The Myths of Twisted Felix Katt (Book 2)

(15) Dancing between the stars

O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet - Saint Augustine

The horrified and disgust look on the great Blooded Lady Temperance St. Katharine’s face was giving me the urge to giggle manically. Apparently it offended her fine sensibilities to see the neatly stacked rows of dead pirate corpses laid out in the cargo hold of my Destiny. Of course it probably didn’t help that Van and I had stripped the bodies naked and collected the items in piles off to the side either. You’re giving me that same look she is now aren’t you? Hey, it’s ghoulish but I’d be a damn fool to let go of equipment and items I could use without paying for them. Most of the clothes could be washed (repeatedly) to be reused by us or sold. All of the weapons were added to our arsenal, and some of the personal items would fetch a pretty coin at the next market bazaar we hit up.

“You’re depraved and disgusting.” Temperance spat at me, her nose so high in the air I could count nose hairs.

“Yeah and?” I retorted, wondering why the hell the Blooded was in the cargo hold to belittle me anyways. We avoided each other as much as possible after the whole, she kissed my blood slave and I nearly ripped her to pieces with my bare hands thing.

“Do you have no common decency whatsoever?” her voice was gaining an octave and I was almost hijacked by a memory of my Mother’s voice doing the same thing.

“Felicity St Katharine, you are a First Daughter Prime, you will NOT run around shoeless like some kind of street ruffian!” Mother’s voice rose to an unpleasant timbre whenever she was angry with me. Which seemed to be always after Daddy left.

It was my eighth birthday, a little under two years since Daddy walked away in the snow, and my little sister Temperance was still too young to be any fun. So I had gone out with my chaperone to enjoy the kid’s part of Mardi Gras, play in the games and act like I was no different than anyone else. Except that I’d given my shoes to a little boy who had none and now Mother was angry at me for it. And I knew she wouldn’t be any more happy with me when she learned whom I had given them to.

I shook off the memory before it could pull me through the whole incident. “Temperance. I’m going to be saying rites over these pirates and letting them drift into space. Something they would never do for any of us in the reverse situation. So what if I don’t see the practical use in letting their clothing, boots, weapons and coins go to waste as well? Death isn’t decent, it isn’t dignified and there is certainly no respect in it. They are meat, and useless meat at that. However, what separates us from them is the respect we give to them after death. I am giving them some. Not as much as you would like but far more than they would have given me. So I sleep easy at night little Blooded. Now if you don’t mind, I have some work to do. Unless you want to help wrap the bodies?” I retorted, somehow managing to keep my tone calm and even halfway to pleasant.

Funeral rites in space are an interesting thing. If you loved, liked or cared about the corpse in anyway, you wrapped them in preservative bandages and locked them in a chiller until you landed so you could cremate their remains. That was the civilized way of disposing of our dead. It cost way too damn much to bury a body anymore, although the super rich could afford to, hell there were whole moons out there dedicated to holding the rich and decaying. But I didn’t have any reason to be civilized to these space scums, I could have simply launched them out to go ker-splat in the asteroid field. Hell, I probably should have, except that I felt that how we treat our dead helps to separate the homo sapiens from a lot of our evolutionary relatives. It wasn’t something Mother had taught me, or even any of my civilized tutors. I had learned it through experiencing all the kinds of death out there, a witness and chronicler of the many ways we humans shed this mortal coil. I doubted that Temperance had the same exposure.