CHAPTER SEVENTY

Joe was at his side.

“I’m alive,” Mike said.

“Pretty much.”

“What happened?”

“You won.”

“What exactly have I won?”

Joe sat on the side of the bed. They were in their cubicle. He made sure his hip touched Mike’s torso. He took his husband’s hand. Joe said, “Bex is dead. You vaporized him and his flagship and a couple other cruisers and several leaders of the Religionist faction. Everybody wants to make a deal with you.”

“Huh?”

“True.”

“I’m confused. Last I remember, I was in a storm on a mountain. When is this?”

“It’s been a week since the battle. If you want to call it a battle. You did one titanic shot and they surrendered.”

“Good, but how are we better off?”

“I’m not sure about us, but you sure are.”

Mike gave him a quizzical look.

“Snek talked about this when we got down from the mountain. Turns out he was right. Remember how in your trial, how because of quirks in the law they could do things to me that they couldn’t do to you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, those rules apply to you as a prisoner as well. We, born citizens of Hrrrm, are out of luck. If it was us who discovered the zukoh, we’d have to give it to the government, or they could just take it. For you, it’s yours.”

“Why don’t they just take it from me?”

“Because besides the odd laws, you are all-powerful. And remember the accountants’ rulings are sacred. They cannot be appealed. At the current rate of exchange of liquid zukoh in this part of the galaxy, you are the richest man.”

“I want to diversify.”

Joe smiled. He leaned over and gave him a kiss on the lips. Mike placed his hand on the back of Joe’s head. Lifting it seemed to cause every muscle to strain.

Joe noted the difficulty of the movement. “Uh, we had to use one of our medical deals on you. We didn’t know what was going to happen. Gek couldn’t use it. I had to. Your implant thinks I’m benign. You should make a full recovery.”

Mike said, “I don’t want to be rich and powerful. I just want to go home. I want to live in peace with my husband. I don’t want to govern or rule or take part in intrigues or trade. I don’t give a shit about business. There are enough here who can and will take care of this.”

“It’s going to be complicated.”

“Can I give it away?”

“Mostly no, mixed with a tiny bit of sort of. We’ll get a gay accountant team in here to go over all of the details with you. The deal with all the factions is to share the distribution and transportation. We’ll trade zukoh with anybody. It will keep any one faction from being able to hoard zukoh, at least initially. There will be battles about it for profit eventually, I presume.”

He told Mike about the ongoing negotiations that had begun in the hours after the battle.

When he finished, Mike said, “Let them fight. I don’t care.”

“You still have a weapon.”

“They’ve seen it work. Vov was a genius. There will be other geniuses. If I could give them the technology in my brain, I would.”

“You realize the explosion you set off revealed another seam of zukoh running through those mountains deep underground.”

“I don’t care.”

Joe said, “You could organize collective ownership of the zukoh here.”

“Communism,” Mike muttered.

Joe said, “Huh?”

Mike said, “Skip it.”

As he drifted off to sleep, Mike had two thoughts. One, that he had gotten revenge on Bex. He’d won and the pig of pigs, asshole of the universe had lost.

In secret recesses of his mind, he wondered about having destroyed Bex. He felt absolute triumph and joy at that thought. And he realized he’d also killed all the men and women who made up the crews on all those ships. When he’d first used his aura to kill on the ship to Hrrrm, he’d had great gusts of conscience and guilt. His feelings were still mixed. For the moment, victory triumphed. He’d beat that bastard Bex.

He’d gotten complete and total revenge on the man who he believed was the most evil in the universe. He’d never thought of himself as a revenge kind of person, but the feeling of getting even against Bex had grown since their first encounter. Was this who he was now?

He’d done the best he could in horrendous circumstances. He didn’t know what he could have done better.

No doubt he was a different person from the peaceful gay waiter who had left Earth not that long ago.

The other thought was that he was with the man he loved, and that feeling was more important. This is what gave him great comfort as he wrapped his arm around his sleeping husband, nestled close, and finally fell asleep.