Elite Starfighter, Game 3 by Grace Goodwin

3

Lily, Moon Base Arturri, Mission Briefing Room

Exhausted wasthe right word for my state of being.

Sated.

Sore.

Happy.

Those were all brilliant words. As was nervous.

Nervous. There was a word. I was walking into a roomful of alien warriors from another planet who expected me to be one of them.

I was a librarian. A brilliant librarian, but still, I’d spent more time with books than with people. Any more than two or three people in a room was a rock concert as far as I was concerned.

So, of course there was standing room only in the briefing room, except for the two conspicuously empty seats in the front row. Which was just bloody brilliant if I wanted to be stared at, inspected and watched by every single person in the room.

Cue the drumroll please. Here is the freak from Earth. Oh, and if her hair is a mess, she’s wearing no makeup, and she looks like she had no sleep because her new pair bond spent the entire night literally fucking every single functional brain cell out of her body? Please do the polite thing and pretend not to notice.

Meanwhile I would try like hell to pretend that did not accurately sum up my life for the last twenty-four hours.

“Welcome back, Darius.” A tall, stunning redheaded female placed her hand on Darius’s shoulder as he led the way around the front of the room so we could wind our way to our chairs.

“Thanks, Bantia. Ulixes.” Darius inclined his chin to a tall, gorgeously dark male who stood next to her. They both wore Elite Starfighter uniforms exactly like the ones Darius and I were now wearing.

I heard Darius’s name more than a dozen times as those gathered quietly welcomed him back into the fold.

But welcome back? As in, Darius was here before? Had he been a Titan?

Who was his partner? His pair-bonded mate? And where was she now?

Had he gotten tired of her and dumped her for me? Was that a possible outcome for us as well? Sorry, Lily, you don’t meet my expectations. Moving on…

The thought made me shudder, not with fear but with dread. Failing to meet expectations was one of my specialties. Just ask my mother.

Maybe his last pair bond was dead. Not saying that was a better outcome, but there was a small part of me that would rather just cease to exist than go through the humiliation of failing at being a Starfighter in real life. Failing Darius. Not being good enough. I’d had enough of that in my life, thank you very much.

Swallowing my nerves, I tried to focus on the here and now. This was an important meeting. All the Starfighter Titans were here. Two generals were here. I was an important person now. I had a job to do. A job that mattered.

Just like in the game, this was just my next mission with Darius. But this was even better. Real Darius. With real hands and real lips and those dark bedroom eyes making me feel like he was going to pounce and devour me.

I wanted more of that. And if I had to climb into a machine and go kick some ass to get more, that’s what I would do. I had squeezed myself into the surprisingly flattering Elite Starfighter uniform with the silver swirl insignia on the chest. That design matched the dark swirl of the cipher implant site on my neck. And that matched Darius’s mark, the Elite Starfighter mark everyone in the room seemed to carry.

According to what Darius had told me on the short walk to the meeting, there were Titan teams stationed on the Arturri moon base as well as General Jennix, commander of the Elite Starfighter mission control specialists. General Aryk and the Elite Starfighter pilots were reportedly running IPBM—Interplanetary Ballistic Missile—patrols as well as helping root out pockets of Dark Fleet resistance on the colony planet of Xenon.

Darius held out my seat and then settled beside me, glaring at anyone who looked like they were even thinking about talking to either one of us.

What was his problem? Was this supposed to be his version of acting protective? Because as far as I was concerned, he was being disrespectful and rude to everyone in the room but me. Flattering, in a dysfunctional way, but he appeared to have the manners of a randy goat. I could just hear my mother’s scandalized gasp of disapproval all the way from Earth.

“What is your problem?” I whispered. “Stop glaring at everyone.”

“There is no problem.” Darius answered me, but his gaze continued to scan the room for something. Assassins? Someone he owed money? I had no idea what the hell was going on.

“Take your seats and quiet down.” Bantia’s voice carried well, and there was no doubting the respect shown her by everyone in the room. “General Romulus is waiting to give us a mission briefing from his location onboard the Battleship Resolution.”

They dimmed the lights, and I leaned in closer to Darius so I could whisper in his ear. “And welcome back? What did she mean, welcome back?”

Darius stiffened next to me, and I caught the alert gaze of Ulixes watching us. “It’s not important.”

I was not a fool, but I did not want to make a scene. I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back in my chair as the face of the Velerion General Romulus filled the screen. His voice was deep, his gaze direct. There were lines of exhaustion around his dark eyes and full lips. It was impossible to determine his age. He could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty years old. His face filled the once-blank space on the wall, and he appeared to be staring straight at me.

“Can he see us?” I asked Darius.

“Yes.”

Brilliant. I should have packed some waterproof mascara and blush. With my pale skin I looked like a vanilla muffin that needed a bit more browning time in the oven. Half-baked and soft in the middle. Hell, soft everywhere. I was no warrior. I only played one in my video game.

“Welcome, Starfighters. I am pleased to introduce Titan Team Seven, Darius of Velerion, whom you should all remember, and his newly pair-bonded mate, Lily Wilson from Earth.”

The room erupted into applause and shouts of excitement as we were formally introduced to the rest of the Starfighters. When the brief round of cheers quieted, General Romulus continued.

“We welcome you both to the fight to defeat Queen Raya of Xandrax and her Dark Fleet allies.”

With his next breath he launched into a fifteen-minute recap of their last mission where, apparently, Mia—my friend Mia—had saved the day like a real-life superhero. According to the general, bad guys had taken over a Velerion colony, enslaved the people, and forced them to use their factories to make a bunch of planet-destroying missiles, which had then been fired at both Velerion and Earth.

What the hell?

Why were they attacking Earth? We weren’t part of this alien war.

Were we?

I breathed a sigh of relief when General Romulus shared that both missiles had been destroyed before reaching their destinations and that Elite Starfighter pilots continued to run around-the-clock patrols to intercept more.

Hence the reason I had yet to see Jamie. Assuming she was really here as Mia had claimed when she texted me.

The general displayed ship locations, planetary orbits that were identical to the fictional planets in the game. I had seen all of this before, in a headset back on Earth.

However, if I’d had any doubt that this was a real war, they were gone when he finished speaking. Either this was real, or I was in a coma somewhere back on Earth drooling on my straitjacket.

“Any questions?” Ulixes asked those assembled as he stepped forward. No one spoke.

“Good. Now, your mission, Titan Teams, is to infiltrate and destroy one of the few remaining underground facilities controlled by Queen Raya’s forces on Xenon. We have cleared ninety percent of the planet’s surface; however, we continue to encounter resistance. The facility we will destroy was built after occupation. The structure is heavily armored and has extensive ground defense weapons. We have our Starfighter MCS teams working on a jamming system that may blind the targeting computers; however, that will not prevent manual operation.”

“How many?” Darius asked.

“Twenty aboveground turrets have been identified so far, but there may be more.”

A few grunts were the only indication I had of whether twenty was an average number. During missions in the game—training simulation- I had to stop thinking of it as a game—during the training simulations, twenty would have been an above-average defense for one facility.

“Get your Titans ready, Starfighters. Shuttle pilots are on their way from Eos Station now to give you a ride. Mission specifics have been loaded into your Titans. I expect you all to be experts on that facility by the time you drop.”

Bantia raised both hands above her head and yelled out, “Two hours, Titans.”

Holy shit. I was going on my first mission in two hours? I hadn’t even seen a Titan in real life yet. What if I didn’t know how to work it? What if it was different?

“Ground and pound,” someone spoke behind me.

All the Titans in the room lifted a fist and slammed it down on the table in front of them in a unified boom.

Just. Like. The. Training. Simulation.

The room cleared quickly as I stared at the now blank wall in front of us. For the first time since Darius had knocked on my door, this felt real.

Like I might die, I might get hurt…I might have to kill someone, real.

Darius watched me in silence until we were alone. He reached forward and touched my cheek with his fingers. “Are you all right?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

He leaned in and kissed me until I melted.

“That’s better.” Forehead pressed to mine, he stared into my eyes. “Ready to climb into your Titan?”