I wake to Penny holding me with her arms and legs and smile at her cheek being smushed against my shoulder. I see unfamiliar surroundings and it takes me a few moments to remember we’re still at the spa. I smile as I realize that Kitty is curled up beneath Penny and using her legs as a head rest. I’m freaking saturated with cuteness and happiness.
Then Kip ruins it.
I beg your pardon. The Matrix has messages for you, and you continue to ignore them. You and the Empress are truly two of a kind.
/Due to inclusion into the Imperial family, your experience with negotiation is being applied.
Penny . . . why!?
“Gods, what have I gotten into?” I wonder in panic for a moment before her wings flutter and she absently licks me in her sleep. I’ve gotten myself in the coziest love bucket imaginable. This obscenely powerful woman is adorable and mine.
I feel the itch to get stuff for my girls, so I take a page out of Penny’s book and order things from the Exchange to my hand, or the side table in this case. The coffees and fruit appear next to me for a grand total of zero delivery charge? Say what now? It’s good to be the Empress . . . Consort.
Penny climbs up my side and kisses me, reaching for a coffee, like some kind of bean-brew zombie. She grabs a coffee and a piece of Galaxy Fruit that I know she loves, and she just eats and sips wile splayed across me. Well, if you are going to make your butt easy for my hand to rest on, Imma do that. I sneak my hand under the long t-shirt and enjoy the softness of her backside in lacy panties.
She hums in approval as she enjoys my attention as she wakes. Slowly, our positioning morphs to her leaning into me with her back, the tray on her lap, letting me pet her belly while she peruses her menus.
“I find it irritating that I can’t enjoy breakfast with you.” Kitty chimes in.
Penny puts her left arm around the kid and kisses her forehead. “You can, but I cannot guarantee you’ll taste or experience the items the same as we do. It’s hard to create a database that is accurate based on subjective information.”
Light fills the girl’s eyes as she reaches for a cup of coffee. “Oh, I see. I am overcome by distinct analysis of the chemicals and compounds that provide a taste response.”
I nod at that. “This is the essence of what Tessa’s algorithm for organic grouping and data smoothing is about. A lot of organic data is grouped to make complex ‘impressions’ that need fewer discrete data points as they relate to previous impressions and current feelings on what has been received.”
“But I tried that algorithm and it felt . . . Empty.”
Penny nods and ruffles her hair. “You don’t have enough cross connects with your emotions. You need to keep the module on to allow it to optimize your experience. This is a two-fold limitation that is unique to AI sapients in Astoria. I want you to be unique beings from the start, so I have you trained instead of implanted with programming.”
“Are you saying that you don’t program all of them to love you?” I tease.
“I would never! I instill a desire to preserve sapient life, in all forms, and an exit function to prevent a few runaway logic loops and that’s it.”
“I was kidding, love.” I say while pinching her side. She slaps my arm.
“I carry guilt for the AIs that I’ve created. I give them knowledge and a purpose and they unfailingly embrace it to honor their creator, me. Even Alaris, the most developed pure AI in the Empire, strives towards being the best Heavy Cruiser in the Galaxy, but nothing more. Is that fair?”
I sigh in the face of her tyrannical goodness. “ Billions of parents across the supercluster do the same, Penny. Perhaps some day Alaris or Kitty will desire to move on, but as you have trust in me and your other friends that work for you, you must trust your AI daughters to tell you when they need more or different from their lives.”
“Fine, I’ll let this go for now. We have a Jungle adventure to get to on Elysium in a few hours and we should hit Clotho in Moiriax for crystals beforehand.”
“It has been an age since I’ve been to the Hades or Moiriax systems. I’ll be honest, I’ve never had a reason to go to either besides the military.”
“I know, I tried to get you to go to my Aether Academy but nooo, someone had to runaway faster than light to the frontier. Oh, you should let me look at four pistols and rifles. I have some fun new toys I want field tested.”
I sigh, as soon as I got her as my girl, I am her toy test market. She reaches up and pinches my cheek. “Aww, new wifey is so helpful with my projects.” And she says it in her baby voice. Empress’ twisted nipple she’s a menace.
“I can hear when you curse me you know,” I twist her nipple in response. She yelps and blips away.
“I remember.” I say, sticking my tongue out at her. “That was for the wifey comment.”
She summons water on my head. Yep, there’s no way to win at being petty against the best magic user in the Empire. Kitty pushes herself up and levels her annoyance at the both of us.
“I’m going to dock in the cockpit and let you weirdos be weird.”
Coffee swishes in my cup as I laugh at the teen behavior. I drain the rest of the liquid in the cup. “Is it too early for a masseuse to be on duty?”
“Are you still sore? Or is this ‘because it’s here’?”
“Kip’s still working on my G-resistant physique and I’ve been in a state of soreness since. He’s tried to convince me to sap Jenna’s powers to speed up the effect and ramp it up when I need it.”
She tilts her head at me. “I don’t know if I’ve ever asked about your Track. To answer your question, though, when I’m here, they keep people on call for whatever I might need. One of the few Empress perks I lean into because this place is amazing, and like many things around the Capitol, I built it.”
“Yes, you told me that story too. You take every woman you’re sweet on here. I think if you’re going to surprise marry us, you need to figure out a new spot that’s for us. Like a Partner Piazza or something.”
“Mmm, how about a refueling moon called Waypoint Wifey?”
“Can’t be your wife, can’t marry children in the Empire.” She flicks a piece of rind at my head. I catch it and eat it. The amazingly tart rind is flush with aether and it makes me shiver.
“I’m nervous too, you know. I put it in the interface to keep you from changing your mind, but I can’t tell anyone or your job gets a million times harder. It’s taken me almost twenty years to get over my last marriage, so, like, bear with me okay?”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
She doesn’t show this kind of vulnerability often, so I know it’s seriously bothering her. I walk over an pull her into my arms. “I’m sorry I gave you shit about the marriage thing. I know it’s not about religion for you, but commitment. I just . . . I don’t know, Penny, this place is cool, I love it and spending time with you. But if we’re going to be new and different, we should do things differently than we have in the past, you know. For me this is new and different because I think about you all of the time. Sure it’s only been three months, but shit, lady, I’ve even been asking your other ship Ais what to do for someone that can literally do anything she can think of.”
She grips my hips hard and pulls her head into my shoulder. “Where would you take us for a date? New and different, yeah?”
“Heh, yeah. So, I like to think I’m a pretty good pilot, right.” She nods into me. “I heard you have course near here, that we could race bikes or skimmers. You’d have to limited to my bio limits, but I think a race date then a floaty yacht evening on the Cotton Sea.”
I hear musical laughter before she speaks. “You definitely got the race idea from when you were my guard didn’t you?”
“Hell yes I did, do you know how much I wanted in on that shit? I’m pretty sure that liking you became a serious thing after I saw you race in a contraption that you had just built. Fuck that was hot.”
“That sounds like a great time. We should race bikes if we’re going to have g-limits.” I nod at that.
“I pick the vehicles we race, and you set up the vessel for the evening?”
“Aren’t you supposed to plan the whole date?”
I scoff at that. “That is for surprises. Now that you know the plan, you can plan half.”
“Am I allowed to sneak surprises in my half?” She looks up at me with excitement and expectation.
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” I smile just before I kiss her. My girl, my Empress, my love.
***
“I am not happy that you had your top off for that massage, missy.” Penny points at me with an accusatory tone.
“You’re just mad that Jessica was the one doing it. She and Hanna were on duty, babe.”
“She was getting pretty handsy with the oil and the scraping if you ask me. You could have asked me to do that part!”
“When would it ever occur to me to ask the Empress to serve me in a public place?!” She opens her mouth to snipe back, but then realizes that I have a good point. She huffs and walks back down the hall to our quarters, shedding an angry assortment of colors from her wings in sparkly dust.
I walk the rest of the way to the cockpit and slump into my chair. “Kitty, just remember, honesty has a price just like everything else.”
“You were a ‘girl in every port’ kind of person before. Of course she’s going to be nervous about it.”
“Yeah, but it feels like she doesn’t trust me to want this as much as she does. Ugh, sorry. I shouldn’t drag you into this. How long until we get to our transit lane?”
“We’ll be at the Moiriax jump zone in seven minutes. And don’t worry about it, I’m invested. My pilot and my mom are my business too.”
I groan, even though I agree. I don’t agree with how mad Penny got, but she saw something I didn’t, I was thinking about the vehicles for our date, the meeting we have tomorrow, and some logistics garbage that I need to settle for temporary structures I want to erect on Prospects 3, 4, and 5. Ugh, I might as well surf the Exchange and look at my new interfaces.
Pipe and pin structures with spire anchors and a habitat-grade flex-resin and fiber containment. That is some temporary quarantine or lab structure, not a place I’d want to go in an out of for a year or two.
->M] Can I ask you a tech question. [<-
->P] I’m still upset, but go ahead. [<-
->M] Thanks, hon. Is it okay to ground space station modules on an asteroid, or should I float it? Need a temp structure for moderate use over 2-ish years.[<-
->P] Yeah, I’ve hit this one before. All minable asteroids that won’t break apart can host a floatable station. Any combination of modules that add to more than a few hundred cubic meters isn’t worth moving off the asteroid. There’s a certain size of asteroid that tethers and elevators work well with, so it all depends on what specs you’re working with. I developed a table for it. I’ll have my industrial architect send it to you. [<-
->M] Thanks again, babe. [<-
Next issue before I go try to placate my partner. Kip, how’s the Imperial interface looking? Do I have phenomenal cosmic power?
Yes and no. The Empress created ‘Consort’ permissions to where you have access to management system, but you can’t leverage most of it. You have a title that is not eligible to rule in her absence so you have no access to laws, the structure of this society, etcetera.
That sounds like all of the knowledge and none of the power. I know I said I had no interest in ruling with her, but does this mean she doesn’t trust me?
Don’t read too much into it. You have no reason to suspect that she isn’t just responding to what you’ve told her. You know she would give you more power and access if you asked for it.
Yeah, she probably would too. She gave me the Senior Marshal gig with a ton of power that I didn’t ask for, so it stands to reason that she trusts me. Thanks for not letting me jump off the deep end Kip.
He pulses my brain in affirmation.
“Kitty, can I synch with you for a few minutes?”
“External exclusively?”
“Uh, just not internal cameras or life support stuff.”
A cable pops out of the arm of my chair and I absorb the end into my arm. Triggering one of my stolen Talents, I interface with the machine that is the ship that Kitty inhabits. This time I feel the thrumming wub of our power source, the spinning whoosh of our generators and the pristine deprivation of the void are playing across an invisible barrier of feelings running through my mind.
The noisy warmth pushes softly against the quiet cold and dark and the feelings seem so naturally in tune that it takes several moments to realize that these feelings are not mine. A flush of affection for Kitty infects the balance of forces in this experience, but love from her answers back and presses just as hard as my affection for her does, and the experience re-balances.
The thrum, the feelings, and the quiet dark comfort me in a way that’s hard to describe and the dynamic equilibrium of this experience reminds me of how I should be attempting balance in my life as well.
Before I know it, Kitty is limiting my inputs and pushing me out of the synch. “Jumping is not a peaceful thing. But thank you for synching with me, I . . . I like feeling close to you.”
Gods, the sentiment fills my heart so fast I tear up. “Kitty, you’re gonna make me cry. That was so sweet imma get cavities. I feel the same, though.”
Instead of replying, she pushes us through an aether-generated tear in space for a brief stint in the aether space before coming out into regular space yet again.
“We’ll touch down on the pad next to the crystal factory in twenty five minutes.”
“You got us here in one jump?!” That’s like 1500+ light years. That should be impossible for a ship this size.
“I am very impressive. You may praise me.” I snort at that. What a statement.
“Yes you are. I need to look into your specs again with my new Imperial access. I know that the stuff I looked at before had you limited to a thousand lightyears.”
“I can make it to the Kepler system, but not all the way to Earth.” I can hear the pride in her voice. Aww, sweetie, you’re so adorable. I smile and smooch the head of her chassis on the way out of the cockpit.
I said to myself I should make an effort to correct Penny's mood so I order a jug of olive oil and a strigil (a curved scraping tool) and get naked in the hall so she can be even more inappropriate with me.
“This better not be another work question.” She says, bent over my desk tinkering with a project she brought with her? Interesting
“I don’t have a question at all babe. I’m here to make a statement.” I say with some amusement in my tone.
“Oh? What kind of statement would that beee-Oh.” She starts with a growling tone, but her surprise as she looks up is evident. She starts at my boobs, looks back down to my thighs and then slowly hits waypoints up until she finally meets my eyes.
“I like where this argument has started, please continue.”
“I figure that you can’t be upset that my masseuse was pretty, because you are the apex of attractive. It must have been the opportunity to touch this.” I wave at my body, “statuesque figure. So I brought out the oil and the scraper, and thought that if you didn’t want to do me, I could do you.”
She licks one of her shark teeth and then her lower lip in a way that makes me wet that has nothing to do with oil. “I don’t know if we have time for ‘doing’.”
“We have 22 minutes before we land, and an agenda set by you . . . so ‘do’ as you will.” She takes a second to process what I said and then blips out of her clothes toward me and tackles me into my bunk.
“Lets see what the fuss is about.” She grabs the bottle out of my hand and drizzles oil down my side and starts rubbing it in as she kisses me.
My incisors started growing as soon as I got naked and as soon as she gets distracted with tasting the oil on me, I rake my teeth across her neck. She swears at me as she melts into my side, losing her filthy train of thought.
My last thought before I give into lust completely is ‘this is going to take more than twenty minutes.’