Starflight (Starflight, #1)(23)

“Sorry it wasn’t to your liking,” Doran told her.

“That’s all right,” Solara said coolly while wiping her mouth. “I didn’t hire you for your cooking skills. I’ll find other ways to make you useful.”

Cassia snorted from across the table and gave a knowing wink. “I’ll bet you will.”

Solara’s face blazed. She couldn’t shake her head fast enough. “No, that’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah,” Doran echoed while pointing back and forth between him and Solara. “There’s nothing—”

“Zero judgment.” Cassia flashed a palm. “Hookups are the best way to fight transport madness. If you don’t rev up those endorphins, the lack of sunlight will scramble your brain.”

With a sardonic twist of his lips, Kane leaned an elbow on the table. “So that’s why you keep a meathead at each port. I thought you just had bad taste.”

Cassia swiveled around so quickly she smacked herself in the eye with her own dreadlocks. “Don’t talk to me about taste, you wharf-licker!” she yelled. “Your last girlfriend couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

“Well, your last boyfriend had a nose like a weasel.”

“Maybe it wasn’t his nose that made him special.”

Kane made a face. “Thanks for the visual. Excuse me while I vomit to death.”

“Enough!” barked the captain, and Acorn dived headfirst into his pocket. “If you two can’t behave, I’ll send Renny to make the Pesirus delivery.”

Cassia gasped and sat bolt upright. “Pesirus? That’s today?”

The captain pointed his spoon at her. “Only for good little ship hands.”

Cassia and Kane turned to each other with manic smiles, argument forgotten, as they bounced in their seats and squealed like children. They drew a joint breath and yelled, “Hellberries!”

Solara shared a questioning look with Doran.

“Those two are weird,” he whispered behind his hand.

She nodded. For once, they agreed on something.

Cassia linked her arm through Kane’s as if she hadn’t just screamed in his face and called him a wharf-licker. “You should come with us,” she said to Solara. “Your servant, too. It’ll be fun.”

The confusion must have shown on Solara’s face because Renny explained, “Pesirus hosts a hellberry festival each spring. We have a contract to deliver cane syrup from Orion.”

“They add syrup to the wine,” Kane added. “To take the edge off. You can drink it straight, but it’s a donkey kick to the mouth.”

“Hellberry wine,” Cassia said, going dreamy. “It’s spicy and sweet and makes you warm all over. There’s nothing like it.”

The captain warned, “Your delivery comes first, then payment, then fun. And take it easy on the drink, you two. We don’t want a repeat of last year.”

His warning made Solara wonder what had happened last year. When she asked them, Renny and the captain grinned but said nothing while Cassia and Kane blushed ten shades of crimson. They avoided each other’s eyes and then suddenly “remembered” they had chores to do. Within seconds, they were gone.

“Must’ve been good,” Solara mused as she watched them retreat. She knew the dash-of-shame when she saw it. “Or hilariously bad.”

Renny laughed. “I didn’t get a ringside seat—”

“Neither did I,” the captain interrupted. “Thank the maker.”

“—but I imagine it was both.”

Solara found herself wearing a smile. There was a real festival nearby, with food and drinks and games. She weighed the risk of appearing in public against the rewards of sunshine and spiced berries. In the end, sunshine won the battle. “Sounds fun. I’ll come along.”

Doran nudged her with his elbow.

“Doran, too,” she added. As much as she dreaded spending the day with him, it wasn’t smart to leave him alone. He might find a way to use the ship’s com system to alert the Enforcers. “He’s no engineer and his cooking may kill us, but even he can haul a few crates of syrup.”




Four hours and two solar systems later, they stood in the bottom-level cargo hold and craned their necks to stare at a mountain of storage containers marked PESIRUS FEST.

“A few crates?” Doran remarked. “How much wine can one colony drink?”

Solara had to agree. Judging by the amount of syrup to deliver, the festival must’ve been more popular than she’d expected. In that case, maybe leaving the ship wasn’t a wise move. She bit her lip, peering out the open door of the cargo hold to the rolling landscape beyond.

The view was nearly too gorgeous to believe.

Pure yellow sunlight gleamed above a field of shorn blue-green grass dotted with lavender wildflowers. The terraformed colors weren’t quite right, as if someone had overbrightened the saturation on a telescreen. But after a month of space travel, her body craved fresh breezes and warm sunrays more than her next breath. She caught herself leaning toward the exit ramp.

She was so going.

“The job’s easy,” Kane said, thumbing toward a wheeled pallet parked outside. “We just stack everything on there, then strap it down and use the auxiliary shuttle to haul it to the fairgrounds.”