Chapter 1: Boats

It had to be done, and there was no delegating this one. Captain Tweedledee had to die. Who the hell knew what Bossie would do, but it had to be done and screw the med-tubes.

That was another thing. Boats had once heard a tech claim that with a head and a short enough time after death, a med-tube could re-grow a body and save just about anyone. So, no head.

Tweedledee was no coward. Certainly not. He was a narcissistic, brutal, power-mad, sadistic, Caligula. He was a worse than unfit leader, but he was no coward. Under the guise of ‘training’ and ‘physical fitness’, the Captain regularly exercised with his command. He worked out faithfully, not only to keep his beautiful body fit, but also because martial arts workouts gave him many opportunities to inflict pain.

He flew into towering rages at any perceived balk at his will or slight. It wasn’t clear if the temper tantrums were real or excuses. Concubines, subordinates? Any reason, anybody, as long as he could inflict pain; status mattered not a whit to him.

Just like sex.

He’d kept his slender, swimmer’s build but had up-sized his equipment to a typical Marine’s ‘Big Bud.’ Sex was painful for any partner. Naturally, he had denied his concubines any enhancements to ease their discomfort, and he had increased his load to the point that its explosion into a pussy or rosebud caused additional pain. He nearly drowned any concubine giving him a blowjob.

Tweedledee was also jealous of Boats’s respect from the ship’s crew, Marines, and passengers. Boats was a certified hero, and as such, was a definite target for the captain’s ire and abuse. But the Captain had never perused Boat’s personnel file and had no real idea what he was dealing with.

In hand-to-hand combat training Tweedledee had many opportunities to inflict great pain on his opponent of the day. Given any opening, he would wreck knees, crush balls, and gouge eyes – anything painful. To foster an appearance of ‘fairness’, he would sometimes leave openings that would result in injury to himself. Woe betide the private or rating or NCO who took the opening and inflicted pain. In the next session with Tweedledee, he or she, especially she, would pay dearly.

Tweedledee was in heaven. The med-tube would fix his victims to like-new, and the sadistic captain could brutalize them yet again; torture disguised as ‘training’. Then he upped the ante. He instituted a ‘no quarter’ option that could be called by any party in an exercise. Once declared, the combatants were required to fight until one was dead. Then the loser would be hauled to the med-tube, repaired, wakened, and punished for failing.

Mentally styling himself a modern-day emperor, he ignored the fact that no one except himself ever declared ‘no quarter.’ Instead, he declared it for any combatants for whom he had a grudge, and loudly threatened a demotion if one participant wasn’t killed. Bossie, having no real-world experience with humanity, and newly installed with programming telling it that humans were inherently violent, saw nothing to question.

Never satisfied, with a self-congratulatory inspiration, he ordered that the ship’s concubines be trained as backup to crew, particularly in damage control and first aid, and that they must be physically fit.

The mayhem was predictable when he started demonstrating with Mom.

Before this new order, Mom had occasionally appeared with black eyes, missing teeth, and bruises. She was thin and growing thinner. The crew, suspicious that her sponsor was starving her as well as beating her, took to carrying food and insisting that she have a snack with them whenever the opportunity presented.

Tweedledee’s first demonstration bout with June sickened even the strongest stomach. Clearly untrained in self-defense, Mom stood in an awkward parody of a fighting stance. The Captain bore in, quickly bloodied her face, and knocked her to the mat. She lay there while he stomped her stomach, and when she rolled to her side to puke, he laid a series of snap kicks to her kidneys. June screamed with pain while Tweedledee cursed her for not fighting back. When she suddenly spasmed and went still, he pointed at two crewmen and directed them to, “Take the cunt to sickbay and dump her in a ‘tube!”