[A/N: Hey y’all! Just in case you’re not on the Discord yet – Amph is in the middle of his college Capstone course, and the one class – just the one he told me about – is an additional 20hrs/wk of work. big yikes. So TS is moving to a twice-per month schedule, but the chapters are longer!
In fact, here’s a new, long chapter right now!]
Darren
sat, calm, collected, and quiet, waiting for whatever came next. A particularly
morbid and darkly humored part of him was hoping for execution by death-ray,
considering how much everything hurt.
There wasn’t a mirror in the interrogation
room with him, but he didn’t need one to know he looked like death warmed over.
He wasn’t sure how many days it had been since his space-adventure-romp had
started, but it had been pretty much a miserable experience from the moment he
left the side of the highway in Ohio. Between the abuse by Cas, the abuse by
alien thugs, the abuse by law enforcement, and the abuse by presumably different law enforcement that was
probably analogous to the FBI, he was having a decidedly bad time.
So, he leaned back in his metal chair, let his eyes wander across the
featureless, slate gray cell he’d been thrown in, and tried to decide if
bum-rushing the next person to open the door was the right call or not. He’d
actually had pretty good luck with using brute force to solve his problems
recently.
The minutes continued to drag on, and he tapped his foot idly, but stopped when
a lance of pain shot through his knee. As he massaged the joint, the imperative
to “use your words” imparted by his mother seemed to have been soundly bad
advice. Every time he’d tried talking he was either electrocuted, shot, or
bludgeoned. He wasn’t really sure he could blame his mother for that though, as
it had certainly helped him get along while he was on earth. Maybe it was time
he come up with different adages and sage advice now that he was an extra-solar
cowboy.
He chuckled, and grinned to himself, but stopped when the swollen mess that was
the right side of his face began to throb slightly harder from the exertion.
Solar cowboy, maybe, but definitely not in a state to be throwing punches. For
the third time. If he was being honest with himself the entire thing in the
cargo bay was just sort of a gut response. There was a deafening sound, then a
brilliant light . . . frankly he had to admit he’d just panicked and lashed out
as best he could.
One of the wall panels slid away, revealing that it wasn’t a wall panel, it was
actually a door. He temporarily revisited his plan to try and rush the first
one in the room, but abandoned it quickly as a tall, female shark-humanoid with
a tail appeared. If he’d bothered to look away, he’d be doing a double take, as
he couldn’t quite believe his eyes. He’d seen the body armor of the people who
dropped him in this little isolation room, and it looked like a futuristic,
modular, composite body armor. Flexible, light, and durable, but still designed
with a sense of economy and austerity. He wasn’t a military genius or anything,
it just looked . . . like it was high-tech and good-stuff.
This was decidedly none of those things. This was
snug, sleek, shiny, and bordering on sensuous with a militant theme. It might
have started life as a military uniform, but had acquired just a little too
much gloss to be leather, and so many buckles and belts had been added to it
one could easily construe that the tailor responsible had a fetish for them. By
whatever gods one prayed to in space, the hat
was possibly the worst part. It
was an absurdity of it’s own. She was wearing a peaked cap
so shiny it hurt to look at in the pale light of the room, and as he squinted
to get a better view he found what appeared to be a gold shark-maw embossed in
relief on both sides of the headband. A miniature trench coat was draped around
her shoulders, clearly too small to be buttoned shut around her not
insubstantial bust, but still long enough to be disrupted and flapped about by
her the movements of her tail.
He’d been mentally preparing himself for interrogation, judgment, execution,
even one particularly silly idea where they pressed him into service as some
kind of royal marine, but this . . . he was left nearly speechless. Nearly.
A barely restrained snort escaped his lips, followed by faint muttering, “One
riding crop away from a gestapo-dominatrix shark . . . absolutely have to be
fucking with me here.” He rolled his eyes and crossed his arms, gritting his
teeth against the distinct discomfort of doing so.
“What did you just call me?” Her tone was indignant, and she stopped dead in
her tracks.
———————— 5 Minutes Earlier ————————
Amonna had finally dug up the file on the “Human”
that had made so much trouble in the hangar bay. The paperwork hadn’t been
completed because of . . . well because there had been no one alive to finish
it, but the drafts recovered from a department workstation by the salvage and
burial team had painted an ugly picture in broad strokes. “Technically
Sentient,” violent offender, likes to sleep and intimidate witnesses- that last
part had been deleted, but was still recovered by the data forensics AI.
He was a tough customer, no doubt. He lived through the destruction of the
station, had shown a willingness to kill at the drop of a hat. Her boots
clicked quietly and steadily, the echo bouncing down the long, desolate
corridors. That steady tempo dropped to silence as she reached the cursory
medical report. His skeleton was some kind of exotic meta-material, made of a
calcium ion lattice and filled with vascular elements. If she ever fractured a bone in her own
cartilaginous skeleton, it would take years to heal naturally, if it ever did
at all. His bones? She could see the remodeling from where the KP weapon
strikes had caused micro-fractures. His body had grown stronger
in the places he’d
been shot.
She could
see where his soft tissue had been damaged, ruptured blood vessels hemorrhaging
internally . . . specialized elements in his blood had blocked the damaged
vessels off, sealed them, and prepped them for healing. Her eyes practically
bulged out of her head. “Nine seconds!?” She read the file aloud. It
had taken nine seconds for his internal wounds to begin to clot. A secondary,
open circulatory system was recapturing the lost vitae and filtering of
bacterial contaminants . . . useful, if it had been an open wound. She could
see where he’d sustained additional injuries to
the head and face. Fractures in the skull, a concussion, damage to his brain
from repeated KP impacts to his cranium. His teeth had all been removed . . .
and put back in with some kind of adhesive . . . that his body was currently
digesting.
She looked up from the file in her hands to the door of the interrogation room.
She wondered briefly if she wanted to walk into a room with a creature like
this. She’d always had the advantage of a predatory heritage. Claws. Self
replenishing serrated teeth. Fast-twitch muscle fibers evolutionarily
cultivated for delivering a single, killing blow. These things had always been
enough to cow every prisoner she’d interviewed into compliance, or at the very
least kept them from trying to start a fight. Hell, she’d had the same problem
in a few relationships as well. Amonna scanned the document one more time,
noting everything from its auxiliary blood supply organ to the shear thickening
ballistic impact gel cushion around its brain. She very much doubted that this thing
was afraid of her, or afraid of anything really. She remembered it’s
cold expression, and intense eyes leering at her from the armored ridges of its
orbital sockets. It made her shiver.
It was strange, how much he was her antithesis. Incredibly durable terminator
to her glass-cannon physiology. There was no doubt he was a predator, but his
lack of jaw muscle development indicated that it hadn’t been the primary means
of delivering a killing blow for some time now, if it ever had been. She ran a
finger absently along the powerful masseter muscles of her own mandible, a
stark contrast to his. Her skeleton, flexible but durable, would buckle
permanently under the weight one of his slender upper limbs could bear. The gravity
well this thing developed in to necessitate such a power to weight ratio must
have been staggering when compared to the near weightless history of her
aquatic origins.
She was caught somewhere between wonder and fear, as she stared a thousand
yards through the doorway before her.
She was intelligent. It was dumb. She was amphibious. It was terrestrial. She
ate a limited diet of amino rich protein substances. It ate . . . everything.
She was female. It was male.
She shook her head sharply, side to side, as if trying to dislodge the thought
from the space between her ears, before taking a deep breath. “You’ve got this.
Your security detail is watching via the camera feeds, he’s been badly injured
three different times now, and even he can see that resisting is useless now.”
She adjusted her hat, set it at what she thought was a more aggressive, more
authoritative angle, and keyed the pad to open the door to this prisoner “Darren.”
The several centimeter thick detention door slid open with a soft hiss of
pneumatics, and she stepped through into the uncomfortably bright cell. She
successfully stifled an involuntary squeak of surprise as his eyes bored into
hers from below a split and bloodied brow. It didn’t flinch as she took a
position opposite it, looming above it by a good two feet, which only confirmed
her suspicions that this creature would be immune to any kind of threat or
intimidation.
“One riding crop away from a gestapo-dominatrix shark
. . . absolutely have to be fucking with me here.” It’s
translator weakly coughed out something that vaguely resembled that, but her
military grade equipment had translated his words in a flash, and
contextualized their meaning in her subconscious.
A riding crop was clearly a goad used to drive beasts of burden. The gestapo,
judging by contextual clues, was assumed to be some kind of policing body,
assumed derogatory term based on inflection. It struggled with the term “dominatrix”
and found no equivalent term. As best it could approximate, a dominatrix was a was
“dominant female sex-worker” but elaborated that there was a complex cultural
undertone that could not be conveyed effectively without further explanation or
procession.
“What did you just call me?” Amonna was flabbergasted, and more than a little
offended. She put her hands on her hips, and scowled at him. She’d been ready
for . . . well she’d been ready to be attacked physically, not verbally. He
called her a whore! As the intense scowl formed on her face, much to her
hastily concealed surprise, a look of embarrassment formed on his.
“I . . . ah . . . I meant . . . whew boy.” Darren coughed into his hand, split
knuckled still glistening with clotted blood. “Err, I didn’t think that’d get
translated . . . or if it did I thought you’d get the idiot-ified version that
everyone else got.” She glared at him as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “The,
you know, translator-” he tapped the polymer collar he’d been fitted with, “-kinda
sucks. Usually doesn’t spit out more than a few words loosely resembling what I
said. Sorry.”
Her brow furrowed more, and he looked away, sheepishly. Externally, she was
harsh, pitiless, and focused. Internally, she was dizzy with the realization
that he was capable of being shamed. Shame was a complex emotion, only felt by
highly social and intelligent species. A violation of the social norm had
occurred by him, and she had called him out on it.
She tried to keep her gaze steady on him, unflinching and stern to hide the
fact that she needed a few moments to completely rethink her approach to this
interrogation.
He was clearly intelligent, so that had been either a carefully cultivated lie,
or simply a lack of accurate assessment. Given the reliability of AI in her
recent career, she was more inclined to believe the latter than the former. She
had just shamed him into momentary submission, which still seemed far fetched
even as she watched him squirm in his seat. That shame meant that he
interpreted her as existing within the boundaries of his social peers, not
predators or prey. He had just called her some kind of sex worker, but that
didn’t accurately translate as simply a prostitute, so that meant that her
state of . . .
Her brain crashed a little. Sex worker. Peer. Shame.
The pack hunting terminator beast with a bulletproof
living-stone skeleton and a healing factor considered her a peer. A peer that
would be considered for sexual partnership.
Darren
spoke up again, hesitantly, while Amonna’s brain
struggled to come to grips with the implications she’d lined up for herself.
“Hey, I’m . . . well I guess I’m sorry about calling you the gestapo. That’s .
. . it’s just your outfit is a little . . . well it looks like . . .” Darren
coughed awkwardly in his hand. “It just looks like you see Nazi’s wearing in
movies and stuff, and you’re arresting me and all, I know it was a shitty thing
to say. I mean, I get that it’s probably some kind of space-cop thing but my
life hasn’t exactly been going so great recently and I’m a little . . .” He
rambled off a bit, aimlessly, before sighing heavily. “You’re just trying to do
your job, and I’m probably some kind of illegal alien. In . . . in space. Let’s
just get the interview or interrogation or whatever you want to call this over
with.” Physically, he was looking away from the shark-morph’s intense gaze.
Mentally, he was trying not to think about whether or not this was affecting
the ‘death ray execution behind the chemical shed’ odds. “Umm, so, yeah sorry
about that.” He mumbled, while pointedly examining the ceiling.
Amonna’s eyes narrowed, and she crossed her arms across her chest, subtly
accentuating her newfound “interrogation assets.” At least, she hoped that it
was her chest, and not something weird like her nostril diameter. Maybe small,
watertight nostrils were incredibly sensuous for this species, she had no way
of knowing if the secondary sexual characteristics her culture found desirable were
the same as the ones his culture
found desirable. With considerable distress in regard to her ego, she realized
that it was entirely possible this creature before her was attracted to her
more masculine characteristics, such as height and muscle mass.
Amonna blinked as his words sank in. “Wait,
gestapo?” Her tone was quizzical, and there was a moments delay as his
translator struggled to bridge the linguistic gap between the two of them. “Oh,
no, that was accurate. I am leading a secret police investigation into the
destruction of Waystation LS-49.”
They both blinked in surprise, as clearly the communication issues weren’t entirely cleared up by the translator. “Gestapo
is fine. Well, not fine, but you’ve actually got quite a few reasons to be
upset with the entire situation, and a disparaging comment about your treatment
at the hands of law enforcement isn’t entirely unwarranted. Although, if you’d
complied, you could have avoided most of your misfortune.” Amonna instructed
him sharply, hoping to play her way into a “friendly” posture with this human,
Darren.
She shifted slightly, tracking his gaze . . . and found that it was flickering between
her chest, tail, face, and waist with frequency that she rather hopefully meant
her approach to information extraction was working.
Truth be told, Darren was trying to figure out which part of her gear held the
death ray that was going to be used to kill him, now that he was certain he was
going to be exterminated by a Nazi Space Shark.
“So
Darren, was it?” She
tried to turn on the charm. Something she’d never .
. . ever had to do before.
To Darren’s ears, her words were laced with something like a salacious venom.
He didn’t know what a cat toying with a trapped bird sounded like, but he had the eminent feeling that before this was
all said and done she might just be chewing his head off and batting his body
around the porch as a way to amuse herself. He swallowed hard. “Yes.
Y-yes ma’am.” He clarified.
Amonna watched as his pupils shrank sharply. That was, again, a characteristic
of focus and sexual attraction in Zylach! A good sign, in her mind. She
wondered, hoped really, that maybe there was some kind of convergent evolution
in place that would allow her to exploit his body language intuitively. He was
using honorifics, no less. Clearly, utilizing whatever sway she held over this
brutish creature by means of her appearance was the ideal path forward. She
smiled, in an earnest display of happiness. “Well Darren, I just have a few
questions about who you are, where you came from, what you were doing on
Waystation LS-49, and we can wrap this up and move on to more pleasant things, yes?” She hoped he was
clever enough to pick up on the inflection cue she’d placed on “pleasant,” but
not so clever to as to really think through the implications of that.
Darren, struggling not to recoil as she bared her rows of serrated teeth at
him, set his jaw firmly and nodded, even though it hurt to do both. He was
going to give her all of the detail he could
muster, because the way she said “pleasant”
gave him
the willies, and he was hoping it would buy him time. To do what, he wasn’t
certain, but he’d tell her everything she wanted to know and more.
Besides, it wasn’t like he had anything to hide to begin with.
—————————— Several Hours Later ——————————
Amonna had come to three significant conclusions.
One: The human had nothing to do with the destruction of Waystation LS-49,
knowingly or otherwise.
Two: The C.A.S.I.I. unit they had down in the fabrication shop was very, very
dangerous, and the true threat out of everything.
Three: Contrary to everything the human had suggested, their society was
matriarchal. Why else would there be all the subtle fear signals mixed in with
the clear interest he was showing?
She swam another lap in her over-sized sleep-tank, enjoying the cool feeling of
the briny water across her gills and through her throat. It helped to clear her
mind, and focus more clearly on how to effectively utilize this information.
She’d moved the human to a more spacious and comfortable berth,
adjacent to her own. An entirely appropriate and innocuous decision that was
made with no regard to his apparent interest in her. It was simply a matter of
security and convenience. The vessel was more than a kilometer long . . . what
if she had followup questions around, say, dinnertime? She could conveniently
ask him questions while they both consumed dinner. It would lower his guard,
and might even trigger some of the basic pack-bonding that was so common in
social predators like him. And like herself.
In regards to the C.A.S.I.I. unit, she’d placed it under a tight watch and
physically separated the processing core from the zero-point power supply. The
technicians in engineering had been having a field day with the thing, claiming
that it was utilizing some exotic, never before discovered system architecture
that completely subverted normal thinking on how AI should be constructed. The
Chief of Engineering had a very colorful analogy for describing it. The
discussion had been long and tedious, but she understood the frantic intensity
of his final summary.
“An AI is like a storm. Conventional architecture demands that we build a shell
around the storm to keep it contained and flowing in directions we can handle.
The . . . monstrosity . . . that is this AI architecture, was built in inside
out. Conventionally, we watch the outer edge of the storm to catch the outputs
of quantum functions, but here the observable boundary exists in the heart of
the storm. We cannot see the storms heart, nor can we see its edge, we can only
receive outputs to inputs we’re not sure how it’s taking measure of or passing
back to us. This system exists as an impossibility that we shouldn’t be able to
observe, as if the entire device is being forcibly held in a state of
superposition. This requires either the perfect knowledge of a god, or such a
profound understanding of quantum mechanics that I can only think the designer
was born of a quantum realm, not from one of conventional physics. The fact
that this exists violates several well accepted laws as it is!”
It had all seemed rather alarmist and unprofessional to her, and the fact that she
had to order him at gunpoint not to destroy the device didn’t help any. They
eventually settled on a compromise. Disassembly and quarantine. When the
universe didn’t unfold like he threatened it would if they took the power
supply out, she decided it was safe enough to just leave unplugged.
She let out a watery sigh in her aquatic habitat as her wrist computer beeped
softly. An incoming message, encrypted, and for her eyes only.
She paused, sinking to the bottom of the tank slowly as she read it.
“Coryphaeus Distress Signal detected, faint but
functional security codes transmitted. Suspect damaged transceiver, as two way
communication seems impossible at present. Requesting permission to move to
conduct rescue operations, given absence of standing orders. -Admiral Chase”
A literal
bubble of amusement escaped her lips as she grinned. She’d
almost forgotten the petty jabs of the Admiral. Having to request permission
for something like this must have chafed her pride. Amonna didn’t hesitate to
authorize the expedition though, there was no way she was going to let her own
pride stand in the way of saving lives.
“Permission granted Admiral.”
