I awoke to Vanessa lying on my chest, purring softly. Bright light streamed in through the windows which meant it must be daytime, but whatever time it was I deemed it not quite time to get up. I pulled my wife closer and ran my hand along her tail, Vanessa made an appreciative sound, stretched and snuggled up to me, her claws running up my leg.

  “Aww, you’re so cute together,” came Zia’s voice from the end of the bed. I sighed and made sure we were at least partially covered by the bed covers. Today she was wearing a white shipsuit that looked like it had attempted to become intimate with a blender, revealing large slashes of bare pink skin.

  Vanessa opened her eyes and blearily eyed Zia’s macerated shipsuit, then she looked at me. “That wasn’t me was it?”

  “You mean you don’t remember?” I asked. The claws that were describing a pleasant circular motion on my upper thigh suddenly grabbed my leg. “Ow, ow, no it wasn’t you.”

  “I bought it like this,” Zia said proudly.

  “It’s full of holes,” I pointed out.

  “I know, Sexy holes,” Zia said, stretching. I averted my eyes. Vanessa pulled the covers over our heads.

  “Bran, why is Zia in our bedroom talking about sexy holes?” she whispered.

  “Because I don’t seem to be able to keep her out. And she has no concept of personal boundaries.”

  “You mean this isn’t the first time she’s woken you up?”

  “Every fucking morning. It’s like she has a moral objection to lie-ins.” Vanessa pulled back the covers to glare at Zia.

  “You asked me to keep an eye on him,” Zia protested.

  “I meant for you to call him, not to sit on his bed and watch him while he sleeps. Some wives would get the wrong idea, you know.”

  “He’s been a perfect gentleman the entire time I’ve known him,” Zia said, not making this sound like a virtue.

  “Of course he has. It’s not him I’m worried about. Why exactly are you disturbing us this morning?” Vanessa asked.

  “Okay, okay, we’ve got a morning appointment with the Great Know-All, then I’ve got us all VIP tickets to the Centuri Dawn festival. You could enter the look-alike contest. It’s being judged by Uwu Paws.”

  “Really, Uwu’s here on Jeckon?” Vanessa asked

  “You know Uwu?” Zia squealed.

  “I recruited her. We’ve never met though.”

  “Who’s Uwu Paws?” I asked. Vanessa sighed.

  “The actress who plays me in Centauri Dawn. And Troy Trantor plays you, please don’t forget that when you meet them,” my wife said.

  “They sound like made up names.”

  “Of course they’re made up names, they’re actors. It’s not like Brandel Hawk is the name you were born with.”

  “That’s different. My family got a Galactic Court order to prevent me from using the family name. And my titles.”

  “I hate to interrupt this fascinating conversation but we really need to get going. You both need to bathe too. It smells like sex in here.” Zia said.

  “That’s because we’ve been at it like rabbits, dear.” Vanessa replied.

  ***

  An hour later we were washed, dressed and on one of the little trains, on our way to the Great Temple, the main government building in Kacke. I was wearing my uniform. I like uniforms, you don't have to think about what to wear and the dark blue JDF Captain’s uniform looked really good on me, or so my companions claimed. On the downside I didn’t exactly blend into the background.

  Not that this was going to happen given what my companions had decided to wear. Vanessa was wearing a version of what had become over the years her go-to formal outfit, black knee length boots, low cut navy leggings that allowed her tail to swing free, a low cut ruffled white blouse underneath a long, gold trimmed burgundy frock coat slit to show off her tail. The outfit was probably a century and a half out of date but she looked piratical, dangerous and sexy as hell, and quite obviously not a human playing a Neko. Zia’s only concession to the formal occasion was to steal a diaphanous green cardigan from Vanessa’s wardrobe and seal the holes in her shipsuit.

  It was only a couple of stops to the Temple. I was surprised at how relatively modest the entrance was given how impressive the rest of the city was, given that the entire planet spanning religion and government was controlled from this one building. All there was to announce this was a very important building was few half hearted vestigial columns clustered around some tall entrance doors that led into the canyon wall.

  Inside it was rather more impressive in a medieval European cathedral kind of way. Arches and columns prevailed, the ceiling showed the overcast outside sky, bathing the foyer in a cool bluish light. In the cavernous space, yellow robed attendants spoke to people on the many chairs scattered randomly around the room. From somewhere came the sound of religious chanting.

  Zia led us to the back of the foyer where a yellow robed female attendant with hair the same colour as Zia’s waited.

  “Oh fuck,” Zia swore as the red headed attendant approached them, they didn’t look happy.

  “Zia, you’ve been back for four whole days and we haven’t heard a word from you,” the red headed woman scolded.

  “Sorry mother, I’ve been working.”

  “You’ve been too busy to even answer your comms or give your poor mother a call? I even called your work in Crystal Springs and they told me you’d disappeared into the outback. I had to pull quite a few strings to be able to see you today,”

  “Mother, what I am doing is classified,” Zia hissed, obviously mortified.

  “But I’m your mother. I have a right to know…”

  “No. You don’t. I. Am. Working.” Zia’s mother’s jaw dropped at her daughter’s contradiction. I decided to butt in.

  “Whilst this reunion is all very nice, we do have an Audience. And madam, you appear to have been the unauthorised recipient of classified information. The JDF would appreciate it if you kept your daughter’s whereabouts to yourself. No doubt there will be an investigation as to how you found out Lieutenant Zia’s location…”

  “I’m so sorry Captain. I didn’t realise…” Zia’s mother stammered.

  “The Audience,” I prompted.

  “Oh, yes, sorry, right along here,” Zia’s mother opened a door and guided us down a long arched corridor, occasionally glancing back at us with a worried look on her face, she then opened another door to another narrow corridor with a closed door at one end, and ushered us in, then, with a strange expression on her face, she shut the door in our faces.

  “Thanks for rescuing me, Bran, I can’t face my mother today, she has opinions,”

  “All mothers seem to have opinions,” I replied.

  “This doesn’t look like a corridor that goes to an audience room,” Zia said, looking worried as Vanessa strode to the end of the corridor and opened the door at the far end. I shrugged and followed her, emerging into the messiest room I’d been into for a hundred and seven years.

  It was a large double height room, more of a warehouse with a small mezzanine floor at one end. My eyes were immediately drawn to several spaceship AI cores from a variety of species that had been prised open and the contents spread across three workbenches, sprouting wires and cables. Actual pieces of paper were stuck to the walls, layered the workbenches and littered the floor. Under these drifts of paperwork I recognised several interesting devices of non-human origin and there were several more devices I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what they were.

  In the middle of this organised chaos stood a tall, skinny dark brown skinned man who would have looked to be in his early twenties if he hadn’t sported the most impressive white mad professor hairdo I’d ever seen. He regarded the three of us with the faintly worried expression of someone who’d never really got the hang of human interaction.

  “Kodos. I should have known you were behind all this,” I greeted the man

  “Ah, Vanessa, Brandel, you’re here, good, good,” the man greeted us as if it had been just a few days since he’d last seen us and not well over a century. “And you must be Zia. Is that red hair real?”

  “Err, yes?” Zia replied, glancing at me and Vanessa, probably wondering what the hell was going on.

  “Very rare genome, that red hair and green eyes. Did you get that from your parents or was it engineered…”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Kodos, focus. You can chat Zia up later, you have stuff we need to know,” I said. An expression of panic crossed Kodos’ face. Even after all this time he was still as awkward as hell.

  “You want to know why we’ve brought you here?” Kodos asked.

  “As you don’t do socialising I guess it's something to do with finding a Precursor Habitat for my wife?” I said.

  “What?” Vanessa asked, turning to look at me.

  “It wasn't actually, why? Have you found one?” Kodos asked, suddenly animated.

  “Possibly. I have some surprisingly good leads,” I said.

  “Now that will bring our plans forward. We did wonder why you found it necessary to visit the bridge of Death to All Humans. No, actually we brought you here because we are entering the final act in the fall of the Corporations.”

  “You really think the last episode of Centauri Dawn will be enough to tip the remaining systems over the edge?” Vanessa asked.

  “Oh, no, although the influence of the series has gone far beyond what we initially predicted. No, we are talking about the destruction of Nutexas Habitat, together with the death of the entire Nutexas Board and a few other rejuvees who have been constantly thwarting our plans. It’s been a long old wait but the result should be worth it. All our plans are finally reaching fruition. It’s really quite exciting.”

  “Wait, you’ve blown up Nutexas Habitat? How the fuck did you manage that,” I asked, utterly astounded.

  “Well, it wasn’t us personally and we only found out about it today. One of the rats scuttling away from the sinking ship around scuttled our way. But if that doesn’t end civilisation as the Corporations know it, we don't know what will. Hopefully the news will hit after Centauri Dawn airs, but when you’re dealing in a timescale measured in multiple decades even we struggled a bit to nail things perfectly.”

  “Kodos, go back to Nutexas. How exactly…”

  “Well, you always maintained that if you hit the system fast and hard enough the defences would be overwhelmed.”

  “Yes, that is what I was trying to achieve when my fleet ran into bloody Admiral Collins who’d been let off the leash with the combined fleets. There was no way I was going to do anything but make a strategic retreat.”

  “It’s now known as the greatest battle never fought, every naval academy uses it as a textbook example of how to run away properly. We did tell you at the time that the chances of sneaking into the Nutexas system unchallenged were low, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “I know, I know, but just think of the chaos I would have caused…”

  “You would have died and your fleet would have been annihilated. We couldn’t allow that.” Kodos stated. My jaw dropped.

  “You betrayed us?” I accused Kodos. He shrugged.

  “We were not going to allow you to die pointlessly. We still had uses for you even in the condition you were in. You made an excellent martyr.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said sarcastically, “but about Nutexas…”

  “Oh yes, I really wish you would stop knocking me off track, Brandell. After Vanessa removed you from the Bridges Burned, she persuaded your Flag Captain to give the ship brain some final orders from us before abandoning ship,” I nodded, in sudden understanding at the sheer ambition and patience Kodos had shown, willing to wait an entire century for what must have been an uncertain result.

  “How fast was Bridges Burned going when it hit.” I asked.

  “We estimate it would have been travelling around 10% of lightspeed. Certainly fast enough for the system defences to have been unable to target it,” Kodos said.

  “Do you have any footage?” I asked enthusiastically.

  “Patience Brandell, give the news a few days to make its way here.”

  “You are taking this very calmly, considering you’ve just found out Kodos has been using us like pawns to manipulate in his little game.” Vanessa said to me. I shrugged.

  “Really, ‘Nessa, Bran has never been just a pawn to us, a knight perhaps, or maybe a particularly sneaky bishop, not that what we are doing is either little, nor a game. This is about the place of humanity finding its place in the galactic order,” Kodos replied patiently.

  “And where do the Neko come into your great plan, O Great Know All?” Vanessa demanded, making an ironic bow.

  “Wherever you want them to, ‘Nessa. That was the price you demanded from me. You are now responsible for what happens to your entire species.”

  “No pressure,” I told my wife.

  “Wait, you are the Great Know All, but you’re so… young.” Zia said to Kodos who smiled.

  “Ahh child, we are older than we look,”

  “Don’t give her that mystic sage shit, you’re ten years younger than I am.” I told Kodos.

  “Is that not venerable by any human standards apart from that of the rejuved. And we are a million times smarter than you.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Vanessa said, grinning at me.

  “How many AIs have you got rattling around in your head now, anyway?” I asked. Kodos looked pained.

  “Do not call them AIs, Bran. They are real personalities, more intelligent and more complex than you could ever conceive. And they are not rattling around in my head. Actually, my physical body is no longer actually required for my existance. But, if you really want to know, with the mind from the module you brought in, there are seven of us now.”

  “That was okay then?” I asked.

  “They had been on their own for a long time. They will need a bit of time to come to terms with reality.”

  “I told you it had probably gone bonkers,” I said to Zia. Kodos gave me a pained look

  “Not bonkers. Just a little detached from reality. And you did the right thing by not activating it, especially given your treatment of the FYT suit I left you. You traumatised the poor thing. Did you really need to strip half its personality away so brutally.”

  “Maybe if it hadn’t decided to fly me directly into a hurricane and crash land me into a glacier in the middle of nowhere I might have been more forgiving.” I argued.

  “Umm… Well, that might have been our fault. I had a few tasks I needed you to do in the outback before you came to Kacke,” Kodos said, looking a bit ashamed.

  “Did it not occur to you to leave me a note?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. I could have done that, I suppose,” Kodos said as if this had just occurred to him.

  “Instead you decided to drop me into the outback… and uproot poor Zia here from her career in Crystal Springs.”

  “We have been manipulating humanity for the past century and a half now and we are very good at it. Look at this city, look at the Free Systems, think how much better humanity will be when the Corporations are gone or neutered.”

  “You still could have left me a note. I know you are shit at communicating, but still.”

  “We have never been very good at communicating, but we were also not sure if your rejuvenation had been left too late. You were not entirely yourself during the trial so we decided to keep you in the outback until we were sure you were back to your old self,” Kodos explained. I wondered what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been back to my old self.

  “And what about me?” Vanessa asked, “I was trapped, slowly dying in a pod. That was not entertaining. And being defrosted wasn’t pleasant either.”

  “There are very few places on this planet and environs that we either can’t access or have very limited access to. Between you and Bran, you have visited most of them. And the people assigned to be looking after you hacked your pod to say you were fine. If you hadn’t got a message to us that something wasn’t right we would never have known.

  “If you have your finger on the pulse of every person on the planet, how come these people were allowed to do this? And how come you haven’t caught them.” I asked.

  “We do not know. This should not have happened. And now they are being annoyingly hard to track down,” Kodos said, sounding genuinely annoyed.

  “So they are high level Corporate spooks then?”

  “Yes. And given their continued elusivity, they are probably assisted by an enslaved mind or have some forbidden anti surveillance technology. Probability suggests they are hiding out in one of the Corporate Embassies. As soon as they try to leave we shall let our displeasure be known,” Kodos smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. It brought home to me the awkward man standing before us was merely the public persona for seven disparate personalities and at least one of them was having problems with the nature of reality.

  Kodos had taken over the Jeckon government, turned Kacke into a glittering mega city, formed the Free Systems and if he… they… were to be believed, the end of Corporations power was at hand, and, if the Neutexas Habitat was gone, his actions had probably already caused the death of millions. Did the ends justify the means? What did Kodos have in mind for humanity? I fingered the disruptor blaster in my pocket.

  “So, what’s your plan for humanity,” I asked, hoping I sounded more casual then I felt.

  “You now comprehend the extent of our power Bran. With Neutexas gone, in a few days we will control the banking system. We have access to every communications system and every surveillance system. We know the inner workings of every government, every Corporation and even the Galactic Court… But we can’t do this alone. There are places we can’t go, places we can’t see. You know what we want for humanity. Remember back just after the three of us first met, when you told me your vision?”

  “I was drunk.” I said, moving my hand away from the disruptor.

  “You were drunk, but your vision was clear, and it is what has inspired us for all these years. Jeckon is my proof of concept. We keep everything running, leaving the people free to do people things that make them happy. No-one on this planet has to work, there are more than enough resources to fulfil everyone's needs. Even the outback serves its purpose. And now, with the fall of the Corporations, we will take control of the Galactic Court and have humanity take its rightful place in the galactic community”

  “And what place would that be?” I asked.

  “If the Zarathians and Krackens fall into line I think we could negotiate our way to be classed as at least a level three Sponsor species. Maybe level four or even five if your Progenitor lead pays off.”

  “Kodos, this is all great, but what do you actually want us to do?” Vanessa asked.

  “We don’t want to skew your reactions… and as citizens of Jeckon you do have the right not to do anything. But you both have unfinished business on Centauri, and we can’t imagine you or Bran not investigating a Progenitor Habitat...”

  “Do we get a ship? Or do we have to acquire one?” My mind on the important things. Kodos smiled.

  “Whilst watching you obtain a ship would be entertaining, one is being made ready for you. And whilst you are just a Captain in the JDF, you do have full diplomatic credentials approved by the Galactic Court which I am sure you will make the most of.”

  “What about me? What am I meant to do?” Zia asked. I glanced at Vanessa who nodded imperceptibly. We both turned to look at Zia.

  “What?” she asked, seeing us both looking at her.

  “How do you fancy exploring some strange new worlds with us?” I asked.

  “Seeking out new life and new civilisations,” Vanessa added.

  “Then blowing shit up.” I said. Vanessa turned to me.

  “Really? Is that your plan?”

  “At some point shit is going to get blown up. I guarantee it.” I said. We both looked back to Zia.

  “Umm… yes… Okay… You are talking about leaving human controlled space and not some weird sex thing?”

  “You should have asked that before you said yes, dear,” Vanessa said.

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