Jewel Read Online Free Page A

traditional
reserves of expensive slide fuel. The base source of that fuel, the mineral
armenium, was one of the rarest substances in the galaxy. The result was that
while they did have enough fuel to get them back out of this system, they
didn’t have enough to make it all the way to their destination. That meant that
the captain’s efforts to save money were going to cost the captain and the
owners of the ship big-time—and cut into everyone’s bonuses.
    All of which ultimately explained why Captain Kiara approved
the course Erik had laid into the gas giant in the center of the solar system.
They still hadn’t heard a living peep out of the Ymirians who had set up the
buoys—just the initial automated message demanding they identify themselves—but
it had seemed the best bet for finding anyone in the locality who could help
them refuel. If you were going to colonize a system, it just made sense that
you did so around a planet in the blue zone. Liquid water was an essential
building block for human life and while it was certainly possible you’d find it
resulting from volcanic activity further out in the system, the odds were
greater in the habitable zone near the sun.
    Jewel didn’t know what had happened after that as Captain
Kiara had finally taken notice of the fact that she was on the bridge and
pointedly asked her to help the steward calm and care for their often rowdy
passengers. Unfortunately for Jewel, the steward, one Vega Costa, who also
happened to be Jewel’s roommate, was poorly suited to her job. She just didn’t
seem to like people very much and had very little patience with them. Perhaps her
attitude flowed naturally from a lifetime in customer service employment, but
it certainly didn’t help calm things down when the steward was even touchier
and more irritable than the civilization-starved men and women she was supposed
to be serving.
    So it was Jewel who put out the figurative fires, triaging
passenger injuries for Dr. Brüning, calming tempers and diverting fights. And
it was Jewel who organized the miners to clean their own compartments and get
their vomit-smeared clothes into the ship’s laundry. All fairly simple tasks if
the primary person stirring up trouble hadn’t been the ship’s officer
responsible for keeping the passengers calm and happy.
    Drained and tired when she reached the room she shared with
Vega, Jewel’s temper flared when she found the woman already sleeping in her
bunk, following a shift rotation that everyone else on board had instinctively
suspended after the accident that had landed them in this mess.
    Jewel slipped quietly across their small quarters and into
the lavatory stall where, for the first time since she and Erik had started
vomiting in the exercise chamber, she was able to examine herself in a mirror.
Vomit, both hers and Erik’s if she remembered properly, stained her white gi in a frankly disgusting manner. The worst part wasn’t that she’d been walking
around like this for nearly ten hours. No, she corrected herself, the worst was
that she’d gotten so used to the puke she’d been cleaning all over the ship
that she’d reached the point where she couldn’t smell it on herself anymore.
    Jewel untied her brown belt and stuffed it in the laundry
chute. Her no longer white gi quickly followed. Then she shucked her
undergarments and examined herself again. She’d never been particularly happy
with her features. Her parents had been adjusting her body with cosmetic
surgery for as long as she could remember. As a result, her nose was thinner
than it should be. Her chin narrowed to slightly too fine a point. Her
collarbone had been shaved to accentuate her neck. Her hormones had been
adjusted early on so that her breasts were full and large.
    Similar procedures had kept her waist very narrow, her hips
broad, and her legs long and slender. By the standards of her people on Luxor,
she was exquisitely beautiful, but Jewel had never liked her