Chapter 1

So, Abby, you may ask: Why are you buck naked, tied to a tritium ringed 50 megaton fusion-implosion bomb on an alien planet in orbit around the star 55 Cancri? Weren’t you doing math homework like earlier this month? Why can’t you have normal hobbies, like normal teenagers?

“I believe that this may, in fact, be stomach acid,” my girlfriend said, craning her head backwards to try and look at me. Her crystalline dreadlocks clinked and clattered against the bomb as she struggled against the restraints that wrapped around her chest and arms. The same restraints that, by the way, kept me stuck to the bomb. A similar pair of straps kept the dampener helmet on my head – locking down every last talent I had.

The massive walls of purplish flesh convulsed around us as my feet dug into the soft, squishy floor. The liquid that sloshed against my toes stung like sticking your hand into orange juice after cutting your fingers open.

“I think you’re right, Ali,” I said, slowly.

Deet. Deet. Deet.

“What is that?” Ali asked, her voice tightening. She wriggled and squirmed. “Is that the explosive device?”

“No.” I paused. “I think that’s the timer.”

“Abby...”

“Yeah, Ali?”

“I think that it is safe in saying that this is your fault.”

Let’s start at the beginning. Maybe, if I could think through all the steps that ended with me in the middle of an off brand Shai’hulud strapped to a fusion bomb, then maybe I could figure out a way to get my ass out of the situation.

So.

The beginning.

First, there was the big bang. Then for a very long time, very little of note happened until a certain alien race evolved on a dismal planet. This race, later named the Doyen, possessed one fuck of an evolutionary edge. They had the ability to innately tap into the subqauntum level of reality. In the same way that quantum mechanics underpin Newtonian mechanics, the Doyen are able to use “psi” to fuck with the world. They never needed a gun or a spaceship or a castle or an atomic bomb. Instead, they simply crafted with tools of the mind, and using that tool, they conquered the galaxy between their little households and factions and kingdoms.

They called it the Doyen Empire.

And they make the Empire from Star Wars and the Borg look like comfy couches of liberal democracy. Say what you will about the Borg, at least they’re not actively flaying people’s minds apart in an eternity of suffering simply to get a psionic high off the pain-fumes. At least Emperor Palpatine could keep his underlings from stabbing him in the back, I’m looking at you ‘Guy whose name rhymes with Yoke.’ So, rather than becoming a creepy but constantly growing collective of cyber-zombies, or a semi-efficent fascist state, the Doyen Empire has been sitting in a continue state of suffering and agony and torture for almost a thousand years.

Yay.

Onto the stage comes a little known race of semi-shaved apes who are still trying to figure out that it’s not okay to treat people bad because they have a different skin color from you. Humanity made contact with the Doyen in 1998, when three Russian MIGs surprised a Doyen paladin in his scout-form (basically, a telekinetic bubble he was using to fly around Earth’s upper atmosphere) and shot him the fuck down.

You might have heard of that as the Norwegian Missile Incident. Yeah, the governments of the world hushed it up. And not just because they’re all massive dicks! The Doyen are psychc, remember? If the planet shaking panic and shock and delight and wonder of making first contact swept through our population, it’d be the same as shooting a flare up. A space flare. And then the Doyen would get nearly ten billion new brains to flay apart for fun and raw psychic power.

So, rather than blowing the whistle, humans did what humans do best. We stole shit. From the bits and pieces recovered from the Doyen, humanity discovered how to activate our own psionic potential. We launched our own psionic warriors into space. We secretly funneled huge amounts of money from NATO and the former Warsaw Pact and China and bits of Africa and South America into the best tech America could buy.

And, of course, various men in sunglasses and suits with names like Mr. Smith or Mr. John or Boris or Yang or whatever the generic name for a government spook is in Brazil was, would show up and offer potential psychics a chance to serve their planet. Usually paired with: ‘Or rot in Guantanamo Bay or nearest non-union equvilent.’

Which is why I, Abdai Hatem, average every day delinquent hacker who may have accidentally hacked into the Pentagon servers for the lols, ended up chucked through a psionically powered stargate and to the deck of the PsiCom Headquarters Ship. Yeah, they had never come up with a good name for the fucker. Most people aboard called her the Headquarters, or just HQ.

Everyone save for my girlfriend.

She called it...

“When the fuck am I going to get out of this fucking prison!?” Princess Tzali Doyen .921, Prime in the line of succession of the Doyen Empire, snarled as she yanked on the shimmering bars of carefully carved psi-crystal that made up the inner door of her holding cell.

“That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Sergeant Barry said, his arms crossed across his huge barrel chest. Sergeant Barry had been one of the first people to welcome me to HQ. He was big. He was black. He was also completely fucking buck naked. I didn’t know if this was true with Doyen powers, but with human imparted psionic abilities, the actual subquantum field manipulations produced by our less developed brains was ... unstable. Fragile. Easily broken. We are so used to thinking of solid things as solid, and not as a haze of atoms and particles bound together by gravity and the strong/weak nuclear forces.

A human skin touching even a thong is literally millions upon millions of chaotic interactions between skin and bits of ball-fluff and dong-bits and the thong itself. And that thong is made up entirely out of inert, psionically dead material. A human psion wearing a thong could maybe make a combat knife out of telekinetic force, or maybe read the mind of a particularly unfocused poker player. Things got progressively worse the more clothes we wore.

Hence why I was trying to ignore the fact that while my girlfriend was in a prison cell, she was also getting about nine inches of view. If you know what I mean. And no, Barry was not some newbie like me, who popped wood when a fellow lance-mate brushed up against me during training. He was a stone cold motherfucker who had been out fighting with PsiCom since the start of the second Gulf War. So, yeah.

What I’m saying is that my most direct superior was hung like a horse and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that fact being flaunted before my girlfriend. Fortunately, I was pretty definite about my feelings about her being locked in a cage.

Oh, right.

How did an average teenager with latent psionic potential become the boyfriend of a Doyen Space Princess? And why would I want to be a boyfriend to a princess who was part of a race who flayed minds like I ate skittles? Well, the answer to that was threefold. The first was, um, look at her? Princess Tzali (or, as I called her, Ali, Tzali was enough of a tongue twister, and I was the only person with an even halfway Arabic name within several parsecs so it felt kind of nice) was gorgeous. No, she took the idea of gorgeous and demolished it with psionic sledgehammers.

Her skin was what I had taken to calling “Night Elf purple” with hints of darker blues along the edges of her extremities. The tips of her breasts (save for her nipples, which shaded to pure white), fingers, ear-tips. Yeah, she had elven ears, why wouldn’t she had elven ears? Add to that a body that settled between hourglass perfection and athletic grace, a superhuman dexterity that made her spine capable of bending like a cat, legs that could literally lock behind her neck, and a tongue that could reach from her lips to my belly button without her even bending over, and...

I coughed and tried to subtly tuck my hard dick between my thighs while also standing at attention.

Barry, used to this kind of thing from his mostly teenage to college age recruits, ignored it. Ali merely flicked her head back, with an air like: Yeah, I’m the prettiest thing in fifty light years, deal with it, bitches.

The only other girl in the room, Squaddie Amelia Pound, looked less irritated and more intrigued. Amelia was one of the best warpers on the ship – warpers being psions with the ability to fold space with their minds. She helped to power the only primary link between HQ to Earth via harnessing the intense longing she felt for her girlfriend, Lt. Natasha. This produced intense expressions on her face when Ali put her sex on. Which was all the time forever.

“You’ve taken my blood, you have examined my brains with your felines, you’ve even questioned my matrix with your kak-handed, incompetent telepaths,” Ali said, sneering slightly. “I’ve done every task you’ve asked and all without complaining much.”

Barry’s eyebrow twitched.

I had not been present for the CAT Scans. But from the amount of scrap metal that had been dragged out of the medops deck and chucked back through the Stargate for replacement on Earth, and from the figure I had heard from a harried accountant while getting my evening chow, I was pretty sure that my girlfriend had just added a few thousandths of a percent to the national debt. Which didn’t sound like much until you remembered America.

“But my patience is far from infinite! I wish to join your war against my father and the other, inconsequential households of the Doyen Empire,” Ali said, crossing her arms underneath her breasts, shelving them with intention. The fact that it was utterly transparent that she was showing off her tits did absolutely nothing to reduce the fact they were mouth-wateringly gorgeous.

Barry inclined his head. “I understand, Princess Tzali. However, we know that the Doyen are not above using mind-slaves or sleeper agents. We’ve performed every major test that we can think of. Nearly.” He nodded. “If you pass this last one, then we will be glad to bring you into our training regime. Once you complete your training, you will join Squaddie Chong’s lance.”

“Lance?” Ali asked, narrowing her eyes.

“A squadron of like minded psions,” Barry said. “Squaddie Chong’s lance, Lance 3, is made up of Private Beli Lapran, Private Diamond White, Private Tasmin Khan and, yes, Abby.” He grinned. “So, you have plenty of motivation.”

Ali beamed. “All right! What’s the test?”

“Yeah, uh, what is-”

And that was when Amelia pulled out her crystal gun – a slender chunk of psi-crystal slung off her hip by the thinnest cord that could be made and still count as existing – and shot me in the head. The explosion of viscera was so real that I spent a good five seconds wondering why I wasn’t, in fact, dead, as I sprawled on the ground. I sat up just about the same time the prison door exploded off and Barry was punted through five decks.

The only thing that saved him was the fact he was Barry and Barry was a badass.

The only thing that saved the ship was that the holding cells were near the central spine, and the outer hull was at least three walls worth of metal and plastic before momentum stopped.

Ali did not take this test well.

But the, uh, depth of her reaction got her into Lance 3. Or, to use it’s more awesome and badass and cool name...

Bravo Squad!

Lets talk about Bravo Squad. While Ali was put through the same training regime I had been put through while she had been in prison, Bravo Squad was set to fixing up the damage that she had caused. Squaddie Fang Chong was our leader. He was a nineteen year old military recruit from the People’s Army or whatever it was they called it in China. I don’t know, google it. He spoke English better than me, had a bunch of crazy high grades in various scholastic formats, and had hefty telekinetic abilities. He was a pretty cool guy, once you got past the tough guy leader edge.

Then there was Beli. She was curvier than Ali and her skin was duskier – and colored more like chocolate than sunset. She was from America, but delighted in bringing out sayings that might have been from the lips of The Buddha himself or had just been made up out of whole cloth just to fuck with us. I was pretty sure that the Buddha wouldn’t have suggested instantly murdering yours truly, but I wasn’t some ... fancy ... tree sitty enlightenment getting guy. Her best friend and nearly complete and perfect fucking clone was Tasmin. Okay, clone was a bit wrong. Yes, Tasmin was just as curvy and beautiful. And yes, Tasmin also had a deliciously musical accent. But Tasmin was also as serious as Beli was playful, and somehow, Tasmin managed to wear nudity like I’d wear a three piece business suit. Tasmin was also our telepath, while Beli was our empath. One hit them where they thinked, the other hit them where they felt. It was a terrifying combo, made all the more impressive by how quickly they could coordinate.

Next, we had Diamond. Diamond was a skinny, flat as a board, gymnastic looking black girl whose hair varied wildly from week to week. Some days, she had it done up in cornrows. Some days, she had it sheered as flat as her chest. Other days, she let it poof out into a huge-ass afro. It was one of the upsides of having at least a tiny bit of biokinetic potential. But while her biokinesis let her floof or defloof her hair as much as she wanted, it was her warping that was the real ace in Bravo Squad’s arm-mounted automatic card launcher.

In my head, the cards were monomolecular sharp and exploded. Like Gambit’s.

All four of them responded to me dropping the news with looks of pure horror.

“You want your psycho girlfriend to join the Lance?” Tasmin asked, her voice as dry and cold as Antarctica. She swung her arm out wide, gesturing to the swath of destruction made by Barry as he had been flung through walls and doors and bits of office.

“Firstly,” Fang said, holding up his hand. “I doubt it was Abby’s choice.”

“I was about to say!” I said.

“Secondly, I’m fairly sure it’s a psycho ex-girlfriend by the time she gets through basic,” Fang said, wearing his ‘I am not smiling, but actually, I am smiling a great deal, but try and prove it in court, just try it, I fucking dare you.’

“Hey!” I said, flushing. “I’m sending her good vibes.” To demonstrate, I sent a psychic ping through the corridors of the ship. Hang in their, baby!

I. Am. Going. To. Kill. You. Ali’s voice came through in ragged psionic gasps, each squirt of verbal communication tinged with fatigue posions that made my biceps burn and my belly ache in a ghostly echo of the hell I had gone through under Barry’s personal tutilage.

KEEP FOCUS RECRUIT!

The psionic boom of Barry’s voice made me almost fall onto my ass. Did you know modern DIs weren’t allowed to swear at you or call you demeaning names anymore? It wasn’t like in Full Metal Jacket. Did you know that a DI could take a perfectly ordinary set of instructions and turn it into the emotional equivalent of being stabbed in the gut by a psi-sword? Well, you do now! Seeing my expression brought a slow smile on Beli’s face.

“Yeah, definitely ex.”

“We won’t break up!” I said, biting my lip. “I mean, crash landing on an alien planet was what brought us together. If our relationship survived that, it can survive anything!”

“Yes, how could a relationship possibly survive two beautiful teenagers being thrown together on a jungle planet, forced to work together to survive, battling life or death monsters while evading Doyen paladins?” Diamond asked, grinning as she scooted by, using a broom to brush chunks of metal along the floor – the clatteirng, clinking noise adding a drum line to her sarcasm. I glared after her skinny black ass. “It’s a miracle you two only had sex, what, three times?”

I flushed. “How do you know how many times we...”

“You broadcast.” The words came from my entire Lance, with variations on the theme. Fang said it like it was a tactical error I needed to fix. Tasmin said it like she was sick of hearing the same joke repeatedly. Beli said it with a smile as she leaned her whole cushy body against her mop. And Di said it like it was the best fucking soap opera in the universe.

“In your sleep,” Fang said.

I flushed. Hard.

There were downsides to being Sigma 6. Which I was. Fang was Sigma 4, while Beli and Tasmin were both sigma 3. Diamond was Sigma 5. But like earthquakes and nuclear bombs, actual power got a lot higher a lot faster than the numbers meant, so Sigma 6 was a big fucking deal. Not Doctor Manhattan big. But I was at least at Professor X scale. With the ribbing done, Fang sent a subtle ‘work’ ping. It wasn’t so much actual words, but rather, it was like was all just felt like we should maybe start working again.

We took the message and went back to work getting everything cleaned up.

Once the last bit of repairs were done, Fang slapped my shoulder and prevented me from heading to the washroom where I was going to get some grease off my fingers. Instead, he smiled at me, his broad, muscular form almost hemming me into the wall. It was at times like this that I remembered just how naked we were. Like, Fang was not a skinny Chinese guy. He was one of those huge, buff Chinese guys who looked like they could go toe to toe with the Rock. The fact he kept his hair short added to that vibe, and the body paint he wore in lieu of uniform did not distract from the swinging dick that nearly bumped against my thigh.

I’d say that this was a work environment made for ‘no homo’, but I liked to think that I was more comfortable in my heterosexuality than that.

I liked to think that.

Instead, my brain kept going: That’s a dong, that’s a dong, dong dong dong, big old swinging dong, all the dongs! In this doggerel chant.

Shut the FUCK up, brain!

“Where do you think you’re going, Abby?” Fang asked, grinning wickedly.

“To ... the ... shower?” I asked.

“Oh no. There’s something we’ve put off for far too long.” His contact made my talent squirm and wriggle. The instinct when one psion touches another is to read their mind, if you have even a tiny bit of telepathic talent. But Fang and I both had our mental shields up – it was the first part of basic braining, and it was actually harder to bring them down than you’d think. Either way, I couldn’t read anything off him other than the sadistic grin on his face.

I started to mentally scramble through everything I knew about PsiCom internal culture. I knew that fucking on the reg was basically a tacitly accepted fact of life by our direct superiors and that they had been carefully keeping certain security camera recordings of late night orgies from getting back to the Kremlin, Pentagon, 10 Downing Street, Paris and Bejing. I knew that there was a girl in the Telepathic Communication Operations Division who could basically act as a holodeck for you if you didn’t mind sliding into a sense dep tank and knowing she’d judge you about every single fucking detail.

But then Fang pushed me forward and a ripple of distorted space clued me in that Di was in on this hazing ritual too. I landed in a chair in a darkened room and started to wonder if maybe me broadcasting my memories of fucking Ali was about to get be beaten with bars of soap.

“Private Hatem...” A deep, gruff voice that sounded faintly familiar spoke. “Do you know what it takes to become a real member of PsiCom?”

“Uh...” I paused.

Like a Cheshire grin, a set of teeth spread into a wide smile in the darkness.

“You gotta get at least one of them.”

I blinked.

“A kill?” I asked.

“A confirmed kill. And since you’re an ass backwards weirdo who decided to hit combat before you even started day one...” the lights flared on and Amelia sat there across the table from me, her hands set on a tray that contained a cake that looked as cheap as it was possible for a cake to look. Considering all the food had to be either grown on the HQ hydroponics decks or shipped here from Earth via the few FTL ships that the PsiCom had access too (the Stargate was a bit too dangerous to leave on for anything but the most emergency of transports), I was actually rather impressed with how good the cake did look.

I was also impressed by the smiling crowd surrounding me.

It looked like nearly every Lance that the ship flew with was here, including Lance-3, all of them giving me huge shit eating grins.

I sagged in my seat, laughing as Amelia spun the cake around and I saw what was written on it.

My call-sign.

Each member of each Lance had a call-sign, given to them once they finished basic braining and got their first confirmed kill. Well, I had finished basic braining. I had gotten a confirmed kill (or two) on the little misadventure that had gotten me and Ali together. And now, I was looking at my call-sign.

PIRATE MASK.

My brow furrowed. “Pirate Mask?”

Amelia held out a knife for me to cut into the cake, grinning. “You stole the heart of a princess. It seemed appropriate.”

Neurons fired and my brow furrowed. “Wait ... like ... Princess Bride? Like Wesley? The Dread Pirate Roberts? Dude in a mask?”

“Yes, yes, now, cut the cake, Mask, we’re all waiting,” one of the older dudes from Lance-5 said.

I grinned, then held out my palm. “Watch this...” I focused. Honing my telekinetic talents, I created a series of razor thin wires of force, which skimmed through cake and frosting alike, then snatched up the pieces, sending them flying through the air. They slapped into plates and everyone cheered.

Fang grinned as he took a seat on the table, crossing one naked thigh over the other. He, like most people on the ship, ate fastidiously, since getting food on your bare skin was just ... weird. But as he ate, he said: “Looking forward to your first mission?”