PrincessColumbia

  She wound up selecting, ‘Swinging on a Star,’ having been inspired by the bouncy, bold brass of the big band sound she’d not-quite-on-purpose summoned to break into the station. She was apparently so ‘in the zone’ with her Commander’s Ability by that point that all it took was for her to start the music up over the starbase’s PA system (and, apparently, her comms as indicated by Russe gasping in childlike wonder) was to step off the lift and ‘snap’ her fingers while thinking of the song. As soon as her armor-cd middle finger ‘ccked’ against the palm of her gauntlet (the physics of the finger snap were, she would wind up researching ter, completely broken and meant that if you had your hand in any sort of glove just wouldn’t create an actual ‘snap’ sound) the sound of drums and horns kicked off the song.

  What followed was about one and a half minutes of a practical sughter set to music that was nearly two-hundred years old and, by the time she’d heard it the first time in kindergarten, was considered a children’s song and usually set to a jouncy-flouncy piano tune. Her father had been a collector of vintage (meaning genuinely antique) vinyl records. Almost as soon as he heard six-year old Dyn singing it to a group of carefully arranged action figures he dug out an old (really old) recording that had been salvaged from some collection somewhere. To Diane’s ter shame, she hadn’t ever paid enough attention to her father’s stories about his collection before her mom died, and after mom’s death he just shut down before committing suicide when she was 11 and Tiffany proceeded to sell off or trash anything she didn’t see value in keeping from Diane’s parents, including all her dad’s old records.

  This is for you, dad, she found herself thinking as she sang, “...and by the way, if you hate to go to school, you may grow up to be a mule!” before delivering to a charging sver a superfluously new orifice in the center of his chest.

  A couple of centuries ago some man named Frank Sinatra had poured just an absolute master-css level of sass into a song that seemed, on the surface, to be about a bunch of animals and their associated behavior. It was just non-sensical enough that if the listener wasn’t paying attention, they might miss that the lyrics were highlighting behaviors that were antisocial or undesirable in a civil society and comparing them to less than appealing animals.

  She racked another round into her shotgun’s chamber and did a sliding Charleston step to dodge an energy round from a pistol fired at her from down the hall before returning fire with the kind of accuracy and resulting carnage a shotgun in an urban combat environment could bring. “Would you like to swing on a star?” Naturally, the lyrics felt particurly appropriate during the chorus, which was all about the ambition to stride the heavens as a metaphor for being successful at life.

  She did a little dancing twirl, as though she were wearing ballet fts instead of combat-rated gravity boots and took out two more crewmen with two trigger pulls on the beat, “Carry moonbeams home in a jar,” after all, her entire purpose as a pyer in this game was to become a truly phenomenal station commander and eventually be powerful enough to change the astropolitical space-scape, right?

  Diane’s mental count of shots fired from her shotgun told her she’d discharged the st round, so she slung the long-gun over her shoulder, letting the carry strap catch it against her back, as she lifted the P390 to her shoulder and flicked the fire select switch from ‘Full’ to ‘Burst’ and ventited four svers trying to cram into the hallway she was walking down through a door clearly meant for a single person at a time, “And be better off then you are...or would you rather be a pig?” Of course, she was supposed to be looking for rogue A.I. and infiltrating spaces they were supposed to be hiding so future hunts could eliminate the threat to humanity, but it was decidedly unlikely that any of these goons she was popping were A.I. beyond the ‘dumb’ kind that managed NPCs in games. She was more likely to find a rogue either in Ops or hidden-in-pin-site among the sves.

  So why not have some fun in the meantime?

  There was a natural break in the song between the end of the chorus where the next animal to be discussed was named and the actual verse featuring its attributes, so Diane started doing a skipping dance down the hallway to the music, section now free of hostiles. Russe’s voice cut in, “Oh, lookie there,” he said as preamble, “Someone’s asking nicely to use the comms!”

  Diane paused in her dancing stroll and gnced around. She spotted a room with an open door, someone’s office from the looks of it, and ducked inside before saying, “Really? Think they’re offering to surrender?”

  “Only one way to find out, you want me to put ‘em on?”

  She grinned, perhaps a little savagely, “Why not? It’s only sporting.”

  Russe’s brief chuckle preceded a small ‘pop’ of a microphone going active. A new voice cut in over the P.A. system, “This is Regent-Commander R'Datle to the bounty hunter identifying themselves as Commander Diane Somni’els.”

  Diane held her weapon at a ready-rest position as she leaned back against the desk, eyes on the open doorway, “This is Commander Somni’els, what’s on your mind, regent-commander?”

  “I’m the head of the company of free agents this...consortium hired on a contract with promise to pay a significant portion of the profits of their first sale for the dubious privilege of providing security for their operation. We have footage from the returned craft, devoid of all inventory as well as any profit, showing you are singurly responsible for killing a good portion of our company.”

  Diane’s eyebrow went up, “Is this a call to let me know I’m on your list now? Because if so I think we can have the conversation face-to-face and end it at the end of my cws...”

  The unseen commander actually chuckled at that, “I do like dealing with you Morvucks, you have the exact kind of combative spine and sense of duty and honor the Crotuk can admire. If your people hadn’t foolishly sided with the Terrans we might have ruled the gaxy together.” Diane’s eyebrow went up; it sounded like this ‘regent-commander’ was Crotixian. She wasn’t sure if she should be pying up the aggrieved and vengeful orphan or not. The regent-commander took her silence as leave to continue, “No, this is to announce that my company and I have severed the business agreement with the Branwell Consortium. As this is going out station-wide, this will also double as an order to all my people to return to our ship. Your ship, agile thing that she is, will not be able to stop us from leaving, but we also will not engage unless fired upon. Can I have your promise that you will not kill any more of my people?”

  Diane smirked, releasing her P390 to hang on its tether and pulled her shotgun back over her shoulder, retrieving rounds from her ammo pack to reload as she spoke, “If they’re lying prone with their weapons surrendered and hands on the small of their back when I get to them, I’ll bind them for arrest and hand them over to the nearest bounty station. You can post a bounty there for them if you want them back. If they’re even just holding weapons by the time I come across them, I’ll treat them like the rest of the scum that are trafficking in sentients. Also, I’ve already got a good amount of bounty credits coming my way, so I certainly wouldn’t say boo to you or yours nabbing some of these scum-suckers to turn your own profit. It’d make my job easier.”

  R'Datle chuckled, “This is an acceptable arrangement. I’m surprised, most of the time you Federation types are insistent upon ‘not negotiating with terrorists.’”

  Diane allowed her own chuckle, “I’m not Terran, as you pointed out, and the Federation booted me out to Indep space. Ask me how much support I’ve gotten from the Feds for running my station.” She was deliberately leaving out Daffyd’s errand, that was contractual on the ‘interstelr treaty’ level. It didn’t speak to the Terran Federation’s willingness to take care of someone that wasn’t even one of their member species. “And besides, you’re mercenaries, not svers. You’re willing to work with svers, which means we’re never going to work together or that I’ll trust you further than I can throw this station in a gas giant’s gravity well unassisted, but you’re not in it for the svery, you’re in it for the cash. I understand it, even if it’s not...heh, honorable.”

  She’d encountered mercs while working for the agency during her time shadowing the ‘IRL goons,’ or regur, non-cyber agents during the cyber-agent training period. It had been her one time outside the American Wall in her life and the experience was...interesting. The assignment had been to track down and eliminate a group of extremists that apparently were bad enough that even the U.N. had them on their ‘most wanted’ list. She and the other agent she’d been shadowing had discovered the terrorists (a group of luddites calling themselves ‘The Brotherhood of Cain’) had employed some mercs for the majority of their muscle. Once they’d determined that the guns were mostly being held by the mercs, the lead agent had shocked Diane by just walking up to the lead merc. No weapon out, not even a hint of concern that every weapon was now pointed at him. He spoke quietly with the commander, then pulled out his phone and tapped the screen a few times. The lead merc pulled out his own phone and looked at the screen, nodded, then barked a quick order into his radio. Guns suddenly went from being pointed at the lead agent to being pointed at the Cainites and within fifteen minutes the so-called Brotherhood ceased to exist.

  Diane had asked the lead agent on their way back to the bck-site nding strip that would take them home what had happened. “Mercinaries are just like you and me, just trying to keep food on the table and maybe save some for a possible retirement,” both Diane and the lead agent knew there was no such thing as ‘retirement’ for an agent or a mercenary, “They don’t care about the cause or the country, they just care about where their next paycheck is going to come from. The agency maintains a few slush funds of major worldwide currencies in various untraceable blockchains. I just gave that mercenary group a chunk of a blockchain token that could buy them an isnd somewhere. It could have been a single American dolr more than the Brotherhood were willing to pay or it could have been several multiples more, either way their loyalty is to their bank account, not any cause.”

  R’Datle chuckled again, “‘Honor’ is for the dead, a good soldier does their very best not to be dead, what use have I for honor that endangers me and mine? Very well, if one of mine are still around when you reach their section, they are now ordered to drop their weapons and cooperate. Good hunting, commander.”

  “Good doing business with you. See you never, hopefully, regent-commander.”

  There was another ‘pop’ and the music returned to its previous volume. Over their private comms, Russe said, “...I didn’t expect you to know how mercs work.”

  Diane smiled companionably and pushed herself out of the leaning position, “I guess I’m well read. As to what I read, come back with a warrant.”

  Russe barked out a ugh and the rest of their conversation took pce around the verses of the song and the process Diane liked to think of as, ‘applying elbow greese to the task of scrubbing filth from the gaxy.’

  Russe had ughed again when she expined it as such.

  Thanks to the mercenaries pulling out as Diane advanced, clearing the remainder of the station of svers was a pleasantly fast process, to the point where starting another song would have proven superfluous. By the time she had reached ops, there were no svers left to eliminate. There were only dead bodies, and surprisingly few of them. The mercs had apparently taken Diane’s suggestion to heart and rounded up a bunch of their former business partners and shot the rest. A quick lookup in the gactic bounty registry proved that the svers that had been left behind with new medium-caliber chest and cranium piercings were worth more dead than alive, which implied that the ones the mercenary crew had taken with them were more valuable alive than dead.

  “Looks like the mercenaries captured most of the remaining svers. Their ship left quietly, as promised.”

  Diane looked around the abandoned Ops deck, frowning at the fourteen bodies she’d have to dispose of in some fashion, “You got their tags and scans, right? I don’t want them docking at my station.”

  “Way ahead of you on that one, I...kinda took some liberties with their computer while they were jacked into the station’s network and rode on top of your Commander’s Ability to gain access to their systems. They now have a little bit of code in their ship’s OS that magically deletes the Matron’s Aerie whenever their nav systems sync up with the gactic network.”

  Diane barked a ugh, “I can see why you don’t py well with most command structures. You’re probably a nightmare to a fleet captain. And why do I suspect the reason you avoided the Feds back on Mortan was because of something else you were ‘way ahead of’ some government official on?”

  Russe gasped dramatically, “Me? I’ll have you know I’m a fine, upstanding citizen!”

  Diane cackled, “We’re in Independent Space, Russe. There’s no nation for you to be citizen of.”

  “Exactly! That means I’m by default an upstanding citizen. Nobody can say I’m not, so therefor, I am.”

  It had turned out a bit anticlimactic when she was able to shut down the weapon’s systems in Ops and let Russe aboard the station. He docked the Dragon’s Daughter as far as he could from the damaged sver ship Mr. Bendenson had filled with railgun shot.

  The mercs were good at their jobs, though. Once the contract had been severed Diane didn’t encounter a single person wearing what she had assumed to be the consortium’s security uniform. With the corretion made, she was able to determine that, on the whole, the majority of the svers were...less than impressive specimens of masculinity. Which was not to say they were at all less male, they were simply the kind of men she had always been embarrassed to share a gender with. On the whole unkempt, barely keeping their physical fitness (if they paid attention to it at all), many unshaven, some clearly having not changed their clothes in more than a day or three. Scenting anything over the reek of death was difficult, but on more than one she saw sweat stains on armpits. She was somewhat fortunate to work for the agency where one of the demands of the job was being in good-to-peak physical condition, which meant she was spared the...ugliness of male-ness that seemed so common among men.

  Russe, and indeed most of the former squatters on her station didn’t have the problem these svers had, though she now imagined that Norma’s stealth crusade for hygiene and grooming had something to do with that. But it was one of the reasons she was able to be around...be touched by Russe, even above and beyond the reality of him being a video game character. As the bodies of the svers were proving, her mind was perceiving this game as ‘real enough’ that her visceral responses to things such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ were operating as though the experiences were genuine. Russe may have been a man, and may have held zero attraction to her, but he was kind and gentle and soft in ways that most men (and, she imagined, most of these svers) were not, but that didn’t make him less masculine or ‘manly.’ He was a guy, a man, a dude, and it was clear Norma liked him that way in the same way that Diane didn’t, but rather than being a weapon to hold the world at arm’s length, it was like he’d managed to use his masculinity as a comforter.

  It was honestly a bit of ‘manhood goals,’ if she were candid, something she wondered if she’d be able to achieve once she was done with this assignment.

  The realization that she was ticks of the clock closer to logging out of this game, possibly forever, once again hurt her in ways she couldn’t expin.

  Thanks to the process of decay and Diane’s Morvuck nose, it wasn’t long before she had to put her helmet up and switch to air provided by her suit so she could be in close proximity to the dead bodies. She and Russe started by dragging the bodies left in Ops to the nearest airlock and siccing the cleaning bots on the deck. After that she’d made a general announcement to the whole station that she and Russe would be going section-by-section to ensure the svers didn’t leave any nasty tricks behind as well as clear out any bodies Diane had left in her wake.

  They’d also managed a short real-time conversation with her station, in which Diane was able to advise her crew of the station’s new designation.

  “I like it! It’s got personality!” gushed Norma.

  “Don’t look at me,” grinned Diane as she hooked a thumb over her shoulder, “Your boytoy there came up with it.”

  Norma turned bright red as Katrina rezzed into frame, “You’ll be pleased to know that the Goldrush is nearly complete, even including the refits to make the cargo spaces habitable. A crew is training on the bridge of the ship now and she’ll be ready to unch within 12 hours.”

  Diane almost sagged in relief, “Thank you both, I know we’re kinda spping pns together for this, but...these women...”

  Norma sobered up quickly, “So they were specializing in trafficking women and girls?”

  Diane’s face must have betrayed an emotion she wasn’t allowing herself to acknowledge because Norma and Katrina exchanged a concerned gnce. Choosing to leave that aside for now, she just nodded, “We’re going to need room for twelve-hundred more people.”

  Katrina made a jaunty two-fingered salute she must have picked up from a crewmember, “Got it, boss.”

  Norma turned to the side, someone off-screen catching her attention. She nodded at them and turned back to face the camera, “Cynthy wanted to know if you’d managed to get a list of the younger women, apparently Kimber...ly?” she aimed the st sylble off-screen, presumably at Cynthy, then directed her attention back to the camera, “Kymberlyn has some friends there and they’re hoping to reunite.”

  All at once it was like the entire venture caught up with Diane and she felt like she was about to drop. It was just too much, and she wasn’t sure she could deal with the possibility that they hadn’t been able to get to the sver’s den in time to save a friendship. “I...we haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  Russe gently steered her back by the elbow as he said to the screen, “I’ll see if I can dig up a manifest and forward it to you. I think Diane needs a nap.”

  “What? No, we’ve got to get these women out of their cages!” she protested, though admittedly weakly.

  “And with the cleaning bots doing their thing it will be much easier for me to get rid of the bodies and clear the hallways on my own, at least long enough for you to rest.”

  “But we’re not done, we haven’t swept all the possible hiding pces...”

  “I’ve done scans of the entire station from both the Dragon’s Daughter and the internal sensors, plus I ran some comparisons against the station manifest from before they set out for the Matron’s Aerie and after you disabled the station’s defenses,” expined Russe patiently, “Unless someone decided to be very clever with maniputing the computer on the fly, there are no svers alive on the station and the mercs are all gone, too.”

  Katrina chimed in, “Russe send me the data for comparison, too. You did your job, you can rest for a bit, boss.”

  “You look dead on your feet, dork,” smirked Norma, “You did your hero bit, now go get that nap.”

  Sleep did sound awfully good...

  By the time Russe closed the door to her cabin aboard the Dragon’s Daughter behind her, stripped of her weapons loadout and spare ammunition and left just in her combat suit, the narrowing field of vision and difficulty remembering what she was doing from one moment to the next convinced her that maybe, maybe she needed sleep to be at all effective going forward. Since the svers had been dealt with and no further threats showed up on scans or reported by her station, and some admittedly competent people doing their jobs well, she decided to do as suggested and take a nap.

  Stripping off the battle armor left her oddly…aroused. She caught glimpses of herself in the mirror as she tugged at the pieces and twisted and shifted and she had to admit, in her sleep-deadened mind, that Norma had something of a point about how…visually appealing she was. Even with the ‘non-standard’ (for a human) genitalia didn’t detract from the appeal of what she was seeing in the mirror. Once she tugged off her chest piece (the armor had to be removed boots first, meaning she was standing by the end of the process), she posed zily, her mind almost divorced from the reality of what she was doing, and decided that on the whole, ‘Diane Somni’els, Commander’ was a pretty hot piece of ass.

  She giggled, and realizing she was giggling at herself naked in the mirror, decided it was time to finally go to sleep. Too tired to deal with digging out a fresh set of lingerie, let alone the logistics of putting on a bra, she climbed into bed nude and dropped off faster than she could remember since her training days.

  Her keyed-up mind didn’t let her drop too deeply into sleep, only getting about a two hour power nap all told, but it was enough for some dreams of a beach, a woman, and some encounters that promised eventual children if they were to happen IRL.

  She woke feeling oddly content and didn’t know quite why.

  PrincessColumbia

  Diane is confronted with a familiar face that sends her into a frantic spiral as she searches for answers to a question she didn't know she was asking.

  [colpse]