The Star King (28 page)

"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 star-fighter 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.