Chapter 1

So, Abby, you may ask: Why are you buck naked, tied to a tritium ringed 50 megaton fusion-implosion bomb on an alien planet in orbit around the star 55 Cancri? Weren't you doing math homework like earlier this month? Why can't you have normal hobbies, like normal teenagers?

"I believe that this may, in fact, be stomach acid," my girlfriend said, craning her head backwards to try and look at me. Her crystalline dreadlocks clinked and clattered against the bomb as she struggled against the restraints that wrapped around her chest and arms. The same restraints that, by the way, kept me stuck to the bomb. A similar pair of straps kept the dampener helmet on my head – locking down every last talent I had.

The massive walls of purplish flesh convulsed around us as my feet dug into the soft, squishy floor. The liquid that sloshed against my toes stung like sticking your hand into orange juice after cutting your fingers open.

"I think you're right, Ali," I said, slowly.

Deet. Deet. Deet.

"What is that?" Ali asked, her voice tightening. She wriggled and squirmed. "Is that the explosive device?"

"No." I paused. "I think that's the timer."

"Abby..."

"Yeah, Ali?"

"I think that it is safe in saying that this is your fault."

Let's start at the beginning. Maybe, if I could think through all the steps that ended with me in the middle of an off brand Shai'hulud strapped to a fusion bomb, then maybe I could figure out a way to get my ass out of the situation.

So.

The beginning.

First, there was the big bang. Then for a very long time, very little of note happened until a certain alien race evolved on a dismal planet. This race, later named the Doyen, possessed one fuck of an evolutionary edge. They had the ability to innately tap into the subqauntum level of reality. In the same way that quantum mechanics underpin Newtonian mechanics, the Doyen are able to use "psi" to fuck with the world. They never needed a gun or a spaceship or a castle or an atomic bomb. Instead, they simply crafted with tools of the mind, and using that tool, they conquered the galaxy between their little households and factions and kingdoms.

They called it the Doyen Empire.

And they make the Empire from Star Wars and the Borg look like comfy couches of liberal democracy. Say what you will about the Borg, at least they're not actively flaying people's minds apart in an eternity of suffering simply to get a psionic high off the pain-fumes. At least Emperor Palpatine could keep his underlings from stabbing him in the back, I'm looking at you 'Guy whose name rhymes with Yoke.' So, rather than becoming a creepy but constantly growing collective of cyber-zombies, or a semi-efficent fascist state, the Doyen Empire has been sitting in a continue state of suffering and agony and torture for almost a thousand years.

Yay.

Onto the stage comes a little known race of semi-shaved apes who are still trying to figure out that it's not okay to treat people bad because they have a different skin color from you. Humanity made contact with the Doyen in 1998, when three Russian MIGs surprised a Doyen paladin in his scout-form (basically, a telekinetic bubble he was using to fly around Earth's upper atmosphere) and shot him the fuck down.

You might have heard of that as the Norwegian Missile Incident. Yeah, the governments of the world hushed it up. And not just because they're all massive dicks! The Doyen are psychc, remember? If the planet shaking panic and shock and delight and wonder of making first contact swept through our population, it'd be the same as shooting a flare up. A space flare. And then the Doyen would get nearly ten billion new brains to flay apart for fun and raw psychic power.

So, rather than blowing the whistle, humans did what humans do best. We stole shit. From the bits and pieces recovered from the Doyen, humanity discovered how to activate our own psionic potential. We launched our own psionic warriors into space. We secretly funneled huge amounts of money from NATO and the former Warsaw Pact and China and bits of Africa and South America into the best tech America could buy.

And, of course, various men in sunglasses and suits with names like Mr. Smith or Mr. John or Boris or Yang or whatever the generic name for a government spook is in Brazil was, would show up and offer potential psychics a chance to serve their planet. Usually paired with: 'Or rot in Guantanamo Bay or nearest non-union equvilent.'

Which is why I, Abdai Hatem, average every day delinquent hacker who may have accidentally hacked into the Pentagon servers for the lols, ended up chucked through a psionically powered stargate and to the deck of the PsiCom Headquarters Ship. Yeah, they had never come up with a good name for the fucker. Most people aboard called her the Headquarters, or just HQ.

Everyone save for my girlfriend.

She called it...

"When the fuck am I going to get out of this fucking prison!?" Princess Tzali Doyen .921, Prime in the line of succession of the Doyen Empire, snarled as she yanked on the shimmering bars of carefully carved psi-crystal that made up the inner door of her holding cell.

"That's what we're here to discuss," Sergeant Barry said, his arms crossed across his huge barrel chest. Sergeant Barry had been one of the first people to welcome me to HQ. He was big. He was black. He was also completely fucking buck naked. I didn't know if this was true with Doyen powers, but with human imparted psionic abilities, the actual subquantum field manipulations produced by our less developed brains was ... unstable. Fragile. Easily broken. We are so used to thinking of solid things as solid, and not as a haze of atoms and particles bound together by gravity and the strong/weak nuclear forces.

A human skin touching even a thong is literally millions upon millions of chaotic interactions between skin and bits of ball-fluff and dong-bits and the thong itself. And that thong is made up entirely out of inert, psionically dead material. A human psion wearing a thong could maybe make a combat knife out of telekinetic force, or maybe read the mind of a particularly unfocused poker player. Things got progressively worse the more clothes we wore.

Hence why I was trying to ignore the fact that while my girlfriend was in a prison cell, she was also getting about nine inches of view. If you know what I mean. And no, Barry was not some newbie like me, who popped wood when a fellow lance-mate brushed up against me during training. He was a stone cold motherfucker who had been out fighting with PsiCom since the start of the second Gulf War. So, yeah.

What I'm saying is that my most direct superior was hung like a horse and I wasn't sure how I felt about that fact being flaunted before my girlfriend. Fortunately, I was pretty definite about my feelings about her being locked in a cage.

Oh, right.

How did an average teenager with latent psionic potential become the boyfriend of a Doyen Space Princess? And why would I want to be a boyfriend to a princess who was part of a race who flayed minds like I ate skittles? Well, the answer to that was threefold. The first was, um, look at her? Princess Tzali (or, as I called her, Ali, Tzali was enough of a tongue twister, and I was the only person with an even halfway Arabic name within several parsecs so it felt kind of nice) was gorgeous. No, she took the idea of gorgeous and demolished it with psionic sledgehammers.

Her skin was what I had taken to calling "Night Elf purple" with hints of darker blues along the edges of her extremities. The tips of her breasts (save for her nipples, which shaded to pure white), fingers, ear-tips. Yeah, she had elven ears, why wouldn't she had elven ears? Add to that a body that settled between hourglass perfection and athletic grace, a superhuman dexterity that made her spine capable of bending like a cat, legs that could literally lock behind her neck, and a tongue that could reach from her lips to my belly button without her even bending over, and...

I coughed and tried to subtly tuck my hard dick between my thighs while also standing at attention.

Barry, used to this kind of thing from his mostly teenage to college age recruits, ignored it. Ali merely flicked her head back, with an air like: Yeah, I'm the prettiest thing in fifty light years, deal with it, bitches.

The only other girl in the room, Squaddie Amelia Pound, looked less irritated and more intrigued. Amelia was one of the best warpers on the ship – warpers being psions with the ability to fold space with their minds. She helped to power the only primary link between HQ to Earth via harnessing the intense longing she felt for her girlfriend, Lt. Natasha. This produced intense expressions on her face when Ali put her sex on. Which was all the time forever.

"You've taken my blood, you have examined my brains with your felines, you've even questioned my matrix with your kak-handed, incompetent telepaths," Ali said, sneering slightly. "I've done every task you've asked and all without complaining much."

Barry's eyebrow twitched.

I had not been present for the CAT Scans. But from the amount of scrap metal that had been dragged out of the medops deck and chucked back through the Stargate for replacement on Earth, and from the figure I had heard from a harried accountant while getting my evening chow, I was pretty sure that my girlfriend had just added a few thousandths of a percent to the national debt. Which didn't sound like much until you remembered America.

"But my patience is far from infinite! I wish to join your war against my father and the other, inconsequential households of the Doyen Empire," Ali said, crossing her arms underneath her breasts, shelving them with intention. The fact that it was utterly transparent that she was showing off her tits did absolutely nothing to reduce the fact they were mouth-wateringly gorgeous.

Barry inclined his head. "I understand, Princess Tzali. However, we know that the Doyen are not above using mind-slaves or sleeper agents. We've performed every major test that we can think of. Nearly." He nodded. "If you pass this last one, then we will be glad to bring you into our training regime. Once you complete your training, you will join Squaddie Chong's lance."

"Lance?" Ali asked, narrowing her eyes.

"A squadron of like minded psions," Barry said. "Squaddie Chong's lance, Lance 3, is made up of Private Beli Lapran, Private Diamond White, Private Tasmin Khan and, yes, Abby." He grinned. "So, you have plenty of motivation."

Ali beamed. "All right! What's the test?"

"Yeah, uh, what is-"

And that was when Amelia pulled out her crystal gun – a slender chunk of psi-crystal slung off her hip by the thinnest cord that could be made and still count as existing – and shot me in the head. The explosion of viscera was so real that I spent a good five seconds wondering why I wasn't, in fact, dead, as I sprawled on the ground. I sat up just about the same time the prison door exploded off and Barry was punted through five decks.

The only thing that saved him was the fact he was Barry and Barry was a badass.

The only thing that saved the ship was that the holding cells were near the central spine, and the outer hull was at least three walls worth of metal and plastic before momentum stopped.

Ali did not take this test well.

But the, uh, depth of her reaction got her into Lance 3. Or, to use it's more awesome and badass and cool name...

Bravo Squad!

Lets talk about Bravo Squad. While Ali was put through the same training regime I had been put through while she had been in prison, Bravo Squad was set to fixing up the damage that she had caused. Squaddie Fang Chong was our leader. He was a nineteen year old military recruit from the People's Army or whatever it was they called it in China. I don't know, google it. He spoke English better than me, had a bunch of crazy high grades in various scholastic formats, and had hefty telekinetic abilities. He was a pretty cool guy, once you got past the tough guy leader edge.

Then there was Beli. She was curvier than Ali and her skin was duskier – and colored more like chocolate than sunset. She was from America, but delighted in bringing out sayings that might have been from the lips of The Buddha himself or had just been made up out of whole cloth just to fuck with us. I was pretty sure that the Buddha wouldn't have suggested instantly murdering yours truly, but I wasn't some ... fancy ... tree sitty enlightenment getting guy. Her best friend and nearly complete and perfect fucking clone was Tasmin. Okay, clone was a bit wrong. Yes, Tasmin was just as curvy and beautiful. And yes, Tasmin also had a deliciously musical accent. But Tasmin was also as serious as Beli was playful, and somehow, Tasmin managed to wear nudity like I'd wear a three piece business suit. Tasmin was also our telepath, while Beli was our empath. One hit them where they thinked, the other hit them where they felt. It was a terrifying combo, made all the more impressive by how quickly they could coordinate.

Next, we had Diamond. Diamond was a skinny, flat as a board, gymnastic looking black girl whose hair varied wildly from week to week. Some days, she had it done up in cornrows. Some days, she had it sheered as flat as her chest. Other days, she let it poof out into a huge-ass afro. It was one of the upsides of having at least a tiny bit of biokinetic potential. But while her biokinesis let her floof or defloof her hair as much as she wanted, it was her warping that was the real ace in Bravo Squad's arm-mounted automatic card launcher.

In my head, the cards were monomolecular sharp and exploded. Like Gambit's.

All four of them responded to me dropping the news with looks of pure horror.

"You want your psycho girlfriend to join the Lance?" Tasmin asked, her voice as dry and cold as Antarctica. She swung her arm out wide, gesturing to the swath of destruction made by Barry as he had been flung through walls and doors and bits of office.

"Firstly," Fang said, holding up his hand. "I doubt it was Abby's choice."

"I was about to say!" I said.

"Secondly, I'm fairly sure it's a psycho ex-girlfriend by the time she gets through basic," Fang said, wearing his 'I am not smiling, but actually, I am smiling a great deal, but try and prove it in court, just try it, I fucking dare you.'

"Hey!" I said, flushing. "I'm sending her good vibes." To demonstrate, I sent a psychic ping through the corridors of the ship. Hang in their, baby!

I. Am. Going. To. Kill. You. Ali's voice came through in ragged psionic gasps, each squirt of verbal communication tinged with fatigue posions that made my biceps burn and my belly ache in a ghostly echo of the hell I had gone through under Barry's personal tutilage.

KEEP FOCUS RECRUIT!

The psionic boom of Barry's voice made me almost fall onto my ass. Did you know modern DIs weren't allowed to swear at you or call you demeaning names anymore? It wasn't like in Full Metal Jacket. Did you know that a DI could take a perfectly ordinary set of instructions and turn it into the emotional equivalent of being stabbed in the gut by a psi-sword? Well, you do now! Seeing my expression brought a slow smile on Beli's face.

"Yeah, definitely ex."

"We won't break up!" I said, biting my lip. "I mean, crash landing on an alien planet was what brought us together. If our relationship survived that, it can survive anything!"

"Yes, how could a relationship possibly survive two beautiful teenagers being thrown together on a jungle planet, forced to work together to survive, battling life or death monsters while evading Doyen paladins?" Diamond asked, grinning as she scooted by, using a broom to brush chunks of metal along the floor – the clatteirng, clinking noise adding a drum line to her sarcasm. I glared after her skinny black ass. "It's a miracle you two only had sex, what, three times?"

I flushed. "How do you know how many times we..."

"You broadcast." The words came from my entire Lance, with variations on the theme. Fang said it like it was a tactical error I needed to fix. Tasmin said it like she was sick of hearing the same joke repeatedly. Beli said it with a smile as she leaned her whole cushy body against her mop. And Di said it like it was the best fucking soap opera in the universe.

"In your sleep," Fang said.

I flushed. Hard.

There were downsides to being Sigma 6. Which I was. Fang was Sigma 4, while Beli and Tasmin were both sigma 3. Diamond was Sigma 5. But like earthquakes and nuclear bombs, actual power got a lot higher a lot faster than the numbers meant, so Sigma 6 was a big fucking deal. Not Doctor Manhattan big. But I was at least at Professor X scale. With the ribbing done, Fang sent a subtle 'work' ping. It wasn't so much actual words, but rather, it was like was all just felt like we should maybe start working again.

We took the message and went back to work getting everything cleaned up.

Once the last bit of repairs were done, Fang slapped my shoulder and prevented me from heading to the washroom where I was going to get some grease off my fingers. Instead, he smiled at me, his broad, muscular form almost hemming me into the wall. It was at times like this that I remembered just how naked we were. Like, Fang was not a skinny Chinese guy. He was one of those huge, buff Chinese guys who looked like they could go toe to toe with the Rock. The fact he kept his hair short added to that vibe, and the body paint he wore in lieu of uniform did not distract from the swinging dick that nearly bumped against my thigh.

I'd say that this was a work environment made for 'no homo', but I liked to think that I was more comfortable in my heterosexuality than that.

I liked to think that.

Instead, my brain kept going: That's a dong, that's a dong, dong dong dong, big old swinging dong, all the dongs! In this doggerel chant.

Shut the FUCK up, brain!

"Where do you think you're going, Abby?" Fang asked, grinning wickedly.

"To ... the ... shower?" I asked.

"Oh no. There's something we've put off for far too long." His contact made my talent squirm and wriggle. The instinct when one psion touches another is to read their mind, if you have even a tiny bit of telepathic talent. But Fang and I both had our mental shields up – it was the first part of basic braining, and it was actually harder to bring them down than you'd think. Either way, I couldn't read anything off him other than the sadistic grin on his face.

I started to mentally scramble through everything I knew about PsiCom internal culture. I knew that fucking on the reg was basically a tacitly accepted fact of life by our direct superiors and that they had been carefully keeping certain security camera recordings of late night orgies from getting back to the Kremlin, Pentagon, 10 Downing Street, Paris and Bejing. I knew that there was a girl in the Telepathic Communication Operations Division who could basically act as a holodeck for you if you didn't mind sliding into a sense dep tank and knowing she'd judge you about every single fucking detail.

But then Fang pushed me forward and a ripple of distorted space clued me in that Di was in on this hazing ritual too. I landed in a chair in a darkened room and started to wonder if maybe me broadcasting my memories of fucking Ali was about to get be beaten with bars of soap.

"Private Hatem..." A deep, gruff voice that sounded faintly familiar spoke. "Do you know what it takes to become a real member of PsiCom?"

"Uh..." I paused.

Like a Cheshire grin, a set of teeth spread into a wide smile in the darkness.

"You gotta get at least one of them."

I blinked.

"A kill?" I asked.

"A confirmed kill. And since you're an ass backwards weirdo who decided to hit combat before you even started day one..." the lights flared on and Amelia sat there across the table from me, her hands set on a tray that contained a cake that looked as cheap as it was possible for a cake to look. Considering all the food had to be either grown on the HQ hydroponics decks or shipped here from Earth via the few FTL ships that the PsiCom had access too (the Stargate was a bit too dangerous to leave on for anything but the most emergency of transports), I was actually rather impressed with how good the cake did look.

I was also impressed by the smiling crowd surrounding me.

It looked like nearly every Lance that the ship flew with was here, including Lance-3, all of them giving me huge shit eating grins.

I sagged in my seat, laughing as Amelia spun the cake around and I saw what was written on it.

My call-sign.

Each member of each Lance had a call-sign, given to them once they finished basic braining and got their first confirmed kill. Well, I had finished basic braining. I had gotten a confirmed kill (or two) on the little misadventure that had gotten me and Ali together. And now, I was looking at my call-sign.

PIRATE MASK.

My brow furrowed. "Pirate Mask?"

Amelia held out a knife for me to cut into the cake, grinning. "You stole the heart of a princess. It seemed appropriate."

Neurons fired and my brow furrowed. "Wait ... like ... Princess Bride? Like Wesley? The Dread Pirate Roberts? Dude in a mask?"

"Yes, yes, now, cut the cake, Mask, we're all waiting," one of the older dudes from Lance-5 said.

I grinned, then held out my palm. "Watch this..." I focused. Honing my telekinetic talents, I created a series of razor thin wires of force, which skimmed through cake and frosting alike, then snatched up the pieces, sending them flying through the air. They slapped into plates and everyone cheered.

Fang grinned as he took a seat on the table, crossing one naked thigh over the other. He, like most people on the ship, ate fastidiously, since getting food on your bare skin was just ... weird. But as he ate, he said: "Looking forward to your first mission?"

"Yeah..." I said, nodding. Then, quietly. "I hope Ali doesn't hate me." I looked at the cake.

I suddenly felt rather guilty.

We'd be fine.

I was sure of it.

Earlier, I said that there were three things that had drawn me to Ali when we had been stranded on an alien death planet shortly after first meeting. The first had been her amazing body. I could, like, make easily half of each paragraphs of this story about how gorgeous she was and still only get a fraction of the idea through to you. But, uh, I'm pretty sure that I'd start sounding like even more of a creepy stalker then. But the second reason why I was drawn to her?

She was a badass.

That was why, a week and two days after she started basic braining, she passed with every commendation that could get handed out. She took the physical training and adapted to it with the skill of a born predator. She took the psionic training and hit back hard enough that Barry actually needed to bring in other people to assist. She took the military training and absorbed it with the air of someone learning to read Korean after struggling through English.

Yeah, apparently, written Korean is, like, the easiest language to learn in the world?

But after the petrified and highly complex hierarchy of Doyen paladins – who were organized along familial, national, ethnic, and power based lines, with different levels of superiority and rank based off the situation, location, time of day and moods of the participants – the relatively straightforward organization of the United Nations, which was a direct descendant from NATO military organization, was like mana from heaven.

So, she kicked ass, took names, and joined Lance-3. There wasn't any fancy ceremony. I mean, PsiCom was an organization where a good chunk of the active service-members wore nothing. Ceremony wasn't exactly a big part of the organizational byline. But there was a welcoming ritual. We all gathered in the massive hanger bays where Lances launched from when combat was imminent, and all of us watched as Ali swaggered into the hanger bay like she owned it.

They say girls look good in uniform.

Did you know that applied even when said uniform was a color coded bit of paint around the neck and some silvery chevrons daubed onto the shoulder. Ali's hair clicked and clattered together as she walked forward, her generous hips rolling as she stepped up to Fang. She saluted crisply. Saluting did fascinating things to breasts and I did my best to remain at attention. Fang inclined his head.

"At ease," he said, saluting back.

Ali relaxed.

Then she smacked me in the face.

I stood there, stock still. Then my hand went to my cheek. "Ow."

"That's for distracting me every single fucking day!" she said, her voice furious. "Do you know how hard it is to do push ups without you sending telepathic pings every five minutes?"

I rubbed my cheek slowly, then said. "Well, I..." I looked at Fang and Beli and Tasmin and Di. Each of them looked a bit apologetic and uncomfortable. Before I could say anything more, though, Ali stepped up and kissed me. Hard. Her tongue thrust into my mouth and uncoiled down my throat, coiling and wrapping around my own tongue along the way. It was like kissing an entire snake, and it set my heart hammering and my pulse pounding. My hands grabbed onto her hips as she kept kissing and kissing and kissing.

Fang coughed. "Ah, we ... are technically on duty..." he actually sounded abashed. If I was not currently suffocating in the best way imaginable, I would have been shocked. Instead, my mental thought process was basically: hurrgaghgble.

Fang coughed again. Louder.

Ali drew back, her tongue retracting into her mouth. I almost collapsed onto my ass, coughing and gasping at the same time. As I clutched at my chest, Ali smiled and sent a private emotional ping to me: And that's for believing in me, Abby.

"Yay..." I wheezed.

While I got my breath back, Fang put Ali through one of the last pieces of training needed. It was here where humanity demonstrated why we were able to stand toe to toe with an alien race that had dominated a huge swath of the galaxy for thousands of years. A Doyen Paladin was a killing machine unlike anything the universe had seen, able to move across light years without a single piece of technology and slaughter entire armies of "mindless" (read, non-psionic) enemies with a wave of their hand.

Even with psionic powers, humans should have been out classed ten ways from Sunday.

But here's the thing about humans.

"Assume your warform," Fang said.

Ali shrugged, then slammed fist into palm. Her body flared and suddenly, her fleshy body was suspended in a cocoon of telekinetic force, shaded a shimmering purple-blue by the specific color of her talent. That cocoon was humanoid (well, Doyenoid) in shape, and contained enough raw strength to tear apart mountains. Given time. Warforms were how Doyen Paladins dominated the galaxy. They could outrun a tank, dodge missiles, and cut buildings in half with their huge-ass psi-swords.

"Load her up!" Fang called out.

The crane arms that were suspended across the top of the hanger bay moved. They whirred and groaned, swinging down armor plates and joints and bearings. Technicians swarmed out of where they had been gathering up tools and started to screw and hammer and even weld chunks into place. Once they were done, a crane dropped the main gun of an A-10 Warthog into Ali's arms. That immense mini-gun had been modified, with handles and braces that let someone the size of a small building hold it like a pistol.

I whistled slowly.

Ali had gone from curvy glowing warform to seriously badass battle-mech in one smooth transition. Okay, I lie, it hadn't been smooth. There had been several occasions where technicians had to yank off parts, try new ones, ask her to move her arm, then take off the parts, put on different new ones, repeat. This was her first fitting, and it took the better part of two hours. But at the end of those two hours, the entire team had gotten her measurements down and could put the armor onto her warform in about five minutes.

"Holy fuck."

Her voice boomed from speakers attached to the front of the armor. If we had been suited up, it would have crackled through speakers built into the helmets. And that was how humanity matched Doyen Paladins. Their warforms were stronger and faster and tougher. But ours cheated. We went into battle with radios, miniguns, missiles, and enough armor plating to make a Timber Wolf blush.

Humanity. Fuck. Yeah.

The briefing rooms were where the surrealism of humanity's secret war with the Doyen really kinda flicked you between the eyes. Most of the HQ ship was built out of cobbled together pieces from every nation, assembled in space and slowly refined by every engineer who ever got aboard her. This gave everything a nicely kludged together sci-fi look. But the briefing rooms looked as if they could have come from any number of collegian seminars or instruction halls on Earth. They even had overhead projectors and, yes...

They used power point.

I let my arms rest on the plastic armrests of the swivel chair that I had claimed, while Ali experimentally kicked off the floor and gasped in purest shock as her chair whirled around and around and around. Fang reached out with one arm and stopped her progress – leaving her head bobbing from side to side. Her eyes closed and she mumbled: "Thanks..."

Our CO, Lt. Kerensky, looked pained. But this was fairly standard for the people in PsiCom who were clothed. The number of active psionic talents on Earth were limited, and the needs of a military administration were vast and complex. And thus, there were loads of non-psions, who wore their clothes and looked slightly pained about every single one of us dick swinging, tit jiggling psychics. Not that I wanted to see Kerensky naked. He was ... not the prettiest man in the world.

He spoke English with a faint Russian accent.

This just added another layer of surrealism to the moment. I mean, you got six naked teenagers or near teenagers (including an alien princess, for god's sake) sitting in office chairs that basically rolled out of Office Depot, looking at a power point run by a guy who sounded like he should be doing the briefing to Red Alert.

The first Red Alert. Before it got super campy.

Yes, I'd played the original Red Alert, it's called Pirate's Bay, look it up.

"Your mission is in the solar system Betelgeuse," Lt. Kerensky said. "Intelligence gathering. A Doyen family rules the sixth planet in orbit around Betelgeuse. There is a hefty supply of psi-crystal there, as well as an agrarian mindless population that we're calling Beta-3 until further designations are available. According to Private Tzali..." he nodded to her and the projector shifted to show a surface projection map of the planet. It looked like it had one huge continent surrounding the northern pole, with a smattering of islands flecking the equator like belly fluff on an exceptionally fat man. Several indicators for temperature and humidity were included.

I whistled. "Holy balls. It's like Florida five years from now."

Lt. Kerensky glared at me.

"Sorry, sir," I said.

Lt. Kerensky pointed with a laser pointer. "The main settlements are along the southern coast of the primary continent. Local wildlife is highly aggressive and mostly kept at bay by psionic impulse crystals crafted by Doyen artisans. The citizenry themselves are split between a landed gentry who are allowed to administer to the rest for the Doyen and the serf-farmers who are among the administered. However..." He clicked the projector forward another slide. This one showed a gleaming chunk of crystal that had been carved into a roughly donut shape. The image was grainy and blurry, like the camera had been flying really fast.

"This is a spy drone snapshot from the center of the capital. This is a psi-gate. A permanent one," Lt. Kerensky said. "Private Tzali, can you enlighten us on the function and methodology of such a gate."

Ali nodded, then sprang to her feet. Her hands clasped behind her back and she thrust out her chest. Her perky tits jiggled and I carefully slid myself so that the table was concealing my lap. I noticed that Fang did the same. Lt. Kerensky just took advantage of wearing pants, the coward. Di looked like she was struggling with some internal jealousy.

"Such a gate is referred to as an Eternal Angst. A Doyen artisan who is near the end of their life can have their mind, uh ... severed in half, then tied to both ends of the gate. This creates a permanent portal. Worlds like this, with multiple populations of chattel and psi-crystal mines tend to become nexus of trade between Doyen houses. When not fought over."

Lt. Kerensky nodded. "This leads to your mission. As Doyen do not know what humans look like underneath our armor, you will drop with your full gear in the wilderness. Stash the gear, then infiltrate in the guise as her retainers." He nodded to Tzali. "There, you will make contact with an organization discovered by Lance-6 in operations in the galactic northwest."

Click. The projector went forward. This time, it showed a symbol that had been carved onto some stone. Ali's brow furrowed. My brow furrowed. It looked like a strange squiggle. But as we looked at it, Fang coughed and then leaned forward. "Tasmin, can you recreate that mentally?" he asked. Clearly, he knew what it was.

Tasmin nodded. Her telepathy felt like one of those ear pokey-looky things that doctors used to peep in your ear holes, but as she formed the symbol in my mind, new dimensions came to life that couldn't be seen with the eyes. I blinked and Ali gasped audibly. She jerked back and exclaimed: "The Event Horizon!?"

"What's that?" Lt. Kerensky asked, his voice sharp. Fang shot a serious look at Ali. Ali actually flushed. But then she firmed her jaw and scowled.

"It's a fairy story. A silly nonsense legend shared among children," she said, tossing her head. "Or as a way to excuse some mistake made by a scout who warped into a neutron star or tried to land on a gas giant."

"The Doyen Empire is thousands of years old and has an extraordinarily spotty history keeping service," Lt. Kerensky said, his voice a tightly controlled growl. "Every legend must be treated as being a potential risk."

Ali looked like she wanted to argue. Instead, she sighed and leaned back. "That symbol is supposed to represent the Event Horizon. As a black hole swallows all, some Doyen say that there is a distance that swallowed all. Traveling further than six hundred zun leads to the Event Horizon swallowing a Doyen whole." She paused. "I believe that's six hundred and twenty five of your light years."

I frowned, slightly. "Isn't that nearly the exact size of the Doyen Empire?"

Ali opened her mouth to respond.

Then she shut up.

"Huh," she said.

"Well, that's unsettling," Di said, frowning.

"I never thought I would be so happy our warpers cannot get very far," Lt. Kerensky said, frowning.

"Sir," Fang said, leaning back in his seat. The office chair squealed under his bulk. "Where did Lance-6 find this symbol?"

Lt. Kerensky frowned. "Burned into the bedrock of a Doyen world that had been attacked by the Doyen Household known as Fenzor. The Fenzor had burned the local castle into the bedrock, then smeared that symbol..." he nodded to it. "Across five square kilometers."

Okay. So, it wasn't a cave wall. It was a planetary surface. I shuddered as my mental horizons were broadened by that vista. I tried to imagine the pyrokinetic power it would take to render a Doyen castle – which, I remind you, is made of pure telekinetic force – into bubbling slag. Pyrokinesis, more than any other form of kinetic manipulation, came from rage. Hatred. Fury. The mental image of a Doyen that mad gave me what I believe the doctors called the shit-yourself shivers.

"Well, then," Fang said. "If the Doyen are scared of them, they may be an ally. Remember, the enemy of our enemy-"

"Is still, sometimes, our enemy," Beli said, her voice soft. Mysterious sounding. Then she brightened. "Still, this does mean I get to bring out the gold bikini!"

Ali looked completely baffled.

This gave us all the tertiary objective of ensuring that she sat through the entire Star Wars series.

It was possible for a human being to wrap themselves in a war-form, armor up, then just jet through warp portals. But that was very tiring for the humans in their war-forms and for the warper, who was also in a war-form. And since Betelgeuse was nearly a hundred light years away from the HQ ship, we instead got to watch as our armor and weapons were loaded onto one of the many secondary ships that PsiCom had built in space. The entire military industrial complex on Earth was a terrifying thing, when you thought about it, and with even a tiny fraction of material and men siphoned away from the wars on Earth, we had enough spare parts to ... spare.

That was a terrible sentence, I should feel bad.

Thus, we all got to cram our butts into a massive barrel of liquid hydrogen and oxygen with a spinal column of living quarters that the PsiCom admiralty called a "scout ship." The main living deck was built into the very nose, with the floor facing the engines. Calling it a living deck was kind of like calling the paint that we were daubed in cold weather gear. My thighs were mashed against Ali's thighs and against Beli's thighs, and I couldn't lower my arms without bumping their tits. This would normally be fine, but each of us were also crammed into seats with life support webbings, com units, and straps. All of the shit was designed to literally tear away into strands if a simple chemical spray was activated by the ship computers.

That was so we'd all be buck naked if, say, a Doyen cut the ship in half and we needed to warform up in a hurry.

Now, don't ask what we'd do if the hydrogen and oxygen mixed too fast and the entire ship exploded like the Challenger. Which was a terrifyingly likely possibility, considering the tech in the ship was only slightly more advanced than the Challenger's. It had only been thirty years, and most of those years had been spent making our phones swanker, not getting better spaceships, because humans have fucked up priorities.

The only one of us who wasn't strapped down was Di. I was trying to find a place to look that wasn't Di's incredibly tight rump, because she was standing in the center of the ring of seats, her arms braced against the ceiling and the floor. She was as close as it was possible to get to the center of mass on the ship. She'd feel acceleration the least, and she had the least amount of anything touching her skin.

"This is Flight-com, do you read me Angel's Grove?" Flight-com's voice crackled through the speakers.

"This is Angel's Grove, we read you," Fang said.

"We have checks on your O2 mixture. The tanks are hooked up, jets ready to fire. Looks like you're clear to go. Good hunting out there, Bravo Squad."

"Same to you," Fang said, then flicked a few switches on the controls by his arm. "Ready, Tycho?"

Diamond – or, maybe I should use her call sign now? Tycho Bright smiled. "Ready."

"On three, then four." Fang – aka Magnum Caliber – grinned and then started to count down. "Three. Two."

Ali squeezed my hand. Her fingers laced through mine and I smiled at her. I tried to project nothing but cheerful goodness at her. But I could feel her nerves, jangling and flaring like a bell being rung by the world's biggest asshole of a hunchback. She was a Doyen. She was used to soaring through space in ships crafted from the minds of her loyal servants and retainers. Being surrounded in this highly explosive tin can must have felt like being launched from a literal catapult.

"One."

The space before the Angel's Grove rippled as Tycho focused every iota of her willpower into ripping open a warp. Then the engines roared to life on four and sent the scout ship through the warp. It emerged about ten light years away from the HQ ship. Tycho actually started to bellow – a fierce war cry. Her arms shook and she closed her eyes, harder. The thruster continued to burn and burn as she opened warp after warp, flickering them open as we cut through space. When the burn ended thirty seconds later, she sagged backwards onto Magnum's lap. This sagging motion came on the last bit of gravity as the burn cut out and the Angel's Grove started to drift.

Magnum wrapped one arm around Tycho. His skin contrasted with hers – and so did the gentleness that he used to handle her, so unlike his normal toughness and efficiency. He swept his hand through her short cropped hair and murmured in her ear.

Tycho grinned. "We better fuckin be..." she said.

This brought a laugh from the rest of us. I felt tension bleeding out of Ali as she shook her head. "How can we tell if we made it?"

Magnum unstrapped from his seat. He pushed himself up into the microgravity of the living deck, his body writhing against Tycho. From the way she wriggled and squirmed in the air, Tycho was more than happy to continue the contact as long as possible. Finally, Magnum actually pushed away from her with a laugh – and Beli (or, as she went by while on missions, Opal Midnight) laughed. "Flying at full mast, Magnum?"

"We're on a mission, Opal!"

Opal winked at Ali, who was looking up after Magnum's half-hard cock with clear curiosity.

Jealousy was unbecoming an officer.

Fortunately, I was fucking enlisted.

However, jealousy was also unbecoming an adult, mature male.

Fortunately, I was not a fucking mature male. I growled slightly and Ali actually laughed. "Like I haven't noticed you admiring Beli's chest."

"To be fair..." Opal said, gesturing to her chest, then grinned. "Also, stick to call signs."

Ali nodded. Then she started. "Wait, I haven't gotten a call sign yet!"

"You haven't gotten a confirmed kill yet, Ali," Magnum said, dogging the hatch in the ceiling. He opened it and then pulled himself into the 'bridge' of the ship. It was really just a closet full of computers, read-outs, screens and some manual overrides. Even those were just different sets of electronic controls in case the automatic electronic controls failed. The future was scary.

"I have too!" Ali said.

"Yeah, but ... we don't like to celebrate humans getting kakked," Tasmin – aka Ebony Noon – said.

This brought a pale chill to the room.

In the silence that stretched and stretched and stretched, I tried to find something to say that would break the awkwardness. We had all tip toed around the facts about Tzali's previous life as a Doyen Princess. To her credit, she didn't look abashed or ashamed or awkward. She merely looked at Ebony with a kind of icy disdain. Then she sniffed and stuck her nose into the air.

"Awkward," Opal sang out. I felt the awkwardness ease – but if that was because Opal was making light of it or if she was using her empathy powers, who knew. Either way, the question was rendered moot because Magnum called down from the bridge.

"All right, everyone. Lets get ready land this tub. Betelgeuse-6 is dead ahead. We'll be getting into the atmosphere in about a half hour." He paused. "Nice shooting, Tycho."

Tycho looked nice and smug.

And together, we headed towards my – towards our - first mission.