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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/daecrist on 2026-03-23 17:31:24+00:00.
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The light jab hung in between us for a long moment. Olsen was still blushing just a little, but then he stood tall. He seemed to take control of himself, which was something he seemed to be doing a lot lately.
I didn't feel like I had much to do with it, other than showing up at the reclamation mine and straight up killing an overseer who made it clear she was going to make life hell for my people. But still, I was proud of the kid.
Considering who his father was and where he grew up, I got the feeling he didn't get a lot of people who acted like they were proud of him. Or maybe that was me projecting. Trying to tell myself that the fabulously wealthy were missing something important in life, when in reality? They had everything. Including a shitload of money.
I didn't know a lot about how his family lived, but it seemed like he fit in down here in the Undercity and the lower levels of Imperial Seat just fine, for all that he'd been brought up in the highest echelons of Terran society. It was an interesting juxtaposition.
He took a step forward. The Spider came with him, and now there was none of that blushing. He was nothing but confidence.
"We've taken control of the detention center, Captain," he said, sketching a quick salute. Which earned him a frown from the Spider, but that was fine.
It was probably going to take some getting used to, the idea that she was now attached to a human who was part of a chain of command. Or that our chain of command had been screwed with pretty thoroughly the moment Varis showed up at the edge of the Sol system and took all of us captive.
"The whole detention center?" I asked, my eyebrows shooting up.
I looked over to the thing. An overlay showed me all the damage that had been done to the place. Not that I needed an overlay to show me the damage. We're talking there were great, gaping holes in it where it’d been hit with munitions during the fighting.
“Looks like the Imperials didn't bother to try and keep their firing under control when they were going to town on that thing,” I said.
“Not at all, Captain." Olsen said, "I've taken the liberty of going through the records in the Imperial systems in there. I had to employ some help from the Combat Intelligence, but we were able to find and separate the political prisoners from the violent criminals, though..."
He frowned slightly as he looked down at a tablet in his hand. I blinked. I hadn't even realized he'd been holding the thing. Maybe he pulled it out of his pocket while I was distracted by his disheveled state.
The very idea of holding a tablet in your hand to get information seemed rather quaint to me now, considering I'd been spending so much time looking at the big board in the simulation. It was yet another reminder that I was something of a special case because I was willing to do potentially monumentally stupid things in the aim of winning a fight.
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"There's a subset of prisoners who are both political prisoners and also have violent records."
"What kind of violent records are we talking about? Arvie, could you pull that up so I can have a look at it?"
Arvie did just that. The big board was suddenly filled with a bunch of livisk faces. Some of them looked downright cheery. Others looked like what I would expect from a bunch of violent political dissidents. The point was, it wasn't exactly what I expected.
"I see," I said, zooming in on some of their records.
There was an older woman whose only crime seemed to be that she swore something by the empress about her trash service being late, and the empress’s representatives down on the ground had taken exception to their dear leader’s name being uttered in the same breath as the thought of garbage and garbage collection.
Then there were others who were a little more hardened. There was one warrior who'd been working for one of the major houses: Rekath. I’d seen in some of my chats with the Arvie shard in my man cave, but they hadn't entered into any of my planning yet.
This guy had been a soldier for them, and apparently he'd blown up a couple of low-level Imperial stations that had been causing trouble at the edge of his noble's territory. And apparently House Rekath didn’t have enough influence to save him from getting thrown in prison for a decade.
I moved through the records. It was an interesting mix of people who got thrown into the slammer for something as silly as saying they didn't approve of something the empress did all the way to somebody who'd been caught trying to get ahold of a nuclear weapon so they could put it under the Imperial Palace in the Undercity and give the empress a fireworks show she wouldn’t forget for her Dilithium Jubilee.
Or maybe she would forget it right away. After all, having a nuke going on right under you was the kind of thing that tended to destroy a person faster than the neurons in their brain could process what was happening.
"These people are all very interesting," I said, chuckling and shaking my head. "I think we're going to want to go through all of these, and we're going to want to put them to work."
I pulled out of the simulation. I'd entered into a weird headspace, literally, where I could see what was going on in reality right in front of me while at the same time seeing what was going on in the simulation. It was a bit of multitasking, but felt like true multitasking.
For all that I knew from my training that the idea of true multitasking was so much bullshit. The best a human brain could do was rapidly focus in between two things, but it usually made that focus worse.
"Excuse me, sir?” Olsen said, staring at me with an odd look.
"Did I do something wrong?" I asked.
"You didn't even look at my tablet," he said.
He looked down. I looked down. Olsen had been holding out his tablet for me to have a look at the records.
I tried to think about how that looked from his perspective. I'd stared off into nothing and started talking about the prisoners. It probably looked like I'd lost my mind from his perspective.
"Ah, right," I said. "I'm dealing with a thing right now. I'll tell you more about it later. Rest assured I did review your reports.”
“All of them?” he asked.
I hit him with a look. I felt like I was doing something wrong here. “Yes. Is there something wrong with that?”
“There were thousands,” he said. “It was a large detention center.”
“Ah, yes, well. Like I said. I’m dealing with a thing. No time to talk about it now,” I said.
He hit me with an odd look, but he didn't press the matter. That was just fine with me.
He had been gone when we went through a lot of the Badass Chip stuff. That’s what I was calling it. The Badass Chip, because it made me a total badass. Once Arvie figured out how to make it work without destroying my brain.
"So you want to put these people to work?" he asked.
"If somebody is willing to fight the empress, then we can try to find some way to constructively manage that impulse," I said. “And if it turns out they're too much of a loose cannon, then we'll cut them loose."
"Is that advisable?" the Spider said, taking a step forward. "If we were to cut somebody loose with the kind of criminal records some of these people have, then we might have to worry about them attacking the empress on their own."
"Which is just peachy keen as far as I'm concerned," I said. "Let them deal with worrying about a lone wolf attack coming from everywhere or nowhere all at once."
"But..."
I held up a hand and cut off the Spider before she could continue that thought.
"We already had a version of this talk earlier when we were meeting in your little lair," I said. "You have to ask yourself if you want to continue living your life under Imperial Seat in the shadows, or do you want to take a chance to live on your feet and defy the empress who perpetuates the system that put you in this situation in the first place?"
The Spider glared daggers at me. It was an interesting sort of look. That little speech was the kind of thing that would’ve been inspiring if this was a movie. Of course, this wasn't a movie.
Maybe it would be an inspiring speech eventually. Assuming we ever got to the point where livisk society embraced what I was trying to start here. But more likely this would just be a footnote that would be forgotten as soon as everybody who was involved in this moment was executed for the crime of defying the empress.
I had no doubt that's exactly where all of this was going if I couldn't keep balancing all the plates I had spinning up above my head. If the empress was willing to throw an old grandmother into the slammer because she swore by the empress that the trash service was late, then I had no doubt she had far more terrifying things in store for us if she could ever get one of us alone without Varis’s forces backing us up.
“Defying the empress just feels wrong," the Spider finally said.
"Tell me about it," Varis said, letting out a sigh.
I looked between the two of them. I was about to say something, but a quick emotion from Varis told me I needed to shut...
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