Chapter Eight
“Stars…the poetry of heaven”
~Lord Byron
Like I said, Tygerians are loud in most things they do, and the next morning, Davos woke me as he got up and dressed before he left for the day.
“Are you going for breakfast?” I asked. “I’ll get dressed and come with you if you are. I’m starving.”
He glanced over at me. “I’ll have someone bring you a tray.”
“But why can’t I just go with you?”
“I’m ready to go now, and I eat first meal with the captain and my senior officers. A room full of rough soldiers is no place for you.”
“They won’t mind if I join you.”
He didn’t even glance my way. “I said no. I’ll have someone bring you a tray. Besides, you need to rest.”
I glared at him. “Rest from what? I just woke up.”
He turned and glared at me. “Blake, I’ll send you a tray. And it will be full of protein. A nice big bowl of merula will set you up. You’ve lost weight, and there is a lot of protein in merula.”
“Lots of grease and mystery meat too. No thank you.”
“Gods, you need to get over this ridiculous aversion to Tygerian food. You’re spending the rest of your life on Tygeria, so you may as well learn to eat properly.”
“I will, as soon as I see some proper food. I’m warning you, if you send that nasty merula stew in here, I’ll paint the walls with it.”
He took a step toward me. “I’ll force it down your throat first.”
“Oh yeah? Try it and see what happens! I dare you!” I sat up and balled both my fists, ready to strike him.
It was around that time he started shouting. “Bah! You eat way too much sugary cereal. You’re eating for the baby too, now, and you need to keep that in mind!”
“If I could go to the officers mess, I could try and find something I could eat! But you’re determined to keep me a damn prisoner in here!”
He made me so furious I wanted to fight him, but he turned his back on me and muttered things under his breath.
I clenched my fists and glared at his back until he left, but it didn’t seem to faze him one bit.
I lay back down on my bed, wondering if I should go on a hunger strike until he let me out of this place, but confident that he would try to force feed me if I did. Besides, I was hungry.
After a half hour or so later, a knock came on my door. It was a ship’s steward there with a tray, and I stood aside and motioned for him to bring it in. He set it down on the table and left without a word.
There was the inevitable Lycan tea along with some powdered eggs and bread with butter and grape jam and a side dish of fruit.
Not too bad, except for that big bowl of the merula crap, a thick meat stew that Tygerians loved for first meal.
It was thick and brown and filled with green vegetables.
The Tygerians dipped hard bread in the greasy gravy, and they all seemed to think it was delicious, but I had never been a fan.
The powdered eggs and jam came from Nilanium traders who had gotten them from Alliance planets.
But here’s the thing—I didn’t fully trust the Nilaniums. They were prone to making substitutions.
It might not be chicken’s eggs, after all, but some kind of lizard eggs or God only knew what, that they had gathered themselves and were trying to pass off as Earthan chicken eggs.
I likewise didn’t trust the butter for the same reasons, but I did drink a little of the bitter tea and choked down the “bread,” which came in two varieties—a thick, hard brown bread and a flat tortilla-like thing that the Tygerians also called bread.
It was edible, and I knew I needed the to eat something, so I forced it down.
As for the fruit, it looked a little like grapes, and tasted okay, so I ate them too and hoped for the best. I sipped the damn tea—about a half a cup—and found it more bitter than usual.
I greatly preferred coffee, so I finished with just the water.
I read for a while after that and then went to the porthole to look out.
The walls of the wormhole we were traversing was composed of "exotic matter.” This matter had negative energy density, giving it a repulsive gravitational effect.
It was crucial for keeping the wormhole's throat open, and without it, the immense gravitational forces from the wormhole's mouths would cause the tunnel to immediately collapse. I didn’t like to look at it, because it reminded me of the impossibility of space travel and that idea had always made me nervous if I thought too much about it.
The view inside it looked like a powerful, curved fisheye lens, showing a distorted image of our destination's external environment.
I turned away from it and pulled the curtain after a while, as it made me feel dizzy to look at it for long.
I had found out that our destination was, like Davos had said, an orbit around the planet Leeria.
Davos was meeting a Nilanium trader there, a man named Atlanthium Rabb, who claimed to have information Davos would want.
When I’d asked why I had to go along, he told me that he didn’t trust me enough to leave me alone.
“Who knows what you might decide to do in my absence this time? I might come home to an entire harem of new husbands and concubines,” he’d joked, but that joke was getting old, and I didn’t find it funny in the least. My back was aching, so I sat down in one of the uncomfortable chairs and tried my best to relax.
An hour or so later, it still wasn’t working, so I got to my feet and decided to walk over to where Davos was on the bridge.
Maybe I could talk him into going to the observation deck with me.
I used my communicator to call him, but he wouldn’t answer.
I knew Davos was probably on the bridge by now, so when he didn’t take the call, I got up to go find him.
It was only a short walk down the passageway outside the door.
Holding onto the walls because my knees were a little shaky now that I’d gotten so big, I managed to make it down to the door leading to the bridge.
It wasn’t far from our own door. It opened with a swish automatically as I approached it, and I could see a room full of large compnets at numerous consoles and men busily working on all of them, along with a huge screen showing the wormhole we were passing through.
People were talking loudly, and the radios were full of chatter, though I had no idea what they were saying.
It all made me dizzy to watch our passage through the wormhole again on the larger, front screen, so I closed my eyes a moment, swaying a little.
I opened my eyes to see one of the big Tygerians staring at me.
He was standing next to Davos, who was sitting in a com chair near the captain, his back to me.
That crewman leaned down to tell Davos I was there and gestured toward me. Davos turned to look at me and he frowned.
“What is it, Blake? I’m busy now. You shouldn’t be here. Go back to your quarters, and I’ll come as soon as I can.”
Every eye in the big room turned toward me.
Embarrassed at being called out and then dismissed so quickly, I turned to go back out the way I’d come in, but we were hitting a bit of turbulence, and I found it a little hard to walk.
Space turbulence was caused by the chaotic movement of gases and plasma, and the interaction of magnetic fields, primarily driven by solar activity and stellar emissions.
It’s not as bad as the turbulence in the skies above a planet, for example, and spacecraft use stabilizers to control it, but there was still some atmospheric turbulence, and it made me nervous every time I felt it.
I took a moment to steady myself, before moving on, and as it happened, I picked a bad place to stop to do it, because I was against the wall and out of sight of the doorway.
It opened suddenly as a large Tygerian colonel came rushing in, and he reeled back as he suddenly saw me there.
Unfortunately, he hit the man following him, who lost his balance as the turbulence hit again, and both of them stumbled forward into me, and we all fell in a big heap to the floor—with me at the bottom of the pile.
I heard Davos shout, but the two men were already scrambling to haul me back up to my feet. I could feel my face burning with embarrassment. The only problem was my legs didn’t seem to want to hold me up anymore. I stumbled a little as I turned but managed to straighten up as I waved Davos off.
“I’m fine,” I said, and turned to make my way to the door, still holding onto the wall. From behind me, I heard a little gasp. I turned to see the officers looking at the back of my robes, and I glanced back around to take a look myself. A small, but dark red spot was staining the back over my ass.
“Your Majesty!” One of them said to Davos, pointing at me, his voice too loud, and then everyone looked and started murmuring all at once.
Davos looked startled and scared, and he jumped to his feet and came toward me, scooping me up in his arms. He began running somewhere with me.
I closed my eyes and clung to him, still dizzy and too scared to tell him he was jostling me too much.
This seemed to me like a big overreaction on his part.
It was the last coherent thought I had, I think, before there were suddenly big, Tygerian men all around us, running down the corridor beside us, leaning over me and peering down in my face and scaring me half to death.
I reached out for Davos and got a handful of his shirt.
He let me hold onto him and clutched me closer.
Someone leaned over and pinched me hard on my arm, and I looked down to realize it was a needle and not a pinch.
I glanced back up, directly into Davos’s eyes.
They were wide and panicked and that scared me most of all.
I put my head back down on his shoulder and closed my eyes.