Making her happy is not your responsibility. Keeping her alive is,I reminded myself.Keep your distance. Do your job. Get everyone to the surface safely and then get out.
“Captain,” Henic called, and the tension in his voice made me forget all about equipment arguments. “I’m showing massive atmospheric disturbance building in our approach vector. It’s like… It’s like the storm systems are reorganizing themselves.”
I looked up at the navigation display and felt my blood turn cold. The storm patterns that had been relatively stable when we’d entered the planet’s atmosphere were shifting, consolidating into something that looked suspiciously like a supercell formation.
“Time to impact?” I asked.
“Based on current development rate… Twenty-two minutes.”
Twenty-two minutes. We needed at least thirty to reach a safe landing zone, and that was assuming optimal conditions. I ran through our options quickly. We could try to outrun the storm, but that would mean pushing the engines beyond safe parameters in an already unstable atmosphere. We couldattempt to navigate around it, but the storm was so sprawling, there’d be no avoiding it.
The only viable option left was to punch through it before it reached full intensity.
“Dr. Rivers,” I said without turning around. “How quickly can you get those atmospheric readings you need?”
“Why?” she asked, but I could hear her moving closer to look at the navigation display. “Oh. Oh, that’s… That’s not good.”
“It’s a planetary-scale electromagnetic storm,” said Cleo, leaning over Zara’s shoulder to peer at the readings. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I have,” Zara said quietly, and something in her tone made me finally turn to look at her. Her face had gone pale, but her eyes were focused and determined. “But only in studies. When a magnetic field destabilizes, the atmospheric layers start to reorganize themselves, and the electromagnetic energy has to go somewhere.”
I could barely follow her science-babble, but I caught the gist of what she was saying. “Where?” I asked.
“Usually? Into the ground, in the form of massive lightning strikes.” She looked up at me, and I saw not fear in her expression, but calculation. “We need to land before the storm reaches full intensity, or we could be caught in an electrical discharge that will fry every system on this ship.”
Perfect. Just perfect. Not ideal conditions to be visiting what we hoped was the Destran home planet, that was for sure. I turned back to the controls and began plotting a new descent trajectory. Fast, steep, and dangerous as hell, but it could get us to the surface before the storm turned lethal.From there, we’d just have to wait it out before exploring the surface.
“Strap in,” I announced to the cabin. “We’re going down fast.”
“How fast is fast?” Cleo asked, but she was already moving toward the passenger seats.
“Fast enough that Dr. Rivers might want to reconsider which three pieces of equipment are most important to her,” I said dryly.
I heard Zara make a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a sob. “At this point, I’m more concerned about whether any of us are going to survive tousethe equipment.”
“We’ll survive,” I said, adjusting our descent angle to take advantage of a gap between two developing storm cells. “I don’t lose passengers.”
Not anymore, I added silently.
The ship bucked violently as we hit a downdraft, and I heard equipment cases shifting in the cargo area, despite the restraints. Through the cockpit viewport, I could see flashes of electrical discharge beginning to arc between the cloud layers below us. Beautiful and deadly, like everything else I’d seen so far of this planet.
“Torven,” Zara said, and the use of my first name instead of my rank made me glance back at her. She was strapped into her seat now, but her hands were gripping the armrests tightly enough that her knuckles had gone white. “Thank you in advance. For getting us down safely.”
I grunted and turned back around, but something warm twisted in my chest at the trust in her voice.
Don’t get attached,I warned myself.Do your job and walk away.
But as I guided the ship through the increasingly violent atmospheric turbulence, I couldn’t quite ignore the way my pulse had spiked when I saw fear in Zara’s eyes. Or the way every protective instinct I’d tried to bury was suddenly clawing through my skin…which was probably a very interesting color right now. With my gloves on, I couldn’t see what tones my skin had shifted to, but they were likely alarming. Destrans showed their emotions on their faces—literally.
The ship’s proximity alarms began to wail as we plunged through the cloud layers, chasing a safe landing ahead of a storm that could tear us apart. And all I could think about was that if we got stuck here for longer than expected, keeping my distance from Dr. Zara Rivers was going to be a lot harder than keeping us all alive.
The electromagnetic storm lit up the sky around us like an aurora gone mad, and I pushed the ship into a dive that would have terrified my previous crew. But my previous crew was dead, and these people were counting on me to get them down safely.
I’d failed once before at protecting the people I was responsible for.
I wasn’t going to fail again.
Even if it meant dealing with a profusion of scientific equipment and one stubbornly brilliant atmospheric scientist who made me want things I had no business wanting.
