Star Crossed

by Heather Guerre

  Asier made a rumbling sound from deep in his chest—Lyra was beginning to recognize it as a Scaeven yes. “My mother was Ravanoth.”

  Lyra frowned. The Ravanoth were generally a little taller than humans, but only by a few inches. They were elegantly slender, with eel-smooth skin that ranged in shades from butter yellow, to shell pink, to pastel orange. Ravanoth were cold-blooded, which served them well on hot, humid Ravanoth. Being aboard a Ravanoth ship was like being trapped in a sauna.

  Asier, on the other hand, was the opposite of a Ravanoth in every way. He had to be at least eight feet tall, with a body as broad and brawny as a mountain. She knew for a fact he was burningly hot-blooded. His deep gray skin shone with a subtly metallic luster, contrasted sharply by his thick, silvery hair. Ravanoth eyes were round and owl-like, whereas Asier’s were sharp and vulpine.

  The Ravanoth were so cerebral, as to seem not fully present much of the time. But Asier’s physical presence was so strong, Lyra could feel him even when he was standing several meters away.

  So much for distracting herself. “You don’t look Ravanoth at all,” she said.

  “I’m not.”

  Lyra tilted her head, confused. “Was she an adoptive mother?”

  “No, biological. Scaeven reproduction is… complicated.”

  Her little sister would’ve jumped all over that, asking question after question, completely fascinated and uninhibited by social niceties. But Lyra could recognize that Asier was uncomfortable with the topic, so she let it drop.

  “So your mom named you. What does Asier mean?”

  “Anchor.”

  Strong, steady, reliable. “A good name,” Lyra said.

  Asier didn’t respond.

  “Do you speak Ravanoth?”

  He replied in the low, purring tones of a dialect she didn’t recognize. It reverberated in his chest with a resonance that Lyra could nearly feel. She had never heard the Ravanoth language sound so lovely.

  She only had a basic grasp of Standardized Ravanoth—an administrative language that almost nobody spoke natively—which didn’t sound nearly so rich or softly flowing as the sounds coming from Asier’s mouth.

  Speaking in Standardized, she asked, “What did you say?”

  He replied back in the trade Creole, “I said, ‘my mother’s people are from the Fasham Islands.’”

  Lyra had been to the Ravanoth home planet several times—twice as a military pilot participating in joint exercises with the Ravanoth Defense Force, and then twice more as a civilian pilot for different research missions. But she’d never heard of the Fasham Islands.

  She asked him about the islands, and he could tell her a bit he’d learned from his mother, but he seemed reluctant to discuss the mysterious Ravanoth female who’d somehow birthed a Scaeven child.

  So Lyra changed the subject. “What’s Scaevos like?”

  “It’s a multi-body system. Ten different moons orbit the largest gas giant in our solar system. I was born on Varan, the largest moon. It is larger than Earth.”

  “Your diurnal cycles must be very complicated.”

  “Scaevens don’t keep time by light cycles like Humans and Ravanoth do.”

  They lapsed into silence for a while, walking on. Lyra scanned the forest with practiced, methodical sweeps. Her peripheral awareness of Asier’s body and movement allowed her to forget about her path, and instead make a careful, detailed assessment of their surroundings.

  She caught the movement of small creatures clambering along tree branches, scuttling through the bracken. Shrill calls and rasping chirps sounded all around them. Bright light filtered through the scarlet canopy overhead, tinging everything faintly red.

  In the space of an hour, the temperature soared from reasonably comfortable to baking hot. Through gaps in the leaves, they could see flashes of heat lightning in fat, lavender-colored clouds.

  Lyra was sweating inside her flight suit. She could feel the air pressure beating on her skull, threatening to trigger a migraine. One drawback to living within the perfectly regulated confines of a ship was that your body sometimes forgot how to acclimate itself to normal planetside fluctuations.

  Before the migraine managed to take root, the air pressure dropped, and the temperature with it. A thin, misty rain pattered down through the forest canopy.

  “So,” Lyra said, breaking their peaceable quiet. “You’re an Enforcer. Is that Scaevos’ police force?”

  “In a way. Scaeven Enforcers don’t protect Scaevens from crime, though. We protect the rest of the universe from Scaevens.”

  Lyra was about to ask more when Asier came to an abrupt halt. She nearly walked into his back. She managed to stop before crashing into him, and peered around his big body to see what had caused the sudden stop. Just in front of him was a circle of soil that looked a little softer, a little looser than the surrounding ground.

  Lyra froze, acutely aware of every wound on her bared leg. Her heart hammered in her chest.

  “Stand back,” Asier said.

  Lyra didn’t argue, backing a good few meters from the spot. She watched from her safe distance as Asier plunged his walking stick into the loose soil. It sank in easily.

  At first, nothing happened.

  But a second later, the stick jerked down. The soil around it shifted and churned. The ground vibrated beneath their feet. The stick jerked downward again, cracking in half. Splinters sprayed from the churning soil. A flash of pale, segmented flesh crested, and then vanished from sight. Within seconds, the churning soil settled.

  Long after the ground stilled, and Asier’s walking stick lay in shattered pieces, Lyra remained frozen in place. Asier looked over at her, quiet for a moment.

  Finally, he said, “I could carry you again.”

  Lyra’s pride resurfaced. She straightened her spine, steadied her breathing. She’d survived worse things than an overgrown worm.

  “No. I’m fine.” She walked up to where Asier stood. “At least we know how to find them.”

  Asier took a minute to locate a new walking stick for himself, and then another for Lyra. She held the thick, ash-white pole in a white-knuckled grip as they journeyed onward.

  After a moment, it struck Lyra that—except for when following military command—she’d never let willingly let anyone else lead the way into danger. The fact that she’d trusted Asier to stand in front of her, block her view of oncoming threats, be the first to react and respond to those threats…

  She frowned as her gaze drifted over his big body. It might not be the toxin. It might just be…him.

  The surrounding forest thinned to whippy scrub as they reached rockier ground. Behind him, Asier heard Lyra heave a sigh of relief.

  “Less likely to encounter worm traps in this rocky soil,” he called back to her.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Lyra replied.

  “How is your leg?”

  “Fine.”

  Asier glanced back at her. He couldn’t tell if she was limping, or if the unevenness of the rocky ground just forced her to move awkwardly. In any case, they’d been pushing on at a pace that had to be grueling for human—especially a human recovering from an injury.

  When they came upon another outcrop of flat, black rock, Asier stepped onto it. It was a big step for him, making it a giant leap for Lyra. He held out his hand to her.

  She hesitated for a second, her gaze darting to his. The shock of her pale blue eyes struck him anew, and he almost jerked away from her. But then her soft little human hand slid into his palm, and he was closing her in his grasp. She braced one foot against the edge of the rock, pushing off as he hauled her up. Their combined momentum sent her crashing against him.

  For just a second, her whole body was flush against his. And then they both shoved away from each other. The subtle feminine spice of her scent teased him, despite the bandana. He shook his head, dragging in fresh air, clearing his mind of the sudden urge to take, mark, claim.

  “Why are we stopping?” Ly
ra asked, sounding breathless. She stood at the opposite side of the rocky table, out of arm’s reach, but still not far enough away to be safe. She would never truly be safe from him. Not until she was back in human territory, completely out of his reach.

  “Rest,” he said roughly. “I need to get my bearings.” He pulled his comm out of his jacket, glanced down at the screen, and swore softly in Scaeven. The irregular weather on Kiri was largely due to the unstable polarity of the small planet. That same magnetic instability wreaked havoc on the comm’s system. His screen displayed a senseless scrawl of gibberish.

  “Problem?” Lyra asked. She’d sunk down to sit on the rock, her hands chafing up and down her injured leg—confirming Asier’s suspicions about her limping.

  “This shraf planet”—the Creole included plenty of colorful language, but nothing as satisfying as his own native profanity—“is interfering with my comm. I can’t plan our route, and I haven’t been on this frerrik rock long enough to navigate by memory!” He resisted the urge to slam his comm onto the rock and grind the broken pieces beneath his boot heel.

  Across from him, Lyra chuckled. “You sound like an outraged tiger.”

  He raised his gaze to her, found her smiling at him. A different kind of heat replaced his anger. His gaze fell to the long, lean line of her exposed leg—the way her delicate hands slid over her soft skin. The way her whole body was made of slim, soft, curving lines, each one sweeping into another.

  When his gaze returned to her face, he found blue eyes regarding him with the same hungry heat.

  “Asier,” she said softly, her hands gone still.

  He turned abruptly away from her. “We’ll have to find high ground. Some of the rock formations rise above the forest’s canopy. If I can see above the trees, I can establish our bearings.”

  Lyra glanced at the surrounding trees. The wind rustled the scarlet treetops, sending big leaves skittering down. “Those look climbable.” They were twisty and profuse with branches—easy to grip, with plenty of footholds.

  Asier shook his head. “They wouldn’t bear my weight.”

  She snorted. “I meant me. I could climb them easily.”

  Asier glanced back at her, his silvery brows furrowed together. “That would be dangerous.”

  “This whole place is dangerous,” she snapped. “And I’m not made of sugar.”

  “No.” He regarded her with undisguised distress. “Sugar doesn’t bleed.”

  Torn between being touched by his concern and insulted by it, Lyra chose not to respond. She got to her feet, jumped down from the rock, and threaded her way through tangled yellow bracken, making cautious progress to the base of the nearest, most suitable tree.

  She grasped a low branch and hauled herself up.

  “Wait,” Asier reached the tree in a few easy strides, crushing woody brush beneath his boots. By the fucking Origin, how on earth had she evaded him for so long last night?

  “I’m going to do this,” she said stubbornly.

  “That’s clear.” He reached into his never ending jacket and pulled out a glass square. He handed it up to her.

  “What is this?”

  “Look through it.”

  She held it up to her eye, and peered at him. It was a scope with a rangefinder. She turned it slowly in her fingers. At ninety degrees, the display shifted, displaying data in a script she’d never seen before. She rolled back to the rangefinder.

  It displayed Crurian numerals. Lyra knew how to read them, but she couldn’t interpret them as easily as Arabic numerals. The humans’ base-10 mathematics had been so engrained in every facet of their technology, that by the time they’d encountered the Ravanoth and other species, there was no turning back. Humankind used Crurians in very specific scientific applications, but human spaceflight and navigation tech still used good old base-10.

  The scope gave her the distance to Asier’s face in units she didn’t recognize, but she estimated the distance between them as one and a half meters. Her focus narrowed to the calculations running in her mind—Crurian to Arabic numerals, then unknown units to meters. Cross multiply… one of Asier’s distance units equalled roughly 1.6 kilometers.

  “What unit of measure does this use?” She asked.

  He answered her with a growl that sounded vaguely like “shrarrir.”

  She tried repeating it, and Asier laughed at the mangled sound.

  “Well, that’s as close as I can get,” Lyra said, smiling. “So when I say shrarrir,” she deepened her voice into a growl for the foreign word, “You’ll know what I mean.”

  Asier chuckled again, a deep, throaty rumble that she felt as much as heard.

  She tucked the scope into the breast pocket on her flight suit. “What am I looking for?”

  “Flat yellow grassland,” he said. “At the base of a long ridge line.”

  She nodded and began to climb.

  Asier stood beneath, watching her with those thick brows still furrowed. She looked away from him, focusing on her ascent, but grinning. She felt like a little kid.

  As she gained height, the branches became weaker, whippier. The central trunk was a thin, flexible spire. Each time she pulled herself upward, the entire treetop swayed, waving her back and forth several meters. Truth be told, the level of sway was making Lyra nervous. But she tamped down the fear, and kept climbing—carefully.

  When she could see above the rest of the canopy, she clung to the trunk. The wind was strong, swinging the treetop back and forth like a metronome. She squinted into the wind.

  Her stomach looped as a particularly strong gust bent the treetop nearly sideways. Heart hammering, she clung on. When the wind abated, and the treetop returned to a more vertical bearing, Lyra looked around. In front of her, and to both sides, she saw nothing but waving treetops, occasionally interrupted by the jagged protrusion of black cliffs.

  Of course the target would be behind her. Of course she was going to have to turn her body around on this dancing toothpick.

  It was slow going, getting herself turned. Every time the wind gusted, she had to freeze and cling to the trunk for dear life. The footholds were precariously thin branches that flexed threateningly beneath her weight. At last, drenched in sweat, she had herself positioned to examine the rest of the landscape.

  And there it was. A wide swath of dingy yellow grassland, backed by a towering black ridge that ran the length of the horizon. Ripples of movement ran over the grass as the wind swept along the open plain.

  Clutching the trunk with knees and thighs and one arm, Lyra dried her sweaty hand on her flight suit before reaching into her pocket for the scope. If she dropped it now, she’d lose her mind. Gripping it carefully, she brought the scope to her eye. She tagged the readings in her mind, and slipped it back into her pocket.

  The descent was trickier than the climb. It had been easy to see her next reach, her next foothold, while looking upwards. While looking down, her body obstructed her view and the six feet of distance between her eyes and the next step diminished her depth perception. Her path appeared as a field of twisting, swaying branches. She went mostly by feel, reaching out with her foot, testing the strength of each branch before trusting it with her full weight.

  Above her, the wind gusted harder. She was below the canopy now, but still high enough that she had to freeze and wait for the tree to stop its wild careening.

  But it wouldn’t stop. The wind gusted again, harder. She heard the ragged tear of splintering wood.

  Wood sprinkled down on Lyra.

  And then a huge branch plunged down, just missing her. It crashed through the other branches with a sound like thunder, leaving in its wake a chute of open air running down the side of the trunk. It crashed to the ground with a resounding CRACK.

  “Lyra!” Asier called, sounding frantic.

  “I’m fine!”

  Forcing her muscles to unclamp, she tried to climb faster. The wind was only picking up more. The tree was only swaying harder.

 
But she heard another splintering tear—and then the gunshot crack of a big limb breaking off.

  Her body acted before her mind could follow. She shoved away from the trunk, just in time to miss being crushed by the ten meters of tree top that came swinging down like a hammer.

  She plunged down through branches. With an oddly detached calm, she leapt through a graceless, drunken parkour—getting foot and hand on passing branches just long enough to slow her fall into something that probably wouldn’t be fatal.

  Somewhere beneath the frantic cacophony of wind and leaves and breaking wood and the toneless, unending shriek playing in her mind, she heard Asier bellow something in his snarling native language.

  And then her balance tipped the wrong way, and she fell backward into the open wake left by the first broken branch’s fall. There was nothing for her to grab onto. She flailed, trying to twist her body so that she wouldn’t land on her head, or flat on her back. Broken arms and legs were recoverable. A snapped spine would kill her.

  She couldn’t get turned. As she sailed towards the ground, she saw only the dancing shake of windswept tree tops. She closed her eyes.

  The impact was like a hammer blow against her back. Her breath rushed out in a rough bark. Her eyes snapped open as her lungs heaved desperately for breath.

  Asier.

  He held her in his arms, her head cradled in one massive palm. He’d caught her. And he’d somehow managed to soften the collision so that his rock hard body hadn’t broken hers. Which was nearly a moot point, since it seemed she was going to suffocate. She clutched at his jacket, wheezing with no results. Her chest ached as if she were pinned beneath a frigate. Her lungs burned as if she were stranded in open space.

  The bandana had fallen away from Asier’s face. His fangs showed as he grimaced down at her. He was speaking, saying something, but she couldn’t understand. He tilted her up to sit in his lap, trying to take the pressure of her weight off her back.

  In slow, thin, ragged gasps, air began to trickle into her lungs.

  And then she was drawing in thin, reedy breaths. Her frozen diaphragm relaxed, finally allowing her to suck in the frantic lungfuls she needed. Her eyes watered so badly she could hardly see. Her hair had come free of her braid, sticking to her sweaty face and neck.