Page 41 of Time Traveling Space Bastards

I woke up tied to a hard chair and my mouth tasted like I ate three-day-old roadkill. I vaguely remembered gas filling up the med bay in Big Daddy but I didn’t remember much after that. I didn’t know where I was, but I was pretty sure I was about to meet the infamous Valtens.

“Oh, bro, Torrek is going to fucking eat you,” I groaned.

“Your mouth was always my least favorite thing about you.”

I cracked my eyes open and fucking Kevin was sitting across from me. My miserable, cunt of a boss who constantly threatened to fire me, but never did because FedEx wouldn’t deal with him anymore if books came in damaged and the last time he managed the shop’s social media by himself, he got a bunch of one star reviews calling him a bigot.

Kevin’s eyes weren’t brown anymore, either. They were snake eyes like Kuka. Fuck! That was why I hadn’t seen anyone with Kuka’s eyes. It was even me that told them they could go out on the street and their eyes could be explained away by special effects contacts.

That went both ways. They also could have bought dark-colored contacts and made their eyes look human. Which is apparently what Kevin had done. Or Valtens. Sorry, he was still Kevin, the spooge to me.

“So, the brat prince of your planet is actually here on Earth poorly running a bookstore? How the fuck did that happen? By the way, you looked like shit when I thought you were a human named Kevin, but you look even worse now that I’ve seen your brother naked.”

“Well, I got stuck, didn’t I? I had to build the perfect trap for when you ended up in this shit-hole. I had to wait for you to write the holy texts and all I needed was for you to write the last one before you got murdered and you couldn’t even manage to do that.”

“I knew it! You refused to carry my books, but I knew you read them. Suck my ass!”

He rolled his eyes.

“Yes, by now, you’re aware everyone on my planet has read your books. You’re insufferable.”

“And you always smell like BO and corn chips. We all have our flaws.”

“You should probably shut that mouth while I have you at my mercy.”

I shrugged.

“Kuka will leave your ass here if you hurt me.”

“Who says I need my pretentious brother to get home? I just need his machine.”

I fell out laughing and Valtens looked like he wanted to strangle me. He hesitated because I was guessing he knew his brother and I had a very good reason for hyena laughing while tied to a chair.

“Kuka’s time machine is sentient. You hurt anyone who came here in that ship or me, it will just refuse to take you back. What was the big plan, anyway? You kill me and make sure my books don’t end up on your planet, then you change the past. You might end up never being born and if you are, you might be a nobody instead of royalty.”

“I know. I figured that out after being stuck here a few years.”

“You watched Doctor Who, didn’t you?”

“Shut up!”

I could have told him about the bond with Torrek and Kuka, but I decided to keep that to myself for now. I could just feel in my gut I shouldn’t tell him because he’d use that. I didn’t tell him about Big Daddy letting me fly him either.

If I was going to an entirely different galaxy, I didn’t particularly want to deal with my shitty boss when we got there unless someone had put him in his place. I knew our bonds meant they would kill for me, but it also meant they would do anything to keep me safe.

If Valtens knew we were bonded, he’d use me against them. Right now, he thought they were just protecting me because I was the Devouring Mother. He knew we were all together, but Valtens didn’t know what we talked about.

And since I never talked about it and didn’t mention it in my book, Valtens didn’t know their holy texts happened because they crashed in my pool when I was a kid. Ghol hadn’t connected my birth name to Baxter Holmes, so he hadn’t known about my childhood. It would have been fairly difficult for Valtens to do that with a powered-down Enix and only human technology.

“Don’t you want to know how it all ends? The last book is in my head.”

It wasn’t. I actually had no idea how it ended, and I wouldn’t until I sat down and wrote it. But I’d lie through my teeth if it bought me enough time for my men to find me.”

“I don’t actually care how it ends. I care what kind of story I can spin. I don’t want to be the king of just one planet. If I can go back with proof I met the Devouring Mother and that she and my stupid brother died on this terrible planet, I can go back with any story I want.”

It finally hit me what his plan was, and it was awful. It wasn’t going to work because Big Daddy wouldn’t take him back if he hurt any of us, but I knew what he wanted to do.

“You want to go back and say the Devouring Mother wanted your planet to go on the attack and take over other planets before they can attack.”

“Bingo. Some of the planets in my galaxy are total shitholes, but they are sitting on untapped resources. I can make them better while making my planet better.”

“So, you’re a space colonizer. Gross. You got stuck here fifteen years and haven’t figured out those people weren’t the good guys? I’ll bet you celebrate Columbus Day, jackass.”

“You weren’t born to rule. You couldn’t conceive of how great my ideas are going to be.”

“Dude, I worked for you for ten years. Your ideas are terrible. I couldn’t figure out how you were still in business after working for you for a week, but it must have been because Nova Credits are worth a lot here and you were using those to keep the shop open.

“You pissed off suppliers, shipping companies, and your customers. The suppliers and shipping companies still work with you because I took over that. The customers eventually came back because you stopped working the front and Tangilique throws amazing book events. How are you going to run one planet, much less all of them when you can barely manage a bookshop on Earth?”

Yeah, I unloaded. He might really be an alien from another galaxy, but he was my shitty boss for ten years and he really acted like Tangilique and I weren’t the entire reason he was able to stay open. We even had to talk him into letting Tangilique throw book events and he acted like it was the worst thing ever, even after they proved successful.

“I don’t care about bookshops. The only reason I went with that was to draw you in and study you. You are crude for a prophet.”

He hadn’t figured it out. He ran a bookshop, but he hadn’t figured out I just wrote alien smut based on his brother, his bodyguard, and his Enix. He still thought I was some kind of prophet and he’d been stuck here long enough to know that wasn’t really a thing.

“I still know how it ends.”

“See, I’m starting to doubt that. Because you didn’t know your boss wasn’t human and you didn’t know I’d be showing up with a gas mask I purchased online to take you away from my brother.”

“Or maybe I’m right where I want to be.”

Breaking story at eleven, I was not where I wanted to be. Kevin wasn’t really stable, so Valtens wasn’t. He could snap and kill me at any time. Omi didn’t have a chance to chip me, so I didn’t think they could lock in on my location if it also had GPS. I was just trying to keep him talking.

“I didn’t just bring a time machine here. I brought advanced weapons from my planet. I’m counting on them to come get you and then I’ll kill you all. If my brother’s time machine is sentient, then it’s like the Enix. It will do as it’s told,” Valtens said, getting up to leave.

Shit. I hadn’t seen Torrek with weapons ever. Omi stowed away, so I doubted she had any. Could they even fight that?

One thing I did know. Kuka knew everything about everything. I wondered if that included battle strategy. I also just realized something.

Big Daddy did this for a reason.