Desire Disguised (7 page)

Ben nodded, unwilling to speak, since he wasn’t sure what he would say. Luckily, a low chime signaling the end of classes echoed in the hallway, and all the classroom doors banged open in concert. Streams of children erupted from the rooms, most looking with great curiosity at his uniformed presence as they passed. He gave a few of the taller ones stern nods and tried to appear non-intimidating with the shorter ones. He doubted he pulled it off; whenever someone commented on his appearance the first words they used were often
stoic
and
tough
. Hardly the first impression you wanted to make with a small child. Or a pretty woman.

Mat’s classmates exited in a rush of chatter, and once the last one had gone, Cara entered the room and went straight to her brother. He stood at the teacher’s desk and smiled when he saw her.

“Cara! This was so great. We did all sorts of stuff.” Mat glowed with enthusiasm.

“Today went very well, Citizen Belasco. He’s well placed in the curriculum for his age group. You’ve done a good job with him.” Mat’s instructor rose from her seat and patted Mat’s back.

Ben watched Cara blush as she shook the teacher’s hand. “Thank you for keeping him until I could collect him. We have an appointment, and I didn’t want to hold up the chief.”

Ben knew she obscured the truth. Cara wasn’t comfortable with her brother wandering unattended in the settlement yet. The teacher nodded and glanced his way again, and Ben finally recognized her. Her name was Topi, and if he remembered correctly, one of his staff had tried to encourage him to ask her out a few months ago. He had resisted their well-meaning advice. Hopefully, Topi hadn’t been made aware of their efforts on her behalf.

Cara thanked the teacher and promised Mat would be back the next day. They left the classroom together, following the corridor to the plaza outside. Ben keyed in a signal to his datpad, and as they exited the building, a flyer appeared overhead, hovering as children quickly scattered from the now illuminated landing pad. Once the plaza was clear of bystanders, it settled to ground, and the hatch opened in front of them in one coordinated motion. Soloman was showing off. Ben waited for Cara and Mat to enter first, and he noticed the admiring looks the children lingering in the schoolyard gave as the hatch closed behind him. Hopefully, Mat would get some positive attention in school tomorrow.

“Sir, ready to take off on your order,” Soloman announced as he smiled at Cara while she helped Mat into his flight harness. Ben knew he’d been petty when he’d insisted on accompanying the Belascos to the crash site, but when he saw how Soloman stared at Cara, he was glad he’d listened to his more selfish nature. He did need to make a more formal inspection of the wreck, and if it happened to coincide with Cara and Mat’s recovery operation, well, that just meant he was being efficient. Not jealous. As soon as the word entered his head, Ben went still. He wasn’t jealous of anything since there was nothing to be jealous of. He slipped into the co-pilot chair and resolutely didn’t look at Cara when he passed her.

Once all the passengers called out they were secure, Mat’s voice high-pitched with excitement, and after Soloman announced systems were good, Ben gave the order to take off, and they launched upward with a gentle hop. Pearl spread out beneath them, and the pilot circled the clusters of buildings in a wide parabola to give the newcomers a view of the place and to display his piloting skills.

The view out the windows gave them a clear picture of how all the new construction had engulfed the original small settlement. Small, dingy buildings were surrounded on all sides by extensive, un-weathered modular units housing medical, transport, supply stores, the barracks, and of course, safety services. Ben wondered if Cara was looking out. Probably not. She was more likely peering around the flyer cabin, scanning for threats and the exact location of the escape pods.

Once they’d cleared Pearl airspace, Soloman set the flyer to a high velocity, and the greyish green jungle below them flashed by in a blurred wash. The younger officer very properly followed all flight protocols as he checked and double checked monitors. Ben stared out the front shield and tried not to think about anything in particular. He couldn’t blame his current confusion on the bureaucratic mess of the morning he’d had. This afternoon jaunt might help him shake off the strange mixture of excitement and dread he experienced. He hadn’t been so ill at ease since he’d faced his final exams in OTS.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Soloman?”

“I was wondering if I might offer Citizen Belasco a seat up here, if I supervise of course.”

Ben craned his head around to look at his subordinate’s profile. “That’s a good idea. Mat?”

“Yes, sir?” the boy’s voice piped up from behind them.

“How would you like to take my seat and co-pilot for Lt. Soloman here?”

“Really? Oh yes, sir, I’d love to.” The boy’s enthusiastic acceptance made Ben smile as he unfastened his harness and listened to Mat urge Cara to unbuckle him. Ben slipped away from his chair without looking at his XO. It was mean-spirited, thwarting the young man like that.

Cara held onto her brother until she could pass him off to Ben, and as he took the young man’s arm, she gave him a frightened glance. He smiled at her reassuringly and then moved to seat Mat properly, adjusting the harness as necessary and pointing out some of the more interesting monitors. Once Mat was safely restrained and peppering poor Soloman with unrelenting questions, Ben did the only thing he could and took the now available seat next to Cara.

“Will he be all right up there?”

“Of course.” Ben reminded himself she’d recently been through a traumatic crash and might still be anxious about being separated from Mat. She could see her brother from her seat, and he hoped that would be reassuring. Sighing, Cara stopped staring at the copilot’s seat and regarded him with wide eyes. Inexplicably, Ben’s feelings of imminent doom increased.

“Thank you for that. He’s really going to enjoy sitting up there. And thank you for taking us out.”

“You’re welcome. I hope we can recover most of your belongings.”

“We didn’t have much. You shouldn’t have wasted your time, Lt. Soloman’s time, and this flight on picking up a few bags of old clothing.”

“We need to survey the site and make more detailed reports to Falk’s executor and to the transit authority.” Cara inhaled and opened her mouth to speak, and he held up his hand. “No, I’m not putting anything about you in those reports. These are for agencies determining cause and salvage possibilities. Passengers don’t factor.”

She swallowed and nodded. Perhaps she was coming to trust him. “How long is this flight?”

“Another forty minutes ought to see us there.” Now, she’d nod, close her eyes, and lean back against the cushion to withdraw from any more contact. Ben didn’t want her to do that. He wanted to talk with her. All the scheduling updates and memos he could be transmitting from his datpad at this moment didn’t compare to his desire to learn more about Cara Belasco.

Instead of feigning sleep, she curved her body as much as the restraints would allow and faced him. “Do you have questions for me?”

He shook his head, hoping he detected a teasing note in her voice. “How about you turn the tables and ask me a few. I might get boring after a few minutes and we can get back to you.”

* * * *

All too soon, Soloman announced they’d reached the crash site. Ben enjoyed the quiet conversation he’d shared with Cara. She’d kept her voice low, and he’d had to incline his head her way along the seat cushions in order to hear her over the mechanical sounds of the ship and Mat’s excited commentary from the cockpit. Her eyes were a beautiful shade of slate blue-green, and she’d smiled in response to most of his attempts at humor. At her cautious prompts, he’d told her about some of his escapades at the academy and a few of the funnier anecdotes from his time here on Gamaliel. She’d revealed her favorite color was green and she preferred savory snacks to sweets. It had been an altogether pleasant ride, but as the ship circled and banked to land, he knew he had to conduct himself as the leader of this expedition again and not as a man trying to get to know an inherently reserved woman.

“Any sign of visitors?” Ben unhooked himself from his harness and took a few steps to peer out the front shield as the ship descended. Technically, he shouldn’t be unrestrained until they were still, but he trusted his balance and Soloman’s piloting skills enough to risk it. Getting some distance from Cara was also necessary.

“No, sir, everything scans as we left it.” Soloman had already activated the onboard detail monitors to record all the pertinent information about the abandoned ship.

Mat was finally silent when he saw the ship from above. It was a dramatic scene. There was over a kilometer of shredded and burned forest from the first point of impact to the final resting place of the barely recognizable vessel. Ben doubted the salvagers would bother with it. Gamaliel was too remote, and the materials they might be able to lift off the planet wouldn’t compensate anyone enough to bother removing the wreckage. Falk’s lost ship would slowly sink into the surface only to be stumbled upon in a century by someone exploring the area.

“Put us down where we landed before. It was a good surface.”

Ben grabbed a loop hanging from the cockpit ceiling as Soloman brought the flyer down. As soon as the ship settled, Mat struggled with his restraints. It took both Ben and Soloman to untangle him from the straps, and the boy soon bounced at the hatch, ready to explore. Ben gestured for the lieutenant to accompany Mat outside, and he turned to see if Cara needed help. She sat immobile and watched him, her hands not making a move to free herself.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure.” She struggled with the chest strap, and without thinking, he knelt to help her. Whenever her fingers tangled with his he noticed how cold her skin was. Together they managed to unfasten all the buckles, and she shrugged out of the harness and to her feet. He followed her to the hatch and almost stumbled into her when she halted at the ramp. The crashed ship rose in front of them like a giant’s mistreated toy. Every surface was pitted and charred and whole sections were missing. Belatedly, Ben realized she’d never seen it. When he’d carried her out, she’d been nearly unconscious. Her brother was apparently unfazed. Ben could hear his excited questions echo in the quiet forest.

“How did we survive?” she muttered under her breath as she took three slow steps down to the ground.

“Your pilot was good. And you had time to get in the foam. That’s what saved you.” Ben tallied up what had ensured their lives in two sentences. Far more people perished in the risky habit of space travel than survived whenever there was any sort of malfunction of a small ship hurtling through trans space. They’d been lucky against astronomical odds.

Following the sound of Mat and Soloman’s voices, they entered the ship through the emergency access cut in the hull. Dried muck coated every surface the rescue crews had stood on, and there was still an enormous amount of debris scattered about. The foam survival pods had been shoved to the sides and yawned open like broken eggs. There was dried blood on most of the cockpit surfaces. Mat rushed up to Cara brandishing a display.

“Look here! This shows the ship in all dimensions. Soloman showed me how to morph it from standard,” the boy adjusted the image to show the cruiser in its sleek and powerful original form, “to how it is now.”

With a few moves of his fingertips, the model contracted and lost every protruding fin and nacelle. “Soloman says we were seconds away from being cooked alive.” Mat sounded thrilled, but Cara blanched as she took in the eroded little image.

Ben scowled at Soloman, unhappy with his language choice, but the young officer was too busy scanning up the data recorder contents to notice.

“Come on, Mat. Do you remember which locker Falk put our baggage in?” Cara wrenched the display away from her brother’s hands and passed it off to Ben without looking. She and Mat stumbled over toward a bulkhead and studied the content markings that weren’t obscured by mud or soot. Before Ben could reach to help, Mat had keyed in a lock code and struggled to pull the hatch open.

“Here, let me,” Soloman said, and he leaped over to the siblings, smiling at Cara as he bunched his muscles and heaved it open with a squeal of bending metal. Cara straightened her shoulders and gathered up some nondescript packs. Soloman offered to carry them out, and she agreed with a small smile. Obviously pleased to be of service, the lieutenant swung everything up in one arm and made his way out of the ship as Mat trailed after while announcing he wanted take some digimas of the destruction.

Ben watched Cara as she stayed hunched at the now open locker, head hanging low as she breathed rapidly, one hand gripping the edge of the door.

* * * *

She could do this. She knew she could. Today had been full of challenges, and this was just one more. Cara tried to slow her breathing and focus on the locker in front of her, but her vision misted as she grew more and more dizzy. The stench of melted resin and burned plastic filled her nose, and her stomach roiled with nausea.

Ever since she’d seen the full horror of the crash she and Mat had survived, her fear had grown. Somehow the destroyed ship forcibly brought home how precarious her situation was. On her own and responsible for her brother without any protection from anyone else. They’d barely survived. She’d flinched when she’d seen Soren’s twisted and bloodied crash pod. One glance at the gore-spattered cockpit was enough to bring tears to her eyes. The damaged walls seemed to press in on her, and Cara couldn’t pretend strength anymore; she had to escape.

Turning and stumbling, she rushed past Ben and pushed her way through slippery piles of debris and fire suppression foam to reach the opening and leave the ship. She managed not to trip and fall on her way out and staggered as she tried to run on the soft ground. All she knew was she needed to be far away from the stinking mess of Falk’s ship. Mere seconds had kept Mat from dying. Soren was still close to death. Only luck had saved them. Those horrible thoughts echoed in her brain as she made her way to lean on a large cocker trunk and gasped.