Chapter 2

The funny thing about space – beyond the asphyxiation and eyeball exploding and radiation – was how it took everything totally logical and threw it on its head. Most of my life was spent picturing space battles as being either sea battles or air battles, just with a prettier backdrop and force fields. Nope! Nada! Wrong!

Also, technically, so was the eyeball exploding thing. The internal pressure of a human body was nowhere near high enough to get even soft tissue to do more than bruise when your blood started to burst out of your capillaries.

For example, if you wanted to go down while in orbit, you actually to go backwards. To go upwards, you had to go forward. It was easier to go left when you were five million kilometers away from a planet than when you were only one million kilometers away – and left was actually a meaningless concept, so really, I was completely lost for most of basic training when it came to orbital dynamics. Even with a fancy computer that did all the hard math for me, I still spent most of the first five minutes of my first mission watching Magnum fiddle with the controls on the Angel Grove and tried to just ... grasp what the ever loving fuck was going on.

We were currently in orbit around Beta-3, the third planet in orbit around the star Betelgeuse, getting prepped to drop from orbit to the surface. But, like all of humanity’s efforts in space, our goal was hampered by three real big problems.

1) Human spaceships sucked
2) Doyen could notice psychic powers
3) The only way to land to without a spaceship was to use psychic powers
Which led back to 1 and us burning to death in a horrible fireball. The Angel Grove had been built on the sly using excess material and funds from the various military budgets of NATO nations and former Warsaw Pact countries. And bits of Africa and Brazil. It had not been designed by NASA or Space-X or any of the other space agencies in the world, because NASA literally had to tell everyone about whatever the fuck it was doing. It couldn’t not do it without breaking a bunch of laws. Also, NASA was mostly filled with non-psychic nerds, who couldn’t be told about the Doyen anyway.

So when I say the Angel Grove is the most slap dash, kak hande, bullshit dumb spaceship in the history of the universe, I freaking mean it. I’d have preferred to be on the Apollo missions, and those were literally fifty years out of fucking date and had a computer less powerful than my freaking iPhone. Basically, it was two large tanks of hydrogen and one smaller tank of oxygen, with a rocket mixer at the butt that could fire up and kick us forward. That provided enough thrust to shift the hundreds of tons of guns, ammo and armor that the Lance required to deploy effectively ... and not much else.

There were a few hundred little RCS – Reaction Control Systems – mounted along each axis of the ship, which let us turn around like a really really fat man sitting on a stool pushing himself with one of those hand held fans. And, finally, as an afterthought, there was a huge mess of webbing and nets that held the aforementioned guns, ammo and armor, and then a teeny tiny little life supporting cockpit that was basically a room with a connection to all the control tech, a bunch of seats, and six highly trained psychic teenage nudist super-soldiers.

Opal Midnight chose this moment crossed her arms underneath her rather perfect breasts, demonstrating just why the service was a true delight and torturous agony for any cishet male aged fourteen to the grave. Her breasts were the largest of the Lance, and her rich, dark skin was accented by the even darker tips of her nipples. Even a tiny motion set off delicious jiggling through her breasts that came to a head (so to speak) with those nipples, practically begging people to suckle to them.

My girlfriend, Princess Tzali, who was sitting to my left, glared at me.

I looked at the ceiling and tried very hard to become asexual, a task I had never managed to do. I figured it’d be just as hard for an asexual to become yes-sexual, but at least I was trying for the universally good cause of not pissing off my girlfriend, as opposed to the universally bullshit cause of heteronorminatiy. Which I was pretty sure wasn’t a word, also, I was reaching.

The ship shuddered and Magnum, our Lance’s leader, grunted. “All right, we’re in a stable-ish orbit. We won’t start de-orbiting for at least four days...” he pushed himself smoothly out of the control nook in the “roof” of the room. I mean, I called it a roof, but we’re in micro-gravity, so it could have been the floor. But it was opposite from all the chairs, so roof seemed like a good enough term.

Ali (my shortened nickname for Tzali because I was being paid by the nerdy reference, not by the syllable) nodded and started to push herself away from the chair. She, like most newbies in micro-gravity, overreached. Her body sailed forward and bumped against Magnum. Our Lance leader and her mashed together and in the naturally sensual way that micro-gravity encouraged, her breasts pressed to his chest and his cock slapped against her thigh. Ali squeaked and tried to push herself away, and ended up floating upwards and slewing around so that she basically flashed the entire group her astoundingly delicious Doyen pussy.

I was really glad that I was pretty dark skinned myself, or else I would be really red right now.

As it was, Magnum was doing his best to keep up his stoic Chinese attitude as he gently put his hand on my girlfriend’s knee (the least sexual part of her he could touch, which considering Ali’s intense inherent eroticism, was still a 4.89 on the Douglass-Ravenwood Eroticism Index) and pushed her away. Ali grabbed onto the upper left corner of the room and stopped her slew as Magnum coughed and said: “Here’s the plan. We need to get our gear out of the net and starting down towards the planet. We’ll be dropping as far from settled lands as possible. Shooting stars happen, but not a bunch at the same time. So, lets get to it.”

Opal and her counterpart, Ebony, wriggled out of their chairs. Since they were old hands at this whole ‘being in space’ thing, they did so without mashing themselves against Magnum, even if Opal might have wanted to.

Quick, pick a word that might describe doing stuff in space!

Exciting?

Dangerous?

Adventureish?

Wrong, super right, wrong, but the best word is and always will be utterly fucking tedious. We were in orbit around a Doyen planet. And while Doyen were sparse on the ground compared to their “mindless” (read, non-psychic) chattel, serfs and slaves, that didn’t matter. If one of them picked up an unusual amount of telekinetic energy in the skies above their heads, they would leap to their utterly logical conclusion of assuming that it was either other Doyen here to raid (because, despite being called the Doyen Empire, it was really more like the Inner Sphere during the pre-Clan invasion, if you know what I mean. If you don’t know what I mean, think Europe during the post-Roman collapse) or us pesky humans.

Either way, they’d come up swinging and the Angel Grove was no X-wing. Or Starfury. Or Viper. Or literally anything capable of fighting or taking a hit.

So, Opal squished herself into the airlock, as she was the one who’d take the most time getting suited up, and the rest of us started to go through a checklist of what we’d do. The Angel Grove launched with six mechanical counterpressure suits that someone in PsiCom had literally stolen from NASA. It had even been reported as a theft. Once we got em, we’d started producing new ones, using Army and Navy and Air Force engineers to try and make them better. The end result was better than the bulky suits that you might have seen in space movies, but still not nearly as nice as, say, any space suit from a TV show.

Basically, remember the whole ‘blood boiling’ thing I had mentioned one thousand three hundred and fifty five words before? That’s because space, as you may have heard, was a vacuum. Vacuum was bad, even if it wasn’t eyeballs exploding bad. Old space suits fixed this by just pressurizing the inside of the suit with air. Now, if you’ve ever moved around in a bulky jacket, you know just how hard it can be to be properly flexible while swathed in thick cloth. Well, imagine if instead of thick cloth, you were swathed in material tough enough to retain shape while also being filled with pressurized air. Yeah, that’s why moving and operating things in space suits took about fifty million years longer than it fucking should have.

MPCs got around this issue by, well, replacing air pressure with just skintight material pressing against the skin. They were easier to move in, sexier, and more comfortable. The downside was that putting them on took even longer than putting on a regular space suit, because fuck you, that’s why. It was like struggling into one of those wet-suits divers wore, while also adjusting tiny mechanical clamps worked into the fabric to ensure it was tight enough to provide pressure but not so tight it started to crimp off blood vessals. All while crammed into a spare airlock in a tiny hab module on a massive flying bomb in micro-gravity while being aware that a single spark of psychic energy could get everyone killed.

And since Opal Midnight was our curviest girl, she had the hardest time working the MCP up around this delicious Indian hips and chomp-able Indian ass and over those perfect Indian breasts. So, while she did her wriggle and jiggle in the air-lock, the rest of us ... as I mentioned...

Did checklists.

Magnum Caliber passed out the clip boards. The rest of the Lance – me (Pirate Mask, yes, I was assigned this call sign, I didn’t chose it, or else I’d have grabbed the obvious Roll Fizzlebeef), Ebony Noon, Tycho Bright, and Ali – all grabbed up a clip board. Each one had a series of instructions on them. I was going to be handling the red net’s left corner. Step 1: Crawl along the edge of the ship to get to Step 2: Unfasten screw A-2. My eyes started to glaze over here, but I forced myself to pay attention.

Even simple jobs could get real gnarly without gravity, air, light or sound.

Which made sense, now that I put it like that.

Once Opal had finally crammed her delicious squish into her MCP, she vacated the airlock and let Ali start to change. This gave me a chance to check out what an MCP did to a girl’s body. And, uh, holy shit. The fabric clung like a layer of fucking paint. I could see the soft folds of her pussy and the cleft of her ass. I could see her nipples. Her breasts were shelved and held up by the form fitting pressure suit, and they were kept in a kind of jiggle-free perkiness that totally worked for me. I shook my head, once more feeling quite ashamed as Opal grinned at me.

“Can’t wait to see you fit into one of these things,” she said. Then, scowling. “I hate what it does to the talent, though...”

That brought me up short. I had been psychic for only a few weeks. In that time, I had just gotten used to being able to use telekinesis and telepathy and biokinesis and all my other powers. But wearing an MCP will do the exact same thing that wearing any kind of clothes did to a human talent: Screw it eight ways from Sunday. I gulped, slightly.

After Ali got her butt dressed – and holy shit, she looked amazing in an MCP. The pale gray fabric clung to her like Opal, accentuating everything awesome about her body, but retaining the alien exoticness that made her features so utterly compelling – I got to wriggle into my MCP. Once I had gotten that indignity out of the way, Tycho and Magnum and Ebony all went in to get their butts changed. Ebony, despite being just as cushy as Opal, went last. This wasn’t because Ebony was some kind of amazing quick change artist. Nah.

It was mostly so each of us would have a nearly equal amount of time with the check lists.

Again, remember what I said about tedious?

Finally, we got our butts into space.

And ... just like the first time ... space took my breath away. And no, that wasn’t some cute way to say I had forgotten to connect the air to my helmet (which was the only part of an MCP that resembled the old space suits, since you didn’t need to have to have perfect manual dexterity with your lips to manipulate space components, we weren’t pastel colored ponies.) No, this was just standard awe at the vastness and majesty of the universe. It was times like this where I almost wished that I believed.

Like ... in a god.

My grandparents were Muslim, but they had both died before I was old enough to remember them. Car crash, actually. Mom had been a Pakistani girl who had been going to Berkeley in the 1990s, and she had never exactly religious. Dad, meanwhile, had been going through his ‘I’m a bitter edge-lord Atheist’ phase. They had gotten together, gotten radical, then aged out of it by 2010. So for the first ten years of my life, I had actually gotten to see Dad record anti-Muslim youtube videos, and jeeze, that’s a surreal as fuck thing to see from the other end of the camera.

Me?

I tried to just have faith in people.

But right now...

Right now the universe felt too big and too beautiful to just be people. I crawled along the skin of our tiny tinfoil shitship and looked outwards at Betelgeuse and Beta-3 and just marveled at it.

Okay, you hear “Beta-3” and you think, “Oh, it’s the third planet!”

So you think that Betelgeuse would look like SOL, our cheerful middle of the road yellow dwarf star. Well, uh, no? Betelgeuse, if it had been swapped with our sun, would have had its equator brushing up against Jupiter. Yeah, holy fuck. More than that, though, Betelgeuse was a pulsating star. It had moved from brighter to dimmer over its observed history multiple times – and up close, that looked astounding. Imagine a huge red fist, throbbing and immense, and now imagine it was surrounded by a massive cloud of glittering rubies. That cloud shimmered and refracted, swirling and pulsating as it moved in slow, stately patterns. I could actually see faint impressions of magnetic pressure rippling through the haze of matter bleeding off the star.

That shroud’s movement and orbit around the star was what had produced the variable light levels from Earth.

Below us, though, was another beauty. Beta-3 was a vast curtain of searing blood red clouds, shimmering with the reflected light of the star, and between the gaps in the clouds, I could see wine-purple oceans and vast continents covered with blackness. Like, literal blackness. Between the black, I could see more familiar earthen colors of browns and even golds. I shook my head slowly. If I had see this planet in a video game (cough, cough, No Man’s Sky), it’d have looked ugly. Because humans had never seen a natural world with natural colors produced under an alien star.

Seeing it in this context, with these eyes?

It was alien.

It was lovely.

It was part of this immense universe and I felt positively thrilled to the bone. My mind reached desperately for some way to hang this feeling on something more than just gaping awe. But then the moment passed, the checklist reasserted itself, and I had to get my MCP-clad butt moving again. So, I could bore you with the play by play of us moving through every single step. But since nothing went wrong and, after two hours, we did finally get the fucking nets taken off, stowed away, and the armor and guns and ammo away from the ship, I think we can just call this a mission accomplished and move on.

Each supply unit was contained in a large package of sturdy ablative armor that served as a heat shield. Once the shield burned off, the unit would open up several immense parachutes to slow the descent. Which was another reason why we were going to wait until we were in a different hemisphere from civilization before we dropped. But the actual dropping wasn’t hard. Each supply unit also came with a small rocket thruster. We just had to attach, then fire them off at the exact right time while also not blowing ourselves up. Easy as pie.

“All right, that’s package six prepped and ready,” Magnum said. “Everyone look away.”

“Oh, no, I like being blinded, so...”

“Quiet, Tycho.”

A quiet giggle came from Opal while Ali scoffed. “I don’t understand why you humans are so enamored of dead things. Rockets, thrusters, Em Cee Pees.”

“Well, to be fair,” I said, grinning as I pushed myself over to look her in the face. Her eyes showed what her voice didn’t: Ali was riding along the edge of utter panic. She had never been in a ‘dead thing’ like this save for training. I wondered how much it was fucking up her her talent. The Doyen were natural psychics, as opposed to us humans. They didn’t need to get dunked in a high tech gizmo to awaken their talents. But even if her talents were only dampened and not destroyed, it still had to be like being blindfolded, gagged and forced to wear oven mitts while also juggling live chainsaws.

I reached out and cupped her helmet with my gloved hand.

Ali smiled at me.

And Magnum said: “Three. Two. One.”

Foosh.

The rockets were silent in space. But I could still imagine it.

The streaks the units made as they hit the atmosphere were like lines of fire.

“All right,” I said. “ ... how do we get down?”

There was a longish silence.

“That’s where, uh, things get awkward.” Magnum sounded like he was rubbing the back of his neck. “Remember the gold bikini?”

“I was kidding!” Opal exclaimed.

A conversation much like this had to have occurred in the smallish village of mindless serfs.

Scene: A pair of dirty farmers grubbing at the ground with stone hoes and wooden stakes. Farmer 1 turns to Farmer 2.

Farmer 1: “Say, did you notice the huge fireballs yesterday?”

Farmer 2: “Yes.”

Farmer 1: “Think we should be worried?”

Farmer 2: “Nah.”

Cue the arrival of us. And farmer 1 could be heard, faintly, muttering: “By the god’s ballsack, Ned, you’re wrong about these things every fucking time.”

You may be picturing a pastoral English village. And you’d be half right. Move the scene about three thousand miles eastward into the steppes of Russia, turn every plant pure black, paint the ground a pinkish red, and replace the English peasants with English peasants as played by a bunch of sexed up skittles, and regress the tech level from 16th century to a curious mixture of the neolithic and early modern, and you’ve got a pretty good image. And yes, I did say sexed up skittles. Not just because the farmers were of every color under the rainbow, but they were also covered with hardened carapace that looked faintly bug-like, exposing rubbery flesh between armored plates. Their bellies and thighs were mostly exposed, giving the men chances to show off their rocking abs and the women to show off their astounding titties.

Their eyes were pure black, and their mouths were small and placed underneath non-existent noses. Instead of nostrils, they had long whiskers, which were all twitching upwards at our arrival. And now, our arrival was pretty dang impressive.

At the front was Princess Tzali. Not Ali, you may ask. No, no, no. She had dressed herself in a reasonable facsimile of her old battle armor, which made her look like a walking geode made of spikes and lens flares. Her face was concealed behind hardened crystal plates and her fingers were clad in intricate, articulated gauntlets. Don’t ask me how PsiCom had managed to recover enough of her armor (which I had kinda accidentally shattered when we first met) for her to rebuild it. But the end result was intimidating as fuck. And behind her came us.

First, Opal and Ebony and Tycho. Each of them was dressed in a no shit gold bikini with tassels and bits of silk to cover their lady bits. They had each gotten five hours of marching through a jungle to get over the discomfort of having their psychic powers stripped down to nearly nothing, and were now dealing with the ... other indignities. And in them, we could see the three reactions to wearing a gold bikini. Opal was having fun selling herself as a beautiful slave girl. Ebony, her taciturn clone, was looking bored. Tycho was shooting glare-daggers at me and Magnum.