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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/daecrist on 2025-12-17 21:45:49+00:00.
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I stared at the Spider. She stared back at me. She licked her lips. Oh, yes. She was really laying it on thick now.
"If I didn't know any better, I'd almost think you were taking a more than professional interest in Olsen."
"Olsen?" she asked, blinking. For a moment that avarice was gone. That look that she’d love nothing more than to have Olsen all to herself was gone.
"The Terran Fox. It’s his name," I said, waving my hand like it was nothing.
"You shouldn't get on her too much," Varis muttered in my ear. "After all, she would hardly be the first powerful livisk woman to take an interest in a Terran."
I snorted.
"What?" she asked.
"She's powerful compared to you in the same sense a house cat is dangerous compared to a growling tiger."
"What is a tiger?" Varis asked.
"Giant predatory creature. A house cat is the smaller version we keep in our homes. They're very cute and dangerous. Good for taking care of rodents and spiders and other tiny pests. Or just sitting around in sunny spots around the house.”
"We'll have to get one of these predators.”
"I'd be all for it if you are," I said with a shrug.
"Would the two of you please stop doing that?" the Spider snapped, biting off every word.
I blinked and turned my attention back to her. Right. We were supposed to be threatening or getting threatened. I wasn't sure which one it was, to be perfectly honest.
"I'm so sorry," I said. "I was just talking with my lady love here for a moment. I really should be giving this the attention it deserves.”
"Yes. Plenty have heard about you and your lady love, and your antics. It's throwing quite a spanner in the works for me down here to have to deal with you suddenly showing up at a reclamation mine and bringing the empress's attention down on us."
"You don't want the empress's attention?" I asked, taking a step forward. Only one step forward. I could see the shimmer of a shield right in front of me that told me taking more than that one step forward would be a mistake.
For now. I turned to Arvie in the simulation and nodded towards the shield. He nodded back at me in understanding.
"My idea of running a good business down here is hitting the empress in places where she's not necessarily going to notice. The kind of stuff that barely comes to the attention of a low-level functionary who’s running things in this part of the city, let alone the kind of thing that attracts attention from all the way at the very top. Do you have any idea how much attention you've called in from the very top with your antics?"
I made a theatrical display of thinking about it. I tapped a finger against my chin, then I took my hands out and started counting on my fingers like I was trying to do a difficult math problem.
"Is he always this infuriating?" the Spider asked, turning her attention to Varis.
"I'm starting to resent how many times that question gets asked when we have a conversation with someone new," I said.
"Some of the time he can be this infuriating," she said, wrapping her arm around me and giving me a squeeze. "But I find it endearing."
"I'm glad he found someone who finds that sort of behavior endearing, but I would like you to please answer my questions without all of this infuriating back and forth."
"I'm afraid that's not possible," I said with a shrug, giving up the pretense of counting on my fingers to see if I was always this infuriating. "And I'm afraid it's also going to be impossible for me to give up Olsen."
"Aha," the Spider said, holding a finger up and looking like she was having a eureka moment. "So you admit you know the Fox's whereabouts and you refuse to give them up."
"Quite the opposite, actually," I said. "You'll note that I didn't say anything of the sort. I merely said I can't give him up."
"Can't or won't?" she said, frowning. "There's a little problem with your intonation there that I'm having trouble understanding.”
Now it was my turn to frown. "Is there really a problem with my intonation, or are you just saying that in a villainous ‘you'd better change your intonation and tell me what I want to hear’ sort of threat?”
She blinked. “What?”
“Sorry. I'm rather proud of my ability to speak your language, you see," I said. "And I've been getting much better at it. It turns out I'm pretty good at learning an alien tongue when I have the proper motivation.”
"Very good," Varis said from beside me, hitting the Spider with a grin.
And then the Spider did something very odd. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, and her whole body seemed to shiver and shake. I also thought I could see goosebumps rising all along her body as well, though it was hard to tell if that was actually happening or if that was just my imagination. Especially from across the room.
Finally she opened her eyes and stared at me.
"Your language is fine. You're much better at it than most Terrans I've run into. I was simply saying that you need to tell me what I want to hear."
"Yeah, well, that's the problem," I said with another one of those fatalistic shrugs, "because I’d love nothing more than to be able to tell you what you want to hear. Believe me, Olsen was a pain in my ass when he was my subordinate on the Early Warning 72. But I don't know where he is right now, so I couldn't tell you where he is even if I wanted to give him up. Though I'll also add the caveat that I'm not particularly inclined to give him up in the first place, even if I did know where he was. He’s gone from being a pain in my ass to being surprisingly effective since he had his little trial by fire down in that reclamation mine.”
The Spider was looking this way and that and frowning in obvious confusion.
Finally, she turned her attention back to Varis. "Does he do this a lot?"
"Only with people he's trying to irritate," she said. "You should feel honored that he's trying to irritate you. You’re in the same rarefied air as the empress.”
"I don't feel anything of the sort.”
"Look," I said, taking a step forward. I put a hand casually against the shield in front of us. It tingled as I touched it, the same as any shielding unit would tingle if somebody pressed their fingers against it.
That was one of those things everybody had to learn in the Academy. Right along with other super fun things like getting voluntarily gassed because it built character and taught people how to react when they were gassed by the enemy.
Raising your hand to point out to the drill instructors that the livisk aren't actually fans of using any sort of gas weapons and you’d get your ass chewed out with relish and at length, and not in a loving way. Assuming you're into that sort of thing. Ask me how I found that one out the hard way.
I looked up to the Spider. I forced myself to smile, even though I wasn't feeling that smile. I was more irritated than anything.
This whole dog and pony show was wasting valuable time. The last thing I wanted was to be wasting valuable time right now. Not when…
“William, we appear to have a small problem,” Arvie said.
“What is it?” I asked, turning my attention to the simulation and letting things slow down outside.
“I’ve been looking for Selii and her troops, and I believe I’ve found them,” he said, frowning as he stared off into the distance.
“Why do I feel like that’s not a good thing?” I asked.
“Because they’ve been taken captive by Imperials checking the periphery of the reclamation mine explosion, and have been taken to an Imperial detention facility nearby while they await transport to the palace.”
“Shit,” I muttered, turning my attention back to the Spider with a new sense of urgency I didn’t want to show her. That might give her the idea she was the one calling the shots here instead of the other way around.
"Look, I think you're a person who doesn't like bullshit. I know I'm definitely a person who doesn't like bullshit. So maybe we cut through the bullshit."
The Spider frowned as she stared down at me. "What does the offal of a ruminant herd animal have to do with anything?"
I put my fingers up to the bridge of my nose and rubbed. Right. You could be perfect at a language and still get a lost-in-translation moment from time to time because you were talking in idiom that didn't quite make the trip across languages.
"You don't like people blowing smoke up your ass," I said.
"Why would somebody do that recreationally? Do you get high from it or something in Terran space?"
"Actually, there are people who drink alcohol by… y’know what? Never mind. Let's not talk about that. The point is, you're the kind of person who’s direct. You're the kind of person who wants to get stuff done. You're not the kind of person who wants to waste either of our time by playing stupid games."
“That does sound fairly accurate," she said. "It would be a much nicer universe if fewer people spent all of their time deliberately trying to waste my time."
"Tell me about it," I said, rolling my eyes. "So here's what's going to happen. I'm going to make a proposition to you, and you're going to go along with it because you stand to gain quite a bit from it."
...
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