“Him!” She shouted, though her voice sounded like she was underwater, at the bottom of a well, a well that was currently being attacked by aliens from the gong planet.
The combat robots paused. Lowered their barrels.
Sarah rolled out of the angel’s arms – dropping lightly to the floor with a faint click of clawed toes on the ground. Her shoes had gotten blown off at some point. She held her hands up, edging slowly towards the debris shrouded body of Space Belisarius. She knelt beside him and gently plucked a piece of plaster off his face. She saw that while his lips were still black, his face hadn’t broken out in the veins that she had seen on Dr. Bowers face when she had infected him by accident. She bit her lip, then extended her wrist tendrils, plunging them into the other Commander’s neck.
What she found was the microbial and chemical equivalent of a war zone. Nanoscale machines – medichines – were soaring through his blood and his muscles and his bone, fighting back against the contact venom on her skin. To her shock, the medichines were actually in a tie. Not winning, but not losing either. She wasn’t sure if that said more about the quality of the medichines or the deadliness of her skin neurotoxin. Sarah closed her eyes. “Okay...” She whispered. “First things first...” She tried to bring her own awareness out of the Commander’s body and into hers – and there, she felt herself. She felt the minor changes she had already wrought, many of them without thinking. She found the glands in her body that were producing the neurotoxin and told them, chemically and biologically, to stop doing that.
Then she injected the cure into Space Belisarius.
And then a sneaky idea occurred to her.
She had transformed Dr. Bowers, accidentally, into a bladeling. That had included the command conditioning, which had let her order him and have him have to follow every single one. She chewed her mental lip. She could slip that conditioning into SB. She could make him, in effect, into her puppet and remove any and all chance of betrayal. It’d be like not fighting. But...also, it’d be ripping away his freedom. She had done it to Bowers by accident. Doing it coldly, intentionally...no. She drew her tendrils back, snapping from the close, quiet, almost intuitive headspace of biomorphing to the real world that she spent most of her days in. When she blinked, she saw that Belisarius was opening his eyes.
“Commander Kappel,” he said, slowly. “If I might make a suggestion for future diplomatic meetings?”
“Yeah?” Sarah asked.
“Wear gloves with your uniform,” Belisarius said.
***
Plasma Dynamics, like StarCon, liked their personnel to be comfortable – when those personnel could pay at the very least. This meant that the chambers that Space Belisarius took the Sarah Gang too were as finely appointed and splendid as anything she had ever seen on the Excalibur and in a very similar style: Rich carpeting, plush furniture, the bold lines and stark figures of art-deco. Everything proclaimed: This is a place for people of wealth and taste. Including the food. Sarah sat at the table across from SB and looked at him through the crystalline wine glass that he had fabricated for her, then filled with equally fabricated red wine.
“It’s a simulated Beaujolais 32, I believe,” Belisarius said, his fingers holding a knife and fork as he sawed into the thick cut steak that he had fabricated for himself. “But if you want this honest trencherman’s opinion? I cannot tell the difference.” He leaned forward, his lips skinning back in a grin. “You could give me a white wine and I’d still call it a red wine half the time, eh?”
“Yeah. Wine.” Sarah shook her head, setting the glass down. “What even is wine. Hah. I mean.” She coughed. “I know what wine is, I’ve had wine. Loads of wine. S-Sometimes, it even came out of a fabricator and not a cardboard box. Not that there’s anything wrong with cardboard box wine! I mean, it was nice! Fine! No! Better than fine, it was good. Not as good as this. I mean, this is fine. I think. I haven’t...” She stopped herself as Belisarius’ cutting slowed, then stopped.
Belisarius chuckled. “It’s not poisoned, you know. You don’t need to-”
Sarah knocked the entire glass back in one quick gasp and slammed it down like she was doing a shot.
Belisarius blinked at her.
“I like wine!” Sarah wheezed, her eyes brimming with tears.
Belisarius chuckled and went back to sawing at his steak.
Sarah pretended to be very interested in the rest of the room’s decoration to cover up her wiping the tears out of her eyes. The room proper was situated on the top of one of the tall spires of rock that dominated the planet. Geologic activity sparked by several impacts on the same scale as the impact that had formed the Earth’s moon had left Wolf-359 B ringing like a gong, even almost two billion years later. The result had been a wild, chaotic fractal of rock and pillars and canyons, wracked with periodic landquakes. The only thing more common than the pillars were fissures that led straight towards pockets of geothermal energy – the multiple impactors had been rich with radioactive elements, which still radiated their heat through the crust. The only sign of life was the faint haze in the stars, adding just enough of a twinkle to trick Sarah’s eyes into thinking she was back on Earth, and the occasional patch of lichen that grew on the tops of the pillars.
Part of the reason why life was so hard to spot, though, was because Belisarius had been fortifying the planet since his blitz. Laser towers, missile sites, surface-to-space launchers, kinetic bunkers, hardened laser shields, force screen emitters, gravimetric field apertures, radial antenna aiming arrays, kiloton after kiloton of hard ordinance stacked up in quake-shielded underground ice shelters. There were trebuchet catapults designed to launch X-ray lasing emitters strapped to dirty fission bombs, so when the bombs went off, the X-ray lasers would whip around wildly like invisible swords, cutting across space and severing everything in their path.
Even with the security pass codes they had gotten from Sexy Napoleon, it was a fucking deathtrap.
“Impressed?” Belisarius asked.
“I...not...kinda,” Sarah said, flopping back and forth between honesty and diplomacy. She blushed, looking down at her cup. “This ecosystem is so fragile. It’s basically rebounding from their own oxygen catastrophe. Yeah, it’s argon, but you can see the fossilized landreefs. Well. Those that your construction tanks haven’t plowed over.”
“Oxygen catastrophe?” Belisarius asked, sipping from his wine.
Sarah sighed. Her fingers rolled the glass gently. “When life first started on Earth, it didn’t breathe oxygen. It breathed the atmosphere that existed at the time. Well, one of those lifeforms excreted oxygen. The oxygen killed everything else.” She bit her lip. “Most of all life on Earth exists because one kind of life killed the rest.”
Belisarius nodded, subtly.
“Then we killed most of that,” Sarah said, quietly. “I mean, we didn’t do it on purpose or anything. It wasn’t, like, avoidable or anything.” She nodded again, remembering her lessons from school. “It just...happens, I guess.” She looked back out the window, at the few scraps of reefs that hadn’t been crushed. “But if anyone attacks this planet, those pew pew guns are going to mulch the lichen, and...that’ll be it for this planet.”
Belisarius nodded. “I want to turn this world into a quagmire for Disney’s enemies. But...” he paused, then set his fork down. “That quagmire can be in orbit.”
Sarah glanced up. “What do you mean?”
Belisarius smiled. “Oh no. I’m not taking you off to show you anything until you eat your dinner.”
Sarah blinked at him. Then she looked down at the large slab of red meat she had asked for. “Oh! Right!” She blushed, then stabbed her fork into it, placed her knife against the meat. She closed her eyes. She just had to act naturally – but Belisarius’ red eyes and his soft voice and the conversation and her own stupid mouth had left her feeling so wound up. She clenched her jaw and sliced. The knife plunged through the steak, plate, halfway into the table, and snapped in half. Sarah re
mained frozen, her hand clenching on the handle, trying to conceal what had happened. She thrust out with her finger, pointing at a random spot on the wall. “What’s that!?”
Belisarius glanced over his shoulder. “That is a wall, Sarah.”
When he looked back, Sarah’s cheeks bulged and her napkin covered her plate and a good chunk of the table. She was chewing slowly. Carefully. She nodded, her cheeks wobbling as she mumbled. “Mmphmm!”
Belisarius smiled. “You know, Sarah Kappel, I think you are by far, the most interesting woman I’ve ever met in my life,” he said, casually. Then he stood as Sarah swallowed, her throat bulging nearly as much as her throat. The steak half stuck and she punched her own throat with one hand before it finally slipped down. She coughed, gasped, then smiled at him.
“Thanks,” she said. “I think?”
Belisarius took her hand without a single sign of fear and walked her out of the room – and Sarah paused only to ping Aiden. Her picture in picture minimap showed that her friends were mostly clustered in one of the fancy living chambers. Aiden’s voice came into her head a bit hesitantly. Sarah? Are you...talking to me?
Hey, it worked! Sarah thought. I wasn’t sure it would. But, I mean, I figure you’re one of my units, maybe I could...send...messages. I’m just checking to make sure SB hasn’t done anything evil or sneaky while he was wining and dining me.
Everything seems fine so far, Aiden said. Then, playfully. Wining and dining huh?
I’m not going to fuck him! Sarah said.
I never said anything about fucking… Aiden’s voice was a playful croon.
S-Shut up!
The lady doth protest too much, Aiden purred.
I can order you to stick your head into a toilet, Sarah thought, her voice somewhat vengeful, but then the connection broke – not because of anything evil or unwanted happening to Aiden. It broke because Sarah’s concentration was shaken to the core as Belisarius took her into a high speed elevator and the faint shift of the gravitational field snapped her attention back to the world around her. Her brow furrowed as the elevator dropped five stories, then whisked horizontally away from the base. She yelped as the elevator’s clear walls showed them whirring along a monorail track that snaked between canyon walls, past defensive structures.
“Uhhhhhh, where are we going?” She asked.
“A hot lab,” Belisarius said, smiling. “The more dangerous a technology, the further from the base it got researched. Plasma Dynamics was working on several space based weapons platforms in this hot lab. Stuff to give an edge in battles between ships.”
“O-Oh,” Sarah said, stepping up to the wall. “And why are you showing me this?”
“Let’s say I’m trying to seduce you,” he said, smirking at her.
“If you wanted to seduce me,” Sarah started, then stopped herself. Her tongue and her brain smashed together into a three-thought pileup. She had gotten used to flirting with Aiden. But Belisarius wasn’t Aiden. He was a stranger. And she was Sarah Kappel. But she was also the sexy, sensual, made-for-fucking human/claw hybrid infiltrator Commander. The combination of impulses, thoughts, and words, left her stammering out a confused: “Then, uh, bu...st….stuff!”
Belisarius chuckled. “Not like that, wench.” He gently elbowed her.
“Wench!?” Sarah asked.
“Do you prefer-” Belisarius was cut off by the elevator as it finished its track along the monorail, coming to a gentle stop against the side of a large silver spire that thrust from the canyon. Geothermal plants dotted the land around it, each one hissing and steaming with the energy coursing through their hyper-efficient turbines. The doors into the hot lab opened and Belisarius spread his hand, gesturing her forward. Sarah walked forward and tried to do so as normally as she could – but she found her hips swaying despite herself. She glanced back over her shoulder and caught the other Commander’s red eyes darting down to oggle her rump for a moment. She smirked to herself, while Belisarius stepped out of the elevator.
The interior of the hot lab eschewed the art-deco flourishes of the main living areas of the base – instead, it was all functional, sleek corridors, corridors that led almost immediately to one of the discretely partitioned laboratories. An observation blister was set into the side of the automated lab – dozens of robotic arms and drones were still at work within the lab, clearly going through a preprogrammed routine, ordered by Belisarius on the way. Sarah walked up to the edge of the blister, her nose squishing against the glass, folding up slightly as she watched the arms finishing their set up.
They had created a blunt nozzled projector, a bit like a gun or the outtake on a thruster.
“Whazzat?” Sarah asked.
“That is one of the devices that PD was working on before I took the base,” Belisarius said, his hand lightly resting on her shoulder. “It’s a new kind of plasma projector – stronger, faster firing, lighter.” He squeezed her as the nozzle of the weapon flared with a searing blue-white light. The sphere of energy it flung out struck a plate of armored sheeting that had just been set up by one of the automated arms, melting through it with ease. The plasma ball kept going, striking a second, then a third layer of armor before, at last, it was depleted. The third sheet still had a huge, glowing mark on it – white hot near the center, and as she watched, a dollop of molten composite flowed away from the center, leaving a puckered hole. It didn’t take being a naval expert to know that, if that had been a starship, that tiny hole would have created a pressure front that would have blown the whole weakened section into space.
“Dang,” Sarah said.
“The problem is, of course, the magnetic fields,” Belisarius said. “That’s the downside of many plasma weapons.”
“Yeah! Synth needs to be well away from my bombardier beetles before they fire,” Sarah said, turning to lean her back against the glass. “Or else she gets all loopy from the magnetic fields.”
“So, it’ll be worse than useless unless its mounted on sturdy, low fi weapon systems. Combots, tanks, that kind of thing,” Belisarius said. “But...what if it was strapped onto a space platform that doesn’t need to worry about magnetic fields scrambling their automated intelligences?”
Sarah’s brow furrowed. “My wingers ?”
“Your wingers,” Belisarius said, grinning at her as he leaned forward. “What weapons do they even have?”
“Uhhh...” Sarah blushed. His eyes were alight with excitement – and Sarah felt herself getting a teeny bit excited too. Her mind flashed back to the way war looked when she was riding on the transport, heading for Kellen Grant’s base. War had a beauty to it – and her mind was already beginning to put together the ways that the biological armament of her wingers combined with the PD plasma thrower could totally mash space ships. She grinned, slowly. “They’d compliment each other real good, actually.”
She and Belisarius began to talk shop – and Sarah shocked herself with how much fun it was. Belisarius had a sneaky, clever brain, the exact kind of clever brain she’d have expected, and it was fun throwing ideas about the use for not only wingers at Belisarius, but also discussing the abilities of spitters and blobbers. He had some suggestions on how to alter spitters - “Have you considered increasing their rate of fire by reducing the size of their projectiles and...” - and bladelings - “short distance agrav wings, like your wingers. More expensive in terms of radioactives, but considering your critters can make radioactives...”
Sarah’s head was whirling by the time she realized that Belisarius had stopped – they had gotten off the car and were back into art-deco land. He smiled at her. “Want to continue to talk shop inside over some more wine? Or...maybe something you actually like?” He winked at her.
Sarah blushed as she saw the small name stenciled on the door. This was Belisarius’ room.
Her blush got darker. “Rootbeer, maybe?”
“With ice cream?” Belisarius asked, punching his finger into the door open button. The door whisked opened and Sara
h walked inside, her finger twiddling with the collar of her uniform. She had gone from wanting to tear her uniform off in agitation to remembering how to be comfortable in her own clothing once again...to wanting to tear her uniform off again. It felt so close and confining. Her skin itched and she blushed a bit, her stomach filled with butterflies. You’re being stupid, she thought. You’ve had sex with, like, three enemy commanders. Well, okay, not Tex. But you...I mean, you’re not even going to have sex, unless you want to. Do you want to?
She glanced back at Belisarius, who had let the door slide shut behind him. He wasn’t exactly what she’d call handsome . He wasn’t Kellen Grant handsome. But the more she spent time with him, the more she found herself appreciating his features. She bit her lip, slightly, considering. And we did a quick bioscan on him , her brain murmured. You could look up how big his blue dick is. How big and thick and augmented it is. You know. Just out of idle speculation.
“Well?” Belisarius asked.
“No!” Sarah squeaked. “I mean, I don’t even know! I...”
Belisarius blinked at her. “You’ve never had ice cream in your rootbeer?”
“I...” Sarah blinked back at him. Her cheeks heated and her hair did one of her nervous little frissons – the spines flexing and unflexing in a wave. “No, actually. That sounds awful. The ice cream would get all soggy and the flavor would mix with the root-beer. Ugh.” She made a face.
Belisarius laughed. “Fair enough.”
They both sat down at a small table that was arrayed before the window that looked out at the starry skies of Wolf-359. The sun hung, low overhead, a red disk that was nearly dim enough to look at directly without pain. The room’s fabricator whirred as the waited and Belisarius murmured. “You know-”
“How did you beat Sexy Napoleon!?” Sarah yelped. The words sprang out of her, nervousness driving her – nervousness about the red gleam in his eyes.
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