Chapter 12 Orion #2
Panic claws at me, but I don’t want to confront it yet.
I know it’s wrong—this is all a mess—but I allow the wave of tenderness I’ve been holding at bay pull me under.
I know she isn’t mine. I know I’ll have to let her go.
I know all the reasons we can’t be—they’re practically infinite.
But for tonight…just for tonight, I can pretend this is us. This is it.
Exhausted by the spirited fucking and the draining events of the day, sleep soon tugs at my senses.
“Orion?” Lyra’s soft voice comes to me almost like a dream.
“Mm?”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I wonder if I dreamt her question. But then, after I hear her take a steadying breath, she continues.
“This wasn’t from the vellia, was it?”
The uncertainty and fear in her voice fractures something deep within me. After all this, she still doesn’t believe I want her for her. The honesty of her sadness—of her acute loneliness—devastates me. Pulling her in until there isn’t a breath of space between us, I sigh and kiss her forehead.
“No, Lyra,” I answer. “It wasn’t.”
It takes a few minutes, but I feel her relax against me, as if she’s been holding onto something and finally lets it go.
In that moment, I feel her vulnerability.
Her trust. It’s a gift more precious than everything locked in Fobos’s vault—more precious than all the enaurium in the universe—more precious than even the Solar Mother itself.
And I swear to all the gods in all the galaxies that I’ll never take that for granted—even if, for her, it only goes as far as this bed, as far as tonight.
With horrifying certainty, I know there will never be anyone else.
I will go to my grave and meet the Death Goddess loving Lyra Phoenix.
I’ll tell her about the Dark Star.
I’ll tell her everything.
At some point in the night, I wake to a shuddering rumble and the soft pulse of crimson light.
Lyra sleeps against me, curled into my side with one leg draped over mine.
I breathe in the scent of her hair, revel in the softness of her skin against mine, and a deep peace blankets us.
Lyra stirs and flings her arm across my chest, mumbling unintelligible words into the mattress.
“Ada, what’s going on?” I ask softly. “What’s that noise? Why are the warning lights on?”
My scanners have picked up a ship closing in. Estimated time of contact: five minutes.
“A ship?” I sit up in bed, shaking Lyra awake. “Lyra, wake up! We’ve got someone on our tail.”
She sits bolt upright and glares at the blinking warning lights.
“Fuck! Ada, who is it? Is it someone we know?”
She crawls over me in a mad dash for her clothes, yanking a tank top over her bare breasts and hiking up her underwear. Before I can toss a pair of pants at her, she rushes through the door, running for the cockpit on bare feet.
Yes. I’m afraid it’s the Edax Deorum. Preliminary scans indicate a full crew within.
The satisfying post-sex blush on Lyra’s cheeks disappears behind a new, sickly pallor, waking that misguided protective instinct deep within me.
“Who’s on the Edax Deorum, Lyra?” I demand, surprised to hear the growl in my voice.
Lyra ignores my question in favor of shouting at Ada.
“Well, why didn’t you wake me up earlier? The purpose of a proximity alarm is to—you know—alarm.”
I didn’t want to disturb you until it became strictly necessary. The level of oxytocin you were producing suggested...
“That’s enough, Ada, thank you,” Lyra snaps.
I tug on my pants and barrel after her into the cockpit. At her pale visage, I start to strap into the navigation seat, but she stops me.
“Can you shoot?” she asks, flipping switches and engaging a secondary holographic screen that I haven’t seen her use before.
“I’ve never fired from a ship,” I admit, panic making my palms shaky and damp with sweat. “But I’m good enough with a plasma rifle.”
She winces, but tugs me into the seat on her left side.
“Take the gunner’s seat,” she barks. “You’re about to get a crash course in space combat tactics.”
It is inadvisable to push the engines without—
“Not helpful, Ada!” Lyra shouts, increasing the thrust and sending the ship shooting forward.
“Lyra, who’s on the Edax Deorum?” I ask again, dread suggesting I already know the answer.
“Look here—these switches engage the targeting, but you have to wait until the ship is within range, shown here. As soon as the ship hits these crosshairs, hit this button to fire. We’re loaded on plasma ammo, but it’s still best to make it count, meaning don’t fire if you don’t think you can hit it.
If you fire in bursts, the cannons need a five-second cooldown period and the target will almost certainly return fire in that window. I don’t like being a sitting duck.”
“A what?”
She narrows her eyes and continues. “They’re going to catch up to us shortly—my ship is fast, but it’s no match for theirs.
Our only chance is to shoot them down, or damage their ship enough to give us a head start to safety,” Lyra says.
Then, she snaps: “Find me a hiding place, Ada! I don’t care how big, bad, or dangerous it is. I’ll take it over the alternative.”
Scanning, Ada acknowledges.
Our ship rumbles with a groan and the deep creak of shearing metal has Lyra swearing a blue streak.
“That better not be the hull…”
“Lyra! Who’s on that ship?” I demand, belting into the gunner’s seat and gripping the controls for the plasma cannons.
“Not now, Ranger,” she growls. “What’s my status, Ada? How’s my ship? And where the fuck am I taking us?”
The fear buried in the tone of her commands twists my insides. Before I can ask her again, the Edax Deorum pops onto the holographic screen in front of me and rapidly closes the distance.
“Ada!” Lyra shouts. “Coordinates, now! Coordinates to something—anything!”
The nearest inhabited object is the salvage station Hephaestus currently orbiting the abandoned Inferis asteroid mine.
“Hephaestus! Stars, we might be saved. Is Evie still aboard? If she’s not too pissed at me, maybe she’ll let us duck in for a spell,” Lyra replies, swerving hard again. If I wasn’t belted into the gunner’s seat, I would’ve been thrown across the cabin.
Evelyn Redfern is registered as the site manager. It’s likely she’ll be on board. Are you certain you wish to infringe upon her hospitality given how your last encounter went?
“We don’t have much of a choice, do we?” Lyra grumbles. “Input the coordinates, now!”
“Who’s Evelyn Redfern? And what happened last time?” I ask, concern seeping into my tone. “Please tell me there were no explosions involved—or jilted lovers.”
Both Lyra and Ada ignore me.
Approximate time to arrival: ten minutes.
“Even with light speed engines? Come on Ada, I know you’ve got some of the good juice on reserve. Now is the time to break it out, baby,” Lyra says tightly.
Light speed is inadvisable in our current state. There is structural damage to the hull after the initial escape attempt.
“Are we going to break apart into little pieces or is this more of a ‘you break it, you bought it’ situation that I will happily buy my way out of once we find a maintenance station? I need solutions, Ada, and you’re only giving me problems today.
” Lyra eyes the scanner with the holographic ship closing in and swears.
“They’re almost in range, Orion—be ready to fire,” she commands.
The probability of a safe landing on Hephaestus with our current structural integrity is 69%.
Panic ratchets my heartrate up.
Lyra chuckles at that. “Nice. Alright, that’s a solid shot, so I’m gonna go for it. Ada, fire up the light speed engine and make for Hephaestus. And no sass, please.”
Our encroaching pursuers veer within range, and I line up a shot on the screen. The first blast goes wide, but the second catches the bottom of the craft, scorching a long burn mark down the hull. Lyra whoops as the Edax Deorum shudders to a halt, but quickly circles back and returns fire.
Lyra pulls back and maneuvers us away from the blasts, expertly steering the ship as if it’s become an extension of her body.
As soon as they’re in range again, I fire four successive blasts, none of which connect. I curse and wipe my clammy hands on my pants.
“Don’t sweat it,” Lyra encourages. “I’m coming around again and you’ll be able to get them from a better angle. You’re not half bad in a fight, you know.”
“Anything else you want to tell me now?” I snap, stress making my temper brittle. “Like, who am I shooting at?”
For a moment, Lyra’s bravado drops and her gaze meets mine in the pulsing blue and red light of the cockpit.
“If he catches us,” she begins in a low voice. “He’ll take me back…and I can’t go. Not yet. I’m not ready yet, and I don’t know what he’ll do to you.”
“If who catches us?” I ask. The ship lurches to the side as Lyra dodges another blast.
She purses her lips and sighs.
“Kraxis.”
The pale panic on Lyra’s normally golden skin makes the protective instincts in me roar to the surface.
Kraxis. The bastard who held a gun to my head.
The walking threat to Lyra. Rage bubbles in me like I swallowed battery acid.
I can’t let him take her back to Brill. I won’t.
Not trusting myself to speak, I simply nod and return my focus to the holo screen in front of me.
I have to do this. I can’t fail her. I can’t fail Lyra like I’ve failed everyone else—my parents, Sylph, my people.
Light speed engine is primed, Ada chirps.
“Okay, Ranger, you’ve got one more shot at this before we run. Cripple their ship and then we’ll blast off and go hide out for a little while. I know you can do this,” Lyra says, gripping the ship’s controls with white knuckles.
Her words weigh me down with desperate purpose.
The jump might save us if I hit their ship—but miss, and the damaged hull, the incoming fire, the jump initiated with a crippled target could tear us apart.
I imagine the worst: a ragged pry of metal, the holo shattering, the last breath of a life that ends with our frozen bodies floating through space.
Taking one last deep breath, I line up the shot with the Edax Deorum’s left engine and fire. Six bursts of plasma jettison forward and time seems to slow—Lyra’s hand poised above the button that will engage the light speed drive.
Two shots miss. A third bounces off a shield at the fore, but the fourth shot connects with the engine in a ball of orange flame and blue plasma.
For an instant a hot, sick hope claws up my spine—then the fifth and sixth shots follow the same path, utterly vaporizing the ship’s left flank.
Lyra smashes her hand down and we lurch forward into light speed—streaks of white blurring against the abyssal black of space.
I jump up from my seat, pumping my fist in the air in triumph, but when I turn to Lyra, she’s staring back at where the Edax Deorum had been before our jump. Eyes welling with tears, she chokes out a sob and throws her arms around my neck.
With her face buried in my chest, I almost don’t hear her whispered words.
“Thank you.”