They sent a harvester.
Of
course
they would! But it didn't have to be Annalise! That was just their perversity; just the kind of sick, willful infliction of casual torture that they so desperately needed to mete out on a regular basis in order to insulate themselves from any examination of just how fragile their awesome power was at its core.
Fuck them. I didn't care about them. I'd stopped caring about them parsecs ago.
They clearly hadn't forgotten me.
"That's far enough," I tell her. I make no move towards any of the dozen or so weapons on my person or in easy reach. Annalise knows me well enough to know that I never say 'stop' twice.
She comes to a halt just a meter and a half away. I could have ended her at any point between there and where she touched down just a klick away. She knew that. She'd counted on me wanting to see her.
So had her masters.
I wasn't sure that I did.
For one thing, I was just a bit put the fuck off by the cheesy chemical augments. Even at a distance, she reeked of the free, sexual, self-possessed woman she used to be before they cyborged the shit out of her. I didn't even know if she still possessed any of the biological structures that had once made that heady cocktail of hormones, pheromones, and body scents. Even if the factories were still original, the fact that they'd been augmented with the intention of weaponizing them disgusted me.
It was a total turn off.
Only nobody sent that message to my midbrain. Or to my cock and balls. My thick little saber was dialed all the way the fuck up and straining at my breeches.
"What the actual...," I start.
She cuts me off. "Aylen, you
know
why I'm here. Please..."
"Please what!? Please don't make this difficult?! For me? For you? For us? What the actual star-trekking
fuck
, 'Lise? You're a Farce-damned Quadrant Praetor now. You can tell them to go fuck themselves! Send somebody else!"
She just looks at me.
"But you didn't," I observe superfluously.
"You'd have killed anyone else by now," she notes dryly.
"No shit," I retort.
"And then they'd have sent in my First Squad."
"And I'd have..."
"You'd have
killed
some of them, Aylen. Maybe most of them. Even one of them would have hurt. Hurt
me
to lose. We're... all close."
I'm just about to work up some kind of a heartless 'fuck all you Imperial Bitches' response when she presses on.
"But! Before another moon dawned on this frakkng rock, they'd have ripped you off it and stuffed you in a pain box and dumped you in my fucking headquarters to deal with. I didn't want that.
That's
what I couldn't frelling bear!"
When she gets really emotional her Galaxy Standard lapses back into the accents and vocabulary of her Sebac upbringing. Our upbringing.
I sit, immobile.
"Please," she says again. The corners of her lips and eyes bent towards me, compelling, plaintive.
Frell! Frak! Fuck!
I extemporize, hoping to give my rage time to subside enough that I could get through what I'd decided to endure without doing anything stupid.
"What happened to the sample you already collected? What was it; three years ago now? The last time we..."
The last time I'd seen Annalise in all of her flesh and none - or, almost none - of... this.
"Aylen, I... We... used all of it."
"I can't imagine you had any yield problems. Seriously: How many brutally-indoctrinated crèche creeps does the empire fucking need!?"
"You'd be surprised," she sighes in an unusually unguarded tone. Fuck! I only hope, in spite of myself, that she isn't being monitored by a whole control room full of technothugs. Deep down I know there is nearly zero chance of that. I'm about to give a bunch of my semen to my now-cyborg ex-girlfriend in front of an audience of interplanetary dickheads.
"But it's you," she starts again, "your genetics...," she corrects herself, then, "No.
You!
You're
special! You
know
you're special!"
"To them," I state flatly.
She hears the accusation all the same. She strides forward two unhesitating steps and leans in close, her eyes boring into mine, her face a sudden wash of tenderness that I could almost hope wasn't the result of carefully rehearsed programming.
"To me!" Her hushed voice is insistent. "That's never changed, Aylen! And it never will!" I could almost buy it. But since there is near zero chance that simple hushed intimate whispering will confound the censors, I know that it all has to be part of the program. Still, a part of me wants to believe... even if only to help get me through what I know has to come next.
"So you blew my whole wad in just three years," I scoff. "Not for nothing, but it was a huge fucking wad! I still remember it," I add, hoping that somehow I can reach some still-vulnerable part inside her and either soothe or hurt it. I almost really didn't care which.
"I do too," she counters. "And it was! And..." she looks half at me and half through me. " and I wanted... I asked them to let me keep it! A part of it anyway. A part of you." She's laying it on pretty thick.
"They said no," I conclude for her. It wasn't a question. Her expression confirms it, though. "We all make choices," I nearly spit, and it registers; just a micro-expression of the felt sting. Or a manufactured bit of theater.
"You think..." she starts, then reconsiders. She regards me for a long moment, then leans back. She squats in front of me until she's at eye level, as if sitting opposite me. Without a chair. Good exercise if you're all natural. Nothing at all if you've got servos that can just lock out the right actuators. Not at all the right pose if she's trying to appeal to me. But she keeps going, on a bit different track. "Aylen. I understand that it all looked like this sudden thing to you. I understand that that was traumatic."
I bark a short. bitter laugh.
