Page 72 of Veiled Vixen

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - DRADEN

Draden knew ALCOR had secrets. Had known this since the day he and his brothers had arrived on ALCOR Station and handed over all those messages. He was the youngest and that had benefits. For one, all his brothers—including Serpint, who was only half a year older than him—kind of forgot about him. They said things in front of him they would not say in front of other brothers. They did things too. And their expectations of Draden were always pretty low.

Draden didn’t mind that. He was used to being the undervalued brother. When it came time for everyone to get a job on ALCOR Station after they arrived Draden had been put in charge of the cleaning servos. Not maintaining them, or fixing them, or even scheduling them. Just… entertaining them.

Which was super fun. And Draden hadn’t minded one bit. Not even when Serpint was given the job of rebuilding them.

Of course Draden was with Serpint nearly all the time so he’d ended up rebuilding servos as well. In fact, he’d wrangled Tray into teaching him how to program simple minds for his rebuilds and by the time he turned fourteen he and Serpint had had a loyal little army of cleaning servos that would do all sorts of unsanctioned things for them.

But sometimes Draden learned things he didn’t want to know.

Like how Crux, when he was going through his year of rage, had almost had sex with Xyla. That was unnecessary and unwanted info.

Or the time he’d seen Tray inside the Pleasure Prison several years after it went online and Tray was with a girl. A girl Draden now knew was Brigit, but still. They were having sex. And while there was a part of Draden that realized, even back then, that the Pleasure Prison was built for virtual sex games, he’d been only sixteen at the time and not yet really interested in such things.

He’d wanted to scrub his eyes clean after he saw Tray and Brigit’s sexy time. And he’d stayed clear of Tray inside the Prison forever after that.

Draden also knew that ALCOR had killed him once when he was thirteen.

While he was inside the medical pod being brought back to life, he… well. This was hard to describe. He hadn’t heard anything ALCOR said, the same way he hadn’t really heard anything those Sisters or MIZAR were saying.

But he knew their minds.

He’d seen those words in his head.

So it might as well be called hearing as far as he was concerned.

He knew ALCOR had killed him and then brought him back to life after he fell off a lift bot at the age of thirteen. But he just didn’t much care. He was fine. No different at all. Except that from that day forward he’d heard all kinds of things that were not actually being said, but thought, and almost none of it was shit he wanted to know.

And now he knew this too.

ALCOR’s deep dark past was coming back to haunt him with a vengeance.

Normally Draden would just tuck that shit away inside his head and try to forget about it. But not this time.

He was really only concerned with one thing. Use Booty Hunter to escape and get back to Serpint.

He’d been wandering for over a year now and he was sick of it. And it didn’t really matter much to him that Harem Station was fucked up and out of control. He could take it back from whichever evil AI was currently in control and set things right.

So after ALCOR spilled this secret about the Golden Nebula, Draden left him and went straight to Booty.

She was playing poker with some other sentient ships on some virtual network, which Draden thought was a pretty cool perk for ships who were forced to be docked at Mighty Minions Resort while their humans had their vacation.

Draden was patient. He didn’t interrupt her game. But once he boarded the ship she pulled out of her virtual almost immediately.

She was the one, in fact, who had sent him to ALCOR to get all his good secrets.

“So? What did you learn?” Booty asked even before the airlock door closed behind him.

He walked over to his favorite chair at the gate-mapping console and sank down into it. God, he missed Serpint. And he wasn’t sure how he’d feel about this Lyra princess. But he wasn’t going to dwell on that until he had to.

He just wanted to go home pick up his brother, and then get back out and on the job.

Not that they needed Cygnian princesses anymore. But… fuck it, right? That just meant they could booty-hunt anyone they wanted.

Draden sighed up at Booty’s ceiling. “It’s a long fucking story.”

“Start at the beginning. I need to know what he’s been keeping from me. I can’t partner with an evil AI if I’m not aware of all his evil deeds. Past, present, future. You name it. I need to know all of them.”