PrincessColumbia

  Svery, Child Svery, Child Sex Trafficking, Statutory Rape mention, violence, gore...

  ...yeah, this chapter is the first to earn the "Gore" tag I filed this fic under.

  [colpse]

  A few more words were exchanged via the mini-tab, locking down pns in the few minutes Katrina and the security team needed to be ready to do their parts.

  Finally satisfied that their hastily made pns were good enough that they weren’t going to come apart at the seams, she finally said, “...what about the sves? Do we have enough active apartments and supplies to take care of them?”

  Diane was sure she heard a smug note in Katrina’s voice, “Already unlocked an empty hab and prepped the synthesizers. Medical supplies, recovery rations, and clothing are being prepped as we speak.”

  Diane gave a soft smile, hoping she was conveying sympathy, to the poor sve woman who was having to function as a prop for their shadow-py, “You’re a lifesaver, Kat. Thank you.”

  “Just pointing out, boss-dy, you’re the one saving lives with this.”

  Diane rolled her eyes, “Gotta get the st word in, don’t you?”

  An impish giggle came through the device just before the digital assistant said, “No,” and remotely triggered the ‘mute’ function on the mini-tab.

  Diane pushed herself off the bunk, burying a chuckle behind the motions to slip the mini-tab back into her pocket. The woman who’d been quietly helping by, well, not doing much besides acting out the most basic of masquerades y on the bed with a confused expression. “Sit tight,” Diane said in what she hoped was a reassuring tone, “With any luck we’ll getting you some healthy meals and medical attention soon.”

  At the woman’s nod, Diane turned to the door and stepped up to it...only to stop short as she realized it wasn’t sliding open. She gnced down at the control pad next to the door and gred down at the red light indicating the door was locked from the outside. “Kat, if you would, please...” she muttered. The indicator light flicked to green and she heard a thunk as the door cmps disengaged. Diane’s lip curled up in a predatory grin as the door slid open to reveal an empty, darkened hall. “Buzz once for yes, twice for no,” she said quietly as she stepped through the open door, “Is the room still being monitored via video?” A single vibration of her mini-tab hummed against her leg in her pocket. She nodded approvingly, “You’re spoofing the feed?” Another buzz. “Get my attention if I’m about to be discovered, I’m going to track down the scumbag who called me a mark.” A single buzz vribrated against her leg as she began sniffing the air.

  Moving stealthily through the ship wasn’t hard, the svers apparently mostly managed security and 'inventory control' with the electronic devices they strapped to the sves. The energy fields on their cells, the isotion, and the panopticon-style arrangement of banks of cells visible to lightly manned guard posts meant there simply wasn’t much need for a robust crew, even if there were hundreds of sves.

  It also made it easy for her to track one Taliesin Sanghvi, as the few men on board meant distinguishing their scents was a comparatively easy task next to the plethora of female scents on the ship. It helped that he wasn’t quite human, a scent signature she’d been learning to identify among the people on her station. The smell of body odor and tin stood out enough for her to follow the trail through the unfamiliar corridors.

  About a minute into her tracking, she passed a door that matched the type that had led to the previous bank of sve cells she’d seen while with the consortium’s ‘representative,’ and that’s when she started to notice another scent signature that seemed to be paralleling Taliesin’s. After two turns she was very sure, Taliesin had picked up a female individual that was accompanying him. Given the ck of female crew from everything she’d seen, she’d wager the sver was sampling his own wares.

  Already feeling sick to her stomach from the svery, there was something twigging her about this scent in particur, something that made her think, oddly enough, of the css of Morvish girls who were favored by the Matron who’d adopted Diane. She wasn’t quite sure why the association was coming up for her. After spending several days on Mortan, she now knew what a Morvick woman smelled like and would be able to single one out in a whole crowd of aliens. This particur female scent wasn't Morvick, so why was she thinking about the girls in the elementary school css?

  A sudden realization stopped her cold. She had to brace herself against the wall as the possible answer skittered across her thoughts. No... she thought, They wouldn’t...they wouldn’t put that in a game, right?

  She dropped the stealth she’d been using and started moving so fast her coat was starting to billow up behind her. As the pair of scents grew stronger, she finally spotted a hatch that she was hoping would be the end of the trail, and sure enough the scents ended in front of the door. “Kat!” she hissed, hoping the digital assistant was still closely monitoring her. The door slid open as Diane drew the pistol from her thigh holster and held it at the ready, thumb flipping the switch that would arm it with a round of energy shot.

  She hadn’t quite caught Taliesin with his pants down, but from the looks of things if she’d deyed even another thirty or so seconds she would have. He’d removed his tailored jacket and was undoing the ties on his shirt when he whipped around in surprise to see her holding him at gunpoint.

  And sitting on his bunk, eyes wide with surprise, was a girl who couldn’t have been more than 16 years old. A human girl from the scent, which just made Diane all the more sure that this wasn’t just some alien species that happened to look like a teenager.

  Nearly every muscle in Diane’s body was primed for action as she stepped through the hatch and let it close behind her. Taliesin backed away, keeping distance from her and eyeing her like she was an apex predator and he’d stepped into her territory.

  Which was exactly what had happened.

  Before she’d even opened her mouth to speak, a deck-rattling growl emanated from her as her teeth bared. Interesting, came the passing thought, Morvuck’s have muscuture to flex their fangs. As her lips peeled back she could feel the sharper ‘eye’ teeth in her jaw shift and rotate slightly, moving into a position that, should she bite down on someone, would sing very, very deep into flesh.

  As her growl tapered off, she finally managed to speak something resembling English, “Are you,” a far deeper voice than her usual came from her throat, still feminine but dropping into a range she hadn’t realized this body possessed, “The captain of this ship?”

  Taliesin narrowed his eyes at her, “...how did you get out of the cell we locked you in? I should have been notified...”

  She interrupted him by shooting the socket-joint of his shoulder.

  Dark blue blood spttered on the bulkhead ptting behind him as he dropped to his knees with a scream of agony. “I...” her voice rumbled, “Am not pying games. Are you the captain of this ship?”

  Apparently in too much pain to do much more than wail and moan, he shook his head frantically.

  Grabbing him by the colr of his shirt, she dragged him across the small room to the door. Before she got close enough to open it, she turned to the girl on the bunk, who had scrambled back into the corner opposite the door and curled up into a frightend ball, watching Diane with terrified eyes.

  Diane realized she must look like a nightmare in a white suit. Her reptilian jaw with her fangs rotated in an apparent threat dispy and her lips twisted back in what probably looked like the most frightening grin ever, and given how bright lighting and sharp the details, she’d wager that her pupils were dited wide enough to make her eyes look like bck holes in her skull.

  She closed her eyes and mouth and took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down at least a little before looking to the girl again. “Stay here,” she managed in a voice that was absent the growling she was producing earlier, “My crew will be by to ensure you are taken to safety and off this ship.” She looked up to the ceiling, an affectation she knew she didn’t have to but couldn’t seem to shake if she was talking to someone she couldn’t see, “Katrina, are you patched into their systems enough to isote a channel from ops to this room?”

  The intercom speakers in the room clicked to life, “I did that before you got out of that sampler cell they had you in, boss-dy.”

  “Good,” she felt a little of the growl sneaking back in, “Have someone from ops talk to this girl, help her keep calm. It won’t be safe in the halls of this ship for the next while and I don’t want her panicking because I looked like a monster.”

  To Diane’s surprise, Cynthy’s voice responded, “I can do that, commander. I’m probably the closest in age of anyone in Ops to her.”

  Diane sighed in relief, “Thank you, Cynthy, you’re worth your weight in…” she trailed off, wondering what someone who’d grown up as a refuge on a space station would find valuable.

  Russe had apparently been listening in (as she’d expected, the man was eagerly competent and competently eager), “Water?”

  She nodded, “You’re worth your weight in water, Cynthy.”

  “Thank you, ma’am!” came the enthusiastic reply. Diane turned just enough to see the teenaged sve on the bed looking at her with wide eyes. Not turning further, not opening her mouth, she just nodded, hoping that would be a reassuring action, before dragging the whimpering form of Taliesin through the hatch.

  ~~~

  “Here’s the thing, Mr. Sangvhi; you screwed up in several ways,” she said casually as she dragged him down the hall like a leaking sack of garbage, blue trailing behind them as the sver bled from his destroyed shoulder.

  Pausing to point her pistol at an intercom panel, she shredded the electronics with an energy pulse. “See, the good folks who live on my station, they predate me. They gave me the head’s-up on your type of ship before you even docked. Of course,” she paused again at a t-junction and gnced left and right, “We couldn’t know for sure about you until we could confirm what your... ‘livestock’ was. I mean, can you imagine how bad it would have been if you’d been hauling cattle and we blew you out of the sky because we thought you might be svers?” She shook her head with a ‘tsk’ sound, “Which way?”

  He groaned and blinked, the pain starting to cloud his thought process. “...pain...can’t think...” he gasped.

  With all the concern of dropping st year’s tax forms in the shredder, she shot the deck next to his feet.

  “That way!” he gasped frantically, feet scrambling to try and gain traction on the blood slicked floor, pointing with the arm not hanging uselessly.

  “Good boy!” she chirped, an almost hostilely sarcastic note in her voice. She turned down the hall, pausing to bst another comm panel to sparking ruin, “So we came prepared, and you really need to improve your cyber-security. My station’s computers just rolled right in and took over.” Another bsted panel punctuated her sentence.

  “W...why...?” he groaned.

  “Why blow out the panels? Oh, see, I’m trying to get attention. I’m not even really caring if I actually meet your captain, but if I shot him in the shoulder that’d pitch this boat into red alert and guarantee nearly the entire crew starts swarming me.”

  As though her words were the trigger, the lights in the corridor flipped to maximum right before turning scarlet and a whooping arm rang out. “Intruder alert! Intruder alert! All avaible security to...”

  She ignored the rest and turned to Taliesin, who to her amusement was actually grinning as though he’d won. “Should...” he gasped out, “Should have just c-“ a shuddering breath shook him, “Cuffed you as soon as I saw you. J-jumped up woman, thinks...” he cried out as she dropped him and casually checked the charge on her pistol, clearly not bothering to try to prepare for the inbound security forces beyond that. After a few moments of catching his breath he pushed through the pain, “Jumped up woman thinks she could run a station. We were going to make you a business partner, you know, slowly take the station out from under you, wait for any little thing to overwhelm you and then...” he shuddered, finally putting pressure on the open wound. “Put you back in your pce. Now you’ve invited our people to storm your station, kill everyone aboard, and just take it. The pce is unlocked, you chose to lose everything all at once and just hand it over to us.”

  She let him finish, watching dispassionately as he struggled to prop himself up against the wall, then just grinned. It wasn’t a friendly smile, it was anger, it was fury, and it was a threat, her lips peeling back to show her extended fangs, her rows of very sharp teeth, and her serpentine tongue as it shed out of her mouth in a pure threat dispy. “That’s where you screwed up the second time. You underestimated me...badly.”

  She didn’t even look to aim, simply raised her arm and pulled the trigger on her pistol. Down the hall, the first of the security guards dropped, a new hole opened in his face.

  Leaping into action, she moved using a combination of her training as a cyber-agent and her body’s native ambush-predatory abilities. For a slowly curving corridor, down which the security guards merely had to point their weapons and pull the trigger, they were really bad at it. She practically bounced off the walls as she zigged and zagged across the space, covering the twenty or so feet faster than she had any hope of doing as a regur human. Even on the move she’d dropped two more of the guards with nearly perfectly aimed shots to the head.

  She felt like the world was moving in slow motion as she holstered her pistol and extended her cws, sshing the throats out of the two remaining guards in that group, grabbing their weapons (energy pulse rifles from the looks of them) as they dropped, clutching their throats. Dropping to one knee, she flipped the rifles in the air and grabbed them by their pistol grips, one in each hand, spinning on her knee and taking aim in the other direction just as a second group of guards ran into view. She waited until five were visible before pulling the triggers on both weapons, rather gratified that the over-confident guards had them switched to fully automatic. White smears of light crossed the sixty or so feet, ripping into the men before they could even raise their weapons.

  Once their bodies thudded down to the deck, she released the triggers and listened closely, mentally cataloging every possible sound for any threat to her. Hearing nothing, she stood and checked the charges on the rifles, nodding with satisfaction when she saw their power cells were still easily over 99% full. She found a fairly handy clip that held a carefully folded strap for carrying the weapon. She disengaged the clip and drew the strap out to its full length, tossing the strap over her shoulder and carried the other by the stock. She ignored the blood dripping from her hands, a mixture of green and red from the two apparent species she simply couldn’t be bothered to learn the names of at the moment, and stepped around the bodies being careful of the pooling fluids.

  At least she now knew what a dying and freshly dead body smelled like.

  The pained smile was gone from Taliesin’s face, repced by a look of hunted terror.

  She didn’t bother to suppress her body’s desire to bare her teeth, nor did she bother to shade her eyes when the pupils blew out wide. Her body was hunting, and she had no disagreement with it at the moment.

  She crouched down in front of Taliesin, casually setting the rifle well within his reach...if the arm on that side of his body was capable of picking it up. His eyes looked from the weapon to her eyes and back, she could see him calcuting whether he could lunge for it with his other arm.

  “And, see, all that might have just earned you a one-way ticket to a holding cell of some sort until we could find some sort of bounty to collect on you.” He blinked at her in confusion, she watched as his brow knit in perplexed thought until he realized she was simply continuing her previous monologue, “But then I discovered something about you, something I think you considered yourself above the consequences of.”

  Faster than even she thought she’d be capable of, her arm shed out and her hand cmped around his throat. His working hand reached up, suddenly desperate to open his windpipe that was being crushed by her grip as she lifted him by his throat, raising to a standing position and pinning him against the wall.

  “I discovered you like to rape little girls, Mister Sangvhi.” Her own words reminded her of the scene she’d managed to interrupt, the teenage girl, helpless to do anything and bound to allow whatever advances anyone might make on her, and she realized she’d never really had the desire to rip someone’s heart out and show it to them as they died.

  But then, she’d never had cws and an obscene level of strength before, either.

  Snapping the cws out on her free hand, she stabbed him in the gut with a knife strike. Thanks to the organic knifepoints at the tips of her fingers backed by enough strength to move an appreciable percentage of a ton with ease, her arm sank into his torso up to the elbow. She followed the sensation of his now frantically beating heart and found it within a moment or two. Tearing it out was so easy she wondered for a moment if she’d grabbed the right organ until she saw it emerge from the gash in his belly clutched in her hand. As hearts did, it continued to pump, dark blue liquid spurting out the torn rifts and dangling veins and arteries. She held him against the wall long enough to confirm he was looking at his own slow death before she dropped him. He sptted in the pool of his own blood limply, lungs attempting to take in air which no longer had a bloodstream to oxygenate. She dropped his heart just as callously, ensuring it nded in front of his eyes as his life faded.

  She started walking away from the dead sver, flicking the sticky slick of his fluids off her hand. After a few steps she slowed to a stop and held her blood and gore covered arm out and just...stared at it. What am I doing? came a distant, hollow thought from deep in her consciousness. I...just ripped a man’s heart out with my bare hands...

  A few moments ter, Katrina’s voice, small and tinny-sounding coming from the mini-tab in Diane’s pocket, managed to shake her out of her stupor, “You okay there, Diane?”

  Diane blinked, following Katrina’s question out of the fog of her own thoughts, “I...I’m fine. They didn’t manage to injure me.”

  “Not what I meant, boss-dy,” Diane imagined Katrina would be putting her holographic hand on her decidedly non-holographic shoulder in a dispy of intimacy, “Your biometrics were showing signs of sudden high stress response.”

  That’s a frighteningly ‘human’ response... Maybe it was the sudden paranoia about her own extremely aggressive behavior, the feeling like she was only half-piloting her body even if she could remember making every single decision leading up to her monstrous appearance and actions; a white suited not-woman wearing a pretention of femininity stretched thin over a beast so ready to bath in blood it couldn’t even be bothered to kill humanely. And now her station’s A.I. was behaving in a manner that was more human than she was at the moment.

  “She’s built so she adapts to best fit the needs and personality of the station owner, which would be you. If you need someone to behave more human,” Daffyd’s words floated up from her memory, “Then she behaves pretty near human.”

  Closing her hand into a fist and ignoring the squelching sensation of congealing blood squeezing from between her fingers, she took a deep breath through her nose with her eyes closed, forcing herself to process the full bouquet of death and violence around her. On the exhale, she said, “Kat, should I have done that?”

  She was met with silence for a moment, then, “Dunno, boss, the whole reason they get seed stations ready for commanders is because questions like that are above my paygrade as a digital assistant.”

  As non-answers went, that was surprisingly reassuring. “...he was trying to rape a child,” she said into the hall full of dead people.

  “That he was, boss. She’s doing alright, by the way,” offered the digital assistant.

  “Hmm? Who?” the conversation seemed to be sufficient to get her out of her fugue and moving again, she started walking in the direction the second group of guards had come from.

  “The sve girl, her name is Kimberlyn, by the way. She and Cynthy are getting along quite well over the comms. And before you ask, the woman they offered you as a ‘sample’ is sitting tight, too.”

  She regained the wherewithal to check the rifle she’d slung over her shoulder. Wiping the blood off her hand with her jacket, heaven knew the thing was going to need to be cleaned within an inch of its mortal thread count, she double-checked the rifle's battery level and the safety switch before holding it at the ready, eyes on the hall and moving with progressively more purpose the further she went. “Thanks for that. How’s our pen team?”

  “Pen...? Oh, penetration team! I’ve got them waiting at a junction about halfway through the outer cell yer until we can draw more of the crew your way.”

  “Outer cell yer?” repeated Diane, “Please tell me this ship isn’t completely full of sentients...these guys are pushovers but it’s combat, anything can happen.”

  “No, thankfully,” responded Katrina with a relieved ‘breath,’ “Only about one quarter of the ship’s outer yer is occupied, the rest of the cells are empty.”

  Diane heard the sound of boots thudding against deck pting, “I guess they didn’t want to commit a full hull until they knew for sure there’d be a market for it.” Slowing to a tactical walk, she brought the rifle up to her shoulder and sighted down the barrel, noting with amusement the notch sights were still being used in The Future. “Any way we can make it easier for them to find me?”

  Diane had moved into range of one of the ship’s comm panels, allowing Katrina to use its speaker instead of Diane’s mini-tab. It came through much clearer, “Strangely enough, they don’t seem to take my direction...” there was a touch of humor in her voice, “But I think if we keep you moving I can direct you to a more central corridor where they’re more likely to filter your way.”

  “Sounds like a pn. Let’s not sit on this any longer, get the security team moving clearing the cells, drop the fields as soon as the guards are taken out, and just cut all comms in those sections. Worst case the team will have to deal with a guard station or two that can’t call for help.”

  “On it, boss-dy. Security team is moving, and your next targets are right around the corner. Show ‘em your teeth.”

  As her heart started thudding with the anticipation of another fight, she grinned, letting her Morvuck physiology stretch her cheeks back and showing far more of her jaw than a human could, “Why Kat, that sounded downright vengeful of you.”

  “My morality coding doesn’t like child sex traffickers any more than you do.”

  Reminded yet again of the type of people running into her trap, she let loose another deck rattling growl.

  PrincessColumbia

  No, the game devs would NOT have put CSA in their game. Even one as adult-friendly as GU:MC with a correspondingly mature audience wouldn't want to be confronted by those realities in a game. This "mission" module is specifically for Diane's benefit, and even then the characters of the sver and the sve girl were set to trigger exactly as Diane found them no matter how long she'd taken to find them. (And no, neither the sver nor the girl are S.A.I.)

  [colpse]