really?"
Jasmine asked.
"How do you know when she's most fertile?"

"Pheromones," Norik explained.
"Every Lyrissian male will know.
Her mate will become territorial."

"Tell me, how did they ever evolve to become a space faring species?"
Jasmine asked, "because it sounds like there's a lot of rutting, posturing and fighting going on here and not much time for iunno, sciences."

"I often wonder the same about Humans," said Norik.

Jasmine stuck her tongue out at him.

"Lyrissian females are fertile once a year," Norik told her.
"Although according to my mother they spend the rest of the year rebuilding after what she refers to as, '
the time all males are more stupid than usual
'."

"I like your mother," Jasmine told him and smiled.

"You would have liked my father as well," Norik told her.
He was heartened, maybe she had forgiven him like she had said.
It did not matter though, he still hated himself.
He had practically raped her and yet they were both sitting on the floor, naked with each other, just talking.
He would have to make it up to her somehow and if she wouldn't take his life then he would have to find a way to save hers.
She wasn't going to die from the cold or go out in a blaze of glory, not if he could help it.

"Was he like you?"
she asked.

"No," said Norik.
He got to his feet and informed her, "I have something to do in engineering."

"Can't it wait?"
she asked him and couldn't help but stare at his genitals, they were now directly in her line of vision.
She wondered if he had ridges in other places she hadn't yet had a chance to see.
"We were just getting to know each other."

"I have to go now," he told her and retrieved some clothing before he left her alone.

Jasmine stared at the empty doorway and blinked.
"That was strange," she said to herself.
Now that he was gone, she didn't have to hide the pain.
Jasmine let a moan escape as she too got to her feet and slowly made her way to the bathroom.
She wanted to see how deep his bite marks went and clean herself up.
That was where it hurt the most.
She wasn't so worried about the ache between her legs, she'd had rough sex before and had endured some really bad sex while on assignment.
Sex with Norik hadn't been bad and after the eyeful she had just gotten of him she now knew why.
She would have to ask him if that served some purpose.
He had scared her though, something he seemed to be quite good at.

She swore when she looked at herself in the mirror.
"I'm going to fucken kill him," she said as she gaped at the marks he had left on her.
The skin was broken on every single one of them and he had drawn blood.
It was as if he had tried to tear chunks out of her.
They would very definitely leave scars.

"Next time I'll disfigure you," Jasmine decided and reached for the injector and vial of drugs to find one for pain relief and to ward off Lyrissian germs.
It took her a few moments to realize she did indeed want there to be a next time, a thought that made her smile.
The only problem was Norik.
She knew he wouldn't want there to be a next time.
He was afraid and Jasmine had already tricked him into it once.
She didn't think he would fall for it a second time.
There was only one other way she could think of, aside from resorting to drugs.
She would have to make him fall in love with her.
Something that didn't seem possible in the few days they had left.

Jasmine frowned and decided she would need to find a way for them both to survive this situation, because he was ribbed for her pleasure and a woman did not let her good time up and die on her.
Nor her something more than a good time, or whatever Norik was.

Norik had gone straight to engineering.
Checked the systems.
Noted they had three more days before they would be out of breathable oxygen, well Jasmine would be.
His lungs could probably process the lower levels of oxygen for another day.
Emergency lighting was still on, which was obvious given that everything was still bathed in red ambient light.
All he needed was to get one system active.
It could be anything, although the communications system or sub-light engines would be preferable.
The latter could possibly also power life support.

He raided engineering.
Emptied cupboards, lockers.
Looked under consoles and behind them until he finally came up with a couple of well used manuals.
Norik decided that the engineers for this ship weren't as top notch as his own, that or his own people also kept tatty copies of manuals that he didn't know about.
It was times like these that made a CO appreciate his engineers a lot more.
Norik resolved to show the Callisto engineers just how much, provided he lived to do so.

Norik eased himself down onto the deck and settled in to learn everything he needed to know about, he glanced at the title of the first one,
Introduction to Xeno-Psychology
.
He groaned and threw the offensive manual across the room.
Luckily the second one did not suffer similar abuse.
He skipped the first few chapters as they explained the theory behind faster than light travel, something he already knew.
After reading the first few paragraphs of chapter four, he decided to go back to the beginning and give himself a refresher.
He had no idea what an Ommerator was and it looked important.

A few hours later found Norik staring at his bare feet.
They were starting to go blue.
More evidence that the ship was bleeding heat and the coldness of space was seeping in to fill that void.
He might be able to breathe in a less oxygen-rich environment but he would feel the cold before Jasmine.
A thought that offered him no comfort.
He couldn't help her if he froze to death.

Norik rolled his head back against the console and took a break from processing information from a subject he had never been interested in but desperately needed to know all about now.
It was suddenly funny to him, how things like that happened.
Never interested in engineering but now his life and another's depended on it.
He was no stranger to people's lives being dependent on him.
People he knew or didn't, it never mattered.
Norik knew his job and he did it well.
He could always be relied on to make the tough decisions, because he was always, in a way, emotionally detached from the situation or the people involved.
Even his crew.
His crew were a tight-knit bunch and might argue were close to him, but he had put up a wall long ago.
Now that he thought about it, it was more like a silo than a wall.
He had completely isolated himself from everyone he knew, even his mother.
It had started as a wall at one point but when his father had died, it grew.
Lilah had snuck around it when he hadn't been looking.
After Lilah, it had become a silo.
And now there was Jasmine.
If he wasn't careful she might try to find a way in as well.
He wasn't sure how, maybe she'd dig a hole or come in through the roof.
She was so stubborn that he was sure she would find a way.
He decided he needed to dig a moat and stop thinking about the stupid analogy and focus on saving her life so he could get her out of his.
The sooner the better, before she stripped naked again and swam across his damn moat.

"I need sharks," he muttered.

Jasmine had turned the ship over.
She had discovered some things that could come in very handy including more drug vials, bandages and emergency rations.
The most important find had been the EV suits, however they all suffered from a few structural problems.
Missing tank, missing helmet, punctured tank, ripped suit.
If they could piece the intact parts together then they would have one whole EV suit.
One was better than none, but it wasn't two and that was the number Jasmine desperately needed.

After she had dumped everything in their bunkroom, Jasmine found herself outside the door to the other room.
The one where the dead people slept.
She hadn't thought to search their bodies at the time but, in an effort to leave no stone unturned, it seemed like a good idea.
Who knew what people carried about their person.
Weapons, food.
money chips, Identicards, a few days supply of air, maybe a spare ship or escape pod.
Wishful and unrealistic thinking, but still, it gave her something to do.

Jasmine opened the door and was immediately assaulted by the stench of several bloodied and decomposing corpses.
"Not such a good idea," she gagged.
Jasmine breathed through her mouth, squared her shoulders and quickly walked into the room.
She closed the door behind her so the foul smell wouldn't infiltrate the rest of their breathable air.

She searched quickly and emptied pockets without looking at faces or their injuries, so she wouldn't bring up her last meal of emergency rations.
Everything she found went onto a blanket in the centre of the room and so far it was what she had expected to find.
That was until she came to Stompy's headless body.
The man who had promised to do vile things to her, who had wanted to kill her and Norik.
What she pulled from his pockets stunned her.
The money chip contained an insane denomination.
He had been paid handsomely to carry out this job.
More than she had made in the past five years and being an undercover investigative journalist paid well.
That information worried her.
If the General was throwing that kind of money around to get what she had taken, then he probably wouldn't stop there.

Jasmine turned Stompy over and felt around for any secret pockets.
She found another two knives, smaller but no less deadly.
Jasmine tucked one into her own boot, along with the money chip.
"Baby needs clothes," she muttered to herself, "Daddy might as well contribute."

She was about to move onto Sulky's body when she thought she heard something.
Jasmine froze and closed her eyes to help locate the faint beep.
It seemed like forever before she heard it again but it had definitely come from Stompy.
She frowned at him and patted the body down again.
Still nothing.
There it was again, another beep.
She stared at his boots and could have kicked herself.
He had a secret compartment in the heel just like she did, only instead of his containing a weapon, it contained a small communications device.
It was kinetically powered and could in theory last forever, except it hadn't moved for a while, hence the warning beep.
Jasmine fell back onto her haunches and shook the device vigorously.
When it had powered up she activated it and her hope that she could use it to call for help vanished.
It was limited to only one receiver and presumably that was the General and she couldn't call him for help now, could she.

"Great, die in a few days or die sooner and more violently," Jasmine sighed.
She refused to cry, it wouldn't help.