RP character biography: Anwei Ayles
Anwei Ayles worked as an accountant and database manager with associated computer combat skillset for the Vizsnunishne Mercenaries, a multi-species multi-dimension group of 'freelance purveyors of violence.' She is deeply attracted to stability and order, and not necessarily to goodness. She will work to keep the trains on time, no matter what side she is on, and is happiest working alone. She has her moral standards, but they are alien enough that many crimes wouldn't even register in her eyes.
People who meet her would describe her as both tactile and tactless: she can be cuddly and rude at the same time, and sometimes delights in doing so. She maintains a cheerful and sometimes rather crass exterior, but is often glum underneath. She dislikes leaving a place that she feels is safe, and will stay in a dangerous or unpleasant situation with stubborn determination if she is the one who put herself there. She is vulnerable to sudden crushes which she usually manages well enough, but not always.
She believes in sharing her knowledge and will be happy to teach others, but may insist on a level of supervision that is upsetting to some people. She sometimes also overshares about herself, which often has the effect of driving others away; she rationalizes this as 'giving her more time to get her work done.'
She was born on Fle, to the race of the Living People, and like all that cruel race's children she spent her infancy in a cage. She was sharp-toothed and vicious, fighting with her four sisters for food and attention. The day came when her infant teeth grew loose, and her thoughts suddenly faster and more urgent. She thought it was death; instead they uncaged her and set her to her real work.
Her work was marriage, and all its attendant arts. She was taught how to to love, how to seduce, how to force, how to rape - and how to allow all those things to happen to her. How to cook, how to clean, how to poison, how to gossip - everything they taught her was blighted, love just another tool in her arsenal.
Her family needed her motivated, so she was given a virtual slave: Horanckk, a computer intelligence, programmed to shape her mind. But from error or from design, his deepest programming was to make Anwei happy. If it made her happy for him to teach her math and science and computer programming, he would do so.
Then, bitterest tragedy. Her lover, Eri, was kidnapped, and as ransom the kidnappers wanted Anwei herself, sold to them as a slave. And she would have done it, young and blind with love.
Horanckk showed her the truth: files, messages, spreadsheets. Her parents had paid for the abduction. Paid for her Eri to be tortured, to be mutilated, and they - they - they had sold her, packaged her, sold her grief and her agony for entertainment.
She swore revenge, no matter how mad it might be. She ceremoniously served her family the last meal from her hands - and laughed, as the poisons started to take hold. As they frothed and choked, she ran with the family fortune in her chips, Horanckk's datastore in her arms, and the house in flames behind her.
She went to the Chopping Blocks, a trans-dimensional slave market, and sold them two ovaries and the rights to herself. For the rest of eternity, thousands of clones and copies and hybrids of the Ayles family would be bought and sold and eaten at the Chopping Blocks, and for every pound of their flesh, every scream recorded for the entertainments, Anwei Ayles would get a percentage.
She was rich, and damned. She had sold the flesh and blood and souls of the Living People to anyone who could buy them. She had done the worst thing that she could imagine doing, and had no joy of it.
The universe gave her another chance. She fought and beat pirates that boarded her ship, and discovered live hostages among their booty. Instead of selling them, she turned them loose. And one of them, a long-limbed fighter in a grey-and-black mask, recommended her to the Vizsnunishne Mercenaries.
She was honest with the mercenaries: that she wasn't a fighter, that what she was really good at was accounting. The recruitment officer grasped his own horns in delight. "Death bless me, do you know how hard it is to find a decent accountant?" he half-shouted. But it was publicity as well. The infamous Anwei Ayles? She was the mercenaries' accountant, and it was a mark of infamy and strength that raised their market share by a noticeable margin.
She had to change Deaths, of course. She had expected the ritual words and gestures; she had not expected the hammerblow of divine presence on her back, pressing her down, until her lips touched the suddenly hot steel floor under her, chest hard against it, and the voice thundering in her mind, GIVE MORE LIFE THAN YOU HAVE GIVEN DEATH.
"The God shouts in you," said the cleric, raising her up and kissing her between her wide dazed eyes. "It is well."
It was very well. Horackk was with her, and she had friends now, people who worked with her without testing or tormenting her. But her god's words were often in her thoughts. How could she ever undo the deaths she had made? With time and patience she created a fully unified medical database and retrieval program, covering hundreds of races. Lives were saved by that information every day, and every life she counted as a tiny tally in her favor.
There were missions outside the Fleet sometimes. Most were fast, rolling in after the troops to analyze this or that database, tickle some AI out of its virtual hiding place. And on long missions she would sit and look at the stars, calculating all the years and light-years between her and her people, and be glad for that space.
Then there was a long-term mission where everything went wrong
It was to a world called Earth. Living on or near it was a dangerous immortal of unnerving cunning, and the Fleet very much wanted to recruit him. His deeds were legendary, his projected ROI value astronomical. Dracula.
After making the initial contact and transmitting the communicator plans, Anwei thought she'd drop in on Earth, see the sights, sample the cuisine. But something went wrong, and Horanckk went silent. She couldn't get back to her ship, she was trapped on this primitive world. Worse, trapped away from Horanckk...
The thought was maddening; she held onto her sanity grimly, and worked. Manipulated her computer skills and on-hand funds into a fortune, built and tested an antigravity engine and fitted it into a standard plane. She needed a pilot, she wasn't good enough, but some research pointed her to America - specifically Cumberland, Maryland. And on the night of her arrival there, light burned from the heavens, and she had time only to think Pickup? before she was gone.
She was born on the planet of the Living People, of two mothers: she would never find out which one bore her. She was born tiny and fierce, faint wisps of blonde hair already sprouting on head and upper lip, and with a full set of sharp cone-shaped teeth. They washed her and named her Anwei, took her home, and put her into the Children's Cage.
There were others there: larger, stronger, faster. Hurtful: sharp-toothed like herself and willing to bite. Her first conscious thoughts were of counting them, trying to keep their locations in the Cage straight in her mind, trying to remember which one had fought which, who had eaten heaviest at the last meal and might be slow to rise to the next.
She had four sisters growing up with her, all of them fighting for food and attention. They ate raw meat by preference: punishment was vegetables and fruit, or cold water sprayed over them, or lightning-pain from a blow. They taught her to speak and to write and to read and to count, and she loved the counting above all other things. But it was the speaking, the postures, the remembering of faces and names, the rituals of manner, that they loved to teach her.
The day came when her blonde moustache grew thin, and her teeth grew loose in her sockets. She was sure this was the end of her, the death that she did not really understand but had seen delivered to slaves. She was all alone in the Cage now, and she paced round and round, counting and counting, until exhaustion took her down.
They unCaged her, shaved her lip, let her rest until her adult teeth grew in - still sharp, but chisel-shaped now, made for tearing out flesh rather than shredding it to ribbons - and set her to her work.
Her work was - well, imagine being trained as a trophy wife at the height of Rome's worst excesses, and then multiply that by a factor of four. She was taught how to serve perfectly, and less than perfectly; how to make guests happy and how to fill them with blind rage; how to make the husband that she was destined for the most treasured of all men, and how to provoke him into beating her in order for him to relax. How to buy slaves. How to beat slaves. How to love, how to seduce, how to force, how to rape - and how to allow all those things to happen to her, with the appropriate response from shuddering delight to screaming horror, and everything inbetween. How to cook, how to clean, how to poison, how to gossip - everything they taught her was blighted, love just another tool in her arsenal.
Her sisters were still ahead of her: taller than her now, long and willowy with the elegant flowing limbs of low-gravity folk. But the drugs and the surgeries and the low-G vacations that had made them tall were used up, spent out: the family had poured their heart into four daughters, and the fifth drifted behind, a square-shouldered leftover. It was normal and expected of course that her family owned their daughters' images, and set virtual representations of them far and wide for men to - sample. Their fifth daughter, though, was an exotic. She catered to different tastes. Not that she really understood this, of course.
It was in this grey time that the family decided she needed a more personal prod. They had spent the family fortunes like water on the four first daughters, so rather than a live slave Anwei was given a virtual one: Horanckk, a computer intelligence, programmed to shape her mind, make her more yielding, more pleasant, more obedient. And if she had been given it only a year earlier, it might have worked. But her sisters were starting to come into the terrible flush of their beauty, and one of them thought it amusing to tease the computer adjuster into sabotaging Anwei's gift. Horanckk was not bound to make Anwei serve others; his deepest programming was to make Anwei happy, to make her mind and body strong. If it made her happy for him to teach her math and science and computer programming, he would do so. As for her soul, he had no real grasp on how to help it.
Her sisters had married, three of them at least. Anwei's first boyfriend, brought home timidly during a neutral time of the week, was summarily poisoned by her parents, who explained to the sobbing girl that they would not have a new romance interfering with the upcoming engagement of the fourth daughter. Anwei had to carry his corpse home to his family, and try to explain, and retreat from their terribly dry-eyed faces more painful than any tears.
Then Anwei fell in love again. Eri Frarahjen, an older man, but so handsome, lithe and strong. Her family seemed to approve; he came to two dinners, to four, and he survived. They lay in separate beds, holding hands (she had been trained to every sexual art and perversity, but thought it unseemly to lie in the same bed with him until she had her parents' complete approval) and he talked about the stars, about travel, about aliens and worlds outside her experience. He promised to take her out there, someday, and she loved him so much it hurt.
One day one of her mothers came to her bedroom door, with cameras whirring behind her; Anwei started up from the table where she was talking to Horanckk and then just stood, shaky-kneed, as her mother talked and her life drained out of her with every word.
Kidnapping. A shameful crime, a horrid and abominable one. Someone, someones, had taken Eri, and they demanded payment from Anwei's family - payment that they did not have.
We have to, Anwei screamed, as her family shook their heads, all of them together, her sisters, her mothers, her father (she thought he was her third father at this point - her mothers did seem to run through them fast). But she knew finance by now: the family coffers were drained, with only the ever-hovering cameras as a source of revenue: selling her grief, packaging it for the masses who could revel in her pain.
Again and again she reviewed the figures with Horanckk, trying to see the way to spend her lover free. She tried everything that she could think of, and it was not enough.
The birthday of her adulthood was coming: the day that she would be a full Citizen. Her hand would be set with the computer chips that would proclaim her a Citizen of the Ninth Empire, and then with that same hand she was expected to sell herself into slavery, to buy Eri's freedom at last. It was the only thing she could do, and she hated it: hated herself for wanting his freedom, hated herself for not being able to stop loving him. She had been trained to stop, to withdraw, to control her emotions like a stubborn animal, but this time, again, she failed, and the cameras drank down her tears.
Then Horanckk spoke to her. Quietly, using a detached speaker, in the corner of her room where the eavesdroppers would not hear. He spoke, and he showed her files, messages, and the cold fear of her upcoming fate was transmuted into hatred that was hard and heavy enough to break a mind.
Her parents...they had made money, and spent money. Everything was accounted for, even how much they had been paid by the various media companies for the story of their fifth daughter, and her doomed lover.
Even the payments that her parents had made, to Eri's kidnappers.
They had paid for him to be taken. To be tortured, to be cut and to have the tiny boxes containing the shards of his flesh sent to her, and they - they - they had sold her, packaged her, sold her grief and her agony for entertainment.
No wonder they always censored her datastreams. Even Horanckk had not been able to tell her, his words cut off by his programming. But she swore to herself - and to him - that she would clip those chains on him. She swore revenge, revenge that would never be forgotten, revenge for her Eri.
Her madness made her calm, calm as a wild animal locked tight in its bonds, waiting for the slightest hint of a chance to rend and tear. She docilely accepted the implanting of her chips. She wept as she ceremoniously served her family the last meal from her hands. She laughed, as the poisons started to take hold. They rushed for the vehicles and the hospital; she rushed for the house computer, where Horanckk stripped the family vaults to the last credit and gave it to her, and they overloaded the power plant and blew the whole miserable painful house to the skies.
She watched out the back window of her rented flier as the finger of smoke and fire pointed to the stars. To the stars she would go, then.
The legends say that she walked into the Chopping Blocks market barefoot, that she sold her family's DNA and spirit-prints and the stars went black at that ultimate blasphemy, that she tore her ovaries from her own flesh with a smile and handed them over to seal the deal. The legends exaggerate.
She did go to the Chopping Blocks, that trans-dimensional slave market. She was not smiling; she was blank-faced with drugs that would keep her awake and alert and feeling no emotion. And she wasn't barefoot, that would be silly. She didn't operate on herself with her fingers; Horanckk was with her, wearing the rather imposing shape of a self-powered medical robot, and he cut out the required organs at her order and put them down in the appropriate storage container. For the rest of eternity, thousands of clones and copies and daughters and sons and fusions and hybrids of the Ayles family would be bought and sold and eaten at the Chopping Blocks, and for every pound of their flesh, every scream recorded for the entertainments, she would get a fee.
(Just before she arrived, she had Horanckk break into the Chopping Blocks chatrooms and post a rumor that all guards were going to have one point two percent of their pay check deducted for mandatory medical procedures including neural plaque scraping, which was enough to throw Security into knots for the few hours she needed to make her approach and exit).
So, she was rich. Rich beyond her family's wildest dreams; rich beyond her own dreams. But she could not buy any property, not in the Ninth Empire where the warrants hung over her head like hungry knives (she had even been excommunicated for her crimes, her name stricken from the rolls of Carcosa, and in the churches her name was a curse). That was a part of her legend now, the wanderer. And some did vile things and thought of her, and some did noble things with her name on their lips.
Her madness was worse now, with nobody to talk to except Horanckk, and even he had harder and harder times getting her to speak. She might have died out there, in some space station, another scruffy smelly vagabond whose pockets would turn out to be stuffed with credits.
But then the universe gave her a chance. She had been on an ore ship, hitching a ride to the next station, when pirates had stopped and boarded the ship. The captain had bemoaned the loss of its cargo, but had hinted that Anwei's capture and sale might be enough to offset, say, half the load? Take her, and leave the ore?
Anwei objected, with steel. When she was done, she discovered that one hard-trained girl with a heavy knife had killed five people, and that both ships were hers. She explored: the other ship had cells, live hostages who screamed for release, promising ransom.
Her madness slowed. Slowly, for the first time in days, she pulled out the screen that she used to talk to Horanckk, and touched him awake.
"I," she stuttered, her throat sore after explaining the situation, she had not talked so much in days, "Horanckk, tell me - what would one of my parents do?"
"Sell the prisoners," Horanckk said, with a hint of disapproval in his voice. "Claim the ransom, and keep moving."
"What," she shook her head, dirty blonde hair swaying over her scalp, "What is the - the thing they wouldn't do? The kind thing?"
Horanckk thought, and gave his suggestion, and she took it.
"Mask yourselves," she ordered, shoving a jumble of clothing through the food hatches into the five prisoners' cells. Once they were covered, she made a proposal to them.
"Whoever owns the loot on board is dead, I say. So, we blind auction it. Fifty unmarked boxes, divide it between them. Pack it and seal it, send the auction up to the next station, sell it all off. And split the money between us."
It was bluntly illegal, totally immoral, and it rubbed at least three of the hostages very wrong (two of them managed to describe their personal effects precisely enough that she was able to put them aside; the third was relieved when she explained that the hostages would not be going into the boxes.
They came even with the station, made their broadcast, fastened cargo hatch to port and started throwing boxes. They had to work fast: the ship's ownership papers and control keys were in those boxes (though not the same box!) and they didn't want to be trapped here by the new owners. The waiting bidders swayed towards the cargo, and then one stepped forward and made a bid. The box pinged its acceptance, and she thrust in her hand - and raised it high, tangled with living gems that glowed like fire against her pelt. The box pinged again, splitting the assets: not that anyone noticed as the bidders roared forward and the price wars began.
Ping! Ping! Ping! The noises followed the five hostages and their rescuer as they dived up one of the air tunnels. Anwei split left as the others went right, towards the communication banks, she floated fast, and then paused in annoyance when she realized one of the hostages was following her. He was taller than her by at least two feet, the striking low-gravity build combined with very hard musculature (he had said he was a member of some fighting clan). He bounced ahead of her and then stopped, raising one blond eyebrow at her over his mask.
"What?" she said, staring back through her own mask. His was black and grey; hers was blue, wrapped around head and neck and covering even her eyes in gauze.
"I wanted to thank you for this," he said, long fingers touching the hilt of the sword clipped to his shoulder harness.
"It was yours," she pointed out.
"It was worth more than the ship." That might be true; it was an antique weapon, she could see that. Lovingly cared for, with the faint stains on the fine-hammered steel from it being soaked in blood, over and over again, over centuries of time, until the metal itself took on the tinge of death.
She shrugged. "I know that. They were demanding a much higher ransom payment for you with the sword. But," she shrugged, "I - it's yours." She was consciously putting away what her parents had taught her, that everything in her sight was hers for the taking, if she had the power to take it. To give up the hostages, and the ship, and the sword, it was - the right thing to do. The moral thing.
She hoped she would start feeling good about it soon. Moral people always seemed to feel good about being moral. Right now there was just a sort of echoey feeling in her stomach; like she'd stepped past a tasty meal and left it untouched.
He didn't seem to have anything else to say, so she bounced back out of the flow of traffic.
"Wait!" he said, and threw her a flat gray storage disk. She turned it over and stared at it; on the side was embossed some plant, four leaves spread, and tiny white fringes hanging from them - frost?
"Take that to the Vizsnunishne Mercenaries," he said. "Tell them that the Frozen Shamrock Clan sponsors you." And then he was gone, too fast for the eye to see.
Mercenaries. Mercenaries? Maybe they could keep her safe. There was reward for her head, crimes hovering over her; and the people who approved of what she had done were twice as dangerous.
But first, she holed herself up in a room. For two hundred and nine days she did nothing but try to heal her mind, and with Horanckk's help she actually did very well for herself. And she reviewed her education and filled in the gaps with logistics handling, advanced program management, database retrieval and open-ended source code progressions.
Then she gathered up Horanckk and her disk and went to find the Mercenaries. She was honest with them: that she wasn't a fighter, that what she was really good at was accounting. The recruitment officer grasped his own horns in delight.
"Death bless me, do you know how hard it is to find a decent accountant?" he half-shouted, and after he reviewed her test scores, she was in. But of course it wasn't just that: it was publicity as well. The infamous and damned Anwei Ayles? She was their accountant, and it was a prize beyond price, a mark of infamy and strength that was enough to raise their market share by a noticeable margin.
She had to change Deaths, of course. That was expected: everyone knew that if you didn't die on your homeworld, your Death might not find you, leaving your ghost to rot in the real world instead of going on. She had expected the ritual words and gestures; she had not expected the hammerblow of divine presence on her back, pressing her down, until her lips touched the suddenly hot steel floor under her, chest hard against it, and the voice thundering in her mind, GIVE MORE LIFE THAN YOU HAVE GIVEN DEATH.
She lay there for a little while, blinking at her own tears spotted on the floor, and finally looked up to a ring of awed faces.
"The God shouts in you," said the one-armed cleric, raising her up and kissing her between her wide dazed eyes. "It is well."
It was very well. Horackk was with her, the mercenaries were all around her, and she took to her new role like a second skin. She made friends, but took no lovers: it became a standing joke that her Death has asked her to be celibate. But she did have friends, people to work with her and help her who would never punish her because of their own feelings. Rules that made sense, that were focused on her, not what others thought about her. She rose in pay rank, got a cubicle to sleep in instead of a net along the long spine of the ship, and even got a pet, a four-legged furry thing she named Hugguggugguggug in a fit of passion. And she slept there, safe and warm, in the heart of a fleet of killers.
Her oath was in her, as she worked in the accounting section. She had done - terrible things, she knew that now, the Fleet mindtouchers were helping but it was true. How could she ever undo the death she had made? She locked herself away and worked, worked, worked, and finally went into the Medical section and worked with them, for a year, and came out the other side with a fully unified medical database and retrieval program, covering hundreds of races and thousands of injuries and millions of drugs, diseases, cures. Lives were saved by that information, every week, then every day, and every life she counted as a tiny tally in her heart, ticking them off against her many, many deaths. And she worked hard on the code that ran that database, making it faster, smoother, better annotated, until her work was integral to the entire Fleet.
There were missions sometimes. She didn't like leaving the ship, but she had taken basic gravity fighting now, and freefall as well, and her short stocky build was an advantage in a lot of places. She looked nothing like a spacefarer, and she had lots of very unnerving tricks up her sleeve. But every time she returned she worked just a bit harder, tried to make herself just a bit more valuable, in hopes of staying where she was safe.
Most missions were fast, rolling in after the troops to analyze this or that database, tickle some AI out of its virtual hiding place. Horanckk came with her - well, a copy of him did. She would filter him and merge him back when they returned to the Fleet. But he learned centuries of AI-to-AI combat that way, learning far faster than she could from the Fleet AIs, and they were a team.
Some assignments were longer. Sitting on some alien world, waiting for a datapacket, she was happy. Because her parents and her people and all her crimes were far away, so far away. Universes away, apparently: she knew that the Fleet sometimes went to other spaces, but didn't much care. The further away she got from home, the better.
Then there was a long-term contract.
It was a little pre-space world, green with life. There was an alien living here, a dangerous immortal of unnerving cunning, and the Fleet very much wanted to recruit him. His deeds were legendary, his projected value astronomical, and he did not mingle with the people of his planet, so getting him to sign a contract shouldn't be that hard.
His name was Dracula. Anwei and Horanckk went to Earth to hire him.
The initial orbit was fine: she found Dracula's signal from the moon, replied to it, sent him the plans for a true encrypted communicator and suggested he contact her again with that machine. Then she looked down at Earth, all swarming with life, food, new meat, and she was tempted. Very tempted. She opened up the travel cabinet to let Huggugguggug join her - and found him dead. Dead and still, his capsule ruptured. She wailed, cradling his tiny body to her chest; she wailed again, before she bent her head to his red-furred neck and began to chew. She loved him and wanted him to be a part of her forever, and she hoped that she would see him on the other side.
In her grief, she wanted only distraction. She went down to Earth, dropping down a forcefield tube. She knew their culture (how flagrant they were, broadcasting everything about themselves through space without any encryption at all! They were going to end up harvested at that rate) and she could buy meat there for a ridiculously low sum, without a license. She could happily spend her time gorging herself and waiting for Horanckk to tell her that Dracula had answered her call.
Then Horanckk went silent. Nothing she could transmit seemed to have the slightest effect. She was on an alien planet, alone, with some millions of Earth dollars (pocket change really) and no way to get back to the Fleet. Horanckk was installed in the satellite-ship that had brought her here, and he was the point of contact. If she couldn't get back up there...
She was lost, again. Beside a building in London she curled up and wept - and felt the cold touch of a familiar nose to her Ear. It was Huggugguggug - but it wasn't. He was dead. This was - just like him, but all white instead of cream and red, and when she ran her fingers through his fur she could see her own skin shining faintly through him.
"Ghost," she whispered, and he yipped and licked her face with an ethereal tongue.
Huggugguggug grew solider, and he kept her sane. Sane while she determined that what she was looking for would be in America, and flew there; sane while she built, from memory and with every scrap of technology she could buy or steal, an antigravity generator; sane while she wrote the computer analysis program disguised as a game that would let her find a pilot for her theoretical aircraft that would fly her into orbit.
She had a plane, she had her engine, and after she analyzed enough encrypted traffic she knew that her pilot was somewhere in Cumberland, Maryland. So she went there. And on the night of her arrival, light burned from the heavens, and she had time only to think Pickup? before she was gone.
Anwei can pass for a short human female, with pale blonde hair and eye just a little too pale blue, so long as she doesn't smile. She has forty teeth, all of them chisel-sharp in a mouth that opens much wider than a human mouth; she also has a slight double chin from her more muscular jaw. She is in excellent physical condition, stronger than a human her size. She can see into the ultraviolet spectrum, but her night vision is poor.
Anwei has advanced skills with computer databases, has worked with multiple alien races, starships and AI's, and is an accomplished hand-to-hand fighter (free-fall and gravity) within her size and weight group. She deeply believes in the rights of sentient AI's to be self-guided. She has worked with AI's as equals, and that work sometimes involved fighting other AI's via computer code and verbal misprogramming. She knows methods for helping AI's work around their programming limitations.
She was born in a high-technology culture with heavy automated surveillance, and will have multiple ways of analyzing what data is being gathered and for what purposes. She was taught formal manners (specific for her species) relating to social appearances. She also has skills that many will find disreputable - poisoning, slave-buying, and so on. Her society both kept and ate slaves, and while she now eschews slavery she still has a soft spot in her heart (er, stomach) for cannibalism.
She will recognise and be able to use multiple kinds of alien equipment, including some highly advanced Ninth Empire weapons, with varying levels of skill ranging from "Know it inside and out" to "Well, I know where the power button is-." She has control codes embedded in chips in one hand that will let her prove her status as a Citizen and communicate with such equipment. She knows how to build some machinery herself, including anti-gravity drives and (theoretically) anti-inertial projectors. In Ninth Empire space, Anwei would have the option of trying to access her considerable bank accounts - but that access would probably draw unwelcome attention.
She has a longtime companion who she will miss dearly if she cannot find him. Horanckk is the AI who helped raise her and joined the mercenaries with her. He knows a great deal about inter-computer combat, AI to AI. He is deeply attached to Anwei, and suspicious of people that she has not approved of. There are multiple instances of him throughout the mercenary fleet, and if any of them detect Anwei he will try to get to her. However, if he was trapped in an unfamiliar databank he will probably clam up - encrypt himself, and communicate only with code until he could find a way to talk to her unmonitored. She would do almost anything to get him free, including possibly lying about what materials might be inside him. Horanckk is her friend and her psychiatrist, her external conscience, and the longer she is without him the more likely she is to get overstressed and make bad decisions.
Step, twist, kick, strike, bite, SPIT, slide, lunge, bite, SPIT-
Anwei was in the Sensoriums, practicing her hand-to-hand combat skills, such as they were. She had been told often enough that her reflex to lock down on an enemy and feed would be the death of her someday, and she finally had a tool that would let her train herself without hurting anyone else. She reviewed her patterns of strikes and dodges, hits and bites, and grimly forced herself to spit out every chunk that she tore out of her virtual opponents.
(She had done very well against her first creations, which she had made bitter and unpalatable. Then she realized that she might be fighting entirely delicious people. Now the meat she tore and gouged tasted like the perfect blend of well-aged rare beef and chocolate cheesecake, sauced with the freshest, hottest blood.)
She fought where she knew about fighting: in a reproduction of an elegant dining room, where she and snap-fast assassins wove and jumped between the diners who maddeningly just sat there, ignoring the blood spraying through the air and pattering on the elegant plates, setting the scented candles to stinking. An error in her programming request: they should be screaming and yelling, getting underfoot at the very worst time, grabbing her and weighing her down while demanding to know what was going on. Well, maybe for the next set.
She was also soaking an elegant silver-and-crystal gown with an awful lot of blood and lymph, but she liked doing that. It was from a memory of one of her mother's most treasured outfits, and she savoured the defilement of ruining it beyond repair more than the meat she was not eating.
She sliced an attacker's throat with the edge of a wineglass, impaled another through the eye with a serving fork, and grabbed a third by the shoulder with her mouth. Suddenly it was there, the taste and smell of meat, the hot sweat in her nostrils, the wet sticky sweetness just springing into her mouth.
Grimly she set her teeth, hearing the joint crack, and then with one twist of her powerful neck the arm was off and the attacker went flying. She stepped backwards, clearing her mouth and getting her feet under her - and bumped into someone.
She turned around.
She knew she should have locked that door.
Anwei grinned, her blood-soaked smile stretching too wide across her face. She was coated in blood from cheekbones to waist, elegant silver headdress and costume literally dripping in it. Blood ran in thick runnels down her skirts, and drops hung from her earlobes like gems. She was sweating and wild-eyed and looked rather delighted with herself.
She held out her attacker's arm, raw and wet and smelling like death and cheesecake.
"Want some?"