PrincessColumbia

  “Soooo…do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  Russe snorted a ugh through his nose, “Do you even know what ‘it’ I’m talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  The tech just turned back to look at her in the captain’s seat over his shoulder, “Then you know why we’re gonna talk about ‘it’.”

  “And you can tell Norma to keep her nose out of my business.”

  “From what she tells me,” Russe offered in the ‘I’m reasoning with a cranky toddler’ voice, “It’s kinda her business. She’s been trying to apologize, you know, even if she doesn’t know what it is she did.”

  Diane gred at the comms log as though taking personal offense to the fact that it hadn’t changed significantly in the st thirty seconds. If it had, she would have been able to focus on that instead of being trapped on the bridge of the Ad Astra with Russe.

  Although ‘trapped,’ she acknowledged, was an exaggeration.

  With the svers tactically driven off, the processing of the sves in Norma’s competent hands, and the multitude of body fluids from other persons fully scrubbed from her person, Diane had settled into her ‘doing business’ mode and did her best to bury her emotions and any thoughts of what they might mean until after the sver problem had been fully dealt with.

  She was more reserved than usual, to an apparently noticeable degree, as she set about their various meetings and pnning sessions for the next phase of eliminating the svers as permanently as Diane wanted. Her Ops crew, for all that they had more or less been cobbled together from the ‘scraps’ of humanity and other races she’d inherited with her station, came together nicely. Given that their ship had been damaged, and a sizeable portion of their crew killed, it was even odds that the sver captain was on a direct course for whatever haven they stayed at when not attempting to viote basic sentient rights. Katrina brought up her scans along their projected route and they found a comparatively small station floating in the depths of space well beyond the Oort cloud of the system Diane’s station was in. This was the meeting she also found out where her station was on the gactic map, something she had to grudgingly admit she hadn’t been paying attention to when they’d been on the return trip from Morvuck; a name that transted from the nguage of the original space power in the area that fell some eight hundred years prior: “The origin of the end of all the skies and the darkening of our hearts, which most people just called “Darksky” for obvious reasons.

  In a move that was admittedly unfair to Norma, Diane had gone out of her way to avoid the other woman. She would ensure that she was constantly moving, passing along requests for things that only Norma could handle and finding somewhere else on her station to be while Norma was dealing with the issue.

  This ‘on the go’ method of handling the tasks that needed to be done before she and Russe departed aboard her ship meant that they got done with preparations almost obnoxiously fast. She had pre-authorized with Ops contact with any government that the sves would wish to reach out to for return to any homeworld they identified, gave Katrina the okay to open up new habs and prep for additional former sve refuges, and gave her official final approval of the modifications needed to the Goldrush for turning it into a people transport.

  Katrina had finished the modifications to her space suit to turn it into an armored combat suit, complete with a full biometric suite and comms package to establish and maintain contact with the computer of whatever ship or station she owned and was on at the time. It had some basic automated first aid and self-repair functions, meaning she could take a hit and as long as it didn’t strike anything that would require a sickbay with a doctor to repair, any injury she sustained could be slowly repaired over time for both the suit and her fleshy bits.

  Which, of course, reminded her that they needed to get an actual doctor for the station. Which was yet another on her increasingly long list of tasks to handle as the commander.

  After ordering the entire contents of an unused, fully stocked security station’s weapons locker transferred to the Ad Astra’s presently empty third crew cabin, she boarded the ship and waited impatiently for Russe to arrive. When he was fully boarded and the ship underway, they settled in to cruise the distance on impulse drive.

  They couldn’t use their FTL, as there was no FTL path charted to the sver’s station and it would take a full scouting expedition to do so with an appropriately kitted out ship, which the station wouldn’t be able to produce for some time yet, especially given that the actual shipyard hadn’t been constructed. The small, economical ships that had been under construction since Diane activated Ops had been handled by the space-station equivalent of a 3D printer with robotic assist. The full shipyard would allow them to construct ships from base materials, scavenged parts, and remanufactured components and do it all robotically instead of relying heavily on the ‘printing’ process. As cheap and efficient as the rge-scale fabrication bay was, it couldn’t handle the much bigger builds of the ships avaible ter in the game.

  As a nod to her...fans? Supporters? The women and girls on Mortan who’d been sending her care packages (They received word via the subspace ‘net that there were already two full ground-shipping containers full of them and a third in progress. Diane popped a message off to Rokyo to see if she could help the overwhelming flood of them be reduced to a trickle, but the older Morvuck had to smilingly break the news to Diane that it really was out of her hands and that Diane should just accept the gifts gracefully and gratefully.), she wore her new hunting vest for the trip. Russe took great pleasure at taking the picture to send to the giver.

  All too soon the reality of space travel caught up with Diane as the ship chewed the miles while Diane frantically sought busywork to keep from thinking and feeling.

  “Norma didn’t do anything, well, not anything wrong, anyway.” Diane grumbled as she gnced around at the various panels of instrumentation that the captain of the small ship would be responsible for.

  “Uh-huh. She said she thought you were about to cry, and not in a good way like happened with the Matron.”

  Diane closed her eyes and took a deep breath in through her nose before opening her them again to gre at Russe, “...you’re not going to stop until I talk about it, are you?”

  He turned his chair so he could face her directly and quirked his mouth into a wry smile, shaking his head ‘no’ as he crossed his legs to get comfortable.

  Diane suppressed a groan as she shoved the swing-arm dispys for comms and the sensor cluster out from in front of her in acknowledgement that she knew she wasn’t getting out of this conversation. She didn’t look at him and couldn’t muster the willpower to make herself do so.

  They sat in silence for a while, Diane’s (Angry? Terrified? Confused?) thoughts chasing themselves in circles in her head while Russe just silently, without judgement, watched her.

  Finally, she said, “...I’m...no human would have done what I did.”

  Russe gave her a few moments to eborate, when she didn’t, he just asked, “How do you mean?”

  “The...biting and the...” she squeezed her hand into a fist hard enough her arm started to shake for a moment, “There was nothing human about the...” she felt her eyes burning but refused to start crying, “...the monster that was on that ship.

  “Monster?!” he repeated, “Why do you think you’re a monster?”

  “You saw me, Russe! I was covered in literal blood and gore! I couldn’t say this in front of Norma...I didn’t even want to tell you this but you’re just sitting there like...like a golden retriever and...” Her nose started running from tears she refused to let gather, she sniffed the fluid back angrily, “The only reason I didn’t actually eat that guy was because some of his blood went down the wrong pipe!”

  Russe’s eyes widened, but she couldn’t smell any fear on him, so it must have been surprise, “Whoah, really?”

  “I was coughing too hard to do anything but choke and spit.”

  Russe shrugged, though his face was still etched with concern, “I guess I don’t see how that makes you a monster.”

  This finally got her looking directly at him, but it was with a look of exasperation, “I tore a guy’s throat out with my teeth. The only reason I didn’t chew and swallow was because of an accidental inhation of his blood.”

  Of all the things Diane had expected Russe to do, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees and giving her an open look of acceptance was not one of them. “Diane, please step me through it, what about that is scaring you?”

  It wasn’t until he actually belled the feeling as being scared that she realized that at the core of all her swirling vortex of anxiety and other unidentified emotion was an existential fear. More out of shame than anything else, she dropped her eyes to her p and realized her hands were shaking. Clenching a fist once again, this time with both hands, she took a deep breath and felt somewhat betrayed by her body when her breath shuddered. “I did very inhuman things on that ship, Russe!” she found herself snapping at him.

  He gave her a patient smile, “And you’re not human.”

  She blinked, Of course I’m human! she thought but didn’t say, “That’s not what I mean!” she growled, “Good people don’t do what I did!”

  “Since when?”

  His simple, two word statement caught her by surprise and she discovered that she didn’t have any response to that.

  Seeing that he’d caught her speechless, Russe continued, “I’ve seen…a lot of the gaxy, well, the parts we can reach with our current engine tech, anyway. Since…” he suddenly seemed hesitant to speak, but continued somewhat evasively, “…some things happened back in Terran space, I’ve been able to see even more than most human’s see in their entire lifetimes. I’ve encountered a lot of people from hundreds of races, including some races that Terrans are taught are just mindless killing machines. So many times I thought someone was a monster, it turned out that they weren’t, they were just…themselves. And Diane, I’ve seen humans do some pretty monstrous things.”

  But I’m a liar and a deceiver, I’m lying to you right now, “But…I’m I…” she found herself struggling to expin what the source of her fear was, mostly because she didn’t know. It felt like the harder she pushed to gain crity, the more fear and shame was stirred into her whirling thoughts.

  “Diane, hey,” she had finally lost the fight with her tear ducts, a film of water obscuring her vision and keeping her from noticing that Russe was reaching out to her until his hands were wrapping around hers, “It’s okay, whatever’s hurting you isn’t here. It’s just your mind pying tricks on you, making you think whatever the danger it thinks is there is real and hurting you now. It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to make sense. The human mind is weird like that, and I guess the Morvuck mind is, too.” That got her to give out a reedy chuckle, “There, see? A little ughter keeps the darkness a way, even just a little.”

  Diane snorted an incredulous ugh, “One is sound, the other is light, how does that even work?”

  Russe released her hands just long enough to do a credible ‘jazz hands,’ “Magic!”

  Her response was to roll her eyes, but her mouth remained turned up in a smile.

  “So,” he resumed, “Why does what happened on the ship have anything to do with what happened in the shower with Norma?” He blinked and pinched the bridge of his nose in self-exasperation, “That sounds like the setup to a joke, and I absolutely didn’t mean to do that.”

  Diane rolled her eyes and took a deep breath before saying, “It...the way she looked at me...it wasn’t...”

  His hands wrapped around hers again, gently squeezing and releasing, a massaging action that was doing far more to ease her anxiety than she would have given it credit for had she not been experiencing it. “Easy, it’s okay. Remember you’re safe here,” he soothed, “Let’s take it a step at a time. Tell me what was going on for you when you were alone in the shower.”

  She nodded as she took a shuddering breath, “I was...trying not to think about what happened on the ship, why I was,” she swallowed thickly, “Covered in blood.”

  He nodded, “Okay, that connection is starting to make sense. So, you’re a Morvuck, that method of combat is just what your people do, but obviously it frightens you. Are you able to tell me why?”

  She felt her jaw trembling, “...it...it is?!” she almost whispered.

  Confusion clouded his face for a mere moment before he had a realization, his mouth forming an ‘oh!’ as he figured out something, “...but you grew up on Earth, so you wouldn’t know about that, would you?”

  She shook her head mournfully, idly wondering what sorts of things were taught in schools outside the wall that she wouldn’t know about by stint of being raised in the American education system. It would be a comparable knowledge gap.

  Russe’s expression softened, “You’re the first Morvuck I’ve met in person, but seeing the footage of some of the Mortan armed forces during the war is what got me interested in your people in the first pce. An entire pnet of,” his expression turned sheepish, “Well, women who were strong and able to go toe-to-toe with a Crotixian Warrior? Let’s just say it awoke some things in teenage-me.”

  That earned him a snicker that he blushingly joined in on. “That expins why you’ve got the hots for Norma, that girl should have been born Morvish.”

  “What? But...” he obviously could tell his objections weren’t going to be received with anything less than skepticism. “Okay, fine, yes, I fell for her and pretty hard. Just be gd I did or I might have fallen for you when you got to the station.” He winked saucily at her as he said this.

  “Ew, gross!” she replied somewhat pyfully, “Boy cooties!”

  He snickered, “You are so obviously a Lost, you don’t know anything about your people but so much about the culture that raised you,” he raised an eyebrow, “Like ‘cooties’ being a thing Terran children learn about in school because it’s part of the culture but not taught in any curriculum.”

  She blushed, “Well, just so we’re clear, I’m not attracted to men.”

  He patted her hand and, in a camaraderic tone asked, “So did any of the proliferators on Mortan catch your eye? Or are you into the progenitors? Or maybe both?”

  All at once the good mood that Russe’s banter had started building up in her was dashed away, a sick feeling in her gut obliterating her levity. Her eyes dropped back to her p, watching Russe gently massage her hands in a calming manner.

  “Hey, talk to me. What just happened for you?”

  Diane found herself struggling to expin even to herself. Why was she feeling so awful about the idea of being intimate with a Morvuck woman? Or any woman? She realized that the feeling of disgusted shame and self-loathing she was feeling now was the same as what she experienced when Norma had walked in on her in the shower. Like a refrain, over and over in her mind the words, Liar, Monster, Filth, hammered away at her. Not knowing what else to say, not able to expin that she was lying and unable to expin to a computer program why her attraction to women, even those with non-human genital configurations, was fundamentally sinful, she muttered, “...I’m a monster...”

  Russe sighed heavily, “I’m guessing you got teased a lot in high school?”

  It was such an odd, non-sequitur question that it actually derailed her emotional maelstrom for a moment. She blinked at him through tear-filled eyes and responded, “...yes?”

  He cringed in the over-exaggerated manner of someone trying to show just how much they sympathizing even if they didn’t necessarily feel the empathy of a shared experience. “Yeah, teenagers are the worst. I should know, I was one of them,” he said in a self-depreciating tone.

  It was, strictly speaking, a true statement. Thanks to a variety of factors she’d been the subject of quite a bit of bullying behavior after her father died and teachers turning a blind eye to it...mostly because her stepmother kept fueling the fires of sentiment against her by convincing her teachers that she was somehow responsible for all of Tiffany’s hardships. What did Rokyo call her...? Right, my ‘caretaker.’ Hmph, even a video game character recognized the idiocy of the term as applied to Tiffany, but it would have been her title if ‘Diane’ had actually gone through the life I’ve been building for my character, so... “My...caretaker called me that, too.”

  Russe’s normally good-natured expression, even when he was sympathizing with and comforting others, seemed to crumple in on itself at that, “...really?” at her nod, he exhaled like the breath was being forced from his lungs, “God, I’m so sorry, Diane.” He opened his eyes again and fixed her with the most soulful look she’d ever seen on him. “No child should be called a monster. Caretakers are supposed to be a source of love and trust and security. I’m so sorry Earth failed so badly for you.”

  Why does it still hurt so much?! she wanted to shout. Instead, she just took a deep breath and started to pull her hands away from Russe’s, “I think I’ll go y down now...”

  To her surprise, he held her hands firmly. “I’m not saying you can’t,” he said in a soft but stern voice, “But I’m going to ask you if you really want to y down...or if you’re just hiding? If you need to hide, there’s nothing wrong with that either. Sometimes we need to shut out the world, but be very honest with yourself; do you need to hide, or do you need to confront this?”

  Upon saying his piece, he let her go and leaned back in his chair, just watching her at a respectful emotional distance. She wished she had some answer, something to give him to expin her complete breakdown in front of Norma, but her mind was a white-noise jumble of conflicting emotions, roiling anger that was and wasn’t hers mixed with a shame and revulsion that overpowered everything else.

  And underlying all that was the knowledge that she was talking to an advanced computer program, something completely unable to actually understand the human experience for all it mimicked it to a degree that regurly fooled her subconscious into thinking this was an actual person.

  “It’s the...” she began, then closed her eyes and swallowed heavily, “It’s the way she looked at me. The...I guess lust when she saw me naked. In that moment I felt so...” she shivered as her eyes closed, hoping Russe didn’t notice her trembling, “...evil.”

  “Why would being attractive to someone make you evil?”

  “Because I’m not...” a woman, she almost blurted out. She caught herself and sniffed back her unshed tears again, swallowing hard to try and keep from letting her self-pity be on dispy. “I’m not...human. I’m a monster wrapped in the skin of a woman.” That, at least, was true. She was a man when not in the middle of a VR game where she’d trapped herself in a confusing body with confusing feelings and confusing instincts. Men were, statistics alone proved, monsters in nearly every way. It required the discipline instilled by the church to keep men from defaulting to their evil, base nature. Women were God’s perfected creation, the final draft based upon the rough draft that was man. She was lying to everyone and herself the longer she was in this body and showing a woman to the virtual world. She was deceiving others, tricking them into perceiving her as being more divine than she actually was, making her a demon by default. How did I get here?! How did I fall into evil so easily?!

  “Diane, please, stop lying about my friend.”

  She blinked her eyes open, a tear finally escaping down her cheek, “...huh?!” she gaped at him.

  He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees again, fingertips pressed together as he looked at her with a sad smile. “You keep calling my friend, Diane, a monster. A monster would have spaced the people she found in her territory. A monster would have never turned an instigator into an ally and made them an equal. A monster would have made a business deal with the svers instead of driving them off. A monster would have just blown up the ship if she thought it was a threat to her, not put herself in danger because there was a chance she might be wrong about it. Instead, she risked herself, risked her station, risked her future, and put her trust in people that she’d only just met but gave them a chance anyway. That Diane, the one I’ve gotten to know ever since she arrived at the station, is no monster.”

  Chastised, she looked down at her hands again, lying imply in her p, “Then...then why do I feel so horrible? Why do I imagine Norma looking at me like...that and feeling like I’m...corrupting her?”

  Russe snorted, “I’ve known Norma for some time now. She is not shy about being attracted to women or men. If she’s ‘corrupted’ it’s got nothing to do with you. And she’s the one that brought everyone’s attention to your...state after you got done with the svers. She very definitely knew exactly what she was looking at.”

  Right, a measure of relief sweeping through her even as a more rational part of her mind was railing at her for being so frantic about her apparent affect on a video game character, For all it feels like I’m in space I’m just in a pod in a game made in Modern Babylon, women are...allowed...to like other women like that. The rampant fear and loathing seemed to ease off, repced instead by that yearning she’d felt when she was on Mortan and saw the two women on the street. It’s wrong, I know...I know it’s wrong, but why does it feel so right when I look at them or think of doing something like that with another woman? Like...maybe...Norma?

  As though the present circumstances of her life were like the combination lock on a vault door built into a dam, images of a perfectly domestic life flooded her head. Impossible fantasies that could never be real. Holding a woman in her arms and falling in love, not as a fictional station commander in a game but as a woman in the real world. Getting married in the temple as wife and wife. Of a honeymoon on some tropical isnd paradise, a pce she could never actually go because Americans couldn’t travel outside the wall. Having children, all girls like on Mortan but in a city in America, probably near the Rockies somewhere. She always did like the Rockies. Growing old with her wife as the children grew up, found love, moved out, and came to visit for the holidays.

  A life so impossible that it could literally never be, because she could never have the children with a woman who she could never meet or love as a person she was not. Because at the end of this mission she’d log out of the pod and go back to being Dyn, a man who worked for a government organization that did the wrong things for the right reasons so good people didn’t have to deal with threats to their lives. As an agent she’d committed sin after sin that her pastor had told her God and The Second would forgive her for so long as she stayed true to the faith until the end.

  But she couldn’t forgive herself of her most recent transgressions; having the temerity to defy God’s pn and pretend to be a woman.

  And it wasn’t even Norma she was thinking of when she had that fantasy of a wonderful life. She’d have been hard pressed to tell Russe who the woman was if he’d known to ask. The woman she’d imagined falling in love with was somewhat formless, the idea of a woman instead of any one woman in particur. The part that was unwavering in her fantasy scenario was the person she was in that dream world was the woman she was in the game. Maybe without the Morvish features, and if she was human she wouldn’t have her current genital configuration (that’s not how humans worked, she knew that from basic biology css in high school), which would be a disappointment but she thought she might be able to live with it if the rest could have been real...

  ...but it never would be. Because this was just a game. And it would be over soon.

  She gestured, bringing up her in-game pyer HUD and tapped through, intentionally keeping her motions calm and collected and brought up the screen for logging out. She had no pns to leave before her schedule auto-logout, but she needed to know how much longer she had before the dream ended.

  Six days. After nearly a month in-game, less than 24 hours had passed IRL. It was Tuesday, morning if she read the time stamp correctly, and the team would likely be checking her... his vitals and monitoring the data stream for any interruptions or issues while they sipped their coffee and talked about the test rankings on the unofficial leaderboard of eliminated rogues. A few weeks, not quite a month of dealing with gactic bureaucracy, station management, and people that may or may not be rogues hiding in pin sight, and not even a full day had passed outside her pod.

  In six days and counting she would go back to being Dyn. That transted to somewhere between seven to eight months in subjective time.

  Her train of thought was interrupted by an almost reverently whispered, “You are a Commander...”

  She blinked, looking through her HUD to see Russe watching her still, but his expression was one of unbridled awe. Hastily, she dismissed her HUD, Damn...damn! She normally didn’t allow herself even that level of foul nguage, but she’d just, well, ‘effed up’ bigtime. She was so focused on her inner turmoil and anxious over how much longer she had before her to return to the “real” world that she’d tuned his presence on the bridge entirely.

  With a voice still shaky with emotion, she asked, “...how did you know?” She could guess but didn’t want to make an assumption and spill any more secrets than she already had.

  “Remember the captain I told you about?” She nodded, almost able to script what he was about to say, “He did that hand motion all the time! Sometimes he’d do it, look at something only he could see, then go about his day, but sometimes I caught him making that motion,” Russe demonstrated with a flick of his hand that was remarkably dead-on for the motion Diane made, “And he’d just stare at a spot in front of him, just like you did! And once I...” he blushed and looked away, one hand scratching the back of his neck in a clearly ‘Guilty? Who me?’ move, “I managed to get some access to security feeds I wasn’t actually supposed to and just watched him for a bit. It looked like he could hear something nobody else could, then he ducked into his ready room and did the motion just before tapping at the air and he started talking to someone. There were no inbound calls in the ships logs, I triple checked. And he had a whole conversation, but there was no other person recorded, no other voices or video in the room!”

  She gred at him, not really able to put much heat into the look, “Russe, are you monitoring my station’s security feeds?”

  “What?! No!” he curled up almost comically before saying in a meek voice, “...Norma wouldn’t let me.”

  She snorted in amusement, “Norma is a smart woman with a good head on her shoulders. You should listen to her.”

  Russe offered an amusingly jaunty salute, “Yes ma’am!”

  Not bothering to be subtle, she wiped the tear tracks from her cheeks, “And we’re not testing the ‘Commanders can’t be killed’ thing. That’s still a one way mistake if you’re wrong.”

  Not even bothering to be disappointed, like he’d thought about this possibility already and had a response ready, he said, “Fine, but if you die and come back anyway through no fault of mine, we get to start doing tests.”

  She rolled her eyes, “Fine, if you manage to survive something that kills me and I come back after, only then can you start tests, but I get veto on anything that looks like it’s something I’d rather not live or die through, got it?”

  He nodded, “Yeah, that’s fair.”

  They shared a chuckle over the absurdity of negotiating permission to find creative ways to kill Diane before settling into a comfortable silence. Russe turned back to his workstation and checking on some ship’s status screens.

  After a bit, Diane asked, “Russe...when I was...when I couldn’t...how did you know how to...?” she trailed off, not quite sure how to ask what she was hoping to.

  Fortunately, Russe seemed to understand, answering as he brought up a couple of screens on his console to run status checks, “My dad...he fought in the war. The whole family learned how to pull him out of it if he ever entered a PTSD state like you did.”

  “PTSD?!” she blurted, “But...I’ve never been in combat...well, okay, before today I’ve never been in a military engagement.”

  Russe paused in his tasks and turned to face her again, “You can get PTSD from more than combat, that’s something we learned early on from the therapist that helped my dad. I’m not a doctor, but I’d say your caretaker gave you quite a bit of trauma if everything we talked about kept leading back to her.”

  That was likely true, if you could get PTSD that wasn’t combat reted. “Well, thanks. You didn’t have to do that.”

  Russe chuckled, “I’m your friend, Diane, something I’m starting to think you’ve never had. I had to because I wouldn’t be your friend if I didn’t.”

  Diane supposed that was likely true, too.

  PrincessColumbia