Nexus

by Sasha Alsberg

  She’d lost them.

  She’d failed them.

  And now she would die.

  * * *

  Andi woke with a start.

  The horrors of her dream were vanquished as a new nightmare materialized before her bleary eyes. Red lights flashed in the doorway to her quarters, in unison with the blaring sirens that resonated across the ship. Confusion racked her brain until realization came rushing inward.

  She’d fallen asleep studying a map of Solera, Lon and Dex in charge of charting their course...

  Something was very wrong.

  Andi leaped up from her cot and ran into the main corridor. With each step, the clamor of the alarms felt as if it was vibrating in her bones. Her tired muscles screamed as she hoisted herself up the ladder, almost running into Lon as she scrambled onto the landing. He was kneeling on the ground before the door to the bridge, twiddling with wires.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  “The ship is going into meltdown,” he told her. “I don’t know why. But everything is shutting down, including the doors. I can’t seem to get them open.” He dropped the two multicolored wires in a huff.

  “Where the hell is Dex?”

  Lon helplessly held out his hands, and Andi let out a growl of frustration. “Move aside, unless you want to land your ass in the med bay.” Lon hurriedly backed away as Andi pulled Gilly’s double-triggered gun from her belt and fired the stunner at the door’s scanner in a hail of sparks and smoke.

  The door teetered on its hinges for a moment before falling inward with a rattling bang.

  “There, it’s open.”

  Lon whistled as he looked at the gun. “That thing is awesome.”

  Andi rolled her eyes and rushed inside.

  The control panel on the dash was going haywire. Holographic blueprints drifted across the console, lighting up many areas of the ship in flashing red. Too many.

  “Memory?” Andi called out as she slid into Lira’s pilot seat. “Run a diagnostics scan.”

  Memory’s voice crackled over the ship-wide com, weakening with each word. “Fuel leak in the engine room. Oxygen levels at thirty-four percent and dropping.”

  Both of which were their lifelines—though by the looks of it, neither would be viable for much longer, at the rate they were dropping.

  “Well, that’s just great,” Andi said sarcastically. She wished, desperately, that Breck was here. Her head gunner knew the ins and outs of the Marauder’s mechanical room like the back of her hand, and while she couldn’t always fix the problem, Andi knew she could’ve at least bought them more time.

  But she wasn’t here. And any attempts they made to fix whatever was wrong would waste time they didn’t have.

  “What the hell is going on?” Dex cursed as he came running through the door, Havoc hot on his heels. The creature leaped for his legs, but Dex kicked it off.

  “Easy!” Lon shouted, reaching out his arms as Havoc yowled and barreled into them, horns just visible beneath his layers of fuzzy orange.

  “The damned thing is trying to kill me before the ship does!” Dex snapped.

  “Took you long enough to get here,” Andi said, sending him an annoyed look.

  “I was having a great dream.” He came up next to her and nudged her shoulder. “You were in it, actually—”

  Andi cut him off. “Spare me the details.”

  Dex glanced at the floating blueprints. “Well, this looks bad,” he said, stating the obvious.

  Lon stepped up to the console, Havoc cradled in one arm as he entered in a code that blessedly turned off the alarm. He’d learned a lot in his time on the ship. Lira would have been proud.

  He turned back to Andi and Dex. “I know we wanted to have a better plan before jumping to Solera, but I don’t think time is something we have anymore.”

  “Do we have enough fuel to make the jump to hyperspace?” Dex shifted his gaze to the fuel gauge, which was running dangerously low. The control panel still blinked a furious red.

  Lon scrutinized the fuel level. “Barely.”

  If they had enough fuel to make the jump, it would be a miracle. And if they didn’t?

  Well, they’d likely burn up in hyperspace.

  “It’s a chance we’re going to have to take,” Andi stated, seeing no other viable options. She buried her nerves deep as she typed in the coordinates for Solera, fingertips flying across the dash. “Dex, why is it that ever since you first boarded this ship, we always seem to be crash-landing?” she asked.

  “Because our love is impossible to keep afloat?” Dex suggested jokingly.

  Andi let out a shaky laugh.

  She wanted to be confident, but her hands shook, the traitorous things. She hadn’t known how much strength she’d actually pulled from her crew until they were gone. Lon and Dex were worthy partners, but they weren’t her girls.

  You’ll get them back soon, Andi told herself. To Lon and Dex, she said, “Time to make the jump.”

  “You sure?” Dex asked, furrowing his brow.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. They couldn’t risk waiting for something else going wrong, if that was even possible. Everything that could have gone wrong just had. So Andi entered in the last command and offered up a silent prayer to the Godstars.

  “Destination confirmed: Solera,” Memory announced. “Warming engines for full thrust to hyperspace in ten...nine...”

  The ship jolted, throwing them to the ground. “Crap!” Andi said, grappling to stand and read the control board. One of the ship’s engines had just blown.

  “Can we still make the jump?” Lon asked, pulling himself up into a chair, his eyes wide as he looked between Andi and Dex. Havoc clung to his shoulders like a rabid leech.

  Andi shot a questioning look at Dex. He knew this ship as well as she did, and right now, she didn’t know the answer.

  “I’d say it’s a forty percent chance,” Dex said, looking at the stats.

  “Thirty-five percent,” Memory corrected in a crackling tone. Even the Marauder’s AI was failing.

  “I’ll take it. Strap in, boys,” Andi said, settling into her captain’s chair. Even in the middle of this disaster, she couldn’t help but melt back into the smooth leather, perfectly molded to her form. Like a queen sitting upon her throne.

  Dex took the pilot’s seat and Lon buckled himself in behind them. The ship shuddered again and dipped to the right. Andi’s head smacked painfully against the headrest.

  Damn things were supposed to protect her head, not give her a concussion.

  “Make the jump, damn it!” Andi growled, looking sideways at Dex. They would get to Solera. They had to, even if the ship was just a husk when they landed.

  They had to make it.

  There wasn’t any other option.

  Dex hit the throttle, launching them into hyperspace.

  Rainbow streaks streamed past the windows, but Andi didn’t have any time to marvel at the sight. She was too busy watching the Marauder’s diagnostic array to make sure the ship wouldn’t explode around them.

  At this point, there was no going back.

  “May the Godstars guide us,” Lon prayed. Andi hoped they were listening—otherwise, they were essentially screwed. And not in the way Dex enjoyed so much.

  The three of them fell into a tense silence for a few minutes as they hurtled through space toward Solera. Andi typed some calculations into the navigation system and readied the ship for arrival—or at least she tried to. Half of the systems were off-line and the other half weren’t functioning correctly.

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” Lon asked.

  That was a great question. Andi thought they’d have more time to plan, but with the current situation putting a huge snag in their mission, she wasn’t quite sure.

  “We need to fi
x the ship,” she said. “That’s our top priority right now. Without the Marauder, we can’t do anything.”

  “But how will we get the parts we need when we don’t look like Nor’s followers? You know, those silver veins?” Lon wondered.

  They were going to have to improvise. Andi had done it before—with Dex, actually.

  She turned to him. “Do you remember Ricar?”

  Dex smiled wide. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “What’s Ricar?” Lon asked nervously.

  “It’s a small planet in one of the rogue systems. Dex and I had to stop there once for fuel, and it didn’t work out too well.”

  “You see,” Dex continued, “Ricar is essentially a terraformed planet made of metal. Most of the people who live there fancy being more machine than human. We didn’t think stopping there would cause any issues, but apparently the locals aren’t too fond of outsiders.”

  “So what happened?” Lon pushed.

  Even in their current situation, Andi had to laugh as she glanced back at him. “We had to become one of them. So we took wires, metal plates...really anything that might seem mechanical, and we dressed ourselves up.”

  Andi could still remember how Dex had wound a metal coil around her neck and arms to hide her skin. He, on the other hand, had glued small aluminum sheets to his face for his disguise. Surprisingly, it had worked. No one batted an eye at them as they refueled. Everything went smoothly, at least until they were back on the ship.

  She took off her disguise easily, but Dex... Well, he hadn’t really chosen wisely when he’d adhered the metal to his skin. The glue turned out to be rather permanent, and the tiny sheets of metal were stuck to his face for a full week before they finally managed to pull them off.

  “Let’s just say we got the fuel, but it wound up causing more problems in the long run.” Dex rubbed a bare spot on his stubbly cheek.

  “Still can’t grow hair there, I see.” Andi smirked.

  “Shut up,” Dex mumbled.

  “It’s time,” Lon said, pulling them back to the present.

  The radar flashed, marking the Tavina System up ahead.

  Dex placed his hand on the throttle and eased it back, exiting hyperspace as they approached Solera. The ship shook around them, far too aggressively as it entered the planet’s atmosphere.

  They’d made it. The ship was breaking apart around them, but against all odds, they’d made it.

  Andi let out a sigh of relief. The Godstars must be liking her today.

  Using the last dregs of fuel, Dex directed the ship toward the planet’s icy surface. But as they passed through Solera’s outer rings, Andi realized that they were utterly alone. It was a known fact that Solerans didn’t like mingling any more than necessary with outsiders, but every populated planet had some type of space traffic around it.

  It was beyond eerie that this one didn’t.

  So when a pulse of light shot through the empty airspace toward them, it caught them unaware. The light encased the Marauder for a moment before resuming its path in their wake.

  Dex swore. “What the hell was that?”

  “Solar ray?” Lon guessed, but Andi shook her head.

  “Let’s just get down there,” she said. “We don’t have much fuel left. Bring her down nice and easy, Dextro. You wreck my ship, you pay for it.”

  Dex grunted. “I can’t,” he gritted out as he tried to engage the thrusters.

  “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “The thrusters aren’t at full power.”

  “They’re only giving twenty percent thrust,” Lon said, furiously typing on the holoscreen in his hands. “And the backup system is off-line.”

  Of course it is, Andi thought grimly. That light must’ve done something to the ship.

  Solera was growing larger and larger by the second.

  “Brace for impact,” Memory said calmly from the speakers as fire engulfed the exterior of the ship, so at odds with the icy world they were quickly approaching.

  Andi gripped the edges of her seat and watched helplessly as Dex white-knuckled the wheel, trying to keep the ship steady.

  She took back what she’d said about the Godstars liking her.

  They really must hate her guts.

  CHAPTER 9

  DEX

  There had been plenty of times in Dex’s life when he’d thought he was dead.

  When he was a child, he’d been told stories by traveling missionaries of what the afterlife was like. If you were good, and had no sin, you’d go to the Godstars’ palace in the sky. But if you were bad, you would be sent elsewhere, to be tortured for all eternity.

  Of course he’d thought about the afterlife, and what lay beyond this existence, but he always thought when he experienced it for himself, it would be unlike anything his mind could’ve conjured up. Now, as his eyes cracked open, he was almost blinded by whiteness. It was the purest color he’d ever seen.

  If those missionaries were right, and there was a palace in the sky where the righteous went after death, then he had not a damned clue why he was there. He wasn’t trying to say he deserved to be tortured, but hey, there were far better people than him in this galaxy.

  That was how Dex knew he must be alive.

  That, and the searing pain that pulsed within his head.

  Dex could feel his heart beating inside his skull, like a hatchet against stone, chipping away bit by bit. The acidic smell of burned metal wafted into his nose, and something sharp jabbed his side.

  “You with me, Dex?” a voice said from what seemed like a mile away. Then a hand connected with his cheek with a sharp sting, jarring him out of his haze.

  The world of white came into focus, and at its center was a pair of stormy gray eyes.

  “I’m with you,” he croaked, rubbing his sore cheek. “You didn’t have to smack me, though.”

  “It got your attention,” Andi said, looking unabashed as she stood.

  “That it did.”

  He was still buckled into his chair. The reason everything looked white when he’d awoken was now obvious. Through the viewport of the Marauder, as far as he could see, was an endless expanse of snow, filling the entire front window as it stretched into the distance.

  Everything came flooding back to him at once.

  The ship shutting down, leaving the nebula behind. The frantic jump to hyperspace. The jarring screech of metal hitting the planet’s frozen surface.

  They had survived the crash, but he wasn’t sure how long they’d last now. Solera was an unforgiving planet, and with Nor’s soldiers having swept across the galaxy... He wasn’t sure if anywhere was safe.

  “Any idea where we are?” Dex asked, blinking stars from his eyes. His head throbbed angrily.

  Andi stared out the viewport. “Not a clue.”

  Dex grimaced. Nothing but frozen terrain out there, as far as he could tell. The ship rocked in the howling winds, and giant shards of ice jutted up from the white plain, towering hundreds of feet in the air. One of them, half a click away, was broken in two, a great gouge in the ice revealing where the Marauder had crashed into it before sliding to a stop here.

  He unbuckled himself and slowly rose to his feet. “Memory, how bad is the damage?”

  “Catastrophic,” Andi answered from the dash, which was flashing erratically with glitching blueprints and radar screens.

  Memory’s absence echoed Andi’s point.

  Across from them, Lon groaned in his seat, straps still secure across his chest. “I’m fine, guys. Thank you for your concern.”

  “We’re a little busy, Sentinel,” Dex said, just as the ship groaned a final time and silence rushed through the bridge.

  The lights on the console blinked out entirely. The only noise came from their hitched breaths and the freezing winds outside.


  And Havoc, screeching wildly as it ran circles around the bridge, horns protruding from its fur. Apparently the creature had enjoyed the ride. Lon scooped him up, and the beast instantly fell as silent as the ship.

  Well, hell, Dex thought as he looked around. This wasn’t good.

  “Did the ship just...?” Andi started.

  “Completely shut down, leaving us to the mercy of the elements? Yes, yes it did,” Dex said. “Godstars, I hate Solera. I managed to deploy the backup shields so our landing wouldn’t damage the ship too badly, but I guess it didn’t help much.”

  That explained why the air smelled like burned metal. He didn’t want to imagine what the exterior of the ship looked like. Varillium was supposedly impenetrable, but how many times could they crash-land the ship and have it remain so?

  “Thank you,” Andi said suddenly.

  Dex stared at her in shock, his eyes widening. “Did you just...thank me?”

  Maybe he was dead after all.

  “Don’t get too cocky.”

  Still dazed, he said, “I should crash the ship more often.”

  Andi glared at him. “Don’t push your luck, Dextro.”

  He laughed, then winced at the ache in his head.

  Lon gasped from across the bridge. They turned to see him glued to the small window on the starboard side of the ship.

  “What’s wrong?” Andi asked.

  The window fogged up as Lon spoke. “It’s so beautiful,” he said in a daze, making Dex wonder if he was okay. “I’ve never seen snow before.”

  It took a moment for his statement to register. “Never?” Dex asked, stunned.

  “Never,” Lon confirmed, wiping at the clouded window. “It doesn’t snow back on Adhira, and until we went to Arcardius, I’d never once left home. My job was to protect Adhira, not leave it. All the Sentinels made vows to my aunt Alara, to protect the Mountain of Rhymore.”

  “A soldier’s vow,” Andi aknowledged with a curt nod. “Something I broke long ago.”

  “Looks like we’re all deserters,” Dex said, thinking of how he’d lost his Guardian status years before, too. General Cortas had promised to reinstate him after he and Andi had retrieved Valen from Lunamere, but the general’s manipulations and untimely death had prevented him from fulfilling his end of the bargain to Dex.