Chapter 46: Black Kite Boards The Wanderer-7

Silence crashed back over the bridge as Chloe took half a step forward from the bottom of the mezzanine stairs with her bandaged hands twitching at her sides and her wide green eyes moving from Aoi’s weeping face to Leo’s motionless back.

"Leo..." Her voice was tiny, a fragile whisper trying to bridge the gap. "Maybe... maybe if we just talk to him... maybe we can—"

It died halfway out.

She saw the crushing loneliness coming off him like cold off ice, and the words froze in her throat and left her standing helpless in the shadow of the dais.

Aoi was watching his face.

She watched the last lingering spark of warmth in his eyes... the boy who called her Sensei with that shy affectionate smirk, the boy who brought her warm scallion bread because he knew she’d been weeping in the dark... flicker slowly out.

’A-ah...’

A sharp tiny pang of guilt struck her heart.

She stamped it down brutally, at this point, the older woman couldn’t make herself care... not with Ren sitting two hundred meters away.

Her brother was alive so nothing else in the universe mattered.

Leo didn’t look at her again... He didn’t look at Elena, or Harper, or Camila, or Jin-Ah.

He turned his back on all of them and faced the dark raider outside the cracked glass.

Slowly, he reached out and tapped the comms terminal on the armrest.

"...Allow it," he whispered. "Open the docking collar."

...

The clink of the docking array came up through the deck plates long before the seals hissed.

Through the narrow quartz pane of the starboard airlock, Leo watched the Black Kite draw alongside with heavy oiled grace, its dark hull blotting out the stars until its shadow swallowed the corridor.

From its flared flank, a segmented umbilical tube stretched across forty meters of vacuum with its accordion sleeves flexing like the black throat of a deep-sea serpent.

CLANK!

The magnetic collar slammed against the Wanderer-7’s outer ring with a shudder that rattled the bulkheads.

HISS!

Pressure seals bit into the seams and pumped equalized air into the sleeve.

[A notification regarding non-consensual exterior contact... The vessel is currently being embraced by a flexible conduit of dubious structural provenance. This unit explicitly records that it does not enjoy being touched by strange hardware... Disinfectant protocols are highly recommended the moment these vermin depart.]

Leo stood three paces back from the inner threshold with his arms loose at his sides and his flight suit zipped to the throat but he didn’t answer the machine.

Behind him the corridor was humming with breathless tension.

Aoi stood right at his shoulder with her knuckles white on her lapels and her eyes wide and wet behind her glasses.

Elena was right behind her, stiff as a steel rod, her icy eyes fixed on the hatch like a hawk tracking prey. Camila, Harper, Jin-Ah and Chloe stood in a tight silent cluster by the galley archway.

SWOOSH... BANG!

The outer pressure door slid back into its tracks.

The air from the tube rolled in colder than the corvette’s climate presets, carrying the sharp chemical tang of raw deuterium, burnt propellant and heavy machine oil.

A man stepped through.

He had to duck slightly to clear the upper ring as he was standing tall and lean, with the easy fluid balance of zero-G combat harnesses.

Around twenty-seven, jet-black hair cut short on the sides and neatly parted, sharp angular features that shared the same delicate line as Aoi’s jaw.

His dark eyes were shadowed by faint purple half-moons of exhaustion that gave him an air of weary protective competence.

He wore a charcoal utility tunic over an open blast vest, with a holster strapped low on his right thigh.

The matte-black grip of the pistol was in plain view, but his hands hung loose and open at his sides... around eight centimeters clear of the leather.

As his boots touched the Wanderer-7’s deck, a slow incredibly warm smile touched his lips.

Two men followed him in and stopped right at the lip of the airlock.

The first was Voss.

A broad hulking mountain of a man whose shoulders filled the doorframe, with a full grizzled beard and cold dead eyes that swept the corridor without blinking.

He just stood there with his arms crossed and his boots planted wide.

Beside him was Dekker.

He was thin and wiry with sunken cheeks and short twitchy fingers drumming a silent erratic rhythm against his thighs with a greasy grin plastered across his pale face and his watery eyes darting from the ceiling runners to the seams of the bulkheads.

Both wore slate-grey orbital engineering suits with the same embroidered blue-and-silver triangle on the left breast.

...Sterling Orbital.

"Ren..." Aoi’s voice was barely a breath.

The man turned his head.

His eyes found hers, and that tired protective smile bloomed into a radiant one.

"Nee-san," he said softly.

Aoi broke.

She launched herself across a meter and a half of deck and threw her arms around his neck with a ragged sobbing cry that tore straight out of her chest.

THUD!

She slammed into him and buried her face in his collar with her slender shoulders heaving in convulsive waves, her fingers knotting into the back of his jacket like the universe would rip him away again if she let go.

Ren’s arms wrapped smoothly around her back.

He pulled her in tight, tucked his chin over her hair and closed his eyes with a long shuddering exhale.

"I’ve got you," he murmured, rich and steady and gentle enough to break a stone. "I’ve got you, Aoi. You’re safe. God... I thought you were gone. I thought I was alone out here."

’He’s real,’ she thought, her tears soaking hot through his shirt as the familiar smell of cedar and clean soap pulled her spinning world back into place. ’He survived... My little brother, the boy who used to hide behind my skirt when thunder shook the roof... he survived the end of the world to come find me.’

Behind them Elena took a frantic step forward, her chin trembling and her eyes locked on the patches on the two men’s chests.

"You..." Her voice was cracked and stripped of every gram of aristocratic venom.

She sounded like a frightened child lost in the dark. "You’re wearing the Sterling crest. The orbital division... Are you from the high-orbit drydocks?"

Voss stayed silent as a tomb, but Dekker’s thin grin widened and his twitchy fingers tapped at his collar.

"Aye, miss," he said, a rapid reedy rasp with a faint colonial drawl. "Station Nine evacuees... Flew out on the third wave before the upper rings collapsed."

"My parents..." Elena stepped closer, her eyes wide and pleading as they jumped between the two men. "Director Sterling. Arthur and Vivienne Sterling. Were they on the manifests?! Did they clear the atmospheric gate?!"

Dekker tilted his head, and his smile softened into something sympathetic and practiced and rehearsed down to the millimeter.

"The Director... We haven’t found his shuttle yet miss, so we don’t know if he survived." He shook his head slowly. "But your mother... Lady Vivienne? She cleared... She’s alive and well... safe as can be in fact."

Elena’s knees buckled.

GASP!

She’d have hit the deck if her fingers hadn’t caught the ribbing of the wall.

Elena slumped against the bulkhead with both palms pressed over her mouth with her chest heaving as a strangled breathless sob slipped out.

’Mother is alive,’ her mind spun as a wave of dizzying relief flooded her veins until her ears rang. ’Mother made it. The fleet held... I don’t have to die in an unmapped asteroid belt with these stray mechanics. I can go home.’

Her eyes drifted past her own fingers toward the bridge door, and landed on Leo standing quietly beside it.

’I can finally be done with these people,’ she thought, and the bitter defensive pride surged back up to cover the tears on her lashes. ’I don’t hate them... They kept me breathing but they’re commoners, trapped in a flying coffin with an insecure stray who thinks throwing flatbread at us makes him a commander... Mother will have real ships... Real engineers and real officers who know what they’re doing.’

Leo stood motionless as his eyes didn’t linger on Elena’s tears.

They drifted to Dekker’s hands.

The constant nervous twitching against his trouser seam and the way his watery eyes kept flicking to the vents like he was measuring the thickness of the walls.

They drifted to Voss, whose right hand was resting eight centimeters above the retention strap of an arc-cutter holster hidden under his jacket.

And then he looked at Ren.

Ren was still holding Aoi, stroking her back in slow comforting circles... but his eyes were open.

Over his sister’s shoulder, they met Leo’s.

It was a fraction of a second.

One single imperceptible beat where the boyish tearful relief vanished completely and a cold look swept Leo from his boots to his collar then it was gone, and the warm disarming smile was back.

Leo’s throat went dry as the pull in the small of his back cinched into a knot.

"Where’s the rest of your ship?" He asked, cutting through the sniffling in the hall. "A Tier-3 raider runs a crew of fifteen. You brought two guys to an airlock."

Ren eased Aoi back with one hand still resting reassuringly on her shoulder and turned to face him.

He just gave an easy understanding chuckle and nodded back toward the docking sleeve.

"Fair question, Captain." His voice was smooth as polished stone. "The Black Kite’s just the scout... The rest of our people, about eighty survivors now, are three light-hours back, holding in a stable Lagrangian pocket. We’ve put together a makeshift mothership out of two linked heavy freighters and a mobile drydock."

He looked over at Elena and his smile turned respectful.

"Lady Vivienne is helping run the survivor council there, Miss Sterling. She’s the one who authorized my search vector... She told me if there was even a fraction of a percent chance her daughter’s transport was in this quadrant, I wasn’t to come back without sweeping every rock." Softer. "She’s waiting for you."

Elena let out a shaky breath and nodded furiously, scrubbing her eyes with her sleeve.

Ren stepped past the threshold into the wider corridor but he didn’t crowd them.

He kept a respectful two meters of distance, open and relaxed, like an man who had everything under control.

He turned to Camila, still clutching her basket of tomatoes by the galley arch, and his eyes widened slightly with what looked like genuine wonder.

"Are those... fresh tomatoes?" he whispered, taking a slow step closer. "Out here? In the middle of a dead belt?"

Camila blinked and pulled the basket closer, her cheeks flushing. "I... yes. I grew them. In the compartment down the hall."

He looked at her like she’d performed a miracle.

"You’re a Biosphere Harmonizer, aren’t you?" His Kansai lilt went soft and gentle. "Back on the mothership we managed to save an agricultural deck from a bulk carrier. Real soil... Three hundred square meters of dark earth under full-spectrum solar arrays but we don’t have a cultivator. We’ve got twelve children back there living on grey paste and powdered milk because nobody knows how to make the roots take. They need someone like you..."

Camila’s eyes flooded.

SNIFF!

She pressed the basket against her heart.

"Children...? There are kids on the mothership?"

"Twelve of them," Ren said. "Scared, hungry and missing their mothers. A warm bowl of tomato soup would mean the world to them."

She nodded frantically with her chin trembling, already lost in a vision of small hands reaching for fresh food.

He worked down the line.

A respectful nod to Jin-Ah for her logistical efficiency, a compliment for Harper on the custom weld seams along the companionway rail.

...Every sentence was tailored to hit the exact nerve, the exact insecurity, the exact desperate want each girl had buried under her armor then his eyes drifted to the dark corner by the garden hatch.

Chloe stood in the shadows with her hands behind her back and her small frame pressed against the bulkhead with her bangs hanging low.

Ren looked at her and he didn’t speak.

His eyes settled on her face then they stayed there for a while.

"Oh..."

It was a slow and deliberate glance, lingering on the faint peach flush of her skin, the slight fullness of her lips, the subtle inhuman density of the way she stood.

A tiny flicker of recognition flashed across his dark eyes before he blinked it away behind another warm gentle smile.

Nobody else saw it... Aoi was still wiping her eyes, Elena was staring at the patches and Camila was lost in a farm deck.

Only Leo saw it.

He stood by the bridge door with his arms crossed and his eyes never leaving Ren’s face, and that half-second sent a cold violent jolt of static straight down his spine.

’He didn’t look at her like a survivor,’ he thought, his jaw setting like iron.

’He looked at her like livestock.’