Imperatrix of the Galaxy

by Tristan Vick

  Jegra looked up to see a cloaked figure standing on top of a large boulder at the crest of the waterfall, her plasma rifle held at her side in a non-threatening manner. She squinted to try and make out the figure’s face, but it was concealed by a navy-blue wrap that matched the rest of the shawl. Probably to help combat the smog and the sweltering desert sun, she surmised.

  Only a narrow slit allowed for two gorgeous emerald eyes to peer down at her from behind the muffler. Jegra’s mysterious savior’s eyes sparkled in the dim light cast by the twin moons and, after a brief silence, her rescuer spoke. “It’s best we clear out. They’ll be back soon.” The woman took out a canteen and, kneeling down next to the rushing water, filled it. She then stood up and tossed Jegra the canteen of water. “Here, you’ll need this. The walk through the jungle is a long one.”

  Jegra slung the canteen’s strap over her shoulder and looked back the way the dinosaurs had fled and then back at the woman who was already turning to leave. Given her options, she’d rather join this stranger than get stomped into the ground by some pea-brained lizard with only food on its mind.

  Plasma rifle clutched in both hands, the mysterious woman paused and looked over her shoulder. “Well? You coming or not?”

  Jegra nodded in compliance and began scaling the slope of the rockface that wound its way up the waterfall. Once she’d made it to the top, she found the woman waiting for her at the edge of the tree line. Seeing that she’d made it, the figure stepped into the forest and Jegra quickly followed after her.

  They hiked along a trail for the better half of an hour and then came out of the oasis to a bluff that overlooked a lush valley. Just beyond the valley was a mountain range peaked by jagged rock formations.

  “There,” the woman said, aiming a finger at the mountains. “That’s home.”

  “That is far,” Jegra sighed disappointedly.

  “When I saw your shuttle crash, I set out right away. It took me three days to get to you.”

  “Three days?” Jegra asked. “Is that all?”

  The woman’s eyes flickered as they scanned Jegra’s face. Then she set out without so much as another word.

  “All right, then,” Jegra said aloud. “Nice talk.”

  Fifty-six hours later, they’d come to the foothills at the far end of the valley. Jegra finished the remainder of water in her canteen then tipped it back and tapped the side trying to get every last drop. Realizing it was no use, she huffed disappointedly and then twisted the lid back on.

  “We’re here,” her travel companion finally said, as she stopped before a steep rockface.

  Vines and moss clung to the rockface and climbed almost to the top. That’s when Jegra noticed it. At the very pinnacle were two giant rock faces that formed a narrow passage. And wedged in-between the mammoth cliff sides was a spaceship.

  It wasn’t a big ship. Most likely a freighter or commercial hauler of some kind. But it was a ship, none-the-less. Completely intact. Apart from it being wedged three hundred feet above the ground, it looked salvageable.

  “Is that yours?” Jegra asked the cloaked figure.

  The emerald green eyes settled onto Jegra’s brown ones and then, without uttering a word, the woman slung her rifle over her shoulder and began scaling the vines that tendrilled their way up to the where the ship was.

  Jegra shrugged, the sunburn on her shoulders stinging slightly as she did so. Without seeing any option but to place her trust in this complete stranger, she grabbed ahold of a thick vine and followed her up.

  14

  A headless Jegra, straddled the emperor’s thighs and ground her pelvis into his. He reached up and squeezed her oversized breasts and groaned loudly as he coupled with her. After a few minutes, he climaxed and then let out a deep, breath-laden sigh. A twisted smile remained on his face as he looked up at the decapitated corpse that was settling into him, soaking him all up.

  “It’s been three days of this morbid roleplaying fantasy, Rhadamanthus, and you still haven’t gotten sick of it?” the corpse asked in a dour tone.

  “Don’t talk,” Dakroth said, “It ruins the illusion.”

  Jegra’s hands reached up to her gaping neck wound and fumbled for an invisible pull. Unzipping the holographic suit, Ishtar peeled the garment down to her waist and looked at Dakroth.

  “Maybe you’re not tired of fucking your dead ex, but I sure as hell am tired of pretending to be her just so you can get off.”

  “Oh, quit your bellyaching,” Dakroth griped. “You were certainly into it the first several times.”

  “Yeah, because it’s twisted as fuck. But doing it night after night…it kind of loses its morbid charm.”

  “Fine then,” he grumbled, roughly pushing her off of him as if she were a common prostitute. “I was finished with you anyway.”

  He clapped his hands and two green-skinned Bre’lal courtesans entered his bed chamber. He rose to his knees and wrapped his arms around their waists as they stood by his bed dressed in nothing but the translucent gossamer skirts and nothing else. Looking over at Ishtar with a mocking grin, he said, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  Ishtar shot him a sharp glance then stormed out of the emperor’s personal chambers. If he wants to fuck green-skins, she thought bitterly, then he can fuck green-skins. If he wants to fuck blue-skins, then, by all means, fuck blue-skins. But if he thought he could fuck her over like this without consequences, he was dead wrong. She’d see to it that he remembered the exact moment the red-skin fucked him in return.

  Angry, she tore at the damn holographic suit, its fake Jegra breasts jiggling as she peeled it off her body and discarded it in the hallway. Leaving the wrinkled husk in the middle of the floor, she marched past some maidservants who quickly scattered out of the way as she rushed past them. The black tribal tattoos running down her red, naked body, dripped with the residue of her lustful encounter with Dakroth. She marched into a lift and then hit the button for the fourteenth level basement. The doors slid shut and she tilted her hips and tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for the lift to sink deep beneath the royal palace.

  When the doors opened again, Ishtar wasted no time and cut across the large chamber to the far end. The stone floor and walls hinted at the fact that it was an ancient part of the palace; the original stone slabs that made up the foundation were still intact after a thousand years.

  Massive Doric styled marble columns, about twenty in all, supported the ceiling, which stood thirty feet tall. Candles, rather than lights, provided illumination to the sprawling chamber, giving it an ancient mystique, an almost temple-like quality.

  Ishtar went over to a clothes rack set up along the back wall and found some black leather strips with a series of interlocking buckles hanging on them. She fiddled with the various strands of leather for a bit and then pieced together a dominatrix outfit. Slipping into the leather attire, she strode over to a large marble slab that stood upright at the center of the broad chamber. Bound to it by her wrists, waist, and ankles was Danica, fast asleep. Even at the vertical angle, she managed to sleep soundly. Even with the threat of parasitic life growing within her swollen abdomen.

  Ishtar gently leaned in and kissed a sleeping Danica on the lips, urging her awake. “Rise and shine, my pet,” she whispered in a faintly melodic, singsong voice like that of a mother waking a sleeping child.

  Ishtar ran her fingers along the bloated and bulbous abdomen of Danica, now ripe with the eggs of the demon worms. Danica’s belly was so swollen it looked as though she were eighteen weeks pregnant. Her purple veins could be seen under her thinly stretched blue skin; Ishtar’s fingers followed the branching vessels; it looked as though the slightest amount of extra pressure would cause her belly to burst, spilling demon worm eggs all over the place.

  Danica slowly opened her eyes and looked up at the grinning red face staring back at her. Waking up from one nightmare into another caused her chest to seize with fear and she began hyperventilating.

>   For the past three weeks, she’d had plenty of time to become intimately familiar with the kinds of depravity Ishtar Bantu was willing to stoop to just to get that small hit of perverse gratification that only her twisted little mind could conjure up.

  “What’s the matter, my pet? Aren’t you happy to see me?” Her voice was all cutesy, as though she were talking to a baby, which made it all the more disturbing.

  Ishtar rubbed her hand over her bald head, her fingers tracing the lines of her tattoos, a kind of ceremonial war paint unique to her people. Caught in a moment of ecstasy, Ishtar’s eyelids fluttered and her eyes rolled back into her head so only the whites showed. It was like she was experiencing an orgasm, even though she’d only just arrived.

  Danica’s eyes welled up with tears. If Ishtar was this excited before she’d actually begun her depraved session of playing doctor, she obviously had something truly twisted in mind.

  Ishtar took a deep breath to calm herself and her face returned to normal. Her gaze hardened and settled on Danica; the corners of her mouth curled upward with a twisted sort of preoccupation.

  “Shall we begin today’s session?”

  Tears trickled from the corners of Danica’s eyes and slid down her cheeks, but she dared not respond. Any response, positive or negative, was only ever met with just one thing. Torture. If she didn’t respond, sometimes Ishtar would grow bored and leave her alone. Sometimes.

  Ishtar went over to one of the pillars in the room and found a control panel. She flipped a switch and the table lowered and tilted back. It locked into place with a loud clunk and Danica raised her head and watched Ishtar make her way to a pristine white machine that looked like a high-end mobile medical lab unit.

  The machine had a series of robotic arms, three on each side which, disturbingly enough, gave it a crab-like appearance. Each arm was fully automated and capable of performing multiple intricate surgeries simultaneously.

  Ishtar wheeled the robotic device over and positioned it at the head of the marble slab. Danica strained against her restraints and thrashed her head in protest, but it was of little use. Ishtar locked the machine down and activated it.

  Clamps rose up from under the stone table and pinched Danica’s head in a vice grip, holding it firmly in place. With a menacing mechanical whine, three of the machine’s arms swiveled around and curled downward. Blades at the end of each arm gleamed in the dim light and they came into position above Danica’s face. The blades retracted and were quickly replaced by a series of syringes. Each needle dripped with a reconditioning serum designed to make Danica submit to anything Ishtar wanted to do to her.

  Ishtar tapped on the control pad and the needles slowly bore down onto Danica’s forehead and temples.

  “Please,” Danica whispered. “Please…don’t.”

  “Don’t?!” she snarled, her eyes wide with menacing rage. “How dare you tell me what to do.” She jammed her thumb onto the control pad and the needles penetrated Danica’s flesh and bone. She screamed out in agony, the tendons in her neck tensing so tightly they bulged under the skin as thick as piano wire.

  “No, please, stop,” Danica pleaded in a barely audible voice. “Please, I can’t take it anymore.” Tears trickled out of the sides of her eyes.

  Ishtar looked down at Danica and grinned. Again, it was that strange, child-like glee that Danica found so disturbing. Ishtar was a true psychopath. Other’s suffering caused her great pleasure. There was no way she would ever stop. A deep sadistic urge compelled her to go through with it till the end. Whether Danica would survive remained uncertain.

  The only thing that could stop Danica’s suffering now would be to give up and just let herself fade away. Let herself die. But some nagging voice in the back of her mind told her not to give Ishtar the satisfaction.

  “I’m afraid we’re just beginning, my dear Vice Admiral.” A vicious grin spreading across her face, Ishtar tapped another sequence of commands and the syringes hissed as they injected Danica with their mind-altering drugs.

  At the same time, the remaining three robotic arms came alive. One was equipped with a scalpel, another with a bone cutter, and the third with a white-hot sealing torch. The servos whirred inside the retracted arms and they slowly extend toward Danica’s body.

  “They say one of these machines can piece a body back together as quickly as it can tear it apart.”

  The arms all repositioned themselves directly above Danica’s legs and then the cutting, searing, scorching pain of the automated arms simultaneously bit into her and she cried out in agony.

  As the stress grew and the pain intensified, the narcotic serum kept her conscious. She began to bleed from her eyes and ears. But all she could do was watch as the terrible robotic limbs dismantled her body piece by piece from the feet up. At the same time, the very same device began mending her. Even so, without the proper anesthesia, it was enough violent trauma to cause even the soundest of minds to go mad.

  Not even halfway through the procedure, Danica’s nervous system shut down and she passed out from the excoriating pain. In her mind, she was certain she had died, except, for some reason, her consciousness was still very much aware of her condition. She realized that she’d retreated so far into herself that she was observing everything going on as though she were an outside observer. A kind of out of body experience. Then, slowly, everything grew even more distant. The terrible sound of the mechanical arms, Ishtar’s voice urging her to wake up again, all slowly faded to a distant white noise.

  She didn’t remember the exact moment she’d blacked out. All she remembered was waking up again and hearing unfamiliar voice.

  “In here!” a man shouted.

  His voice was filled with panic and dismay and for a brief moment Danica thought she had dreamed it. Slowly, she came back into her own body and opened her eyes. Awakening from the paranormal experience, she winced at the bright lights all around her. She blinked several times, giving them time to adjust, and then opened them again. Blurry faces wrapped in white medical masks swarmed her and she fought through hazy vision to try to make out what was going on.

  She heard the faint sound of the same man’s voice speak again, but this time it drew nearer. She heard other murmured whispers and, then, the first voice gasped out in horror filled dismay. “Oh my Gilded Lord.”

  Danica opened her eyes to see a doctor and several medics standing over her. She lay in some kind of warm muck, but was uncertain as to what it was. Slowly, she looked down to see her entrails sprawled out across the floor. Demon worm eggs mixed in with her blood and guts. Apparently, the machine had malfunctioned when it got to the worm larva in her body, not knowing how to deal with the foreign entity.

  When the worm brood had exploded, so had most of her abdomen. And the worm’s lethal venom would have most certainly killed her if it wasn’t for the fact that it had literally all spilled out of her faster than it could affect her systems.

  Ironically, being so near to death is precisely what prevented her from dying.

  “Get her onto the gurney. We need to get her to the OR immediately if we’re going to have any chance of saving her,” the doctor shouted. The medics complied and reached under Danica’s arms and hoisted her onto the gurney. The hover coils hummed as they set her down onto the stretcher.

  As they hauled what remained of her bloody body out of the chamber, one of the medics slipped an oxygen mask over her face. She turned her head to the side as she breathed in the cool flow of air and glimpsed Dakroth standing off to the side, his arms clasped behind his back, radiant pink energy streaming out of both eyes. A sign he was beyond enraged.

  In the corner of the room cowered Ishtar. One of her arms had been complete vaporized, the nub of what remained smoldering white wisps of smoke that curled upward in the dimness. She clutched her side and looked absolutely pathetic, groveling at the emperor’s feet. She had gone too far and would certainly be punished for it.

  As the medics ushered her out and rushed her to
the operating room, Danica felt her heart stop inside her chest. As she flatlined, a smile settled onto her face. At last now, she thought, the pain has finally come to an end.

  15

  High above the sprawling canopy of the jungle, Jegra looked out the ship’s view portal at the alien landscape below. It seemed that the dense patch of vegetation that enclosed them now was only the size of a small city. Beyond it only lay the dead forest ruins and a never-ending desert.

  The stranger gradually unwrapped her shawl and revealed herself to be a Bre’lal woman who bared a striking similarity to that of one deceased Abethca Agnar, except that she had a beauty mark, was about four inches taller, and had slightly less muscle definition.

  “Abethca?” Jegra gasped, thinking she was in the presence of a ghost.

  “No, I’m her sister. Onelle Te’Legra Agnar.”

  Jegra rushed over and snatched Onelle up in her arms and gave her a great big hug. Onelle laughed at the unexpectedness of it and Jegra gently set her back down again.

  “Does the empress of Dagon greet all her subjects that way?” Onelle asked.

  Jegra smiled but understood the question was rhetorical. “I knew your sister. I knew Abethca,” Jegra informed Onelle.

  “Then you must know who killed her,” Onelle said. Her tone was cold and vicious and contained a menacing quality that hinted at the fact that Onelle was out to get revenge for her sister’s murder.

  Jegra nodded solemnly.

  Onelle’s voice came out rough and hard, the voice of a warrior on the battlefield, one who knew he was headed into a battle he couldn’t possibly win but who had been in a hundred other such battles and, miraculously, lived to tell about it. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me who killed Abby.”

  “An assassin named Ishtar Bantu killed her. I had left Abethca alone to bathe herself after a bout in the arena. If I had only returned sooner, I could have…” Jegra’s voice seized up and she choked on the sadness that the painful memory of Abethca’s death, her first great loss in or out of the arena, drudged up.