Chapter 6
Arkon
Things have quite literally never been better. My human is performing excellently in her role, our mutual affection is growing day by day, and the project is starting to come to a stage I don’t think any of us ever really thought we would get to.
I am in love with Evie. She is everything I have never dared to want in a mate.
Her body feels as though it is made specifically for mine; the way she wraps her pussy around me and grips me so tight, the way she fights me then surrenders to the pleasure I can give her, the wicked way she insists on trying to steal things even though she knows she is being watched by more eyes than she can countenance.
“What are you thinking about?”
She asks the question over breakfast. I realize that I have been staring at her.
“How glad I am that I chose you to employ, and not the male candidate.”
“You would have hated Rustle,” she laughs. “He was such a constant, consummate asshole. He would have driven you mad, I think.”
“Why is that?”
“He was just a jerk, and he was bad at games. He’d want you to explain why the rings were significant and when he missed them he’d be like ohhh, it doesn’t matter that much actually because, blah blah.”
I like listening to her talk about her life before my employ, even if it is to complain about what sounds like the universe’s most pedestrian and beige arch nemesis.
“Anyway,” she says. “I like the work here too, but I’d really like to know what I’m really training for.”
“What do you mean, what you’re really training for?”
“Whatever you want me to do, it’s not really fly through rings,” she says. “Back on Earth, they trained birds to sit in missiles and peck at targets as a means of orientation in the days before decent tech. Is that what you’re doing with me? Integrating me into a weapon or something?”
She sips her human-safe protein drink and I think about how best to lie to her.
“The Kensington Group is a collective of rebel pirates and renegades and outlaws,” I start to say.
“You’re making them sound very cool, though,” she interrupts me.
“There is nothing cool about breaking intergalactic law,” I say sternly, watching as she tries not to break out laughing in response. I don’t know what it is about this human and her near complete inability to take anything seriously, but here we are.
“We have to defend our territories and our borders,” I say.
“I knew it! You want to use me as a weapon,” she says. “I’m not going to do anything fucked up, I hope you know that. I mean I’m not going to…”
“Not a weapon,” I say. “An advanced deterrence system.”
“Sounds like another set of words for weapon,” she replies. “I know. I’m human. We have endless words for weapons in all of our cultures.”
“That’s really not what it is,” I say. “Think of it more like a very large robot.”
“Oh, my god, I’m going to be piloting a flying mech suit!” She jumps up, beaming. “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place? I would have worked for free!”
“I don’t need you to work for free,” I say. “But I do need you to take your work seriously.”
“And I do,” she says. “I take it so fucking seriously. I work way harder than anyone else, I bet. And I hardly ever steal anything anymore.”
“That’s got to stop completely,” I growl. “And you know it. The price for taking any of our tech is a lot worse than a spanking and some rough sex.”
“So, what, anal?”
I frown at her. She has this air about her that means nothing really ever touches her.
I think it helps in the sense that it keeps her from getting overwhelmed in the way many humans would if they were ripped out of their world and taken into an alien realm, but it means she never quite takes me entirely seriously.
“There are real consequences,” I repeat. “You could find yourself incarcerated. Not in the sense of the cage I barely use with you, you absolute brat. But in real jail.”
“You should probably use that cage,” she says. “Chekhov’s cage. Gotta use it before the last act or people will get mad and say you didn’t know what you were doing.”
She’s being silly again, and I let her be silly because there is no harm in it. If she is happy, engaged in her work, and not asking too many questions about the actual purpose of it, then I am happy.
* * *
Evie
We get to work, and I am very excited to get in the machine. As we come in, Arkon is swarmed by juniors who need his help. He gives me a swat on the butt, tells me to be good, and sends me off to his office.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. I want to get in the machine, but without Arkon to put me in it and get the sexy suckers all situated, I’m not going to be able to do it until he is done with whatever series of silly little tasks the juniors need him for.
As alien as this world is, and as strange as this mission city is even for an alien world, I am starting to feel very settled and normalized here. It’s beginning to be routine to come to work and come over and over again, just as I suspected it one day would be.
I am surprised when I get to Arkon’s office and discover that the machine isn’t there. What is there is Drak. I don’t know which discovery is worse.
“Where’s the machine?” I ask the question immediately.
“Congratulations.” Drak smiles at me. “You’ve graduated.”
“I have?”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “That was a training rig, obviously. From the data we’ve been gathering over the last few sessions, it’s become obvious to me that you’re outgrowing it. You’re ready for the real thing.”
Excitement builds in me. I cannot start to imagine what the real thing will feel like. The training rig felt incredible.
“I’m going to get you fitted for the real rig,” he says. “There’s not as much room in it as the training rig. So we’re going to need to take you in and get you measured up while Arkon is busy sorting out some of the peripherals.”
I am too excited to even really listen. I follow Drak out of the office and up a couple flights of stairs, through a heavily guarded steel reinforced door that has red and black stripes all along the sides.
I get the feeling I am being shown a part of the facility I would never have been allowed into in a thousand years if I hadn’t proved myself.
“Is this where you keep the robot?”
Drak grins at my question. “No,” he says. “There’s nowhere big enough on this asteroid to keep the robot.”
“So it is a robot!”
He laughs, a rare display of emotion other than complete disdain for me.
I think he is excited to show me what he has been working on.
Secrets like these, ones that are too big to show anybody who matters, are often shown to the household pet.
I feel like that’s what my status here is as far as he is concerned.
“Where is it?” I look around, wondering where he has it hidden away. I guess a door will open for a big reveal, or maybe a sheet will fall, or…
He presses a button and a screen lights up, showing us a view of the space on the darker side of the asteroid. It should be bland, devoid of much of anything. This is not a sector of space with very dramatic views.
But there’s something there.
Something so big that the orbiting camera has to pull back in order for us to see all of it.
“What is that?”
At first, all I can see are big shining planes of gold and silver and white panels, and then as the camera slides back those become outlines and take shape and…
“Is that a fucking robot?”
If it is, it is bigger than the space transporter I traveled from Earth on.
It is built in the shape of a two-armed, two-legged creature.
It gleams with metallic plates jointed to resemble the—I have to say it—human body.
The eyes are particularly magnificent. They gleam like brilliant color shifting nebulae from inside a skull designed to look like a sentient being.
It is floating in space, but it does not seem lost. It commands everything around it.
It seems to be large enough that it has its own gravitational pull, or perhaps the bright shapes orbiting it are of its own making.
Or maybe they’re alien construction tech, putting final touches on.
I cannot be sure, but I do know that it is one of the most beautiful pieces of engineering I have ever seen, far surpassing any simple ship.
“Not a robot,” Drak says, a rare note of reverence in his voice. “A goddess.”
“Incredible,” I breathe, more awed than anything.
It’s beautiful. A work of art as much as it is a work of science.
The camera pans around it, and I see details in every single part of the creature.
I can see the influence of the human form in every part of it.
I don’t understand why aliens would have decided to make something like this look like us.
“Why does it look… like me?”
“That is you,” he murmurs. He still has that trance-like air about him.
He is absolutely entranced by the thing he made, and I know somehow that he made this.
As many hundreds or maybe thousands of aliens are here, this creation is specifically and personally his.
So when he says it is me there, I know that cannot be true.
I know it must have taken years to build, and have been here a matter of weeks at most.
“How can that be me?” I squeak the question in a very mundane, very human way.
That is not me out there, redirecting the courses of various asteroids.
It cannot be. I am not large. I am not powerful.
I am a silly little human who is constantly getting spanked for her misbehavior and trying to sneak poisonous alien food because I believe, deep down, in the power of my gut.
“That is what you have been learning to control all this time,” he says. “All that training was so that you could become one with the goddess.”
“Is that why it only has two arms?”
“That’s right. You can’t map four arms, so neither can she.” He turns to look at me with a mad passion in his eyes. “Do you understand what you are looking at? Do you feel what all this has been building to?”