“That fool should consider himself lucky that he didn’t get away from the police,” Marc snarled as Maiair finished her report. “He had the human dead to rights, and let Dr. Liamssen shoot him? Let him rot in prison. Make sure nobody posts bail for that fool. If someone does, I want them both brought to me in chains.”
“As you command,” Maiair replied, turning to signal to her younger sister with the message to convey.
Once the younger woman was gone, Marc was alone with the older in his outer chamber. He moved to the table and took a seat, gesturing for her to do the same. Normally, he would enjoy a glass of wine right now, but he was too angry for that to settle him.
This was why he needed to go get some of his old gang, even if he had to break them out of prison. He knew of the perfect tool for a jailbreak. However, right now he was surrounded by fools that would rather talk than shoot. Cleveland Eddy and Two-gun Kowalski wouldn’t have made that mistake.
“What do we know about Talyarkinash Liamssen?” he asked, rubbing his eyes in frustration.
“Best in the field,” Maiair replied. “At least among those willing to work for us under the table. Probable a few better geneticists out there, but not that much better.”
“Make your plans on the assumption that the man coming after us is my size and at least as smart as me,” Marc warned her.
“As smart?” Maiair asked.
“She’s the one who did my physical structure, Maiair,” Marc said. “Morty and Xiomber did the programming that upgraded my mind. At a minimum, you’re now facing me, but as a cop.”
“Then we might have a problem, boss,” she said carefully. “You’ve managed to whip the rest of the gang into shape, but in doing so, you’ve intimidated the hell out of them. Which was a good idea at the time. Will another human echo that and cause them to freeze up? We don’t know what happened to Cheepsath. He might have frozen, thinking about facing a human.”
Marc sighed.
“That’s my one fear here,” he said. “Having to rely on a gang I didn’t build, to go up against the most competent, most capable enemy I’ve ever known. Once I get past you, your sister, and Zorge, I’m not sure how many more managers I’ve got, versus a lot of make-weight street criminals.”
“Managers?” Maiair asked, at a loss.
“This organization is going to have to get much bigger, Maiair,” Marc replied. “And soon. We’ll have to come out of the shadows at some point.”
“But we are the shadows, Marc,” she said, headcrest bobbing in confusion. “Why would we come out?”
“Because I’ve got bigger plans than just ruling Zathus’s underground, Maiair,” he explained. “At some point, we need to take over the whole godforsaken planet. We’ve already made a good start on that, with corrupt politicians we can bend.”
“What’s your ultimate goal, Maximus?” Maiair asked, headcrest now fully up and puffed sideways a little bit. Not challenging, but fierce.
“Taking over the entire Accord of Souls, Maiair,” he said simply, saying it out loud for the first time.
“How in the nine hells do we do that?” she probed, headcrest puffing even more sideways with energy.
“I have a check list, actually,” he said with a small laugh. “Fringe benefit of a bigger, faster brain. Who to turn. Who to kill. Things like that. At some point, I plan to import some of my old killers from Earth and their families, and start a new government.”
“Would you make them Vanir, like you?” she asked carefully.
“No,” Marc understood where her mind was going. “We’ll leave them as humans. That way, the Vanir can still fight them on relatively even terms: Vanir might against human ruthlessness. The only real advantage the Vanir and other species will have over the next millennia will be numbers, because I won’t bring that many humans over. Who knows where I’ll be in a thousand years.”
“Won’t you be dead, Maximus?” she asked. Her headcrest had bobbed back down again. It was better than watching eyes and mouth on a human, to read their internal monolog.
“Not if all goes to plan,” he explained. “The Chaa never programmed limits into humans. Why bother, since we were still stone-age cavemen, little better than animals, when they left. No, I will need a few geneticists to work on a project I have in my head, but I should be able to live forever.”
“What about the rest of us?” Maiair asked.
The way she said it left a question in Marc’s mind, but Maiair was a Warreth. Not the sort of creature he was interested in, except as a means to an ends.
Still, he fixed her with a stern gaze.
“You’ll have as much responsibility as you can handle,” he said. “For as long as you can handle it. That’s decades, for your kind. I’m just sorry we can’t do anything to extend that.”
Her headcrest collapsed. Her head hung as well.
This creature couldn’t have been hoping he would make her immortal, as well? Perhaps more? Did she think he needed a Warreth empress to rule with?
Marc’s mind flitted back to the one woman who might have been a perfect queen, a decade ago. Before she made her choice. Maybe one of these days he might bring Philippa Loughty, the little maid of the lake, here, just so he could show her what a bad decision it had been, picking Gareth Dankworth over Marc Sarzynski.
If the machines were still available, he might have even chosen to bring her here now, just so she could be there when he finally caught up with the man and finished him off.
Perhaps another day.
But he would need to return home and scout for a future wife at some point. Someone he could turn into the physical form of a Vanir, while he made the changes she would need to breed up the generation of advanced humans he would need as a new nobility for the star empire he envisioned. Which he planned to rule forever.
But first, he needed the loyalty of his closest people.
“Maiair,” he said softly, causing her head and headcrest to come up some. “I would grant you immortality, if I could. And we’ll look into what gaps your genetic bonds have to improve you. I fear that the Warreth generally got the short end of that stick from the Chaa, along with the Tree People and the Borren. But who knows what we might be able to do with human science thrown in.”
That brought some color back to her eyes. Some luster to her feathers. As much as he could do, for now.
It wouldn’t do to alienate the very criminals he needed.
At least not until he didn’t need them anymore.
Once he had enough humans to rule the rest, all bets were off.