Page 22 of Time Traveling Space Bastards

I knew what hate felt like. I didn’t know what it was for the longest time, but I hated my owner. I hated some of the regulars he sold me to. I hated this Owen, and it wasn’t for the same reason Torrek and Kuka hated him.

We all had pasts. If we brought Baxter back with us, she’d meet Torrek and Kuka’s exes and plenty of people I was sold to. I hadn’t known her long, but she might want to murder their exes, too. She’d have a problem with the people who bought me.

No, I hated Owen because I knew men like him back home. I’d been sold to a few. If Owen didn’t do it, then fine. But the proper processes should have been followed to prove that. If he did, he should have been launched into space or whatever this planet did to murderers.

Maybe he was innocent. Baxter was the only person in the room who knew him, and she thought he was. It was the fact that no one did their jobs to prove that. They bungled an innocent girl’s murder investigation to protect him. Maybe that didn’t matter to them, but Baxter Holmes was very important to my planet, and she was an amazing woman. We couldn’t save her life with the information in her file.

Your first experience time traveling in Big Daddy should be amazing. Ours was. We went through a black hole and lived. We should be taking her anywhere she wanted to go, but we were just going back to find out what her ex did on Thursday nights.

And Big Daddy was sentient. Kuka wrote a system that was similar to mine and used technology his genius mother developed in college to collect matter from the black hole in our galaxy. Big Daddy was probably smarter than I was and could access the same information. He didn’t always take us where Kuka directed him to go, but we always ended up where we needed to be.

We wanted to see what Owen was doing on Thursday nights, but that might not be where we ended up. Valtens was an idiot, but even Kuka’s earlier blueprints were solid. There was always a chance Valtens could have ended up here and been the one who murdered her. We had the much better time machine. We could want to see Owen and end up seeing what happened to Valtens.

“What do you wear when you time travel? I hate them, but does this require an under-wire bra?” Baxter asked.

“Why are there wires in the bras on this planet?” Omi said, wrinkling her nose.

“Not sure, but it probably involves a man. They tell us if you’ve got big tits like me, you need that wire digging into your flesh, but they are making some amazing bras without them for those of us with bigger girls and I think they should make those people president.”

“Wear whatever you’re comfortable in,” Kuka said.

“I don’t like it,” Torrek grumped. “Kuka is the brains. Enix knows how to defend himself, but he’s a pacifist. Omi and I have no problem tearing apart anyone dangerous, but we can’t pass on the street. We can’t go with you.”

That was the problem. Kuka didn’t know how to fight. It was against the law to lay a finger on him without his permission. Kuka wasn’t like this, but Valtens had people arrested when he bumped into them.

I was just starting to learn. I was essentially lab-grown skin over a metal skeleton and I could feel pleasure, but not pain. I could do a lot of damage with just one punch. I just didn’t like violence. It didn’t hurt, but I still didn’t like it when I got sold to a sadist.

We needed Kuka and Omi. Omi was brilliant. She could easily keep up with Kuka and not everyone could have tricked Big Daddy into not alerting us we had a stowaway. It had to scan of life signs to get the oxygen levels right and the computer should have alerted us someone was making food we didn’t know about.

Omi and Torrek grew up in Rilia. It wasn’t the best area of our planet. You had to know how to fight to survive there. They got out and as soon as they were making money, they got their family out, too.

Maybe it was weak of me to rely on them for protection when I could crush a man’s head with my fist. Maybe it was strange that I had no problem with them ripping someone apart with their claws, but I didn’t want to kill them myself.

I was still figuring out feelings now that I was free and not constantly being factory reset. It was complicated and scary, but it was also…nice.

“Shit, they are right. If Owen is killing women on Thursday night, we need Torrek and Omi, but we can’t bring them with us on this planet,” Kuka said.

Baxter fell out laughing. Everyone was looking at her like she lost her mind, but I knew that laugh. Kuka did that when his genius brain figured out the answer to one of his insane theories.

No, Baxter Holmes had a plan.