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Martyn knew he shouldn’t have cut and run. He’s put up with worse — okay, not much worse, and not in years, but —
The ground careens closer. At least there’s some sort of planet, even if most of it looks like mud and rocks. Martyn should have known better than to trust the transport pods on a cramped cargo transport with a crew that looked rawboned and nervy at best and hunted at worst. Two days of flight is barely anything, but his engines are still sputtering no matter how he tries to coax them back to life. The emergency signals don’t even look like they’re working.
He’s close enough to see a couple tiny patches of green, maybe life, maybe mineral, jutting up in from the blank planetary surface. Close enough to feel the first dregs of atmosphere pushing up against the ship, the friction bouncing him around like a pinball. Bruises from his harness will be the least of his problems.
Martyn slams his hands on the up-thrusters, wonders if the heat shield can even hold up against the planet’s atmosphere. The metal surrounding him spits out another grinding shudder as he gets closer to the planet. It’s not going to be a pleasant landing.
The heat shield starts to chip, sandblasted until Martyn outside is just a haze of metal that distorts Martyn’s visibility until he’s flying on instruments only. It’s ear-splittingly loud, shrieking bend of metal and polymer, four different emergency alarms. The ground can’t be far now. Martyn kicks the up-thrusters into full gear, never mind how little fuel he has left, but the deceleration is barely noticeable. All around Martyn, dents appear in the framework of the pod itself. Not much longer, now, whichever way it goes.
Some distant part of Martyn sends up a prayer to a moon he’ll probably never see again.
For a breath Martyn’s senses don’t register a thing, but it’s chased by a rumbling thump that dwarfs Martyn’s senses, snaps his harness clean off and lurches him viciously forward. His shoulder catches the worst of it, hits the ceiling with a sick twisting sensation followed by a clean bloom of pain. It’s dark, suddenly, his limp frame piled on what used to be the pod’s nose. Breathing hurts. Everything hurts. The pod’s emergency lights blink amber and eery.
Sparks dance across his vision in the unquiet dark. Time slips through his awareness like rain through the jungle, brief consciousness followed by freefall. It never gets lighter or darker. The pain abates slowly as Martyn stops panting for air that seems to never come. His thoughts are disorganized, hard to marshal into a plan of action. Bad. It’s all bad.
He doesn’t know how long it’s been when he hears a sound outside. The fragile walls distort it into a throaty lowing, barely audible.
Something bumps the ship. The sound comes again.
Martyn steels himself, shoves his legs under him into an approximation of kneeling. It’s still not enough preparation for the blistering pain that sears through him, lights up his shoulder and his shin. He swears for a solid ten seconds in Lumian, because nothing’s ever quite like the curses from home. The pain doesn’t abate, but it localizes into a pulsing knot behind his scapula and a sharp ache in his ankle. Worse.
There’s a smear of bioneos glowing on the shreds of his shirts. He’s bleeding, moon knows from where. The pod’s primary escape hatch is probably buried underground, but there’s a backup by the engines. Martyn inches his way on his knees towards the back of the ship, cursing.
The shreds of plastic and metal on the floor work slit Martyn’s pants until his knees leave glowing lines behind them, centimeter by inexorable centimeter.
Whatever’s outside rams the ship again, this time hard enough to tip it a couple degrees. Martyn tips with it, barely catches himself with his good arm. The shock of it is still enough to whip pain through his ribs, halt the progress he was making towards finally getting out.
He should have just stuck it out with the shady captain who was definitely going to sell half his crew at the nearest trafficking-friendly port planet. Should’ve pretended to be some mundane race with glowing tattoos, one of the ones that no one’s interested in selling off, and left once there was another ship to stow away on. He hangs his head, tries to breathe slow and steady. He might die here, too weak to crawl to the port door only a few body-lengths out of reach.
Light streams into the pod, blinding, disorienting, and Martyn throws his arm over his eyes before he realizes that the door’s opened. Someone’s opened the door.
“Help,” he tries to say. His throat’s too dry, the swollen pain of it lost in the way the rest of his body is screaming.
“Who are you?” Someone else.
All Martyn can do is stare blindly up. It’s so bright. There’s a smear of grey in the middle that might be a silhouette, but Martyn can’t make heads or tails of it.
“Help.” It’s a sound this time, barely a rough whisper.
Nothing moves for a long time. The alarms stopped blaring at some point, but soft rushing sounds bleed in from outside. The angle of the floor changes almost imperceptibly. Martyn searches for something solid to hang on to, something that won’t get caught up in the slide of the pod, but his brain is too fuzzy to figure anything out.
The smear of grey gets larger. Martyn blinks a dozen times until his vision solidifies. It’s a — being, larger than Martyn but mostly humanoid. Green, not grey. He blinks again. Humanoid, except for the four arms, one of which is wielding a wrench of some kind, one of which swings a toolbox and two of which are held at the kind of faux-loose attention Martyn recognizes from his own posture. They’ve got a glowing artificial eye, but their natural one is just as unreadable.
Martyn wets his lips. “Please. Help.”
“Where are you hurt?” The being’s voice is rougher than Martyn expected. Their Common is unpracticed, with an accent Martyn doesn’t recognize.
Martyn points hesitantly at his shoulder. It’s never ideal to give that kind of information to a stranger, but he doesn’t have a lot of options. This being is bigger than he is, and has the advantage of not being injured. Play nice. Hold on to everything. Get out alive, get back to the stars.
“Okay.” The being picks his way inside, head nearly brushing the ceiling. “I’m going to take you to my house.” They set down the toolbox.
That’s the warning Martyn gets before hands scoop under his torso, the bend of his knee, one hand coming up to cradle the back of his head. Martyn’s sensory processing briefly shorts out at how warm it is, how alive. The being’s hands are big and deceptively careful, and it barely even hurts when Martyn gets hoisted into the air.
“I’m Doc,” the being — the man, he used a masculine suffix — says. “I farm goats. It’s just me here.”
“Martyn. I’m a… handyman, I guess. Man at all jobs.” They’re almost outside, Doc holding his body steady without apparent effort. “Where’re we going?”
“My house isn’t far. I can get you fixed up, back to your home.”
The sun is near-blinding outside. Martyn gives up on the losing battle to keep his eyes open. Here isn’t safe, by any means, but it’s not actively trying to kill him. That’s as much as anyone can ask. It’s as quiet outside as it was in the ship, and the warmth and peace serves well to lull Martyn to sleep.
The next time he regains consciousness, he’s in far less pain.
“What’d you give me?” Martyn mumbles.
No response. Tentatively, Martyn lifts his head from the mess of blankets he’s been set on. Sure enough, the room is empty of people. It’s empty of almost everything else, too: just a couple soft-looking mattresses stacked on each other, a chair and table, a semblance of a cooking area and what looks to be sacks of food in the corner. Nothing light and useful that won’t be missed, no visible knives or even sufficiently sharp-edged tablets.
No windows, either, although the door is letting in light from outside.
Martyn tests his weight on his ankle: still bad, but bearable. His shuffling steps leave tracks in the dust that covers the floor. At least Doc left him his shoes and the rest of his clothing.
Outside is just as foreign as Martyn was expecting. For about two dozen meters in front of him, there’s low-cropped green plants. After that, as far as the eye can see, is plain dirt. Nothing above waist-height, no mountains or houses or even trees. Flat planes of sunlight rake the earth. No shadows, either. The ground seems to sway gently under him, and Martyn wastes time checking that the doorframe will support his weight before he remembers just how long it’s been since he’s stood on solid ground, not the creaky-buzzy floor panels of a ship.
One sun hovers in the bright grey sky.
Doc emerges from a building that looks almost identical to the one Martyn’s standing in. He’s wearing an apron covered in what looks like ash. “You’re up!” He sounds more surprised than pleased.
Martyn manages a half-smile. His ankle is starting to throb again. “I can get out of your hair soon.”
“I’ve got painkillers to spare,” Doc says offhand. “Gonna take me a while to get your ship back up and running.”
“Don’t bother, it was a piece of junk anyway. Just give me a lift to the nearest port planet and I can make my own way.” Martyn silently prays that he can. Ship captains tend to be ruthless with slow, sloppy work at the best of times, and Martyn’s pretty sure he won’t be able to do his best work.
“Make your way where?” One pair of Doc’s hands are occupied with a torch of some kind while the others fiddle behind his back.
Martyn shrugs. He’d sworn to himself that he wasn’t going back to his home planet, so now he doesn’t have a home planet. Wandering vagrant, that’s him. “Around.”
Doc scuffs one foot on the ground in a gesture reminiscent of a bull getting ready to charge. “Here’s as good as anywhere, then. Come help me with this if you need a project.”
It sounds like a challenge, but Martyn can’t imagine why. “Okay.”
Limping his way over takes the pain in his ankle from a steady throb to a constant shining burn. Doc offers him an apron from the door, then explains what he’s doing — brazing some overcomplicated system of pipes and hoppers together for an automatic feeder for his goats. With one arm, all Martyn can really do is monitor the flame and pass Doc flux, but it’s nice to focus on something other than the pain. The workshop warms gradually, until Martyn’s pausing to wipe sweat off his brow with his good hand. By inches, the work gets done.
“Huh. You aren’t half-bad at that.” Doc sets his torch down with a clunk. He doesn’t look bothered by the heat.
“I’ve spent eight years working in mechanics,” Martyn scoffs with a smile. Some of the nervous tension eased its way out of his system at some point. The ground feels like it’s solidified under him, no unconscious motion from his head. “It’d be awful if I couldn’t braze at this point.”
Doc huffs out a laugh. “I’ve worked with enough people to know that competence is hard to come by.”
“Well.” Martyn scrabbles for somewhere to take the sentence, doesn’t find it.
“If you don’t have anywhere else to be —“ Doc shrugs. “— I could use the help.”
Something in Martyn freezes, like Doc’s a hunter and he’s a tiny mammal caught in a trap. He doesn’t have anywhere else to be, but it’s not like he can stay. He can’t. It’s not — him. His body doesn’t know how to stay in one place anymore, much less the rest of him. On the other hand… Martyn tests his ankle on the ground, winces at the results. “I think I might have to stay for a while. I dunno.”
He’ll get better, and then he can leave. Forget about this dirtball like he forgot about Lumian, like he’s forgotten about every scrap of kindness someone’s showed him. Their loss. It’s eat or be eaten, steal or be stolen. Yeah, he’ll hitch a ride somewhere. Keep living his life. Whatever his life is.
*
The part Martyn didn’t take into account was how frustratingly long healing takes. He can walk, now. It still hurts, but only with the achy pain of a joint remembering a wound. Or maybe it hasn’t been quite as long as it feels like: time passes differently on this planet than on ships. The days don’t correspond to the galactic standard, but to the speed the planet’s rotating.
The only reason Martyn knows how many planet-days it’s been is that Doc marks off the date every day on a data pad, one of the old junky ones that won’t connect to anything that’s not just nearby. It’s a habit for him, really. He marks the calendar right before he makes obnoxious amounts of noise to wake Martyn up, or gradually realizes that Martyn’s had the kind of shivery nightmare that rolls him off his futon bed well before the sun.
Most times, those days, Doc’s face will carefully clear of any emotion as he hauls Martyn inside to eat something. He’ll sit on the same side of the low table as Martyn, seemingly only so he can knock their knees together when Martyn looks too spacey. It’s sweet in a way Martyn forgot that he could understand, much less get accustomed to.
If Martyn does the same for him, the days that Doc tosses and turns all night in the bed next to his, it hardly counts since neither of them talk about it. They avoid the subject even when Doc slips under Martyn’s duvet, unsubtle because Doc’s probably never had to move with grace on this planet. Martyn’s not bringing it up either, not the not-quite-itchy crackling texture of Doc’s fur or the way he radiates like a space heater and tries to tuck Martyn’s chin under his head. There’s plenty else for them to talk about, goat husbandry and new crops to look at planting and what the highest price they’d be willing to pay for a decent agri-bot is.
Martyn’s not sure when it turned into a them, rather than just Doc. Maybe about the same time Doc started trusting him with the goats, as much good as that’s done him. Martyn swears loudly as Violet headbutts the back of his thigh, her hooves digging into the pasture grass.
“I’m trying to feed you! Be nice!” Martyn says in Lumian because he’s found the goats care far more about his tone of voice than his actual words. “Yeah, keep going.”
The goats can mostly keep themselves fed on the cover crop that Doc’s careful to cultivate and fertilize, but it’s easy and frugal to give them all the vegetable scraps that neither Doc nor Martyn can digest. When the goats are feeling charitable, that is. Violet nudges him again, but it’s gentle this time. He rewards her with a handful of scraps before making his way over to the trough.
“See what happens when you’re nice?” Martyn calls back as she munches.
“Morning!” Doc yells, coming out of the workshop. He’s always up before Martyn, but he goes to bed as soon as the sun sets. Something about how he gets his energy. “Have you learned goat language?”
“It’s Lumian,” Martyn blurts before he thinks better of it. No, that’s a lie. He thought better of it, he just didn’t act on it, and now he’s going to pay the price. Some hindbrain part of him tenses to flee. He doesn’t think Doc’s someone to be wary of over that, but these things are impossible to predict.
“…oh.” Doc visibly stills, glances over Martyn in a reassessing once-over. It’s not a pleasant feeling. “I’ve never met a Lumian before.”
Martyn smiles tightly. “A lot of people haven’t.” It’s a vicious circle. They’re sought-after because they hardly ever leave their home planet. They never leave their planet because they’re sought-after by the kind of people with crews that look hunted. Not to mention the exotic goods trade in bioneos.
“Guess not.” Doc nods, not jerky but not exactly smooth. “Good to know you could tell me.”
Some of the tension bleeds out of Martyn’s shoulders, makes it easy to pitch his voice into something lighthearted. “It was going to come out sooner or later.”
“Guess so.” Doc blinks with his biological eye, then glances around. “Let me know if you need any help with the goats. I know Johan isn’t your biggest fan.”
“I’ll bring him around.” Martyn waves a hand towards the house. “Go eat lunch — I know you skipped breakfast.”
Doc snorts, but he goes to do it anyway. It’s enough separation for the rest of the tension to fall out of Martyn’s posture, like a mound of snow sliding off a roof. He’s not alone, not really, but he’s not on the lookout either. Now that he thinks about it, it’s been a few days since the last time he checked his back with the kind of clockwork precision that used to be natural. Farming’s hard work, sure, dirty and smelly and hand-to-mouth, but it’s not worse than Martyn’s used to. And it’s with Doc — it’s with someone whom Martyn’s body has decided he can trust — so in a lot of ways it’s better.
The sky is singing to him, but Martyn’s not sure he can hear the words anymore. Certainly not as clearly as he can hear Doc, yelling at him in accented common to come eat something too.
“The crops are growing pretty well, huh?” Martyn says over their meal. They’ve mostly been eating some sort of tuber vegetable that grows underground that Martyn doesn’t recognize, but the first of the berries are coming in on the bushes that line the back of the house too. He’s long since used to eating bland nutrient-complete food, so the little pops of tart-sweet mixed in are a nice surprise.
“Wait until the rainy season.” Doc gestures with one of his free hands. “The harvest explodes. The rest of the world does too.”
“What?” Martyn laughs. “You don’t actually mean explode, right?”
“Green everywhere.” Doc makes an expansive sweep of the hand. “I blend right in.”
“Guess I’ll just have to see it for myself.” Martyn takes another bite, says through the mouthful, “When’s it coming?”
Doc makes a thinking noise. “Another dozen tendays, probably. It varies, though, could be further away or closer.”
“…oh.” Martyn’ll definitely be healed by then — he’s almost there already, really. The ankle will work if he asks it to, and the shoulder is only distractingly painful when he tries to use it. Doc’s semi-adapted medicine has worked as well as anyone could ask. Martyn will be free soon. Won’t see the planet
He’s got better things to see, anyway. Like the inside of a dozen different boiler rooms, and the hollow insides of a ship’s walls, patching cracks in the thin skin between himself and the void outside.
He’s got a real moon to see. This planet doesn’t have one, its night sky just an enormous swathe of stars across the sky that looks like salt dropped on dark earth. When Martyn was on Lumian, he knew there was more out there for him than this.
“Are you okay?” Doc asks.
Martyn snaps out of it. “Yeah. Zoned out. Thanks, by the way.”
Doc shrugs, treats Martyn to a smile. “It’s just lunch. You’ve more than accounted for your room and board.”
“Not just for the food — although it is delicious,” Martyn promises. “For giving me a… safe place to stay. You know?”
“Not really, if I’m honest.” Doc mops up the rest of the food on his plate. “You’re welcome, though.”
Martyn leans back in his seat. He’s satisfyingly full, his muscles satisfyingly sore “Yeah. Didn’t know what I was missing, I guess.”
“Guess not.” Doc turns to do the dishes like Martyn knows he will, because it’s not hard to fall in line with the rhythms of a two-person planet. It’s about time for him to check on the crops, make sure none of them need more water than they got last night. There are never any diseases or pests. Living on a planet with no animals that Doc didn’t bring over himself has some advantages, although it’s just plain luck that none of the native microorganisms break down plants like they do rock.
Some of the plants are finally getting taller than Martyn is. It’s a weird kind of familiarity, shoving himself into the middle of the stalks until he can’t see more than half a dozen centimeters in front of his face. Like being on a ship again, if the ship swayed back and forth to brush over his arms, his face.
No blight or bugs. No sounds, the soft leaves of the plants absorbing the last traces of Doc’s unmelodic whistling and clattering with the plates and spoons. Even the plants in the center of the field are the cheerful pale purple that says they’re growing well.
He’s very alone in the unfriendly light of the sun.
And then, suddenly, Martyn’s pushing his way out, heedless of how the leaves drag at his hair and the tie of his shirt. He wants to — not be alone. He wants to hear Doc’s awful dishwashing song, the one with lyrics in Doc’s native language that Martyn likes to purposely butcher because if he tried to do them for real they’d wind up only slightly less butchered.
He wants to sit with Doc as the sun goes down and swap creation myths and fables for children and brew tea that they have to make sure isn’t poisonous to Martyn, and drag Doc into his bed even on the nights that neither of them have nightmares.
Doc looks up when he bursts into the room, one pair of hands drying while the other pair washes.
Every word Martyn’s ever known dies on his tongue. For a second the weight of wanting freezes him in place. Doc says his name, lilting and curious and with a thread of trust that Martyn’s heard blossom bit by bit.
Martyn crosses the room in hurried strides, looks up at Doc. Slowly, he loops his good arm around the back of Doc’s head. Goes on tip-toes. Pulls Doc down until their lips touch.
Martyn’s kissed people before, hurried fumbling things with other crew that cut into their allotted sleeping hours. He’s always come out of it feeling like a serviceable distraction. Someone to forget.
Doc sets the bowl he’s holding down on the table with an overloud clatter, and then his arm wraps around Martyn just slightly too tightly to make breathing comfortable and he presses closer. For just a second, everything about Martyn, all his walls, the dozen mental timers he keeps ticking, they all stall out. It’s heavy-handed and real and open, the pressure of Doc’s lips on his impossible to lose track of. Doc’s fingers scrabble at his back and for a glorious second Martyn knows that this, here, anchoring a memory, is where he’s meant to be.
Martyn pulls back after a few seconds. His face feels hot, and he can feel himself starting to glow just a fraction.
“You’re sure this isn’t — uh — what’s the word.” Doc frowns. It’s a good look, even this close-up. “Stockholm syndrome?”
“I could leave if I wanted.” Martyn’s grin splits his face. “I just… wanted this more.”
Doc’s fur is twitching restlessly under Martyn’s palm. It’s never done that before. Martyn wonders briefly if it’s Doc’s equivalent of glowing. “I didn’t want to assume.”
“Assume away, big boy,” Martyn says, and he tilts his face up in as obvious an invitation as he can make.
The dishes don’t get washed for a few odd hours afterwards.
*
Surprisingly little changes. Martyn’s shoulder finally starts supporting weight with only a whisper of complaint, the kind that he has in both knees and his neck, the kind that he suspects will never go away.
He starts waking up when Doc does, if only because it’s impossible to sleep through a small blast furnace wiggling out from across his back. He sees the sunrise. It casts the sky in purples and blues, and it looks beautiful, turns the green crops a pale cornflower blue and the purple ones into vibrant lilac and even the odd orange ones into shades of harmonious brownish-grey. It casts brilliant highlights over Doc’s fur, makes Doc whisper in Martyn’s ear that when it shines on him, he looks like he’s nothing but bioneos. Nothing but starlight.
Martyn’s starting to think he had forgotten more than a few things during his time wandering, seeing the galaxies. It’s weird to think that the stars might be more beautiful from planetside.
“We should probably do something about my emergency pod,” Martyn mentions one day while they’re moving the goats to a fresher pasture. Johan’s finally warmed up to him, is trying to use his leg to scratch himself on. “There are probably still some usable parts.”
Doc snorts from where he’s checking over the kid Violet’s had just a tenday ago. It’s steady on its legs and keeps lipping at Doc’s finger even though it makes Doc squint and pull back. “I saw that ship, and it was a hunk of rubble. I was lying to you when I said I thought I could fix it.”
“Spare parts are spare parts.” Martyn’s pretty sure he’s won this one when Doc tilts his head in the way that means fine, point taken. The pre-lunch chores clear up pretty quickly, even in the uncharacteristic humidity of the day.
The pod is farther away than Martyn remembered. He must have dozed off for longer than he’d thought, on his first journey. It’s a nice little nostalgia trip so long as he’s careful to avoid thinking about the pain and blood. Between the two of them, they can move most of their toolbox over and hold hands besides.
When they finally arrive, the pod is diminutive, tipped over on its side next to the furrow its nose dug in the ground. There are still patches of mostly-evaporated bioneos, glowing brightly enough to see even in the daylight.
“Let’s get going,” Doc says.
“Dibs on the systems,” Martyn says. “You take the power train.” Doc’s better suited to that kind of explosive engine mechanics anyway, and he’s plenty happy to let Martyn deal with finicky wiring.
It’s a few hours of satisfying work before either of them breaks their comfortable rhythm.
“…you were right,” Doc says, shoulder deep in the guts of the pod’s engine that he’d hauled out onto the dirt. “There’s good stuff in here. Just put together by a sea slug.”
“Keep what you want and sell the rest,” Martyn offers. He’s having less luck on his end — most of the wiring was smashed into useless impure clods by the force of impact, and the effort to scrape out the rarer compounds won’t be worth their value.
“You’ve never been to market with me.” Doc’s speaking more carefully than usual. “Would you like to?”
Martyn takes a second, rolls Doc’s words around in his head a few times. “I’m not going to ditch you for a spot on some third-rate captain’s work crew, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I was asking if you wanted to go to market with me,” Doc says, but there’s levity in his voice that was absent before. “Come help me drive a hard bargain.”
“You’re intimidating enough I doubt you’d have any problems.” Martyn smiles, knows it’s obvious in his voice. “I’d love to come with you. You can even let me fly.”
“Oh, thank the gods,” Doc says. “She drives like a bucket. You’ll hate it.”
“I’ve piloted a few buckets in my time. The flight school had a graduating class of fifteen! I was lucky they had proper flying ships and not just terra racers.”
“Then you’ll love it.” Doc pulls out another mostly-unbroken engine crystal.
The annoying part is that Doc’s right, Martyn does love his godawful souped-up ex-prisoner transport that has no turning radius to speak of and can’t reach the top speed of a determined blob of space moss. He’s always liked a challenge, and he can feel that under all the temperament Doc’s picked a reliable model, just one that takes some coaxing to get them where they’re going. The market is mostly like any other planet — Doc seems to have a few acquaintances, and Martyn somehow runs into his college roommate, gets coerced into leaving the planet coords in his communicator — but it doesn’t feel familiar like it used to. It doesn’t feel like the closest thing to home that Martyn’s ever going to get.
They stay on-planet for as little time as they can. It’s a sigh of relief when Martyn steps out onto the dirt of their planet, except — the earth’s not quite the same as it was. It’s still brown, but with a little film over top of it, confusing enough that Martyn kneels down for a closer look.
“Oh,” Doc says, surprise and the closest he ever gets to delight in his voice. “It’s starting.”
“What’s starting?” Martyn shoves his hair off his forehead from where it’s escaping his headband. The humidity’s even higher than usual, like the planet’s trying to remind him of how Lumian was.
“The… explosion. You know —“ Doc makes a little explosion sound. “Green stuff.”
Martyn still doesn’t quite take his meaning until the next morning. It’s all normal: get rolled out of bed by Doc, breakfast, go out to milk the goats. And then Martyn steps out the door and reflexively sends a prayer up to the moon.
Past their crops is an ocean of flat green, textured, nuanced, impossible to look away from.
Martyn lets slip a little punched-out sound. “It’s —“ like home he wants to say.
“Yeah,” Doc says. “There’s life here. You just have to wait a little to find it.”