I intend to spend the next year or so writing stories for this setting and
Eternal's
setting, plus a few one-shots. (When I'm more confident in my skill, I'll start rewriting
Cold Steel
--I know some people liked it, but I feel like it could have been so much better.)
As for this particular story, it'll take a while to get to proper sex , but there's going to be a lot of sensuality, and if you care about plot, I'm doing something here that I haven't seen anywhere else.
Also, if you recognize where I'm getting the chapter descriptions from, don't spoil it in the comments. I'll reveal it at the beginning of the final chapter. (Figure it out, and you'll get a bit of foreshadowing--I didn't initially intend the parallels, but I was amused at how well it fit.)
"Are we there yet?" Maria asked in her best little-kid voice.
"Not for another two hours, no matter how much you whine." Captain Davison was not amused. He rarely was, and he was not the target of her question.
"What'll you do if she keeps whining, Cap? Put her in charge of scrubbing the toilets? I thought that was my job." Manuel--
he
was the target of the question. Repairman, handyman, and general odd-jobs man, he was by far the lowest-ranking of the crew. But it was nice to see another brown face in the sea of pink that was the space program, and he was not without a certain irreverent charm. They'd both taken well to the news that they'd be spending two months with each other on an isolated planet.
Of course, that was before spending a week in a ship that was cramped even by the space program's standards, all four crew members drinking each other's recycled fluids and fighting over the only movie player. A sufficiently skilled captain could maintain the chain of command in such circumstances, but Maria had yet to see any demonstration of whatever qualities had gotten Davison appointed to the position. In this case, he merely glared at Manuel before clomping off to the furthest point of the ship, not quite out of earshot.
Isaac was the eldest among them, and the absence of a proper leader, he did his best to keep order. "You have nothing to complain about, Maria. The higher-ups agreed that the rarity of life this advanced outweighed any questions about the planet's geology. Never mind that we've never once seen a planet with this distribution of metals--the strangest phenomena are concentrated in the lifeless zones, so you get to watch your plants grow, and I have to do my research by satellite. Besides, I've seen the eyes you make at Manuel."
Maria pretended to be indignant. "I do not 'make eyes!'"
Manuel switched languages to remark that she'd graduated to making faces. For about half a minute, the two bantered back and forth--but then they noticed that Isaac had one hand on his cross necklace. "You understood that, didn't you?" Manuel asked.
Isaac was clearly embarrassed. "I've been studying Spanish since shortly after we last met. I wanted to surprise you once my accent got better. The problem was that the more I heard you two say, the less I wanted to admit I understood it."
Maria and Manuel reddened in turn.
"Don't worry too much about it," Isaac assured them. "I know you two think of me as a good little church boy, but I, too, was in love once. Watching you two brings back good memories for me. These days, of course, I'd be at a disadvantage trying to make eyes at anyone." He gestured at the silvery orb where his right eye had once been, and Maria suppressed a shudder. Manuel, too, had a metal souvenir from the Procne incident, but it was inside his head, and she consciously avoided wondering what his face had looked like before reconstructive surgery.
"To be honest," Maria told them, "there's a lot going through my head. This could make all of our reputations, but you've always got to be a little afraid of an inhabited world. I mean . . ." She broke off, but she was well aware that the other two knew what she would have said. "I just feel like we should eat, drink, and be merry, you know?"
"It'll be fine," Isaac told her. "You'll spend the days looking at flowers under a microscope, and maybe you'll give one to Manuel. I'll become engrossed in soil composition, and I'll become quite boring to anyone who converses with me. And then we'll be home again. I, for one, have already made plans for when we get back."
Their conversation turned to other subjects, and Maria forgot any tension. She was thrilled to be studying a new planet, thrilled to be present at what might be the decade's greatest find.
If anything, she underestimated its importance--and overestimated the odds that any of them would return.
-- -- -- --
"I'd kill someone for a new movie right about now," Manuel told Maria, addressing her over their suits' radio.
"They're worried that you might kill someone if you got one," Maria responded. She was kneeling over one of the larger flowers, determining whether her environmental suit made her too clumsy to uproot it. With half her mind, she was thinking of a rhyme for "petals of scarlet" (though she'd yet to show anyone the notebook of poetry she kept.) With a quarter of her mind, she wondered what Manuel was doing outside. The rest was focused on . . . other subjects.
"Yeah, yeah, Procne virus, blah blah blah. I was at the Procne ruins. One of the zombies nearly debrained me. Maybe those things had just enough mind left to pilot a spaceship, but there was no way you could mistake them for normal people. I can understand why they give the second survey team the fuel we'll need to take off, but they could at least check in on us--we're not that far off the FTL route."
"I agree, it's overkill, but you've got to understand how command feels about this. We've found one alien ruin after another, and while the technology they've left behind has been useful, everyone's starting to wonder what exactly killed off so many species. Then people on Procne start hearing voices telling them to bash other people's heads open. They've got to be cautious."
