Star Crossed

by Heather Guerre

“Right now? I would like to get some sleep.”

  Asier nodded and rose from the pilot’s chair. He stepped out into the passageway, and Lyra shrank back from him. Already it had begun. He’d killed any goodness between them. If she was carrying his son, he’d do everything in his power to please her. He could start by giving her a private space in which she could avoid him.

  After several strides down the corridor, he realized that Lyra was not following him. He glanced back.

  Lyra was in the control cabin, her hand pressed to the emergency panel. As he watched, her hand closed on the lever. She was going to seal him out.

  He sprinted back as the doors began to slide shut. Metal scraped over his body as he threw himself through the closing gap.

  Lyra screamed—a sound of fury rather than fear—as he fell at her feet, entirely inside the control cabin. The doors clacked shut behind him and the heavy thud of the emergency locks engaged.

  “You can’t do this!” She snarled, stepping over his body. She dropped into the pilot’s chair and began pecking with fierce jabs at the instrumentation panel.

  He hauled himself upright and joined her at the panel. She’d reset the coordinates to a location within human territory. The coordinates flashed red on the display, and the panel prompted her for the override authorization key. He’d been cleared for excursions into human territory, if strictly necessary in pursuing the traffickers, but there were multiple failsafes to prevent impulsive, unnecessary breaches of the human ban.

  He hadn’t given Lyra the code. And he doubted she could read his people’s writing system.

  She snarled, confirming his suspicions. She deleted out the coordinates and entered new ones—the merchant station he’d originally programmed for their flightpath. She’d memorized the coordinates of a station she’d never been to and hadn’t known existed. The acuity of her mind was stunning.

  The ship allowed the coordinates and the panel gave a little blip, indicating its acceptance of the new flightpath.

  She turned and looked up at Asier. “I have to go home.”

  “I can’t let you. Not until I know for sure that you’re not carrying my son.”

  “I’m not!” She exploded out of the chair and shoved at him. He was an immovable mass, and she succeeded only in shoving herself back into the chair.

  She gripped the arm rests, steadying herself, and looked up at him. There was no warmth, no humor in her gaze. Those crystal-clear blue eyes had gone as flat and cold as ice. “There’s no way, Asier. The way the implant works—”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Humans are a compatible race. That’s all it takes for Scaeven conception.” He leaned over the instrument panel, and with one touch, restored the previous headings.

  “You’re not listening!” Lyra grabbed his wrist, trying to pull his hand away from the panel. “If you would let me explain, you’d understand—” her words died in another furious snarl when she realized she lacked the strength the move his hand at all.

  “It has to be this way, Lyra.”

  “No it doesn’t!” She shoved out of the chair, putting as much distance between the two of them as the little control cabin allowed. “As soon as you turn your back, I’ll be back here, sealing myself in, resetting the coordinates.”

  Asier looked down for a long moment, clenching his hands. “I assumed you would.” He pushed out of the chair, regretting what he had to do before it was even done. He crossed the small space to where Lyra was pressed against the bulkhead.

  “What are you doing?” She slid along the wall, towards the sealed door.

  “What I have to,” Asier said, his voice heavy with the crushing pain in his heart. He scooped her up in his arms.

  “Asier!” She fought like a scalded cat, kicking and squirming and flailing. But she was small and weak. He was a powerful, looming monster. He overpowered her easily. Keeping her squirming body clutched tightly to his, he unsealed the doors, carried her to the medbay, and tossed her on the bed in the quarantine cell.

  Before she was back on her feet, he had her sealed in. He set the quarantine for the remainder of their flight time.

  “Asier!” She screamed his name until the sound of it warped in his ears, a hot needle in his skull. Her little fists pounded on the glass.

  He stood back and let her fury wash over him. He deserved every bit of her wrath. But when he looked into those wide blue eyes, it wasn’t wrath he saw reflected back at him. It was hurt. Confusion. Fear.

  “Please. Please, Asier. Let me out.”

  Seeing her like this tore him apart more keenly than her anger could have. He couldn’t bear to look at what he’d done. He turned away.

  “Asier.”

  He walked out.

  “Asier!”

  Lyra stared at him through the glass.

  The strong, honest, noble Scaeven who’d carried her on his back so that she could sleep, who’d fought an acid-spitting, coyote-sized spider for her, who’d trusted her enough to turn his back on those spiders while she shot them down, who’d taught her to fly his ship, and who’d broken through the powerful drugging hypnosis of their sexual chemistry to save her life—he was betraying her.

  Hot tears welled in her eyes, blurring her vision.

  Chapter Fourteen

  She stopped eating. She stopped talking. She stopped… being.

  When Asier came into the medbay to check on her, she was always in the same spot—sitting on the floor, wedged into the corner, her knees drawn up to her chest. She stared blindly at the floor in front of her. When Asier spoke, she did not respond. She didn’t look up, she didn’t flinch. She was a statue.

  “Lyra,” he said, his throat almost too tight to speak. “Please eat something.”

  Five zeitraums worth of rations sat in front of her, untouched. She hadn’t had water, either. With another twenty zeitraums before they reached his home planet, there was plenty of time for her to die of dehydration. If she kept this up for much longer, he’d have to sedate her and put her on a fluid drip.

  Lyra sat like a statue, staring at the door. At first, Asier had stayed in the medbay with her, trying to get her to talk, to eat, the drink. He left only briefly to respond to the ship’s needs, or his own, and then he was back, pleading with her to come back to life.

  His pleas eventually tapered into brooding frowns. When he left the medbay, he stayed away for longer and longer. Eventually, he was gone most of the time, and visited only to check on her vitals.

  She could tell he didn’t want to leave—that he was doing what he thought she wanted. Even after taking her prisoner, he was so fucking solicitous. He was destroying her life, and somehow managing to look like a kicked puppy while doing it.

  Overhead, the reverse airflow system’s large vent silently purged the quarantine cell. A subtle draft coursed over Lyra’s skin, fluttering the hem and the sleeves of the shirt she’d taken from Asier’s closet.

  She glanced up at the vent, wishing she could turn the damn thing off, then looked back out at the medbay. Still no Asier.

  A minute passed.

  Lyra stiffened. She looked back up at the vent. She looked for a long time.

  When the shame of his cowardice grew too strong to ignore, Asier forced himself out of the control cabin and back to the medbay to check on Lyra.

  Perhaps the time apart had allowed her to come to terms with what he was doing. Maybe she’d be calm enough that he could explain. If she’d listen, he’d promise her everything in his power to deliver—everything except her freedom.

  But when Asier got the medbay, the quarantine cell was empty.

  For a moment, he simply stared. There was nowhere to hide. She’d torn the privacy drape down from the lav, so he could see she wasn’t in there. And the bed was a solid block, mounted to the deck. Unless she was clinging to the overhead like a spider...

  It was a ridiculous idea, but he looked up anyway.

  His heart stopped.

  The ventilation syste
m. The grated cover hung down, revealing the circular opening. It was far too small for a Scaeven to enter—and so it had never been considered as a security concern for the quarantine cell. But a human? It was just wide enough for her.

  It wasn’t the fact that she’d escaped that turned his blood to ice. It was the fact that the ventilator in the quarantine cell led to the ship’s incinerator.

  She was going to get herself killed.

  Lyra wasn’t an idiot. She’d guessed where the ventilation system terminated. That’s why she was crawling against the airflow. Odds were good that she could find her way back to either the control cabin or the flight deck if she was quiet and patient.

  In the interest of destroying any airborne pathogens, the ventilation system would have to drive the airflow away from the other parts of the ship as well, to make sure that the dirty air from the quarantine cell ended up in the incinerator. That meant there’d be reverse airflow vents everywhere else on the ship. Not directly in the cabins, but connected to the systems that circulated breathable air throughout the vessel. She just had to hope that those ducts were as big as this one.

  The ducts weren’t like those on human vessels. Instead of rigid piping, these were soft-walled tubes that sagged beneath her weight. They were nearly noiseless as she crawled through them. The tubes were only just wide enough for her to squeeze through. The airflow was strong inside the ventilation tubes, blowing her hair loose from her braid, and whipping Asier’s shirt around her body like a spaceport flag.

  Despite the breeze, the air in the tubes was hot. The incinerator’s airflow likely also heated the ship against the thermal void of space. Lyra was dripping with sweat. Her fingers curled into nervous claws as she worked her way forward. The airflow wasn’t quite strong enough to push her back, but the more she sweated, the more she slid against the smooth walls.

  Her knee slipped out from under her, and the air pressure pushed her back a few inches. Lyra’s heart jumped into her throat, and she spread her limbs out wide, pressing her slick hands and feet as hard as she could against the soft walls of the vent tube. She stopped her backward slide.

  Taking in a shuddering breath, she inched onward.

  There were three possibilities. One: Lyra was headed for the control cabin. Two: she was headed for the flight deck. Three: her body created a strong enough bottleneck against the ventilation system’s airflow, that the air pressure had overpowered her and was currently sweeping her towards the incinerator.

  There was one possibility on which Asier had to act.

  He sprinted from the medbay and towards the engine room. It was three levels down, on the complete opposite end of the ship from the control cabin. He was fast, and he knew the ship like the back of his hand, but each passing beat was another beat in which Lyra could be inching inexorably towards her death.

  Or leaving him forever, in an entirely different way. But he couldn’t think about that right now.

  He reached the engine room and all but tore the doors off their tracks. At the far end of the bay, the incinerator was housed just behind the engine casing, shielded behind six-inch thick thermal-plate walls. It was a crucial component of the engine’s function, rendering the extremely volatile byproducts of the engine’s bioplasmic fuel cells inert.

  If turned off, the engine bay would become a powder keg within a single zeitraum. One good knock against the hull, and the accumulated plasmic waste would turn the entire ship and everything inside of it into confetti.

  Asier pressed his palm to the control panel beside the incinerator’s service hatch. Despite the intensive thermal-plating, heat radiated from the walls, making the control panel almost painful to touch.

  The panel recognized Asier’s bio-imprint and receded, revealing a lever similar to the one he’d showed Lyra in the control cabin. Assuming she wasn’t being dragged to her death, the control cabin was most likely where she’d headed. Equal measures of furious and frantic, Asier gripped the lever and wrenched it down.

  The hum of the incinerator died away to silence.

  The ship’s AI came over the comm. “Incinerator has been manually disabled. Plasmic build-up will reach critical levels in one half zeitraum.”

  Asier twisted the lever.

  Inside the walls surrounding the incinerator, Asier could hear the sound of several layers of barriers snapping closed. Just turning off the incinerator wouldn’t be enough to save her—the residual heat would kill her just as immediately. He had to vent the heat into space.

  A light on the control panel indicated that the airlocks were all in place. He pulled the lever towards himself. Through the thermal-plating, he heard the roar of vacuum.

  The incinerator’s heat was no longer a threat. But he had to find Lyra and restore the incinerator before the ship itself destroyed them both.

  Lyra’s hair was pasted to her sweaty face and neck. Asier’s shirt clung to her body like a wetsuit. She’d stretched the hem beneath her knees, giving herself more traction as she crawled through the vents.

  Very abruptly, the airflow stopped dead.

  Asier. He’d done something. He knew she was in the vents. She had to move fast.

  Ideally, she’d drop down directly into the control cabin and seal it up before Asier even knew she was missing. But she couldn’t waste time time searching for the perfect exit. She would have to crawl out wherever she could and find her way to either the control cabin or the flight deck through the passageways—risking running into Asier.

  As soon as Asier realized she was gone from the quarantine cell, he’d return to the control cabin to head her off. It was a huge risk, but it was her only choice.

  At the next juncture, she found herself peering into Asier’s berth. She listened for a breathless second. It was hard to be sure over the sound of her pulse thumping in her ears, but the berth sounded empty.

  She prized her sweaty fingers beneath the lip of the vent cover. The cover was a round grille, made of a harder material than the ventilation tubes. It popped free, dropping immediately from her sweat-slicked grip, swinging open.

  She couldn’t get a grip on the mouth of the vent, so she had no choice but to drop down to the bed like a sack of potatoes. She landed awkwardly on her shoulder, and her teeth clacked together hard enough to rattle her skull. Ignoring the pain, she slid off the bed and paused at the hatch, listening for sound in the passageway.

  Silence.

  She held her breath and stepped into the passage. It was empty. Asier’s berth was equidistance between the control cabin and the flight deck. But the medbay was closer to the control cabin, and the control cabin was where Asier would expect her to go.

  So she turned, and raced silently for the flight deck.

  When Asier reached the control cabin, the doors were open, and the flight plan unchanged. His stomach turned to lead.

  She’d gone for the shuttle, then.

  Between shutting off the incinerator and checking the control cabin first, he’d given her plenty of time. That knowledge didn’t stop him from running as fast as his legs could carry him.

  On the flight deck, Lyra went to the closest shuttle and wrenched the hatch open. She threw herself into the pilot’s chair. She pressed her hand against the panel. After a second, the panel flashed its recognition of her bio-imprint and the controls lit up beneath its smooth surface. Working from memory, Lyra commanded the shuttle to prepare for launch.

  While the shuttle ran through its startup protocols, Lyra slid out of the chair to kneel beside the computronic hatch below the flight panel. She pried the cover back, revealing the inner workings of the instrumentation panel.

  The RSP core that allowed fleets to track all of their vessels was a small bit of circuitry submersed in in a bio-electric gel matrix. It looked very much like the one on Ravanoth vessels. Without any tools at her disposal, and with no time to waste, Lyra slid her fingers into the gel matrix. Mild electric shocks pricked over her skin as she plucked the core out.

  The
ship pinged at her, and the AI began to scold in the growling Scaeven language. Lyra closed up the computronic panel.

  “NO!” Asier’s bellow echoed through the flight deck.

  Lyra leapt from the pilot’s seat and reached the open hatch just in time to make contact with his wild-eyed gaze. As soon as he caught sight of her, his face hardened, and he surged towards her.

  She wrenched the hatch down and just managed seal and lock it before Asier reached her. He gripped the handle, trying to rip it open. The shuttle let out a warning alarm. She couldn’t understand the growling AI, but she assumed it was something about not being able to move until all hazards were cleared of the shuttle’s perimeter.

  She turned back to the hatch, looking through the small square window to make eye contact with the ferocious creature who had her heart. Even after his betrayal, she still wanted him. Wanted to give in and step out of the shuttle, and just be his. If he hadn’t betrayed her, she might have even asked for it. In a strange way, she had to be grateful that he’d driven her back to her honor and her obligations. He’d sent her back to her sister.

  “Asier” she said hoarsely, her face rigid with grief. “It’s your fault that it’s ending this way.”

  Asier slammed his fists against the sealed hatch. The entire shuttle rocked beneath the blow. “The shuttle has a tracker!” He snarled. “I’ll find you!”

  Lyra blinked back tears. “I’m not stupid.” She held up the dismantled RSP core.

  Asier’s face fell. A soft gleam lit behind his golden eyes. For a long moment, they only regarded each other, abject despair etched onto both their faces.

  Asier let out a heavy breath. “You win, Lyra.” He stepped away from the shuttle, his gaze locked with hers. The gleam of his eyes grew stronger. “I can’t keep you. You’re not mine, are you?”

  Lyra choked on a sudden sob. “I wish I could be.”