Chapter 12

Lucius slidin the last command and set the firing sequence. Now it was only a matter of waiting. He checked the readout.

For another nine minutes.

He’d been sweating by the time he’d finished, trying to beat the launch deadline had been tighter than he’d thought. His information was old and there’d been several systems upgrades since then. It had required reprogramming several of his canned routines.

For two hours he’d been working around and over the silent console operator. She’d slowly shifted from wide-eyed fear to giving him a nod in the right direction when he couldn’t find a control. The gag had also been outside his experience and he’d apologized when he told her that they’d both be better off if he didn’t touch it.

Eight minutes. He stretched his aching muscles.

That meant?—

“Syra!” Gone for over two hours. Was she dead?

He spun to the door to race into the halls and find her.

But there she was, sitting on the floor with her back against the door, watching him.

“Thank God!” She didn’t respond. Syra simply sat and looked at him with no expression for the longest time before she spoke.

“You a believer?”

Lucius had to think for a moment before he realized that she was responding to his own exclamation.

The Middle East Faceoff had been merely bloody until it went nuclear and then it was thoroughly devastating. Religion hadn’t been real popular after the decade-long nuclear winter that the conflict had caused. The Vatican was the only major religious center politically savvy enough to stay out of the fray, but a gang of renegade Episcopalians had taken them down shortly afterward. Nobody had seemed to care by that point.

“No,” Lucius shook his head. “Not really. I believe in people.”

“Are you demented?”

He shook his head.

“How can you accept…” she waved a hand toward something in another section of the Mirror Moon, but then let her hand drop. It was as if someone had drained the life out of her. It was just wrong to see her like this. He stepped over to squat down in front of her until they were eye-to-eye.

“It’s easy, Syra. Look at where you got us on this mission. You made hard decisions that I never could, but they were good ones.”

“Were they?”

“We’re here. We’re alive. It’s the cruelty of governments that baffle me, because somehow it overshadows the good deeds of people.”

“Not all people,” there were dark shadows deep in those green eyes.

He shrugged. “I’ve met the bad ones, too.”

“What do you do?”

“I don’t kill them.”

Her scowl said that he’d just put his foot in it. And in the past it was the sort of thing he’d have done. But he understood Syra better now. He understood the terror of the machine he’d just sabotaged and that it had to be stopped at any cost.

So, instead of stammering, apologizing, or wondering what to do about his lousy choice of words, he sat down beside her, leaned back against the door, and took her hand in his.

“I’m not saying that sometimes they don’t need to be killed. I’ve been thinking about that a lot over these last hours.”

“I thought you were busy programming.”

“I was multitasking.” He smiled across at her, glad that she’d retracted her helmet back into the suit. “I’m saying that killing is something I don’t do. It’s not my skill. I may hate its necessity, but you’re right. All those billions. A few more to avert a darker future is a good thing.”

“So I’m the killer. What do you do?”

He glanced at his timepiece. “This. I do this.” He slid a hand around her waist.

The program launched.

With a stomach-wrenching lurch, the room flipped on its back. He hooked a table leg with one hand and held them both in place. Her suit might be hard on the outside. In fact, he suspected that’s how everyone saw her, including herself—hard and strong through and through. But he’d seen the sadness in her eyes and knew there was so much more to Major Syra Clairborne than medals and bravado.

He kissed her as the room lurched into its new position. He wasn’t sure if the nervous flip in his stomach was due to the room or the kiss.

“What just happened?” And Syra’s tone said that she wasn’t sure which she was reacting to either.

“I flipped the station on edge. Just as we entered Earth shadow. Now neither reflector is facing India, but the solar collector is perfectly aimed to get maximum efficiency from the sun. It should take them a while to figure out that they can no longer see the Mirror Moon by which time we’ll be in a very different orbit.” He’d been counting seconds in the back of his mind as he spoke. “And…now!”

The station jolted hard and the floor was once again the floor.

“I just fired all of the orbit-keeping engines, except now they’re facing along Earth’s orbit instead of straight down. We’re firing them on full and diving down close to the atmosphere until we gain speed. Enough speed to break out of orbit.”

“Leaving Earth. Where are we going? You never said.”

“I’m going to park it in the one place that India can’t see.”

Syra blinked. Twice. But not a third time. Then she started laughing.

The captive still strapped in her chair on the far side of the room was barely slower, barking out a hoarse sound of surprise around the gag. Her eyes were laughing—saying that maybe she wouldn’t mind never going back to India—and that tipped Syra right over the edge.

Her own laugh shook her right down to the core. It might have been tears for a moment. For the woman who had died in the corridor. For the one bound and gagged but now aglow with the fresh energy of hope. For all those who had died in all of these pointless wars.

But at the core, it was still a laugh and that finally triumphed like it was purging her soul. When she could catch her breath, she answered her own question.

“You’re parking it out at L2 with the British habitat cans, hiding it behind Lunar Farside. We’re going to the asshole of space.”

Lucius nodded. “We’ll be out of range of the particle beam in another twenty-seven minutes. That’s all we need for them to not pay attention.”

“And if they’re paying attention?”

Lucius shrugged.

And Syra knew. Just because he was an engineer who didn’t kill people, didn’t mean that he was a man controlled by fear any more than a Marine. For twenty-seven more minutes he had accepted that they might be killed. With the reflector turned to the side, the India Beam would blast through the habitat-and-control structure mounted between the beam-reflecting mirror and the solar power-collecting one. He’d accepted the risk of death to solve the problem. Definitely her kind of man.

“Once it’s there at L2,” Lucius continued as if it was a certainty. “It will be a secondary light source for Farside. I’ll configure the reflector to gather the sun and shine it back down on the surface. The two weeks of darkness out of every Lunar month shall now become both light and a source of energy.”

It was so out of the box. It was like a brilliant military maneuver that there was no way to understand until it had been completed.

Farside hadn’t been properly set up before the Earth failures began happening. It was safe there, but the struggles to stabilize the colonies were ongoing. Having power and light shine down from the Mirror Moon rather than being trapped in the long Lunar night was going to help the tens of millions fighting to survive there.

“You did that,” she could only whisper in awe.

He shrugged easily enough, but his smile was at least a little smug—pride of ownership smug. There was modest and then there was stupid, and Roodee Lucius Markham wasn’t stupid.

“I thought it up the first time I saw it as a kid. I haven’t done anything else for the last decade except figure out how to make this happen.”

“And you did.”

“And I did.”

Syra thought about that. It was a personal drive of perseverance worthy of a Clairborne woman. Down a different path, but no less important.

“How long will it take to get there?”

“Six days.” He checked his timepiece. “And twenty-four minutes.”

She still had to interrogate and consider freeing the prisoner. Make sure the security systems were fully under their control and that no booby traps were waiting. But that wasn’t going to take six days. It would probably take less than one.

“Six days and twenty-four minutes?”

“Twenty-three now.”

“You are an engineer.”

Lucius combined a nod with a shrug of those nice shoulders.

“I can think of a lot that we can do with six days.” Her voice was whispery and happy in a way she barely recognized.

“I hope they’re the same things that I’m thinking of.”

Syra couldn’t help but smile at the tone in his voice. “Let’s just say that they’re probably along the same mission profile.”

“Good.” Lucius kissed her on the temple.

She leaned into it and marveled at how good it felt. It wasn’t a kiss of a good sexual romp, that was already a given.

No. It was a promise of so much more if she was willing. Time would tell, but once a Clairborne woman found her man, she kept him for good—just like Dad and Grandpop.

“What color is your hair?” His whisper tickled her ear.

“Same as Mom and Grandmom’s.”

He snorted a laugh. “Helpful.”

“Just the kind of woman I am. It’s even more regressive than your blond.”

“Red,” he said it like a gasp of wonder. “Red hair and green eyes.”

Which was exactly why she kept it shaved. Men always got all weird about red hair because it was so rare. But this time he’d already been on board before he found out.

“If you’re a very good boy, I might even grow it out for you.”

His kiss said that he wasn’t too good a boy. It was a very nice kiss.

She relaxed into it and let it slowly warm her body. Let it heat and melt that dark core she’d always held so close to her heart.

Lucius was bringing light to half a world.

And he was also giving it to her and she knew it would shine for a lifetime.