Last Call (Stranded in the Stars Book 1) (4 page)

Her breathing was soft and even so he jumped down silently, pulling out a syringe-like device strapped to his hip. The space was relatively small and it glowed with a dim indigo blue throughout. He heard the small water source tucked into a corner and walked over to it to lean over the still pool.

The light originated from deep beneath the glassy water, he kneeled down and reached out. The water was cool to the touch and relatively clean. It came from a spring deep underground.

Jack turned toward the girl sleeping on the ground, monitoring her physiological patterns to ensure he wasn’t going to wake her up. She was facing away from him.

Quietly, he brushed her hair to the side and pricked the skin behind her ear; her body flinched slightly from the sting before it settled back into sleep. The syringe gave her a weak sedative just in case things went sour.

He pricked his finger with the same syringe and ran a diagnosis, finding nothing life-threatening. Afterwards, he had his nanocells clear her out of his system. She was malnourished and was on a terrible diet but nothing indicated illness or disease. Jack couldn’t see what she looked like accurately in the dark even though he had night vision and his need to see her increased with his disappointment.

He turned to leave for his ship but stopped short, looking around her home again, noticing she had very little. He could give her so much with so few of his supplies. He reached down and grabbed a threadbare cloth and draped it over her form before turning back to climb out of her space.

Without giving it another thought, he successfully reconnected to the underground telecom channels as he jogged back to his ship and processed all the new information he could find on Larik; working on his mission for the remainder of the night.

***

Jack was getting annoyed. After spending the remainder of the rest cycle monitoring channels which ended up being a waste of time- he had no new leads.

It was light out now. The sun had risen several hours prior and was going to reach its zenith soon and since he rose that morning, he had been repairing his ship, willing his body to replenish so the repairs would go faster.

There hadn't been any sign of the female since yesterday evening. His sensors told him she had yet to leave her cave; that her breathing was even. He figured she was a late sleeper or the sedative he gave her had been too strong.

Frustrated in more ways than one, he focused on the job before him, scorching off a damaged part of his impulse drive. The outside only had cosmetic damage, it was the interior that was knocked up.
My poor baby
. He patted the smooth metal. Soon he would have the palladium circuitry exposed to work on. The process would take some time but he would get it done. It wasn't like it was his first time performing surgery on the flyer.

Putting his laser gun aside, he removed another panel of the outer shell, placing it with the rest that came before; getting his first view of what awaited him. The circuits didn't look damaged. They just appeared to be burned out. If he wasn't a Cyborg that could connect with machines he may have never known there was problem here.

Reaching in and pinching one of the square blue and red circuits between his finger and thumb, he began to directly transfer nanobionics into it. The bionics would heal the circuits as if it were a bio-organic organism.

He used those same nanobots to infect, take over, and destroy machines as well. The only drawback was how long the process would take. Jack only had so many nanobots that he could use at a given time until his body needed to create more.

A ship as advanced as his baby, he looked lovingly at it, had a lot of variable chemical reactions his bots would have to morph and adapt to.

Glancing up, the sun was now directly above him and pulling away from the impulse drive he scanned for the female's presence again– she was moving, and in his direction. Smirking, he shed his chest armor, unstrapping
the weapon belts attached across his back and chest, only leaving his bicep straps in place.
He was a scarred motherfucker.
He had white streaks crisscrossing all over his body. Most women were disturbed by them while others, the wanton ones who had seen him naked, always wanted to add more.

He wanted to know how the wild girl would react to them. Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he went back to work.

***

Allie woke up sore and dirty, gingerly opened up her eyes while sitting up. She had passed out again on the floor– never making it to her bedding in the corner. Dust specks floated in the air around her, silhouetted against the ray of light beaming through the cave entrance. She could tell it was late morning.

Moving over to the spring, she quickly submerged her body in the water, scrubbing the dirt and sweat that caked her skin; dunking her head under several times to rinse her hair. Satisfied, she got out to pick up her leather rags and dress and wrapped the frayed cloth around her breasts, around her waist and between her legs, and several times around her feet.

She stuffed a handful of roots into her mouth and climbed out of her cave. Eagerly jogging in the direction of the newcomer while absently scratching her neck.
Please let him still be here.

The anxiety she felt didn't last long when she rounded a boulder and saw the glint of chrome in the distance. Moving closer, Allie noticed the hatch to the ship was open, open and unattended and that the dagger from last night was still hilt deep in the ground.
      

There were a guns, body armor, and straps piled up next to it. She peered around warily before crouching low to the ground to take a closer look. The male's footprints were scattered all along the side of his ship, especially near an open metal plate.

He must have been at it all morning. Where is he now?
There were fresh footprints leading away from the vessel but she couldn't be sure if he was actually gone.

Deciding to follow them for a short while, she soon realized he really had left as they kept going out into the distance. She took the opportunity that this presented, turned back towards the ship and ducked through the hatch.

If I'm quick enough, I can find supplies and be gone before he returns.
She steeled her nerves and ventured forward.

Immediately upon entering the haul, the atmosphere changed. Inside the temperature was comfortable where just moments ago it had been a dry, heavy heat. The air, he sniffed, smelled clean and metallic.

She looked around curiously while proceeding forward as everything was sleek, dark, and pristine. Unlike her cave dwelling in every way, there were no dust specks floating in the air.
I'm the dirtiest thing in this place. He's going to know someone had been here.

Moving forward with apprehension, she entered a large round room.

There was a circular table directly in the middle and central to that was a floating planet. Awed, she moved closer to examine it. The planet was a beautiful holographic sphere with equal parts blue and green. Thinking to herself,
this must be a planet with oceans and vegetation;
and Earth came to mind. Allie had learned of her ancestors home world while part of the Trentian colony. One of the elder women, whose mate had long since passed, had known people from Earth.

Allie didn't know where her ancestors came from because she never knew her family. Her mother’s mate had dropped her off at an orphanage before she could remember as it was prudent to do so at the colony. Females were to be monitored and protected and one man wouldn't have been able to do it alone.

She looked straight ahead past the floating planet and found the cockpit, she could even see the outside, the hot barren landscape, through the viewing screens. Two symmetrical corridors were located on either side of her.

If this room was ever to be closed off and she spun in place for several seconds there would have been no way to tell which door led to what area. She knew she had gotten distracted and quickly picked the path to her right, hoping to encounter the medical bay or lavatory.

Instead she found herself in a small, enclosed space that housed soft white walls with pillow-like protrusions spaced out. She reached out to touch one, her finger softly indenting into the cushioned frame. She looked around at the padded room as even the ceiling resembled the walls and the only abnormality was the hardness of the floor.

There were no windows and the only light came from the small rim of a soft white circular orb above her head. Allie didn’t like the strangeness of the room nor the stark, austere nature of it. The space reminded her of nightmarish past events; she turned around to leave.

As she left the room she heard heavy footsteps, the noise shocking her system. In a frightened rush she quickly went back into the obscure padded room and hid next to the entrance, her body flush with the soft wall. She placed a hand over her mouth, keeping herself from gasping out a sound as her other hand gripped her wrist to keep it in place.

The footsteps got louder as they entered the center of the ship. She heard a shuffling and then a muffled clang as if something had been dropped. Her eyes closed as a chair from the middle table scraped across the floor. The next few sounds were indiscernible. The man was doing something at the table.

Allie felt like she had been standing there, holding her breath for what seemed like forever before she heard the man get up and move away, his footsteps receded further into the ship. She softly let go of her breath and peeked around the corner. The room before her was empty but the table was not.

It was covered with metal bits and tools; most likely pieces from the ship or items used to repair it she concluded. Shuffling silently into the room and placing her body close to the outer walls, she kept a watchful eye toward where the footsteps had disappeared to. She stood there for a minute, listening for any sound that he may come back and when it remained silent, she silently approached the table to examine the items he had dropped.

Everything before her looked foreign. She wasn’t about to swipe something that may alert him of her presence and the items on the table looked important enough to not be messed with. There was even a small gun of some sort, running her fingers over the chilled silvery metal. She could see the reflection of the holographic planet on it before dropping her hand away.

If I stay any longer, I will get caught.
Taking her chances, she quietly walked back toward the hatch, holding her breath the entire time.

When she stepped back into the arid heat and the crunch of dirt sounded beneath her feet, she ran away from the ship, back toward the safety of her cave
.

The beautiful gun was now a deadly reminder imprinted into her mind.

***

Jack learned a lot about the girl when she didn’t snatch any of the precious things he had left on the table. Some of the machinery he had placed out was priceless. The gun, one of his most coveted and prized possessions was made from Pyrizian rock. He had also left out communication devices, schematics, tools, and medicinal products and the girl had snatched none of it.

Instead, as he followed her trail, she had gone into the brig. He could still see the small finger indent she had left in the wall. It looked queer amongst the bright austere walls.

So she wasn’t here to pillage my valuables
. But she was willing to invade his space and encroach on a battle flyer.

He now knew the girl had no idea that he was a Cybernetic organism.

The next day he purposely left the hatch open but instead of placing random valuables out, he created food from his replicator and opened his supply unit. He placed the breaded rations on a random panel in his cockpit and then left his ship, curious to see what the girl would do with the sustenance.

He approached the burned out circuitry that was now slowly repairing itself and transferred more of his nanobots into it, he did this everyday to try and speed up the process but his patience was running thin. Every hour he was stuck here was another hour Larik had to find a hole to hide in. He ground his teeth before forcing his body to shut down his frustration.

After he finished up, feeling slightly faint from losing so many nanobots in such a short amount of time, he walked away from his ship to monitor the girl at a distance.

It didn’t take long for her to appear, her movements and body language bolder as she began to feel more comfortable with the daily routine. He watched, pleased, as she tracked his footsteps again.

He still couldn’t make out definitive features about her but he did notice her long golden brown hair and her small frame. She had stopped to stare at his prints fading into the distance, to where he was located now but she didn’t move. Instead she stared in his direction as if she could tell he was there.

What the hell?
Jack now felt he had to be the one to remain frozen and even out his breathing; trying not to alert her.

He watched in frustration as she turned around and left.

Chapter Five:

---

A
llie had returned the next day, not to explore his ship but to confront the strange man. It had taken her hours to build up the courage but as she approached the ship, he wasn’t there, his footprints leading out into the landscape again.

Why did he keep going out into a wasteland that had nothing? She had gotten an uneasy feeling, losing all of her courage in the process and quickly left. She hadn’t seen him since that first day and now desperately wanted to look at him again. The fact that the scenario happened twice now felt like a sign that she should be wary.

I haven’t survived this long without listening to my sense.

She returned to watch him the following several days but had never found him at the ship again. She could tell progress was being made on the repairs, the plating around the damage had begun to change and some of the discarded plating on the ground had been removed and reused on the area where the long jagged laceration had been. The worst of it was covered up now.