AnnouncementI have TWO announcements!

  First up; Patreon! That's right, I'm taking the first steps to becoming self-supporting with my fiction writing. I'd always been a touch hesitant to do so before, but as I venture away from pure fanfiction and into the realm of original fics, it's time to y the foundation for being my own boss.

  (link)

  Next up; I've opened up a Discord server for fans of my works. It's currently in "Alpha" status, so I'm only opening it up to a number of people I feel comfortable with (which I don't know yet) and because you're reading this fic, you get a direct invite without having to ask for one on Tumblr!

  Princess Columbia's Fan Chat

  Hope to see you there! (Oh, and if you have any difficulty getting in, please message me here and I'll look into it)

  PrincessColumbia

  “Status of the security team?”

  “Inbound, half of them are in one car while the other half are presently loading...ah, they just finished, both cars are on their way.”

  She tapped a thumb on the screen of her mini-tab, “Any new comms?”

  “Negative, commander,” answered Cynthy, “Any requests for more details just gets the same introductory packet again.”

  Diane grumbled as she felt the rumbling of the docking cmps lock into pce with the vehicle presently connected to the top of her docking bay. “Well, looks like we’re about to find out why they’re being so quiet. Monitor this channel, Cynthy, I’ll set this to broadcast anything the mic picks up.”

  “Aye, Commander,” was the only reply as Diane tapped the buttons on the screen to mute any inbound audio. She shut off the screen and shoved the device in her pocket.

  She turned to Katrina’s hologram, “Any better sensor scans now that they’re actually docked?”

  “Negative,” replied the digital assistant, “You may want to consider prioritizing the sensor tower and astrometrics. Once those two buildings are completed we should be able to complete scans far more accurately, greatly enhanced resolution, and at greater range.”

  “Yeah, well, that’ll be nice for future us, but right now I get to interrogate a potentially hostile party that just boarded my station. Kat,” the off-the-cuff nickname seemed to make the hologram smile, “Do docked ships automatically connect to the station’s network?”

  Katrina nodded as the lights above the airlock flickered from red to yellow, indicating compression regution and atmospheric testing was underway, “They’re connected now.”

  “Good, start probing for vulnerabilities...discretely, if they turn out to be bad guys blow their firewalls to hell and get in as fast as you can. I want full control if we need it.” Katrina’s transparent eyebrows went up in surprise as Diane continued, “Dismiss the hologram for now, I want them underestimating us as much as possible.”

  “Clever thinking, and just in time. Here they are,” she said just before she de-rezzed and the cargo airlock indicator lights flipped to green, the door hissing open with a puff of recycled air.

  Standing in the wide access doorway was a single individual. He looked...like a salesman. Humanoid, though from his scent, slightly tinny, rather than the human and Morvuck coppery smell, he wasn’t human at all. Looking carefully, she realized that his ears seemed to either be nonexistent or fully flush to his skull. His...muzzle also seemed to protrude, like someone had started sculpting some other type of predator, changed their minds, and squashed it into a simucrum of human shape without bothering to get it right. In all, it was jangling Diane’s nerves.

  The man looked her up and down, seeming surprised she was there. A brief gnce around quite obviously revealing nobody else there, he turned his focus back on her, noted the firearm strapped to her hip, and nodded, “You would be the welcome wagon, I presume?”

  Diane debated internally for a moment how to best respond, finally deciding on, “If you like. It’s something of a concern when a rge, unscheduled, and unknown, ship barrels in at a comparatively breakneck clip after only doing us the favor of sending the cargo clearance packet. You’re honestly lucky we didn’t blow you out of the sky.”

  Apparently unphased, and perhaps a touch dismissive, the man just nodded in acknowledgement, “Well, for my own sake I’m gd you didn’t, then.” He extended his hand in a distinctly human gesture of a handshake, “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Taliesin Sanghvi, I’m the primary agent and representative of the recently formed Branwell Consortium.”

  “Diane Somni’els, station commander,” she said simply as she took his hand to shake it, “And the name ‘Branwell Consortium’ means very little to me, I’m afraid.”

  His face lit up, “Ah, magnificent! I hardly expected to meet with the station commander first thing! I mean, obviously that was the intent, but usually we get...in any case,” he effused without eborating. “That’s splendid! And yes, we recently broke away from our previous employer over...differences of opinion in as to how the interests of our business could best be served. In any case, we parted ways and struck out on our own! As it happens, we heard that this particur Terran station has finally opened for business, so we thought we should bring a sample of our wares and discuss a partnership.”

  “Well,” began Diane as she took her hand back, making the conscious effort to not automatically wipe it on her pants. She felt distinctly unclean having shaken his hand. If we only knew for sure he was a sver I’d be tempted to eject him from an airlock without a ship on the other side, he’s just such a...salesman, she thought with revulsion. “This particur station is still working on getting manpower to handle all the potential problems that might arise, such as cargo decred as ‘Livestock, other.’ You can understand how we might be concerned given how much of this station’s life support is dependent on several self-sustaining biomes.” She was about fifty-percent fabricating her statement by this point, but there was enough truth to it that Mr. Sanghvi merely nodded in understanding, “Since your manifest was decidedly...vague, I’ll need to inspect your cargo before any of it comes aboard my station.”

  Mr. Sanghvi merely nodded as if this were an everyday occurrence when a ship docked at a station. Who knows, thought Diane, I’m hardly an expert in cargo shipping in this game, maybe this is standard procedure. “Naturally!” he said in a slightly condescending tone, “We can even arrange a sampling of our wares while you’re aboard.”

  Diane refrained from commenting, not wanting to guess about said wares based on assumptions.

  Taliesin seemed downright proud of the beaten-up old ship as he reversed his course and began giving Diane the nickel tour. It was all, as far as Diane was concerned, familiar enough from her viewings of sci-fi (admittedly, mostly Trek). Security empcements at key crossways, deck pting that was easily removeable for convenient access to ducting and raceways and wiring. Especially grating was the way he tended to overexpin, as though she couldn’t know what he was talking about. Hell, she thought, I probably know more about starships than this guy, what with how many models I’ve built. The ship’s gravity apparently operated mostly on stored inertia, the precise mechanics of it seemed to be mostly technobabble and handwavium, and Diane honestly couldn’t have cared less.

  What she was focusing on was her very new sense of smell. Sure, outside the pod she had a functional nose, but as Diane she had a nasal structure that rivaled most Earth dogs. On her mostly empty station where the density of people wasn’t enough to drive home how intense the body odor of a sentient being could be she was mostly spared the problems of excessive body odor everywhere except the locker rooms, and on Mortan the entire culture had developed (for ‘game design’ levels of development) with the enhanced sense of smell as being just part of the environment.

  But whatever Taliesin’s species was apparently had the sense of smell of a human (or simir), because he wasn’t noticing, or at least not commenting on, what was practically the scent equivalent of bsting a spotlight in her eyes or parking her in front of a concert speaker at full volume; living bodies.

  Diane’s problem was she simply didn’t have the actual experience to interpret what she was smelling. Sure, there were bodies, and she didn’t think they smelled of death (she’d been around a dead body or five in her time at the agency, one doesn’t become a spook without some exposure to death), the scent could simply be a dead livestock animal, and since she’d never scented that particur animal she’d never know until she was seeing it.

  But she could tell there was a lot of bodies on this ship. The scents were fresh, and the closest thing she had to compare it to was seeing a video of a crowd at a concert or a line of people trying to get into a club; the density was too thick to make out individuals, but you knew there were a lot of them.

  “...and we have here is our cleaning bot station for this deck,” Mr. Sanghvi said as he indicated a section of what looked like wall pting that was offset from the rest by about four inches, “Once an hour this unit goes about the deck looking for anything that needs to be cleaned, whether that’s a chemical spill or psma residue or even biological waste and eliminates the waste material. Can’t have any sorts of contamination or diseases given what we’re transporting, am I right?” he cast a slightly conspiratorial smile at her.

  He was still giving off a vibe that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end, but again had shown her nothing concrete, so he just nodded and returned the smile, though perhaps a little hollowly.

  Every so often on their tour they’d pass another member of the crew, and she could see why this man was their designated representative. They looked clean-cut enough and there was nothing about them that gave signs that they were unkempt, but they all had that same ‘vibe’ that made her want to snarl at them. She was beginning to feel angry, though there was nothing for her anger to be directed at. It was like...

  ...it feels like they’re challenging me with their stares. The realization made the puzzle pieces fall together, at least mostly. She was a woman. They were men. They expected her to be subservient, compcent. Women aren’t supposed to be leaders, they’re supposed to follow their husbands, an inner voice that sounded a lot like her pastor dictated to her, This is why being a man is clearly better than being a woman. Any man will automatically be superior to a woman, and any woman will automatically be subservient to a man.

  She felt her gut roiling at the combination of odors around her, the predatory and/or hostile behavior of the crew, and her own mind doing its damnedest to tell her how much of a mistake it was to have created a woman character. They passed closed door after seemingly empty hallway where the smell of a musky odor she had identified during her time on the station as being associated with women (she hadn’t yet dug into what this scent’s source was, though her theory was that it came from the mucus membranes that were, on human women at least, only a little ways into the genital passage and responsible for the majority of the wetness and, consequently, odor that she had detected...heaven knew she had enough intimate knowledge of that since gaining the appropriate plumbing) incongruously identifiable in spite of the apparent ck of female crew. By the time they had made it to a primary security juncture, this keyed her up enough that when she saw the first woman besides herself on the ship, she almost sighed in relief...only to realize there were manacles on her wrists.

  Pulling herself out of her stress induced tunnel-vision, she realized that the woman was in something resembling a cage, though with an apparent energy barrier instead of bars. The barrier would shimmer softly, most likely from air crossing the energy threshold. The inside of the cell was as clean as the outside, which was to say, there was no sign of dirt or trash or dust, but the ship showed all the signs that it was simply old and that made it look shabbier than it actually was. The woman was as...’well kept,’ she supposed the best choice of words would be, as the men outside the apparent cell were, but there were obvious signs that she was not in good shape. From the overall ssitude of the woman’s posture to the fact that she never looked up to meet anyone’s eyes told Diane very clearly, this woman was broken. This close and she was able to start making out the woman’s unique scent under the myriad of odors that surrounded her. It seemed...off. She may have been inexperienced with her new nose, but she could at least recognize the overall stench of dumped adrenaline and bad stress. Whether from her time as a proto-agent in the real world being trained by full agents to take on the rogue A.I. or the few times someone had been injured on the station and she’d checked in on them in sick bay, she could identify that, at least. It seemed to be universal among species, or at least the humanoid ones she’d encountered thus far. She was also nearly naked, only an ill-fitting pair of mass produced briefs and a camisole-style top providing covering.

  Mr. Sanghvi seemed to notice how much attention he was paying to the woman. “Ah, that one caught your eye, how about I have her prepared and taken to one of the sampler suites we have on board? That will allow you to inspect the wares, and afterword, we can discuss a business retionship that will be beneficial to the both of us.”

  Not trusting her voice or her ability to choose words that wouldn’t be spoken in anger, she gave him a tight smile and nodded.

  Taliesin turned and strode about twenty feet away to the security desk to speak to one of the nearby crew, a man who’d been eyeing Diane like she were the ‘merchandise.’ He issued a few instructions to him quietly enough that Diane actually had to strain to hear him over the hum of the noises of the ship.

  “Get the merchandise ready, this is the commander of the station and it looks like she’s as much of a mark as we thought.”

  The other man grimaced, not realizing that Diane could see his expression perfectly from the corner of her eye. Thank you superior Morvish senses, she thought as he said under his breath, “Shouldn’t we just grab her and wait for the real commander to show up? She can’t actually be the one in charge...”

  Taliesin’s voice dropped even lower, “She’s a Morvuck, you idiot! Half of them are really men that only look like women and the other half are dykes! Get the girl ready and we’ll see which one she is when she tests out the goods in the sampling suite.”

  If she weren’t so insulted (on behalf of actual Morvish women, obviously) she’d have considered that a clever means of gathering intel. Of course, it also likely meant they had some sort of visual monitoring on whatever room they were using for ‘samples.’ Good thing I’m not pnning on actually getting caught with my pants down on this ship...

  A few minutes ter, yet another member of the crew (she’d lost track of how many she’d seen but noted that they were all men) hustled through a door to, apparently, open the cell the woman was in for transport to the ‘sampler suite.’ The automatic sliding panels of the hatch stayed open long enough that Diane caught a glimpse of dozens of simir cells, all lit up with active force field barriers, lining the passageway beyond.

  Her stomach twisting in knots as she watched the girl be guided down one of the corridors that branched off from the main hallway. She was watching with a predatory instinct, not focusing on the girl, but on the man practically dragging her off. She felt like her senses were keyed up to 11 and like the lights had gotten brighter while the scents had gotten...stinkier, for ck of a better descriptor.

  Sounding like he was just an inch from her ears, Taliesin’s voice echoed like they were in an amphitheater to her, “My colleague is just going to get her set in the sampler room. We haven’t got our full suite of paraphernalia that would give you the full experience, unfortunately.” She turned to him and simply raised an eyebrow, “Costumes, set pieces for the bedroom, that sort of thing. We’ve found our clientele has certain...tastes, often harkening back to the glory days of their home world’s history when svery was a more respectable business. Of course, Morvic women still practice the subtle art of domination, so perhaps we don’t need to provide anything for you in this case.”

  She wanted to rip his throat out. None of the women on Mortan behaved as this crew did. What little ‘dominance’ she’d noticed while on the pnet was done with gentle guidance and stern words (which she only now realized in retrospect that Rokyo had been using on Diane nearly the entire time she was there), to break a being so thoroughly as to leave the woman in the state she was in...that wasn’t domination, not like the Morvucks did it.

  He continued his sales pitch, but she was mostly tuning it out by that point. She had already decided this man wouldn’t be leaving her station...and realized that a very, very angry part of her had also decided that he wouldn’t be ending the day alive. She allowed herself to be guided to the sampler suite, her mind already plotting her next twenty moves, unsure if her blooming anger was going to allow her the patience to execute on these hastily made pns.

  Soon enough, the pocket door to the generically dipidated room they were calling the ‘sampler suite’ closed behind her. She looked around, her wide open senses giving her more information that was practical or useful at the moment. The girl was sitting on the bed, something resembling a queen sized mattress in bunk form and most likely two regur berths shoved together and a rger set of sheets and bnkets covering the whole of it. The room had been given a modicum of an upgrade from what she had seen as the standard around the ship so far. The walls had a fresh coat of paint (she could smell the chemical tang, it itched the inside of her nasal passages considerably) and the smell of cleaning chemicals was heavy, indicating recent use, likely within the st few hours. There was a pocket door on the opposite side of the room from the entrance, and she could smell even through the poorly maintained sealing gasket on the sliding panel that it was a bathroom, or at least a toilet. It had clearly been cleaned (more chemical smell), but bathrooms seemed to all smell pretty much the same no matter the ship or pnet and no matter the time period. It was a distinctly organic odor that twigged her instincts to gain some distance from the pce where waste was disposed of, even if she intellectually knew that was handled automatically by the ship.

  Why are the lights so bright?! she groused mentally, eyes tracking around the walls to look for anything resembling lighting control. She spotted it where you’d expect to find a light switch on a 22nd century Earth wall next to the door. Makes sense, she thought, Humanoids in this game will want to reach for the lighting controls as soon as they enter a dark room, and this game favors humanoids for their human pyers. She tested the panel and was gratified that the lights dimmed but didn’t go out. Once they were low enough that she was satisfied that she wasn’t going to have to squint through the entire encounter, she approached the woman sitting on the bed.

  Her dark green hair was clean, but obviously only given the barest of care. She had olive tan skin (a skin tone that she didn’t see much of in 22nd century America, which she decided was unfortunate because it did look quite beautiful) that might have looked luminous if she’d been properly fed and given access to proper lighting. She’d been fed, her body wasn’t showing signs of malnutrition, but Diane would wager it was a calorie deficient diet, one designed to keep captives from ever gaining the strength and energy to push back against abuses. Diane noted the pointed ears and wondered if there was also some key nutrients her species needed that she wasn’t getting, the way humans needed to take supplements if they couldn’t eat meat for their diet (The war and the resulting wall around the country, both physical and economic, meant that America was literally starving for a few years before the country’s agriculture and meat processing industry could be properly adapted, resulting in an entire generation suffering from edema and stunted growth).

  Very gently, Diane put a hand on the woman’s shoulder and guided her back to y on the bed and carefully positioned herself above the sve woman...using the action to disguise her other hand pulling her mini-tab out of her pocket and pcing it next to the woman’s head on the mattress.

  Diane tapped the ‘mute’ button and held her finger to her lips in the universal ‘quite’ gesture (at least she hoped it was universal) and murmured, “Katrina, were you monitoring?”

  “Every word, boss dy,” came the equally quiet reply. The sve woman’s eyes went wide as she realized that she wasn’t about to be ‘sampled,’ at least not right away. “Good job acting, by the way, the mini-tab was picking up your biometrics. Your endocrine system was pinging so hard I thought you were going to tear their heads off.”

  “That option is still on the table. Are you in their system?” Diane said as she began making motions as though she was being particurly intimate with the sve woman. To her credit, the woman (Diane hoped she’d have enough time and the opportunity to get a name) seemed to pick up on it and started moving as though reciprocating.

  “It rolled over like a puppy begging for a treat,” Diane’s nonplussed reaction to the simile was, fortunately, covered up by the sve’s actions. Diane blinked her thoughts back on track and took her own part of the masquerade back up again as Katrina continued, “Speaking of, I’ve got eyes on you through the hidden cameras in that room...what are you doing with that sve, boss? Should we make room in your quarters for her?”

  Diane rolled her eyes, “Kat...”

  The digital assistant chuckled, “Just pying boss. I’m still reading your biometrics and you’re clearly not there to enjoy yourself. That’s for your companion’s benefit, by the way. Good job picking up on what we’re putting down, you’re making this easier for us.”

  Diane nodded in acknowledgement to the other woman as she said, “The security team?”

  “At the airlock and awaiting orders. I’ve blinded the ship’s sensors to them, any entry will be a one-hundred percent surprise.”

  Diane was as surprised as the sve woman when a deep, hungry rumbling rose up from the bottom of Diane’s ribcage and was loud enough to practically vibrate the deck pting. “Good,” she growled, “Tell the sergeant that her team is to prioritize rescuing the sves. You’re going to drop the cage doors and any other electronic measures that are keeping them ensved. I’ll be keeping the crew...busy.” she could barely get the st word out, the scent of fear from the other woman seeming to drive her barely leashed fury to new heights. She wanted to leap out the door now and begin tearing into the svers with her cws and teeth!

  “Busy doing what, boss dy?”

  “They will be busy surviving,” rumbled Diane with a menace that she was almost frightened to hear coming from her own mouth.

  PrincessColumbia