She traced a wandering line across her forearm, noting the feel of the fibers beneath her finger. Then she slid a hand under the thermal blanket she had tucked around herself—under the blanket and under the jumpsuit—and she touched herself where she hadn’t dared before. Breasts, stomach, thighs, and then between her thighs.
There was no pleasure to the act; it was a clinical examination, nothing more. Her interest in sex was somewhere south of zero at the moment. And yet, it surprised Kira how sensitive her skin was even through the covering fibers. Between her legs was as smooth as a doll, and yet she could still feel every familiar fold of skin.
Her breath hissed out between her clenched teeth, and she pulled her hand back. Enough. She’d more than satisfied her curiosity in that regard for the time being.
Instead, she experimented with the xeno. First she tried to coax the suit into forming a row of spikes along the inside of her forearm. Tried and failed. The fibers stirred in response to her mental command, but they otherwise refused to obey.
She knew the xeno could. It just didn’t want to. Or it didn’t feel sufficiently threatened. Even imagining a grasper in front of her wasn’t enough to convince the organism to produce a spike.
Frustrated, Kira shifted her attention instead to the suit’s mask, curious if she could summon it forth on demand.
The answer was yes, but not without difficulty. Only by forcing herself into a state of near panic, where her heart was pounding and pinpricks of cold sweat sprang up across her forehead, was Kira able to successfully communicate her intent, and only then did she feel the same creeping tingle along her scalp and neck as the suit flowed across her face. For a moment, Kira felt as if she were choking, and for that moment her fear was real. Then she mastered herself, and her pulse slowed.
With subsequent attempts, the xeno grew more receptive, and she was able to get the same result with a sense of focused concern—easy to produce given the circumstances.
While the mask was in place, Kira lay for a while, staring at the EM fields around her: the giant, hazy loops emanating from the Valkyrie’s fusion drive and the generator it fed. The smaller, brighter loops clustered around the interior of the shuttle and stitched one segment of paneling to another with tiny threads of energy. She found the fields strangely beautifuclass="underline" the diaphanous lines reminded her of the aurora she’d once seen on Weyland, only more regular.
In the end, the strain from her self-induced panic was too great to maintain, and she allowed the mask to retract from her face, and the fields vanished from view.
At least she wouldn’t be entirely alone. She had Ando, and she had the suit: her silent companion, her parasitic hitchhiker, her deadly piece of living apparel. Not an alliance of friendship but of skinship.
Before the burn cut out, Kira allowed herself to eat one of the ration packs. It would be her last chance to have a meal with any sensation of weight for a very long time, and she was determined not to waste it.
She ate sitting next to the small galley area. When finished, she treated herself to another pouch of chell, which she nursed over the better part of an hour.
The only sounds in the shuttle were her breathing and the dull roar of the rockets, and even that would soon disappear. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the cryo tubes at the back of the Valkyrie, cold and motionless, with no indication of the frozen bodies within. It was strange to think she wasn’t the only person on the shuttle, even though Orso and the rest were barely more than blocks of ice at the moment.
It wasn’t a comforting thought. Kira shivered and let her head thump back against the floor/wall.
Pain shot through her skull, and she winced, eyes watering. “Dammit,” she muttered. She kept moving too quickly for the increase in g-forces and hurting herself as a result. Her joints ached, and her arms and legs throbbed from a dozen bumps and bruises. The xeno protected her from worse, but it seemed to ignore small, chronic discomforts.
Kira didn’t know how the people on Shin-Zar or other high-g planets bore it. They were gene-hacked to help them survive and even thrive within a deep gravity well, but still, she had a hard time imagining how they could ever really be comfortable.
“Warning,” said Ando. “Zero-g in T-minus five minutes.”
Kira disposed of the drink pouch and then gathered a half-dozen thermal blankets from the shuttle’s lockers and brought them with her back to the cockpit. There, she wrapped the blankets around the pilot’s chair, creating a golden cocoon for herself. Next to the chair, she taped the rifle, a week’s worth of ration packs, wet wipes, and a few other essentials she thought she might need.
Then a faint jolt ran through the bulkhead, and the rockets cut out, leaving her in blessed silence.
Kira’s stomach rose within her, and the jumpsuit floated away from her skin, as if inflated. Trying to keep her lunch (such as it was) from making an encore appearance, she nestled into the foil-wrapped chair.
“Shutting down nonessential systems,” said Ando, and across the crew compartment, the lights winked out, save for faint red strips above the control panels.
“Ando,” she said, “lower the cabin pressure to the equivalent of twenty-four hundred meters above sea level, Earth standard.”
“Ms. Navárez, at that level—”
“I’m aware of the side effects, Ando. I’m counting on them. Now do as I say.”
Behind her, Kira heard the whir of the ventilation fans increase, and she felt a slight breeze as the air started to flow toward the vents by the ceiling.
She tabbed the comms. “Tschetter. The burn just ended. We’ll be transitioning to FTL in three hours. Over.” The time was needed to allow the fusion reactor to cool as much as possible and for the Valkyrie’s radiators to chill the rest of the shuttle to near-freezing temperatures. Even then, it was likely the shuttle would overheat two or three times while in FTL, depending on how active she was. When that happened, the Valkyrie would have to return to normal space long enough to shed its excess thermal energy before continuing onward. Otherwise, she and everything in the Valkyrie would cook in their own heat.
The light-speed gap between the Valkyrie and Adra meant it was over three minutes before Tschetter’s reply arrived: “Roger that, Navárez. Any problems with the shuttle? Over.”
“Negative. Green lights across the board. What about you?” The major, Kira knew, was still waiting in the escape pod for Iska to retrieve her.
… “Situation normal. I managed to splint my leg. Should allow me to walk on it. Over.”
Kira felt a pang of sympathetic pain. That must have hurt like hell. “How long until Iska reaches the base? Over.”
… “Tomorrow evening, barring any problems. Over.”
“That’s good.” Then Kira said, “Tschetter, what happened to Alan’s body?” It was a question that had been bothering her the past day.
… “His remains were transported to the Extenuating Circumstances, along with the rest of the deceased. Over.”
Kira closed her eyes for a moment. At least Alan had had a funeral pyre fit for a king: a flaming ship to send him off into eternity. “Understood. Over.”
They continued to exchange messages intermittently over the next few hours—the major suggesting things Kira could do to make the trip easier, Kira giving advice about surviving on Adra. Even the major, Kira thought, was feeling the weight of circumstances.
Then, Kira said, “Tschetter, tell me: What did Carr actually find out about the xeno? And don’t give me that classified bullshit. Over.”