Chapter 73: SM03-Epsilon, Day 10, Evening

Steve was just settling down to relax after dinner when the message came through. He'd had a relatively quiet day, except for the usual sexual antics (Bev and Luanne in particular had been unusually demanding, which was odd given their submissive tendencies) and a couple of visits to the 'neighbors' to check up on them. The visit to check up on Father Andrew Smith had been interesting, given what he'd heard from Gamma about his Andrew becoming his sex slave.

In the Epsilon version, Andrew had been seduced, but not dominated, by one of his women, and since his vows were now broken, he was sleeping with anyone who asked him to. Neither Andrew nor the women had realized how submissive Andrew was, so things were pretty normal on the surface. There was no telling if things would stay that way, however.

Steve had also gotten to see his version of Ed Baker, who had picked a wife, 'married' her, and successfully resisted the urgings of his woman to share the wealth. The unmarried women had reached an agreement with Ed that they would get knocked up by non-survivor sperm (one of them was a district attorney and had been asking the room monitor a lot of questions), and he'd help raise the resulting kids. None of the unmarried women had given up, but they'd all learned that nagging wasn't going to help matters, so there wasn't a lot of stress in the house.

When the room monitor told him it had an urgent private message, Steve got nervous, and so did the women in earshot. When he came out of the bedroom, the expression on his face stopped all conversation. Luanne was uncharacteristically sober when she asked the question on everyone's mind.

"What's wrong?" she asked. "It's obviously not good news."

Steve shook his head, "I don't have a lot of time, so here's the short version. I told you before about Raul Santiago, how his Eta copy killed the Eta Johnny, then himself? Well, our version seems to have killed himself too; I've got to get over there and see what's going on and what I can do about it, if anything. For the record, I'm going to try to avoid bringing anyone home with me. I love you all, but you're almost more than I can handle. If Lisa and Michelle were straight or bi, I don't know what I'd do."

As he'd hoped, that last crack was well-received, and lightened the mood considerably, especially when the two women stuck their tongues out at him simultaneously. As several of his wives whispered, "Hurry back," Steve left the room and his home.

A short transport later, he entered the Santiago household, just in time to hear a hysterical scream, and an equally hysterical, "You perverted bitch, this is all your fault!" and to see a deranged-looking woman shove a knife into the stomach of a naked woman, who had screamed at the sight of the bloody knife being waved at her.

Steve rushed in, and was about to call for the room to sedate the knife wielder, when a third woman moved to intercept her, with a police baton in her hands. The attacker screamed, "Stay away from me," but the tall, athletic woman moved in, and skillfully deflected the blade with her baton, before grabbing the woman's wrist and applying a disarming move.

The knife dropped to the floor as the attacker's arm came up behind her back, and Steve finally managed to call to the room for sedation for the attacker, and medical assistance for the victim, who was on the floor, writhing in pain.

The room monitor told him a treatment device was waiting in the replicator, so Steve grabbed it as the voice told him how to apply it. It looked like a thick towel, and when Steve pushed the woman's arms away, and pressed it against the wound, it stuck, then quickly spread out to form a kind of belt, with the thickest part over the gash in the woman's belly. As Steve and the other women watched in surprise, the woman relaxed, the flow of blood stopped, and the 'towel' seemed to melt into the woman's skin.

Steve looked up to see the woman's rescuer holding a nearly unconscious attacker and alternating between staring at the woman being treated, and at Steve. Steve nodded at her, then stood up. "Very well done. Much faster than what I was going to try, and at least as effective. I'm guessing here, but you're a cop?"

The woman shrugged, "Shore Patrol, actually, and retired at that. Not voluntarily, I might add. I had a little accident, and they gave me a medical discharge and full pension. But the missing bits seem to have grown back, to my pleasant surprise. Wasn't worth having the fucking planet blown up, though. The name's Tami Rosen. What's yours, and why are you here?"

Steve nodded, and said, "And I'm Steve Miller. Through no fault of my own, I seem to have been elected as troubleshooter, and when the monitors found out that Raul had killed himself, they asked me to look into it. Unfortunately, I've had a small amount of experience at dealing with suicides already; it wasn't anything like this, though."

Tami looked at him, visibly deciding whether to believe him or not. She decided in his favor, and said, "All right. Nicole Jones is our perp, and the victim is Jessie Baker. I'll give you the full story once we've got the situation contained."

Steve nodded his agreement. Shifting his attention to the victim on the floor, he said, "Room, when will it be safe to move the victim, and how long will her treatment take?"

The room replied, "She can be moved now. It will require approximately four hours to heal her injuries and replace the lost blood. The treatment system will stabilize the wounds and keep her asleep until she is fully healed, so you need only take the usual care in moving her." There was a odd shimmer in the air, and a thin flat board appeared next to the victim. "Place her on the board, and I will move her to her room. I am unable to exercise fine enough control to do the initial movement under current conditions."

Steve picked a couple of the on-lookers and said, "Help me move her, please. Be gentle, but don't worry about hurting her." The three of them lifted the victim to the board, which extruded supports around her, then floated into the air with no visible means of support or propulsion. The board drifted down the hall, then turned into her bedroom.

Steve turned to Tami, and said, "Let's get your friend there into her room as well, and get her restrained. I'm thinking that she's mentally unbalanced, so we'll keep her sedated until we can get a trained psychiatrist to talk to her. Fortunately, I can get one for you, but probably not until the morning."

Tami accepted Steve's suggestion, and the two of them got their burden into her room, and got her arranged on the bed with some comfortable restraints, and an IV drip arranged by the room. "What about bedpans?" asked Tami, only to be informed by the room that her garments and the bedclothes would remove and process any waste products she passed overnight.

The two of them left Nicole's room, locking the door behind them, and went to Jessie's room to check on her. As far as they could tell, she was fine, so they continued on to Tami's room, where she offered Steve a drink and invited him to sit while she told her story.

"I'm guessing that we woke up the same way your group did, and got the same horrible video. Raul announced that he would make wives out of all of us, without really asking our opinions. We weren't entirely thrilled with his attitude, but he wasn't bad looking, and it didn't seem like we had a lot of options. Nicole volunteered to be his first, and she seemed to bond pretty tightly to him. He took her new cherry, and spent the first day with her.

"He took us one per day after that, in his own chosen order. Jessie was the next to the last, and I was going to be the last one. When he took Jessie, though, things got ugly. She apparently decided she wanted to be his sexual pet, because she came out of his room naked, wearing a choke-chain collar, and at the end of a leash.

"He took an extra day with Jessie, playing with her in public and in private, and then this morning, he told me it was my turn. I wasn't real happy with him, and when he showed me the collar he'd picked out for me, I called him every dirty name I'd ever learned in Spanish. I must have gotten at least one right, or the translator fixed it up for me, because he roared in rage and took a swing at me.

"I blocked him, and swung back, and dumped him on his Latin ass. I told him if he tried to touch me again, I'd castrate him, and I tossed in a few other threats and insults. He stayed in his room and sulked, and we didn't hear anything from him. A few minutes before you got here, Nicole decided she was going to check up on him, and seems to have found something that upset her.

"Since the knife in her hand was bloody even before she cut Jessie, I'm betting that Raul cut his throat or something similar. I haven't had time to look into that yet, so unless you have any questions first, we should probably check that out before someone messes around in there."

Steve agreed, and finished his iced tea in a gulp. They went into Raul's room, and found him lying on the bed, a dried puddle of blood around his neck, which had a deep gash down the left side. His right hand was bloody, and stains on the bedclothes showed where the knife had been. There were a few shallower cuts higher on his neck, which hadn't bled much. It looked to Steve like Raul had taken a couple of shots at it before he managed to cut himself severely enough.

Tami had made the same examination as Steve, though she'd gotten a bit closer, and when she stood back, he asked her, "Did your Shore Patrol training include crime scene investigations? Or just things like the best way to subdue a nut with a knife without killing him?"