Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Cyprian
Cyprian’s heart pounded as he settled into the chair. The weight of the moment hit him like an ax across his shoulders. Beside him, Kaelen moved with the quick competence of one well acquainted with his ship. Cyprian watched, trying to understand the controls. He’d never flown this kind of ship before. In fact, he had flown a vessel in space exactly twice in his life. If Kaelen needed help, he wanted to be able to do so.
“We’ve got two options,” the smuggler said. “Option one: we veer off-course and head for an asteroid belt a few light cycles out.”
“Option two?” Cyprian asked.
“I’m still working on an option two.”
Fek . “Your outpost,” Cyprian barked to Kaelen. “How far are we from it?”
Kaelen tilted his head, his hands still a blur over the controls. “Too far. They’ll catch us long before we hit its safety fields. And I’m not too keen on leading them to my home.” Kaelen scowled at the monitors that displayed their pursuers closing in. The ship’s alarms blared in steady rhythm, filling the cockpit with an unrelenting pulse. “I suppose I’d better tell you what I was planning on sharing at my outpost. Just in case.”
Fivra sat just behind them, strapped in and as safe as she was going to be in this situation. Her pink hair was tousled from their lovemaking. She was deathly silent. Her aqua eyes were wide but calm. Cyprian caught her gaze for the briefest moment, willing her to hold steady. He couldn’t falter now—not with her life in his hands. “Talk to me, Kaelen,” Cyprian said as he opened the navigation panel and quickly scanned the controls. They were fairly standard. He’d be able to perform some basic tasks without too much confusion.
“I have a source,” Kaelen began. “And I have the data I stole from the Axis’ databases. It’s not the Terians they’re concerned about. Not really. It’s you .”
“Me?” Cyprian’s gut clenched as he studied the navigation console before him. His wings were crushed uncomfortably against the back of his seat, doing nothing for his already fraying nerves. “What do they want with me?”
“They don’t want to lose you—and the others like you. There are more Zaruxians, did you know that? I gave Glivar what I know about what happened at the Terian penal colony. That revolt put something in motion. Your Zaruxian brother easily destroyed several of the Axis’ best ships. Easily , Cyprian. He did it to protect his mate.”
“He did so in his dragon form?” It was a foolish question. Of course, this Zaruxian was in dragon form if he used fire to destroy the Axis ships. But Cyprian had never completed the transformation. Inside the confines of Erovik, there was no place to make the change, and no reason to do so. Flying was also out of the question on a space station, where corridors were small and open spaces were still filled with life forms. It was a luxury to even stretch out his wings fully.
“Yes. But here’s where it gets interesting. There is concern that Terians are natural mates for males of Zarux. That the rest of their collection of Zaruxians will rise up and revolt if they find their mates among the Terian females. Your rebellion has proven to them that this is a credible threat.”
“Collection?” Cyprian processed this as he began to grasp the controls of the navigation interface. The star maps unraveled before him, spreading out like the threads of a tangled web. He needed to find them a safe haven—a planet, a moon, anything that could shield them from the Axis’ relentless pursuit. Preferably not that asteroid cluster. The glowing markers of nearby celestial bodies blurred as he scrolled through potential destinations. None of them seemed particularly promising.
“That’s what the Axis calls them,” Kaelen said. “I don’t know how many Zaruxians they have in their, ah, collection. They’re down two, now. The one on the colony and you.”
A plasma burst slammed into their rear thrusters. Kaelen hissed through his teeth as the control displays flickered and dimmed momentarily. The entire ship shuddered violently, throwing Fivra against her straps with a sharp gasp. The Axis had closed the gap. Their six liks were up.
“I wish you would have told me this earlier.” Cyprian’s gaze moved over the star maps.
“I wanted to show you the data, not just tell you about it,” Kaelen said. “Something about your kind frightens them. But what? And the more I think about it, something about this isn’t right. They shouldn’t have found us.”
But they had. “We’re being tracked.”
“Not this ship,” Kaelen replied. “I run regular sweeps to check for tracking devices. Nothing.”
“There has to be…there!” A flickering blue marker caught Cyprian’s attention—a small moon hidden in the dense asteroid field he’d been hoping to avoid. It wasn’t ideal by any means, but it had an atmosphere and a surface riddled with craters for hiding. “I’m sending over coordinates to a moon in the Vypex system. If we can thread through the field, we can hide and regroup. Plus, the debris might throw off their scanners.”
Kaelen spared him a dubious glance, his gold eyes narrowing. “Vypex Belt?” He let out a low whistle. “Option one it is.” Kaelen tapped a series of commands into the navigation console and adjusted their trajectory. The ship groaned and protested but obeyed. “All right then, to our doom we go. Hold on tight, little Terian. We’re about to play a game of dodge the death rocks.”
“Anything else you want to tell me?” Cyprian clenched his jaw as red lights flashed to warn of incoming fire. Plasma bolts flared in the viewport’s edges. The ship’s shields shimmered faintly as they absorbed another glancing hit, the force rocking them sideways. “Just in case.”
“Just that your dragon fire is a serious threat to the Axis,” Kaelen said. “They’re tracking down the Terian females to keep them away from the Zaruxian males in the Axis’ custody—oh, and you’re also on an inmate list. Meaning that you’re a prisoner of the Axis. Clever of them to make you think you worked for them.” He shook his head. “ Brilliant , I have to admit.”
Cyprian’s head swam with this new, casually delivered information. “I’m a prisoner of the Axis.”
“Yes. Since birth, I believe. See why I wanted to tell you at the outpo— fek . Shields are down to forty percent.” Kaelen set about rerouting power to the aft shielding. “One more direct hit and we’ll be getting very warm in here.”
“Time to get fancy with the flying.” Cyprian’s gaze moved between the map on his console and the glowing debris field growing larger by the second in the viewport. Each asteroid spun ominously, glowing faintly with reflected light from the local star. Their jagged surfaces jutted out like the teeth of a monstrous beast waiting to devour them. “We’re nearly at the asteroid field.”
Kaelen chuckled darkly, gripping the thruster controls tightly. “Relax, mate. I always do my best work under pressure.”
Cyprian heard Fivra make a little noise that was a half laugh, half whimper as the ship lurched again. He glanced back to see her determined expression and steely gaze. She was holding it together.
“Ha!” Kaelen put the ship into a sharp dive to dodge an incoming plasma blast that narrowly missed their tail.
Cyprian’s grip on the controls tightened as he mapped out a path through the Vypex Belt. The asteroid cluster was unforgiving. Its ever-shifting debris created a labyrinth of death for anyone reckless enough to enter. “Keep it steady heading into this mess,” Cyprian warned. “Try not to get us killed before we get to the belt.”
“Your faith in me is overwhelming,” Kaelen quipped as he flipped the stabilization thrusters online. The ship leveled, its vibrations worsening under the strain of repeated evasive maneuvers.
Cyprian shifted his focus to their pursuers. The Axis ships gleamed sleek and menacing. They weren’t just trying to disable Kaelen’s ship—they were trying to destroy it. No prisoners, only ash.
The ship plunged into the Vypex Belt, weaving between hulking asteroids that tumbled and spun in bizarrely mesmerizing trajectories. The viewport filled with impervious shards of rock and metal, each one a potential death sentence. Kaelen gripped the controls with a steadfast intensity, his usually sarcastic bravado subdued by the precision required to navigate the chaos swirling around them.
“Hold steady,” Cyprian barked, though his own claws dug into the edges of the console. His wings pressed back against the chair, every muscle in his body coiled tight as Kaelen’s craft narrowly slipped between two grinding boulders.
“Steady is for amateurs,” came Kaelen’s irritatingly collected reply. He pitched the ship with what looked like reckless abandon, skimming the jagged underside of an asteroid. “This is art.”
“This is insanity,” Fivra muttered from behind them.
Kaelen turned into a sharp roll that tilted the entire cabin enough to make Fivra gasp. “The best art comes with a little danger, doesn’t it?”
Cyprian growled low in his throat. “I’d rather not rely on your ‘art’ to keep us alive, Kaelen.”
A whistle came from Kaelen as he banked the ship hard to avoid a cluster of smaller debris. “Shields are down to twenty percent and the right thruster’s barely hanging on.”
Cyprian glanced at the darkened edges of his own console. No power rerouting would save them now if the Axis dared to follow suit through the asteroids. The ship violently shook as a piece of debris clipped the hull, setting the emergency alert lights into a chaotic pulse of red.
“The field is dense enough to throw off their targeting scanners,” Kaelen continued. “But I have a theory about how they tracked us.”
Cyprian kept his gaze locked on the viewport. “Care to enlighten us?”
Kaelen pulled a tight turn. The ship vibrated dangerously under the strain. “They’re tracking you ,” he said. “When I scan you, I’m sure I’ll find an implant.”
“ Fek ,” Cyprian growled. He was still working through the whole “prisoner” part, replaying his life for evidence that this was true.
Fivra craned her neck to glance at the console that displayed the Axis ships. Her voice was urgent. “Are they still following?”
“For now.” Kaelen jerked the controls again. “But we’re gaining space. The debris is slowing them down.”
The metal groan from the ship’s frame grated on Cyprian’s nerves. “This ship will not hold together much longer.”
“We’re close,” Kaelen said, his voice tighter now, all pretense of levity gone. His clawed hands moved over the controls with surgical precision. Ahead of them, a dark crescent on the navigation map glimmered faintly. “There. That’s our moon.”
The ship’s thrusters sputtered as Kaelen pushed them harder, weaving through the last stretch of the asteroid field with a reckless grace that bordered on miraculous. The moon loomed ahead. Craters of varying sizes scarred its unremarkable surface, casting long shadows across the terrain. Gaping scars of black rock swallowed the harsh light from the nearby star, shrouding sections of the surface in a cloak of impenetrable darkness.
“We’re heading into that big crater—dead ahead,” Kaelen announced. He tilted the controls, sending the ship into a steep dive just as a rogue fragment of rock tumbled dangerously close to their tail.
The ship made unpleasant noises as its hull strained, going from space to the moon’s gravity. “We’re going in fast, but we’ll land. Probably.”
Cyprian shot him a glare. “That’s not comforting, Kaelen.”
“Good, because I wasn’t trying to be.” Kaelen’s grin was sharp, though his gold eyes were bright. Kaelen cut the thrust in one engine and engaged the landing stabilizers. Sparks flew from the console as Kaelen slapped a large switch on his right. “Brace for impact!” he yelled.
The ship plummeted into the yawning crater. Its underbelly skimming the jagged ground in a cascade of sparks and grinding metal. A deafening roar filled the cabin as they finally skidded to a halt. The craft settled deep into the shadowy depths of the moon’s surface. Silence followed, broken only by the faint hiss of cooling systems and the groaning protests of the ship’s stressed framework.
“Well, we made it.” Kaelen rubbed a hand over his face.
“Not quite.” Cyprian’s blood ran cold as dragon fire burned in his throat. “They’re still coming.”