Star Adder WarShip Stanislav N'Buta
Zenith Point, Csesztreg, Invasion Corridor 2
The girl stretched in bed luxuriously, beads of sweat dripping down her nude body. "Oh master," she said. "You are so forceful. What am I to do if you put a baby in me?"
IlKhan Garret Banachek tried to contain the revulsion at the thought of creating a freeborn spawn with this thing, concentrating instead on filling a water glass from a nearby sink. "I would assume you would be intelligent enough to dispose of it without me telling you." Still, her words triggered some sort of perverse curiosity, causing him to look back at her. "Is that even possible?"
The girl smiled seductively, arching her back to emphasize her breasts as one hand caressed her belly. "It is if you want it to be," she said.
"I do not," Banachek said forcefully before taking a drink of water, his revulsion once again rising. "Nor are you to breed with any other lovers you may have taken."
"Don't worry, dear master," the girl said as she plucked a datapad off the nightstand and began paging through it. "The others are far too stuffy for that. All except Grigori, maybe."
Banachek walked over and took the datapad from her, earning a pout. "SaKhan Spaatz has expressed interest?"
"He calls me a demon," the girl replied. "Those quaint little extra traditions of his, you know. All that human baggage his ancestors brought with them. He desperately hates me, but I can see behind that, he's curious. Oh the things he would do to me..."
That was something Banachek would have to keep an eye on. He had expected his Khans to be above the girl's influence. If what she was saying was at least partly true (and it usually was at least partly true) then the Cloud Cobra SaKhan, and the entire Supercluster's religious traditions, bore further watching.
"Is that why you have been stirring up trouble among their lower castes?" he asked. "Seeking to draw his interest?" Seduction was part of her game, even the Society renegades that had first found her had managed to understand that. She found a way to get under your skin, draw you in, and wrap you around her finger.
"I'm hurt," the girl replied with another pout. "I have nothing to do with that Yellow King nonsense. So dour, always grim, and I look terrible in yellow."
Banachek hadn't told her any of the details, certaintly not the talk of a Yellow King. But her ability to simply appear wherever she wished would allow her to learn that on her own. However her words betrayed more than overheard gossip. "But you know about it."
"Oh yes," she said. "We're old acquaintances. I would have assumed he was asleep right now, but the Big Splash seems to have stirred up some of my kind. That's the great thing about you humans, you're always so quick to do things without really understanding what you're doing. So fun!"
She'd mentioned this 'big splash' before, and context clues seemed to link it with whatever phenomenon had crippled their HPG communication. If it was somehow tied to entities like her, it raised more than a few troubling concerns. "This Yellow King, is he a threat?"
"It's never the leader that's the threat," the girl said. "It's the people who follow him. I don't know what he and his followers have been up to. Would you like me to go find out?"
Another clumsy attempt at manipulation. The girl hungered for knowledge and understanding about human culture and technology, and even the Society renegades had been smart enough to deny her. "Do you really believe I would say yes?"
The girl did not answer immediately, as a technician entered the IlKhan's cabin carrying a datachip. "The latest reports from the front, my Khan," he said as he handed it over. He said nothing about the girl in the IlKhan's bed, and if pressed he would probably say he couldn't recall anything about her. Just some nameless warrior the IlKhan had chosen to couple with, clearly nothing of consequence.
After the technician left, the girl spoke again. "I could do so much more for you, master, if you would simply let me."
Banachek ignored her and plugged the datachip into a portable holoviewer on the table, taking a moment to sit down and go through the results.
The girl took this moment to get out of the bed and cross over to him, peering over his shoulder in a way that pressed her breasts against his back. "Good news?"
"For the most part," he said. Of the twenty four worlds targeted, twenty three had fallen. Mellisia remained contested, with a Jade Falcon WarShip merrily bombarding their troops on the ground, but the Black Phoenix supercluster had sent another four WarShips to the system to clean up their mess. Even that was only a matter of time. And the enemy had yet to mount any notable response. "It seems their communications are as crippled as ours."
"I have no doubt," the girl said. "The way you try to splash around without understanding the movement of the water." She slipped her arms around him and nuzzled against his cheek.
"I suppose you could help us with that, as well," Banachek replied. His body was responding to her affections, and he wondered if she saw that as a victory over him.
"I could, maybe," she replied. "I can see what you try to do, but I don't understand how you do it. I would need to learn how it all works before I could help you make it better." She began nibbling on his ear. "But once I did, I could make it so much better. Your splashing around is all power, no finess. I could show you so much."
Banachek pulled away, a little bit faster than perhaps he intended. "We will manage on our own," he said, chagrined at feeling just a little flustered. He needed to regain control, remind her why he was her master. "We both need a shower," he said. "Come."
She smiled and followed him.