Exile by Julia Barrett Page B

least some of the same things I do.”
    Kyr tapped his mug. “Then why not use you? He had your family isolated. There was no one to stop him. Why not use you, any one of you? Take your blood and use it to get what he wants? Why kill you?”
    “I think it wasn’t until he had me in his laboratory his scientists determined something like this might work. I suspect they also warned him this could kill him. It didn’t kill him, this time. But if he continues down this path, he will discover it leads to insanity and death.”
    “Do you think he’ll try something like this again?” Davi asked.
    “I have no doubt that he will. He craves power above all else. But if he had more of my blood he would have used it. Either we would be under pursuit or you would both be dead and I would be his prisoner. I sensed fury in him, fury that the men beneath him refused his command to enter the Pikes. I’m sure they were unaware he’d injected himself with my blood, and they didn’t trust their ability to navigate through such a thick asteroid belt. Every man who flies knows the limitations of the auto-nav. As you can imagine, to admit what he’d done would have brought an immediate death sentence upon him.”
    “By a gack’s shit, I would say so,” muttered Davi.
    Aja asked, “Do you wish to hear my history? Remember, it’s not just my history, it’s your history, too.”

    Kyr closed his eyes. He folded his arms behind his head and stretched out his long legs. He leaned back in his chair and let the soft, even tone of Aja’s voice wash over him like the song of a bard.
    “Back in the ancient days of Earth, our place of origin, there was war and famine, murder, rape, pillage, slavery. Brutal men controlled most of the resources, while women, the weaker sex, acceded to the men.
    “A secret cadre of both male and female geneticists launched a program to select specific genetic traits from specially chosen subjects, men and women who possessed unusual physical and mental abilities, all the qualities we of the Royal Bloodline possess today. The project was named Persephone, after the Earther’s mythical Goddess of Spring, and it lasted for many generations. The researchers were able to isolate the genes they sought on the DNA double helix. Once they were able to replicate their results and enhance human embryos, it was decided by all involved that the genetic mutations would be transferred to the female line only. Only females could replicate or reproduce other female children who would carry these genetic mutations.”
    “Why?” Kyr asked.
    “Because genetically speaking, women are less prone to violence than men and we are more nurturing. It was assumed that a genetically enhanced race of females would help to stabilize the very unstable situation on Earth. After all, men had dominated most social structures since Earth’s own ancient times, since the end of what the Coalition historians have renamed, The Dark Period of the Goddess.”
    “And they succeeded?”
    “After many centuries of careful breeding and continued genetic enhancement, yes, they did succeed, in some places. These female leaders, or rulers… Empresses, as they came to be called, were able to bring stability and peace to some regions of the Earth. In other regions the women were simply slaughtered as were any men who supported them.
    “It was the Empress Ya who was the first to have Full Sight, the first Empress who could see her way through time and space and lead her people from a dying Earth. Oh, men had traveled the ancient solar system. They’d been to the moon and settled on the planet called Mars and the moons of Saturn, but the Empress Ya determined that Earth, the Earth of our origin, was breathing her last.
    “Men and women had been experimenting with intergalactic travel for many centuries, but all the crafts had been unmanned. The Empress Ya could see the way; she could see adjustments that needed to be made to navigation systems, to