Chapter 17: The Empress's Challenge
The air in the throne room didn’t just hum. It tightened. Like a great, invisible muscle flexing around them.
The Empress’s descent was slow, each step a statement. Her starlight robes seemed to dissolve from the bottom up, melting into wisps of luminance that trailed behind her. What was revealed wasn’t a body, not in any human sense. It was a sculpture of intent, a form shaped from the same iridescent, living metal as the throne, but fluid and impossibly smooth. It had curves, lines, a terrifying semblance of the feminine ideal, but it was cold. A perfect instrument.
Bambi just stood there, thumbs still hooked in her imaginary belt loops, her head cocked. But Essie saw the subtle shift in her stance—the right foot sliding back half an inch, the slight settling of her weight. Earl’s fight-or-flight wiring, recognizing a predator.
“Leave them,” the Empress commanded, her voice now a focused beam of sound aimed solely at Bambi. The marines holding Essie and Jez released them and stepped back, becoming part of the wall.
Jez simply folded to the mirrored floor, sitting with her legs tucked beneath her, watching with the serene, vacant awe of a child at a fireworks show. Essie remained standing, her own golden cuffs now vibrating with a frantic, eager frequency. They were reacting to the concentrated field of… whatever was about to happen. It felt like static electricity dancing on her skin, unbearably intimate.
The Empress stopped an arm’s length from Bambi. She didn’t touch her. She just looked. Those depthless black eyes seemed to drink in the peach-hued glow of Bambi’s skin, the messy hair, the defiant slouch.
“A vessel,” the Empress repeated, more to herself. “Brimming with stolen, chaotic potential. Let us… decant it.”
From the floor around the base of the dais, strands of that living gold slithered out. They moved with a snakelike consciousness, hissing softly against the mirror. They didn’t rush. They took their time, coiling around Bambi’s ankles, winding up her calves.
Bambi looked down, eyebrows raised. “Hey now. Buy a girl a drink first.”
The gold reached her knees, then her thighs. It was warm, constricting but not painful. It pulsed in sync with the cuffs on her wrists, which began to glow brighter, pulling her arms gently outward. Another tendril rose, twining around her torso, just beneath her breasts, a caress that was also a bind.
“You mistake the transaction,” the Empress said. Her own form began to emit a soft, pearlescent light. “This is not an exchange. This is a reclamation. You are a spill. I am the sponge.”
Bambi’s cocky smirk finally flickered as the tendril around her torso tightened a notch. The gold was heating up. Not burning, but transferring a deep, radiant warmth directly into her core. Essie recognized the sensation—it was the Secuceotron, but laser-focused, dialed up from a soak to a scalding jet.
A breath hitched in Bambi’s throat. It was a small sound, but in the silent, focused room, it was a detonation.
The Empress’s lips, if they were lips, curved. “There. The seal cracks.”
“Ain’t… ain’t nothin’,” Bambi gritted out, but her voice had lost its lazy edge. It was strained. Her head tipped back slightly, the tendons in her neck standing out.
More tendrils emerged. One slid up the nape of her neck, into her hair, a possessive grip. Others traced the lines of her hips, the insides of her bound arms. The gold was everywhere, a gleaming, pulsating web holding her aloft, suspending her a few inches off the floor. It was a display. A gourmet presentation.
The Empress finally moved. She lifted one impossible, fluid hand and placed her fingertips in the center of Bambi’s chest, right over the sternum.
Bambi jerked as if electrocuted. A sharp, truncated gasp escaped her.
“You feel it?” the Empress purred, her harmonics dropping to a visceral, bone-conducting thrum. “That is the riot inside you. All that desperate, grasping hunger you absorbed. It has no shape. No discipline. It is noise.” Her fingers pressed. The peach glow under Bambi’s skin swirled, agitated, drawn toward that touch. “I will give it silence.”
Essie watched, frozen, her own body aching in sympathy. This wasn’t just physical. She could feel it, a tearing sensation in the air. The Empress wasn’t just stimulating nerves; she was funneling Bambi’s stolen energy out, sucking the very experience of desire from her capillaries.
Bambi began to breathe in short, sharp pants. Her eyes, wide open, were fixed on the cascading holograms on the ceiling, but she wasn’t seeing them. Her confident mask was gone, stripped away layer by layer by that relentless, extracting touch. A low moan, unbidden and raw, vibrated in her chest. Her back arched against the golden bonds.
“Yeah…” Bambi whispered, the word shuddering out of her. “That’s… that’s the spot…”
It wasn’t surrender. It was confirmation. Earl had always been a addict for sensation, any sensation. Pain, pleasure, it all bled together into intensity. The Empress was offering the motherlode.
The alien woman’s serene expression faltered for a microsecond. This wasn’t the reaction she was built for. Resistance, yes. Collapse into grateful oblivion, yes. Not this… gritty collaboration.
She increased the pressure. The light flowing from her into Bambi intensified, a shimmering column connecting them. Bambi cried out, a sound that was equal parts agony and ecstasy. Her body convulsed in its beautiful cage.
“You see?” the Empress said, turning her head slightly toward Essie, a thread of triumph back in her layered voice. “The storm is tamed. It seeks its master.”
Essie’s nails were cutting bloody half-moons into her palms. The vibration in her own cuffs was a maddening itch, promising to make the ache go away, to let her float like Jez was floating. She wanted to scream. To look away.
But she didn’t.
She watched Bambi’s face, contorted, mouth open, breaths coming in ragged sobs. And then, through the sheen of sweat and trembling, she saw it.
Bambi’s eyes, glazed with forced pleasure, slid from the ceiling. They found Essie’s. And in that fleeting, electric moment of contact, the glaze cracked.
There was no wink. No grinned reassurance. Just a flash of pure, unchanneled Earl. A spark of ornery, stubborn, hold-my-beer selfhood in the heart of the directed storm.
The Empress felt it too. The flow of energy stuttered. For a heartbeat, the shimmering column flickered.
Bambi’s lips, flushed and parted, moved. No sound came out at first. Then, a scrape of a whisper, aimed at the goddess whose hand was draining her.
“…you call that… a finishing move?”
Bambi’s body, which had been arching away from the touch, suddenly went fluid. She slumped in her bonds, a dead weight for just an instant. Then she surged forward, straining against the living gold, pressing herself into the Empress’s draining touch.
She took the firehose of sensation and drank it.
Her head snapped up. Her eyes locked onto the Empress’s. And she smiled. It was a wild, messy, terrifying smile. Not of submission, but of recognition.
“I’ve had drunks in the back of my cab… with more finesse.”
The Empress recoiled. Physically, an inch. Her harmonic voice shattered into discord. “You—you consume it? You wallow?”
“Honey,” Bambi gasped, the stolen energy now swirling in her eyes like madness, “you ain’t masterin’ desire. You’re sterilizin’ it. You’re servin’ filtered water… and I just showed you a mudslide.” She laughed then, a hoarse, breathless, glorious sound. “Tastes better, don’t it?”
The throne room went silent. The holograms froze in mid-pulse. The hum died.
The Empress stared at her own hand, then at the defiant, glowing creature bound before her, who was now feeding on the very power meant to drain her.
Somewhere in the perfect, refined machinery of her consciousness, a fundamental assumption had just broken.
The contest was over. And nothing had gone according to the script.
And nothing had gone according to the script.
The Empress’s flawless face was a monument to a calculation that had just failed. Her head turned sharply, those black pits of eyes seeking not Bambi, but Jez.
Jez was the design. Jez was the predictable outcome. Jez was validation.
She sat on the mirrored floor, posture perfect even in stupefied reverence, a testament to refined conditioning.
Essie moved. The golden cuffs were still a live wire against her skin, but the Empress’s distraction fractured their hold on her nervous system. She didn’t walk. She slid, a fluid, quiet displacement of air, until she was kneeling beside Jez, their shoulders almost touching.
Jez’s head lolled toward her, a slow, dreamy smile gracing her immaculate lips. “Isn’t she magnificent?” Jez breathed, her voice thick with worship. “Such absolute… curation.”
Essie leaned in. Her lips were a breath away from Jez’s ear. She didn’t purr. She let her voice drop into a low, Appalachian gravel, the sound of creek beds and backroads. It was the antithesis of the Empress’s harmonics.
“You said something to me once,” Essie whispered, the words a secret blade. “Back in that fancy room at the Neptune. When you had me on my back and you thought you were running the show.” She paused, letting the memory surface in Jez’s fogged eyes. “You looked down at me and you said, ‘The real power isn’t in taking what you want. It’s in making them crave what only you can give.’”
Jez blinked. The dreamy film over her ice-blue eyes rippled. A crack, microscopic, appeared in the awe.
Essie pressed her advantage. She didn’t touch Jez’s face. She let her own flawless cheek hover close enough for Jez to feel her body’s heat, a different kind of radiation than the throne room’s cool light. “You were right, Jezebelle. So why are you sitting here craving her diluted, universal crap?” Essie’s voice sharpened, a needle of pure, personal contempt. “When you could be craving mine?”
Her hand came up. Not to caress. To claim. She fisted her fingers into the savage red undercut at the nape of Jez’s neck, a grip that was both intimate and brutally possessive. It wasn’t a request. It was a repossession.
Jez gasped. The sound was short, sharp, utterly human. Her back arched, not in ecstasy, but in surprise. The blissful glaze in her eyes shattered into confused, thrilling clarity.
“Essie?” The name was a question, a memory, a key turning in a lock.
Across the room, the Empress sensed the shift. Her attention, a palpable force, snapped from her stalemate with Bambi toward this new, discordant ripple in her perfect atmosphere. The draining column of light connecting her to Bambi wavered again.
“You are an interruption,” the Empress hissed, the harmony in her voice fraying into a string of discordant notes.
Bambi felt the lapse in pressure, the flicker in the oppressive focus. She saw the Empress’s head turned away, saw Essie with her hand in Jez’ virus, and she knew.
Her body, still throbbing with trapped energy and woven in living gold, coiled.
The Empress, distracted, took a single, instinctual step toward Essie and Jez—a regent moving to quell a rebellion.
Bambi moved. It wasn’t graceful. It was pure, grunting physics. She threw her weight sideways against the golden tendrils binding her legs. They held, but they also gave, flexing like tense rubber bands. She used that tension, pivoting on her trapped feet, and swung her bound legs in a wide, low arc.
Her ankles, clad in humming gold, connected with the back of the Empress’s impossible knees.
There was no sickening crunch, because the Empress wasn’t built of bone. But there was a profound disruption of geometry. The elegant, towering form buckled. A surprised, staticky shriek tore from the Empress as her legs folded the wrong way.
She toppled. It wasn’t a slow, dramatic fall. It was a sudden, ungainly collapse. She hit the mirrored floor with a sound like a cathedral bell being dropped on concrete, ringing and wrong.
The column of light vanished. The throne room’s holograms stuttered into frantic, jagged shapes.
Bambi was already surging against her restraints. The tendrils, their purpose disrupted, loosened their intelligent grip. She tore one arm free, then the other, the living metal snapping like overstretched taffy. She didn’t stand up. She pounced.
She landed on the Empress’s back, one knee driving into the space between those shimmering shoulder blades, her hands tangling in robes that felt like captured electricity. She leaned down, her mouth beside the Empress’s auditory receptor.
“Now, sug,” Bambi growled, her breath coming in hot, ragged puffs against the iridescent metal skin. “Let’s talk about real domination. It’s a hell of a lot messier.”
The battle for control left the realm of energy, of refined sensation and psychic draining. It became a sprawl of limbs on cold mirror, a raw contest of weight and will, a tussle in the dirt. Just like Bambi wanted.
A sound rippled through the cavernous space, then broke into a wave. It wasn’t applause. It was something deeper in the gut—a collective, guttural ohhh that shook the very air. They weren’t alone. The shifting holograms along the walls resolved, flickering for a heartbeat into thousands of attentive, alien faces in a darkened gallery, watching. The throne room was an arena. And the Empress had just been slammed to the canvas.
The crowd went wild.
A metallic roar, deafening and percussive, filled the chamber. It was the sound of a universe’s worth of bored, refined spectators seeing blood in the water for the first time.
“Now, Jez,” Essie hissed, her voice slicing through the noise. She didn’t wait. She hauled Jez upright by the grip she still had in her hair, a brutal kindness. Jez stumbled, her icy eyes wide but focused now, shock sharpening her back into the woman who ran Normandy Boutique. The one who recognized a seismic shift in trends.
“Behind the throne,” Jez yelled over the din, her Mid-Atlantic accent cutting through. “The feed lines! The aesthetic is always centralized!”
They moved while the spectacle held every inhuman eye. Essie’s bare feet and Jez’s boots slapped against the mirrored floor as they darted for the massive, writhing hulk of the throne. The two marines guarding it were statues, their attention utterly absorbed by the dissonant, beautiful struggle at the room’s center.
The back of the throne was a console of living light. Swirls of energy pulsed in intricate patterns, responding to the conflict. To Essie, raised on Jed’s diet of discarded console controllers and truck-stop arcade machines, it looked familiar. It was an interface. A damn video game.
“Flashy light show, predictable UI,” Essie muttered, her fingers hovering over the swirling patterns. She touched a pulsating amber node. A schematic of the throne room flared to life, hovering in the air. Golden lines—the tendrils—were depicted as throbbing circuits. Most converged on Bambi’s struggling form. One central, pulsing nexus was the source.
The Empress.
Essie didn’t think. She acted. She slapped her palm against the central nexus on the schematic and dragged it. The holographic image resisted, then tore. She threw the connection, the entire flow of the system, back onto its origin point.
In the arena, the golden tendrils that had been binding Bambi went abruptly slack. They retracted, not into the floor, but recoiled through the air like snapped whips. They didn’t dissipate. They re-formed, re-knitting themselves with a new, vicious purpose.
The Empress was pushing herself up, a low harmonic scream of outrage building in her throat. The severed tendrils, now shining with a hostile crimson light, shot from the floor, the walls, the very air. They wrapped around her wrists, her ankles, her throat. They yanked her back down, spreadeagled across the cold mirror, a captured butterfly of starlight and fury.
“What is this?!” she shrieked, the sound scraping at the edges of reality.
Bambi, suddenly free, rose from her crouch. She shook out her arms, rolled her neck. She looked at the bound Empress, then up at the seething, howling holographic crowd. A slow, wicked grin spread across her face. She lifted a hand, pointed at the struggling goddess, and gave a sharp, downward chop of her hand.
Finish her.
The crowd’s roar hit a new, fevered pitch.
Bambi sauntered over, the peach glow of stolen energy making her skin look heated from within. She planted a foot on either side of the Empress’s hips, looking down at the perfect, agonized face. “Told you you lacked finesse,” she said, her voice carrying, a performer’s mic-check. “Lemme show you how a professional closes a deal.”
She dropped to her knees. The move had a practiced, theatrical flair to it—part reverence, part predation. She didn’t hurry. She made eye contact with the crowd in the holograms, winked, then lowered her head.
Her tongue wasn’t human. Not anymore. It was a conductor of raw, unmapped sensation, the very instrument she’d been filled with. She didn’t kiss. She administered a shocking, focused current of pure, chaotic experience right at the epicenter of the Empress’s being.
The Empress’s back arched off the floor, a silent, seizing bow. Her harmonic screams shattered into crackling static. It wasn’t pleasure. It wasn’t pain. It was a foundational rewrite, a corrupting torrent of everything she had spent eons sterilizing and packaging. It was the mudslide engulfing the filtration plant.
Bambi worked. It wasn’t passion; it was craft. Years of Monday-night rumbles on a static-filled TV, of watching legends sell a move, build the crowd, hold for the pop—it all flowed through her. She’d sell a shudder, pause for breath, look up to gauge the reaction, then go back in with a new, inventive variation. She was telling a story with her body, and the story was about the gutting of a queen.
The holographic crowd was hers. Completely. The unified roar had shapes now, pulsing in time with Bambi’s movements. A chant began, emerging from the chaos, transmitted across whatever subspace channel this was broadcast on. Two guttural syllables, hammered out by a thousand voices.
“BAM-BI! BAM-BI! BAM-BI!”
The Empress’s struggles weakened. The perfect, curated light of her form was flickering, error messages of color cascading across her skin. Her writhing became a twitching spasm. A high, thin, desperate whine escaped her, the last coherent signal from a falling satellite.
Bambi felt the final surrender, the systems going dark. She lifted her head, her mouth glistening with non-human light. She placed a hand on the Empress’s quivering abdomen, raised her other fist to the roaring, chanting galaxy, and brought it down in a final, symbolic pin.
Silence.
Then, an explosion of sound that made the earlier roar seem like a whisper. The throne room itself seemed to vibrate with the approval. The golden ribbons retracted, leaving the Empress in a motionless, dimmed heap.
Bambi stood, swaggered to the center of the space, and took a bow. The chant of her name was the only thing left in the universe.
The chant was a physical thing, a pressure wave that made the mirrored floor shiver. Bambi stood in the center of it, breathing hard, the chaotic light under her skin finally settling into a satisfied, low-wattage hum. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, looked at the faint shimmer there, and grinned.
“Crowd’s with me, ladies,” she called over the din to Essie and Jez. Her voice was horse, raw, but it carried. “Think we got a hometown advantage.”
Essie let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding for years. Her fingers unclenched from the throne’s interface, leaving temporary impressions in the light. Jez was beside her, one hand pressed to her own sternum as if checking her heartbeat was still her own. The vacant awe was gone, replaced by a sharp, assessing look.
“You just… rebranded a goddess,” Jez said, her voice almost lost in the noise. “Do you have any idea the market disruption?”
Bambi’s answering laugh was pure gravel. “Later, Jez. Gotta manage the merch while it’s hot.”
She turned from them, her gaze sweeping the coliseum of flickering alien faces, the frozen marines, the dim, twitching form on the floor. The throne, that pulsing, organic monstrosity, sat silent atop its dais. The tendrils of light that had once writhed around it were still, awaiting a new directive.
Bambi didn’t rush. She took her time, walking a slow circuit around the defeated Empress. She nudged a still-radiant shoulder with her toe. “You still in there, your former highness? Or did I fry the motherboard?”
A weak, staticky pulse was the only reply. The starlight robes were tarnished, dim. The perfect form seemed smaller.
“Good enough,” Bambi mumbled.
She turned her back on the creature and approached the dais. The steps were made of the same iridescent metal, cool and seamless. She took them one at a time, each footfall echoing in a sudden lull of the crowd’s noise. They were watching, waiting to see what the new champion would do.
The throne itself was like sitting in the heart of a dormant engine. It hummed, a deep potential thrum that vibrated up through her bones. She ran a hand over one armrest; it was warm, almost fleshy. She turned and let herself fall back into it.
It molded to her. The sensation wasn’t entirely comfortable. It was like being held in a firm, knowing grip. Supportive, but demanding. She shifted, getting settled, then let her body go liquid. She reclined sideways, one leg draped over an armrest, an elbow propped on the other. It was the pose of a creek-bed catfish who’d just eaten the biggest crawdad in the hole.
“Well,” she announced to the room, her voice amplified by the throne’s systems, bouncing around the chrome vastness. “This’ll do.”
Her eyes, sharp and amused, found the huddled form on the floor. She crooked a finger. “C’mere, you.”
The former Empress stirred. The movement was hesitant, uncoordinated. She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, her head hanging low. The radiant light of her was guttered, but a new, softer glow emanated from within—a warm, peachy gold that mirrored Bambi’s own. She crawled. It was a slow, broken procession across the shining floor, the long train of her robes dragging behind her.
Essie watched, a knot of something fierce and protective tightening in her chest. Jez just observed, her head tilted as if evaluating a shocking new fashion line.
The former Empress reached the base of the dais. She didn’t look up. She tucked her limbs beneath herself with a wobbling smoothness, curling into a compact, shimmering shape at the foot of the throne, right beside Bambi’s dangling foot.
Bambi looked down at her. She reached out, not with force, but with a casual, almost offhand touch. She patted the sleek, luminous metal of the Empress’s head. It was the kind of pat you’d give a dog that had finally learned to sit.
The former Empress flinched at the contact, then stilled. A moment later, she leaned into the touch. A low, pure harmonic tone, devoid of words but brimming with simple contentment, vibrated from her. She tilted her head back, those depthless black eyes now reflecting Bambi’s lounging form with utter, beatific devotion.
“See?” Bambi said, scratching briefly behind a non-existent ear. “Everyone just needs a little direction.” She looked out at Essie and Jez, her grin widening. “Now. Where were we before we got so rudely interrupted? I believe someone was fetchin’ our things.”