Hi! Thanks for all the kind reviews. Don't forgot to keep voting for the romances you want to see happen in this story, though i'm trying to give story and romance equal importance in L2L so some may find the love story develops a little slowly for their tastes and that's okay. Yes there will be Niff, but both Nick and Jeff have some serious issues that need to be resolved first, hence "learn to love again". And yes Jeff will learn to defend himself better as he spends time onboard.

And yes I'm really struggling to work Sebastian into the story but I have a side plot lined up for him later on so he is going to stop being such a recluse soon. Enjoy! :)


The Saarak was angered by his youngest son's decision to join the team of humans, but had eventually given permission. Now, a week later he paced In the small cavern that was his personal quarters. Before him a young Tharon with purple warpaint wrung his hands, dropping to all fours and pressing himself to the floor as the Saarak hissed in frustration, a small jet of fire singing the stone.

"How many?" He asked in his native language, it was very rare that a Tharon would use English in their home unless it was for a human's benefit, and humans didn't visit.

"We estimate about 300 of these Tharon cross-specs were shipped off Mars before Saar Zthisulio and Commander Duval's tea, had the compound shut down." The purple faced Tharon whimpered as the Saarak roared and more flames licked the walls of the cave, before he rubbed his temples and sighed.

"you may leave now. Have someone find me a way to contact Zthisulio."

Commander Duval would need to know. Much as the Saarak loathed to admit it, these cross specs would destroy entire galaxies as an army, and the commander was the first human spacer from the military to befriend the Tharons. If any human could be trusted it was Nicholas Duval.


"I don't trust you Commander," David leaned forward in his chair opposite Nick, who automatically leaned back, pulling his hands closer to his chest.

"If you think I'm lying go ahead, you'll be punished severely." The commander smirked and leaned backwards, one arm on the back of the chair.

"He's bluffing, his eye twitched!" Jack exclaimed on David's left, on his right opposite Jack, Eddie nodded as the commander frowned slightly. For a minute Duval almost looked scared. That settled it for the trio.

They all spread their cards on the table.

"Awh come on!"

"Royal flush! Don't say I didn't warn you." Nick snickered as he took all the money from the middle of the table.

"You're an evil man Commander," Wes chuckled from the corner of the room where he, Rachel and Jeff stood laughing at the other three marines' shocked expressions.

"I'm gonna go check on Ziss, see you losers later." Winking, he took a bow, spun around and strolled away.

"That was three weeks wages I lost!" Jack moaned as he faceplanted the table.

"That was hilarious," Rachel answered "how couldn't you tell he was acting?"

"Normal people aren't as perceptive as us," Wes whispered in her ear, his dark hair tickling her face.

"And you're incredibly unperceptive. Look how David is looking at you. Why don't you date him Wes? You must like him or you'd just tell me you're not interested."

The male Cross-Spec's face darkened and he looked away from her, moving over to talk to Jeff.

"How are you feeling Jeff?" The engineer asked smoothly. Jeff smiled tentatively at him, scratching his neck.

For the last week they'd been waiting for the new acting ambassador to arrive. With his important new role, Councillor - now Ambassador - Anderson had to travel in an extremely well defended galleon. The downside is that galleons are extremely slow. Until then they'd been orbiting mars, having some time off.

The alliance divided their ships into classes according to size and weight, but Jeff couldn't understand for the life of him why they used the names coined hundreds and hundreds of years ago for old boats. He found it fascinating to think how much had changed in the last thousand years. The discovery of how to travel faster than light, how to make cars hover and guns which recognised fingerprints, and the ability to grow food in a lab - however did humanity manage without? Jeff couldn't imagine a world where people died just from getting dirt in a cut.

"I'm fine," the blonde realised he hadn't given Wes a response "I've enjoyed getting to know you all."

Wes actually smiled, to his surprise.

"Yeah, you've come out of your shell a bit. I can't believe you're taller than most of us, you seem like you should be really small, like mouse size, with how quiet you were."

"Erm," Jeff began, not sure how to respond to this statement.

"Jeff!" Thad ran into the room, "you need to get to the vid room ASAP. Something's happened."


The vid room was perfectly rectangular, with the door that opened into the steel-walled room in the middle of the wall. The entire back wall was taken up by the screen, and leather chairs were pushed against both side walls so as not to take up space. When Jeff walked in, the screen was frozen on an image of an upside down black triangle inside a slightly larger red triangle on a silver background.

"Jeff," Nick the only other person in the room, looked at him with pained eyes. "I'm so sorry. I have something to tell you, sit down."

An icy sensation ran down Jeff's neck and he shivered, suddenly unwilling to sit in the proffered chair the commander pulled in front of him. The commander's face... It was the sort of face the doctor had worn delivering the bad news to Jeff's father.

"Jeff..." Nick tugged at one of the curls in his hair anxiously, pausing for thought before trying again. "Jeff, I've just received a video from the council, it was sent to them with a ransom request. I've shown no one else on the ship yet, and you don't have to watch it if you'll find it distressing."

"What is it?" Jeff asked sharply, a sense of horror growing and the icy feeling intensifying.

"Your father has been taken by a terrorist group."

"Play the video." Jeff's face closed off and Nick pressed a button on the com-cuff on his wrist. The logo faded out of focus as the screen blurred darkened to black. When it refocused, they were staring at a limp form slumped in a chair, hands tied and a sack over his head. The room was dark, lit only by the candle held by a gurning toothless man in a dark brown uniform bearing the triangle logo. Using the hand which wasn't holding the candle, the toothless man saluted someone off camera.

The other person spoke in a calm, distinguished voice, clashing with the savage imagery of the burn marks and cuts all over the man in the chair's body.

"Tom, perhaps you'd be so kind as to remove our prisoner's hood."

The toothless man pulled the sack from the hostage's head, and even though Jeff knew who it was, the reality of seeing his father's normally steely grey eyes looking helpless and afraid, and his mouth taped shut, still stunned him.

"This is councillor Sterling. You probably know him well. From what I've heard he certainly knows you well," The voice continued, "he had lots of interesting stories to tell me, with a little persuasion." Carl Sterling uttered a muffled scream as Tom deliberately dripped hot wax on his ear.

"So I'm going to cut you a deal councillors. One million credits for the councillor, and another million not to spread your dirty secrets. You have one week, and then ill start taking your sons and daughters. I would think they're all worth at least three million to you?" A dark chuckle and then the video ended.

The silence was deadening in the small room as Nick waited for a response from the councillor's son.

"So what happens now?" Jeff asked eventually, face stony.

"We keep looking after you like normal, the council will get Sterling out, but no one is getting to you. Jeff, if you want to talk to anyone I'm here, I mean it. The crew and I are 100% behind you. I won't let anyone hurt you and since the captain never leaves his office this is my ship."

"I'll be fine thanks," Jeff replied flatly "I don't really care about him."

Stunned, Nick could only blurt out;

"You don't really mean that."

"Why do you pretend to care? If you were really bothered about him you would've rescued him by now yourself."

Nick caught Jeff's hand as he stood up and turned to leave.

"I care about you. You don't hate your dad, and he definitely doesn't hate you. He cared enough about your wellbeing to have you placed on here for your protection, though he doesn't seem like the affectionate dad type. He's refused to give out your location so far, even under whatever kind of pain they put him through. Otherwise we'd have been followed or attacked now, the council got this video a week ago."

Jeff pulled his hand out of Nick's grip and left, not saying a word.

"Hey Nicky, the council wanna chat, I'm linking them through." Trent's cheerful voice irked Nick even more. Now he couldn't run after Jeff. Great.


"Councillors," Nick inclined his head in greeting, as a semicircle of humans sitting on plush red chairs appeared on the screen. The effect was disorientating, as if the screen wasn't there at all, and the councillors were in the room with him.

"Commander Duval, excellent work apprehending former ambassador Charles Rein. Evidence linking him to the terrorist group holding Councillor Sterling has been found. They are known as the Galactic Defence League, a highly anti-council organisation."

"I've never heard of them."

"They're fairly new, which makes it worrying they were able to pull off a kidnapping of this scale. They've been linked to illegal cloning research in the past, and the illegal manufacture of CrossSpecs. The labs you discovered were Galactic Defence League funded. Worryingly, from the little of Rein's files he wasn't able to destroy, we've discovered that there are several other Galactic Defence League projects on other planets, and Mars wasn't even the most high priority one."

"I'll let you know if anything crops up."

"Likewise Commander, until then, you are tasked to remain on Thar until Ambassador Anderson arrives, and guard him whilst his security personnel are setting up in the new Ambassador residence."

"Understood."

"Good luck Commander."

The screen faded to black.

"We're getting another signal from, and you're not gonna believe this, the former ambassador's office."

"Send it through," Nick fidgeted, half expecting a shadowy silhouette to flicker on the screen and speak with that dark, sophisticated voice.

"Commander Nicholas Duval." What he got was a Tharon with gold war paint all over his face and body, painted gold talons and a shimmering golden belt adorning baggy brown trousers with silver chains hanging around his chest.

"I am the Saarak, leader of the Tharons."


"Commander Duval over and out."

"commander." the screen turned black and he was left to process this new information.

"300 Tharon CrossSpecs. Three. Hundred. Tharon. CrossSpecs." Nick tried to regulate his breathing. " Holy snakes on a plane that's bad. I'm going to bed."

After the initial formalities, the Saarak had relayed the bad news, expressing his hope that Nick would help, and he couldn't exactly say no when he had the guy's son onboard, he grumbled to himself as he bypassed his crew.

He was headed back to his quarters when something made him stop and go check the observation deck. Sure enough, as the door opened noisily, the back of a blonde head was visible, stacking white polythene cups into a pyramid. He didn't even look up as Nick approached. Closer up Nick could see his eyes were red and his hands were shaky.

"Jeff..." Nick plonked himself down next to the councillor's son.

"I knew you'd come find me...eventually." The American still didn't look at him.

"I'm sorry, I had to talk to the council." Now didn't seem like the best time to remind Jeff he was the commander of a Navy Spaceship and had other responsibilities.

"He's done so many bad things! I shouldn't care about him!" Jeff yelled suddenly and Nick's hand snapped to the pistol on his belt before he could stop it, as he automatically leapt back.

"Sorry." They both apologised at the same time and started in shock again.

"He's your father, and he raised you, of course trying to hate him is going to tear you in two. I can't pretend I've been through what you're going through, but I've met so many people with parental issues before it's scary. Some of those parents and children genuinely didn't care about each other anymore, and you're not acting like one of them. You obviously care or you wouldn't be so upset about this. I know you two obviously weren't very close, but he's looked after you and seen you at least once weekly since you moved out at sixteen. He deeply cares about you, from what I've been told. Even went through court to force the British Government to take you, outside the jurisdiction of the Ten. He knew you'd be safer here than anywhere else, and he was right - turns out the guy who betrayed your father was American Army. Turns out the Galactic Defence League have at least three moles in the Ten and their advisors. Councillor Sterling must have suspected."

"He was always paranoid, said that's what kept him alive. I put some new shoes on once without checking the soles for explosives first and he freaked out." The ghost of a smile crossed Jeff's face.

"Commander!"

"What Trent?!" Nick barked.

"Well, we're still orbiting Mars but I had to pull out a little further to avoid some asteroids. We're about thirty seconds from hitting a Solar storm and there's more asteroids headed our way, which I won't be able to avoid if our power cuts out in the storm."

"What?!" Shit! Jeff get away from the windows! We have to leave the observation dec-" a large crash and the entire ship rattled, the lights flickering. Rocks the size of cars floated past outside, making horrible metallic screeches as they scraped the hull. "Jeff we have to go now!" The pair scrambled to their feet and headed for the door when the entire ship tilted upwards, sliding them away from the door. The last thing Jeff saw was Nick turning pale as they were both flung backwards through the air by a violent judder towards the glass. Then there was an explosion on the back of his skull and everything went black.


An angel carried him upwards, and Jeff felt free as he floated away.


Thanks again for reading this and the loveLy reviews. Each one makes me smile, even during the grim exam period that is my life right now.

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