Author Daecrist
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How I Helped My Smokin' Hot Alien Girlfriend Conquer the Empire 83: True Fear
🕑 Added 2025-06-11 19:13:35 +0000 UTCThat irritation coming through the link spiked again. Varis grasped my arm and pulled me away from the gathered livisk. She wore a look of supreme annoyance. There was no need for a mental link to tell me she was upset.
“A moment of your time, Bill,” she hissed, though it was a hiss that was loud enough that I’m sure everybody gathered there could hear it and know how annoyed she was.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She pulled me a little ways away from the rest of the livisk. She glared daggers at me, and that irritation and annoyance that’d been running through the link turned to something else. It was downright anger now.
I blinked in surprise. I tried to remember the last time I’d felt outright anger from her. Then again, I wondered if she was just as surprised a little while ago in the tower when I’d been outright angry with her and attacking her to the point she was in very real danger if I hadn’t gotten things under control with the practice sword.
“What in the name of the empress are you trying to do?”
“You need to stop swearing by the empress,” I said.
She blinked. “What?”
“You always talk about doing things in the name of the empress,” I said, shrugging as though it was the most simple thing in the world. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe it’s not a good idea to be swearing in the name of somebody we’re trying to kill?”
She let out a hiss and glanced over to the gathered livisk. Some of them were casting looks in our direction. Others were so pointedly not looking at us that it was obvious they had every ounce of their concentration on what was happening with us, and not on the holodisplay in front of them.
“You need to watch who you say that sort of thing in front of,” she said.
“Why?” I asked with a shrug. “Are you worried your people are disloyal?”
“If you take the empress’s name in vain them somebody could turn on you. Even if they’re loyal to you.”
“That sounds like a fancy way of saying somebody isn’t loyal to you,” I said. “I don’t know if you understand the gravity of what’s going on here, but the empress just nuked your building. Maybe that’s a way of saying “Hi! How ya doin’?” in livisk, but back on earth that means you’re not friends. I think it’s time we start acting like we’re not friends with the empress.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. A complex mix of emotions fluttered through the link. So complex I couldn’t really tell what was going on. The she opened her eyes there was just that irritation there again.
“Saying that kind of thing still isn’t a good idea,” she said, but she said it weakly this time. Like she didn’t believe it any more than I did.
“Oh yeah?” I asked, snorting out a laugh. “What are you worried about? That the empress is going to drop a nuke on me?”
She stared at me for another moment. Then she smiled. Then she started to laugh at the ridiculousness of this whole situation.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I said.
But when she looked back at me again, she was totally serious. It was the kind of intense look I expected from a nun standing at the front of a class with a ruler. Ready to put the smack down on anybody who took the Lord’s name in vain.
At least I assumed that’s what she looked like. Admittedly, I’d never gone to a Catholic school or been taught by nuns. It was just a vibe that was out there in the culture.
“You’re still not going in there,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s ground zero of a nuclear blast!” she said, as though that was the most self-explanatory thing in the world.
For anyone else on any other planet in any other emergency situation? That probably was self-explanatory. Walking into ground zero of a nuclear explosion was a bad idea. Even with radiation poisoning cures and shielding and things like that.
There was all sorts of nasty stuff that could happen in there that could potentially kill me before the long-term effects of being in the middle of a recent nuclear explosion had a chance to work their dark magic on me.
“Your people are in there,” I said quietly. “And your people are my people. It’s a crazy fucked up situation that your people are my people, but they’re my people as much as the people out in the reclamation mine are my people, and I’ll do anything I can to save them.”
I stared at her. She stared right back at me. It was a back and forth that seemed to last for a small eternity, neither one of us budging. Neither one of our emotions changing as determination pulsed through the link.
Finally she sighed and looked away.
“You would dishonor me by saying I’m not willing to rescue my own people?”
I reached out and took her hand. Which got some chattering from the blue sparklies standing around pretending not to watch us. I guess they’d decided to drop all pretense that they weren’t watching us.
“I’m not trying to dishonor you by saying you won’t go after your people,” I said. “I’m trying to bring honor to you by saying I’m the person who’s going to go in there after your people. There are two of us. You can be in two places at once.”
She stared at me again. It was an intense stare.
“I don’t want to risk you,” she finally said.
And there it was. There were tears threatening at the corners of her eyes. I tried to remember when I’d seen her cry, but I couldn’t. I recognized what was going on. That complex mix of emotions that’d been so difficult to understand finally made more sense.
Fear. Something I hadn’t felt from her all that much. Maybe not at all. Not like this, at least. She was genuinely afraid.
Not for herself, but for me. Which was a justifiable fear. Again, walking into ground zero of a nuclear explosion wasn’t exactly a safe thing to do.
It was the kind of thing that killed people. It wasn’t close to a death sentence these days, but the cultural memory of it being a death sentence had hung on in civilization’s collective imagination long enough that people still thought it was a pretty ballsy thing to do.
It really was a pretty ballsy thing to do, when you got down to it.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, grinning and shaking my head. “It’s not like this is my first time with boots on the ground after a nuke went off.”
“It isn’t?” she asked, blinking in obvious surprise.
“No,” I said, fudging the truth just a little. “I had to run supplies down as a lieutenant, and I got wrangled into the rescue effort once I was down there. Things tend to be a little confused after a nuke has been dropped on somebody, and you have to get in there and take care of things quickly.”
The shit I’d been wrangled into wasn’t directly assisting with the rescue effort. No, it was mostly just helping with supplies going out to the people helping directly with the rescue effort, but she didn’t have to know I was talking about the role of a rear echelon motherfucker when I was out there assisting with a nuclear drop response.
"Fine," she said.
I blinked. "Fine?”
"Fine, you can go in there."
"Great," I said with a grin, slapping my hands together. But then I paused, because there was something coming through the link that told me there was a catch to whatever she was about to say.
"Why do I get the feeling there's a catch to what you're saying?"
"Because there is a catch," she said, blinking and trying to look like the picture of innocence. "I'm not going to make it easy for you."
"I'd hoped you would make it easy for me."
"Yeah, that's not happening," she said, shaking her head again. "You can go mount a rescue effort if you can find a strike team and a rescue team willing to go in there with you."
"A strike team and a rescue team?" I said, blinking and wondering what she was getting at.
"The strike team is for safety," she said. "There is a possibility the empress is going to attack."
"And you think she's going to attack directly through the irradiated destruction she created dropping a bomb on one of your buildings?"
“Again, think of all the conversations we've had recently about not underestimating the empress's stupidity.”
"Fair point," I said.
"And a rescue team is trained as first responders. The kind of people who are willing to run into the breach like that. The kind of people who know how to rescue someone in a building that’s been hit by a nuke.”
"Do you have teams like that?" I asked.
"Of course I have teams like that," she said. "But you'll have to convince them to work with a human."
"Convince them to work with a human?" I asked, suddenly feeling a touch queasy. I looked over to Ch’alm and thought about how he'd been unwilling to even shake hands with a human. Like my very touch was offensive to him.
I'd only had limited experience going around Varis’s tower. I'd only had limited experience interacting with livisk. There was Harath, of course, who I think I'd developed something of a rapport with.
But Harath seemed like the kind of guy who didn't care what species you were as long as you were able to turn a wrench. Like a metaphorical wrench. They didn't actually turn actual wrenches much with a modern starfighter, but you get the idea.
As I looked over to Ch'alm and the other gathered livisk, all of them hitting us with looks that were curious at best and outright hostile at worst, I realized there’d be livisk out there who would be a little harder to win over.
I let out a sigh. It all seemed so insurmountable for a moment. Everything weighed down on my shoulders. My people in that reclamation mine, no rescue coming from human space because they were writing me off as a traitor. Livisk on this world hating me because I was a human. The empress trying to kill me because she was upset I'd killed one of her pets, even though they were the assholes who’d decided to invade human space and take over one of our colony worlds that we'd stolen from them fair and square,
It was a lot, and I didn't know how I was going to take care of any of it.
I looked at Varis and she had a sympathetic smile. Like she could sense what was going through my mind and she knew how difficult it was.
I could understand in that moment her reluctance to rock the boat. Why she was so willing to continue with the status quo. Maybe the status quo with the empress running things wasn't ideal, but she'd managed to carve out a life for herself, such as it was, and it was a life that was far more luxurious than most beings in the galaxy ever got to enjoy.
I could understand how it was easier to go along to get along. Even living under a tyrant.
There’d been plenty of people on Earth who'd made that same trade. That it was okay to let a little bit of creeping authoritarianism into their life because that was easier than getting off your ass and actually doing something about a wannabe despot slowly taking more and more.
That firmed me up more than anything. The empress was the one who did all of this. I was going to stop her, damn it, and I was going to stop her one small act of defiance at a time.
I grinned at Varis, who suddenly looked surprised at the resolve coming through the link. I clapped my hands and rubbed them together.
"Great," I said, turning to the other livisk with a grin. "I'm going to need a strike team and a rescue team to go into the nuclear conflagration in front of us and pull people out. Who's with me?"
Comments
daecrist
Looks like I misclicked and didn't add it to Crazy Super Fan. Should be there now. Sorry about that!
Edward J Purcell
Why can,t I get episode 84 when episode 59 is posted on hfy?
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