We could see Earth from the bridge’s cockpit. There was something about Sol’s planet and their charm. A striking blue ocean split by lumps of land, orbiting around a fairly common star, in a solar system far away from the Esuh home planet. Still, Lenora’s informer, well, had informed her that the one she was looking for, Bohin, was last seen here.

In a way, I felt relieved that the man actually knew how to hide. There was no way we could find him among billions of lifeforms in a habitable planet like Earth, with its booming biodiversity. Now, if he had tried to hide on Luna, Earth’s natural moon, then things would be different.

The last time an Esuh spaceship decided to make contact with humans, the inhabitants of planet Earth, they hadn’t even developed the gift of language and intelligence.

No, I was certain now. Lenora wouldn’t be able to rush into danger headfirst so soon since she wouldn’t be able to find him. But, it kinda made me mad that I was not the reason for that.

I turned my head slightly towards her way and watched her checking that damned list one more time. I could easily arrest her and drag her back to our home planet for illegal information leakage to a third-person outside the Esuh Empire, but if I did that, then I knew she would hate me for the rest of her life. But why did it feel like she had changed since she undertook that mission?

It was like she wanted to put herself in trouble, and just capturing hits wasn’t enough for her to satiate that she needed anymore. She wanted to save the whole galaxy from an invisible threat that no one had even tracked yet.

She was my wife and all, but I didn’t know if I agreed with her now.

“Hey you,” she suddenly said without even turning her eyes away from the holographic display. She had noticed me sulking over what we were going to do when we landed on Earth. Lenora always knew what I was thinking even without me saying a thing.

“Hey.”

I tried to sound mundane in a passive-aggressive way. I wanted her to know that I was upset at her.

“Thank you for doing this for me.”

I turned my head and looked at her one more time. She hadn’t moved an inch, but I could see that her hands had stopped moving.

“You know I would have done everything to help you, Lenora. But I don’t understand why you have to be the one to find Bohin and bring him to justice. If you had reported the incident to the Esuh officials, they would have sent a team to investigate in due time. Even if part of that team was you, it would have been safer, more organized that barging in on our own.”

She twirled her head to look at me now. Her eyes were fiery traps filled with anger. “Because, if we don’t do something now, it may be too late when they send a team in due time. We’ve lost two dreadnoughts, Jasih. Two! Two thousand people died. And that happened a year ago, with the rebels working under our noses. Not from our enemies in the front lines, Jasih, but from a petty intergalactic smuggling operation and a common group of rebels. What does this say about us?”

“No one could have seen that coming. And even under those circumstances, we still were able to keep losses to the bare minimum.”

“There! That’s exactly it. We couldn’t see it coming because we were too busy fighting a futile war to defend one tenth of our territory from people that we oppressed in the first place. Nusae have every right to claim that land and Bohin will do everything to justify his cause under the war banner. What if it was your ship that got destroyed in that attack? Where would that leave me?”

She almost jumped on her feet and headed out of the bridge. I put the system on the autopilot and followed her behind. Lately, Lenora seemed to forget that I was a Prime Officer and, primarily, of superior rank to her. Talking like that to me about the war effort brought up a taste of injustice in my mouth.

Hell, I had been fighting throughout most of my career in the army to keep people of the Empire safe, and I wouldn’t let her take that away from me, not when she was the one that almost got herself killed to save one woman.

I got up and followed her. I found her in the observatory room, gazing the spherical planet rotate around its axis. To be honest, under other circumstances, we would be making love in our bedroom, with only the light of Luna and Sol falling on our naked bodies. Now, though, things had gotten serious.

When I got in, I crossed my hands before my chest and collected my thoughts. I couldn’t win a fight with Lenora if I was careless. Something had changed inside her, and I had to find out what it was.

“This war’s purpose isn’t only to protect our borders,” I started saying. She jerked her head back and snorted. Honestly, I was at my limit. She was one step away from me arresting her. “The Esuh Empire was only able to prosper because people knew that they can’t mess with us and not have their asses kicked afterward. The Nusae knew that and still moved against us to take back their land and for every crazy reason they came up with. But, you know better that I do, that people like Bohin don’t give a shit about borders. They want it all, especially to see everything we’ve strived to build, crumble and fall to the ground. I admire your zealously, but honestly, if you get yourself killed, then where would that leave me?”

Lenora was standing still, not saying a thing. However, I couldn’t stop talking. The words rushed out of my mouth like a stream of water. “I want to have a family with you, Lenora. I want to live my life next to you on equal terms and under a common goal. I can’t stop you from being what you want to be, but there’s no way in hell I’d let you die to prove a point about heroism and who’s doing more to win this war.”

Something about my words seemed to stir up a wave of regret to penetrate her thick skin. When she turned to stare me in the eyes, it was not the angry, disappointed, First Kind agent I saw, but my wife, the woman I chose to spend the rest of my life with.

She opened her mouth to say something to me, but in a twist of fate, the ship’s scanner set off. I turned my head, starting towards the bridge, when I heard her voice uttering behind me: “What in the hell is that?”

I moved by her side and saw for myself. I had seen many things during my time in the army. I had puked, cried, and even frozen still in shock from all the sights those eyes had confronted. However, never, not even once, I hadn’t been shaken to my same core to the point of gawping like a teenage boy.

As my eyes met Lenora’s, I knew that we had to investigate this phenomenon at once. But, a hollow fear inside me told me otherwise. My instincts, the honed instincts of a seasoned fighter, told me to turn on the engines and run as fast away from that thing as possible.

Shit, what in the world is that light?