Starflight (10 page)

Sweet mother of God.
It tasted like death.

When her eyes and mouth watered in protest, she reminded herself that she couldn’t let Doran win. She had to eat it. She tried to swallow three times, but her gag reflex kicked in and forced her to spit the mouthful into her bowl. The bite landed with a plop that splashed her cheeks.

The table erupted in laughter, and Kane walked to the stove to fill a new bowl for her. “I made extra, just in case,” he said. He handed the porridge to Doran, who set it in front of her with a grin that made her want to slap him so hard his grandkids would feel it.

“Sorry it wasn’t to your liking,” Doran told her.

“That’s all right,” Solara said coolly while wiping her mouth. “I didn’t hire you for your cooking skills. I’ll find other ways to make you useful.”

Cassia snorted from across the table and gave a knowing wink. “I’ll bet you will.”

Solara’s face blazed. She couldn’t shake her head fast enough. “No, that’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah,” Doran echoed while pointing back and forth between him and Solara. “There’s nothing—”

“Zero judgment.” Cassia flashed a palm. “Hookups are the best way to fight transport madness. If you don’t rev up those endorphins, the lack of sunlight will scramble your brain.”

With a sardonic twist of his lips, Kane leaned an elbow on the table. “So
that’s
why you keep a meathead at each port. I thought you just had bad taste.”

Cassia swiveled around so quickly she smacked herself in the eye with her own dreadlocks. “Don’t talk to me about taste, you wharf-licker!” she yelled. “Your last girlfriend couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

“Well, your last boyfriend had a nose like a weasel.”

“Maybe it wasn’t his nose that made him special.”

Kane made a face. “Thanks for the visual. Excuse me while I vomit to death.”

“Enough!” barked the captain, and Acorn dived headfirst into his pocket. “If you two can’t behave, I’ll send Renny to make the Pesirus delivery.”

Cassia gasped and sat bolt upright. “Pesirus? That’s today?”

The captain pointed his spoon at her. “Only for good little ship hands.”

Cassia and Kane turned to each other with manic smiles, argument forgotten, as they bounced in their seats and squealed like children. They drew a joint breath and yelled, “Hellberries!”

Solara shared a questioning look with Doran.

“Those two are weird,” he whispered behind his hand.

She nodded. For once, they agreed on something.

Cassia linked her arm through Kane’s as if she hadn’t just screamed in his face and called him a wharf-licker. “You should come with us,” she said to Solara. “Your servant, too. It’ll be fun.”

The confusion must have shown on Solara’s face because Renny explained, “Pesirus hosts a hellberry festival each spring. We have a contract to deliver cane syrup from Orion.”

“They add syrup to the wine,” Kane added. “To take the edge off. You can drink it straight, but it’s a donkey kick to the mouth.”

“Hellberry wine,” Cassia said, going dreamy. “It’s spicy and sweet and makes you warm all over. There’s nothing like it.”

The captain warned, “Your delivery comes first, then payment, then fun. And take it easy on the drink, you two. We don’t want a repeat of last year.”

His warning made Solara wonder what had happened last year. When she asked them, Renny and the captain grinned but said nothing while Cassia and Kane blushed ten shades of crimson. They avoided each other’s eyes and then suddenly “remembered” they had chores to do. Within seconds, they were gone.

“Must’ve been good,” Solara mused as she watched them retreat. She knew the dash-of-shame when she saw it. “Or hilariously bad.”

Renny laughed. “I didn’t get a ringside seat—”

“Neither did I,” the captain interrupted. “Thank the maker.”

“—but I imagine it was both.”

Solara found herself wearing a smile. There was a real festival nearby, with food and drinks and games. She weighed the risk of appearing in public against the rewards of sunshine and spiced berries. In the end, sunshine won the battle. “Sounds fun. I’ll come along.”

Doran nudged her with his elbow.

“Doran, too,” she added. As much as she dreaded spending the day with him, it wasn’t smart to leave him alone. He might find a way to use the ship’s com system to alert the Enforcers. “He’s no engineer and his cooking may kill us, but even
he
can haul a few crates of syrup.”

Four hours and two solar systems later, they stood in the bottom-level cargo hold and craned their necks to stare at a mountain of storage containers marked
PESIRUS FEST
.

“A
few
crates?” Doran remarked. “How much wine can one colony drink?”

Solara had to agree. Judging by the amount of syrup to deliver, the festival must’ve been more popular than she’d expected. In that case, maybe leaving the ship wasn’t a wise move. She bit her lip, peering out the open door of the cargo hold to the rolling landscape beyond.

The view was nearly too gorgeous to believe.

Pure yellow sunlight gleamed above a field of shorn blue-green grass dotted with lavender wildflowers. The terraformed colors weren’t quite right, as if someone had overbrightened the saturation on a telescreen. But after a month of space travel, her body craved fresh breezes and warm sunrays more than her next breath. She caught herself leaning toward the exit ramp.

She was
so
going.

“The job’s easy,” Kane said, thumbing toward a wheeled pallet parked outside. “We just stack everything on there, then strap it down and use the auxiliary shuttle to haul it to the fairgrounds.”

“Easy,” Doran repeated with a scowl. But he didn’t spend another second complaining. He grabbed the first crate and walked outside, then double-timed it back for another.

Apparently he was anxious for fresh air, too.

Kane pulled off his shirt and tossed it over a nearby railing just as his fellow ship hand joined them. Cassia caught her lower lip between her teeth and stared at the dusting of blond hair across his chest before catching herself. Then with an eye roll, she snapped, “Quit showing off for the guests and put on your clothes.”

“What?” Kane asked, splaying both hands. “Laundry day’s not till tomorrow, and this is my last good shirt.” He shot her a teasing grin and flexed his pecs back and forth in a twitchy little dance. “You think I’ve got something to show off?”

Groaning, Cassia spun around and picked up a box of syrup. Solara moved in to help, but Cassia shook her head. “The captain will flay me alive if I let you do my work,” she said. “Why don’t you wait outside? It’s nicer out there than in here.”

Solara didn’t need further convincing.

She jogged down the exit ramp until her boots met grass. Once there, she couldn’t stop herself from jumping in place to feel the dull thud of soil beneath her feet. She never thought she’d miss something as simple as standing on the ground, but there was no replacing it. Not even the
Zenith
’s manufactured lawn had come close.

Giddy, she raised her face to the sun and pulled in a breath of air. The breeze smelled sweet compared with the stench of burnt porridge, but the effect wore off the longer she stood outside. Then she began to detect other scents—sharp and acrid, like cleaning products—and her smile faded.

She studied the turquoise grass between her boots. She’d never visited a colonized planet before, but some people claimed the terraforming chemicals caused cancer. Others said that if a planet’s ecosystem wasn’t completely destroyed before terraformation, its elements could mingle with the earth’s to create new toxins. She didn’t know if any of that was true, but she decided to remain standing instead of taking a seat on the ground.

“Not much to look at,” Doran called to her while stacking another box. He flicked a glance at the landscape before marching back up the ramp. “They didn’t even spend enough to bring birds here.”

Gazing skyward, Solara realized he was right.

Since alien life hadn’t been discovered yet, all animals were imported from Earth. And here, not a single creature took to the clouds or perched on tree branches, not even insects. There were no chirps or musical warbles to fill her ears. The quiet was unsettling, and she wondered if her new home on the fringe had imported birds to populate their world. If not, maybe she’d take up a collection to buy doves. And squirrels. Butterflies, too.

She was still making a mental list of her favorite animals when the group finished stocking the supply trailer. They descended the ramp dressed for the festival, Doran in a clean pair of coveralls, and the two ship hands in their usual canvas pants and tops. Kane explained that the auxiliary shuttle only seated two people, so she and Doran would ride on the trailer.

Once they were under way, sitting side by side with their legs dangling over the edge, Doran extended a hand, palm up. “I need some fuel chips.”

Solara eyed him skeptically. “For what?”

“Why does it matter?” he snapped. “They’re
my
chips.”

“Not while they’re strung around
my
neck,” she reminded him. For a moment he stared at the necklace as if tempted to rip it free, and she covered it with one hand while delivering a warning glare. “I don’t need a stunner to break your nose.”

“Fine,” he huffed. “There’s a com-booth at the festival. I want to contact my father.”

That’s exactly what she was afraid of.

“No,” she said. “You can call him from the next outpost.”

“But that’s days away!”

“So?”

“So by then he’ll probably think I’m dead. In case you’ve forgotten, I disappeared from my ship without a trace.”

“I’m sure he can go a few days without hearing from you.”

Doran looked at her like she’d sprouted horns. “You don’t know much about my family, do you?”

She mirrored his expression. “I must’ve missed that lesson in school.”

“My dad is all I have,” Doran muttered, and faced away. “We’re close. Close enough that I know he’s going crazy wondering if I’m okay.”

Solara fingered her necklace and stared at the grass as it moved beneath her dangling feet. She felt a sympathetic tug for Doran, along with a heaping side of envy. Aside from Sister Agnes, no one on Earth would care if she ever returned, not even her parents. Especially not her parents. She remembered telling Doran that no one would miss him because his life didn’t matter. But he did matter, at least to his dad.

“All right,” she decided. “But I’m coming with you. Not a word about me or what happened on the
Zenith
.”

He huffed a dry laugh. “You mean how I tried to help you, and then you stabbed me in the back? Don’t worry. My lips are sealed.”

“
Help me?
” she repeated, rounding on him as all her sympathy turned to dust. “The way I remember it, you almost helped me into a life of whoring.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” he said. “If it weren’t for me, you’d still be on Earth, begging for passage.”

She blinked at him in shock. Did he really see it that way?

“You showed more compassion to your girlfriend’s dog than to me,” she said. “Maybe I made some bad choices since then, but what I did was nothing compared to the way you crushed me under your boot for a month. People don’t treat each other like that.”

His gaze mocked her. “You’re naive. People do far worse.”

“Maybe. But I trusted you.”

That seemed to get through to him. He took an interest in the ground, hiding behind the dark locks of hair that had fallen across his face. “Let’s focus on making it to the next outpost,” he said, and tugged at an earlobe. “Then we never have to see each other again.”

“Fine by me.”

They didn’t exchange another word until the cart stopped outside the fairgrounds.

The auxiliary shuttle landed beside them, and Kane disconnected the towline while Cassia skipped—actually skipped—away to collect payment. Their smiles helped lighten Solara’s mood. She reminded herself of why she was here: spiced berries and sunshine.

Not even Doran could ruin that.

Hopping down from the cart, she turned to survey the fairgrounds.

The familiar setup of white tents and wooden booths brought a grin to her lips, reminding her of a hundred fish fries and carnivals where she’d sold tickets to raise money for the group home. At this early hour, the festivities hadn’t begun, but the mouthwatering smell of fried dough began to sweeten the air. The scent reminded her of Sister Agnes’s funnel cakes, fried golden brown with extra powdered sugar. Wards of the diocese weren’t allowed many treats, but that was one of them, and Solara looked forward to it all year.

A sudden prickling of heat stung her eyes. She never thought she’d miss the nuns, but it hurt to know she would never see them again. They had cared about her, in their own way. And in all fairness, she hadn’t always made it easy on them.

“Are you crying?”

Doran’s voice jerked her back to the present.

“No,” Solara said, dabbing at her eyes. She led the way into the maze of tents and called over her shoulder, “Let’s get this over with before the fair starts. Then you’re on your own.”