Drone
13
The Baroness Alexandra zee Panara inspected her face in a mirror. Behind her, her three attendants raised their eyebrows and gave the royal fiancée half-hearted smiles of encouragement. They stood in a neat row, one in a green dress, another in a purple, the last in a soft yellow. The maid in the middle had her hands raised and her fingers clenched, for luck. “You look beautiful, ma’am,” she said, hesitantly.
“Thank you,” Alex replied. She turned her face first one way, then another. Then she stared at herself straight on and maintained the gaze long enough and deeply enough for the three maids to start to look nervous again.
The baroness took note. “You can go, ladies. Thank you for your help this evening.”
“Don’t you want us to accompany you, ma’am?” the maid in the green dress asked. “It’s our duty, my lady,” the one in soft yellow added. The girl in purple said nothing. She still had her fingers crossed.
“No, thank you,” Alex said, turning from her reflection. “Please. I’ll be all right. It’s just an evening out with my boyfriend.” The nonchalant way she said it made the comment a joke, and the maids laughed politely, as they were supposed to. They repeated their offer, and again Alex declined graciously, and they left, still obviously reluctant to do so. She was not sorry to see them go. They were nice enough girls, but they had a tendency to hover. Like everyone else, they treated her as if she might crumble to dust at any moment. Alex accepted their attention with the respect it deserved—they were only looking out for her—but she couldn’t help but be a little annoyed by it too, especially after six months.
Alex returned her gaze to the mirror. Tonight was her first public appearance since her unspooling, not counting private interviews and brief cameos to passersby in the palace and the royal grounds. She had been keeping to herself. “The Betan people want to see you, my love,” Peter had said to her more than once. “They care about you. We all do.” She had been persuaded in the end to join Peter at this historical first meeting of the People’s Assembly, the new democratic legislative body the sovereign had created to balance the aristocratic Beta Assembly. Within the hour she would be on view by more than a billion people. Several thousand would be in attendance in person. Her maids were clearly concerned that their mistress might be feeling a little intimidated. But that was the least of her problems.
Once again, Alex turned her face one way in profile, then the other. She stared directly at her face.
She sighed. Six months, and still she didn’t look like herself. There was still something foreign about the face she saw every morning. This was not to say the cosmetic regenerators had not completely restored her original appearance. Alex could find no trace of a drone countenance in her features anymore. Physically, she was her old self again. Unless someone knew, there was not a hint that she had once been a pleasure drone. Maybe that’s the problem, Alex thought, still staring into her own eyes. Maybe that’s it. Six months, and still those eyes, that face, did not seem her own anymore.
Five minutes later she heard a knock at the door, and she was reminded that it was time to go.
“We are a united people.” The Sovereign was making his final remarks. He stood without a podium on the bare stage, alone, and his amplified voice rang out over a vast crowd. “We are united through history. We are united through hardship. We are united in our love and in our desire for freedom!” The audience began to cheer. Peter’s words reverberated in the great hall. Alex sat next to the stage along with other notable figures, her legs folded neatly together. Her beloved had been speaking for the last hour. She had lost count of the number of times he had had to stop and wait for the crowd’s applause and shouting to diminish. He looked so handsome and majestic up there.
She loved him. She truly did.
“Our enemy is everything that we are not. Our enemy is divided. They inflict hardship. They reject love.” Peter looked down at Alex meaningfully. She felt a chill. “Our enemy is the enemy of freedom! Our freedom! Everyone’s freedom! Their slavery must end, my friends!”
More cheering, more ovation, especially from the new People’s Assembly representatives. Alex noted a slightly lower level of enthusiasm among the representatives from the Beta Assembly.
Alex sat primly and smiled when she was supposed to. Peter came to her, and she stood, curtsied, and took his hand when he offered it. The crowd cheered again, and Alex wished she was somewhere else.
There was a more private reception afterwards, only a few hundred people, mostly members of the Privy Council, the Ministries, allied nobles from the Beta Assembly, and other interested parties. Alex was the center of attention. Everyone was very respectful, and the one obvious topic of conversation was deliberately avoided. Alex fulfilled her duties as consort-to-be. She made the rounds, talking to everyone that needed talking to, laughing at the witticisms spoken in her presence, nodding politely at their political commentaries, yet none of it touched her not even a little, and every once and a while she would overhear guests talking about her in low whispers when they thought she was out of earshot, talking about how pale she looked, how wan, how unlike her old self, and Alex would then sigh and talk to someone else. After an hour, she looked down at her hand and saw that it was shaking.
She became conscious, in a familiar, exquisitely feminine way, of the eyes on her ass and her legs as she walked throughout the room. The baroness felt a familiar heat rise within her as well.
“Excuse me,” she said to the ambassador from Plato’s World and went to the lavatory.
“Get a grip,” she told herself when finally alone. “You have to maintain. You have to. Have to.” She bit her lip. She closed her eyes. It was coming back. She could feel it inside her. Beneath her dress the baroness began to squirm. Too many men. Too many women, all at once. There was a reason she had avoided people for so long. She was getting . . . excited again. Alex looked at herself in a mirror and saw the sweat appear on her brow. She could feel it between her legs as well.
A hand touched Alex on the shoulder, and she jumped.
“Are you all right, ma’am? Are you feeling unwell?” It was her maid in the yellow dress.
“No. I’m fine.” Alex didn’t scold the girl as she probably deserved for breaking her privacy. She was likely under orders from someone on the Council to keep a close watch on her, possibly even from Peter himself. At the same time, she was angry but couldn’t somehow show it. It was unhealthy, and, worse, defeatist, this passivity she had adopted recently, but she couldn’t help it. It hurt too much to think about, what she had lost. As a soldier, Alex had always been proactive, always doing something, going somewhere, or planning for the future. Now, she could barely stand to think about her future.
“I just needed to splash some water on my face.” She used a towel to dry herself. “Let’s go back.”
The reception dragged on. The topics of conversation were interminable. Voting franchises in the People’s Assembly. Financing for transdrive reconnaissance missions to other inhabited stars. More participation for the inhabitants of Proxima Five. Someone asked the baroness what she thought about negotiations with the Drad Republic on Bungula Secundus, and she uttered an obscenity.
Peter talked to her in private. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I wish people would stop asking me that.”
Her beloved looked at her with concern. “Perhaps this was a mistake after all. You’re not ready.”
She patted his hand. “No. No, you were right. The people have a right to see me.” God, I wish you’d bend me over and fuck me, she thought at the same time. Fuck me right here and now in front of everybody. Alex closed her eyes and shuddered. She had a sudden vision of herself on her knees giving fellatio to one man at the party after another. The heat blossomed between her legs.
“You’re going home,” Peter said with finality. “We’re both going home.”
“No!” she said, loudly enough that one of Peter’s aides turned briefly. “No, that would only make things worse.” Alex took a deep breath. “I’ll make one more pass through the room, and then I’ll give excuses about how tired I am. You, my dear, on the other hand, have to stay for the duration.” She laughed, sounding almost like her old self for a second. “You’ve got a job to do, mister. Go be a politician.”
He took her hands in his. “Hang politics. You’re what I care about.”
Then give me what I need! she thought. She found his weak touch unbearable, but it was unthinkable that she should pull away from him. It would hurt him too much, and in any case how could she explain? She didn’t know why herself. “Let me do my job, Peter. We are not here for ourselves.”
She took another deep breath. “I understand that the Drad ambassador wants to talk to you. You should let it.”
Peter shook his head. “No. Not after what they’ve done.” Alex had given an account of the Drad spy Halan Ovidia and its participation in the mysterious disappearance of the Countess Xarusha some years back. She really hadn’t wanted to, but Alex had wanted to talk about Sovien. Moreover, she had been worried about future plots from the Beta Assembly. “They’re lucky we’re not at war.”
“We need them,” Alex said, doing something few other people would do, overriding the Sovereign of Outer Alpha Centauri. “We don’t have to like them, but the Centauri worlds should all be united in defense when the Solarians return.” Peter mumbled something noncommittal.
They returned to the party. Alex started her run through the throng of people, feeling like she was in enemy territory. Her smile was painted on and meant nothing. She shook hands with the new Prime Minister of the People’s Assembly. She heard nothing of what he said to her, though, so concerned was she with his dick beneath his trousers. She wanted him. Her mouth was watering for his cock.
She talked to a woman from the third planet of Alpha Centauri, but throughout the entire conversation the only thing on Alex’s mind was slipping her tongue into the delegate’s pussy. Barely half way round the room, Alex’s body was plagued by a savage wanting to be stroked and played with, to be filled and dominated. Again and again, Alex saw the men around her, and to a lesser extent the women, and, horribly, began licking her lips, over and over. The urges between her legs increased in intensity.
It was suddenly too much.
Abruptly, Alex excused herself and returned to her suite in the palace. Peter gave her a confused look as she departed but said nothing. He knew there was a problem between them. He had tried talking to her, but Alex kept insisting that nothing was wrong. The previous evening they had made love for the third time since her unspooling. It was, as on the previous occasions, unsatisfying. She had had to fake her climax, and this last time she was fairly certain Peter had known. Back in her private bedroom, now sweating quite profusely, Alex took out an orgasm generator and used the handheld device for over an hour. The climax she eventually had was weak and inadequate. The baroness wept herself to sleep.