Chapter 121: Nexus-Prime In Sight

The whole cabin went completely and utterly silent.

Harper’s jaw dropped so fast her chin nearly hit her knees.

Elena’s icy eyes went wide as saucers, and her folded arms fell into her lap.

Camila sat frozen with her cheeks going a blinding beet red, and Jin-Ah’s slate slowly tilted sideways in her hands while her own face flushed scalding crimson from her collar to her hairline.

Down on the rug, Chloe simply looked from one of them to the next with mild interest, like someone watching a play she’d already read.

The silence stretched for five... six... seven agonizing seconds.

’Oh no,’ Camila thought, staring at Aoi’s trembling figure. ’Oh no, oh no... I’m going to laugh. I can’t laugh. Don’t laugh, Camila...’

She laughed.

It came out as a tiny breathless giggle, and she clutched her linen skirt with both hands while her hazel eyes danced with helpless amusement.

"Well..." she said softly, with her voice shaking from everything she was holding back, "if it’s a boy, we could call him Leo Junior... But if it’s a girl, maybe ’Asteroid’ has a nice modern ring to it?"

BOOM!

The tension exploded.

Harper threw her head back against the bulkhead and roared with laughter, kicking the mattress with both heels.

Elena buried her face in her hands and groaned in scandalized exasperation, though her shoulders were shaking with chuckles she couldn’t hide.

Jin-Ah fanned her burning face with her slate and coughed frantically, and Camila collapsed sideways onto the bunk, laughing so hard that tears spilled down her cheeks.

"Or Gerald!" Harper wheezed. "After the duck rock!"

"Nobody is naming anything Gerald!" Elena snapped through her fingers, which only made everyone laugh harder.

"Vela," Chloe offered thoughtfully. "Vela would like that..."

"Absolutely not!" Aoi shrieked.

She grabbed a heavy pillow off her bunk, dove face-first onto the mattress between Harper and Camila and crushed the pillow over her head with all her strength.

"STOP IT! ALL OF YOU, STOP IT RIGHT NOW! I’M YOUR SENIOR OFFICER! THIS IS AN UNACCEPTABLE BREACH OF PROTOCOL! SHUT UP! SHUT UUUUUP!"

Her muffled screams were drowned out completely by the laughter all around her, and it spilled out under the hatch and echoed down the quiet corridors of the ship.

It took a long time to die down.

When it finally did, they were all lying or sitting in a tangle on and around the bunk, wiping their eyes and hiccupping, and Camila’s tea had gone lukewarm.

Aoi was still under the pillow, and Harper patted her back with rough sympathy.

"Come on out, Professor... We’re done. Mostly."

"I’m never coming out," said the pillow. "I live here now."

Camila reached over and gently lifted one corner of it.

Aoi’s face underneath was still blazing, and her eyes were wet, half from laughing and half from something else.

"Aoi," Camila said softly, and all the teasing had gone out of her voice. "Listen to me... Whatever happens, if anything happens at all, you won’t be doing it alone. Not for one minute... You know that, don’t you? We’d raise it together, all of us... Even Elena."

"I would supervise its education," Elena said stiffly from the chair. "Someone in this family has to teach it which fork to use."

"I’d teach it to fix an engine before it could walk," Harper said.

"I would keep its growth charts," Jin-Ah said, and then, after a pause. "And I would read to it... I’m told children like that..."

Chloe didn’t say anything.

She just reached up from the rug and laid her small cold hand flat on Aoi’s stomach for a moment, very gently, the way she listened to the ship during drills, and then took it away again.

Aoi looked at all of them, and for a long moment she couldn’t speak.

’Family,’ she thought, and her throat closed up. ’I said it like a speech... but they actually mean it.’

Then she pulled the pillow down into her arms, hugged it against her chest and laughed, wet and shaky.

"You’re all ridiculous... You’re all completely ridiculous, and I love you."

"Yeah, yeah," Harper said, and bumped her shoulder. "We know..."

Jin-Ah cleared her throat and made a small careful note on her slate, and nobody asked what it said.

’Nexus-Prime shopping list, item one,’ she thought, underlining it twice. ’Above reaction mass... Above the documents... Non-negotiable.’

Two hours later, the Wanderer-7 had settled into the deep stillness of the late watch.

Up on the command deck, the lights were dimmed to a low night amber, and Leo sat alone in the throne with his boots on the edge of the footplate and the sun-stone warm against his chest.

He’d heard the laughter from Cabin Three come rolling up the companionway an hour ago, and he hadn’t gone down to ask about it.

’Nope,’ he’d decided. ’Whatever that is, I don’t want to know. I’m safer up here...’

Through the starboard glass, the purple hull of the Mirage carved through the dark thirty meters away, trailing two quiet ribbons of lilac fire.

He reached forward and tapped the private channel on the throne’s console.

STATIC-CLICK!

"Vexa," he said softly, keeping his voice low so it wouldn’t carry down the stairs. "You awake over there?"

There was a second of silence, then a soft sleepy yawn, and then a quick THUMP-THUMP-THUMP of a long pink tail beating against the inside of a cockpit.

"Leo?" Her voice was a little hoarse, and it brightened instantly. "Of course I’m awake! Racing pilots don’t sleep on an active vector, we go into high-frequency meditative cycles! What’s wrong? Did your coils slip? Do you need a telemetry cross-check?!"

"No, Vexa..." He smiled faintly in the dark. "The coils are holding at ninety-seven percent... Everything’s quiet."

"Then why are you calling me in the middle of third watch?" Her voice dropped into a curious, playful purr. "Are you bored? Do you want to do another tandem roll? Because I can drop my stabilizers in three seconds..."

"I called to say thank you, thank you a lot." Leo said.

The channel went dead silent except for the faint whir of her cooling fans.

"I mean it," he went on quietly. "You dove through the roof of that megalith and drove straight through a Level 5 matriarch to pull my crew out of the dark... And when the Iron Scythe showed up with five warships, you turned that purple needle around and flew right into their guns beside me. You could’ve run, and nobody would’ve blamed you but you stayed."

The fact that she stayed and refused to go made his heart thump and it made him happy though he wouldn’t tell Vexa to her face of course, Leo was sure it would turn into teasing material.

...He looked out at the purple ship cutting through the starlight.

"And now you’re flying escort to get us past twelve orbital platforms... A few days ago we were strangers, and you didn’t owe us anything. So... thank you, Vexa."

For four long heartbeats, she didn’t say a word.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

Over the open feed, her tail was hammering against her seat so hard the whole carrier wave rattled with it.

"I... well... I mean... by the twin suns of Thyrra!" Her voice jumped a full octave into a flustered squeak. "You don’t have to SAY it like that! It wasn’t a big deal! I’m a champion, Leo! Champions don’t leave good pilots behind to get eaten by space bugs and scrap-iron pirates! It would’ve been an... an appalling aesthetic tragedy to let that chubby gunboat get vaporized!"

She let out a high nervous giggle, and then her voice dropped into the quiet hush it always had when she was telling the truth.

"Besides... you know why I stayed. It’s the feeling... In our backs."

Leo reached up and rested his fingers on the back of his neck, where the deep golden warmth sat quietly between his shoulder blades.

"Yeah," he said softly. "The feeling..."

"I’ve won forty-two championships, Leo," Vexa whispered, and her tail finally slowed to a gentle brush against her seat. "I’ve got so many trophies they fill a whole hangar wall, and every single day of it felt like floating in cold water... But flying next to you, through the rocks and through the fire, it’s the first time in my whole life the wire between my shoulders hasn’t felt lonely..."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Leo? Are you... are you warm now? After the ice? Nobody would tell me anything... I watched the frost on your face through the glass, and then Jin-Ah turned off my channel, and I sat out here all night not knowing if you were dead."

’She sat out there all night,’ Leo thought, and something in his chest went very soft. ’Alone in that little cockpit... just waiting.’

"I’m warm," he said. "I promise... Somebody took really good care of me."

"Good," she said, very small. "That’s good."

Then she sniffed, determined, and the bounce came back into her voice.

"When we get to Nexus-Prime, I’m going to show you what real racing is! I’m taking you to the High-Orbit Rings, and we’re going to push these engines until the stars turn purple!"

"It’s a deal, Vexa," Leo said, smiling. "Get some sleep... Long approach tomorrow."

"Goodnight, Captain Handsome," she purred, and the channel closed with a soft click.

He was still smiling at the dark when the bridge hatch hissed open behind him.

Harper came up the steps in her grey sweatpants with two mugs of tea and her hair sticking up like she’d been lying awake for hours.

She handed him one without a word, sat down on the edge of the dais beside the throne and leaned her back against his leg like she’d been doing it for years.

"Couldn’t sleep... don’t worry about me." she said.

"Me neither."

She blew on her tea.

"You were talking to the cat-girl, again huh?"

"I was thanking her."

"Yeah... I heard." She was quiet for a moment, looking at the purple ship through the glass. "She did good, back there with the Scythe. Real good... I’d never have made that pivot."

She took a sip and added grudgingly.

"Don’t tell her I said that though or I’ll kick you in the balls."

"Trust me... I won’t."

"She’s still annoying."

"She is," Leo agreed.

Harper leaned her head back against his knee, and he put his free hand in her messy hair without even thinking about it.

"The girls had a meeting tonight," she said. "In Aoi’s cabin."

"...I heard laughing so I’m guessing it’s something good and not an argument?"

"Yeah." She grinned at nothing. "You’re in so much trouble, Cap. You have no idea..."

"Should I be scared?"

"Terrified." She tipped her head back so she could look up at him upside down, freckled and smug and happier than he’d seen her since before the sky broke. "But we decided to keep you..."

He laughed softly, and she caught his hand in her hair and held it against her cheek as they drank their tea and watched the stars go by.

After a while, her breathing slowed and evened out, and Leo leaned down and took the mug from her loose fingers before it could spill.

Dawn came as a cold blue light blooming slowly across the forward display, and Harper was still asleep against his leg, snoring very faintly, with one hand fisted in the cuff of his trousers like she was afraid he might wander off.

BEEP-CHIME!

Leo’s eyes snapped open, and Harper jolted awake with a startled snort, and both of them looked out through the canopy at the same time.

Filling the forward glass was an enormous world of swirling turquoise oceans, deep emerald continents and brilliant polar ice caps, wrapped in glittering webs of orbital traffic lanes.

Nexus-Prime then Jin-Ah’s voice came from station three behind them.

"Nexus-Prime in sight... And Captain, twelve orbital platforms have just locked onto us."