Harem Assassins : King Sekton's Harem Planet, Book 2: A Space Opera Harem Adventure by Baron Sord (top inspirational books .txt) 📗

suggested that exact idea after they gave me the rundown of how the agitator compass worked. My plan for today hadn’t been for anyone to figure it out this quickly. Oh well. I was an engineer, not a politician. “If you see techs wandering around scanning things, now you know why.”

“So we do have a spy, my king?” someone else asked.

“You mean traitor,” one woman grumbled randomly.

“We don’t know that,” I sighed, wishing I’d never brought up the agitator. Guess I’d been too excited to talk about tech and gotten carried away.

“Traitor!” another woman shouted with feral zeal.

That triggered an eruption of indignation and irritation.

“Shifter scum!” a third woman grumbled.

“Nobody said anything about shifters!” I cringed. “How did we get on shifters?!”

“It’s always a shifter!” someone shouted sourly.

“Or a Xeno!”

I still didn’t know the precise definition of the word Xeno, or if it was a general term for a broadly defined group. But the word was obviously derogatory and implied an outsider of some kind, an interloper infiltrating the group, possibly with nefarious intent. Whatever it meant, I didn’t like where the room was going. Sirius was a shifter. I didn’t know if they were talking about her in particular, or some other shifter here? Now that I thought about it, I didn’t know if Sirius was the only shifter at the outpost or one of many. If so, that meant there was a painful possibility Violet had been a shifter of some kind, deer or otherwise hoofed. Either way, I didn’t want Sirius or others like her getting persecuted simply for being a shifter. What was not to like about beautiful women who could turn into beautiful animals?

In the audience, some women were looking around with angry eyes, glaring at each other like they might ferret out the spy if they simply looked hard enough or wanted it badly enough. Their agitation was palpable.

“Ladies!” I hollered, feeling the stress of their rising ire. “Don’t get ahead of yourselves. We don’t know it’s a shifter. And we don’t know it’s a traitor in our midst.”

Half the women in the auditorium reacted audibly, muttering things that suggested we did know it was a traitor most definitely in our midst.

“No, I said we don’t know that!” I grimaced in frustration, reminded again why I’d never gone into politics. Too messy, too unpredictable, too unruly, too chaotic.

I really needed to get their minds off the traitor track. Reason being, the most likely suspects were always the new people, and the newest people at this outpost — other than me, their beloved acting king and Titano tamer — were Oia, Venus, Cygna, and Sirius. Those four had already been beaten nearly to death for being interloping exiles. Had I not intervened, the last king would have killed them as an example of what happened to exiles who dared return. Half the women at this outpost had watched the whole thing. Probably every woman in this room. They had seen how the Bombshells had been treated. Talk about bad first impressions for the Bombshells. Didn’t matter I was now king. We all knew how first impressions lingered. Like a foul, sulfurous stench. My hope had been keeping the Bombshells effectively hidden away in Medical while they healed would give the guardswomen time to forget any ill will they felt toward the Bombshells.

In short, changing public perception regarding the reputation of the Bombshells was already an uphill battle. The last thing I needed was for a bunch of agitated officers to pile on and gang up against me and start pushing the reputations of the Bombshells back downhill into the bubbling black tarpit of Traitor Town.

“It was a male slave!” someone blurted. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense!”

“Yeah!” someone else shouted. “Only a male slave would try to kill the king!”

I didn’t bother to mention I was male and I had not only tried to kill their previous king two nights prior, I had succeeded. No, I was just glad these women weren’t singling out the Bombshells. Let them blame men.

“Crewd’s pirates are men!” another woman scowled. “They must have sent a man to pose as a male slave! That’s your spy!”

I thought, man here. Not a spy, but definitely a man.

Someone hollered, “We should execute the slaves! Execute all the men! That will root out every possible traitor!”

At least they weren’t targeting the Bombshells with their hatred.

“Yeah!” someone else shouted. “Kill every one! Kill the slaves!”

“Kill the men!”

“We don’t need them!”

That garnered vocal agreement from the entire auditorium.

Except me. The only man in the room. Who would’ve thought an auditorium full of supermodel babes would hate men so much, and yet adore their king?

One woman snarled, “We should torture every man here until they tell us who did it! Women died yesterday because of that trax!” She had a point there. “A male slave must be to blame!” She lost me there.

“Yeah! Torture them!”

“Torture the men!”

“Make them pay for what they did!”

More cheers of agreement.

This was going off the rails faster than a runaway rollercoaster. I needed to pump the brakes for them. Looking at my HUD, I activated ENERGY.

Ring, I thought, amplify my voice to 110 decibels.

That was as loud as a rock concert.

Then I shouted:

“STOP THE CHATTER AND LISTEN UP!” My voice boomed like Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden on stage at Wacken Open Air.

The room went dead silent.

I hid a satisfied smile and resisted the urge to shout, “Scream for me, Wacken!”

After turning off my vocal amplifier, I said sedately, “Ladies, Colonel Sadys and I are already on top of the transmitter issue.” I glanced over at her.

Sadys tipped a knowing nod and a superior smirk because we’d already discussed it while I’d been eating breakfast this morning. Then, our plan had been to keep quiet about any spies, but I’d accidentally let the cat out the bag. No surprise. Cats were wily. And historically, I wasn’t good with cats of any kind, be they feline or fine females like the