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“Good. Let’s go.”
Tez protested all the way to the airlock, but soon decided she couldn’t afford to waste the air. Falling silent, she stepped out onto the surface of Arvex in front of her unswayable captor.
It was still dark. They’d timed the trip to the early hours of the planet’s morning, when remnants of the warm nightly winds were still brushing over the rocky landscape, preventing them from freezing to death out there.
They estimated the location of Tez’s crashed craft by memory, agreeing on a spot just under two miles away. They allocated a full hour to walk that distance to make sure they had enough of a buffer to climb the walls of the crater in which Stag’s Raptor lay. With the oxpacks being good for approximately three hours, that would give them an hour to pick up whatever useful scraps they could grab, if any. With any luck, Tez’s comms module would still be functional. They were built to withstand collisions like this as best they could, considering if a Raptor did crash, the first thing you’d want to do is contact the outside world. Too bad that didn’t work for Stag’s pile of junk.
Tez was drenched in sweat by the time they clambered to the top edge of the crater. The temp had dropped significantly, but the physical exertion of the climb heated her up. She and Stag took a couple of minutes to catch their breaths, then exchanged curt, silent nods to indicate they should keep going. The less they spoke, the longer their oxygen would last.
About thirty minutes into the trek, the sky had faded from black to its daytime lavender. The gray ground below them was smooth, the rock worn over millennia of melting and re-freezing water. Eventually, the melting stopped and Arvex turned into a planet permanently covered with a heavy sheet of ice. When the company first got there, it was almost a third larger in diameter than its current state—so thick was the sheet of ice that cocooned it. But before that final freeze, the water had moved enough to wear the rock underneath into perfectly polished swoops and slopes that rose high above in swirls like structures designed by some eccentric artist.
“There.” Tez’s admiration of the planet that may be about to kill them was cut short by the sound of Stag’s voice in her earpiece. She turned; he pointed to their right. Squinting, she saw it: scraps of metal littered along the ground. She checked the timer on her wrist, pleased to see that they were five minutes ahead of schedule.
CHAPTER6
STAG
The crash site was as pulverized as he had expected. They walked around the mini-crater of twisted metal embedded in rock, and he couldn’t help but imagine what she would’ve looked like if she’d gone down with the ship. Pushing the image from his mind, he studied the debris instead.
He’d kept his distance. She might find something that could serve as a weapon among the wreckage, and Stag was under no illusion that taking her virginity in the heat of the moment would prevent her from dispatching him at the first opportunity. He was, after all, still fully intending to use her as his shield should the necessity arise. He needed to make it back to his people, but he hoped neither of them would have to end up dead in this situation.
Tessa jumped atop the wreckage and traced her gloved fingers against the opening through which she’d ejected. The deformed opening was crammed and squeezed tight, with sharp metal edges making it look like a fanged maw. When she crouched and cocked her head, studying the hole, he knew what she was thinking.
“It’s too small. Your oxpack won’t fit,” he said. The cockpit was in there, along with the comms. But there was no fucking way anything down there was still functional.
She looked back at him, and though he couldn’t see her face behind the one-way material, only seeing his own helmet and the sky reflected in the black visor, he could picture the little dent between her brows as she would’ve frowned. “You can hold the pack.”
“What?”
“You hold the pack, I go in, check it out.”
“No.” The woman was either suicidal or unhinged, and he still had too much use for her to let her off herself. “You’ll rip the ox tube.”
The oxpack connected to the helmet with a thin oxygen tube that was robust, but notsurvive sharp metal edges of a crashed fighterkind of robust. “If you get a tear, you’re never making it back.”
“Maybe why you should’ve let me go alone and have your pack as backup,” she muttered under her breath, her low voice coming through with a subtle crackle.
She turned back to the hole, and Stag was hoping she’d just leave it. “Let’s go back. We’ll wait.”
Instead, Tessa’s chest rose in a deep inhale, and before he realized what she was doing, her hands were at her chin, unclasping her helmet.
“Fucking hell!” Stag scrambled forward, reaching for the clasps, but she was already taking it off and shoving it at him, then quickly doing the same with her oxpack.
She wasn’t exactly leaving him a choice here. She was running on a lungful of air and had what… a couple minutes max? How long could she hold her breath? He sprung to action because clearly there was no winning with this one. He slipped the straps off her shoulders, holding the equipment to his chest even as he watched her hop down into the tiny hole.
“Fuck,” he muttered to himself. She wouldn’t hear without her helmet. “God fucking damn it.”
He could see movement in there, but nothing else, and after about thirty seconds, panic was starting to set in. Where the fuck was she? He didn’t sign up to watch anyone suffocate and bloat on the toxic fumes of Arvex.
As if reading his mind, her head popped up through the hole. She motioned for the helmet with her fingers. He slid it back over her head, relief flooding his chest as she clipped the seals back to her suit. Stag still held the oxpack, making sure the tube remained well away from the edges.
“You’re insane!” He heard her drawing long, sharp breaths. “Get out.”
“It’s working,” she sounded elated in his own earpiece. “It’s working!”
“Shit, Tessa.” He didn’t know what to do with her. Turns out his enemy had been batshit this whole time.
“I’m going to take another breath. Go down there, broadcast our coordinates.” They’d recorded them before setting out in case they got lucky and made contact. “Stay here, okay?”
