Page 12 of Star Bright
He needed to start the revival transition.
“If you’re ready,” Darcy said.
Had he said that aloud? Or maybe she’d just known. “But what if…?” He couldn’t go on any more than he could’ve lifted the ship out of the dirt with his teeth.
She was silent a moment, considering, though not with an expectant air, as if once again she already knew what he was thinking. “Whatever you find out, would you not want them here?”
He glared at her. “My fledglings are the light of my flame.”
She just tilted her head meaningfully.
And yet despite his angry claim, his hand shook as he reached for the control panel. He still didn’t remember everything, but his fingers punched out his private code by rote: a sequence from Yaya’s natal chart. His fiery first born.
The lights blinked in unison to accept the code then began to flash a countdown. “It will be at least three local days before the waking protocol is complete.” With one hand lingering on his son’s pod, he sagged back.
Darcy eyed him. “Maybe you should rest some more.”
“I slept for too long already. I want to view the ship once it’s connected to diagnostics. Presumably this place has aconnection to transgalactic finance institutions, and I need to check my credits. Also I need to contact my family.” Murky anticipatory grief curdled in him. “Those still alive who might know of me.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “All right. One thing at a time. Let’s see what we can do.”
Leaving the pods blinking away, they went back out. She took him to a small, open-sided, earthbound vehicle and guided it manually along the paved pathways toward a more distant part of the grounds.
“I’ve only been to the garage once when I first got here when I was checking out the place,” she told him. “Of course it was locked and I’ve never really cared about cars anyway.” She let out a little snort. “If I’d known there might be a spaceship in there, I might’ve been a little more curious.”
“You would’ve wanted to meet outworlders alien to you?”
“I mean, yeah? Who wouldn’t?” She slanted a sideways look at him, her lips quirking. “Maybe that’s why Brin offered me this gig as a sort of test run.”
“To find an alien mate.” More of that nebulous grief leached from the confused knots remaining inside him. Apparently he’d signed a contract for an alien mate.
Ah, by the eternal fire, Shanya… He struggled to focus on one thing at a time, as Darcy had suggested.
But she seemed caught up in some internal distraction of her own, her brown eyes shadowed despite the glimmering sunlight.
He observed her for a moment. The Earther female did not express the kind of quicksilver temperament or natural volume that his mate had—passed undiluted to his daughter—but there was apresenceto her. Even unfamiliar with the complexities of the universe, Darcy had been willing to dive in. Shanya would like her.
Or maybe he was being condescending. Just because a planet was primitive, closed, and far along an outer arm of a lesser galaxy didn’t mean it lacked complexity. Certainly Darcy seemed to be as lost in her own thoughts as his ship had been lost in time.
“But you said you were working here,” he recalled. “Not that you were a patron yourself.”
She glanced at him, blinking away her reverie. “I had no idea intergalactic dating was a thing. And even without the intergalactic part, no, I wasnotlooking for any dates, alien or otherwise. I was just looking for a place to spend Christmas by myself.”
“Christmas?”
“Oh, a winter holiday, partly religious, partly economic, shared in various parts of this planet and very social.” She shook her head. “You speak my language so well, it’s easy to forget you are, um, not from around here.”
He touched the back of his head, behind his ear. “A translation implant allows me to hear and speak and mostly understand. It’s not perfect. For example, you said Christmas is a social holiday but you also said you wanted to spend it by yourself.”
“Yeah. That’s not a glitch in your implant. I was actually supposed to be spending the holiday with friends but…it fell through.” When she let out a hard gust of breath, the wind moving through the vehicle whipped the visible plume away. “Or I guess a more accurate translation would be, my boyfriend dumped me to go party with his friends a long way away.” Her lips twisted again, and Vash thought she meant to convey amusement but it looked false. “Not as far away as you came from though. Where is your planet anyway?” She winced. “Unless you don’t want to talk about it.”
He appreciated her consideration even when she was clearly not wanting to talk about herself. “I could show you the drakling homeworld on the ship’s astronavigation chart, but I suppose that doesn’t really mean much. We call our planet Skyearth, or at least that’s a synonym for our name.”
She laughed, more genuinely this time. “I suppose a lot of people—or sentient beings or whatever—end up with similar words for their home.” She glanced around them. “Although I’ve never really thought about how we call our place Earth when it’s mostly water and sky. Kind of self-centered, I guess.”
“Draklings fly.”
“Hence the spaceship.”
