I stared up at the ship that would be taking us to the planet of Iulius as it descended down into the atmosphere contained by artificial gravitational fields. It was a grand vessel, though not one meant for battle. It was formed of steel and expansive sections of glass and had golden statues twenty feet tall of the Olympians and heroes and legends of Grecia and Roma and Thaekyria lining the sides of the ship. The front of it was crowned with an aurelian eagle with a proud aquiline beak and glorious wings spreading in flight. It did not fly with thrusters or repulsors like many smaller craft, but with a gravitational attractor that latched onto a sufficiently large object of considerable mass like Sunburst Station or a planet like Lavinius or Iulius. The gravitational attractor would pull the starship towards the more massive entity, essentially falling through the void as if it was in the orbit of the destination. I thought it was unlikely that it was meant to travel from solar system to solar system, most likely the other systems of the Dominium were too distant for the attractor to lock onto and bind to. No, this ship was merely meant to ferry passengers from one planet or interplanetary space station to another planet or space station like Sunburst.

Antonias, Caesia, Kato, Livia, Junia and a number of the other Imperators’ servants and hanger ons stood with me in the priority boarding line. The Servi accompanying us were carrying a good number of luggage and assorted traveling necessities. Antonias had packed the most, I thought he might have brought his entire luxurious and expansive closet of fine clothes. Couldn’t be without them, I supposed. Kato was surprisingly sparse, having brought a single suitcase. One of the Servus had tried to take it from him, but Kato had waved the man off, saying he could carry it himself.

“Why did you bring so little clothes?” Caesia asked Kato.

He shrugged. “The Scholarium is supposed to provide uniforms. Why bring unnecessary items? I like to travel light anyway.”

The starship hovered above us, perhaps a lofty two hundred feet. It remained stationary in that position by regulating the gravitational attraction between the starship and rapidly switching between pulling itself towards Sunburst Station and using anti-gravity to push itself away. The frequency of the switching back and forth and the sheer size of the vessel gave the illusion of motionless, static fixation above the boarding terminal. Small pods exited the main hangar of the cruiser and fell towards us, coasting down with light bursts of liquid oxygen oxidizer and liquid hydrogen fueled thrusters that slowed and steered the landing pods’ speed and direction. There were twenty pods that served to fit twenty people at a time. They would go up and down as many times as necessary to deliver the nine hundred passengers, their luggage, and the food and resources needed to provide for the passengers as we embarked on our six week journey of six hundred million miles from Sunburst Station to the capital of the Apollo solar system. Inertial dampeners and kinetic stabilizers would make the rapid acceleration and deceleration of our flight seem nonexistent and would keep us from being pasted against the front or back of the cruiser. Well, maybe just the Servi among us would be meat paste. Us Bronze Imperators were more likely to be slightly smushed by that kind of forced impact. We would probably shoot right on through the hull and out into the dark vacuum.

A robotic, slightly feminized voice came over the loudspeakers in the priority line terminal.

“Attention, honored guests, please proceed to the landing craft.” She… no, it said.

I shouldn’t humanize it just because I was unused to technology that mimicked human speech and intelligence. I wasn’t acclimated to such things, that kind of technology wasn’t available on my home planet. It probably wasn’t a Silicon Daimon like we were going to have implanted into our brains as officers of the Solar Guard, an advanced artificial intelligence, those were expensive and rare. Most likely it was a simple computer with prewritten responses to factors like the docking of the transportation pods or the presence of waiting passengers.

Caesia, Kato, Antonias, myself, and our entourage of companions and servants walked through the glass walkway to the docked pod and entered it. It smelled of jasmine. Tentacles like wormwires, but longer and thicker ensnared and wrapped around our luggage, taking it from the Servi and from Kato who still held his own bag, to keep it steady while we ascended.

“Greetings, honored guests!” A man’s voice this time, still clearly artificial and annoyingly chipper, like a flamboyant squirrel drugged on amphetamines and experiencing a sugar rush.

“Please take your seats and buckle in so we can proceed to the Skyfather’s Glory!” It said.

We sat down. The pod was air conditioned, but the seats were preheated. I noticed there was a display on my right armrest that offered temperature controls and a massage function as I strapped myself in. Antonias immediately fiddled with his control display for his seat and purred like a cat when the massage mechanism came on. Caesia rolled her eyes at his reaction to the vibrations.

”Thank you for complying with the seating procedures!” The voice in the pod said irritatingly brightly.

“Please ready yourself for takeoff!” It said enthusiastically.

The thrusters rumbled and then thundered beneath us as they ignited and sent us soaring into the false sky maintained by the space station ring’s artificial climate controls.

We reached the zenith of our short flight in under a minute, entering the gaping, hungry mouth of the Skyfather’s Glory’s open hangar. I felt a buzzing sensation on my skin and a vibration in my teeth as we passed through the forcefield that was the boundary between the void of space and the interior oxygen rich atmosphere of the starship. Livia winced next to me at the feeling, rubbing at her jaw as her teeth were acted upon. I longed to breathe the fresh air of the Skyfather’s Glory as the scent of the jasmine aroma permeating the transportation pod was quickly growing onerous due to my keen sense of smell granted by my Path and Rank.

The pod settled down, our party the first to land inside, and the door opened.

“Thank you for your patience and welcome to the Skyfather’s Glory! I hope you will enjoy your stay on our luxury cruiseline. Make sure to check out the pools and zero G rooms available to you during your travels with us. Dinner will be served at-“ I tuned the machine’s saccharine, exuberant voice out of my perception.

We unbuckled and the Servi took our bags as the mechanical tentacles released the luggage and receded into the floor like a snake shrinking away into its den. We walked off and the transportation pod lit with thruster fire once more and departed to get the remaining passengers below. More full pods entered the hangar, bearing Servi Golds and rich Servus families who could afford early prioritization just after the arrival of esteemed Imperators like us and our servants.

A Servus woman, Silver Rank I noted, came up to us smiling.

“Welcome! Please follow me and I will escort you to our VIP suites.” She said, clasping her hands together.

We followed her, I curiously looked over the walkways down at the central promenade that ran through the entirety of the center of the ship where restaurants and cafes could be found. Sparkling fountains splashed spurts of water up into the air in bursts and cheery music played throughout the expanse. On our right I could see through the glass siding the black emptiness of space. Floating in the air above the interior promenade without anything visibly holding it up was a body of water. It rippled and shone under colored spotlights that danced over its surface and stained it bright shades.

“Our pools,” the guide said proudly.

“What happens if you swim too close to the bottom?” Antonias asked.

“You fall out obviously.” Caesia said. She shoved him lightly. “Don’t be a dweeb and fall out or I’m going to laugh at you for all six weeks of this flight, Toni.”

“There’s an unseen forcefield preventing accidents from happening by passengers slipping out the sides or bottom of the pools.” The guide woman said. “We wouldn’t want to risk injury or death of our lesser passengers or the embarrassment of higher lifeforms such as yourselves or Golden Servi.”

We arrived at our suites and the guide bid us farewell. Livia and my suite was Suite 003. There was no keycard slot or number pad lock, but there was a small lens set at a Servus’s height. They had built it more for rich Slaves than Imperators, I guessed. I kneeled and shut my right eye and widened my left eye as I stared into the lens. We had submitted biometric data when we had booked our passage aboard the Skyfather’s Glory. The lens scanned my retina and the door beeped and then chirped like a bird, opening on its own. Livia and I walked in, followed by some servants Antonias had kindly lent me. They brought with them our bags.

The suite was large to say the least. It had a kitchen, a common room, six bedrooms with accompanying master bathrooms, sizeable servants’ quarters, a balcony that extended into space with the air being kept in via a forcefield and a gravity generator, a theatre room with forty-five foot width by thirty foot high projection screen, a small private gymnasium filled with exercise machines and weights, and a pool with an attached jacuzzi.

“Wow!” Livia said with her eyes wide.

“It’s pretty nice.” I admitted, though I tried not to gawk at the extravagance.

The Servi servants put our bags in our rooms and then filed off to the servants’ quarters. With my enhanced hearing, I heard them begin to talk more naturally and joke freely when they thought they were outside of my hearing when before they had been demure and silent unless directly spoken too. In a way, I kind of missed when I had been a Servus if only to be able to be treated like an ordinary person like the rest of these men and women. I shook my head, I was what I was now. I didn’t regret putting on the ring that had transformed me and rewrote my genes and soul to put me on the Path of the Emperor.

“What do you want to do now, Adrias?” Livia asked me.

I eyed the pool in our suite. “Let’s go swimming.”

“We didn’t bring any swimsuits.” Livia fretted.

I shrugged. “Just strip down to your underwear.”

“W-what?” She said, blushing a bright red.

I pulled my shirt off and then my shoes, my socks and my pants. After a moment’s hesitation Livia followed suit though she shielded herself when I looked back at her.

“We’ve changed in front of each other plenty of times back when we lived in that tiny apartment.” I said, amused.

“I know.” She said, though she was turning even redder.

“Come on.” I said, opening the glass door to the pool area. The scent of chlorine was strong. I liked the scent in a similar way to how I liked the smell of gasoline. They weren’t necessarily good smells, but they were distinctive in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. I could tolerate the smell of chlorine better than the obnoxious aroma of jasmine that was pumped into the transportation pod that had brought us up to the Skyfather’s Glory starship cruiser.

“Did the smell bother you too when we were being brought upwards to the ship?” I asked Livia.

“What smell?” She asked confused.

“The jasmine.” I said.

“The pod smelled like jasmine to you? I didn’t smell anything at all.” Livia said.

“Huh.” I said. It had been overpowering to my senses. Perhaps they were too sharp for my own good sometimes.

I took a flying jump into the pool, landing in a cannonball that splashed water high into the air. Even in the deep end I could touch the bottom and still protrude out of the water. I crouched down so I was submerged to my neckline. Livia dived in.

“Adrias.” She said smiling slyly.

“… what?” I said warily.

“Surprise attack!” She splashed water into my face.

I grinned and shook my head like a wet dog. Then I splashed her back. We played in the pool for an hour before we switched to the jacuzzi. I had to sit in the depression in the center in order to have a good amount of my body immersed in the hot water. It bubbled and frothed satisfyingly.

I closed my eyes in contentment. Sometimes it was nice to take a break from fighting and training and scheming and just enjoy life in a way that didn’t involve violence or drugs.

I heard a knock at the door.

“Who could that be?” Livia asked.

I stretched, reluctant to leave the soothing warmth of the jacuzzi and the relaxing feel of the bubbles churning the water.

Then came another knock, harder and more impatient.

“Adrias!” Antonias called through the door. “Hurry up, man.”

“Coming!” I called, knowing he could hear me even outside of the room.