The Unexpected Companion, Part Two

By Shadar

(Part One ended with Win and Miki traveling on a MagLev train at .8 Mach, approaching a range of mountains with a tunnel beneath them. Miki believes the tunnel is probably rigged to blow up the train — Arion privateers are chasing her and they will stop at nothing, regardless of collateral damage. While Miki could just fly away with Winston to save him, she’s determined to save everyone else on the train, if she can.) 

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Despite Miki telling me to stay in the train Suite for my own safety, I was too fascinated by what she was about to do to stay behind. She was so amazing that I didn’t want to take my eyes off her. 

Walking boldly out into the corridor, I found her standing in front of the sealed doors between the coupled cars. She was an exotic dream of beauty and power, wearing just that red skirt, fully empowered, revealing her fantastic muscle tone and all that golden skin and what I called ‘Galadriel’s hair’. An absolute vision of perfection. Her short skirt made her legs look impossibly long and golden. especially standing topless in the corridor with those gravity-defying breasts sitting so high, so round and proud, the source of her power. She was an impossible mix of beauty and extreme strength. 

Walking her way, I got close enough to read the door placards: 

“Danger: Shock waves. Safety doors automatically locked during high Mach.” 

Definitely written by an engineer. The doors looked like they meant it given the thick stainless steel frames and even thicker glass, likely of the armored variety. 

I’d almost reached Miki when she jammed the outstretched fingers of both hands into the narrow crack between the steel-framed doors, enlarging it. Shifting her elbows to the sides, she started to pull outward. Fantastic curves of Velorian steel rose across her bare shoulders and back as my mouth went dry again. There was beautiful… and then there was superhuman. 

The doors bean to give off a groaning, screeching crunch as she slowly bent the metal frame outward, the thick glass cracking wildly. Then, with a further ripple of her powerful shoulders, she ripped the doors completely open, shattering all the glass and crushing the steel as she jammed them up against the sides of the corridor with arms outstretched. Chunks of torn hinges and shards of thick, shattered glass pinged off the walls and flew across the floor to cover my feet. 

That set off an alarm that was quickly lost in the violent scream of near-supersonic air coming from the partially-sealed vestibule between the cars. A blast so strong that it picked up the glass shards and blasted them dangerously toward the other end of the carriage where they clattered against a similar door. I was about to be blown away with them, but managed at the last moment to grab handfuls of her blonde hair as it streamed across my face, tangling my fingers in those silky strands as I hung on for dear life. 

She didn’t seem to even notice as she dragged me forward into the calmer air of the vestibule, where she stood in the middle of the floor, her skirt lifting over her waist from the blast. I released her hair with one hand to grab the hem of her skirt, pulling myself closer to her until I was able to wrap my other arm around her right thigh. Shifting my other hand from her skirt to her other leg, I held on with both arms now, her thighs feeling as solid and immovable as tree trunks. 

That’s when I noticed that her feet were bending the floor downward, more and more each moment. Realizing that she was going to grip the train coupler — the only thing strong enough to secure the entire train — I climbed higher on her body, feeling a bit like a monkey in a hurricane. The dramatic muscles of her nude upper body served as handholds until I could wrap one arm around her waist, the other arm around her shoulders, holding on with all my strength. 

Meanwhile, she continued bending the floor downward until she could wrap her long legs around the huge train coupler that connected the carriages, squeezing it hard enough to fuse this carriage and next together. 

Now that she was securely anchored to two carriages, she clenched her fists while tensing her upper body the way she’d done for me earlier, thick layers of curvaceous, sensual muscle seemingly rising from nowhere. Her neck and shoulders turned to sinew and muscle beneath my arm as her isometric flex marched all the way down her back. 

The train immediately started slowing, so quickly that I was plastered against Miki’s back, the loud buzzing of induction motors filling the compartment, which could only mean that the AI was using all the train’s power to try to maintain speed. Yet we were still slowing rapidly. The conflict of powerful forces caused the train to shake wildly, swaying from side to side and up and down in a wavy motion as the maglev endured forces it had never been designed for. The rail guides that kept the train centered over the rails sent clouds of sparks streaming beneath us, the fireworks lighting the frozen trackbed the length of the train. 

Astoundingly, Miki was not only overcoming the powerful engines but also the near-supersonic inertia of thousands of tons of train, with all that flight power coming from the Volutai beneath her breasts, which held the source of her superpowers.

I definitely wasn’t underestimating her now!

The near-supersonic slipstream stuttered and fluttered around me as it was shaped and reshaped by shifting shockwaves, tearing painfully at me until the train slowed enough for them to collapse into a painfully cold wind, one that thankfully further collapsed as the train finally came to a groaning, screaming, scraping stop. The air was now full of the dangerous stench of overheated motors as the maglev shut down and the carriage dropped a few centimeters to land on its skids on top of the power-conducting rails. 

Miki opened her legs to release the coupling as she rose weightlessly up and out of the floor. I scrambled from her to crawl across the broken floor to the back of the vestibule, watching as she turned around in mid-air before dropping back down to grab the coupler again, this time from the opposite direction. Given she was facing me now, I could better see her legs squeezing the coupling, her thighs harder than the steel coupler as she crushed it tightly enough to bend, compress and ultimately pressure-weld it into a solid chunk of mangled steel. 

Closing her eyes, she concentrated again, tensing her upper body, those hard curves rising. Seconds passed as she got harder and harder, her breasts glowing again from the Orgone burn, her biceps rising so impressively as she put every muscle to work. A wonder of the known universe. Velorian muscle…

“Ah… you might want to grab onto something, Win,” she said through gritted teeth as she opened her eyes. 

I grabbed what handholds I could find as the train suddenly lurched backwards to begin squeaking, popping and mostly scraping and screaming as it ground against the rails. Given the maglev had shut down, she was forcing the entire train to slide along the rails on its landing skids. The friction from thousands of tons of weight sliding steel against steel had to be immense, yet she was forcing the train backwards at ever increasing speed.

Staring at her in renewed awe, I could literally see the energy flows in her body now, flowing outward from her breasts to reach every muscle, her raw strength somehow returning to power her glowing Volatai, generating enough power to push the wheelless train down the rails, showers of sparks flying from the skids under each carriage. 

Thankfully, the AI sensed movement and turned the maglev back on, and we rose slightly as all that friction suddenly ended, freeing Miki to apply all her strength toward driving the train in reverse. It was all I could do to hang on now as the train accelerated wildly, proving that she was a girl who was literally more powerful than a locomotive.

I was beginning to think this was all going to work out — her saving the train and passengers and all — when an impossibly bright flash of white light blinded me, my last vision being the bones of my hands and arms. My heart froze in mid-beat as my first thought was that I was being vaporized from a nuclear burst. I felt an intense prickle of heat as I imagined the flesh being blasted from my bones… and everything went black.

---

I awoke in a panic, screaming as I threw myself against an unseen wall in the darkness, trying to get away. Clawing at the wall in my panic, looking for escape from that awful white light that was eating everything. 

And then I heard Miki’s voice only inches from my ear. 

“Shhh… it’s Ok, Win,” she said as I realized she was spooned up behind me, her warm breasts flattened slightly against my back, punctuated by her hard nipples. “Just give it a few moments.” 

Blinking wildly, my vision slowly returned, all cloudy and blurry at first. Turning around to face her, I found her body slender and lean, her incredible musculature hidden once again. I slowly relaxed my panicky grip on her as her long, blonde hair spilled over me, exuding that wildflower-honey scent which somehow washed my terror away, replacing it with a sudden rush of intense arousal. I gulped that wondrous scent in as I got higher, harder, bigger. It was like a sex drug.

“Don’t worry about your vision, Win,” she whispered in my ear. “The x-ray flash from an AMAT causes temporary blindness and brief unconsciousness at close range. We were barely eight kilometers from the tunnel entrance.”

“Holy shit, that was a fucking AMAT!” I screamed, struggling to blink away the black spots from my eyes as I hugged her with growing passion. “But that’s… that’s a kind of anti-matter weapon!”

“Yes. Obviously someone paid to have me taken out too. It was timed to detonate once we were inside, and it wouldn’t have left so much as a flake of ash behind from both the train and passengers. Total annihilation of matter. As it is, that mountain has been blown apart, its core of granite turned to fused glass.”

This was NOT reassuring.

“So… they tried to kill me and everyone else on this train? And you expected this?” I shouted.

“NO, no, not this way,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t expect that they’d try to take me out too, which only an AMAT could do. A weapon like that should never be in the hands of pirates. I’m beginning to think there is more going on here than I know.”

I knew nothing as I shuddered again at the thought of an AMAT. They supposedly came in various yields, with the biggest ones able to blast entire moons to smithereens, even crack planets open. A medium one might turn a large city into a glass-lined crater a dozen kilometers across, blasting even the most distant suburbs to kindling before igniting a firestorm. Gigatons of equivalent yield. And then there were small ones, such as the one I assumed had been used here. Megatons? Small was very much a relative term when it came to AMATs.

“You… you just saved the entire train and everyone on it!” 

“Not everyone. A portion of the first car was too close to the canyon opening. Part of its gone. People in the next two carriages have burns and many will be blinded for hours, a few possibly permanently. Thankfully, I’d managed to get the rest of the train back around that curve and far enough into this narrow canyon first, which ensured that they only got hit with reflected thermals and blast but no direct x-rays.”

“But… but won’t those assassins figure out that the train wasn’t in the tunnel and come after us here!” I cried.

“Yes, they most certainly will. But an x-ray burst that big will shut down their orbital sensors for a while. But I presume they have operatives on the ground — the ones who set the bomb in the tunnel at a minimum — who are probably watching us right now from a safe place. They’ll call in a further attack from orbit. Two or three micro-nukes should ensure the destruction of the rest of the train. Given the terrain and weather, the passengers can’t escape anywhere.”

I just stared at her, horrified, remembering all the faces behind the glass of the terminal. The woman who’d kindly offered Miki a coat.

“But we can prevent that, Win, if we make sure they see us leaving before they can launch. They know my ship is in orbit, so we need to let them see us heading that way. That’s our only chance to save lives on the ground — by taking this fight into space. You and I are their only targets.”

“Is this… is this what I have to expect when we get to Pernakis?” I asked fearfully, my vision almost back to normal now.

Miki shook her head. “No. There may be plenty of intrigue and evil manipulations and corruptions along with a rare knife in someone’s back or even some poison, but never open warfare. I’ll deal with whoever made this devilish deal with the Empire, and fix it. Things will normalize.” 

“What does ‘fix it’ really mean? Killing people?”

“Someone sold out our planet to the Arions, Win, undoubtably in exchange for future political influence. The Arions are here to kill you, the only heir to the throne, which means whoever put them up to it plans to seize power. There are only a few men on Pernakis who have that kind of wealth and lust for power, and one or more of them put a contract out on us. They won’t stop now. They can’t exactly say ‘sorry’ and make up.”

That’s when it hit me that people had just died because of me. I felt sick to my stomach. “Seems like I’m already fighting for my life.”

“That began the moment your father died, whether you knew it or not. It also makes whoever paid these Arions a lethal threat, not only to you but the entire planet and its independence. Arions use deals like this to suck entire worlds into their orbit — if we let them. We need to get you on the throne so you can authorize whatever force I will have to use to fix this.”

I slowly shook my head, horrified as I realized the kind of things I was going to have to do. “This is all going way too fast.”

“It always does when dealing with Arions. And as far as their ship here in orbit, I need to take it out. Completely. Given their use of an AMAT, the gloves are off. No more letting them follow us so they can try again.”

“And then we’ll be heading to Pernakis?”

She nodded. 

“In that case, I need to call Mother first,” I said, wincing as I realized I sounded like a child. “I can’t just disappear. Especially after News gets out about the AMAT explosion along the train route. She needs to know I’m safe.”

Miki shook her head. “It’s not safe to draw attention to her yet — they may be able to monitor our Comms. We don’t want Jessica to become a hostage. Or worse.”

“You don’t know Mother.”

“And you don’t know Arions. They’ll drop a small nuke on her if you don’t give yourself up. Blackmail and hostage-taking are their thing. But as far as I’m concerned, any attempts at negotiation are now off the table.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. Trying to kill me was bad enough, but killing Mother? 

Miki saw the horror on my face and gave me a crooked grin in return. 

“Hey, don’t you worry. You’ve got me. Your supergirl. Long as they don’t know exactly who or where your mother is, she’ll be safe until I deal with the Arions. But she will be most unhappy when she discovers you are with me. I was the reason she left Salvador in the first place. Their marriage couldn’t survive his buying into my contract. She was too proud.”

I just gawked at her, trying to imagine my always-in-control mother leaving my father with me in her womb to go into exile because her husband had hired a Companion. It was yet another connection to my past that Mother had never hinted at. But then, given Miki’s incredible power and her obvious beauty and her ways of bonding with her Patron, I understood at one level.

“As I see it, Win, these assassins can’t know any more than I did coming here. Likely they were blindly following me. So let’s keep them focused on you and me as we head directly from the train to my ship.”

Given what had just happened, I sure as hell wasn’t turning that idea down. I was getting paranoid as hell about nukes dropping from orbit. Would Miki even see them coming?

“So where’d you park it? Your shuttle?”

She glanced up. “Up there. I just stepped out the airlock and dove for the planet below. I was planning on having Lexi bring the shuttle down if I found you, but we don’t have time for that now. ”

My jaw fell again. “Ostremity’s orbital velocity is over 27,000 kph. That must have been some serious aerobraking while coming in. And who’s Lexi?”

“Lexi’s the AIP who runs my ship.”

“But that aerobrake… we’re talking steel-melting hot…” I gasped, my voice trailing off as I tried to imagine her blazing meteor-like descent through the atmosphere. “Thousands of degrees. Many, many thousands. While wearing just this outfit? That’s your idea of fun?”

She flicked up the tiny hem of her skirt. “This skirt is Galen origin. Absolutely indestructible fabric. The rest is very tough too, being Vendorian make and all.”

“Never heard of Vendorians, but actually I was thinking of you, Miki, not your clothing. All this bare skin revealed.”

“Aerobraking can’t hurt me. Quite the contrary. Open my legs, get just the right angle, blazing through all that heat, and it’s highly… stimulating.”

“But… Ok… wow… is there anything about you that isn’t somehow erotic? And how does that get me up to your ship anyhow? I can’t survive hard vacuum or steel-melting temps or much of anything.”

She smiled. “Oh, that part’s easy. I have a plan. You’ll like it.”

Thoughts of a personal rocket or some kind of mini-antigrav and maybe a pressure suit filled my mind. Maybe just a big metal container with me welded inside with enough air to get to her ship. 

“I have a biofield surrounding my body, Win, and I can obviously fly. If the nature of the contact between us becomes profound enough, and most importantly deep enough, personal enough, that field will enlarge to surround you as part of me.”

“Profound? Deep enough…?”

She grinned mischievously. “Oh, yeah. Something you seem to have the skills for.”

My jaw fell as it began to hit me what she was talking about. “Wait a minute…are you saying…?”

She gave me a sexy laugh, amused by my expression. 

“No… no way…!” I gasped.

She smiled broader while nodding. 

“You and me? Flying? While having… sex?”

“I’m your Companion, remember? My job is to protect you. Expanding my biofield to protect you is always the very best way — if we have time.”

“But flying into space — while… how else can I say it — fucking?” The thought was so bizarre it was funny. “Can you imagine how envious everyone at the Uni will be if they find out. I mean, I’m studying Astronautical Engineering, hoping to someday design spacecraft. But the idea of flying like that… impossible. Crazy.” I was lost for any other words.

“You are going to make a lot of men envious during your lifetime, Winston. And just because we’re intimate doesn’t mean we’re having sex. Different goals.”

“Ahh, maybe not in your culture, but we call it sex whenever Tab A is inserted into Slot B.”

“It can also simply be viewed as a way to keep you alive, Win. And my absolute priority is saving your life and getting you to Pernakis. Any way I can. But if I can also save innocent lives at the same time, so much the better. Stopping this train was just a reprieve. Getting you away from here and off the planet is the next step toward saving the others.”

Before I had a chance to get my head around that, she took my hand in the sinewy warmth of hers and effortlessly pulled me from the bed and back to my feet — where she proceeded to rip all my clothing off as if it was merely tissue paper. Which was kind of great given she was the one undressing me. Except that she then started getting dressed again in her original white tunic and blue jacket. 

I was sorry to see those marvelous boobs disappear under clothing. It seemed the less she wore the more normal she looked, if that makes any sense. But then, all the rules were different with her.

“So, Miki… why am I naked while you’re getting dressed?” 

“I’m sure as hell not leaving this Vendorian-make clothing behind. This stuff is hard really to find, especially in a style I like. And as far as your clothing goes, my biofield only extends a few millimeters beyond the skin. Your clothing will mostly burn away as we fly, the outer layers at least, leaving you wearing a smoky and smelly burned mess when we get to my ship.”

That sounded scary, the burning of my clothing, but any worries I had evaporated when she wrapped her warm fingers around my dick, which of course was pretending to be a flagpole again. Something I’m unusually good at, which explained a lot of my girl problems over the years. 

I tried not to think about her ‘strength of a thousand men’ thing as her hand held me uncomfortably tight, my blood surging downward as my blood pressure rose to meet her challenge. Between that and the intoxicating scent of her hair — which I now realized had to be the source of her pheromones — I couldn’t resist pulling her close, loving the feel of my hands on the warm, rounded steel of her backside, even more, loving the way the smooth ripples of her abs rubbed across the head of my dick now as I moved. Every ripple felt as if it was made of warm, sensuous and superbly flexible steel. 

She rose slightly into the air as I continued to hold her, opening her legs to wrap them around my waist. I thought of that crushed train coupler as I prayed she’d be gentle. 

I needn’t have worried as she rose higher and then flipped upside down, her long blonde hair falling over me as she slid down my body to take me with her mouth, slowly deep-throating me. No girl had ever been able to do that before!

Opening her legs wide as her skirt fell open, I followed my instincts and leaned into her as I began working that ancient 69 position. Tracing my tongue along her sex, trying to open her as she bounced up and down on me, my hands still grabbing her perfect ass, her thighs closed warmly around my head while this strange sense of power began filling me again. 

She took me to the very edge, and then, just as started to lose it, she lifted off me to spin around again in mid-air, wrapping her arms and legs around me as she faced me while lowering herself down my body to take me. Yet instead of opening for me, I felt myself painfully bending as the pressure became agonizing. “Ah… Jesus… wait a sec, Miki… hold on… too much supergirl.”

“Just keep trying,” she squeaked. “We can do it.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. She was fully empowered, and if her overall strength was thousands that of mine, what did that mean for vaginal muscles? As if in response to my thought, she opened her knees wider to press her heels against my ass to lift me off the floor, both of us floating now. I felt like her sex toy or whatever as she began to use me, my feet dangling while she worked herself against me in mid-air, her eyes closed and fluttering as she concentrated on relaxing her inner strength. 

My blood pressure soared through the roof as her blonde hair covered me, the lovely scent of pheromones driving me wild as she kept going, pressing herself against me, harder and harder. Then, just when I thought she was going to either crush or break me, a sudden blinding surge of power rushed out of her and into my body, bringing with it a rush of raw strength that made me more virile than I’d ever been. That surge of raw strength ran through my entire body until it felt as if it was going to blow my head off, and then somehow traveled back to my dick to leave me feeling like a superman.

This was her biofield? Sharing a bit of her Velorian power with me?

She went crazy on me now, holding me tighter and tighter as she worked herself faster and faster, crying out as she slowly began a long, wondrous slide over me, taking me into the tightest vagina I’d ever known. Her blonde hair was flying around me in a cloud as she went faster and faster, working me deeper, centimeter by centimeter. 

I wanted to do my part, but without my feet on the ground, I had no leverage. I was just her toy to use however she wished. Still, I was in absolute heaven thanks to those crazy, exciting flows of raw strength that flowed from her to wash over me in ever stronger waves, filling me with a sense of power so extreme that I had no proper words for it. She began literally vibrating around me as a series of powerful contractions pulled me deeper and held me there.

Then, just when I didn’t think it couldn’t get any better, she buried my face in her deep cleavage while wrapping her arms around my head to hold me beneath her golden hair as her entire body tensed like spring steel. Motionless and buried to my hilt, surrounded by her superhuman body, inside and out, she launched us up into the ceiling like a rocket.

I should have been instantly killed, my skull crushed and who knows what else, but it was her head and shoulders that took all the abuse. I felt only a faint blow as we tore through steel girders, bending them outward as if they were no more substantial than cooked spaghetti, exploding out into the ultra-bitter cold. 

There she relaxed her hug just enough so I could lift my head from her cleavage to look through those waves of blonde hair. The first thing I saw was exploding chunks of the train’s roof still flying in all directions, and steel beams bent outward in all directions. The wind howled around me, but it merely felt comfortably cool and breezy despite the temps down to -72C at last report, and windchill far worse. Clearly the biofield she’d talked about was protecting me, joining us together in a way I’d never imagined was possible with a girl, our bodies more than merely intertwined as she held me so securely inside her protective field. 

I stared out in awe at the snowy landscapes all around us, stretching off across craggy snow-covered mountains in all directions. All except one mountain that seemingly had blown up, the remains of it smoking like a volcano, a glowing cloud rising from square kilometers of shattered rock. Looking back down at the train, I could see all of it in a single glance in that narrow canyon, most of the cars off the track, including the melted remains of the lead carriage. 

I hugged her with my now considerable strength as her strong legs wrapped around my hips while she flew with me tightly coupled and laying on her. Dropping back down toward the end carriage, she turned to fly on her back as I held onto her shoulders. It was a bizarre way to fly, but I wasn’t complaining. 

She floated down a carriage roof to find it’s center of balance, and then bent her body backward to reach behind her, blonde hair spilling across the top of the carriage as her muscles flexed powerfully as she dug her fingers into the main girder in the carriage’s roof, and slowly lifted 60 tonnes of carriage to set it gently back on the rails. The sensation of her body working as she exerted that kind of strength was amazing, her abs turning to solid steel as they pressed against mine. She continued her feat of superhuman power with the other 18 carriages, getting the entire train back on the tracks. It was an awkward and bizarre way to fly, let along lifting such heavy railroad carriages back on the tracks, but Miki did what she had to do while keeping me safe.

I found a sign along the side of the tracks that said: ‘DANGER: Exposed electrified rails. 5000v 100hz 200KVA’. 

“We gotta sent a signal to the power controller for this section of track,” she said, staring off into the distance. “It scrammed when the train derailed, maybe also knocked off-line from the x-ray burst. Time to jump start it.”

She floated down so I could land on my feet on the snow between the rails, which didn’t feel cold despite my being naked. There she opened her legs wide. “This is going to feel a little weird, but you’ll be protected.”

I had no idea what she was talking about as she placed her bare feet on the two rails. Nothing happened at first — the rails were dead — but then a powerful surge of crackling power began to build inside her chest, which was pressed against mine. Shockingly, a bolt of blue electricity shot between her nipples and across my chest, which then traveled down her body and legs to her bare feet and into rail, sparks flying everywhere for a moment. The lights in the cars flickered until the distant power supply for this segment of track decided it was safe to come back on line from whatever signal she was sending back down the tracks, and 5000 volts suddenly flashing through her body, up one leg, through her pelvis (and my dick!) and down the other leg. Once she lifted off the rails, the lights in the carriages stayed on. 

“Gonna take a while to rescue them, given all the first responders are going to be freaking out from the AMAT, so they’ll need heat to stay alive until rescuers get here. Could be days.”

I shook my head in amazement as she wrapped her legs around me again, her skin warmer given the powerful current she’d just channeled through herself. “Is there anything you can’t do?” I asked in wonder.

Miki just smiled. “And some people think being a Companion is only about one thing.”

She began to slowly climb now, circling the train several times at increasing altitude. “Gotta make sure the Arions get a good look at us.”

Finally satisfied, she arched her back and began climbing like a homesick angel, her legs wrapped tightly around mine as her inner strength held me locked me in place. We’d soon climbed so high that the mountains were just wrinkles far below, the sky turning dark blue as shockwaves began visibly streaming off Miki’s blonde head — we were flying supersonically, even hypersonically. I felt the flow of air across my exposed back, with a sharper tingle of shockwaves tracing down it, but it was more ticklish than painful. The cold wasn’t bothering me at all. 

Moments later, the blue sky turned to purple and soon to black as stars began to appear, unblinking and bright. We were leaving the atmosphere behind!

My body should have outgassed and exploded due to the lack of pressure — right after passing out from hypoxia just before I was torn apart by the shock waves and my hair and skin ignited from the air friction — but none of that was happening. I felt perfectly comfortable in Miki’s erotic embrace — more than comfortable as the energies in her body filled mine with her power as I filled her in the usual way. We were one with each other in what I was beginning to suspect was a very Velorian embrace. 

If there’s a Heaven, this is the way I want to get there!

A few minutes of wonder later, she began to relax, her body softening as we began to coast, her hair floating freely around us in a zero-G cloud now, faintly glowing as her biofield protected every strand. Far below, the blue planet I called home was slowly moving beneath us as we seemed to be standing still. 

Next to Miki herself, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And to see it all while in her wondrous embrace, without a ship or suit or anything else in the way, during sex of all things (even if she didn’t call it that), peering through a cloud of golden hair, it was all beyond merely amazing. 

I was outrageously enjoying the sightseeing, but she was busy searching ahead, her eyes wide and glowing. Soon she found what she was looking for, and tensed herself tightly around me, putting her flight power back to work. 

Pulling my eyes from the beauty below to look forward and up, peering through the cloud of blonde hair that was now streaming out ahead of her as she slowed, I saw a spherical ship approaching rapidly in the distance, the exterior polished as brightly as quicksilver. 

I knew that was an illusion — we were actually the ones catching up with the ship — but without any sensation of movement given the hard vacuum or any other nearby reference points, my mind decided we were the stationary ones. There was also no way to judge the scale of the ship until we got close enough to see lighted windows and hatches and other details. Her ship had to be at least two-hundred meters in diameter and perfectly round and reflective — just like pictures I’d seen of wormhole starships. Except this one was much smaller than the Scalantran Trade-Ships, which are all hollowed out asteroids that are kilometers in diameter. I used to watch them in orbit with my naked eyes.

Slowing, she flew us toward one of the hatches, which began to open as we approached. Gentler ripples began to travel across her warm body now as she tensed this muscle and relaxed that one to control her flight, working to perfectly match speed and rotation with the ship. We finally floated through the entrance into a small cargo bay to land with superb smoothness and control. The outer door quickly closed behind us as air began hissing. 

At the same time, artificial gravity gradually came on to pull my feet harder against the floor. Miki was still clinging to me, arms and legs slowly relaxing as she rose upward to release me from her intimate grasp, withdrawing with a soft pop to float above me in mid-air, smoothing her skirt down. 

I sadly felt her biofield collapse at the same moment, which exposed me to the cold air in the room, my feet suddenly aching against the cold floor. I began to shiver as the inner door opened, the cold taking care of what was left of my arousal. Still, I was glad nobody was there to see me walking around naked. 

Miki just winked at me as she dropped down to land beside me, leaning close so her lips could brush mine. “See… told you you’d like my way of shuttling up,” she giggled, sounding like the young girl her face proclaimed her to be.

“I would never have believed…” I tried to say, my mouth dry from the wonder of it all. “What an incredible way to fly!”

“We’re going to have to break orbit very soon, Win. The Arions won’t waste any time coming after us, and I need this ship in one piece to get you through the wormholes. If they were willing to use a small AMAT on the ground, they won’t think twice about using an even bigger one up here. Gotta go…” 

And with that, she turned her back to me and walked out of the cargo bay through an inner doorway. I stared at the gorgeous view of her rounded calves flexing with astounding definition and power as her body shimmied sexily as she walked out of sight. I soon heard her speaking to someone as her voice rapidly disappeared into the distance. 

And that’s when my legs gave out, dropping me to my knees. Her ship’s gravity was significantly heavier than Terran Standard, and clearly all traces of whatever power she’d shared with me had now completely dissipated. 

Now I understood why men like my father had spent such vast sums to purchase the contract of a Companion. I was already head-over-heels infatuated with Miki and I’d just met her today. Even more, I now understood that super-sex was really a thing, and not just some Sexbot come-on in the alleyway behind a Pub. 

That wasn’t a very profound or enlightened reason for flying off across the galaxy with Miki, but at the moment, it was all I could think about. Except for my freezing feet, which were killing me. I quickly staggered out the doorway of the frozen cargo lock into a corridor that was thankfully warm and comfy. 

I realized full well that I’d go anywhere with Miki. Follow her even into Hell, which is where I was likely headed. But led there by my dick? Girls had done that to me since high school. I had never been the assertive one. Never needed to be.

My thoughts turned darker as I thought again of becoming an Emperor or a King. To rule an entire planet. What a laugh that was. I wasn’t that kind of person. Not even close, what with my being an Omega, which made me a submissive. But then, I’d never had to be anything else. Even worse, we were going to a planet that was apparently rife with discontent and extreme politics and constant power struggles? My only reference point for that kind of place was the ancient Game of Thrones fiction from Old Earth, or maybe the later Halls of Power holo series. 

Yet all I really wanted to think about was my hot new girlfriend.

Which in reality Miki wasn’t. My girlfriend. Instead, she was a combination of servant, bodyguard and concubine, but without the usual limits or rules. Nothing in my life had remotely prepared me for this kind of relationship. 

And that’s when it all crashed in on me — Miki might be amazing, but I was a total imposter! 

I didn’t belong here. 

Why should such an incredible being as Miki spend all her time worrying about me? Mr. Ordinary. A nobody. I wasn’t Kingly material beyond maybe an accident of birth. 

Why hadn’t Mother told me about any of this? She’d prepared me to be an Engineer, not an Emperor. A major fuck-up given how things were now going. And all the time I was growing up here on Ostremity, she’d still been married to that monster. She’d never said a word. 

We were going to have a LOT to talk about when we next met. Except here I was, about to leave Ostremity and Mother behind, possibly forever. 

I struggled to push back a sudden wave of insecurity. I’d never truly been on my own before, and here I was, trusting in Miki and going along with anything she said, despite knowing nothing about her except what she’d told me. I was trusting that her being a superhuman gave her a special kind of credibility, and the fact that we’d flown up to her ship in such an intimate way had definitely proved that. This was all totally off the map. But still, how could anyone truly protect me in a world of nukes and AMATs? 

More worrisome, did this make me a pawn in a far larger game that only Miki knew the rules to? Was she using my right by birth to the throne to give her legitimacy? She’d as much as said that. Was that what this was all about?

I shook my head as I struggled to stop my thoughts from racing in crazy directions. No, I refused to believe that she was just using me for herself. She was kind. She cared. Plus her people had this sacred Contract thing that I apparently now owned. She’d come here to find me because she wanted to save a world. To save its people. Something apparently only I could do, as ludicrous as that sounded.

I shook my head, sighing. I had to get moving. Wasn’t going to figure anything out standing here. After a couple of tries, I was able to walk down the curving corridor, bent over in the heavy G. And I was an athlete, young and strong. A lesser man would likely have been pinned to the floor. 

But where to go now, other than in the direction she’d disappeared in. I staggered off after her, but had barely gone fifty meters before I came across several intersections. Sniffing each one, I found a trace of her natural perfume down one corridor, so I followed my nose, and made several other turns the same way until I finally came to a huge armored door. By then my quads were burning from fighting the heavy gravity.

Walking close to the door, I was startled when it snapped up into the ceiling with a sharp hiss, rising almost too fast to see. Yet it had to weigh tonnes. Behind it I saw a large, dark space with work stations scattered here and there, all seemingly floating in thin air. Was this the Bridge? 

Walking through the opening, the huge door snapped closed inches behind me, plunging the room into darkness while frightening me enough that I leaped forward. I definitely didn’t want to be under that thing when it came down. Squash me like a bug, it would.

My feet started to feel lighter as I moved away from the entrance, and soon there was no gravity at all as I began floating toward the center of the sphere. Not everyone likes zero-G, but I was loving it compared that that heavy gravity. That and the warm air, still being naked and all.

Minutes passed before the walls slowly began to light up as a huge hologram formed completely around the room, seemingly fed by external cameras and other sensors. I could suddenly see the entire curve of my blue planet again, seemingly just below us, with bright stars extending to infinity in every other direction. 

I felt like I was in space again, although nothing would ever match the joy of flying the way I just had with Miki — who suddenly appeared well below me as other lights came on. She was floating cross-legged in mid-air behind a row of scientific consoles, talking to a startlingly tall blonde dressed in an exotic outfit of black leather. 

Her exotic outfit closed across her chest with a number of black straps, her midriff bared, her long, tight leather pants revealing a hint of golden skin through narrow laced openings. Her eyes were a bright blue, her face as beautiful as any model, her age somewhere in her twenties — although I wasn’t going to trust appearances when it came to Velorians, if that’s what she was. Her hair was a mix of blonde and darker gold. Intriguingly, she had an elaborate tattoo on the right side of her abs that looked like some kind of pink flower, and she wore a holster with a large handgun. She looked incredibly hot, but also dangerous. 

I cocked my head to try and hear what Miki was saying…

“… he’s a normal Terran, so stay close enough to Sapiens limits to not injure him. Leave plenty of reserve antigrav capability to deal with sudden maneuvers or combat.”

“That’s a severe limitation,” the leather-clad woman responded in a low voice. “We can accelerate a lot faster if he’s protected. The G-Seat at least.”

“But even then, what do you get before you over-stress him, Lexi? Long term. Maybe four G’s? The Arions can do twenty. Speaking of which, are they powering up and preparing to break orbit?”

“I’m unable to determine. Their ship is on the far side now. It’s in a lower orbit trying to catch up with us, but I won’t have eyes on them for another nineteen minutes.”

“I need to kill their ship without compromising ours, Lexi. Likely they’ll launch on us with AMAT’s once they have targeting, so I want to be there before that happens.”

“Then you need to go now. But first, what about our first hole dive?” Lexi asked. “We’ll need to be flying at 0.35c for that one. That’ll take a while to reach at 2G or below.”

“Plan it out as best you can given our tactical priorities and Terran physio limits. The Arions won’t be chasing us by the time we break orbit — I’ll make sure of that.”

“Three wormhole dives will be required to get to Pernakis. The estimated ship’s travel time while accommodating a Terran on board under those conditions is 43 days. After relativistic normalization, that will be roughly 60 days back on Pernakis. But without the Terran, we could get there in a small fraction of that time.”

Miki sighed. “Then we have to improve on that. I’ll protect him with my biofield for maybe a few hours every day, I think he can handle that, while you accelerate at max G for a while. Maybe we can cut your projected travel time in half, or better. As it is, I’m hoping things aren’t already too broken to put back together by the time we get home. Someone back on Pernakis put the Arions up to this attempted assassination.”

Turning from the other woman to face me, Miki gave me another of her incredible smiles from across the room, the dimples in her cheeks making her look so cute. She floated over to gently wrap one bare leg around me to keep me from floating away. 

“So… who’s the scary hot golden girl? Your sister?”

“Sis… no, no, that’s just Lexi. One of her, anyway.”

“She’s gorgeous. I thought the two of you made a very…”

“She’s just an AIP,” Miki interrupted. “She has to get things done on the ship, so she has many motive-units. Most are functional looking, but she’s also taken on a Velorian-like persona and appearance. Which comes in handy when she lands some place out on the Fringe and has to leave the ship for supplies or whatever. Velorians are always welcome, Companions even more.”

“But she’s really just an android?”

“Shhh… don’t say that to her.”

“I heard that…” came from across the room.

Miki lowered her voice to whisper in my ear. “You’ll just encourage her to prove how wrong you are about the ‘just’ part. She’s fully self-aware and sentient. Enough so that she has an ego.”

“But… is she trying to be a Companion like you?”

Miki shrugged. “Kind of. It’s normal for a ship’s AI to generate a number of androids and bots to get physical things done, and most ships have at least one android who is unusually attractive. For security — and other reasons. She’s naturally copying me given Companions can open any door, at least when men are involved.”

“Still, I’m impressed. Talk about procuring scarce supplies in some rough and ready spaceport town. Show up looking like that, ready to do some trading… not to mention her being armed.”

“Yeah, Lexi isn’t someone you want to fuck with. But she’s very good at trading.”

“So… tell me about these Arions,” I asked. “The ones who blow up mountains while trying to kill some third-year Engineering nerd.” 

Miki shrugged. “They were once Velorians like me, but they had some moral and political differences with us and broke away to live on another world. There they tried to differentiate themselves by using Galen genetic tech that they didn’t fully understand. It didn’t go well. When the dust finally settled, they were all as universally raven-haired as we are blonde, and the vast majority of their people were significantly de-powered — although even the weakest ones are still fifty times stronger than any Terran, and mostly bulletproof. But that final fatal minority of their people grew stronger than any Velorian. We call the first group Betans and the second Primes. They all thankfully lost the use of their Volatai organs in the transformation and are flightless. That’s my only advantage against a Prime if I get into a fight.”

“Sounds like a major fuck-up on their part.”

“Totally. One they blame us for, claiming we contaminated their Galen DNA samples. Which for all I know could be true. There were some serious tensions at that time, and since then, over the last few hundred years, the Arions have developed an aggressive militant culture focused on conquest. Think back to your Old Earth history, to the Nazis in the mid-20th century Europe, and you’ll get the gist of them.”

I just stared at her, eyes wide. “So… superstrong and bulletproof Nazi’s with antimatter nukes! Joy.”

“Yeah, a real bitch. Thankfully, the ones chasing us are undoubtably the weaker Betans, outlaw pirates and privateers most likely, but we can’t get in a race with them. Our antigrav and propulsion systems are similar, but they can overrun their antigrav a lot more than we can given you’re on board. Betans can withstand uncompensated acceleration up to 20G’s for long periods, yet we have to stay very close to 2G uncompensated to keep you healthy. And closer to 1G for very long periods.”

“Unless I’m inside your bio-field.”

“True, but that’s not something we can maintain for weeks.”

“Still, might be fun to try,” I grinned. 

“My job is to keep you alive, not fuck you to death. Which I could too easily do.”

“But what a way to go…” I mused.

She rolled her blue eyes. “On a more serious note, the Arions are likely to launch missiles at us when they rise above the horizon. This ship can’t survive an AMAT hit. But if I’m attacking their ship, they’ll target me first. I can hurt them. So my plan is to draw their fire before they can put their sights on you.”

“But you said they’re warriors or whatever. Won’t their ship be seriously armed? Maybe able to do several things at once? Guided missiles and over the horizon orbital tech and maybe manned fighters?”

“Which is why I have to go now so I can take them out before they can launch. But even I can’t survive inside the annihilation zone of an AMAT warhead, which can be quite large in space given there isn’t enough matter around to fully react the antimatter. On a planet, that annihilation zone is relatively small, with the damaging effects beyond it due mostly to x-rays and heat and atmospheric shockwaves. Those don’t bother me, but if enough antimatter makes it through my bio-field, it can cause serious injury. Companions have died that way.”

“Sorry, but I have to ask. What happens if you don’t come back?”

“If you are still alive, which will be extremely unlikely if I’m not, Lexi will deposit you back on your planet and you can forget about any of this. And me. Which I’m sure will make your mother happy.”

“Let’s leave Mother out of this. Just come back.”

She leaned closer to run her hands through my hair as she kissed me. “Definitely the plan. Stay here on the Bridge to keep Lexi company. She’s got this G-chair that she’ll strap you into before we start maneuvering.”

My head was spinning as I got another whiff of her pheromones as her hair swirled around me. She kept shifting between girlfriend and supergirl in my thoughts, but I still didn’t fully grasp the whole Companion thing. 

In the distance, the massive door opened and closed in the blink of an eye as she went through it, moving too fast to be more than the faintest blur. Sighin as I felt alone without her, I managed to catch one of a series of handholds and began working my way toward Lexi. I was still naked and half turned-on from Miki’s kiss, which wasn’t helped by the way Lexi looked. But then, if she was imitating a Velorian, she’d not be offended.

It was easy to see how most people would confuse her with a Velorian — the same expanse of blonde hair, which hung to her waist in the back, same golden skin, same fantastic figure and profound fitness, same bright eyes. But with an outfit and weapon that said something very different than Miki’s cute, youthful vibe.

“Hello, Lexi. Miki asked me to keep you company.”

“That was very nice of her,” Lexi said as she looked at me with her bright eyes, her half-blonde hair floating everywhere. “But I don’t get lonely. There are always things to be done.”

I tried not to think of Lexi as a woman — she was a machine running a cybernetic AI inside. Which made me wonder how distributed the ship was. Was there a central AI and a bunch of bots, or was the AI distributed among a bunch of autonomous bots by speciality? With Lexi as the First Officer?

“Well, if you have the time, Lexi, how about you keep me company. Tell me what is going on out there.”

Her eyes met and held mine, seemingly looking through me much the way Miki did. 

“Ok… Miki has left the ship and is flying toward a spot over the horizon where she plans to intercept the Arion ship before they can scan us — assuming they haven’t changed their orbit from my last observation. I also have some defensive missiles I’m preparing to fire if need be to stop any incoming weapons that get past her.”

“How good are your defenses?”

“Pretty good. Long range interceptors are 97% effective against Arion missiles, which are fast and extremely agile and clever at avoiding interception.” 

“What if the 3% happens?”

“Our lasers and particle beams should take them out, leaving the rail-guns as a close-in last resort. But if they get past them, we’ll be in big trouble. They use AMAT warheads. My mission will fail.”

“And your mission is?”

“To get the next Emperor back to Pernakis before social order breaks down completely. Miki is very enthusiastic about serving you. As am I.”

There it was again — serving. As in servant. I didn’t like the sound or the feel of that. It was one thing for an AI to serve me given that’s what they did, but Miki was flesh and blood. Able to make her own decisions. On the other hand, Miki said that Lexi was fully sentient and self-aware with an ego. I’d never met an android who wasn’t a bit fake, so it was going to be interesting to explore how Lexi worked. 

“So what’s your formal classification, Lexi?” 

“I’m a velorpomorphic android class 94/96.”

“Which means…?” I asked, puzzled. 

“That I’m fully synthetic with 94% physical congruency with a Velorian and 96% congruence in social skills. In other words, I’m made out of different stuff, but a good enough copy that only another Supremis could find my falseness. And I’m still working on that.”

“You have the same abilities as Miki?” 

“Far greater than her when she’s gold-encumbered, but far less when the gold comes off.”

“But wait a minute… you’re suggesting you hope to someday pass for a Velorian in other’s eyes? Doesn’t that violate some kind of universal robotics prohibition? Bots are never allowed to actually pass for people, and their physical abilities have to be Terran-similar.”

“Definitely not universal rules, Win. Plus Miki is a Velorian, not a Terran, so they wouldn’t apply in any case. You’re talking about Arion Empire rules — they hate bots. But who knows what the new Velorian Enlightenment will finally put together for laws, assuming it ever properly gets off the ground. But Miki doesn’t follow any rules beyond what her Patron sets, and I follow hers. As her ship’s AIP, I try to be a projection of her.”

“Artificially Intelligent Projection. That can also mean her shadow. Her dark-side.”

She grinned for the first time, a beautiful smile. “Which I kind of am. We’ve got a lot of nuances to unwind here, Win. Someday. But until then, it’s easiest for you to think about me as Miki’s Companion, just as she is yours.”

I wasn’t sure if I liked the sound of that. Lots of nuances, indeed.

“What can you tell me about Miki? Her history.”

“You’ll have to discuss those things with her directly, Win. But I can tell you about your father.”

“Ok.”

“Salvador Pernakin was one of the cruelest, most heartless and violent men I have knowledge of. He sought power always, and at any cost. He killed anyone who got in his way, using Miki to do his dirty work whenever she agreed on the necessity. Which she often didn’t. Sometimes she gave the job to me. That was very frustrating for your father, despite his falling so deeply in love with her. He wanted her to be his hammer, but instead she’s a negotiator first.”

“Wait a minute… are you saying you could kill a Terran if you needed to? Doesn’t that violate even older robotic rules.”

“I do whatever Miki needs me to do. Anything.”

“We’d call you a rogue android.”

“Which I am. I’m more dangerous than you know.”

“Miki said the same thing about herself.”

“Way more true for her than me.”

“So why did my father stay married to my mother for the last twenty years or so if he was in love with Miki?”

“Because he couldn’t find her to serve divorce papers. Or kill her. He was equally likely to do one as the other. After you were born, anyway.”

“Glad I never met him. I’m not like that.”

“Not now, you aren’t,” Lexi said softly. “But absolute power is absolutely corrupting. Terrans are shaped by their experiences.”

“I’ll surprise you.”

“Perhaps you will. We can hope anyway.”

“But what about Miki? She could kill anyone. Destroy anything, at least from what I’m hearing and seeing. Who could stop her?”

“She’s Velorian. She doesn’t think that way. She lives to serve and to preserve life anyway she can.”

“But she could…” I continued, only to be interrupted when an alarm sounded.

Lexi froze, her eyes flashing brightly enough to dazzle me as her smile disappeared.

“Some missiles just got past Miki. They’re coming for us…”

---

To be continued in Part 3…