I could feel the change in space on my Null, even stranger than heading into the Underweb in Gloom. This was a place incredibly reactive to psychic will and pressure, the mishmashed convergence of astral planes and their eventual destinations, all crammed together and dominated by madness and unrestrained emotions without a chance to be purged.

It was the realm of the Warp Gods and what minor divinities were left to conflict with them, at least for this galaxy. Who knows what would happen outside it?

Regardless, I didn’t much like the sensation, even as I had the thought that Sage Sama was somewhere in this place, setting it on vivic fire, and forever putting demons and Warped to peace. Whether it was enough to actually make any headway against the numbers being continually created was another matter, but the simple fact she could and was doing it was creating holes in the absolute domination of the Warp Gods... and just what might fill those in, as the Divinities outside Creation reached in and took away their own, leaving the Warp to get weaker, and ever more concentrated with its own filth, fighting over the scraps that remained?

At some point, the Warp was simply not going to be strong enough to sustain itself anymore, as all the non-Warped souls were spirited away and their power lost. It was a slow process, but as inevitable as grinding down mountains, and there was nothing the Warp could do about it. If they dared go Outside Creation personally, they were going to be stepped on by some non-finite beings and either purified, expunged, or just sealed up and locked away as their stolen power leaked away, rending them useless.

But that’s what was happening outside the ship. Inside the Throne Field, we were as safe as we could expect.

---

I walked out of the empty kitchen with a tray in my hands, Tarya and Minya looking out my eyes as their fractured minds latched onto mine to stay together. Their memories diffused through mine, and I safeguarded their souls into ova as I clicked my tongue, and they were very expectantly looking forwards to this.

I’d co-opted Tarya’s tracker, so the room was flagging me as a registered person, and if Minya was nowhere to be found now, the system didn’t actually care enough to investigate further. The girls in the Marquis’ chambers vanished without warning fairly often...

I pushed open the door, set down the tray with lunch on it, and strolled over to where the Marquis was going at it with Atoya and Lusilu, and actually wouldn’t stop until he was dead.

My hair and primary Tail whipped out at the same time. The hair went for the girls, who were definitely looking the worse for wear, already being clawed at and bit, fear in their eyes, but unable to act as anything more than turned on by what would in the end be lethally bloody sex. The Tail flared crimson on his back, and left a Brand there, which made him arch his back in a pang of surreal pleasure, and turn back to look at me with wild red eyes.

I hit him again, before he could say a word, and his whole body rippled, more strongly than the first time. The girls fell back and away from his hands, bloody bits of skin caught on his nails, the sheets an absolute mess, as were the genitals of all concerned. His mouth was dripping with blood, and flesh and hair was caught in his teeth.

The appearance of an unknown party and potential threat had basically made Mr. Paranoid here catch a moment of clarity in his deadly hedonism, but it didn’t make any difference as I Brand-tasped him again, and he could only sit there and take it from me, his eyes losing focus as the combination of #9 and the Brand locked down his brain and made him my slave.

The girls watched it all as they quivered and bled and suddenly relaxed. I was inside their heads as the Marquis got nine Brands and was basically reduced to a drooling puppy in front of me, so zoning in pleasure even the erection he hadn’t been able to lose was gone now.

He was in a different realm of pleasure now...

“Go clean yourself up and pick out some new clothes,” I told him calmly, shoving him towards the showers he generally had two of the girls helping him with. He could handle it alone, and he would, having no choice in the matter. “If anyone calls, gaff them off until I say you’re ready.”

“Yes, Mistress,” he answered dazedly, and trundled off in that direction. I turned my eyes on the two girls bleeding away on the unsalvageable Kmesti moth-silk sheets, and sighed...

-------

I was alone when he came back out. He was naked, but carrying a new set of clothing for the evening, his eyes still kind of vacant, but despite themselves lighting up when they saw me. I was now the center of this twat’s existence, and all four of the girls were very eagerly watching to see what I was going to do with him.

I dressed him up with deft four-way experience, and even had the extra limbs to accommodate everyone if I chose. He kind of dazedly looked at all five of my Tails and my Arakne Arms... and my wings... and the many tendrils of my hair... and he was totally turned on and completely unable to do anything about it.

Not that I had the slightest amount of attraction to him, either.

“My pet,” I said, because that’s all he was now. He didn’t even deserve a name. “You are to act among all others as if things are perfectly normal, and you are fine. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, mistress,” he replied firmly, and his eyes flickered as he remembered how to act like he used to be.

“Excellent. I’ll be putting you to sleep at night and cooking for you, so don’t fret. However, I’m going to need full access to your ship, privileges up to and equaling your own.”

He nodded. “I can take care of that, Mistress.”

“Excellent. While you are at it, why don’t you start by telling me all the interesting things you’ve been doing since you became a Marquis. I understand you are the first of your line. Let’s start with just after you received your Writ, and you can tell me all the wonderful things you’ve done.”

His eyes lit up at the thought of doing something that might interest me. “Yes, Mistress! I received my Writ of Nobility one hundred and thirteen years ago from the Sector Lord Scipio, a maneuver by certain rivals of mine to remove me from the circles they were attempting to gain power in.”

“Names?” began the questioning and clarification, as I guided him out of the room to the study, bringing the tray of his dinner and drinks with us as I listened to him relate his entire history of mass murder and debauchery proudly to me.

----------

The Umbrans should have put a bullet into his head within a decade of him getting the Writ. Onnager de Krov was shameless, ambitious, determined, unscrupulous, and zealous in his desire to gain power and wealth, and outshine all his enemies. Indeed, he had outlived a few of the original ones who sent him out onto this path, not the least by personally gutting two of them, and his name was now definitely far better known in more places than theirs would ever be.

Infamy has its own dark allure.

While the first talk only lasted an hour or two before I sent him back out with a Charisma Mark and his senses wide open for me to look through, the follow-ups went on for quite some time, as he had quite a long career behind him, and under the demands of my influence his memories had sharpened remarkably.

I also got to read his logs and memoirs as he quickly set me up with full authorization to the ship’s systems. The maids actually had authority to go anywhere in the ship on his orders, but of course would never think of doing so without his command. It did mean that if a woman in his livery appeared anywhere in the ship, she would be avoided or obeyed in terror. Setting a hand on one of the Marquis’ maids meant he’d kill the maid, and then anyone and everyone in the area for allowing someone to lay a hand on them. He’d offed a few of his own close subordinates for daring to test his tolerance of these rules, and so nobody was going to mess with me if I simply put on the right uniform and went wherever ‘I was told to go’.

------

The ship’s computer bay was naturally my first step, as it tied together the whole ship.

The Mekker running the show had been lobotomized and brain-slaved to the Marquis long ago, having no initiative of his own remaining, a perfect cyberslave to his boss. The Marquis naturally didn’t trust anyone who had control of something he didn’t, and that included the systems of his precious ship.

He had logged the permission status authorized by his captain, and so I was free to do whatever I wanted. The authority of the ship radiated from my bracer’s Boole, so all the cyborgs and automatons servicing the ship simply acknowledged me as if I belonged, the meat parts of them not up to mounting any suspicions. If it turned out that I had a great interest in the AMT systems that had been heavily modified and spliced with all sorts of strange alien tech to see if they could help performance out... well, I had authorization, that was all that was important.

Of course, it wasn’t just me; the Goldilocks crew had hooked in through Markspace when I first came aboard, and my thoughtstream with them became basically a link for some truly awesome amounts of programming downloaded before the Helldive. They had been working on it ever since I saw the bastard in Gloomheart, and we’d all been designing the interfaces and subsystems since then, just waiting to get hooked in.

The amount of data someone with access to Compression tech can hold onto personally is freaking immense, and I could easily store the programs for a ship this size on my local data cache, even if I didn’t have the power to actually run them. I dove right into the ship’s systems, again with full authorization, and began to rewrite everything with grim thoroughness while I was cut off from the rest of Markspace.

This actually involved tearing out some very dangerous stuff hooked into those systems that should not have been there, and which the idiot in charge thought was pretty cool. No, you don’t use fifth-dimensional chronal nodes for navigational compression calculations! The Yth are not things you want to trust your Hellrides to, especially when you’re downloading your requests into their thoughtspace servers, idiot!

There was a lot of drow tech running on principles I couldn’t quite understand, but a bunch of it was TL 15, and seemed to have a ‘look away’ effect on the Warp, making this ship something the Warp ignored, rather than defied right out. The idea had merit, except the tech seemed to run more efficiently when subjected to negative emotions, so it had been installed above the discipline and torture chambers of the ship, which were quite active at the moment.

Coincidence? I think not.

It didn’t take long before I was in absolute command of the ship’s systems, its contingent of enslaved Mekkers, ‘borgs, and bots, and there was not much anyone could do about it. The cyborgs and brain-in-a-jar that oversaw everything were precisely reprogrammed for loyalty to me instead of the Marquis, which de Krov thought was an absolutely wonderful idea.

------

I found myself up in the observation room at the top of the ship, the showy dome that could be used to host parties, watch the stars, meditate, and do other things that might be interesting when you weren’t in a fight. In a fight, it was anywhere but where you wanted to be.

Normally the screens of the cupola were lowered during the transition through the Warp, as sane people, especially ones of lower moral standings, didn’t want to look outside at what was out there. Plenty of things out there were willing to look right back and drag you out there to enjoy your company, after all.

Me, not so much of a problem. Nulls are kind of obdurate that way.