This was a short-range fighter, not a shuttle or transport.
“Valor, you are clear for launch in three…”
I squirmed in my seat. Holy shit.
“Two…”
I bounced now, too excited to sit still. A quick glance at Alex showed he was watching me and grinning like the cat who ate the canary.
“One… Launch.”
With a flick of my wrist I moved the controller forward and the ship took off like a bullet fired from the barrel of a rifle. I felt like a bullet, too, as the acceleration threw me back into my seat.
This had not been in the game.
God, the vibration, the sound, the hum… the guy beside me…
The flight-suit armor I wore had somehow connected with the ship’s control system, and the suit pressurized, hugging me tightly from toes to shoulders the moment we began to move. Good thing, otherwise every bit of blood in my body would have rushed to my feet and legs, and I would have fainted.
We were pulling some serious g’s. Roller-coaster-on-steroids g’s.
“Yaaaaaaaas!” I let out a yell, then a whoop as the Valor shot down the launch tube and out into open space.
Silence.
Darkness.
Billions of stars shining on a carpet of deep black.
“Holy shit.” The weight of the moment made my chest clamp down until I had trouble breathing. This was real. Space. Aliens. I was flying a starfighter while sitting next to Alexius of Velerion with a real planet full of billions of people now counting on me—me! A daughter of a drunk, fatherless, high school graduate—to save them. All I’d done was excel at a video game. And yet… it hadn’t been a game.
“Oh my God.”
“Your heart rate is elevated, Starfighter Valor. Do you require assistance?” The voice of the launch control operative from Bay 4 interrupted my panic.
I took a deep breath, let it out. “No. Just taking a moment to adjust.”
She chuckled. I heard her, and I knew she had left her comm unmuted purposely. “Understood. Welcome to Arturri. Enjoy the ride. It’s a beautiful night.”
“Night?” I turned to Alex, and he pointed to his right.
“We are on the dark side of Velerion at the moment. Vega will crest the horizon in a few minutes if you want to watch your first sunrise from space.”
Did I?
“Yes.” I wanted to do a dozen different things, but seeing a sunrise on a new world with the sexiest man who’d given me the best orgasm of my life at my side? Definitely.
Impossible to miss now that I was looking, the massive planet directly below us filled my navigation screen. I turned our ship toward the new world and moved in the direction Alex pointed.
“Throttle back. We don’t want to be too close.”
I did as he instructed and held us in position halfway between the moon base and the planet’s surface, adjusting as the planet moved around its star. “What’s it like down there?”
Alex stared at his home world as he answered. “Peaceful. Beautiful.” He turned his head away from me, then pointed. “Look.”
I gasped as Vega, the Velerion star, peeked above the horizon. From here, the star moved quickly, enveloping us in bright light in a matter of moments. But even more spectacular was the view of Velerion.
White, swirling clouds. Deep turquoise seas, the darker blues of the water closer to what I assumed were their north and south poles. The land below looked like Earth. Some green. Some brown with desert sands. The shapes of the continents were all wrong, but still I recognized them. I’d seen them before, in the game.