Criminal Core

by Nick Broad

  “It’s my decision.” I said flatly. “I’m the Warden. I’m in charge around here.”

  Her lips twisted in a pout. “Yes you are,” she huffed, pulling a face.

  Great, I thought. One minute she’s fucking my brains out, now she’s pissed at me. Women.

  It didn’t matter. She’d come around eventually. Once we got this place up and running again, Meiko would see that all the sacrifices were worth it.

  Still, the thought of obliterating this girl’s chances of regaining her old life didn’t exactly make me feel awesome about myself.

  “So how do I do this?” I asked sheepishly. My hand went to the back of my neck. “I just say, ‘I name you’? Fuck, what do I name a Fae, anyway?”

  Meiko still looked upset. “You could call her ‘Onna’,” she said, tilting her head to the side.

  “That’s just the Japanese word for ‘woman’,” I said, flexing my language muscles yet again. “I’m not calling her woman like she’s some kind of animal - that’s degrading.”

  Her face lit up with surprise. “I forget that you know things like that,” she murmured. “Yet you don’t understand things that a child ought to - like not to give a name to a Nameless Fey.”

  “Whatever,” I grunted. “Hey, you!”

  The girl looked up from her hands, her eyes going wide. “What?”

  “You have a name,” I said, nodding at her. “Your name is Ruby.”

  I could have sworn there was a change in the air. A crackle, almost like some of that “magic” Meiko had been going on about. Maybe I was just feeling things, but the room definitely felt...different, somehow. From the look on her face, Meiko felt it, too.

  The girl’s eyes unclouded, the tears drying on her cheeks as she blinked rapidly. “Ru...by,” she whispered, like the word itself were holy.

  “Yeah, ‘cause a ruby is red, and you’ve got ruby-red hair,” I said, running my fingers through my own. “Okay, it’s not the most original idea in the world. If you want to come up with something better, that’s on you...”

  “Ruby,” the girl said. No, not ‘the girl’ anymore. “My name is Ruby.”

  “And now we’re both monsters,” Meiko whispered bitterly.

  I didn’t have time to dwell on her words, however. Because just then, Ruby jumped into my arms and started sobbing.

  “My name! My name!” she whimpered, clinging to me like the last piece of ballast after a shipwreck. Which, to be fair, to her I pretty much was. “My name is Ruby. Ruby...”

  “Yeah,” I said, laughing. It felt kinda nice having her in my arms, to be honest. “Everything’s alright now, Ruby. You’re gonna be fine...”

  She lifted her head from my shoulder and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Oh my,” she whimpered, looking around the room as if she were seeing it for the first time. “Where am I?”

  “This is a space station called the Black Oubliette,” I explained, my hands on her hips. “I’m in charge around here.”

  “It’s a prison,” Meiko added. Her eyes were hard.

  “I’m a prisoner?” Ruby’s face was a mask of shock. “I...I don’t understand!”

  “Let’s get you out of here,” I said, soothing her. “We should all head back to Alpha. Shay can hook you two up with crew quarters, since both of you are going to be helping me.” I stared at Meiko. “You are helping me fix this place, right?”

  Meiko didn’t look happy about it, but she didn’t disagree with me. “Fine,” she said, shaking her head. “Like it or not, we’re all in this together now. God help us.”

  “And don’t think I’ve forgotten about you,” I added with a smirk. “I’m looking forward to hearing your story, Meiko.”

  Ruby shivered against me. When I met her eyes, her face was filled with so much love and devotion that my heart skipped a beat.

  “Thank you, Master,” Ruby whispered. “Thank you for freeing me...”

  Oh shit, I thought. Master? This is going to be awkward as hell to explain to Shay...

  “I’m not your Master,” I said, chuckling. “I’m the Warden.”

  “Actually,” Meiko said, rolling her eyes, “you kind of are. Ruby is bound to you, now. You’d really, really better hope we never get any other Fae in here...”

  I could worry about other Fae later. First, I had to take care of this Fae. I was going to get Ruby settled, and then start exploring the rest of the station. Now that I had a crew to work with me, it was only a matter of time until the station was rolling in energy credits again.

  I hoped so, anyway.

  Eleven: Settling In

  “I’m impressed,” Shay said, giving her coffee a cute little slurp. “You came back with not one, but two new employees. I underestimated your hustle, Noah. Well done!”

  “Thanks,” I replied. The four of us were sitting in the control center, made more comfortable now that Shay ordered the drones to “relocate” a few chairs and a table from other areas of the ship and give us some space to rest. We’d arrived back in Alpha a few hours ago. “They’re not employees, though, Shay. We’re all working together. We’re partners.”

  “No,” Meiko said flatly. She had a hot mug of some kind of tea Shay had programmed into the replicator for her. It looked delicious. The steam from it surrounded her face like a halo. “We are most certainly not partners.”

  I winced at that. Meiko’s anger hadn’t cooled a bit - it had just gone under the surface. Every time I thought we were past it, it flared right up.

  “We’re all working towards a common goal: fixing the station,” I said firmly. “That makes us partners.”

  “Even if it’s only partners in crime,” Shay said with a smirk. I couldn’t help but notice she’d chosen her wardrobe to compensate for her height. She was easily the shortest of the three girls in the room, but she’d put on a pair of thigh-high boots with what looked like six-inch fuck-me heels on the ends. Standing side-by-side, she’d be just an inch or two below Meiko and taller than Ruby. There was no doubt about it - she definitely knew Meiko and I had had sex, and she considered the dark-haired woman some kind of a threat.

  Ruby scooted to the edge of her seat. When Shay introduced her to the replicator, she’d immediately done some complicated thing that had thrown up a half-dozen alarms and nearly gotten Chirrup involved. The liquid that had come out was a rich, golden nectar, which she lapped up with her tongue in a way that made Shay roll her eyes and gave me very ungentlemanly feelings between my legs to watch.

  “I’m whatever you need me to be, Master,” she purred, her expression open. “If cleaning this place up is what you desire, then it is my goal!”

  “Thanks, Ruby,” I said with a smile. At least one of you is on my side.

  Shay coughed. “Yeah, about that.” She cast a dismissive glance in the Fae’s direction. “I don’t have any particular affinity for the fairy people, but did you really have to go do something as difficult as slapping a new label on one of the fucking Nameless?”

  “It wasn’t difficult,” I said. “Hell, it was easy. I don’t know why more people don’t do it.”

  “Most of them aren’t noble enough to shoulder the burden,” Shay said, in a tone that made me think the word she really wanted to use was stupid.

  “Ruby seems perfectly nice!” I protested, patting the Fae’s knee. We’d found a new shipsuit for her wear - one that allowed her gauzy, diaphanous wings to hang free. They looked so light I found it hard to believe she could actually fly. “She’s not a burden at all!”

  “She is nice,” Shay shot back. “But you realize you just made every single other Fae in the universe your blood enemy for the rest of your life, right?”

  I stared at her blankly.

  Shay scoffed and turned to Meiko. “Didn’t you warn him?”

  The dark-haired beauty sipped her tea. “I tried,” she said, arching an eyebrow.

  Crap. That sounded bad. Really, really bad.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I decided. “We had to
get this place running again, one way or the other. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  Shay finished her drink with a final slurp. “Your funeral,” she said, setting the cup on the table. “So what’s the plan, exactly?”

  I spread my hands out in front of me and took a moment to collect my thoughts.

  “Obviously our primary goal should be to get the solar sail in operation,” I said, looking at each of the women in turn. “It generates more energy than all three of our reactors put together. Once we hook it up to the trailer hitch, this place will be fully operational and we can start making repairs-”

  “I’m sorry,” Meiko said, raising a hand. “Trailer hitch?”

  “The solar sail launch array,” Shay corrected.

  “Ah.”

  “Whatever,” I said, waving my hands in the air. “The important part is this: we install that, we’re golden.”

  Meiko looked thoughtful. “We have a solar sail?”

  Shay sighed. “No. We have the blueprints, but no sail.” She started to giggle at her own joke. “Get it, ‘no sale’? ‘Cause we’re broke?”

  “Yeah, thanks for reminding me,” I said sarcastically. “Manufacturing the solar sail costs energy. A good amount of it. And the station is currently earning five energy credits a month. Meaning just waiting around for our coffers to fill up isn’t an option. We’ve got to go out and earn those fifteen-hundred credits, one way or another.

  “My idea is still sound,” Shay said haughtily, crossing one leg over the other. “We cut power to Beta and Gamma Spires. Go dark. That saves us nearly nine hundred credits a month. Then all we have to do is wait two months, and these two can do the heavy lifting for us.” Shay had already explained the problem with the SATR to both women.

  I shook my head. “Not happening,” I said.

  Shay made an aggrieved expression. “Have you caught a sudden case of conscience, Noah? Come on, you’ve already saved the two cute ones. Let the rest go!”

  My mouth dropped open. “That is not why I chose those two!” I sputtered. “Chirrup, she told me which two to recruit! The ones that had been here...”

  Shay broke off laughing. “I’m just pulling your cock, new guy,” she said with a grin. “Just like I’ll do later,” she added with a sharp glance at Meiko.

  “It’s not conscience,” I said. “It’s realism. There’s people in Beta, coming in and going out. They’re not going to take cutting off their food and oxygen lying down.”

  “They’ll lie down plenty when they’re dead,” Shay said sweetly.

  “Not before they attack Alpha,” I said. “And we have zero countermeasures to deal with that. None. A handful of well-armed crooks could take control of the whole Oubliette right now, and there’s not a damn thing we could do about it in our weakened state.”

  That sobered up the room right quick. Shay and Meiko’s faces went ashen as they realized just how defenseless we really were.

  “We would fight,” Ruby said in a determined little voice.

  A burst of pride filled my chest. “Yes, of course we would,” I told her, patting her knee. “The point is, they know we’re weak. We don’t want them to know exactly how weak we are.”

  Shay thought that through. “Then why not just vent Gamma?” she asked. “Those aren’t violent prisoners.”

  “Have you looked at Gamma?” I asked, glancing around the room for support. “It’s a mess down there. When you said ‘infestation’, that wasn’t the half of it.”

  “So?”

  “So,” I said, leaning forward, “what if the little trickle of power going through there is the only thing keeping whatever the hell that stuff is contained? It wasn’t in Ruby’s cell, after all. What if cutting the power lets it fill the rest of Gamma, then come through the tether and cover all of us in gross scales?”

  Shay looked like she was about to be sick. “I look good in black,” she said, blanching, “but not like that. Blech!”

  I didn’t like the thought of Shay’s soft, beautiful body covered in that hard black chitin, either. “So that’s out,” I said. “We can’t tighten our belts any more than they already are. If we want to build that solar sail, we need to increase our income.”

  “Which means getting the reactors working again,” Meiko said. She cocked her head to the side, raising one eyebrow at Shay. “How feasible is that?”

  Shay looked like she’d bitten down on something sour. “Not very. Both of them are pretty borked. The one in Beta was damaged in a prison riot many, many years ago and overheated as a result. It’s been leaking radiation ever since - I’ve shut down the bottom three cell blocks to keep anyone from wandering down there.”

  “Why, Shay,” I said, my mouth dropping open. “You actually did something to protect the prisoners?”

  “I’m not allowed to hurt them,” she reminded me. “It’s in my programming. Only you get to do that,” she added with a smirk.

  I ignored that last part. “A radiation leak sounds pretty bad,” I said, looking down at my hands. “These bodies we’ve been downloaded into - are they resistant to radiation at all?”

  Shay nodded. “We should be fine. Although we’d have to undergo decontamination on the way out, just to make sure we don’t get the rest of the station sick. The last thing we need is for you to kill your brand new Fae on top of violating one of Titania’s punishments.”

  “You and I will head to Beta, then,” I decided. “We’ll tackle that one first, see if it can’t be fixed. Meiko and Ruby can stay here.”

  Ruby, who’d been sedately licking at her nectar while we talked, suddenly sat up straight. “I want to go with you, Master!” she said, her eyes wide.

  Hoo boy, I thought. I’m never going to get used to this Master thing.

  “I know you do,” I said, turning to Ruby. “But it’s not safe. You’d get sick down there - really, really sick. Trust me, it’s better if you stay up here with Meiko.”

  “Besides,” Shay said with a little smirk. “You two are about to get some well-deserved rest and relaxation. You’ve both been prisoners long enough.”

  I was shocked by her words. “You’re making them crew? Really?”

  Shay pursed her lips. “They’ll still be classified as prisoners. Nothing I can do about that - the system won’t let me override it. But I’ll make them crew in everything but name. They’ll have quarters right next to ours, full access to the station - full replicator privileges...”

  “Yay!” Ruby giggled, her tongue swirling around the rim of her cup. “I can cook for all of you!”

  My eyes widened. If that nectar was what passed for coffee among the Fae, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what they considered a good, hearty breakfast. “That’s not really necessary,” I said, showing a smile to try and keep the disappointment off Ruby’s face. It didn’t work. “Well, maybe we can try it...”

  Ruby apparently took this as an emphatic yes. She let out a girlish squeal and rubbed her hands together, practically brimming with energy. “Hooray! I can’t wait!”

  “Uh huh,” I said in a strained little voice.

  “That’s one reactor,” Meiko said, leaning forward. “What about the other?”

  Now it was my turn to look like I’d tasted something bitter. “You want to go back down there? Into all that...stuff?” The thought of it made me dizzy.

  “It didn’t seem to hurt us much,” Meiko said with a shrug. “I agree that it’s disgusting, and would certainly make traveling all the way to the Gamma reactor a pain, but it’s unlikely to harm us.”

  Shay put a hand over her forehead, then ran her fingers through her hair. “That’s not entirely accurate,” she said slowly, pushing her lips together.

  Meiko and I shared a look.

  “It’s not?” I said warily. “Shay, if there’s some poison down there you didn’t warn us about...”

  “No. No poison. It’s just...” For some reason, Shay looked irritated. “There’s something down there,” she admi
tted, turning over her hands. “Something the scanners aren’t picking up.”

  “What?” I asked. “Like, a creature?”

  “I haven’t seen it,” Shay whispered, looking from side to side. “Not personally. But I sent drones down there when the infestation started. I would have gone myself, but the thought of getting my makeup ruined by those awful growths makes me break out in hives. Now I’m glad I didn’t.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “What happened in Gamma, Shay?”

  She gave me a searching look, then sighed. “Chirrup, bring up the last footage from the drones on the Gamma expedition.”

  “Yes, Mistress!” Chirrup said.

  The viewscreen came to life, showing a hallway deep in the bowels of the Gamma Spire. It was a POV shot, bobbing up and down gently as the camera moved forward.

  “This is the area directly around the Gamma reactor,” Shay explained. “Drones 4 and 5 were conducting a survey of the area when...this happened.”

  The drone bobbed down the hall, turning to the sides every few steps to check out this or that fixture covered in that strange chitinous substance. It did a one-hundred-and-eighty degree swivel, and I saw behind it another bulbous, circular drone floating a few feet behind it.

  The second drone acknowledged the first with a cheerful little beep. Then something barrelled out of a doorway and it disappeared without a trace.

  All of us sat up a little straighter in our seats. Ruby actually screamed.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered, my knuckles gone white around the armrest. “What the fuck was that-”

  The recording stuttered a bit as the drone froze in mid-air, processing what had just happened. Then it backed down the hallway, accelerating as it went. The walls blurred as it applied more speed, panicking in a way that was almost human.

  It was almost to the stairs when something dropped from the ceiling. There was a rush of black, and the recording dissolved into static.

  The lights came back up to full brightness. The three of us who hadn’t seen the footage before slowly looked at each other, our faces full of horror.