Chapter 126: Sparring With Vexa

The scanning arm kept humming above her, and the blue light kept sweeping slowly back and forth, and the little word on the panel refused to change.

[Analyzing...]

Aoi stared up at the white ceiling with her heart hammering against her ribs.

It was taking too long.

Surely a machine this expensive should have been able to give an answer by now, and the longer it took, the louder the thoughts in her head became.

’What do I say to him? How do I even start? Leo, I have something to tell you... No. No, that sounds like a bad film...’

She swallowed hard.

’And what then? We live on a warship... The Pale Federation is hunting us across three systems... Where would a child even sleep? In the cartography pit? Between the turret feeds?’

"The probability is low," Jin-Ah said quietly from beside the bed.

Aoi turned her head on the padded rest and looked at her.

Jin-Ah was sitting very straight on the little stool, with Aoi’s hand still gripped tightly in hers, and her eyes were fixed on the panel as if she could make it load faster by staring at it.

"Based on standard human cycles and the timing involved," Jin-Ah went on, in the same calm careful voice she used for fuel reports, "the probability of conception from a single encounter sits somewhere between fifteen and thirty percent... It’s far more likely to be negative than positive."

"Fifteen to thirty?" Aoi repeated faintly.

"Yes, fifteen to thirty is an estimate."

"That’s not as low as you made it sound, Jin-Ah."

Jin-Ah paused.

"...No," she admitted. "It isn’t."

Her grip on Aoi’s hand tightened, and Aoi realized with a strange rush of warmth that Jin-Ah was holding on just as hard as she was.

Sira stood quietly by the wall with her hands folded and her four golden eyes lowered politely, and for a long moment, the only sounds in the little white room were the hum of the scanner and the soft hiss of the air vents.

WHIRRR... CLICK!

The scanning arm stopped moving.

The blue light faded, the arm folded itself back up toward the ceiling, and the panel on the wall flickered once.

[Result: Not pregnant...]

Aoi let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding for five days.

All the strength went out of her body at once, and she sank back into the padded bed with her free hand pressed over her eyes, and a small shaky laugh escaped her before she could stop it.

"Oh..." she breathed. "Oh, thank goodness... Thank goodness."

Beside her, Jin-Ah slowly let go of her hand and exhaled properly for what looked like the first time since they’d come downstairs, and her shoulders dropped a full centimeter.

"Negative," Jin-Ah confirmed, reading the panel twice to be sure. "Good... That’s good... That’s the optimal outcome."

Aoi lay there with her hand over her eyes and let the relief wash over her in long warm waves.

Then, somewhere underneath all of it, there was something else like a door closing softly in another room of a house.

’...Huh,’ she thought, and frowned a little at the ceiling. ’Why does part of me feel a little sad about that?’

She decided, very firmly, not to look at that feeling too closely.

"Thank you, Sira," she said instead, sitting up and reaching for her glasses. "Really... Thank you for not asking anything."

Sira bowed her head with a gentle smile, and the soft lights of the medical suite reflected in all four of her golden eyes.

"Miss Vexa’s guests are Miss Vexa’s guests," she said softly. "What happens in this room stays in this room..."

They walked back up through the quiet corridors of the lower level side by side, and for a while, neither of them said anything at all.

"Should we tell him?" Aoi asked eventually, quietly. "Leo, I mean... About today."

Jin-Ah considered this with a small frown.

"He doesn’t know there was ever a question," she said slowly. "Logically, telling him now would only create the anxiety after the fact, without any of the relief... It would be like informing someone that they nearly fell off a cliff yesterday."

Aoi laughed softly.

"That’s a very Jin-Ah way of putting it."

"It’s an accurate way of putting it."

"I’ll tell him someday," Aoi said, and looked down at her hands, which had finally stopped trembling. "When we’re somewhere safe... and it’s something we can laugh about."

"Then I’ll mark it as a pending item," Jin-Ah said, and she actually made a small note on her slate right there in the corridor.

Aoi felt light enough to float, and she kept catching herself smiling at nothing then Jin-Ah cleared her throat.

"Aoi," she said, staring straight ahead with her slate held against her chest. "May I ask you something? For research purposes."

Aoi glanced at her.

"Of course."

"The... encounter." Jin-Ah’s voice was perfectly level, but the tips of her ears had started turning pink. "From a purely physiological standpoint, how long did it last?"

Aoi nearly walked into the wall.

"Jin-Ah!"

"It’s a reasonable question," Jin-Ah said quickly. "I’m only trying to understand the... the biological mechanics... The duration... The physiological response... Whether the reported elevation in heart rate is consistent with moderate cardiovascular exercise, or whether it’s closer to a combat stress reaction, because the sounds during third watch suggested..."

She stopped herself abruptly, and her ears went from pink to red.

Aoi stared at her.

Then a slow smile spread across her face, warm and knowing and just a little bit wicked, and she realized she’d been handed the perfect chance for revenge after the whole ship had teased her at girls’ night.

"Jin-Ah," she said sweetly. "Are you curious?"

"I am conducting research..."

"You’re curious, aren’t you?"

"Research," Jin-Ah repeated, more firmly, clutching her slate tighter.

Aoi stopped walking, turned to face her and leaned in a little, with her dark eyes sparkling behind her glasses.

"You know," she said softly, "you should try it yourself, Jin-Ah... However you’d like it. Slow, careful, with lots of notes... Leo is very patient. I’m sure he’d let you take measurements. You could get addicted..."

Jin-Ah’s whole face went crimson in an instant.

She shook her head so hard her neat bob swung from side to side, and she stepped back with her slate held up between them like a wall.

"Absolutely not," she said, with her voice climbing upward in tone. "It’s an evolutionary mechanism, Aoi. It’s chemistry. It’s hormones and nerve endings and... and a purely biological feedback loop with no practical value... How could anyone ever get addicted to something like that...?"

Aoi just smiled at her and said nothing at all.

Jin-Ah looked at the smile, and her face went even redder, and she turned on her heel and marched away up the corridor at twice her normal walking speed.

Halfway down the hall, she stopped, turned around and pointed her slate at Aoi like a weapon.

"Do not tell Harper about this conversation..." she said.

"I won’t," Aoi promised, still smiling.

"Or Elena..."

"Or Elena."

"Or Camila, because Camila will tell Harper..."

"My lips are sealed, Jin-Ah."

Jin-Ah narrowed her eyes at her suspiciously for a long moment, then nodded once and marched off again.

’She’ll understand someday,’ Aoi thought fondly, watching her go. ’Probably sooner than she thinks...’

On the other side of the main pavilion, Leo pushed open a heavy door at the end of a long hallway and stepped into Tarn Point’s training room.

It was big and bright, with a high ceiling, a floor covered in thick grey mats and one whole wall of glass looking out over the sea.

Racks of weights lined the far wall, along with heavy bags hanging from chains, wooden practice dummies and a few strange machines Leo couldn’t name, and the whole place smelled faintly of sweat and polished metal.

Vexa was in the middle of the mats.

She was stretching with one leg pulled up behind her and her tail curled around her other ankle for balance, wearing the same charcoal leggings and cropped violet top from earlier and her purple hair was tied up out of her face.

Her ears twitched toward the door, and she turned around with a bright grin.

"Leo! You found my favorite room!"

"I was looking for the library, honestly," Leo said, walking in. "Elena made it sound important..."

"The library’s boring," Vexa said, and let go of her leg. "This room is way better... This is where I come when I’m not flying... Keeps the reflexes sharp."

She tilted her head at him curiously, and her ears perked forward.

"So? How’s your day off going? Did you like the cliffs? I saw you walking up there earlier with the little scary one."

"It’s been great, honestly," Leo said, and he meant it. "I sat in the grass for a while. Just... touched it."

Vexa blinked at him.

"You touched the grass?"

"Yeah..."

"On purpose?"

"We haven’t seen grass in a while, Vexa."

She thought about that for a second, and then her face softened, and her tail gave a slow gentle sway behind her.

"Then you can touch all the grass you want," she said warmly. "I’ve got twelve whole kilometers of it..."

Leo looked around at the heavy bags, which had clearly been hit very, very hard, many times.

Then he looked back at her.

"Can I ask you something, Vexa?"

"Mm-hmm!"

"You always seem so confident," he said. "About everything... Racing, flying, waving off orbital platforms, punching through a Level 5 matriarch with your ship... but do you actually know how to fight? Like, with your hands? Or is it just flying?"

Vexa’s grin went very slowly from bright to dangerous.

"Do I know how to fight?" she repeated, and her tail started swaying from side to side behind her in long, interested sweeps. "Leo... are you asking me to show you?"

"I’m asking if you can..."

"That’s the same thing," she said, and stepped back into the center of the mats, and lifted her hands into a loose easy stance with her weight balanced on the balls of her feet. "Come on, Captain Handsome... Let’s see what humans have got."

Leo laughed and shrugged off his jacket, tossed it over a weight rack and stepped onto the mats across from her.

’I mean, I took a few self-defense classes back on Earth,’ he thought, raising his hands. ’I’m not completely useless... How bad could it be?’

They circled each other slowly.

Vexa moved like water and her eyes never left his chest while her tail kept swaying behind her with lazy amusement.

Leo stepped in first and threw a light, testing jab at her shoulder.

She slipped it without even seeming to try, and her palm tapped the side of his head almost gently.

TAP!

"One..." she said cheerfully.

"Okay," Leo said, shaking it off. "Okay, that was a warm-up."

He came in again, faster this time, with a jab and a quick follow-up, and when she spun to counter, he actually managed to get his forearm up in time to block it.

SMACK!

"Ooh!" Vexa’s eyebrows went up. "Nice! You’ve done this before!"

"A little," he said, grinning, and they traded a few more light blows back and forth across the mat.

THUD! SMACK! TAP!

He couldn’t land a single hit on her, though he held his own far better than he’d expected, and his feet remembered more of those old classes than he’d thought they would.

He blocked a kick, ducked a swipe and caught her wrist for half a second before she twisted free, and Vexa laughed out loud.

"You drop your left shoulder right before you punch," she told him, dancing back out of reach. "Every single time... I can see it coming from a kilometer away."

"I do not..." Leo said.

He threw a punch, and his left shoulder dropped while Vexa slapped his fist aside with a giggle.

SMACK!

"See?"

’Okay... she’s not wrong,’ Leo thought, shaking out his stinging hand. ’That’s actually really annoying.’

"You’re better than I thought!" she said, bouncing lightly on her toes. "Okay, Leo... you ready for me to actually try?"

’Wait,’ Leo thought. ’She hasn’t been trying?’

"Sure," he said, raising his guard a little higher. "Bring it..."

Vexa’s grin went wide, and her violet eyes flashed, and then she moved with no wind-up and no warning at all... Vexa became a blur of pink and purple that slipped straight through the gap in his guard so fast he never even saw her feet leave the mat.

Her fist landed square on his face.

THWACK!

The whole room spun sideways, and the ceiling suddenly swung into view as the mat came up and hit him in the back of the head.

THUD!

Leo lay flat on his back staring up at the lights, and for a moment, all he could see were little stars spinning slowly in circles, while somewhere very far away, a ringing sound filled both of his ears.

’Ow,’ he thought distantly. ’Ow... ow... What just hit me? Was that a ship?’