Star Crossed

by Heather Guerre

  Asier’s comm hacked through the locks again, bringing them, floor by floor, down to the ground level.

  “It’s a good thing your Scaeven baby gave me super strength,” Lyra told him as they hurried down the steps. “Because he’s about twice the size of a human newborn.”

  Asier resisted the urge to pull her in and kiss her. There would be time for that later. First he had to get her to safety.

  On the ground floor, the two humans at the central work station were still there. They both looked up in alarm at the sound of three pairs of footsteps racing down the hall. Asier lifted his electron gun and knocked them both out with two closely-timed shots.

  “Hurry!” He growled, turning down the long hall that led to the outside. The security grid would be another concern. Lyra and Sofie would trigger it, and he couldn’t predict what automatic responses might be triggered by the breach.

  “I have to carry you both,” he said. It was a long shot, but if the grid was laid into the ground, keeping them high enough above it might prevent triggering it.

  He bent, and scooped an arm around each woman. They braced themselves against his shoulders, linking their arms behind his neck. Lyra clutched Orion tight between Asier’s body and hers.

  “Hold on,” Asier instructed, opening the door, and pushing out into the night darkness. They crossed the ground surrounding the facility without incident. He carried them across the auto lane and set them down deep within the shadowed cover of the tree-lined pedestrian path.

  “We have to leave Copernicus,” Lyra said. “I won’t be safe until we’re completely outside the Home Alliance territory. By law, Orion and I both belong to the university now.”

  Asier swore in Scaeven, a bitingly guttural sound that made Sofie jump.

  “My ship is waiting at port,” he said. “Let’s move.”

  He started forward, but immediately sank back into the shadows as two dark autos raced towards them. The vehicles bypassed them, headed fast for the facility they’d just escaped.

  “They know we’re gone,” Sofie whispered.

  “We have to move,” Asier growled. “Fast.”

  Lyra’s hand on his arm held him back. “This way,” she said, nodding in the opposite direction he wanted to travel. “It’ll take longer, but we’ll be invisible to aerial surveillance.”

  Asier slid his hand up her slender back until he cupped the back of her neck. He looked down into his mate’s ferociously beautiful face.

  They didn’t have the luxury of a single spare moment, but Asier couldn’t stop himself. He leaned down, kissed her. He ended it within the space of a heartbeat, but that brief touch bolstered him. He would see this through. He would tear apart the entire station if it meant saving Lyra and his son.

  And Sofie, he added, realizing the young female had become part of his family from the instant she’d bashed him in the shins with an improvised cudgel.

  He squeezed the back of Lyra’s neck, and released her. “Lead the way. I’ll cover you.”

  They made their way from the research facility, across the university neighborhood Lyra had once lived in, and into the industrial park. Slipping beneath the auto lanes that transported product in and out of the manufacturing center, Lyra led a zig-zagging path towards the port.

  The sound of heavy machinery thundered overhead, waking Orion. He wailed his displeasure—a sound less like a human infant’s cries, and more like the rasping yowl of a leopard cub. They journeyed onward, his cries drowned out by the roar of the machines.

  It could have only been twenty minutes at a hard run, but crossing beneath the industrial park felt like it took hours. When they finally reached the edge of the port, Lyra was drenched with sweat, breathing raggedly.

  “Do you want me to take Orion for a while?” Sofie asked.

  Lyra shook her head. “I’m good.” Despite her increased strength, her arms and back ached from running with him, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go of him. She moved onward, and the other two flanked her.

  “They’ll have sentinels patrolling the port now that they know we’ve escaped,” Lyra whispered. Away from the industrial park, the roads were quiet, the station mostly asleep, the port idle.

  “What was your plan when you didn’t have a Scaeven waiting to fly you off-station?” Asier growled.

  “Hijack a private vessel,” Lyra answered bluntly.

  “Go hard or go home,” Sofie said in English.

  “And then what?” Asier asked, after a momentarily baffled glance at Sofie’s good cheer.

  “Ride the bulk flow towards the Antlia Gate, jump to the Fornax cluster, ditch the stolen ship, then beg passage onto a Ravanoth ship headed for a Scaeven port,” Lyra rattled off the plan she’d been carefully stewing over for the last three days.

  As soon as she’d recovered from the c-section, and found herself locked into the facility living quarters with her son gone, she’d begun her planning.

  Well, first she’d battered her fists bloody trying to escape and find her child. The medical staff had promised not to separate them again if she’d promise not to injure herself. She’d agreed. Her hands had healed within a few hours.

  Sofie’d been imprisoned with her—mostly for informational security, since Sofie knew more than the university wanted to be made public. But also partly for bio-containment. Before she’d called an ambulance, Sofie’d had contact with the amniotic fluid and blood when Lyra first went into labor.

  And thank the bleeding stars she had been. It was only because of a passing complaint from Sofie that Lyra had realized she could jerry-rig the display screen with the Scaeven RSP core. These stupid Ravanoth displays don’t recognize human touch inputs!

  From there—the hot flare of victory—Lyra had made up her mind. She planned with a calm, cold ferocity. To the doctors and the other staff, she presented a calm resignation. But when she and Sofie were alone, they turned their backs to the surveillance cameras, pretending to work together on a jigsaw puzzle. Out loud, they made inane comments.

  I found another corner piece.

  Oh, look, here’s more of the waterfall.

  Wow, this is a hard one.

  I think we’re missing a piece.

  But while their mouths were uttering nonsense, their fingers were moving swiftly, arranging the little pieces into letters and numbers. It was a slow way to communicate, but over the course of a single day, they’d nailed their plan down in its entirety.

  “You were planning to enter Scaeven territory?” Asier asked, sounding surprised.

  Lyra looked up at him. His golden eyes still gleamed faintly, the pupils blown wide in the darkness. He watched her with a quiet intensity.

  “Yes,” Lyra said, moving close enough to grasp his big hand. “I figured if I showed up with your baby, they weren’t going to throw me out.”

  “You would want that?” Asier’s hand squeezed hers. “You would give up human society?”

  Lyra laughed. “I was never much for human society to begin with.” She glanced over at Sofie, who’d gone silent, her gaze fixed on the darkness ahead. “I knew there would be some difficulty getting Sofie in, but I thought maybe we could buy some time by lying and claiming she was pregnant by some unnamed Scaeven.”

  “Is that still what you want?” Asier pressed.

  Lyra stopped for a second, forcing Asier to stop with her. Sofie continued onward, giving them privacy.

  “I want you, Asier,” she said fiercely. “And I want my son to have his father. Wherever that takes place, doesn’t matter to me. Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I regretted it day and night. I…I’ve only ever said this to two other people—my sister, and Orion—so I don’t say it lightly, but, Asier—”

  “I love you,” he interrupted her rambling. “With every piece of me. It broke me when you left.”

  She looked down for a moment, steadying herself. When she found the ability to speak again, she said, “I love you, Asier.”

  Asier cup
ped her face in his hands, kissing her fiercely. She wanted to crush her body to his, but she didn’t dare disturb Orion, who’d only just subsided back into sleep. She lifted her hand to the side of Asier’s neck, the warmth of his iron skin seeping into her blood and humming through her veins.

  At last, she pulled away, breathing raggedly. “We have to keep going. We have to get out of here.”

  The two of them hurried to catch up to Sofie’s distant figure.

  Climbing up from beneath the auto lanes into open air of the port, they were exposed to the station’s extensive security and surveillance. Getting aboard Asier’s shuttle was a disorienting feat, but one that had to be conducted quickly. Asier’s ship was cloaked, invisible to the eye.

  Lyra experienced a wave of deja-vu as a hatch opened, seemingly in mid-air, revealing the interior of a small shuttle. Sofie gasped at the sight.

  Asier handed Lyra inside, then Sofie, and clambered in after them. No sooner had he sealed the hatch than flashing lights and sirens blared through the port.

  Sentinel shuttles lifted from the docks, converging on the berth where Asier’s cloaked shuttle sat idle.

  “Sit down!” Asier barked, throwing himself into the pilot’s chair.

  Lyra shoved Sofie into the berth at the stern, and clambered in after her. They clutched onto each other, curling their bodies protectively around Orion. He howled his objection to the commotion, lustrous gray face furrowed into the fiercest little scowl. His stunning, white-lashed, catlike eyes—still baby blue, but showing signs of an eventual change to harvest gold—were narrowed to furious slits.

  Asier let out a burst of Scaeven cursing, and then the shuttle lifted off with a surge that seemed to leave Lyra’s stomach on the docks. Orion’s cries petered out into stunned silence.

  The shuttle shot past the shrill blare of sentinels’ sirens. Moving with a falcon’s finesse, Asier slipped out of the holding bay and into open space.

  One minute they were hurtling through dark nothing, and then the next, a sudden deceleration nearly threw Sofie and Lyra out of the berth as the shuttle entered the flight deck of Asier’s waiting ship.

  As soon as the shuttle came to a halt, Asier launched himself from the pilot’s chair and threw the hatch open. He sprinted from the flight deck towards the control cabin. Sofie began to get up, but Lyra reached for her, stopping her with a touch.

  “Wait. Scaeven ships are smooth, but I don’t know what happens when they’re pushed to their upper limits.”

  Sofie nodded, and huddled against the back of the berth next to Lyra. She looked down at Asier’s owly face, stroking her thumb across the smooth curve of his iron-gray cheek. His baby blue eyes fixed upon his aunt, filled with inscrutable infant contemplation.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” she asked.

  Lyra squeezed her arm around her sister’s shoulders. “I don’t know, Sof. But I do know that you can trust Asier to protect you. He’ll figure something out. And if he can’t, we will. Me and you, we don’t mess around.”

  Sofie smiled faintly. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Lyra reached up and tugged on Sofie’s hair the way she used to tug on her ponytail when she was younger. “Sweetheart, it’s all going to be alright.”

  Sofie nodded, sagging against her sister. “It has been so far, hasn’t it?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Undeclared Space

  Enforcement Vessel Ashritha

  IG Standard Calendar 236.46.17

  Asier set a heading for the fastest route out of Home Alliance territory. When he was certain that they weren’t being pursued by authorities from Copernicus Station, he put the ship on autopilot, and returned to the flight deck.

  He found Lyra, Sofie, and his son all huddled together in the berth of the shuttle. Sofie and Orion were sound asleep. Lyra looked up when he returned, a soft, loving smile lighting her face.

  “Can you carry Sofie to a more comfortable berth?” Lyra asked.

  Asier nodded and stepped forward to scoop the girl up. Lyra slid off the berth with Orion in her arms and followed Asier out of the shuttle and through the flight deck.

  “Does it disturb you to be near her?” Lyra asked quietly.

  Asier frowned. “Of course not. Should it?”

  Lyra hesitated for a moment. “She’s a healthy female of reproductive age.”

  Asier’s face twisted as instinctive revulsion boiled through him. He almost dropped Sofie to the deck.

  “No,” Asier said forcefully. “No. She’s...” He cast about for an explanation. “She smells like family.”

  A slight tension eased from her shoulders. “That’s good. I’d trust you with her life, but it’s good to know you won’t struggle to be near her.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if she were family or not,” Asier told her as he opened an empty berth. “The mating bond between you and I… I won’t ever notice other females in that way.” He laid Sofie on the bed and pulled the blanket over her.

  They slipped quietly into the passageway, closing Sofie’s berth.

  “I won’t notice others, either,” Lyra told him.

  “The mating bond doesn’t exert the same influence on the female partner,” Asier told her. There was no condemnation in his tone, only pragmatic acceptance.

  Lyra leaned against him. “It doesn’t matter. I only want you.”

  Warmth filled him to the brim. “Can I hold him?” He nodded at Orion, still clutched in Lyra’s arms.

  “Asier, you never have to ask. You’re his father.” She passed the baby gently into his hold.

  He cradled his son and simply looked down on him for the longest time. Lyra curved her slight body into his, her hand smoothing over Orion’s swaddled form. As they stood together, looking down on their child, Asier’s heart throbbed. The perfect silence stretched on, an infinite moment that he would’ve lived in forever if it were possible.

  But after a while, Lyra shifted. “What will happen with my sister?” She asked quietly.

  “I will look after her,” Asier said fiercely.

  “I know. But how difficult will it be?”

  Asier didn’t answer immediately, considering the possibilities. “We’ll be able to get sanctuary residency for her—due to her relationship with you, and the danger of returning her to human custody. Getting her residency will be a fight. Since she’s an adult and not a child, she won’t be able to legally join my household. And the fact that she’s unmated will put her in some danger. She’ll have to be protected if she wants to go into public.”

  Lyra sighed. “I was worried about that.”

  “But she can continue attending university. It’ll have to be a distance program, through telecommute. And we’ll have to redirect the connection through a comm hub in human territory.”

  “It seems like half the classes are telecommute these days anyway.”

  “Will she be okay with that?”

  Lyra was quiet for a moment. “Only time will tell. Sofie’s a bit like me—and it’s probably my fault, raising her on ships instead of somewhere more stable—a bit of a drifter, no strong ties to any one place. She’s fascinated by other races, other cultures, other customs. At first, she’ll probably be enthralled to be living amongst a technologically advanced, uncontacted race. But when she’s done with school and looking to build her own life? I don’t know.”

  Asier let out a heavy breath. “It’s not perfect, but we’ll figure it out as it goes. Perhaps she’ll meet a nice Scaeven and put the matter to rest the old-fashioned way.” Asier stroked his thumb across the velvet skin of his son’s brow.

  “She’s only eighteen,” Lyra objected. “She’s not settling any time soon.”

  Settling. The term echoed in his mind from a previous conversation he’d had with Lyra. That’s what the humans called their mate-bond. “Are you settled with me, then?” He asked her.

  The frown eased from her face, and her soft blue eyes met his. “Yes.” She reached out to grasp his arm, careful no
t to jostle Orion. “I love you. I’ve loved you since you trusted me to fly your ship. Since you carried me on your shoulder and trusted me to kill the spiders before they killed us. Since you pushed me away from you and fought every instinct in your body to give me a choice in our being together.”

  Asier sank down onto one knee so that he could be face-to-face with Lyra as he gathered her close to him. “Before I knew you were pregnant, before I knew we had mated, I missed you with my very soul.”

  She touched his cheek, kissed his brow. “Let’s put the baby to bed,” she said softly.

  He unsealed the berth next to his own, and Lyra used the blankets to shape a protective nest. He laid his son gently into it, and gazed down at him with a fullness of feeling that threatened to overwhelm him.

  After a long moment, Lyra’s hand found his. He let her lead him out of the baby’s berth, and into his own. She pulled the hatch shut, and when she turned to face him, her eyes had turned to blue fire.

  Asier smiled slowly, retreating as she advanced. The back of his thighs hit the bed, forcing him to sit. Moving with leonine grace, Lyra flowed into his lap, her thighs straddling his hips. She slid her hands over his chest, over his shoulders, and around his neck. Her lips found his, and he was lost in her.

  There was no threat, no deadline, no hurry at all. They explored each other with languid pleasure, rediscovering the taste and touch and feel of bodies and spirits who’d almost been lost to each other.

  And with each touch, each taste, the slow burn ignited into a flame. They undressed each other, laughing at their clumsiness, and then gasping as hot skin met hot skin. Asier was hard as steel, and when he stroked gentle fingers between her thighs, he found Lyra just as ready for him. A pulse of razor-sharp longing cut through him.

  “I can’t wait any longer,” he said hoarsely.

  “I can’t either.” She shifted and reached down to grasp him, guiding his shaft to the apex of her body.

  Asier shuddered as his crown breeched the slick, tight heat of her. She sank down on him, agonizingly slow as her body relearned the size of him. He groaned at the feel of her inner muscles stretching to accommodate his thick cock.