Page 55 of Alien Prince's Fake Bride
“Umbra?”
I tilt my head to the side. “Why are you here?”
He looks away. “Ah. That. Well, you left so abruptly and I thought, ‘My fake wife has terrible manners. I have to go after her and lecture her about how to appear classy.’”
I frown. “Really? Is that why? I didn’t mean to push that launch button. I fainted and fell on it.”
He gives me a lopsided smile. “No, that’s not why. It was an impulse. I wanted to make sure you were not alone, wherever you were going.”
I understand what he’s really saying: ‘I took a terrible risk so I could keep you safe, on the miniscule chance that I’d survive that landing.’ I go over to him and put my hand on his bare chest. “Thank you. I know you didn’t have to do that.”
His eyes pierce me. “I felt that I did. And it was a quick way to escape the Vyrpy.”
I look up as if to check if theGladiuxis coming, but above me there are only treetops. “What will happen with your ship, anyway? And with Caret’ax and Sigise and the soldier girls?”
He looks around us. “I don’t envy a gang of Vyrpy being stowaways on a ship where both Caret’ax and Grast’s squad are worried about what happened to their prince and princess. Unless everything aboard theGladiuxhas gone awry, including all the alarm systems, those Vyrpy are now floating dead in space. And theGladiuxwill be searching for us. That is the basis for everything you and I will do now. We’ll get your beacon going and then see what kind of equipment we can find in our pods. Mine is unfortunately in worse shape than yours.”
He’s right — one side of his pod has been ripped open, almost tearing the pod in half.
“That must have been a hard landing,” I comment. “Mine was too, but not like this.”
“Crushed almost everything inside. Except me, but including the beacon.”
It takes us an hour to get my beacon started, signalling our location to anyone with a radio receiver. At least while the alien battery lasts, which I suspect won’t be long.
Then we gather a heap of things from the pods. There are emergency rations, first-aid kits, lightweight tools, and several things I can’t identify, but which look like random trash someone threw into an escape pod just to get rid of it.
“That should keep us alive for a while,” Mareliux says. “We might even be comfortable here.”
I’m not impressed by any of it. And I suspect I have much more survival training behind me than the prince. “There’s no water. No water-cleaning stuff. No filters. No weapons. These first-aid kits are a joke. There’s no flashlight. No spare beacon. No extra power source for the beacon. No communication equipment. These rations will keep us fed for maybe five days. We’ll burn a lot of energy in a survival situation. These blankets are probably the most useful items here. Sorry, we’d need more to get through this alive. Because as survival packs go, this ispitiful.”
22
- Mareliux-
Umbra is cold and business-like when she tells me that the escape pods from my own flagship are not well stocked.
“Very well,” I say drily, “but now tell me how youreallyfeel.”
She gives me a quick, worried look. “Of course I don’t mean to?—”
“No, no,” I assure her. “No need to retreat. Stand your ground. You’re right. It does look a little lacking. The water problem I think we can deal with. I spotted some fruits over where I crashed.”
“In the worst case, we can dig,” Umbra points out. “This is such a humid jungle that there’s bound to be liquid water under the surface. Maybe just a few feet down.”
I regard her with new interest. And also because I like looking at her. “You speak as if you’ve been in a similar place before.”
She kicks at the loose ground. “All Space Force personnel have to take survival training in a jungle. And in a desert. One weekin each. It’s in case we have to abort a launch or we’re forced to land our craft in some dangerous or deserted place on Earth. It has happened.”
“That sounds both shockingly primitive and charmingly pragmatic,” I marvel. “Spacefarers having to prepare for their ship maybe not reaching orbit. It’s like something out of the ancient histories. But it makes a strange kind of sense. All right, Umbra. I declare that you are in charge of keeping us fed and hydrated. I will see if we can be kept safe from the wildlife. Or maybe he was the only one.” I glance in at the dead monster in Umbra’s pod. “I wish we could get him out of there.”
Umbra shakes her head. “He was only barely able to get in. You want him out, you may have to cut him into pieces.”
I nod, not relishing the idea. “It’s our only shelter. And it could be quite safe, but we need him gone. Don’t wander off, Umbra. Stay close.” I draw Bellatriz. “Sorry, old girl. I know you only want to be used for fighting, not butchery. But this is not a normal situation.”
“Wait,”the sword chirps. “How will it help if you get the carcass out of there? There’s still a lake of his blood in the pod. It’ll be very sticky to walk in, and it’s going to stink to high heaven. You won’t be able to lie down.”
“Ah. Good point.” I replace her in the sheath, then walk around the pod to the other end, the rounded one.
