A Commanding Weakness

"Lieutenant Kuznetsov, you have the bridge."

"Yes, captain!"

Captain Yvonne Vasser didn't smile, but she did allow herself a moment of pride as her commanding officer stood at attention and, along with the rest of her bridge crew, gave her a crisp, sharp salute. It had been a long tour of duty out on the far rim of Alliance space, and she knew that standards of professionalism could easily slip. Not on her ship, though. Captain Vasser made sure of that. She didn't mind being called a stern disciplinarian or a stone-cold bitch behind her back if it meant the Inyx had the finest-trained crew in the sector.

Once she stepped into the turbolift and heard its doors close behind her, though, the stalwart captain did allow her usually-immaculate posture to slip by a hair. It had been a long tour and a long shift, and while it would be poor form to let her subordinates see it, Captain Vasser was tired.

Hunting vandal-hackers on the edges of known space was a vital task, but not a pleasant one. The Inyx was currently on the trail of one of the most infamous, a woman known only by her callsign: Wasp. A few months before, she had hacked her way into the core servers of several major Alliance banks and had managed to wipe out trillions of credits' worth of wealth in seconds. The economy had been sent spiraling into a downturn as a result, and Captain Vasser had been dispatched to bring Wasp to justice.

So far, no luck. They'd had many close encounters - including one just a few hours earlier - but somehow, Wasp always managed to slip away. It was starting to seriously piss Captain Vasser off.

She needed to blow off some steam. So, as usual, after handing over command to her XO, she was headed down to the holodeck to enjoy some recreation.

"Computer, lock the holodeck," Captain Vasser commanded, stepping inside. "Hold all non-urgent communications. I don't want to be disturbed."

"Affirmative," replied the ship computer's familiar, robotic voice.

With her privacy assured, Captain Vasser could let down her hair a little - literally and otherwise. She removed the hair tie that normally held her dark hair up in a severe ponytail, and loosened the jacket of the uniform she ironed fastidiously every morning before leaving her quarters. It was an old habit - she was from a military family, after all - but it was starting to weigh on her, just like every other part of this mission.

The captain tried and failed to resist the urge to look at herself in the holodeck's strange, mirrored walls before she activated her recreation program. She wasn't getting old. Captain Vasser insisted on that, internally. Making the captain's chair in her mid-thirties was an astonishing achievement. Besides, she looked good. Captain Vasser caught her subordinates looking, sometimes. She kept in fiercely good shape, and her uniform was a neat fit. She'd never had any problems with women.

But she was certainly starting to feel old. Her cheeks were filling out under her high cheekbones, she had a new wrinkle every week, and she had big, dark patches beneath her eyes. Captain Vasser was feeling the deep, gnawing fatigue that sometimes came with long-range deep space travel. Having a life outside of work would do wonders for her, but how was she supposed to have a life when the nearest civilized planet was seventeen parsecs away?

So, the holodeck was all Captain Vasser had. As captain, she had a generous allowance of holo-rec time - more out of courtesy than expectation, but lately, Captain Vasser had been maxing it out every single week. She wasn't proud of it, but no one would ever know, and in the privacy of the holodeck she could indulge fantasies that had no other source of release.

"Computer," Captain Vasser called. "Load up and engage scenario delta-four."

"Delta four?" the computer replied, in a voice that immediately chilled Captain Vasser's blood. It was distorted and crackling with static, and worse, inflected with distinct emotion. "I was just perusing that one. It's wild. I must have left you in a real mood, huh?"

Captain Vasser knew that voice - mostly because she kept hearing it taunting her and her crew over inter-ship comms. It was Wasp. The hacker was in their systems, and that was very, very bad.

Immediately, she went for the door. It didn't budge. "Computer, unlock the holodeck!"

"No use," Wasp taunted. "I'm in control here."

Captain Vasser slammed her palm into the communicator on her chest. "Captain to the bridge, do you read me?"

There was no reply but Wasp's impish laughter. "Nope."

"How?" Captain Vasser hissed.

"I pulled it off in our last little near-miss," Wasp replied brightly. "When I was disrupting your tractor beam, I injected some bad code into the signal that got picked up by your ship's internal communications system. Not easy, by the way. Kind of a genius move."

"Then..." Captain Vasser frowned. She was no engineer, but she still knew a thing or two about how her own ship worked. "No. There's no way something like that could get past our core firewalls. You can't get to our life support, our propulsion, weapons, anything like that."

"Correct!" Wasp didn't sound the least bit discouraged. "Holodeck, though? That's civilian shit. I figured there'd be none of your fancy military software here."

"Which means this is meaningless," Captain Vasser continued. "All you can do here is waste my time. Sooner or later, someone's going to notice what's going on. They'll get the door open, shut down the holodeck, and purge our systems. This is pointless."

She sighed. This was not how she wanted to spend her rec time.

"I love a girl who's done her homework!" Wasp laughed. "But, correction: this was pointless. See, I was hoping I'd catch you with your pants down in the middle of something embarrassing. But all this, here in your private files? This is sooooo much better than I could have imagined."

Captain Vasser took a few deep breaths to keep herself from reacting. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Ooo! Bad lie," Wasp jeered. "Hold on. Let me get this shit booted up so we can talk face-to-face."

There was a distinct hum as some of the hidden holographic projectors came to life. Moments later, a human figure blinked into existence a few paces in front of Captain Vasser. She recognized them, of course. She'd spent enough time staring at the woman's file. It was Wasp.

She was short. Far shorter than Captain Vasser. That had jumped out at the captain just from reading the hacker's file, but it was now even more apparent. She was wiry, too; a tiny, slim, nimble little thing, just like her namesake. For a wanted criminal, she made no effort to be discreet. Wasp wore her counterculture sympathies on her sleeves, in all manner of patches and pins and glowing elec-tattoos. Her hair was shaved on one side, and the rest was a messy forest of spikes, tufts, and untidy braids, all of which were unceremoniously swept over to one side. The hacker's clothing was just as punk; it bothered Captain Vasser, for some reason, that this woman had evaded her for so long when she couldn't seem to wear a jacket that wasn't three sizes too large.

Wasp looked around before staring straight at Captain Vasser and licking her pierced lips, blue eyes shining with amusement.

Captain Vasser couldn't help it. She took a swing.

Wasp laughed as the captain's fist passed straight through her holographic face. "I'm not here, remember? And I wouldn't give you the pleasure of a hardlight punching bag."

"Enough games! Let me out of here," Captain Vasser commanded, a little too urgently. "Or I'll make you regret it. You're already a criminal, but there's always a harder way we can do things."

"Wow," Wasp snorted. "That might actually be intimidating if I didn't know you were really just trying to keep me out of your dirty laundry."

"Nonsense," Captain Vasser snarled. "I don't have any dirty laundry. You're wasting your time as well as mine."

"I dunno," Wasp replied, in an infuriating sing-song voice. "Some of this stuff is really embarrassing, captain. Pretty disguised, too. I can understand why you wouldn't want anyone peeking into your privacy."

"So that's it. You're trying to blackmail me." Captain Vasser kept her voice even, despite the way her heart was pounding. "It won't work. There's no prohibited material in my holodeck files, and I trust in my crew. Whatever someone uses their rec time for is their business. Everyone understands that. They won't judge. And even if they did, I'd die before betraying them."

That sounded good, she thought. But Captain Vasser's bravado deflated a little when Wasp's smile didn't budge.

"I know I'm getting too predictable when even someone like you can guess my plans." Wasp sighed theatrically, before letting her face settle back into a crooked smirk. "Well, yeah, that was the plan. Was. Threatening to expose someone's porny little fantasies is one of those old tricks that never really gets old. But when I saw what you were into, I got curious enough to watch some of the logs. And that gave me a way, way better idea."

Captain Vasser didn't know exactly what the hacker was referring to, but couldn't shake the feeling that she was in danger. "What?"

Wasp winked mischievously and, in a burst of static, her clothing transformed. Suddenly she was wearing scrubs and a long doctor's coat, with a stethoscope hanging around her neck. Captain Vasser rolled her eyes at the theatrics.

"Tell me, captain," Wasp said, "how does this make you feel?"

Now the holodeck around them truly came to life, and the walls collapsed into huge, swirling spirals.

"Wha-" Captain Vasser cut herself off in surprise. A wave of dizziness hit her, and she wished she could tell herself it was just holodeck legs. Her instinct was to close her eyes, but she refused to give Wasp the satisfaction.

"I knew it!" Wasp cackled gleefully and made a big show of writing something down on a clipboard she was suddenly holding. "What a delightful little kink for a starship captain. I'm well-acquainted with it, actually."

"I-I don't know what you're talking about," Captain Vasser tried to insist. It was difficult to sound convincing when she had to try so hard not to stare into the spirals that were all around her.

"Oh, drop it!" Wasp snorted. "What? Did all this trashy hypno porn fall off the back of a truck or something? Anyway, it makes perfect sense."

Without warning, Wasp's holographic clothing shifted again. In the blink of an eye, she was wearing a turtleneck sweater and thick-rimmed glasses, and when she threw herself to one side, a psychoanalyst's couch appeared to catch her.

"A high-strung, domineering captain like you?" the hacker went on. "It's only natural to crave a little submissive spice in your downtime. And what could be better than not having to think at all, right? And all the other stuff, well... I'm guessing you had a pretty repressed upbringing too. Spacefleet brat, et cetera. It's always fun seeing how that comes out."

"Shut up!" Captain Vasser yelled. She was long past the end of her patience. "You have a point? A plan? Then get to it, before I knock myself out just to be rid of your inane chatter."

That seemed to amuse Wasp most of all. "Jeez, you're no fun! Not yet anyway... fine, fine. Here it is: I'm gonna hypnotize you, Captain Yvonne Vasser."

Captain Vasser paused, then blinked, then snorted derisively. "No. You're not."

"Cocky, huh?" Wasp licked her lips. "Extra fun."

"You're insane if you believe I would allow you to hypnotize me, whatever I do in my recreation time."

"Oh, I never said anything about you allowing me." Wasp licked her lips again.

"That's ridiculous." Captain Vasser fully believed that, but something about Wasp's smug conviction kept her uneasy. "That simply isn't how it works - as you should know, if you're as familiar as you claim. This isn't a corny movie, Wasp. You can't hypnotize someone against their will."

"Yeah?" Wasp jeered. Her grin could only be described as devilish. "Then why do you need to try so hard not to stare at the spirals?"

"I..." Captain Vasser frowned. Why was she feeling so dizzy? "What... you! You're doing something."

She looked at the floor, which was mercifully still stationary. Wasp, though, wasn't one to miss a sign of weakness.

"Am I? You don't seem so sure." The hacker leaped back to her feet. "What's the matter, captain? Feeling a little sleepy?"

"No."

Wasp laughed. With her eyes fixed to the floor Captain Vasser could only see the hacker's feet as she got closer. "Well, not like that, maybe! You're afraid instead, aren't you? C'mon, captain. Don't you trust yourself? Your own willpower? Look. Look at the pretty spirals already. Don't you want to win and rub it in my face?"

"Shut up."

Captain Vasser took a moment to breathe slowly and center herself. She was in a dangerous situation, and in the presence of an enemy. She could trust all of her training to keep her alert and on edge. With that thought fixed firmly in her mind, she looked upwards, into the heart of one of the spirals that surrounded her.

Immediately, her mind and body betrayed her. Her legs started to give way, and it felt like the floor beneath her was melting into jelly. Gravity seemed to shift, and Captain Vasser had to suppress the instinct telling her that she was about to fall forward, beyond the spiral's event horizon.

Why couldn't she fight this?

"Like I said, I watched some of your sessions," Wasp said, sensing her confusion. "And I noticed how into it you were. In particular, I noticed how deep you went, and how quickly. That got me curious. So I decided to look at your stats. I was wondering how many times you'd been down here, hypnotizing yourself. Know what I found?"

"I... don't... know..." Captain Vasser didn't know how to fight what was happening to her. Her thoughts were slowing to a crawl, and they were stuck on sheer disbelief.

Hypnosis was just a fetish. A guilty pleasure. It was something she'd indulged in for years - ever since she was a teenager. Always discreetly, always without telling anyone. How could it be leading to this?

"One hundred and eighty-four times," Wasp continued. "That's how many times you've looked at this exact spiral, captain, and it's far from the only one you've been enjoying. What do you think that does to you? You seem to be having a hard time answering my questions, so allow me to go ahead and speculate. I think you've conditioned yourself."

Conditioned. That word, deeply charged for Captain Vasser, sent a shiver down her spine. She hated that the thought turned her on.

"Eroding your willpower, bit by bit." As Captain Vasser was transfixed by the spiral, Wasp danced behind her, leaning over to whisper in the helpless woman's ear. "Training yourself to succumb so very easily to the right images and the right situations. Working yourself deeper into delightfully perverted little niches. My dear captain, it took me a little while to realize it, but there's quite the treasure trove here in your holodeck files. It's the skeleton key to your pretty little head."

"N-no," Captain Vasser replied in a quiet, distant voice, twitching as Wasp's words ran through her. The kind of lurid defeat Wasp was describing was uncomfortably close to some of her deepest, most forbidden fantasies. She knew it was wrong to be turned on by it, but the part of her that was turned on was deeper than morality or propriety. "I... I won't..."

"You will," Wasp teased. "You totally will. Whatever you're thinking of, you will. Anything I want. I'll make sure of it. I admit, I'm not really the 'planning' type of girl. I'm usually way too impulsive for my own good. But you? You're going to be way too useful not to make big plans with - once I make you mine, anyway."

"I... won't!" Captain Vasser insisted. She tried her hardest to hold on to that one thought, to make it the core of her being. "I'm not yours. I won't be."

"My, my." Wasp made a sound like she was savoring a delicious meal. "This is the captain who's been on my ass for months, huh? I hope you keep all that fire, baby. It'll come in useful. And besides, it gets me kinda hot."

"I am going to catch you," Captain Vasser vowed. Wasp was making her angry. That was good. Anger was something she could focus on besides the spiral. "I'm going to catch you and bring you to justice. I'll make you pay for everything you've done. I'll make sure you can never get within reach of another computer ever again for as long as you live."

"OK, OK!" Wasp held up her hands and stepped back in front of Captain Vasser. "I would have been disappointed if one little spiral vid was enough to break you. I think it'll be a whole lot more effective in context. Time to get serious. Let's run through one of those delightfully specific scenarios you've got tucked away. It's so hard to pick but... how about this one?"

Now the holodeck truly came to life. The spirals vanished, and the entire room around Captain Vasser seemed to phase out of existence. Moments later, the holodeck created the world anew. It conjured a perfect simulacrum of Earth, right down to the taste of the air and the sensation of the wind on the captain's skin. Normally, it was a moment she loved to savor, but this time the familiarity was alarming. Captain Vasser knew this place, which meant she knew what was going to happen.

It was the Fleet Academy, on Earth. The place Captain Vasser had received both her basic training and her captain's stripes, just like every other recruit. On her instructions, the Inyx's computer had created and saved a loving recreation, right down to every last blade of grass. Right now, she was standing on one of the many paths that crisscrossed the open green spaces on campus. Captain Vasser had stood on that spot more times in simulations than she had in real life. It was one of her favorite holodeck scenarios. Which meant-

"Excuse me, Captain Vasser. Could I get a moment of your time?"

It was Wasp, jogging towards her across the grass. This time, she was dressed in a tight-fitting recruit's uniform. It didn't look right on the punk hacker at all. None of this was right. This was one of Captain Vasser's fantasies, but she wasn't in control anymore.

Of course. I'm always happy to help an interested student. That was what she usually said, and it was such a familiar script that she found the words perched on her lips. Instead of speaking them, though, the captain found that she was paralyzed. This was like being in a dream she couldn't wake up from, and the most torturous part was how crazy turned on she was by it. She couldn't help. Captain Vasser could feel herself growing wet from sheer, conditioned anticipation.

"I just saw your presentation," Wasp said. She was delivering the scripted lines perfectly, but with mockery written on her face. "I recently joined the officer track. It was amazing! I really look up to you, captain. I was actually hoping you could take a look at something for me."

She lifted the dataslate she was holding in one hand. Even before she looked at it, Captain Vasser was feeling dizzy. She couldn't let this happen to her.

"Computer!" she called out desperately. "Pause scenario!"

There was no reply. Wasp was in charge.

I just have to stay in control, Captain Vasser told herself. You can't be hypnotized against your will. I don't want to be hypnotized. I will remain awake. I will remain the master of my own mind. I will not let this criminal have the pleasure of putting me into a trance. I will not-

Wasp turned the dataslate towards Captain Vasser for her to look at. On it was a blaring, spinning spiral. Automatically, Captain Vasser stared straight at it. An instant later, her shoulders slumped and her tongue lolled out of her mouth. Her eyes lost focus, and the simulated world around her disappeared into a blurred haze - all except for the spiral.