Page 16 of Crave
“Except we’re on the way to the location of a possible fortune,” she noted. “I assume we can we get around it since we’re, like, in space?”
He hesitated. “Yes. But there is a danger—”
“There was a danger when we left,” she said tightly. “There’s always a danger.”
She wasn’t wrong. But that had been theoretical, before. The ship components and lingering radiation—and worse, the dispersed organic molecules—left adrift in the void were very, very real.
He’d always been smaller and weaker, and the other orcs had always looked askance at him, leaving him to wonder if they were mentally calculating the drain on resources he represented. Because he’d certainly done the math. He should be used to such wondering by now.
They didn’t have time or resources to make this perfectly safe, and they never had. Why would he hesitate now? Because of Kinsley?
But she had her own reasons for risking.
Gnashing his tusks, he programmed a path—as Kinsley just moments ago had traced his mouth with her tongue—through the wreckage. “This will avoid the worst of it and hopefully get us clear faster,” he said. “But the density of the debris field makes it hard to get an accurate scan of the vicinity.” It also meant the destruction had happened fairly recently, with insufficient time to dissipate. As to whether the fragments represented the aggressor or the victim, there was no way to know.
“Override recommended reversal?” the shuttle asked him sweetly. As if he needed the reminder he might be making a mistake going forward.
“Override.”
Their little ship plunged into the dust.
At first, the faint hiss was almost imperceptible, even to him. Then a few metallic pings retorted through the shuttle.
“Kinsley,” he said. “Go put on a suit.”
“What about you? You need—”
“To fly the ship,” he finished. “If we’re hulled, I can hold my breath, and my hide will protect me long enough to grab a suit if needed.”
She glared at him for an instant, then hustled away. Since theDeepWander’s shuttle was intended and outfitted for brief periods of work, it offered no particular comfort or privacy. So he couldn’t help but hear her struggling into the exo-suit. Even the ghastly reverberation of impacts couldn’t distract him from the whisper of fabric descending over her skin, the soft huff of her breath as she shimmied into the protective suit.
And the annoyed grunt as she settled beside him again, fluffing her hair out from underneath the attached helmet. Fortunately, the stowed exo-suits came standard with flexible sizing and a customizable number of limbs, so she’d configured the frame and drape to mostly fit her shape.
“If we die, I take full responsibility,” he told her. “Mag always complains that I am too much of the dreamer, seeing only whatmightbe and not what is. And this time, he might be too right.”
“If we die, I take no responsibility,” she countered. “Because we’ll be dead.”
He winced. “Kinsley—”
“Sil, stop,” she told him. “According to my grandmother, if there’s an unread book on the bedside table, that means we can’t die yet.”
“Your grandmother who read romance novels,” he said.
“Yeah. I admit, I believed her for a while. She did have a lot of books and she was really old. Speaking of making it, how much longer in this debris field?”
Though he was unnecessarily curious about her past, he’d been tracking their progress the whole time she spoke, so he answered immediately. “Too long. I think this may be the remnants of more than one ship.”
She sighed, as if he just said someone else had eaten the last dewdrop whorl. “If there’s a way things can be worse…”
“Or better? Maybe the aggressors destroyed each other.”
She gave him a long look and then burst out with the noise of Earther amusement. “Why, Sil, you are positively bloodthirsty.”
“That does sometimes seem to be a point of pride in romance novels,” he noted.
“Don’t trust everything you read.”
“What do you trust, Kinsley?” He held his antennae very still to capture the nuance of her movement or inflection.
