And it's no wonder; for even [Lucifer] himself
Is able to take the form of an angel of light
2 Corinthians 11:14
Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.04 AE
Alpha Sector: Command Carrier ‘Eternal Light’
Supreme Commander-General Jophiel
Jophiel
"Supreme Commander-General?" Major Klik'rr, her Mantoid assistant and, quite honestly, her right-hand man, called down into her quarters. "You have an alpha-priority-one message from the Prime Minister's office. He needs to speak to you right away."
Irritation flashed in Jophiel's gut, though perhaps it was simply a post-partum fluctuation? Her milk had come in and, unlike all the other children she'd birthed, refused to dry up, leaving her breasts constantly swollen, leaking fluid, and exacerbating her already irritable mood.
"Tell him I'm indisposed," Jophiel snapped. She cut off the communication far more brusquely than was warranted. She buried her nose back into her pile of reports needing processing and was irritated when her comms pin beeped a few seconds later.
"Sir?" Klik'rr asked. "He insists it's urgent."
The signature she'd been scrawling across the electronic tablet sprawled darker, the 'L' in 'Jophiel' looking more like a stab-wound than the end of Alliance cuneiform.
"Very well," Jophiel groused. "Put him through."
She didn't even bother to primp her hair or straighten out her everyday uniform as a tow-headed visage materialized on her video monitor.
“What do you want, Prime Minister Lucifer?" Jophiel schooled her face and voice to be devoid of emotion. Her fists clenched out of sight beneath the table so it wouldn't show up on the two-way video monitor.
Lucifer sat poised in his stereotypical ‘politician pose,’ artfully arranged before the monitor to convey sincerity and authority. Raised from birth to speak on behalf of the Emperor, every mannerism had been trained to get him whatever he desired. Especially his voice! Lucifer dripped pleasantness, reasonableness, unrealized hopes and desires.
It was all a gods-damned act!
“I've been getting complaints about your goon squad.” Lucifer's eerie silver eyes glittered as he spoke with practiced smoothness. “You must order them to stop harassing honest traders.”
“Sata’an traders,” she retorted, resisting the urge to simply believe their highest-ranking civilian authority and adopted son of their emperor/god.
“Under the treaty signed by the Eternal Emperor himself between the Alliance and the Sata’an Empire in 152,299,” Lucifer rattled off with a practiced tongue. “Those portions of the uncharted territories are considered neutral. The traders have as much of a right to be there as anybody else.”
“Not when they smuggle counterfeit goods,” Jophiel said. “And unload it on unwary settlers for their entire year's harvest!”
“Caveat emptor, Jophie." Lucifer dropped the act just for a moment to show the seething hatred she knew lay within. “You know how much the Emperor respects the right of free will. If the settlers wish to purchase those goods, who are we to contradict them?”
“-I- will,” she snapped. “When the money they get from selling those goods funds expansion of Shay'tan's war fleet!”
“You know the terms of the free trade agreements the Alliance signed with the Sata'an Empire.” Lucifer dripped reasonableness once more. “All honest traders, no matter what their species, have the right to sell any good to any other colony and neither the Alliance nor the Empire will interfere. If we intertwine their economy with ours, they'll be too dependent upon us to go to war.”
“A treaty you negotiated while the Emperor was away," Jophiel said. "I don't see Shay'tan buying a whole lot of goods from Alliance planets, only our hard-earned Alliance money flowing into Sata’anic coffers.”
“You don't need to like it, Jophie." Lucifer gave her a lascivious grin he knew drove her ballistic. “You only need to enforce it. I'll take this matter up with the Emperor.”
“You do that,” she hissed. “Until then, if my men think they are carrying contraband, we're going to stop them, Alliance or Sata’anic.”
Lucifer's handsome features hardened into a habitual sneer, and then softened in an expression of exaggerated false pleasantness.
“Oh … Jophie. Have I passed along my congratulations on your latest little bundle of joy?" Insincerity dripped from his voice as he needled her with the veiled insult. “My, you're a prolific one, aren’t you? Perpetuating your genome with all those lower-ranking men.”
“Only with a worthy mate!" She returned his jab with a verbal right hook. “I only had one mating attempt that ever failed!" She cut off the transmission before he had a chance to retort.
Her hands hurt. Looking down, she realized she'd dug her nails into her own palm and drawn blood. Lucifer might be an asshole, but he was the most exciting asshole she'd ever fucked.
She was better than him! She didn't lead her children's fathers on with promises she could never keep. She didn't pluck them fresh out of the academy, too young and naive to understand the law of their people was written in stone, and insinuate their liaison was special. She didn't promise them she wished to continue their relationship after the heat-cycle had passed, and then 'sic her Chief of Staff on them to tell them the man you had fallen hopelessly in love with kept a dozen mares in the stable at all times and had no interest in an infertile female!
Damn him! Damn him and the only mating attempt which had ever failed! But she'd had the last laugh, because she had gone on to birth twelve babies, while She-who-is had given Lucifer none!
She bent down to her bottom drawer and pulled out the scrapbook she hid filled with photographs of her twelve children and the twelve fathers who had helped her sire them. All happy and smiling. All except for Uriel, whose little face was red from crying.
She hadn't contacted Raphael directly since the day she'd gone into labor, unable to bear his sorrowful expression as she'd cut out his heart and handed it back to him. She'd warned him! She'd warned him that she only formed relations to fill the ranks of the Emperor's armies. She'd made him sign the waiver. She'd done her best to remain impartial. To not get attached. It was the law!
Her fingers traced the sad little dimple on Uriel's cheek, so much like his father's that it made her heart ache. Mikhail had filled her head with foolish, romantic notions. It had been him she'd first requested to sire this child, not Raphael. The Emperor wanted Mikhail to produce offspring and she knew the brooding Seraphim harbored feelings for her, but it had not been enough to make him budge. Seraphim only took one mate for life, he'd quietly told her, and she was incapable of giving him what he needed. With a kiss upon her forehead, he'd told her that she would always have a special place within his heart, and then he had asked to be reassigned.
Damn! She was no better than Lucifer! She'd only asked Raphael to sire this child because she'd found herself smarting from Mikhail's rejection and wanted to hurt him by forming relations, instead, with his best friend. The joke had turned out to be on her. The affable Raphael, so very different from the dark, brooding Seraphim, had caught her unawares. In five meager days, he'd wiped all thoughts of Mikhail, her cadet mating experience with Lucifer, and the eleven men she'd mated with since then, right out of her mind!
Poor little Uriel. He looked as unhappy as she felt.
Chapter 40