This short story takes place before And Shall Machines Surrender.
The woman beneath Orfea is writhing in the way of a body in extremis, though for the moment Orfea is only straddling her thighs, pinning her down by the wrists. She draws in a mouthful of air, carefully, carefully. The feedback loop of sensory load she’s set up between them is an unequal one: she feels only half while her partner feels all. And what sensations they are. Her partner, as of now, is experiencing what it is like to be pierced by dozens of fine, delicate wires no thicker than hair. Small bursts of electric currents. The woman gasps at a particularly sharp one and her teeth clench around the gag Orfea put there to keep her from biting her own tongue.
Orfea strokes the woman’s face with her finger. Her own breathing is labored. She never learned her partner’s name–there was no reason to–and was interested only in how voluptuous she is, how soft she looks, the promise of a pliant and willing body. She used to not be able to tell. These days she is better at picking out someone who enjoys what she has to give: there is a look to them, a delicacy that she can parlay into such sport.
Slowly she shuts off the feedback loop between them, liberating herself but not her partner. Who trembles, ample breasts heaving. They have agreed, early on, upon a signal. The woman would make the lights in the room flicker cyan blue, and Orfea would stop. At the moment, the light remains pale gold and new ivory.
There is the question of how far she can go, how inventive, how bold. The set she is using today is experimental, the product of combining and recombining. Even with full access to a person’s neurological array, creating such precise sensations is no easy task. There are so many components, the coldness of the wires, the way it bites–light, at first–as it enters flesh, slipping through dermis and then subcutaneous fat. Reproducing the sensation of blood welling in dewdrops is another moving part; she must take into account every intricate element.
She bends to take a nipple into her mouth. Applies, just the slightest, pressure with her teeth. The woman screams, or tries to, around the gag. Hoarse pleading sounds.
(Ever since she has discovered this side of herself, orgasm has become an event of complex architecture. Orfea still appreciates a good mouth between her legs and a good hand to go with it, but she doesn’t always require stimulation–and she can supply her own, using the same control she does on her partners. Something about the hot weight of a woman beneath her, screaming in agonized rapture, that has become its own galvanic force. She comes. Or she experiences the close cousin, not an explosion that leaves her weak, but a burst of endorphins coruscating through her like rainbows and which leaves her with euphoric apotheosis. A god receiving tribute which bucks and arches and whines under her thighs.)
Orfea stays around to check the woman’s vitals, her limbic status, to make sure she hasn’t gone into shock. The body doesn’t necessarily distinguish between real and phantom–as far as the endocrine system is concerned, Orfea might as well have taken real wires to this body, has left her sopping in a pool of her own gore. But her partner is fine, must have done this before, or rather has had it done to her. No first aid needed: the benefit of the virtual sensory link is that there’s no fluids to clean up, and little prep is required. No paraphernalia either. There is much to recommend the method.
She leaves the woman eventually on the bed of gray silk sheets, in the anonymous hotel room. Not hers–the woman is an off-planet tourist from some distant region, most likely the Seoul Belt. Here to see the sights and sounds of Kowloon, the jewel of this star system. Throughout the encounter, they remained nameless to each other, conversation carefully uninformative. For all Orfea knows, she has just fucked a celebrity or dignitary senseless, but if that is the case she has never been impressed by fame. She spends a few minutes checking herself on a wall projection, tidying her clothes, straightening her skirt. Her cosmetics has stayed on perfectly, the membranes that make her eyelids iridescent and her pupils swim with fluttering butterflies, the delicate antennae that frame her lips and twitch along her jawline.
In the high-ceilinged, busy lobby there is a thrum of noise, and a crowd to blend into. Water cascades down a sculpture of warped glass in a muted roar, limned in twilight. As Orfea moves toward the exit, she catches the eye of a curious receptionist whom she remembers watching her disappear with the woman from Seoul. She holds the receptionist’s gaze and smiles slowly until the girl flushes and looks away.
She is almost out of the lobby and into the crisp autumn evening when a woman plants herself directly in her path. A tricky matter to manage when the lobby is so wide and the entrance is the size of a wall, but there’s no mistaking that this woman wants Orfea’s attention. Not especially imposing, but striking. The stranger is dressed in a burgundy suit-dress, the jacket parted to show generous cleavage and nearly the navel, the ensembled filigreed at one hip and an opposite shoulder in betta fish and curling corals.
“Doctor Orfea Leung,” says the stranger. “A moment of your time?”
“I don’t believe we have met.”
The stranger smiles with a mouth lipsticked the blue-black of unoxygenated blood. The rest of her face is unpainted, plain. Her Cantonese is accented but it is a chameleon accent, one that admits no hint as to where she might’ve come from, what her native language might be. “We haven’t, but I’m here to deliver a warning. The woman you presumably just left a quivering, sated mess is the wife of a syndicate boss based in Krungthep Station. This syndicate boss is an ardent monogamist and is unhappy zer wife has chosen to seek extra-marital relations. Unfortunately rather than doing the reasonable thing and filing for divorce, zie will take zer displeasure out on you instead. Zer people should be here in about five minutes, to abduct you into some black vehicle from which you’ll never again emerge.”
“Kowloon Security–”
“Can be bribed, just like anywhere else, and anyway the local police commissioner owes the syndicate boss a favor. You don’t have to believe me, just come spend a few minutes with me in the restaurant.” The woman holds up her hands: they are clad in half-gloves, filigreed like the suit, and empty. “Dinner’s on me, Doctor.”
Orfea pinches her mouth. She follows the stranger into the hotel’s restaurant, second floor, where they have a view of the entrance. Sure enough, in a few minutes an elongated car–black, windows opaque–comes by, pauses a moment as though expecting someone, then speeds on. Out of the hotel’s premises, lifting into the flow of aerial traffic beyond. An unremarkable vehicle, and yet.
“This could just be a coincidence,” Orfea says to her table companion. “Plenty of cars are black.” Though she can tell that the make of this one is foreign. She tries to remember whether there was some kind of tell, but as far as she was able to glean, her partner on the gray silk sheets was just well-off.
“It could just be a coincidence,” the stranger agrees amiably, “and this was a ploy to get you to dine with me because I fancied the look of you. What would you like? I haven’t eaten here before, but it’s sure to at least taste expensive.”
“I’m not hungry. What do I call you?”
The woman grins. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
“That is not a name.”
“Daji.”
“Not a real person’s name.”
The woman laughs. “Choosy. Call me Camille then. Obviously not my real name, but it’s short and it sounds somewhat glamorous, it will have to do. Though I still think Daji sounds more powerful.”
Orfea wonders if that means the woman is Chinese or from someplace where Mandarin is the majority language. Probably not: too obvious, and it strikes her that this person–Camille or whatever her actual name is–wishes to hide her origins. “Suppose this wasn’t a ploy. Why did you take an interest? Do you work for someone opposed to that syndicate boss?” If zie even exists.
“As if I’d work for anyone that small. My employer has far more… wide-ranging concerns. A person of far greater scale, nothing as petty as a crime syndicate that touches two or three polities at most. But one of the syndicate lieutenants has something I need.” Camille holds up one of the long-stemmed glasses on the table, twirls it. “I’d like to hire you.”
She blinks, caught out by a sense of unreality. “I’m sorry? I’m not some desperate–”
“You’re very well-paid, as a cybernetics specialist of considerable talent and qualifications. But you’re going to be in danger until this is resolved, and filing a complaint with the police isn’t going to get you anywhere. It’s beneficial for you to resolve this faster.” A chime as the glass is rapped against Orfea’s. “Besides, I’ve looked you up and you don’t strike me as the type to be content here. You’re fantastically accredited and your professional experience is longer than my arm. You’re wasted on some backwater hospital, Doctor Orfea.”
“I assure you that you know very little about me.” Except she is at a severe disadvantage, though now she knows Camille is most likely from somewhere that doesn’t formalize the surname. Doctor Orfea, not Doctor Leung. “Who’s your employer?”
“You’re lucky I’m not undercover. Even then, I wouldn’t normally say, it’s so gauche–like I’m trying to brag.” Camille sets the glass down, lowering her voice. “Think of this as a gesture of utter trust, Doctor. I work for the Armada of Amaryllis.”
Orfea can’t tell whether this woman is lying–she may well be declaring she is not human at all but stardust and nova-glare given form, it is that improbable. The Armada of Amaryllis is nearly apocryphal. Or rather it is very real, in the same way that extinction events are real. A mercenary fleet that went unscathed by the AI secession and which has, therefore, become the most powerful military in the universe. Matchless, brutally efficient, capable of dispensing genocidal force. “Am I,” Orfea says, “supposed to just believe that.”
“I can show you proof.” The woman clears her side of the table, making room for a platter of desserts she must have ordered sometime during their exchange. The server lays it down with a flourish–human server, these days there are few service automata, AI development having abruptly been halted and set back decades. “For example, the entire time we’ve sat here I have set up a privacy filter. I could be stabbing you with this fork here and you could be screaming bloody murder, and no one would hear.”
“Privacy devices aren’t exclusive to Amaryllis officers.” The radius should extend a little past their table, half a meter perhaps. Orfea judges the distance and waits for a server to pass by before hefting her glass and flinging it to Camille’s right.
The glass shatters on the wall; fragments fall, tinkling. No one in the restaurant even looks their way; the nearest server continues to pour wine for the next table. On her part, Camille has not flinched. Instead she raises one eyebrow. “For a civilian you’re very bold, Doctor–and you guessed how far the filtered bubble extends, so that waiter was just outside of it. That’s very good. Very interesting.”
“Being a civilian doesn’t mean I don’t know anything. Why would you possibly want to hire me instead of a seasoned mercenary?” She could ask if Camille is even authorized to do so, but she doesn’t know enough about the Armada’s command structure. A black box, knowable only by its successes and the destruction it has left behind: a hundred charred worlds, a thousand vaporized stations.
“The obvious. They’ll try to abduct you again. You’re my in–an easy one. And then I will stage a rescue or a parlay. Rest assured, the entire time you’ll be safe. Almost as soon as they’ve captured you, I will send the syndicate lieutenant a message that you’re a valuable hostage and not to be harmed. And, as for your compensation–” Camille names a figure.
It is a vast amount, even to Orfea; her salary is hardly what one would call impoverished. That kind of money can get her anywhere. Kowloon, despite Camille’s derision, is hardly a backwater. But neither is it a place where Orfea looks to spend the rest of her life, even if she doesn’t quite know what destination precisely she wants to reach. “What is it you want from them?”
“You’re coming around.” The Amaryllis agent lifts her own empty glass, as in a toast. “I’ll brief you. The syndicate lieutenant is called Kehinde, a woman who owns something I’ve been tasked with retrieving.”
♦
Preparing to get kidnapped is a new experience to Orfea. She is a doctor. She has been on the fringes of war zones, but even then–in the last decades, most medical professionals would have been: so much violence has broken out, so few places remain safe. Doctors are required everywhere. She has tended civilians, soldiers, and on memorable occasions people who fall under different definitions–special ops, spies. Medical matters were once the domain of AIs. AI doctors and AI nurses, embodied and not. They operated with much smaller margins of error, with much cleaner consciences and fewer biases or prejudices.
Recently human medics are in demand once more–human everything, if one comes down to it. There used to be talk of all-AI armies, though leashed to and commanded by human generals. The future that seemed on the cusp, where machines fulfill every difficult need and every dangerous role, upended and vanished overnight.
“Do you carry an AI?” Camille is asking her. They have adjourned to Camille’s room in a nearby hotel, a place of unassuming chrome and synthetic marble. The room is even more anonymous than the syndicate wife’s, pale walls and paler floor, bed and couch looking arctic. Of Camille’s belongings, none are to be seen, as if the woman is more itinerant ghost than person. More than the privacy filter, that works to convince. A normal person travels with more: more detritus, more personality.
Orfea tries not to touch anything, just in case. “I don’t carry any. A set of personal heuristics, nothing unusual.” She used to have a personal AI. But that was long ago.
“That’s just as well. Once Kehinde’s got you, she will put a jammer on you to disable communications. The plan is that she’ll take you to her boss back on Krungthep Station, or possibly some other outpost that’s neutral territory. So she won’t run afoul of Kowloon laws for executing a resident, you know how that goes. The nearest viable station should be… Salome Seventy or Kaguya Fifteen? Hmm. You’re not a Kowloon national, that much I know.”
“I’m not the national of anyplace that has a treaty with Krungthep Station.” And therefore she will have no protection from Krungthep laws, if the syndicate boss is even concerned with such things.
“Fair enough. I don’t think Kehinde or her boss cares, regardless.” Camille rummages through a slim suitcase that appears to be her only possession, and which is surely too small to contain much of anything. “Any neurological condition that’d make it challenging for you to function while offline?”
“None.” Orfea frowns, watching Camille draw out a long syringe. “I still haven’t exactly agreed to this.”
“Well, Doctor. I delved into your records a little. It looks like you’re a most upstanding resident, not even the most minor of violations, by the looks of it you’ve never even been caught littering. So prim, so proper, so…” Camille holds the syringe up. “Would you be so kind and administer this?”
“I’m sure you can do it yourself.”
Camille peels off her suit, which–being part of the dress–means she takes off the top half of her clothing entirely. “I would rather have the sure hand of a medical professional. No need to worry about sterilization, I’ve got an… enhanced immune system.”
“What is in it?” No answer. Orfea sighs and takes the syringe. Under the jacket, Camille is almost bare except for a band that wraps around her considerable breasts, a thin material that gives support but which does very little to cover the well-shaped umber flesh. A glimpse, just, of dark nipples. The gloves stay on. She takes hold of Camille’s proffered left arm, uncaps the syringe, finds the deltoid muscle. Injects.
Camille’s eyes flutter shut. Her mouth parts, a half-smile, and she shudders–all out of proportion. Orfea realizes that this woman enjoys pain.
“Thank you, Doctor.” Camille draws her jacket back on, heedless of the puncture site, and re-buckles her belt. “I can’t arm you, since Kehinde is thorough and will scan you for everything. But I can track you. Are you inoculated against sedatives and hallucinogens? No? Ah, civilians.” Camille hands her a packet of two tablets. “This will make you immune to common sedatives and paralytics, plus several brain-altering drugs, I’m sure you know how to fake being unconscious or being high. Lasts twelve hours. By then we should’ve sorted it all out.”
“You don’t appear to be armed.”
“Appear being the operative word.” Camille sniffs. “Civilians. If it comes to a firefight, we’re both in trouble, Kehinde and her people quite outnumbering me. Of course if I reveal who I work for, she’ll give pause, but I’d rather it doesn’t devolve to that point.”
Orfea remembers a rumor. “Is it true that the Alabaster Admiral will break a world for the offense of having killed her officers?”
Camille flicks her a look. “Depends on the officer. She’s not a woman to cross.”
Out in the night’s openness and its biting chill, Orfea sobers. Her tryst with that woman, in that anonymous room, must have intoxicated her more than she thought. Very little of Camille’s proposition is sound or sensible, and none of it she can verify. The tablets she has taken are real, at least, her overlays have analyzed them as such; few side-effects. But the rest–she should have gone to the police. It is not as if she will be snatched away from a well-lit street like this one, in an area under public city surveillance. She blinks an emergency number on, begins to say, “I need to report–”
A hand closes on her wrist. “I wouldn’t do that, Doctor Leung.”
The woman–Kehinde–is tall, her scalp shaven and glittering with a serpentine curl of dermal jewelry. The pressure she exerts on Orfea is light, but her grip tells Orfea that she can break a wrist without much effort. “Do please,” Kehinde says, “come along.”
The same black car. Orfea is bodily shoved inside: the door slams shut. Someone grabs her and slaps a patch onto the side of her neck that her overlays tell her are meant to deprive her of primary motor control. A second later, her overlays go offline.
Kehinde, from beside her: “By protocol I should be beating you as a lesson–pain is the great teacher, as they say, better than any prophet or bodhisattva. But I’m in a different sort of mood and in any case you’ll soon be dead, I prefer doing these things cleanly.”
It takes effort for Orfea not to turn her head and track the woman; she is meant to have no motor control, and that includes head movements. The illumination is slight, nearly pitch-black; Kehinde must have optical implants that let her perceive heat signatures. Orfea licks her mouth. She can see nothing through the window, either. “I appreciate not being hit. Can I ask what I’ve done to deserve this?”
“You’re very calm about this.” Kehinde clasps a pair of restraints around her wrists, which hardly seems necessary. Red, slight give to it, but heavy. “Interesting. I don’t think there’s anything military in your records. Or have you hidden it? Except someone with ties to mercenary or intelligence agencies wouldn’t do something quite as stupid as you did. All that for your libido.”
“It’s not–”
“You happened,” the woman says, “to have fucked the wife of a very jealous, very powerful person who can make you disappear. It’s a shame. I don’t approve of such extravagance, but an example must be made. Any last wishes?”
Orfea’s chest constricts. It doesn’t even sound like Kehinde intends to take her to a remote mining outpost or depot before she goes through with the murder. “Even if I said I had any, you wouldn’t exactly fulfill it.”
“I wouldn’t, but I wanted to be polite.” Kehinde leans back, her head twitching slightly. She sighs. “Looks like I need to pick something else up. Can’t you say something genuinely insolent, Doctor? I want to be inspired to do minor violence to you. I’m just not very good at punching someone in the teeth when they haven’t provoked me. A bullet, sure, but a fist is so much more personal.”
She says nothing, aware that Kehinde may decide silence itself suffices as provocation. The woman does not. Orfea still hasn’t gotten a good look at her and wishes that she could, beyond the impression of height and a whip-like frame. She bites down on the inside of her cheek–she does not need to feign signs of panic; Camille’s promises or not, her safety is far from assured.
The car stops. Kehinde manhandles her out of it and into a drone that doubles as a stretcher. She lies on it, limp, jostled with each step and staring up at the sky–mostly dark, streaked by air traffic and Kowloon’s satellites–and then at a ceiling of scuffed metal and blue-white halogen fixtures. Kehinde is speaking in Thai, a language Orfea is passingly conversant with. From the sound of it, a colleague of Kehinde’s has brought in another piece of cargo, whatever that entails.
Orfea is propped against a chair, brought upright and nearly face-to-face with Camille. Who lolls in a different seat, giggling. There are streaks of drink down her front, staining the beautiful jacket and the skin between her breasts. Mermaid lenses cover her eyes, though they don’t hide the dilation of her pupils. Kehinde’s colleague has taken hold of Camille’s arm, peeling back her sleeve to expose a small tattoo of a white snake etched into the inside of her wrist. It was not there before, Orfea is certain.
“She belongs to Bai Suzhen,” says the colleague. The White Snake of Chinese legend and presumably the name a rival syndicate has taken. “Drugged to the gills. Who knows what she was doing out there.”
“They struck a good deal in Kowloon recently. Must’ve been out celebrating.” Kehinde roughly grasps Camille’s chin, forcing her head up. Camille makes a weak, gurgling protest. “Not very bright, and not very high up, newly sworn in most likely. I’ve never seen her before, but I don’t know all their underlings by sight. You?” The colleague gestures in the negative. “The boss will be happy enough to get at one of them. Let’s move out.”
♦
The shuttle lifts into the air, Kehinde’s colleague in the pilot’s seat. Orfea and Camille are strapped in. They go high, well above city traffic–Kehinde’s ship must be in Kowloon’s orbit. No one speaks, not aloud, though Kehinde must be communicating through overlays. Asking her employer in what manner zie would like Orfea executed, whether torture should be involved, whether footage should be recorded in visceral detail–close up and zoomed out, from every obscene angle. Perhaps the employer would force zer wife to watch. Orfea has not dealt with crime syndicates before, has until this point never touched or been touched by anything illegal or unsavory. Her life has always been ordered, even staid.
Her overlays snap online.
Keep calm, Doctor. I’m grabbing a few accesses–ah. Here’s the pilot’s sensory feeds. He’s very wired, and you’re a specialist at these things, right? Go on, have fun.
Outwardly, Camille looks no more conscious than before. Her mouth is slack, drooling slightly. Orfea trains her gaze on the pilot, a thick-set man with a deep-troughed brow. A connection is open to her, giving her secondary access to his nervous system. It spreads before her like an anatomical diagram. With this, she can do anything to him: cause the finest, subtlest agony. But that is what she reserves for women who strike her fancy. For this she’ll require a blunter option. She selects a line of nerve, strikes.
The man doubles over–to him it would feel as if he is in the middle of cardiac arrest, his entire chest compressing, a fist clenching his heart to the point of rupture. Kehinde acts quickly, taking over the shuttle’s controls.
Camille has sprung free. She has produced a pistol–nearly toy-like, too dainty-looking to be a threat–and pressed its muzzle to the base of Kehinde’s skull. “Lieutenant Kehinde,” she coos. “We have never met, but I’ve seen your combat statistics. Impressive ones, too. I love women who are so prodigious at killing.”
“My battle stats–” Kehinde goes rigid. “You aren’t Bai Suzhen’s.”
“As if I’d work for someone so parochial.” Camille flicks her wrist, making the white snake disappear. She looks absolutely lucid now. “You’ve gotten rusty, Lieutenant. Though, in your defense, I’m oh-so-good. Exceptional, if I may say so myself. You didn’t find even one of my weapons.”
Kehinde licks her mouth. “You’re from the Armada.”
“The Alabaster Admiral would like to reengage your services.” Camille absently nudges the fallen pilot with her heel. “Albeit you were fellow officers at that point, I think? You served under the Crimson Admiral.”
“Anoushka could have just asked me like a normal person.”
“She wanted to be sure of your allegiance and passion. That is to say, that you weren’t too enthusiastic about being in the employ of–” Camille sneers. “What amounts to a nobody, not to be insulting.”
“What is your rank?” Kehinde cuts Orfea a look. “And is that your subordinate?”
“My rank is agent. Things run a bit differently now–entire intelligence corps, you understand, I’m not a soldier myself. As for the doctor, I should be so lucky. Could you bring us back to Kowloon’s surface? I have a place in mind, and then we can haggle like nice, civilized beings. The Admiral’s willing to speak to you personally, if you should require.”
“Fine.” Kehinde grimaces. “She owes me at least that much. Hah. Alabaster Admiral, what a title. I’m going to make her tell me what she did to our former commander. And you, little girl–”
Camille arches an eyebrow. “I’m not that little, you’re just tall. But tall women are magnificent, so to me that’s a plus. Are you going to ask me out for a drink?”
“One day,” the apparent lieutenant says, “I’m going to get my hands on you and make you regret all this.”
A peal of laughter. “I can’t wait, Lieutenant.”
♦
Yet another hotel room, this one in purple and red, the walls and furniture soft as disemboweled organs. There are few seats. There are several beds, circles of mattress and dripping sheets like stray viscera.
“That went well.” Camille comes out of the bathroom in a loose robe the color of ripe plums. Her breasts are full, heavy, and she moves like she knows it–that they are a bounty, a treasure for any woman’s eyes.
Orfea made herself scarce while Kehinde, Camille, and the Alabaster Admiral–who presumably appeared in projection–had their conference. She doesn’t want to get any more entangled than this, any more implicated. “I can’t believe you were flirting with a woman while holding a gun to her head.”
“I was hoping she’d lose her temper and body-slam me. Or try to, at any rate, I can move like an eel.”
“You’re a masochist.”
Camille grins suddenly, a glint of teeth as sharp and perfect as a cat’s. “And you’re a sadist, Doctor. You like to hurt women, don’t you? The techniques you demonstrated on that mob wife were innovative. Do they teach that in med school?”
“No.” Orfea pulls a clasp on her sleeve shut. The clothes Camille gave her are elaborate, a stiff body wireframe draped in sunflower silk. It is not a color she would have chosen for herself, but by chance or intent it is miraculously flattering–royal, imperial. “How long have you been spying on me?”
“I was spying on the syndicate wife. You’re a bonus–but a very nice one, higher-value than my original target in fact. Not many cybernetic specialists have your, ah, dedication to personally researching techniques. And your skills, if advertised to the right buyers as it were, could be in high demand.”
“Is this a recruitment pitch?” She finishes off the other sleeve. Stands. Discovers that the dress is not as constricting as it first looks, is surprisingly comfortable. The skirt undulates around her legs like flighty fish, brushing her knees with sleek fabric. “Or are you going to kidnap me and sell me to the highest bidder?”
Camille leans toward her. This gives Orfea a further view of those soft breasts; the robe gapes to reveal one dark, broad thigh. “The Armada of Amaryllis has plenty of perks, and the Admiral’s been restructuring recently. She’s hungry for more… unorthodox personnel. Her predecessor was very traditional, kept just a small intelligence staff and otherwise recruited mostly brawn, very little brain. What do you think, Doctor?”
“I’m not looking to become a military medic.”
“I’m not looking to waste your talents on so basic a position–we already have perfectly good medics. No. I want to ask if you’d like to become a field operative like me.”
“Do you,” Orfea says slowly, “have the clearance to offer me that?”
Camille’s smile unfurls further. “Let me fret about that. Besides, I’m more cyborg than flesh, so why shouldn’t I have a field partner who can see to my maintenance? Most medics aren’t people who can double as spies. They’re too straightforward, too invested in healing. With you, that’s not a concern.”
She will regret it, Orfea knows. Yet some madness has taken hold of her. She remembers seeing this woman break free, unveil a gun like sleight-of-hand; she remembers Camille moving as though the world owes her everything, must surrender itself to her ripe and yielding. And perhaps it is adrenaline’s aftermath, perhaps it is the memory of the woman writhing underneath her–the euphoria that accompanies power, that accompanies surety of one’s strength. “You can start by telling me what the Armada offers.”
“Oh,” Camille says, her eyes glittering, “everything. To start off, Doctor, I’m offering myself…”
Read And Shall Machines Surrender for Orfea’s and Krissana’s further adventures.
A Bee Writes 