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“Adjust the thrusters before you attempt the landing. The planet’s gravitational pull is high,” Vietai said.
Grinning, Haoyu watched Jenny, the new recruit, stare in confusion at the book in her lap.
“Captain, it doesn’t say anything about above-average gravitational pull in the star charts Daniela gave me.”
Vietai just smiled. Haoyu knew by now that was a thing he’d taught himself to do while living amongst humans, but it looked pretty on point, despite the fact that it couldn’t reach his eyes on account of him not having any. Instead, he’d tied a red silk cloth around his head, which made humans feel better about looking at him. With his face being so much like theirs, the total lack of eyes could be unnerving otherwise, Vietai had explained once. Of course, you didn’t strictly need the smile or any eyes to tell when he was amused, considering that his plaster-white skin started to glow a soft gold, an effect his own people could not see, but that was supposedly a by-product of to some sort of harmless radiation only their keen space senses picked up on.
“I trust Haoyu will humour me?” Vietai asked.
“If you miscalculate, the worst that’s going to happen is that we’re going to crawl down the sky for half the afternoon at snail’s speed for no reason, so I guess I’ll chance it this time,” he said magnanimously, while adjusting the cranks and levers that moved machinery in the round belly of the trading ship, just as he’d done without hesitation for two years now.
Vietai glowed a little brighter. He had never gotten the hang of producing laughter that sounded all the way natural and eventually he’d stopped trying, as he had confessed to Haoyu once, but Haoyu could still tell where laughter would have sounded were he human.
As the ship sank into the atmosphere of the planet Ehrenburg, several warning lights flickered on around the bridge consoles, blue stars against copper metal, alerting them of the strong gravitational pull.
Jenny made a noise of surprise. Along with Haoyu, Daniela laughed where she stood monitoring the output from the machine room. She was a human like Haoyu and Jenny and most in the sector, sixty, maybe seventy, not that she’d tell, with a cigarette precariously balanced between her lips and half a toolbox at her belt and a few small bounties on her head in the far-off northern sector – but a warrant out for your arrest was almost part of the job description on this ship.
“Just remember, Captain’s more reliable than the charts,” Haoyu told Jenny.
“While we cannot see, Tallassans are attuned to space. We can even survive in the void without equipment and move there,” Vietai said, draping one of his long white braids over his shoulder. “It’s where we were born once upon a time, or made, as some theories go.”
“It’s why we can fly our crazy short routes in the first place,” Haoyu added. “Normal equipment can’t measure with the same precision – so make sure the Captain never hits his head while we are in dark space or we might be in trouble.”
Jenny stared for a moment, but then nodded her head sternly, as if she’d taken his words a hundred percent serious. “I’ll remember it,” she said.
“Come on,” Daniela said, waving at her. “Descent is gonna take a damn while. I’ll show you around the machinery room. You got an eye on things here, Haoyu?”
“Two more than the Captain,” Haoyu said.
Daniella just snorted and shook her shaven head, but Vietai glowed softly in his seat.
They were left alone in the bridge. Haoyu had sprawled in his chair before, but now he put the feet up on the console.
“Are we staying on Ehrenburg for a while?” he asked.
“At least a couple of days. We need to refuel.”
“Shouldn’t be an issue with the money we’re making with this job. Bet Jenny is going to love it, she’s seen nothing in her life but that mining shithole so far.” He stretched his arms over his head, let them hang there. He would know about growing up on shithole planets, after all. “You want to go out together?”
“Certainly, if you don’t mind,” Vietai said, his slender, long-limbed figure now more relaxed in its seat that he did not have to pay so much attention, with the ship on its steady downwards path.
“Come on, when have I ever?”
In space, Vietai was like a friendly will-o-the-whisp, leading them all down the strangest paths safely, but on land, it was harder for him to move, especially in unknown places. The Tallassran cities, from what Haoyu had heard, were built to accommodate this other sense, but this was mainly human territory and nothing here was made for a man who had been meant to spend his life floating through vast multi-story stations in the void of space. Vietai had been born in these human regions, so he wasn’t helpless, but he’d been drafted to work on ships from when he was very young and still often looked lost to Haoyu when left alone on the ground.
“I just thought it might be more convenient for you if you didn’t always have to lead me around.”
“I said it’s fine.”
Haoyu clamped down on the anxiety fluttering in his chest. Vietai was simply a considerate person, right? Yet, since everyone else, from his parents to the friends he’d thought he had had eventually walked away from him at some point, the fear was written like scars in his heart. After all, while Vietai was vital to this little operation they had got going here, Haoyu was replaceable, even as a second in command. Vietai would be polite enough to give him some cash before throwing him out, on account of Haoyu having stolen the ship back in the day, but he could still decide at any point he’d rather want Daniela or Akira or any of the others to take the wheel. The rest of the crew liked Vietai as well and would be happy to lead him around the port, too, so even if Vietai still wanted to work with him but didn’t want to hang around, he had options.
Vietai and Haoyu had met some two and a half years ago in prison. Haoyu had taken food out of the dumpster of the wrong high-street restaurant and the owner had him arrested for being a potentially unsightly distraction for guests looking out of the toilet windows. Vietai, for his part, had accidentally overheard a little bit too much about his then-boss’s weapon smuggling. His special, very lucrative talent meant he might have gotten away with it if he’d kept his mouth shut, but unfortunately he had that most damning of all traits, a conscience. As the only non-human in the prison facility, he’d been one of the few interesting things to Haoyu there. They struck up a conversation, a friendship, and eventually Haoyu grabbed him by the hand when he’d finally managed to snatch the key card off a guard’s belt. Once out, they took one of the ships of Vietai’s former employer as a last goodbye and, with Vietai’s talents, were lost in space faster than the police ships could leave the harbour.
Since then, they’d been honourable traders, carefully avoiding the sector they hailed from, but otherwise avoiding trouble, since neither of them was a big enough fish to deserve real attention, especially after Haoyu had painstakingly scraped off all identifying marks on the ship. Their crew was a mottled group of all sorts of petty criminals trying to turn a new leaf as well as some who ended up here because Vietai had a big heart (well, three big hearts, actually, if Haoyu remembered correctly) and Haoyu could never tell him no, which was how they’d come by their newest hire Jenny, a fourteen year old orphaned pickpocket. However, the fact they weren’t the most efficient crew in history didn’t really matter, since they were made up of people just trying to live a life and not get richer than Federation oligarchists, and Vietai’s space sense guaranteed them lucrative enough jobs to keep all heads above water.
So this was a good deal, objectively. You wouldn’t want to lose it. That was what Haoyu had told himself at the beginning, when he’d still managed to pretend like he wouldn’t have lived back in the slums with Vietai if that was what it took to stay around him. It was especially fun, being in love on board a ship. Couldn’t even have avoided Vietai if he tried, considering they slept with nothing but a wall separating them and spent most of their time together on the bridge. Then again, he also hadn’t ever tried very hard, and in fact often found himself looking for more opportunities to be with him. Maybe he was a masochist after all, but in truth Vietai was just fun to be around.
“Haoyu?” Vietai asked.
“Nothing,” Haoyu said, happy that Vietai couldn’t see his expression, which made it much easier to seem without concern. “You’ll handle unloading with Erik, right? I’ll figure out what we can do down there for fun.”
He’d make sure that Vietai didn’t grow bored of him yet.
-
Neuenhain was the capital city of Ehrenburg, a small but prosperous town living off the land, growing fields and fields of a bush-sized plant with broad leaves of a blue hue that were apparently used to make high-value threads. This plant only prospered in cold, crisp atmospheres, which Neuenhain certainly had. Haoyu knew because they were supposed to take a storage room full of their special harvest back into more civilised space, but they had shore leave before that.
When he met up with Vietai at the harbour, he grinned as he saw him wrapped in several layers of wide grey fabric, a scarf pulled up to his nose, his tall, thin-limbed figure sticking out two heads above even the tallest humans around him, several layers of robes billowing in the wind. Tallassrans hailed from a solar system with a strong sun and despite being able to survive in the depths of space, they did not like the cold very much.
“Everything alright?” Haoyu asked.
“Yes, the payment went through and Erik will deal with the cargo.”
“Good. I brought something.”
As he often did, he took hold of Vietai’s elbow to pull him quickly through the crowd. Vietai followed, lifting his chin.
“It almost smells like pines on the wind,” he said. “Are there pines?”
“Something like it, anyway. I think they might have brought them from earth and let them adapt over the centuries.”
He stopped Vietai with a squeeze of his arm and then opened the door of the speeder he had rented for them, patting him on the back to push him forward. Vietai reached out and found a leather bench, curiously feeling it with his palm.
“Thought we could drive out into the mountains for a bit, breathe some different air than the recycled one on the ship – not that you really need to breathe,” Haoyu joked, running a hand through his short, shaggy black strands while he rounded the speeder and sat in the driver’s seat.
The metal parts of the speeder reflected the dim golden light emitted by Vietai. Haoyu smiled involuntarily.
“I would like that,” Vietai said. “We haven’t really had time to stop in a place like this for so long.”
“I brought us some drinks and food as well. Maybe we’ll find a spot that’s not so windy and have a picnic. If the weather gets too bad, we can also pull up the roof of this speeder.”
Vietai cocked his head.
“You have prepared everything perfectly as always. What is there left for me to do?”
Haoyu shrugged his shoulders. “Enjoy,” he suggested.
He certainly already felt rewarded by the quirk of Vietai’s lips, the way he relaxed into the seat as Haoyu let the engine purr to life.
The speeder was old, so the fire in its innards warmed their seats as it shot down the broad, unpaved dirt road. Haoyu gave Vietai the map to hold on his legs so he could check it as he drove up the cliff that towered over Neuenhain.
“Are there many trees?” Vietai asked, leaning back with the incline. “The smell of pines is stronger.”
“They’re tall here by the side of the road. They reach up into the sky,” Haoyu answered. “Their needles are longer than any I’ve seen on earth, as long as my hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger.”
He had learned over time to use words that made sense to Vietai. As a man whose species was not meant to see, it really didn’t help to tell him of things like colours, but he understood shapes and the dimensions of the world, the sounds something could make and how it would feel.
Vietai had asked him often if Haoyu didn’t get tired of describing the world to him, but Haoyu really didn’t. It forced him to pay attention, too, and besides, it was a welcome role reversal from their day-to-day, when they were in space and Vietai guided him and the rest of the ship with his void sense.
Only, of course, that on the ship they were continually surrounded by people, but here he had Vietai for himself. Maybe that was one of the reasons that he didn’t pay too much attention to the sky overhead as he kept describing the craggy landscape with its wild outcrops of rock, watched the wind rush through Vietai’s hair. Still, he also hadn’t been asleep at the wheel. The sky really had grown black from basically a moment to the next and then the first fat drops of rain were already coming down.
He pulled up the car’s rooftop.
“I think picnic is off the table. There’s a storm coming.”
“I gathered. I had heard that the weather can be very changeable here.”
“No joke. The sky was clear a couple of moments ago.” Haoyu frowned. “Oh well, maybe we can turn back and have dinner – fuck!”
His last word was drowned out by a crash outside.
“Lightning?” Vietai asked, holding on to the edge of the seat with one hand, his face calm but attentive.
“Yeah,” Haoyu muttered, waiting for his heartbeat to slow down.
“Maybe we should find some shelter. Even with the speeder, it could get dangerous if we are too high up.”
In the rapidly falling darkness, Haoyu peered outside and pulled the speeder around, away from the road and towards the face of the mountains, scanning what he saw with the help of the speeder’s headlights.
“Not a cave, but an overhang. Won’t be able to make a fire here, but at least we probably won’t be fried.”
Vietai made a thoughtful noise. “If the storm lasts for a bit, it might be a good idea to sit a bit closer, unless you mind. It’s a little cool since we drove with the roof down…”
“Why didn’t you say that you were cold?” Haoyu asked, feeling guilt coil in his stomach that he hadn’t realised sooner that Vietai was probably shaking in his boots, and annoyance that the planned outing was going sideways so hard. If he wanted to keep Vietai’s goodwill, a night spent freezing in a speeder was not the way.
“I liked the scent of the pines and the wind,” Vietai said, glowing slightly.
Haoyu shook his head as he parked the speeder under the overhang. “Say something earlier,” he said, pinching his shoulder. “I’ll go check on the engine, that lightning bolt basically split the ground we were hovering over and there’s some warning lights on here that don’t look good.”
“Of course.”
Haoyu climbed out of the vehicle and opened the machinery hatch. He wasn’t an engineer, but he’d learned his way around engines playing stowaway in his youth and tinkering with stuff he found in the industrial garbage yard he’d lived in for a while before his stint in prison, recuperating from an injury at a factory he’d worked at that had almost cost him his arm.
The systems seemed mostly fine, but the combustion accelerator had squeezed out of its mount. He grabbed a stone from the ground so he didn’t have to touch the heated metal with his bare hand and pushed it back into place. However, as it reconnected with the rest of the engine, an auto-check of some sort triggered and sent a spark through the machine. Haoyu hissed as it burned his bare underarm, shaking it out in the cool air as he made sure nothing else had got hit and slapped the machinery hatch shut again.
“Engine’s fine,” he muttered, as he sat back down on the front bench.
“But?” Vietai asked.
“Nothing, I just got my arm seared.”
Vietai held out his hand, a silent request. Reluctantly, Haoyu placed his arm on his palm and watched Vietai dig through his layers of robes to find the medicine he always carried. Vietai had told him he had gotten into the habit back at his old job, when his colleagues tended to return from their visits planet-side with a suspicious number of injuries for mere innocent traders, a part of the puzzle that had landed Vietai in jail; this way, he’d picked up some rudimentary skills as a makeshift nurse, too.
Vietai felt carefully around the edges of the wound with his long, slender finger before he picked out a package of all-purpose healing gel and spread it over Haoyu’s wound. Haoyu hissed, though he wasn’t sure if it was from the quickly-numbing sting of pain or the tension he felt radiating from Vietai’s gentle hold on him.
“I could have done that myself,” he said, as Vietai handily wrapped a thin, auto-sealing bandage around the wound.
“But you probably would have pocketed it instead and said we should save it for something more dire,” Vietai said, glowing gently.
“I’d have been right,” Haoyu decided, forced to smile against his will.
He did like to scrounge when it came to essentials like that, an old habit of necessity, but Vietai always spent them on him. He was not careless, but Haoyu was, apparently, in some way a priority. He couldn’t pretend that didn’t feel could.
And yet, he could not shake the words he had said on board of the ship. It still felt like he stood at the edge of a chasm that had opened suddenly, without warning; an ending.
“Haoyu?” Vietai asked into his uncharacteristic silence.
“Nothing,” he said. “I did bring a blanket to eat outside, so let’s use that to cover us... you said we should sit closer.”
Vietai nodded his head, though he did not look convinced. They inched towards each other until they could share their warmth, sitting shoulder to shoulder. Outside, the storm was still raging, but under the dent in the mountainside, their speeder stood in relative safety. If it had not been for the fact that Haoyu felt like a live wire with Vietai’s poised body so close to him, it could have actually been comfortable.
He was overreacting to Vietai’s words, he knew that in some way, but it was frightening how important he had become, how intolerable the thought of not being around him was. If you lived in a world where everybody left, attachment wasn’t a weakness you should have, Haoyu had learned long ago.
“Why is it you are so quiet?” Vietai asked, after a long moment. “Are you tired? You could have stayed on the ship if you wanted to rest. You have been on duty a lot lately, too.”
Something in Haoyu twisted and before he could stop himself, he smiled and said: “If you want me to fuck off, you don’t always have to make it sound so nice.”
Vietai raised his chin, the way he would when he was surprised, a way to refocus his senses much like a human might snap their gaze towards you. “What gave you that idea?”
“You’ve basically been telling me all day that you don’t need me around.”
Haoyu brought some distance between them, but the speeder really only allowed for a hand’s width of it to begin with.
“That’s not at all-” Vietai stopped himself, an unusual stagger in his voice. “I just thought that perhaps you would be bored, having to adjust for my shortcomings on shore leave. I didn’t want to monopolise your time. Why would you doubt that I enjoy being with you?”
“Why would you think I don’t like being around you?” Haoyu shot back.
“Because I gain a lot from being with you.”
Haoyu gave a dismissive shrug.
“Come on, the others would help you around the city if you asked. It’s not like you can’t find your own way, either, it’ll just take longer.”
“That’s not what I mean. I would not be with you.”
There was something uncontrolled about the way he said it, too loud at the start and quieter as he continued, as if he’d already decided he wanted to words to return to him before he’d finished. Haoyu quieted, his bristling pride and fear finally calming for a moment. He looked closely at him and found that Vietai was hanging his head, which covered his face behind a veil of silver, a trick that hid that he was very bad at hiding his facial expressions.
With a sudden surge of courage, Haoyu reached over and pulled the curtain back behind his ear. Vietai straightened at the touch and steadied himself with a breath.
“My apologies,” Vietai said. “Perhaps we shouldn’t be sharing this blanket, after all. It doesn’t seem to be good for my self-control and that’s quite shameful.”
Only someone like Vietai would consider a few misplaced words a terrible breakdown of his self-control, but in his case, it really was. Haoyu could only thank whatever stars were watching over him for pushing Vietai there.
“No, I think we should keep sharing this blanket,” he said, and suddenly, it wasn’t at all difficult to put the customary playfulness he’d lost back into his voice.
He closed in on Vietai and, when he did not draw back and in fact turned his body towards him, mouth half-opened in surprise, Haoyu pressed a kiss on his mouth.
The whole interior of the car lit up like a supernova. Haoyu thought that whatever cosmic rays Vietai’s people read from this were finally penetrating him as well because he suddenly felt three times as warm.
“I’m not bored by you,” he said, after they’d finally parted. “In case it was not clear. I’m happy for all the time I get with you, on the ship, but especially alone with you down on the ground, when you don’t always have to keep half a mind on the stars so we don’t ram an asteroid. When I get you for myself.”
“That does clear things up,” Vietai said, smiling.
Haoyu grinned as he reached behind the seat. Feeling his body shift, Vietai lifted his head.
“What are you doing?”
“Digging for the food I brought. We can still have a picnic, can’t we?”
The speeder filled with Vietai’s amused glow again as he leaned into Haoyu’s side.
“Yes. In fact, I think I could spend the entire night like this.”