Page 55 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
O kay, now the panic was starting to sink in. Not about leaving the galaxy. I was pretty happy to fuck off of Earth and leave it all behind. It was the black hole thing. I mean, obviously, Kuka figured it out because he not only stole a little bit of that black hole for Big Daddy, but he ended up in my pool and living room, so clearly, whatever he’d done made it safe.
But sometimes, the irrational part of my brain took over, and it said shit like that noise I heard at two in the morning was the ghost of a violent serial killer who used to live in my apartment. What if I couldn’t survive the black hole because I was human? What if I turned into a noodle person and died?
“Breathe,” Torrek said, wrapping his arms around my waist.
“What’s wrong? Are you having second thoughts?” Kuka asked.
“Slightly panicking about the black hole.”
“Remember when I said I was more like my mother? She was the one that figured out how to take a sample of a black hole and engineered a metal that could withstand it. She wrote her thesis on our black hole, and it was her research that helped me figure out time travel and time machine construction. It’s perfectly safe in one of my machines. I wouldn’t go near it if anyone else is promising it’s safe and doesn’t have access to my mother helping them with tiny details.”
“She’s brilliant,” Omi said. “She’s like Kuka and took some medical classes while she was at university. She didn’t complete the surgeon program, but her classes led her to develop some of the tech I’m being taught now.”
“She’s also just nice,” Enix said.
She’d better be nice to Enix, or I wouldn’t be nice. That was good to know because I guess she was going to be my mother-in-law. Was that even a thing on other planets?
“If it wasn’t safe, I never would have brought other people with me when I tried to time travel and if I thought it wasn’t safe for my Velne, I’d just stay on this planet with you.”
“Okay. I trust you. But if a black hole turned Big Daddy into a pervert, it might give me the ability to haunt the shit out of all of you if I die.”
“You won’t,” Omi said. “I stowed away, and I made it.”
“Good point. I usually have to freak out before any major decision, and now that it’s done, I can leave the planet now. Literally, not in a bottle of Everclear this time.”
“Then, strap in. We’re about to visit my planet seven thousand years in the past.”
Maybe. If that was where Big Daddy wanted us to end up.