[center][h2]Discoveries[/h2][/center] [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/YGKOIA3.jpeg[/img] [/center] “Whew!” A panting Yuri gasped. “Where did you learn how to do that? No…no. Don’t tell me,” he smiled as Edina collapsed onto his chest. “I’d have to hunt your teacher down and…” “And what?” she lifted her chin, her tone comically seductive as she regarded him. “Shake his hand,” the first mate chuckled. “Buy him drinks!” His arms enfolded her, greedy fingers caressing skin as their legs entwined. “Pick his brain for all the details!” “What makes you think it was a ‘him?” she grinned. “Look at you,” Yuri laughed as he moved, tousled sheets gathering about as he now found himself atop her. “Bein’ all mysterious and stuff. Come here.” He gathered Edina into his arms, pressing his lips to hers in a slow, grateful kiss. “Whoever it was,” he traced an appreciative finger along her collar bone, “I’m in their debt.” That stopped Edina’s inspection of Yuri’s frame in it’s tracks. “Not the usual male response,” she lifted an eyebrow as her fingers worked the hair on the back of his head. “Oh?” he asked, his own explorations barely disturbed by the point she was making. “I gotta hear this.” “There’s an old song I heard once,” she replied. “I don’t know; it might be from Earth-That-Was. A pretty funny tune about how to get women. Anyway, the guy talks his way through it, [i]dohn mah[/i]? And he says…’Men have what I call a Columbus Complex. Other people may have been there, but we still want to feel like we discovered it.” His expression was blank. “Discovered what?” Her smile wavered. “Oh, you know. It….[i]it[/i]” “It? Uhhhhhh. Columbus was some kind of an explorer, wasn’t he?” Yuri asked, before the spark of humor in his eye gave him away. “Hey…HEY!” he laughed as her fingers made expert use of the ticklish spots on his ribs. “Okay, okay! Shiny! I surrender!” “Gorram right you do, Mister Antonov!” Edina brought him back onto her for another soulful kiss. “What I was trying to say is it’s nice that you don’t get all puffed up jealous at the thought there might’ve been others before you. It drove my ex husband out of his mind.” During their time together, Edina had rarely spoken of her husband, and as far as Yuri was concerned, with good reason. He knew the man’s name was Andres, and that he worked the fishing boats that plied the waters of New Melbourne. He also knew that when Andres was ashore, he made a habit of beating his wife with such force and frequency that she was a regular at the local clinic. Until one eventful day, when something inside of her cried “enough!,” and she found herself booking passage on a boat named China Doll. He settled in beside her, draping a thigh over hers as his palm came to rest on the smooth flesh of her stomach. “Sounds like a good enough reason to call him ‘Ex,” Yuri observed. “We’ve both had people before. Doesn’t matter where you come from, but where you go means everything. The first thing we ever had in common was that this boat lifted us out of the worst times of our lives. “And here we are,” he smiled down into her eyes, “going wherever we’re bound together. I hope,” he lowered his face to kiss the tip of her nose, “that’s as good for you as it is for me.” “That’s some mighty flowery language you got there, Shakespeare,” Edina rewarded him with a crooked smile. “Would’ve been better if I’d worked in truss, exploding bolts, or navigation vectors. You’d be positively swooning,” he teased. “That reminds me,” Edina’s expression grew serious. “How long do we have to keep sneaking around out here?” Yuri cast a quick glance toward the source box on the desk. “It’s twenty-three-forty-five right now. We should be clear of Reaver space around oh-five hundred tomorrow. Normally we’d sweat the Miranda no-fly zone as well, but the planet’s currently on the far side of it’s orbit. I’d guess the Captain would declare all clear around oh-eight hundred.” “And after that?” She nestled in against him, comfortable in the bunk they’d shared since the new folk had come aboard. As he spoke, she pleased herself by gently pinching at the close cropped beard. Yuri’s hand lay upon her stomach, where from time to time his fingers softly drummed, or the palm doled out a gentle caress. “Two days’ run through the deep black. We find our asteroid. If everything works like it should, we’ve got about four days to hunt for anything worth salvaging…if we’re lucky.” “Won’t three big cargo containers be pretty easy to spot?” “If they’re intact, sure,” he nodded. “But you’ve gotta remember, thye Gossamer hadn’t done a deceleration burn or a course correction before they jettisoned those containers. Right now, we’re operating on two sets of gravitational calculations that both hope the containers were captured by the asteroid’s pull. But they were still moving at about twenty thousand KPH when Gossamer dumped ‘em,” Yuri continued, “which means they could be lost forever in the black, or they smacked that asteroid hard and came apart on the surface.” Edina’s brow furrowed. “But wouldn’t we still see the wreckage?” “Maybe,” he shrugged, “maybe not. The records say it’s a big asteroid with it’s own gravitational field. It’s been pulling in dust for over three hundred years since the crash. That’s why the museum hooked us up with the Snuffler.” “You mean that big yellow thing you’ve got coiled in the cargo bay,” she replied. “Abby tried to explain how it works to me, but sometimes I don’t conjure Abby Speak.” Yuri fixed her with a mischievous grin as he grabbed the bedsheet. “Here! Let me show you!” With a sweeping motion, he hauled the sheet upward, completely covering Edina from toes to chin. “The sheet is three hundred years’ accumulated dust, pebbles, and rocks that have landed on the asteroid. Because of them, we can’t see the good stuff underneath.” “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she quipped. “We can’t just vacuum it up,” he continued, “because there’s no atmo. So we’ve got the Snuffler. It sort of…grazes up…the loose objects. Like this!” With that, he was beneath the sheet, offering a physical demonstration of “snuffling” to the woman who shrieked laughter and squirmed in ticklish delight. “Hey!” Yuri’s head popped up from beneath the sheet. “Guess what I discovered?” Edina tugged at his shoulders. “You gonna come plant your flag or what, Columbus?”