The Earthly Queen: The Woman of Worlds Apart

Chapter 20: (Caine)

I wake to boiling heat. It's like a tropical jungle in here, humidity hanging in the air so thick the overhead lights are blurry from the rolling steam.

Mack-He sits in midair next to me. His eyes light up as I slowly sit up, head throbbing, and wipe away a stream of drool from the side of my face.

"I kept trying to tuck your tongue back in," Mack-he says, "but you just kept rolling it out every time, so I eventually just gave up."

Panting when overheated is an embaressing habit I've had since childhood; my canine genes acting out I suppose.

"You know, fingering around in a sleeping person's mouth sounds really awful when you put it that bluntly and is very disconcerting, right?" I say.

Mack-He just shrugs.

I look around the disgusting ship we're riding in, the smell of the unwashed interior is severely amplified by the moist heat.

Mack-He explains what we're riding in and where we're going.

The whole time I have to wipe the drool from my chin due to my out of control panting.

"Sorry about the heat," Mack-He says, "the artificial atmosphere generator is on the fritz."

"How far are we, currently, from Aqueous?" I ask.

"Still pretty far off, a few more solar systems to go. Traveling from Earth to literally anywhere in the Verse is not a timely task. The 'Milky Way' galaxy is in the middle of, as you'd say, 'Bum Fucked Space.'"

For the next several hours I am able to do nothing but pace anxiously; pace and sweat and pant. I'm simply unable to sit still. Every time we have to wait for the portal generators to cool down - and of course the generators are just as poor as everything else on this boat - I practically gnaw at the upholstery.

I eventually get so overheated I slip my shirt off and fan myself with it. Mack-He takes pity on me when he sees this and uploads an app that changes his hands to spinning fan blades. They're at least able to get the stagnant air stirred up a little bit.

Mack-He watches me with a somber expression on his face. "Caine, you really need to relax," hee says for the trillionth time this trip, "being this up tight helps no one."

"Yes, mother," I snap. "You going to remind me to clean my hands after using the restroom, say 'please and thank you' and make sure the hygienic cleaner gets behind my ears too?"

Mack-He is taken aback by my unprovoked harshness and looks rather miffed.

His eyes suddenly blink red as an alarm goes off. "Ah, generator's cool, one last portal jump and we'll be there."

Mack-He briefly takes his leave to activate the portal generators. I glance out the cockpit window as a beam of light shoots out from the shuttle and explodes into a huge nebulus and swirling golden mist. We fly into it and are instantaneously transported to Cerulean Halcyon-Akin's private planet.

Aqueous is a very fake looking planet, to me anyway. Once upon a time it may have been a raw and pure place but has since then been thoroughly domesticated. It's now nothing more than Entitled eye candy; sculpted like clay. True, it's an amazing feat of mankind, but considering the original residents of the planet were most likely enslaved and forced into making the planet what it is, trillions dying in the process, it loses some of the majestic charm.

As the blue and red of the approaching planet fills the cockpit Mack-He looks at me with a worried expression on his face.

"What?" I demand.