“Understood, sir. But still, I wish more for you than a loveless life. It would seem… barren.”
Caretax’s words hit me like a bucket of cold water. A loveless life?
I stare blindly at the viewscreen. No, I don’t want that. I want a woman who gets me, someone to share the weight of the crown. I need her laugh to cut through my days and soften them, her teasing to keep me grounded, her trust to ease and forget my scars. I’ve loved before, and I swore I’d never open up again. But deep down, I crave it: her hand in mine, her voice in the dark, her body close when I feel the galaxy falling apart around us.
A faint buzz in my chest, like some instinct, tells me she’s out there. Maybe she’s the one who won’t break me. Or maybe I’m just chasing another injury. Surely I can’t find my happiness on an alien world.
I am a prince. I will be emperor. I will be the best emperor I can be for the people of the Empire. And as they say, being close to great power without being able to wield it is a burden very few can carry without going mad. No woman could stay pure and uncorrupted by the Imperial court. It may be that my lifemustbe loveless, but dutiful. It wouldn’t be much different from my life right now.
I sit down in the prince’s chair on the bridge of the ship and put my legs up on a navigation console. “Very well, Caret’ax. I will take a look at your aliens. And if we find a suitable one, sweet and mild and obedient, then who knows what kind of empress the Khavgren Empire will gain.”
2
- Umbra-
“Target Red Shadow, converging!”
The two men kick off from the walls of the training cube and launch themselves at me, one from each side. It’s a good attack — I can’t get at both of them. But now they can’t control where they’re going until they get here. There’s only air between them and me.
I feign uncertainty, looking this way and that, before I squat against the wall, looking as if I’m going to kick off straight to the red wall opposite me. Both Vic and Jack, callsigns Vector and Hammer, reach their hands out to grab me, fingers splayed.
Instead I duck and flatten myself against the wall, just out of their reach. I can feel the air pressure as their fingers go past, finding nothing.
The two Space Force sergeants crash with each other, swearing and yelling as they lose all their momentum and are left spinning on the spot in thin air. There’s no gravity to help them, no wallthey can kick off. Vector reacts first, grabs Hammer, and flings him at the opposite wall, which has the effect of pushing himself into this one. Just as he grabs a handhold, I kick off for real and float casually away.
“Good going, Shadow!” Emma shouts from straight ahead. “They got really close that time.”
“Not close enough,” I reply, looking at a triangular feature on the wall and thinking about how it might be useful. “Easy on that patch, Hammer. It's not rated for your bulk.”
“Impact stress at eighty-one percent,”Vera warns from my wrist. “Recommend lighter kicks.”Everyone on the Space Force station has one of those AI watches strapped to them, and they are so advanced that they have developed their own personalities. Vera is a meddling type more than most.
Training how to fight unarmed in weightlessness is one of the more physical parts of being a Space Force officer. I’m not sure who thinks we’re going to need to know how to do it, but it’s not a bad way to get used to being in space.
But I suppose practicing how to fight in space makes some sense. All we know about aliens is that their behavior towards us has been pretty bad, stealing college girls and taking them into space for some mysterious purpose. The owners of the flying saucers that abducted hundreds of women one night years ago are clearly not our friends. Some day, we might have to fight them. And I’ll be ready.
The arena is just called the Cube. It's a modular box bolted into the station’s core, built extra light to not influence the space station’s movements too much. Its walls, thinner than the main hull, flex under strain. A patched conduit panel on thefar wall gleams unevenly. It was reinforced after last month’s micrometeorite scare, a weak spot we’re told to avoid.
But of course,I think to myself, the whole station is a weak spot. Light and flimsy materials are the rule. Heavy stuff is expensive and difficult to get up into orbit.
Hammer crashes into the wall on the other side. He stays there, yelling his plan to Vector in a sports code they’ve worked out. “Thirteen one six! Target Echo.”
Emma and I don’t have a secret code to communicate with. But I don’t think we need one, either.
“We’re doing good!” I yell. “Stay slippery, Echo.”
“Always!” she laughs. “Nobody can hold on to me, Shadow.”
The cube is full of obstacles, technical equipment and such, mimicking the packed and tight guts of a spacecraft. One of the walls of the cube is painted bright red. The purpose of this game in total weightlessness is to get a member of the other team to touch that red wall, losing them a point. Or ‘neutralize opposing combatants by forcing contact with the designated boundary,’ as the instructions state. It’s a way to get used to moving fast and accurately in zero gee, as a preparation for fighting aliens we might encounter in space.
Most people on the station dislike this part of their duties. I love it. Nothing on Earth feels like this.
We started with three points for each team, but now the two men are down to one and Emma, and I still have two. Despite being smaller, lighter, and not as strong as the guys, we’re more limber and harder to get hold of. And we have more experience with thisenvironment, especially me. This, being in Space Force, is all I ever wanted to do. I've spent a lot of my free time in the Cube.
The guys are being aggressive, not wanting to lose. Probably because I’m a second lieutenant and this is one of the few places on the space station where no ranks are used — it’s a straight fight, and nobody can pull rank during the game. Or maybe it’s because we’re girls.
Vector suddenly launches himself at Emma with surprising force. Well, he does have the thigh muscles for it.
She responds by kicking off from the wall, heading for the big metal cage in the center of the cube, where she can get some distance between herself and him.
