Rouhr

by Elin Wyn

  A clatter rattled through the control room as a short blade coated in blue blood dropped to the deck.

  Thribb grabbed the Gateway, pressing at it, poking and prodding frantically at the lit sections. “This is our chance, don’t you see?” His voice was high and pinched. “I couldn’t let her take our chance away.”

  At his feet, Fen’s arm moved, her dark eyes blinked slowly.

  “Fen, are you all right?” It felt like such a stupid question. Her hand moved toward her speech pad.

  “I will survive,” she said. “Get the Gateway.”

  “No!” Thribb snarled. “This is our chance.”

  “Chance for what?” At the moment, he hadn’t stumbled upon the way to open a rift, but at any moment he could get lucky. Keeping him distracted for now was our only chance.

  But we didn’t have long.

  “To go home!” Thribb exclaimed. “We’re off that wretched planet. We have the Gateway! We can escape!” His voice cracked.

  “Thribb,” I took a slow step toward him. “You know the Aurora can’t last long in space. Give me the Gateway before it’s too late.”

  “No! I can’t turn my back on my world!” he screeched. “I’d rather destroy the Gateway before I let it come to that.”

  “Listen to me,” I said gently. “I understand how difficult this is, but right now, we have to go back to Ankau.”

  “You just want to go back to your human whore! So many of you have been put under their spells! They’ve wanted us to suffer and bleed for them while our worlds burn.”

  Thribb had truly lost his mind. He didn’t notice Fen sliding away toward the back of the control room. She pressed a small button under one of the countertops.

  “Thribb, I need you to think carefully,” I said. “Do you remember why you joined the Vengeance crew?”

  “Why are you stalling? We must escape now! My people need me,” Thribb howled. He shook the Gateway, but it still refused to respond to his touch.

  I took a deep breath.

  Thribb was a Sugavian, the only one in the crew, and for a good reason.

  For him, there was no world to go back to.

  I wondered how long he’d been carrying these delusions. His fervent obsession with completing the Aurora’s repairs finally made sense.

  “I need you to answer the question,” I replied.

  “Enough of your questions!”

  The rest of the Urai crew, aside from Mar, entered the room. Two of them went to assist Fen, the others took in the scene before them. “I did not spend weeks altering my calculations to fail now!”

  “That sounds like a lot of work.” And explained why the Urai’s results were so different from Thribb’s.

  “Yes! I’ve been feeding you false calculations so we would have enough supplies to last us on our journey home!” Thribb exclaimed, as if his motives were logical. Obvious.

  “Did you tell the crew we’d be able to go home on the Aurora on purpose?” I asked.

  “I needed to ensure the others would be on my side when I realized you weren’t going to listen to me.” Thribb’s shrill laugh sent a shudder down my spine. On the control panel beside me, red lights started flashing.

  The Aurora’s systems were failing.

  “I have to save my people!” Thribb shrieked over the cacophony.

  “Your people are dead, Thribb!” I shouted, temper fraying. We were out of time. “Your planet was destroyed by the Xathi. That’s why you joined my crew. Don’t you remember?”

  “You’re wrong!” Thribb screamed. “You’re a liar! You’re a murderer!”

  “Thribb, I’m so sorry.”

  I lunged at him before he could respond, and we hit the deck hard enough that his shoulder crunched underneath my weight.

  The Gateway slipped from his grasp. Zan, the one who was with Amira when the Gateway was found, picked it up.

  “Get us back, if you can,” I ordered.

  Thribb fought against me, but I had the advantage of size, strength, and experience. Still, madness drove him on.

  “Thribb, you need to stop struggling this instant.” I tightened my grip on him until he could barely move. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You’re killing my people,” he rasped.

  “We’ve all suffered great losses at the hands of the Xathi,” I said. “There’s nothing more we can do for our homeworlds. We have to carry on.”

  The Aurora began to move once more. I assumed Zan had successfully opened a rift.

  Something in Thribb seemed to snap into place. His eyes went dull, that manic spark gone.

  “I’ve made a grave mistake,” he said softly.

  “We’re going to get you some help when we land, understood?” I said.

  He nodded. I released my grip on him, and helped him to his feet. “Put him somewhere where he won’t harm himself or others,” I instructed one of the Urai crew members, who led him away by his arm.

  Fen was back on her feet. The other Urai had patched her up enough to stop the bleeding.

  “I apologize for allowing him into the ship,” I said. “I should’ve known he was unstable.”

  “War changes all of us,” was all she said.

  As we approached the rift, the Aurora suddenly shuddered and groaned.

  “What was that?” I demanded.

  “System failure, as I feared,” Fen said. She rushed to the control panel as quickly as her injury would allow. She started pressing buttons and flipping switches faster than I could comprehend.

  “Prepare for a crash landing,” she said to me as we started freefalling through the rift.

  28

  Vidia

  “Holy shit, they actually did it!” Amira squealed. She and Jeneva wrapped their arms around each other, and jumped up and down as chunks of debris tumbled from the sky into the desert. Mariella cried tears of relief. It was over.

  We had our planet back from the Xathi.

  But still...

  “Why haven’t they come back through?” I asked after nearly two minutes had passed.

  Fen had warned Rouhr that the Aurora couldn’t survive long in deep space.

  Immediately, my head swarmed with visions of everything that could’ve possibly gone wrong. They could’ve collided with a chunk of the Xathi ship. The Aurora’s systems could’ve failed immediately upon entering deep space. The hull’s structural integrity might not have been as stable as they thought it was.

  I couldn’t panic. If I did, I would come apart completely. I took slow, deep breaths, trying to steady my racing heart. I put my hands on my hips, and it was then that I remembered I never took my comm off.

  I flicked it to the private frequency I’d shared with Rouhr, but that channel was nothing but static.

  I flipped through the frequencies until I heard voices. I recognized the voices of the strike team members amidst the sounds of battle.

  “Status report!” I demanded, startling the other women. “Anyone! I need a status report now.”

  “A large number of Xathi survived the fall from their ship.” Tu’ver responded. As a sniper, he wouldn’t be in the thick of battle. He’d be somewhere a little way off with a good vantage point. “Our soldiers and supplies are holding.”

  “But where is the Aurora?” I demanded.

  A long pause. “No sign.”

  I looked at the timepiece in the observatory. Nearly four minutes had passed.

  “What’s happening?” Evie asked.

  “Things are going well for the ground team,” I said first, to give the other women peace of mind about their mates. “But there’s no sign of the Aurora.”

  My throat thickened with emotion. I raised my hand to my chest as if that would stop my galloping heart.

  “Vidia, you look pale,” Evie said gently. “I think you should sit down.” She reached for me so she could help me, but I shied away.

  “No,” I insisted. “I need to know where the Aurora is.” I clicked back to the private frequency R
ouhr and I were using.

  “Rouhr? Can you hear me?” I shouted into the comm. The sound of snapping static was all I received in response. I clicked through the channels again. I knew Rouhr said that he would go out of contact when the Aurora was in deep space, but I had to keep trying.

  Five minutes had passed since the Aurora went through the rift.

  Something must have happened. As soon as the rift snapped on the Xathi ship, they would have been able to engage in combat.

  Fen had mastered the Gateway at this point.

  Opening a rift for the Aurora to return should’ve been no problem.

  Six minutes.

  A shuddering sob racked my body as the cold reality of the situation settled around me. If the Aurora’s systems hadn’t failed yet, they soon would.

  With each passing second, I lost hope that Rouhr would come back to me.

  “Vidia.” Evie gently rested her hand on my shoulder. That small bit of contact caused something to break within me. My legs began to wobble. Evie caught me as I slumped forward.

  “He promised,” I sobbed into her shoulder. “He promised he’d come back.” Evie didn’t say anything, simply rubbed my back and let me cry. The other women flocked around me, offering kind words and gentle hands.

  “Wait, what’s that?” Amira asked.

  I lifted my head from Evie’s shoulder and looked at the monitor. I didn’t see the Aurora, but I did see a new rift. I wiped the tears from my eyes, clearing my vision.

  “They must be alive,” Leena whispered.

  “Then, where’s the ship?” Jeneva whispered back.

  “Please,” I begged quietly. “Please, come home to me.”

  The Aurora came through the rift, bow first. I noticed something was wrong when the hull came into contact with the edge of the rift and bits of metal flew off like paper scraps. As they fell through, the bow didn’t pull up.

  The Aurora plummeted toward the planet’s surface.

  “I think their systems failed,” I gasped. I reached for the comm again, and clicked to the frequency the ground team was on.

  “What’s happening?” I demanded.

  “The Aurora’s engines aren’t responding,” Tu’ver replied.

  “What the fuck are they going to do?” I demanded.

  “The Aurora has an emergency landing system,” Tu’ver explained. “It can redirect air currents to level the ship for a smoother crash landing even if there’s no power to the engines.”

  “Why aren’t they doing that?” I could hear my voice growing frantic and shrill.

  Tu’ver remained silent, but I knew what he must be thinking. He thought most, if not all of them, were dead or incapacitated in some way.

  I refused to believe that. Someone had opened the rift.

  Someone must be fighting to save the Aurora.

  “What can you see?” I asked Tu’ver.

  “Not much,” he said honestly. “But a gust of wind tipped the bow up and leveled the ship a bit. I think that’s what they needed to jumpstart the emergency landing system.”

  I clicked to the private channel, holding my breath until I heard something other than static feedback. It sounded like blaring alarms and whooshing air. It had to be Rouhr’s comm on the Aurora.

  “Rouhr? Are you there?” I screamed. No response.

  “He probably can’t answer if he’s performing the emergency landing,” Evie reasoned.

  I nodded and forced myself to breathe. I hoped that was the case. I couldn’t bear it if it wasn’t.

  I couldn’t hear anything but the alarms and the wind. I told myself that no one was loud enough to speak over something like that.

  “Rouhr,” I began again. “I don’t know if you can hear this. If you can, you don’t need to answer me. Just listen. You are the strongest, kindest, most incredible person I’ve ever met. My life would be empty without you. I love you more than anything. Please come home to me.”

  I set the comm on one of the countertops. The six of us stood close together as we listened to the static and watched the monitor. Every time the ship leveled out, we tried to figure out if the wind currents had been purposely redirected or if it was just a coincidence. Before long, the Aurora dipped below the curvature of the planet, and we lost sight of her.

  On the comm, there was a horrible crashing sound. So many loud noises happened at once that it all blended together into one deafening roar. I squeezed Evie’s hand and waited for silence to fall.

  Once it did, I wished for the roaring again.

  The silence was unbearable.

  There were faint rustling sounds. It was hard to tell if it was someone’s movement or the ship settling. The rustling grew louder until it sounded like something was brushing up directly against the comm.

  “Vidia?”

  29

  Epilogue: Vidia

  There was no point in moving the Aurora, not when we had the Gateway.

  Besides, I never liked the swamp lands. I was much more suited for the desert. After spending the majority of the past few months either within a spaceship or inside a city built into a mountain, I was ready for some light.

  I made time to stretch out on a blanket under the desert sun. My skin was on its way to becoming the rich golden shade it once was.

  Sometimes Evie or Leena would join me, but most of the time, I was alone, with nothing but a datapad filled with fiction to keep me company. It was my little treat to myself for working my ass off.

  That was one of the things Rouhr and I had agreed to work on. It was perfectly fine for us to love our work, but we needed to stop loving it at the expense of ourselves or our relationship.

  Now that the Xathi were gone and the planet was healing, we promised each other that we would start working at a reasonable hour, come home at a reasonable hour, and get at least six hours of sleep a night. Eight was still too much to ask from either of us.

  Besides, not all of that rack time was spent sleeping. There needed to be time for that, too.

  Rouhr walked into our cabin, holding a steaming mug. I smelled the coffee instantly.

  “Put that down!” I exclaimed.

  “What?” The rim of the cup was already against his bottom lip.

  “You’re breaking one of the rules.” I pointed an accusatory finger at him. “No coffee after sundown.”

  “But you said time doesn’t exist,” he argued.

  “That was when I’d pulled a twenty-two-hour shift at the Glymna rehab center and you had to carry me home,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Rouhr nodded. “You kept calling me a sexy red man.”

  “I most certainly did not!” I gasped.

  “You most certainly did!” Rouhr was having trouble containing his laughter. His shoulders shook with the effort, causing him to slosh a little coffee over his hand. “Skrell!” He quickly set the mug down and shook the hot liquid from his skin.

  “That’s what you get.” I stuck my tongue out at him. It was amazing how he could make me feel like a silly teenager in love for the first time.

  Rouhr narrowed his eyes at me, picked the mug back up, and took a long gulp. I stared at him, wide-eyed, half-impressed and half-aghast.

  “Bet you didn’t see that coming,” he said proudly.

  “No, I didn’t,” I admitted. “Was that…enjoyable?”

  “Not at all,” Rouhr sputtered. “I deeply regret doing that. I just wanted to spite you.”

  “Aw, you’re so loving.” I rolled my eyes. He walked over to where I sat at my desk, bent down, and planted a huge kiss on my cheek.

  “What’s that?” He indicated the datapad covered by an expensive fabric sleeve that bore the emblem of the capital city.

  “I don’t know yet.” I twisted in my seat to look at him. “I haven’t had the chance to open it.”

  “Why not? It must be important if it’s from the capital,” Rouhr reasoned.

  “It probably is important. That’s why I wanted to wait for you so we c
ould open it together,” I explained.

  “I’m here. What are you waiting for?” Rouhr took a few steps back to sit at the edge of our shared bed. I removed the fabric sleeve from the datapad and powered it on. It asked for a facial scan to ensure that I was the person who received it.

  After the scan was completed and it had verified that the face it had scanned belonged to Vidia Birch, a letter appeared on the screen. I read it quickly.

  “It’s a job offer,” I explained.

  “Really?” Rouhr sounded surprised. “What’s the job?”

  “The city leaders of the capital want to meet with me,” I continued reading. “They want me to take an active role in the rebuilding of the city.”

  “That sounds like quite an honor.” Rouhr reached out and rubbed my shoulder. “What do you think?”

  “There’s no going back to Fraga,” I sighed. There hadn’t been enough of the town left after the Xathi attacks. The few survivors had resettled in other towns, rebuilding their lives the best they could.

  “Glymna doesn’t really need me, either,” I mused. “I mostly just make sure everything continues to run smoothly and interject so I feel like I’m contributing.”

  “If they don’t need you anymore, I think you should dedicate yourself to people who do,” Rouhr said.

  “I think you’re right.” I turned around with a sly grin on my face. “You know what that means?”

  He looked confused for a moment before realization came over him. “No,” he scowled. “We don’t need to move.”

  “Rouhr!” I sighed. C

  “We have the Gateway,” Rouhr shrugged.

  “I don’t want to have to get Fen or Amira to open a rift through all of time and space just so I can go to a market,” I laughed. “Besides, we could have an entire house instead of just a room.”

  “It’s a nice room,” Rouhr said defensively.

  I climbed onto the mattress and sat behind him with one leg on either side of his. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, despite the fact that they were almost too broad for my arms to fit all the way around.

  “It’s a very nice room,” I hummed. “But what if we had more than one nice room? What if my office wasn’t a foot from my bedroom?”