Jewel (3 page)

“The buoy is still querying us, Sir,” Everson reminded the
exec.

“Give them our ship’s name and identification number, tell
them we’ve arrived due to navigation error, that we’re shaken up and need some
time to assess ourselves.”

Everson immediately began to relay the message.

“What happened?” Peron asked.

“You screwed up and we crash translated into an unknown star
system,” Erik told him.

“I screwed up?” Peron protested, defensive anger filling his
voice.

“You’re the navigator, aren’t you?” the exec asked. “Now
shut up before you further disgrace yourself.”

More data began to appear on Jewel’s screen. “This is
interesting,” she said. “That gas giant in tight orbit around the white dwarf
is actually in the system’s blue zone—those moons are potentially habitable.”

Peron rolled over on to his hands and knees, then paused and
waited, probably for his head to stop spinning.

“Can you see any sign of habitation?” Erik asked.

“Not from this distance,” Jewel told him.

“Well let’s move in closer then.”

Jewel spread her hands apologetically. “I’m sorry, Erik, er,
Sir,” she said, “but while I could probably figure out how to do that, I’m not
trained to plot courses.”

Peron clambered to his feet beside her. “That’s right, I am.
Now get the hell out of my seat!”

Erik immediately strode over beside them and clapped a
decidedly unfriendly hand upon Peron’s shoulder. “You know something, Mustafa?
When someone’s just spent the last twenty minutes covering your post in a
crisis you created, you damn well better be polite. One more word out of line
and I’ll kick your sorry ass all the way back to engineering!”

Peron twisted around to stare at Erik, but apparently didn’t
like something he saw in the exec’s eyes.

He backed down.

“You’re right, Mr. Exec,” he said. With exaggerated courtesy
he bowed to Jewel. “May I please have the honor of taking my own seat?”

Jewel couldn’t help scowling as she gave it to him.

The next nine hours were grueling ones. There had been no
fatalities, thankfully, but with three broken bones among the crew and seven
among their motley assortment of passengers, there had been plenty of people in
need of medical attention. And those numbers ignored the wide assortment of
concussions, contusions and lacerations that the passengers and crew had
accumulated during the moments immediately following the
Euripides’
crash translation back to N-space.

All in all, the physical damage to the biologicals on board
had been less than it might have been. It wasn’t clear that that was the case
with the physical systems of the
Euripides
. A slide drive was a delicate
device—more susceptible to problems of wear and tear than a conventional
in-system propulsion engine and the ship’s engineer, Ana Yang, was unwilling to
certify the drive safe for sliding without taking the time for an extensive
systems check.

Then there was the question of fuel—a matter Jewel had
brought to Captain Kiara’s attention in writing before they left Thimble. The
captain had protected her margins this whole tour—and maybe her whole career
for all Jewel knew—by avoiding unnecessary expenses like the traditional
reserves of expensive slide fuel. The base source of that fuel, the mineral
armenium, was one of the rarest substances in the galaxy. The result was that
while they did have enough fuel to get them back out of this system, they
didn’t have enough to make it all the way to their destination. That meant that
the captain’s efforts to save money were going to cost the captain and the
owners of the ship big-time—and cut into everyone’s bonuses.

All of which ultimately explained why Captain Kiara approved
the course Erik had laid into the gas giant in the center of the solar system.
They still hadn’t heard a living peep out of the Ymirians who had set up the
buoys—just the initial automated message demanding they identify themselves—but
it had seemed the best bet for finding anyone in the locality who could help
them refuel. If you were going to colonize a system, it just made sense that
you did so around a planet in the blue zone. Liquid water was an essential
building block for human life and while it was certainly possible you’d find it
resulting from volcanic activity further out in the system, the odds were
greater in the habitable zone near the sun.

Jewel didn’t know what had happened after that as Captain
Kiara had finally taken notice of the fact that she was on the bridge and
pointedly asked her to help the steward calm and care for their often rowdy
passengers. Unfortunately for Jewel, the steward, one Vega Costa, who also
happened to be Jewel’s roommate, was poorly suited to her job. She just didn’t
seem to like people very much and had very little patience with them. Perhaps her
attitude flowed naturally from a lifetime in customer service employment, but
it certainly didn’t help calm things down when the steward was even touchier
and more irritable than the civilization-starved men and women she was supposed
to be serving.

So it was Jewel who put out the figurative fires, triaging
passenger injuries for Dr. Brüning, calming tempers and diverting fights. And
it was Jewel who organized the miners to clean their own compartments and get
their vomit-smeared clothes into the ship’s laundry. All fairly simple tasks if
the primary person stirring up trouble hadn’t been the ship’s officer
responsible for keeping the passengers calm and happy.

Drained and tired when she reached the room she shared with
Vega, Jewel’s temper flared when she found the woman already sleeping in her
bunk, following a shift rotation that everyone else on board had instinctively
suspended after the accident that had landed them in this mess.

Jewel slipped quietly across their small quarters and into
the lavatory stall where, for the first time since she and Erik had started
vomiting in the exercise chamber, she was able to examine herself in a mirror.
Vomit, both hers and Erik’s if she remembered properly, stained her white
gi
in a frankly disgusting manner. The worst part wasn’t that she’d been walking
around like this for nearly ten hours. No, she corrected herself, the worst was
that she’d gotten so used to the puke she’d been cleaning all over the ship
that she’d reached the point where she couldn’t smell it on herself anymore.

Jewel untied her brown belt and stuffed it in the laundry
chute. Her no longer white
gi
quickly followed. Then she shucked her
undergarments and examined herself again. She’d never been particularly happy
with her features. Her parents had been adjusting her body with cosmetic
surgery for as long as she could remember. As a result, her nose was thinner
than it should be. Her chin narrowed to slightly too fine a point. Her
collarbone had been shaved to accentuate her neck. Her hormones had been
adjusted early on so that her breasts were full and large.

Similar procedures had kept her waist very narrow, her hips
broad, and her legs long and slender. By the standards of her people on Luxor,
she was exquisitely beautiful, but Jewel had never liked her appearance. It
felt sculpted to her, artificial, her parents’ dream of the daughter they
wished they had had, rather than the one that had actually been born to them.
The one bright spot in Jewel’s appearance was that her skin had begun to slip
back into its natural mocha from the creamier tones her parents had bought for
her. She couldn’t have stopped the process if she had wanted to—bleaching
treatments were expensive—but she had to admit she wanted to see the way she’d
look with the colors the stars had intended for her.

She ran a fingertip over her left temple, tracing the
perfectly camouflaged patch of artificial skin she’d worn there for the past
nine months. She wore a similar scrap on the right side of her head to make
certain her face maintained a balanced appearance and no one guessed what she
was concealing beneath it. Yet another legacy of her parents that made life
just a little bit more difficult now that she was living without them. Of
course, from their perspective, anything they could do to make her life more
difficult these days would prove to be money well spent. They must be
apoplectic that she had escaped from them.

Jewel sighed, more from decades-old heartache than from
exhaustion and turned to the shower stall. Resources were tight aboard the
Euripides
,
especially with their large contingent of passengers, so everything, even
recyclable commodities like water, was being tightly rationed. She punched her
three-minute shower allotment into the control panel and set the temperature at
ninety-four degrees. She slipped inside to take advantage of every single
second of the spray.

A fine, warm mist enveloped her for a few moments, a
soothing prelude to the cleansing to come. Then the real force of the water
struck her and she filled her hands with cleanser and began to scrub the
detritus off her face and body.

As she worked, she thought she heard the door to the
lavatory open and wondered if she could really be so tired that she’d forgotten
to punch the privacy lock. “Stars, Vega, can’t you hear the shower running?”

Vega didn’t answer, and the blurry shape approaching the
privacy screen was much taller than her roommate would ever be.

Fear flushed through Jewel’s body, wiping away the initial
signs of her fatigue in an invigorating surge of adrenaline. “Hey,” she
snapped. “I’m naked in here!”

She cracked open the privacy screen, sticking her head out
while continuing to shield her naked body from view.

Erik Gunnarson stood three feet away from her, grinning from
ear to ear. “I should hope so, Ms. Aurora. This wouldn’t be as much fun if you
were still clothed.”

Jewel stepped back in shock. “How did you get in here? The
cabin door was locked and Vega’s right outside.”

“I’m the ship’s exec,” Erik reminded her. “I have a master
key. And as for Vega, let’s hope she continues to sleep.”

He stepped closer, removing the belt of the
gi
he’d
been wearing since the whole crisis started back in the exercise room.

Jewel pulled back deeper into the shower stall. “But what
are you doing here?” she asked.

Erik slipped the
gi
off his broad shoulders exposing
a chest that was every bit as impressive as Jewel had hoped it would be. His
hands moved to the top of his pants and hesitated. “I’m hoping to take a shower
with you. Do you really want me to leave?”

Jewel focused on Erik’s crotch. She didn’t want to look
there. She knew it was rude, or crude, or something like that. But she’d never
seen a man’s penis in the flesh and suddenly she could as Erik lowered his
pants and exposed himself. It wasn’t hard yet, but hung down in front of him,
dangling next to balls big enough to fill her hand. Even as she watched, the
phallus swelled and stirred and started growing larger.

“I’ll take that as an invitation,” Erik told her.

He touched the water controls, punching in a new set of
commands, and then slid past the privacy screen to join her.

Jewel couldn’t help herself. Her right hand snapped down to
cover her pussy while her left hand and forearm covered her tits. Warm water
sprayed off her back and forearms, her body protecting Erik from the direct
spray. “You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered, but she couldn’t put any force
into the words.

Erik backed her into the corner of the small stall so that
the direct stream of water began to miss her and hit him. He didn’t seem to notice.
Instead he took hold of her left arm and gently pried it away from her excited
breasts. “Why not?” he whispered back.

Her nipples grew larger as he looked at them. She was unable
to put her real fears into words so she settled for saying, “Vega is out
there.”

With his right thumb Erik gently rubbed the very tip of
Jewel’s swollen left tit.

She closed her eyes and focused on remaining standing as her
whole body quivered with pleasure. “So we’ll be quiet,” Erik told her.

He rubbed her nipple again and Jewel slipped on the wet
floor, collapsing into his arms.

He caught her easily enough, his arms encircling her waist
so he could hold her body against his. Her breasts flattened against his chest
and his thick penis touched her stomach. Then he lifted her higher so his face
could touch hers.

“Your choice,” he whispered. “I can stay here and we’ll make
love, or I can walk back to my cabin and shower there.”

Jewel started to speak without being certain what she was
going to say. “Please…don’t leave.”

Erik kissed her, gently separating her lips so his tongue
could probe her mouth. He’d brushed his teeth, fortunately, so all she tasted
was minty clean wonderfulness—none of the foul stuff they had both vomited up.
She’d found some mouthwash shortly after she left the bridge because she just
couldn’t stand the foul taste in her mouth any longer.

Erik kept kissing, stoking heat between her legs, which
strangely added to her uneasiness. She just couldn’t get comfortable with what
was happening. She wanted to, but couldn’t stop thinking of Vega in the next
room, or of the hundred-thousand warnings her mother had given her about how
the consequences of losing her virginity would affect the family fortunes.
Again, the image of Kole in his latest holo pic, popped up in her head—young,
strong, handsome. If she did this—

Erik’s free hand cupped Jewel’s other breast, interrupting
her thoughts and focusing all of her attention on the feel of his fingers
taking hold of her. It took several seconds for her to remember to breathe, and
several seconds more for her to remember what she’d been thinking. If she did
this…

But that was the point, wasn’t it? After staying true all
her life to the fiancé she had never met, the Armenites had insulted her by
putting off the wedding without any real explanation. But did her parents care
about that? Had Mama turned her infamous temper on the Armenite legation to
defend her daughter’s honor? No. All her parents cared about were their bank
accounts. How much money were the Armenites willing to pay to compensate her
parents for this indignity? How much more raw armenium were they willing to
supply to Khaba Cartel refineries to make up for the humiliation of telling
their daughter that the Armenite House of Delling wasn’t quite as anxious as
they should be for her to marry their son.

It was all too disgusting and Mama and Papa were even worse
than the—

Jewel suddenly realized she was thinking about her mother
while the man she’d been fantasizing about since boarding the
Euripides
was trying to make love to her. That simply wouldn’t do. Part of the reason
she’d run away from home was to stop her parents from continuing to control
her. She couldn’t let them spoil this moment. Pressing her mouth more firmly
against Erik’s, she thrust her tongue inside him. She had to stand on the tips
of her toes to do it and the movement straightened out her body so that she
could feel his hardening dick against her belly.

His fingers tightened momentarily on her breasts before
slipping down her back to cup her ass. He squeezed deliciously, coaxing her to
grind herself against his length. Hot beads of water struck her back again,
heightening her excitement even as a small part of her brain continued to worry
that they would wake her annoying roommate.

“Mmmmm,” Erik whispered. “This is even better than I
expected it to be. You’re so beautiful and you’re all mine.” He squeezed her
ass possessively as if to reinforce his point.

Jewel laid her wet cheek against his hard chest. “This is
nice,” she agreed. “Please tell me you added your three minutes to mine and the
water isn’t about to shut off.” The whole idea of time limits on something as
essential as a shower was still difficult for Jewel to come to grips with but
the idea of the flow of liquid cutting off right now was too terrible to
contemplate.