Page 61 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
“Is your mom going to be mad I’m not Saki?”
“She’s not going to care. Finding your Zovea is a celebration, and they are getting harder to find. I had to travel light years to find mine.”
“My mother will love you, too. Just ignore my father. I still haven’t figured out why she keeps him around. He’s just like Valtens.”
“Ugh. Ten years of dealing with Kevin and now I got to deal with the man who raised him like that. Not going to ruin my good day. Let’s do this.”
Kuka asked Big Daddy to take us home. This was it. It was almost over and then the only thing I had to worry about was being with Baxter and hopefully my previous owner not making a stink about taking me back.
FIFTY-NINE
BAXTER
Iwas nervous as fuck. I was the feral casual dater that bolted at the two-month mark, so I’d never actually done the whole ‘meet the parents’ thing. Fuck me. That worked pretty well for me on Earth, but it couldn’t be avoided now and the first parents I was ever going to meet were royalty.
I trusted Kuka that his mom would be cool with me being human but then I also trusted myself to shoot my mouth off if his dad was a spooge like Valtens. I wasn’t going to sit there and take it. My parents stole my voice and after I ran, I made sure it was heard.
I didn’t know why she was keeping him around because Kuka didn’t, but if she was in the kind of love with him that overlooked all the red flags, she might get offended when I reminded her of them in front of her court.
Still, I trusted Kuka and I couldn’t avoid this.
I stepped out of Big Daddy and took a good look at this planet seven thousand years later. It was still beautiful, at least in the palace. We were in some kind of garden and the plants were just as lovely.
I didn’t know what I was expecting from space palaces. There were places all over Earth with castles older than the country I was born in, but I’d never seen any of them in anything other than pictures. If this planet had been discovered seven thousand years ago, then I guess I expected the castle to look like one of ours.
This society waswaymore advanced than mine. I thought I had an idea with the time travel and getting to fly Big Daddy, but I really didn’t. The palace looked like some kind of concept art for a steampunk palace that was actually a lot more high-tech than actual steampunk.
It was gorgeous. There were all these theories about how the pyramids in Egypt were built. I didn’t know the answer, but I couldn’t figure out how anyone built this, either. Some of it was so ornate, it didn’t look like it was structurally sound, but I already knew that it was.
A gorgeous woman who looked just like Kuka came running across the garden and threw herself at him. Yeah, that was definitely his mom.
“Welcome home, Son. I knew it would work. There was a part of me that thought you might not come back to time travel everywhere and there was another part that hoped you did because it would make you happy,” she said, squeezing him.
Before Kuka could introduced me, we were joined by another man who was scowling at Kuka. They said Valtens took after his uncle, but I could definitely see similarities between Valtens and this man. He was in much better shape with better hygiene, but that was definitely Kuka’s father.
“Your brother isn’t back yet,” he grumped.
“He won’t be coming back,” Kuka said, squaring his shoulders. “He got stuck fifteen years in the past and needed me to take him home. By the time I found him again, he’d kidnapped my Velne to draw me out and made his intentions clear to kill all of us and take my machine back home with his own version of the events.”
“You found your Velne?” his mom gasped.
“You murdered my son?” his father growled.
“I defended myself within the rules of the contest. He would have killed her, but Enix jumped in front of the blast and took it. He wouldn’t have been able to protect me when he turned the gun on me. He was planning on lying about meeting the Devouring Mother and that she told him that he was supposed to go out and conquer all the planets in our galaxy and move on to the next. He would havedestroyedour planet.”
“The defective one doesn’t look damaged,” his father sniffed. “Guards! Arrest him.”
A few of the guards stepped forward and pointed guns at all of us, including the queen. And they only needed a few because there weren’t many out here. Shit. Kuka’s dad was staging a coup.
I’d never seen Ghol in action before. Like, I knew he had all kinds of programming that Valtens added, but I’d only seen himdestroy evidence before. Ghol just cracked his neck and the next thing I knew, all the guards were lying on the ground with their weapons away from them.
Ghol was blocking the queen’s body with his and his teeth were bared at the king. Damn. Ghol was fierce.
“What would you like me to do?” Ghol asked over his shoulder.
“What would you like to do?” the queen asked.
“I’m accessing the data. The king was plotting a coup. It’s deeply buried, but I found it. It was supposed to happen after Valtens killed Kuka. I’m sorry, but Valtens wasn’t a good man. Some of your guards were on their side. It’s more than these. I’m learning that I’m more than my programming, but I would really like to hurt him.”
