24-Hour Story Contest Short Story | The Brothel at the Edge of the Universe

Christian Hecker, Endeavours - A Promise in Light | Source

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I do not remember much about my mother’s early life.

But she had a penchant for doing great things. And she always told me, ‘Someday, Maxie, every single decision in the galaxy will be made at the tables of my establishment, between the arms and the legs of my girls.’

Thirty-five years later, there is not a single entity in the Universe who disagrees with that.

It doesn’t matter how grand or sophisticated are the speeches in the Commonwealth of Planets’ Archtribunal. Neither does matter how sanctimonious are the rites made on the halls of the Moon Throne, right at the center of the mighty Temrid Empire.

The true power of the Universe rests within my humble abode.

And oh, my, what a place it is.

My mother was not exactly what you would call a prostitute or an escort, no. She was a courtesan of the highest ranking, who usually worked with the most powerful men and, occasionally, with the most powerful women. Not that she shied at the sight of a girl, for her sexuality was as fluid as a river. She just knew that there was only place for one woman in her heart, and only one… me.

Besides, she knew that her active life at her line of work, no matter how refined the tastes of her customers were, had a date of expiry. Every girl who works either the streets, the corporate offices or the palace halls knows that, and my mother was too good not to know. She saved quite a lot of her income and started to invest it in various outlets and ventures across the galaxy, applying every advice and trick she heard in the parties and places she worked.

When she had amassed enough money to bribe a councilman of the Commonwealth of Planets and a little more than that…

… she decided that she wanted to buy an asteroid.

And so she did.

Naturally, my mother’s proposition wasn’t exactly legal or easy to accomplish, but she knew how to… mesmerize her customers to a point that you couldn’t see the difference between pleasing them and targeting them. And her contact in the Archtribunal, luckily for her, was a well-connected and influential man who led an entire fraction of the Prelates, the higher, collegiate wing of said institution. And, might I say, he was quite handsome for a man of his age.

My mother and he locked themselves for a full weekend on the presidential suite of the Hathek, one of the most prestigious hotels in the Andromeda Nebula. She never spoke with me openly about the things they did…

… but, whatever those things were, she came home with a bill of property that determined that Asteroid 549VB, located in the outer rim of the Norma Arm, was entirely hers for whatever purposes she could fathom.

We departed on the next cruiser, with enough resources and engineers to terraform a planet and a small attaché of escorting ships from the CPN that, of course, weren’t there. A final gift from Prelate Therion Gargas, and a reminder that, whatever were my mother’s objectives on that piece of dust, she wasn’t meant to be touched, assaulted or pirated by anyone.

Twenty-five kiloparsecs, forty wormholes, and nine CPN guard posts later… We were at Asteroid 549VB, located in a massive belt orbiting a Class-III blue giant star called Hekate.

And, to put it lightly… 549VB was a shithole.

A very large shithole, yes, but it was quite a barren place to begin with.

But there she, Clara Verlan, stood alone, burying her flagpole’s tip deep in the ground. Not with the Commonwealth of Planets’ flag pending on it, but with her own flag, that she carefully designed in the light months that took us to arrive there. A purpure triangle vair-in-point on a sable field, ‘a symbol of freedom for every mean bitch in the Milky Way’, she said.

Two Hekatian years later, using all the manpower and the money that she had invested, my mother had built an authentic oasis in 549VB, or 69 Circe, as she named it… for very peculiar reasons. And thus, the legend of Madam Clara’s began.

Making good use of her network of agents, recruiters, and clients, my mother slowly turned Madam Clara’s into the in place to be. Invitation-only, of course: with enough security countermeasures and even a quantum network disruptor, the only way you would ever reach Madam Clara’s was if my mother herself wanted you to be there.

And my mother didn’t want lowlifes of bastards harassing her girls, no, no, no.

She wanted only the most influential, powerful customers knowing about Madam Clara’s existence… And she extracted her clientele out of the governments, churches, and megacorporations of the whole Milky Way. Such was her skill in promoting the amenities of her gentlemen’s club that the main hall of Madam Clara’s usually looked like the Commonwealth of Planets’ afterparty; you could spot admirals of the fleet talking with councilmen or even emissaries of the alien empires and federations out of the CPN’s reach.

Of course, expanding Madam Clara’s clientele to other races implied that my mother had to expand our workers’ offerings as well…

… and for that, my mother had the initiative of forming a personal, elite army.

A group of the most badass, vicious, combat-able ladies in the whole universe, that only swore allegiance to her and her girls. Not only to safely escort and protect them out of the most dangerous places in the galaxy but to protect them from our customers. Applying a careful mix of influence and manipulation, she got enough support from our usual military frequenters to recruit what she would call ‘her valkyries, those who would put a sword in the necks of whoever wanted to damage her babies’.

And so, Verlan’s Raiders were born.

In the course of a few galactic standard years, my mother initiated a private war against most of the slavers and sex traffickers of the known galaxy. It didn’t take much to start hearing fearful rumors of all-women crews of mercenaries and assassins falling from the sky like meteors, subduing entire slaving operations to the ground and emasculating said trafficking rings’ enforcers in glorious retaliation. Suffice to say, the CPN turned a blind eye into my mother’s avenging activities: some admirals and high-ranking officials of the Navy even started funding her efforts, knowing the CPN was fighting on too many fronts and seriously needed the support of blackwater operations like the one my mother ran.

Not that my mother ended up hiring each girl she saved, though. She always said that women who wanted to work for sex had to like sex, after all. And for that, she trained me to manage and to eventually run her place, carefully selecting females from every humanoid race we knew in the universe and running enough tests and education programs to make the Temrid Empire’s Immortals blush in fear of their ignorance. Whoever ended up not liking the work, or was too emotionally scarred out of her previous experience to work for her, was paid a small fortune and silently relocated into a line of work more in line with her psychological profile and goals.

And the ones who reunited the beauty, the ambition and the knack for pleasing their customers…

… they became the most expensive, valuable and loved girls of the universe.

My mother’s girls frequently started as many galactic conflicts and wars as they ended. Not that said fact is of the knowledge of many people in the Commonwealth or abroad; it would be a shame for many politicians and diplomats to acknowledge that, for example, the Fourteen Days War at Proxima Centauri started just because of the jealousy a Khargan warlord had of the love between one of our girls and a well-known Commonwealth governor of that sector. Or that the three-months coltan miners’ strike at Rigel Beta started because of a bet between a coltan syndicate’s representative and a Temrid Empire’s emissary who wanted to see how much coltan miners would be able to deprive themselves of food.

Sadly, my mother didn’t live enough to see their dream finally come true. As she was quite fond of smoking, her lungs eventually lost the battle with a very aggressive form of cancer that she didn’t want to treat. I always found it funny, the way such a powerful being like her knew when her time was over… and she just let herself be walked away to the depths of space.

Not only her girls, but her Raiders, and even a few of her truest clients of all time – including a very old and wrinkled, but still handsome and quite silver-tongued Prelate Gargas – assisted to her funeral. Her ashes were spread in the vastness of space above 69 Circe, to became stars of her own.

And what happened to me? Well…

… I ended up becoming Madam Maxime. Making myself sure that my mother’s legacy continued, and that, when every single being in the galaxy with deep-enough pockets and a hearty disposition for the affairs of the powerful wants to be properly pleased and pampered, he or she ends up saying…

“We’re headed to Madam Maxime's, at the edge of the universe”

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This short story is participating in the 24-Hour Story Contest Short Story by @mctiller featured here!