Just following orders
12 Feb 2019Kara waldeN
If the Devil were not a myth she would have earned more than a Monarchy for her murderous labours of late. If the sanctity of life was not the cruelest of illusions and if the Universe granted an inalienable right for life to exist then she would be guilty of an uncountable number of the most heinous of crimes.
Yet the Devil did not exist and the Universe made no such promise.
She had finished her labours and exterminated the last Nova Imperial supporter from the systems she been contracted with. In HIP 110245, Haoria and Fyrly she had murdered many thousands in the name of the Emperor and no one had lifted a finger to stop her. The reward for this dark work was an elevation in social standing. She was now a Queen of the Empire. As imaginary a construct as Lucifer himself.
Perhaps they would let her rule a system?
She wondered if they would let her rule in the manner she had risen. Let her be Queen of her own Hell? Give her space to put a little flesh on the myth of malevolence . Or instead, would they not expect her to put those ways behind her and be more becoming of the title.
Through the looking glass of her sociopathy, the ways of Humanity were strange.
Her victory had nearly been a defeat and injury had put Queen Kara in a reticent mood.
Her body armour was beyond repair, wisps of smoke crawled out from amongst the burned servos while the rise and fall of her pained breathing caused shorted wires to crack sparks across the darkened transport tube. She was bleeding from at least a dozen lesions and one on the top of her head leaked down her face.
No diamond tiara for Queen Kara, just a Crown of blood.
Her plan to drop a building onto the last NI cell had finished the job quickly enough and seen her final promotion come through but next time she used seismic charges she would make sure her escape route wasn't blocked by her own troops.
Not that she had any troops left after the building came down.
She always worked better alone anyway.
Her first act as Queen would be a solo affair. There was one criminal left.
Just one bad guy to kill. The worst one.
The doors to the transport tube opened and the lights came on.
She had left him till last. Kept him alive to bear witness to his crimes. He was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. There had been a genocide in his name.
The Recruiter stepped in to the transport tube. He laid eyes on the battered, bloody figure who waited for him and his eyes bulged in shock.
She moved quickly towards him, the armour popped and squealed, exhaling its last breath in trails of oily smoke, shorting circuits and bloody footprints.
He stammered a greeting, then a disparaging comment on the brutality of her methods and finally a warning as he caught her intent but Kara had never been one for listening to authority figures.
Besides, she out ranked him.
She grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the floor, holding him at arm's length. His kicks and and struggles fared for nothing against her ironclad grip. She watched as the neck skin around her fingers flushed and darkened. His tongue came out and his eyes rolled in their sockets.
“You recruited me to kill enemies of the Empire and you said nothing when I spaced them by the hundreds. You didn't stop me when I destroyed defenceless refugee boats. I shot people and set fire to them for you. I drowned them and exploded them into tiny pieces. I even buried them under the ruins of a hospital for you,”
“Most of those people were guilty of nothing more than wrong thinking, of ideas shaped by the words of others,” she told him and twisted his body so she could watch his face turn shades of grey and purple.
“You might have noticed, I'm something of a wrong thinker myself. I find your concepts of good and evil as alien as the Thargoids. It really doesn't matter to me whether those people exist or not, I am as uncaring to their fate as the Universe is to yours,”
The struggles of the recruiter grew weaker in her untiring hand.
“But I do, on some level, on some strange hypocritical level think that their deaths need to be accounted for. I feel that your obedience to questionable cause should not be overlooked and that a judgement for their deaths must befall someone to whom a judgement would mean something,” she said and squeezed harder until his face strained and bulged one last time.
With a sudden pop, the life fell out of him and his body went limp. She dropped his corpse in a heap at his feet and fished a partially burned copy of her contract out from a storage pocket.
“When you make a deal with the Devil you can be sure she will collect. Mission complete,” she said tossing the contract at his remains.