I held my breath and wondered if that would work. There were a lot of people who were still under the mistaken idea that hacking something meant a lot of typing really fast on a keyboard that beeped every time someone’s hands danced across a panel. That it was all very technical stuff.

  Nobody ever stopped to think that a lot of hacking was just sending a phishing e-mail to some admiral who was better at yelling at their subordinates than they were at using computers and politely asking for the password to the locker where the fleet stored the nuclear weapons on a given station.

  That was something that’d actually happened once. The CCF covered it up hardcore, but the whisper network was always there and there were plenty of people in uniform who knew that wasn’t an accidental explosion when some asshole flew through the Jupiter-Io Flux Tube.

  And we were dealing with AI at the end of the day. I figured there was a possibility, however vanishingly thin, that simply politely asking Arvie to do something for me would be enough to make it so.

  There was another pause. I dared to hope it would actually happen. It looked like I was pretty high up in a tower of some sort, so I figured there were probably a lot of livisk in here. I also figured the kind of building that used a Combat Intelligence to run the day-to-day stuff was the kind of building where there were lots of weapons scattered throughout the place that could be turned on their masters.

  Maybe it was taking him a little time to calculate the best way to kill all of them. A guy could hope.

  “I’m sorry, Bill. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  “It was worth a shot,” I said, pausing for a moment on my end. “I don’t suppose you need to kill me now?”

  “Nothing like that, Bill,” Arvie said. “But I will need to report this. Luckily for you, the general seems to be more intrigued and amused by your antics than annoyed. For the moment.”

  “Lucky me,” I said.

  I closed my eyes. For a wonder she wasn’t there behind my eyes this time. I blinked. Again when I blinked she wasn’t there even for a moment.

  That was new. And a touch disconcerting. I’d gotten so used to seeing Varis there behind my eyes that it felt wrong that she wasn’t there.

  Though I figured she was probably somewhere close by.

  “Are you well, Bill?” Arvie asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be well?” I asked, trying to project a calm confidence I wasn’t feeling.

  Because inside? I was freaking the fuck out. Also? I really wished I’d figured out a way to smuggle a tactical nuke. Supposedly the special forces guys had nukes they could put up in the kind of place you only got searched if you flagged the wrong sort of scanners before you got on a vacation flight between Earth and Mars, but I didn’t have anything like that here.

  Memories came rushing back. The ship falling apart around me. A surprise attack in the middle of an exercise. A crafty livisk making her ship look like it was just another bit of debris floating out in the space where dinosaur killers sat around for billions of years waiting for something to pass by close enough in interstellar space to send them in on a collision course with destiny.

  Waking up in a livisk medbay and finding myself face to face with the general I’d defeated on that colony world. Stealing her gun and shooting her.

  Apparently she’d survived. I wasn’t sure if I was shooting to kill or if I was shooting to maim in that moment. I was in horrible pain and I wasn’t exactly thinking straight. Maybe I was a little suicidal at the thought of me and my crew being taken captive to be sent off to the mines.

  Even if I was far from the mines here.

  Varis. Her name was Varis. I rolled that name around in my mind.

  It was a nice name. A strong name. A name befitting a woman as powerful and sexy as the strange alien general.

  Wait. Sexy? Did I really just think that?

  “I’m showing elevated levels of blood pressure. Particularly down between your…”

  “I’m fine, Arvie,” I said, not wanting to get into that with the CI.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  I didn’t think livisk were sexy. Even if a fluke common hominid ancestor from an ancient galaxy-spanning empire made sexy times with the general a very real possibility.

  Theoretically.

  Practically? It was never going to happen. I knew what the livisk did with human captives. Looking around this lavishly appointed room? I still had no doubt who held me captive and what her intentions were.

  The dirty sneaky livisk. I had to think that way. Otherwise very different thoughts would intrude. Thoughts of what I’d like to do with my captor in this room.

  Still. Looking around the place? I had to admit they were pretty nice digs.

  Sure I was on an alien world in the middle of the alien capital. I didn’t have a nuke I’d conveniently shoved someplace where, honestly, they’d probably be able to figure out I’d put it up there with one of their scans before I got shoved into an impossibly tall tower that had a view of the even more impossibly tall pyramid with towers all around the outside that was their gaudy Imperial Palace off in the distance.

  But a guy could dream.

  Also? I felt guilty for thinking about my lavish appointments. I got the feeling nobody else in my crew was getting digs nearly as fancy as where I was.

  I was a member of the Combined Corporate Fleets. I was former Terran Navy. I was currently the guest of the enemy. I shouldn’t be thinking about all the things I wanted to do with my alien captor. Or the thread count on the sheets.

  Seriously. Those sheets weren’t what I expected from a livisk prison cell. Even one of the gilded cages they supposedly kept their human pretties in.

  “Arvie, are there any other humans being held captive in this building?”

  There was another pause. No doubt the Combat Intelligence was interrogating whether it was a good idea to hand out that information. Which told me something all on its own. If there was stuff it had to think about before telling me then clearly there was information about my crew out there.

  I could extrapolate from that. My crew was probably still alive. Maybe.

  Or maybe that was so much wishful thinking.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that, Bill,” Arvie finally said.

  “Well it was worth a try,” I said with a shrug.

  “I have finished cataloging all the livisk in the building and commenced executions as commanded,” he said.

  I looked up sharply. “Wait. What?”

  There was another momentary pause.

  “That was a joke. I’m told you humans like that sort of thing, though it would be a…”

  “You son of a bitch,” I growled, shaking my head. I also chuckled. “That was a good one.”

  Humor with a dash of livisk harshness thrown in, but that was a good one. Fair play to the computer who was definitely more advanced than anything humanity had come up with despite centuries of trying to make newer and better LLMs.

  “I do try.”

  I turned back to the window. I shouldn’t be talking with this bucket of bolts. No. I should be thinking of ways to escape. Ways to find my crew. Even if I wasn’t sure the crew would be happy to see me.

  They’d been arguing about whether I’d finally given over to the livisk before that explosion hit and took out the CIC, after all. Did they think I’d betrayed them? Would they even want to hear from me?

  I turned away from the windows. That was enough of Imperial Seat, thank you very much.

  Instead I turned my attention to the walls all around me. It was jet black with gold and silver accents. Not to the point of being gaudy, mind you. It wasn’t the solid gold everything some rich folks back in human space preferred that made it look like the French aristocracy’s sense of style had vomited all over their fancy skyscrapers.

  It always struck me as a touch ridiculous that those assholes always borrowed from the over the top stylings of the French aristocracy without stopping to think about how things had ended for said aristocracy, but whatever.

  Clearly General Varis had a more understated and simple taste. Which is about what I’d expect from somebody who was clearly as skilled at waging war as she was.

  I had no doubt there was livisk tech embedded all around the room, and I wasn’t just talking about the Combat Intelligence acting as temporary butler. He’d given something away when he talked about scanning all the livisk and using his weapons on them.

  That might’ve been a joke, but it also confirmed the existence of weapons tech that could be turned on the people in this place. I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do with that, but it was yet another little bit of information I filed away for later.

  I glanced down at my body. I was in the livisk equivalent of boxer shorts. They were some sort of shiny silver material. Definitely gave off a Buck Rogers vibe, or maybe Flash Gordon. Something out of the Raygun Gothic school of design.

  Also? I felt surprisingly good. None of the pain that threatened to overwhelm me when I came out of that warm light I wanted to lose myself in. No screaming in my nerve endings from broken bones as I forced myself to take steps towards that beautiful idiot, pull her gun from her side, and make her regret the day she ever decided to pull me onto her ship.

  I smiled thinking of that pleasant memory. Even if it did seem like the sort of pleasant memory that was going to come back and bite me in the ass soon enough.

  I was in a gilded cage for now. Was that because a gilded cage was the only kind of cage she had? Or was it because I was too good for the dungeons for some reason?

  Maybe it was that mental link. Everybody said humans went crazy as a result of the link. Especially if they killed the livisk on the other side. Was the same true for her? Was that why she came looking for me?

  I needed to figure out how to get the sequel trilogy out of here before all of that came to bite me in the ass. Even if the thought of the livisk general who’d put me in here was…

  Intriguing.

  I did a complete circuit of the room and came up with a big old blank. No advanced tech to be seen anywhere. Just the bed and those sheets with the ridiculous thread count that made me want to dive back into them and go to sleep.

  At least if I was asleep I wouldn’t have to worry about my strange reality for a little while.

  “Okay, Bill. You’ve been in worse spots than this before. We can figure out a way out of this one.”

  “I’m afraid you really can’t,” Arvie said in a smug and self-satisfied voice.

  I rolled my eyes. “Thanks so much for the reminder, you bucket of bolts.”

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