This is how I die. My flux capacitor releasing every bit of luminous flux I have left.
Because I won’t be needing it anymore.
Something grabs my arm. And if I had any breath left, I’d scream.
But I don’t.
I just place my gloved finger on the key pad one more time… one more zero…
And press down as hard as I can.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE – SERPINT
The universe implodes.
It’s a brilliant mixture of pink and gold and my heart sinks as the reality of what just happened hits my brain. I turn away from the exploding warship as the screen on my suit automatically blacks out to save my vision should I survive.
But I have her. I have clipped my suit tether to Lyra’s suit and Luck has tethered his salvage unit to Nyleena’s pod.
Because it wasn’t Nyleena and Lyra who blew up.
It was ALCOR and Beauty.
And even though I know it’s wrong, there’s relief in my heart and my head too. Relief that Lyra is still alive. That it wasn’t her.
“Hang on, Lyra,” I whisper, placing my helmet up to hers so she might hear my voice via sound wave transduction. “I’ve got you, princess. I’ve got you.”
Her light, which was just flashing like a SOS signal in the darkness of space, is gone.
But I hook the extra oxygen tank up anyway. I can’t not keep up hope. We didn’t go through all this to lose her now. ALCOR and Beauty didn’t kill themselves on a suicide mission just so she could die.
We are soulmates. She must live.
I press the influx button on the side of the canister, forcing the lifesaving gas into her suit. It fills up until she looks like a balloon. But her light does not return.
I do that over and over and over, until Luck and Valor are pulling us both, and Prince too, into the lifesaving salvage unit.
I take her helmet off once we pressurize the interior compartment, and kiss her. Blowing my breath into her body over, and over, and over again until she takes a breath.
Just one breath.
“There you are,” I say, pushing her pink hair away from her face. “There you are.”
She doesn’t wake up, but she does keep breathing. And that’s the best I could hope for.
I wait with her like that. My lips up to hers. Hoping each time she exhales, she will inhale again.
“One more,” I tell her. “One more breath.”
And even though Princess Lyra doesn’t like to take orders from anyone, not even me, she obeys this one time.
Booty tugs the incapacitated Dicker away from the debris field left over from the explosion ALCOR and Beauty initiated, and we wait our turn out in the darkness of space.
Once Lyra’s breathing stabilizes we place her into a cryopod to receive automated medical attention until we can make our way back to Harem.
It might be hours, or maybe even days, before we are picked up and safely inside Booty again. We had to leave the salvage units behind because there’s no room on Booty to dock them, but no one cares about equipment.
ALCOR and Beauty are dead. Harem Station will never be the same after this and there will be yet another memorial service for the lost.
But Lyra is alive. And we have her sister, Nyleena. So those Cygnian bastards will never be able to use her as a weapon again.
Never again.
We won this battle but the war has just started.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO – LYRA
Serpint tells me I was in the medical cryopod for months. Because that’s how long it took to return to Harem station with the Dicker in tow since we had to use special gates that allow for unstable ship configurations.
Months that Harem Station waited for our return, the ALCOR copy doing its best to run things. People died. The copy isn’t nearly as efficient as the original. Whole neighborhoods lost power, some even lost atmosphere. But an AI can learn quickly and by the time they woke me up in the harem medical center, that stupid cyborg master peering down at me saying, “Lyra, can you hear me?” as he flashed a pen light over my newly-opened eyes, things were almost stable.
And maybe I do still hate that guy, but he is certified in eleventy-billion medical procedures for untold numbers of species, so I let him do his stupid exam.
Well, most of it. He wanted to test out my flux capacitor, see if it was still working since my glow didn’t come back when they opened my pod, but that’s Serpint’s job now and I made that clear by punching the master in the face.
Reflex, I guess.
I still glow. One touch of Serpint’s fingers across my bare cheek as he leaned down to kiss me fully awake was all it took.
Today is the memorial service for ALCOR and Beauty. The guys put it on hold until I was up for the ceremony and because, to everyone’s surprise, the Prime Navy sent word that they wanted representatives there for the service.