Page 44 of Journey to the Forbidden Zone

And Mila had her instead.

Her terminal chimed softly, an alert she’d set earlier. Saved schematics for Kovoid-patrol corvettes. Potentially useful. Critical, even. She dismissed it with a flick of her finger, irritation flaring.

She couldn’t focus on enemy ships when the enemy was inside their own hull – a rival for Carmen’s attention.

The image flashed again: Mila on the bridge, standing beside Carmen’s command chair, those calm, green eyes taking in the damage reports. The way Carmen had glanced at her, just a flicker, but Letitia had seen it. Not lust. Not the raw hunger Carmen sometimes turned on her.

Something different.

A spark of respect? Interest? Something that cut deeper than physical need. And Mila, serene, unruffled, offering solutions, proving her worth beyond the obvious.Engineering knowledge.

Who was this woman?

Jealousy, hot and ugly, twisted in Letitia’s gut. It was ridiculous. Illogical. Carmen was her captain, her friend.

Her occasional mistake.

Not her partner. Never that. Carmen didn’t do partners. She did control. She did release. She took what she needed, when she needed it, and moved on. Letitia had accepted that. Embraced it, even, for a while. Until she realized she wanted more than Carmen’s carefully curated surrender in the dark.

So why this sharp sting seeing Carmen look at Mila like she was … interesting? Like she was more than a convenient body?Was Mila just another toy? A fascinating, exotic diversion for Carmen to dissect and dominate?

The thought should have been repulsive. Instead, it felt like a betrayal. Carmen knew how Letitia felt. Knew she craved connection, intimacy, something real.

And she was giving that to Mila.

The camaraderie. The companionship. The sharing. Everything Letitia wanted.

And Letitia had made it all happen with her insistence on rescuing the alien. If she’d kept her damned mouth shut, if she hadn’t fucked Carmen again after ending things, they could have sold the Xena back to Maltese, and all their problems would be solved.

Except Letitia couldn’t have lived with herself. And shestillwouldn’t have had Carmen.

She sighed. Why did life have suck so much?

At least Mila was trying to help solve their problems. She’d identified the pirate ship’s weakness, offered a solution. She’d volunteered to help Zed, not demanded attention or cowered in fear. There was a quiet strength there, an intelligence that demanded acknowledgment.

So what was niggling at the back of her mind? Was it just raw jealousy? Was she that petty?

She decided it didn’t matter. XenX in general, and Mila in particular, were an unknown quantity. If they were going to risk their lives for this woman who had no business being aboard their ship, she wanted to know more.

Driven by a sudden, sharp need for answers that had nothing to do with enemy patrol corvettes and barbaric financial systems, Letitia abandoned the article she was reading. Her fingers flew over the console, calling up the ship’s encrypted research archives. She bypassed the tactical files, the astrogationcharts for the nebula fringe. She needed something else. Something deeper.

Search parameters:XenX species. Cultural database. Restricted UPA archives.Cross-reference:Physiology, biochemistry, known psychological effects on other species.

The console whirred, accessing Zed’s meticulously organized, if fragmented, data repositories. Public XenX cultural entries scrolled past – superficial glossaries about the Harimi tradition, vague geographical references to Lintensia, sanitized summaries of Kovoid foreign policy. Useless.

She refined the search, digging deeper into the restricted layers, the stuff flagged by the Collective or scraped from illicit UPA medical servers. Terms like “bio-contaminant protocols” and “xenopsychological impact assessments” started appearing.

Her pulse quickened. What was she looking for? She wasn’t sure. She just knew the puzzle pieces weren’t fitting. The files and factoids she found didn’t jive with what they already knew.

A file header blinked, tagged with a high-level UPA security cipher and a biohazard symbol, dated decades ago:

Subject: XenX Physiological Secretions – Pheromonal Analysis (Project Chimera).Classified – Omega.

Letitia’s breath hitched. Omega clearance. That meant planetary-level threats. Weapons of mass destruction. Why would XenX physiology warrant that?

She bypassed the encryption with a sequence Zed had shown her years ago, a backdoor into fragmented UPA data streams.The file opened, text scrolling, dense with technical jargon. She skimmed, her eyes catching phrases:

… unique class of volatile organic compounds …”