Hotter on the Edge (2 page)

One breath of Sol air, and her heart was already pounding hard. Not enough O
2
. Years ago, she'd been able to last twenty minutes before stars poked into her sight. But she'd been taking supplements then.

The survival pack. She ripped the seal with her good hand and her teeth. Found the breather.

A drum beat on the hull and Mica whipped her attention up. A hexapedal monkey had dropped onto the flyer, intent on her. She knew the trinomial.
Solus cebus nimravorus
.

Mica stared at him while she put the breather's plugs up her nose. She inhaled deeply to quicken her reflexes.

He was a sharp-toothed capuchin, hungry during the orbital period of Sol when the subtropical jungle froze. Sol-adapted to be carnivorous. The white markings at his temples identified him as male. The rings on his tail were another Sol trait, while the structure of his face was Terran. Two years old, considering the nubs on his forehead. The six limbs were a T-forming developmental curiosity. She should write a paper on him.

The monkey loped forward, too hungry from stasis to care about their size differential. He crouched, baring his teeth. Hissed…Launched.

Mica swatted him out of the air, his tail arcing. She grabbed for it, changed his trajectory, and brought him face down on the hull. The creature, stunned, shook itself, while Mica took hold of the back of his head. Broke its neck.

Fieldwork had taught her all sorts of things.

She scanned the area while she steadied her breath. A silver light winked through the layers of canopy growth. They were coming. Could be too late already.

If she were caught, they would kill her. And they would send her head to Pilar as a wedding gift. Or something just as bad. They fought Sol with a single-minded determination that made her shiver.

Mica swung her legs outside the door, whimpered a little at the thought of the steep fall, and then she let herself slide down the incline of the ship.

The ground came up too fast, and she rolled into the jarring landing. Her shoulder and arm hurt, but no bones broken. Already dirty again. Sorry, Pilar.

She stood, considering which direction to go. The city was due north, too far for her dismal preparedness. That left the Way Station. Could be 20 km. But it was shelter, supplies, and safe communication with the city.

Her family knew that she was supposed to be coming in today. Eventually, they'd seek her out and track her movements from the dock to where she'd ditched her escort. They'd leave no sector unsearched, if only to make sure her hair looked good for the media.

Her nails were already ruined.

***

"They're an hour ahead of us at most," Simon said over his shoulder to his crew as they finally broke through the winter dormant growth to discover the branch-striated hull of the ship.

He slapped another razor bug and cursed. He was going to need a shot of antihistamine if this kept up much longer. They all would. His skin was already feeling numb.

The flyer hung almost vertically, grasped by branches and vines. These trees didn't give or break; they were pliable, and had played with the flyer as if it were a toy. It was typical of Sol—nothing foreign had much luck at changing anything native. Not the T-forming, not this ship. Not the people. Sol always won and left the rest to scrape along as best they could.

"Even if they have breathers," Otis said, "they're already dead." He knelt at the downturned nose to pull new plasma packs from his bag.

Simon regarded the craft. Switching the old plasma out was fairly simple. Getting the craft free of the clutches of the trees was another matter. Concealing the site during and after the process posed even more problems.

Simon grunted, his foul mood getting worse as he hacked through the brush to round the scuttled ship. The Tear would have been safe and easy—for everyone. The frond-like branches bent, with resistance, then whipped his face. Bugs buzzed all around—attracted to heat and movement. And the fracis was already blooming, brought out of winter hibernation by the warmth of the hull. The radiating heat had signaled the spring thaw to the immediate area, which meant bugs, pollen, poisonous frogs, and bone lizards—what a mess.

"Jace," Simon called. "Get inside and tell me what we've got." Let the survivors be huddled inside. Sol could give him that much.

Jace started climbing a tree. Simon caught sight of the slicer gun he had tucked into the back of his pants and felt a reservation stir. Jace liked to shoot things. But then again, he liked his share of the payout better.

Simon rounded the nose of the flyer to find a small skid of disturbed earth. A handprint there—too small for his liking. A bare footprint—feminine. Damn. If the woman didn't have a breather, they'd find the body nearby.

Simon glanced up to check Jace's progress, just in time to see him drop down on the hull. Arms pinwheeling for balance, Jace disappeared from sight to investigate.

"Yeah?" Simon shouted.

"I've got an open hatch and a dead capu. Neck's been broken."

Some rich woman killed a monkey, and then ran off barefoot? Simon closed his eyes for patience. "Inside please," he called to Jace.

In the meantime, Simon made a quick, but thorough, search of the area. Found another footprint headed east, toward the Sol City wall. It would be a very long walk, doomed to failure, if that were her destination. At least the woman had to have a breather, or he—and opportunistic pests—would've found her body by now.

He returned to the ship to find Jace dropping gear from above. Simon waved Otis away, saying "Plasma," and searched what looked like some kind of trekking pack. What the hell was it doing here, and not on the survivor's back? He dumped its contents. A crush of clothes fell out in the dust—dingy colors of well-worn grays, but feminine. Technical tools dropped on top, sampling stuff, data measures. Belatedly, a woman's scent snuck past his plugs to make his belly curl with terror, his cock harden in memory.

No, no, no.
He broke a sweat.

Among the stuff, he picked out a neon yellow ident-tag. The color made his heart suck until bursting, all sound muted but for the pounding in his ears.

Oh, please, no.
The tag was a six-moon survey permit for Encantada, a cluster world at the edge of the Han System. It was the kind of tag a xenobioform engineer would need among a crew exploring a new world. He'd seen one once before. Five years ago. When she left him.

His balance faltered. Vision narrowed. The universe condensed to a name, printed above the tag code.

Mica Sol. Once his. Forever his only.

He could've killed
her
…

A shock of pain staggered him for a moment. He braced his hands on the ground.

No. Alive. Still alive. He
hadn't
killed her.

He drew on his plugs. Worked up a swallow to get his body functioning again.

And she was well enough to kill a capu before it took a bite out of her.

Damn it, Mica.
A bitter laugh escaped him. She
would
end up here, now. He thought she'd had another year on her contract. The expense to pull her out must have been—he frowned—the expense would have been nothing to her family, especially with the wedding.

And she was fast enough to get herself out of the range of bloodthirsty scavengers. He was, in fact, seeing red.

And smart enough, brilliant even, to attempt to lead her pursuers in the direction of the city wall, when he knew very well that she wouldn't head there.

His woman would head for the Way Station—for the place they'd built together.

Chapter Two

Mica shivered as she jogged forward, her initial adrenaline-fueled panic giving way to sluggish limbs and goose bumps. Rough roots and cold-packed earth made progress quick. The dense growth, a sleeping green, made her shield her face with her arms. Her feet ached, and her toes were numb. The day's cool temperature waned with the setting sun, the sky deepening. The night's freeze would follow.

She couldn't keep up her pace. She was already stumbling. Her chattering teeth rattled her head and messed with the irregular beat of her heart.

And something was bugging her shoulder. The emergency pack. Right. She dug inside and pulled out a thermal poncho, a tiny square that unfolded into a feather-light rectangle that covered her from shoulder to mid-thigh. The silver reflective material was a safety concession she had to make. That, or start dying.

Stop.

She couldn't afford to think like that. Couldn't afford mistakes. She'd been given a test, that's all, just like her competency exams for T-forming onsite collection and research. She had a task: get to the Way Station. The obstacles were her sorry state of dress, the cold, her meager supplies, and…the very real threat of capture by scavengers.

Scavengers. Here. Now.

Of course they would be here.

What better time for them to send a message to her father than during the lavish wedding of her sister? Mica gripped her skull as the full impact of the situation hit her. Pilar's wedding was the lead ticker on all comms. Who was who. Who was wearing what. Personal slights and related corp business. A dramatic display by the scavengers would bring the sector's attention sharply to them and their plight: had the terraforming worked completely, they would have been the rulers of Sol, not the corp that had come in to mine.

Mica shivered under the poncho.

Her family had extended aid over and over again. The scavengers wouldn't take it, wouldn't acknowledge in any way what they considered the Sol family's dominion over them. Nor did they trust the off-world medics who came to treat the deformities wrought by human mothers ingesting Sol biomatter. Not even the safe rations and genetic buffers that had been dropped by remote craft. The aid was supposedly tainted by the dependence that went along with it. Sol should be theirs. Her family members were usurpers.

And Mica had seen what the scavengers had done to her father's emissaries who'd tried to convince them that a life in the mines was a good life. If she were hurt, her father would strike back, brutally, and they would retaliate, and so on and so forth.

No mistakes. This was a pass/fail scenario, in the extreme.

What next, then?

Trekking by starlight would only get her lost. Lack of sleep would weaken her. The cold would immobilize her. Some creature would finish her off.

She needed shelter for the night.

She kept up her pace to keep her blood moving as she considered her situation. What did she have to work with?

She could use the long and wide leaves of the summa tree, though it would be difficult pulling them from their branches. They were good insulators and would camouflage the structure to all but those standing very close. With the summa, she could make a pocket of warmth…which would awaken and attract predators just coming out of stasis.

The heat of any shelter would awaken and attract predators.

So no fire either, a skill she'd perfected for her comps.

She could do this, a thought at odds with the rushing sensation behind her eyes that threatened tears. She crouched to conserve the heat that was slipping out from under her poncho. Something tickled her foot, pinched. She swatted, and got a burrow spider. The spiders burrowed into the ground, but also into flesh. Even the earth under her feet was responding to her warmth—though her feet felt like blocks of ice. A thin smear of blood arched across the bridge of her foot.

She was damned at every turn.

Keep walking, then? From her crouch, she lifted her gaze to the frigid tangle of trees ahead, now darkening with the setting sun. Wait a sec…She lowered her gaze a fraction to a depression in the ground between two close-set trees, like an underground cradle, grown over with caterpillar moss. The makings of a nest. And she knew to whom it belonged.

Solus lasiorhinus xerinus
.

A large wombat-like animal, herbivore, that hibernated in packs. Their Terran brown fur had developed into soft spines. The acidity and stench of their dung kept pests away during the Sol winter stasis, while insulating their nests from the cold—another Sol adaptation.

Mica eyed the mossy brown opening. Grinned.

Room for one more?

***

Simon ran his thumb over Mica's name on the ident-tag. The dragon had to be registered to her as well.
Nice ride, sweetheart
. Proof of her identity would be all over the craft. In about three minutes, his crew would know that they'd scored a Sol princess. There was no hiding it to protect her. Not that he would let her go free.

Because, yeah, she, of all people, could survive here. And he had no doubt that she could do it barefoot, during winter, in an environment otherwise deadly to humans. She wasn't just a daughter of a corp family; she was a daughter of this planet. She was Sol, through and through, and Sol seemed to love her back.

There was no other way. Not when his crew knew her identity. These men—criminals like himself—had no reason to go soft on the princess, not when her father had exiled them to almost certain death outside the city walls.

"Pax!" Simon shouted. His voice was grim, but his crew wouldn't hear anything but money. The intergalactic standard currency—pax—was a misnomer just about everywhere.

O dropped the plasma and looked over from his crouch near the nose. Jace suddenly appeared above, interest alight in his eyes. How much pax did a princess go for these days?

"Anyone opposed to hostages?" Simon asked with a huge smile while his chest burned in opposition. He knew the answer already. And this way, he could make sure she was delivered, safe and unmolested by beast or man, to Sol City.

O jerked his chin toward the ident-tag. "Who is it?"

"It's a sign." Simon flicked the tag in the air. "Mica Sol, daughter of the very wealthy Drummond and Michaela Sol, sister of Pilar Sol, the glorious bride-to-be."

O was already striding toward him. "A sign, indeed! A little more
mica
to add to our bounty?"