by Susan Grant
From his cockpit, Rom wished he could see past Jas’s visor, wished he could read what was in her eyes. “My decision to make you my a’nah was impulsive. It is not at all what I wanted for us, but I haven’t a choice. I have no title, few resources.” And if he joined with a non– Vash Nadah woman in an unapproved, unarranged marriage, it meant giving up his secret hope of reclaiming his father’s favor.
His stomach muscles tensed. Well, he thought. He’d finally admitted it. But with the admission came a harder realization. If the man wished to see him, he would have done so already. But in its own way, that, too, was liberating.
“By all that is holy, Jasmine, we ought to be wed. Lawfully. Alas, I have spent a lifetime dreaming of the impossible, wishing for what cannot be—”
“Why can’t it?”
Because he never imagined such a decision was his to make. The concept shook him. His life was his own now, was it not? He was not the B’kah heir, would never be again. They’d leave soon to visit Earth, and after that…well, they had yet to discuss it. Of course, there was the question of whether she’d actually consent to any arrangement…
His words rushed out like a nervous youth’s. “We would need authorization—I’ve no official title, you see. But then, you are not Vash Nadah. However, there are different restrictions for the frontier, looser restrictions. The Treatise of Trade states—”
“Rom.”
He stopped himself midsentence.
Her voice was husky, a soft caress. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
With the computer maintaining the fighter’s speed, Rom gripped the control stick with one hand and lifted his other, pressing it to the window facing Jas. “Yes.” Silent, she raised her hand, fingers spread wide, as if overlaying her palm with his. He reached out with his senses until he could almost feel the heat of her skin coursing up his arm.
Tenderly, he asked, “Well? What say you to a lifetime formally bound to a space drifter with nothing to offer but a cargo ship and a bad reputation?”
Jas had no chance to respond. Out of nowhere a hunk of jagged metal hurtled toward them. She banked right and he veered left. The debris tumbled between them.
“Asteroids?” Jas asked tightly.
“No.” He checked his viewscreen. “It was an outlying buoy. One we would have used to set up a comm link with the space-city.” He searched ahead for the other buoys. “That’s odd. I can’t find anything.”
“Let me try.” She input the coordinates he gave her into her viewscreen. “It looks like more debris.”
He initiated a diagnostic on his ship and Jas’s, certain he’d find a malfunction explaining it all. But he found no glitches, only an empty viewscreen. The back of his neck prickled. Where was the space-city? Surely he’d have seen it by now—the sparkling lights on the immense central cylinder, the majestic spokes radiating outward. But nothing seemed to be out there.
Impossible. Something that huge simply didn’t disappear.
They blazed over the curve of the planet and into a sea of wreckage. Great Mother. Their starfighters looked like specks compared to the chunks of solidified slag whirling past. But the smaller items were what riveted his attention: a broken chair, a shoe. He fought a surge of nausea.
“What’s happened?” Jas asked.
“The space-city…the mining colonies—they’re gone.” Unable to fathom the immensity of the devastation, he listened to his own words with disbelief. Not since the Dark Years had there been such an atrocity.
Forty thousand people. Dead.
It was Sharron’s doing! He’d sent his minions after Rom as he’d promised, a brilliant hit-and-run above the cloak of the Tjhu’nami.
As his ship’s computer scoured the area, searching for signs of life, Rom envisioned the bleak future awaiting them if nothing was to be done about this attack. One by one, the ancestral homeworlds would fall. Over time billions would defect to the Family of the New Day out of fear as the balance of power shifted. All because the Vash federation was too mired in tradition to act.
He swore under his breath. No, such a future would not come to pass. Not as long as the blood of Romjha beat within him.
With the exigency to retaliate singing in his veins, he punched the flashing red light that was a direct link to Mistraal’s planetary security. “Get your asses up here. All available fighters—”
Jas shouted, “Bandits—two o’clock!”
A surge of adrenaline readied him for combat. His gaze tracked to his viewscreen, to several cruisers and a contingent of smaller vessels speeding away from them. He enhanced and magnified the image until he discerned the symbol emblazoned on their sides.
A blazing sun above two clasped hands.
The Family of the New Day.
“Rom, they’re almost out of range!” Jas yelled.
One glimpse of her, still flying valiantly off his wing, plunged him into soul-wrenching indecision. She was a worthy combatant, but never would he willingly place her, or any woman, in jeopardy. Yet what of his brother Lijhan, and Zarra? Hadn’t he lost them because he had left them behind?
“Jas—” A sound of anguish rumbled in his throat. The last of the enemy fleet was about to jump to hyperspace. If he lost them, he’d never discover their home base. “Turn back.”
I loved you, Inajh d’anah, he said silently.
Sweat and remorse burned his eyes as he sped away from her. Sharron would pay for the carnage he’d wreaked; this time Rom would see it through, even at the cost of his own life.
But not Jas’s.
He’d ensure her safety by snatching the enemy ship’s coordinates, jumping with them to light speed, then trailing the bastards until they dropped back to normal space. By the time they engaged in battle, Jas would be light-years behind, enfolded in the protection of the Mistraal space force.
Accelerating to catch the retreating ships he armed his weapons. “Sharron, I will find you!” he roared into the blackness of space.
“Romlijhian, is that you?”
A raspy voice invaded his comm.
Rom froze. A muscle jumped in his cheek. The man had sensed him. Fighting for composure, he extended outward with his senses, searching the enemy fleet. Sharron was among them—but in which ship? He reached farther. There. In the one remaining cruiser: irreparable, desolate coldness honed by intense self-absorption.
“Join me, Romlijhian.”
Rom blocked out Sharron’s entreaty, pushed his starfighter as fast as it would go.
“Things have changed considerably since Balkanor. Then you were a naive young man driven by misplaced heroics. Now you are adrift without family, without power. But you can have those things back. I can give them to you.” Sharron’s voice was gentle, so very reasonable. “Walk with me, Romlijhian. Let me save your soul.”
Revulsion choked Rom. “Save this.”
He fired what he intended to be a preemptive strike before achieving light speed. But Sharron’s cruiser slowed—because of Rom’s offensive, or simply in impatience to retaliate, he didn’t know, but he had no time to worry about it.
Rom blew past. Sharron’s cruiser fired. Rom yanked his starfighter into an evasive maneuver, banking away from the pursuing missiles, his onboard computer expelling chaff and decoys in the ship’s wake. The first missile spent itself on a decoy. The second got “smart,” and exploded in a blinding sheet of energy. Rom’s shields protected him, but the impact rammed him against his harnesses. The stench of something burning seeped into his air supply. Warnings flashed on the control console: HULL INTEGRITY 64 PERCENT, PLASMA LOSS NUMBER TWO THRUSTER, EQUIPMENT BAY FIRE. Somehow the damaged starfighter stayed intact. But it was leaking fuel, losing thrust. He shoved the good thruster to maximum power. Go, go, go! But the starfighter shuddered and dumped most of its velocity. Sharron’s cruiser wheeled slowly around and headed toward him. To finish me off.
“Crush the darkness!”
Startled, Rom jerked his attention away from the cruiser.
/> A starfighter streaked past. Great Mother—it was Jas! Uttering a war cry he’d shared with no one since…the Balkanor angel.
Rolling inverted, she let loose a deluge of missiles, hammering away at the cruiser and the fighters that hadn’t yet made the jump to hyperspace. One of the smaller ships burst apart, the explosion damaging another too close by. Hurtling away, its wreckage glanced off the shield on the cruiser’s underbelly.
“The next shot will be between the eyes, pal,” he heard her scream into her comm. “Between the eyes!”
Rom sensed Sharron’s surprise, and then his outrage.
He’d kill her.
“Jas!” Rom shouted. “Egress, egress now!” Don’t die in my place, he beseeched her silently, desperately. Turn back.
No! I won’t leave you this time.
He heard her response in his mind—as she’d no doubt heard his. But how? He obliterated the thought even as he formed it. If he distracted her from her task, they were as good as space dust. There would be time for questions later, if they survived.
Their two starfighters were no match against a heavily armed cruiser, but a tenacious assault could very well keep Sharron from making the leap to hyperspace. And the longer they occupied him, the greater his and Jas’s chances of receiving reinforcements. Panting from exertion, Rom blinked sweat from his eyes. Victory depended on him and Jas. This time he had no choice. Together, they must fight.
Perhaps, he thought, that was what the Great Mother had intended all along.
“Crush the darkness!” he roared, his senses unnaturally acute, heightened by shock and proximity to death. Jas’s thoughts, her fear and exhilaration, ebbed and flowed with his, mirroring the eerily beautiful dance he remembered from Balkanor. They blasted away at the cruiser’s defenses and most of the weapons the enemy ship hurled at them. But they took hits, hard ones, damaging their shields. Rom’s hopes of getting Jas out of this alive eroded. They were weakening. They couldn’t go on much longer.
Abruptly Sharron’s four remaining starfighters detonated in front of them. The intense display of pyrotechnics made lights dance before his eyes.
Rom whooped. “What a shot!”
Jas gasped. “Try to warn me next time.”
“That wasn’t you?”
“I thought it was you!”
Rom jerked his attention to his viewscreen. The Quillie was screaming toward them from one quadrant, and Mistraal’s fleet from the other. “Looks like we have company.”
“Woo-hoo!”
In moments, the engagement escalated from doomed skirmish to an emotionally charged battle. The odds were even. Missiles were exchanged. Relativistic bomblets. Deadly smart-dust that detonated on impact. Someone’s shot—his? Jas’s?—tore though the already weakened cruiser’s hull. The trillidium surface peeled back like fish skin, exposing its inner core. The cruiser erupted into a glorious blossom of energy so intense it seemed to ignite space itself.
Rom stared at the fireball long after it dwindled into tiny, unsurvivable bits. Then he tipped his head back against his seat, his muscles shaking with relief and exhaustion. He had lived this moment once before, on Balkanor, when he thought he’d killed Sharron. Only this time he knew it was true. The coldness, the evil he’d sensed during the battle, was gone.
Sharron had ceased to exist.
Once back at the palace, Rom was swept into the shuttle bay’s antechamber along with a sea of disheveled, exhausted soldiers, men whose battles were ordinarily confined to the Bajha arena. But numbing grief had already subdued their triumph. Forty thousand people were dead.
He pushed his way through the crowd until he found Jas. She cried out and ran into his arms.
He lifted her to him, finding her with his mouth, shuddering with the raw emotion in their all-too-brief embrace. As the crowd jostled around them, he clamped his hands to either side of her face and gazed intently into her eyes. “You remembered. You remembered Balkanor.”
“Yes,” she whispered, her eyes shimmering with tears. “When I realized it was Sharron out there, and you were about to face him alone, my thoughts…imploded. I don’t know how else to describe it. Words came into my head…images.”
She paused to take a breath. “You’re the man in the desert; it was you I always searched for, but couldn’t find. Because I never meant to leave you there, wherever it was we were. Never. Do you understand? I was taken from you when I was rescued—when I woke up after being unconscious. My God, after all these years, the dream finally makes sense. My life makes sense.”
He closed his eyes as she swept kisses along his jaw. The old memories overtook him then, swirling like grit in a sudden sandstorm, recollections of his first year of exile, how his obsession with the Balkanor angel had enabled him to dig in his heels when loneliness and guilt had pushed him to the precipice of despair. I never meant to leave you.
“If only you knew what those words mean to me, Inajh d’anah,” he whispered. Not trusting his emotions, he caught her around the waist, pinning her to him as they merged back into the crowd of returning pilots.
The massive doors to the dining hall slammed open. “Ajha, ajha!” Exclamations of shock and surprise preceded them into the enormous chamber, where Joren awaited them. Music hushed. Plates crashed to the floor.
Rom released Jas and walked to his brother-in-law.
“Is it true?” Joren demanded.
“Yes. The orbital city, the mining colonies, all gone.”
There were gasps and muttered prayers.
Rom raised his voice. “It was deliberate, premeditated.”
Joren recoiled, as if the concept was too grotesque to contemplate. “Go on.”
“Sharron used the Tjhu’nami to cloak his attack.”
“And now he’s dead.”
“Yes,” Rom said. “The surviving ships jumped to hyperspace.”
Joren swore under his breath. “Now we’ve lost them.”
“No, we haven’t, my lord,” a new voice said.
Intrigued, Jas glanced over her shoulder. Gann stepped past, Muffin behind him. They looked rumpled and worn out. Gann’s forehead was bruised, and he was favoring his right ankle. Unconsciously she pressed her palm to her sore stomach.
Gann straightened under Joren’s scrutiny. “Gann of the Quillie, my lord, inbound from Karma Prime to see Rom B’kah.”
“You had help?” Joren prompted.
“Yes. A cruiser. Class-six. They picked up a distress call from one of the mining colonies, as we did, and came straightaway. We both detected the enemy vessels as they transmitted coordinates to make their jump. Had but seconds to decide—the class-six was the better ship to track them out of the system, so I brought the Quillie here. We came in as the battle was under way.”
“So the cruiser’s trailing them?” Joren asked.
“Yes, my lord.”
Rom drummed his fingers on his upper arms. “A class-six. I wonder who they are. Merchants, you suppose?”
“No. Vash Nadah.” Gann appeared uneasy. “Rom, it was a B’kah ship.”
Chapter Nineteen
Visibly shaken, Rom stepped toward the exit. “We shall discuss this privately.” Joren, Gann, and Muffin trailed him, along with several guards. Jas hung back for a heartbeat. Di and the other women appeared stricken, but none seemed remotely interested in following. In that moment, the culture gap between them seemed enormous. She ran into the corridor as Rom spun around, clearly looking for her.
He waited until she caught up. “We have fought side by side since the beginning. We won’t stop now.” Pointedly, he settled her hand over the crook of his arm and resumed his long strides.
They entered a room with two conference tables arranged in concentric circles. Then the visiting diplomats—those who had been lucky enough to be in the palace and not the space-city—filed in, their shoulders bowed as if they bore lead weights. Soon the room was filled to overflowing. Jas edged toward a window to inhale fresh air. The pale blue sky was streaked
with contrails. Ships that had weathered the storm in underground hangers were soaring beyond the atmosphere to view the aftermath of the attack, while communications personnel hunted for signals sent back from the B’kah ship trailing the surviving attackers.
The day wore on. After a brief visit with the Dars’ surgeon to treat her reinjured abdomen, Jas returned to the conference room.
Rom brooded, sitting by her side, while officials who ran palace intelligence came and went, asking them questions and entering the data in their handheld computers. Some gazed at her with a mixture of curiosity and awe. News of her decisive role in the battle had spread.
“Lord Dar, sir!” A strapping young man entered the conference room, gripping a starfighter pilot helmet in his hands. He bowed in front of Joren. “Wing Commander Ben e’ Dar requests permission to speak.”
“Proceed,” Joren said.
“Our tests indicate that antimatter detonations indeed destroyed the city.”
Several gasps emanated from the crowd.
“An entire city.” Joren peered around the room. “And dozens of ships carrying respected members of our Great Council. All killed in a cowardly terrorist attack carried out with banned weaponry.” Joren glanced at Rom. Jas saw a silent signal pass between them. Then Rom nodded curtly and addressed the group.
“Sharron vowed he’d bring his war to the Vash homeworlds. And he has. Yes, he is now dead. But his people will carry out his wish to destroy us all.”
The diplomats and surviving Council members began to murmur among themselves. Joren silenced them. “They are more ruthless and more relentless than we ever grasped. It is time we paid heed to Romlijhian’s warning—one he gave us twenty years ago. This man owes us nothing. This man has every right to leave us to our closed-mindedness, our stubbornness in not acting intelligently to end such an appalling threat. But he has not.”
Joren’s black-and-gold tunic shimmered as he faced Rom. “You are the heir of the exalted Romjha, our light in the dark. We await your orders, Lord B’kah.” He fell to one knee and bowed his head. One by one, others, though not all, followed suit.
