by Blaze Ward
The left hand of evil.
With that sort of power you could just shut her mind down while you ravaged her body. Or leave her awake as a passive witness, trapped in her flesh and unable to fight back. When that got boring, that sort of power would probably make it possible to make her participate with an appearance of willingness.
And if you were really a rapist, perhaps make her enjoy it. Become dependent on it.
Daniel saw everything through a red haze as he slid back out of sight. He could still hear the lurid suggestions the beast was making, but it all faded back into a dull roar as Daniel looked around for something he could use as a weapon. There probably wasn’t sufficient time to go back up to his kitchen and get the knives he would have preferred.
There. Fire extinguisher. Standard issue on every starship and vehicle repair bay in the Empire. Six in his kitchens, both here and back on Genarde. Compressed foaming agent capable of snuffing out anything merely burning, like hot grease or bread some idiot has forgotten about in the oven. Metal tube in the traditional red older than space flight.
Daniel growled at the tiny voice in his head asking questions. The one that had watched too many horror movies as a child.
Now was not the time. In the background, someone was working his way to the many things he might do with an entire harem of strong, beautiful women at his command.
At his command?
Daniel removed the device from the carrier on the wall and pulled the simple pin holding the trigger grip open. He turned and slid to the edge of the doorway to spy.
Commander Omezi was just finishing stripping nude as the beast watched. Her face was utterly slack with disinterest, telling Daniel that the man was indeed mind-controlling all these women somehow.
“You,” the invader pointed at Erin next. “And you.”
Iruoma joined Spectre Two in removing clothing without a pause or a squawk. There was little noise, so Daniel moved slowly, staring at the back of the beast’s head as he stealthfully entered the landing bay. If he could somehow mentally assault the bastard from here, he would have, but the daggers he stared seemed to all fall short.
Seeing three of the amazing warriors nude did nothing to help Daniel’s concentration, but this was something none of those women would have ever volunteered, unless someone had a gun pointed at them.
He couldn’t see anything in either of the invader’s hands, so Daniel wasn’t sure how the monster was doing whatever it was. There appeared to be that glow, only because something seemed to be reflecting from flat surfaces, something the same hue as the light emerging from the eyes of the crew.
Daniel gauged his distance and hoped he was close enough. He would only get one chance to do this. He shifted a hair to his left, hoping that the creature had the same sort of right-hand dominance that was common in humans.
Anything for an edge, as he was about to do the second stupidest thing he had ever done. Opening his first bistro still took that cake.
“You next,” the man with the short arms pointed at Areen Ojukwu, Spectre Three. Alone among the comitatus, Areen had cornrow braids in her hair that went clear down to her shoulders. Daniel had never figured out how she managed to keep them all in a flight helmet, but if they didn’t have proper space suits, it probably didn’t matter as much. Her skin reminded Daniel of an old, copper Half-Crown. Not the brighter red of a new coin, but an older one that had been out in the galaxy for a while and picked up some dirt and weathering. The kind you could clean up if you approached your task with enough patience and the right touch.
She was also one of the few willing to let a Rabic cook try occasionally.
Daniel figured that it was now or never.
“Hey, connard,” he called in a quiet voice that still rang across the vast silence. “You missed one.”
“What?” the monster bellowed in surprise and anger as he turned.
Both hands came up with some sort of frightening glow, but Daniel blasted him in the face with the fire extinguisher, moving patiently up and down from eyes to mouth, crossing the strange, vertical slits in between that were maybe nostrils.
Nobody likes a face full of fire suppressor.
The man doubled over, coughing and gasping, trying to wipe the foam away from his face so he could do something. Daniel had no idea what, and didn’t care. If he could do that to all these stubborn women, the invader would have him for lunch, once he could breathe.
Whatever it was, the effect apparently required concentration. Daniel took four steps forward and reversed the grip on the metal tube as Commander Omezi and the others snapped out of their fugue.
“What?” the commander started to ask, but Daniel was focused elsewhere.
He got within reach of the salaud and hammered him on the side of the head with his fire extinguisher like he was chopping pork ribs with his favorite cleaver.
The first blow didn’t drop the man, so Daniel hit him again. The sound rang out like the bong from a church bell calling a faithful. It was like working in an abattoir and learning to stun cattle. He had visited one, just to make sure he understood how meat was produced, but never actually held the mallet until today.
The third strike drove the invader to his knees. Daniel realized that the creature was no taller than he was now. He had only appeared bigger when he was glowing and monologuing.
Fourth shot broke something. Blood began to spurt. And brains, if they were really greenish pink. Daniel had better reach now. More torque.
The fifth shot crushed the top of the creature’s head in and he fell, leaking pink and green fluid onto the deck.
Daniel stood over him, lungs working like bellows making steel. He would need a shower to get the gore out of his hair, but thankfully he was still wearing an apron that could be burned if necessary.
Maybe not even necessary. He might do it just so he never again had to think about what he had just done.
Just in case, Daniel went to one knee, working to stay out of the pool of spreading blood. A hand on the neck could not find a pulse, if there had ever been one.
He glanced up and realized that he was surrounded by legs. Some of them were bare.
Commander Omezi was standing right in front of him. Utterly nude. Utterly beautiful.
Utterly carnivorous, if he had to classify the look that replaced the glow in her eyes.
“What just happened?” she asked in a cold, tight voice.
“I have no idea,” Daniel said between gasps. “But this branleur was behind it, and he’s dead now.”
“How did we get here?” Erin demanded in a hotter voice. “And why are several of us naked?”
Daniel turned to her and let all of his anger loose.
“Violeur,” he growled, standing so he could kick the rapidly-cooling corpse between them one more time as hard as he could, just for good measure.
“Huh?” she snarled.
“Rapist.”
11
Kathra didn’t have any personal hangups with nudity, but she had to work hard to keep from letting her rage take over now. Glancing right and left, Erin, Areen, and Iruoma were also nude, standing in the middle of the repair deck, surrounded by what looked like the entire crew.
“What happened?” she demanded of the cook that had apparently just saved her life, her command, and probably her entire tribe.
Daniel had a hard time concentrating. His eyes kept going down to the alien on the floor, and had to traverse her and several of her nude warriors in the process. She didn’t have the slightest interest in the man, but she also knew that he was having a hard time focusing. Violence and nudity and whatever else.
“You were all eating lunch,” the man finally said in a low voice, adding another kick to the corpse as he did.
The eyes came up and focused on hers. Probably the only way such a man could work. They were the weaker gender, after all.
“Everyone went completely silent while I watched,” he continued with a shrug. “You got up and walked ou
t. I followed, but everyone else seemed bewitched and I could not do anything to distract any of you. Eventually, you all ended here, and I heard something, so I snuck to one side to watch.”
Another shrug, but the eyes weren’t seeing anything now. Erin suddenly thrust a bundle of clothes into her hands and broke the second spell that had fallen over her.
“Everyone to stations,” Kathra yelled. “Prepare for battle, but do not launch The Haunt. Alert the ClanStars to remain ready to flee. Whatever hit us probably hit them as well.”
She pulled a shirt on and that seemed to drag Daniel’s mind back to the present with a wry smile. Single man, surrounded by hundreds of women, several of them naked. Every Sept boy’s fantasy, perhaps? Around them, the room emptied quickly as crews ran for their stations.
“The salaud was in the process of forcing each of you to disrobe for his enjoyment,” the cook spat the words out angrily. “You first. Then Erin and Iruoma. He had just selected Areen when I managed to sneak up behind him and empty the fire extinguisher into his mouth. Then I beat him to death with it, I think.”
Kathra knelt beside the body and flipped it over with one hand, while the other held a knife poised to stab. Yes, the skull appeared crushed in at this point.
She had not appreciated that the man had that sort of rage inside him, but she supposed fire was what made him a chef in the first place.
The rest would be merely cooks.
The being was a species she had never encountered before. Bipedal, like so many of them. Rough skin that appeared to be scales over flesh, with dermal ridges on the parts of the skull that were still convex, as opposed to the concave parts.
The creature was dressed in a lime-green bodysuit with white boots, gauntlets, and belt. A gem the size of her palm rested at the base of his throat in a chrome and platinum setting and seemed to pulse with some inner fire. She was tempted to order the corpse spaced as is, but she needed to know how he had managed to sneak up on the squadron. How he had gotten aboard her ship.
What the hell he had done that had apparently captured the minds of all the women on this ship, and ignored the one male?
Daniel seemed to be in another realm when she stood again and looked at him. His eyes had gone hooded and face pulled dour and almost glowering. For a man that was generally just tolerated for his skills and occasionally despised for his gender, the man looked like he had taken the entire situation as a personal insult.
What had happened in his younger years that would inspire such a reaction? Kathra knew that he had run a good kitchen. She had agents who had quietly interviewed people who had worked for the man. Few had left the kitchen for anything other than chasing their own dreams, and all spoke of him in high tones.
Apparently he was a good person, in spite of his gender.
“Commander, we have signals from the other ClanStars,” a voice echoed hollowly over the space. “Everyone is just waking up from whatever happened and…”
“And what?” Kathra demanded.
She could almost hear the woman gulp before she spoke again.
“And there is a ship off our bow, Commander,” she said. It sounded like Kamharida, Spectre Four. “A really big one.”
“How big?” Kathra felt her blood run cold suddenly, in spite of the pants and jacket she had managed to pull on.
“It’s not a Septagon, but it looks comparable in size, Commander,” Kamharida finally said. “You need to get up here to see.”
Daniel looked like a woman falling into shock. She grabbed him by the arm and gave him just enough of a rattle to focus his eyes on her again.
“How did he get in here?” she demanded of the only witness.
No, not only witness. There would be security footage she could watch, once she got the squadron out of the immediate danger.
If she could.
Daniel stopped in thought for a moment and then pointed.
“That airlock,” he said.
Kathra nodded to Erin, now dressed, and the woman took off like a gazelle to check. Most of the comitatus had disappeared. If they weren’t launching ships, there were other tasks to supervise: engineering, damage control, and bridge, for instance.
Kathra was fully dressed now and started to move, pulling a barely-resisting chef along with her.
“Iruoma, take the corpse to the medbay and guard it,” she yelled over her shoulder.
Daniel put up no resistance once he figured out where she wanted him to go. The man needed to work out more if he was going to stay with the Mbaysey, but he didn’t complain. Just put his head down and lurched along in her wake gasping.
Up to the inner deck, she had half a dozen warriors with her, all following the cook, as if they might need to pick him up when he fell or surrendered, dragging him along. Except he hadn’t. Didn’t now. Nearly ran into her until she caught him and stood him upright while they waited for a lock portal to the core to line up.
She thrust Daniel into the gap and followed. The two pieces of the ship rotated slow enough, relative to each other, that she could get the cook headed forward and out of the way while the rest of her warriors followed, half now and half waiting for the next portal.
They would be along shortly. She needed to be on the bridge.
Now.
12
Daniel had been up here on WinterStar’s bridge once. Just long enough to familiarize himself with the entire vessel, on the off-chance that the comitatus was at action stations aboard rather than in their ships, and he needed to deliver the commander dinner in the middle of combat. Or some other trouble.
Commander Omezi did all the zero gee work, so he just kept himself compact enough that she could do that. He ended up tucked into a corner nearby when they got there, with his feet hooked under an anchoring bar set here to keep landswomen like him out of the way of the professionals, with his one hand holding a bar to keep him still and on beam with the others.
Omezi was at the center of the room, seated in the main station, with four other women, staff side rather than comitatus, around her at their own stations. The rest of the warriors that had followed were staying out of the way, like he was, but doing a much better job at it.
He was a cook, not a zero gee acrobat.
“Merde,” the commander muttered under her breath.
It took Daniel a second to realize she must have picked that word up from him. It wasn’t like his kitchen was exactly safe for children, with hot surfaces and sharp knives, so nobody ever really paid attention to their language.
As long as you were quiet enough that the customers out front didn’t hear anything they had never heard before.
He had expected a holographic display, but then remembered that the poverty of the Mbaysey was in the advanced electronics. They could grow fruits and vegetables. Several ClanStars specialized in mining asteroids and comets for raw materials, and ForgeStar, IronStar, and the two WaterStars processed things into useful goods that were swapped at TradeStations for advanced material.
The commander watched the scene on an antique-looking flat screen. He wasn’t close enough or tall enough to see what was out there, and the blast shields were currently down.
“Open the shields,” she ordered sharply.
Okay, spoke too soon.
Four flat sheets of metal, apparently several centimeters thick, slid out of the way.
Normally, the view out a porthole was deep space. Black and speckled with white dots. Occasionally, as at Wylanne, the Commander would move WinterStar close enough to a gas or ice giant planet that you had the most gorgeous views for a few days.
There was a thing out the front window.
Several voices joined his in a plethora of profanities.
He had seen the Septagon. Even studied it a little after they escaped, just because he was curious about a starship that could hold three hundred thousand people or more. That ship had been square lines and regular geometry.
The thing out there was almost close enough to dock, had
someone wanted to. It had an organic look to it that he didn’t understand.
“What’s it doing?” Commander Omezi called to her bridge crew.
“Nothing,” one of the middle two said. “We’ve been reviewing the logs. It appeared almost on top of us before we had any scan signal. Then we were caught up in whatever happened, locked our stations down, and went out.”
“Erin,” the Commander had apparently opened an internal channel. “Did you find his ship?”
“There is nothing there, Kathra,” the warrior replied in a voice packed full of doubt and nerves.
These women didn’t do nerves. That was what made them comitatus.
“What do you mean, nothing?” the Commander snapped.
“There’s nothing here,” Erin said slowly. “I show that the lock cycled, but there is no record of a ship docking.”
“Do you expect me to believe he just flew here?” the woman in charge demanded.
“Until you can explain it better, yes,” but that was just Erin being twitchy.
Daniel had no better explanation than anybody else did.
But he did have curiosity. All good chefs did. You had to, in order to not grow stale and boorish, like those old men who had let life slip away from them.
Daniel moved along the rail and got close enough to the window to leave steam on the material as he looked out. It wasn’t glass, but it acted close enough.
“Merde,” he agreed, looking out at the invader’s chariot.
If WinterStar was a giant, skinny top, spinning forever, and the Septagon a mass of solid geometry, then he would describe this as a turtle.
Daniel didn’t serve sea turtle in his restaurant. Hadn’t. But he was familiar with it. This thing reminded him, looking.
An enormous oval shape, like a turtle that had two top shells, curved along a central spine, instead of a curved top and flat bottom. A head stuck out of one end, and six legs that looked vaguely like flippers from the corners and middle. It was even green, although a much darker hue than the color of the creature’s costume. The tips of the broccoli’s florets, perhaps, rather than the raw stalks.
