PrincessColumbia

  One minute of silence during a speech can feel like forever. Five minutes running with nothing making noise besides your own feet pounding the pavement and your own breathing to occupy your ears can feel like the universe ended and forgot about you.

  Fifteen minutes of uninterrupted combat should have felt like an eternity. She should have felt like her mind was shutting off and she was about to be shellshocked and completely exhausted.

  Diane felt like she’d chugged an entire vending machines worth of energy drinks.

  Katrina had directed her to a four-way corridor junction that, sure enough, was where two main arteries of traffic converged. The halls were wide, which gave her plenty of room to maneuver even if they provided absolutely no cover.

  Twenty bodies ter, she’d barely been nicked by one lucky shot once the svers got smart and began using cover. That was okay, though, because that gave her the chance to figure out an interesting feature of the rifles; they had a function that turned them into low-yield grenades.

  Sure, it would normally have been a waste of a perfectly good rifle with a nearly full charge...but thanks to the moronic first charge of the security grunts she had twenty more rifles to py with.

  A little bit of instruction from Katrina once she’d discovered the user’s manual in the sver’s ship’s database and Diane had managed to trigger the safety release on the explosive feature and lobbed the weapon down one of the corridors and just past the corner the guards were hiding behind. She heard a gruff voice bark a swear word over the whine of the overcharging power cell just before it detonated, eliminating one group of guards and letting her focus on the second. She turned and sprinted in the opposite direction of the corner she’d just blown up and stooped on the run to grab up another rifle. Pulling the trigger a couple times to ensure it was working, the two bolts she’d fired spshed harmlessly against the deck paneling down the hallway where she’d aimed it. Ignoring the test shots, she increased her speed until she judged she was close enough to the junction of corridors and leapt into a baseball slide. It wasn’t a perfect slide, her coat was so matted with blood by this point it was more of a sticky glide that left a trail, but it still did the job of getting her close to the cluster of guards around the corner and opening fire, peppering them liberally with energy shot.

  “You know, Kat,” she said as she picked herself up from the trail of gore she’d left behind, “If it weren’t so sticky, this would actually be kind of fun.”

  “Gotta love what you do, boss. Careful, you’re going to run out of svers before your team manages to get all the women and girls off the ship.”

  Another spike of rage lit her insides as the assistant confirmed multiple children were being sold into svery and her cws came out almost of their own accord. Just then a crew member rounded the corner, one carrying a significantly bigger gun than the previous guards had, and before he even realized she was there she’d sshed him belly-to-neck and made an extra effort to rip out his throat. He hadn’t even had a chance to cry out before she gutted him.

  Once again she found herself absolutely feeling like the coolest person on the pnet as she simply...grabbed the rger rifle out of the guards hands as he fell. She didn’t have time to do more than feel impressed with herself as two more guards followed behind. With one hand occupied she acted mostly on instinct and jammed her fingers into one guard’s neck with a knife strike and lunged forward and sank her fangs into the other’s neck.

  It wasn’t the taste of blood or even the warm fluid in her mouth that snapped her out of her near berserker state, it was when some of the liquid spshed down her windpipe, forcing her to cough that shook her hard enough she more on accident shredded the man’s throat in her paroxysms. She leaned forward, one hand on a knee while she used the un-investigated long gun as an impromptu cane, jamming the butt against the floor as she hacked and sputtered.

  “Why the FUCK did I do that?!” she excimed as soon as she was able to draw enough breath, spitting alien blood from her mouth.

  “Maybe expectorate ter, boss, you’ve got incoming, looks like they’re taking you seriously, too. 34...no, 38 goons on their way to take you down.”

  Grumbling, she straightened and inspected the weapon she’d grabbed off the dead guard. It seemed to just be a bigger, more dangerous looking version of the rifles she’d been taking off their person and realized they’d been using carbines for their standard response team carry. That made more sense than this thing, which had a much longer barrel and a bigger battery...until she spotted a fairly heavy looking casing that she couldn’t immediately identify.

  As she started moving, she asked, “Kat, any reason I shouldn’t ditch this in favor of the carbines?”

  “Two phrases, two words each,” chirped Katrina through the comms panels nearby, “Dual rails and auto-aiming.”

  Katrina’s pronouncement made her realize she wasn’t holding an energy rifle, she was holding a railgun. A double-barreled railgun at that. Auto-aiming would be nice, but if it had fully automatic capability... “Kat, find out how we can get more cartridges for this thing,” she said as she slung it over her shoulder to carry it on her back, “Idiot who was carrying it clearly didn’t realize you don’t bring a long gun to an urban combat setting.”

  “I just got word that our security team has reached the st bank of cells and is working on the exfil now, based on the previous banks this should take about eight minutes. If the dy prefers, I can put on some music from your personal pylist to keep you from becoming to hyperaroused again.”

  Hyper...? Oh, right, that...berserker state I was in. Not a bad idea, but what does she mean about my personal pylist? She wouldn’t have access to my home server. I haven’t had time to build a pylist in the game except... Her eyes bugged out and her cheeks flooded red in embarrassment, “NO! Do not py that here! That...just...no! I’ve been using that to find singable songs, not...kick butt and take names!” She hustled her steps in the direction of the stern of the ship where the docking cmps were still holding it firmly in pce.

  There was absolutely no denying the undercurrent of mirth in Katrina’s voice, “Oh, but boss! They’re cssics!”

  Diane crouched on the move to retrieve a couple of carbines, face still fming, “Yeah, Broadway cssics from four centuries ago! There are people listening right now!”

  There was a distinct ‘tsk’ sound as Katrina expressed her amused disappointment. “Fine, ETA on the next batch of hostiles in 30 seconds as of...mark. They’ll be coming in from behind.”

  Diane nodded, “Perfect, I can make it look like I’m on the run. Are we leaving the ship with enough crew to make it back to their home base?”

  “So long as the bridge crew and the engineering team don’t leave their stations, they’ll be fine. Most of the muscle they’re sending after you are meant for corralling the sves.”

  Diane felt her lips pulling back in that predatory grin and took a deep, cleansing breath through her nose. “Music might help me stay...grounded, I guess. What have you got that’s good for this situation that isn’t from 400 year old Broadway musicals?”

  There was only a few seconds of silence before Katrina offered, “How about an even older song remade with more contemporary fir?” Without waiting for Diane to confirm the selection, the sound of old-style percussion, snare drums if Diane remembered her high school band css properly, in a syncopated rhythm rolled out of the comms panels in the corridor. Within a measure, an element of electrical distortion altered the depth of the sound. Shortly, the sound of bold, loud brass yered over the top in a hint of Americana that just about anyone raised in the Republic would recognize, even if they couldn’t name it.

  She squinted her eyes reflexively, as though that would help her divine the name of the song. “What is that...swing?” she asked Katrina.

  “‘Sing-Sing-Sing’, recorded 1936, remixed in mid-22nd century phonk-swing style.” Came the reply.

  Diane’s eyebrows shot up as her head started bobbing to the heavy bass that repced the kick-drum in this version of the remix. Almost unconsciously, she found herself moving to the beat, her steps in time with the rhythm as her motions to ready one of the two carbines she was carrying were performed in step with the brass notes.

  “You know what, Kat?” she offered as she shouldered the first carbine and popped three rounds off in rapid succession, felling three guards that had managed to get ahead of her before turning to face the wave of guards that she could hear behind her, “I like this...phonk swing? Keep it coming!”

  The following ten minutes were more of a dance than a firefight for her. With as much of a tactical, speed, and training advantage as she had on these game characters, it was almost impossible to not start doing some pseudo-tap dancing. She’d never learned the dancing discipline, but she always admired the ability of the performers to produce their own percussion as they danced to it. Before too long, she was adding some swing-style kicks and spins as she slowly made her way back towards her station.

  Eventually, she found signs that her team had beaten her to the area, which was, of course, how it should be. She was in the middle of a sshing pirouette, sshing at the arm of a guard who had managed to get within melee range and causing him to recoil long enough for her to pull her sidearm and spsh his brains against the wall paneling, when Katrina interrupted, “Alright, boss-dy, the st of the former sves and our team are off the ship. Just waiting on...” Abruptly, the deck rocked and nearly knocked her and the thugs down the hall from her off her feet.

  “Boss, get out of there! They’re trying to manually fire the thrusters! I’m trying to keep ahead of them in the system, but it’s only a matter of time before they rip the automated safeguards off!”

  Diane just nodded and triggered the ‘grenade’ mode on the carbine she was carrying and sent it flying down the hall just before turning and high-tailing it back to her station. The explosion was satisfyingly loud and destructive, but her Morvuck physiology had her almost literally gliding down the corridor, each running step sending her nearly five yards in a single bound. The exploding carbine was so distant by the time it detonated it was almost ughable.

  The ship rocked twice more before she made it to the airlock, performing another baseball slide through the gravity interchange. She rolled to her feet at the end of her slide and smmed her fist a little too dramatically against the hatch’s operation button, she heard the polymer crack under the sound of the heavy doors grinding closed. As soon as a positive seal was formed, she heard the docking cmps disengage, thankfully not damaged (or at least, not significantly, there’d have to be an inspection before they could dock another ship on that airlock) and allowing the ship to break free.

  Diane started walking through the docking bay, heading in the direction of the tunnel to the construction deck. She tossed a half salute at her security guards, whom she was gratified to find they had actually kitted out in full armor. She couldn’t see their faces through their helmets, but one of them gave a hesitant wave as she pulled out her mini-tab and umuted it, “Ops, talk to me, what’s the status of the ship?”

  Mr. Bendenson’s voice answered, “Their systems are coming online, they’re going to be switching from thrusters to in-system impulse any moment now.”

  “Alright, scuff their paint, ding their doors, make it look like we’re trying to hit ‘em but we’re a bunch of newbie scrubs at station defense. I want them to think we’re less capable than we are.”

  “Aye, commander!” came the enthusiastic, if gruff, reply. Diane was power walking through the access tunnel by this point, not bothering to wait for an empty car as they were all in use transporting liberated sves.

  Absently, she realized they seemed to all be looking at her, both sves and her people on the station, but she ignored that for now as she barked more orders into her mini-tab, “Russe, get the Ad Astra ready for you and me and my space suit. Do we have armor for it yet?”

  She felt the trembling of the station as the huge weapons halo that ringed the station rumbled to life, the defense ptform the size of a small building gliding along its track to take aim at the fleeing ship. Over her mini-tab, Russe asked, “Armor for the ship or the suit?”

  “The suit,” she answered as a fairly unique vibration transmitted through the station’s structure and caused the deck pting to buzz in an echo of what a railgun would sound like in an atmosphere, “We haven’t built the hanger needed to refit armor to the ship. Speaking of, how’s the construction of the Goldrush?”

  Katrina manifested her hologram form next to Diane as she walked, another shot from the defense ptform humming through the tunnel, “I can answer both of those questions, boss-dy. Fabbing some armor to fit your suit now, and I’m having a bot retrieve your suit for transport directly to the fabrication workshop. I’d like to get some sensors installed so we can do regur upgrades based on you activity while wearing it.”

  “Uh-huh...and why weren’t these already installed?”

  “I don’t think anyone was ready for how...hands on you’d decide to be when it came to protecting your station.”

  Diane swept the tip of her tongue between her teeth and upper lip and realized the metallic taste she’d been ignoring wasn’t her own blood but a bit of flesh from the guard she’d bitten into, “Blech!” she paused to spit the viscera out onto the deck pting, “Yeah, that’s gross. I’m gonna have a nice little freakout ter, probably.” To Katrina she said, “You have a point. What about the Goldrush?”

  “Ninety-eight percent complete, but it’s a mining ship and cargo hauler, it won’t really help with a combat operation.”

  “True enough,” she answered, “But it’ll be the best people hauler we have under our control. I want something that can transport every single sve we might find at the sver’s little hidey hole.”

  Russe’s voice came over the mini-tab, “We’ll need to refit the cargo hold for carrying people, that’ll add to the construction time a bit.”

  Katrina nodded, “Modifications sent to the construction bay, updated completion status at 88%. It will not be completed within the next 48 hours.”

  Diane frowned, “It’ll have to do. Mr. Bendenson, status on the ship?”

  “Out of range,” came the giddy reply, “But I scuffed their paint alright.”

  The curiously cheerful note in the old man’s voice wasn’t a mystery for long as Russe said, “He managed to punch a hole in one of the exterior yers, they vented atmosphere from that section for a bit.”

  Before Diane could reply with the satisfied grin that was crossing her face, Norma’s voice startled her so badly she nearly dropped the mini-tab, “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WITH MARY IN A BOTTLE OF SCHNAPPS! DIANE ‘FIRST FOUND’ SOMNI’ELS, WHAT DID YOU DO?!”

  Suddenly feeling like she was seven and had crashed her hoverbike into the canal near the house again, she cast her eyes about feeling unaccountably guilty and not quite knowing why other than her friend had invoked her full in-game name, she found Norma stomping across the deck pting with all the fire and iron one would expect of a woman who’d been ‘governing’ a band of nearly 900 refugees. “You are...covered in...is that blood?!” Sheepishly, Diane looked down at herself and realized she was still pretty much coated in a yer of gore, “And it’s on your...did you EAT one of them?!”

  “Ew!” piped Russe’s voice from the mini-tab, “Really?! Let get the visual up...ohmygawd...you ate someone?!” he almost squeeked out, apparently getting some sort of camera feed on the Ops screen.

  In the background of the call, she heard a young female voice make a retching sound as well as a ugh that could only be Mr. Bendenson, “If I’d had more XOs ‘lead from the front’ like you I’d never have left the fleet!”

  “Russe, turn off the video feed!” snapped Norma into the mini-tab, “I don’t want to have to make anyone clean up after Cynthy because this dork,” Norma’s fist clonked down on Diane’s head with an audible ‘thok’, “Decided to eat some svers!”

  “I didn’t eat them...” Diane said petuntly as she reached up to rub the top of her head where Norma had bopped her. She was stopped as the smaller woman waved her arm away without actually touching it.

  “Don’t touch your hair, you’ve got blood all over your hand!” snapped Norma. Diane pouted at her gore covered appendage as Norma continued her tirade, “You’re just...covered in...gross! No wonder the girls we just rescued are terrified of you! If I hadn’t seen you a stupidified ball of besotted Morvuck after the Matron got done with you I might actually be intimidated by you like this!”

  Diane felt her face go red as she looked around at the small crowd of rescued women and a good representative sample of the station’s residents that Norma had apparently drafted to help with the logistics of situating the sves post-rescue. The station’s residents seemed to be giving her looks that were a mixture of awe and mild disgust while the women and girls that had just been rescued were looking at her in naked fear. “...oh...uhm...” Not knowing what else to do, she looked to Katrina, who simply shrugged with an amused smile.

  “Katrina,” Norma addressed the hologram by her name for the first time in Diane’s recollection of their interactions, “Is there a shower somewhere that’s not inside the residential hab where we can clean...” she gestured up and down at Diane’s entire form, “...this?”

  The hologram’s tail was curled into an amused arch and zily drifting back and forth, a sure sign, they’d learned, that Katrina was enjoying the silly organic being she shared a station with, “The security station that we activated at the start of the action will have some shower stalls.”

  “Perfect!” Norma scowled and pointed in the direction of the ‘cliff’ that separated the construction deck from the Ops deck, “Go! You’re walk of shaming this, I’m not going to have you dirty a car that we need for transporting these rescued girls!”

  “...I...”

  Norma stomped her foot and continued pointing, saying nothing.

  Diane sighed, “...fine...but only because you have a point about needing the cars for the people we rescued.”

  “And I’m keeping an eye on you!”

  “What?!” that drew Diane up short.

  “MARCH!” roared Norma, and Diane was so startled by the order she leapt into a brisk walk, “I’m not going to trust you not to eat the soap!”

  “I didn’t eat anyone! I just bit someone!”

  “Where did you bite them?” Norma snapped.

  “...on the ship?”

  “Where on their body did you bite them?”

  “...n th n’ck...” Diane muttered.

  “Louder!”

  “On the neck!”

  “What, were you making out with one of them or something?!”

  “Gross! No, I...it was instinct, okay? He jumped out at me!”

  “And she ripped his throat out,” said Katrina from the other side of Diane.

  Diane scowled at the hologram, “You’re not helping!” For her part, Kat was smirking, clearly pleased with stirring the pot.

  “You did eat him! Or at least his throat!”

  “I spit it out!”

  Diane kept her focus on one thing, the svers were selling and (at least one of them) raping children. She kept focused on this because if she didn’t her mind started going over the fact that she’d torn a man’s heart out of his chest.

  She was in the normally public shower (The Future apparently had unisex locker room showers, which made some sense given the plethora of alien races that may not even have the same genital configuration as humans, she was, herself, proof enough of that) all alone while her security people were dealing with the triage and disposition of the sves. Some four hundred sves on that one ship, and it wasn’t even full.

  She spared a mental clock cycle for the observation that her private bathing room (and it was, in fact, just a bathing room. The toilet was in a separate closet all on its own like she’d heard they did in Europe) was about half the size of this room, which was intended to shower twenty people at a time. Privilege of rank and ownership, I suppose, she thought.

  Four hundred sves that were going to have to be scanned medically and inspected for possible impnted devices (she made a mental note to pass that order along via Katrina once she was done showering), and otherwise treated in a less than human (heh, funny ‘cause she was technically an alien in this game) manner, then they had the slog of figuring out what to do with the now former sves. She was sure that just sending them back to their home worlds and hoping for the best probably wouldn’t actually yield positive results. Why does doing the right thing always involve so much paperwork? she pondered as piping hot water cascaded down her back.

  Which reminds me... she thought, and with a flick of her wrist brought up her HUD. Huh...three notifications? That was in addition to the pile of experience she got for killing the svers. Ignoring the experience for the moment, she tapped the notifications bell and read the message headers:

  “Racial Abilities Leveled Up”

  “Research Node Unlocked”

  “Ethics Node Unlocked”

  Her eyebrows shooting up, she tapped on the st notification first:

  Enhanced Tactical Leadership

  You aren’t the kind to let your troops take the hit if you can help it. Showing them your back shows them your trust, and they’ll follow you anywhere.

  +20% bonus to PvE squad or ship combat

  She chuckled at the title, Clever, ‘enhanced’ must mean, ‘really, really stupid moves that you’d be busted five ranks in an actual military for.’ She realized the thought was somewhat cynical, but the Ethics tree had a habit of forcing her to live in her own head a little too much, which was a pce she very much did not want to be at the moment. Girls as young as 10. They were going to sell 10-year-old girls into svery, she reminded herself before bringing up the next notification.

  Astronautics and Imaging

  Prerequisite for the Sensor Tower and Astrometrics buildings

  Diane frowned, No bonuses? Huh, must be a one-time unlock...seems a little gate-keepy to me, but I’m not a game designer. Wasting no further time, she brought up the final notification, which was a redirect to her character profile screen.

  Highlighted under the heading that procimed her to be a Morvuck was a section that had been bnk before but now had two new abilities:

  Zen Berserker – Enter a state of calming and rexing combat readiness. The longer the combat continues, the more you will be able to fight with continually increasing ability. Every minute of combat grants a cumutive 1% increase in Strength, Stamina, Pain Mitigation, Focus, Luck, and Awareness for a maximum 300% bonus. The berserker state can end prematurely at any time and result in a catastrophic crash, rendering the pyer incapable of independent movement and may even result in loss of consciousness for up to 2,000% of the duration of the berserker state. There is a 1% chance every minute of experiencing a catastrophic crash. Every five minutes doubles the chances of a catastrophic crash per minute.

  Instinctive Strke – When engaged in PvE melee or solo combat, pyer gains one free automatic attack per encounter with a +20% chance of success and increase in damage.

  She was about to close the interface and deal with the experience rewards ter when she noticed one of the racial abilities slots she hadn’t unlocked wasn’t bnk like the others. Intrigued, she looked closer at the grayed-out text and managed to make out, “Matron’s Blessing – Unlock all racial abilities to activate this racial ability” Pleasantly surprised, she nodded in impressed appreciation for the cleverness of the game design. Give out some racial bonuses, tease something really big and interesting to encourage using those abilities on a regur basis.

  She finally dismissed the interface and checked her thoroughly waterlogged body for any remaining blood or gore. As usual, just looking at her naked form resulted in a surge of yearning and desire for this form to be her real body, even outside the pod. Gritting her teeth and fighting back the mencholia that accompanied the awareness that such a thing could never happen, she finished the actual bathing process as efficiently as she could.

  Just as she was turning off the water, she was startled once again by Norma’s voice, “Damn, girl! All that exercise you do has paid off! Why do you cover so much of that up?”

  Smming the front of her body up against the tiled wall of the shower to at least attempt to preserve some modesty, she futilely tried to use a hand to cover her naked backside, “Norma! What are you doing in here?!” she gasped out red faced as she craned her neck to find her hotheaded friend.

  She found Norma in the archway leading from the showers to the locker room, bundle of what looked like a towel and one of her regur suits in her arms. The other woman was not looking at Diane’s face, but was instead very obviously ogling the poorly covered rear end, her own face red for an entirely different reason than Diane’s abject embarrassment.

  Abruptly, the embarrassment was joined with another feeling, arousal. She was, to her absolute shame and horror, enjoying Norma appreciating her as a sexual being. No, no, no! A computer program is reacting based on its code to a generated image! She absently wondered if she was talking about herself or Norma, This is not my body, there’s nothing about this that’s interesting or sexual or arousing! Stop it! She snapped at herself, her breathing starting to come in panicked gasping.

  “...you okay, Diane? You look...scared? I’m sorry, I’ll just leave this here. Take your time, okay?” she heard some rustling and the sounds of Norma’s boots ccking against the tile floor.

  Diane realized she was shivering and couldn’t remember having closed her eyes. Forcing them open caused a couple of tears to fall that, thankfully, blended with the water from the shower. She looked back to the archway tentatively and saw that Norma had left the bundle she had been carrying on a bench by the door. She was alone again.

  Sighing in frustration, she once again reminded herself that there were four hundred women who’d been forced to endure far worse than someone she liked and trusted happening to catch a glimpse of her naked body. Absently banging her fist against the tile, only just hard enough to make a thud sound, she pushed herself off the tiled wall and went to dry off and get dressed.

  It wasn’t until she was putting on her pants that she realized she had completely forgotten she’d left her anti-A.I. weapon sitting on the same bench Norma had put her clothes on. I’m starting to wish I’d never taken this mission, she thought, All these...sensations and...feelings, I guess? They’re messing with my head, I’m forgetting basic OpSec because I’m dealing with alien...literally alien emotions. Grumbling unintelligible sylbles, she held the firearm up against the small of her back and tried to let the security of her weapon adhering to her pseudo-magnetically sweep aside the shame and anxiety she was feeling and stubbornly ignoring that she was using a lit match to keep her warm in the midst of a driving hurricane.

  PrincessColumbia