Women should stay on Earth. Women shouldn’t seek intergalactic fame.
Do your duty and breed more humans. Do you want the attention of Trentian men? They’ll send their Space Lords and their smugglers and steal you.
None of it mattered right now until she was back safe at home.
Ugh.
Her wristcon buzzed again but she ignored it. It kept buzzing until she got home, pushed her chair back in front of her door. After she fed and loved on Bees, took a shower, ate, and brought up her network to ready a post for when the announcement hit.
She called her parents and told them the news—they were at least happy on her behalf. All the while, she stared at the picture of Cypher on her screen, feeling his deep voice penetrate her flesh and the paranoia that any minute he could come crashing through her door.
And then it happened. The speakers for the tournament aired. The twelve competitors were listed. Flux, Agent Smith, Future Future, Pulse of Life, Leene Salty, Beautiful Horizon, The Brandons, Sunsets and Dawns, Halo Grail, Space Dogs, and one that surprised her, Deadly Dearest. One of the first and only woman-run teams since even before the war.
Then her name was announced and her image, with her Terraform black suit, set against her neon red and black gamer tag she sent in when she qualified aired. So did an image of Cypher.
Vee smiled despite everything, surging to her feet to jump up and down. Music played, posts on her page flooded her media site, and she beamed.
Congratulations!
For a moment, everything else that happened in the last week faded away.
She grabbed her pillow and screamed her excitement into it, even ignored her neighbors banging on the walls. Bees jumped up onto his cat tree to get out of the way.
This moment—this moment was going to stay with her for the rest of her life, bad stuff be damned. She wasn’t going to let anything ruin it for her. She’d worked too damned hard for it. Even if she lost two months from now, she would always know she earned her place—above thousands of others to compete.
She’d earned it, no one else. Vee swiped away the happy tears gathering on her lashes.
No matter what happened between now and then, nothing would take this from her, Cyborgs, politics, or otherwise.
An hour passed before she settled. Lying back onto her bed, she gazed at the glow-in-the-dark star stickers on her ceiling.
Vee lifted her hand into the air and looked at her wristcon. Other calls were waiting for her, but she ignored them, going to Cypher’s most recent one.
Do it now before you lose your nerve.
She swallowed the lump in her throat, curled her toes, and finally sent a transmission to Cypher’s source.
6
Cypher waited impatiently. He’d finally gotten through to her, only for the call to end right when she seemed to believe him.
Protestors?Where was she? Was she also protesting? It hadn’t seemed like it, just based on their short conversation. She seemed winded, aloof… And if she was protesting, what was so important to her to risk her safety? It didn’t sit well with him.
Is she safe?
And, somehow, he was involved. In all of this. Without having a clue as to how or why.
Cypher punched the wall, and his fist went right through the plated metal.
Why do I even care? I’m putting an end to all of this.And Vee was nothing but his first stop. He jerked his arm back and shook out his hand.
Vee didn’t matter, he told himself. Whether she was out and unprotected made no difference to him.She’s just a hiccup. A damned bump.Nothing more than something he can squash under his boot.
A goddamned thorn in my side.
Cypher wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He readied his ship to warp to the Milky Way Galaxy and tried to focus on the task at hand, shutting out everything else. In the last couple of days, he’d gone through Sagittarius Dwarf and Canis Major, having left Andromeda where Ghost currently traveled half a week ago.
As his ship moved into commercial warp space, he paced the bridge, unable to sit still. He was accustomed to long periods where nothing happened besides systems updating, but for some reason, the patience he’d honed all these years wasn’t helping him now.
