Page 20 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
I t was a mystery, and those were my favorite things. As the prince, I was isolated from most people unless my parents approved of them. I’d only ever met two people who could keep up with me when I was working out a theory. They were both women, and they challenged the fuck out of me.
My parents approved of Azaet. They would have married her off to me in a second if I said I wanted her. She was brilliant, beautiful, and completely into women. Azaet was also more like my sister. Even if she wasn’t, I’d never force her to be with me because that would happen if I said I wanted it. That was more my brother’s speed.
The second was sitting across from me. Omi was also like a sister to me. Even if she wasn’t, Omi was into men with stripes, tails, or tattoos with bad attitudes and some kind of criminal record. Torrek hated it, but I said good for her.
And I’d just met a third. Baxter Holmes was crass and slightly violent, but she seemed to understand time travel on a level plenty of people on my planet didn’t. My traveling companions wanted to keep her and so did I.
“Help me figure it out. It’s making my stomach hurt. We crashed into her pool and created the holy texts. We came back now because if she dies, we can’t get the last holy text and fix what’s going on back home. But if we save her, we don’t know to come back at this specific time to save her life, so she dies anyway. Some version of us did this because the holy texts ended up on our planet seven thousand years ago, and that version of us let her get murdered. We need to figure out why.”
“We’re never going to figure that out. We might have been set upon by stronger forces and couldn’t stop it. You’re in charge here. That version of you could have been a greater good man and decided one human girl wasn’t worth the fate of your entire planet, let her die, gone back home to tell everyone the holy texts were all a lie, and that our planet was never going to be attacked,” Omi said.
“No. No version of me would ever do that.”
“You could have. You ruined her life when she was a kid. Another version of her could have taken one look at all of you and wanted nothing to do with you.”
“That’s true,” Enix said. “She was pretty mad about the food.”
“If the exchange rate between our planets hadn’t been so extreme, she probably would have kicked you all out of her place. I looked it up. Do you know what the equivalent of four million earth dollars would be in Nova Credits to someone who isn’t royalty? That’s enough to set you up comfortably and if you invest it right, you’d never have to work again in both galaxies. It would have calmed me down.”
“I wish I would have known that before I suggested having a male tell her to calm down,” Enix moaned.
“Based on how she’s looking at you lately, she’s forgiven you,” Omi giggled.
Just then Torrek came striding out of her bedroom alone with no shirt on. Baxter wasn’t with him, which wasn’t shocking. It didn’t matter if they were male, female, or somewhere in between, sex with the Saki tended to be exhausting. The Saki were also really big snugglers, so I didn’t know why he left her.
“Listen, you’re in charge here. I don’t know where your brother is, but he’s an idiot and he’s never going to be king. You’re going to be the one that approves anyone immigrating to our planet. We can’t leave her. I didn’t know it was possible since she’s human, but I imprinted and she responded. She might not even be aware of it because she’s never felt it before, but she’s my Zovea.”
“No shit? Congrats, big brother.”
Every race on my planet had a similar concept and a similar bond. Not everyone found theirs. Some people had a fierce love without that connection. Others took partners for power or money. Some planets in my galaxy had concepts like that and others didn’t. We didn’t exactly understand it, no matter how much we tried to study it. It was a primal thing.
“Is she going to understand that?” I mused.
I could see from Enix’s eyes that he was scanning the data from this planet and could give us some kind of answer.
“It’s not the same and not all humans believe in it, but they have a concept called soulmates. It’s another being who completes you, but they don’t get the same perks. They can’t feel when each other is in danger and they can’t sense emotions. They are like Enix in that regard. They just have to watch and guess and sometimes get it wrong.”
So, not only did we have to save her life, we had to convince her to come to an entirely different galaxy where she’d be the only one of her kind. Torrek couldn’t be parted from her now and he couldn’t exactly blend here. He would forever be in danger.
Thing is, I still hadn’t puzzled out how to save her and still know I needed to come back at this time to save her. And I didn’t know how to convince her to come with us if she didn’t want to.