Chapter Three
Despite her overwhelming size, Aliara was actually much lighter than expected, at least once they got the battle armor off her. Sketch hadn't been sure how to remove it, but Serena knew how to get it off the Y'bari soldier with almost no pause at all. Beneath the heavy armor, Aliara wore a sleek black bodysuit that had several prongs that connected to the mechanics of the armor itself.
With the armor off, he could see the woman's form better, and he was struck by how remarkably large her breasts were, each one of them having to be basically the size of his head, the fabric of the black suit so tight he could see the indentation of her nipples through the surface.
"How the hell did you know how to get her out of that armor?" Sketch said as he moved to grab Aliara's ankles while Serena was grabbing the woman's wrists, making sure to attach the soldier's case to her belt first, unwilling to leave it behind for whatever reason. The Y'bari wasn't too heavy, but the general size of her made her unwieldy to carry solo.
"I actually know quite a lot about the Y'bari, Sketch," she said to him. "Those of us within the Royal House had Y'bari assigned as personal guards for a while. I saw them taking the armor off and putting it on loads and loads of times. I even helped them take it off sometimes."
Once they had her on the elevator, they set her down and Helen began to move the shifter down two levels towards the brig. "This is only going to get us killed, Princess," Sketch sighed. "You know that right?"
Serena giggled a little and moved over to kiss him, her lips like a burst of sunshine on his own. "You need to trust me on this one, Sketch," she replied. "It's all going to work out fine. No,
better
than fine.
Way way
better."
The elevator stopped, and they moved to pick the soldier up once more, carrying her out of the elevator and into a portion of the ship that Sketch almost never walked through, which included the medical bay and the brig. He'd thought several times about retrofitting the areas to just be additional cargo holds, but each time Helen had talked him out of it, insisting that some day, he wouldn't be the only person on board
The Praeteritus
and that when he finally got a crew, he would need both of these rooms to function as they were designed to.
Despite the fact that he hadn't used the brig before, it was still spotless and dust-free, as Helen's army of micro utility droids would come through and clean the area up regularly. The last thing he wanted was to get caught up in some sort of fight between a deposed Princess and a member of the Starless Dominion's private army, but somehow, he was pretty certain he just didn't have a choice in the matter. The brig had a couple of cells to it, and as soon as they had Aliara's body in the center of the room, Serena set her down so she could unhook the case from her belt. "Gods below, that's fucking heavy," she said, setting the case on a nearby shelf. "It might be heavier than she is."
Because of the height differential between humans and the Tropage, Sketch had often found himself having to build sets of steps around commonly used portions of the ship, although Helen had done him the courtesy of having the bridge controls lowered to a more acceptable height for him. She'd offered to do that for the entire ship, but Sketch had pointed out he really only needed it for things he would regularly use. The doors were generally controlled by Helen anyway, so there was no need for manual buttons that he could use, but when it came to things like the brig, all of the tables were basically just above his shoulder height.
"Helen, open cell one, would you?" Sketch said aloud.
"Do you want the force shield translucent or transparent?"
"Transparent," Serena said, as they began to pick her up again. "I need her to be able to see through it. The force shield won't affect Sketch's empathic abilities will it?"
"No, m'lady," Helen replied. "We haven't found much of
anything
that will dampen them. If anything, the force shield might even subtly reinforce them."
"Good," Serena said with a broad smile. "That's just what we want."
"It is?" Sketch asked, as they lowered the Y'bari Centurion onto the floor.
"You bet your sweet ass it is," Serena chuckled. "Now where was it... ah! Here it is." She seemed to find some sort of latch or hook on Aliara's bodysuit, and after she unfastened it, part of it began to breakaway on the side, as Serena began to slowly pull Aliara out of the suit.
"What the hell are you doing, Serena?" Sketch said, unsure if he should look away or keep looking on. "As tight as that is, there's no way she could have weapons concealed in it!"
"Well," Serena said with a chuckle. "One, you're wrong." She reached into the back of the bodysuit and pulled out a single silvery tube about the length of his finger, which she tossed to him. "That's a universal solvent. She could've probably carved an escape hole out of the floor with that. And two, that's not the reason we're taking the suit off of her."
Sketch found himself a little unable to speak as the suit was peeled off Aliara's top, exposing those voluminous tits of hers, capped with nipples that would've been simply to-scale human analogs if not for the one slight difference in that they were a sort of muted pastel blue shade, not all that different from one of the shades of her hair.
"You may not know this, Walker," Serena said to him, "but the Y'bari are somewhere around an 83% genetic match for humans." She was starting to work on the unconscious woman's waist now, sliding the bodysuit down over her hips, exposing a sizable pubic bush, neatly trimmed and maintained, but with dark green hair the color of algae in bloom. "The Starless Dominion would never tell us anything about the Y'bari's history, and the Y'bari themselves don't know fuck all about their own past, but the royals theorized that maybe some alien visitor passing Terra in the early stages of human development abducted say twenty or thirty of our primitive ancestors and then kept them as pets, and they evolved on their own."
"Shame all the other royals except you are dead," he said, finally just accepting he was going to look on, as Serena tossed the now-removed bodysuit out past the edge of the cell. "So much lost information when they all died."
"Not as much lost as you think," Serena said to him a smile, raising her right hand up in the air, waving it at him. "You don't know what that is, do you?"
He looked on at her in confusion for a moment. "What
what
is?"
"On my bracelet."
He'd noticed she was wearing jewelry, but hadn't taken a particular interest in it up until she'd drawn his attention to it, stepping in a little closer. "Is... is that some sort of storage crystal?"
"Hey, put one point on the board for the old timer," she laughed, almost sounding impressed. "It's a royal information matrix. When the Starless Dominion took over, the royals didn't want to lose all the records and data they had, so they had a couple hundred of these made. And the archive itself was built into the walls of the House of Sanada, so anytime I walked through a doorway with the bracelet on, all the newest information would be added to my copy of the archive. There's tons of information in here that'll probably help you... I mean, help
us
loads... we might even be able to get an idea where we could track down an Ashaka for you."
"Why didn't you mention it sooner?"
She giggled again, rolling her eyes at him. "We've been a little preoccupied, you know? And I'm still more than a little cock-mad since you can't seem to dial it down a bit. If anything, since she got here, it's been even harder to focus."
"My abilities are working on two brains now, yours
and
hers, and I have no idea how that's going to play out," Sketch frowned. "I'm a little more surprised my head hasn't started to hurt. Maybe because I haven't had to use my abilities in so long they're tapping into a reservoir of built up energy."
"It's also possible she's amping you up even more," Serena said. "You weren't wrong about the Y'bari being especially sensitive to the empathic abilities of The Calm. That's the main reason the Starless Dominion had the order wiped out - they were able to influence the Y'bari in ways they didn't care for. Anything that threatens their control cannot be allowed."
Serena stepped out of the cell and reached high to push a button to turn the force wall on, a slight blue tinge in the air where the shield deployed. "She shouldn't be out too long... oh look, I think sleeping beauty's starting to wake up."
"The hell did you do to me?" Aliara said, rubbing her face with one of her large hands.
"Well, we-" Sketch started to reply before Serena cut him off.
"I shot you in the head with a stun round," Serena said, proudly. "You were checking out my man's ass, and I took offense to that."
'
My man
?' Sketch thought to himself.
"You two idiots have signed your own death warrant," Aliara grumbled. "Why the hell am I naked and why is it so hard to focus?"
"You don't remember me, do you Aliara?" Serena said, placing her hands on her hips. "To be fair, you didn't see me
that
often, but I would've thought I might have made an impression." She pushed her hair back out of her face, wiping some of the grime off. It took a moment, but the facial expression on the Y'bari shifted quickly once she seemed to recognize her.
"Princess Serena O'Quincy," Aliara said in a hushed, almost shocked tone. "How the fuck are you even
alive
? You were slain with all the others on the Parlor Day Massacre."
"See, I wasn't, not that most of our supposed Y'bari defenders did much to prevent that," Serena sneered. "Most of them were the ones
doing
the massacring. But you didn't have to get your hands dirty because you were off doing deliveries, much like you always were. You see, Sketch, Aliara here was technically part of the House of Sanada's Royal Guard, but because she had a tendency to question orders a lot, she had been demoted to courier duty. None of the royals wanted her for a personal protectorate, something I always thought was a mistake on my counterparts' judgment. Hell, I might have taken her for myself if I hadn't already had Rozo."
"Did Rozo make it out with you?" Aliara asked, seemingly with genuine concern. "Tell me it was some other corpse the strike team found and mistook for his?"
"Is that an attempt at camaraderie I'm seeing from you, Aliara?" Serena said, clenching her fingertips together into a fist. "No. He gave his life defending mine, defending all us royals, like every other bonded Y'bari did, fighting against their own kind who had come to slaughter all the human royals. It was his plan to incinerate the body of a servant girl who'd been killed in the crossfire and use that to fake my death, but Rozo had been too heavily wounded to come with us, so he decided to use his death to help sell the story of my own demise. It's good to know that his death sold the story."
Aliara slowly rose up to her feet, standing over them, looking down at them, as though she hoped her height might intimidate humans, although the fact that she looked unsteady in her stance didn't help sell the intimidation any. "You know I have to kill you now, Serena," the Y'bari said. "Orders are orders, and I have to follow them."
Serena chuckled a little bit. "What if you
didn't
have to follow them, though? You always struck me as a Y'bari who seemed particularly unhappy beneath the Starless Dominion. There's a way out, you know. A way for you to be able to ignore their orders entirely for now and all time."
