[Preview]Renegade Ravager Vol. 3 -- Chapter 2

Chapter 2 – 01738.083 AA

“You laid it on way too thick,” Elspeth told Aggy. “A new golden age? Seriously?”

A second later the albino’s head snapped back as Iuno punched her.

“Too slow!” the légionnaire taunted. “You’ve got to keep your hands up and your head on a swivel!”

To her credit, the albino engineer didn’t complain. She just wiped the blood from her nose and then raised her fists.

We were back in the gym a week after capturing the black ops ships. It was our first chance to get together and catch up.

After seizing our spoils, we had returned to the Albrecht System. It was a desolate stretch of space along the edges of the Hegemony’s territory. Technically, Vermin Ventures, Elspeth’s company, owned the entire region of space. It was one of the prizes she had received after we had defeated the Diaspora Circus and slaughtered its guests.

As soon as we had met, Iuno had insisted on climbing into the sparring ring with Elspeth. She wanted to continue the young woman’s training in close-quarters combat.

Elspeth had been eager at first to show off her hard-won wisdom, but Iuno was steadily beating the confidence out of her.

“Iuno favors her right side, watch for her jabs!” Aggy said.

Iuno backed up and gave the former empress an exasperated look. “Who’s side are you on?”

“Mine,” I answered. “And she’s right, Iuno. I remember the instructors back in the legion used to give you the same shit. Learn to throw a left hook!”

Elspeth raised her fists. “Come on, let’s go.”

Iuno grinned widely. “I knew I liked you for a reason!”

She was far taller than Elspeth, and she possessed a much longer reach. And while Elspeth fought with scrappy resolve, Iuno was a trained killer who had fought and bled all across the Milky Way Galaxy.

And she only held back enough to keep from outright killing her pupil. Otherwise, she considered everything fair game.

Iuno had once told me she had killed her first man at only eight years old. I believed her.

Ducking in low, Elspeth delivered what would be a crippling kidney blow against any other foe. Iuno just shrugged off the attack and brought her elbow down against the back of her opponent’s skull. Elspeth went down like a bag of nutrient paste.

“Good!” Iuno grinned and then bent down to help the other woman up. “I think that’s the first clean hit you managed to land against me!”

“Clean?” Elspeth said woozily. “You nearly shattered my skull!”

“Your new skeletal and muscular augmentations are far too rugged to allow for something like that,” Aggy chided her.

“Tell that to my headache,” Elspeth griped.

In truth, it took most légionnaires months to learn how to live with their cybernetic implants and artificial muscle augmentations. Often, there were painful lessons when they tried to move too fast or pushed themselves too hard, resulting in torn muscles and shattered bones. The fact that Elspeth was in the ring with Iuno after only a few weeks was a testament to her character.

Once again I was reminded my harem contained some truly amazing women.

She had insisted on going under the knife and receiving full légionnaire implants after the fall of the Diaspora Circus. With the return of my battle brothers and sister, she did not want to be left behind. She wanted to continue fighting by my side.

Elspeth had always been a survivor. Born an albino, a mutant, she had struggled with stigmatization and abuse growing up in the Republic. After her mother’s death, she had found a position serving on board a scavenger ship, using her engineering talents to keep the bucket of bolts flying.

We had only encountered each other via chance, both of us being stranded on board the same alien anomaly trapped in sub-reality. That had only been a year ago, but by that point, I couldn’t imagine my life without her.

Still ephemeral and pale, Elspeth’s frame rippled with lithe muscles, the result of hard work and surgical enhancement. Her ruby-red eyes, which had always sparkled with barely contained brilliance, had a harder edge to them. She kept her hair long, but she had learned to tie it back while sparring with Iuno. The légionnaire had made it clear she was happy to fight dirty, especially if it helped keep her student alive when we entered the battlefield.

“Come on, one more round,” Iuno said. “If you land a clean hit, I’ll tell you about the time James got drunk and lost on shore leave!”

We left the two women to continue sparring while Aggy and I went to check on Josefine.

The Yord woman was next door, in a muster ground we had constructed. The one thing the Liens Lumineux had in abundance was extra space. Even with the skeleton crew we had rescued from the Diaspora Circus, the cavernous ship still felt mostly empty. It was designed for a crew of thousands; we had barely rescued forty from the bloody arena of Xiphon-8.

Even with our newest recruits, we still needed to depend on drones and automatons to carry out many of the day-to-day duties. It had been Josefine’s idea to train her horde to help fill the gap.

We found her standing on a catwalk above the muster grounds. Below, hundreds of Yord workers practiced ship maintenance and repair using simulated equipment.

Josefine was a hybrid, half human, half Yord. Her most striking feature was her four eyes, one set aligned atop the other. Pink, pebbly skin and black and yellow chitin ran along her limbs, and her hair was a mess of thick, purple tendrils, far thicker than human locks.

She was inhuman but stunning, a perfect blend of the best of both species.

“Not like that!” she yelled, pointing to a group of workers attempting to lift an arc regulator into place. “The prongs go into the hole! Turn it around!”

Zoto, her constant companion, ran around her feet. He kind of looked like a dog, if someone had assembled him using chitin and insect parts and somehow forgotten to give him eyes. I swore his oversized tongue weighed more than the rest of him combined.

He barked at the workers till they got the part installed correctly.

Josefine sighed as we approached. “I swear, when it comes to biological engineering, my buddies are the undisputed masters, but you give them a puzzle and they’ll jam a square peg in a round hole.”

Aggy and I watched just such a scene unfold as a pair of workers tried to shove a power regulator into the wrong slot. Zoto ran over and nipped at them till they stopped.

“I can only imagine your frustration,” Aggy said dryly, “but I do appreciate your effort. Even if the ship has been fully repaired, we’re still running at less than fifty percent efficiency due to manpower shortages.

Fleets of drones and automatons floated through the flagship’s empty passages, trying to fulfill the duties normally assigned to human sailors. And while they were excellent at routine work, they were consistently slower and less efficient than a living being, especially when dealing with unforeseen circumstances.

Hence Josefine’s efforts to train her Yord to act as our flying crew, replacements for the sailors and engineers responsible for emergency repairs.

Aggy joined the workers, patiently showing the creature how to properly install the part. The workers, who looked like bundles of carved wood and verdant vines, clicked happily once they got the regulator slotted in correctly.

Deep in my heart, I knew I should be horrified by what I was witnessing. The Yord were one of the greatest threats to the universe. Driven by savage hunger, they went from planet to planet, stripping away their biomass to feed their need to propagate and conquer. They would reduce the Milky Way to a barren, lifeless wasteland if the sentient species of the galaxy didn’t stand in their way.

And we were teaching them to use machinery. What could the horde do if they combined their endless, biological adaptability with the power of technology?

Josefine touched my arm. “James?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”

She gave me a small kiss on the cheek. “I said, do you have time tonight to come to the greenhouse?”

It didn’t matter what I had to do or what kind of horrors I had to unleash, I would use every weapon at my disposal to get our revenge. The heavens themselves would bleed for what the Republic had done to my legion, to the Star Ravagers.

I kissed Josefine back. “I’d love to.”

Aggy decided to stay and work with Josefine while I left to continue my rounds. I would have loved to spend more time with my harem, but there were simply not enough hours in the day.

“You’ll join us on the bridge when we scuttle the Esprit de Liberté?” I asked the pair.

Confirming I’d see them later, I popped back into the gym to check on Elspeth and Iuno.

The two of them had given up on sparring. Instead, the légionnaire was guiding Elspeth through drills in her power armor.

“I hate to admit it, but she might be a savant,” Iuno growled as I watched Elspeth scale a climbing wall.

“She has a natural affinity for machinery, even power armor,” I agreed.

Covered in sweat and blood, Iuno was still a captivating sight. She was nearly my height and stature, with a deep, onyx complexion. Her arms were scared, the flesh left like running wax, the same as mine. Those scars were a reminder of what the Republic had done to us when they had stripped us of our names, our achievements, and our honor.

Iuno had let her hair grow out, the long, black hair spilling down to her shoulders, framing her delicate features. Despite her rough and tumble nature, she had a regal face, with a narrow jaw, lush lips, and utterly expressive eyes.

She was a queen, meant to rule over the battlefield.

We locked eyes for a moment.

She licked her lips. “You got any free time this afternoon? Want to spend it with me?”

Iuno and I had slept together before. Back, during our term in the legion, we had been easy bedfellows. There was a natural compatibility between us.

But things were different. I was different.

“Iuno,” I began. “How do you feel about me?”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Really.”

She sighed, some of her lascivious amusement bleeding away. “Hell, you’re –”

There were a lot of terms she could use; battle brother, comrade, friend, lover, savior, but I could see none of them fit.

“You’re James Browning, légionnaire of the Ninety-Second Legion,” she finally answered. “You, me, Victor, and Xarl, we’re the last of the Star Ravagers. The Republic, the Martyred Goddess – or the ideal of her – it was all a lie. They sentenced us to a fate worse than death the moment it became convenient for them. Hells, now we know that the entire Republic is run by a bunch of xeno-worshiping lunatics.”

It wasn’t easy, knowing that the Republic, the cause my brothers and sister had died for, was all a lie. After the fall of Sanctuaire Généreux Deux, our legion had been falsely framed for the planet’s doom. Most of the legion had been executed or doomed to be lobotomized thralls, while I had been sentenced to life imprisonment. Only a lucky accident had set me free and allowed me to meet Aggy.

Iuno, Xarl, and Victor were also sentenced to life in some penal colony. The crooked planetary warden had sold them to a Hegemony arena where they had been doomed to die as gladiators.

I put down the towel and regarded Iuno. “I was. I’m not even sure who I am anymore, but I know what I want. And I do want you, Iuno, but for more than just sex. I want you.”

She paused, focusing on my words.

“Damn,” she muttered. “James, you really know how to put a girl on the spot.

I couldn’t help but laugh, feeling on easier ground. “Maybe, but I’m not going to bullshit you. If you want to be with me, you’ll have to be alright being with us – Elspeth, Aggy, and Josefine.”

I wasn’t looking for a roll in the sac anymore, I was looking for commitment. We were a family, a strange one at that. I still felt myself fumbling at times, I never expected to have a harem, but I was determined to do right by the women I loved.

“Just think about it, I’m not going to rush you,” I told Iuno.

She nodded, a serious expression on her face.