Chapter 106: Excavating The Rewards

Vexa took one trembling step backward, and her knees wobbled inside her white suit.

One hand flew to the collar of her helmet as if the vacuum had suddenly turned to liquid lead.

She looked at the cracks in Aoi’s visor... She looked at Harper’s bruised knuckles, at the dried blood under Leo’s nose and the small pale girl unconscious in his arms, and past them at the Wanderer-7 sitting on the rock behind them with its seven scarred slate plates welded along its flank.

’A-ah...’

Her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it in her helmet as her skin was burning with a sick hot nausea, and her stomach rolled.

’What have I done?’

Slaves, dead worlds and people dragged out of cracked hulls and chained underground, and she’d been helping.

For two whole seasons she’d flown their patrols.

She’d laughed at their briefings and traded jokes with their flight lieutenants and accepted their codes, because it let her push her engines past their limits without the Thyrrian Racing Commission pulling her license.

She’d treated the deep dark like a big lawless playground, and the whole time a river of broken bodies had been flowing right under her landing skis.

She looked at the man standing in front of her... He had no family crest and no championship sash.

He wore a patched pressure suit caked in basalt dust and dried blood, and his dark eyes held varied feelings.

He’d put his ship between his people and three gunboats... He’d thrown himself past a void beast’s teeth... He’d nearly torn his own body apart down there to protect the women behind him and she’d hunted him like a game fish.

With shaking fingers, she tapped her wrist terminal.

BEEP-CHIME!

A small projection flickered up above her gauntlet... a jagged three-pointed emblem drawn in pale bloodless white light, her auxiliary command credentials, her encrypted transponder key and a pending bounty inquiry offering two thousand Zuni for the coordinates of a fifty-meter Tier-1 corvette with seven slate-composite plates.

Vexa stared at the white emblem for three long agonizing heartbeats.

Something hard and furious came up through the shock in her face.

Her little white fangs bit down on her lower lip until a bead of bright violet blood welled up as she raised one finger, pressed the master override and keyed in the purge code.

CRACKLE-POP!

The terminal flared with violent white static.

The three-pointed crest shattered into dead pixels, the encrypted frequency severed from the network, and deep in the Mirage’s core, the auxiliary command module went dark and wiped every trace of Federation software out of her ship forever.

...She was done with them, for good.

Vexa lowered her arm and let out a long shuddering breath that fogged her visor and cleared again, and lifted her chin to meet Leo’s eyes.

"It’s gone," she said, her voice was quiet and had a hard clean edge in it that hadn’t been there before. "The link’s dead... My transponder’s clean. If they want this rock, they’ll have to send their own butchers to find it."

She looked past him at the open ramp of the Wanderer-7 and the warm golden light spilling down it from the airlock.

Her face was naked with longing, like a cold stray looking through a lit window, and she took one small instinctive step toward it.

Leo stepped into the middle of the ramp and planted his boots on the grating.

"You don’t cross this ramp, Vexa."

She froze mid-step and blinked up at him, startled and hurt.

"What? But... I killed the matriarch! I purged everything! I told you, I’m done with them!"

"And you’re still a stranger," Leo said, without any hesitation at all. "My ship has rules... Nobody comes aboard... Nobody opens an airlock to an outsider, and nobody answers an outside channel without my order. You saved my crew down there, and I won’t forget it but you don’t set foot on my deck."

Behind him, Harper let out an audible breath of relief, and the hard set of Elena’s shoulders eased a fraction.

They had initially thought he was about to change up the rules

Vexa stared at the broad-shouldered young man blocking her way.

On Thyrra, governors and merchant princes had paid fortunes for fifteen minutes in her private lounge, admirals had offered her commissions, syndicate bosses had begged her to fly their colors.

In forty systems, nobody had ever simply told her no.

She waited to feel insulted, and it never came as her pink tail gave one small stubborn twitch.

Without a single word of complaint, she turned around, walked exactly three steps from the foot of the ramp, pulled her knees up to her chest and sat down flat on the freezing iron.

She wrapped her arms around her shins, rested her chin on her knees and looked up at him with a completely immovable violet gaze.

"Fine," she said, puffing out her cheeks inside the helmet. "I won’t come aboard but I’m not leaving either... I’m sitting right here until you fly."

She paused.

"And when you fly, I’m following you... You can’t make a rule about that since Space doesn’t belong to anybody."

Elena let out a soft exasperated huff.

"A racing champion with the emotional maturity of an abandoned kitten... How remarkably dignified."

"At least she’s out of my hair," Harper muttered, though she kept one eye on the pink girl as she stomped up the ramp.

Leo turned his back on the pink girl sitting on the rock, and the strangest part was how hard it was to do.

He carried Chloe inside.

In the medbay, he laid her on the bed, pulled off her helmet and his own gloves, and held his bare wrist to her lips but she didn’t wake.

Her mouth found his skin by instinct and her teeth sank in, and she drank with her eyes closed while Camila hovered at his shoulder with a blanket, watching the color creep slowly back into the small white face.

...It took a long time.

When she finally let go and licked the punctures closed, she looked up at him with clear green eyes and smiled.

"...There’s a pink thing outside, Leo. Did you see it?"

"I know."

"It smells like candy and engine grease." She sat up, frowning. "I don’t like it..."

Ten minutes later she was back in her suit and walking down the ramp, and Leo, who’d gone back to the bridge to start the recovery checks, didn’t see her go.

She walked straight up to where Vexa sat on the rock and stopped half a meter from the alien’s boots, looking down at her through her visor with cold unblinking focus with her small fists balled at her sides.

"Leo is mine," She said.

Her voice was small and it carried a hatred that made the static on the open channel crackle.

Vexa blinked up at her with wide, completely innocent violet eyes.

Romance and jealousy and territory between people had never once been part of her world.

...Her whole life had been engines and telemetry and tracks, and she had no idea at all what the tiny girl meant.

"What does ’yours’ mean?" she asked earnestly, and her tail flicked once in curiosity. "Is he your contracted navigator? Did your crew buy his flight license? Because on Thyrra you can’t own a pilot... A pilot’s hands belong to the pilot."

Chloe’s eyes narrowed.

She leaned down until her visor almost touched Vexa’s crystal bubble, and her voice dropped to a fierce possessive whisper.

"It means his blood is mine. I drink from his neck when the lights go out... I sleep curled up on his chest every night... He holds me when the cold hurts, and he feeds me himself, and I’ll tear the lungs out of anybody who tries to take him away, understand?"

Vexa stared at her and for two full seconds, her brain processed it.

Blood... Neck... Sleeping on his chest... Every single night...?

FLASH!

A catastrophic blush exploded across Vexa Tarn’s face.

It started at the collar of her suit, swallowed her cheekbones, turned the tips of her ears a glowing magenta and rolled all the way down her body to the tip of her tail, which slapped against the iron three times in hysterical succession.

THWAP! THWAP! THWAP!

"Y-y-you SLEEP on his CHEST?!" Vexa squeaked, two whole octaves higher. "...With your face on his NECK?! EVERY NIGHT?!"

"Yes," Chloe said, deeply satisfied by the reaction she had caused.

"THAT IS SO SHAMELESS!" Vexa slapped both gloves over the front of her helmet, then realized she couldn’t cover her face that way and peeked out between her fingers, scarlet. "You can’t just SAY that on an open landing shelf... On Thyrra you have to be engaged for a whole YEAR before you’re even allowed to hold hands in public!"

Chloe hummed, smug and very pleased with herself as she turned on her heel and marched back up the ramp to go and demand her lemon water from Camila.

On the bridge, Leo had heard every word of it over the open channel. He buried his face in his hands.

"I’m going to have a stroke," He told the console.

While Vexa sat on the rock fanning her burning helmet with both gloves, the recovery machinery woke up.

The real treasure of the Obsidian Vein was waiting in the hollow at the heart of the megalith.

With the swarm gone, the cavern was an unguarded vault, and the Guild contract had given them first claim on whatever ore they could pull out of the core pocket before the commercial dredgers arrived... Leo had no intention of leaving a single gram behind.

Elena took the controls of the rebuilt suction lances from the engineering console.

CLANK-WHIRRR-GURGLE!

The lances unfolded from the ship’s belly and snaked down through the vertical shaft.

Their harvesting heads, ringed with high-frequency sonic drill collars, plunged into the glittering veins of void-platinum on the cavern floor around the Matriarch’s carcass.

CRACK-CRUNCH-CHUG!

The sonic heads shattered the brittle iron host rock away from the ore, and the vacuum lines drew the crushed crystal straight up into the cargo holds, while Harper, Aoi and Leo worked the cavern floor by hand with heavy extraction chisels and magnetic bins.

It was rare Grade-A void-platinum, deep obsidian-black crystal shot through with rivers of liquid silver light.

Struck with a chisel, it didn’t shatter... It cleaved along clean planes and rang with a high clear chime they could feel through their gauntlets.

’What an alloy it is...’

Void-platinum was cold, heavier than it looked, and it hummed with a faint harmonic field that made the floating dust dance in tiny geometric patterns around it.

Every time they came up the shaft with a full bin, Vexa was still there on her rock.

The first time, she waved... The second time, she waved and pointed at the crate and gave Leo two enthusiastic thumbs up and the third time, Harper caught her trying very hard to look as if she wasn’t watching Leo, and failing completely.

"She’s like a puppy," Harper muttered, hauling the bin past him. "A puppy that commands warships... I hate it..."

They hauled forty sealed crates of it into the hold and stacked them three high against the retaining bulkheads.

BEEP-CHIME!

Jin-Ah stood in the middle of the cargo bay sweeping the crates with her slate, and her eyes widened.

[Material Extracted: Void-Platinum (Grade-A Crystal)]

[Weight: 1,240 kg]

[Estimated Value: 6,400 Zuni!]

"Six thousand four hundred," she breathed, with a rare tremor of awe. "Captain, if the Guild pays a hazard bonus for the Matriarch on top of the twenty thousand... we could walk out of Driftmark with nearly forty thousand Zuni."

Harper dropped her chisel and tackled Jin-Ah into the ore bins with a whoop.

"WE’RE RICH!"

Leo laughed, turned away from the chaos and stepped out onto the ramp to check the perimeter one last time before they lifted.

Vexa was still sitting on the rock exactly where she’d promised to be, looking up at the stars with a quiet stillness that didn’t match her at all.

Her tail lay curled around her boots.

’Why does she still keep on nagging...?’

She looked small and young, far from home like them too... and Leo stood there watching her.

’Plus how did she get that feeling too...? And why are our stories so similar...?’

Well not exactly similar, he had felt it but he didn’t know the feeling could be that serious until he got into a simulator.

Vexa noticed him, and the stillness broke as she sat up straight and gave him a tiny hopeful wave.

The moment his boot touched the stone, a golden panel unfurled across his vision with a deep celestial chord.

[Void-Manta (first kills): +20 SP each!]

[Void-Manta (repeat kills): +1 SP each!]

[Swarm Hive Destroyed: Bonus SP awarded!]

[Survival Points Acquired: +398 SP!]

[Current Balance: 602 ? 1,000 / 1,000 SP!]

The text pulsed once and dissolved into a vast slowly turning wheel of celestial fire that filled his whole field of view.

[The Wheel of Fate is ready to spin!]