P: Shadows

Brendan spent the morning nearly motionless at his desk, but he was actually almost frantically busy as he verified that everything was in place.

For the last day messages had flown back and forth between him and his family members, with a frequency that would probably have anyone who might be monitoring the messages on high alert. He hoped that whoever noticed would assume that they were spaceship race related, instead of human race related, but he wasn't counting on that.

The grim news was that an anti-original movement fit more than just the pattern Brendan had traced. The King had already been aware of a certain amount of prejudice among the top corporations, and the Queen reported that she had already dealt with several outbreaks of actual violence against mixed couples.

Brendan's own specification, that his bride must either carry the L chromosome or be an original, turned out to have sparked a lot of debate. It seemed that everyone could understand the requirement for the L chromosome, since it meant that his heir would be able to inherit his M, but few people understood why he had included originals, especially since the Aldrich family was known to avoid direct genetic modifications. They didn't have any idea just how much control the Eks Corp Kings had over what they passed down.

If Brendan's mate carried an L, he could choose to pass along only the M. Since double M's weren't usually viable, because they relied on the L structures, the resulting child would definitely carry the king's M. The fact that his siblings carried their mother's M was actually by the king's choice. In addition, if Brendan's mate lacked both chromosomes, he could simply pass on both pieces of the pair, which was something that most families couldn't do without outside modification.

The spaceship race for his future princess had already been designed with a large support ship following the entrants, but now all Eks Corp Security ships with combat capabilities were moving into positions along the course. There weren't as many of those as Brendan could wish at the moment. They would do their best to defend all registered entrants, but there was a much shorter list of likely targets. One girl who was an original, like Adrian, and three who had recent beyonder ancestors.

Brendan's own tiny ship was going to have to be every bit as fast as he'd hoped, to hit the extra checkpoint that only the Prince of Eks Corp would be visiting, and still keep up with the real entrants.

--

"Are you nervous?" Adrian asked with almost maliciously cheerful curiosity.

Brendan stilled the movement of his fingers and lifted his chin as he replied with mock frivolity, "What could I possibly have to be nervous about?"

Adrian shook his head and began listing possibilities, "Meeting the winner at the end, coming in last in your own race, being disintegrated by aliens that you don't believe in, flying with your bum practically resting against the reactor…"

"Maybe a little nervous," Brendan interrupted laughingly. "So, which one are you betting on?"

"Who says I'm betting?" Adrian asked with an expression of exaggerated innocence.

Brendan just lifted an eyebrow.

Adrian grinned. "I'd bet on you of course, except that you insisted on keeping your participation secret, so my bet's actually on the oldest ship out there."

"Oh?" Brendan invited an explanation without explaining that his own route would be longer than the entrants' course.

Adrian tilted his head, and then shrugged. "Flexibility. Unlike your baby there, the inspection crews said that it's got two backup drives, one of which is an old fashioned chemical drive."

"A lot of the yachts have a chem drive as backup," Brendan pointed out in a coaxing argument.

"Only three of those could ever get themselves off planet," Adrian explained graciously, "and their core systems are too new to allow the pilot to override the max boost limit."

"Hah, there's not a ship in the entrant field that isn't loaded with mods," Brendan countered.

They argued the benefits and disadvantages back and forth, allowing him a welcome distraction, until it was time. As he reached out to close the chat window, Adrian added, "Plus, it's running one of my experimental core designs with an ancient beyonder system that hacked into the transportation network."

Brendan froze, and Adrian closed the chat window from his end. He wasted valuable seconds calling the most infuriating friend in the solar system back. He didn't waste words asking how Adrian knew. "Did you report it?"

Adrian looked offended. "Of course not. But I did make sure that it wasn't accessing anything that any standard registered system can."

Brendan felt confused. "What do you mean by hacked the system then?"

"It downloaded the registration numbers for every active ship in the system." Adrian explained. " Anyone can check a registration but it did it by…"

"Okay," Brendan cut him off and closed the connection.

The race had already begun when the smallest ship began to move. The largest ship finally activated its own drive, as though it had been waiting on that signal.

Technically, Brendan could have kept talking to Adrian until the distance created lag times that turned conversation into something that resembled correspondence. Like every other ship in the race, his core system was in charge of actually moving the ship according to his designated course.

However, he had one more person to talk to before he moved very far out of range. The Queen of Eks Corp answered his call with a speed that said she'd been waiting for it, and that she was relatively nearby.

"I'm so proud of you kid," she announced. Her youngest child gazed back at her with such a confused expression that she laughed.

"For?" he asked cautiously.

"This!" she explained far too expansively. After a moment she relented and added, "For choosing to uphold your ridiculously archaic inherited duties by giving yourself an opportunity to fly alone."

"I'm hardly alone," he pointed out dryly. "There are literally hundreds of entrants and you helped me set support ships along the entire route.

"They aren't stationed along your entire route," she replied just as dryly.

Only five people knew the exact route he planned to take, and he nodded. Even the traffic system held only a course to the first checkpoint for his little ship, just like every registrant who didn't know where the next checkpoint was yet.

"Do you regret taking on your own archaic position?" he asked soberly.

Her smile grew sharper. "Not yet."

"Did you know…" He wondered why he'd never asked.

"I could give you a dozen different answers and they'd all be true. I knew, but I didn't know. And she, whoever she turns out to be, won't know either, no matter how carefully you try to explain. As I expect you remember…" Her eyes seemed to glitter dangerously.

Brendan flinched. But if he looked for the memories of what past kings had told their queens, and what the queens had told their kings when they stepped down, they were there. The unfamiliar girl of the past betrayed the true nature of that dangerous glitter as well. His mother's eyes glittered with tears as she watched him access memories stored before his own conception.

"I…" he began hesitantly.

"Be swift. Be safe. And don't lose your shadow, because they can't be sewn back together as easily as that old anim tale would have silly children believe," she instructed firmly.

"I won't lose… my shadow, and that one will be free of one ridiculous archaic duty soon," he promised.

"Not too soon," she stated.

His siblings had always traveled on paths that paralleled his own.