How I Helped My Smokin' Hot Alien Girlfriend Conquer the Empire 3-56: The Ripley Gambit
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“Almost there," Sera said.
Only I could see she wasn't going to make it quite in time. The mining ships were going to come into visual range before she could reach the escape pod, though it was still a toss up as to who would reach the escape pod first.
It wouldn’t matter if they started firing on us and she suddenly had to focus on that instead of the salvage and rescue job.
"I want you not to panic, Sera, but we're going to have incoming in a moment."
"Incoming?” she said, looking up at me. I could see the beginnings of panic starting there.
"Some of the mining bees from the mining facility are coming in. Probably to try and steal the escape pod before we can catch it.”
"Traitorous bastards," she said.
"Duplicitous double crossing bastards," I said, holding a finger up in a repeat of the conversation I had with Arvie. "We aren’t to worry about them. Though.”
“But it looks like there are a lot of them," she said, staring out of the cockpit at the cloud that I could see moving in. Some were still trailing flames where the ass end of the swarm was still moving through the atmosphere.
"Just focus on the escape pod. Trust me on this."
I looked at her. She looked at me.
"You aren't doing that thing where adults try to make kids feel better about something that's outside of their control, right? Ms. Arveth did that when our building was destroyed all around us."
I felt bad for the kid that she even had that experience, but I grinned right through the obviously painful memory.
"I promise I'm not going to bullshit you on anything, Sera. Ever. If we were really in trouble then I'd let you know."
She looked at me and she nodded.
"Okay, then I'm concentrating."
"Harath, are you ready?"
"Ready," Harath said. He didn't sound nervous either, even though the frigate couldn't be seen. I didn't have it actively pinging, and the salvage ship didn’t have the kind of sensors that would show it at this distance in a gas giant’s atmosphere when I was keeping to the clouds for cover.
"Those bees are getting close," Bronhel said. "At the very least, they'll be able to interrupt us."
"Will they?" I asked, turning and grinning at her.
And in that moment, the frigate suddenly rose up from the cloud layer below us, the clouds rolling off the thing and creating quite an impressive entrance, if I do say so myself. I rocketed up towards the mining bees who were swarming towards us, only they suddenly seemed to hesitate. As though they were rethinking all the decisions they'd made in their lives that led them to this moment where there was a fully armored and armed frigate coming at them and they were in nothing but a glorified pressurized cabin with a laser mining drill attached to the bottom.
"You did that thing with the clouds on purpose, didn't you?" Varis said. Though I could feel how impressed she was through the blink.
"You know it, babe," I said, turning and winking at her.
"Should I be doing anything different here, Bill?” Sera asked, her voice tense.
I glanced over at her . She was holding the control stick so tightly that her hands and fingers were almost white, but she was still staying exactly on the target. I could see that we were going to intercept with the escape pod any moment now. And I could feel through the salvage ship's systems that Harath was ready to go with the grappling hook.
"Keep doing everything the way you've been doing it, Sera," I said, keeping my voice calm, because what else was there to be in a situation like this but calm.
"On it," she said, her eyes straight ahead. She didn't so much as glance at the enemy ships. She just assumed someone helping her out said it was being taken care of, and so it was being taken care of. There was nothing else to say.
I was going to have to commend the kid for being ice-cold under a stressful situation. Assuming she didn't break before all of this was over. Still, she was doing a great job so far.
Meanwhile, I took my ship that wasn't quite a frigate and it wasn't quite a corvette, and I gunned the engines and blasted straight at the mining bees coming at us. I also made sure to power up my shields and all my weapons. I even had all the turrets point at them with just enough charge to emit a low-grade glow.
Letting out a low-level glow wasn't the kind of thing a ship's weapons did under normal circumstances, but I figured I was dealing with mining ships that were coming down into the atmosphere of a gas giant. I couldn't assume any of them had systems to detect weapons coming online. That just wasn't what they were designed for.
So I needed to give them a more visible example of the kind of mistake they were making by attacking a ship my little girl was flying.
I blinked at that, though I wasn't sure if I was blinking in the cockpit, in the simulation, or in the frigate/corvette. All I knew was I had a sudden and very possessive feeling about Sera. She was my kid, damn it, and I wasn't going to let anyone do anything to hurt her.
The sudden strength of that emotion was surprising, but it was there. Papa Bear was here. He had a ship that was armed to the teeth, and I was going to show them the error of their ways if they were going to try and hurt her while we were in the middle of what I wanted to turn into a teachable moment. Damn it.
There was a sudden buzzing sensation in the back of my mind that was interesting, another one of those notifications that I was getting in my head without getting the notification on a physical thing.
Though I noted there was also something coming up on the panel in front of me in the cockpit.
"Incoming communication," Bronhel said when I didn't respond to it in what she thought was a timely manner.
"Yeah, I'm on it," I said, figuring I was going to answer this one in real time. A head popped up on the holodisplay. Luckily that display wasn't something Sera needed to do her thing, but I was a little annoyed that it was taking up valuable real estate we could otherwise be using to assist in our alien rescue mission.
A livisk woman who didn't look familiar popped up, so it wasn't somebody I'd talked to earlier. I had a much better memory for faces these days than I had before I had the computer chip implanted in the back of my head.
I hit her with my most winning smile. Meanwhile, she hit me with a frown that said she wasn't happy with what was going on here.
"Who are you and what are you doing?" the woman demanded in a tone that said she was the sort of person who was used to people giving her exactly what she wanted as long as she delivered her demands in that tone.
"Hello there," I said, giving her a little wave. "How are you doing today? Fancy meeting you down here in the upper layers of a gas giant's atmosphere."
If anything, the woman's scowl only got even more deep and angry. "I'm going to ask you one more time before we open fire. What are you doing down here?"
The lady was brave. I’d give her that. Almost to the point of stupidity. I put a hand against my chin and tapped at it for a moment.
"Now, that's quite an interesting conundrum you're presenting me with here," I said. "Because I'm flying along in this ship that's bristling with all sorts of fun weaponry that could reduce your entire swarm of worker bees to so much slag riding gravity down into the crushing depths in the more unforgiving lower layers of this gas giant's atmosphere with a thought, and yet you're threatening me with a bunch of mining lasers that aren't even going to be able to scratch the paint job on my ship.”
"That salvage is ours by right," the woman said. "This is territory belonging to House Alarth. This whole system belongs to House Alarth. You can't just come in here and steal something that belongs to us by right."
I turned and glanced to Varis, then to Arvie in the simulation. Both of them shrugged and nodded at me. It was a subtle thing, but I wanted to make sure my understanding of salvage law in livisk space was totally clear.
"See, that's where I think you're wrong," I said. "This system might belong to House Alarth, but my understanding is that salvage rights hue more to the philosophy that might makes right, and in the current moment? I'm the one holding all the might.”
I didn’t like that might made right in livisk space. Not that throwing a legalistic veneer over might and money makes right was working much better in human space. Still. I might want to change something, but I was more than willing to take advantage of it for now.
The woman's eyes narrowed. Meanwhile, Sera had gotten into position. She really was doing some fancy flying, for all that everything was relatively calm up here.
Everybody thinks about the atmosphere of a gas giant and imagines something like the Great Red Spot. There are always dramatic documentaries that talk about extremophile windbags that fly around inside some of those storms devouring the more unfortunate creatures dumb enough to get caught up in the winds in those storms. So everybody thinks everything is all hurricane-force winds that could strip the flesh off of a person's bones if they were inexplicably thrust into a situation where they were naked in a storm on a gas giant.
Which was utterly improbable, but that was the standard unit of measure. Sort of like how piranha stripping a cow down to its bones had become the standard unit of measure for that sort of thing a millennia ago, and nobody had bothered to update it. Even though it was rather nonsensical if you looked at the actual real-world situation.
Anyway, the point was she had pretty clear skies to fly through, and so she was able to pull up on the escape pod rather nicely. Harath let loose with the grappler.
It flew out, and it landed on the thing perfectly. Not that I doubted Harath for a moment.
"You will give that escape craft to me immediately," the woman said.
"You still haven't given me any sort of introduction," I said.
The woman blinked. Clearly I'd thrown her off just a little, but that was fine. Throwing livisk in positions of authority off with disarming things like asking them about their name was part of my whole shtick, after all.
"I'm not giving you my name, human. Why would I do that?"
"So that when I talk to the people who are running House Alarth when we get to the planet, I'll be able to tell them exactly who’s been interrupting my important work here. I'm sure you wouldn't like to have a conversation with the head of your house about that sort of thing."
"I am a second cousin by marriage to the Grand Duchess,” the woman said, talking through gritted teeth. "Nothing you say to either of those two idiots trying to run things right now will be able to…”
I let loose with a few shots. Several of the mining bees that were closest to the front end of the swarm exploded in puffs of fire. Their wreckage went flying down into the crushing depths below. It was probably cold comfort to the livisk who’d been in there that they likely weren’t alive to reach those crushing depths below thanks to all the explodey stuff.
I told myself it was a mercy, but they were still acting like they were going to try and attack us even though they were also doing that thing where they were moving in like they were doing an attack run, but then they would pull away at the last moment. Because none of them were actually brave enough to do an attack run against a fully armed and armored ship when they were in a glorified mining craft with a mining laser.
This lady might be crazy enough to try and take us on, but that didn't mean anybody working for her was eager to die. Clearly these miners weren't the victory or death types willing to die for the glory of their house.
I opened comms on a wider band. Something that hopefully everybody in the mining craft would be able to pick up on.
"Okay. Everybody out there. I can tell that most of you are probably just trying to do a job. You're miners. You want to get whatever is on that moon, and you don't want to be involved in fighting or any bullshit like that. I totally get it. I'm a fighter. It's what I do. You're a miner. That's what you do. I don't want to go down in a mining bee and shoot rocks with cutting lasers, and you don't want to go up against my ship and die. So this is your opportunity to get out of this. Anybody who wants to go, you can turn around and make your way up into orbit. Note that you don't want to go back to your base right now. Go into orbit so that House Alarth can collect your whenever it's convenient."
A bunch of the mining bees turned and clawed for the relative safety of space, leaving behind a smaller but still substantial chunk of the swarm that finally dove towards the salvage ship.
“I’ll destroy you,” the woman growled. “You can’t…”
I continued right on, talking over the angry livisk woman.
“As for you, lady. I have just one thing to say to you sitting there in your mining craft threatening my little girl while she tries to do her first salvage run: get away from her you bitch!”
Posted Sep 15, 2026, 1:49 PM UTC