Dark Fate, Chapter 151 (Patreon)

Chapter 151 – Considerations

I stroked my new slave’s head as she bobbed up and down over my lap. We’d had a brief layover in Ulora on the way back, just to make sure that the Incux hadn’t returned, and see if there was anything else we could do to help dig them out, if there were holdouts still on the planet. Fortunately, that hadn’t been the case, but even if they weren’t staying long enough to warrant shore leave, everyone was happy to have time to trade stories with other crews. And all the commanders purposefully overlooked the shuttles going back and forth between ships, no doubt trading contraband or grey market goods between crews. Of course, the NCOs were on the watch for anything dangerous or very illegal, since they didn’t want their own business interrupted by crewmen being stupid, so I wasn’t particularly worried.

That meant I had had plenty of time for my little game with Ferranti and her friends. It was a simple game, which they all agreed to before I took care of their circular enslavement problem. Once I bound them all to me, each girl got to pick a marble out of a bag. Each girl had a different bag, so no one had a better chance of things than the others. In each bag there were five white marbles and one black one. The rules of the game were simple. Reach into the bag without looking, and pick a marble. That’s it.

Well, not entirely. A white marble meant that I would get to fuck her, and then she had half an hour to decide whether or not she wanted to continue the arrangement. Simple, really. Except that the time started when I finished, and, well, none of these girls were succubi. Two of them (including Ferranti) actually passed out, and missed their chance. Not that they complained when they woke up.

Three of the six pulled white, and managed to keep their wits about them enough to speak coherently. They asked for their freedom, and I granted it. Immediately after, they asked if they could still come over sometime, when duties allowed, which I wasn’t going to turn down. Obviously.

The last one, though, pulled black. That meant they didn’t get a choice about whether to be my slave or not. They were going to be my pets, and, as further penalty, they got to ‘enjoy’ a bout in the Ceres Slavefight League. Fortunately for her, Gloria Leoz was a Marine. Even better, the Kitsune was also a Level 30 Monk, meaning that her hand-to-hand skills were top tier. So, all things considered, she ought to have a good chance of winning, depending on who she went up against.

I’d already chatted with Lilith about it, who laughed out loud when I gave her the full story. She only gave me a little bit of a ribbing for picking up even more slaves, but she understood that there was no way I couldn’t punish the girls a little for being so stupid while drunk. It was a potential security breach, after all.

I finish in the Feytouched girl’s mouth just as we are about to pass through the stealth field surrounding Ceres and the local area of the belt. Fortunately, there was little for me to be doing as we approached Ceres except catch up on my mail, and make sure no one had burnt down anything important while I was gone. The captains of the various ships would see to putting them in parking orbits, with only the Si Vis Pacem actually docking with Ceres. Until we built a dedicated military station, it made more sense to just use shuttles to transfer people to and from when they had shore leave, or were on skeleton crew duty.

The station’s design had already been finalized when we left, and building it, along with the other improvements for the fleet, was part of the ‘next steps’ for production, now that we had a significant enough military presence to project power out of the system. Checking with the shipyards, I saw that additional mining and fabrication craft had already been built, and were currently harvesting and processing the necessary materials.

As Ferranti finished cleaning me up and tucking my cock away, I checked on the immigration numbers. Still good. The initial burst was over, naturally, but, as more news got out about Ceres, and what life was like there, I was getting regular influxes of people. The average came out to be something like twenty thousand people every two months. We still were nowhere close to hitting the four million ‘comfortable’ population cap on Ceres, but it was time to start opening up other operations.

The last thing I wanted was for Ceres to start getting overcrowded. Overcrowding in a city on Earth was problematic enough. Overcrowding on a cruise ship was near disastrous. Overcrowding on a space station could literally be life and death, especially if people started getting antsy, and Murphy started getting involved.

The dedicated military base would be one part of that expansion, sure, but I couldn’t funnel all these newcomers into the military. Especially when I had staked claims to all the outer planets and moons. I needed someplace bigger to not only give people a frontier to expand in, but someplace with at least some semblance of a gravity well to put industry in. There weren’t any solid planets out past Ceres, not until you got to Pluto (I still called it a planet, regardless of what the scientists said), so a moon would be the next best bet.

Ganymede was my choice for the first ‘colony’ of the Kingdom of Ceres. It was the largest moon in the solar system, with a radius nine hundred kilometers bigger than that of Luna. Plenty of space to spread out in, as the colony grew. And Jupiter was nearby, offering abundant resources for the colony to be.

I pulled up another report. The gas mining platforms were starting to be put in place over Jupiter, good. The platforms basically were mobile processing plants that could skim the atmosphere, and harvest different gasses. Of course, that was just the base functionality. Once the platforms were fully online in a couple years, they would be able to enter Jupiter’s atmosphere itself, harvesting deeper gasses, and using the increased gravity for different processes. Honestly, if I wasn’t currently on the deck of a warship in space, having just returned from an alien world, I would have laughed at the notion, calling it hopeless, a product of ‘handwavium’ scifi rather than something practical.

However, these were apparently not even something my research and design teams had come up with. They were old tech, used by a lot of the groups closer to the galactic core. All my team had to do was update the basic designs from the System Shop to work with the manufacturing processes we had here in Sol. Just one more way how, despite everything, we were far behind the galactic curve.

Oh well, that wasn’t a problem for now. Or, rather, it was a problem that would sort itself out, over time. We just had to keep advancing, and make sure that no pirates or omnicidal bugs took us out until we could make it there. Since I wasn’t above copying, or stealing, advancements that others had made, it wouldn’t take the same amount of time as someone who was literally researching blindly, without even knowing that something was possible.

Things on Earth were starting to move, as well. Apparently the new administration in the US hit the ground running, trying to both add a mandatory service period, so that everyone had to either spend six years in a non-military position, or do enlist for two years. It was a solid plan, actually. With monsters all over the place, dungeons in need of clearing, and more, all while one-fifth of the US population was dead, they needed people who would take on jobs that weren’t as immediately financially lucrative as stock trading or other white-collar jobs.

Then, there was the judicial slavery bill, and the negotiations for revising the Geneva Conventions. He’d actually had people keeping track of those conversations, especially on the international level. His diplomats had been going around, adding their support for the changes. Since most of them weren’t even humans, but were summoned from elsewhere in the galaxy, that gave their words a lot more weight when they said that this was the galactic norm, and they had yet to find a better system in the wider galaxy.

I patted Ferranti on her head to signal that she could return to her duties, while I considered the next move on that front. My diplomats were all signaling that things were going smoothly, but some people were going to need convincing. While the ins and outs didn’t really concern me, since I already had Ceres set up like I wanted it, I really wanted Earth to start getting its shit together, so that I wasn’t the only line of defense the system had.

Perhaps a demonstration was in order? I was, as far as I knew, the only person from Earth at Tier 2. It would be a good way to showcase just how futile attempting to hold someone like me was, if I did not wish to be held. Yes, it would also be grandstanding, and a bit of a show to advertise my own abilities, but that was a happy side effect.

The only consideration was where to do this demonstration. According to the diplomats, the countries most firmly opposed to the changes were those who hadn’t directly had dealings with Ceres. But most of those were not really powers worth talking about. Sure, the democratic nations were gearing up for a PR push to sway public support, but the people in charge were already coming to see the light. And the less democratic countries were already firmly in support, once the leaders at the top had been convinced of the necessity. Not needing to worry about public opinion as much was a boon for them.

Happily enough, no one on Ceres was going to have a problem with the slavery provisions being put into the Conventions. After all, the people who might cause a stink about such things wouldn’t willingly come to a place where that was expressly part of the legal code already. And the ones who didn’t come willingly were probably already slaves, so they didn’t really count for anything except taxes. People who came to my little space dictatorship had already acknowledged that the new realities under the System required changes from the way things had always been.

Looking back at the list of countries where they were expecting problems with getting the treaties updated, the biggest concern was probably the NATO countries. The public in those countries weren’t going to be happy with the way things were. Definitely were going to need something to open their eyes.

Hmm. I was going to have to give a press conference, now that we were returned, to go over all the ‘fun’ that had happened. I could drop that I had bumped up to Tier 2 while I did that, perhaps? And then offer a challenge to any country that thought they could keep me in prison without using System enslavement or other such means?

No, better yet, I could make it an open challenge, not just to countries. Let the corporations get in on it, and individual inventors. They would quickly be forced to accept that the conventional means of incarceration were just too expensive to scale up to what it would take to keep a Tier 2 individual in check, much less a higher Tier person. And I wasn’t even a melee-focused class. A Monk or Barbarian type would literally be unstoppable if they wanted out of a conventional prison.

I would have to set limits on the challenge, of course. Both on the scope, and the potential prize. No puppet brands or other extreme nastiness. And some kind of cash prize, or a piece of tech? No, go big. If someone discovered something that worked, they’d get their own personalized X-pattern fighter, or GP equivalent. That should get people chomping at the bit to figure out a way to make it happen. Even the corporations would love it, because they’d get a chance to tear the fighter apart and reverse engineer it.

Yes, that was the beginnings of a plan. I sent my notes to my ‘cabinet’ and the other people in my inner circle as a draft of a proposition. I’d just sit back and let my people do what I’d hired (or bought) them to do, and figure out the details. Like a good leader should.