This is what I'm currently working on...about ten chapters in. Here is the first:

Chapter 1


The ship screamed as she fell.

My ship.

My companion.

The atmosphere ripped at her folded solar wings, tore her delicate communication arrays, all of her skin rippled with fire, with light, before it tore away, spinning and shrieking. She could not navigate such things as the painfully blue sky. She had glided, always, in the cold and dark. Not this conflagration.
Together, we burned. I screamed with her, on my knees in the room I had shared with the artificial intelligence for over ten years, hands warding off flaming air. I could feel us breaking, the aft crew quarters slashed away, the bridge imploding. Knit to her through my temporal implants, there was no way to separate. We were parts of each other, falling in agony.

And I could hear them, the crew, adding their own ragged death cries to our own through the open com channels. Only some went silently, the long exhales of surprise as they found themselves sucked out and flying beside her, burning as she did. We spun as she lost what little aerodynamic lines she had, tumbling now, and I retched and choked, hitting first the shiny black floor of the heart-center room of her, chunks of wall and machine boards rolling past and around me like darting sea creatures from my home-world. Then I was bounced off walls, ceiling, each impact at least driving the feeling part of my mind into a stupor. For one perfect moment, I felt suspended, the debris dancing with me, metal caressing skin, sliding by in slow motion.

We hit--bounded airborne as if she could find her wings, as if pieces of her were not already littered over a hostile surface, bleeding smoke and flame and pale bodies onto the earth-- and hit again, more final this time, sliding, canting, then another last slow roll, the metal alloy of her supports screaming now, drowning our puny voices out.

The tender slide of metal against skin ended, ripped edges cutting me, pinning me at last, delicate insect that I was. The Empress would have liked to see me like this, I am sure, bleeding out on the Jinnai home world, her nephew brought to heel and crushed at last. The pain roared in, this time truly my own, intimate and no less horrific.

Even then, the ship would not let me go. I turned my head to her delicate brain, the slender cylinder protected by force fields still danced with the arora borealis of her own sensation, thoughts, and emotions in a riot of pinks and reds and baby blues sliding through the clear chemical medium.

“I could not...” the words came through with static, with gut lurching pain, hers or mine, it no longer mattered now. I shoved with bloody hands at the huge chunk of metal grinding into my right leg and hip and gut, crying out as it simply settled more, intent on cutting me in half.

“I could not...”

“My fault. Mine. Mine.” I panted the words. She would hear me through our link; like me, she had no choice in the matter.

She had lined up on the battlefront, the Jinnai cruisers arrayed before her, the Tehelon ships, our ships, beside her. I remembered her horror as she felt minds so like her own, the fury and animosity and the fear aimed across the cold depths. And rather than fight, she had fallen, not a shot in her, not a shot fired. She had committed suicide, the only alternative she had because I could not quite let her turn and flee.
It had been my job to keep her focused, on task, balanced or even thirsty for blood. But I had failed her. It was not in me, either, the silent battles in space fought over what amounted to divergent ideas, the bodies floating away, the explosions blooming in data-streams and emptiness. Surely the Empress would have perused my psych evaluations, would have known that pairing me with a battleship would eventually get me killed. And the crew? The ship? Brushed-off collateral damage lost in the protection and expansion of her empire, financial hits easily absorbed so she could turn her cold eye to the next in line for her throne and begin to plot other happy accidents. Me? I had never had the stomach for such things. But I have always known that weakness kills as effortlessly as cold plotting.

“Jinnai ground troops inbound. I hear them, but I am blind, Cori. They will come. They will help you.”

She so seldom used my name. I lay my head back, eyes shut, sharing the last minutes of dark with her. A creeping cold was settling in my chest. “The Jinnai take no prisoners.”

“Monsters,” she said, automatically.

“No, Pella. We both know better. It’s just not their way.” Pella was a pet name, short for Pelican. I used to tease her about her ungainly undercarriage but her magnificent solar wings. Her real name was The Black Griffon. I smiled behind my closed eyes. Somehow the pain was receding, even my lock on her mind growing fine-threaded and frayed.

The ground jumped as the Jinnai troop transports landed. I didn’t care. Pella and I rocked together in our pain, bound as always, twins in a vast womb clutching each other to the last. Without the functional ship to keep the medium of her consciousness alive, she was dying as I was, growing cold, pulling back from what few sensations were left to her.

The soldier of the Jinnai came at last. I listened to him rip away the shattered entry portal, his armor and lasers making short work of the thing. I forced my eyes open. We might have committed suicide, Pella and I, but I was determined not to be a coward in the end. The door shrieked and shuddered aside and he stepped through, all six and a half feet of him, the lights on his helmet cutting through the dust that swept in with his entry. I could smell the air of his home world now, that, and the acrid waves of what used to be my ship. The silver-white battle suit picked up the colors of Pella’s chemical column, making them more pastel and flat. In his metal-encased hand hung a formal warblade, also silver with wicked teeth on one edge and the whole length shining with blue runes ready to drink an enemy’s blood. It would be quick. The Jinnai, from all I had studied, were not sadistic.

They were simply efficient.

But rather than striding the short distance to where I lay, he turned his head toward Pella. He stood there, his sword half-lifted, his helmet cocked to the side. And then he sheathed the blade, flipping it over his shoulder and flawlessly, soundlessly into his back harness. Moments later, he stood just outside the force field-encased room. The barrier crackled a warning while lines of orange light ran up and over his extended hand like a miniature lightning storm.

I could feel a strange yearning then, as if Pella had lifted her head and opened her eyes finding herself at last with a lover who could touch her. The force field hum, the background noise of ten years of my life, fell away and she willingly gave the Jinnai access into the most sacred sanctum of the entire battleship.

I lifted my head a little, my hand slipping and groping at the metal. “Leave her alone!” I screamed. “Pella!”
The Jinnai turned his faceplate toward me, his spotlight lanced into my eyes, and I threw my arm over my face. And then, he snapped back to the crystalline column and walked through to a place I had never been.

I sobbed as he reached out, tentative, the fingers of his hand oddly delicate now. And all of Pella rushed to where he touched, brilliant feathered arcs of light striking the clear inner wall of her skin, swirling there. She dragged me with her, and I understood at last. The Jinnai flared like a young sun in my mind, warm, powerful and wholly open. But like a sun, I couldn’t stare straight into his mind, even as I found myself drawn to it. Pella and I stood under that blazing brilliance, entranced, and I finally understood why a moth dares the flame.

And then she began to fall for the second time. I tried to grasp her mentally as she drained into the shadowed corners of my brain, the colors of her thoughts lingering momentarily without substance. I screamed her name, thrashing, crying. I had been prepared to die with her.
But to die alone, to watch her die first?

No. No.

There were no words as she let go at last, only a sigh that seemed to sink into the bones of my skull and a vibration like a struck bell that faded into the softer tissues at last before it flows away.

I forced my eyes open, blurry now through tears. The Jinnai stood by the AI containment column, his hand flat now on the perfectly clear surface, his head bowed as if he had felt her go as well. When finally he shoved himself away, his hand reached back for his battle sword with alacrity, as if by killing me he could break whatever fragile bond had formed there, between the three of us. He strode to me, his feet ringing on the black metal and detritus of what had been my home and sanctuary.

I didn’t glare up at him. I simple threw open my left arm along the floor and raised my eyes. Smiled and saw my smile reflected in his faceplate. There was nothing left now. Pella was dead. I would join her soon.

He stood over me, the sword pointing down at my breastbone, his gauntlets fairly groaning with the grip he had taken. I could feel him scanning me, hesitating there. And his hesitation both confused and infuriated me. Couldn’t he see I was ready, that the longer he waited the more he put to the lie what I had told Pella, that the Jinnai were not cruel.

“Do it,” I said at last. It sounded brave, but truly, I was in so much pain within and without that I wanted it merely to end. I could feel cold tears against my own cold skin, slicing even through the pain. “Do it,” I repeated, with even less force than the first words.

He moved then, dropping to one knee, laying his weapon within easy reach, his hands reaching out to touch the two button-like implants at my temples. A moment later, he flipped the helmet closures at his neck and transformed before my eyes, the robot-like thing set aside to reveal an almost ethereal face, with green eyes shot through with gold, and storm-cloud gray hair plaited back from a high brow. He looked young. He looked ancient, both at once. His battle gloves came off next, exposing long, refined fingers. Those fingers fell again to my temples, to the tech embedded there, even as his thumbs stroked my tears away. He half-smiled then.

I lay confused and broken under his touch. I could feel him again, blazing, golden, running through me like power through a chemical grid. He continued until there was only breath, his eyes, his presence within me. And when his head snapped up, casting around in a kind of panic, I nearly cried out as he broke the connection. He snatched up sword and helmet, leaving his metal-enforced gloves on the floor and abruptly, his steps pounding in time with my heart, he left me to bleed and die alone in the wreckage of a once proud ship.