Release (8 page)

“We’re in hyperspace,” said Keirth. “I’m taking you home.”

She dropped her fork onto the table with a clatter. “What?”

She wasn’t pleased? “You need to be back with your family. You’ve been through an ordeal, and they can—”

“I can’t go back there.” She looked furious. “I’m a murderer.”

Keirth sighed. “Risciter might not be dead.”

“He’s dead,” she said. “I killed him.”

Keirth took a bite of his noodles. “Even if you did, you had to. It was self-defense. He was trying to hurt you.”

“No one will believe that,” she said. She picked up her fork again. She twirled noodles around it. “People won’t believe what Risciter was. I didn’t believe it until I witnessed it myself.”

“Well, if he is dead, his body’s on Kush,” said Keirth. “No one needs to know.”

She brought her fork to her mouth. She chewed.

Good. Maybe she was calming down. She’d seen reason. He ate another bite himself. It was really quite tasty. He’d never had dehydrated food this good.

“Even if I could lie about it,” she said, “and I’m not sure I could, I can’t go back. I’m ruined. I’ve been unchaperoned for nearly two days. I’ll never get an offer of marriage. I’ll turn into my Aunt Tildy, drinking myself into a stupor at parties every night.” She shook her head. “No, I’m not going back.”

Oh, this was ridiculous. Keirth got up to get himself a glass of water. “Where else are you going to go?”

“I...” She shook her head.

Hadn’t thought of that, had she? “Do you want some water?”

“Please.”

He set a glass in front of her and took a drink from his own glass. “I’m sorry about what happened. I’m sorry if this has really made a mess of your life. I wish you’d never been on the ship with me. I wish none of this had happened. But you have your family—”

“You don’t know anything about my family.” She sipped at the water. “They’ll be horrified. They’ll tell me I brought this on myself. I did go after Risciter without a chaperone. I’ve destroyed all my prospects, you see. And now I’ll be a burden on the family. Without a husband, I’ll be the spinster everyone has to pass around for the rest of my life.”

“I’m sorry,” said Keirth. He supposed he’d never really thought about how binding the rules were over the nobility.

“What are you going to do?” she asked him.

Keirth’s jaw dropped. “Don’t get any ideas, sweetheart. I may not want to cause you any more harm, but I’m not taking responsibility for you.”

“Of course,” she said, looking down at her noodles.

“After I drop you off, I’m going back to make sure Risciter is actually dead. If he’s not, I’m going to find him and kill him.”

“What did he do to you, anyway? Why do you want to kill him?”

Keirth pushed his noodles around in his bowl. “It was my mother. He...killed her. I was fifteen. I saw it happen. I tried to stop him, but I failed.”

“Oh,” said Ariana. “I’m so sorry. That must have been... He’s really very horrible.” Her voice trembled. “Do you really think he could be alive?”

“I don’t know,” said Keirth. But he hoped so. He’d dreamed of snuffing out Risciter’s life so many times. He didn’t want that taken away from him.

She ate some more of her noodles. “I really am sorry about your mother. And I hope he
is
dead. Because he was...he was evil.” She shut her eyes tight.

Keirth felt for her again. She’d been through so much. He knew that when she’d come out of the woods, her clothes had been askew. He didn’t want to push for information, though. He figured it wasn’t his business. But he knew that for a man like Risciter, raping and killing women were all caught up in his twisted ideas of pleasure. His own mother... Keirth didn’t like to think about that. It had been his mother’s profession. Keirth hadn’t liked it. He’d tried, so hard, adolescent that he was to find some way to get together enough money that she could stop, but he’d never been able to find enough work. He knew was Risciter was capable of. And if he’d...violated this girl, maybe that was why she didn’t want to see her family. Keirth couldn’t imagine what an experience like that would do to someone like her.

“You’re right, though,” she said. “If I don’t go back, I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Should he ask her? How would he put it? What would he say?

“But if I don’t tell them what happened to Risciter, what will I say? What will I say I did? Where will I say I was? Will I tell them you captured me and then you just let me go?” She looked at him. “And what will happen to you? They’ll think you hurt me. They’ll be after you. And you haven’t done anything wrong. Of course you’d want to kill Risciter. Anyone would. He’s...” She grimaced.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Keirth. “I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself, sweetheart.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said.

Keirth had to admit he was glad to see a little of her fire come back. He smiled.

She stood up. “No, there are too many things rolling around in my head. What if Risciter is dead, and they find out I’m a murderer, and they put me in jail? What if Risciter isn’t dead, and he comes back into society like nothing happened? I can’t let him get away with that. And no one would believe...” She gripped the back of her chair. “I need to know. I need to be sure that he’s dead.”

Keirth rubbed a hand over his face. “That’s not going to work.”

“Why not? Turn the ship around. Let’s go back.”

“When we left, you wanted to leave.” Despite feeling sorry for her, she was starting to annoy him again.

“I know that,” she said. “But I was in shock then, and I hadn’t had a chance to think. We need to go back and make sure, like you said.”

“No,” said Keirth. “He took my blaster, and I’m in a stolen ship. This is the last trip I’m taking in it. I’ll put this boat down, and I’ll find another one.”

“Okay,” she said. “So, then we get another ship. And I want a blaster too.”

She really wasn’t getting this, was she? “No, you’re not coming with me.”

She folded her arms over her chest. “Why not?”

Keirth’s mouth worked for a second, but no sound came out. She couldn’t seriously be asking that question, could she? “Because you’re Miss Ariana Gilit, and I’m a criminal, and you’d... It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“But I have to know.”

“So give me your comm number. I’ll send you a message when I’m sure he’s dead.”

“No,” she said. “Let me help.”

“You can’t help,” he said. “You’d just get in the way. Now, I’m sorry for everything. I really am. But I’m taking you home, and that’s all there is to it.”

Ariana surveyed him for several minutes, tilting her chin and looking down her nose. Then she turned and stalked out of the kitchen.

Kerith slumped in his chair. She was angry, but she had to see that it didn’t make any sense for him to drag her across the galaxy. She was a member of the nobility. It wasn’t his problem if she didn’t want to go home. He shoveled more of his noodles into his mouth. She might not like it, but it would be better for her. She’d see.

Suddenly, the ship started to shudder. There was a screeching noise radiating from the walls.

Oh no. Keirth leapt out of his chair and bolted for the bridge.

She was standing over the console.

“What did you do?” he said, even though that sound meant only one thing. He knew exactly what she’d done.

“I disengaged the hyperdrive and put us back in real space,” she said, looking triumphant.

He pushed her out of the way, hitting buttons on the console. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Did you hear that screeching noise when you did that?”

“I guess so.”

He glared at her. “You guess so? You know what that sound was? That was the hyperdrive dying. You burned it out. It’ll have to be replaced.”

“Okay,” she said. “Is that really bad or something?”

“Kind of,” he said sarcastically. “We can’t go faster than light now.” He typed furiously on the console. “Where the hell are we anyway? Are we even back in the sector?” The console blinked the location at him. Damn it. He sat back in his chair. He could strangle Miss Ariana Gilit. He really could.

Chapter Seven

Ariana had her arms wrapped around herself. She stood back from Keirth as he scrambled around the bridge, checking various consoles and muttering to himself. “I’m sorry.”

Keirth glowered at her. “Well, you should be. You wanna know where we are, sweetheart? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

She chewed on her lip. “That’s bad?”

“Of course it’s bad.” Keirth pointed at the console’s screen. “Do you see how many light years we are from the sector?”

She peered at the screen. That was a lot. Oops. She hadn’t meant to screw everything up. “So, um, it would take us hundreds of years to get back to the sector?”

“Yep,” said Keirth. “If we even had enough fuel, which we don’t. Without a hyperdrive, we’re crippled. We can only go to planets close in this system.”

“Are there any close planets?”

Keirth sighed. He threw himself into the captain’s chair. “One. Trioth.”

“I’ve never heard of that planet,” said Ariana. “Is it a colony planet?”

“Not exactly. The people on Trioth have been been there long before we ever settled the sector. They’ve got their own ways of doing things. And I swore to myself I would never go back there.”

“You’ve been there?” asked Ariana.

“Yeah,” said Keirth. “I had a false lead that Risciter was on the planet, maybe a year ago. Let’s just say I didn’t make the greatest impression on the residents of Trioth.”

“Oh,” said Ariana. That wasn’t so good. “So what are we going to do?”

“We don’t have any choices. We have to go to Trioth,” said Keirth.

“But if they don’t like you...”

Keirth threw up his hands. “It’s either float around in space until we run out of fuel and life support and suffocate to death from lack of oxygen or go to Trioth. I pick option B.”

“Okay,” she said. She sat down next to him. “I really am sorry. I didn’t know it would mess up the hyperdrive.”

He glared at her.

All right, then. It was pretty clear that Keirth was not going to be forgiving her anytime soon. Ariana studied her hands, feeling ashamed. She shouldn’t have done what she’d done. Now they were in trouble. But Keirth hadn’t understood that she couldn’t face going back to the sector now. Things were different now that she’d confronted Risciter. She didn’t have any idea what she wanted to do instead, but it was a big universe. Certainly, she had to have some kind of option besides being a spinster for the rest of her life.

Keirth began to pound the keys of the console. “It’s going to take us a day and a half, maybe two days to get to Trioth. I’m setting the course now. There’s no reason for you to hang around in the bridge and screw anything else up.”

“I won’t screw anything up,” said Ariana. “Hey, it’s not like I haven’t ever flown a ship before. I had lessons.”

“And in these lessons they never taught you not to disengage the hyperdrive using a manual override?”

“No,” said Ariana. “I never wanted to switch course in the middle of traveling. What should I have done?”

“Readjust the coordinates, of course,” said Keirth as if she were an idiot. “You can change course in hyperspace, but coming out of it abruptly is bad.”

“Well, I didn’t know where I wanted to go.”

“You should be going back to your family, where you belong. And as soon as I can find some way to ship you back there, I most assuredly will.”

Ariana recognized that she’d screwed up, and that Keirth was less than happy about the situation they were in. But he was wrong to send her back to her family. He didn’t understand. “You don’t know a thing about where I belong. You have no idea how much shame I’d bring on myself if I went back. How embarrassing—”

“Who cares if you’re embarrassed or not when we could die out here in space?”

He had a point. She sighed. “I didn’t think I’d be putting us in danger.”

“Yeah, that’s obvious. Look, I know you’ve just been through hell with Risciter. And that’s awful. But sweetheart, you don’t know the first thing about flying a ship out here in deep space. And as sympathetic as I am, I can’t let the way you’re processing your trauma kill us both.”

Ariana folded her arms over her chest. “I’m sorry,” she said again. He really wasn’t going to let this go, was he?

“I think,” said Keirth, “that it would be better if you’d just leave me alone up here. I don’t really want to talk right now.”

“Fine,” Ariana said, getting up out of her chair. “But you don’t have to be so rude about all of it. It was an accident, you know. I wasn’t purposefully trying to mess things up for you.”

“Maybe not,” said Keirth, “but ever since you walked into my life, it seems like things have been messed up.”

That hurt, for some reason. Keirth was being all high and mighty about her mistake, but his life wasn’t destroyed. He could go back to being whatever lowlife he’d been before he met her. She was ruined. “Well, things are not exactly perfect for me either. I wish I’d never seen your face.” She went to the door of the bridge.

“Right back at you, sweetheart,” said Keirth.

She punched the button to close the door as hard as she could.

* * *

Time passed slowly on the ship. Ariana wanted to try to get some vids on the nets to watch to pass the time, but Keirth informed her that they couldn’t afford anything to divert any fuel from traveling to power the vids. Since they were so far out, it would take a lot of power to communicate with the entertainment feeds in the sector. She had nothing to do, then, except watch old vids that were already stored on the ship. That left with her exactly four episodes of some soap opera she’d watched last year. She watched every episode over and over. By the time a day had passed, she was sick of it.

Keirth wouldn’t talk to her, which was fine with Ariana, because she didn’t want to talk to him anyway. She couldn’t believe he was such a jerk. She hadn’t meant to screw up. He didn’t have any right to carry a grudge for so long.

She tried to make dinner for herself at the end of the first day. It should have been easy. All she had to do was add water and heat up the food. However, she burned it when she left in the heating unit for too long and had to start over. She felt like an idiot. She wasn’t about to ask Keirth for help, even though he’d managed to make perfectly edible food every time he’d tried. She didn’t need his help.