A destroyed ship in a little traveled pocket of space—Ty knew a set up when he saw one. But whether that set up was there to entangle him and Dorsey or if the trap had already been sprung on an unsuspecting ship, he didn’t know. Something about this situation, about this specific ship, had disturbed Dorsey. He could practically feel her roiling emotions through their nascent bond.

However, he didn’t need anything metaphysical to tell him she didn’t want to talk about it.

The ship they’d stolen wasn’t equipped with a short range teleporter, so they both enabled the nav functions on their suits. They’d be able to pilot themselves through the gravity free layout of the dead ship and make it back to their own vessel even if there was a need to spacewalk. After a quick test of the suit mics, Ty pressed the big red button inside the airlock, sealing them off from their own ship.

The outer door opened to reveal the closed hatch of the Consortium freighter. Dorsey punched in a code on a keypad and they were in.

They floated into a silent, deathly hell. The only light came from the lamps integrated into their helmets. With no gravity, debris—boxes and clothing and anything that wasn’t nailed down—floated all around them, bobbing and swaying in the eerie gloam. Ty’s heartbeat kicked up and he spared a glance over his shoulder. There was nothing there, but it felt like eyes were crawling all over his skin.

This was a bad idea.

He wanted to call Dorsey back, to abandon the ship and continue on their way. But the set of her shoulders told him that she wasn’t about to back down. And if she wouldn’t leave, that gave him only one choice. He’d protect her to the end. If there was something sinister waiting for them on this ship, he’d fight it, end it, and see her home safely.

They came to a split in the hallway. “Crew quarters or cargo?” he asked. From his view inside their own ship, the cargo container had appeared intact. He didn’t need a med scanner to know that it was the only place where someone might have survived.

But Dorsey turned to the right. “Crew quarters first. I have to see it.”

There’d been no spare blaster on their ship, so he was left with a heavy pipe as long as his arm as his only weapon. In zero grav it weighed nothing, but it had been nearly impossible to lift before he stepped into the airlock. It was no defense against a blaster or las fire, but he could do plenty of damage to anything else.

Ty engaged his suit and pulled himself a little in front of Dorsey. If there was anything waiting for them in the crew quarters, he would take care of it. He couldn’t let her get hurt.

They came into the kitchen, which he only realized when an unwrapped meal replacement bar floated near his head. He swatted it out of the way and found five more wrapped bars floating freely. Those he grabbed and stashed in one of the pockets of his suit. He saw Dorsey doing the same with several packages of dehydrated fruit. He tried to say something to her, but she looked away swiftly, as if scavenging food from the dead ship embarrassed her.

Other than the free floating food, the kitchen was empty. Dorsey floated up to a computer panel on an interior wall and tried to bring up the command screen. It remained steadfastly black.

“Why did the door panel open if the power is dead?” Ty asked.

“There’s independent power to all outer doors. The interior is centralized, but there’s a battery backup in the engine room.” Her sure movements would have told him that she had experience with this type of ship even if she'd never mentioned the Consortium. “I don't think we need to waste time trying the backup.”

Ty agreed. “Let's keep moving.” The longer they stayed in one place, the more exposed he felt.

She held up a hand. “One minute.” Without waiting for a response, Dorsey opened up a small cupboard and pulled out a canvas bag. She opened a second cupboard that was full of spherical containers of food. “It's not like anyone on the ship needs it,” she justified as she secured the canvas pack to her belt.

“I know.” He floated along the wall of the kitchen until he was right next to her, their suits lightly brushing, though it was impossible to feel through the fabric. “There's no shame in survival.”

She tilted her head up towards him and her eyes blazed. “You don't—never mind. We need to keep going.”

She took off down the central hall, propelling herself forward with a practiced application of her thrusters. Ty was a bumbling boulder behind her. But he didn't need to go far. Dorsey stopped in the central hallway, just before a sealed door. A body unprotected by a spacesuit floated in the center, frozen in the vacuum of the ship.

She reached out a hand to stop the body's gentle spin, pinning him in place with two fingers. “Lex always said…” The sentence ended with a ragged sob and Dorsey jerked around, throwing her arms around Ty and holding tight.

Ty couldn't do anything but hold her. “He was your friend?” he asked. Lex had been frozen in death, his lips a pale blue and his skin more beige than brown. A human like Dorsey, from her system. Someone she knew well enough to cry over.

Ty would not be jealous of a dead man and he was not stupid enough to ask if they'd been lovers.

“He's got a wife and they live in this tiny apartment on Tarni with her brother and an obnoxious cat who thinks she's a lion,” she said through her tears. “We were going to-to-to go on…” Her words dissolved into jagged cries.

Ty kept her cradled close and murmured nonsense that sounded good. He didn't say that it would be alright. He didn't have the right to say it, and he wouldn't lie. “The med bay on the ship is equipped with a cold storage unit. We can take him home.”

She nodded against him. “Yes. Let's take him home.”

 

***

 

 

They stayed with Lex’s ship for a little more than an hour. After disengaging and taking back off towards Tarni, Dorsey plugged in the ship’s manifest and studied the cargo list and travel log. It was all completely mundane, no hint of how he came to be floating dead in space, a hole punched in the side of his ship.

For a change of pace she sat in the galley, the manifest displayed on a tablet she’d dug out of a closet in the cockpit. A list of cargo numbers and labels scrolled by, making her eyes blur. TG544 - Rations; TR563 - Clothing; TF555 - General. Nothing looked strange. And for Lex to be dead, there needed to be a mystery. He was twice the pilot she was and even more cautious. It wasn’t his fate to end up a popsicle.

Movement out of the corner of her eye brought Ty to her attention. He’d showered after handling Lex’s corpse, changing into some clothes they’d recovered from the dead ship. He leaned against the doorway, his arms casually crossed and his skin somehow even bluer than before now that they were in the bright light of the kitchen.

Had she really taken this man into her body just a day before? Everything had seemed so simple then. She wanted to pull him down beside her and climb on top of him, take his hard cock, and pleasure herself with it until they were both more than spent, passed out from heat and exhaustion and passion. She wanted to take him and make herself forget.

Those sexy, dangerous red eyes of his narrowed, and she got the feeling he knew everything she thought. “Can you read minds?” It slipped out and Dorsey’s eyes hurt from how wide they strained before she snapped them shut, trying to regain some tiny bit of control over her expression.

Ty looked down with a grin. “You’re thinking of the color orange and…” He sucked in a breath and waved his fingers around near his head, straining to think. “Alcohol?”

She rested her elbow against the edge of the table and let her forehead fall against her fingers. “So that’s a no?”

“Our psychic bonds don’t work that way,” he confessed.

She didn’t know what he meant by ‘psychic bonds’ and almost felt bad for how relieved his answer made her. Dorsey held out her hand. “Join me?” she asked.

Ty placed his hand in hers and took the seat next to her. He laced his fingers with her own and the fit was so tight, so perfect, that it would have been impossible to tell that they were different species were it not for the blue tint of his skin covering the brown of hers.

She set the tablet down on the table and pulled his hand closer, idly tracing the dark, square-shaped patterns in his flesh. They were raised a bit like a birthmark, but much more intricate. “Are all Detyens blue?”

He squeezed his hand but didn’t pull away. “No, we come in all sorts of colors. What’s… what’s left of us anyway.” He said the last bit deliberately, almost cutting himself off but continuing at the last moment. “We’re a doomed species.”

Dorsey knew he threw it out there to distract her from what they’d found. Pain laced every word he spoke, but she grabbed onto the life support suit he threw her and held on. “What do you mean?” She scooted her chair closer. If it hurt to talk, he shouldn’t be alone. And if the warmth of his body comforted her, her warmth must have comforted him as well.

But next to each other wasn’t good enough for Ty. He pulled her forward with their locked hands and placed his other hand on her hip, hoisting her out of her chair with surprising ease and lifting her so that she straddled his lap, their chests facing each other. She could feel the strong beat of his heart, even and loud as a drum next to her ear. He threw an arm over her back, clutching her to him, and Dorsey anchored herself with a hand on his waist. It felt so damn right to be flush up against him that her muscles started to feel like jelly.

“We’re from a place called Detya,” Ty said once she was settled. His lips didn’t quite brush her ear, but the air from his words ruffled her hair, tickling a little.

“I’ve never heard of it,” she said against his shoulder.

His arm tightened painfully before loosening just as quickly. “I’ve never seen it.” Now that was pain, the kind that only came from an unfathomable loss. Ty kept talking. “A hundred years ago, the planet was attacked, destroyed. In hours it went from a beautiful, thriving, peaceful world full of art and culture and… it was a home. A good one. We weren’t at war with anyone, nothing more serious than a few territorial skirmishes in the sector like every starfaring planet faces. But then someone attacked. They had a weapon that’s never been seen before or since. It blackened the land, rotting it and killing everything the rot touched. Someone tried to burn it out, but it caught light and it didn’t stop burning until there was nothing left. Over four billion Detyens and millions of people from other species died that day. A few thousand made it to escape ships, and there were some others off planet at the time. But since that day we’ve been planetless. And we die far faster than we replenish our number. In another hundred years I’m not sure anyone will be left who remembers us.” His voice was empty when he finished, emotion leeched out in the telling of his people’s tragedy.

The wet splotch on his shirt told her she was crying. Dorsey sucked in a deep breath and tried to wipe her tears as subtly as she could. This man didn’t need her pity. She knew he didn’t want it. “Do you war still with those who tried to destroy you?” To kill a planet was an unforgivable crime. There was always a way to avoid destruction at that level.

“We still don’t know who or what did it. A few garrisons of our soldiers escaped and gave pursuit, but they never caught anything.” His hand rested against her head, cushioned by her soft hair. “Don’t cry for us, sweet, we are as strong as we need to be.”

If he could talk about it, she could control herself, but it took a moment for her breaths to steady. “You said you had psychic bonds?” That seemed like a safer, less bloody topic. But his body froze beneath her, just for two seconds, but long enough for her to notice. “You don’t have to talk about it,” she said.

Ty took the reprieve. “Did you find anything in your friend’s logs?” And like that, the spell he’d weaved over her with the tragedy of his people was broken. Dorsey pulled back, but she didn’t slide off his lap. The feel of him so close to her, his masculine scent enveloping her, made her feel all warm and fuzzy inside and she wasn’t about to let go of that, not after what happened on Lex’s ship.

“His log looked almost identical to what I’ve been shipping for the past several months,” she said. “But most of our work is done within the system. It doesn’t make any sense to come all the way out here.” Though ‘out here’ was no longer entirely accurate. They’d left Lex’s ship behind and jumped back into FTL, speeding towards Tarni.

“So he wouldn’t have been shipping these products to another system? Another Consortium?” Ty loosened his grip on her hand and flipped it over, idly tracing the lines on her palm with his thumb.

“I don’t think so.” That touch burned and something coiled within her, ready for another go at him.

“May I see the manifest?” he asked. If she hadn’t been sitting on his lap, his tone wouldn’t have given away that he wanted her. So badly that she could feel it.

Dorsey twisted around and grabbed the tablet, handing it over. She flipped on the projector function so that they could both see the data. “I’m running a compare and contrast algorithm to see what was still in his inventory compared to what he left Tarni with. So far the only things that aren’t there are all in the general category.”

“What’s that?”

“Could be anything. Most companies throw anything that they can’t easily identify into it. It’s hell on inventory systems, but I don’t have to deal with that crap.”

“Do you think it could have been an accident?” Ty asked gently. “Perhaps there was a mistake with your friend’s navigation or life support system.”

Lex didn’t make mistakes. She almost said it, but Dorsey forced herself to think it through. Anyone could make a mistake and Lex would be the first one to remind her of that. He was good, but that didn’t make him infallible. “Sure, I guess. But it still doesn’t explain how he ended up where he did.”

Ty flicked a hand and the tablet turned off. “Obsessing about this isn’t going to solve the mystery tonight. Get a few hours of sleep, I’ll watch the nav system. Once we’re on Tarni, we can find out what happened.” He kissed her cheek and let her slide off.

She didn’t remind him that he was going to leave her once she got to Tarni. What was the point? Right then she needed to believe that there was one person in the galaxy that she could count on, even if he was an alien almost stranger.

Even if she had to let him go.