Chapter Nineteen

Dizziness threatened to overcome Datron’s best intentions to pilot the Hyperion back to Oceanus. Knowing he was very close to passing out, he got up out of the captain’s chair.

He still had something to do. Despite the pain, he had to confront Charlie while he could muster the strength.

His entire crew was back at their stations on the bridge now. They didn’t need him and never had. In fact, he’d done more harm on this mission than good.

“Clitus take over. Gilla monitor any transmissions. If that Ussarian admiral is anywhere near, I need to know. The minute the power comes back online get us home as soon as you can!”

“Where will you be?” Electra smilingly asked as she opened and closed vents to air out the smoke from the bridge.

“Engine room…talking to our little Lucent Stone-immune demolition expert,” he quipped. Then he strode through the bridge hatch and slowly walked toward the space where he knew his little meteor would always be happiest.

Once he was in the engine room, he gazed around and found two, tiny booted feet sticking out from under the engine housing. He couldn’t decide whether to hug or shake the little fireball until her teeth rattled. But he had no energy left to do either. Every reserve he had was gone and he knew Electra, Clitus, and Gilla must be feeling the same. They’d been beaten, too. Not as badly as him but they were still throttled and doing their best to get their jobs done. He must do no less.

His mind was just getting wrapped around the fact that they hadn’t died when they should have, several times over.

For the hundredth time he considered how the mission would be a total failure except for Charlie. Had she not been aboard, the Lucent Stones would now be headed toward Ussar where a full scale war would probably erupt over who on that planet actually got to keep them. That war would have spilled over into several sectors of space where governments of every nearby planet would be questioning each other as to who might or might not be under the influence of the stones’ dust.

All that considered, the Creator must have been watching over them in the form of a very tiny guardian.

He didn’t believe in coincidences and never had. Their stowaway had been given the gumption to take action because he couldn’t. A greater power must have known.

Datron knelt down and tapped the toe of the closest small boot. “We need to talk.”

“Just a minute. The inertial stabilizers kept us from feeling most of the blasts. An internal stress test showed the hull is pretty banged up, but she’ll get us back to Oceanus.”

“Charlie—”

“I guess you could just say that we had some kind of pirate encounter…to explain the hull damage to the ground crew,” she continued with her mechanical summation.

He had the feeling he was being ignored. “Charlie—”

“I’ve got one more fusion connector to…there. That’s got it,” she finished.

Datron looked up when the overhead lights flashed back on and the engine started to hum. He stood and backed up so she could use a rolling mechanics’ backboard to scoot out from under the engine housing.

Like a miniature ball, she bounced up from her supine position, expertly twirled a micron-macrometer wrench in one hand, then gazed up at him. And once more, he was captured by her bright smile and the pure, innocent joy in her eyes. With grease on her face and the dust of Chiron all over her jumpsuit, she was still the loveliest thing he’d ever seen.

Nothing brought her down.

He was so in love with this woman that everything in his life paled by comparison. He couldn’t imagine going on without her. It’d taken only a few short days to change every priority he’d ever had. All because one little fire-flit had buzzed into his existence. But one horrible thought still floated in his tired mind.

“Charlie, what did you mean when you said you were dying anyway? Did you say that just to negate my concern over your being in Goron’s control?” He watched her smile fade, and felt his heart drop to the bottom of his gut.

For a very long moment, she just stared at him. “No. I was telling the truth. I’ve got eighteen months to live.”

The entire front of his chest went numb. He grasped for a support beam to lean against and fought pain, weariness, and this final horrible shock.

What a number of vicious Ussarians hadn’t managed to accomplish, her words did.

He slid down the beam and went to his knees. Objects nearby seemed to waver in a water-filled mist.

Charlie dropped her wrench and wrapped her arms around his head and shoulders. She pulled him against her body and held on tight. He felt her warmth and her soft breath on his cheek. Someone so vital couldn’t be dying. He’d misheard. He was in pain and hadn’t understood.

“I-I’m sorry to blurt it out like that. It’s not a good time, but I don’t know when there ever will be for that kind of news. I never wanted to hurt you or anyone else, Datron. God as my witness, I didn’t!” she whispered.

His hands lifted automatically. He couldn’t control them as his palms lightly skimmed over her hair, face, and shoulders. All this was a bad dream brought on by either injury or mental issues.

“Th-there’s g-got to be some mistake,” he choked out. “I’m banged up, baby. I know I’m not hearing you right.”

“Datron, it’s the truth.” She took a deep breath and glanced away for a moment.

He watched her blink back tears, and his mind went numb. If a heart could actually rip, his just had.

“I should never become involved with you. But I wanted you so much,” she softly told him. “I think I might have been falling in love with you ever since I saw you compete in the Mr. Interstellar Feller pageant. You didn’t see me but I know now that your mind was on your secret mission.”

No words came to his lips. His brain just wouldn’t command his mouth to speak.

“Datron, I don’t know my real name. My parents gave me up to St. Anne’s Cathedral in Chicago a few days after I was born. The Sisters gave me a grandiose name befitting my tiny size. They said Charlotte Grayson seemed elegant and important for such a small baby.”

He saw her try to smile and knew, in his entire life, he’d never met anyone braver.

“I, I don’t know for sure but I think my folks might have been told I’d contracted something called Black Hole Syndrome. It’s caused by some environmental anomaly. It’s not communicable. But, as you can imagine, it kept anyone else from adopting me.” She swallowed hard and kept talking slowly.

“It’s kind of odd, really. The doctors are able to calculate almost the exact minute I’ll die, but they can’t do anything to cure the disease.” She shrugged as if what she was saying didn’t signify. “That’s the way it is. There just isn’t any known treatment. I’ve known about it since I was twelve.”

He shook his head, wanting to hear no more. But his tiny warrior put both hands on the sides of his face and made him look at her when he would have stared at the deck. And in that moment, he knew he’d never meet another woman he could love.

“Datron, I want you to hear this because…because you have to know why I acted the way I did when I first met you. And why I didn’t tell you about this sickness sooner.” She pushed his hair out of his face before continuing. “At first, I tried telling myself I walked across that ballroom to put you in your place. I kept saying I was fixing a wrong. But the truth was more about my needs than the dignity of those contestants.”

He couldn’t respond. He couldn’t move and didn’t want to breathe.

“You see, I just wanted an excuse to make you notice me,” she explained. “And then, when we got too close, I tried to push you away because I didn’t want to hurt you. That’s why I acted so cold after we had sex.” She shook her head and chewed on her lower lip before saying more. “I still wanted you. Now…I don’t want to lose you.”

The darkness of the engine room was so appropriate. He tried to focus but couldn’t. Nothing mattered. Nothing.

“I don’t know if any of this makes sense. I’m not even sure you can understand right now. You, you don’t look so well but I’ve gotta finish. You see, I don’t want to die alone, without anybody there to know who I was or to care. At the same time, there won’t be much to look at. My brain will have been decimated by the disease and I won’t be very attractive—”

His voice finally came through, though it sounded hoarse and disconnected. “Stop it! I can’t. I won’t listen to this! I have to get back to the bridge. It’s my responsibility to… to do what?” He shook his head and put one shaking hand to his forehead. “I…I have things I should be doing.”

“God! You’re either hurt so physically bad that you can’t hear, or I’ve hurt you so bad emotionally you don’t want to. This was so wrong of me,” she whispered. “I should have just walked away and let you live your life without putting you through this. It was a selfish act and I’m so very sorry.”

He quickly stood—though it took almost every single ounce of strength he had left.

She stood with him.

He was operating on nothing but nerve now. Strength and courage were gone. Duty was all he had left. He had to do his duty.

“I-I’ll talk to you about this when we get back to Oceanus. The doctors there will fix everything. They’ll fix us all. And we…it’ll be like…none of this ever…I have to get back to the bridge, Charlie. Get…get some rest,” he babbled.

“Baby, the doctors can’t fix me,” she insisted.

He put out one hand, pulled her near, and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Wait until you see those baby porpoises swim. I can’t wait to show you. And…and we can buy a house in the garden district. We can have those parties’ people give. You know, the ones where we serve cocktails on the patio and stay up all night playing ridiculous games. Won’t that…that’ll be…we can have it all, Charlie. Just you and me. Okay?” He drew himself up, squared his shoulders, and took a deep breath. “I have to get back to the bridge. You, you keep that engine going. We have so many plans to make. So many…”

He slowly walked away.

It was possible he heard someone sobbing from behind him, but it was just the damned engine gauges acting up. Everything was fine. Everything would be fine.

He just had to get back in the captain’s chair and see this through. They’d land soon and this mission would finally be over.

A few minutes later, he was back where he needed to be. From the bridge he could control everything.

“Our flying time back to Oceanus is twenty-eight hours,” Electra informed him.

Datron slowly sat in the captain’s chair and gripped the console. Darkness closed in though he tried to fight it off.

In slow motion, Electra and Clitus rushed forward.

He heard Gilla’s voice, but the words were scrambled.

Someone said something about the sickbay. Another voice responded all their medical supplies might have been looted by the Ussarians.

It didn’t matter. He tried to tell them so, but his brain wasn’t connecting again.

Blackness more deep than anything he’d ever known closed in like a mile-high wave. He accepted the darkness.

There was no pain there.

****

Charlie wiped her nose with the dirty sleeve of her jumpsuit.

He doesn’t want to accept the truth.

It made helping him impossible but then what had she expected? His reaction was amplified but still similar to what close friends had done when they’d found out she was dying.

In Datron’s case, he loved her. His heart and emotions were shattered, and there’d be precious little time to get him used to the idea. But she couldn’t leave him. After looking for him all her life, that wasn’t an option. Going away meant he’d probably come after her. Besides, being absent wouldn’t take the pain away.

She sniffed again and turned to pick up her equipment. A ship’s alarm sounded, and she kicked the bulkhead with her booted foot. Couldn’t they just get this damned trip over?

“What the crap?” she loudly complained though there was no one to hear her enraged outburst.

The alarm suddenly went off again, but was followed by an urgent message.

“Charlie, if you’re still in the engine room you need to get to sickbay. The captain’s down,” Clitus quickly announced.

She didn’t pause, didn’t think, and didn’t stop to close any hatches behind her.

By the time she made it to sickbay, she was dragging air into her lungs. Sweat poured down her face as she rushed forward.

Clitus, Gilla, and Electra, bruised and battered as they were from Ussarian mistreatment, were placing Datron out on a large stretcher. His eyes were closed; his bronzed skin uncharacteristically pale.

“I can’t find any med supplies,” Gilla announced as he opened and closed cabinets.

“Dammit!” Charlie uttered. “I didn’t have time to put back what the Ussarians looted. I was working against time as it was.” She ran to Datron’s left side and picked up his hand. “Is he that bad? He was in the engine room just a few minutes ago.”

Electra checked his pulse then gently palpated his abdomen while Gilla and Clitus looked on. Once done, she swiped one hand across her forehead. “I assume you’ve all had the same emergency medical training Earth enforcers get,” she mused. “I think he’ll be okay, but I don’t know for sure. For a man who had the living crap beat out of him, I’m surprised he didn’t pass out sooner.”

“No internal hemorrhaging?” Gilla asked.

“If there is there’s nothing we can do about it,” Clitus answered. “We don’t even have a scanner aboard. As Electra says, if his organs were badly damaged his systems should have shut down. He’s still got decent circulation, he’s breathing on his own. All we can do is keep him warm and comfortable.”

“I-I can do that!” Charlie told them. “The rest of you look like hell. You’re covered in bruises.”

Her compatriots took time to look each other over. It was probably the first time they had.

“If I can make a suggestion…you might want to take shifts piloting and sleeping. After what I’ve seen, I’m quite sure you can operate an old bucket like this. Obviously the auto-pilot works since there’s no one on the bridge.” She sighed, shook her head then continued. “In the meantime, if there’re any supplies at all left, I’ll get hot coffee and food to you as well as look after wing man…uh…the captain,” she quickly corrected.

“That’s a good idea,” Electra agreed. Then she put her hands on her hips and considered the only stowaway in their midst. “What are we going to tell the king about you, my dear? And please don’t tell me you don’t know who I’m talking about. You must have heard every conversation we had,” she finished as she pointed to the overhead ductwork with her thumb.

“Indeed,” Gilla stated as he stroked his chin. “I never thought we’d make it off Chiron. And we wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for Charlie. But now we must get our collective stories straight.”

“Why can’t we just tell the king the truth?” Clitus asked. “He’s not likely to care about anything except the destruction of those stones, and the obliteration of planet Lucent and its moon. As to what we’ll say to anyone when we land, I don’t know. We’ll need to call a medic transport for the captain and that will take some explaining.” He scratched his head in thought.

“Pirates might have boarded and attacked when you were on a routine flight. You were supposed to be checking the Hyperion for diplomatic use. That story could still hold,” Charlie said with a shrug. “And that would explain the trashed sickbay and other looted parts of the ship.” She put her hand on Electra’s arm. “If the king is pissed about me stowing away then I’ll be the one who’ll deal with him. None of you knew I was here. He can’t hold you responsible.”

“Your pirate story should work,” Electra nodded as she rubbed the back of her neck. “As to His Highness’ opinion of a stowaway…well…it’d be difficult for him to punish you when we’d normally have a mechanic aboard for any test flight. If anything, your presence actually solidifies our story. And, at this point, I can’t remotely imagine you being a security risk! There’s no way you’ll be blabbing about any of this.”

The two men nodded in unison.

Charlie sighed in relief. All she wanted to do was get back to Oceanus, make sure Datron was okay, then try to make her death announcement less devastating. Somehow, there had to be a way to make him understand. She’d known about this all her life and was ready. He had to accept her impending death.

“Clitus, if you and Gilla will make up some kind of sleep schedule, even if it’s for a couple of hours each, I’ll stay here for a moment longer and help Charlie find something to keep the captain warm,” Electra told them. “I’ll meet you both on the bridge in a few minutes.”

Clitus and Gilla took another moment to gaze at their unconscious captain. Then they nodded at her as they walked through the hatch.

It took five minutes to find a couple of bedcovers that hadn’t been stolen from bunks. They used these to cover Datron.

“Don’t worry, Charlie. I know the king well. You saved our lives and used your wits to finish this mission.”

“Thank you, Electra. I know my methods were a bit unorthodox—”

Electra stopped her by raising one hand. “My dear, you did it. That’s what matters. And as to whatever is happening between you and him,” she gestured toward Datron, “that’s no one’s business.”

“I-I’ve hurt him so badly,” Charlie murmured.

“He should be glad to have known you. I certainly am! So are Clitus and Gilla.”

“So…so I was right about you knowing about my disease?”

Electra nodded but said nothing more.

“I wouldn’t have missed knowing any of you, either. I’ve done and seen things most folks can’t even imagine. Thanks for everything, Electra.”

“My extreme pleasure, my girl. And if it makes any difference, know that you’ll be with friends. We’re here for you if you want anything at all.”

Charlie bowed her head and clasped her hands in front of her.

Electra hugged her once then quickly walked away.

For the remainder of almost thirty hours of flying time, she tried to help the others. They were tired and hurt, but focused. As one took the console, another ate what supplies were left after the looting, then slept.

As for Datron, she watched over him as well as anyone could. She always kept blankets warmed via the sickbay internal heaters. She spoke to him softly, talking about meaningless things. If he could hear, she wanted him to know he wasn’t alone.

Occasionally, she slid her palms over his shoulders and face. She tried to brush his long, unbound yellow-gold hair with her fingers. It lay in a fan shape around his shoulders and head.

More than ever, Datron looked like an angel—a very tired, injured, worn angel who’d shouldered responsibility honorably and who’d almost lost his life because someone he and the rest of the crew trusted betrayed them.

Charlie didn’t want to think about what Electra would tell the king on that account. She didn’t want to think about this mission or her part in it at all. It was over.

The only thing that mattered, as she hugged the huge body of the man she loved, was making sure he was all right and that he eventually got over her. In that regard, they’d have to have a very long talk.

She tried to reach around him but couldn’t possibly encompass his massive frame. Nor would she have been able to make her hands meet in the back even if he’d been sitting up. But she hugged him as much and as often as she could.

Sleep could wait. She’d be resting quite soundly soon enough.

As she gazed at his square, bruised jaw, swollen lips and blood-clogged wounds, he was still the epitome of heroic, knightly honor.

They hadn’t known each other very long and some might say his display of angst over her impending death was overly dramatic given their short relationship.

But sometimes, a person could see another person in a crowd and experience a life-altering feeling of deep connection. That’d been the way it was for her, when she’d seen him two years ago. Sadly, she hadn’t made a move to know him then. Now, there were only months left.

Whatever love there was in the universe, they’d experienced it. If only for a brief period in cosmic history.

Eventually, she heard Clitus’ ship-wide announcement that they were landing at Oceanus’ Enforcer Airfield. He also relayed a med-tech team was standing by.

She stroked Datron’s cheek and gazed down at him once more. Soon, they’d take him away and someone else would care for him.

He’d recover. His breathing was deep and steady—his color much improved. Even though the wings he rested on were twisted an odd shape, and she couldn’t tell which of them might be broken if not both, they’d heal.

She dropped her gaze and briefly closed her eyes. “Thank you for letting me have him for just a short time. Thank you for bringing us all home safely. And be with them all. But mostly…be with him,” she finished as she felt the Hyperion land, and heard the outer seals break.

Medical personnel rushed aboard. They made a quick, efficient job of taking the wounded crew out of the vessel. Datron was placed on a large stretcher. Great care was taken not to move his injured wings more than necessary. His body was stabilized for transportation. He was still quite unconscious. She was sure he didn’t know a single thing about what was going on around him.

As she mounted another shuttle, her friends received care and were also placed on stretchers. It occurred to her then that she was the only one who wasn’t really hurt. The dying girl hadn’t got more than a few bruises when Goron struck her.

For his crimes, Goron was dead as well as his whole crew. But she didn’t mention any of that to the medical personnel. They didn’t need to know and she’d been trusted to keep secrets. And so she would.

The trip to the medical facility went quickly. Once there, her friends were taken away.

She stopped at a set of double infirmary doors when hospital staff told her she couldn’t go beyond them to be with Datron. That left her quite alone with her thoughts.

Although tired and hungry, she couldn’t leave. She slowly turned and found a waiting room; aware her disheveled, dirty state wasn’t winning points with any of the other patients’ families.

To take her mind off her problems, she found an empty chair in a corner and sat. Watching any dull program on the visiting room vid screen was better than dwelling on a future she wished she could have.

Feeling sorry for herself had never been an option before. Now, however, she wanted someone with all her heart, and couldn’t figure why he’d come into her life at the very end. It made no sense.

She eventually turned away from the wall vid display.

An odd sensation of floating suddenly overwhelmed her. Then a jolting, fierce pain hit her between the eyes.

Blinded by the unholy, sudden agony in her skull, she tried to call out but didn’t know if a single syllable escaped her lips.

Sudden blackness engulfed her, and she felt herself falling.