by C. F. Harris
Irritation turned to something that almost seemed like fear through the bond. “Talia? What are you doing? You need to surrender. Now.”
I added Jorav to the list of things I was ignoring today.
“Talia, please,” he said.
There was something in his tone of voice that gave me pause. Only for a moment. Then I saw the familiar signature of a spread of missiles being launched from his ship. I grinned. He knew how the game was played and he was playing every card in his hands. The clever bastard. Trying to distract me with a plea.
Well it wasn’t going to work.
I put my hand down on the big lever that controlled the faster than light drive. Normally that was the last thing anyone would dare touch in a planet’s atmosphere. Even the open air surrounding me was full of happy little molecules that would slam into a ship moving at even a fraction of the speed of light and cause an explosion that made even one of those city-destroying strategic nuclear weapons I’d been wishing for look like a firecracker.
I grinned. I was hoping for that. I figured I was just about as high as I was going to get without getting blown up so I killed the main engines and moved into a dive. Right towards the imperial palace. I put all the power I could into the forward shields and the missiles Jorav had just fired at me exploded against that energy barrier harmlessly. Almost harmlessly. It burned out the shielding unit.
Not that I would need it much longer. Not if this worked.
“Goodbye, Jorav,” I said. “You put up a good fight.”
I slammed the FTL drive forward. There was a sickening moment where the craft sputtered around me and I worried that one of those warning indicators I couldn’t read was telling me the FTL drive was down. Not that I could do much about that, so I kept my craft pointed at the palace and prayed.
If this worked then even the massive shielding they had around that palace wasn’t going to be enough to save their precious emperor.
The engine sputtered as though it was trying to turn over a couple more times. Not that your average FTL engine ever tried to turn over like one of those ancient combustion engines that gave birth to that phrase. Then there was the same sickening sinking feeling I got in my stomach right before my body was flung across the galaxy at speeds faster than any living creature had any business going until we figured out ways to tell general relativity to go fuck itself.
Only this time instead of jumping into a new system instead everything went black as the void embraced me.
Just kidding.
I held my hands on the controls for another moment. I was surprised at how damn realistic everything had felt. Just like some of the best rigs I’d been in when doing my training at the academy, and Jorav had whole bays of these things available in his tower for his soldiers to train on. In his fucking house!
I’d certainly moved up in the world. Even if I wasn’t on my world any longer.
The screen popped up again and showed me a cheerful set of figures. I was treated to a gorgeous real time rendering of the Livisk capital city going up in a blinding flash of light as the computer calculated what would happen if all the matter in my craft, and my body, was suddenly converted to energy by slamming into the imperial palace at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
The results weren’t pretty. When the dust cleared there was no city. There was nothing for kilometers around the city. I grinned. Good old fashioned kinetics with a touch of e equals m c squared thrown in for good measure. Hurling a piece of matter at something at a ludicrous speed. It was better than nukes any day of the week.
Something banged on the exterior of my training pod and I winced. It was time to pay the piper. There was a hiss as the door opened and Jorav stood there frowning at me.
Hey, this might be a simulation, but that didn’t mean he had to suddenly like losing or something.
“Did you have fun sweetie?” I asked.
“You defeated me,” he growled, his bare tattooed chest heaving in a very distracting way. He frowned. A gesture that was the same between human and livisk. “Again.”
I reached out and patted his cheek. The seething irritation coming through the bond was almost as delicious as how he looked standing there so pissed off. “I’m sorry about that, but you didn’t expect me to throw the game to make you feel better about yourself, did you?”
Jorav raised a confused eyebrow. “Throw the game? What are you talking about?”
I rolled my eyes. Right. Alien who spoke a completely different language from a completely different culture. I used to him to the point that I forgot about that sometimes.
“Never mind. I’ll explain later. The point is I’m not going to go easy on you just because you look so good storming around the palace pouting.”
“I do not pout,” Jorav growled.
“Sure you don’t baby,” I said.
He shook his head. “This human tendency to refer to me as your offspring. I do not understand it.”
I patted his cheek again as I stepped out of the training pod. Ran that hand down to his chest. I liked any excuse I could find to touch his chest. It was so hard and rippling and muscular and just manly. Even if it was bright blue and sort of sparkly.
Yet another thing I’d had to get used to in my time on this strange new world.
“You don’t have to understand it. Just like I don’t understand those guttural clicks and pops you made at me the last time we were in bed together,” I said.
“That is a term of endearment on our world. I have only ever called one other woman by that name!”
“Sure you have. Still sounded like a bunch of clicks and pops to me, but I appreciate the sentiment.”
“You will tell me why you decided to sacrifice yourself at the end there to secure your victory.”
Okay then, it looked like the conversation was switching to mental. A gift from the emperor we both hated so much. A gift that was meant to kill both of us, but instead it simply gave us an effective means of communication that couldn’t be bugged by any of the emperor’s listeners.
Awfully nice of him to do that for us.
Jorav always switched to speaking mentally when we were about to go over something that he didn’t necessarily want someone listening in on. Not that there was much chance someone would be able to bug any part of this palace without being messily killed, I’d watched him slowly dismember a spy that was caught just two days ago and it wasn’t pretty, but there was no point in taking chances when it was so easy to sidestep the issue entirely.
“My, aren’t we changing the subject quickly?” I sent back to him through that mental link.
Jorav’s shoulders raised as he heaved a great sigh, and he let out a massive and impressive breath. “I’ve been good enough to allow you to use some of my training pods. The least you can do is explain yourself when we’re done. Need I remind you that…”
“The emperor would have your head if he knew you were training me how to use your fighters,” I parroted back at him in a singsong voice. “Trust me. I’m aware. You’ve only told me about every time we’ve done this.”
“Good. I’m glad we understand each other,” he said.
He stared at me with such sincerity, with such a complete lack of understanding for the subtleties of human sarcasm, that I couldn’t help but wrap him in a huge hug. He let out a surprised grunt but then he wrapped his massive arms around me. I liked being in his arms. It felt like home in a way that no human ship ever had.
Strange that I had to be captured and dragged halfway across the galaxy to the enemy homeworld to finally discover something like this.
I looked up at him. Grinned. “I figure if I’m going to go out then I’m going to take everyone with me. Besides, didn’t I tell you the first time we flew over this city that you didn’t give any thought to someone doing a suicide run at faster than light?”
“My duty would be to report something like this to the emperor,” he said.
“You mean the emperor who is trying hi
s best to kill both of us? Is that a duty you’re really going to follow through on?”
Jorav paused and let out another massive sigh. He shook his head and smiled at me. We both knew there wasn’t a chance he was going to tell the emperor about this. For one it would bring up too many awkward questions about how he came about this knowledge. For another there was the simple fact that he hated his nephew.
I was going to have to keep working on that. There was something there. In the brief time I’d known him I’d come to realize that Jorav would make a hell of a better leader than the current emperor. Of course there was also the terrifying idea that with Jorav at the helm of the Livisk Ascendency there was the very real possibility that they might start doing more than a halfassed job of prosecuting their war against humanity.
That was something to think about later. Conflicting feelings between my loyalty to Jorav and my loyalty to my species were nothing new. For now I wrapped an arm around him and walked with him.
“That was an interesting tactic,” Jorav continued, his voice echoing in my mind. “But you might not want to do that in practice. Remember, if you are going to overthrow an empire then it helps to have a city with an established bureaucracy to rule from…”
I rolled my eyes, something that wasn’t lost on him through the mental link, and listened as he lectured me on some of the finer points of Livisk politics and what it would take to rule this world.
2: The Deal
Jorav:
“I only agreed to a rematch because you promised, Jorav.”
I sighed and put a hand to my forehead. Pain was threatening behind my head plating. Amazing how the sharpest blades in the world couldn’t pierce that unless they were in the hands of the strongest warriors and yet this human woman was able to cause a piercing pain with simply her voice.
“I did not promise anything,” I replied. “I said that I would consider letting you out into the city again if you went against me again.”
“Yeah, well I went against you again and you lost. That means you owe an honor debt to me, or whatever it is that you blue sparklies call that thing.”
A flash of irritation lanced through my mind, red and electric, as she referred to me as a blue sparkly. I quickly masked that feeling to hide it from her. For some reason knowing that I was irritated only served to irritate her more.
Human women were an enigma that I was never going to truly understand. They were even more alien than being a species that evolved in the cradle of another world could account for. I had the constant itching feeling between my shoulder blades when I was around her, only the knives she landed in me weren’t physical.
I chuckled. At least not anymore.
Talia giggled right along with me. “To be fair you were the idiot who let me so close to you. What was I supposed to do with that knife?”
I shook my head and realized that I’d dropped some of my mental barriers. I had to be careful about that around her. I’d discovered it was all too easy for those barriers I’d carefully erected, carefully practiced over years of being bonded with my former wife, to come crashing down in a way that they never had before.
This woman was dangerous, and not only because she was the type of creature who would gladly fly a craft into the emperor’s palace at nearly the speed of light killing herself in the process to take out her enemy.
I decided to go for calm and rational. Anger never seemed to get me anywhere with this one. The experts all agreed that was the best way to calm a human in your harem, though I wasn’t sure that I would consider her to be part of a harem. I hadn’t ever kept a harem, for one, and she was nothing like the docile creatures I’d heard of from others for another.
“Going out into the city could be dangerous for you,” I said, hoping that logic and reason would win the day where pure emotion had obviously fallen short. “Are you forgetting what happened the first time you went out?”
Talia stopped and looked up at me. It was a piercing gaze. She had the most captivating eyes. Eyes that had no business being captivating on a sub creature like a human, and yet here I was feeling a familiar stirring between my legs as my body yearned for her. Longed to take her and make her mine.
“Are you saying going into the city would be dangerous for me, or dangerous for anyone who tried to cross me?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to let in several large deep breaths. It was a calming exercise meant to soothe before entering into battle, and this was a battle unlike anything I’d ever entered into before.
“If you would only appreciate how much influence it took for me to remove you from the authorities’ custody after they discovered what you did to that mugger…” I said.
“I’m still convinced that was an agent of your precious emperor,” she said.
“That was a simple thief, not an agent of the emperor,” I said. That pain behind my front armor plate in my head was worsening. “We’ve been over this time and again.”
“If you say so,” she said in a voice that communicated she clearly didn’t believe me. Her thoughts broadcast the same just in case I missed her tone.
She started walking again. Not necessarily a good thing. Walking meant I was getting a very distracting view of her backside. I knew she was putting some extra sway in her step just for my benefit. Or maybe she was doing it to addle the mind.
In combat you took any advantage you could. It just so happened that she had a formidable weapon that was far more potent than any energy weapon or mass driver science could devise. A weapon that had been controlling creatures on billions of habitable worlds throughout the galaxy since the first primitive life form arose from the primordial goo of the first world able to sustain life.
And now I was on the business end of that weapon. She knew it, too.
We reached our chambers. Our chambers. They had been my chambers just a few short cycles ago, but now we shared them. Not that there had been anything particularly interesting happening in those chambers, which was a source of some frustration for me. Frustration that I carefully masked from her.
If she had any idea that I was distracted like a rutting male fanged gevortha then she would never let me hear the end of it. She would never stop using that as a bargaining chip to extract everything that she wanted from me.
“Already I’m providing too lenient with you,” I said. “I see that you’ve grown accustomed to certain privileges not typically afforded a human on this world, and it is time I put my foot down.”
Talia turned on me and grinned. “You used that phrase correctly! You’re getting better and better at speaking Terran.”
I felt a burst of pride at that which I immediately pressed down on. I shouldn’t feel pride at mastering the language of my enemies. I was already considered fluent, though being with Talia had provided me with an unintended crash course on Terran vernacular.
“That’s not the point,” I said.
“You’re right,” Talia said, advancing on me with her eyes flashing with anger. “That’s not the point. The point is I can take care of myself and you need to lighten up. I’ve already proved I can take care of myself. I won our combat simulation. What more do you need?”
“I need you to be safe,” I growled.
“Fine. You want me to be safe then you make sure I’m safe,” she said.
I cocked an eyebrow. “You mean you’d let me come with you to ensure your safe passage through the city streets?”
Talia laughed. It was a musical sound that went straight to my soul. A musical sound that went straight between my legs where already my hardness was growing, desperate for the touch and feel of her body. Even if I knew it wasn’t a laugh that boded well for me. Usually when she laughed like that it meant that she was about to say something I wouldn’t like.
Human females were fascinating and confusing. It was a good thing she was so pleasing to me otherwise. Well, that she had been so pleasing to me otherwise on at least one occasion.
I felt her mirth c
oming through the bond. At least I could rest assured that however she felt, I would get advance warning of it through that. She hadn’t quite learned how to shield her thoughts from me, and I had no intention of telling her. Not to mention she couldn’t read Livisk well enough to even begin to decipher how to do that on her own.
“Why do I have a feeling I’m not going to like what you’re about to say?” I asked.
She reached out and ran a hand along my cheek. She had to stand up on the tips of her toes to do that. I shivered and I felt the pleasure growing in her at that touch. I reached for her, but I wasn’t quick enough to shield my own intentions because she quickly took a step back.
“None of that you sparkly blue bad boy,” she said. “You don’t get what you want if I don’t get what I want.”
I closed my eyes and forced myself to go through combat meditations. Again. I did that a lot around her. I probably got more use out of those meditations since Talia came to live in my palace than at any other time since I’d gone into combat. And I’d gone into combat a lot.
“You mentioned something about me being able to keep you safe,” I growled. “Could you elaborate on that? You keep trying to distract me from the matter at hand and it isn’t going to work.”
“Oh that? I was going to suggest you start teaching me hand to hand combat or something like that,” she said. “I mean it won’t do me any good this time around in the city, but if you’re that worried about me then it’s sure to do some good the next time, right?”
I blinked. “You don’t know hand to hand combat? But what about the time you bested me on your ship?”
Talia shrugged. “I had power armor backing me up then. Something tells me you’re not going to let me tool around in power armor here in your capital city, so you’re going to have to teach me a thing or two about how to fight your kind for the next time I go out.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and did a few more of those exercises. Not that they helped greatly.