How I Helped My Smokin' Hot Alien Girlfriend Conquer the Empire 3-57: A Dishonorable Lack of Death
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"Get away from her, you bitch," Varis said.
Amusement came rolling through the link. I turned to look at her. Okay, amusement and something else. This was one of those situations where I was doing something stupid, but it seemed like it was something stupid that had gotten her attention.
"It's a line from…”
“A movie that was popular on Earth a thousand years ago and all the people who go into space absolutely love it because it's baked into your popular culture like some sort of sacred text," she said, waving a hand as she did it and rolling her eyes. Though she also wore a smile that said she was enjoying the trope at this point.
I had to figure anybody who'd stuck with me for this long was the kind of person who enjoyed that trope rather than being the kind of person who was tired of life and got upset at a little bit of sci-fi referencing fun.
"Am I that obvious?" I asked.
"I don't know that you're that obvious," she said. "It's just something that's happened often enough at this point that it's practically a cliché with you.”
"Well, I suppose there is that," I said. "Anyway, we totally need to sit down and watch Aliens sometime. It's pretty awesome."
"Aliens?" she said, frowning.
"I'm sorry, but I really don't have time for this right now," I said.
I turned my attention back to the mining bees that were diving toward us. Apparently the lady running things here hadn't taken my warning to get away from Sera, you bitch, seriously.
"Why would you call me a female dog?" the woman asked, frowning in the holodisplay as I reactivated the connection.
“It's an insult on Earth," I said.
“I figured. I’m going to kill you and your friends," she growled.
I stared at her for a moment, and then a thought occurred to me.
"Varis, real quick,” I said.
"I thought you said we didn't have time for a conversation," she said, and again, amusement was coming through the link. Along with the barest hint of a smile playing across that beautiful face.
We really needed to do another date night. It’d been too long with everything going on, which was no excuse. I needed to keep the romance going. It couldn’t all be romantic destination attempted usurpations and near-queenslayings.
"Yeah, I know," I said. “I promise this is gonna be a quick culture lesson that’s important to what we’re doing.”
I probably could’ve asked Arvie, but Varis was there and I wanted to talk to her.
“This lady here is probably working for House Alarth," right?
"If she is a second cousin by marriage then she has a position in their family, yes, but it probably isn't an enviable position. What I did with Norak is comparable."
"Oh yeah. Being put in charge of an entire battle fleet is such a terrible fate," I said, rolling my eyes.
"It isn't considered an honorable thing," Varis said with a shrug. “Someone shunted into a position like that gets the experience of running a fleet, but at the same time they're being put into a position of irrelevance where the best he can ever hope for is being pressed into service for the empress if she ever decides to start a war where he might have to go and fight. And even that hasn’t happened within the lifetime of anyone in the Ascendency currently.”
“Is that one of those things where it actually hasn’t happened within the lifetime of anyone currently in the Ascendancy, or one of those things where it happened in the last succession war and y’all don’t like to talk about it,” I asked.
“The former,” she said. “That sort of thing is usually invoked for waging war against a worthy foe, or an existential threat from the outside. That didn’t even happen when we were fighting you.”
"I see," I said, deciding I wasn’t going to be insulted about that jab at humanity. "So it's basically the equivalent of ancient Japan where they’d shunt somebody off to a desk where they didn't have anything to actually do in order to try and get them to quit?"
"Except I'm not trying to get Norak to quit. I'm just trying to put him someplace where he can cause the least amount of damage."
"Do you think it's likely they're doing the same thing with this lady and the mining operation?"
Varis thought about that for a moment. Meanwhile, I interrogated the readout. This really was the world's most ridiculous dive-bombing attack, except they didn't actually have any bombs they could use as they were diving for us.
No, they were just in those mining drones that had a ridiculously slow top speed, and so they were closing the distance at the speed of... Well, it was the kind of thing that would've been a screaming fast speed when compared to, say, an ancient jet fighter, but with the distances we were talking about in space and in the atmosphere of a massive gas giant? It wasn't exactly fast.
Sort of like someone threatening to run you over with a steamroller, or a Zamboni.
"It's entirely possible that House Alarth put her out here because they don't want to have to deal with her bullshit, yes," Varis said.
"And would that be the kind of thing that would lead somebody to maybe try and do a suicide run so they could die in glorious combat rather than continue to deal with the shame of running whatever ancillary operation their house has tossed them into?"
"That's entirely possible," she said.
"And would it piss that kind of person off even more if they were taken alive?"
Varis grinned. The link was flooded with satisfaction and approval. She could tell where I was going with this. She nodded.
"Yes, that is exactly the kind of thing that would piss somebody off."
"Thank you for the brief Livisk cultural lesson," I said.
Now that I’d figured that one out, I turned my attention to Arvie and grinned.
"What is it, William?" he asked.
"Do we have anything non-lethal on this ship?"
"We certainly have quite a bit of non-lethal capability," he said. "The question is whether or not you think we would be able to use that non-lethal capability to disable those mining bees without accidentally destroying them."
"What kind of tractor beam do we have on this thing?” I asked.
"It is certainly far more powerful than the tractor beam capability on the salvage ship."
"Probably would’ve been a better idea to just take this thing in the first place and use it to go after that ship."
"Except we were here in the salvage ship. We wouldn’t have time to bring this out in a timely manner, and on top of that, the idea of putting the child at the controls of a ship like this sends a quiet terror running through my digital heart."
"Those are all very good points you make, Arvie. Could we go ahead and get a detachment from the fleet that’s able to come down here and grab a bunch of mining bees?"
"Certainly," Arvie said. "And what about that bit where you told all the ones who moved up into orbit that they needed to stay away from the mining facility?”
"We're going to get to that in a little bit," I said. “It would be awfully helpful if you could go ahead and send some drones to reconnoiter that mining facility and see if there are spots we can hit that will really fuck up their infrastructure while causing minimal damage to life."
"I'll never understand your human obsession with trying to cause minimal damage to life."
"It's not that I mind taking lives if it's necessary. It’s just that I’d rather not do that if we're trying to win hearts and minds."
"Some would say it's impossible to wage a war against somebody and win their hearts and minds at the same time," Arvie said. "The livisk habit of simply going in and destroying their enemies until they are truly destroyed rather than trying to win them over to their side seems like it would be preferable."
"Yeah, it's definitely playing on hard mode to do this kind of thing," I said. "Not to mention the kind of assholes who usually talk about how they're winning hearts and minds are also the kind of assholes who are only paying lip service because they feel like they need to do that to get reelected."
"Truly your species is an oddity and a curiosity all wrapped into one," Arvie said.
"Okay, we’re almost there," I said, looking at the array of non-lethal weapons and then doing some quick calculations.
The problem wasn't that we had weapons that could knock out the mining bees without blowing them up. The problem was we were inside a gravity well on a gas giant, and knocking out their weapons would also knock out their engines. That would send them plummeting down into the depths of that gas giant where, as I've noted several times before already, they would very quickly reach a crush depth that would turn their mining bee into a metal death trap and eventually reduce it to a chunk of metal about the size of a baseball. Maybe even smaller.
Gas giants could get really damn dense the deeper you got into them. Especially one like this that was so much more massive than Jupiter that it wasn't exactly tickling the limit of becoming a brown dwarf, but it was actually smaller than Jupiter in terms of actual volume because there was so much material here that it pulled it inward on itself.
"I'm going to need you to take the tractor beam on this one," I said.
"William?” Arvie said.
"We’re going to pull a Battletech but we’re doing it with the tractor beams rather than the shields."
"I see," Arvie said, but his tone said he didn't see.
"You don't have to pretend like you know what I'm doing when you don't know what I'm doing," I said. "We've covered this plenty of times before. My meat brain comes up with stupid bullshit you never would’ve conceived of. That's not something to be ashamed of."
"Very well," Arvie said. "What exactly are we doing here?"
"I need you to manipulate the tractor beams so we're grabbing those ships one by one and pulling them up. It’ll be a little more effective than trying to do a wide dispersal, but I don’t trust my meat brain to do that. If my calculations are correct, then a wide beam runs the risk of losing some of them and sending them tumbling down into the gas giant’s depths.”
"And that's something you want to avoid," Arvie said.
"Yes. If possible."
"Sending your enemies down to crush depth where they will die a relatively tame death compared to the various ways you could kill them if you wanted to."
"Exactly," I said.
He paused for a moment, no doubt wondering why I wasn’t driving my enemies before me and listening to the lamentations of their women, but whatever.
"Very well," Arvie said. "This should be an interesting challenge, at the very least."
I activated the weapon. It was basically a fancy version of an EMP, which was one of the oldest weapons in the book. So old that there was a lot of shit that was hardened against it as a matter of course these days.
Not to mention there'd been that solar flare back in the 2200s that had knocked out a good chunk of the grid in North America because the idiots running things back then still hadn't bothered to harden their power grid against a massive solar flare despite knowing about the threat for several centuries at that point.
Then again, they were also still on the tail end of boiling the atmosphere all around them because there were massive industries dedicated to pulling up dead compressed phytoplankton out of the ground and putting it into their transport vehicles who were constantly lobbying against more sensible things like renewables and eventually fusion power when that started to become a viable alternative.
I reminded myself that they were really no different from humans these days. They just had a different set of challenges in front of them at the time. Though thankfully being able to reach for the stars had united people somewhat and started to solve some of those problems.
Either way, the pulse that went out from the ship was a far more powerful and weaponized version of an EMP. The kind of thing that was more than just a happy side effect of discovering how to detonate nuclear weapons. It blasted out and hit all the mining bees at the same time, and as one they started to move in a downward arc as their momentum carried them forward for a moment, and then that momentum started to bend down as the inevitable pull of gravity from a massive gas giant started to yank at them.
I could only imagine the expression on their faces as they moved down towards that crush. They were miners living on a mining facility on a moon in the shadow of a gas giant. I was certain plenty of them had plenty of opportunity to stare at that gas giant and wonder what it would be like to take a dive down into the thing's atmosphere.
"You dishonorable rat," the woman said, appearing on my holodisplay in the simulation.
I grinned at her. "Oh, I haven't even begun doing things to bring you dishonor, lady."
Her eyes went wide at the same moment the tractor beams, plural, started to shoot out, operated by the deft hand of a Combat Intelligence who could use them far faster and with far greater precision than any mortal mind could ever hope to achieve.
"Wait, what are you doing?" she screeched. "I was supposed to die. This isn't fair, you bastard!”
Posted Sep 16, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC