“Fuck you!”
“Should I demonstrate? Hmmm?”
“If you do I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Grab my balls again?”
I laugh. I’m being a total prick. I know this, but I can’t help it. I love this night so much. Hell, I love this day.
But that thought shakes me to my core.
How the hell could I even think that? Draden is dead. Ceres, blown up. And Booty is still offline.
How could I fucking forget this is the worst day of my entire existence?
I turn away, suddenly ashamed of myself.
“We’re done here,” I say, tucking my dick back into my pants and walking across the room.
“What? What the actual fuck is happening?” she yells.
“I said we’re done. Go put on another shirt. In fact, just… go to sleep. And take the fucking bed. You can have it. I’m going out.”
A few minutes later I’m down in the medical bay looking at the lifeless shell of a ship that used to be Booty.
I grab the nearest engineer and tug him towards me, growling, “What the fuck is happening with my ship? Why is she still offline?”
He stutters and stammers for a few seconds, then sputters out, “I was just going to call you!”
He’s one of those aliens who look perfectly humanoid. No distinguishing features at all. No glowing eyes or double dicks. No wings, no organic body armor, no prosthetic arms with power tools attached. Just… ordinary.
“Were you now?” I ask him.
He’s a little guy too. Like a whole third of a meter shorter than me. Hell, he’s not even as tall as Lyra. So he’s looking up at me like I’m a monster right now. Like I might squish him like a bug.
“Yes, sir,” he says. “I was. She’s… she’s…”
“She’s what?” I snap.
“She’s got damage, sir.”
“Obviously,” I say.
“I mean…” He shakes his head. “Organic damage. We have to take her apart, I’m afraid. And replace her—”
“Wait,” I say, putting up a hand. “What do you mean organic damage?”
“—neural network.”
“Which is made out of quantum tech,” I say.
“No.” He shakes his head. “No, she’s… not a quant, Mr. Serpint. We didn’t realize this either.”
“How could you not know this? She was upgraded—”
“I know, sir, but we didn’t do the upgrade. ALCOR did. And we don’t know how to fix her. Only he does.”
“So? Tell him to do it.”
“We can’t, sir!”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because… because he’s not here, sir.”
ALCOR.
He turned my ship organic without telling me.
And he skipped the station tonight and left her to die.
I will kill that fucking bastard.
“Where’s Crux?”
“Gone, sir. They left together. Tray went too. I thought you knew!”
“Are you fucking shitting me right now?”
“No, sir. I’m not. I’m being totally serious.”
“It was a rhetorical question,” I growl.
“Sorry, sir.” He stares at me for a minute. “But… but I can let you talk to her, if it will make you feel better.”
“Talk to who?”
“Booty Hunter, sir. We have her mind in containment. She’s awake.”
“Why didn’t you fucking say that in the first place? Take me to her right now.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN – LYRA
Not-so-fun fact about Cygnian princesses.
We don’t really do emotions.
Well, positive ones, anyway.
We do anger. Resentment. Jealousy. We’ve got all the bad ones down.
We’re good fighters. Pretty good at killing enemies. Friends and family too. But we have trouble with attachment bonds. In fact, I’d go so far as to say… we don’t attach to anyone.
We don’t do friendship, or liking, or love. We don’t even do loyalty all that well. Which, I suppose, is why they feel the need to lock us away in our own system and not let anyone leave.
That kind of thing just isn’t programmed into our genetics.
The truth is we princesses were custom-made for harems. There are only a few purposes for us girls back home. So it’s ironic that after escaping my home system thinking I was escaping my fate, I find myself here. We’re just things back home. And here too. But at least on this station, we’re—well, maybe not respected, but definitely revered as special.
I could do worse than Crux’s penthouse harem room. I could do worse than this arrogant Akeelian, Serpint, if I’m being honest. He’s kind of an asshole, but he’s not really mean. And sure, I think his version of kink is a little out there. But he hasn’t actually done anything to me. He didn’t put those bracelets on. He didn’t stick me to that wall. He didn’t even ask the bot to pierce me.
In fact, he took better care of me than anyone I’d call family or friends back home.
And he said… I like you. He called me pretty.
Which might’ve been bullshit. But no one has ever said that to me before.
No one.
Before this day and this man I was going on the assumption that Akeelians didn’t do attachment bonds. Didn’t do like. Didn’t do love. Didn’t think about pretty beyond how it can make them money. It was in all the myths told in the harem back on my planet.