How I Helped My Smokin' Hot Alien Girlfriend Conquer the Empire 3-24: The Secret to a Good Bluff is Holding All the Cards
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"Okay, Arvie," I said, turning to him in the simulation. "Do we have all our stuff ready to go?"
"I believe we have just about everything ready to go, yes," he said.
"Excellent. Could you patch me through to Rachel for a moment?"
"She is waiting," Arvie said.
A panel appeared, floating in the air in front of me in the simulation. I frowned at that, wondering at what point I'd done away with actually having a representation of a flat two-dimensional screen and just started having a two-dimensional projection appearing in front of me inside the simulation.
That seemed like something important to know. For all that I suppose it didn't really matter as long as I was getting everything done in here.
Still, the descent into transhumanism and getting more and more used to just doing things inside a computer simulation rather than having representations of doing things outside of a computer simulation inside a computer simulation seemed like an important distinction.
"Okay, Rachel," I said, nodding at her. "Are you ready?"
"Where are you?" she asked.
"What's that?"
"This place doesn't look like the inside of a cargo shuttle,” she said. "And you look a little off. Sort of uncanny valley."
"It's a long story, and I don't have time to get into it right now," I said.
"Yeah, that's fine," she said, getting down to it. "We've prepared our first little surprise for the Ascendancy. It was surprisingly easy to do it once the Terran Fox found the proper cabling and let Arvie get direct access. You’d think that’s something the empress would be watching a little closer.”
“You’d think, but she probably can’t conceive of us doing something like this,” I said.
“You’d think she’d be paying somebody to conceive of us doing something like this,” Rachel said. “But I’m not going to complain about my enemy making mistakes. We're ready to flip the switch whenever you are."
"Okay. Go ahead and do it now," I said. "I'm going to start my conversation with the empress right now."
"Doing it now," Rachel said.
A second window opened up to the right of Rachel. She grinned and gave me a thumbs up. A moment later, an older livisk woman I didn't recognize appeared in another window. She projected gravitas through the screen, which made her exactly the kind of person you wanted appearing on your media program to put the livisk audience at ease.
Basically, the sparkly blue equivalent of an old white dude telling people stuff on the news. For all that humanity had become so wide and varied over a thousand years of fucking each other in an era of easy travel around the world and between the stars that there weren't many old white dudes around anymore, but whatever. Cronkite had cast a long influence over the media landscape in much the same way that pilots still talked in the laconic Chuck Yeager voice to this day.
"Good afternoon, people of the Livisk Ascendancy," the woman said, her voice smooth but stern as she leaned forward staring at the camera with an intensity that made me want to lean back. "You have to ask yourself: what is the empress doing? Launching an unprovoked attack against a noble house that has made it clear they have no interest in fighting her right now? Breaking the peace of a Grand Gathering? It makes you question exactly what kind of world we're living in that the empress thinks she can take this kind of bold and illegal step against the nobility."
A picture-in-picture appeared over the woman's head. It was a view of the empress's giant head floating in front of the yacht as more and more munitions moved in towards us. Some of the plasma blasts were getting close, but the empress's ships had opened up from far enough out that there was still a little bit of time for us to do this dog and pony show.
The woman continued droning on, but I muted the window and shunted it aside. I had more important things to concentrate on.
"I'm going to rely on you to take care of this, Rachel," I said.
"On it, Captain," she said, and her window muted and moved to the side as well. I turned back to the empress. Or, rather, to the projection of the empress ridiculously keeping time floating in front of the yacht.
"Time for our second big surprise, Arvie," I said.
"Working on it," Arvie said.
And suddenly there was another giant head projecting in front of the yacht. I figured it was even money whether or not the empress went with the whole big giant head routine when she was trying to spank me for being a naughty boy and escape the planet, but she'd already been two-for-two. I figured if she was going to be predictable and attack us as we were trying to get off-world, then she’d also be predictable and go back to the big giant head well again.
So why not have a big giant head of my own?
"How's it going, Your Worship?" I asked. My voice boomed out over the city. It also went to pretty much every media delivery device in the entirety of the Livisk Ascendancy as well.
The empress frowned, and then she turned to the side and started muttering. But her projection was loud enough that the muttering carried even though it wasn't as loud as mine. She wasn’t quite as good about muting herself when she didn’t want to be overheard.
"I don't care how his is louder than mine," she said. "I need you to turn up the volume. I'm not going to have a Terran beating me at my own game."
I grinned and shook my head. Utterly predictable.
"So do you want to explain why you're attacking us right now?" I asked. "I thought we agreed I was going to have a nice vacation off-planet, and there's still the peace of the Grand Gathering..."
“The peace of the Grand Gathering that you broke, Bill," she said, turning back to me. It was an odd sensation as she turned back to talk to me, because her voice started getting louder. Almost like a Doppler effect, but I figured it was just somebody turning up the volume on her microphone.
“And we agreed to ignore all that unpleasantness and pretend the peace of the Grand Gathering was still a thing,” I said. “Doesn’t seem very sporting that you’d take the first opportunity you could to try and kill us after making that agreement.”
I knew I wasn’t going to change her mind. You rarely could with asshole despots like her. She wasn’t my main audience, though. Hopefully there were some wheels turning and some hearts and minds that were thinking, even if they weren’t changing. Yet.
"I'm not going to try and kill you, Bill," she said. "I am going to kill you. Have you forgotten the promise I made to you the last time around?"
"Have you forgotten the promise I made to you the last time around?" I asked.
Her eyes went wide, and she suddenly looked slightly panicked. Then her eyes narrowed.
"I know you're bluffing and trying to get me to do something stupid, but it's not going to work."
I shrugged. "You say so, but I want you to know that you started this fight. Besides. I don’t have to bluff to make you look stupid.”
"Of course I started this fight," she said, her eyelid twitching ever so slightly at my insult. Which might’ve been less noticeable if it wasn’t on a projection that had her floating head at kaiju proportions. "I am the empress of the Livisk Ascendancy and the Sovereign of all I survey. I can do what I want, up to and including killing you for being a constant problem."
"That's fine, Your Worship," I said. "I just wanted to get that on record."
She blinked. Her ship was keeping pace with the yacht. It was currently running at a power level that would be the red line for the typical engines in a yacht like this. Of course it wasn't anywhere close to the red line of the yacht I was in right about now, but still.
Show people what they expect and they’ll rarely go digging deeper. The empress seemed like the kind of person who didn’t have any sort of depth, and I was banking on that right now.
"I warned you," I said with a shrug.
“I still say you're bluffing," she said.
"I never bluff, Your Worship."
There was a pause. She looked around. Her eyes went a little wide, like she was clearly nervous, and then she laughed.
"I knew you were bluffing," she said. "It was nice knowing you, Bill Stewart of Earth."
"Yeah, whatever," I said. "Let's get to work."
I punched it, and by punching it, I mean I took the engines from fifty percent, which looked like about one hundred ten percent for a yacht this operating normally, and I moved it up to about sixty percent. I still didn't want to give away exactly what this thing was capable of. Yet.
The yacht started rocketing up way faster than any of these had any business moving. The reinforcements combined with the structural integrity field that had been introduced into the thing meant it held together where any other pleasure yacht like this would’ve flown apart at the seams.
Though I was perfectly willing to fly her apart if it meant fucking with the empress.
"If you think flying a little faster is going to get you out of this, then you're sorely mistaken, Bill," the empress said.
"You know, it feels unfair," I said, the giant head projecting my words back at her.
"What's unfair?" she asked. "That you're about to die?”
"No. That we're only half on a first-name basis, Your Worship. You keep calling me Bill, and I keep having to call you Your Worship. I suppose I could call you YW for short, Y-Dubs. How does that sound, Y-Dubs?”
"What are you even on about?" she said after a pause. Her voice was flat. The kind of voice she had got when I was annoying her. I grinned.
"I'm talking about how it seems unfair that you get to call me Bill, but I can't call you whatever your name is."
"I am the empress of the Livisk Ascendancy," she said. "I am a goddess. I..."
The blasts coming at me were close enough now. It was a perfect bit of timing. I might not like the empress, but she seemed to have an almost preternatural ability to set me up perfectly.
It was almost going to be a shame to have to kill her eventually.
I let loose with all the defensive weapons that had been hidden away on the yacht at the same time, and the fireworks show that resulted was nothing short of spectacular. Though it was still well short of the fireworks show I had planned for the end of all this.
I imagined holes opening all around the ship. Payloads went out and slammed into the missiles that were homing in on the yacht. A shield generator in the ship also started to put up small directed shields that slammed into the plasma blasts and prevented them from hitting us without going to all the energy expenditure of running a constant shield around the whole thing at all times.
I got that idea from watching some ancient anime that used that as a plot point. I couldn't remember what it was. Only that they had actual humans with trackballs who were controlling the shields and keeping things from hitting them, and it was a point of dramatic tension when they couldn't move the trackballs fast enough to stop everything from slamming into their ship.
Only in this case it was shielding that was being controlled by a Combat Intelligence who’d been fully unleashed.
“Puny goddess,” I said with a shit-eating grin.
“How are you doing that?” she said, and for a moment she looked more impressed than pissed off.
"It's time for you to witness the power of this fully armed and operational Combat Intelligence," I muttered in a voice reminiscent of the late, great, legendary Ian McDiarmid.
"What was that?" Arvie asked.
"Something from Star Wars," I said. "You wouldn't have picked up on it since you're a Trekkie."
“Ah, I see," Arvie said. "I understood the draw of maybe the first two of those movies, but I never understood why they were so popular after that. And the attempts to recapture the magic over the subsequent thousand years have just been sad, with a few notable exceptions that nobody watched because they were so used to being disappointed.”
"I'm a firm believer that Mel Brooks made the last great Star Wars movie," I said. "And that's saying something considering we've had a millennia of people beating that dead horse."
"Indeed," Arvie said.
There was a moment of profound silence all around us. The airspace all around the yacht was utterly silent. The empress floated in front of us, her projectors easily keeping pace with the yacht. She stared wide-eyed, blinking a couple of times.
"I told you," I said.
"I thought you were going to attack me," she said.
"I mean, the day is still young," I said with a shrug that was barely picked up as the projector moved my shoulders into the frame. "But I figured you were going to try and attack us."
"You figured I was going to attack you?"
"It's in your nature," I said. "The frog and the scorpion."
There was a pause. She turned to the side again, no doubt consulting with her human culture experts. Then she turned back to me and sniffed.
"I've decided I'm going to take it as a compliment that you are comparing me to a deadly venomous arachnid predator on your world."
"Take it however you want, Y-Dubs,” I said, grinning at her. Again an eyelid the size of a grav-in movie theater screen twitched. "But this is your last chance before I make you regret this."
She stared at me. I stared at her. Meanwhile, the droning from Rachel’s new show was still going on in the background.
"You're bluffing?” she said. Only this time, the question was obvious.
“You keep saying that,” I said. “Are you sure you want to keep testing that assumption?”
Posted Jun 8, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC