"Fire in the hole."
"Tell Corvus that he can have his railgun prototype back after I am done with it."
It was not a particularly dark day when those words were uttered. Rorak 5 had been quiet for some time now. The station had once possessed the particular nervous energy common to places where criminals, mercenaries, smugglers, and political undesirables congregated beneath the same leaking roof. Now, however, most of the galaxy's criminal elements seemed to have lost their appetite. The great syndicates were cautious, the pirates had grown complacent petty tyrants hid behind treaties, respectable titles, and respectable friends. Even violence had become terribly bureaucratic.
But to call the day bright and cheerful would have been an equally considerable fallacy.
Virelia rarely experienced happiness in any conventional sense. Happiness was such a fragile little emotion, dependent upon circumstance, validation, comfort, things she had long ago learned to regard with contempt. Pity was worse. Pity demanded that suffering possess some intrinsic tragedy, that pain was an aberration from the natural order rather than one of its purest expressions.
She had moved beyond such things. Satisfaction, however, remained.
And there were few satisfactions quite so exquisite as bringing undue suffering to another creature simply to feel that familiar, cold passion stir somewhere deep inside her. It was indulgent. Wasteful, perhaps. Almost certainly unnecessary, but that was precisely why she enjoyed it.
So when word reached her that some half-time pirate had managed to acquire a prototype railgun considerably above his mortal calibre, Virelia could hardly resist the temptation. The weapon itself interested her, certainly, but novelty was a terribly seductive thing when one had lived long enough to watch entire generations repeat the same mistakes while believing themselves original.
Besides, who better than the Tyrant Queen to command such an interesting little device for an evening's hunt? Many people, probably. But they did not currently have the prototype railgun.
She did.
"You ain't paying for it, so I see no good reason as why ye should keep it!"
The pirate puffed himself up as he spoke, shoulders broadening beneath a battered coat as adrenaline hurried dutifully into muscles that had suddenly discovered courage. His fingers flexed toward the weapon at his hip. His jaw tightened. Perhaps somewhere inside that frantic little mortal mind, a fantasy was already constructing itself: the sudden draw, the perfect shot, the impossible victory.
Virelia watched him with six patient eyes.
The man's hand never reached his weapon. Something invisible curled around his throat. At first, his expression was almost amusingly confused. His fingers went to his neck as though he expected to find a rope there. Then came the understanding. His eyes widened. His mouth opened, but whatever threat he had intended to make emerged only as a strangled gasp.
Virelia tilted her head.
She had always enjoyed choking people. There was an intimacy to it that more conventional methods lacked. A blade was over too quickly. A firearm reduced murder to a simple procedure. But strangulation allowed a person to understand what was happening to them. It gave them precious seconds in which to bargain privately with whatever gods they had spent their lives pretending to believe in.
His boots scraped desperately against the deck. His hands clawed at empty air.
Virelia's smile widened by the smallest degree.
"Go on."
He struggled harder.
"That's better."
There was something strangely beautiful about the moment instinct conquered dignity, for beneath enough pressure, emperors and beggars made precisely the same sound. For several delicious seconds, she allowed him to fight.
Then she grew bored. The invisible pressure tightened. There was a sharp, unpleasant sound.
Virelia watched him collapse with mild disappointment. She enjoyed the struggle, certainly, but there was another pleasure in the instant when life simply stopped—when the invisible energies binding consciousness to flesh were severed and something that had possessed ambitions, grudges, lovers, enemies, debts, memories, and plans for tomorrow abruptly became an object, and sometimes, if one knew how to reach into that delicate transition, nourishment.
She breathed slowly through her nose, the sensation passed through her like warm liquor.
"Mm."
Her attention returned to the railgun. The weapon was an inelegant prototype, all exposed magnetic assemblies and reinforced housing, its manufacturer apparently subscribing to the charming philosophy that anything requiring warning labels probably needed more power. Virelia turned it over in her hands, examining the mechanisms with considerably more affection than she had afforded its previous owner.
A diagnostic flickered across the weapon's display. She adjusted the output, then adjusted it again. There were limits, destroying Rorak 5 merely to kill a handful of pirates would have been embarrassingly gauche.
Footsteps thundered beyond the doorway. Virelia sighed.
"Always more."
The first man through the door managed perhaps half a second of comprehension. The railgun cracked. There was simply a violent displacement of atmosphere and a brutal metallic shriek as the projectile crossed the chamber faster than mortal reflexes could meaningfully comprehend. The second had enough time to raise his weapon. Another crack. His body struck the durasteel behind him with such force that the wall itself seemed briefly offended.
Smoke curled lazily through the chamber.
Virelia lowered the weapon.
"A pity."
Those were all the words she could muster for the dead beneath her feet. Her mind had already moved elsewhere.
There were still so many enemies scattered wastefully across the galaxy. People protected by titles. People protected by institutions. People suckling greedily at the teat of nepotism while congratulating themselves upon their own merit. They hurled moral proclamations at their enemies and dressed ambition in prettier words: justice, necessity, order, liberation.
Virelia had always found morality most entertaining when spoken by powerful people.
They never said, I wanted this. They said, It had to be done. They never admitted, I enjoyed destroying them. They said, There was no alternative.
How frightened they were of their own appetites.
Virelia stepped over the pirate's corpse, the railgun resting comfortably against her shoulder. At least she possessed the courtesy of knowing exactly what she was. There was no grand cause hidden beneath her cruelty, no sacred mandate, no desperate insistence that history would absolve her. She did not require history's absolution. No, not anymore...
She wanted. Therefore, she acted. It was beautiful.
Through the observation glass beyond the chamber, the galaxy stretched outward in glittering obscurity. Countless stars burned in the distance, each perhaps illuminating another civilisation convinced that its institutions were permanent, its rulers indispensable, its morality universal.
She approached the glass. For a while, she merely stared. The reflection staring back was unmistakable: six eyes gleaming faintly against the darkness, the silhouette of the stolen weapon resting against her frame, and that subtle expression of amusement which so often preceded somebody else's catastrophe.
Perhaps the galaxy had become too comfortable. Perhaps everyone had mistaken stagnation for peace. Perhaps all those little factions and governments, sitting comfortably within the architecture of their alliances and bloodlines, needed reminding that stability was not a law of nature. It was merely an arrangement, and arrangements could be altered.
Virelia ran one finger slowly along the railgun's housing.
A little adjustment here. A whispered rumour there. One assassination performed at precisely the wrong moment. One secret delivered to precisely the right person. One frightened ruler persuaded that his neighbour intended betrayal. One weapon placed into hands too ambitious to understand why it had been given to them. Nothing vulgar nor immediate. Just pressure.
A tiny alteration to the machinery of history. A little turn of the knob.
