I had been on shift, alone in the cockpit for several hours. Of course, it wasn’t as silent as it usually was. A small room plus five tiger shifter kids accustomed to having free reign in wide open spaces did not make for a particularly peaceful, nor quiet, passing of the time. At points, I had been sure they were intent on killing each other, only to hear Seria laughing in the background. Thank the stars she was there, because there was no way I was equipped to deal with a bunch of kids.

I heard Ral coming towards the cockpit, teasing the kids in the tones of Tigerese. I anticipated him coming into the cockpit, but he somehow plopped down in the co-pilot seat next to me much sooner than I expected. Stupid silent werewolf feet.

“A moment of your time, Captain.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a request or an order. Up until that moment, I was positive that all I wanted was to go back to the usual formalities. It had been a one-time mistake that I wasn’t going to repeat. I couldn’t let my judgment be influenced by something as archaic as sex. I had a job to finish, a mission to accomplish, and nothing was going to stop me from carrying out my orders.

But now that we were, I wasn’t so sure if that’s what I really wanted.

I decided to take it as a request. “A second, Your Highness.”

I set a few systems on auto monitoring and double-checked the auto-piloting. And then did it again, because I really didn’t want to talk about what had happened between us. It was only meaningless sex. Couldn’t he leave me alone?

Finally I turned to him. “Yes, Your Highness?”

He pulled up a screen. Three pictures flipped into existence. Two men and a woman.

Oh. So he didn’t want to talk about it. That was good. Wasn’t it?

I stared at the pictures trying to think of a response. One of them looked oddly familiar. “Aken is one of your people.”

He gave me an odd look. “How does a Coalition Starbolt pilot know one of my black ops undercover agents? And his real name at that.”

“Fighting space pirates.”

“Why is the Coalition sending Starbolt pilots out to fight space pirates? That’s like using diamonds to hammer a nail.”

That was a compliment, I think. “Some missions are granted upon request.”

He pointed to the picture next to Aken.

“Jillyn Kyam. From the age of twelve, she was a street orphan. She is also vegetarian.”

I raised an eyebrow. “A vegetarian werewolf?”

Ral continued with the next image. “Not exactly. Kasen So. He has a cat.”

“That’s it? No other details?”

“He’s a wolf that owns a cat. That should tell you a lot.”

I didn’t know much about wolves. They didn’t really get around to the areas of interstellar space that I did. Cramped habitats and factory-foods were not considered too desirable by werewolf standards.

Aken’s picture stared at me.

Ral looked at me in the reflective glass beyond the screens. “You and I are not so different as you think, Captain. Like you, I have a duty to serve and protect.”

“No. Every leader knows that sometimes soldiers need to be sacrificed. And though we hope we’re not the ones picked, sometimes luck takes a dump and you have to be left behind for the greater good. And it doesn’t make any sense for an heir to the House of Nightclaw to risk his life and certain capture for the lives of three random guards. Why are these people so important to you?”

He looked away, silent. “I didn’t grow up on Alzar-4 with the trappings of House privilege. You’d probably call my mother’s relationship with Alpha an affair.”

“Your father cheated?”

“Not in the Alzarian sense. Marriages among the Houses are a matter of political contracts, enacted to produce heirs. Once children are produced, and contractual obligations fulfilled, each of the parties are allowed to move on to other contracts. My two older brothers were products of political contracts. At the time of my parents’ relationship they were already completed.”

“That sounds…cold.”

“It can be. Or not, depending on which of my brothers you ask. They think I’m lucky because Alpha cared deeply for my mother, a human from First Earth. She was a merc, and the best sniper of her time. Jillyn was a student of hers. My mother found her orphaned and injured in a tiger shifter village that had been devastated by a werewolf attack, and took her in. Growing up, Jillyn was the closest thing I had to an older sister. When I was officially invested as a prince, she immediately joined my personal guard because Jillyn’s last words to my mother before my mother passed were that she would always protect me.”

“Jillyn’s a tiger shifter?”

“Told you, things aren’t as cut and crystal as the humans make it seem. Who is Jillyn to me? She’s family.” He looked at the other two pictures. “They all are. They’re my personal guard, loyal to me, not the Alpha or my House.”

I had always thought that the werewolves and tiger shifters were two sides of a coin, destined to be forever engaged in war based on mutual distrust and hate. It was the stuff of story-vids that I grew up watching as a child. For a werewolf prince to call a random tiger-shifter with no bloodline or family ties to him his sister said something about both of them.

I knew that if I heard the other stories, and I let myself like him too much, it would be the beginning of something destined to end in pain and tears. Even if he was a good guy, there was always going to be an angle with him. Men with status were always like that; that’s how they stayed there. And the fact that he was prettier than sin didn’t help. You just couldn’t trust those looks.

I pulled a screen to block his reflection in the window. “That’s enough. What you ask for doesn’t change the fact that the rest of us have serious consequences to face when we don’t obey orders.”

He put his hand on my forearm. I looked at it, then up at him. His eyebrow was raised. His wolf-blue eyes skeptical. “A dishonorable discharge? Court martial? I highly doubt that. You would have my highest commendations.”

Ral thought too much of his influence on Coalition bureaucracies. I shook my head, thinking of Commander Singh’s last message. “Follow your orders or you won’t have any orders to follow outside of the service.”

Ral could see it in my face. He moved his hand to mine and squeezed. “That’s what you’re afraid of. You’re afraid of not being a soldier anymore.”

I looked at his hand holding mine. I pulled my hand away, and took it off the yoke. Auto-piloting took over with a beep. My chair turned to face him. “I’ve spent my whole life being a Coalition soldier. It’s who I am. It’s all I am.”

He rested his elbows on his knees, leaning in close to me. “That’s not true.”

I took a deep breath. I realized I was clenching the armrests and forced my hands to relax. “Last year I was on a deep space mission shadowing this fleet of space pirates. I had been following them in my Starbolt for days. I realized that the space pirates would be attacking a tiger insurgents’ convoy of Coalition POWs. I comm’ed my commanding officer. If I'd had enough support, we could have stopped the space pirates and rescued the POWs.”

His hand covered mine again. “And did they give you the support?”

I could feel the heat from his hand, warming mine. “No. The POWs were low priority. If the insurgents figured out we broke their codes, the codes would be changed. But I couldn’t let those soldiers go like that, like lazyfish that don’t fight when you pull them out of the water. That to me was the worst fate.”

He squeezed. “You didn’t try to take an entire fleet of space pirates by yourself…did you?”

I tried to smile at him. “I’m not that psychotic. I dropped word to some pilots I knew patrolling nearby sectors. Those that could come, came."

His hand stroked mine, drawing circles of warmth that seemed to spiral up my arm. He turned my palm over and traced the veins inside my wrist. “So you not only disobeyed orders, you recruited others to help you do what you had explicitly been ordered not to do.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the hot trails of his fingers on the inside of my forearm. “Well, when you say it like that, it doesn’t sound so great. But we succeeded in getting those POWs free and chasing off the pirates.”

He leaned in closer. I inhaled savoring his scent. If he could bottle that werewolf prince smell, he’d make a fortune and then some. “That’s not your whole story.”

I closed my eyes, as if not seeing him would make it easier. “My Starbolt lost control and I crashed on a nearby moon. I was strapped into my cockpit, losing air, with two broken arms. I didn’t think the Coalition would come for me. But they did."

This was stupid. Was I really so afraid of being hypnotized by his princely hotness? I opened my eyes. His gaze was calm and entirely focused on me. Yup, I had been right to fear. “You’d think I’d be afraid of dying, but it’s not dying I’m afraid of. It’s death without a purpose. You know who actually came to visit me in recovery, not in the military, aside from my sister? No one. Space Force is my life. Without my Starbolt, I’m no one.”

Handsome as he was, his lower lip was a little bit chapped. I don’t know but why this tiny bit of imperfection only made my abdomen tighten more. I had to stop looking at him. I pulled away, turned my chair back to the screens.

“As a result of my actions, the tiger insurgents discovered we had broken their code. So they changed it. A month later, Aurelia was destroyed in a surprise attack – 5,078 casualties, mostly civilians.”

His hand came to my shoulder. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“Can’t I? Military intel says otherwise. The Coalition isn’t perfect. But there are bigger things going on than what’s in front of me. And I have no idea what the big picture really is.”

He slowly stroked the back of my neck. Goosebumps rippled down my shoulders. The roughness of his fingertips was more sensual than any synthsilk I had ever felt. “That’s the problem with you Coalition soldiers. They force their best and brightest on tasks like hunting space pirates when there’s a more important war going on. They train you to stop questioning. They are training you to –"

I took advantage of his sudden silence to finish his sentence. “To be soldiers.”

His hand drifted between my shoulder blades. I was armored, and knew technically there was no way I should be feeling anything. But my skin prickled at the thought of his hand on my bare skin. “I know what it is to be a soldier. But that doesn’t mean you give up your sense of right and wrong.”

The interstellar com screen popped into view, beeping the alert of a call from base command. I sat up, away from him, my exo-armor sliding around me.

“Your highness, I need you to step out. As vexing as it may be to you, it’s my job to make sure military codes remain secret.”

He frowned. “Of course, Captain.”

And there we were, back to our titles, dousing what had been between us with a bucket of ice cold formality.

I listened this time, and actually heard him walk to the door. I heard the door slide open. He paused. “The tiger insurgents change their codes on a regular basis, based roughly on the cycles of the three moons of Tigrantine. We told Coalition intel. Your military should have known that and calculated for that. You’re not responsible.”

It took a moment for what he was saying to sink in. Even if it were true, did it matter? Had they been lying to me? “It doesn’t feel that way.”

“We’ll talk more later,” he said, closing the door behind him.

Not if I could help it. I was done baring my soul. It had been a moment of weakness, one I was determined not to repeat. I tapped a screen, exchanging the usual codes, usual call signs and codes were exchanged, and my commander’s picture popped onto my screen. Her voice sounded as if she was reading from a script.

“The Council has determined the unauthorized cargo to be a liability. You are hereby ordered to dispose of it.”

They couldn’t be serious. I knew there had been elections recently, but I hadn’t had any time to vote or follow what was going on back on the capital planets of Gaia and First Earth.

Thankfully this was audio. If there were visuals I probably would have been court martialed from the look on my face alone. “Ma’am, these are children.”

“So find a Free City and let them go.”

“We can’t do that.”

“You can’t abduct children from a place you’re not supposed to be from an intergalactic species that we’re almost at war with. You bring them back, and they’re going to be turned over to the tigers again. I don't know how we're going to explain this. They’re a liability. Get rid of them.”

“Commander, I have a question. Is it true that the tigers change their codes based on the cycles of the Tigrantine moon cycle?”

There was a lag. “I can neither confirm nor deny that, soldier.”

So it was true.

I sat back.

My commander ended the conversation.

I stared into my hands.

In the palm of my armored hand, there was a Coalition insignia. A predatory bird, wings outstretched, clutching a serpent within a circle of stars. There was grime embedded in parts of it, a chip in the tip of a wing.

I fingered the bird. This wasn’t the military I signed up for. This wasn’t the Coalition I knew. This wasn’t why I put myself on the line.

I punched the bulkhead.

This is what I had been warned about. Old grizzled vets had come to talk to us at some Academy thing. You can be doing the right thing, they said. But as soon as there are elections, the right thing can be the wrong thing and vice versa. That’s what happens when you live in a democracy.

So then what’s the point of living in a democracy, someone had asked.

It’s not that governments don’t get shitty. The point is that when things get shitty, there’s a path to a peaceful change of power where people don’t get killed.

Of course, I hadn’t really paid attention. I had visions of glory, honor, and a life of adventure. And of course I had forgotten to vote.

My Starbolt, as gorgeous as it was, was just a ship.

But those kids, Red, the royals, Aken and the other damn soldiers, they were people that didn’t deserve the crap fate had handed them.

They were both right and wrong. The point of living in a democracy was that citizens decided the fate of things. I was a citizen. I could change my fate.

I could change their fate.

I pinched the bridge of my nose.

Fuck it. “Aken, you son-of–a-bitch. You are so going to owe me.” I opened another screen and began transmitting messages.