Chapter 15 The Generators #2
She does. Her rifle cracks, and I’m already spinning, already engaging, trusting her to guard my blind spots while I guard hers.
Henrok reaches Generator Two. I hear him roar something in Zaterran—a curse, a prayer, I cannot tell—as he rips the charge panel open.
“Sixty seconds on the timer!” he bellows. “I need time!”
We give him time.
Polly drops two more. I take out three in close quarters, the fighting brutal and ugly and nothing like the elegant dueling forms I learned in my father’s court. Blood and smoke and screaming, and through it all, that terrible song playing like the universe’s worst soundtrack.
Fifty seconds then forty.
A suicide squad breaks through—four soldiers, sprinting for the generator, armed with backup detonators. They’ll blow themselves up to take us with them if they have to.
Polly and I move without discussion.
She takes the two on the left, rifle switching to full auto. I take the two on the right, plasma fire and ancient reflexes combining into something deadly.
They fall. All four.
Thirty seconds.
Rynn. Her voice in my head, tight with warning. Behind you—
I spin, but not fast enough.
The plasma bolt catches me in the side, right over the existing wound. The pain is—
I hear myself scream.
The floor comes up to meet me. Or maybe I fall to meet it. Hard to tell when the world is fracturing into white-hot agony and the only thing I can feel through the bond is—
"RYNN!"
Her scream tears through the chaos like nothing else has.
I’m on my back. The ceiling swims above me, emergency lights bleeding into each other. Through the haze of pain, I feel her—terror, ice-cold and visceral, slamming through the bond hard enough to steal breath I don’t have to spare.
Then something shifts.
Terror transforms.
Into rage.
Cold. Focused. Lethal.
The bond blazes so hot it almost burns, and I feel her stop thinking, stop planning, stop being careful—
“POLLY—”
She drops from her elevated position like a falling star.
I see it through pain-blurred vision: her rifle switching to full auto, her face twisted into something savage, her whole body arrowing toward the Meridian position like she’s forgotten what self-preservation means.
Through the bond: Shut up! I’m busy saving your life!
She’s not fighting tactically anymore. She’s fighting furious. Grenades flying, plasma launcher attachment on her rifle spitting fire, curses pouring from her mouth in languages I don’t even recognize.
A Fringe berserker. A human hurricane. A woman who watched the man she loves go down and decided that everyone responsible is going to pay.
“Cover her!” I try to shout, but it comes out broken, barely a whisper. “Someone—cover—”
Henrok’s warriors respond, laying down suppression fire, but Polly doesn’t need it. She’s already through their line, her assault so audacious that the Meridian soldiers scramble, unprepared for a solo charge from a woman half their size with twice their fury.
She breaks them.
It shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t work. But she’s moving too fast, hitting too hard, and they’re still reeling from the communications chaos, and—
The gap opens.
Henrok lunges for the charges.
And Polly is exposed now, surrounded, taking fire from three directions, and I can’t reach her, I can’t help her—
I will burn this fortress down before I let anything happen to her.
The thought isn’t rational. It isn’t tactical. It’s something deeper, something older, something that doesn’t care about wounds or odds or anything except getting to her right now.
I move.
Pain doesn’t matter. Enhanced biology kicks in—adrenaline, mate-bond, sheer will. I force myself up, stagger, nearly fall, and push through anyway. Three elites converge on her position, and I slam into the first one before he can fire, tear the weapon from his hands, turn it on the second.
The third one falls with a hole in his helmet, and I don’t know if that was me or her, and it doesn’t matter—
I reach her.
We slam together back-to-back, spine to spine, and the solid warmth of her against me is the best thing I’ve felt in hours.
“You’re supposed to be the careful one!” I manage.
“And you’re supposed to not get shot!” She fires over my shoulder, drops someone I couldn’t see. “Guess we’re both terrible at our jobs!”
Through the bond: relief. Determination. Absolute trust.
She guards my wounded side without being told. I cover her blind spots without thinking. We pivot together, synchronized in a way that goes beyond the bond—practice, partnership, choice.
This is what it means to fight beside my mate.
Not protecting her from danger.
Fighting alongside her.
And it’s so much better than anything I ever imagined.
“CLEAR!”
Henrok’s roar cuts through everything—the gunfire, the music, the pounding in my skull.
“Timer stopped at three seconds! Charges disarmed!”
Three seconds. We came within three seconds of losing everything.
The remaining Meridian forces fall back, melting into the smoke, their assault broken. The generators groan behind us—damaged, struggling, but running. Still powering the shields that keep us alive.
Victory.
My knees buckle.
Polly catches me before I hit the deck, her arms stronger than they have any right to be, her hands moving immediately to my wound. “Rynn. Rynn, look at me. How bad?”
“I’ll live.” I touch her face with blood-slicked fingers. Wonder, even now, how I got so lucky. “You came for me.”
Her voice breaks on the word: “Always.”
Through the bond, I feel her trying to be strong. Trying to be steady. Feel the terror she’s suppressing, the love she isn’t hiding, the way her hands shake despite her calm voice.
“That was reckless,” I whisper. “Charging in like that. You could have—”
“Could have what? Let them kill you?” Her jaw sets. “Not happening, starshine. Not ever.”
Starshine. The nickname makes something warm bloom in my chest.
Henrok limps over, checking his surviving warriors. Too few. Too many dead. The Zaterran warlord’s face is stone, but I see grief in the set of his shoulders.
“We cannot hold another assault like that.” His voice is flat. “If they send a second wave—”
He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to.
Comms crackle.
“Henrok?” Suki’s voice, strained but alive. “Anyone reading?”
Relief crashes through Polly so hard I feel it in my own chest. Her sister. Alive.
“We read you,” Polly responds, grabbing my wrist comm. “War Room status?”
“Holding. Barely. Upload just hit 63%, but we’re low on everything.” A pause. “Wait—sensors are picking up multiple signatures. Dropping out of hyperspace.”
My heart stops for an entirely different reason.
“I don’t think they’re Meridian.”
I pull up my wrist display with shaking hands. The holoscreen flickers, damaged, but the transponder codes come through clear enough.
I stare at them.
I stare, and my chest tightens, and hope and disbelief war for dominance, and—
“Those are Valorian Fleet signatures.” My voice cracks. I don’t try to stop it. “My family. They came.”
Three generations of work. Grandmother’s sacrifice. Father’s burden. Everything we’ve fought and bled and nearly died for.
They came.
Through the bond, Polly’s fierce pride blazes like a sun. Her hand finds mine, squeezes hard.
Suki’s voice: “Upload just hit 100%! High Council has everything! Rynn, your family knows. The coordinates, the proof, all of it.”
I close my eyes.
It’s done.
It’s finally done.
The moment of relief lasts exactly four seconds.
Then Commander Voros comes back on comms, and his voice is nothing like the cold professional from before. Now it’s cracked. Unhinged. The voice of a man who’s lost everything and decided everyone else should lose everything too.
“If I can’t have you,” he snarls, “no one can.”
The tactical display updates. My blood runs cold.
Every remaining Meridian vessel is moving. Not retreating. Not maneuvering for combat.
Accelerating directly toward the fortress.
“All ships,” Voros continues, voice cracking, “ramming speed. Take them with us.”
Kamikaze. He’s ordering a kamikaze run. Dozens of ships, millions of tons of mass, hurling themselves at the fortress at maximum velocity.
No shields can stop that. Not damaged shields running on crippled generators.
The math updates on my display.
Valorian Fleet: 4 minutes out.
Meridian impact: 90 seconds.
My family can avenge us. They cannot save us.
“Dying today?” Voros laughs, and it’s the laugh of a man who’s already dead, who just hasn’t stopped moving yet. “Then you’re dying with me, Lord Valorian. You and your little human pet and everyone in that fortress.”
I survived assassination attempts. Pursuit across three sectors. A siege.
I found my mate. Completed my mission. Saved my family’s legacy.
And now I’m going to die in 90 seconds, staring at a countdown timer while the woman I love breathes hard against my side.
Henrok stands tall despite his wounds, despite the blood dripping down his arms, despite the death toll of his warriors carved into his expression. The Zaterran way—defiant to the end.
“Then we take as many with them as we can.” His voice is granite. He looks at Polly and me—at the way we’re still pressed together, hands intertwined, neither of us willing to let go. “It has been an honor.”
I pull Polly closer. Feel her heart hammer against my chest. The bond blazes between us—no fear in it, not anymore. Just love. Just certainty. Just the absolute knowledge that whatever comes next, we face it together.
“Together?” I ask.
She looks up at me. Her eyes are fierce, wet at the edges, absolutely unafraid.
“Always.”
I would do it all again.
Every choice. Every moment. Every terrible decision that led me here.
For her.
The countdown ticks: 85 seconds.
The Valorian Fleet burns toward us, too far away.