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    Lizzy Dupree and the Thousand-Year Crush: The Immortal Mistakes, #2
    Lizzy Dupree and the Thousand-Year Crush: The Immortal Mistakes, #2
    Lizzy Dupree and the Thousand-Year Crush: The Immortal Mistakes, #2
    Ebook123 pages1 hourThe Immortal Mistakes

    Lizzy Dupree and the Thousand-Year Crush: The Immortal Mistakes, #2

    By Sandra L. Vasher

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    About this ebook

    Is unrequited love forever?

    Lizzy Dupree falls for Myles the first time she meets him. But after a thousand years together in space, Myles is still pining for another girl. Lizzy knows Myles will never love her. Even so, when their mission is compromised and Myles volunteers to complete a risky repair outside the safety of their ship, Lizzy won't let him go alone.

    Soon, Lizzy finds her immortal life in jeopardy, and Myles is unable to help her. But Lizzy isn't the only member of the crew who has been hanging onto an impossible crush. Her best friend Maaz is determined to save her against all odds. Can he do it? If he can't, he and Lizzy could be friend-zoned in outer space for all eternity.

    Lizzy Dupree and the Thousand-Year Crush follows Stella Rose Gold for Eternity as the second book in The Immortal Mistakes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMortal Ink Press
    Release dateMar 31, 2020
    ISBN9781393349693
    Lizzy Dupree and the Thousand-Year Crush: The Immortal Mistakes, #2
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    Author

    Sandra L. Vasher

    Sandra L. Vasher is an indie writer, recovering lawyer, dreamer, consultant, blogger, serial entrepreneur, and mommy of very spoiled dog. She enjoys long drives in fall weather, do-it-yourself projects, animated movies and cartoons, fanfiction, red wine, traveling everywhere, and baking sweet and savory treats. She can often be found trying not to hunch over her computer at her favorite coffee shops in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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      Book preview

      Lizzy Dupree and the Thousand-Year Crush - Sandra L. Vasher

      Lizzy Logo

      1.

      LIZZY

      3442 CE Astronomia Nova

      I’m a thousand years into a three-thousand-year space journey when death makes a serious threat to my immortal existence.

      I should see it coming, but I don’t. I’m on duty on the command deck, and I’m the first person to notice our water levels dropping. I investigate for a minute or so before I find the source of the problem. Then I speak up.

      Water pod eleven is partially disconnected, I tell the others with me. Water levels dropping.

      Commander Rowan, a shrewd woman with admirable girth, immediately turns her attention to the water pod. Let’s get eyes on it, she says, and I pull up a video feed on our central console.

      Pod eleven is dangling from the ship.

      Shit, Rowan says under her breath.

      Personally, I think that’s an underestimate of how bad the situation is. That dangling water pod is a threat to the mission and the entire crew. Our ship, the Astronomia Nova, has twelve water pods, and each is capable of holding an Earth year’s worth of water.

      Water is life for us. It’s what we drink, cook, and bathe with. It’s what we convert into oxygen when the plant bay isn’t pumping out enough. It’s what we use to maintain the right gaseous balance in the cerebrospace layer that cushions our biosphere from the many blows the external hull the Astronomia Nova takes.

      We recycle as much water as we can, but there’s no way to keep it all contained. We lose a few drops every day. If we were only traveling for weeks or months, that might not matter. But we’re on a journey scheduled to take millennia, and we’re on our own. No one’s going to rescue us if we run out of water. We have to keep filling up those pods, or it’s game over.

      To accomplish that, we typically make pit stops on asteroids, moons, and small rogue planets that we identify as detectable sources of water. We send drone rovers out with the pods to collect, and we only need to refuel like that once every twelve years or so. But right now we’re in a drought. Ten of our pods are empty. It’s been that long since we’ve found a safe place to stop.

      Pod eleven was one of the two that were still full. I zoom in with a camera as my colleagues on the command deck gather around the central console. Even though the pod is barely hanging off the ship, we can’t see any damage.

      One of my colleagues, Myles, points over my shoulder at a place on the screen. He’s standing close behind me. I don’t think he realizes he does it, but he always stands closer to me than he does to anyone else. And I always know where Myles is standing in relation to me.

      Looks like the leak’s coming from there, he says.

      I see it, too. There’s a tiny fountain of static right where he’s pointing. Water must be dribbling out from a leak the cameras can’t see. And if the cameras can’t see it, the drones won’t be able to get to it. We’ll have to go out there and fix it ourselves. A spacewalk is required.

      I’ll suit up, Myles says, and I don’t know why a queasy feeling tingles in my throat.

      Are you sure? my colleague Yedda says. It’s not your turn. Sterling and I could go. Or Sterling and Xael.

      Myles shoots a look at me, and I know what he’s thinking. We are a crew of a hundred highly skilled immortal humans. Everyone except our three commanders is eligible for this kind of thing, but it’s going to be a risky repair. It needs to be done right, it’ll have to be done before we can completely bring the ship to a stop, and we don’t entirely know what happened to that pod.

      Yedda, Sterling, and Xael are all adequate with emergency repairs, but we need more than adequate out there.

      Commander Rowan smacks the side of the console with the back of her palm. No, we need the right team out there.

      "We are all qualified," Yedda says, specifically not looking at me. I like Yedda, but she’s always jumping at the chance to get out into space, especially when she thinks I might want to go instead of her. It’s silly. I hardly ever want to go on a spacewalk. I’m not irrationally afraid or anything. After the first time, there’s just nothing fun about a spacewalk. They’re cold, dark, and dangerous.

      But you don’t always get what you want, and what you want doesn’t necessarily determine what you should do. So I put an end to the matter. With the truth. Myles and I are the only team who regularly beats the emergency simulations. I’ll suit up, too.

      Go, Commander Rowan says. We’ll get Yedda and Sterling ready on backup.

      Myles and I run to the airlock bay, suit up in heavy-duty deep space suits, and wait the least amount of time we possibly can for our suits to pressurize. We release the airlock, and just like that, I’m on a tether attached to a ship in outer space.

      We move along the sides of the Astronomia Nova like rock climbers, clipping our tethers to one anchor loop after another and using footholds to push forward. Our suits are equipped with two cables each, and we’re using my second to tether to each other. The dual-tether system allows one person at a time to unclip, move forward, then clip back to the ship while the other person remains secured.

      Myles and I have done this so many times—in reality and in virtual simulations—that we don’t have to talk to coordinate. Even though we’re fighting the ship’s forward velocity as we make our way from the airlock to the pod, the trek only takes ten minutes. Then we have a closeup view of the pod. There are some tears in the metal where the pod is supposed to be hooked to the ship, and the water leaking out is freezing in sharp icicles that protrude from the pod.

      Think this is from that dust storm we went through a few days ago? I ask Myles over the radio.

      Hard to say, he says.

      In any case, we need to melt that ice and solder patches over the tears, then we can try to reconnect the pod. Myles stays clipped to the main body of the ship and holds the toolkit we brought with us while I clip myself to the pod and do the thawing and soldering. It only makes sense to divide the work this way. It’s a delicate job, and I have better dexterity than Myles, especially in a spacesuit.

      We’re out there for two hours before I’m happy with the patch repair. All that time, Myles never rushes me. Never tries to backseat solder. Never makes me any less than perfectly confident that I can fix this. He just hands me tools and says things like, Nice work, Lizzy, and Looks good, in a calm, even voice.

      This is all why we work so well together. We never fight about who should do what. Neither of us is the type to panic. He trusts me to be capable, I trust him to have my back, and vice versa.

      I’m about to tell him I’m ready to reconnect the pod when an unexpected interstellar wind yanks the pod away from the ship and me with it.

      Interstellar wind. It’s not real wind like we used to know on Earth, but our crew astrophysicists haven’t decided exactly what it is yet. They spend a lot of time arguing about whether the invisible gusts emanate from black holes or maybe clouds of dark matter.

      The next time I talk to those nerds, I’m going to tell them the gusts feel like violent vacuum suction. I am tethered to Myles and the pod, and after the cable between Myles and me grows taut and threatens to pull him away from the ship, too, I have a split second to choose which cable to unclip.

      It’s a strange moment for me. Happens slower in my mind than it probably happens in real life. The pod is important. More important than I am to our mission. If I unclip from the pod, we risk losing it permanently. If I unclip from Myles, I might be able to save it.

      I unclip from Myles.

      It is the best choice, despite that queasy feeling I still have.

      I am surprised to hear him yell my name, and I can see his eyes turn red as I am sucked away from the Astronomia Nova with the pod. Red eyes happen to us when we get stressed. Because we’re immortals, and that’s one of the side effects of the virus that made us this way. It took me a couple hundred years to decide that Myles’s natural eye color is

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