From: Philanna A'tri

Subject: Kody, Come Find Me

The last I heard, Kody, you were grounded on Earth. The Voyager had been sequestered.

I’m transmitting this message to her. Without your access code it should take more than a human lifetime to crack my codes; my privacy is important here. I’ll explain why soon.

I can’t imagine you not able to travel the stars, not for long. Death didn’t stop you. Bureaucracy won’t.

You’re one of the finest women I’ve ever met, of any species, and you know me better than I know myself, I think.

That’s why I need you. As soon as you have the Voyager, I need you to come find me.

I can’t tell you exactly where I am. I know, I know, in all the time we’ve known each other I’ve always had a clear idea of where I was, even if I couldn’t see a way forward. In this case I just don’t know.

What I can do is tell you how I got here, and hope that you can get most of the way - and that the people you inspire like you always inspire will get you the rest of the way.

I never wanted to be extra work for you.

I wanted a partnership of equals. I’ll never have your courage, or your strength and determination, but I do have decades of research, combat training, and all the resources of my new position. I know I can offer you talents that you can be grateful for.

This sounds so mechanical. Kody, that’s not what I want. I loved you. I still do. And I know you loved me.

I pray you still do, but whether or not you still do, I need you now.

If you need me to say it, I will: The high-and-mighty Ouhanian needs saving, just like I did on Tahalla, just like I did from the Twilight King.

Every time I go off on my own I end up needing you to save me, Kody. I hope you will once more.

It started out with an attempt to make you happy. You know as well as I do that Cordelia Floyd’s loyalties are entirely suspect. After your mission, I of course checked on everyone from your team - all but Pa'aka, who I was unable to locate at all.

Cartran Varankin, Glacin Uniron, Brawychus, and most of the others had acted in ways that did not surprise me at all. I confess, Kody, I was surprised to learn of Allysion’s ultimate fate. Now, writing this, I have been given a very different perspective.

Just how did El'achin persuade you, I wonder? Even the very best have been captivated by Ouhanians like her…

This is off the topic. I confess, Kody, I almost do not went to tell you. It isn’t just that I feel like a fool; I am also scared.

Cordelia Floyd had disappeared. Not as fully as Pa'aka, but I take that simply to mean that she didn’t have that skill.

I wondered where she might have gone. I wondered, if I am honest, whether her loyalty was still with Komainu, rather than with you.

I went to the last place she had been seen. I went in search of her sister, Olivia.

I don’t want to write the next sentence.

I was caught in the same trap Cordelia had been captured in.

I think it had been left active only for you. Whatever Floyd’s many faults, she had been part of your crew, and it’s well known how protective you are of your crew.

They sprang the trap on me from three different angles, and I was only prepared intellectually for two. So I failed you in two different ways. I fought off the first wave. I was holding my own against the second.

They got me in the ass with a drug-dart. Then one of them yelled out “Pull back and watch for her friend.”

I assume that meant you. At the time I thought they’d mistaken me for El'achin, and thought I was looking for Cordelia out of shipmate loyalty. I’ve realised since that it must have been you they were expecting; they simply didn’t know you were grounded. I don’t think any spaceborn smuggler, any arms dealer, any mercenary in the galaxy will believe you can’t reach them any time soon, my love.

I passed out with my hand clenched around the dart, before I could even pull it out. I woke in a cell on a corvette, human made, but not Republic. The cell’s viewport just showed me the same image the whole time, a pillar marked with Progenitor glyphs. Technology more advanced than anything we understand that had fused somehow to stone sculpture. It was a sight from planetside, but I could feel the whole time that we were in space; I was just barred from seeing anything that might help me locate myself.

The station I’m on now, I saw no identifiers, and I passed through junctions on the way to my new cell where I should have done. I think they’ve been removed, and that tells me that Komainu owns this whole station.

It is Komainu, by the way. I recognise the combat armour. And… well, and there’s more.

I’ve seen Cordelia Floyd, Kody, but it’s worse than that. I’ve spoken to the Shogun. He’s not here. Cordelia’s not, either, but she was.

The Shogun called my cell this morning. One of his holographic appearances.

“Dr A'tri,” he said. “Of all the people to catch in our web, you were far down my list. I had expected Lieutenant Commander Rainault, or Mr Twining, really. But if not them, certainly someone who had been travelling with Kody recently.”

He was looking me up and down through the holo, his cigarette in his mouth, and he exhaled. “For you to care for Ms Floyd is something I hadn’t really expected.”

I was stung, I admit. “You have no idea what my motives might be,” I said, “and you’re a fool if you think you’re going to get away with this.”

“You know something, Doctor?” he asked me. “I think I probably was a fool to think I’d get away with this.”

Kody, the smile he gave me just after that still haunts me.

"Then let me go.”

He shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any reason for me to do that now. I said was a fool. Things have changed.”

“What could possibly have changed that means you suddenly don’t have to be scared?” I asked.

“I had a breakthrough.” He gestured, and someone else walked into the holo pickup range.

I didn’t serve alongside Floyd, but I recognised her, with or without her clothes. She was nude, her hair longer than I expected it, and her lips were parted, her mouth a slack O. She stood as I would have expected her to stand; she held herself as a warrior. But her lack of clothes was obviously a point the Shogun wanted to make, and there was something, too, about her eyes.

Her eyes seemed to glitter slightly. You’ve seen these holomessages, Kody. You know how hard it can be to make out some details. I was sure those eyes meant something, but I could draw no conclusions from them.

“A strange effect, indoctrination,” he said, and he reached out, putting his hand around her hip, pulling her closer. She offered him no resistance. “Not well understood, either. But it does turn out to be reproducible.”

I shuddered, and I’m sure he saw it. He snapped his fingers, and Cordelia Floyd straightened to attention, her back arched, her chest pushed out in the way Ouhanians joke we should do if we want to land a human.

Uh. Please, Kody, don’t think too much about how I stand around you in that context. I have too many other things to be thinking about here to watch my wording. This is important.

He snapped his fingers again, and Floyd dropped to her knees. Kody, I watched her open his pants and take out his cock, and I watched her suck his cock and nuzzle his balls with an eagerness that most actual lovers can’t simulate.

That doesn’t fit any theories of how the indoctrination process works. When we spoke to the Khovian’s captive, her experience was very different. I theorise that this is because of the source of the indoctrination; the only explanation that I think makes sense is that a living being driving indoctrination, rather an AI, somehow changes the reward cycle that drives those affected.

Kody, there is no doubt in my mine that the Shogun has the secret now, nor that it was developed where I now am. I believe that he intends to use it on me. Perhaps he already is.

He had to give me a communication module to taunt me with that video. After spending some time hacking their safety protocols, I am almost certain this message will transmit.

Please come and find me, Kody. If not for what we’ve shared, for the secret of this new indoctrination; I will try to find out everything I can. I will hand it to you and your backers on my rescue so you can find a counter.

I believe they will use it on me, but you still have some little time. The will of an Ouhanians is infinitely superior to that of most humans, and Floyd I judge to be in that number.

*

From: Philanna A'tri

Subject: The Clock is Ticking, Kody

I think it’s been three weeks since my last message. I may have been incorrect in some claims, having been misled, or things may have changed.

Kody, Cordelia Floyd is here, and I believe so is the Shogun.

Cordelia has been here for at least a week. It’s difficult to tell; sometimes it feels like I’m repeating a day. The same events seem to happen in the same sequence until I notice and actively try to change it.

She’s visited me at least once a day. Her clothing varies; usually she wears that padded, protective jumpsuit Komainu issued her with before she ever met you. Sometimes she wears only underwear. Once she was naked, and there was still sticky cum on her mouth, and I knew she’d come straight from him.

I think there must be a pattern and I haven’t seen enough yet to know what it is. She doesn’t always come at the same time.

When she does come to me, we talk. She says she knows how they applied the indoctrination process to her, but she has been ordered not to tell me.

She’s been ordered not to tell me several things. She knows where this station is, too. And she knows its name. She won’t tell me either.

I have asked her every question I can think of that might give me an angle to take toward uncovering the secret of indoctrination, and none of them have been answered.

Indoctrination wasn’t invented by Komainu. It doesn’t belong to the Shogun.

Last time Cordelia visited with me I had decided to make use of this. I wanted to drive a wedge between her programming and her current master.

I asked her “What will you do when the Steel Collective rise?”

She looked at me with puzzlement. “That’s a strange question to be asking, Philanna.” She’s called me Philanna this whole time. I have asked her not to, repeatedly, and it has changed nothing.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, you’re indoctrinated. You don’t even deny it?”

“Why would I deny my perfection?” She sounded even more surprised than she had about my first gambit. “I am part of something bigger now, Philanna.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“But it’s your name.”

“And you don’t deserve to use it.”

She snickered. I tried again. “You’re indoctrinated. And that’s a Steel Collective process.”

“I cannot deny any of that,” she said.

“But you obey the Shogun.”

“That’s also true.”

“When they return, his interests and theirs won’t be the same. So when they return, what will you do?”

Cordelia had looked at me with patient pity throughout my line of questions. “That’s not why it’s a strange question to ask,” she said at last, as gently as any Ouhanian might speak to a child who doesn’t know the strength of their tie to the Starsoul. “I do not decide what I will do then. My Master, the Shogun, will decide.”

“Or the Steel Collective.”

Her peaceful expression did not change. “Or the Steel Collective, yes. I have no power in this situation, Philanna. I am helpless, just as I am now helpless when my Master gives me an order. You know that.”

I nodded. Nothing could be plainer to me. “It’s horrifying,” I said.

“It is no such thing,” she retorted, and I could hear the hurt in her voice. “Indoctrination is perfectly natural. You’ll understand that soon.”

“It can’t be that natural if it takes this complicated process to take place,” I retorted. “A month ago, you weren’t indoctrinated.”

Cordelia shook her head. “I don’t say indoctrination is inherent,” she said. “Like all inevitabilities, it is a natural force. But it’s also intelligent.”

“Intelligent?”

She smiled, and it was such a natural smile it was impossible to believe she wasn’t pleased. I mean, that Cordelia wasn’t pleased, not the indoctrination itself. “Oh yes,” she said. “From the moment an indoctrination source encounters a species, it is looking for a way through. An opening. And then, each time it encounters a new individual, the same process continues on that individual scale.

“Even now, you’re being examined for an opening by something more intelligent than you are, which also has access to sensory information you and I can’t even understand,” Cordelia said, and her smile had become blissful. Her eyes were vacant, not through the erasure of her mind but through its fixation on something erotic.

I realised with a shudder that the eroticism she’d found was in her own submission. She was reliving the experience. “You’re saying this source, whatever it is, is - what? Looking for my weaknesses?”

My question evidently called her back to herself and she fixed her eyes firmly on me. “Weaknesses is an incorrect way to think about it, Philanna,” she said. “Nor are they strengths. They are simply openings.”

“What do you mean?”

“It may look for a point on which you’re weak-willed and vulnerable to temptation,” she answered. “But it also may find something you take pride in which aligns to it. Or simply a fascination.” Cordelia smiled. “Of course, you wouldn’t know anything about Collective adjacent fascination, would you, Dr A'tri?”

I won’t deny I felt myself flush. She’d done her homework on me, even if it had simply been because at one point I was travelling with you. I looked as dismissive as I could. “I find it hard to believe that knowing my enemy could become a threat to my own strength of mind.”

Cordelia just smiled. “So now, you’re willing to overlook potential openings out of pride?” she asked. “I think the process has already started to work on you.”

I scoffed, of course, but inside I admit I was in turmoil. Could that be so? Would I notice in time?

You know how thoroughly my mother had fallen to the process, Kody. By the time you met either of us, it was irreversible. I still hope we will find a way to undo indoctrination in future, and not just for my sake; we will need it, I think, in coming times.

What I will never know is whether the process could be stopped by the time she understood it was happening to her. And now I find myself facing the same question.

I said little for the rest of Cordelia’s visit. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, for one thing. I also found myself examining my own behaviour closely, in retrospect, judging myself against my own rules, my own past behaviour.

Kody, I thought at the time it would be impossible to see the point where your behaviour begins to diverge from what it should be. But when Cordelia took her leave of me, I was wondering what I might have done in captivity otherwise, and I was comparing myself to Cordelia, the only other example I had of someone undergoing the effect.

My mind began to wander, I’m afraid. And, well, I’ve written and deleted the next section several times already. It’s embarrassing to admit. I’d rather you not know about it, Kody. You know how I feel about you; just the thought of telling you this makes me blush. At the same time, this information needs to make it to researchers, just in case it gives us a key to beating this.

I found myself thinking about Cordelia’s naked body, not as I’d seen it when she visited me but as it had been, as she had stood, when I saw her drop to her knees to service the Shogun over the holocall.

A strange thing to find myself fixated on, it must seem. At the time the chain of logic seemed clear and obvious, even if it’s no such thing now.

It was the way she had moved. I told myself that as her motions were those of the indoctrinated, there might be a clue in them. But I was thinking of what she had done, of how fully she had given herself over to his pleasure.

I’m not sure when I started to fondle myself, alone in my cell. I didn’t notice unfastening my own jumpsuit or baring my breasts to any camera the Shogun may have watching, to say nothing of the sensors that Cordelia suggests the ‘indoctrination source’ may have. Needless to say, I was heedless of their attentions. I was thinking of the way Cordelia had seemed utterly devoted to a single purpose, but I was also -

Well.

I was also thinking of you, Kody. I still remember the taste of your tongue, the softness of your lips on mine; I remember the intelligent, expert questing of your hands.

You took me, then. But that wasn’t what I pictured this time. I was thinking about how it would feel to give myself to you, to offer myself up, giving even more than you would have thought it right to take.

I would have been yours even then, Kody. If I never made that clear enough, if knowing would have kept you from your association with Komainu, I am sorry. Perhaps I should simply have been more of a slut.

Writing that made me shudder, but I can’t say I’m sure it’s disgust. I wish I could.

Kody, I lost myself that afternoon. My fingers were everywhere; my breasts, my pussy, my mouth. I was slick with my own juices, their taste on my lips alongside the memory of you, utterly heedless that anyone might be watching.

I came to my senses on my knees, my ass in the air, tits pressed against the cold metal floor to give me something more to feel, one of my hands desperately frigging myself even as the last of a chain of cascading orgasms shuddered through me and still I wanted more,

With the return to consciousness came a return of shame and embarrassment. I couldn’t believe I’d given into pleasure, at first. Then, as I thought back, I couldn’t believe that I’d let my dreams of you distract me from rational scientific inquiry.

It was a little later that I realised this must have been the indoctrination source testing me. I think it knows that your strength is my weakness.

Kody, I believe the process is already affecting me. Please, please come for me. Please find me. I don’t know how much longer I have.

I have to go. I hear Cordelia’s voice talking to the guard outside. She can’t know I’m reaching for help. I’ll update you when I can, hopefully with something useful.

I might be able to get something out of her.

I love you, Kody. Please find me.