-Yamak Rettle P.O.V.-

I awoke to the harsh blaring of the alarm by my bed, the piercing simulated sunlight from ionized windows doing its very best-and indeed it was spot on-impression of a hellish morning awakening. Suffice to say, mornings were not the domain of one such as I.

“Yamak, rise and shine.” The alarm chirped, a familiar feminine voice that came pre-programmed into the A.I. that ran most of the basic functions of my home.

With a groan, I muted the clock, and then promptly dimmed the lights afterwards. I didn’t really need to be up early today. A few more minutes wouldn’t hurt.

In the darkness, though, I felt a twinge of sound. I froze even as the voice of yet another very familiar woman spoke, “Captain, don’t you have something you ought to be doing right now?”

The cold threat of the voice came from red eyes that stalked over to my bed.

“M-Maricene? Wh-Why? What are you doing here?” Goosebumps shivered across my dark red skin.

Cold hands as hard as steel grabbed me by my ankles, “Waaaaait! I’m sorry, I’ll get up!”

“Good morning sir,” the first robotic voice rattled out from the speakers instead, the lights brightening as I spun, utter confusion on my face.

“Uh, Sira, what? Whait, where is Maricene?” My eyes darted across the room, looking for the pale skinned light blue haired devil that was my vice-president.

“She was never present, sir,” The robot enthusiastically informed me, “I’d asked her to record a series of her voice templates in order to better manage the well being of your life. In this case, getting you out of bed.”

Relief surged through me, “Ah, good, good. I thought she’d finally had enough.”

“While it is true, sir, that you are less than the dirt under her fingernails, she would not opt to spend the time to kill you and dispose of the body.” The A.I. happily walked me through my seconds thoughts, “According to her, anyways. Though, for your own mental health I have summarized her considerations.”

“Good, that’s good,” I sat up, rising from the floor where I’d been dragged and stretched. It was strange how much she didn’t like me, “Don’t I pay her enough?” I added aloud.

“Sir, I believe that’s why you’re alive, sir. Would you like breakfast?” Sira asked, tilting the robots head, a simple model that didn’t have any defining features.

I nodded, “Yeah, whatever you feel like cooking, I’m taking a quick shower. Mind having one of your other bodies pick out something suitable for going to the Council Chambers?”

Sira nodded happily, shuffling off as another body was deployed from the drone closet, rolling over towards my wardrobe, this particular model bearing a large sphere as the bottom half of it’s semi-feminine form. As it did so, the clink of a mostly automatic kitches came alive, and I busied myself with the task of enjoying warm water spray from six nozzels all around me in the shower.

The tiles were teal, red, and white, arranged in intrinsic designs. I’d spent a lot of money on my high-rise home, along with the rest of the building. It wasn’t the biggest building, only about eighty stories tall, dwarfed by the thicker, larger three hundred story tall megastructure in the middle of town. The Council Chambers were designed to withstand some serious punishment. If all of its defensive systems online, most nuclear ordnance would sooner melt the city around it than get through to the building itself. It was even capable of suspending its own gravity in the event that it was ever struck by something hard enough to cause a collapse. Then, of course, it would just put itself back together with its robust army of drones.

My building wouldn’t put itself back together, but we did invest in some pretty hardy upgrades. Never knew when a Generation Five Biotic might show up, may as well make it take a few more minutes to bring the building down.

As I stepped out of the shower, I let a series of arms emerge from carefully hidden plates in the walls, grooming me and drying me off. Was it a needless luxury? Yes. Would I buy it again? Yes, very much so, yes.

The mirror showed my well muscled body off, the few scars that I’d had carefully cleaned up to be sleek and edgy, rather than mangled messes. I could have gotten rid of them completely, especially the one that trailed my chin and light my red skin a slightly darker shade of purple. My orange eyes and short-trimmed blue hair gave my face just the right amount of balance. I wasn’t much for vanity, in spite of my insistence on luxuries, but I did have to admit that I looked good.

These days, that mattered a bit more than it had before. Being a mercenary company in this day and age where biotics were everywhere and only getting stronger, it paid to look good. It also paid to be really good at killing biotics, and my company was just that.

I walked back out to my bedroom, the drone waiting on standby. I pulled on a few of the clothes, but I grimaced at the fresh jacket, leather cleaner and polished. To anyone else it was a great - and expensive - adornment. I promptly ignored it and went into the closet to pull out my worn leather jacket, plates of carbon fiber woven into and under the leather would stop anything short of armor piercing rounds, but was still quite light.

I heard Sira groan as I ignored the jacket she’d set out, “This is why no one likes you.”

“Ouch!” I chuckled, “You know I’d never go anywhere without my lucky jacket.”

“Even if it makes you look like a rich hobo?” The robot put it’s mechanical hands against it’s waist, huffing again.

I blinked, thinking hard for a few seconds, “I don’t think rich and hobo can go together.”

“Well, you make it happen.” Sira gave up, putting the jacket away.

I winked at a nearby blue panel, “I always knew you’d see I was special someday.”

There were too many seconds where she said nothing, “Your food is ready in the dining area.”

I laughed, she loved me, even if she hated me. Well, everyone I knew was like that, but what was the fun in doing everything the right way?

Satisfied with my day already, I dug into the meat filled breakfast with vigor. As a Slethan, I had to make sure to keep my protein intake high, leaning hard to the carnivore side of things, albeit we could still eat the green stuff. Our bodies didn’t like a lot of them, though, something about the fibers and such.

Maybe another species would join the galactic market with fruits and vegetables that didn’t result in… digestional mishaps.

“Alright, I’m off.” I waved over my shoulder as I made my way through the door, the rid and black striped walls and shining black marble tiles always pleasant on my eyes.

“Have a great day, sir!” Sira called back kindly, moving to clean up after breakfast and take care of general chores.

I went into the elevator, polished and bullet-proof, laser resistant enameled glass giving me the view outside of the building. The mega-city was a sprawling mass, but even so there was a definite order to the buildings. Many of them had been rebuilt at least once, and now the cog-wheel appearance of the city helped to keep disparate parts of the city contained within itself without too many issues. Automated cars floated through the air, humming with whatever engine kept them aloft. Some of them were quite dramatic, pulsing with lines of plasma that burned out rapidly behind them, others took a more classic approach with fan blades that spun rapidly, contained within sheltering nooks. Those would switch to simple anti-grav when they neared the ground, no reason to blast everyone with wind every time you took off or landed.

Without hesitation, I stepped out of the elevator at the bottom floor and promptly pivoted to the right, passing by another elevator next to it that was responsible for moving down into our more sensitive operations. Everything above ground was housing, for my mercenaries and their families, but below, all business. I didn’t need to go downstairs today, and I also didn’t want to get entangled in any extended discussions by some of my more veteran crew members.

Of course, I realized a moment later that my second in command was staring right at me.

“Cap-” Maricene Rockman began to say before I quickly rushed through the door.

“Sorry, gotta go! Busy! Bye! Talk later! Much love!” I spat out the words in a constant stream and the moment I crossed the threshold for the door I sprinted to where my favorite vehicle was.

A few of my men watched the scene with a shake of their heads and good natured laughing. Some of them knew where I was going today, but Maricene had no idea. Which was a good thing, because if she knew how much I’d gambled on this latest project she would almost certainly flay the skin from my back and salt the wound.

“Carry on!” I laughed with almost manic glee, almost free as I dove into the red and silver hover car, the variety that had a pair of turbines to the front and one larger one in the back, long V shaped fins protruded from the belly, sides, and back of my ride. There were, additionally, a pair of ports for good old fashioned jet-thrust, albeit with heavy modifications.

All I had to do was punch in the command, and the vehicle rose. I saw out the side window a confused, good looking Borama woman in high ranking dress, gold, black, and a silvery blue. I waved out of the window to Maricene as her pale skin suddenly etched with small black markings like tattoos.

“Oh yeah, she knows.” I chuckled with a shake of my head. Borama tattoos were emotions activated, which was partially a reason why a Borama was supposedly viewed as supremely trustworthy. Though, that didn’t matter much when they learned to suppress their emotions. Maricene was one such individual, problem being that I was quite blessed with certain abilities. It was true! My power was to get under anyone’s skin if I wanted too.

Joking aside, I was very, very good at pissing her off.

At this time, though, I’d have preferred not doing that. She’d deeefinitely want to know what I was spending company money on. There were a few events, the most recent of which was ten years ago, where I may or may not have spent a few million dollars on things that may or may not have been useful for actual mercenary work. Yes, I did have a pleasure cruise ship. Yes, it was also useless for anything other than vacation time. Also, yes, it would cost a ludicrous amount to keep it.

I won that case by putting it to a vote for everyone in the company, which luckily for me was in my favor by a landslide. Turns out my merc’s loved being able to have their families go there whenever they wanted, who knew?

After that, though, she’d made it quite clear that any such expenditures should go through her first.

To be fair, we had a lot of money, more than we’d ever had before. Biotic killing business was good, and exchanging most of the M.E. to more specifically minded groups that could use it raked us in even more cash. Some believed that selling M.E. was foolish; I believed that holding onto M.E. that could be used for research was beyond stupid. What did it matter if you could stockpile enough M.E. to build a battlecruiser? Just build the damn thing and upgrade the hell out of it the old fashioned way.

I wasn’t the only one who thought that way, luckily, but some of the more… mentally challenged of my competitors didn’t share that outlook.

In any case, I’d only spent about four-hundred million credits.

Okay, so that was thirty times my cruise ship purchase, she’d definitely murder me. Suddenly I was less keen on coming back to the tower.

In the meantime, though, I was spared from having to think on my impending doom. The massive three-hundred floor building that covered several city blocks at its base loomed tall over me. I couldn’t see the top, and as the vehicle came to a stop, I hopped out, letting it drift into a garage section that carefully and expertly grasped the vehicle, linking into the onboard A.I. and exchanging information.

With eagerness I walked, more than a few individuals giving me friendly nods and greetings, all the people that I’d worked with frequently. Today was a big day, I’d get to see the results of the Obelisk project. I still remember when they had me do the recordings for it, just in case any sentient life came across them. Which, of course, I assumed would happen, and in a rare instance of seriousness, I’d recorded a bit of general information, an introduction. Alas, I knew the chances that any primitive species would have no idea what I was talking about, but it was the thought that counted. As far as we were aware, whenever a biotic surge was detected, there was almost always a series of small comets ejected at high velocity out to distant space. These comets were filled with cores, and if you could catch up to them, you’d be very, very wealthy.

Problem being that they moved ridiculously fast and were hard to track if you didn’t catch them right off the bat. This time around was one of those situations, regrettably, and therein came the Obelisk Support Project.

Everyone used Obelisks these days, supplementing civilizations everywhere with Matter Energy provided by biotics. While the biotics themselves were extremely hazardous to life, they were manageable up to Generation Three, or exceedingly rare Unique biotics you’d find. Those were crazy rare, though, you’d be lucky - or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint - to find a Unique biotic out of billions. Maybe one or two per planet, that’d be pretty much it.

The problem was that anyone who didn’t have an Obelisk would be in for a really bad time. A Generation One biotic generally only absorbed the template of a local organism and improved it in some relatively simple way. Some of them could get a little crazy, but most anyone could handle a basic one with a simple projectile weapon. The issue was that they were numerous, as were most biotics, and their numbers could, and had, literally emptied colonies of their ammo supplies before finally succumbing to the relentless waves.

Generation Two were nastier, usually mixing and mashing templates together and tweaking things until it worked. They were almost always lethal to anyone that wasn’t at least a soldier, armed, and armored. Generation Three… well, those could get bad.

I personally made sure to utterly destroy any core that was spewing out Gen Threes, they were just too varied to safely deal with on a day to day basis.

As I came to the counter, the clerk looked up to me with surprise. She was a Titherin, standing upright on two legs, had two arms, fairly normally proportioned. Her skin was a bronze coloration, an average for her species. Her reddish brown hair gently curled around her high cheekbones and around to the back of her head. While some mistakenly referred to the Titherin as a reptilian species, that classification was not quite accurate. They had many mammalian features in spite of the patches of scales the gleamed in bits. Her cheeks, bridge of her nose, and her forearms bore the shimmering scales.

She smiled as I approached, her arms professional attire hugging her curvaceous form, “Oh, Captain Rettle, I was expecting you.”

“Excellent! Then I’ll cut to the chase,” I flashed a wide grin, “Have the Obelisks found any sentient races, or just a bunch of rocks in the biotics path?”

“Well, if you’ll just come with me, we can find out.” She smiled politely, standing and moving to a far door that I knew would lead to an elevator. Namely, the V.I.P. one.

Considering how much money they stood to make off of my ‘donation,’ I expected nothing less.

“After you.” I followed her, doing my best to avoid staring at her many attractive points too long.