Free Your Planet or Mine? by Susan Grant Page B

and dance.” He rotated his index finger. “Spinning around on her toes.”
    Jana remembered that girl, too. She’d been gone a long time. With an unexpected sense of loss, she didn’t realize how much she’d missed her.
    “I watched you for days while my father worked. One night I decided to fly up to the porthole of your dwelling to see where you went at night. I swooped in too low, tried to fly out of my error and got tangled in the tree.”
    And the rest was history.
    “I called you Peter,” she confessed. “After Peter Pan. He was a character in a children’s story. A magical boy who flew and never grew old.”
    “I grew old.”
    “Not to me. I look at you and I see Peter. I see someone I never forgot.”
    “Never?” His mouth seemed to want to form a grin that he wouldn’t allow. The result was a boyishly charming half smirk. “That didn’t seem to be the case in the market, Jana. You ran from me.”
    “You expected me to remember you on the spot after twenty-three years?”
    “Yes.”
    “And if I’d walked onto your spaceship, no notice, and said I needed to talk to you, you would have remembered me?”
    “Yes,” he said with conviction.
    Jana gave a little huff of disbelief.
    “It is true. You grew up to be more beautiful than I could have imagined, but when I look at you, I still see the same girl that took my heart. You were beautiful then, and even more so now as a woman.”
    A flush of heat burned her cheeks. “Thank you,” she whispered. Other men had called her beautiful, but their words hadn’t affected her this way.
    “Believe me, Jana, when I say I didn’t fully understand my father’s line of work back then. The mission to your world was the turning point.”
    “Yet it didn’t turn you into a pacifist. You grew up to be a soldier.”
    “I came to see the reasons behind the Coalition’s methods, even if I didn’t agree with them all. The Drakken would change your mind, too.”
    “They’re the bad guys, I take it.”
    “Far worse than anything you have here on Earth.”
    “I don’t know about that. We have some pretty evil characters on this rock.”
    “Take them and what they do to the nth degree, and you have the Drakken.”
    Jana was glad fog covered the stars tonight, so she couldn’t see them. She couldn’t help thinking of all the evenings she forgot to look at the stars because she was too busy, rushing here, rushing there. Tonight had changed that forever. Not only was there other life out there, other human life, there were battles and governments and decisions being made on a vast scale where Earth was nothing but an insignificant speck. Less than a lowly pawn in a chess game. She’d never look up in the sky and see the stars the same way again. She wasn’t sure if she ever wanted to look at the stars again. “Cavin, how is Earth going to keep the Drakken away? We can’t even keep the REEF away.”
    “It’s the Coalition I have come to warn you about. The Drakken aren’t a threat here.”
    “The Coalition? But the Coalition are your people.”
    “Yes.”
    She glanced sideways at him, but he’d blanked his face of emotion. “But doesn’t—doesn’t that…?”
    “Doesn’t that make me a traitor? Believing Earth deserves the chance to defend itself? That the loss of use of one planet won’t make or break the Coalition? Yes, I suppose it does make me a traitor to have such unconventional views. I don’t intend for the Coalition to find out, however. Treason is a capital crime. I’d be executed, and not mercifully, either.”
    “Cavin…”
    “If the REEF doesn’t get to me first.”
    “ Cavin! ” She took a few deep breaths to calm down. He risked his life to save hers, and everyone else on Earth. And now he expected her to be the one to sound the alarm. The sensation of being swept out to sea in advance of an approaching tsunami consumed her. “All we have to do is talk. Mediate a compromise. Explain to the Coalition that we live here,