Page 24 of Collision!
There were a few more words of the conciliatory and cautioning kind, but Suvan was focused on the bar sensor and the anomaly’s impact to the ship.
He didn’t let out a breath until the readings across the board had returned to baseline.
Even without musical augmentation, it seemed the linkages remained between the resonark, the living beings on board, and the ship.
It was late—but not so late—when he finally shifted all control to his portables.Delphine claimed to have calculated the trajectories of all significant detritus in their vicinity.Until they set a new course, they were just another unruly rock.
Which meant he was out of excuses.
The corridor lumes had dimmed to afterhours levels, so at least he didn’t have to squint.He stopped at the salon long enough to confirm the new sensor had been recording accurately—and to glare at the resonark.
It did not react to his ire.
And Mariah was not there, so he continued on to the staterooms.
He’d intended to leave the package outside her door.But as he bent, the portal opened.
The coincidence seemed suspect, and he should check his datpad to see if any anomalous energy had spiked…
But he was frozen on one knee as the slight change in air pressure wafted over him with the sweetly musky perfume of her.The wide, gauzy hem of her trousers brushed his knuckles still clenched on the box before settling back around her ankles again.
Her bare toes were…rainbow-hued.
Only the nails, but that didn’t make it less fanciful.
He looked up into her slightly hazy eyes.“Did I wake you?”
“I thought I heard something.But I didn’t see you on the door monitor.Because you were…creeping around?”
The husky timbre to her voice shivered through him.“I wasn’t creeping.I was leaving this here.”With her Earther senses, she could not have heard anything through the plasteel walls.And yet somehow she’d known he was there.“Don’t ever unlock your door for mysterious sounds.”
She blinked sleepily at him.“You’re not so mysterious, Chief.”Soundless on those bare rainbow toes, she stepped back.The fine, opalescent plasilk of her sleeveless tunic shifted softly around her body.“But your package is.So bring it in here.”
“If you were in bed—”
“I wasn’t yet.Or I was, but I wasn’t asleep.”She waggled her fingers in an inscrutable gesture.
He should leave the box, but he had to admit, he was curious.“I’ve not seen the stateroom interiors.Are they all…like this?”
When she glanced over her shoulder at him, a faint line appeared between her brows.“There are plenty of empty cabins.You should take one.And no, yours doesn’t have to be rainbowed like mine.”
“Like your toes.”
Looking down at her feet, she laughed, another low vibration along his quill-scales.“I had this done at one of the port station beauty parlors.So cool, right?Reprogrammable nail polish, like these wall panels.I love all the colors.You could do black if you want.Oh, but let me…”
She’d only had the bedside table light illuminated, along with the foyer overhead, and she dimmed both.
“For your eyes,” she said.“But I still need to see what you were creeping around with.”
“I wasn’t…” She’d adjusted the lumes for him?The realization caught him off guard, short-circuiting his denial into data sharing.“On my homeworld, Etavis Nor, extreme plate tectonics created a continental mountain range of silica and metal oxides.And we have severe sandstorms, which is a problem.”
“Blowing glass,” she murmured.“It must be beautiful.”
“And deadly.My Szauralithyn ancestors adapted to underground dwelling, although we now have transparent plasteel and a thriving tourism season.The light doesn’t hurt, but my visual acuity suffers.”
“Maybe I should make it brighter so you can’t see the mess.”Padding over to the big couch, she sank down under the viewport.She’d added a filter that overlaid all the tumbling boulders with prismatic trajectories and emphasized the smaller rubble with sparkles.
It turned the lethal ruins into something lovely.
