Shifty Reads Gladiatrix of the Galaxy, Chapters 7-8

Cassera smiled and then stood up. Her face and skin still had dirt stains from their bout against the Nogrossian razorback hog as she hadn't even left Jegra's side for one moment. But Jegra didn't care if Cassera was sweaty and a bit salty. Sometimes the added flavor made it all the better.

Welcome back to Gladiatrix of the Galaxy.

When last we left our heroine, she'd passed out after taking a nasty, logistically improbable wound from the spiked tail of a giant warthog. Will she pull through? Yes, obviously. We're only a sixth of the way through the book. Strap yourselves in, readers - this episode runs long.

Chapter 7

Jegra wakes up in bed, heavily bandaged and in a lot of pain but very much alive. Cassera is with her and has been tending to her wounds with anaesthetic ointment and herbal tea. I'm a little surprised that better healing tech isn't available, especially for the emperor's wife - maybe this is one of those mixed-tech things where some fields haven't advanced, or maybe the processes aren't compatible with humans. Cassera has some bad news for her about the time, though.

"How long was I out for?"

"About twelve hours."

"Twelve hours?" Jegra gasped. "But that means it's a whole new day."

I can't put my finger on exactly why I find this exchange so funny. Maybe it's because Jegra seems to be shocked and appalled by the concept of time having passed.

They wax lyrical for a little while about Jegra being a survivor and getting up every time she's knocked down. Chumbawamba starts playing in my head. Jegra gives Cassera a grateful kiss, though Cassera's not as into it as Jegra is - she's still mentally beating herself up for failing to keep Jegra in good shape for her wedding day. Jegra somehow manages to flip this into making the most of what time they have, and Chumbawamba slides into Marvin Gaye; Cassera's lips are described as 'Prussian blue' for what I think is the third time so far (I can't check, as this book is somehow not search-indexed - first Kindle book I've read to have that problem), and their tongues engage in another 'sultry tango'. Seriously, the exact same wording used for Abethca in chapter 2.

But, in what seems to be a recurring theme for this book, they're interrupted before they get to any actual sex. This time, it's a bit more serious than Cassera not being able to hold her liquor.

Loud bangs echo around the stadium, and Jegra and Cassera run out to see that 'half of it was on fire, the other half demolished'. The source of this chaos and destruction is obvious: five spaceships the size of the Dreadnaught (that's Dakroth's battlecruiser, by the way - that one's on me for not mentioning it earlier) are all attacking said flagship and the debris is raining down on the planet. It's the Nyctan fleet! These guys are the Dagon Empire's only real enemies, and this time they seem to have gotten the drop on Dakroth.

Cassera tries for an emergency evacuation, but when the beam drops, it's sending someone down instead, specifically Dakroth himself, injured in both body and pride.

"How could I have been so stupid?" he grumbled, chastising himself for his strategic mistake. "I should have never left the front line. The Nyctans knew that the Dreadnaught was without the protection of the royal fleet. They ambushed me above my own homeworld!"

Yeah, about that - why did Dakroth leave his flagship completely without escorts? It may be a pretty fearsome starship, but, going by the size of the Nyctan vessels, it's nothing uniquely devastating. And, even then, I've lost enough games of Endless Space to know that single large vessels, however scary, are often very vulnerable indeed without backup.

Dakroth actually stops Cassera when she starts self-flagellating again for not being there with him. I guess that's nice? Not sure it makes up for WifeUnknown's Battlegrounds earlier, though.

Cassera relocates Dakroth's arm and he explains that this is most likely a raid rather than a full-scale invasion and the Nyctans will probably run away when the Dagon fleet shows up. Jegra, though, thinks that it's more complicated than that: the Nyctans are going to feign retreat and the Dagons will end up 'leaving the back door open' (heh heh) to an actual invasion.

For some reason, Cassera accepts this unsolicited strategic advice, from someone with no experience of military strategy and every reason to have it in for Dakroth, as gospel, and declares that this is, in fact, an invasion. Dakroth's back on form and starts blaming one of his other vice-admirals, but there's no time to kvetch - the Nyctan ships have started actively bombarding the arena, having traced Dakroth's movements, and Dakroth makes for his escape route, a secret door in Jegra's quarters.

"How Come [sic] I didn't know about this?" Jegra asked, both hands on her hips as she stood by and watched in disbelief as a secret passage was revealed to her.

This book claims to have an editor.

Incidentally, Dakroth's answer is that 'every emperor likes to have his fun'. I'll get back to you when I've made sense of that reply.

The journey through the pitch-black tunnel is slowed by Jegra insisting on giving Cassera a playful swat on the rear, because there's no better time to play grabass than during a full-scale orbit-to-ground bombardment.

They make it out of the tunnel, which deposits them right in the middle of the desert, twelve klicks from the nearest settlement, an oasis town called Mardok. Dakroth built this escape tunnel - why not put it closer? But Jegra's none too happy about going back there, as the slaver who sold her into the arena was from Mardok.

Jegra found herself unable to hold back the flood of emotions. Mardok was the first place, other than Earth, she'd ever set foot and it was the last place she expected to see again anytime soon. She took a deep breath and composed herself.

Somehow, this is a bigger deal in her mind than being forced into a horrifying free-for-all with sixteen other women by her future husband. Seriously, besides Jegra's injuries, that hasn't come up at all this chapter. Are we just... moving on?

Dakroth's plan is to find transportation and head to the Zargora system, which is apparently unclaimed, largely uncharted space full of smugglers and pirates. In this system is a secret asteroid base where the new flagship is under construction. Cassera pledges herself as Dakroth's bodyguard for the journey, which feels pretty superfluous, and they head off towards Mardok. As they go, we zoom in on Cassera for a moment and are hit with the following shocking revelation:

In the short few days she'd spent with the Earth woman, she'd felt a strong connection form between them. It was a shame that, after all was said and done, she'd have to be the one to kill her.

Whaaaaa? Layers upon layers, wheels within wheels!

Interlude: The Alleged Editor

After reading that nightmare of a sentence I highlighted earlier and spotting a couple more typos in chapter 7, I decided to look into Gladiatrix of the Galaxy's editing situation. The front matter credits one Sheila Shedd, who didn't seem to have any sort of professional website besides a Facebook page, which links only to the Goodreads page for one of her own works.

Shedd does have a fair few editing credits according to Amazon, all for self-published works (including quite a few of Vick's other books), but her page seems to be highlighting her more as a writer. I actually took a quick look at the Amazon preview for Heart of Jet, the book she links to, and, though I didn't read enough to assess it as a whole, the quality of prose is pretty solid! I didn't spot any mistakes, and she doesn't list an editor, so I'm going to assume she did that part herself.

All this raises the question of why Gladiatrix of the Galaxy has so many obvious mistakes in it. Heart of Jet was published in January 2018, two months before Gladiatrix, so it's probably not just a matter of Shedd having a sudden and drastic improvement in her writing and editing ability. Maybe she was too preoccupied with her own book to give this thing a proper pass? Maybe she gave up on trying to edit Vick's work after her experience with his earlier zombie books? Or maybe she was trying and couldn't get through - Vick wrote a rebuttal to the only non-five-star review of Gladiatrix on Amazon, which suggests to me that he may not be good at accepting criticism. (I'll cover that rebuttal in some later installment. It's highly illuminating.)

Anyway. Back to the text itself.

Chapter 8

We start the chapter with Jegra taking a piss.

 "Must you always act so primitively?" Cassera carped, repulsed by Jegra's lewd and uncensored behavior.

carp v. to complain about a fault; to harp on. I don't think I've ever seen this word used as a speech tag before. Also, how exactly is Jegra meant to censor herself here? They're in the middle of the desert, and it's not like she's forcing Dakroth and Cassera to watch.

They're five klicks from Mardok.

 Jegra estimated that a klick was about a kilometer,

They're literally synonymous, Jegra.

just shy of a mile,

I don't think being 60% less than a mile is really "just shy" of one.

so that meant they could probably make it in the next hour and forty minutes.

We pause for some more friendly bonding banter between Jegra and Cassera. Cassera helps Jegra up over a dune, Jegra teases her for becoming too human, i.e. kind, etcetera. Dakroth demands urgency, because the sand worms (of course there are sand worms) come out after nightfall.

But Cassera has more important things on her mind. Specifically, Dakroth's master plan.

I will now attempt to explain, as neutrally and objectively as possible, Dakroth's master plan.

Cassera is going to continue having sex with Jegra for as long as it takes to be sufficiently corrupted by her human DNA, and study the effects. Once she's past a certain point, she'll start research on a cure, and her previous research will be put towards weaponising the rewriting effect. Making all non-Dagon species partially human will weaken them and make them easier to conquer, but Dakroth will keep Jegra as his wife as a symbol of false hope for the oppressed masses to keep them loyal.

There's... there's a lot to unpack here.

• Dakroth isn't certain that there is a cure for the corruption, though he's apparently confident that they'll find one. We know that Cassera already has some gene therapies that can slow its progress for a while, but there's no confirmed way to reverse it.
• Dakroth can't be certain that the corruption will weaken the people he uses it on. His exposure to humans is limited; Earth is a backwater nobody cares about and its inhabitants are evidently not very well-studied. Sure, they don't have Dagon super powers, but how does he know that this isn't one of those sci-fi universes where humans are the baddest motherfuckers in the galaxy despite being underdogs?
• How exactly does he plan to weaponise the effect? The fact that it requires sex rather than, say, skin contact, implies that only close, extended contact will cause DNA damage. Replicating that in a form that's useable as a weapon is going to be tricky if existing bioweapons research is anything to go by, especially given that, as Cassera noted when she first told Dagon about the effect, it doesn't seem to be a pathogen.
• Using Jegra as an aspirational symbol doesn't seem very reliable. If turning the oppressed masses partially human is a deliberate, hostile act, isn't the gesture of keeping Jegra on as empress - sorry, Imperatrix - going to be a very obvious ruse?
• If this plan relies on keeping Jegra alive, then why was Cassera musing about killing her at the end of the last chapter?

Cassera felt it was a genius plan.

I stand corrected. This plan's good, actually.

Our protagonists make it to Mardok, which is a desert town full of drinking and gambling and sex, and Cassera has something extremely hilarious and clever to say about it.

"You won't find a more wretched den of scumbags and villains," Cassera warned her travel companions as the three of them cut briskly across the street to the pub on the other side.

Huh, he really did it. He really, honestly went and did That. This is clever writing, right? You lampshade how blatantly you're aping Mos Eisley by aping the most famous line about Mos Eisley.

We are told very early on that Mardok has no shortage of 'slattern women' (did Gary Gygax possess Vick from beyond the grave for this line?) to offer, and Dakroth, who has his priorities very well-ordered, starts checking them out.

They end up slipping into a pub through a side entrance to avoid drawing attention to the fact that one of them is the Emperor of the entire friggin' galaxy. Besides, as Jegra warns, there could be Nyctan agents here who wish him ill. Good call, Jegra. Remind me, why are you sticking up for the man behind Fortwife: Battle Royale?

So our heroic trio go looking for disguises. Dakroth puts on a big cloak, Jegra finds a janitor's outfit which doesn't zip up because her tits are too big but puts it on anyway, but Cassera refuses to change. Jegra responds by ripping Cassera's clothes clean off, earning her 'the good ole stink-eye', handing her a tube top and an orange pleather miniskirt to replace it, and fucking up her hair for some reason. Cassera is left looking 'indistinguishable from an upscale call-girl'.

And thus the three of them stumble into the pub: a caricature of a sex worker, a rejected side character from Bayonetta, and some guy in a cloak. They ought to blend right in.

Thus ends chapter 8. This was a long one, but good gods was there a lot to talk about, and we are, at least, into what I think is the meat of the plot now. I think we have to accept that Jegra's somehow forgiven Dakroth for Apex Wives (sorry, I'm running out of battle royale games), so I guess that thread went nowhere - it served only to establish Dakroth as the fucked-up guy we already know he is, since, if the other wives had to be out of the picture for plot reasons, they could've just died in the Nyctan attack.

Next time: boob fondue, careless whispers, and... Anaïs Nin?