Chapter Text
I groaned as dizzying sequences of lights flashed and I underwent the uncomfortable process of disconnecting from the interface. It was always strange, feeling my body shrink down from a many-thousand-ton warship to a delicate little flesh bag. Feeling my brain cut in half as it’s separated from its digital counterpart deep in my hull. I heard the pneumatic hiss from behind my head as the interface cables released their clamps and retracted leaving only the cold metal sockets implanted in the spine of my human body. I looked around the room, limited to my woefully inadequate eyes that lacked full spectrum analisis and radar returns. A few medical personnel bustled around looking at vitals, running various tests on my blood and neural state. Mostly they were a nuisance, making far too much noise for the ache that was already starting to pound behind my forehead. Blessedly the smell was at least tolerable this time. My nose was always far too sensitive after coming out of the link. I looked behind me longing to fall back into the embrace of my interface pod, picturing how comfortable it would be to feel the thrumming of my shields and the pleasurable pulses of electricity flowing through the magnetic coils in my railguns.
My dread of the coming task made all the standard disconnect dysmorphia and interface sickness so much worse. A peace conference. A peace conference between a corporation and a band of pirates. What a joke. I still couldn’t believe that the higher up’s were actually taking this seriously. Pirates have no honor. They are filthy stinking scum who would rather steal from the hardworking frontiersmen rather than actually put in the work to build something real and positive themselves. Lazy. Fucking lazy bastards completely lacking a moral code.
As I stood one of the nurses hurried over and slotted the portable subspace relay into the waiting port. That little piece of hardware would burn scan my brain and upload me to a fresh clone if I was on the brink of death. As an infomorphic lifeform that link provides me with the next best thing to immortality. Beyond the incredible reaction time and processing advantages of the direct ship interface, and even beyond the reduced crew requirements for an infomorph piloted ship, having veteran pilots who can get blown up and be ready to fly again in hours makes for one hell of a war machine. A war machine critically necessary out here in star systems far beyond the protections of any of the major empires.
I rolled my shoulders and started to dress in one of the outfits that people of my designation were required to wear in public. My employers were only marginally better than the pirates. Sure they built infrastructure and provided equipment and jobs to settlers, but those things were only accessible to common people at extortionary rates. People had homes but only so long as they could pay, they had food but never enough, and the healthcare oscillated along a grim spectrum between abysmal and unaffordable. Pirate bands didn’t have to steal much to reduce the average settlement from poor to completely destitute. All so the corporate fat cats in the galactic core could live plush lives and have more ships to throw into the eternal meatgrinder of the wars between the four major powers.
I stepped out into corridors that looked so very wrong. I know every inch of the ship like it was the back of my hand. Most of the time, it almost literally was. But nothing looked like it should. I was seeing things from the wrong angles and the identifying features that normally would guide me were missing. Was this the corridor with the power control junctions for the radar array? Or did this one have the plasma junctions? These things were easy to intuitively feel through the link but in the flesh it was so hard to keep track. Fortunately the bridge officer who would be coming with me station-side emerged around the corner just as I was trying to get my bearings. Unfortunately that officer was Johnson, and he was already blasting out his disgusting pheromones like a fog horn. He was clearly irritated by the assignment and trying to intimidate me by flooding the corridor with a deliberately dominating smell. There were some alphas I wouldn’t have minded it from but this particular man’s glands emitted a smell like burning tires and cheap cologne. He was the kind of insecure weak alpha who made a fool of himself by trying way too hard to make up for his… deficiencies.
“Are you prepared to disembark Omega Raven?”
Fucking annoying. Humanity had colonized half a galaxy and abolished nearly all forms of legal and systemic oppression except one. Race, gender, religion, even many things that had been considered crippling disabilities in ages past were all irrelevant now. But designation, fucking sub-gender, was what the humanity had carried with them to the stars. Even though in the corporate militarily I technically outranked this fucking stuck up alpha he could address me my my sub-gender and my first name rather than my rank and last name like he would have been required to do with literally any beta or alpha. I consciously flexed my glands, creating a little bubble of my own scent to push away his chemical stink before replying.
“Yes Alpha.” That was the required response. Just alpha. Just a fucking title as a constant reminder that he was above me in the social hierarchy and always would be. Sub-gender based social roles are one of the immutable laws of society. Being an infomorph means I can customize my new clones. I could have any height, build, appearance and whatever primary sex I wanted. The only thing that was never, ever, allowed to change was my subgender. Wearing a body of another sub gender or even just one meant to conceal it carries penalties nearly as stiff as those for piracy. And the investigations into cross-designation clones are pursued a hundred times harder than even the worst pirate gangs.
Jonahson grabbed my upper arm dragging me far more roughly than necessary, especially since it wasn’t necessary at all, and we set out through my halls toward the docking umbilical in silence. As we neared the airlock I caught a glimpse of the battleships docked in the adjacent moorings, another one of society’s absurd rules staring me in the face. Omegas could only pilot ships up to light cruisers like mine and even then an omega getting that high was a rare thing. Most omega pilots would never be promoted beyond a corvette or frigate, if they made it into a combat vessel at all, and didn’t wind up stuck mining or hauling freight. Heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships could be given to betas. But the massive titans and carriers, the true prides of a proper fleet, with their devastating singularity generators or vast launch bays… of course those behemoths were reserved exclusively for alphas.
There were none of those giants lurking here today. Just black sky studded with stars all around as our pod hissed through the umbilical. This was a peace conference on neutral territory after all. Each side had agreed to a limited delegation of five pilots. Two alphas in battleships, two betas in heavy cruisers, and an omega. No one had specified what the omega should fly. No one had deemed it important enough. But that lack of a restriction was the main reason I was chosen for this. I was the best omega pilot that Hive Corporation employed in the sector, good enough that they hadn’t been able to justify denying my purchase order for my first production run of three Galavant class light cruisers.
It had been a truly staggering amount of money. Ten million credits, with each credit representing the equivalent of the entire annual wage of a low skill worker. It was nearly unthinkable for anyone other than an infomorph to possess that much. But when a single infomorph piloted ship can mine and transport as much metal as a full asteroid mining station manned by hundreds of traditional miners the economic differential makes sense. Still it had taken twenty years of scrimping and saving, skeleton crewing mining barges, and running a salvage destroyer in between flying every single Hive Fleet op and bounty hunt I could possibly cram myself into. I was the first omega in the whole sector to own a light cruiser, and a top of the line model to boot. The funny thing about money is that once you have it it’s easier to get more. For larger ships the insurance payouts are higher, Hive Corp’s ship replacement fund covers a higher percent of what insurance doesn’t after a loss. And bigger ships get more money per patrol, fleet, or combat action you fly in. So I’ve been able to buy plenty of backups despite my losses and still hoard up a nest egg large enough that I could technically buy a pair of small battleships if the laws against omegas owning them weren’t in place.
With all that said it was clear why I’d been chosen for these negotiations. The raider’s omega would likely be coming in some rinky-dink destroyer at most, so having me along for the ride tips scales of both tonnage and skill in our favor. That made it worth it for Hive Corp to bring me along even if seeing me always chafes the alphas.
We arrived at the suite of rooms on the station that had been reserved for us and as the door slid closed I glanced to the right, going over the structural plans in my head. There was a short hallway there ending in the door to the large meeting room where the negotiations would take place. Then mirrored on the other side was the matching suite of rooms that would house the pirates. I had already memorized all the tools available to us. Sure technically no weapons were allowed here but nothing in the terms said anything about software that would let us rupture power conduits or reroute toxic gas into the rooms. I’d also memorized the orders. None of those were to be used unless things went south and we needed to make a quick getaway. There had also been a truly massive spreadsheet of permitted compromises, contingencies, and counteroffers that I flicked onto my HUD from the limited storage implant at the very top of my spine.
These rooms were only for the delegates so I was finally free of my smelly escort. I know how these things go though. I would only have a little time to settle in myself before I was expected to start preparing the rooms for the arrival of the higher designations. Things like swapping in the perfect pillows, unpacking some of the luggage that had been sent ahead, and generally keeping house would all be my duties. These things aren’t my skill set, I’m a biological component of a war ship for fucks sake, but the duties of an omega overshadow my capabilities. So I sighed and went to work. In my bathroom I did my best to scrub off the scent of my fucking useless second officer. There would be enough pheromones flying around this place soon and the last thing I needed was to add the scentmark of yet another alpha into the mix no matter how weak and repulsive it was.
There were little things to do here and there. In each of the four other rooms I carefully hung up the clothes of the alphas and betas. Two men and two women, that had been another one of the conditions, one of each gender for each sub gender except omega. No one cared about omegas enough to specify which gender. After all both types of omegas have a warm hole and that was all that mattered to the alphas. The crates in the women’s rooms included long flowing dresses intended to shock and awe, with various choices depending on how much skin they felt like showing. There were even a few nice blouses to pair with slacks and blazers. The men's wardrobes were boring. Military uniforms and suits only.
Finally with the empty crates hauled away by the station’s robotic servitors, servitors who were more than capable of handling everything I had just done if not for society's demand for domestic labor from omegas, I had a little time to relax. The alphas and betas would have gotten a full decompression cycle on their ships allowing themselves to come up from the link slowly in quiet, dark rooms in order to prevent exactly the interface sickness that had my head pounding and my stomach churning. But that wasn’t a luxury permitted to me, not the omega that was expected to serve them hand and foot. In some of the more progressive empires this kind of treatment was reserved for a limited bonded pack. But most of Hive Corp’s employees came from The Imperium, the only one of the empires that was arrogant enough to refer to itself as The Imperium. As if none of the younger but equally fierce superpowers truly deserve the title of empire. It was also the only one of the four where true omega slavery was still legal and the one nearest to this sector so it was no wonder that many of its more toxic traditions had bled through to this little pocket.
Soon there were the telltale heavy footfalls of alphas outside. My fellow employees had arrived. I quickly darted into my room. The more I could stay out of sight the better. They weren’t likely to hit me casually since we had the first dinner of the summit tonight but it wouldn’t take much provocation to set them off. And Katherine, the female alpha, was the kind of asshole who viewed simply looking at an omega as a provocation. some conversation that I couldn’t particularly make out but if it was carrying through the door it was far too loud for me. My enhanced omega ears did pick out a few words here and there “Pirate scum” “Kill em all” etc. Clearly the male alpha didn’t think we should be having the negotiations at all. His scent was starting to seep through my closed door. Distinctly angry but less unpleasant than Johnson’s overall. Leather and burning oak. Not too bad if a little acrid. The next smell was distinctly a beta’s, no… two betas, so similar that they almost blended together. Either these two were related or had been mated so long that they were nearly indistinguishable. Calming, but sterile, like lemons and vodka. That was the role of betas after all. They were the least affected by pheromones and didn’t get heat or rut cycles so they were the stable voices of reason.
The shouting calmed down and I was left alone in my room. In the bathroom mirror I could see the face I designed for myself staring back at me as I applied a light layer of makeup. Big grey eyes, light brown hair in long loose curls, perfect lips and cute cheeks. Pretty. Cute. A body designed to make alphas want to protect me. I would have preferred to leave off that last one. But clones are expensive and the company won't pay for body plans outside of the standard templates. That means I'm short and no amount of working out will pack any muscle onto my tiny frame. The body is about average for an omega but still only five foot nothing. It doesn't take me long to finish making myself pretty. The clone is literally designed to be attractive after all. My loose curls fall naturally into place and my skin is free of blemishes as always.
Soon after finishing I hear the hiss of my door opening without a knock, revealing the two betas I smelled earlier. They were short for betas, only about three inches above me, and they had matching midnight black hair and nearly black irises. The woman gestured for me to strip while the man walked over to the closet. I sighed but complied. They were going to pick my outfit for the evening and even though their pheromones were tightly controlled, I could tell they weren’t in the mood for a discussion. Just a hint of irritation bled through in their pheromones. Not at me though. Clearly the end of the shouting hadn’t been the end of the difficulties with the alpha.
I didn’t know the one who had been shouting personally. His file stated that his name was Sean and that he had been a commander in The Imperium before being kicked out and winding up as a mercenary. He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder a mile wide and a particular distaste for pirates. Even after winding up with Hive Corp he had been reprimanded for shooting escape pods, a war crime he got away with because there wasn’t an official state of war with the pirates. Technically the living breathing human beings he had murdered were “unlawful combatants” and so war conventions didn’t apply. The pirates for their part broadcasted their declaration of war every single time an engagement began but since Hive Corp never responded the company could get away with it. At least as long as they greased the palms of the inspectors who were supposed to ensure compliance with galactic laws like the standards for initiating an official conflict.
A dress was pressed against me and it only took one look for me to understand the implication. I was there to be eye candy. The bright red fabric would barely cover my breasts and the material of the whole thing was so thin and tight that it was only marginally better than being naked. The thing was beautiful though, glimmering with tiny red crystals. Still I’d like it a lot more if only the patterns of glimmering shards were not clearly intended to draw an onlooker's attention to my boobs and crotch. As an omega I was there to be seen, not heard. Sighing, I stepped into it and turned for someone to zip the dress up. By the time I turned back around the woman had closed in on me and was holding open a well crafted wooden box. A thick and intricately decorated collar with a bee motif rested on thick maroon padding.
I looked up at her. “Seriously? Not just leather? The metal ones hurt my ports.”
“Company policy. You're going to be in close proximity to known hostile alphas. They don’t want your future mate to be able to sue us for property damage if you wind up with a mating bite that takes.” My future mate, not me, notably.
“And the gold and jewels? Aren't the bees a little on point?”
“Our personal touch. You’re representing Hive Corp after all and the profitability of a thousand star systems hangs in the balance.”
I snorted at the lie but lifted up my hair anyway. Hive corp technically had mining and settling rights to that many systems but actually had operations in less than a hundred. Maintaining jump gates to the rest would have cost more than the systems could produce each month. At least until Hive could construct real stations to act as infrastructure hubs and that was slow work, taking years for each one. The woman slid the collar in place and the latch closed with a loud snap. It probably wouldn’t come off for the rest of the week even though it was going to make sleeping fucking miserable. Thankfully she resisted clipping a leash to the ring on the front and just motioned for me to follow. I still couldn’t decide if the two betas were mates or siblings, they had tall shirts that hid the glands on the neck where a mating bite would normally go.
In the main room Sean and Katherine were dressed to impress. Sean was in his old Imperial dress uniform and Katherine was wearing a red dress similar to mine. The matching was clearly intentional. Where my dress was skimpy hers was tasteful, where mine was paper-thin hers was solid. Where the sequin on mine reduced me to my sex characteristics, hers pulled the eye to exposed muscles built on a solid frame. By putting the two of us side by side in such similar outfits the differences were being deliberately highlighted. I couldn’t say any of that outloud. In fact I had been staring a little too long and my eyes suddenly found the floor by my feet very appealing as the alphas turned, noticing that the three of us had entered the room. More of the rules. Don't make eye contact with alphas. Don't contradict them. Respond with their title. Speak only when spoken to. Treating one alpha this way would be tolerable. The omega in me even yearns for it. To submit myself to my alpha. But that’s the key. My alpha. Even the idiot lurking in my hindbrain hated having to treat all of the undeserving assholes this way. And well… I don’t have an alpha yet. Being an unmated omega at my age was unusual and was a big factor in why I came to the frontier in the first place. If you’re a good pilot and have even a little money, out here it’s easier to dodge marriage contracts than it would be coreward.
Katherine gave a huff and walked across the room to inspect me. Even if I didn’t know Sean or the betas, I knew her. She had caught a whiff of my pre-heat pheromones right before one of my heats a little more than two years ago and hadn’t taken kindly to the measures I took to avoid her knot. Especially not the part where I lured her out of the trade lane sensor nets and left her stranded with disabled engines. Since none of the sensor buoys watched me fire on her and she didn’t want to admit that her battleship got disabled by an omega in a light cruiser she hadn’t been able to retaliate through official channels. But she’d had it out for me ever since. Luckily we were assigned to different patrol zones so until now I had been able to keep far far away from her. Judging by the look in her eyes as she gripped my chin and raised my face, she still hadn’t forgiven or forgotten me.
“Hello Raven.”
I winced but didn’t reply. She hadn’t technically asked me a question or ordered me to speak so I could technically get away with not returning the greeting. At least until her hand slid down onto my throat and she rammed me against the nearest wall. The motion is sloppy. Mason is always too reliant on raw tonnage. “Too good to greet me eh omega?”
“No alpha. I’m sorry alpha.” Katherine pressed harder against my windpipe. That wasn’t all she wanted. “Hello Alpha Mason. I’m sorry alpha. I’m sorry.”
She released her grip and my hand came to my throat rubbing at the new soreness as I slumped against the wall and apologized one last time as I sunk down to the floor. It wouldn’t bruise but it still didn’t feel good. She tugged her dress back into place and left the betas to help me up. A quiet chime sounded. Time for dinner. The alphas turned and strode toward the door. As a safety feature the conference room was only accessible when the chime sounded and everyone would be required to leave later when it sounded again. At least food was a reliable way to distract alphas.
“Hopefully the rest of the night won't be too bad.” As an omega I had sharp hearing and my whisper barely reached my own ears.
I should have known the universe would hear me anyway and kept my damn mouth shut. The Hive Corp alphas had entered the room together at the same time as the pirate alphas followed by both sets of betas and then the omegas. My omega counterpart was a wisp of a man almost half a foot shorter than me, clearly underfed and nearly every exposed inch of skin was covered in bites and bruises in various stages of healing. But he wasn’t the problem. I knew who the problem would be as soon as the doors slid open. Jaina Euler. Six and a half feet of pure alpha beauty. Dirty blonde hair, shockingly blue eyes, and perfectly tanned skin. Her face is gorgeous and handsome at the same time. It’s like every one of her features was carved from solid marble from her jawline to the powerful muscles that rippled beneath the surface. I could smell her pheromones, a unique blend of vanilla and spring flowers. It’s one of the most incredible things I’ve ever smelled and it’s attached to one of the most vile alphas alive.
I was forced through the door as a faint buzzing started to build in the antechamber indicating that the door would close soon. Hive hadn’t known who the pirates would send. They had literally hundreds of pilots after all, but of course it had to be that bitch. She spotted me as soon as I was through the door. Before I could blink the air was driven out of my lungs as she slammed me to the floor. “Rayray!”
I actually heard her teeth ping off the metal collar. Barely a few seconds into this week and the collar had already saved me from a mating bite. I was suddenly glad the betas had insisted on metal instead of leather. For alphas smaller, weaker or less driven than Jaina, a leather collar was enough to deter them. But too much pressure against the mating glands would still leave an omega with symptoms almost identical to mate bond withdrawal for days or even weeks.
Hive Corp’s alphas were slow to react. I wasn’t their mate. Hell they barely cared about me at all but Jaina had gone too far. I was still at least tangentially theirs for the week and that was more than enough to get their hackles up. I wasn’t really conscious of what was going on in the room above me. My breath still hadn’t come back, my head was swimming with the intensity of Jaina’s pheromones. She was so close to me, forming a cage with her stiff limbs and looking absolutely furious about the collar. We were locked there forever as I tried to swallow down air and kept getting mouthfuls of pure domination tinged with more than a little arousal. Within seconds that felt like hours she was pried off of me. Three of the betas were trying to keep open combat from starting as the male pirate alpha and one of their betas worked together to drag Jaina off of me.
By the time I had recovered enough to stand back up the two sides had separated but Jaina was still grinning at me from across the room. Normal people's smiles can be comforting or attractive or kind. Jaina’s smile was the grin of a lion drooling at a slab of raw meat. It’s a look she wears well. She is absolutely stunning after all. Unlike Katherine I had never met Jaina in person before. I only knew a few things about her. First, she’s a pirate. Second, she goes out of her way to kill me at every opportunity. And third she has some method of tracking my heats with disturbing accuracy. Everything else was peripheral and based on conjecture.
The female beta drags a chair over to me and gestures for me to sit, omegas can’t use furniture outside of our private rooms without permission. Then she handed me a glass of water. “Can you explain what that was about Raven? Do you two know each other?”
I take a long drink before responding. “I think she hates me. I beat her the first time we ever encountered each other on a patrol. It's been eleven years since then and every time we have an encounter she runs straight after me, flying the most overclocked and modded heavy cruisers that I've ever seen. She loses a fair few of them too since chasing me frequently pulls her out of formation. She sends me really fucking weird messages too.”
The beta purses her lips. “That's one hell of a grudge to carry it for eleven years especially if it's costing her ships. Does she kill you often?”
“About even. Sometimes I can beat her alone, sometimes the fleet helps me, sometimes she kills me before either of those happen.”
“What about the letters? What do they say?”
This is getting weird now. The betas for this parley are supposedly an expert team from way up the Hive corporate ladder. Why is she so interested in Jaina’s weird grudge? Still I have to respond. An omega can't just ignore a direct question. “They alternate between stoking her own ego, talking about how much stronger than me she is and threatening to enslave, murder, torture or rape me… sometimes in the same sentence. There are also a disturbing number of sexual fantasies mixed into the messages. I used to respond with a ‘fuck you’ or gloat a little every time I managed to beat her but that just seemed to make things worse so I stopped. I haven't read any of the messages in a while but the packages are harder to ignore.”
“Packages?”
“I’d rather not talk about them. It’s… personal.”
“Dangerous?”
“No.”
“Gross?”
“Kind of.”
“So sexual then.”
I blush at even the memory of what’s inside the crates but the beta is staring at me expectantly. “Yes ok she sends me weird stuff. I think it’s her way of taunting me.”
I clamp my mouth shut there. I can’t tell this total stranger that every single time I’ve started my heat for the last ten years, twenty nine heats total, a package of clothing, blankets, and pillows has shown up at my quarters absolutely saturated in her scent. It’s her making fun of me. I hate her for it. Jaina is rubbing my designation in my face just like she does every time we fight. She knows I can't fly anything larger than a light cruiser so she brings more tonnage. She knows my heat cycle so she taunts me with her scent. Always reminding me that she's an alpha and that I’m a helpless little omega who, to paraphrase the last letter I actually read, “should count herself blessed if she ever gets the chance to choke to death pleasuring my cock.”
It’s kind of shame she’s so fucking crazy actually. She's a good pilot and if we were fighting fair with nothing on the line I think I could really enjoy our duels. But that’s not possible. She won’t match my tonnage, bringing those stupid heavy cruisers instead, and every time she blows me up hundreds of my regular human crew die. Not to mention the helpless people on the planets and freighters that she pillages. No fuck her and fuck whatever the fuck she was up to.
The rest of the dinner went decently as far as I could tell. The betas sized each other up looking for angles and weaknesses, the alphas postured and blustered as usual and across from me the other omega sat dead silent and eating only the few bites the male alpha had placed on his plate. Not nearly enough to sustain the frail omega, much less heal the injuries that covered his body. After things were done the doors chimed indicating the time allotted for the first dinner was over. I was shepherded through the doors first, the alphas clearly unsure what Jaina would do if I was the last one out.
As I settled into my bed I shook my head. This was going to be a long fucking week.