Not Nice
“You can't be truly rude until you understand good manners.”
---Rita Mae Brown
“No my lordship, I haven't been hiding any supplies of any...” Through the dim and murky light of the Naud ship's lower corridors, there could be heard another vicious slap across her mouth and she recoiled, cowering against the wall. Other crew passed by through the gloom without even a glance. If the Quartermaster wanted to let off steam beating one of the ilk to death, more power to him---at least it wasn't one of them.
A young Naud junior officer rushed up to the Quartermaster. “Sir; there is a row beginning at the back of the stores rooms. Apparently...” he didn't get to finish the explanation as his superior changed targets and smacked him for interrupting his diversion.
“Let that be a lesson to ya: Don't butt in!” and he stomped off toward his most precious dominion, the ship's storage rooms and the hold. Crew and conscripts alike gave the lumbering devil a wide berth as he passed.
The beaten 'ilk' struggled to her feet, “Pardon me for saying so, sir, but he really doesn't swing as hard as he used to.”
“I'll thank you to keep your gob shut!” as he back-handed the impertinent conscript.
“Yes sir,” and as quickly as the young officer turned, the conscript disappeared round a bend in the corridor and into the cabin she'd been edging toward when the Quartermaster cornered and accused her.
“That wasn't so bad...” Senta breathed to the other ragged form in the darkness.
“It won't get any better I'm thinking;” the Elf replied. “The recordings certainly didn't prepare us for the near darkness and...”
“This stench! It's everywhere! Don't the Naud ever bathe?! And their breath...” Senta groaned.
“You'll get used to it. You take the starboard holds and I'll work my way up through the port side. As soon as you can attach yourself to a work gang, do it;” the Elf opened the cabin door just a crack and prepared to go.
“I know my job.” Senta countered in an irritated voice and caught herself. “This place just so needs a good cleaning.”
They slipped back out into the momentarily empty hallway and separated. The Elf quickly attached herself to a group of four 'ilk' dressed as she was---in tatters---and carrying large containers. They wound through the lower decks, the miserable muffled moans and whimpering sounds of agony and abuse escaping each open chamber they passed in the darkness. The Lascorii had an advantage here, their eyes could pierce the thickest gloom---a legacy of their arising. That was one of the reasons Senta had such a decidedly strong opinion of the Naudi housekeeping abilities. What the shadows hid from their fellow conscripts' eyes was all to apparent to them: the Naudi habit of treating all things as disposable made their ships floating garbage bins in space.
Meanwhile, Senta ducked from one cabin to the next; she wasn't going to have a repeat of her first 'welcome' by Naud officers if she could help it. Ahead of her was a brighter bay, perhaps one of the 'work rooms,' she suspected. What met her eyes as she sidled up inconspicuously to the opening, wasn't exactly what she was prepared to witness. Crouched in little huddled clumps of threes and fours, the tattered forms of 'conscripts' scraped, cracked, chewed and sifted out even the smallest bits of ore from the mounds of rock and debris surrounding them. Several swaggering Naud taskmasters roved through the huge bay. A crack of a rod on bone, the snap and sizzle of plasma goads into flesh and the near constant cries of pain sprang from one part of the room then another as if part of some grotesque concert of agony and torture.
What would anywhere else have been performed by ore refining machines, here was being done with the broken teeth and bleeding fingers of slaves.
Senta wrenched her gaze from the scene and sneaked passed the gaping maw of the bay opening as quickly as she could manage. Her body shook from the sights that were now etched into her mind---the empty faces, the twisted and emaciated bodies. “Okay,” she recounted to herself, “Definitely not volunteers... and not the work gang for me!”
The four with whom the Elf had attached herself emerged from the bowels of the lower decks onto the ship's main promenade and the Elf had to squelch a yelp of surprise. The light wasn't any brighter, but the conscripts weren't in tatters up here. In fact they were a stark contrast to the misery just yards beneath their feet below. These were the 'lucky' ones no doubt. She recognized Lanorians and Gorim, a few Nourii and some Hanurians. These weren't menial servants to the Naud, these were tasked to maintaining the essential services: galley workers, lab techs, and most obviously as the personal sex slaves of the officers... And the Naud officers weren't squeamish about how and when they disported their near constant animal urges.
Her little knot of conscripts entered what appeared to be a galley, though the only 'food' was a gloppy gelatinous muck that the Naud gulped and slurped with relish. They all went into the back; two of them brought out empty containers, while she assisted the other two at refilling and replacing them. Her 'partners' commented in whispers, “...takes some getting used to, but this batch even I would eat...” “...even knowing where it came from?!” “...better than what them's below gotta swallow...” the other pointed with her chin at the room at large and the several 'ministrations' certain slaves were performing for their masters; “...or what those poor souls have to...”
When they reached the main corridor once more and passed another group heading further up into the ship, the Elf shifted and attached herself to the new little group. These weren't in the tattered wear of the lower decks. As they reached a sharp turn, she decided to 'make a costume exchange' with one of her companions about the same height and build.
“And just what's this about then?!” the 'volunteer' gasped as she sidelined the fellow into an empty alcove.
“I am changing stations,” the Elf replied evenly, “And you are going to assist me. I have to get as close to the bridge of this ship as I can.”
His eyes narrowed at her as his tunic and pants were pulled from him in her deft hands. “Hold on now; no one tries to be around even more of them Naud... You been overdosing on happy pills or something?”
“Is that how they keep down revolt then?” the Elf quizzed as she pulled on the new costume.
“Where are you from?! We haven't taken on new slaves in at least two weeks...” his voice was uncomfortably loud. She put her hand to his mouth.
“Let's just say, I'm only here for the matinee. My tour guide assured me it was not to be missed,” and she smiled. “Now shall I tie you up and gag you? Do you need an alibi?”
He was still sorting through the realization that anyone would voluntarily come aboard a Naud ship. “I don't need that...” He seemed to come to a decision. “I'll come with you. Been hoping to get a bit of my own back from these... these...”
“I'm pretty much a solo act, I can't...” the Elf began to say. But he leapt up and darted back out into the corridor.
He poked his head back round the corner. “Coming?”
The Elf straightened her tunic and joined him. “Best if you walk ahead of me, won't do to have me,” and he gestured at his rags for clothes, “leading a techie around up here.”
“What technical work are you tasked with?” The Elf wondered what she'd be expected to account for if questioned.
“Oh it's complicated it is...” his voice was tinged with sarcasm, “I keep the heaters running. That seems to be something fairly arcane to our hosts.”
“No surprise.” the Elf retorted glibly. “You look to be Lanorian... and you mentioned a restock of 'volunteers' a couple weeks ago?”
“Yeah, wrong place at the wrong time...” he muttered. “Against my better judgement to have gone all the way to Firefly. I been an inmate of hell here for thirteen weeks, four days and change. Just lucky, I suppose that their air exchangers and heating crapped out just then... Been assigned to making the rounds ever since.”
He reached forward a hand and tugged on her sleeve to turn down a lateral passage. “I'm Renno, by the way. Service access three up here is the next stop. It's two bulkheads over from the bridge and as close as I'd like to ever get.”
“Well Renno you've been more than informative and helpful;” the Elf commended as she opened the access door.
“Uh... I'll just find a nice little niche to curl up in in here, if you don't mind;” Renno made for a ladder leading up to a cat walk that seemed to branch out across what was probably most of the command deck.
“Hold it!” The Elf had her hand on his ankle. “Those catwalks. They pass over the bridge?” His look of disgust was answer enough. She was climbing up passed him and sneaking along the narrow grating before he found his hiding hole.
Senta made it up through the most wretched of the lower decks and stumbled up into what had to be the less abused conscripts' 'dormitories.' She startled a pair of women just entering from the same hallway she had left. “What's a scrunge doing in here?!” one of them gasped at the sight of Senta.
The other one made a move to grab Senta's shirt, supposedly to kick her out.
“It's not what it looks like...” Senta evaded her grasp and was behind them holding the door closed quicker than they could see. More gasps. She eyed their outfits and asked with a sly smile, “Which of you would like to donate to a good cause?”
A few minutes later, she was on the same promenade the Elf had just left half an hour before. Senta took in the scenes in front of her and realized unhappily that she'd adopted the costume of one of the sex-slaves. “Uh oh... this is not good...” She backed into the nearest opening and a hand gripped her shoulder.
“Fresh! How fortunate...” the Officer grunted as he unbuckled his belt with his free hand.
Senta's next movements were too fast to follow. Next she was dragging the cumbersome weight of the lieutenant, his arm over her shoulders, into a secluded corner of what appeared to be a lounge or something. Slapping him to consciousness after binding his hands behind him and stuffing his own socks in his mouth, she opened the interview. “Just nod for 'yes' and shake for 'no.' We are going to play twenty questions! And you are my first contestant. Ready?” and she loosened her masking body suit just the tiniest bit.
The officer's puffy and protruding beady eyes, his distended nostrils and near flopping ears were all very much focused at that instant on the obviously demented wench in front of him. Without recourse and helpless, he forced his head forward in a nod.
“Good!” Senta's voice was sweetness and charm. The goon in uniform, the Naud, was beginning to waver; his mind was swimming with fantastical images. The woman wasn't a wench at all, he realized, she was... a shining and beautiful goddess and he was her favorite servant. He wanted to help her... Senta realized she may have over-exposed the beast. She glanced around the rest of the dank and dark room. Those who had been there had left.
“I want to know where is your phalange Admiral and his cruiser?” she purred, and confident of her spell, she pulled the socks from his mouth, holding a finger to her lips to remind him to speak quietly. He nodded in a devout assurance.
“We ain't got an Admiral...” he whispered. “...Only the Husim...”
“How did that come about?” she mused. “Deserters then?”
“Oh no...” he shook his head. “Cruiser and fleet destroyed is all.”
“Pity.” She pushed ahead with the interview more quickly. She was certain she heard the clomping of booted feet up the corridor outside. “And your Captain turned to piracy to keep you all fed and supplied?”
The Naud grinned then and nodded. His eyes no longer focusing on her directly. His hallucinations were crowding out all reality.
“And you found playmates who had also become very naughty?”
Again the nodding and fawning expression.
“How many others?”
His mouth tried to form the answer, but it became clear that he couldn't convey the numbers. He attempted, “So many. So many. Scattered from here to the edges of the frontiers they are...” And he began weeping. The goddess asked for a number, and he didn't know it. His tears filled his vision and he began blubbering like a child.
Senta rolled her eyes, and loosened her body suit very wide. With an intense effort of will she forced only a small bit of her enchantment to surface in a burst and only for a split second, then she pulled her wrappings tight once more. The Naud lay plopped face forward on the table. His breathing labored and erratic. “That's going to be some headache when you come to... in six or seven hours...”
She crossed to the door and peered at the backs of the passing patrol, the clomping that she'd heard before. “Perhaps just changing shift?” she wondered only for a moment and shadowed them, flitting from doorway to doorway, alcove to alcove as they ascended from one deck to the next. “And the air isn't so heavy and rank up here...”
The three-soldier patrol stopped at a dead end in the hall before a set of heavily armored and locked doors. Without entering, they turned and set up sentry duty instead. “Great!” Senta breathed, “Dead end and no way to backtrack without being noticed...” She scanned the deck and ceiling for any possible avenue of retreat. Nothing. “So... do I tip our hand or wait it out?” She settled into a crouch. “And what's a set of armored, locked doors need with three guards?” That clinched it. She rose, pulling her body suit loose around her torso as she did. “Let's just see...”
As the Elf scrambled around a last turn along the catwalk she looked ahead and had to shake her head to clear her eyes. She blinked hard and stared. Poised, and staring straight down through a ventilation grate into the bridge was Yula. “How the hell?!” The Elf advanced to Yula's side and gazed down at what she had found. “Aren't you the mystery then? And found just what Mama said she wanted!” her voice hadn't been actually even completely audible. She added, “We are going to have to have a heart-to-heart chat when we get back.”
Dangling by her feet over the convenient ventilation grate Yula still presided over, the Elf took in the bridge activity, but her focus was on the monitors directly below her---the navigation consoles. The record of this ship's travels was repeating and repeating in a very long loop. As the Naud were nearly completely inept at stellar navigation, the best they could hope was to only ever venture a little ways from wherever they had been before; hence the looping reminders.
The Elf memorized every twist and turn through the systems flickering passed her eyes. Over and over it looped and looped below her. Once she was certain she could recreate the path, she pulled herself back up to the catwalk and retraced the way she'd come, which wasn't hard as Yula led the way. Once at the service closet again and making sure that 'Renno' had his own tunic back, she made her way to the insertion point; wondering as she did so, just where Yula had gotten off to. “It's been five hours. Senta must be there by now...” The ship erupted in alarm. “Great!” the Elf smiled slyly. “Like they knew I was coming and wanted to make me feel at home!” She hurried toward her destination with less caution than before.
Senta 'let' the last guard, still standing, unlock and open the armored doors for her, then she made sure he took a 'nap' with his mates. She stealthily entered stepping over his slumbering, noisy, body. “Of course they're wicked snorers... With snouts like that...” Her eyes took in the stores room in a single scan. She crossed to the central aisle that led to the main entry, perhaps fifty yards or more from where she'd entered and peered around at the crates and shelves. “Naturally that lump of a quartermaster would even post guards at his locked back door. Now then let's take a quick inventory. See from whom they have been commandeering their livelihood.”
She climbed to the top of the racks nearest at hand and used the elevation to race around the room, noting as many containers' origins as she could. The main doors suddenly swung wide and the slightly brighter offices beyond them splayed shafts of light into the warehouse. She ducked into a cleft between some crates marked as being from a system she recognized the name of at once. She gasped, “Lascor textiles?!” The two people who had come into the storage area, stopped what they were doing.
“You hear that?” one snorted to the other.
“Yeah, you farted... so what...” came the sniveling answer.
“Did not! It came from over there...” the first insisted.
“Oh, well you're a regular magician you are. Throwing your farts across the room...” was the mocking reply. “Just get the bottles he demanded and hurry about it. I'd like to keep this cushy assignment. So much better than the hold down there... All those aliens and... I can't think about it without shuddering...”
Then they noticed the back doors were standing wide open and a screech rose up out of them. “Your Lordship! There's a breach! And it wasn't us!” they ran back the way they'd come.
Senta listened as the clanking bottles crossed beneath her and she realized her routes of escape were dwindling rapidly. She leapt up and circled round to the wall and followed it to the front, still hopping from one crate top to container high above the deck. The familiar looming form of the Quartermaster filled the threshold causing his two minions to skid to a stop at his feet.
“What's this? Somebody trying to pilfer from me?! And through my own back doors?!”
“Not us Lord... Not us.”
“We only just discovered it...”
“Just this second...”
And as he looked up the main aisle they slipped passed him to the relative safety of the offices beyond. He took a few steps toward the breach.
Senta jumped, as silent as death to the gap between his back and the only avenue of escape. She ducked under the first offer of concealment she encountered: a day bed. The poor sex-slave outstretched and bleeding there took no notice of anything in her vision. Senta calculated the distance to the opposite office doors and the corridor beyond. She listened for the heavy steps of the toad of a quartermaster. “Now or never...”
She had just reached the corridor and vanished into the dull gloom of an alcove when the Quartermaster burst into the hall after her. He slammed his thick hand against the alarm set into the wall and the ship came alive with sirens and bells. Through the din and clamor, Senta smiled. “Chaos is our friend.”
She set off for the insertion point so much less cautious than when she'd arrived. One conscript looked like another, one soldier or officer like the next. That and there was a sudden run on the stores room to take advantage of it having already been presumably looted. So Senta had to work her way 'upstream' after a fashion, and none of those pushing and gouging their way passed her took any notice of just one more tattered servant. Make that two tattered servants.
The Elf emerged from a side door and grabbed Senta's elbow. “Down this way... I found the highway home. How did you make out?”
Barely breathing hard, Senta chuckled, “It's almost like they really wanted to tell me whatever I wanted to know.”
The Elf scowled at her, “I really hoped you could keep your shirt on;” then she softened. “As long as they don't remember a thing, no harm, no foul.”
They reached the juncture they were looking for. The shaft that led out to the nacelle service hatches. The pods were just where they left them---clamped tight to the hull---and Yula waiting patiently. Senta gasped, “I thought you left her on the Huntress!?”
“I did;” was all the Elf offered at that moment. A touch of the access panels and they opened at once. Yula darted into the Elf's pod ahead of her and so quickly even the Elf's sharp eyes didn't notice. After squeezing inside, the Elf looked up into the vacated access shaft. “Now where has that cat gone?!” A muted 'mew' rose up from near her feet. She rolled her eyes, and touched the com, “Ready for pick-up once the shift change comes around again, Dena.” Senta and the Elf settled into their pods and took a much needed nap. Four more hours and the Elf's pod beeped at her. “Times up,” she murmured. She and Senta de-polarized the magnetic clamps holding them to the ship.
Two tethers instantly snaked out from the cloudy space beyond the Naud corvette, apparently from nowhere. They were reeled away into the murky nothingness. The invisible Huntress backed away from the little cluster of ships and once beyond the Naud's limited scanning range, reeled them the rest of the way into the reception bay. In a little while Dena was standing over them as they wriggled out of their metal cocoons.
“Y'all are the first to be retrieved;” Dena announced. “Nine and half hours---marginally behind our initial timetables. You did acquire some decent answers to our questions?” Her tone was as a mother scolding her children for truancy. Senta and the Elf were nearly doubled up in giggles at the sight of Dena, alternating hands on her hips then arms crossed, waiting for a better response than their laughter. Then Yula crept out from the Elf's pod. Dena's eyes narrowed even tighter. “And as for you!”
The Elf intervened, smiling, “We have something to go on, yes;” she assured Dena and pulled her to herself. “Nice shooting out there, by the way.”
That was enough to warm Dena's chilly reception. “I have just been beside myself worrying! Y'all didn't train me for that part of the assignment!”
Nine and a half hours before on the flagship of the Naud pirate fleet...
“What I wouldn't give for a little enchanting pheromone ability just now.” Jista chuckled as they crawled out of their pods into the empty service shaft.
Reia chuckled, “We've been on dozens of these sorts of missions...” Pim nodded silently. “...We didn't have that trick up our sleeves then. And see how we ended up?”
The three girls had to laugh at that development. Pim opened the fold of her jacket and produced a little scanner, waving it up one way then the other she nodded, “This way and stay close. We'll be separating soon enough. No rush...”
Jista took point as they moved with uncanny speed up into the heart of the starship. She slowed and came to a crouch at a juncture leading straight up and down from the lateral shaft they'd come up. “Wonder why the Boss let us have the obvious flagship?”
Reia shrugged, “Special treat for good behavior?”
Pim shook her head, “Uh uh. The recordings we made showed that it was clear this Captain, at least, had some intimate experience with Lascorii. It wouldn't do any of our sisters an