Chief Warrant Officer Charlie David Wasserman-
“May I sit with you?” I heard just as I sat down to chow. The troopers were a very earthy bunch. I was a paladin, I worked with troopers all the time, but I’d never been in a Valkyrie ship. The moment we’d pulled out, ironically escorted by Petty Officer Reynard’s fleet drones, everything had changed.
Even my name. Everyone called me “Paladin”, and just automatically started using it, and the nickname, or I guess call sign now, had spread like wildfire. A couple of the troopers still used their first or last names, but mostly we called each other by our call signs casually.
The wardroom had sort of closed up. The captain, a charming young brunette baseline who I doubted was even close to as baseline as the rest of us, was a gold core. She looked twenty, could have been two hundred, but her attitude, behavior, and speech marked her as nearly the age she appeared. Most of the officers ate with the crew in the crew mess, and at mealtimes rank just sort of… disappeared. That cover-model elf I had seen on the loading dock, Dienne, was cheerfully flirting with the Chief Engineer, who was now ‘Kimmy’.
The captain still took her meals with Taera exclusively, but now Taera was just Taera. Everyone knew she was the XO, but she acted like she didn’t need to be reminded of that fact every single time anyone saw her. Apparently, she was something like the ship’s chaplain and therapist as well as its second in command, and she said she had an open-door policy and seemed to be serious about it.
It had only been two days, but we already had a destination, and wonder of wonders, the ship’s transit barely bothered me in the slightest. I wouldn’t say that Reynard’s little upgrade had actually improved my capabilities, but I was getting almost no interference from my necrotic overdose, which almost had me performing back to my old standards. I was not out of the woods yet, but gold core and its potential purification were in sight on the horizon instead of being buried away forever. I still needed to find a way to regenerate my meridians, but if this ship rifted as often as was hinted, I might be able to afford it sooner rather than far too late.
I also learned an interesting fact from one of my troopers, Sargeant Corellia. Apparently, fraternization wasn’t a thing on Valkyries like the Crow, except, you know, when a semiconscious warrant officer accidentally decides to grab a petty officer’s tits and never even wakes up enough to enjoy the experience. The report had been stricken, but stayed on my cover, just in case ‘I ever got ideas again’ according to Taera. There were traditions, both written and unwritten, surrounding it, but the most important tradition was that the higher-ranked individual didn’t initiate it.
I looked up to see the most gorgeous eyes I could ever imagine looking right at me as Petty Officer Third Class Reynard stood with a fully-laden tray covered with mashed illeps, brog-loaf, and green fried tullar buds covered in brog gravy. Important tip, apparently Maenads were not vegetarians.
She’d stopped growing, it looked like, but where she’d stopped was sort of amazing. She also ate like an orc, which made sense since drone pilots used their gifts constantly and drained their body's energy and calories to do so. Braxis was already on his third overfull tray, and the ship’s reserves were designed to account for the dietary habits of pre-twin cultivators.
Those eyes. They were a blue like manufactured sapphire, crystal and brilliant with a hint of emerald around the cornea. Yep, focus on the eyes and pretend the rest of her exquisite little body didn’t exist. Damn.
“Please do so,” I said, standing up. Okay, sometimes I accidentally fall into very old mannerisms my father sort of beat into me when I was a youngster. A gentleman stands up for a lady and helps with her seat, if the seat isn’t bolted, like the table, to the floor.
“A gentleman!” she smiled, catching me with that sunlight glare that makes a man’s heart miss a beat, and slid into the bench right across from mine, putting down her tray and saying, “Thank you,” as I sat again.
You know, I had flirted with a lot of women and had conversations with a lot more, but the mind always fastens on what requires the least amount of effort when your brain is spinning, so I went with the most inane thing I could imagine, immediately beating myself up. “So, are you enjoying your new command so far, Petty Officer Reynard?”
She nodded, “Very much so, but please, underway rules. Could you call me Gabrielle? It’s my middle name, but my family grew up calling me Rose.”
I chuckled, “At the risk of sounding trite, I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful name than Gabrielle. I’ll be happy to use it. Please call me Dave. Umm… I wanted to apologize for that…”
She looked at me very seriously, “You mean when you were trapped in a feedback loop by an empathic mirror with no connection to the real world whatsoever because otherwise, your mind would have been ravaged by the most complete sensory deprivation possible while we reconnected your nervous system?” she said, and then took a quick breath after that mouthful. “There is literally nothing to apologize for. You had no more control over it than you would a seizure, and I am really irate with XO Taera for filing it. If you’d done it on purpose, I might have gotten upset because you didn’t ask, but… I think we are caught in a quandary.”
“A quandary?” I asked although I was beating the phrase ‘you didn’t ask’ up in my head, trying to find a weak spot so it didn’t mean what I thought it meant.
“Yes, a quandary. See, I have no idea what a Divine Paladin is, I am having an enormous amount of trouble not breaking rules. Thank you for keeping your aura suppressed so I can think, by the way… now Taera is trying to throw us together for some reason. I don’t even know you other than our competition at J-School.”
I sighed. Straight to the point. “We both have gotten quests. Honest-to-God system quests. Mine is one of the reasons I am here. Apparently, if you get bonded to the wrong person, they could twist you into becoming a monster. A paladin is...someone that accepts quests like that, to protect people, stop great evils even if they aren’t from the Chaos Lords, and play knight in shining armor.”
“Do you have shining armor?”
“Yep. Totally shining. Not tarnished at all from the fact that I have enough necrotic essence crawling through my meridians to empower a lich lord. Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m dying, I think I probably would have already tried to talk myself into learning more about you… but I don’t want to be the cause of exactly the evil I am trying to prevent.”
“So what is Taera’s quest? And you are sick, not dying. It can be fixed, it’s just a matter of when.”
“To meddle. I cannot give you details, obviously, but all Taers were inveterate meddlers. It’s what they do, their only pastime.”
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“And can you tell me yours? It’s a little insane that you might have gotten a quest involving me, kind of old-school, but then, on pre-flight worlds, they often get quests to help the local widow round up her chickens or clean rats out of her basement.”
I chuckled a little, “I think, but I am not sure, to counterbalance hers, except that hers involved getting both of us here. Taera is fanatically loyal to the Timur family. The Timur family has made it their personal mission to bring down the slaver worlds. That means that Taera is devoted to that mission. Her quest makes it… difficult to serve two things at the same time, and I think I am here to help her come up with a useful compromise.”
“You are opposed to shutting down the slaver worlds?” her eyes had narrowed a little, and I could sense a hint of disapproval in them.
I shook my head, “No. I am in favor of dropping the lot of them on their heads, but there are complications. An invasion or an embargo would wind up hurting or starving thousands of their… people, without affecting the ones that support it at all. It might even open them up to rift overload, which would be bad since most of them have at least a dozen major rifts on their world. Mass unhappiness tends to do that. Surgical strikes, well, slavery is like drugs. If you take out the leaders, the void will get filled almost immediately and things might even get worse.”
“The Captain’s family seem to be honorable folk, even though their motivations might be as financial as they are benevolent, but your background is attractive. Proof that slaver worlds are using conscription enforcers as a way to provide merchandise? They could use that as an excuse to not only shut down conscription, which I can honestly say I’d love them to do, but it would also cause a massive backlash from the church. They would HAVE to declare a crusade against the slaver worlds.”
“They’d use you as a political tool and probably get you bonded to a member of the family or an ally as quickly as feasible. Most likely to whoever seemed most likely to support their cause. That way you are a perfect influencer, loyal to their cause, and potentially someone nearly as powerful as a technomancer under their thumb. They are on the right track now, but that kind of power has a terrible appeal.”
I shrugged. “My job is to stop that from happening.”
“For how long?” she asked, blushing a little after my comment.
I chuckled, “It’s an open-ended quest. I have no clue. All I know is, if I fail, based on Taera’s quest, there might not be any galaxy to return to.”
She was smiling slightly, “So you want to stop the raiders and destroy the Slaver worlds' ability to BE Slaver worlds, and the whole time, maybe for the rest of your life, you will be protecting me, my bond, and my life with yours?”
I nodded, “Pretty much.”
She nodded, “And you don’t want to bond me.”
“Yes, it feels… unethical. Taking advantage of a genetically engineered slave bracelet just to make my goals easier. Something you cannot ignore, break, or resist. It would be hypocritical.” I shrugged, “Plus, I can already feel that I am a hair’s breadth from deviation. I read about what can happen when a Maenad’s bond deviates since that’s what happened with the technomancers.”
She seemed to be hanging on my every word. “So you are tasked with protecting me, but you won’t bond me because you feel it’s wrong to take away my freedom, and you want to protect me in case you deviate, right?”
I nodded and took a bit of my own loaf. “That’s what I just said.”
She smiled, “Yeah. But I have two questions.”
I chuckled, “Ask and I shall answer, sahib.”
“The first question is, what if I decide I WANT you to bond with me?”
I looked at her in confusion. “Is my information on the bond wrong? Why would you want to throw away your freedom like that?”
She shook her head, “You act like you understand bonding. I don’t think you do. What you are talking about is a forced bond, and yes, it’s awful, and self-deceptive. This leads me to my next question, do you know what happens to the bondmate? The one that does the bonding if it’s NOT a forced bond?”
I shook my head, “No. Is this the best place to talk about it?”
She smiled a little wickedly, “We could always talk about it in my room, or yours.”
“Probably not a good idea.” I sighed. Was she actually flirting, or teasing a little? Either way was probably good since it meant she was unbending a little. Not that I‘d do anything about the former, but more comfortable is good, especially since, as I understood it, troops and droners were a lot more heavily interactive on the Crow than in the usual fleet.
She nodded slowly. “Probably not. That’s how you get a forced bond. It’s not always a bad thing… my grandparents were technically an accidental forced bond, but they were still happy because they probably would have bonded the right way anyway.”
“The Grav gym?” I asked. The increased Gees would keep me focused on the conversation and NOT on her body, and privacy was almost assured. I knew she’d be fine with it because it was a lot more like her home world, and I’d seen her practicing there almost every day without any issues. It was also very private during off hours. Nobody went in there unless they had a very good reason to do so, like the troopers during their drill times, because…. Well… feeling over two and a half times your normal weight wasn’t particularly pleasant, especially before you formed your foundation.
She nodded, taking a bit of her mash. I tried not to watch her mouth as she ate it, but it was one of the hardest social challenges of my life. When she caught me watching her mouth, she blinked and looked… both surprised and pleased. “Wait… I know our auras match, but do you actually think I’m attractive?”
I nodded with a gulp, “Yeah, you are literally one of the most profoundly beautiful women I have ever met.”
She scowled. “Are you serious? Because I think you are a beautiful man, but I know that uhh… some other people don’t think of it the same way, all they can see are your badges of victory, not the reason you got them or the man that earned them.”
I looked at her in confusion. “No, by any subjective standard and many objective ones, you are pretty much ideal for about half of all human males. Of course, admittedly, we have a pretty broad category of what we consider ideal, but you kinda fit into the narrow end really well.”
She raised an eyebrow, “The narrow end?”
I nodded, “Yep. Many men prefer their women to look like they have safety systems in case of sudden front impact, or a place to set a drink on their back while they take a walk without spilling. That’s the wide end. The Narrow end is in favor of women that look… well… I fit that definition. And you are right where I want you.”
She nodded, “Princess said I looked like a stretched-out frog, but that was okay because desperate men would go for anything. So far, that’s sort of true. The only person that’s showed interest is Dienne, and he flat-out admitted that he’d go for anything remotely female if he got bored, even the XO.”
I chuckled, “Princess? Oh, Princeton! Right. Well, bear in mind that she’s considered… pleasant, mostly because of her age and hair color, but she’s right on the middle of the scale, mostly because of genemods. She’s probably jealous, but I was once told that I have tunnel vision. I think you might share that trait. You tend to stay in one or two areas of the ship, and the only reason that some of the troopers haven’t hit on you is… well… me.”
“You?” she asked.
I nodded, and called Dirk over, who was walking from the lane holding a tray of food. “Hey Dirk, what do you think of Gabrielle here?”
He looked quickly at her, and then at me nervously, “She’s uhh… she’s okay.”
I sighed, “Can you pretend I am not here? Honest opinion. I won’t be angry.”
“You sure?” he asked. He was a short, brown-skinned man. I think he was a hybrid baseline/desert dweller because he had the extra-wide rib cage and nostril look of the Corvains.
I nodded, “Yep. She’s a droner. She can handle it, and I promise no repercussions. Honest opinion.”
He smiled a little, “Jeesh, top. If I didn’t think you and Jessica would kick the scrot out of me, I probably would never let her wear clothes. Or leave my lap. I’d want to lick the sweat off her bottom, the tears from her eyes, and the mil..”
“Okay. Thanks, Dirk.” I interrupted, “So why haven’t you asked her?”
He chuckled, “Because of you, top. And now Jessica, we been doing things you wouldn’t believe with a pr….”
I nodded, “Right. And why me?”
He chuckled, “Because we ain’t idiots. You got your eye on her, and we figure if we even start talkin’ about her you’ll nail down the deckplates using us as the nails. Although it might be worth it if I got to be the nail for her bo….”
“Thanks For your input, Dirk. Enjoy your lunch.” I said, dismissing him, and then chuckling a little, “Dirk is very… descriptive at times. Does that answer your question?”
She nodded, her food having mysteriously vanished, and the green of her cheeks was far darker than normal.