My patrons voted for it, so here is another chapter of The Serpent’s Garden! Snippet below, full text in the link.
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Red One didn’t put any stock in the possibility that the Hegemony might be able to reform the Compact. Others had tried. All of them had failed. Those that hadn’t had their names and very existence wiped from history were left as shattered fragments of their former glory as object lessons to others. One could also call them abject lessons, I suppose.
Adam would have appreciated that joke. He also would have opposed her decision to come here, let alone pursue this contact with the Hegemony. You need a guide, he’d said to her on the day he became part of her crew.
Do I?
He’d smiled in a way that reminded her of Yasmine. Yeah. You do.
There were other possibilities, other outcomes that Red One had calculated as the result of contact between the Compact and the Hegemony, but none so likely as conquest or collaboration. In that final analysis, she didn’t regret stacking the deck in the hopes of creating a third possibility. Maybe such a decision was wrong, but she had so little hope left. The chance to find an ally was about all she had remaining. That tempest of thoughts raced through her in less time than it took any of her guests to take a single breath. “The more we understand each other,” she added. “The more likely we are to find common ground and from that… who knows what could be possible?”
Tell yourself whatever you want, the memory of a voice haunted her, as clear as the day she had silenced it. You’re not some saviour. You’re not humanity’s last hope.
You’re a monster.
“But,” she began, “I think there is another question you want to ask me, isn’t there? And… this one is not about my creators, is it?”
“No,” Iljta-Risan had to agree. “It’s not.”
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