Space Shortcuts Boxed Set, page 5
“With me too. But, I really want to go back to Earth. I don’t know what the hell has happened to my former life there—my money, my house. Maybe a distant relative has it now.”
Belinda’s smile seemed to fade as the expression in her dark eyes turned inward. “I had family members there—once. So many years ago….” Now her voice faded. And Jose realized then that she had replaced her old life with her life on that new world. But now that life was gone for her too.
He said quickly, “We can make a new family—me and you. We’re a family of two, aren’t we?”
Her eyes came back his way; her left hand slid over his right as she smiled at him, including with those warm eyes of hers.
And in that moment, for the very first time in both his old and new and then new again life, Jose Martine felt like he was no longer lost. He had everything he needed, and everything he wanted.
“We’re going to Earth,” he said. And, smiling now, his fingertips gently pressed at his control panel as he plotted a flight-path home.
Second Reflection
Captain Amelia Pantera was getting dressed in her cabin when she noticed the odd second reflection.
She had been standing before the long wall mirror beside the bathroom door, and the mirror showed not only her own self but also the reflection of the other mirror over the silver dresser behind her. As usual, the reflections from the opposing mirrors repeatedly cascaded into the distance. But in the second reflection of above the dresser, there was an odd bright spot. No—was it three tiny bright spots clustered together?
She groaned in frustration: her body kept getting in the way of an accurate viewing. She tried bending and shifting herself around, but her black, dressy uniform pants and blouse still kept blocking too much of the view. What on earth was the source of the light? The spot wasn’t visible in the first reflection or on the mirror above the dresser. Was she simply imagining the whole effect?
Her top lip had begun sweating, and when she finally realized this, she gave up on trying to figure out the weird reflection: she’d overslept during her nap and was late for dinner in the dining room with her crewmembers; she didn’t want to finally get there looking all sweaty and agitated. She and her crew had been traveling in a vast, mostly empty area of space for over a week. They wouldn’t reach another fold of space with any civilization, human or alien, for another week.
The dinner tonight was in commemoration of the Black Javelin’s tenth “birthday.” It was Amelia’s first command back then, and she hoped that someday the Black Javelin would also be her last command. The ship had been built to last, and Amelia never wanted to be anywhere else but on it and in space; she had been spending most of her life like that for years, including her “vacation”-time….
Letting out a small sigh, she grabbed her round black communicator-button from on top of the silver dresser and snapped the button onto her black captain’s belt.
She didn’t look at the mirrors again as she walked across the room and out the doorway.
*
The party in the ship’s large dining area was in full swing when Amelia reached the space. Several of the dozens of crewmembers drinking and dancing around inside grinned at and saluted Amelia—but she just laughed at the gestures as she wove through the gyrating bodies and over to her usual hexagonal table. It had been moved against the right side wall, to make space for the dancing in the room’s center.
Eddie Lopez, one of the ship’s engineers, was already sitting at the table, and Kerry Kramer and Tamin Sin suddenly stopped dancing together and moved over to the table.
Eddie raised a glass of white wine in a solitary toast toward Amelia as she sat down beside him at the table. When he spoke, his voice was his usual deep one with that slight crackling edge Amelia always liked. “Where have you been, Amelia?” he asked her now.
And she replied loudly, over the suddenly loudening music: “Sleeping—I overslept!”
“That’s just what a captain should be doing.”
Amelia rolled her hazel eyes. “Don’t rub it in.”
She watched Eddie’s wide mouth vibrate as he laughed under his breath. Eddie was thirty-five and Amelia was forty; they had known each other for over ten years, had spent the last five together on the Black Javelin, so they’d perfected their bantering with each other and never took any of it personally—or at least Amelia never took it personally.
“You missed Eddie’s birthday speech!” Tamin said as he pulled out a silver cushioned chair for himself then fell back into it.
When Kerry plopped into the chair between him and Amelia, Kerry smiled, the dimples in her dark cheeks deepening, the way they often did when she’d succeeded at figuring out something at her science station on the bridge. Now she said to Amelia, “Jake made Tamin’s family recipe for cauliflower pakoras. I’ll go order a batch for you—is that okay?”
“Of course!” Amelia said. “You know how I feel about pakoras. I would have been here earlier, but I got distracted in my cabin.”
“By what?” Eddie asked as he popped a small, golden pakora into his mouth. Amelia felt jealous because she also felt like she was starving: she’d gotten so involved in her and her crew’s space-mapping work earlier that day, she’d forgotten to eat anything all day. The crew had to send another regular report to the Galactic Industry Commission, and Amelia wanted to send as complete a report as possible.
There were 262 crewmembers on the Black Javelin, so there were a lot of people available to get things done. But sometimes Amelia thought she pushed her crew too hard. They were tired now; she was tired. But, they lived in space, and they had to be pushed hard and push themselves hard so they remained in good practice at surviving….
Maybe Amelia had indeed been working too hard at that: she wanted to reply to Eddie’s question, but she was the captain. She couldn’t tell him or any of her crew that she had been living in space too long and had finally begun to imagine things.
…On the other hand, Eddie knew her well, including the troubled expression on her face: his head leaned closer to hers, and then he asked her in a quieter voice if something was wrong.
She shook her head from side-to-side at him. “Nothing’s wrong. I just saw something in my room—in my mirror.”
Eddie’s dark eyebrows rose at her in confusion, and she realized how strange her statement would sound to someone else. Now she had to explain more.
She did explain, quickly, on a little laugh. “It was crazy: there was this bright spot in the mirror on my wall. I couldn’t understand where it was coming from. It was only in the second reflection from the mirror behind me.”
Eddie was frowning now. “Maybe it was the lights in your cabin—the amount of power to them might need adjusting.”
She shook her head again. “I shifted around—there was no glow from a specific direction. The bright spot in the mirror stayed still, like it was coming from inside the mirror.”
Eddie sat back in his chair, shifting a little away from her, his dark uniform shirt tightening against his trim torso. “Well, it’s probably just a distortion because one or both of the mirrors isn’t completely smooth.”
“A distortion that only happens to the second reflection?”
“Maybe there’s some defect in the material in the mirror that’s getting excited by the lights in the room but isn’t letting off photons till later—like a phosphorescence. Are you sure the spot was in the second reflection always?”
She frowned. “I’m not exactly sure. It was hard to shift around too much because my own body or head would start blocking the view.”
He stood up suddenly, his dark-brown eyes staring down at her. “Well, you’ve really intrigued me now! How about we both go take a look? If I see it too, then at least you’ll know you’re not going nuts.”
“Not really. We could both be going nuts,” she said.
*
“So it looks like we’re both going nuts,” he replied about ten-minutes later when they were finally standing in her cabin, and he had just done the stand-and-bend-in-front-of-the-mirror-testing and had gotten the same result as she had.
“It’s unreal,” he said, surprise raising the pitch of his normally deep voice as he continued contorting his body in front of both mirrors, trying to examine the odd light better. “It’s in the same spot in the reflection in this wall mirror, but not on the mirror itself because I think it disappears sometimes—well, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell—hard to see—”
“Mmhm,” she said, one side of her mouth tilting up.
His head turned her way then. “I believed you before, Amelia. It was just hard to visualize. I mean, now that I’m standing here, there’s something strange about the light. I can’t quite put my finger on what.” He let out an abrupt breath and quickly ran the fingers of one hand through his wavy dark hair. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll go get the portable magnifiers and hand-scan from different angles in here—”
“Oh,” Amelia said, bending her body in front of the wall mirror again, her eyes locking onto that odd light. “Don’t worry about it tonight—you didn’t even finish your dinner—” She turned around to him again. But, partly because she had been bending at an odd angle and partly because the edge of one of the rubber tiles on the cabin’s floor had lifted slightly, she lost her balance, tripped and went flying right at Eddie—went flying right up against him, full length.
His arms wrapped right around her, pinning her till she was more stable on her feet. He was only a little taller than she was, and she could feel the warmth of his thighs coming through the soft fabric of his pants against hers, could feel the heat from his chest pressing against hers.
For a moment, she didn’t breathe; she’d never seen him in front of her like this—so close, so serious, his sculpted handsome face so open, his dark eyes so warm and focused only on her….
Time seemed to stop in her cabin, and Eddie’s face seemed to come closer to hers, or maybe hers moved closer to his—or maybe both.
The next thing she knew, his hot mouth was on hers, and her mouth was opening and she couldn’t stop kissing his delicious mouth; it tasted sharp from white wine and sweet from cardamom. Her hands grabbed his and roamed; his forearms were hard, the hairs there silky. Her hands slid all the way up, till they found the warmth of his neck.
His mouth still on hers, his arms wrapped around her again, but this time his hands pressed at the small of her back. She felt their heat make her skin beneath her shirt tingle, and then she felt herself pulling him back and back, toward her bed, till she fell back onto it and all his hard warm weight was finally on top of her.
*
It happened so fast and with so much excitement, Amelia felt exhausted afterward. Almost immediately, she rolled onto her side and fell asleep.
When she woke the next “morning,” he was beside her—beside her and still naked. But, he was asleep, and the sight of his warm sleepy body there catapulted her mind into a shocked state. She would be lying if she said she’d never thought of the two of them like this, but she’d also never thought it would actually happen….
In the past, humans had imagined that space would be full of spaceships containing rigid hierarchies, but it turned out that people lived and worked best when living on a ship felt like an actual life.
The Black Javelin in particular was a mapping and maintenance ship, not a police ship. The GIC was just as much a business entity as it was a governmental one, so the structure on many non-law enforcement GIC ships was a loose hierarchy, with the captains basically acting as figure-head managers. The other crewmembers didn’t really use or even need official titles because they ultimately weren’t responsible for the whole ship.
This all meant that sexual relationships between crewmembers weren’t really against the rules. But, sexual relationships involving those in charge who had to give orders—those relationships were more complicated.
During all of Amelia’s years on the Black Javelin, she certainly hadn’t been celibate. But, she normally only got involved with men who weren’t residents on her ship—it was a rule of hers, a rule she’d now broken.
She was forty years old so had definitely been around the block more than once. But a part of her still felt embarrassed, as if, now, she would forever seem to be standing in her underwear in front of her crew, as if they would know she’d had sex with one of them. She wondered how it even happened—oh, she’d tripped against Eddie—so silly!
Or maybe it all started with the mirror—maybe she could blame it on that.
Yeah, she told herself inside her mind. It’s the mirror’s fault.
It had been affecting her, changing her, what with her oversleeping and now her screwing Eddie….
He stirred beside her now on the white bed sheet, but before he could fully wake up, she slipped off her bed and rushed into her bathroom.
*
She stayed in there a while, first using the toilet and shower, then slowly drying and brushing her brown hair…but she couldn’t stay in her bathroom forever.
She grabbed her purple robe from the wall-hook by the door and slipped on the robe; then she quickly opened the door without looking at the doorway—and almost crashed right into Eddie’s bare hairy chest.
Her eyes shot up to his, her heart started pumping really hard, and in his dark eyes, she could have sworn she saw a flicker of disappointment.
“I thought you’d never come out,” he said now.
She let out a long breath. “That obvious, huh? I feel—well, I feel embarrassed, Eddie!”
Now his eyes seemed to cloud in confusion. “Why? We’re adults and we did what adults tend to do, especially when they’ve known each other for years and have been attracted to each other the whole time.”
She couldn’t help laughing a little. “How do you know I was?”
One of his dark eyebrows shot up. “Um, by your effusive response last night maybe?”
“Effusive!” She was laughing harder now, but not in a mean way. She slowly shook her head at him, then looked down at him in his white underwear, at the bulge of him there, at his trim hairy thighs. And she really liked what she saw. Again.
When she finally raised her eyes to his, he apparently saw what she’d been thinking reflected in her eyes. One of his forefingers quickly shot up toward the ceiling and he grinned. “All right—hold that thought till I come out of the bathroom!”
He rushed into there and closed the door.
And Amelia stood in the center of her cabin, thinking, Oh well, the deed’s done. If it was a mistake, two of the same mistake is as good as one!
*
Later, when she was done happily bouncing on him and they were both spent, she rolled off of him and jumped into her shower again, then re-donned her robe. When she walked back out into the cabin, Eddie was stepping into his black pants.
He glanced at her, then tilted his head back at the wall status-panel near her bed. “I hate humping and running, but Jake just posted a message on the status-board—the power to the stoves suddenly conked out. And lunch’ll be in thirty—”
“Lunch!” she said in alarm, glancing over at the status-panel. “Wait—let me make sure no one’s in the hall before you leave.”
“For chrissake, Amelia—”
“Come on, Eddie! I’m still your captain.”
His eyes rolled as he slid one of his arms into his black shirt. “Whatever you say, Captain.”
“Don’t go that far. It’s Amelia,” she said, quickly stepping toward him and giving him a soft kiss on his lips.
One of his arms snaked around her back and pressed there. “I’ll be back later,” he said in a lower voice, his free hand gesturing toward behind her. “The mirrors, remember? I’ll bring the magnifiers.”
*
By the time they saw each other again later that afternoon, Amelia had finally eaten a meal and gotten some work done on the bridge.
She and Eddie met outside her cabin now, and when they walked inside and she closed the door behind them, she thought—or actually hoped—he would kiss her. Instead, he bent over and laid out the equipment in the black case in his hands onto the rubber floor.
She stared down there. “What’s all that?”
He lifted the pieces as he spoke. “Two magnifiers, a light-meter, a scanner, my hand-held, which I linked down to the primary computer processor in engineering. Jean’ll be running an analysis on the numbers.”
Amelia’s face was flushing. “You’re really going all-out on studying this.”
His head shifted up her way. “Why do you think I decided to live in space in the first place? I love seeing and doing new things.”
“Do you?” she said.
His dark eyes were still on her, and now he slowly straightened up. “So are we talking about the mirrors or us?”
She bit her bottom lip. “I don’t know. I’m not sure yet.”
She heard a little sigh come from him, but he only slowly nodded, then bent over for his equipment again. She couldn’t help watching the slim muscular curve of his body in his black clothing, especially the curves of his butt and thighs….
He sprung back up and began placing equipment in different spots in the cabin—on the bed, on the dresser.
There was a much-used red armchair and desk set at the back corner of her room, and Amelia walked there now, to turn the armchair to face the room. She plopped back onto the cushioned surface.
Technically, she had more work to do on the bridge, which she could have done on the computer on the desk behind her. But she just couldn’t bring herself to look at her work now. She was more interested in her mirrors, and—yes—in watching Eddie move….
He began talking to her as he held up his black scanner toward the wall mirror. “Hmm…okay. What I’m getting now isn’t that surprising; the equipment has a better resolution ability than our eyes have. But, it turns out that the light spot in the reflection contains many more points of light than it looks like.”
