Page 4 of Adrift! (Cosmic Connections Cruise #2)

The next “day”, Remy stayed in her quarters for as long as she could stand it.

The cabin was nice enough, combining comfortable with streamlined like any decent cruise ship.

She’d gawped briefly at the “futuristic” amenities—the fabricator, the biometric bath, the endlessly customizable settings for the ambiance of lights, sounds, and even scents—before reminding herself this was the future.

Although the bed was too big for only one person. Of course.

But the in-room diversions were limited to light snacks and slightly suggestive ambient music, probably because the passengers were supposed to be entertaining each other.

And she hadn’t loaded her personal datpad with anything sufficiently distracting since she hadn’t intended to be stranded in space.

Plus, the room dispenser didn’t have coffee. What sort of cruise from hell was this anyway?

So she donned some fuzzy orange socks (she’d programmed the fabricator for “comfortable footwear” and it churned out fuzzy orange for some reason so she’d been very carefully specific in her request for clean underwear) and ventured into the great beyond.

A Cosmic Connections Cruise had seemed fantastical—or maybe ridiculous was the better word, since apparently she needed to be more precise. But fantasy or joke, at least it was not the world she’d wanted to escape, and claiming the free cruise ticket had felt like fate taking pity on her.

Now it seemed more like the next verse in the universe’s most maudlin and unbelievable blues song.

When she reached the Starlit Lounge, she sniffed. At least there was coffee.

Only a few of her fellow passengers lingered at the couches near the breakfast buffet. Remy beelined to the carafes set up on the bar—nodding once to Ikaryo who stood there as if he’d never left.

“Good morning,” he said in his slightly buzzy baritone.

She glanced at the viewport. Still very black. “I…guess?”

He chuckled, a very Earther sound. Was that something he’d learned along with slinging drinks? She realized she didn’t even know his species. Was it ruder to not know or to ask?

Feeling her cheeks flush, she grabbed her coffee and turned to find an empty nook where she could caffeinate in peace.

But right then, Mariah arrived, alone. When they made inadvertent eye contact, Remy dredged up a smile.

Probably not as convincing as Ikaryo’s, but the other woman grabbed a drink, and after a brief chat with the alien bartender, she hastened over to Remy.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Of course. Or I mean, of course not.” She shook her head. “We both are native English speakers, we both have universal translators, and I’m still not making sense.”

Mariah laughed. “We both haven’t had our coffee.”

Remy gestured at the cushions across from her. “First things first.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes before Mariah sighed. “I should probably be using this time to get to know our potential dates, but…” She glanced around surreptitiously. “Speed dating is supposed to be lower stakes, and it seems weirder when we’re going nowhere.”

“Gives you more time, I guess.” For no good reason, Remy felt her gaze drift toward the bar. Probably just needed more coffee…

“By the way, I like your socks.”

“Oh. Thanks? The fabricator in my cabin made them.” A bit self-consciously, Remy stuck one foot out, peering down. “Maybe a bit much?”

“No such thing when it comes to socks. If you want to go even wilder, come to my knitting circle tonight, and I’ll show you how to add hand-crocheted flowers.”

“Uh…” Remy had overheard some of Mariah’s conversation with other passengers in the lifepod about supplementing her alpaca woolens with astrology, tarot, and healing touch. That all seemed like a bit much.

Except… When Mariah spoke about her passion for purls, planetary alignments, and pressure points, a nasty envy twisted in Remy’s chest. Here was someone who could rock up on a fest or farmers market back on Earth, radiating excitement for her fiber arts and other fantasies—and even endless lightyears away from that source, Remy could still feel that joy.

Worse yet, she remembered it for herself.

Into the awkward expanding pause, Mariah arched one eyebrow. “Unless you have something else to do?”

Before Remy could come up with a good answer—any answer would’ve done—Ikaryo circled past their nook. “More coffee?”

She jumped on the distraction. “Please.”

Mariah put her hand over her mug. “If I do a second cup I get the jitters. Then I end up stabbing myself with my knitting needles. Or reading apocalypses into the tarot cards.”

Ikaryo withdrew the carafe. “Stabbings and apocalypses are a different cruise.”

With a laugh, Mariah stood. “That’s a relief. I need to go make some yarn anyway. Will I see you tonight, Remy?”

“Oh. Well, Ikaryo had asked if I had anything to add to the entertainment bucket so I should probably prep something…”

“I’ll put you on the schedule for tomorrow night, Remy,” Ikaryo said, so smoothly she wondered if he was covering for her or coercing her.

“It’s like sleepaway camp with a talent show,” Mariah enthused.

Was it too late to get stabbed instead?

As the sardonic thought went through her head, Remy caught herself. Bad enough she couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm that had once propelled her from Nebraska to Nashville to LA, but now she was going to be bitter about someone else’s enjoyment?

“I’ll be there,” she said. And if she had to stab herself a little to put some energy into the words, it was worth it to watch the other woman clasp her hands together in delight.

Remy kept the smile on her own face until Mariah left. She was the last one in the salon. Except for Ikaryo, who didn’t need her pretense.

He lifted an eyebrow as Mariah had, like it was a trick he’d just learned. “So you do have something you can share?”

She could stab him instead… “I always did. It’s just that no one wanted what I was offering.”

“Now you have a captive audience.”

She wrinkled her nose. “That is not what I want, at all.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the empty room, and for a moment she thought she might’ve finally pushed him away.

Instead, he sat down.

“Tell me,” he said simply.

She stared at him. Was this just part of being a bartender? Pouring drinks and listening to the slushy sorrows that poured out in return?

He just watched her, the ice-gray half-moons of his eyes barely flickering.

“It doesn’t even matter, so why do you care?” Her voice—once strong enough to carry all her dreams—was little more than a whisper.

“I came all this way too, if not on the exact same path.” His gaze angled to the viewport. “Do you realize how many points and trajectories there are in the universe? Far, far too many to count. The chance of any given moment is impossibly slight—and yet it happens.”

When he glanced back at her, the shimmer in his eyes was brighter, as if he’d absorbed light from those stars she couldn’t see.

She dredged up a chuckle. “Dammit, I was a musician, not a mathematician.”

“You said you weren’t, not anymore.”

Even the semblance of amusement faded in her. “It’s a mangled quote from an old science fiction television show about… Actually, never mind.”

“But you do mind.” He topped off her coffee. “Minding is what got you this far. But I’m not sure how much farther it will take you.”

A cold flush that even fuzzy socks couldn’t protect against radiated through her. “I suppose you’re going to say that taking a chance on love is the next step.”

“I didn’t say it,” he protested. Then he grinned at her, a dimple flashing in his cheek. “But it is in the cruise brochure.”

Aliens had dimples? Was that some sort of transplanetary evolutionary adaptation to enhance charm? She’d received all the required inoculations after she’d submitted her IDA profile, but apparently she wasn’t immune to temptation.

“If this is rude, please ignore me, but…” But at least they could stop talking about their feelings.

“Can I ask about your people? You mentioned the tonic you made was from your homeworld. Do you get home often? I haven’t been anywhere except Earth, of course, then the IDA transport that took us to the space station where we boarded. And now here.”

His dimple faded. “My planet is also called Earth in my language. And like your Earth, it is a closed world. Just not in the same way. It was the originating planet of two divergent sapient species. From the times of rock and bones until antimatter rocketry, we fought. Not until we finally made it into space and colonized other planets and moons in our system did our people mostly reconcile.”

“So maybe there’s hope for my Earth too.”

“Always. But my homeworld was badly damaged over the millennia before that. Although I was born there, when I was young, the planet was declared a disaster site. Everyone was relocated elsewhere in the system. It was too late for parts of me.” He splayed out his hands, the one cybernetic hardware, the other tattooed with symbols.

“Just a few generations earlier, I would’ve died from the toxins built up in my world and in my body. But I made it out. Most of me, anyway.”

So much for idle chitchat minus emotional entanglement.

Unable to stop herself, Remi reached over again to touch his hand, and her fingertips brushed the arguments in his tense forearm.

“I’m sorry to bring up such hard memories,” she said.

“That’s a lot of scars, and you’ve given them a special kind of beauty. ”

“Whenever I see myself, or whenever I look at something else and my vision shifts across the spectrum, I remember.” He spun his hand upright so that her fingers slipped naturally into a soft grasp.

“Maybe I can’t go back, but even if I’d stayed, even if I’d rejected the relocation and the reconstruction, the mutations in my cells would’ve changed me anyway.

At least this way, I have some say over the changes.

” His grasp tightened on her, just for a heartbeat. “I suppose we’re similar like that.”

She’d seized this chance to pursue something totally different, not the same. But he wasn’t wrong that she’d left pieces of herself behind, not cancerous toxins maybe, but never finding her audience had been killing her soul.

She angled her gaze to the salon viewport, which as far as her human eyes were concerned was an unrelieved field of nothingness. But she stared into that abyss without blinking so that the stinging prickle in her eyes didn’t overflow.

If she started crying now, she’d flood the whole damn ship with tears.