Le Femme BEM

Pink has not glanced up from his readouts. "Station Operations is going into yellow alert."

The smooth tones of a Majel voice synthesizer makes an announcement as the alarm fades. "This is a station-wide yellow alert. This is not a drill. All hands, please stand by for instructions."

"Thanks for the heads up, Pink," I say. "What does that mean on your end?"

"Ops is going to pull the station's systems off the interweb," Pink explains, "Our direct link will be unaffected, but any haxxoring's going to get very dicey. If there's anything you need me to do, tell me now, not later."

Majel interrupts again. "Station management is pleased to announce the purchase of a supermajority stock interest in the Janus IV mining franchise by unsolicited bid."

"That was fast," Pink says. "Great way to secure claim to the Great Old One statue, though: just buy the entire space station and everything on it. There are only two megacorps with the collateral to pull this off."

I my inner eyelids flick shut. "Please let it be Umbrella. I can handle Umbrella."

"Janus IV Mining is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Leet Corporation," Majel says. (I'm fuxxored.) "Please join station management in welcoming our new executive leadership, Leet Corporation. Leet Corporation: We Own You." (I am sooo fuxxored.) "In an unrelated communiqué," Majel adds, "Janus IV management has been instructed to inform all hands that this station has been commandeered by the Leet Space Marine Corps." (I am sooo fuxxored it hurts from my ass to my ears.) "All unaffiliated guests, please remain where you are or risk summary disintegration. All hands, please prepare to be boarded. A Leet Corps battalion will be translating into the system shortly. Thank you for your unconditional cooperation."

(I am sooo fuxxored that...wait a minute.) "Pink, did she mention an in-system translation?"

"Yeah," Pink says, sounding as confused as I feel, "Station Ops is prepping for a translation. That doesn't make any sense. In-system translation takes a shit load of computational power. I'm talking serious, multiple world parallel processing."

I whirl around to peer through the porthole. The crowded star field hangs almost motionless in the limitless distance. The milky, banded strips of the asteroid belt and the ringed bulges of gas giant planets are much closer, their movements generating far more parallax with the geodesic struts and pod-zones on station's far side. Generating the most parallax, no more than a few clicks from the station itself, is a blue-shift gravity lens distortion. An invasion of Einsteinian reality from interstitial space. A ship generating its own translation point. An honest-to-shit Leet Corps jumpship.

Pink is still in his exposition-trance, bless his nerdy hearts. "...the only kind of computer capable of astro-navigating an in-system translation is..."

"Pink," I say, watching the sleek lines of a Leet Corps jumpship translate from the interstitial realm of imaginary time into real space, "I need to talk to EJ."

Pink's unibrow furrows as he thinks this over. "Alright, I admit that makes sense. But what makes you think he'll want to talk to you?"

"He's financing this expedition." The Boussard ramjets of the jumpship fire as it moves in for a direct docking. I've got a few minutes, more if the Corps crew's Master Chief is green.

"You stole from him, you mean." Pink leans close in the holoblock. "Suppose he's willing to talk, maybe even help you a little. He's back on Terra, two Galactic Arms away. Do you have any idea how tricky it is to secure a long-distance transmission like that? One typo or packet misroute and Leet will know exactly where I am. And you, too."

I can see the jumpship maneuver into position, matching velocity and rotation with the station's docking ring. "Pink, I don't care if you pirate subspace radio, piggyback an ANSIBLE signal, or shove a warp nacelle up a carrier pigeon's butt. Just get EJ on the horn as fast as you fuxxoring can! Tell him, 'Xixa says she's sorry.'"

Pink's face crinkles up in a wry smile. "He won't believe me."

"Of course not. Tell him I think I was wrong, too. That should make him curious and angry enough to start speaking to me again." An umbilical is already unwinding from the jumpship's hull to the station ring. So much for my hopes of a green Master Chief. I roll my shoulders and loll my head, working the tension out of my neck. The disruptor thrums, its weight heavy but so very welcome in my hand. "Now I gotta go bag me some marines. Xixa out."

The touch-pad on the slumber-pod's door flashes amber, signaling remote lock-down initiated by Station Ops. A quick burst from the disruptor's sonic screwdriver fubars the pad's security circuits. At least I hope it does, because with Pink working his cyber-mojo outside the station's systems instead of inside, I can't be sure. I holster the disruptor high on my back, the smart-chemise morphing out loops wherever I need them. Flipping down the door's manual release handle, I push the sliding door ajar with both hands, just enough space to whip my antennae through the air of the corridor beyond. No unexpected pressure changes or chemical traces. I'm good to go.

Lugging open the pod door without servo assistance takes two hands. The corridor of the berth deck stretches windowless and empty on either side. The emergency lighting mutes tasteless graffiti and tacky, corporate provided artwork. The hostile takeover is well underway. Little Leet "We Own You" and "w00t" logos are popping up all over the reactive wall-screens. No one's here to notice but me. I guess everyone else is taking the "summary disintegration" warning seriously. I've seen how Leet operates—Hell, I've operated for Leet—so I don't blame them one bit. Speaking of Leet, it's time for some cyber-mojo of my own.

My wrist-top computer may be four years old but I've kept all the communications gear inside it up-to-date. First, I toggle off the holoblock's pop-up display and muck about with the audio until its broadcasting a focused sonic frequency you need antennae like mine to hear. Next, I launch the wrist-top's netstumbler. I keep the program well fed with black market decryption keys, so the stumbler locks onto the battalion's common channel in under a minute. Of course, if they learn I'm eavesdropping, the jumpship's central computer will take over encryption duties and then my meager wrist-top would take longer than the remaining lifespan of the universe to decode a single data-squirt.

"Master Chief to Blue-1." The Leet Chief sounds frosty, large and in charge. "What's your twenty?"

"Blue team is in the hen house," comes the static-filled reply. "Please be advised that someone has ten forty-two'd the station surveillance subsystem. Station manager suspected an external hax-job, took station systems off-web. Otherwise Ops is buttoned up, over."

(God, did I sound that dorky during away missions? It's okay, you can tell me. I won't hurt you much.)

"Red team is ten twenty-three and awaiting orders," says another voice. There's an overlong silence and the tinny voice finishes, "...Over."

I smirk. Red team is mighty green. This might be fun after all. I call up a flat display of the station's schematic on my wrist-top. Too bad I can't risk a live feed from Ops, or else I'd know exactly where these bozos are. I'll have to keep an ear out and plot my course to the docking ring accordingly.

"This is MC. Red team: fan out. Search and recover the item. System surveillance is compromised, so don't trust it. Rely on hardwired sensors only. That includes your guts. MC to Tizona, requesting authorization for a ten thirty-five, over."

"Tizona to MC," purrs a smoky, feminine voice. Hers is the only signal free of echoes and static. (Bingo! If Pink gets EJ on the line, I might make it out alive after all.) "Ten thirty-five is authorized, provided the physical integrity of the objective remains your highest priority. Tizona out."

"You heard the senora," the MC grunts. "You have clearance to consider all encounters hostile, but bust the item and we'll all be busted down to clearing space hulks. Blue-1 has the conn. MC out."

"Aye, aye," is Red-1's unneeded reply. There is a mutter of off-channel chatter. "Blue-1, Red team is ten-eleven to the bridge deck. Red-1 to secure alpha pod, Red-2 is en route to gamma and Red-3 is sweeping flush deck, over."

I send a quick audio-only squirt to Pink: "It's my lucky day, they're splitting up. See you on the other side."

It takes me a good fifteen minutes to cat-and-mouse around Red team, forcing my way through doors and airlocks with the sonic screwdriver, and reconnoitering Red team's position based on their constant status chatter and my station schematic. The Master Chief and Blue team maintain radio silence, but I don't really notice that until I finally reach the door leading to the bridge deck, tug it open, and get a nose full of storm bolter barrel for my troubles.

I've got the door to bridge deck cracked open and my face poking in the gap like I'm ready to croon, "Heeere's Xixa!" Instead I'm gawking at a Leet space marine in full, blood-red battle armor. The marine's face is hidden behind the angular, hard-radiation filtering faceplate of his helmet. He and his partner, twin-armored and covering each other's six, carry locked-and-loaded storm bolter carbines. The handheld rail guns are black steel and space titanium and fill the room with the aroma of ozone, gun oil and slide-action lubricant. The smell makes me weak in the knees, but not from fear. Hey, what can I say, I'm a gun-buggy.

The marine's voice buzzes from an external speaker on his helmet. "Come on in, mister," he tells me, "nice and slow." The external speaker clicks off so he can relay a message on the battalion's coded, common channel. My wrist-top picks it up and plays it back, audio still set to my-antennae-only. "Red-2 to Master Chief, have encountered what appears to be an unaffiliated Bug Eyed Monster, over."

"Roger that," Master Chief replies. "Secure it, interrogate it, confirm whether it's the hostile that's been monitoring our transmissions, and then neutralize it. Over."

Ah, I get it now; they've been code-talking over the common channel, making stuff up all this time in case someone was listening in. This Master Chief is a hardass. I sigh and wedge the door open a few more inches, barely enough space to squeeze my butt into, which just so happens to be my intent. I rock my hips and wriggle through the door ass first. I see my rear-end reflected in the marine's visor. Down there, the smart-chemise is little more than a thong between two globes of juicy green muscle with purple freckles. I pirouette as I pop free from the door, keeping the disruptor holstered behind my back secure and out of sight while the rest of me jounces and jiggles in plain view.

My shameless little show has its desired effect. Red-2 falls out from his combat stance, becoming stiff and awkward. "Um, please be advised that the BEM is a, uh, femme." He clicks on his external speaker. "Put your hands on your head so I can see 'em, Miss."

"Don't you mean, 'Put your hands on your head where I can see them?'" I ask aloud, my arms rising. "Assuming your talking about my hands, that is." My hands which are now only a few inches from the grip of my disruptor, I should say.

The marine on his six shuffles up and his speaker crackles, "He means spread your arms out on either side, where he can see that they're empty." This must be Red-1, the mock-green code-talker and all around clever bastard. I like him already. Too bad I'll probably have to kill him in a minute. Red-1 clouts Red-2 on the back of his helmet. "Noob!"

Red-2's bolter is now pointed at the floor. Red-1 has his barrel aiming about a foot above my head. Even slowed down in all that armor, it will still take them half a second at most to reacquire me as their target and fire two explosive-packed slugs of depleted uranium through my cranium. This pod of the bridge deck is wide, sterile and empty, providing no cover, so there's no way I could possibly draw and fire my disruptor before they pull the triggers on their bolters. I sigh again, heavy and heaving, and spread my arms wide. My empty fingers waggle. "Happy?"

"Not until I find out what's in that bag," Red-1 says, nodding at the pouch on my hip, "and where the Hell you got all that ultraviolet Leet gear."

"Give me a visual on that BEM," Master Chief commands over the common channel. "Over."

Red-2 shakes his head and talks over the speaker. "I told you the MC's a xenophile. No offense, Miss."

"Shut up and turn on your helmet cam," Red-1 tells him. He can't hide the smile in his voice.

Red-2 cricks his neck and a green LED starts flashing on the side of his helmet. He performs a slow pan, starting with the soles of my boots and ending with my antennae. "That's over two meters of green goddess goodness...Again, no offense."

"None taken," I drawl, doing my best to keep my smarmy poker face intact as the Master Chief starts barking orders over the common channel.

"Disengage!" He's shouting into his mic, his audio popping in and out. "...extremely dangerous! Disengage...terminate...immediately!"

I reach for the disruptor. I've got it clear, aimed, and ready in a hairsbreadth over half a second. As I said before, that's just not fast enough. Red-1 and Red-2 have already fired. The uranium slugs are flying through the air probably a meter away from my face, their trajectory assisted by smartgun technology, before I get to pull the distruptor's trigger. Leet marines always shoot first, and they never miss.

Good thing it doesn't matter. Set to wide-and-close, the graviton disruption wave catches both miniature missiles and the two marines, compressing the mass of all four objects into a one-dimensional piece of subatomic plasma spaghetti before shunting it all off into some quantum parallel world somewhere on the other side of imaginary time. The energy released from such a conversion probably detonates a supernova or three. EJ told me the whole process takes about a femtosecond.

Good Lord, do I love this gun.

* * *

I am holstering the disruptor and trying to sooth my raging libido with promises of Pink/Xixa hentai when the Master Chief gets back on the common channel. "Red-1 what's your twenty? Red-two, ten twenty! Zomg. Master Chief to Tizona, ten one-thousand, I repeat, ten one-thousand. I am sending you visual confirmation of the suspect now—"

"That won't be necessary, Master Chief," Tizona's sultry voice interrupts in clear violation of Corps comm protocol. "I have been monitoring Red team's transmissions and have already contacted Leet executive command. Our mission priorities have changed, over."

"This is Master Chief, awaiting instructions, over."

I edge down the pod's blank wall toward the sealed, triangular airlock on the opposing end.

"Tertiary priorities," Tizona begins. "Preserve Janus IV property and affiliated crew. Preserve Leet Corps enlisted personnel and ordinance. All such resources expendable. Understood?"

"Ten four, over," says the Master Chief without pause.

My nubbin tail bumps over clusters of convex, high-rez projection lenses, dark and dead thanks to the lockdown. The pod would be full of holographic workstations otherwise.

"Secondary priorities," Tizona continues, "Obtain meta-mineral artifact. Preserve jumpship. Preserve Master Chief. Preserve Tizona construct and related systems. All such resources expendable." Her purring alto gives me goose-bumps, and I bet the bitch doesn't even have vocal chords. "All related standing orders rescinded and conventions suspended for the duration of the mission. Understood? Understood, Master Chief?"

I hear something rustle against an audio pickup and then the Master Chief slowly replies, "Ten four, over."

"Primary mission objective," Tizona concludes, "the termination with extreme prejudice of hostile code name Zero-G-G, Leet Corps Master Gunnery Sergeant Xixa Xylem, found guilty of mutiny by Leet courts martial in absentia. Tizona out."

Well, it's nice to be remembered, I suppose. After my blundering into Red team's ambush, I'm not taking any chances with doors I can't smell behind, so I'm creeping halfway to the airlock when the common channel broadcasts again. "Master Chief to Xylem. Xylem, do you read? Are you listening, Master Gunny? Over?"

I inch closer to the airlock. "I copy, Master Chief, over."

The comm falls silent for a minute before Master Chief speaks up again. "I just wanted to say I was an ensign on the DeathStar III."

What the heck is this about? "You've climbed the ladder pretty fast, Master Chief."

"I admired how you let the noncoms evac before you detonated the main reactor."

He's coding talking again, to me this time. "I'd checked the crew roster in advance," I say, sidestepping to the airlock. "Six hundred and forty two janitors in the detention levels alone."

"The X-O went down, though."

"Actually, he wouldn't." I toggle my disruptor into sonic screwdriver mode and set to work on the airlock. "He was a real lousy lay. His death was no big loss, believe me."

"Well, I wanted you to know."

You wanted me to know you're ordering an evacuation and setting the station's core to self-destruct. An anti-matter breach will vaporize the station and me with it, and then you'll gazerbeam the vapor into quark slag from the jumpship, just to be sure. That's what I did to the DeathStar and its fuxxoring Executive Officer, after all. "I read you five by five, Master Chief." And now you'll want to know if I'd risk the lives of the five hundred-plus civilians on the station to save my own ass or just stay out of your way and die like a good girlbug. "I couldn't murder janitors."

"Good." The Master Chief clears his throat. "Master Chief to Tizona, the common channel has been compromised. Requesting you take on full encryption duties, over."

My netstumbler program locks up with an overload of decryption data and crashes so fast I don't even hear her answer. The sonic screwdriver breaches the airlock. My antennae tell me the decompression chamber behind it is empty. I squeeze through the airlock and into the chamber.

I'm inside a little pyramid. Four triangular sides are gunmetal grey and lead to other bridge pods. The square "floor" is painted safety orange and covered with red alert decals. I kneel to peep through the porthole in the floor and into the vacuum of space.

The synaptic interface on my bracer winks, signaling an incoming message. With a quick rub of my thumb, Pink's holoblock image mists back into existence, anxiety node swollen with worry and annoyance pheromones. "Alright, I've got EJ on the horn. Audio only, and lossy as rapidshit, but I got him."

I blow him a kiss. "You're the best, Pink."

Pink rolls his eye, an oval orb bigger than a dinner plate. It's quite a thing to see. "Well, I guess we won't be needing EJ then. I'll cut transmission." His irony node looks like it's fit to burst.

I look him square in the eye. "You are the best, Pink."

Pink's smiles through melancholia. "Thanks, Xixa." A tentacle ripples. "Patching him through now." My wrist-top's audio fills with hissing white-noise. "Go ahead, EJ."

"Xixa," EJ says, his tone unclear through all the static, "you broke my heart."

"Water under the bridge, EJ," I say.

"No," he says, "I mean you gave me a heart attack when you shot me. The college infirmary had to grow me a new heart in a vat."

Now, how could I have known that? I had hijacked the quickest out-system shuttle I could find right after I'd shot him. I pout for a few seconds before I realize he can't see me. "I used the lowest setting."