Elite Starfighter, Game 3 by Grace Goodwin

13

Darius, Titan Tycho

I watchedLily climb inside her borrowed Titan and breathed a sigh of relief that she had not sought me out. Well, not me, but Dea, the Starfighter who was supposed to be on this mission.

Dea herself had helped me sneak on board the shuttle in the dark hours of the night. We’d swapped Titans so she could take Intrepidus on her newly assigned mission on Velerion while Tycho and I took her place out here. With Lily. My stubborn, beautiful pair-bonded female.

The launch sequence commenced and the Titan shot off the rail system as fast as I’d ever seen. I stood in the view room and waited until she’d confirmed her coordinates and fired her boosters.

There was no turning back now. For either of us.

She was mine. I was a fool. I’d humiliated her without realizing my mistake. Made her feel that I lacked confidence in her abilities when the opposite was true. She was strong. An excellent fighter. Fearless.

Just like my brother had been.

I was the one who was weak. Afraid to lose her. And yet, my need to keep her safe had driven her from my side, out here, to the most dangerous Titan mission ever attempted.

Somewhere out there were two other shuttles with two Titans on each. Bantia and Ulixes on one. A bonded pair I did not know well on the other. And if any one of our teams failed, Velerion would fall to Queen Raya and the Dark Fleet.

There were few things I was willing to die to protect. Lily was first. But second was my home. My planet. My people. We could not fail.

“Load up, Starfighter. We are approaching your launch coordinates.”

I nodded at the shuttle crew member as she walked by and made my way toward Tycho.

After climbing inside, I waited for the rail system to lift me into the launch position. My Titan swayed.

“Starfighter, loading has commenced.”

“Copy. Ready to load.”

I watched the inner support structures of the launch bay sway before my eyes. There was no change in gravity, or lack of. The only indication of my movement was the shifting position of the shuttle’s walls.

Fighting back the urge to bark at them to hurry the fuck up and get me to Lily, I bit my tongue.

“Launch sequence has commenced. Launch in ten…...five, four, three, two, one, launch.”

I closed my eyes as my display screens showed streaks of light moving past, the tiny pinpricks of light from distant stars had become lines of white in my peripheral vision.

“Tycho, check out coordinates and launch trajectory. Confirm our position and send it to the shuttle crew.”

A few seconds later my Titan responded. “Trajectory confirmed. Ready for booster burn.”

“Good luck, Starfighter.” The shuttle crew was nothing more than a dot on my monitors now.

“You too. See you on Velerion. Going dark.”

Tycho shut down our communications and non-vital systems so we could come up on the Cruiser with as little detectable noise as possible. I wasn’t sure this wild scheme of Mia’s was going to work, but no one had come up with a better plan and anything was better than sitting on Arturri waiting for Queen Raya’s armada to come and destroy our entire civilization.

And then there was Lily. She was out here somewhere. Alone. Angry with me. Hurting. I had done that with my obsessive urge to protect her. I needed to apologize, explain, get her naked and make her come over and over until she gave me another chance.

“Darius? Shall I fire boosters?” Tychoasked. He’d been silently waiting for my command.

“Increase thrust by five percent. I don’t want Lily on that Cruiser alone.”

“Five percent. Acceptable. However, our reserves will be on the red line.”

“Understood.” Red line meant I’d be running on luck and prayers if I needed to use them again. Red line was usually good for one adjustment or jump on the ground, but not much else.

I didn’t care, as long as I made it to Lily’s side, where I belonged.

Tychofired the booster and I stared out into space for the journey, eyes open but seeing nothing. Thoughts of Lily consumed me. The soft curves of her skin. The way she tangled her fingers in my hair when I pleasured her with my mouth. The hot, wet heat of her clamping down on my cock when she came. The sounds she made.

Her voice. Her smile. The adorable crispness of her speech. She sounded nothing like the other two human females. Her tone was clear. Concise. I loved the way her cheeks turned pink when I teased her. And her obsession with her books.

I’d recovered the two she had placed in the recycling unit. Read every word last night. Had to use my hand to find release more than once as the dominant beasts in her stories claimed their human females. One claiming in particular caught my interest and I fully intended to speak to Lily about it once she was speaking to me again. Allowing me to touch her.

This time, I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. She was a Starfighter. An Elite warrior trained to fight to protect Velerion and our people. I could not deny her that power in a bid to keep her safe any more than I could order General Romulus to stop being a general. I’d made peace with that and determined my only course of action going forward.

I would stay by Lily’s side. Always. Every mission. We would face every threat, every danger together. And if she died, her life would only be taken once I’d already given mine fighting to protect her.

That was a decision I could live with.

The silence stretched for long hours. Perhaps I dozed off. Perhaps my musings about my female made the time pass quickly, but Tycho alerted me to our arrival a short time later.

“We are five minutes from our destination.”

“Copy that. Give me visuals.”

A nav grid popped up on my screen and I frowned. Squinted. “You have the wrong vid up, Tycho. Switch to a live camera feed.”

“Affirmative. This is the live feed.”

What. The. Fuck? This was not possible. “Is that a Dark Fleet Battlestar?”

The nav grid screen shifted and the small black star I’d seen in the center of the screen grew in scope to be equal in size to my face. “Based on the camera evidence, there is a high likelihood that the structure is a Battlestar. Class Seven. Twelve thousand ground troops, four hundred eighty Scythe fighters. Twelve detachable assault towers. That is all the data I have. I cannot confirm that data without scanning the ship. There has never been a Battlestar in the Vega system before.”

That, I knew. This was not good.

“Where is Lily?”

“Unknown. Do you want me to activate my scanners?”

“No!” Fuck no. We’d be dead in seconds. This was no half-century old Cruiser from Queen Raya’s fleet. That would have been bad enough. This was so much worse. A planet killer. Twelve ships traveling as one designed to break into pieces, surround a planet, block all transmissions, jam all signals in and out as their ship mounted cannons destroyed thousands of targets on the ground below. Followed by ground troop invasion with air support. Of course, they didn't send in their soldiers until there was no resistance left.

“Are we on target?”

“Yes. Impact in two minutes.”

“Vega help us. We’re in trouble here.” I wasn’t sure how much Tychounderstood about our situation, but I didn’t have to tell him to activate our grappling claws or tighten my flight suit in preparation for impact. “Give me a countdown when we’re close.”

I didn’t have long to wait.

“Three. Two. One.”

The Titan slammed into the dark black panel near a structural point attaching three of the twelve spikes to the core. I nearly lost consciousness as the force of impact hit me like a boulder in the chest despite Tycho’s automatic adjustments. Rather than strike head on, my Titan rolled, the mechanical arms redirecting our armored body in a way to minimize contact as the grappling claws dug deep and slowed us down.

When we finally stopped moving, I held still for several minutes taking stock of our condition. I should be dead. But the engineers, the people who figured things out, built and programmed our Titans, had pulled off a miracle and managed to get my Titan onto this ship without killing me.

I’d buy them all a drink if I made it back alive.

With a groan I felt all the way to my bones, I anchored the grappling claws of my foot deep in the ship’s surface and stood to take a look around, engaging the magboots which were designed to keep us from drifting off into space.

I was near the center connecting point for three rising assault towers. Each one black, taller than I could see, and each facet lined with too many energy cannons to get an accurate count. Each of those cannons was easily three times the size of anything we had on the Resolution. Compared to this ship, my Titan was like a microbe standing up to inspect a mountain.

“Tycho, are you getting this? General Aryk is going to want every bit of intel we can get him on these ships.” Assuming he was still alive in a few hours. But I kept that thought to myself.

“Confirmed. I am recording and archiving all data.”

Well, that was something. “Have you found Lily?”

“Negative.”

I had to find her. Now that I knew what she--we--were up against, working as a team was going to be more important than ever.

“Do we have enough firepower to destroy this ship?”

“Negative. However, if the Titan Bellator has retained its full ordnance, the combined force would do significant damage if the charges were strategically placed.”

That’s what I’d been afraid of. “Hold that thought. I’m going to climb, go to higher ground. Number one priority is locating the Bellator.”

“Understood.”

Using my Titan’s claws, I climbed toward an energy cannon about a third of the way up the structure’s side.

“Stop, Darius. I have located the Bellator.”

“Where?”

Tycho replaced my forward camera feed with a panoramic view and zoomed in on movement on a neighboring tower. Lily was there, running.

Seconds later, she leaped, propelling herself without grappling hook or claws, toward the core.

“Lily!” What the fuck was she doing?

And then I saw the attack drones chasing her.

“Do we know anything about those drones?” I held on to my calm by a thread. I had to trust Lily. She’d been right all along.

Tychochanged my view again to focus on the tip of the structure I’d climbed. “Negative. I suspect they are programmed to remove debris and repair the hull should the ship take any damage.”

“You’re guessing.”

“I am. But we will know soon enough.”

I looked up to find half a dozen drones closing in. And I’d lost track of Lily.

She was gone.