All of My Maids are Robots? Pt. 06

"...I...uh..." I blinked.

"Are you having second thoughts?" Thompson asked, frowning at me.

"No? Kinda. Yes? Possibly," I stammered. "I, uh-"

Thompson, who until now had been Tedding as hard as a Ted could Ted, transformed quite suddenly and quite alarmingly. The angles of his features shifted into a series of planes and angles that made him go from old elderly mummy to terrifying British ghoul. Like the kind of guy who would defund the NHS just to be a dick. "Do you know how much money and effort and lives I've spent?" He grabbed onto my hand, and from a distance, I was sure it looked like he was just politely squeezing my hand. Instead, his fingers were gripping me so tight that my knuckles started to hurt. I gasped and quailed a bit as he leaned in, glaring at me. "These bloody clankers don't make it easy to train new programmers, ever since the last of the human ones retired when I was a lad. But I have the programmers, and all I need is the bloody shares in the bloody company!"

I quailed. "L-Let me go!" I whispered, and holy shit, I was...so freaking scared. Like, in movies,...I...you watch them and think wow, okay, I'd be way smarter and tougher and I'd poke the bad guy in the eye or something, but instead of any of that, my brain was just going: oh SHIT Oh SHIT shit SHIT shiiiTTTT at the top of its lungs and I couldn't do anything but tremble.

"Listen here-" Thompson said.

A shadow cast itself over the table.

"Ahem."

For a delirious, hopeful moment, I thought it was Ra. They were definitely in a military looking coat, but I didn't hear fans or see glowing eyes in that silhouette. But then the same voice spoke: "I believe that the gentlewoman asked for you to let her go, sirrah." Her voice was a lilting Irish brough and it was full of such menace that Lord Thompson let me go in a tearing hurry. I sprang to my feet, trembling slightly, while Thompson's face shifted back to the old mummy with a smile.

"I beg your pardon," he said, all sweetness and light now. "We were simply having a discussion about foxing. Were we not, Lucy?"

"Y-Yeah..." I stammered and leaned against my mysterious benefactor and I was instantly in love with them because they were warm and tall and they were rescuing me. Then they swept me away from the table and onto the dance floor. My head was spinning with the sudden transformation in my situation -- and I gaped as I found myself moving into the proper position for this dance, music swirling around me.

"Are you all right?"

Are you all right?

Uh.

No.

I'm pretty sure I was dead? Dead as hell? Because I was being gently swept along in a dance by a gorgeous angel who was perfect in every way. Her skin was a lovely ebony black -- the kind of blue black that you almost think isn't real if you're a pasty white doof from a Seattle that has been quietly ushering black people out of it for years (thanks gentrification.) Her eyes were a warm brown. She had a broad button nose (all the more perfect to kiss) and her lips were full (all the more perfect to kiss) and her throat was graceful and sleek and vanished into a navy blue jacket with a whole constellation of medals that glittered across her (all the more perfect to peek off her body, so I could kiss her.) She had full breasts and strength just radiated through her arms as she held me.

"...you're hot..." I whispered.

She smirked, slightly. "So, I take it that's a rad-clicker in your handbag? And here I just thought you were happy to see me." Oh god. Did black people have Irish accents now? Uhhghgbbgnleeep;;;.

Yes, my thoughts had several semicolons in them, that was the effect this girl was having on me.

She swung me around and around and around and only the fact Georgette had tutored me real good on how to dance this did I manage to not completely embarrass myself. I...you don't know...what...okay, we come from a culture that is painfully lacking in moments like dance. It's not that I think the olden days are magical or anything, it's just that we're all miserable and overworked and have no time for nice things and most of us are so wrapped up in our own internalized bullshit -- we're not pretty enough, or graceful enough, or fancy enough...but we are, you see! I mean, it's rich as hell for me to say that, considering I was currently a femmy space vampire princess and I was pretty sure if I was in my old body, I'd have felt like a blimp in a pig's skin trying to dance this but...

Ugh.

Like.

I'm not explaining this good.

But...

Picture floating. Just...moving.

Picture lights, sliding out of the corner of your vision. Imagine music -- gentle and beautiful. Imagine strong hands on your wrist, on your hip, guiding you, letting you move with her...imagine, the little smile on her lips as you manage to do the twirl just so. The rustling of fabrics. The...silly, absurd madness of being utterly, silly in love.

Guh.

It's like a punch to the stomach, or falling out of an airplane or realizing that God's actually real. It's electrifying.

That's what this dance was like.

And when it was done, she laughed and bowed to me, and took my gloved hand and kissed my knuckles and then said, quietly. "Shall we?" And she took me for another -- and this time, the music was jaunty and fast, and I took her hand, and she spun me, dipped me. Her lips almost touched to my neck and I was sure that we were scandalizing some people, and I didn't care. Once the set was done, my knees were trembling and I was giddier than if I had taken five hits of hardcore helium off the butt of a cartoon stripper. I didn't...my similes weren't even making sense anymore, that was how...yes I was right now.

She took my hand and led me off the dance floor -- while the MC announced that the first remove was going to be set out. I was starving, but also the idea of having anyone near me who wasn't her was like sandpaper mixed with glass. I licked my lips, turning to face her, my voice soft. "L...Lucy," I said.

"Amelia," she said, nodding. "Captain Amelia O'Neill."

"One L or two?" I whispered.

"Two," she said, grinning.

"The G'hould are fucked," I said, still dizzy.

"I don't believe I've heard of that particular breed of autowar..." She paused. "Sounds Arabic? Are they some that the Ottoman Republics have been dealing with?" She grinned at me, teeth brilliant. I wanted to lick each of them individually and kiss my way along her neck and nuzzle into her for the rest of my life. "I have a shameful confession that I must admit, the...ah...the idea that you're a follower of the Navel Gazette is...rather exciting..." She leaned in close, her voice soft in my ear. "But also, rather dashing. I was hoping to get to tell you my thrilling adventures without any preamble..."

"Oh, no, no, no, I don't even know what a navy is!" I said, hurriedly.

"Then I have a great deal to tell you, my-" Amelia paused, then blinked a bit as my belly growled. Like. I'm not talking a little dainty rumbly tummy. I'm talking like someone just tossed a chainsaw into a wood-chipper and the lumberjacks are screaming in horror. No! How could you!? That chainsaw was five days from retirement! That's not even what you use woodchippers FOR. What is wrong with you!?

Amelia drew back (boo!) and smiled (yayyy!) and said: "Shall we? I hear that the salmon is just to die for..." she slid her arm around my back and I leaned against her, leaning in and whispering quietly under my breath.

"I like fish. And fish things. That. Taste like fish. And...I...uh...like...lots of things."

Amelia chuckled. "You have the oddest way of talking, Countess. I rather like it," she said, grinning at me.

"Thanks, I practice a lot. Making myself look this silly took lots of effort and hard work," I said, nodding seriously as we came to the banquet hall. The table was 'balanced', which mean it went boy, girl, boy girl, boy girl, boy girl, alternating so that everyone was seated across from someone of a different sex or gender or whatever, and the whole place would be equally mixed. Egalitarian? Question mark?

The master of ceremonies nodded. "Miss Captain, I-"

"Ah, sir," Amelia said. "Please. Sir Amelia."

"I...see," the MC said, looking faintly confused, his fans whirring. This meant that Amelia was seated across from me, which made me beam at her, even if I was sat next to a dude and a girl who looked like the last time she had had a good time, she had declared it 'terrible uncouth' and decided to never again smile in her life. The boy seemed okay -- he was kinda chubby, but cheerful chubby, like Santo! Or 20 GO 10 [Similarly Jolly Fat Man Not Found.]

"So, uh...you're...trans?" I asked, curiously. "Er, uh, Received Sex? ...is that rude? Shit. I just did that thing I hate people doing. I'm so-"

Amelia laughed. "It's fine, Lucy," she said, adjusting her collar, while the chubby boy to my right blinked.

"What's Received Sex?" he asked.

"It means you've taken hormones to alter your sex so as to be more fitting your preference," Amelia said with the confidence of a born space captain which, did I mention, made her super fucking hot. "As for me, I am quite happy with my body and my sex." She brushed elegant, dark fingers through her afro. "I simply also happen to appreciate the masculine form of address. Sir. Mr. He. Him." She grinned. "I figure if I can run up an American flag whenever needs must, I can throw out a different pronoun or too as the winds blow." Her eyes sparkled and I almost said 'fuck me right now' at a fancy dinner banquet.

Instead, I waited for the food to get set down before me. I rubbed my palms together. "Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub, yay god!" I said, cheerfully, then grabbed my knife and fork and started to serve myself salmon after salmon after salmon chunk, and mashed potatoes too, and finally, threw on some greens and bread and then I started to lather butter onto everything that could potentially hold butter. Once my plate was heaping with food, I glanced up and saw everyone on this part of the table was looking at me, frowning.

"...in my defense..." I said, slowly. "I'm very hungry."

"And thirsty?" Amelia asked, grinning. I tried to say 'only for you' with my eyes.

"Well, uh, you are a growing girl," the matronly woman to my side said, nodding.

"Thanks!" I said, then started to tuck into food. I chewed and licked my lips. "Jeeze, this food is so freaking good." I licked my lips again. "So! What's it like being in the space navy? The...snavy?"

"We're just called the Navy these days -- I think we barely have any wet ships," she said, her voice amused. "But I admit, adding space to things does make them sound more exciting."

I nodded.

"As for being in the navy, it's large stretches of being bored combined with singular moments of abject terror...intercut with beauty and splendor you can hardly imagine. Stars lit by their own inner flames, wreathed in organic molecules tumbling forth from bountiful nebula, thick as oceans. Solar flares crawling along the rigging of sails that stretch out for tens of thousands of kilometers -- crackling and snapping like ivy made of pure light and rainbow color. Worlds of fire and ice, mountains of diamond that tumble in space, lonely and silent. I've heard suns sing and seen planets burn..." She grinned, slowly. "Does that answer your question about what it is like in Her Majesty's Navy?"

I gulped. "Yeah. Yeah. That. Uh. That just about...covers...it..."

"Whoa..." the chubby boy whispered, a forkful of salmon between his plate and his mouth. The fish slipped back onto the plate with a wet plap as Amelia picked up her glass of port, sipping on it. She looked over the edge of the glass with her warm brown eyes and murmured. "Now...do you want to hear about how I earned my command?"

I nodded so had my head almost flew off.

"Well!" Amelia said, setting down her cup, then picking up a salt shaker. "Imagine this is the star known as Far Aquarii..." She picked up a pepper shaker. "Imagine this, here, pepper shaker is the smaller cousin, Near Aquarii, which is significantly smaller. They're a large-dwarf binary, see." She set them down as I leaned forward, food entirely forgotten. "There was a little Gaian planet, which we shall represent so with this grape..." She set the grape down. "Orbiting here, at roughly...thirty five aye-ohs, er, ah, Astronomic Orbits, that would be the basic distance from the Earth from our merry old SOL. Now!" She set down a fork. "This shall serve as my captain's ship, the HMS Unicorn! She was a fantastic ship -- five hundred yards long, a hundred and sixty eight souls aboard, fifteen human, the rest machine. Most of them Wills, but we had a Jack or two. Old hands, you know?" She nodded as I watched, growing enraptured.

Like...

This was a real for fucking honest to god space battle!

"We had just decelerated from superluminal velocities and thrown out the reefing sails and cut the mizzen and the main down to fit the scale of the system -- too much, you see, and the foremast can't properly focus the magnetic fields to impel fragmentary objects away from the sails. Now, cutting the masts down took all of us throwing our all into the labor -- and it was a good thing too, as it was Jacqueline Tarr on the very edge of the foremast, adjusting the outermost acres of the solar sails who spotted a plume."

I gasped. "Like...another spaceship?"

"Aye...and as we were patrolling a part of the Concert where several civilian ships had gone missing, we were all on the alert -- and so, we trained scopes and, there!" Amelia's voice grew husky. "We saw her: A cthonic Autowar. Fifteen leagues from stem to stern, biological in construction -- chiten armor harder than steel and planetvore capacity. It had just stripped the Gaian planet bare..." She plucked up the grape, popped it into her mouth, and chewed.

I blinked. "What's an autowar?"

"Everyone knows what an autowar is," the chubby boy said.

I blushed. "I just wanted to hear Amelia explain it..." I said.

Amelia chuckled. "An autowar is a ship constructed by an alien species that is no longer extant. Seemed most of the buggers were damned ready to destroy everything else in the galaxy if they needed to. Hurm." She shook her head. "Rather rude of them."

"There issss no third planet!" I said. "Don't you think I know that!" I clutched my chest. Everyone looked at me. "...s-sorry, uh...book reference..."

"Oh? Which one?" Amelia asked.

"Uhhh...the Doomsday Machine?" I asked.

"Never read that one," Amelia said. "Now, where was I...ah, right. Now! Normally, when a frigate of twenty six coilguns and not a single transmutative munition goes up against an autowar of this scale, well..." She shook her head. "The Captain was already beginning to order us to reef sails and prepare to accelerate away from the system, top speed. But the Cthonic had already come at us -- and with the Orbital Gauge. She was at a higher point in the plane of the ecliptic, see..." She used her knife to indicate. "It takes a great deal of energy and time to move from one plane to the other...energy her drone fighters had, but our poor Unicorn did not."

"They came on: Slavering fangships, propelled by some unknown means. Tentacle beasts struck at out rigging -- and almost immediately, Captain Silver was struck dead!" She shook her head. "The Jacks and Wills had their marlin spikes and pikes at the ready, but there was so many of them...but then I saw my chance. Through the scopes, I saw that there was a solar storm brewing. A big one. I used our solid fuel jets and brought us so..." She moved her fork between the pepper shaker and the salt shakers. I tried to imagine what it must have actually been like.

Scary as shit.

"Two of the beasts came into the bridge. I thrust once, twice, with my sword -- acid for blood! Then my surviving midshipman, one Mr. Tom, clubbed another with a magnetic oar, and then the machines were there, forming a protective wall. I brought us into the solar sails and we insulated ourselves utilizing some quick jerry rigging -- I had the spare sailing wadded up and then we simply had to hold off the Cthonics for, oh, a week. We had a recycling system and took our turns at the breech -- fortunately, with our muskets and swords, we could clog them up, then clear the ship and get fresh supply."

We were all utterly rapt now. My food was cold and I did not care.

"But then...we were right in the midst of the solar storm. I hit the emergency release on the rigging and we unfurled every bit of our sails -- it was a total muddle, yes, but it created an immense shell of writhing cables...cables that picked up the solar radiation and became energized. They formed a kind of thrashing electromagnetic blender, and the cthonics were transfigured like that from the most terrible threat into nothing more than minced meat...well done minced meat." She beamed. "Their maiden ship clearly thought we were dished and approached -- and only once she was within open sights did me and the surviving machines let fly with a full, treble shoted barrage of flechettes! We reloaded faster than I'd ever seen such a poorly mauled crew do -- and we fired again! Then we spun the ship by venting our secondary atmosphere tanks and fired the larboard broadside. And...well..."

She grinned." That was that."

***

Three removes later and I was just round as a football and...maybe a...a..tiny bit drunk.

People were beginning to take their leave, and Amelia and I had actually pulled off to a side table, where she was roundly beating my ass at backgammon and being too polite to point out that I clearly had no idea what I was doing. And I was in a real pickle.

"So...I've been...subtly trying to tease an anecdote from you all evening, Lucy," she said, her voice wry. "I'm afraid this means I'll have to take advantage of us both being slightly inebediated and cut to the point: Tell me something about yourself. You have projected around yourself an absolutely enchanting air of mystery all evening."

"Hah!" I blushed. "Really?"

"Yes, really!" she smiled. "I have no idea what your interests are, what is like being a countess, what your goals are..." She licked her lips. "And for a lady that dances as well as you, and that is so fascinated by naval exploits, that is just criminal."

I smiled. "W-What if my goal in life is to meet a pretty navy captain, fall madly in love with them at first sight, and just listen to them talk forever?" I paused. "N-Not that, uh, that is my goal. But, you know, what if? I...not that...I don't madly love you!" I said, hurriedly. "I don't want to make this weird. Oh god. I made this weird."

Amelia chuckled, softly. "You do know..." She looked down at the board. "You can't...move that piece there."

I blushed and shifted the piece back. "King me," I said.

"That's not how backgammon works," she said, her lips quirking up. "Besides, I was under the impression you'd want to be queened." She grinned.

"That's not how Chess works, though," I said, sticking my tongue out at her.

"You're evading my question," she said, her eyes glittering.

"Uhh, yeah? I thought this whole...air of mystery thing was really working for you," I said.

"It is," Amelia crooned. The tolling of the clock jerks my attention away from her. It's late. I should be getting to Jenny. I blushed, then opened my mouth, then closed it. Then Amelia's fingers grip my chin, turn my head back to face her. She leans across the counter, then cocks her head, then leans in and kisses me. Hard. Her tongue thrusts into my mouth and I had forgotten how good kissing was. Kissing girls without lips, without tongues...uh...it made me...