The Daughters of Persephone, A Space Opera Special Edition

by Julia Barrett

  “You’re flying blind! You’re flying blind, Aja. Give me back the controls.”

  “Not now. Strap in or you’ll be injured.”

  “By the Gods,” said Davi, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “What the hells is going on?”

  “Get down, Mr. Fedd. And hold on.” Aja opened her eyes for a moment to look at Kyr. “Listen to me. Trust me. This is what I do.” She closed her eyes and turned back to her console.

  Davi dropped into the navigator’s chair and Aja heard both men click their safety straps.

  “Dropping out of flash drive. Prepare to come about.” The jarring motion of a rapid drop threw all three forward against their harnesses.

  “Coming about,” Aja said.

  The ship groaned sickeningly, skidding sideways through space.

  “Gods in heaven.” Kyr managed to speak despite the g-forces. “You can’t come about at this speed. She won’t hold together.

  “She’ll hold.”

  Behind her, Aja heard the sound of Davi gagging, and she knew he’d thrown up the meal he’d eaten two turns before.

  Aja stayed sublight, heading straight for an enormous asteroid belt.

  “The Pikes. We can’t enter the Pikes. Aja, stop.”

  Aja concentrated on reaching the belt before the pursuing ship dropped out of flash. The Coalition ship was too large to drop as fast as she had, giving them some breathing room.

  “Aja, who is it? Who’s after us?”

  “Bom. General Bom.”

  “How?”

  Aja thrust her left leg in Kyr’s direction. “Your knife,” she said. “Get it.”

  Kyr reached around his back and pulled his knife from its sheath.

  “The purple bruise, just above my ankle. I thought I got it struggling against the ropes. It’s a bloody transmitter. The son of a Chigalla planted a bio-mimetic transmitter under my skin. You’ll have to cut it out. Cut it out now because I’ll blow this ship to the Seven Hells of Wrath before I’ll let them take us.”

  Kyr flipped off his harness and knelt on the floor. He grabbed Aja’s leg to hold her still and without hesitation, sliced directly into the mark above her ankle.

  “Deeper.” She gasped. “He planted it into the muscle. It’s already attached itself. Gods, Kyr, cut it out. Get it out of me.”

  Kyr enlarged the incision, digging into her leg until the knife hit something hard; something he hoped wasn’t bone. He spread the edges of her skin apart and he saw a tiny metallic chip with living tentacles gripping her muscle fibers. He dared a glance at Aja’s face. Tears lined her cheeks but her eyes remained closed. She’d bitten down on her lip, drawing blood.

  Steeling himself, he sliced through every muscle strand and used his knife to pry the thing out. Aja sucked in a deep breath just as the thing flipped onto the floor. From behind him, Kyr could hear Davi muttering curses.

  “Hold her steady,” Kyr shouted. “I’m shooting this out the airlock.” He grabbed the blood-smeared chip and headed down the companionway to the galley.

  “Kyr,” Aja called after him. “If they drop on top of us, I’ll have to come about again. Be ready.”

  Kyr searched a locker for a container. By the Gods, he didn’t want the thing sticking to his ship. He dropped the bloody piece of metal into a prese jar and screwed on the lid. He wove his way to the supply bay. There was a small airlock there. He’d installed it in case they had to jettison any illegal cargo in a hurry.

  He heard Aja call, “Prepare to come about.” He just barely had time to wrap himself in the wall of cargo netting before she yelled, “Coming about!”

  His feet flew out from under him. The muscles in his arms took the strain as his ship swerved once more and he flew sideways, his legs in the air, his back crashing against the padded cargo wall. He held onto the jar for dear life.

  When the ship righted herself, Kyr untangled his arms and legs and crawled to the sealed hatch. He flipped the lock and opened the small door, tossed in the jar and closed the door behind it, pulling the handle tight, ensuring he’d made a proper seal.

  He hit the button and the exterior hatch opened. The jar was sucked into the blackness of space. Kyr closed the exterior door.

  “Done,” he shouted.

  “Then get your sweet ass back here and strap in,” Aja yelled. “I’m entering the Pikes. Shields up, Mr. Fedd.”

  Kyr heard Davi’s weak response. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Kyr threaded his way toward the cockpit, grinning like a madman. What a bloody wild ride this was turning out to be.

  Book I: Exile

  “You lost them. You blood-sucking whore mongering son of a Chigalla, you lost them.”

  The captain knelt on the deck. Face to the floor, he began to stammer out his apologies.

  “Shut up, fool. You should have followed them into the Pikes.”

  “But General, to do so I would have… I would have destroyed this cruiser.”

  General Bom put a booted foot on the back of the man’s neck and mashed his face into the deck. “I told you to shut up.”

  With cold eyes, the General surveyed the command room, hoping some officer would look up, would challenge him. He craved a battle, a bloody death by his hands.

  There were no takers.

  Cowards.

  They stared at their boots, at the wall, hoping against hope they would be spared the captain’s fate, whatever horror that might be.

  To be bested by a woman, his own daughter, at that. The Abomination.

  “Get up,” he ordered the captain. “Scan this quadrant. I want our forces alerted in every system, at every refueling stop, at every supply depot. Tell them to watch for anything unusual, anything out of the ordinary no matter how irrelevant it might seem. Tell them to report suspicious activity immediately.”

  The captain rose to his feet with care, keeping his head bowed. He walked, stiff as a board, to his command console. “Yes, General. Mr. Stax, get on the com and send out an alert. Lieutenant Rowd, did we get a reading on that ship?”

  “No sir. It had some sort of shielding. No reading.”

  “Any name on the vessel? Any identifying marks?”

  “No sir, they were moving too fast for a visual ID.”

  The captain turned toward General Bom. “General, do you want us to continue to scan the asteroid field? At the very least, there may be some debris. More than likely the ship collided with a rock and broke apart.”

  “More than likely they’ve flashed to another quadrant, idiot. There won’t be any debris. I’ll be in my quarters. I don’t want to be disturbed unless you have word of that ship.”

  The command room remained quiet as a grave until General Bom had disappeared through the doorway. When the sound of his footfalls died away, second in command, Lieutenant Rowd, approached his captain.

  “Sir,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Do we know what the general is looking for?”

  The captain shook his head.

  “But sir, how can we be expected to find something if we don’t know what it is we seek?”

  The captain shrugged. “We do whatever he tells us to do until he leaves this ship. Those are our orders.”

  “I don’t mean to question the General, sir, but it makes no sense. It’s as if he’s ordering us to chase a phantom.”

  “Keep these thoughts to yourself, Lieutenant. Such questions won’t do you any good, and they sure as hells won’t do me any good. Until General Bom leaves our ship, we follow his orders.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  General Bom dismissed his personal guards. He paced the floor of his cabin, ignoring his growing hunger, his thirst.

  If she could set aside the requirements of her body, so could he.

  He was of the Blood. The power should never have been given to an inferior female, never. It should have passed to a son, to his son. But his sons had died at birth, deformed, mutant, the results of generations of past genetic tampering with his bloodline.

  All he had
left of his line were the three abominations, his daughters, his daughters with her.

  How he hated that bitch. She’d used him, absorbed his blood, allowed him a taste of hers, taken his seed three times, given him more pleasure than any man had a right to experience in this galaxy, and then, when he’d begged her to stay with him, to rule jointly with him, she’d left without a single backward glance.

  Her heart was devoted to that ordinary soldier, Dua N’ib.

  She knew how to hide from him, the Empress. And she’d taken her consort and her children with her. Ah, but the worst of them, the one who posed the greatest threat to the Coalition...

  The General allowed himself a smug smile.

  He’d managed to steal that one from under her nose. He’d almost succeeded in ridding the galaxy of them all, but for one rogue resistance fighter and an undermanned laboratory...

  Damn the Gods.

  He hadn’t been able to risk a full complement of guards. Word would have leaked out‌—‌General Bom would have been caught breaking his own laws banning recombinant DNA.

  She should be in his possession right now, the one named Aja. He would have her if it wasn’t for this cowardly captain and his equally cowardly crew.

  He could have guided them through the Pikes if the effects of the Blood hadn’t worn off. Now his supply was exhausted. He’d used the last of it to track her, to trace the tiny bio-mimetic diode he’d ordered implanted in her, the diode that contained a few microns of his serum.

  Ika Bom laughed. He’d made use of his own daughter’s blood, injected directly into the right temporal lobe of his brain to give himself the Sight, the ability to fly by inner vision, to track his own blood. For a brief time, he’d tasted the power she possessed and he wanted more. If he controlled her, no one could stand against him. Not the Empress, not the Ruling Council, not the Provincial Governors. He would be unstoppable.

  If he had her, this daughter of his, he could harness her power for himself and breed her to the men he chose, begin his own genetic program; establish his own dynasty from the sons he would insist she produce.

  Yes. The more he thought about it, the more feasible it seemed. He’d acted precipitously in thinking to kill the entire Royal Family. Better to use them.

  And if this one died? Well, didn’t he have two more daughters? Perhaps he should focus on them. They might prove to be easier targets and he might even catch this Aja if he threatened her sisters. He understood enough about the Blood now to know that she would see what he did. If he held her sisters she would know and she would come to their rescue.

  No, his ancestors made a terrible mistake in giving power to the weaker sex. Only men were worthy. What the hells were they thinking?

  “General?” His com buzzed.

  “Yes?”

  “What heading are we ordered to?”

  The general thought for a moment. He would sell his soul and the soul of every man alive for the Sight right now. “Return to the capital.”

  “Yes sir.” The com clicked off.

  Yes sir, indeed, Bom thought, my soul and the soul of every man, woman and child in the Empire for the Sight.

  Book I: Exile

  From the navigator’s seat, Davi groaned. “Why isn’t he sick?” he asked, pointing down the companionway after Kyr.

  Aja turned around to look at the poor man, his meal all over him. “Because he’s had my Blood. Don’t feel bad, Mr. Fedd. Most people get sick at these speeds. My vestibular system is different. Motion sickness was bred out of my line long ago. Rapid course changes don’t bother me.”

  Aja flashed the ship away from the Pikes and clicked on the auto-nav, punching in new coordinates. She unstrapped herself, stood and stretched.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “Let me help you get cleaned up and I’ll make us something bland to eat. That should settle your stomach.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” replied Davi. “If you don’t mind, I’ll get myself cleaned up and I’ll join you in the galley directly. What about your ankle?” He released his safety harness and pushed himself up onto wobbling legs.

  Aja glanced down at her bloody foot. She’d forgotten all about it. Kyr had cut deep.

  She pulled up her trousers. Now that she saw the torn flesh, the wound hurt. She’d have to use the ultra-violet unit before she could heal it. Her immune system could handle most bugs, but it wouldn’t hurt to be cautious. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry.”

  Aja watched the man weave his way toward his cabin. She hurried to the galley to get cleaning supplies. She wanted to get her leg disinfected and the cockpit washed clean before Kyr returned to the controls. She could close her mind to the stench and pilot for a time, but this wasn’t her ship and she felt responsible for the mess.

  She found Kyr in the galley, heating up a pot of soup. He’d already rinsed some snowberries and opened a vacuum sealed container of dryebread and set the rounds on the table. To Aja’s surprise, Kyr was humming.

  Kyr glanced up as Aja entered the galley. He shot her a wicked grin, one that he knew damn well she could feel all the way to her toes. Surprise showed on her face as he headed straight for her, lifting her by the waist with both hands and setting her down on the end of a heavy wooden countertop. Kyr spread her legs and he stepped between them, pressing his erection against her. Aja’s eyes opened wide. She began to protest that she had cleaning to do.

  “Shut up,” Kyr said, as he dropped his mouth to hers. He nibbled Aja’s lower lip and she opened for him. Whimpering, she wrapped her arms around his neck, holding on tight now, in a way she hadn’t needed to hold on during the wild ride through the Pikes.

  Kyr kissed the woman like a man who had been starved for weeks on end. One calloused hand traveled her body. He wanted her lost in his touch, in his merciless kiss, in the demands of his body.

  “I’m as hard as one of those fucking rocks out there,” Kyr’s said. He removed her clothes, tossing them aside without a second thought.

  “Kyr,” Aja cried. “Gods, Kyr...”

  “I’m right here, my love.” He took her mouth as he took her body, with deep, hard thrusts.

  Aja trembled in his arms. Gods, he did feel like a rock, solid and heavy, a force she could always count on. He growled against her lips as he joined with her.

  In the midst of their heated embrace Kyr experienced a sudden flash of vision, and he froze. Behind his closed eye lids, a young child with his golden hair and violet eyes stood in a patch of sunlight. As quickly as it had appeared, the vision disappeared.

  What the hells was that?

  Enveloped in Aja’s sweet warmth, he forgot all about it.

  Kyr released her mouth. Panting, he pressed her close. She laid her head on his shoulder and he felt her body relax in his arms. She seemed at peace.

  In that moment, Kyr realized how much he treasured her.

  “If flying through an asteroid field makes you this excited, I’ll be happy to oblige on a daily basis,” Aja whispered.

  Kyr laughed, his body shaking hers and the counter upon which she sat.

  “Oh, Gods, I declare you are a wonder.”

  “Seven hells!” It was Davi Fedd. “Not in the galley! You have a cabin, Captain, and if you’ll pardon me, use it.”

  Kyr picked up Aja’s trousers, tossing them to her as he fastened his own. He glanced over his shoulder. Davi had turned his back, but Kyr screened Aja with his body nevertheless. One glance at her red face told him how embarrassed she felt to be caught, literally, with her pants down.

  “So sorry,” Aja called to Davi.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said, tossing an accusing look over his shoulder at Kyr. “You manage to get that leg cleaned up yet? Before you were interrupted?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll take care of it now.”

  “Let me see it,” ordered Kyr.

  “No, it’s already healing.”

  Kyr grabbed her wrist as she tried to get by him. “I’m the captain and I said, let
me see it.”

  He knelt down on the floor and lifted the leg of her trousers. He studied the wound for a moment. “Forgive me,” he said. “I did this to you.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive. You did as I asked. You did what was necessary. And it worked, didn’t it? He can’t track us, at least for now.” Aja walked to a storage unit. She removed some cleaning supplies and headed back to the cockpit.

  Kyr stopped her.

  “I’ll clean up,” he said, taking the rags and the bucket from her hands. “Let Mr. Fedd see to that ankle. He’s had some experience patching up the wounded.”

  Kyr watched while Davi retrieved the first aid supplies. “Aja.” She turned at the sound of her name. “When I’m finished, we need to fill our stomachs. After we eat, the three of us will talk. Do you agree?”

  She nodded.

  “So it’s true, then,” said Davi. “Females of the Blood make stunner pilots.”

  “Yes,” Aja replied, as she crumbled her dryebread into the soup Kyr had made for them.

  “It’s no wonder the Coalition barred women from flying. Their male pilots couldn’t hope to compete,” Kyr said. “My own grandmother was a pilot and my father did a little piloting for a time, but from what he says he couldn’t hold a candle to her.” He glanced at Aja, “And neither can I. That was some impressive flying.”

  Spoon halfway to her mouth, Aja stopped eating. “Your grandmother was a pilot?”

  “A damn good pilot. She traversed the route between Calen and the Galactic Core for thirty years.”

  “That means you’re of the Blood,” Aja said, her voice soft, her eyes staring down at the bowl of soup. “Why didn’t I see that?”

  Davi snorted.

  “Of the Blood?” Kyr laughed long and hard. “I don’t think so. I grew up poor as a field rat on Calen. My father worked the lithium mines. My mother tended a flock of winat goats and spun thread from their wool to sell to the weavers. Of the Blood? Unlikely.”

  “Kyr, if your grandmother was a pilot, then you are of the Blood. What you think doesn’t matter. Only female descendants of the Blood possess the genetic traits that allow them to be stunner pilots, as you call them. Many people can be trained to pilot, but only women of the Blood can fly blind, so to speak. Could your grandmother fly blind through an ion storm?”