Page 13 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
“So was I because you kept trying to recreate them and I had to keep beating the shit out of people,” Torrek growled.
“I thought you said it didn’t matter what consenting adults did behind closed doors?” I asked. “Because that part is pretty cool.”
“Well, the men were consenting adults, but Omi was a fifteen-year-old kid and wasn’t old enough to consent.”
“How old were you the first time you had sex?” I demanded.
“That’s different!”
“Oh, I like her. We’re going to be good friends.”
“Anyway,”Torrek growled. “The last text has always been an issue.”
“Just the last one?” I snorted. “There was some pretty fucked-up shit in the first three.”
“Well, the last book ends with a massive fleet of heavily armed ships flying into our galaxy and it’s hinted they want to invade and then the book ends,” Kuka said.
“Oh, yeah, if they thought I was a prophet, I could see where that might be a problem. Shit.”
“There were no texts after that. There were scholars who thought The Devouring Mother wasn’t a prophet, but wrote about what came before. The invaders destroyed everyone in the galaxy and she wrote about it. She was just killed before she could finish. There are other scholars who think she was trying to warn us as much as she could, but we were supposed to figure the ending out ourselves.”
“The truth of it was, books are expensive to publish and I don’t make a ton of money. I was trying to save up and then my car shit the bed and I had to use that money to fix it. Then I got writers’ block, which honestly might be more of a motivation thing because I was broke and the series was barely selling. And apparently, I get murdered in two days, so what’s up with that?”
“There is another set of scholars that work in secret at the pleasure of the palace. My family. They look atalltheories. Our planet is on the brink of doing something very stupid. A lot of people think the mysterious fleet is our ancestors. The planets our people fled from who finally found us and want to oppress us again. Things are at a tipping point because one faction wants to do what we’re doing and prepare for it and the other wants to go in search of the galaxy our ancestors came from and wipe them out before they find us.
“My family’s scholars looked at all known galaxies for the Devouring Mother. This galaxy is putting enough satellites into space and the signals are getting strong enough for us to be able to connect to them. This is kept close to my family to not incite anyone, but they located the name on our holy texts here in this realm.
“My parents told them to not dig any further because the Devouring Mother being a human would upend our entire society, but my brother and I have been looking closer. We bothhave an Enix. He bought his, and I stole mine. My brother wants to prevent the texts from ever making it to our planet and I wanted to save you to finish them. That was before I met you and found out the texts got written because we were trying to find Baxter Holmes before she got murdered and got you when you were just a kid going by the name your parents gave you.”
“So, your goal is to protect me while I write the next book? I don’t know how it ends. I didn’t outline anything. I just made it up as I went.”
“It’s not just that. If we were involved in the creation of your books, then someone from my planet might be involved in your murder. My brother and I used two different teams to work out time travel, but that’s not to say they haven’t sold it, even though they were paid not to. My family’s scholars are sworn to secrecy, but the Devouring Mother possibly being human is pretty major. They might have told someone. We also need to figure out how your books ended up on my planet seven thousand years ago.”
“That’s alotof pressure.”
“I know, but we’ll be here the entire time. And we have a time machine capable of traveling to different galaxies. We can take you somewhere safe,” Torrek said.
“Can we kill Hitler when he’s taking a shit before he does all that awful stuff?” I asked.
Kuka just shrugged.
“Time travel isn’t linear, and it doesn’t always take you where you want to go. Weneededto meet you when you were seven, otherwise, we never would have had any reason to come looking for you. So, that was where we ended up, even though that wasn’t where we were trying to go.”
“Yeah, that’s fucked-up. I think it’s time for you to try donuts while I disassociate.”
How was this my life?
Igenerally loved watching a woman who liked food. What I didn’t expect was also enjoying watching Enix eat for the first time. Kuka and I stole him from his owner because he was being mistreated. We let him do what he wanted and never pressured him. When we needed his help, we asked. If he didn’t want to do something, we never made a big deal about it.
Baxter just met him, and yeah, she tried to hit him, but after she found out why he said the things he did sometimes, she was pretty great with him. He’d tell you that he wasn’t programmed to feel anything about what his owner did to him, but I’d been around him long enough to know that he was. I knewsheknew that, too. I had a feeling she’d find a way to help him deal with it.
We’d finally moved to the part of the conversation where we discussed saving her life, but she really wanted us to try her food first. It appeared to be fried dough. We had something similar back home, but I was a little wary to try it. She seemed to behandling our food okay, but that didn’t mean we wouldn’t react to hers.
I’d never been able to stop my sister from doing a damned thing. If she wanted to do something stupid, she was going to do it no matter how closely I watched her. Omi and Enix were the first to try the donuts. Omi took a delicate bite. Enix had never eaten before and hadn’t really learned table manners, so he just shoved the entire thing in his mouth like he did with the kebabs and tacos.
It was honestly adorable.
Kuka tried it next. There were all kinds of embarrassing stomach problems I was worried about and I wasn’t sure how archaic the plumping was on this planet. I couldn’t exactly run to Big Daddy to use the facilities in an emergency if there were humans around.
