1 Falling Star

What woke me in the middle of the night was not clear. Tip-toeing to the window I pressed my face against the window pane, feeling my breath puff down past my nightie onto my bare skin after being cooled by the window, causing my nipples to crinkle up. The window fogged over except where my hot breath blew directly on the center pane.

It was the time of night when the whole world turned grey. It was scary at night when none of our three moons were in the sky to illuminate the world. Skiffs of snow blew here and there around the courtyard catching on the dried grasses creating changing patterns of grey. The trees still had a few lonely leaves hanging from their bare branches.

Looking up into the dark sky at the constellations that had slowly become familiar to me (at least the milky way still spilled across the heavens), I wished that the stars were the friendly stars of Tera. But I might as well wish that Mom and Dad were with me. I had adjusted to the fact that I would never see my family again. I had discovered that it was not a situation about where I was, but instead when I was. I knew deep in my soul that mom would never stop searching until she found me, but how can you find someone lost in time?

I could see a glow forming in the heavens, a dark object in the center of the glow suddenly seeming to come from an impossible angle with horrible speed. From where I watched, it appeared as if I was the target. At the last second, it seemed to suddenly swoop to the side, and the field behind the barn erupted and blew newly created molten lava all over. Leaving a deep crater behind.

Almost at the same instant, the sky rumbled as if a vast freight train had crossed the heavens. Followed by a massive boom. Almost before the boom grumblingly rolled off into the horizons, I was on my way outside.

My sisters were waking to screams, only to discover that they were the one screaming. I should have stayed to calm them. After all, I was the president of Crèche 292, but my heart would not let me, for at the last instant I had seen a body amid the flames.

I caused my vision to kick into night vision, and suddenly the world was bright as day, I had lost much of my strength during my years here, but I still had enough to take the stairs in a single leap. I hoped that everyone was too emotionally shattered by the sounds and concussion wave to see me. These kinds of superhuman behaviors had created too many situations in the past, and I had learned not to let others see me do things like this.

Once I was hidden from their eyes behind the barn, I turned on all the speed that I could, and while not up to my old three Gee trained self, I could still run like a demon.

Teetering on the edge of the crater I peered into its heart. There floating on the lava was a black-clad human form.

I paused to activate my boots and greaves to keep my legs from burning up and my gauntlets to protect my arms. I could not activate all my armor without getting fully nude first, and I simply did not have time to slip out of my loose-fitting nightie, as I expected my curious sisters to be here any second.

I jumped down and grabbed the still body and heaved it out of danger. I followed on a similar trajectory a heartbeat later. The armor they were wearing was a type that I knew. Quickly interfacing with that suit, I used the emergency override to turn it off. I caused my suit to disappear, as well. I turned the body over and first noticed that they were breathing. Next, I noticed that he was around the age I was when I first arrived on this planet ten years ago, and he was unbelievably cute.

Now back home this would not be an issue, but in my here and now I had never seen a male. My first knee jerk reaction was to tuck the incriminating evidence between his legs so that vive la différence would not be so obvious.

I suppose that you might be wondering how I knew about his suit and where did I find similar armor out of thin air? The short version is that I was born during the early skirmishes of the Xiǎo Māo war causing a heightened desire in Grandpa to make sure that I was protected and Grandpa commanded that my parents have SImp and Bit Install a neural network implant into my body before I was even one-year-old.

Hmm? Oh, Simp was a computer that had gained sentience, Momma Serina helped my Dad invent him back when they were lost in time during the dark ages of Tera. Somehow, they survived the twentieth century. If they could do that, I can survive this! Anyway, Bit was created by SImp, but also in some weird time loop helped create SImp. The end results were that I also had an Implant like Lance and Serina, my parents, only mine had the equivalent of thousands of more human-years of development time.

Before you ask—yes, that Lance and Serina and yes, the emperor was my grandpa. What if I was a real Imperial princess? What difference did that make in my here and now?

Having made sure that my patient was OK, even if he was unconscious, I was brushing off the still glowing embers that dotted my nightie (and which had drastically shortened it as it had almost burned away while I was rescuing him), when the first of my sisters rounded the corner of the barn.

The babble of voices began to be recognized as discrete phrases as they got closer.

"Jane, are you OK?"

"What happened?"

"Who is she?"

"Where did she come from?"

"So cute!"

"Talk about having nothing up top!"

"Flat, flat, flat…"

The little ones were still back in the dorms, and a few of my sisters had stayed with them, but still, I had forty or so girls all clamoring for answers. Answers that I simply did not have. I certainly was not going to try and explain that he was a boy, not a girl.

I hovered over him, "Back off! Give her some room!" Luckily they had all come to respect my position as the leader of the crèche. Besides, they all knew that not only the caretakers supported me, but that I could beat the snot out of any of them. Or all of them at once, as I had once proved.

"Dora!" I snapped. "Have your team start doing damage control. We have little fires breaking out all over. I want your team to recruit anyone stupid enough to be out in this cold and get all those fires put out. The rest of you report to Dora and protect the little ones. Then get back to bed. Dorra, you and your team stay up to make sure nothing new happens."

"Yes, ma'am." Was my only response.

Picking up our little visitor in a princess carry, being careful that that small tell-tell piece of flesh did not show his alien nature, I told the group. "I'm taking her to the caretakers." Then I broke into a smooth run so I could get him safely out of there before anyone asked questions that I couldn't answer.