The First Nova I See Tonight by Jason Kilgore (the false prince .txt) 📕

"Who says I'm past my peak!" he said with mock annoyance.

She laughed and pushed herself against his groin. He was growing hard again.

"And what about you?" she asked. "Did you train as a warrior?"

He grew more somber, thinking back to his youth. An orphan and refugee. Parents killed when the mining colony was destroyed. Their asteroid, Eros, had collided with another after a gravitational anomaly. Earth wouldn't take him, since miners and their children were looked down upon and he wasn't born there, so he was shipped off to Tesla. He closed his eyes, remembering the explosions. The alarms. The panic.

His parents were never found.

"I guess you could say I had an informal training. I grew up alone on the streets of Muskon," he said, referring to the capital city of Tesla. "Ran with gangs. Scrambled to make ends meet beneath the glittering skyscrapers and luxury stores. Lived underground. Stole when I could. Fought when I had to — and killed." He winced as a memory flashed by of his first kill, a boy his age who had tried to murder him in his sleep. "By the time I was sixteen I ran my own hustles and smuggled goods to offworld captains." He leaned into her head, felt the softness of her fur against his face, and the bad memories dissipated. He took a breath. "By the time I was nineteen, I had my own rickety ship to run those goods myself."

She was quiet a moment, her tail wrapping and unwrapping around his right leg. "Thievery is not honorable, but to do so to survive is acceptable." She arched her back and ran her tongue over her fangs. "The thought of you killing to survive gets me so excited."

She took his right hand in hers and moved it down between her legs. His heart fluttered. She seemed to enjoy his renewed firmness as she moved against him.

She moaned as he used his fingers to stimulate her, his other arm wrapping tight around her chest. He lightly kissed her behind her ear, then moved down to her shoulder, kissing as he went.

"I think we have plenty of time before the next gravjump," he said softly.

She turned so they were chest-to-chest, smiling with bedroom eyes, and rolled him so that she was on top.

"Yes.…" she whispered, her fangs lightly touching the skin of his neck, "My stud."

And they made love again, this time gently, caressingly, in the red radiance of the star overhead.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE WITCH'S TITS

Yiorgos yelled back to the rear cockpit, "We're about to fold to the Baeris star system."

Dirken and Eow had dressed, so they stepped forward to the front cockpit.

"I see you've repaired your leg," Dirken said.

"Only part-way. A number of synthmuscles are severed in the right thigh. I imagine I can walk with a limp, but I need a couple new parts. Maybe when we get to where we're going I can find a cybernetic engineer to help with it."

"There are engineers at the hideout," Eow said. "I can get one for you. They can also modify the controls of this fighter so that it can be piloted without using Aquarian Centaur language."

"Good," Dirken said. "I'm itching to take it for a flight."

Yiorgos punched in the coordinates and the gravjump ribs extended around the vehicle. "While you bunnies were going at it back there, I was actually doing something useful by looking up this system."

"What is a 'bunny'?" Eow asked.

"It's a small animal on Earth that mates a lot," Yiorgos replied with sardonic dryness.

"Well, I am lusty," Eow responded, seemingly pleased by Yiorgos's response. "Are they predators?"

"Yes!" Dirken responded right away. "They're vicious creatures that can rip your neck out if you don't please them."

Eow lifted her chin. "Well then. Consider me a bunny!"

Dirken coughed and turned away from her, trying not to laugh out loud. Yiorgos turned away, too, not quite hiding his smile, and pressed a flashing button on the console.

The gravjump generator spun up and they folded through space.

When they passed through, they found themselves squinting at a white dwarf star resplendent in blue-white intensity. The canopy dimmed, and they turned their attention to the navchart monitor showing the orbit of several planets around the star. Yiorgos reached toward the monitor, made a hand gesture as if picking up a platter, moved his hand away, then flexed. The star and planets jumped into a hologram around them in the cockpit.

"Anyhow, when I did my research I found that none of the planets here are habitable by most species. Yet there are UW patrol reports indicating potential mafia and smuggler activity. They suspect a base on the moon of the fifth planet." He pointed at a large sphere rotating around them. "This gas giant."

"No," Eow said. She pointed to a tiny blob that Dirken hadn't noticed before. "Here."

Yiorgos squinted at the blob with his one human eye, then moved both hands as if parting a curtain. The hologram expanded, and the blob enlarged to show an irregular object that looked vaguely like a peanut shell with one end slightly larger than the other end. It tumbled slowly, a trail of vapor flying behind it, and wasn't very far from their current position.

"A comet?" Dirken asked, raising an eyebrow. "The hidden mafia base is on a… comet?"

"Not on a comet. In it," she corrected. "It is called the 'Witch's Tits.'"

Dirken snickered, but Yiorgos huffed in annoyance. "Oh please. That's just obscene." Turning back to the console, the cyborg said several words in Aquarian centaur and the ship turned to port. "How do we hail them?"

"Pull up the comm monitor," Eow said. When he did, she typed in a complicated series of codes and sent it. "They will now be expecting us. You must make your approach toward the tip of the larger end of the comet."

The cyborg looked at a schematic of the comet. "That would take us through the dust