Free Hollow Space by Belladonna Bordeaux

 

     
     
Hewlett-Packard Company

     
     
     
     
    Chapter One

    Look before you leap.

    10.5 years after the Last Great War
     
    Jada, crowned princess of Dareaux’s Northern Territory, stepped silently through the airlock connecting the League of Sentient Beings’ shuttlecraft to the massive Nebula Class Navorain War Galley. She nodded to the extremely tall warrior who met her and her party.
    Please don ’ t think. Please don ’ t think.
    Her head clanged from her quick trip through Prometheus Station and had left a foul taste in her mouth.
    Forcing her arms to remain at her sides, quelling the urge to rub the ache from her temples, she blew out a breath. Please don ’ t think.
    The persistent buzzing of thoughts twittered in her head, raking long twinges of pain down her spine. A soft sigh passed her lips.
    Her gaze moved over the rather bland-colored reception area until her gaze once more settled on the warrior standing at attention near the door. Please. Please. Let my mission be a success and do not allow the thoughts of others to interfere with the negotiations.
    It i s unlikely, she mused.
    Her telepathy had picked up not just the garbled jumble of thoughts rolling from the different species but a myriad of emotions too. All the noise in her head combined with the bombarding effect of the feelings to make her a frazzled mess.
    It didn’t help that she was already on edge because she’d been ordered to attend this Congressional Session. Though her education would say she was more than capable of negotiating everything from a charter to a trade agreement, and she had, on several occasions, proven her worth to the High Kings of Dareaux, she wasn’t as sure about her upcoming meeting.
    This time was different. Very, very different.
    Well, part of it is different. She blew out a harsh breath, wafting the veil shrouding her face. The ramification of failing in her mission was a whole other bucket of trouble.
    She was to renew Dareaux’s pledge to not take advantage of any sexually immature race. Normally, her father handled this simple task via interstellar communication. Unfortunately, a new faction was flexing its muscle and calling for sweeping changes to the charter that had brought Dareaux beneath the mantle of the League’s protection and had made her homeworld a member of the Community of Modernized Planets.
    The New Chastity Party. Some of the other members of the League believed this new party, based on a platform that had been conceived of two centuries before, was improved, giving kinds like hers more opportunity.
    Truthfully—it was much more stringent than the original concept.
    Bile rose in her throat, but she managed to swallow it.
    Pasting a serene expression to her shrouded face, she tried to think of her “happy” place. A place where Dareauxsians lived in peace and harmony with the other sentient beings sprinkled across the modernized universe.
    An involuntary shiver shook through her when she considered the group who were bent on destroying her people’s way of life.For all their sanctimonious rhetoric, the New Chastity Party might just be Dareaux’s undoing.
    They ’ d not deny any other species food or a breathable environment, but they would deny us the way we produce our food source. They'd never say to another kind, you cannot heat your house at night or be allowed to produce power for your technology.
    Granted, the New Chastity Party didn’t know why Dareaux’s people engaged in intimate contact daily. She doubted it mattered to the morally self-righteous faction, even if she did explain that her species needed intimate contact to survive. No. They were set on instilling their ideology that “sharing” should only occur after double occupancy or, in more infantile races, the ceremony of marriage made it official.
    They talked ceremonies and single donors and such. Much of their high-browed arguments went directly over her head. She’d never heard of such things.
    The weight