Chapter 83: Reprimanding Harper

"Gah—!"

Then she coughed, a hard wet hack that folded her forward over her knees, and the whole corridor breathed again.

Her face was black with soot and her dirty-blonde hair stood up in wild singed tufts.

Red friction burns streaked her right forearm where hot gas had vented across the skin, and she was holding a bruised wrist against her ribs.

Beside her, the secondary test sled was a smoking ruin of twisted steel with its ceramic containment sleeve shattered into hundreds of pieces across the floor.

"Harper!" Camila shrieked, dropping to her knees with tears already welling and her hands scrabbling for her medical pouch. "Are you hurt?! What happened?!"

"I’m fine, I’m fine..." Harper wheezed, waving a sooty hand through the smoke. "Just knocked the wind out of me..."

Leo stood over her with his chest heaving and his fists clenched so hard at his sides that his knuckles had gone white.

The friend who’d laughed with her over the hololith that morning was gone.

The man standing in the smoke was something else entirely, and the air in the armory seemed to drop twenty degrees around him.

His eyes burned with a cold flat authority, and his jaw was locked so tight that a muscle jumped along it.

"What did you do?"

He said it quietly, and the quiet was worse than any shout.

The words cut straight through the blaring alarm, and Harper flinched back against the crates with her mouth opening and closing on nothing.

"I... I wanted to test the helical sleeve," she stammered, staring up at him with wide frightened eyes. "The lathe finished the prototype, and the tolerances looked perfect on the hololith, so I loaded a half-charge into the sled to check the muzzle velocity..."

"Without telling the bridge?" His voice cracked like a whip. "Without sealing the compartment? Without venting the volatile lines, or putting anybody at the fire suppression controls?!"

The armory went dead quiet.

Elena stopped in the doorway with her breath caught in her throat.

Aoi folded her arms, her face grim, and Camila looked between them with wide pleading eyes... Only Chloe moved, stepping silently past them all to stand close behind Harper with her nostrils flaring at the thin smell of blood.

"I thought the ceramic would hold..." Harper whispered, and her head dropped, her freckled shoulders trembling under the soot.

"You don’t think with experimental munitions on a live warship!" Leo roared, and he took one heavy step toward her with his finger stabbing the smoky air between them. "If that sleeve had cracked at the base, that tungsten core would’ve drilled straight through the Deck Two plating and cut our main fuel line, and this whole ship would be drifting atoms right now! You nearly killed yourself, and you put every single person on this crew at risk because you got impatient!"

Harper bit down on her lip so hard that a thin line of red broke across it and mixed with the soot on her chin.

She sat on the cold floor and took it without a word of defense, her eyes brimming with hot humiliated tears, and nodded.

"I’m sorry, Captain," she rasped. "It won’t happen again."

Leo stared down at her for three long, agonizing seconds while his chest rose and fell.

"Camila, treat her burns," he said, cold and final, and turned for the hatch. "Elena, structural sweep on the Deck Two plating... Aoi, reset the alarm and clear the smoke."

He walked out of the armory without looking back, and his boots echoed down the service corridor with deliberate finality.

Two hours later, the ship was quiet again.

The armory had been scrubbed clean, the mangled test sled stripped for scrap and the last of the acrid smoke pulled out of the mid-decks by the scrubbers.

Harper sat alone on an upturned crate beside the darkened lathe with her right forearm wrapped in clean dermal bandages that smelled of Camila’s burn salve.

She’d washed her face, but her eyes were rimmed red, and she was staring at the bent blackened casing of her prototype slug where it lay on the bench.

The hatch slid open quietly.

Harper stiffened, bracing for round two... and it was Leo.

He’d changed into a loose black utility shirt, his long dark hair hanging over the collar, and he was carrying two chilled flasks of Camila’s mint water.

The terrifying edge had gone out of him as he set one flask on the bench beside her prototype and sat down on a crate directly across from her.

Harper looked at the flask, then at her boots, and picked at the edge of her bandage.

"If you came down to chew me out again, Cap... go ahead. I deserve it."

Leo picked up the blackened slug and rolled the scorched tungsten slowly between his fingers.

"The helical grooves worked," he said.

Harper’s head snapped up. "What?"

"I pulled the telemetry from the sled’s black box before Elena wiped the buffer," he said, studying the twisted metal with honest focus. "The blowout wasn’t a jam... Your vortex pushed that round to twenty-three kilometers a second in less than sixty centimeters of travel. The ceramic sleeve failed because it was rated for ordinary Tier-1 pressure. Your design didn’t fail but rather the sled did."

He looked up and met her wide stunned grey-blue eyes.

"It’s brilliant, Harper... It’s the smartest piece of engineering I’ve ever held in my hand." His voice dropped. "However I can’t lose you. Do you understand that?"

Harper’s breath hitched, and a sudden painful lump rose in her throat.

"I yelled at you because you’re my best friend," Leo said quietly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and looking straight at her. "Because I’ve known you since you were twelve and setting Henderson’s lawnmowers on fire and because if you blew yourself up down here while I was sitting in that chair upstairs, I don’t think I’d want to fly this ship anywhere ever again... So next time you use the reinforced slate housing. You rig remote triggers and you call me down to watch the monitor with you. We finish it together. Got it?"

A single hot tear broke loose and cut a clean line down her cheek.

She let out a wet half-strangled laugh, wiped her nose with the back of her good hand and grabbed the flask.

"Yeah, Cap," she whispered, and a trembling radiant smile broke across her mouth. "Got it... Together."

"Good." Leo stood and held out his hand. "Then get up. We’re doing it now."

Harper blinked at him. "Now?"

"You think I’m going to sleep tonight not knowing if it works?"

They rebuilt it in ninety minutes.

Harper pressed a second prototype while Leo bolted the reinforced slate housing around a fresh sled, and they ran the trigger line out through the blast door and twenty meters down the corridor to a battered handheld monitor then they crouched shoulder to shoulder against the bulkhead like two kids hiding behind a garage, and Harper’s thumb hovered over the switch.

"Your call, Cap."

"Your gun," Leo said. "Your call..."

She pressed it.

KRA-THOOOM!

The corridor shook as dust drifted down from the ceiling and the numbers flickered up on the cracked little screen.

...Twenty-three point one kilometers per second with the containment intact and the barrel wear at zero.

Harper stared at it then she screamed, threw both arms around his neck and nearly knocked him flat on his back, laughing into his shoulder while he laughed with her and the alarm Vela had politely suppressed blinked silently on the wall above them.

"Sixty," she gasped when she finally let go, her eyes shining and wet. "I’m pressing sixty of them tomorrow... Half to sell, half for us so don’t argue."

"I wasn’t going to," Leo said, grinning. "Just eat lunch first."

By the time the ship’s chronometer rolled into the evening cycle, the crew had drifted off to their quarters along the living corridor on Deck One.

The hallway lights had dimmed to a soft warm amber.

Leo walked down the runner toward his own cabin with his shoulders aching in the pleasant heavy way of a long and useful day, rolling his neck and thinking about five hours of uninterrupted sleep on a real mattress.

...He reached his door, and Chloe was sitting on the floor beside it.

She’d pulled her knees up to her chest so that the oversized black sweater swallowed her whole, and her head was tipped back against the cold composite bulkhead.

At the sound of his boots her head snapped up, and her eyes weren’t green anymore.

They’d shifted into a deep luminous crimson, wide and dilated and pulsing with a wild hunger that made her pale lips tremble.

Her breath came in short fragile hitches, and her fingers dug into the wool of her sweater while her whole body shook with the hollow ache of empty reserves.

"Leo..." she breathed, so thin it was barely sound. "I waited. Like you said... You told me not to come find you during your rounds, so I didn’t."

There was a pause.

"It was a very long day."

Leo’s chest tightened. He palmed the lock, knelt in front of her and took her cold trembling hands in his.

"Come on," he whispered. "Inside."

PSSH!

The door slid shut and sealed behind them.

His quarters were sparse and clean, a wide bunk built into the starboard bulkhead, a small desk and a plain wardrobe.

He sat on the edge of the mattress and drew her toward him, and the moment the door locked, the careful control she held around everyone else simply fell away.

She climbed straight into his lap and settled astride his thighs, threw her arms around his neck and buried her cold face against the warm skin of his throat.

She was shaking violently.

He could feel her heart slamming against her ribs through the thin wool, feel the frantic little click of her teeth and the hot ragged rush of her breath along his pulse, and every breath made the fine hairs on his neck stand up.

"It’s okay," he murmured, wrapping one arm around her narrow waist and smoothing her dark bangs back from her forehead with the other hand. "I’m right here... Take what you need..."

He pulled his collar aside and bared the curve of his neck.

Chloe let out a low shuddering whimper of relief.

She pressed her lips to the skin just above his collarbone and breathed him in slowly, her crimson eyes glowing in the dim light, and her mouth lingered there for one long trembling second as if she wanted to remember the taste of him before she took it.

Two sharp delicate points sank in.

Leo’s breath caught, and his jaw clenched as an electric jolt raced down into his shoulder.

He tightened his arm around her and held her close against his chest while the warmth began to flow.

GULP!

Chloe drank with desperate greed.

His blood was steeped in the Space God’s essence now, and it poured into her mouth like liquid lightning.

Every swallow sent a deep shudder through her small body that he felt all the way down his spine.

The trembling slowly drained out of her limbs, the hollow cold in her belly turned to radiant heat, and her fists bunched in the back of his shirt with frightening strength while she made soft helpless little sounds against his throat.

"Mmm~ Nngh~ Swe~"

Leo tipped his head back against the wall and breathed.

His hand moved slowly up and down the line of her spine, his pulse thudding in his ears, and the heat of her pressed against him made it very hard to think about anything at all.

After several long minutes, her drinking slowed.

She let go with a soft wet gasp, her breath hot and ragged against his skin, and licked the two small punctures closed with slow unhurried strokes of her tongue that made his fingers dig into her waist then she tucked her face back into the crook of his neck and let out a long deeply contented sigh.

Her eyes faded back to soft luminous green.

"Better?" he whispered, his voice rougher than he meant it to be.

"Mmm." She nuzzled deeper into his shirt. "Your heart’s going very fast, Leo..."

"It’s been a long day."

"Mm-hm," Chloe said, in a tone that suggested she believed him about as much as she believed in cumin.

He leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes, and her body went soft and heavy in his arms.

Within a minute her breathing had slowed, her small fist still knotted in his shirt as if she expected someone to try to take him away while she slept.

BEEP!

A soft private chime sounded from the comm-link clipped to his belt.

Leo carefully slid a hand down, keeping Chloe cradled against his ribs, and tapped the receiver.

The speaker crackled on a private encrypted channel, and Aoi’s voice came through, hesitant and breathtakingly soft, with a strange fragile tension in it that made his pulse skip.

"Leo...? Are you awake? Could you... come to my room for a moment? Alone?"