"So, a prince consort is on the way," Varis said, frowning down at the woman I'd so recently liberated of her brains via a low-yield plasma shot that bounced around inside her skull.

It was always freaky when someone's eyes and ears and other orifices glowed because of a plasma bolt bouncing around in there. At the same time I didn't want to go high yield and risk hurting Varis who was standing right behind her.

Besides, it was the most convenient way of killing her quickly. I might need to take somebody out, but I didn't want to be an inhumane bastard, or whatever the livisk equivalent of being inhumane was. The point was, I didn't want my enemies to suffer.

They still had to die, but I didn't want them to suffer while they were dying. Even if thinking about all of them trying to kill me was enough to make me want them to suffer just a little.

Damn, I really had to watch this whole bloodthirsty thing.

"Bill."

I blinked and looked at Varis. She was breathing just a little heavily. She locked eyes with me, and it was an intense look. Like we're talking it was the kind of look I hadn't gotten from her since we were in the decontamination chamber trying to take care of all the radiation we'd absorbed because the empress dropped a fucking nuke on top of one of her outlying fortress buildings, and then I was stupid enough to go in there and rescue her people and take care of a prince consort while I was at it.

And as I stared at her staring at me, suddenly I was starting to put two and two together.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Is this shit turning you on?"

She bit her lip. I felt the feedback from the link, and I realized it was feedback that was hitting me as well. It could get dangerous when that shit was bouncing back and forth between the two of us. It's a self-reinforcing thing that had both of us acting like a couple of horny teenagers who were just discovering how our parts worked for the first time, and we couldn't wait to try it out on each other.

I blinked, and I took a step back and away from her. It was the only thing I could think to do. It was dangerous being so close to her when we got like this. Especially considering where we were.

Her chest was rising and falling, and her mouth was wide open. She'd taken a step towards me. Her hands flexed like she was thinking of grabbing me.

I could feel the desire pulsing inside her. Which was a nice feeling. Don't get me wrong. A guy could get used to having a beautiful blue-skinned sparkling woman staring at him and having that kind of feeling coming through the inadvertent psychic link he'd created with her not realizing what he was doing taking her on in single power armor combat in the halls of a ship that was currently being overrun by a bunch of asshole livisk warriors.

Yeah, when I thought about it like that, it had really been a walk to get from where we started to where we were now.

She blinked and shook her head when I took that step back and away from her. When she looked at me a second time, there was still that desire there, but she also sort of had it under control. Maybe.

"I'm sorry," she finally said. "I need to keep it in my pants."

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Isn't that how you humans phrase it? I need to keep it in my pants?"

"Yeah, that's exactly how humans phrase it. I'm just surprised to hear that turn of phrase from you."

I couldn't remember using that particular turn of phrase in front of her, and I'd been a big fan of using human colorful metaphors in front of her. The same as she'd taught me some interesting colorful metaphors in Livisk that definitely hadn't been covered in any of the language classes I took when I was at the academy.

I looked off towards the reclamation mine again.

"I need to find my crew. I need to make sure they're okay."

"Yes, we do need to do something about this," she said.

"The last thing I want is for them to be taken captive by the stupid empress right when I was on the verge of liberating them. Damn it."

"Exactly," she said.

I turned in the opposite direction for a moment. I squinted as I stared off into the distance away from the imperial palace.

The palace was at the center of everything in Imperial Seat. There were even laws that stated buildings had to be equidistant from the imperial palace, and if things started to get built up too much on one side of Imperial Seat then the livisk had to start building on the other side so the city maintained a perfect circle shape around the palace.

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More or less. It was impossible to do it perfectly. There'd been at least one empress about three hundred years ago who'd tried for that perfection via executing a bunch of people who didn't get it quite right, and it had resulted in her ending her reign about eight inches shorter than she'd started it.

None of the empresses since had bothered being so strict about those laws since they didn't want to pull a Charles I with their own reign.

"What's wrong?" Varis asked, moving up next to me. She also stared off into the distance, but I felt mostly interest coming through the link, not the confusion that would come from her seeing what I thought I saw.

"I thought I saw something sparkling."

There was a time when I might've tried to keep it to myself. When I would've figured I was just imagining things. But I'd learned the hard way that it was important for me to have nothing but radical honesty with my smokin' hot alien girlfriend. And so I was going to be honest with her about what I saw down here.

Even if I might be going crazy.

Besides, there was always the possibility I wasn't going crazy and there was something dangerous lurking down here she might know about. It wouldn't do for us to get killed because I kept something important to myself.

The "I told you so" she'd hit me with right before we died a painful death definitely wasn't worth it.

"I thought I saw lights twinkling off in the distance," I said, staring off in the direction where I'd seen that twinkling light. Though now that I was looking out there and not seeing anything, I seriously wondered if my mind was making things up. Filling in the gaps in the darkness.

Varis also stared off in that direction for a long moment. I could feel her studying that distance. There was a strange neutral feel to the link. Then she shook her head and looked down at me with a faint smile.

"There are many things going on at different levels of the Undercity," she said with a shrug. "And most of them don't have anything to do with the politics of the empress or anybody trying to make life difficult for a human captain who's been kidnapped by an alien general."

"Yeah, I keep forgetting there's a whole city, a whole empire out there, full of people who are just living their lives and trying to ignore the nobility as much as possible," I muttered, still looking off in the distance.

It was good to be reminded of that from time to time. That there were so many people in the Livisk Ascendancy who were in the same situation as so many downtrodden people in human space. Livisk who were just trying to live their lives, and they didn't care who the empress was.

It was sort of like the voter apathy problem that had been endemic to humanity and democracy and republics and all that good stuff for so long. People didn't ever see anything change, and so they were apathetic at best about their power to change things.

It was similar here in the Livisk Ascendancy, with the big difference being the nobles and the empress were the ones who squabbled and fought each other in wars that occasionally went hot instead of bitching at each other on social media and feeling like they'd accomplished something without doing anything.

Though the social media thing was probably a little better considering human capitals weren't nuked regular enough to create a multi-layered Undercity beneath them.

Still, for the average livisk? If they just kept their heads down and tried to live life, there was a good chance they could go that entire life without catching the interest of the empress or the nobility.

It was a shit system, the same as it was a shit system back in human space, but it was the system that was in place.

I shook my head and turned back to Varis, and then I looked at the dead livisk all around us.

"Come on," I said. "We need to get to the mine."

"So you're not worried about whatever's out there?" she asked.

"Should I be?" I asked.

"It just seems like the sort of thing you'd fixate on," she said. "Especially when I've told you there's nothing to worry about."

"Well, I don't mean to toot my own horn or anything," I said. "But we are a livisk battle pair, and I figure that has to be good for something. And I have managed to kill everything that's come at us down here. The same as I've managed to kill everything the empress has sent at us."

"I seem to recall that I was the one who did a lot of the killing in both cases tonight," she said, sounding a little wounded that I was downplaying her own contributions.

"And I appreciate it," I said. "I always know you'll come for me."

"And I always know you'll come for me," she said, leaning in and hitting me with a kiss.

A kiss that was quickly turning into a problem. Remember all that stuff I said earlier about how we had a feedback loop thing going because of the link? How our horniness for each other could bounce around inside our heads until the two of us were willing to get down and dirty even though we were most likely being hunted by the empress's forces?

Yeah, the longer that kiss went on, the more that became a very real danger. The lust bounced back and forth, and finally I had to put a hand up against her. Which didn't help things all that much, because I put that hand up against a particular part of her anatomy that was electric to my touch. Even if she was wearing a breastplate to cover them.

I stepped away, and she did the same. She looked at me for a long moment and let out a low growl. I worried this was happening whether or not she was worried about rolling around in a bunch of livisk blood and the grease that was left over from the reclamation mine. I hoped this might be happening despite her worries.

But then she blinked, and the desire cleared from her face. Even if it didn't quite clear from the link.

"Let's move," she finally said, and we turned and headed towards the reclamation mine again. Though we didn't have far to walk before we came across even more bodies.

I paused, holding my hand up, and both of us moved forward slowly. We both had our weapons out this time. I had my sword in my right hand and my plasma pistol in my left hand. I was thankful that me and my friends had played shooting games when we were kids that involved seeing who could make the most shots with their non-dominant hand.

Talk about something that felt like fun in a game back in the day but it was providing training without me realizing that's what was going on. Come to think of it, there were a lot of video games like that in human space.

It was a good thing I was ambidextrous with plasma pistols. I was many things, but the man in black I wasn't when it came to swords. I was hopeless left-handed.

I approached the bodies with caution, keeping both weapons out. I still had my plasma sword out, but unlit for now. I could flip it on in an instant if I needed to, and in the meantime that glow would be like a signal fire declaring to the whole dark Undercity that there were people with plasma swords walking around. The closer we got to the reclamation mine, the more dangerous that prospect became.

Then we reached the bodies. They were all livisk, and I realized they were familiar.

"Oh hey. It's the first group of assholes you killed!"

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