The area of the officer’s quarters was needlessly overdone and elaborate, with trophies of conquests and kills here and there. There were stuffed and mounted beasts, broken helms and cracked armor, at least three crowns, a collection of flags hanging upside down in defeat, and other mementoes of past victories, some recent and unknown, some of which I could actually reference.

The plundering of Groupus IV. The ravaging of Mendilar. The destruction of the Egosa family. The ruin of the Tibentan Dynasty. The burning of the Jijembe Apostasy...

All his greatest triumphs were against his own kind, for good or ill. He’d ravaged at least five worlds, plundering and enslaving millions from each, and where those people went, there were no records of. He’d probably been selling them off to the drow for decades, if not over a century, turning humans into mere commodities to be bought and sold on a whim...

He was also suspected of more than a little piracy, plenty of world-raiding out in the void, and when he dealt with alien races, he kept it very quiet.

I was going to enjoy what I was going to do to him.

All this waste of space, high arched halls, hanging trophies, and self-worship created plenty of places to wait for this overclad, paranoid, ruthlessly opportunistic blackheart to get what was coming to him. I tucked myself up in a corner, and waited for him to get done with his stroll around his ship, intimidating his fawning underlings, and arrive back at his quarters.

He came striding back with his personal bodyguard, his crimson overcoat with the gold epaulets and ornaments hanging upon it helping his big frame look even bigger. He had at least seven weapons on him, including one of those Harlique amulets that shot out nasty kill-beams. Thing cost almost as much as a light cruiser, which showed just how profitable his work had been over the years. He was a ferocious combatant, with both cybertech and biotech, augmented in all sorts of ways, and probably pissed that he couldn’t break Ten even after these extra years.

Drugs to retard aging weren’t that hard to get ahold of for someone at his level, so he didn’t have to worry about dropping dead or getting too many grey hairs, but the real attraction of long years was getting strong enough to enjoy more long years... and it was going to be plenty hard for him to break Ten with tech reliance, as it was for everyone.

But, he was also the kind of guy who broke worlds and preyed upon his own people. The Akasha might be replete with people like him, but it wasn’t going to reward him. The only way he was going to break Ten is if he started some serious anti-alien stuff... and if he had done to the Empire’s enemies what he did to its citizens, he probably would have broken Ten long ago.

The Warp had probably made overtures to him already, and only his ego and fear of the Empire had kept him from endorsing it. After all, the Warp didn’t offer you anything you truly couldn’t do yourself, it just made it so very much easier...

He dismissed his guards, and opened the door to his quarters.

The Interdiction was broken as the Walled Matter was opened, and Chalice smoothly displaced me inside forty steps past him, still invisible, and around the corner.

He had his own living room the size of a small house, a small mansion inside the massive starship, a huge waste of space and tribute to his own self-importance. I took it all in, putting colors to the materials as the alarm quietly rang, signaling that the master of this space was home.

There was motion, and I smoothly retreated into a side room leading to the supply rooms as the maids hurried into position on the stairs leading up to his sleeping quarters.

They were in very classic French maid attire, very short skirts, hose, and superb figures. They probably got continuous bio-treatments to keep them looking like that and in such shape, and were no doubt unable to survive without them, now. If he threw them away, and they didn’t find another such master, they would die in days as their body fell apart from the stress imposed upon it by unnatural demands on their physiology.

They were all attractive in different ways, and were currently working very hard to present different airs. Dark and sultry, fiery and eager, clean and innocent, strong and faintly rebellious... all giving him a different taste to enjoy. There’d definitely been biosculpting to touch them up, and no matter how they tried to hide it, there was dread in their eyes.

They’d probably seen many other girls fail and be thrown aside, sold off to unspeakable fates, and they had no control of their destinies. Likely they had bioware installed and simply were unable to act against him at all. He wouldn’t be taking any chance with his personal safety. They were pretty little pets he could acquire and get rid of as he pleased, like anything else.

The four of them were arranged perfectly on the curving, ascending stairs, ready to serve their master.

“Welcome home, Lord de Krov!” they called out in harmony as he stepped into the room.

There was barely a flicker as his eyes swept over them, saw nothing out of place. He continued forward, and they flowed down the stairs with prancing steps.

His greatcoat was doffed, and his broadsword and gunbelt removed smoothly and set on a table to the side. A tray of delicacies was presented to him by the blond while the voluptuous nubian poured him a drink, impressive cleavage fully on display for him, and he smoothly and naturally put his arms around both of them, hands going wherever he wished, directing them up the stairs towards his chambers to celebrate his deal, no doubt.

They had only smiles and eagerness for him. The redhead and brunette ducked out to begin fixing him a post-coital meal, their expressions intense and focused as only those in fear of their lives can be.

There were pressure sensors on the floor, walls, and even ceilings, and heat trackers in the walls. They were feeding data to a security brain somewhere, disembodied and directing all this tech, looking for any assassins. Getting aboard the ship using dimensional travel was likely impossible, but if the teleporting was tight enough, say, concealed by a following Interdiction to pound any ripples of displacement flat instantly, the internal sensors weren’t going to detect anything.

I was gliding above the floor, completely at room temperature, and even the sonic pulses slyly going off every now and then and verifying the other sensors flowed right around me.

I hopped to the upper floor, glanced at the pscanner in the ceiling light scanning for sentient thoughts, or any thoughts, tirelessly, and glided after the pirate and his slaves.

Every place was being watched, and the boudoir was no exception. On the other hand, privacy was not required, and as long as I didn’t touch anything, getting inside wasn’t a problem at all.

He was already in the process of being disrobed and starting the ravishing process. I glided up behind him, the girls oblivious to my presence, extended out one of my stingers from my back, and put in three drops of #9 into his fine Coutiganae wine (Cheri Rantha was a Talented Wine Snob and beloved of the remaining high society on Janus III, and had already managed to assemble quite a wine collection. That drink he was sloshing around was a couple thousand credits a bottle) and simply withdrew.

He was definitely going to give them one hell of a sexual performance, and then he would be mine. I stayed back there and waited until he took one drink. It went straight into his blood and bypassed all his nano-filters with psi-powered alchemical glee, made that drink taste like ambrosia, and started the stimulation of his pleasure centers.

He very eagerly downed the rest of it, starting to get very frisky indeed, and while the girls began to squeal at his eagerness, I left the room.

There were two other maids I could see about releasing from his hold, and what kind of mods he made to them.

----

Someone walking into the kitchen a few minutes later would have been a little surprised.

I was leaning against the wall, staying politely out of the way as the two maids moved back and forth making an intricate light meal. The Marquis demanded real food, not processed, so all the ancient cutting and scraping and burning and other stuff had to be done, and generally had to be force-programmed into these girls, since they wouldn’t have much experience working with non-processed foods.

That was fine, as that was where all my experience with food was, too, wouldn’t you know, and I hated gak-food, too.

This was important because right now they weren’t really in control of themselves.

I’d poked a hole in their heads and then infiltrated their craniums with my hair. I had plenty of reach, plenty of hair, and now what looked like a cable of scarlet was attached to the backs of their skulls. Their thoughts were basically being held in stasis, and I was moving their bodies around by hooking into their cortex as part of what I was doing... not that hard, when you have multiple thoughtstreams.

Yeah, there was both cyberware and bioware stuck in the heads of these girls, giving them an Identity for the ship and sculpting their brains and bodies with tons of override functions that were simply wearing them out. Their bodies were on hormone-producing sprees that were destroying their organs, and the programming was twisting their minds and breaking them over robotic inflexibility and their total inability to defy commands, even if they didn’t know they were breaking. Add in the biosculpting keeping them in an unreal state of physical condition and artificial forms, and yeah, these girls were pretty much done for.

I didn’t even have to read their minds to see how bad they had it, and while these two weren’t saints, they were survivors, they weren’t actively wicked people... although what they wanted to do to the man who had done this to them probably wouldn’t be considered very nice.

Such is life.

I was frying elements of both the cyberchips and biochips implanted into them, having to be careful since a complete wipe of the cyberchip would instantly turn them into an intruder on the ship, and they would be swiftly eliminated by one means or another. Keeping their coding intact while precisely eliminating the commands to, oh, instantly alert the ship if the Marquis was attacked or they suspected he was being controlled, was on the agenda here, so there was computer hacking and programming going on. I was recoding the biochip basically at the genetic level, trying to alleviate the stress on their minds with brain surgery, and I was controlling their bodies to cook his meal and make sure the ship’s sensors didn’t register anything grossly out of place while I did so.

A high-end Restoration from a Psi could probably return the girls physically to a livable condition, but whether they’d be able to keep their sanity was something else. In any event, they definitely weren’t going to continue looking like they were, flesh-molded and warped into unnatural figures for the entertainment of the one who held their lives in his hands.

Yeah, I was doing a bunch of things at once, some of them very intimate, and the girls, for the moment, were kind of frozen inside their own bodies, unable to send off an alarm as I was tinkering with the things that controlled them.

I lifted all our heads as the alarm went off, and an odd energy spread through and around the ship and its conduction architecture.

The Throne Field was fully engaged. A Helldive was about to begin.

Plenty of Ranthas had been through Helldives by now. To a Null, it wasn’t anything special, and Mom-me wasn’t nearby to link up with, so it was only basically wondering if there was going to be a daemon attack coming through the Throne field and killing everyone on board. The Throne Field was an active Ward effect, so it blocked telepathy crossing it, including a Mark, so I’d only been able to experience a Helldive through relayed memories after the fact.

The reality-rending engines powered open, reaching out to open a Rift in the Veil, the membrane that protected reality from the insanity of what we were about to jump into. Outside the ship, unholy light would be pouring out in reds and pinks and purple and some really fruitcake hues in the pspectrum.

Then the Throne field reached out, linked in, and as the Rift closed, it reached out and grabbed us... or more precisely, reality shoved us through it to get such a bunch of idiots opening planar gaps out of it, and the ship plunged in.