by D. R. Rosier
Xia asked, “Why wait on the database?”
He replied, “We’re still… editing. The database contains all their technology as well, it’s likely if all the worlds in the empire could match your navy we’d have problems at home. It will be ready by tomorrow.”
It was an ugly truth, but real enough. The peace the Xarans kept in the empire was greatly enhanced by the fact they carried a bigger stick than everyone else, almost everyone else that is. A.I.s matching their technology wasn’t a big deal, only because they were all pacifists. Outside of himself anyway.
That wasn’t true of all the other races in the empire. A large shift of power within the empire would be disastrous.
Of course, they could strip all the technology out in moments and send the rest of it, but they were discussing and voting over each technology which took time. So far, they’d only stripped out how to use gravity through apertures, and the shield configurations needed for subspace level two and how they fight.
Xia nodded, “That’s probably a wise decision, we’ll see you after the Jazuno then. Good luck, Xia out.”
The hologram blanked.
“Set a course for Jazuno, and implement as soon as all the Mirosians are back aboard.”
Chrystal nodded, “They’re only nine minutes away.”
He almost got up to get everyone refills, but stopped himself at the last moment. It was a hard concept for him that she actually wanted to serve him more than she already was, especially since she was a princess. She was the least entitled princess he’d ever met.
Not that he knew all that many personally, outside of Xia, perhaps his preconceptions simply come from Earth history.
He held out his cup, “Would you mind Alyndra?”
She nodded and took his cup, Chrystal got up as well, and took Nadia’s mug, “I’ll help,” and they walked off the bridge.
Nadia said, “That wasn’t easy for you was it?”
He shook his head, “I’ll have to get used to it though, for her sake if nothing else. The Esari are as long lived as the Mirosians, she’ll be around a long time.”
Nadia frowned, “But you had no trouble asking me?”
He chuckled, “With us, it was a playful power game and flirting between equals. For her, it is her life and mission to serve and protect me. Two completely different things. Will you be joining Chrystal and I tonight after dinner?”
Nadia smiled ruefully, “Yes, I can’t believe I’m saying that, but yes. A part of me thinks you’re just a perv that wants a threesome, something I’ve never done before. But only a part.”
He nodded, “I’ve never either, you and Chrystal are the only women I’ve ever been with. It is more than that though, I’ll be with both of you, but you’ll be with both of us. We’re both here for you, it isn’t me and you, and me and her, it’s all of us for each other.”
Nadia replied, “I get it, I really do, and I guess we’ll find out if I can handle it tonight.”
He added with a rueful smirk, “In the interest of honesty, there is also a small part of me that is perving out over the idea of being with both of you at once. I am a man after all.”
She giggled, “Noted.”
She got up and leaned down to kiss him as she straddled his lap, and then wrapped her arms around his neck. Unlike the earlier heat of that morning’s torrid lovemaking, it was soft, tentative, and full of the softer emotions as well as barely restrained passion.
When she broke it and pulled away slightly to look into his eyes, he was painfully aware of the vulnerability in her bright intelligent green eyes. His own emotions for the raven haired beauty in his lap welled up in response. There was still so much he didn’t know about her and her past, but he knew he already cared about her very much, and liked what he did know a great deal.
Her eyes were telling him not to hurt her.
She was so beautiful, and he was speechless at the way she exposed herself to him, her heart was in her eyes. She didn’t love him yet, but she’d taken the mask off so to speak, and he knew she could one day. Hoped she would one day.
He caressed her mouthwateringly thin waist, and then played with her hair with his fingertips as he pulled her in for another lingering kiss.
She moaned softly in both desire and pleasure into his mouth, and their kiss grew even softer, and more teasing. Their lips barely touched as their breaths mingled, and their hands slowly caressed each other’s bodies with light touches. In a way, the simple teasing kisses they passionately shared on the bridge, were far more intimate and revealing than what had gone on in her bedroom this morning.
When she broke it, she reluctantly slid off his chair and onto her feet. The look in her eyes told him that what they’d just shared was just a promise for later, and his hard cock strained against his pants.
They’d be at the Jazuno world in five minutes though, he’d have to wait.
“Temptress,” he teased.
She smirked, “The feeling is mutual Mike. I’d say it was your huge cock, but I know that isn’t true.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
She shrugged, “It’s everything all added up, and I feel safe with you. Hell, any other man and I wouldn’t even try to explain it.”
The bridge doors opened, cutting off their conversation.
He was curious what she’d meant, but let it go. Besides, it was enough that she did feel safe, attracted, and had desire for him, wasn’t it? Did it really matter what the whys were? He wasn’t sure he deserved the two women in his life, and wasn’t sure if it would last with Nadia, but he’d be there until she changed her mind.
He might have been half digitized human, and half A.I., but that part of him was all A.I. He wouldn’t change his mind about her, as long as she stayed with, and remained faithful to, him and Chrystal. He didn’t love her yet, but he knew he could, and he was falling fast. Fast for a human, typical for an A.I. whose mind worked a whole lot faster.
Polyamory wasn’t a pass to cheat after all, and they all had input on adding anyone to their circle. That was the only thing he wouldn’t do, share her outside of their circle.
Or with another male, ever, if he was honest with himself. That part was the human side, and like his father.
“Thanks,” he said softly as Alyndra handed him a coffee.
He caught another faint smile on Alyndra’s face as she turned away. That was twice he’d gotten her to smile for him. He didn’t really understand the mentality of being happy to serve him like she was, but he didn’t have to. All he had to do was understand that truth, and give her what she needed. He could do that, except where it conflicted with his own morality.
Which is why she had her own bedroom, and didn’t bathe and dress him. Luckily, she seemed okay with those limitations.
“Your welcome,” she said in her soft musical voice.
The bridge doors opened again, and Dahlia walked in, helmet off but armor on. She had a faint smile on her face, but she was obviously here for a reason.
Dahlia said, “I understand this is the last world we’ll be liberating?”
He nodded, not really sure what she was getting at yet.
“Yes, we can take you home after that if you’d like?”
Dahlia shook her head, “Actually we were hoping to stay a little longer. The rumor coming out of Xaran is there will be a senate meeting, to discuss going after them in Andromeda? If that’s true, we’d like to come along. I imagine there will be ample worlds there already enslaved where we can find righteous battle. You’ll need ground troops.”
He smiled, “We’d be pleased if you stayed, and if you joined us if it’s decided to go.”
Dahlia added with a wink, “Plus, the real party will be tonight, we couldn’t possibly go home until after that.”
He replied, “Looking forward to it.”
They dropped out of subspace, three light minutes from Jazuno.
Dahlia nodded at the hologram which showed the planet, and three enemy ships.
&nbs
p; “I’ll leave you to your work, while we prepare for ours,” she said, and then she turned and left the bridge…
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Launch two fighters each for the other two ships.”
As soon as they reached energy range, the three ships changed course drastically to prevent them from closing in.
“Well this is new, what do you suppose brought it about?”
Chrystal frowned, “It shouldn’t be possible, unless they got orders from home to change tactics.”
“Gravity weapons.”
Chrystal nodded, but frowned a second later.
Chrystal shook her head, “We can’t, they’ve countered that as well. Their apertures are changing every two tenths of a second to different emitters. By the time I target one and activate the field through subspace, it isn’t there anymore.”
Shit, a simple if effective defense.
He frowned, “Start hitting them, randomize our energy flow paths and firing points as much as possible to prevent them from accurately returning fire.”
As long as the enemy hit a quiescent part of their shield, their attacks would be easily absorbed. They no longer had the option of using lower powered attacks to prevent return damage, since they couldn’t neutralize their shield in sections by using gravity to crush all the emitters in an area. Not unless they could close the range, which was looking doubtful.
The enemy of course, had nothing to lose, since Chrystal could pierce their quiescent shields with the higher power, so being cautious wasn’t necessary. All three enemy ships were hitting them twice a second, slightly randomized so they couldn’t time their fire to avoid all damage, with fifteen strikes on his ship’s shields.
So far, the enemy hadn’t gotten lucky as they slowly turned the enemy ship into Swiss cheese, but it was only a matter of time before they did get lucky and hit a vulnerable portion of their shields while they fired at the enemy.
Every single time his ship fired, he put a hole straight through their hull and out the other side, but they were small pinpricks in comparison to the size of the huge ships.
Chrystal said, “I’m trying to target areas I know have power systems, but there is still an element of luck involved. The difference between taking out the power core, or destabilizing it to cause an overload, is measured in millimeters.”
He nodded, “Understood.”
They started being holed themselves, ten times in half as many seconds at their vulnerable shield points. He stood up straighter wondering how their targeting was suddenly so accurate.
Chrystal cursed, and she pulsed the shields, sending out a globe of subspace energies at less than one percent power.
That was more than enough for her targets, and there were hundreds of tiny explosions around the ship.
“What the hell was that.”
She replied, “It’s how they started to target us so accurately, they’re seeding their wake with tiny little sensor drones. Quantum paired, and they’d have no lag in sensor data, not even the couple of light seconds between us.”
A beam left their ship, and holed the enemy for perhaps the fiftieth time, and the ship exploded. The other two just kept absorbing the damage.
“Any casualties?”
Chrystal shook her head, “The Mirosians were forced to don their helmets while I fix the hull breach, but none of them were hit.”
He sighed in relief.
Chrystal smirked, “That isn’t by chance my love. I’ve been routing the energy with them in mind, it’s random, but I’m also avoiding routing energy over the bridge, or the areas that intersect where the Mirosians are. Not to mention the power cores.”
“Good call, I should have thought of that.”
Chrystal shrugged, “Getting holed is a nuisance, but they aren’t going to get lucky and destroy us.”
She pulsed the shields again to clear away more of small sensor drones, and the fight went on as they chased the enemy’s ships. After hundreds of strikes on each ship, she’d managed to open a hole in their defenses the hard way.
The next strike they sent was a thirty-foot-wide circle of energy at just five percent, which passed through the hole in their shields she’d created and blew out a two-mile-long hole spanning several decks in both enemy ships.
Neither of the Kascorix vessels exploded.
Chrystal returned to the smaller more powerful shots and started to expand those holes in their shields. The vessel on the left suddenly exploded into dust and gases. They focused all their efforts on ship two. This new tactic of the enemy’s was just delaying the inevitable and drawing out the battle.
In truth, he imagined the leaders of the Kascorix were getting an eyeful of what they faced. The three ships could have retreated, but were obviously being sacrificed to gain more information.
He was tempted to show their belly, and just send a high-powered pulse the size of their ship just to end the fight, but that would make them too vulnerable to a lucky shot, and would expose the whole ship. At best it was a foolish risk, and at worst it would be suicidal.
In all, they had to flash the shields twice more, and fill them full of holes another ten minutes before the last ship finally exploded. They’d almost been at the edge of the solar system.
“Turn us around, take us to Jazuno.”
Chrystal replied, “Acknowledged.”
They made their way to Jazuno, and immediately launched the shuttles full of Mirosians…
The Jazuno were small compared to other humanoids, with their large black eyes and sticklike arms and legs they weren’t very strong warriors. They were exceedingly intelligent, but were no match against the invading Kascorix.
Much like at the planet Feilia, it was apparent almost immediately the Mirosians would be fighting alone, as the Jazuno kept to themselves and under cover throughout the city.
That was fine of course, the empire had as many worlds of peaceful inhabitants as it did those with violent tendencies. He was just worried for those going into harm’s way. It was perhaps inevitable, that he worried about Dahlia the most, as he knew her personally, or was starting to.
He also had a bad feeling that the leaders of the Kascorix hadn’t just updated the battle plans of their ships, but perhaps their ground troops as well. Nothing looked different though, as he viewed the big picture on the holographic table top. The enemy troops were waiting as they always did, hidden behind shield walls and turrets.
Of course, any good trap would look like business as usual, as he himself learned not long ago when they lost the first ship.
He took a sip of coffee and put it down on the side table, and wasn’t all that surprised when both Nadia and Chrystal claimed his hands. They looked nervous too. It was almost amusing that all three of them seemed to be more nervous now that their part of the battle was over, and others were going into harm’s way. Almost.
When the second wave of shuttles landed to deploy the remainder of the Mirosians, they headed off into that run that would eat up the four miles in a little over five minutes. Some already spreading out, to partially encircle the enemy and give them more to worry about.
When they reached the open area around the camp, plasma weapons from both sides started to fire back and forth. The turrets were once again taken out quickly, but not before they’d managed to extract their toll in blood. The Mirosians were deadly and fast in their armor, but the unmanned turrets were even faster. Between two to four Mirosians died at the twenty city sites in that initial rush, for a total of fifty-eight deaths.
That’s when the plan went awry.
The Mirosians jumped to clear the energy shields and obstacles to land among the enemy as they had in the last two battles, but the large artificial gravity sheet covering them from attacks from space, turned into a dome at the last second.
He watched in horror as they hit the gravity shield at close to forty miles an hour, and stopped dead. They were fine thanks to their armor, but stunned as they fell to the ground outside the
energy shield walls.
Then the dome turned into a sheet again, and the enemy started to fire into the recovering group of Mirosian warriors, working as groups of three or more to overcome their more powerful shields.
The Mirosians weren’t called the best warriors in the empire for nothing however. They recovered quickly and started to move rapidly in random directions as they returned fire. They might have preferred up close and personal, but every one of them was an expert shot. They soon evened the odds, killing one or two from each Kascorix team made a huge impact, and then five of them activated their energy nimbus, and tossed their weapons over the shield walls.
Then they all dropped to the ground for cover.
The explosion of energy was enormous, and they used the Kascorix’s own energy shields as cover from it, as the enemy armor was torn apart.
At first, he’d thought they’d overloaded their weapons, but when they jumped over the walls this time, he saw those same five soldiers pick up their weapons which had survived the explosions they caused. Then they moved for the ship in the center with a vengeance. It was over just moments later.
Alyndra said, “I didn’t know they could do that. The weapons I mean.”
He nodded, they’d responded perfectly, and with finality to the Kascorix trap, but it had cost them. There were over twenty dead Mirosian warriors just at the one location, three hundred and eighty-six altogether at all twenty sites. That was still not a bad ratio, less than a four percent casualty rate was more than acceptable when attacking a fortified position like that.
It still pissed him off. He was angry.
It would be a mistake to let them adapt, and then send a new wave that was better prepared to overwhelm their defenses. He hoped the senate thought so as well, though the empress would have the final word on the matter.
The Mirosians started back to the landing coordinates to return to the ship…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
