Chapter 14

Thrusting the gemstone into his utility belt, Luc spun to face the approaching ship. Another vessel in the Void could only be there for purposes as nefarious as their own.

And his first glimpse of the newcomer didn’t change that kneejerk assessment.

“It’s a raider ship,” he said grimly. “Get back to the Blissed.”

For once, Amy did as he ordered. Although her plaintive voice came through his helmet. “A raider ship?”

He slapped the auto return sequence on his booster pack, raising his voice over the harsh sound of her breathing as they accelerated. “They aren’t responding to the passage token, and the dat-pad indicates the ship’s identification is returning as forged. Raider ship.”

And now that they knew Octiron wasn’t going to save them…

He slammed through the hatch of the Blissed, and Amy staggered as the gravity grabbed at their boots. But she righted herself quickly, which was good because he didn’t have time to steady her. The hatch had barely sealed when he was stripping out of his EVA suit and reaching for the controls. “Engines hot,” he barked. “Come about hard.”

Even as the gravity fluctuated, struggling to keep up with the sudden change in acceleration, the Blissed shuddered and keeled over hard. A terrible clang, like a broken version of the beautiful note that hummed through the Body’s Hunger, tore through the ship.

“What—?” Amy gasped.

Luc staggered toward the cockpit. “They’re firing on us.”

“Plasma cannon discharge detected,” the ship’s automatic comm announced calmly. “Honeymooners, please remove yourself from this area of conflict and return to your bliss.”

If only. Luc swore under his breath. He threw himself into the pilot seat, Amy a half second behind him.

“Engines still at one hundred percent,” she reported. “They hit the water reclamation unit that vented into space. That’s what threw us so hard to the side.”

Good thing too. If the cruiser had been in its proper configuration, their engines would’ve been disabled. Now they’d just have to shower together to conserve water…

He jammed the engines into full burn, and the little Blissed leaped forward. “Since when do you know how to read the copilot panel?” He clenched the throttle hard, as if he could strangle a few faster bursts from the engine.

“I thought I wasn’t smart enough to learn stuff like this.” Her hands flew across the controls. “I guess I just never had the right motivation.”

He grinned at her fiercely. “Like not dying in deep space?”

“The Firestorm Queen’s Diadem is ours,” she growled.

His inner drakling roared in approval.

Unfortunately, that didn’t make the little pleasure cruiser any faster. In their viewport, a vicious sulfur yellow beam stabbed toward them.

“Tangler,” Luc said sharply. “If they even graze us, they could short out our systems. And us too, probably.”

“Brace for evasive maneuvers,” the ship said with serene complacence. “And always remember to say you love each other.”

“Oh my god,” Amy hissed. “Shut up.”

“When arguing, it’s important to modulate your voice and speak with kindness,” the ship informed her as they banked hard enough to toss them in their seats. “One of the keys to a successful relationship is knowing how to disagree fairly.”

“I think we can all agree we’re larfed,” she snapped.

“Negative judgments are no way to begin a marriage,” the ship opined. “Also, there is a second unmarked, anonymous ship approaching.”

“Now we are really larfed,” Luc said. To his surprise, his pulse was steady as he mentally calculated the rapidly diminishing escape vector for the Blissed between the two ships. But when he thought of what might happen to Amy, his blood congealed in his veins. The pleasure cruiser had an escape pod but no one would find her out here in Jessup Void, and that assumed the raiders didn’t just grab her.

“We’ll offer them the gems,” he said.

“No.” Amy twisted in her chair to face him. “They haven’t tried to open a comm. They fired on us without even making a play. They aren’t going to just take the gems and go away nicely.”

“Firing plasma cannons is considered rude,” the ship confirmed.

Luc grimaced as he triggered the override on the Blissed’s data core and shot the narrowing gap between the pursuing ship and the oncoming one. Alarms blared, but his calculations were correct and the other two ships had to scramble to avoid a collision course as the Blissed slipped past them.

The first raider wheeled away. And the second ship fired.

On the first raider.

Amy sputtered, her hands flying over the copilot board. “It’s Idrin.”

“Who?” Luc refocused the viewport on the second ship.

“The guy who gave us the moon-brandy,” she said, “and the token. Look.”

Hazarding a glance away from the viewport, Luc checked the passage token which was installed in a comm port. It was flashing a message: a tiny holo-vid of the pale smuggler from the day spa lounge waving his arms.

Amy tapped the holographic head.

“Get out of the way!” Idrin bellowed. “I’m trying to save your larfing asses.”

Luc yanked the throttle away from the autopilot just as another jolt of tangler energy from the raider shot past their bow.

“He’s been tracking us through the token,” Luc said. “That’s how Rickster knew we had the first gem.”

“So Octiron is helping us.” Amy stared at the little holo-vid who was obviously manhandling his velocious-class scouter into an attack line against the raider. “But… Was the raider sent by Octiron too? For ratings?” She shook her head. “Who’s on our side?”

“It’s you and me,” Luc told her. “That’s it.”

“Having common hobbies is important in a successful relationship,” the ship informed them.

“I’m getting us out of here,” he said over the approving voice. “You jettison that token.”

Amy grabbed the small disk out of the comm port. “Should we stay to help Idrin?”

“The Blissed doesn’t have weapons—”

The ship interrupted. “Honeymoon cruisers are stocked with twelve massage oils, twenty-one aphrodisiacs, thirty-seven ethanol-based beverage choices—”

“And I’m not sure Idrin is a friend,” Luc finished. “Or Rickster, for that matter.”

She took a breath as if she might argue but then she nodded and strode out of the room. He waited only long enough for the airlock to beep an alarm—quickly returning to a sealed status light—before he initiated a speedy retreat from the battle behind them.

When Amy returned to the copilot seat, her brow was furrowed.

“We couldn’t help him,” Luc said, his hackles prickling at a failure she hadn’t said aloud.

She shook her head. “It’s not that. I’m just trying to figure out how this game works. Why did the producers make retrieving the first gem so dangerous? Why is Idrin helping us now? Why did they need a tracker when the whole universe is supposedly watching us?”

“I don’t know.” Luc aimed the Blissed for the far side of the nebula to lose the raiders and Idrin in the rampant radiation. “Seems like we have some more studying to do. I’m going to set an evasive course, but we need a closer look at the gems. The first one is in the bedroom, and the second is still in my EVA suit. Can you bring them here?”

She nodded and slipped out while he kept a watchful eye on their wake. They weren’t being followed, at least as far as the honeymoon cruiser’s scanners could find.

“Cannon fire and evasive maneuvers have caused elevated stress reactions in this honeymoon,” the ship informed him. “Custom recommendations include a mutual massage with scented oil number three and fewer encounters with raiders.”

Luc rolled his eyes. “I’m taking notes.”

He wasn’t even being completely sarcastic. As he initiated another scan for nearby vessels, he admitted that he’d been angry—no, honestly, hurt when Amy seemed more interested in the race than him. Her calculations of his value shouldn’t have surprised him, considering both his previous attempts at relationships had been more about where he ranked as an unlucky thirteen with a sizeable galactic credit account than who he was.

But he’d thought she was different, that she understood. Instead, she’d made it clear that any mating between them was only part of their teaming.

He wouldn’t make that mistake a third time.

By the time she returned, he’d almost completely convinced himself that he didn’t need anything more.

She handed him a goblet, the curl of steam carrying the sweet-tart scent of pixberries. “Tea,” she said. “And gemstones.” She placed the red-orange and yellow-green stones on the command console between their seats.

With one last glance at the comm and seeing no warnings, he leaned forward to lift their latest find. The stone was heavy in his palm, the faceted sides velvety smooth and strangely warm. Maybe it had absorbed radiation from the nebula as it floated in the Void, although his suit scan hadn’t identified any danger.

Besides earthquakes, mites, raiders, caffeine poisoning, and whatever Octiron might be throwing at them. Although he was starting to have some suspicions about that too.

Amy placed their first find on the dat-pad and punched in a command. A cool light flowed across the gem, triggering a scintillating display from the tear-drop facets. He placed his stone beside it to add to the reading.

With a deafening peal from the second gem—that perfect middle tone—the two stones fused together.

The dat-pad chimed a much more discordant warning, and the screen scrambled with a gibberish of symbols. The harsh stink of frying components filled the cockpit.

With a wheeze of alarm, Amy shoved the gems off the dat-pad. Reflexively, Luc caught them. And froze.

The light and sound of the conjoined crystals seized him as if in the grip of invisible, relentless teeth. They were calling…calling to the missing third, the Soul’s Dream, somewhere out there still…

Dimly, he was aware of Amy calling too, his name over and over.

But he wasn’t Luc Amaveo—he was the yearning blacksmith, forging a crown for his queen from her lovers’ offerings, when all he wanted was to claim the prize for his own. Not the gemstones, but the queen herself.

“Exiled, the Soul’s Dream, with only a sweet, farewell sigh,

For they had found awakening in each other’s burning eyes.”

Easy enough for the Firestorm Queen and her blacksmith to abandon the third gem in her diadem. They had each other. But the gemstones were meant to be reunited.

Amy wrenched the gems from his hand, and he slumped in his seat with a gasp.

She leaned beside him, her dark eyes wild. The partial rainbow of the diadem shone through the gap of her missing finger. “Don’t move. I’m going to space them—”

“No!” He grabbed her elbow when she stood, swinging her around.

“It’s hurting you.”

“I’ve been hurt before. I’ll get over it.” He took a slow breath, watching her for any sign that she was experiencing the same effect he had. But though she seemed rattled, she didn’t look transported into another time, place, body, and desire. “Amy, I think…”

She crouched at his knee when he hesitated. “What?”

“I think these are real.”

“Real gemstones?” Tentatively, she parted her fingers to display the joined gemstones on her palm. “You said the first one was a rare aquari crystal. This one is too?”

“No… I mean, yes, they are real gemstones.” He raised his dazzled gaze from the stones to her wide eyes. “But I think they are really the Firestorm Queen’s Prism.”

She sank to the decking on her backside, stunned. “I thought you said it was just a legend.”

“I…thought it was. But the math. The actual stones. This is real.” He swallowed. Should he tell her of the fleeting vision, the longing still reverberating in the rocks? It wasn’t radiation they’d absorbed, but raw emotion. He’d sound like a fool… “Historical artifacts,” he hedged, “from a millennium ago.”

“I can’t believe they’d scatter such a valuable prize across this galaxy.” She stared at him when he clenched his jaw. “Or…they didn’t scatter the stones. They are using us—using your calculations—to reassemble the diadem.”

He nodded. “Except I don’t think we’re really part of the Great Space Race at all.”

Her golden skin turned a sickly pale. “What?”

In the tight confines of the cockpit, he couldn’t join her on the decking and gather her in his arms. And he wasn’t sure she’d want that anyway once he explained. “Rickster is the only Octiron rep I’ve had contact with. No interviewers, no recording crew. He told me we were running too late to attend the launch party with the other competitors. And the Blissed isn’t the same as the other race ships even though they are all supposed to be equal.”

She put her fingertips over her lips. “And…and the prizes we were supposed to get, if we won?” Her voice trembled, as if the only thing stopping it from breaking was her tight-pressed fingers. “What about…going home afterward?”

Every muscle in his body tightened with the need to go to her, to wrap around her and protect her. Except he was the one who’d convinced her to play along, to stay in the race. “Amy—”

She slammed her hands down on the decking beside her, fingers spread wide. “I knew this was too good to be true.”

That he wasn’t good enough. His jaw worked. “It’s not over yet.”

She shot him a disbelieving look. “Not over? We’re not even part of it. We never had a chance.”

“We still have the Blissed. We have the signing bonus credits in my account. We have two of the three diadem gems.”

“What good does that do us?”

“You saw Rickster. Whatever else is real or not, he wants the diadem. He had Idrin following us, ready to take the stones, I suspect. Well, he’s not going to get them now, not unless we give them up. The diadem is our way out of Paragon.”

With her head bowed, her black hair fell across her closed eyes. “This was supposed to be my shot at a new life.”

Now they’d be lucky to keep their lives at all.

The honeymoon was over.