Taking an interest in the story didn’t look like a bad sign, so the captain spoke a little more tenderly.
“Right now we’re passing through a nebula called Nebula Delta. It’s full of violet dust, so through the ship’s windows it’ll look just like those flower fields back home that you loved.”
Luca glared at him, face twisted with pain.
“Our planet... didn’t have anything like flower fields. It was all rock and sand.”
The low voice was threatening in a way that didn’t suit his delicate, sensitive looks. Even at that near growl of a reply, the captain smiled, pleased.
The boy who’d said nothing but kill me all this time had given him a proper answer for the first time. That alone made him glad, delighted.
There was a slight lift in his voice.
“Is that so? Then I was wrong. Next time I’ll look for a nebula that resembles sand dunes. Somewhere you’d want to see.”
“...”
“Or should I find you something else?”
“...”
At the question, Luca nearly answered, I want to see a tree. The place he’d lived was a barren planet, but nothing was as beautiful as the vitality of the trees that grew stubbornly even in those sandstorms.
He nearly said he missed that toughness, then stopped himself. He didn’t want to reveal a will to live to the captain in that way.
Frankly, I’m getting tired of this...
Tired of screaming to be killed every single day. No matter how he begged, this man showed no sign of granting the request. He’d stay silent as though he hadn’t heard, then come without fail every day to look after him, and it was irritating, like being made fun of. Nothing was as exhausting as dealing with a persistent nuisance.
And I still don’t know what kind of man he is, to fuss over me like this...
Luca glanced down at the captain’s hand holding his own. His fingertips, unwrapped from their bandages for the moment, had nails cracked to pieces. Those sharp edges scraped the back of the captain’s hand and left marks, and still he didn’t pull away. If anything, he laced their fingers together and shared his warmth.
That touch resembled the temperament the captain always showed. However much Luca pushed him away and refused him, he kept to the same place without changing, waiting for Luca to come to him first.
He seems like the type who’d grant me anything I asked, except for that one thing.
Luca raised his eyes and looked at him quietly. He’d poured every scrap of physical and mental strength into his own situation, never turning his attention outward, so he hadn’t noticed until now.
The captain’s appearance wasn’t very different from the people of the planet he’d grown up on. No, he belonged to a class of attractiveness that couldn’t be compared with them at all. Though maybe that warm smile made him look better than he was.
...What planet is he from?
The galaxy was wide. It overflowed with demi-human races that had evolved to fit their own peculiar environments.
Take the demi-humans of Aegir-V, a planet with three times his home world’s gravity: their skeletons were grotesquely thick and dense, and their skin was a smooth grey, like the shell of some aquatic creature. They only felt settled under the pressure of high gravity.
Or there were the demi-humans of Kyros-Beta, a planet with two suns where all four seasons were nothing but daylight. They carried self-luminous elements inside their bodies, so a faint phosphorescence flowed beneath their skin according to their emotions. Warm gold when they were happy, cold blue when they were sad. Their beauty lay in the delicacy of that light.
There were even the alien species of Silis, whose entire bodies were made of transparent silica crystal and who could survive only in the brutal cold of a hundred below. When light struck them, their whole bodies broke it apart like a prism and shone brilliantly. But they carried the sad fate of never being able to press skin against any species that had body heat.
The captain in front of him was none of those.
If he had to categorize him, the man was of a race extremely close to his own. His skin had the same texture as Luca’s, in a healthy wheat tone. His frame was solid but not grotesque. Body heat came through warm from where their hands were joined. Above all, those golden eyes held depths that seemed capable of taking in even the meanest creature in the universe.
There was a distinct atmosphere about him that went beyond simple physical beauty. A loftiness and refinement built up over long years of wandering space spilled out of him.
“...And you?”
Luca’s mouth opened slowly, and that distinctive low voice came out. The captain’s gaze lingered a long while on those cracked, scabbed, unlovely lips. Luca paid the look no mind and went on asking.
“...What kind of person are you? Tell me what planet you came from, who you are. How you found me. Why you saved me... What kind of ship is the Nautilus? Where’s it headed...?”
The questions poured out all at once, without order. Each one would take hours, or days, to answer, so the captain couldn’t readily open his mouth.
Instead of answering, he chose silence for a moment. Some emotion difficult to read crossed his profile as he stared at the infinite darkness outside the window. At length he spoke quietly. An answer to one of the many questions.
“This ship, the Nautilus, is a ghost ship that doesn’t exist in the empire’s records.”
Is the ship more important than anything else I asked? Is that why he’s telling me that one first?
Luca looked at the strange man in front of him, of a race so like his own yet with thoughts he couldn’t begin to gauge, and opened his mouth again.
“A ghost ship...? Are you a criminal? I’m asking if you’re on the run with a bounty on your head. And then why bring someone like me aboard and save me?”
Once he’d started, the questions he’d been holding spilled out unrefined. The jumbled mess of them showed plainly how close to his limit Luca’s mind had been pushed. As if to calm him, the captain laid his large hand quietly over the back of Luca’s trembling one.
“If I explain, the story will get very long.”
“I don’t care. I want to know all of it.”
“Well, if Obel gives me permission to tell you a story that long, I’ll tell you.”
“...What kind of answer is that?”
“Right now your recovery comes first. But I’ll promise you this one thing. Aegis won’t find my ship easily. They may wipe out an entire planet without breaking a sweat, but laying a hand on my ship is a problem of an entirely different order.”
Luca looked at him, unconvinced. Aegis was known as the most dangerous and powerful of the empire’s allied forces. He’d learned in modern cosmology class that they achieved what they wanted by any means available. So however excellent a vessel the Nautilus was, slipping their radar wouldn’t be easy. That was what he wanted to say.
But he realized that cynically poking holes in reality wouldn’t help anything. So he settled for a small sigh instead. The truth was, more than any of that, he wanted to know why the man had saved him.
What does he gain by keeping me alive...?
That question bred wariness, and it kept his gaze from being anything like friendly. Watching Luca glare at him with those sharp eyes, the captain smiled faintly. It seemed he’d decided that loosening Luca’s guard came first.
“Shall I tell you about the crew?”
No, I’m not interested. He almost answered that way, then shut his mouth. He simply wanted to hear something, anything. Any story that could soothe, even briefly, a mind worn ragged by waking from nightmares every night was welcome.
This was a place where even dying wasn’t easy. If he could manage it with the help of some other crew member rather than the man in front of him, then knowing something about them couldn’t hurt.
“My first officer, Ivelinsia, was once the most promising commander in the Galactic Alliance. She’s recorded as dead now, though. She’s a stickler for principle, very stiff. When you make it up to the bridge someday, she’ll be the first one you run into.”
Luca listened quietly. Not knowing the reason behind that concentration, the captain’s gaze warmed. Naturally, seeing him focused with those calm eyes was lovelier than watching him weep to be killed.
“Doctor Obel, who seems to torture you daily, is a pioneer of the quantum medicine Aegis declared taboo. He isn’t mad about fixing people, he’s mad about reconstructing them.”
I’m supposed to be finding an accomplice for my death. Somewhere along the way Luca forgot that goal; the tension left his eyes and he sank into the story. The fact that outside this hellish treatment room a world, and people, were still breathing brushed at his senses.
“And Kai, the engineer shaving down a prosthetic to fit you... he’s probably in the storeroom right now, debating whether to engrave his favorite logo on your new arms and legs. He’s the sort who holds conversations with machines.”
“...”
“There are plenty of other crew. You can talk with them whenever you like. So get your strength back soon and hear their stories yourself.”
His story was missing the single most important part.
“Why won’t you talk about yourself? I asked what kind of person you are.”
