We all love fairy tales growing up. The great adventures, the handsome princes, the gorgeous maidens -- these tales have been etched in our memories.
But what if these fairy tales are given a twist? What if the stakes have changed?
The Oh My! Antho...
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Alarms blare as Prince Richard strides into the security room. He tries to rub away the soreness from where his wrists had been bound, but the feeling won’t go away.
“What’s your report, Captain.” His voice echoes through the white, cavernous room with the authority of his title.
Royal guards in their tidy red uniforms jump to attention. The room reeks of panic.
The crown prince joins the captain of the guard in front of video monitors that replay different angles of the unknown girl’s flight from the palace. There’s a smirk in her warm brown eyes as she looks back over her shoulder. She teases him. Catch me if you can.
“Your Highness,” the captain says. His voice trembles. “We are having trouble finding her registration number. We’ve searched the invitations scanned for tonight’s ball and one has been tampered with. It was just a shell. It didn’t have a personal ID attached to it.”
Richard folds his arms across his broad chest. “So we don’t have a name. What about a ship? She can’t have entered Sigyn palace airspace on an unregistered craft.”
“The number was brand new, issued in the past week…” his voice fades.
“No name to that either?”
“No name.” The captain continues his summary. “She left on an old planet jumper so she can’t go far. Those things aren’t meant for deep space.”
“Assuming it hasn’t been modified,” Richard says.
“You really think her capable of that?”
“I wouldn’t put anything past her.” Richard smiles despite his wounded pride. “No, she hacked into our information archives. Alone. I need to know what she was looking for.”
A woman with a tablet rushes up to them.
“Your Highness, the only files accessed in the last hour were the files on our proprietary terraforming technology.”
Prince Richard’s head snaps to look out the gaping window that faces north. Sigyn-9’s atmospheric stabilizers glow on the horizon. A green light pulses against the night sky like the planet’s heartbeat.
Genius.
The terraforming technology developed by the Sigyn Federation was the crown jewel of what would soon be Prince Richard’s kingdom. That tech was worth more than any gem in their treasury. It was what made the Sigyn Star System so powerful — that they didn’t have to rely on terrodomes to stay alive. An artificial magnetosphere meant they could do much more than just get by. Smart girl. The wealth of a kingdom at her fingertips and she chose knowledge. Dangerous girl.
“The files were downloaded to a storage device. They haven’t been released onto an interplanetary computer network so that’s a relief,” the woman says.
