“Shit, shit, shit! What the fuck was that missile?! Why are my shields dead?” Bea yelled over the alerts, one hand gripping the ship’s controls while the other one scrolled through heaps of errors and warnings.
[War-r-ning. Sys-t-tem breach de-detected. Initiating emergency core shut-t down in o-one hundred seconds-s…]
“Fuck! Darren, this is not good!” Bea whipped her head back, fear contorting her features. “We need to jump now!” she said and pressed the Maine’s controls forward. The shipaccelerated so fast, Aiden’s stomach lurched up and stayed there. “Nyle, what the fuck is going on? What did they hit me with?”
“Bea! You nee—”Nyle’s voice rang through Aiden’s earpiece, scrambled and barely legible.“—J-drive online be—system… shut down! What—shot at you… fucking bad! We—jump… thirty seconds! You need to go—”
The screech of static cut Nyle off. Aiden winced and covered with ears, gritting his teeth as he tapped the little device off.
“Bea!” Darren yelled over the noise, which was also coming out of the ship’s speakers. “Get the drive online! We are jumping now!”
Bea muted the speakers, flicked through some more menus and switched to fully manual control of the Maine. All the warnings and alerts stopped and the red emergency lights switched back to the normal ones. The hum of the engine grew louder with every blur of a rock outside the viewport and Aiden could tell there was something different about it. It still had the familiar pattern to it, the melodic rhythm, but it was slightly higher-pitched, and the ups and downs were less evenly spaced.
A barrage of blue missiles flew past the Maine as Bea did another sharp tilt, crashing into the drifting half-intact body of an old asteroid probe and blowing it up. Dust and rock particles flew everywhere.
“Okay! This is it! I’m dropping the shuttle now! Hopefully it will be enough to trick Marcus into thinking we crashed,” Bea announced, leaving the explosion behind. Another one followed, but Aiden didn’t even see it, the only indication it happened the activity reading on the central console. “Darreeen, it’s now or never!”
Darren’s fingers tightened around Aiden’s, and he brought their hands to his lips. “Make the jump, Bea,” he said calmly, locking his gaze on Aiden and placing a kiss on his knuckles.
“Here goes nothing!” Bea cackled just as the Maine’s AI announced the jump had been initiated.
Aiden glanced out, his timing coinciding with the Maine clearing the Moon’s debris field. The black stillness of space engulfed the ship from all sides, and for a moment it was just that, the Maine rocking gently through that celestial darkness. But then Aiden’s heart took its next beat and the world suddenly crumbled, folding in on itself around him first and then inside him as he felt every individual cell of his body break down into millions of tiny pieces.
The pain of it was excruciating and all-encompassing, like no pain he’d ever experienced. It was internal and external at the same time, a contradiction of sensations coursing through and around him that he couldn’t fully comprehend. It was like suffocating and taking a deep breath concurrently, like being cut apart and being glued together simultaneously. It just kept going and going for what felt like forever, a hell Aiden wanted to make stop because it was too much and too torturous and a thousand times worse than any kind of death Marcus would’ve given him. No matter how much he wished it to end though, it didn’t. It just looped over and over again until he couldn’t tell anymore if he felt anything or he’d simply ceased to exist.
The sense of dread and finality that came with that thought started to settle in and then he feltit. A flicker of something so familiar and dear, it filled him with joy and contentment. It was faint at first, but then it spread and grew until it concentrated in one spot right where he imagined his heart was. From there, it solidified and so did his body, the process as painful as the one that had torn him apart.
This time though, the warmth and the sense of belonging that came with it made it bearable. Exciting. Profound. And when the merciless pain dissipated entirely after what felt like a second and, simultaneously, an eternity later, all that Aidencould feel was the grounding force of Darren’s touch as his hand found Aiden’s and held it.
“Darren,” Aiden whispered and opened his eyes without actually opening them as the world took shape again. From the formless and colorless place that Aiden was in, the Maine’s cockpit emerged as if it had never disappeared, and along with it so did Bea and Darren, both of them looking just as disoriented as Aiden felt.
“I’m here,” Darren muttered, his entrancing eyes taking all of Aiden in. Mapping him, studying him, as if to make sure it really was him. Only when they were sure he was real, did they refocus on the rest of the world. “Aiden, look,” Darren said and smiled, the midnight in his gaze shifting to that mesmerizing rich purple as he looked straight ahead and light from whatever was there lit up his face.
Aiden took a moment to etch that into memory and then turned around too, curious to see what had Darren’s expression shift to such wonder. He spared Bea only a heartbeat, a second in which his brain made sure she was fine, and then a sense of fundamental awe sparked inside him as he took in what lay on the other side of the Maine’s viewport.
There, just in front of them, George’s cruisers drifted unhurriedly through space on the backdrop of two yellow dwarfs.
