11. Oberon
Despite my best efforts and intentions, I somehow managed to wake up with Lark’s body cradled against mine.
Her cheek rested in the hollow of my shoulder joint, her pouty, full lips slightly parted as she breathed steadily against me.
Her legs were entwined with mine, and my hand had found its way across her tapered waist.
Her tank top had ridden up her stomach through the night, exposing the expanse of her stomach where my palm rested over the dip.
She was soft and warm beneath my calloused fingers, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d woken up with a woman…
held a woman…or been intimate with a woman.
What was worse, I’d slept well—too well. The way we fit together like puzzle pieces intrigued and repelled me simultaneously.
This was bad. On so many levels.
If she woke up and found us entangled as such, she’d be furious, and I had a feeling it would mean an early-onset headache if she began shrieking at me right after waking up.
How could the woman appear so calm and fragile while sleeping, but be an absolute force to be reckoned with while awake? I’d been avoiding her calls, but I hadn’t expected she would be clever enough to force my hand in such dramatic fashion.
Still, I should have known that avoiding her so vehemently would tip off the crew and that Natalie, in particular, ever the romantic, would catch wind of it, give me the benefit of the doubt, and seek to rectify the situation without so much as a word to me.
It pained me that holding Lark so close was awakening something long-dormant, deep inside of me. I didn’t want to admit to my loneliness, but here she was, forcing me to face these awful feelings head-on.
But it was so much more and so much deeper than that.
For years in the military, I’d had to take things one day at a time.
My life had never been a guarantee, so it had been easy to ignore the future, to put off thinking about what was next.
It had been easy to push aside any feelings of wanting or even needing anything.
And when everything happened on Enceladus, I hadn’t thought I would make it out alive.
For most people in that situation, it would’ve left them regretting all their life decisions or the things they hadn’t accomplished.
For me, it felt inevitable to die in action, and although I’d welcome death when it came for me, it wasn’t myself that I was fearful for, but for my men.
Since coming back, it almost felt as though a part of me was trapped on that godforsaken rock.
I didn’t even know what was left of me. I’d been floating around like a zombie for most of the time since then, shuffled from one press gathering to another for a while, and then it was Darren who had suggested I needed purpose.
It was Darren who had told me I should consider getting my own ship, positing that I could negotiate a higher severance from the military to use as a down payment.
And so that’s what I’d done. I didn’t have to think about it, I’d just continued to follow others, instead of making my own decisions…
instead of really thinking about what I wanted out of life, because wanting was dangerous, just like hope.
And being next to Lark made me want things.
It made me want to know what she’d feel like underneath me.
It made me want to understand what it would be like to be in a real relationship—a true partnership with someone.
What did it feel like to love someone and be loved in return?
I’d never loved anyone romantically, and I’d never given a woman the opportunity to fall for me.
Love was something other people had or wanted.
And I told myself I shouldn’t want anything.
However, it didn’t stop there. Lark was stirring feelings of need.
Those were too heavy to explore more. The wanting was bad enough.
I couldn’t need her, or anyone. Because once you needed someone…
that was when they left. And I couldn’t bear for anyone else to leave… they all had. There was nobody left.
As slowly and as silently as possible, I began to extricate myself from Lark’s hold, praying she wouldn’t wake up and realize what was going on.
Luck was on my side, and after a few pained moments, made trickier with a numb arm, I was able to silently roll off the bed and get to the bathroom without rousing her.
It was still over an hour until her alarm would go off, and I didn’t want to disturb her sleep.
I needed a cold shower and distance between myself and Lark. I didn’t like wallowing or allowing myself to sink into the past, but picturing her lying in my bed had me wondering what it would take to finally clear away the mental fog that had plagued me since I’d survived Enceladus.
Until now, I hadn’t really had a reason, but her…this mission…maybe they were exactly the motivation that I needed to finally sort through my shit and figure out, once and for all, what I wanted the future to look like for me…to allow myself to want something.
I knew immediately upon entering the bridge that something was wrong.
Jordan was frozen at her station, staring at a newsfeed she had pulled up on the big monitor covering the windscreen of the ship.
The feed was frantic, bouncing back and forth between reporters in a studio and out in the field and cutting to footage of chaos and carnage.
The chyron on the bottom of the screen read, “Oberon Terrorist Attack Linked to Meridian.”
My heart dropped.
Silently, I placed my hand on Jordan’s shoulder.
Slowly, she turned to look up at me, her eyes glassy with tears. Showing any emotion was such a rare occurrence for her, so seeing her upset nearly broke me. She was the strong one. And if even Jordan was heartbroken, what hope did that leave for the rest of us?
Like me, she’d lost so much to Meridian. Even a single life was too much, let alone what we were witnessing in real time, not to mention all the lives that had already been sacrificed.
“It happened a couple hours ago. I didn’t want to wake you, if you were actually getting any sleep.” She wiped the tears from her eyes before they could roll down her cheeks, and straightened her posture, protectively going back into her first-officer mode, an easy defense mechanism of retreat.
Oberon, a satellite of Uranus, was mostly set up as a mining station, with all sorts of valuable minerals and materials being pulled out for use across the system.
The news reports showed that it was the largest mine and several of the ancillary mines with the most valuable resources that had been targeted.
And whether or not Meridian had already taken credit for the assault, it would be everyone’s first assumption because Oberon was owned by a rival syndicate and was the source of said rival’s funding.
While most of the coverage spoke to all the money that would be lost and dove into what little was known about the complex and mysterious origins of Meridian and how the organization had risen from the ashes as a result of the Phoenix’s infusion of cash and strategic leadership, it angered me that the casualties were being completely glossed over…
simply reduced to a general number: thousands.
Growing up as an orphan, I knew early on that a path in the military was the best chance I had to make money, but it came with the high risk of not making it out alive, and the knowledge that I would struggle through every moment of service.
Because those without a family business to go into, or other financial resources, were inevitably forced into manual labor, like the miners and workers on Oberon.
Seen as the worst jobs in the system, the workers rarely returned, or if they did, it was with a severely limited lifespan or injuries.
Nobody went into those mines if they had another option.
So those thousands the news was casually referring to had suffered for years, maybe even decades, only to be killed without reason, and weren’t even given the respect of being acknowledged as more than a group of people to be forgotten as a simple number or statistic.
It was infuriating.
I felt my breath cut short in my lungs as I found it hard to suck in any air.
My shoulder began to ache, right where it had been crushed on Enceladus, and my head pounded. The smell of smoke filled my mouth, and my ears began to ring with the cries of my men, suffering worse injuries than I had while trying to evacuate civilians, despite us being instructed to abandon them.
“Captain.” Jordan stood from her station and grabbed onto my arm at the exact moment my knees buckled and I crumpled to the floor, gasping for breath, but only finding smoke.
“You are on the Radiant,” she told me calmly, squeezing my good shoulder. But her voice was tinny and far away, and difficult to hear through the sounds of agony around me.
“You are safe. You are not on Enceladus.” Her tone was more forceful—louder than before, and I heard it just a bit more clearly. “I need you to listen to me and breathe with me.”
It wasn’t the first time that Jordan had done this—sitting with me and talking me through breathing exercises to help me fill my lungs with air and work through a panic attack, transporting me from the depths of despair on Enceladus and back to my bright and safe bridge on the Radiant.
Once my ragged breathing had somewhat normalized, she helped me into my chair at the head of the bridge, eyeing me with concern as I slumped into the seat, already exhausted despite having slept solidly for the first time in a while.
“I don’t mind staying for a while,” she offered softly.
“You just worked a double to accommodate me,” I grumbled, my eyes unable to meet hers, so instead I focused on the floor just past her.
“I don’t mind—”
“No.” I shook my head.
“At least let me send someone up here to keep you company.” She released an exasperated sigh, always knowing the exact negotiating tactics to use with me.
“Fine.” I waved a hand at her absently.
“Sit tight.” She glanced back at the news report, still flickering on the big screen, then made her way out of the bridge.
It was too much. All of it. Meridian was too big.
The Phoenix too elusive. This mission too impossible.
I needed help. I needed Lark. It pained me to admit it.
I’d been stubborn and selfish, and how many days had we lost because I’d refused to work with her?
Could this have been stopped if I hadn’t been such a prick?
No. I couldn’t go down that path. What was done, was done.
What mattered now was my path forward. This was too important to allow my pride to get in the way.
There was a good chance the intel that assisted with this heinous act had been filtered through the illegal coding that had been introduced to my ship through the enemy.
It needed to stop. All of it. Come hell or high water, I was determined to make it work.
If she was my only salvation, I would find a way.
I was too close to my crew. I knew that now. She’d warned me—Darren had warned me, and I hadn’t listened, but I was listening now. I just had to figure out how to reverse course and get her to align with me, with full transparency.
After how I’d acted, I didn’t deserve her trust, and I wasn’t sure if she’d be willing to give me one last chance. But one shot was all I needed. This time, I wouldn’t miss.