He enveloped her in his arms, drawing her close and stroking her back. She always felt safe with him.
As safe as she’d felt on the B’autachia.
“I’m scared,” she whispered against his shirt.
He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “Those are the last two guys you have to be scared of.”
“Of never remembering.”
She felt his melancholy as he hugged her more tightly. She wasn’t sure if it was possible for him to feel truly sad now that they were back together. “Babe, even if you never remember, that’s okay. We’ll make new memories. All four of us together. I promise.”
Aaron and Caph barely spoke. Not because they were upset at each other, but running a ship as large as the Tamora Bight with just the two of them took its toll, especially when combined with sleeping alone every night and compounded by their existing grief over losing Emi.
Aaron didn’t let himself think about the possibility of Emi also being on that vessel. Dead or alive. It would hurt too fucking much if he was wrong.
He would kick Ford’s ass, then fuck it, then kick it again once they got him back. Maybe not in that order, but close enough. In what little time he and Caph could spend together, Aaron tried to hold the other man, not that they could or were in a mood to do much more than cuddle. When they reached Mars, they would get Ford back and the three of them would go to a Martian resort for a couple of weeks.
And then maybe he would talk to them about giving up the Bight for good. Graymard, under the circumstances, would give them Earth-based jobs. They could do training. They had the experience.
He didn’t want to lose anyone else. Death was always an inevitable part of life, but Caph was right. It wasn’t worth losing those you loved to space. First Kels, then Emi.
Now their chatterbox.
He never thought he’d miss the twinspeak, but he longed for the days when he had to order only one of them to talk around him.
They can talk themselves hoarse if I can just have Ford back. Please, gods, please let us get him back safely.
Chapter Twenty-One
The closer they drew to Mars, the more anticipation Emi felt from not only her shipmates, but from Ford as well. He also spent more time talking in Beyant with her, although sometimes they spoke a confusing jumble of her in Beyant, with him replying in English, that they both understood yet left their Beyant shipmates at times scratching their heads.
They were less than three weeks out from Mars when Emi awoke before Ford in the wee hours one morning. She lay there in their bunk, tightly cuddled against his warm body and wishing for sleep to return.
Unfortunately, her stomach wouldn’t comply. She barely had time to roll away from Ford before jumping up and racing to the facility, where she threw up the remnants of her dinner from the night before.
Immediately, Ford rushed in behind her, pulling her hair back away from her face and holding it for her. “Are you all right, babe?”
She spit into the bowl, eyes closed, and shook her head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Maybe something last night didn’t agree with you?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ve been in space too long for it to be space sickness. You went through that pretty bad when we lifted from Earth, but once you got over it, it never came back.”
In her limited recollection, she ran through a list of symptoms and ailments and tried to narrow down the possibilities. Something was wrong with her, of that much she was certain. She’d felt a lot of fatigue in the last few days that wasn’t normal for her. And now the vomiting.
Her eyes dropped closed as she tried to think of the last time she’d had a cycle and she couldn’t. It had been after Ford arrived, but she was now overdue if the four-week pattern was normal for her.
“Babe?”
“Can I ask you a stupid question?”
“You can ask me anything you want. I don’t know if I’ll have an answer for you.”
She switched to English, because in her state, it made her stomach twist to spend that much energy trying to come up with Beyant equivalents. “You said you’re a medic.”
“Yeah?”
“Medical knowledge?”
“Yeah, sure. Not a brain surgeon, but I can hold my own on the basics. Why?”
“What do you know about reproductive organs?”
“Um, Emi, you’re scaring me.”
She looked up into his blue gaze. “How often do I have…” She struggled for the phrase in English until it finally popped into her brain. “Menstrual cycles. How often do they happen?”
He blinked a few times. “You’re really starting to scare me now.”
She didn’t answer, just waited for his reply.
“Every four weeks or so, I guess. I think. Why? Do you think this is your period doing this?”
Period. That was the word that had escaped her. “What happens when a period is late?”
He snorted. “Nice try, sweetheart. We’re both chipped. It’s a lot of things, including birth control…”
She must have looked horrified, because he stopped, staring at her.
Eventually, in a whisper, he said, “Please don’t tell me your chip’s gone.”
“Back of the neck, under the scalp?”
He closed his eyes. “Fuck!”
Once she got her stomach under control they awoke Pachya, who removed the small specimen container from his locked storage cabinet and showed it to Ford with a questioning look. “This?” He stood there in his bathrobe, which was definitely not how Emi was used to seeing the medical officer.
Ford took the specimen container, a mixed soup of emotions flooding from him so fast that Emi couldn’t keep up.
She reached out and touched his arm. “Please, what is it?” She suspected she knew, but she prayed with her ruined memory that she was mistaken.
He leaned against a counter as he stared at the tiny chip. “This,” he said, “is a crew pairing chip. We each have one. They do a lot of things, like ensuring the crew stays sexually faithful to each other, if they are paired that way.” In his distress he spoke standard. Emi struggled to translate as best she could for Pachya, who stood there listening with a frown on his face and his arms crossed over his chest.
“It keeps people from raping each other on a ship,” he said. “It didn’t protect you from that fucker on the Bight because he technically wasn’t raping you in the way normally registering on the chips. It was, from his end, a medical procedure, even if against your will.
“The chips also allow for tracking crew members in emergencies. It’s probably how Aaron realized I’d ended up here and followed us. He likely had the station’s security office track me via my chip, and it showed where I’d gone.”
She waited for him to continue, but he stared at the chip.
Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “What else?”
He let out a sigh and slowly turned his head to look at her. She still couldn’t decipher exactly what it was he was feeling, but suspected he couldn’t, either. “It’s birth control. Female birth control. It means when you’re chipped, we can’t accidentally get you pregnant.” He handed the container back to Pachya, then pulled her to him and kissed her. “It means there’s a good chance that this”—he laid his hand on her belly—“means you’re carrying my baby.”
Ford kept the other half of the equation from everyone else as news spread throughout the ship and the ambassador and Yanna both joyously congratulated the couple. Until he knew he was right, he refused to say anything that might dampen the happy mood.