Exigence: Book Three of the Prison Ship Sheol Saga, page 29
Hild groaned and croaked out two words in response.
“End… it.”
Phyra frowned and tilted her body slightly until the brutalized woman gasped in pain.
“Pain can cloud the mind, but it can also clear it. Pay attention, dragon. I am coming to my point.”
The orm’r woman nodded and shifted her weight onto her elbows to seek some relief from her agony.
“I… lisssten.”
Phyra nodded and continued.
“I learned that your mortal sin is Pride. Your whole species has drowned in it. Each and every one of you gathers wealth and power and hordes it for your own glorification. You risk nothing unless you are sure you can win. You seek no new knowledge except what you can buy or steal from other cultures that do. You stunt your young so that they cannot surpass you. You build nothing of consequence but great, gaudy shrines to your own being that no-one else cares about but you. Your whole species is a stagnant pond, because you care for nothing but yourselves.”
There was a pregnant pause until Hild realized she was expected to speak. Focusing her mind back through what had been said, she seemed to grow more aware of her surroundings and less lost in her pain.
“I… agree. Foolsss… ever staring… in their looking-glass. Why I… was ssshunned. Cared not for such thingsss. In my youth… I did only ever seek… to fight! To prove my worth… in battle. Heedless and foolhardy. Even ssstill.”
Phyra smiled, though it was awash with dark humors.
“I am glad we agree on this. Because in my studies I also learned that a banner can pass without the death of the old leader. They are permitted to yield. But none ever have, because to do so would be to wound their precious pride, and there is no graver wound than that for an orm’r.”
Hild looked back at her sharply, anger in her eyes.
“You would sssee me give way?”
Phyra stared back at her without the slightest hint of pity.
“There is the pride. Sewn so deep in your soul that you cannot even see the thing you disdain lurking within yourself.”
Hild flinched, but her expression didn’t change.
“The dishonor is- nooooooaaahhhhhhhhh!”
Phyra turned the ravaged ankle once again. The eyes of the orm’r on the sidelines began to glow with vengeful hatred.
She ignored them all.
“Oh, I know it! The dishonor is too great! You will gladly die rather than face it. You would gladly sacrifice your kinfolk to the last soul rather than feel it for even a moment! But today you have stepped into the ring with a devil, and she is going to make you eat your sin whether you like it or not. I will not kill you. Instead, I will torture you without end atop a mound made from the corpses of your slain kin until I finally find the limits of orm’r pride.” She leaned forward, straining the ruined leg but stopping at the edge of the agony, ensuring she had her victim’s complete attention. “What I do now, I do because your pride is in my Master’s way and I will see it cleared from his path, one way or another. Swallow your pride and pledge yourself to my banner here and now, or clutch at its shredded remnants in search of false comforts as I teach you the true meaning of regret. Choose.”
Silence filled the room as everyone present waited to hear the words that would decide their fate.
From her twisted up position on her elbows, Hild suddenly deflated and pressed her face to the metal floor as though to hide from the coming humiliation.
“I… yield. I pledge myself and my folk to your banner.”
Phyra immediately release her hold and rose shakily to her feet as a collective breath of tension was released throughout the room. Before she had straightened fully, Reverie appeared at her side and ducked under her arm to support her.
“That was a hell of a gamble, Phyr. You could have just broken her neck. It’s what she wanted.”
The battered ashtor shook her head.
“With her dead, I’d have been challenged by each of her folk in turn until I had killed every one of them, or one of them managed to kill me. But alive and unshunned from her clan, only she has the right to challenge me for leadership unless one of her subordinates kills her first, which is unlikely seeing as she gained her status in the first place by besting all challengers.”
Phyra licked her cracked lips and winced before continuing.
“Unfortunately for her, she just swore herself and all those under her command to me directly, so challenging me would break her spoken and witnessed oath, dishonoring her so thoroughly that she would thereafter be unworthy to make such a challenge to anyone ever again. She is now stuck, and they are stuck with her. It is what Master would call a Catch-22. One that was never eliminated from their code because until today, in all of their many millennia of recorded history, it has never been invoked.”
Phyra motioned to Vaye and sent her off to retrieve a medical stretcher with instructions to bring Hild to the primary medical bay. That done, she and Reverie walked slowly toward the lift to go there themselves. Behind the pair, Jordy rolled along in his slender form carrying a pile of armor in his claws. When the doors closed, Phyra slumped against the wall of the elevator car and let her eyes shut for a long moment.
“What we have now, sister, is an honor bound, uncompromisable cadre of the best soldier stock the Bedlam galaxy has to offer, and I intend to forge them into a shield to guard the back of our disaster magnet of a husband-to-be.”
Reverie cocked her head to the side and smiled.
“Well, when you put it that way, I guess murder really wasn’t the answer!”
Phyra smiled, but kept her eyes closed.
“There is a first time for everything, I suppose.”
✦✧✦
“So… you were engulfed in molten plasma and struck repeatedly by lightning, and the primary concern you’d like your Chief Medical Officer to apply her unique genius to, is how to grow your hair back before your fiancé sees you bald?”
Phyra nodded, a look of genuine concern tenting the ridges where her silver eyebrows used to be.
“Yes. Very much so.”
Faia rolled her eyes.
“Well, pattern baldness isn’t a thing anymore after the advent of VI’s, but hair restorative bio-chemistry did get pretty advanced before they started being implanted at birth. I’ll whip you up a knock-off later today. Check back around 1800.”
Phyra stood from her med pod bed with a grateful smile on her face and scooped the diminutive blonde human up in her arms.
“Thank you si- doctor. I do not wish for Master to see me in such a state.”
Faia rolled her eyes and reached one arm around behind the trembling ashtor to pat her on the back.
“It’s… fine. Honestly, your boy’s been around the block a few times. Not a lot seems to bother him. He’d probably just think it was cute, or worst-case scenario, kinda funny.”
Reverie grinned from atop the adjacent bed where she sat with her legs crossed under her.
“Yeah, then he’d tease you about it and you could pretend to be really hurt, and he’d feel bad and end up pampering you all day to make you feel better…” The mischievous skipp paused, looking thoughtful for a moment as she rubbed a finger across one silvery-blue eyebrow, then shook her head.
“Nah, still not worth it.”
As if on impulse, the skipp girl let her right hand drop to her side and a pair of long, fluffy fox tails shimmered into existence in her hand. Smiling, she gently stroked them through her fingers.
“Never mess with your fur… probably the only useful thing Mom ever said.”
Looking up through her long blue locks, she saw Phyra and Faia both staring at her with mouths agape. Even Jordy beeped in surprise.
“W-what?” she asked, nervously clutching her tails to her chest.
Faia pointed at the fluffy appendages as if leveling an accusation in a courtroom.
“Floof! How- When-… You have floof!”
Reverie shot her an insulted look.
“Of course I do! You see skipp all the time, they always have tails! What, didja think I lost mine?”
Phyra lifted her hand to answer diplomatically, then let it slide to the back of her head to hide it in her hair, only to be reminded that she had none. Sighing, she let the hand drop.
“Honestly, sister, I thought you had suffered some horribly traumatic accident so I did not bring it up.”
Reverie’s shoulders sagged a bit.
“Well, I suppose that isn’t far from the truth.”
Phyra frowned and strode forward to sit beside her.
“What do you mean?”
Reverie casually batted away Faia’s grasping hands as the tiny human woman danced around her chanting “Fluff the floof!”
Clearly embarrassed, she looked at the quiet ashtori out of the side of her eye.
“They’re… I’m… stunted. I was due to get my third tail the year I got caught and sentenced to- well, to never get out. All the stress from the trial and the media coverage, and then knowing my life was basically over at seventeen…” she shook her head sadly. “It just never grew. Not even a nub. Twenty is when the latest bloomers get their third, and I’m more than a year past that now. It’s a bad sign for a skipp to stop growing tails. Lots of negative implications for health, fertility… lifespan.”
The ashtori’s lips pressed together into a pensive line before asking her next question.
“Does Greye know?”
Reverie sighed and pointed at Jordy.
“He does now.”
Phyra’s mouth formed into an “oh” of realization.
“I still sometimes forget they share that body. And remain unsure how much of it he actually registers.”
Reverie shrugged.
“It’s fine. I just… didn’t want to bring it up. I know it’s not a big deal to anybody but other skipp, but to me it’s like… well, like that.”
She pointed up at Phyra’s missing hair. The crimson-toned woman reached up to touch her bald head with a sigh, then reached over and pulled Reverie into her chest, shoving the girl’s face into the thin fabric of the medical gown between her ample breasts. Reverie squirmed against the hold, but the ashtori woman held her tight as her muffled voice issued from within its soft confinement.
“Phyr, this doesn’t work for me. I’m not a guy.”
Phyra shushed her.
“You do not have to lie, sister. Soft and round and squeezable is for everyone.” She pushed the skipp girl’s face deeper into her bosom to emphasize her point.
“Everything will be alright.”
Reverie suddenly yelped in surprise and began to struggle in earnest, but she could do nothing to escape her sister’s loving embrace. Faia grinned and gently ran her fingers through the tail she’d finally captured.
“Fluff the floof,” she whispered quietly under her breath.
✦✧✦
After checking in on the orm’r woman she’d badly maimed, Phyra had begun to re-equipped her armor when Reverie approached Faia on another matter.
“So before the head squishing incident that never happened and we are all forbidden to speak about ever again, Phyr and Greye and I all had a talk about… you know… the future and all that, so… I- we were wondering if… you know, with the whole different species thing…”
Faia rolled her eyes and pointed at her.
“On a species level, the answer for you is yes, though chance to conceive is about 80% lower…”
Phyra walked closer to join them, extremely interested to hear what the unorthodox biologist had to say on the topic. As she approached, Faia’s finger shifted to point at her.
“As for her species, we don’t know. There’s no record of crossbreeding between humans and ashtor since there weren’t any until they invaded. Considering all their POW’s die shortly after capture, if there’s been any experimentation it’s happened on her side.”
Phyra shook her head.
“We are not allowed carnal contact outside of our species. It is forbidden by our M-… our… overlords. To do so would be to doom your entire clan.”
Reverie frowned and Faia grimace, then sighed. Reaching into her lab coat pocket she pulled out a polymer vial and retrieved a cheek swab from the drawer of her desk.
“Alright, bend down and say ‘ahh’.”
Phyra nodded and bent down, then spoke the onomatopoeia ‘ah’ and stared at the human woman expectantly. With a long-suffering sigh, the blonde twin reached out and stuck her thumb in the much larger woman’s mouth and pushed her teeth open.
“Hold.”
Sticking the swab between her teeth she scraped the side of her cheek back and forth for about half a minute, then dropped the swab in the vial and sealed it.
“I can do a quick Chromatic Pair Scan with that and tell you if your chromosomes could theoretically match or even align, but if you’re both seriously looking to go the baby route someday, then we need a Gamete Fusion Assay and for that, I need oocytes.”
Both women looked perplexed by that statement so Faia rolled her hand in front of herself as if she were explaining things to a member of a stone-age tribe.
“Oocytes. Egg cells. You know what? Nevermind. I know the answer. Whoever’s first, hop up in the med pod and get ready to see one of the biggest needles I’m legally allowed to use on living creatures.”
As Reverie crawled onto the pod’s bed and made herself comfortable, Phyra turned to Faia with a question.
“Do you not need reproductive samples from Master as well?”
Faia snorted and then laughed out loud.
“Are you kidding me? We have a whole room in the lab filled floor to ceiling with that man’s DNA. If he ever did actually get himself killed, we could probably build three more of him just from the cell cultures we have on hand right now.
Phyra stood with her mouth open in shock, but the moment the dome closed over Reverie, Faia’s attention shifted to her control panel. An unexpected beep drew Phyra’s eyes to the ground beside her leg, where she found Jordy looking up at her with his optical sensor at a high tilt. His claw was extended with her new eyepatch in it and she smiled at the helpful robot and took it from him.
“Thank you, Master. It is good to know you are always watching over me.”
The robot beeped again and held its grapplers up in the motion that indicated he wished to transfer to backpack mode. Phyra lowered her arm to help him ascend and then waited until he was firmly in place on her back. Looking down at the eyepatch, she noticed something blinking within the part that covered her eye.
“What’s this, now?”
Donning the device took a bit of time, as this time she had to figure it out for herself, but once it was in place her vision lit once again with all the additional information that her link to Jordy and her Master provided her. At the bottom of her field of vision she saw the telltale orange text that indicated a message from Aia.
“SHIP REQUESTING PERMISSION TO DOCK. CARGO RUNNER, BAY 16. AUTOMATED SHIP’S MANIFEST CATALOGUES MEAT AND FRESH PRODUCE SUFFICIENT FOR ONE WEEK’S RATIONS. SHIP HAS TRANSMITTED A DELIVERY SCHEDULE. IT IS LISTED AS SHIPMENT ONE OF EIGHTY-FOUR.”
Phyra slid to the ground and began laughing hysterically as a wave of stress she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying suddenly melted from her shoulders. From behind the med pod’s transparent polymer dome, Reverie looked at her with concern as Faia’s head popped up over the top from the other side, where she’d clearly stood up on her chair.
“What’s so… uh, are you laughing or crying? Are you okay?”
Phyra nodded and wiped at the tears that rolled down her cheeks.
“I am better than okay.”
The smile she gave her was serene.
“My Master never fails me.”
In a Rut
T
he first night in the Namaah compound was an adjustment. The guest suite had enough bedrooms for everyone, but unsurprisingly, only Anya used hers. Lilia wanted to fool around but the device the matriarch had put on her fit a little too perfectly for coincidence. I couldn’t sneak so much as a finger beneath it. We eventually gave up for the night, but when I woke in the morning it was to the momentary panic of unexpected release, only to realize where I was and lift the sheets to find a heart-shaped face and pale pink eyes staring back at me from behind an unhinged grin.
She put her finger to her lips and pulled my pajama bottoms back up, then rolled to the side opposite Renay, who was still curled under my right arm and fast asleep. Sliding her naked body up my torso, Lilia dragged her nipples over my skin and shuddered a bit before reaching my head, where she promptly shoved a pillow over both of us and then put her lips directly beside my ear.
“It’s important that she thinks her wicked little punishment is working or she’ll come up with something worse, so you need to keep playing along. This is her guest suite, after all.”
It took me a second to work through what she was implying after she removed the pillow, but the answer came to me a moment later and I nodded that I understood.
All the spy movies you’ve watched and you didn’t think of that? You should be ashamed.
Lilia’s expression shifted to a sulk and she stated aloud her intention to shower alone. It was good that she’d taken the risk to tell me what she was up to beforehand, because that statement would have set off deafening warning sirens in my head if she hadn’t. My hungry little eisheth hadn’t showered by herself even once since we’d gotten together. No matter what I was doing, she always came and dragged me in with her. I had accepted it as a pillar of my new reality. Now that reality was being messed with and I found I didn’t much appreciate the disruption.
Breakfast was a surprisingly hearty meal, with a fairly wide selection of human dishes to choose from. I did my best to hide my excitement, but I doubt anyone missed the foot high stack of pancakes or mound of bacon roughly half the same height. After long weeks on military rations and prison fair, I had no intention of wasting even a single meal while I was here.
