Chaos Quarter: Imperial Ambitions Read online

  “Other than that,” Rex cut in, knowing he sounded more annoyed than he should. “I mean nobody taught you how to properly fire a gun?”

  “It was not considered necessary for my duties,” she replied.

  “Got a natural there,” Jake declared. His knees bent and locked in what was his “sitting” position. Had a biological human tried it, their muscles would’ve been aching in a matter of seconds. Just looking at Jake in this position made Rex feel a twinge of pain in his legs.

  “I want to fire again,” said Second.

  Rex waved her on. Nothing happened. She stared at him.

  “Remember gestures, Second? A wave means go ahead,” Rex spoke.

  “It also means good-bye and functions as a method of getting attention. Which meaning did you imply?” she asked.

  Lucius gave up the fight and chuckled to himself.

  “Well, I’m not going anywhere, and I already have your attention. Context and deduction imply…” he began, trailing off and waving her on.

  “That I should shoot,” she finished. She smiled, pleased with herself, and turned. She fired and kept firing. In a half-dozen minutes she’d emptied forty rounds into the target.

  Rex’s mechanical eye zoomed in again. The entire center of the target had been shot out, revealing splintered wood behind it.

  “Jesus,” Rex muttered.

  “All hits, weren’t they?” Lucius asked.

  “Every one,” Rex replied, looking at Second with newfound respect.

  “These shots would have killed a person?” Second asked.

  “Yes,” Jake replied. “Forty persons.”

  Second frowned visibly at this and stepped back from the bench. Lucius stepped up to fire off a clip.

  “Which forty people?” Second asked as the gunner let loose.

  “What?” Rex asked.

  “Jake said I could kill forty people. Which forty people would I kill?” she asked.

  “It’s hypothetical,” Jake clarified. “You don’t have to kill anybody.”

  She thought about this for a moment.

  “But I killed the ambassador. I am a killer,” she surmised.

  The vast chamber went silent. Lucius even turned from the target, staring at Second with concern in his eyes.

  “Second, it doesn’t work like that—” Rex began.

  “But I killed him!” she said, suddenly frantic. “By your own laws, I am a murderer!”

  “It isn’t murder when the person is trying to kill you,” Rex stressed.

  She looked ready to cry, and Rex knew she didn’t know how to handle that. He’d seen her tears maybe twice since he’d rescued her.

  “I…I…”

  She turned abruptly and stormed out of the room, into the lower-level corridor.

  “Umm…” Jake said.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Rex replied and took off after her.

  He found her at the end of the lower corridor straightaway, just before it bent at a ninety-degree angle and ran across the ship. She sat slumped in the corner, tears streaking her face.

  “Second, what is it? Tell me what you’re feeling, as it happens,” Rex said.

  “I don’t understand!” she snapped through tears. “He hurt me! Why do I feel bad?”

  He crouched in front of her, gently wrapping his hands around her fists. Slowly he pried open the fingers.

  “The ambassador?”

  “Yes,” she said, hyperventilating. “He hurt me. He raped me, and…and I didn’t even know. Why should I feel bad?”

  “You feel bad for killing him?” Rex asked.

  “No! I…maybe…I do not know!” she wailed. She flung her head forward, crying into his shoulder. A great deal of shock ran through Rex on top on his concern. Second, generally speaking, didn’t know how women acted, or how men acted, for that matter. Yet the act was all too human.

  “I see his image in my mind when I don’t want to,” she said, her fist balling through the fabric of his shirt. “I see memories of him…they are painful. They are bad, but they keep appearing. I do not know why my brain is repeating images that I find painful. It does not make sense…my memory of killing him does not feel bad. Why is that not repeating?”

  “The mind has weird ways of dealing with things sometimes. They don’t always seem to make sense to us—” Rex began.

  “How can my own mind not make sense to me? That does not make sense!” she said, cold and angry.

  “It’s…uh…it’s a subconscious thing,” Rex managed.

  She blinked a few times and then said, “Mental processes that are occurring without direct conscious knowledge or control.”

  “Yeah, that. It’s always going, figuring things out that you’re unaware of. Maybe that’s why you keep seeing the ambassador,” Rex suggested.

  “I was unaware of the subconscious before you liberated my mind,” Second informed.

  Rex’s eyes went wide, the words slowly sinking in.

  “You mean before the surgery your brain didn’t…didn’t function in the background?” Rex asked.

  “I am not sure,” she said. “If it did, I was unaware of it. Random memories did not appear in my mind.”

  “Good God!” Rex said in disbelief, massaging his bow. How exactly did a person respond to something like that? Or even make sense of it? It had been hard just wrapping his mind around the idea that she had existed, for ninety-seven years, without free will. It had never occurred to him that control of her mind had been so absolute that she’d been unable to even be aware of any thoughts except the ones she was actively thinking. And since she had only thought of things the ambassador had tasked her to, it meant the only thoughts she’d ever had were ones he had specifically instructed her to think of. Tasks he wanted her to do, facts that she needed to know to do those tasks…nothing of her own, nothing that did not serve Ambassador Cody’s purpose.

  Fucking monsters, he thought to himself. Hell, Lucius’s former people were bad, but even the most brutal Europan couldn’t actually directly control what thoughts their serfs had!

  His mind hurt from contemplating it, so he decided to step back, focusing on the more immediate cause of her pain.

  “Okay, forget all that for now. Today, just now, when did you start feeling bad?” Rex asked.

  Her words were muffled by his shirt when she spoke.

  “When Jake said I could kill forty people,” she managed. “It…it did not feel the same as when I remember killing the ambassador. It felt…cold. I felt cold thinking it.”

  “Well, remember that he said could, Second, could,” Rex said. “Not would. He only meant that you would be physically able to do it, not that you would do it.”

  “I don’t want to kill people,” she said, almost in a whisper. She looked into his eyes, her face no different than any crying woman he’d ever seen.

  “And that is a very good thing,” Rex replied. “A moral thing. It would be wrong for anyone to go around wanting to murder people.”

  “But I didn’t feel wrong killing Ambassador Cody,” she repeated. Rex didn’t have to ask to know she felt that way. In the last eight months, since the surgery that had removed the control cortex from her brain, she’d been able to see, feel, and remember everything that had been done to her, from an all-too-human viewpoint. Given the context, the staggering level of hate she felt for her late ex-master was entirely reasonable.

  “Second, listen. He wronged you. He committed crimes against you that can’t be forgiven, and he was going to kill all of us. When somebody is trying to kill you, and you have to kill them to stop that, it isn’t murder,” he explained, slowly to make sure she understood each point.

  “But he’s still dead, and I still did it,” she replied. “That means I could do it again.”

  “Yes, true enough. But so could I. So could Lucius, or Jake, and Chaki. But we don’t. And you won’t. Ask yourself, do you feel the compulsion to kill anybody now? The way you did when you killed the ambassador?”

/>   “No,” she said, her tears slowing.

  “How about when we were on Paphlygonia? Did you want to kill then?”

  “No.”

  “See, murderers do. They don’t kill because they’re threatened; they kill because they want to. Do you understand?”

  “No,” she said. “Why would they want to kill?”

  “For money, for power, because they hate somebody…they have a lot of reasons,” he explained.

  “I hated the ambassador,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  “It’s okay to hate somebody who is trying to kill you. But if they’re not trying to kill you…”

  She paused and then said, “Then killing them would be murder.”

  “Yes.”

  She was quiet for a moment, but not settled.

  “Is that why you are teaching me to shoot? To kill people if they try to kill me?”

  “Or us,” he replied. “There are bad people out here who will murder somebody to get what they want.”

  “How will I know the difference?” she asked.

  “You’ll know,” Rex replied. “It’s instinctive.”

  She looked away from him, lost.

  “Do I even have instincts?” she asked.

  “Yes, you wouldn’t be crying if you didn’t,” Rex replied. He grasped her by the shoulders and guided her to her feet.

  “I want to go to my cabin,” she said quietly.

  Rex took a step back and waved her on toward the spiral staircase that led to the upper deck.

  “This is a ‘go-ahead’ wave, just so you know,” he said with a smile.

  Her face tightened into a scowl.

  “I know that,” she said with just a hint of irritation.

  He rolled his eyes and headed back to the cargo bay.

  ***

  Grith half-dozed, the darkness of sleep interrupted occasionally by the star-specked darkness of space, whenever his eyes opened. There wasn’t much else to do. Prezwalski was empty. There were some rogues flying around in clunkers, but little else. None of the local states wanted to claim it, not with it being so close to the Commonwealth. The local “states” liked a little buffer zone between them and the big dog, some empty space beyond their control so that they could claim they had nothing to do with whatever was pissing the Terrans off. And Terrans could be annoying—make a wrong jump and stray into one of their systems and they’d have a damn fleet out, hunting you down. Poor Spotsy had made that mistake a few systems over and was now rotting in some Commonwealth jail cell.

  Not that there was much here that would’ve interested the local despots anyway. There were lots of rocks, which Grith knew probably had a lot of metal in them. But every system had asteroids. It wasn’t worth sending in the troops to secure Prezwalski when you could find the same thing in your own backyard.

  He sighed and opened his eyes completely. Blackness awaited him—pretty much the same blackness he’d seen when he tried to sleep. His vessel, formerly a fast-delivery courier ship of Nipponese make, hovered in orbit around the same dull asteroid that it had been circling for six hours. He had no idea when Kerwood thought his target would come through here, or even if he did. The man had sent his scouts to four systems, all along the Commonwealth border. He was expecting somebody to come through this way and was in a bad mood about it.

  It was unusual for his employer to take this route. Kerwood, commander of the Drake Company, liked to keep his forces together. He’d spent years building up his company from a group of ragtag pirates into the region’s best mercenaries and years more convincing worlds to hire his people for protection. Scattering meant putting valuable ships at risk. Rogue pirate bands couldn’t do much against the Drake Company when they moved in force. But they were all too willing to pick off a ship on its own.

  Yet here Grith was, waiting for a “small Commonwealth freighter” to arrive…

  The ship’s radar chirped. For a moment the sound didn’t register, and then it chirped again. Grith rubbed his eyes and leaned forward. The display showed a ship having just entered the system. Well, it had actually entered the system four hours ago; it had just taken that long for the radar to hit it and bounce back across the vastness of space. The computer tracked it, plotting out a general path as more and more waves returned.

  Grith enlarged the signature on the screen. A fuzzy picture of the vessel emerged. It was small for a freighter, with a squarish, blocky hull and what looked like engines on side pylons. He’d seen similar ships before. They went for big money around these parts, even when beat up and half-stripped. It was definitely Commonwealth.

  “Son of a bitch…” Grith said. He shifted in his seat, and grabbed the controls. With a jerk he pulled the scout ship out of orbit and headed for the nearest jump point. Kerwood order’s had been clear: If you see the ship, jump back to Natagoy and send word. The company would be waiting.

  From what I’ve seen of your entertainment, you as a people go out of your way to avoid the portrayal of the dark aspects of sex. You don’t like to show how it’s used for power or when it’s used to inflict hurt or how prevalent such behavior is in the galaxy. You are disgusted by the very idea of rape and rightfully so. It is absent from much of your story telling. Or it is implied but not spoken of. Even your “dark, gritty” films and programs minimize the portrayal of such things. Your civilization goes out of its way to promote the idea that sex is always meant to be positive, consensual, and joyful. The ideal is demanded and the reality scorned. You have no idea how refreshing this is to me and how great you are as a people for doing this. Both in the empire and the Chaos Quarter sex is far from ideal. So much of it is concubines and prostitutes—women, and sometimes men, passed around as nothing more than vessels for another’s pleasure. To a bed serf in the empire, sex is not about pleasure; it is a duty, their reason for existing. To the wild-born serfs who work our factories and fields, sex is a weapon used against them by the nobles and warriors. It is a weapon they are not above using against each other when their superiors aren’t looking…so much have we debased them. And as you already know from my wife, the scum who inhabit the Chaos Quarter are all too eager to imitate the empire when they get their hands on something they like. For so much of my life, such behavior was considered normal, part of what being a noble was. Now, after what I had with my first love Yvette, and now with Chakrika, I find myself wondering how I could have ever thought it right to take something meant to be so wonderful and loving and make it so brutally hurtful…May God forgive me; I was a monster…

  —Logs of the debriefing of Lucius Baliol, taken February to June 2507 Standard Date; Classified; Not for public release

  Natagoy System, Chaos Quarter, Standard Date 8/08/2507

  “And your man is sure?” Vermella asked.

  Kerwood nodded, unable to pull his eyes from the swell of Vermella’s breasts as they pushed up against the camisole. She was a tall woman of great beauty, her features finely shaped. Her cheekbones were high and framed deep, green eyes. Her mouth was small and lips, full. Red hair cascaded from her head, framing her face in a profusion of auburn. Her skin was light, but not as pale as so many red-haired people. Even had she not been of Sirizonia, it was likely the swarthy little Kerwood would still be wrapped around her finger.

  But she was not the type to leave such things to chance, so she pulsed out just a bit more sex pheromone, her neck twitching slightly as she did. Kerwood, diminutive warlord of the legendary Drake Company, Victor of One Hundred Battles, Hunter of Pirates, The Man Who Killed for not but Gold, visibly shuddered as the scents washed over him. He dropped his head a bit closer to her, inches from what he desired.

  “He’s sure…” Kerwood said, somehow making such ordinary words sound lustful. His right hand came up, ready to cup and fondle.

  “Uh-uh!” said Vermella. “Who said I was ready for that?”

  “Sorry, my love,” he grumbled, dropping his head to his chest.

  “Oh, it’s my fault,” she replied, movin
g to lie down on the small bunk in the small cabin of her small ship. “I really need to spend more time with you. I know how irritated you get when I’m away.”

  She gave him a “what-can-you-do” smile and nestled her head back. Kerwood stayed where he was, visibly vibrating with lust. He’d been away for a few days now, out looking for the freighter Mr. Gareth’s message had spoken of. The Terrans and their jump-gate system had meant that her pet Europan spy, Gareth, had been able to get word to the edge of the Chaos Quarter in less than two days. His coded message had been received by one of the Drake Company’s ships; the ships had then, on her (or Kerwood’s) orders, spread out along the Terran frontier to look for their quarry. And now one had found them, a fellow named Grith. She did not recall having bonded the man to her, meaning he was probably of no importance to the company. All those who were, who held any power, had lain in her bed already. They now spent their free moments dreaming of when she would return. She did return to them, ever so often. Let a bonded man go without her presence too long and he started going crazy; longer still and he usually ended up killing himself. And she honestly didn’t mind making the rounds. Some of the Drake Company’s underlings were far better lovers than Kerwood.

  He was shaking noticeably now, all the pheromones in the air pushing his sex drive well beyond the normal human limit. But she was sure to pulse out a few control pheromones, masterful creations of her people that could dull a man’s body and make it hard for him to act on his desires. She could only imagine how Kerwood’s mind was working right now…every instinct telling him to mount her, mixed with fear of her response if he dared act so forwardly, all suppressed by the fact that his body was slow to respond to either impulse.

  It was such a delicious torture—one men had richly deserved for so long, but only recently had been able to feel. She let it drag out for a few minutes longer and then sighed.

  “Kerwood, pleasure me,” she said, spreading her thighs wide. The loose skirt she wore bunched up around her hips, revealing everything to him.