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  ***

  A little while later, Sarah looked around the kitchen table at the odd, mixed group who had gathered there, holding cups of coffee while her dad thawed leftovers even though no one had shown any interest in eating. It always made him feel better to have something useful to do.

  But what a strange, mixed bunch they were. Jeren and Rei had come in from dealing with the bodies (Rei hadn't told her what they'd done with them; she hadn't been able to work up the nerve to ask) and now the group around the table consisted of Sarah and her dad, one human federal agent, one blue alien (currently with his arm around her) and one enormous feline alien who dwarfed the chair he was sitting in.

  "So you said they're leaving and taking Anita with them?" asked Rhodes. He was hunched in his chair with both hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. Sarah had given him some Tylenol from the upstairs bathroom cabinet; Rei had told her that being stunned could give you a hell of a hangover, and he still seemed to be a little out of it.

  "Yes," Sarah said. She was serving as an interpreter since she was the only one of the humans present who could understand the aliens. "As soon as we—as they finish cleaning up here, they're going to be out of your hair forever."

  And out of my life.

  She felt Rei's arm tighten around her, as if he'd picked up her thought out of the air. Maybe he was having similar thoughts of his own.

  Rhodes looked skeptical, as well as hung over. "I've got a job to do here. You know that, right?"

  "Listen, Agent Rhodes," Sarah said. "They didn't tell me to say this, but we both know they could just throw you in one of those pods like they did with Agent Pradhan. I mean, if this guy here decided to do that, do you really think we could stop him?"

  Jeren looked up from trimming his nails with one of her dad's kitchen knives. He smiled wide enough to show a flash of teeth that were much pointier than human normal. Rei had basically human teeth, but Galateans had fangs.

  Rhodes blanched. "Can they understand what we're saying?"

  "More or less, as long as an English-speaker with a translator in their head is nearby. Anyway," Sarah said, "we want to let you go. But we can't do that if you're just going to come back to my dad's farm with a dozen more agents and arrest him for hiding illegal aliens or whatever."

  Reluctantly, the corner of Rhodes' mouth quirked up in a tiny smile. "I don't think there's a law to cover this. But even if you're willing to take my word on faith, I don't have a whole lot of control over what my bosses will do when they find out Anita's missing."

  "That depends on what you tell them about where she went," Rei said, and Sarah translated.

  "And how much control do you have over your people sending more ships to find out what happened to the last one?" Rhodes asked pointedly. "I've got a whole country to worry about. Hell, a whole planet."

  "We can't promise they won't send more ships," Rei said. "Any more than you can promise your people won't send more men. We're going to try to stop them, but ..." He leaned forward, his amber eyes sharp as broken glass. "You have to give us a reason to want to help your planet. Locking up Sarah and her father won't do that."

  Sarah sighed and translated.

  "Or we could just stick you in stasis," Jeren said, flipping the knife from hand to hand. "Or kill you. I don't know why you two are trying so hard to negotiate with this native when there's nothing he can do for you."

  "We could also stick you in stasis," Sarah told him.

  "You want to try it, little girl?"

  Rei made a growling noise deep in his throat.

  "Sounds like negotiations are going well," Gary remarked. He set the tin of shortbread cookies in the middle of the table. "Sarah hon, I know you're busy here, but I hear Bonnie raising a fuss out there. We're way overdue on the evening chores. You want to take a walk with me, kiddo?"

  ***

  There was a wet, clinging cold in the air, and Sarah pulled her hands inside the sleeves of her jacket as she and her dad walked through the damp grass to the barn. The next clear night would probably frost.

  She had to resist the temptation to go to the spaceship instead of the barn. She wanted to look at it so badly, try to figure out how it worked, ask Rei to tell her all about it ...

  But she could ask a thousand questions and it would never be enough to satisfy her curiosity. The ship was going to be gone soon, and Rei along with it. And somehow she would have to go on with her ordinary life and pretend that her heart hadn't been ripped out of her chest.

  "We can get this done quickly if we only do the most important chores," she told her dad, using long practice to stop her heart from breaking by focusing on the small details of the here and now. "You can get the eggs while I milk Bonnie and round up the sheep if they aren't halfway to the county line by now—"

  "Sarah," her father said gently. "Go with him."

  Sarah stopped in the act of ticking off chores on her fingers. "What?"

  "Honey, I remember standing with you in Walmart when you were nine years old and telling you that you could pick out a poster from that whole rack of 'em to put on your bedroom wall. And I remember how you flipped past the unicorns and ponies and fancy-pants big-hair singers to the posters of outer space. You begged me to please get you two instead, because you couldn't decide between the one with all the planets in the solar system, and the one of that comet or whatever it was—"

  "Nebula," she whispered. "The Orion Nebula." She still had it.

  Gary turned to face her. It was almost dark in the shadow of the barn; she couldn't make out his expression, but she could see the glimmer of the whites of his eyes.

  "Sarah, sweetheart, I know what you put aside because of your mother and me. I know what it cost you. Punkin, you can't spend your whole life looking after me, giving up everything. Not when a chance like this comes along."

  "But ..." She couldn't believe in it. Couldn't let herself believe in it. "What will you do? How will you ..."

  "I'll manage. I'm getting around well enough to do everything that needs doing around the farm, and if there's something I can't do, I can get Bill Haverford or one of the Muller boys to come over. I can drive fine now too."

  "But we need the money from my part-time job—"

  "We've still got my disability checks. If that's not enough, I can pick up some cash fixing engines for folks, same as I did back when your mother was still—back when Maggie—" He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had softened until she could barely hear it. "Thing is, with you so good-natured about doing what needs done around the farm, it's been too damn easy to do less than I can. Awful easy to sit around the house working on my projects, feeling like there's nothing that really needs doing, not worth getting up on these wobbly pins of mine. Tell you the truth, honey, I think you going out there and living your life is gonna be the kick in the pants that I need to start living mine again."

  Somewhere deep in her chest, something fluttered, an emotion as delicate as a butterfly's wings. "Daddy, you know this might mean leaving really soon, right? Maybe even tonight, or tomorrow morning? I've got—I've got my job, my classes—and I'd be leaving you to deal with whoever the government sends, maybe even an actual alien invasion when they realize their ship's gone missing. I can't just ..."

  "Sarah," her father said, and Sarah fell silent. "Do you want to go?"

  She had to swallow a few times before she could get the word out. "Yes." Oh yes, yes. More than anything.

  "There's a lot I haven't been able to give you. But I can give you this. You've been doing a lot of things around here you should never have had to. Trust the old man to clean up any messes that are left behind—oof!"

  Sarah threw her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder, like she used to do when she was a little girl. She was shaking again, she realized dimly, but for a different reason this time. It still didn't feel real: not the spaceship sitting in the pasture less than a hundred yards away, let alone the idea that she might be on it soon, with an entire galax
y full of stars, quasars, and nebulae spread out in front of her.

  "You could come," she said into his shoulder. "If they can fix Agent Pradhan, they can probably fix your back."

  She could feel him shaking his head. "Honey, if you find a miracle cure, you come right back here and tell me about it. I'll get on that ship tomorrow and go to whatever outer-space hospital you found. And then I'm gonna get on that ship and come back here. My life is here. But I don't think yours is. It never has been."

  She was crying now, full-on sobbing, a pent-up flood of unshed tears.

  "Hey. There, there." Gary patted her back. "Hey, kid. It's okay. It's gonna be okay." He kissed her hair. "What d'ya say we go milk that poor cow before she ends up with mastitis, okay?"

  Sarah wiped her eyes and sniffled, and smiled through her tears. "It's a plan."

  19

  ___

  S ARAH'S FASCINATION WITH the ship glowed from her eyes, filling Rei's heart with shared joy as he escorted her through the cargo bay and took the antigravity lift to the upper deck. It was a vast relief to see her regain some of the sparkle she'd lost after the fight. She seemed to be handling things better now, but Rei knew from his own experience that it was going to be an up-and-down process. Sometimes she'd be fine, sometimes she wouldn't. It had been awhile since he'd had to help someone who was new to fighting through the aftermath of what the Galateans called battle shock.

  But exploring the ship helped a lot. Everything fascinated her, even the most commonplace things. She touched the wall with wondering fingertips, stared at the galley fixtures, peeked into the tiny medbay with eyes round with wonder.

  "This place is amazing."

  "You're looking at the bathroom," Rei said dryly.

  She punched him playfully in the arm. "It's a space bathroom. Shut up."

  "Looks better without bodies all over the floor," Jeren remarked, coming in from the bridge.

  Sarah jumped.

  Rei growled softly at him. "Thanks, you're helping a lot. What were you doing up here, anyway?"

  "Just checking out our new little friend here." Jeren patted the ship's battle-scarred bulkhead, and flashed a fang in a smile. "Seeing how we're going to be sharing quarters for a bit, or isn't that the plan?"

  "The plan is to drop you off at the first inhabited planet we come to. Unless we just put you back into stasis—"

  Now it was Jeren's turn to growl. Sarah moved closer to Rei.

  "Nobody," Jeren said in a voice that was soft but full of menace, "is shoving me into one of those pods again. Ever."

  Rei made sure his hands were unencumbered, just in case he needed them for fighting in a hurry. "Yeah? If you expect us to leave you free, I think it's about time you told us what you did to get locked up."

  "I'm a bounty hunter," Jeren said.

  "Yes, and? Last I checked, that's not illegal in the Empire. What'd you do to make them shove you in a pod like a violent criminal?"

  After a long silence, Jeren said, "They think I killed someone I didn't. I'm not a murderer."

  Rei gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "Your behavior on the ship says otherwise. I literally watched you kill people. Not to mention your suggestion about blowing up the engines and killing everyone on board."

  "Self defense is different. You said it yourself. Yes, I've killed. I'll probably kill again. You telling me those cuffs on your wrists are just for show? Every last dead Galatean on this planet was killed by me, huh?"

  Rei curled his lip and said nothing.

  "Yeah, thought so." Jeren stalked past him, with a parting shot over his shoulder. "Guess I'll go work on patching that hole you cut in the side of the skimmer so we can take off, huh?"

  Sarah was quiet. Rei held her tight against him and kissed the top of her head. If that asshole pushed her into another battle-shock breakdown, Rei just might kill him.

  "I don't like that guy," Sarah said softly.

  "Yeah. Me neither."

  "Do you trust him?" she asked, pulling away. She seemed steadier; Rei let her go.

  "Not in the slightest. Especially since, as an escaped slave, there is a bounty on my head, dead or alive."

  Sarah's eyes rounded. "I didn't think of that. Does he know?"

  "I'm sure he's put two and two together. But he's right, we'd have a real fight on our hands if we try to get him back into that pod."

  "I liked your idea about stunning him while he's asleep. I'm worried about him slipping into our cabin and slitting our throats."

  "I'm not especially worried about that. Stunning me and stuffing me into a pod to take me back to the Galateans ... that's what I'm worried about. Fortunately he's still locked out of most of the ship's systems. I can only get in because I'm a pilot."

  "Do the cabin doors lock?"

  Rei smiled briefly. "Not usually, but I can make them do it. Do you have a choice of quarters?"

  "Somewhere far away from wherever he's going to be."

  "The cabin just behind the bridge is the captain's quarters and therefore the largest. We could take that one. We'll need to ... clean it out first."

  The sick look was back on her face. "Oh no, I hadn't thought of that. All their things are still going to be—"

  "Sarah." Rei took her face in his hands. "You can't change it. We can't change it. And we have to sleep somewhere. This is a military vessel, so the crew swaps out on regular rotations; they haven't been here long, either. It's not their house."

  After a moment, she nodded. "What did you do with their bodies?" she asked quietly, looking up at him, her face still framed between his palms.

  "Burned them," he said without hesitation. If she could handle the rest of it, she could handle this. "It seemed the best way. The Galateans cremate their dead, so that's what would have been done at home."

  To his relief, she just nodded again. It was time, he thought, for a distraction.

  "Want to see the bridge?"

  "I know what you're trying to do," she said with a tiny pout and a scowl.

  "Is it working?"

  The scowl broke up in a smile, a little shaky, but sincere. "The bridge of an actual spaceship? Are you kidding?"

  Rei didn't think the bridge was that much to look at. Its main attraction were the viewscreens, covering the entire width of the ship and wrapping around. The screens looked like windows, but weren't; the prow of the ship was heavily shielded against radiation, enemy fire, and stray space debris. At the moment the screens showed the dark pasture in front of the ship, but they could be set to any other view within range of the ship's sensors.

  But Sarah looked amazed, wandering from one side of the bridge to the other. "Does this ship have a name?" she asked. "Do Galateans name their ships at all?"

  "They do." Rei slipped his arms into the pilot's cradle to make contact with the ship, and closed his eyes as text scrolled behind his eyelids. "According to this, it's called Glory to the Empire 46."

  "Well, we're sure not calling it that."

  Rei opened his eyes to grin at her. "As this ship's new co-owner and co-captain, would you like to name it?"

  "Millennium Falcon?"

  "Sure."

  "No," she said quickly. "That was a joke. One you wouldn't get. Um ... how about North Star?"

  "Your planet's fixed star?"

  "Yes. A fixed point to steer by. A star to guide you home."

  "I like that," he said, and made a few tweaks to the ship's designation. "North Star it is."

  ***

  Jeren was nowhere around when they left the ship. Rei hoped he wasn't off placing a call to the Galateans for the reward money. Of course, that'd just get Jeren thrown in prison himself, if he had told them the truth. The enemy of my enemy is my friend ... maybe. Or at least less likely to kill me.

  Back in the house, they found Agent Rhodes and Gary on the couch, having coffee and talking.

  "Really, Dad?" Sarah said. "You're making friends with the Men in Black?"

  "Turns out Aaron here—"

&nbs
p; "You're on a first-name basis with the Men in Black?"

  Rhodes flashed a quick smile.

  "—served in Afghanistan," her dad went on. "And me in 'Nam. Just catching up on old times. Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same."

  "Except we had better gear than you guys did."

  "And better chow, from what I hear," Gary said with a grin.

  Rhodes grimaced. "Most of the time."

  Sarah glanced at Rei and then shook her head wearily and turned toward the stairs. "Have fun bonding, you guys. I guess."

  Rei followed her upstairs as the quiet voices in the living room resumed.

  "What do you think your government is going to do next?" Rei asked softly.

  Sarah went into the bathroom and started washing her face and hands in the sink. She left the door open, which Rei took to indicate that she didn't require privacy. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe Dad can talk Rhodes into helping us. Maybe he'll turn us in. I'm just too tired to deal with it."

  Rei took his turn at the sink, scrubbing at his hands until the skin hurt before he made himself stop.

  Take the advice you gave Sarah. We did what we had to do. That's all.

  What comes next will come.

  He went into the bedroom to find Sarah stripped down to her underwear, gazing blankly at the wall as if she'd run out of energy in the process of changing into her night clothes. Rei stripped off his own clothes and, wordless, they climbed into bed and lay in each other's arms.

  He was expecting a replay of today to fill his head as soon as he closed his eyes, but his mind was surprisingly cooperative as long as he grounded himself on the feeling of Sarah against him, breathing softly against his neck.

  The sound of a vehicle door slamming outside made him sit up. Sarah pulled back the curtain, and they watched the red rear lights of Rhodes' vehicle turn out onto the farm road.

  "I guess he and Dad came to some kind of arrangement," she said quietly. "Where's creepy cat dude, do you know?"