Jack of Harts

I remember one day the girls were hand delivering some new toys to me in the middle of the Hyades Cluster when a Shang fleet faded in around us. They had us dead to rights. I didn’t know how we were going to get out of it. Then Rosalie and Rosalind opened up a channel and spoke the chemical building blocks of a bioweapon that could kill every Shang in the galaxy while leaving every other human being alone. They followed that with the antidote and a simple, “We don’t want to kill you. We just want to survive you.” I thought the Shang were gonna just nuke us all right there, just to shut us up. Then they turned and left. No shots. No words. Just gone. They never did that. They never ran without firing a shot. A part of me still wonders if I imagined that.