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  “Kyr, if your grandmother was a pilot, then you are of the Blood. What you think doesn’t matter. Only female descendants of the Blood possess the genetic traits that allow them to be stunner pilots, as you call them. Many people can be trained to pilot, but only women of the Blood can fly blind, so to speak. Could your grandmother fly blind through an ion storm?”

  “So my father claims.”

  “Did she fly through the Tionay Nebula? It’s the shortest route between Calen and the Galactic Core.”

  Kyr seemed reluctant to answer her, but at last he said, “Yes.”

  “Who flies through the Tionay Nebula since the coup? Who, Kyr? Tell me. Do you? Does any pilot you know? Do the Coalition forces ever risk their ships in those electrically charged ion clouds?”

  “No.” Kyr and Davi exchanged looks. “I don’t know of anyone who flies through the Tionay Nebula. At least, not for the past thirty years,” Kyr added.

  “Not since the coup,” said Aja. She spooned up her soup.

  Both men followed her example and ate in silence.

  When they were all three finished, Kyr pushed his bowl away. “What did you mean, when you said, why didn’t I see that? Have you been in my head, Aja?”

  “No.” She bristled at the implication. “And I don’t intend to be in your head, as you so succinctly put it. When I first saw you I read your intentions and your heart, not your mind. If someone has had my blood as you have, then yes, I know what you are feeling, but no, I don’t read your mind. I’ve already explained this. Your thoughts are your own.”

  “I’m sorry,” replied Kyr. “But I needed to know. I don’t understand how you work, for lack of a better way to put it.”

  Aja’s face reddened. “I work exactly the same way you work, but I’ve been genetically enhanced. It’s hard to explain. There are things the Coalition doesn’t want anyone to know and I’m afraid I might endanger you by discussing these matters.”

  “But we already know the legends and the myths,” said Davi. “And my mother claimed there is always a core of truth to the old stories. Besides, I suspect we’re in more than a bit of danger already.”

  Kyr rose from his chair and walked over to Aja. He knelt beside her and took her hands. “Do you trust me?”

  “You have my heart,” she said. “I trust you with my life and everything I hold dear.”

  “Then confide in us. Davi and I need to understand how Bom knew to find you, how he tracked us. I need to know why Davi lost his lunch on that ride through the Pikes while I found it exhilarating. Explain these things. Please.”

  Aja brought his hands to her lips. She smiled down at him. “I’ll make a bargain with you. You make the cavitt and I’ll tell you a very long story. I like mine sweet,” she added.

  “And me,” said Davi.

  Kyr laughed, and he set about grinding the cava nuts and boiling a kettle of water. Ten minutes later, he brought three steaming mugs to the table along with a tiny pot of rare and precious Akkan honey.

  “Contraband?” Aja dipped the tip of her little finger into the thick, clear liquid.

  “My percentage,” Kyr replied. “One of the perks of smuggling.”

  Aja closed her eyes and licked the honey from her finger. “Mmmm. We aren’t allowed anything so valuable.”

  Davi raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised,” he said. “I would think the Royal Family, well, that you would be provided with whatever you wish.”

  “No.” Aja opened her eyes and smiled at him as she stirred a small spoon of honey into her caavitt. She passed the pot to Davi. “The Ruling Council delights in keeping us hungry and cold. Warm clothing is in short supply and our home rock is quite chilly. Most of the guards, while not overtly cruel, are indifferent. A few men are kind. They risk their livelihood, their career, to smuggle in stockings and wool undergarments, even extra rations.”

  When both men frowned, she added, “Don’t pity us. It has made us quite resilient. I think the men of the Council were hoping we would die of the elements or deprivation within a year or so, but, well, what’s the old saying? The best laid plans?”

  Davi asked, “I would like to hear how you know my future. Are you like the traveling gypsy women of old? Do you tell fortunes? You claim you didn’t read Kyr’s mind, but did you read mine? I don’t understand how this works.”

  Aja thought for a moment. “After a generation of rule, the Coalition has been quite successful in making us, my family, I mean, seem a bit like gypsies. They’ve written us out of the history books, but because your parents and grandparents still remember the Royal Blood, we’ve become a mixture of fantasy and reality. The truth is different. It lies in the science of the ancient Earthers, our ancestors. My line, my own bloodline, was the result of a science experiment. The ancients perpetuated the Blood for a reason, because we can help guide the people through space and time.”

  “So you do see through time?” Kyr asked.

  “That’s one way to put it, I suppose,” Aja said. “We see time as we see space. You see before you a table, six chairs, three cups of cavitt, and a pot of Akkan honey. I see these things, too, but I can also see where the honey might be in six hours, or six days, or six months from now. It can be disconcerting. It’s why women of the Blood are trained to control these visions, to discern from among these pathways to the future. To discriminate between what is real and what is not yet. What is likely and what is unlikely.” Aja smiled. “It’s complicated and it’s why so many of my ancestors have, unfortunately, had difficulties.”

  “But the women pilots?” asked Davi.

  “Every woman who has an aptitude like mine must be a descendant of the Blood. There is no other way to navigate with ease and safety. The Coalition fears us for many reasons. One of which is that they believe we bend time. No one can bend time. We simply have the inbred ability to find our way through the time eddies and currents and we can choose the shortest route between here and there. If there is an ion storm, for instance, we see a safe path through it. It’s why your grandmother, Kyr, could fly through the Tionay Nebula and not fry.” Aja blew on her cavitt and took a sip. “The primary reason the members of the Coalition deposed the Royal Family is because they do not believe in the ascendance of women. They want a male-dominated galactic society, one in which wives are protected and cherished by confinement to their home compounds. The Coalition wants an empire where whores are made available to satisfy the sexual appetites of men. There is no in-between. The Coalition does not believe women are fit to rule, or to lead, or to guide the people.”

  “Yet Bom is your father,” said Kyr. “He’s in a position to understand the abilities of the Empress and the Blood better than anyone.”

  “You’re right, it’s true. I believe my mother chose him because of the purity of his line, among other things.”

  “Other things?” Kyr asked. “Other things like preventing the coup in the first place if she could see it coming?”

  “As I’ve told you, the future is not set in stone. I believe she must have discerned a larger pattern, a path between the lesser of two evils. Perhaps if she’d tried to prevent the coup, it would have been worse. I don’t know. It would appear she chose the middle road, one that would lead to the possibility of me. General Bom couldn’t see that path, but he agreed to the mating because he wanted her and he wanted to possess her power. He got neither. In his eyes, my sisters and I are each an abomination.” Aja hesitated.

  “What else?” Kyr asked.

  “My father is no longer so certain he wants us dead. I was able to glimpse the new direction he is considering. It would appear he wants to make sons with my abilities.” Aja winced at the violence she saw in Kyr’s eyes.

  “He won’t touch you, I swear it.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t want me for himself. Thank the Gods, he wouldn’t dare break that taboo. If he did, he knows he would consign himself to the lowest of the Seven Hells. He wants to breed my sisters and me with other males of the Blood, to try to
produce a male dominant bloodline that will have the same power as the female line.” She shook her head. “He should know that’s impossible. He’s already tried and failed three times.”

  “But that’s genetic tampering and it’s against his own laws,” said Davi.

  Aja nodded. “The General, in a very large sense, is the law, until he’s dead and then he won’t be the law. It’s very simple, Davi. General Bom and other men like him rebelled against the Empress because they did not want women to possess any ability a man didn’t. In their view, a powerful woman makes a man, how would you describe it, impotent?”

  Kyr nearly choked on his cavitt.

  “Well, that’s one answer.” She suppressed a grin. “But perhaps the better answer is this‌—‌he hates us because my mother chose the father of my heart, Dua N’ib, as consort. She chose him out of love. She couldn’t give Dua N’ib daughters, but she wanted to give him sons, my two brothers.”

  Kyr nursed his bitter cavitt for a moment. “Why couldn’t she give him daughters?”

  “Because the man I call father, Dua N’ib, does not possess even a drop of the Royal Blood. She could only give him sons. It’s very complicated. His daughter would not have survived infancy, just as General Bom’s experimental sons did not survive.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” said Davi. “You can choose the sex of your child? And if you, pardon me, mate with a man who is not of the Blood, you can only bear sons?”

  “Yes, those of us directly descended from the Empress Ya, that is. My mother chose the sex of her children. I can. I suspect my sisters can. Our line is very pure. If I were to mate with a man not of the Blood, yes, I would make certain to give him only sons.”

  Both men sat back in their chairs. Aja noted that they seemed to avoid eye contact with each other and with her. It didn’t take much intuition on her part to know both were thinking about the implications of Kyr’s bloodline if his grandmother had indeed possessed the Royal Blood.

  Aja sipped her cavitt, giving the men a few moments to digest the answers to their questions. She asked, “Do you wish for the long version of the story? Or would you prefer the abbreviated version?”

  “Whichever version you choose,” said Kyr. “I want to understand how this, how you, are possible. I want to know how Bom tracked us and why you didn’t sense it immediately. And I want to know what the hells we do now.”

  Aja smiled. “The tracking chip is easily explained. It must have been implanted in the lab before I regained consciousness as a safety precaution in the event I managed to escape. It became a part of my own body and I didn’t sense anything different until Bom activated it. He used his own blood, not much, a few microns, but enough to track me. And he took my blood. He must have injected it directly into his right temporal lobe. That’s the only way he could feel me. How do I explain?” Aja tried to find the right words.

  “Kyr, if you were to draw some of my blood and inject it directly into your brain you would see what I see, at least for a short time. For instance, you would be a better pilot. You would be able to see some of the pathways to the future. Not as clearly as I can because you don’t have the training, but you would sense at least some of the same things I do.”

  Kyr tapped his mug. “Then why not use you? He had your family isolated. There was no one to stop him. Why not use you, any one of you? Take your blood and use it to get what he wants? Why kill you?”

  “I think it wasn’t until he had me in his laboratory his scientists determined something like this might work. I suspect they also warned him this could kill him. It didn’t kill him, this time. But if he continues down this path, he will discover it leads to insanity and death.”

  “Do you think he’ll try something like this again?” Davi asked.

  “I have no doubt that he will. He craves power above all else. But if he had more of my blood he would have used it. Either we would be under pursuit or you would both be dead and I would be his prisoner. I sensed fury in him, fury that the men beneath him refused his command to enter the Pikes. I’m sure they were unaware he’d injected himself with my blood, and they didn’t trust their ability to navigate through such a thick asteroid belt. Every man who flies knows the limitations of the auto-nav. As you can imagine, to admit what he’d done would have brought an immediate death sentence upon him.”

  “By a gack’s shit, I would say so,” muttered Davi.

  Aja asked, “Do you wish to hear my history? Remember, it’s not just my history, it’s your history, too.”

  Kyr closed his eyes. He folded his arms behind his head and stretched out his long legs. He leaned back in his chair and let the soft, even tone of Aja’s voice wash over him like the song of a bard.

  “Back in the ancient days of Earth, our place of origin, there was war and famine, murder, rape, pillage, slavery. Brutal men controlled most of the resources, while women, the weaker sex, acceded to the men.

  “A secret cadre of both male and female geneticists launched a program to select specific genetic traits from specially chosen subjects, men and women who possessed unusual physical and mental abilities, all the qualities we of the Royal Bloodline possess today. The project was named Persephone, after the Earther’s mythical Goddess of Spring, and it lasted for many generations. The researchers were able to isolate the genes they sought on the DNA double helix. Once they were able to replicate their results and enhance human embryos, it was decided by all involved that the genetic mutations would be transferred to the female line only. Only females could replicate or reproduce other female children who would carry these genetic mutations.”

  “Why?” Kyr asked.

  “Because genetically speaking, women are less prone to violence than men and we are more nurturing. It was assumed that a genetically enhanced race of females would help to stabilize the very unstable situation on Earth. After all, men had dominated most social structures since Earth’s own ancient times, since the end of what the Coalition historians have renamed, The Dark Period of the Goddess.”

  “And they succeeded?”

  “After many centuries of careful breeding and continued genetic enhancement, yes, they did succeed, in some places. These female leaders, or rulers… Empresses, as they came to be called, were able to bring stability and peace to some regions of the Earth. In other regions the women were simply slaughtered as were any men who supported them.

  “It was the Empress Ya who was the first to have Full Sight, the first Empress who could see her way through time and space and lead her people from a dying Earth. Oh, men had traveled the ancient solar system. They’d been to the moon and settled on the planet called Mars and the moons of Saturn, but the Empress Ya determined that Earth, the Earth of our origin, was breathing her last.

  “Men and women had been experimenting with intergalactic travel for many centuries, but all the crafts had been unmanned. The Empress Ya could see the way; she could see adjustments that needed to be made to navigation systems, to the flash drive.”

  “How?” Davi asked.

  “I assume because she could look ahead and see the interstellar ships humans would build in the future and she brought that knowledge back to the past.”

  Kyr wondered if Davi felt as confused as he did. He raised his eyebrows and waited for Aja’s explanation.

  “When one can see as I do, there is very little difference between the past, present and future. It’s challenging to sort through it, and it would be very hard for you to understand. Think of this as circular logic‌—‌a equals b, b equals c, therefore a equals c. Circular. Today we can travel through space and time because the technology to do so was brought back to the past, yet we possess the technology today because knowing in the past allowed us to build it in the future. Does that help, Davi?”

  “No.”

  Kyr opened his eyes in time to catch the smile on Aja’s face.

  “Welcome to my inner world,” she said.

  “Go on.” Kyr closed his eyes again.

>   “It took the people nearly forty years to build a fleet large enough for everyone, an entire generation of builders. They provisioned themselves with food, seeds, animals, building materials, evaporators, water purifiers, everything necessary for a new world.”

  “Like that old children’s story of Noah and his great floating ark,” said Davi.

  “Yes, the story is similar. Eighty thousand people traveled to Alpha Centauri and colonized the planet we know as—”

  “Persephone,” said Kyr.

  “Yes, Persephone. From Persephone humans set out to explore the rest of the galaxy, women of the Blood leading the way. You’ve heard a portion of the true history from your mothers and grandmothers. It’s only over the past thirty years that the Coalition has attempted to rewrite the history books. Their goal is to minimize the contribution of women of the Blood. They feel secure in doing so as technology has advanced far enough that intergalactic travel is possible without female pilots.”

  Kyr stretched and opened his eyes. “But travel is not as sure, and if your ability is any indication, it’s slower.”

  “Yes, but as long as it is men doing the piloting and giving the commands, the Coalition doesn’t care,” replied Aja.

  “But what you still haven’t told me how you know I will find a woman and have three children with her,” said Davi.

  “Oh, Davi Fedd.” Aja laid her hand on his arm. “That’s easy. Your future surrounds you like the halo from a beacon star. I see a lovely woman in your future, with coppery hair and freckles and hips just made for popping out babies, provided we manage to keep you out of Bom’s reach.”

  Davi tipped his chair back and grinned at her.

  “I think the larger question is this,” interrupted Kyr, catching Aja’s eye. “How do we manage to keep you out of Bom’s reach?”

  “Eir-Edan,” answered Aja. “But with a slight change in my original plans.”

  DAUGHTERS OF PERSEPHONE