Chase You To The Sun Read Free Page B

richest Elite British families on Luna, but when he married Ava, his parents cut him loose.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, he’s her half-uncle, to start with, and she’s of mixed heritage – common and Elite. They had to keep their relationship a secret for quite a while,” Alen explained.
    Lana fell silent. The rebels who killed her mother had been British. Of course, they hadn’t been Brits from Earth – their resistance cell had been on Amalthea, one of Jupiter’s struggling production unit moons – but the whole experience had left her scarred and suspicious of anything that wasn’t Elite. If she was completely honest, she’d tried to avoid dealing with British commoners after her mom’s death.
    “Well, I’ll try my best to drop by if I have any time left,” she promised.
    The rest of the day flew by rather uneventfully. There was a small magnetic storm close to the asteroid belt, but Captain Blanco managed to fly them through with minimal turbulence. By the time it was nine o’clock Desidan Time, the DSD One vessel had reached Martian airspace.
    “We’ll be landing at Deimos for the night,” the captain told them, getting out of the cockpit for a short break. “It will take another hour or so to get there.”
    “That’s quick.” Lana peeked out the window to look for the smallest of the two Martian moons, but it was still too far away. Mars was a bright-red floating disc among the stars, though.
    Tori joined her at the window. “It’s a shame we can’t visit New Berlin,” she said.
    “Maybe we can do that on the way back.”
    “Yeah.” Tori smiled. “That way, I can show Alen where I grew up, too.”
    Suddenly, they were interrupted by a loud, blaring siren coming from all corners of the room. Red warning lights started to flash along the ceiling.
    “What the...” Captain Blanco jumped up from his seat and ran back to the cockpit.
    “What’s going on?” Svetlana gulped down the ball of nerves stuck in her throat. She was always a bit nervous about space travel, no matter how many times she’d flown back and forth between Ganymede and Europa or other planets in the solar system. Alarm bells and warning lights on any kind of spaceship or cruiser immediately put her on edge.
    “Might be a meteor,” Alen shrugged. “Or another object blocking our path. It’s the standard warning signal whenever the ship’s on automatic pilot.”
    “It’s another ship,” the captain shouted from the cockpit. He’d left the door open to keep them updated. “A big one. And it seems to be on a collision course.”
    “Try some evasive maneuvers,” Alen said.
    “That’s going to be difficult. We’re in controlled airspace. If I avoid this ship, I might slam into another one.”
    Lana felt her stomach turn with fear. Some of the high-tech cruisers servicing Mars actually traveled near the speed of light and couldn’t be seen in time, which was why everyone was supposed to stick to the standard flight routes. Sergei had taught her that once. She snuck a peek into the control room, her gaze landing on the gigantic ship outside now hovering in front of them and blocking their path.
    “I’m gonna hit the brakes,” Captain Blanco grumbled. “There’s no way to avoid this thing. You think they’re adrift?”
    “I have no idea,” Alen replied. “Nobody should be using this route but us, so yeah – I guess that’s the only explanation.”
    They all froze when the intercom started to crackle. “This is your one and only warning,” a crisp, British voice erupted from the comm system. “Make a full stop and prepare to be boarded.”
    “What the fuck?” Captain Blanco exploded. Despite his outburst, he did exactly as he was told. The DSD One ship hovered motionlessly in space, at the mercy of the enormous ship preventing them from reaching Deimos. “Is this some kind of random check?”
    “It doesn’t feel like one,” Alen responded, a frown knitting his eyebrows together. “If this is a