Daughters of Lyra: Heart of a Prince

Daughters of
Lyra: Heart of a Prince

Princess Renie,
one of the beautiful and strong daughters of Lyra, loves nothing
more than exploring space with her twin brother, Rezic, but when
they venture too close to the Black Zone, the barrier between Vegan
space and the rest of the galaxy, things turn from exploration to a
fight for their lives. With Rezic injured in a meteorite shower,
Renie has no choice but to accept help from a vessel within the
Black Zone, even when it turns out to be Vegan! Separated from her
brother and taken hostage, to be held for ransom, Renie isn’t sure
what she’s going to do…

Until she meets
a man in the cells, the most unusual and gorgeous male she has ever
seen, a man who seems to be willing to do anything to protect her
and makes her pulse race.

Tres isn’t
enjoying his stay in the cells. The commander has broken his
thermal suit, leaving him cold and weak, and his last chance of
leaving the Black Zone has been thwarted. But the galaxy comes to
him instead, and she’s more beautiful, warm and full of feeling
than he’d ever dreamed. When he discovers her and her brother’s
plight, he vows to help her if she’ll help him, and when she
touches him, showing him warmth, he wonders how touch can be so
forbidden and realises that he’ll do anything for her.

When Renie is
injured during their escape and Tres is forced to stay behind so
Rezic can leave with her, will she ever see him again? Will she be
able to convince her father, General Lyra II, to go back into the
Black Zone and rescue the man she’s fallen in love with? And will
she still love Tres when she realises just who he is?

Daughters of
Lyra: Heart of a Prince

Felicity
Heaton

Smashwords
Edition

Copyright 2009
by Felicity Heaton

All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without written permission from the author, except for the
inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

****

Chapter
1

Renie frowned when the
first beep sounded. She cast her dark eyes across the small bridge
of the ship to the display panel on the wall to her right. It
beeped again. Switching the ship over to automatic controls, she
unclipped herself, her eyes still fixed on the display panel, which
now showed diagnostics on something that looked like a planet. She
crossed the bridge and studied the panel. Her fingers danced across
the panel above, accessing the star charts for this region of space
so she could pinpoint their location. She wasn’t familiar with this
area. It was the furthest from home they had ever been.

She brought the black band
around her wrist to her mouth and pressed the button.

“
Rezic,” she
said and waited for her twin brother to answer. No reply. He was
probably sleeping. It was her turn to pilot after all. When they
had hit space that they didn’t recognise on the charts, they had
agreed to take shifts at the controls and alert the other if
something happened. She felt as though she hadn’t seen him in
weeks. They had meals together but that was about it unless there
was something that needed to be fixed or charted.
“Rezic?”

Her communications band
crackled when she released the button.

“
What?” he said
in perfect Terran when she had been about to shout at him in
Lyran.

She smiled.

Their parents told them
off whenever they spoke Terran around Lyrans or other species. They
both preferred it to Lyran. Even their younger sister Natalia had
picked up the habit. Too many people could speak Lyran and even
though their father was a Lyran, they still insisted on speaking
Terran most of the time.

Especially when they were
on an expedition.

“
I need you on
the bridge.” Renie lowered her hand and looked at the display again
and then the star charts.

There weren’t any systems
in this area. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much at all. The
star charts ended around seventy thousand leagues from them. They
were heading into space unknown to Lyra.

Rezic appeared beside her,
running a sleepy hand through his cropped dark hair and tousling it
further than his bed already had. His black eyes matched hers
perfectly. They both looked like their father, Balt. Rezic closed
one last fastening of his loose white shirt, leaving the top three
undone, and rubbed his eyes before tucking the tail of his shirt
into his brown trousers.

“
I was dreaming
a good dream, this better be important.” His gravelly voice spoke
of how deep asleep he had been and he struggled to stifle a
yawn.

Renie hated waking her
brother but it was important.

“
There’s a
planet,” she said and pointed at the display.

“
Very
observant.” Rezic yawned again. “Is that it? Christ, Renie, how
many planets have we seen? I thought you’d get over it by
now.”

Renie smiled at his grumpy
air, knowing that deep inside he was as excited as she was. Or at
least he would be when he let her finish speaking and woke up a
little.

She pointed to the star
charts and the area where the system should be.

“
There’s
nothing on the map.”

Rezic eyes narrowed on the
chart and then the planet. “It’s a class six. Is it beyond the map?
Maybe no one discovered it yet.”

His voice held a hint of
excitement now.

“
Maybe, but it
should be right here and it isn’t. That’s inside documented space,”
she said and before she could utter another word, Rezic was
punching in the coordinates and sending the ship towards
it.

He moved to the controls
and Renie held onto the back of the co-pilot’s seat when he shifted
the small vessel into its top speed, which wasn’t much. The ship
creaked as though it was going to break apart. It was a heap of
junk, but it was theirs and they had bought it with the money from
their first big find in the temples of Marsha Three. Since then,
they had explored the galaxy, documenting dead cultures and
searching for artefacts.

Their two younger brothers
and sister said that they were treasure hunters.

Their parents called them
archaeologists.

Or at least they called
her an archaeologist.

Renie looked at Rezic, his
excited smile bringing out her own as he raced to find the planet
on the display.

They called him Lyra
V.

Renie moved around the
co-pilot’s chair and slid into it, buckling herself in.

Rezic had no desire to
achieve the throne though. He was happiest out here with her,
finding ancient things, charting new territory and cruising space.
She was happy here too.

She wondered if things
would always be this way. It was many years since their birth, but
they were mature now. Their mother said that in Terran years they
looked a little over thirty, the age their father had looked when
they had married. She knew that it was their mother’s way of
telling them that soon they would begin to think about finding
someone to love. What would happen then? What if Rezic found a
woman, other than in his ‘good dreams’, and decided to settle down?
The thought chilled her. She wanted to adventure in space with him
forever.

Perhaps whomever they
married would be adventurers too and they could buy a bigger ship
and continue their journey together.

Renie pulled her knees up
to her chest and toyed with the white sleeves of her
shirt.

“
Is something
the matter?” Rezic said with a sideward glance at her. She smiled
at him to alleviate his worry, knowing that he could sense her
feelings sometimes. The connection they shared as twins ran
deep.

She went to speak but the
proximity alarm sounded. Both of them looked at the front screen of
the ship.

Renie couldn’t believe her
eyes as Rezic slowed the ship to a halt. In front of them was the
planet the ship had detected but it looked nothing like she had
expected it to. It was a brown, pitted rock. More shocking than
that though was the fact that it was only half a rock that looked
as though it had been split perfectly down the middle.

She unclipped herself at
the same time as Rezic and went to the display.

“
It doesn’t
make sense,” she said and looked from the display to the dead
planet. “The readings say it has the mass of a class six planet and
it’s being displayed as a whole, not a half.”

She went back to the
window and stared at the planet.

“
It’s
definitely dead,” Rezic said and set the computer to scan it. The
readings came back quickly. “No atmosphere. Signs that it was once
inhabited. Whatever happened here, it wasn’t nice. There’s a lot of
carbon on the planet.”

“
Carbon?”

“
A lot of
living things died very quickly.”

She gasped and stared at
the planet.

“
Did the sun
collapse?”

He shook his head. “No.
The planet would have been wiped out and there’s no sign of debris
or the sun itself.”

Her brother was far
superior at science, but none of what he said made sense at all,
not on any level. Normally she could follow him quite well. She
looked up at his profile. He seemed to be having difficulty
understanding it too.

“
Why is there
only half a planet when the ship says there’s a whole one? Where
did the sun go?” he said with a frown.

Renie looked around them
and then stopped when she noticed something. Her eyes moved from
the star spotted space to the left of the planet where it curved,
to the blank space on the side that had disappeared.

“
Rezic,” she
said and touched his arm. “Where are the stars?”

She looked at the empty
black space in front of her. There was nothing. It looked as though
darkness had swallowed half the planet and the rest of the
galaxy.

“
The Black
Zone,” Rezic said and she sharply turned to face him.

A chill danced down her
spine and along her arms.

“
The Black
Zone?” she repeated, hoping that he had been joking. “The Vegan
barrier?”

He nodded and went to the
star charts, pulling up the overview that connected all the
separate maps together. He zoomed into the area they were in and
pointed out the perfect line across the charts.

Renie’s heart thundered
against her chest and her palms sweated. It couldn’t be. She
stepped up to the charts and stared wide-eyed at them.

“
The Vegans
erected the barrier after the war with Lyra to protect their
territory.” Her brother swept his hand across the empty area of the
chart. “Originally the Vega system wasn’t on the other side. It
stood sentinel on this side of the barrier. Just after we were
born, they expanded the barrier to cover Vega, withdrawing
completely. The star charts were erased. All we know now is that
Vega is on the other side somewhere. No ship can cross the barrier
without permission.”

Renie touched the screen.
There were systems on the other side, planets that a Lyran had
never seen, or at least hadn’t seen in hundreds of years. Her
stomach fluttered with excitement and nerves.

“
If we could
cross the barrier—”

The proximity alarm
drowned out the rest of her words and she whipped around to face
the front screen of the ship. Masses of meteorites were heading for
them, coming out of the Black Zone. She ran for the controls for
the shield.

“
Renie, get
down!” Rezic shouted and then slammed into her as the ship rocked.
He tackled her to the ground, his body covering hers, shielding her
from the meteorites as they battered the ship.

There was a terrifying
sound of buckling metal and then darkness. Rezic’s body pressed
down hard on hers, suffocating her along with the blackness. She
struggled to breathe. Panic consumed her and made her breath come
in short sharp bursts. The alarm continued to sound and her head
felt light as the air rushed out of the bridge. She clawed her way
out from beneath her brother and fumbled with the control panel.
Finding the shield, she pushed the dial for it to maximum and then
hit the emergency beacon.