Jubilee by Stephen K. Stanford

Author:Stephen K. Stanford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror; dark fantasy; flame tree press; creepy stories; dark suspense; horror fiction
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2023-12-05T15:09:10+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Six

Things moved quickly. A ship appeared the next day, our ‘royal’ spacer, the Sandhurst. Batum came back from the shop, rebuilt to look like one of the household droids, and we inspected him in our suite. He was now one meter tall with old-fashioned ball joints at the elbows and knees, and sporting a slip-on suit complete with bow tie that slid over the top of his silvery metallic body. Perfectly functioning, if a thousand years out of date.

“Happy now?” he asked grumpily, spinning around to give us a good look.

I caught sight of myself in the mirror, decked out in Grendevan finery. “How do you think I feel, buddy?”

The robot laughed aloud. “I guess we’re all making sacrifices.”

A bunch of documents arrived from Lady Fenwick. Our royal commission declaring us emissaries to Rethne – signed by the king, stamped and embossed with gold leaf all over the place. Anywhere else in the galaxy these would be electronic. Excellent, the weirder the better. As final preparations were made, we took a walk in the woods and tried to enjoy our last hours on Grendeva.

“I’m going to miss this place,” sighed Danee.

“In spite of myself,” said Batum, “I will too.”

I walked in silence, obsessing about the trip. In the afternoon, Lady and Prince Fenwick visited our rooms to say goodbye and within the hour we were gone, the blue-green orb of Grendeva growing small in our monitors. Danee had appointed herself pilot – fine by me. She tweaked our course in the hours it took for us to exit Grendeva’s gravity well. Normally you’d do this work on your kom, but being a Grendevan ship….

I explored our luxurious vessel and noticed something interesting about its interior design. There’s a general ‘look’ to spacecraft we’ve all become familiar with. Minimalist, square edges, lots of white space. It’s been this way for thousands of years and must have emerged somehow from male sensibility because the women of Grendeva, creating their ships from first principles, had arrived at something quite different. Everything about the Sandhurst was curved, soothing and feminine. Our master bedroom was decked out with a chandelier, the walls lined with soft pink faux fur, and it featured a four-poster bed with lace canopy.

We needed six jumps for this trip – which, trust me, is a lot. Danee charted a course taking us anticlockwise around the galaxy, passing close to the galactic core. Allowing for a reset between each jump, we’d need forty-eight hours of elapsed time. We stored our mobiles in a stasis locker for the duration – didn’t want anything recorded on them that might be compromising.

I played a lot of chess with Batum, which was new to him. He always beat me, of course, but I started to get an appreciation for it.

The ship was crawling with royal household robots. One of them seemed to irritate Batum the most.

“Hey, moron,” I heard him say to the official ‘security droid’.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me that, I’m just another robot, like you.

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