Luke woke up the next night with an assassin in his room.

He had no problem with that, because this one was pyrogenic, female, and without clothes. He did nothing in response, following the general rule of 'when a naked girl walks into your bedroom, don't discourage her'.

She pulled the covers from him with a smooth yank. Her hands started low and moved up his body, teasing, inviting, slowly and carefully as if she was preparing material for a high-danger operation. She straddled him, slowly lowering herself onto his now-swollen dick.

Jesus Christ! The inside of her vagina felt like someone had drilled a hole into a brick wall and lined it with dry sandpaper. And her hands were no longer just traveling along his upper body but had made their way to around his throat, starting to squeeze, threatening asphyxiation and immolation both.

He reflexively grabbed her wrists, pinching the channels shut. Idiot. If she loosed and oxidized now, her arms would explode and take his head with them. Instead, she bounced up and down, ignoring the pain of friction. Luke's dick felt like it was being skinned. You like this, asshole? This is sex with me. You really wanted me that badly? Fine.

Luke released her wrists- she almost fried him right there- and grabbed her breasts. Now they could both kill each other instantly. He'd send his kilowatts across her chest, she'd turn his head to charcoal. Instead, he began to grin. How many times had Paul told him about the Law of Unintended Consequences? He put his forefingers on each nipple in turn, sending a jolt through them, defying her to roast him into oblivion. Go on bitch, do it. He didn't speak aloud. Silence was to be savored, and this bed did not creak despite how hard they were using it.

It begame marginally more pleasant, feeling now like a scalding steam bath. Oh, you like electricity, huh? He put his hands on her ass and sent four hundred volts into it- her butt cheeks clenched and her feet shot fire. Oh, you do like it. He sent a more powerful jolt and they both came at the same time- she spread her arms wide to send dragon breath flying across the room- and then as he laid back, she removed herself from him and walked out of the room, leaving him to his ecstasy and pain, the only reminders she had been there the spot on the sheets and the faint smell of smoke.

She chuckled faintly as she left him. Post-coital somnolescence would have him out in minutes, possibly even before his regeneration pushed a couple layers of epidermis back on his dick. Her vagina hurt as well- possibly worse- but she simply chose to ignore it. ('And I did that just because I felt like it.') She hadn't done anything just because she felt like it since she was four.

She fell asleep easily on top of the covers and dreamt sunlit, expansive, relaxing dreams.

When she awoke, she felt three things. The first was the mild chill of sleeping without covers on all night. The second was a faint crust of dried sweat; she really should have showered before she went to bed. The third, as she got up, was the unmistakable knowledge: 'I'm pregnant.'

'How do I know that?' She could simply feel it, the same way anyone could feel a full bladder or the need to eat, subtle changes in her hormones telling her that her menstrual cycle had stopped, that somewhere inside her was a life not her own. She guessed the reason why she knew those things. (What she did not guess was that the Operator had a few servants making substantial strides in the realm of biofeedback over the past few months.) She sighed once, took the needed shower, got dressed (with a top this time, no more dodging grease), and went through the usual motions while pondering the subject of abortion.

If Gritzl had gotten her pregnant, she would simply have ripped it out of her womb the moment she became retroviral, tearing apart her own uterus in the process. She pondered doing it now. It would be unimaginably painful, but that didn't matter anymore, and it'd grow back. 'Maybe I should have asked them to get rid of it, period.' What would a death machine need one of those for, anyway? Never mind. It was just standard human equipment and she knew how to deal with it without blood loss and organ damage.

Luke and Ruby treated each other neutrally at the breakfast table; the twins figured they had simply come to some kind of mutual understanding and thus ended comedy hour. Ah well, it would have gotten stale soon anyway. Sarah knew something was up the moment she saw Ruby's face, and they were almost able to leave together unnoticed afterwards if not for the constant gazes of the males, who had figured that something sexual had happened from gestures and faint scents.

The twins asking Luke lurid details would have been impolitic; that was Paul's job. And Paul distinctly wasn't asking; he could either bring what he saw as Jerry Springer drama to a place where it didn't belong (even if it had turned out well for Jeremy and Kylie, that business between them was not something he wanted to see with himself or his servants), or he could deal with the new power structure caused by Javier's acquisition. Javier had been slowly turning his gangs into a paramilitary force which performed cross-border raids, not so much an actual threat as a pain in the ass. For Javier to suddenly try to talk them out of it would have been ineffective at best and a secrecy breach at worst, and some those gangs had ties to other gangs that no one controlled. Since their territory was across the border, Paul couldn't use the Venezuelan police and military to attack without starting a war. He asked a few other Illuminati with Colombian connections for help in getting rid of these guys before they became a real threat, and got one terse 'It's your problem now' from one and nothing from the others. Paul sighed deeply; he'd gotten himself too feared. Even though his regional peers had to accept it because a rogue was a complete outlaw, they didn't want to deal with anyone who had just made an Illuminatus his slave.

Paul could possibly use that slave and his own holdings to slowly turn the gangs towards profitable drug smuggling instead of less-profitable open violence, and if that failed he could always turn the gangs against each other.. but Paul wanted to solve this immediately, not try to mastermind something that could take months to finish and might not fully work. Even as a retroviral sixteen-year-old, he never liked the finicky, slow business of long-term manipulation. Besides, there was a fairly quick solution which wouldn't be terribly hard to pull off, there were only three groups that looked like an immediate threat, and these murderous, kidnapping motherfuckers had it coming. He wouldn't even need to ask Sarah for this, because now he had his own murderous, kidnapping motherfucker. He brought Luke to his room and started giving orders, making gestures to his screen. These people are here, here, and here, Javier says they plan to do this, this, and probably this, prevent them while keeping secrecy, etc, etc. "And no mess that needs physical or social clean-up this time. Make it look like they were taken by a government organization." Which would mean that his servant would probably just vaporize them the same way he had his parents; the latest fusion incinerator could fold up and was easy to carry. Exeunt Luke.

Complete disappearance was also on someone else's mind. "Sarah, I need one of your instant abortions," Ruby asked in the most casual voice she could.

A male master would have likely responded with either a no or what would come to be known as a Falcon Punch. Instead Sarah just looked at her and asked "Why?"

What, was she intentionally setting her up for a Snappy Answer to a Stupid Question or something? The words 'Because I'm pregnant' almost escaped her lips, but Sarah's expression showed that she was being more serious, and so Ruby remained mute for a half second. "Why do you take them?" she asked in response, confused.

Sarah chose the condensed version: "Because the Dominator and I don't have evenly compatible DNA. We didn't realize it at the time, but Quad was an amazing stroke of luck. The next one would probably be horribly deformed or possibly cancerous." She didn't talk about her nightmares of that: expelling from her body not a baby but a writhing, multi-limbed, multi-headed tumor. Or the other nightmare of having to rip out her own uterus because of it. ('And that absolutely can't happen, that's why we have doctors, it doesn't need to be pondered.') Her face and mannerisms never betrayed her thoughts unless she wanted them to. "Did you ask just because you thought it was a standard for assassins?"

"It's not?" Ruby asked in instant defense. Oh fuck. This was another one of Sarah's set-ups- only this time Sarah was setting her up to have a child. Now she knew she should have gone for an actual sandpaper condom. ('Why doesn't the bitch just order it?')

"No. What I expect you not to do is be stupid like I was and end up going into labor on a mission. But why would it be a standard? For you it will be an operational downtime of one week for safety in a bit less than three months, and.. that's it."

"It will be. You're ordering me to have it."

"Yes. You're practically begging me to do that, and for good reason- if you choose to have it, you'll feel responsible for whatever happens because of that choice, but it you choose to abort it you'll wonder what could have been. And all of this is mixed up with both sane emotions and retarded normal concepts that have no place anywhere." What meaning did 'pro-life' have for pros at death? How could either of them even say the words 'pro-choice' without laughing? "Giving you no decision is better, and gives us another valuable engineered. If you like, you can consider it repayment to the Operator for your changes; he'll probably want to see someone grow up with an electricity and fire combination."

"It'll have both?"

"Absolutely. The genes are fully dominant, and the retrovirus gave you both two copies." The genes each took up a significant portion of what would otherwise be junk DNA. The Operator would probably curse himself later for using up such valuable chromosomal real estate, but that was how science marched on. "Don't worry about that. After the colossal fuckup making me and the twins incompatible, I'm pretty sure the Operator learns from his mistakes."

"That's... not it," she said quietly.

"You are valuable to me, but I'm sure I can find a suitable replacement among all my other, less personal, servants for a week. But that's not it either, is it?"

"I..." Her head slumped a bit. She was going to have his baby. After she grudge-fucked him. The first time she does something she feels like in a decade, and now she either has to 'deal with the consequences' or kill herself, although Sarah would never use remotely the same words as one of those moral-sanctity-of-life hypocrites even if the effect was the same.

"Is it some sort of punishment? You carry around a few extra kilos for a few months and create a new person. Welcome to female reproduction. Everything else is taken care of by our support system. Where does the problem come in?"

Ruby had promised herself she'd try to adopt Sarah's aloof mindset, but this was just plain alien. But.. Sarah wasn't wrong. Every time she came up with an objection it was either the same sort of normal-world bullshit they were both trying to throw out of her mind as the trash it was, or inapplicable to her new biology, or forgetting about things like Northberg. Only three months, a third of a normal's gestation time, less than a pig's and more than a dog's. She wouldn't have to raise the child herself. The child's safe, stable, mostly-pleasant future was fairly well guaranteed. A pregnancy would do all of jack shit to an engineered after the milk stopped flowing, let alone the long run. (And normals, she reminded herself, don't have much of a long run.)

"There isn't one. Not here in this body in this society. But is there something else I should be learning here? Because I feel like I've been set up."

"Two slightly post-pubescent servants with a lot in common under the same roof with no other potential mates?" Every clause Sarah added made it sound more and more laughably obvious. She could have just ended it with 'Two slightly post-pubescent'. "I'd say the situation sets up itself. Don't look at me like that. You invited him."

"How do you know that?"

"Because if you didn't, we would be having a louder conversation about Paul's loss of a servant."


Said servant staggered in the door ten hours later at dinner time, taking off his shoes before he entered to avoid dragging bloody dirt all over his master's floor. "Oh Christ I never thought I'd have to plow down that many sheeple," Luke muttered. He started to go upstairs to change clothes, as even his stain-resistant clothing was splashed with various substances.

"Sit down and eat something before it's all gone," Paul told him instead, and he gratefully did just that, digging into the sauce-covered pork and shrimp with an inhuman appetite as his master hugged him with one arm. "You proved your worth out there today. Thanks, Luke."

"Going to tell us what happened?" Howard asked them.

Luke took a deep breath between bites. "Paul says, disappear three groups of people. No sweat. But, power vacuum. There were some other groups they were worried about who would have taken their place. So, I shot those guys with the first group's guns and made it look like a fight. There were so many different groups out there, they all wanted each other's turf, Javier never really controlled what they did, so eventually I just ended up killing all of them." He had killed more than five hundred people in total, reporting in regularly, telling his master over and over again that he could take care of it without more help than the handful of Enforcers he'd brought, using the jet-helicopter to hop from target to target like a frog of death. "There's a lot in the database, but if you want the whole details, forget it; I didn't record anything, and I don't write books or know anyone who does. It's all secrecy-good, it's what happens out there, and there's probably other other groups waiting to take their place."

"There are. My problem," Paul said. "Some of them I can get real control over, some belong to other locals. We'll clean this shit up." Paul would inform his peers that he'd used one servant for something that even Sarah would probably use several squads for, and make them talk to him through direct intimidation if all else failed. It'd probably be all normal-world settled in a couple of weeks, he'd have his local servants make it look like another coup attempt or something. More importantly, the twins had their sixteenth birthday party coming up soon; they elected to have it on his local South American turf, and fortunately they warned him in advance so he could prepare a nice secret area, misusing local Incan ruins for the purpose. He'd have fun with it, subtly reminding the twins of the temple-of-doom test they were required to survive before Howard was proclaimed Dominator. He hadn't been there himself for that one.. it was better if he didn't think about where he was when they were doing that. He, along with his servant, would rather think about food at the moment.

"Luke, you're going to be a father," Ruby said as Luke took a particularly large bite.

He did not choke nor spit out his food as she half-expected; he meticulously finished chewing it, staring at her. "No, I'm not." She opened her mouth. "No, I know what you mean, you mean that I got you pregnant last night. I'm not going to be a 'father', that thing doesn't exist here. The kid'll be raised in North Medical with the rest of the.. servants."

"Northberg," Howard corrected him. "And the disconnect isn't as complete as you think. You'll be a dad, you just won't be expected to act like one. Unless Paul...?"

"Not even going to go there," Paul said. "But Luke, really? Are you going to give up the whole concept of fatherhood because of a few assholes?"

"You don't even want to know.. if I ended up being.. look, I killed the old bastard for a reason, all right?"

"I'm sorry, I seem to have forgotten something," Paul said. "Your genetics are what, now? Your society is what? You live where, you do what for a living- you just got done doing what at how many frags per hour?" Luke didn't reply. "At least you're not bringing up the idea of it ending up with someone psychotic."

But what did he care? It wasn't his problem.