How I Helped My Smokin' Hot Alien Girlfriend Conquer the Empire 3-58: Clean Up and Lessons
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I split my attention in between the ship and what was going on in the salvage ship. I really needed to come up with a name for this frigate/corvette thing, because I really liked tooling around in it.
"Hey, Harath," I said in the cockpit of the salvage ship.
He grunted, which was about as much acknowledgment as I was probably going to get from him on something like this.
"Is it possible for us to do a custom paint job on the ship I'm tooling around in?"
"It is," Harath said.
"We are definitely going to have to do something like that. I'm not sure what I want to put on it, but I think we could come up with something pretty cool."
I paused for a moment. I could feel an odd mix of emotions coming through the battle link from Varis. I turned to look at her.
"If that's okay with the general, of course," I added at the last minute, realizing I probably should’ve asked her for permission before I started commandeering her stuff.
"You are my general consort," she said with a slight smile and a nod. "If you want to add a bitchin' paint job to one of the ships you've commandeered, then you're welcome to it. It's not like we ever got a lot of use out of those things anyway."
"Oh can I think of some uses for this baby," I said, grinning as I took in all of the information coming in from the sensor suites all around the thing.
I'd moved into an escort pattern around a small fleet of salvage ships that had come down from the carrier to help us take care of all the mining bees. Meanwhile, Sera had been able to capture the pod, and it was now floating in a tractor beam under the ship. Though far enough away that if there was a self-destruct mechanism or some other surprise on that thing then it wasn’t going to do direct damage to the ship.
I blinked as I realized where she’d put it, glancing at the sensors coming in through the salvage ship.
“Why did you put the alien escape pod there?” I asked.
She looked up at me. Again, there was a brief flicker of that questioning. Like she wasn’t quite as sure of her reasoning for putting it there as she wanted to let on, but then she took a deep breath and I could see the carbon fiber moving up and down her spine.
It was a look that made me proud of the kid. It meant she was learning. It also meant she had the kind of backbone that was going to make her a terror in livisk society someday.
Assuming I could help to build a livisk society that’d still be here when she grew up. Assuming we could make that livisk society a place where she’d be able to thrive.
Then again, the kind of kid who had a noble pedigree, even if it was via an adoption we hadn’t even finalized, and had no problem going in and mixing it up in combat, might be precisely the kind of kid who had success ahead of them considering everything happening in the Livisk Ascendancy at the moment.
That tempered my exultation at everything that was happening. It was a reminder that everything we were doing here was creating more conflict in the Ascendancy, for all that I had to tell myself the conflict we were creating was in the name of creating a society that was a little better for everyone in the broader Livisk Ascendancy.
Not to mention the livisk’s neighbors. What we were working towards had to be better than it was right now under the empress. Then again, wasn’t that what every revolutionary asshole in the history of history told themselves?
“I was worried there might be a self-destruct mechanism or some other sort of weapon we weren’t aware of on that ship, and I wanted to make sure it was far enough away that it wouldn’t be able to do too much damage if it went off,” Sera said.
“You don’t trust your shielding and armor to do that?” I asked.
“Shielding and armor are all well and good,” she said, her chin moving up just a bit. “But shielding and armor won’t protect you against something you don’t know you need to protect yourself against.”
“Good work, kid,” I said, reaching out and patting her on the shoulder. “Knowing what you don’t know is one of the principles of contact with the enemy you always need to keep in mind, and you managed to come up with it all on your own.”
The kid sat up a little straighter as I said that. She beamed at me, and I was hit with that overwhelming sense of pride again. A sense of pride that went beyond anything I’d ever felt for anything I’d ever accomplished for myself.
It really was like a drug, watching the kid learning how to do things and navigate the world on her own. It made me want to teach her more. Help her to learn stuff that would turn her into that holy terror that might bring down an empress someday.
Assuming we failed.
“Thank you,” she said, nodding to me.
“Now let’s go ahead and get up into orbit,” I said, checking the sensor sweep from the far bigger and more sensitive sensors on my own ship. It showed me we were heading into a weather pattern that would be nasty. It was the kind of thing our ships would be able to navigate with no problem with shields, armor, and antigrav, but I wasn’t quite as sure about the escape pod that was only attached to the salvage ship via a grappling hook and tractor beam.
“On it,” Sera said, and she moved the control stick and punched the antigrav to send us moving up and out.
I kept a wary eye on the mining bees. Supposedly they were all well under control and wouldn’t be able to cause any more trouble, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t been surprised in the past. I wanted to minimize as many surprises as possible, which meant keeping an eye on them and making sure they didn’t try any more bullshit.
Only they all stayed firmly lodged in the tractor beams they were trapped in. All their ships had been disabled by the modified EMP I sent at them. The only direction any of them would move in if they did manage to break free was down, and I didn’t think any of them but the second cousin by marriage was so eager to die here today.
"Well, okay then," I said, clapping my hands together in the salvage ship, which had everybody jumping.
"Okay, then?” Varis asked.
"It looks like we've got everything in hand with taking care of the people who were attacking us, and it looks like we've got everything in hand when it comes to capturing that alien. So now we need to take an opportunity to go up to that mining facility and teach them a lesson about what a monumentally bad idea it is for them to try and take us on after we were nice enough to save them from the alien invasion force in the first place."
"What are you going to do, Bill?" Sera asked, looking up at me with wide eyes.
"We’re going to teach them a lesson about sending out a bunch of stupid mining drones to attack us. Though it's not even the mining drones attacking us that's the main problem. What do you think the main problem is?"
I figured I could turn this into a teachable moment. I was really starting to get addicted to teachable moments with the kid. She thought about it for a moment.
"The main problem is that they attacked us after we already saved them from the aliens," she said. "That was dishonorable."
"Precisely," I said, holding a finger up as I gave the lesson. "But that brings us to an important thing you need to keep in mind. We don't care about what's honorable or dishonorable."
She blinked. That was clearly a new line of thinking for her.
"We don’t?”
"No, we don't," I said.
I could feel some tension from the rest of the cockpit as I imparted this particular lesson, but if she was going to be my adopted kid then I was going to teach her how to fight sneaky, dirty, and underhanded like humans did. Which is how we'd managed to fight the Livisk Ascendancy to a standstill to begin with.
"No, we're going to do this because it sends a message," I said. "Maybe it’s dishonorable, but the thing I care about more is that word gets out that if somebody tries to cross house t’Thal, then there are going to be consequences."
"Oh," she said, and then she grinned. "Well, that is the honorable thing to do as well. If somebody is stupid enough to try and bring dishonor to you, then nobody is going to think less of you for teaching them a lesson."
"Oh," I said, blinking a couple of times. "Well then. I suppose we're defending our honor if that's how this works."
"That's exactly how it works," she said.
"You're not going to be able to participate in this if you're in this salvage ship, though," I said. "We could transfer everyone over to my new ship and go on the bombing run from there."
"No way," she said.
I blinked. I figured the prospect of going up and mixing it up or getting to blow some things up would be the sort of thing that had her jumping at the opportunity, but she was looking at me with defiance.
"You don't want to go up there and help me blow up parts of the mining facility?" I asked.
"It's not that I don't want to help you blow up the mining facility," she said. "It's just that I want to keep an eye on the escape pod I captured. I don't want anyone else to have anything to do with it. This is my project."
"That's very true," I said, and I felt like I was really getting onto a roll here with trying to impart wisdom to the kid. “But at the same time, one of the lessons you have to learn if you're going to be involved in command in any capacity is that you have to be able to pass things off to other people who are more capable than you. We're going to have to put that into a quarantine and run scans on it, and have the eggheads try and figure out exactly what's going on."
"Eggheads?" she asked.
"You know. The nerds."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Slang can be a problem in translation, Bill," Varis reminded me with a quiet whisper.
"Right. The science people," I said. “Though I suppose the science people are new enough at their jobs that they might not even consider themselves to be science people, but whatever. The point is, we need to hand this over to them so they can do their thing.”
"I don't care," she said. "I'm going to follow this through, and I want to be there when they open it up so that whatever's inside can look the person who captured them in the face."
I grinned. "Okay, I suppose that's something I can get behind, but we still need to go up to the mining facility and teach them a lesson."
"But isn't that the kind of thing I could help you with remotely here from the salvage ship cockpit?" she said. "You don't have to be right over the moon to destroy the mining facility. You just have to be able to connect to the ship. That’s what you’re doing, after all.”
I grinned. "Yeah, I suppose that's true. We could do this whole thing in a work-from-home setup."
"Good," she said, grinning as she took the salvage ship up on a course out of the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the small flotilla of other salvage ships we'd used to capture the mining bees also started to move up and out of the gas giant's atmosphere. It was a good time to do that, because a nasty storm was whipping up around us.
Meanwhile, I took my new ship and started on a course for the moon and the mining facility on it. It was time to teach them a lesson about double-crossing people who were nice enough to come in and save their asses.
Posted Sep 17, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC