Page 23 of Radiant Exception
And when everything happened on Enceladus, I hadn’t thought I would make it out alive. For most people in that situation, it would’ve left them regretting all their life decisions or the things they hadn’t accomplished. For me, it felt inevitable to die in action, and although I’d welcome death when it came for me, it wasn’t myself that I was fearful for, but for my men.
Since coming back, it almost felt as though a part of me was trapped on that godforsaken rock. I didn’t even know what was left of me. I’d been floating around like a zombie for most of the time since then, shuffled from one press gathering to another for a while, and then it was Darren who had suggested I needed purpose. It was Darren who had told me I should consider getting my own ship,positing that I could negotiate a higher severance from the military to use as a down payment. And so that’s what I’d done. I didn’t have to think about it, I’d just continued to follow others, instead of making my own decisions…instead of really thinking about what I wanted out of life, because wanting was dangerous, just like hope.
And being next to Lark made me want things.
It made me want to know what she’d feel like underneath me. It made me want to understand what it would be like to be in a real relationship—a true partnership with someone. What did it feel like to love someone and be loved in return? I’d never loved anyone romantically, and I’d never given a woman the opportunity to fall for me. Love was something other people had or wanted. And I told myself I shouldn’t want anything.
However, it didn’t stop there. Lark was stirring feelings of need. Those were too heavy to explore more. The wanting was bad enough. I couldn’t need her, or anyone. Because once you needed someone…that was when they left. And I couldn’t bear for anyone else to leave…they all had. There was nobody left.
As slowly and as silently as possible, I began to extricate myself from Lark’s hold, praying she wouldn’t wake up and realize what was going on. Luck was on my side, and after a few pained moments, made trickier with a numb arm, I was able to silently roll off the bed and get to the bathroom without rousing her.
It was still over an hour until her alarm would go off, and I didn’t want to disturb her sleep.
I needed a cold shower and distance between myself and Lark. I didn’t like wallowing or allowing myself to sink into the past, butpicturing her lying in my bed had me wondering what it would take to finally clear away the mental fog that had plagued me since I’d survived Enceladus.
Until now, I hadn’t really had a reason, but her…this mission…maybe they were exactly the motivation that I needed to finally sort through my shit and figure out, once and for all, what I wanted the future to look like for me…to allow myself to want something.
I knew immediately upon entering the bridge that something was wrong.
Jordan was frozen at her station, staring at a newsfeed she had pulled up on the big monitor covering the windscreen of the ship.
The feed was frantic, bouncing back and forth between reporters in a studio and out in the field and cutting to footage of chaos and carnage.
The chyron on the bottom of the screen read, “Oberon Terrorist Attack Linked to Meridian.”
My heart dropped.
Silently, I placed my hand on Jordan’s shoulder.
Slowly, she turned to look up at me, her eyes glassy with tears. Showing any emotion was such a rare occurrence for her, so seeing her upset nearly broke me. She was the strong one. And if even Jordan was heartbroken, what hope did that leave for the rest of us?
Like me, she’d lost so much to Meridian. Even a single life was too much, let alone what we were witnessing in real time, not to mention all the lives that had already been sacrificed.
“It happened a couple hours ago. I didn’t want to wake you, if you were actually getting any sleep.” She wiped the tears from her eyes before they could roll down her cheeks, and straightened her posture, protectively going back into her first-officer mode, an easy defense mechanism of retreat.
Oberon, a satellite of Uranus, was mostly set up as a mining station, with all sorts of valuable minerals and materials being pulled out for use across the system. The news reports showed that it was the largest mine and several of the ancillary mines with the most valuable resources that had been targeted.
And whether or not Meridian had already taken credit for the assault, it would be everyone’s first assumption because Oberon was owned by a rival syndicate and was the source of said rival’s funding.
While most of the coverage spoke to all the money that would be lost and dove into what little was known about the complex and mysterious origins of Meridian and how the organization had risen from the ashes as a result of the Phoenix’s infusion of cash and strategic leadership, it angered me that the casualties were being completely glossed over…simply reduced to a general number: thousands.
Growing up as an orphan, I knew early on that a path in the military was the best chance I had to make money, but it came with the high risk of not making it out alive, and the knowledge that I would struggle through every moment of service.
Because those without a family business to go into, or other financial resources, were inevitably forced into manual labor, like the miners and workers on Oberon. Seen as the worst jobs in the system, the workers rarely returned, or if they did, it was with a severely limited lifespan or injuries. Nobody went into those mines if they had another option.
So thosethousandsthe news was casually referring to had suffered for years, maybe even decades, only to be killed without reason, and weren’t even given the respect of being acknowledged as more than a group of people to be forgotten as a simple number or statistic.
It was infuriating.
I felt my breath cut short in my lungs as I found it hard to suck in any air.
My shoulder began to ache, right where it had been crushed on Enceladus, and my head pounded. The smell of smoke filled my mouth, and my ears began to ring with the cries of my men, suffering worse injuries than I had while trying to evacuate civilians, despite us being instructed to abandon them.
“Captain.” Jordan stood from her station and grabbed onto my arm at the exact moment my knees buckled and I crumpled to the floor, gasping for breath, but only finding smoke.
“You are on theRadiant,” she told me calmly, squeezing my good shoulder. But her voice was tinny and far away, and difficult to hear through the sounds of agony around me.
“You are safe. You are not on Enceladus.” Her tone was more forceful—louder than before, and I heard it just a bit more clearly. “I need you to listen to me and breathe with me.”
