They didn’t…she’d waited until she was below the level of the debris he was hiding behind, he realized when they finally flared.
He understood why she’d done it, but he still wanted to shake her for scaring him.
Her gear could probably have absorbed some of the impact of a forceful landing, but it would have caused her pain and possible injury.
As soon as she’d touched down, she crouched and scanned for his location.
He signaled to her, then had his attention yanked away from her by something he saw on his drone camera.
The pilot had accessed the ship. And was now closing the hatch behind him.
It was so disappointing when humans lived down to your expectations.
20
Rinna pulled her hand weapon, saw Tim signaling to her, and in a crouching run, made it to his side without getting shot at.
His free hand—the one not holding a weapon—found and crushed her hand in greeting. She didn’t dare look at him. She couldn’t afford to be distracted from assessing her surroundings.
The landscape had been intimidating viewed from inside the shuttle. Here on the ground? It might be terrifying if she allowed herself to think about it too much.
The tumbled remains of damaged ships and other, harder to identify debris, made it more hellscape than landscape.
Rust, fire damage, weapons impacts, and neglect had all made themselves felt in everything she could see. A hellscape certainly suited the doughy alien she’d watched waddle importantly down his barely functioning flyer ramp.
What was it about this place that made the man feel important? She’d have been embarrassed for this to be her domain.
She had a sense of movement at her feet and glanced down. She managed to stifle the scream down to a gasp—helped by the fact that the large insect hadn’t stopped as it passed her by.
The somewhat larger—and harder to classify—animal that seemed to be after it, also didn’t look at her.
This time she choked because she’d been in the process of gasping when she saw it and they were incompatible sounds.
“What’s wrong?” Tim asked.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this place has a vermin problem,” she said, trying and mostly succeeding in giving him a smile. And then, when he looked surprised, her smile deepened into something without the strain. “You hadn’t noticed?”
“I’m not accustomed to interacting with vermin,” he admitted.
Now he looked around him. Of course, there was nothing vermin-like in view but he managed to not look skeptical. She almost thanked him but realized he’d have no clue why. They had enough on their problem plate without adding male and female interactions to the list.
“He seems to be keeping his head down,” Tim said, his attention turning back to the place where the ship still fired on a position. “Or he’s dead.”
“Is that where the large alien is? Did you want him to not be dead?” Riina asked. She guessed it had to be where the doughy alien was hiding, since he wasn’t in their vicinity.
“He might be a bargaining chip,” Tim said.
That was a very large “might,” Riina decided. He was a very dirty—and as previously noted—doughy chip. On the other hand, whoever was in the hostile ship seemed determined to take him out. But could they, in good conscience, trade his life for theirs?
She would have been a decided no on that subject, but it wasn’t just their lives. The shuttle also contained their mostly unwilling passengers. That turned a slightly difficult right and wrong equation into something much more complex.
How many lives saved were worth one, rather nasty life? She’d never had to face these questions before the long sleep. That wasn’t because complex moral questions weren’t there, just that her contact with them had been limited.
In other words, not her job.
Now here she was, in some unknown junkyard, fully armed, and…what?
“If we save his life,” she said, “will that help us get out of here?”
