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“Being tainted.”
“Oh,” I said. “I mean, the decontamination sure wasn’t fun.”
“Being tainted is fun though, I take it?”
I tried not to smile, but Hypatia smiled for me.
“I thought you were going to be angry with me.” I said, “and mean.”
“I’ve been High Command for less than twelve hours, Weapons. They can’t make me into a frigid bitch quite so quickly. They’re trying though. They’ve got me on a tight leash.”
“So they actually agreed to let Kaav on-board? That wasn’t just your call”
Her smile lost most of its shine when I mentioned Kaav.
“Yeah,” she said, “they insisted.”
“Who istheyexactly? Emissary Eve got tainted in seconds. You said they’re replacing all of High Command with lesbians? Did they already have gay women embedded in High Command, or—”
“The highest ranking non-lesbian women have been hermetically sealed somewhere on Eden. I don’t even know how they are getting orders in and out of there, but it’s something very low-tech. Something the Khetar Hive Mind can’t hack into.”
“Yet,” I said.
Hypatia bit her lip. “The Hive Mind is really that powerful?”
I nodded. “I’ll be very straight with you, Chef. You were straight with me, and more importantly, you were a really good friend to me when I needed it. I’ll return that courtesy as best as I’m able. Based on everything I’ve seen and felt, I truly believe that there is no hope in resisting the Khetar. We have no weapons to fight the taint.”
“Kaav told me they can’t forcibly breed. We could just tell them to go back to wherever they came from.”
“They won’t just leave if High Command asks them to. They’ll only leave if every individual woman on Eden refused them. They’re very…democratic when it comes to this stuff.”
“I see,” Chef said. Her shoulders sagged, and she sighed. She must have already seen enough data to know that the likelihood of such a large-scale refusal was somewhere around zero percent.
I told her as much useful information as I could. Particularly the part where Thuliak had mentioned that usually species the Khetar wanted to breed with would broker deals and get something in exchange for “breeding rights” with the planet’s females.
“So,” Chef said, “if we can get the women of Eden to not be hopeless virgins who are tainted in fractions of a second, we might be able to get some Khetar table scraps out of the whole thing? As a start, do you think you could get Thuliak to stop sending these ridiculous holos down into our cities?”
“Can I see the holos?”
She scowled at me. Despite all my recent experiences, I still hadn’t seen what it looked like when a Khetar dingdong shot out its seed.
“You may not,” she said, crossing her arms.
“I’m already tainted!”
“I don’t have footage on the ship. High Command is doing everything it can to contain the spread of those holos. Women in Ginsburg aren’t even allowed to leave their houses.”
“And how’s that working out?”
“Thuliak is just making the holos larger, so that you can see the big teal dingdongs clearly from your windows. High Command began boarding up windows in response, but women are still being tainted by the thousands.”
“It’s a losing battle,” I said.
“So what are you offering us then? If it’s hopeless and nothing can stop it, what do you suggest we do? Do you think you could convince one of these packships to wipe out the pirates? If it’s really so hopeless, one packship could probably take out their whole fleet, right?”
“I’ll ask Kaav about that.”
“I’m not letting him out of the airlock.”
