I said, “Baiting?”
Michelle said, “To lure our mate to our nest.”
Bailey said, “Yes. Luring is a high priority. The creatures you found this morning can be ravenous and they will be very imaginative in their efforts to attract you and get you to copulate. We suggest that you just go along with it. Learn to enjoy it.”
I said, “Oh, I enjoy it!”
Michelle said, “Anyway, the clothes are designed for all the functions we could think of.”
Bailey said, “And all morning I haven’t been able to think of anything else.”
We walked along as Michelle said, “I can’t stop thinking about the freak.”
I said quietly, “Michelle, don’t call her that. Please.”
Bailey squeezed my arm and said, “Jimmy, you need to accept something. She is a freak. I think you changed her parameters for who she is a freak for, but she’s still a freak. That was a brilliant move, by the way, letting her dance and showing her that you thought that she was beautiful, not a tragic comedy. It worked really well. If you hadn’t been sitting there, adoring her with your eyes and body language, truly loving her, she would never have caught on. And when you let her collapse and cry, I didn’t know what you were doing, but it seemed to be brilliant.”
Michelle said, “Sweetie, we all love her. But I’m a trained killer and when the time comes, I will kill without remorse or hesitation. Bailey is an engineer and diplomat, and she negotiates for us without asking permission or second-guessing herself. And Alison, our pretty Alison, is a freak and she will want, and will have, sex as often as she can. She was made to crave it and now you have made it possible for her to be satisfied. There is nothing wrong with her. It’s what she wants. Hell, Bailey and I do too, but she’s a freak. Accept it. Don’t reject her or what she is or what she wants. If I have to kill, we might regret that it was necessary, but you won’t regret that I did it. And when it needs to be done, we won’t argue about if it should be me or you or Alison that does it. It will be me.”
Then suddenly, she hissed, “Oh damn! Speak of the devil.”
Michelle slowed our pace and watched the crowd in front of us. She was waiting for something and neither Bailey nor I spoke. Something was up and only Michelle knew what it was. As the crowd moved around us, her right arm shot forward and she grabbed a woman by the throat and lifted her half a foot off the floor.
She said authoritatively, “There’s nothing to see here folks. Just an old friend.”
The others around us moved to the sides and continued on their way.
The woman that Michelle had in hand was “normal size”, about four feet tall. She had an orange tint to her skin and nothing remarkable about her. She was pretty compared to a lot of the populace, but not overly so. All in all, I would have said that she was entirely average and unremarkable.
Michelle stepped out of the main corridor into a doorway, never setting the woman down.
When we were out of the flow of traffic, Michelle said to the woman, “You have a death wish. Tell me about it,” and she let the woman’s feet touch the ground but kept a firm grip on her throat.
Bailey whispered, “The next thing we need is to get you a universal translator. At least that way you will be able to understand what’s being said. OK, the woman is saying that she didn’t mean any harm. Michelle says that she was pickpocketing and that the woman knew that Michelle would detect her. She’s a castoff. She says it’s her only way to get something to eat. Michelle doesn’t know what to do now. Before she might have just walked away, but now she doesn’t feel like she can. And a mercy killing isn’t right in this case. The woman says that she would welcome it. Oh no. Michelle is telling her that she can come with us. Oh, it isn’t as bad as I thought. She’s saying that if the woman wants to, she can be registered to you and be contracted out. At least then she can get a job and make a living. OK, she has some skills. The real problem was a partnership. She’s asking Michelle how she can be transferred to you because castoffs can’t be claimed. Michelle is telling her that she is being salvaged. That she won’t be part of the resident crew, but we will register her and take her somewhere and get a contract for her. The woman is asking if you will go along with this and Michelle is saying that you will and that as First Mate of The Eevona Space Command that she has full authority to make this decision. OK, woman crying, scary security guard relaxing her death grip, woman starting to collapse, Amazon comforting her, blah, blah, blah, warnings that if she steals from us or crosses us that she won’t be happy with the consequences, reminder that if she is registered as salvage that you are her partner and unless she goes chameleon again that she is bound to loyalty and service, woman sobs and says of course, blah, blah, furtive glance at her handsome rescuer, batting of eyelashes, slight look of jealousy from Michelle, stern look of warning from same, and we’re done.”
Michelle said, “Captain, this Unit is salvage. You heard Bailey’s explanation. We can register her but Bailey will have to convince the authority that it’s legal unless we take her back to the ship and have Ee do it.”
Bailey said, “It won’t be a problem. I can be very persuasive.”
Michelle said, “She will work for us. She will be loyal. She won’t do anything illegal. She will stay here and we will find her a job. She will use an amount that you allow for her expenses and the rest will be paid to you.”
I said, “And we can trust her?”
Michelle said, “As soon as she is registered to you, yes. She won’t willingly go back to being a rogue. She understands that she will be on her own and that it might be a long time before we see her again.”
There was a quick exchange between the woman and Michelle and then Michelle said, “She asked if she should come with us.”
I said, “And?”
Michelle said, “Bailey and Alison wouldn't feel comfortable with that. Um, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. She has other options. Bailey, you explain it. I have to keep holding her until we get her registered.”
Michelle moved her grip from the woman’s throat to her wrist. It still looked like she could cause a lot of pain very quickly if the woman tried anything.
Bailey said, “It’s really up to you, Captain. Understand that we pretty much have the power to give this girl life if we choose to. If we choose not to, she’ll be dead in a year or less.”
I said, “No, I’m all for it. It sounds low risk to us and it helps her. Just do it.”
At that, Michelle headed for an area map and looked up the location of the nearest offices where we could register salvage. Bailey and I followed her down the street.
Bailey held my arm and said, “Do you understand why Michelle doesn’t want her on the ship?”
I said, “Not exactly. You say that she can be trusted when she is registered, but is it that she can’t.”
Bailey said, “No Sweetie. She could be trusted. But you can’t.”
I said, “Me?”
She said, “Yeah, you. If this girl comes on the ship, you will have compassion on her and that compassion will turn to affection and your affection will make her want a relationship with you, and Michelle and I don’t want that.”
I said, “You're jealous?”
She said, “No. We’re realistic. This girl isn’t one of us. Not like Alison. She’s random. You don’t love her and neither do we. You might say that she doesn’t smell right to us. Not to be with us. She can work for us but not be part of us. Me, Michelle, and Alison are like aspects of a whole. We are parts of your thing, and you are part of our thing. The thing is a family or crew or bed or shower or dining table. If you are with Michelle or Alison or Ee, having a food time, talking, laughing, fucking, whatever, I’m as happy as if it were my body you were loving. Ee is happy and experiences our orgasms. The five of us are bonded and more like two people than five. There’s you and there’s us. Just two entities. If my Bailey body can’t be with you, my Alison body can. Ee doesn’t even have a body and has to be p
art of one of us, all of us, to experience what she needs from all of us. This girl isn’t part of that. She just isn’t. She can’t be. Because she just isn’t.”
I said, “You know what? I get that. That makes me really happy. Bailey, if I had made this decision on my own, I would have wanted to rescue her and do more than necessary. You two are absolutely right. Register her so that she’s safe, get her a job, give her a loyalty to uphold, and give her parameters to work within. The results are what she can make of it. We make her safe, she makes choices to make herself happy. Thank you. This feels really good.”
We made it to the office and went to the counter to speak to an agent. Bailey explained that we needed to register the Unit. There were questions, but as Bailey had said, she was very persuasive. The story was that we had salvaged the Unit, along with the scrap from a derelict ship, just before she died. They didn’t usually run into cases where a Unit was salvaged, but they saw the logic of it and if she was registered to me, she wouldn’t be any trouble to the authorities, so they accepted it and programmed her ID implant to show me as the partnership.
They didn’t care. No one would try to steal a Unit. If we said that it had happened a certain way, that was good enough for them. Why would we lie? And it was a pretty small lie. As far as I was concerned, if a Unit was castoff, and she wanted to come in from the cold, the salvage scenario was perfectly legitimate. She’d be on her own, but legal, at least.
Bailey immediately asked about a contract posting and was directed to a computer console across the room. She scanned postings and found something that would be safe, for the most part. The girl was thankful. Now that she was registered, her loyalty conditioning kicked in and she was more or less happy for the protection, such as it was. Bailey accepted the contract from the console and gave the girl the information and sent her on her way. She was allowed to keep 95 percent of her income for expenses and was to keep the other five percent in holding for us. If she ever needed us, my name and ship registration were recorded on her implant. It would be tough to track us down, so it was really our responsibility to find her if we wanted her. She’d be here if we ever came back.
Chapter 15 - Beast Mode
We wandered around and did some shopping. Bailey arranged for supplies to be sent to Eevona via cargo shuttle. We’d have non-dehydrated food for at least two months and we didn’t expect to stay away from a station for that long at a time. She also arranged for a flush of the waste system, some exterior maintenance and polishing, and a supply of fresh water.
The one piece of equipment that we bought was a universal translator that I could put in my ear so that I could carry on conversations with locals if necessary.
The clothing was ready in a few hours. After taking our orders, the tailoring staff went straight to work preparing what we wanted. It was a large order. Not enough to take several days, but enough to make us preferred customers. The order was for full wardrobes for four people and that was a good sale for one day. The final product was bulky enough that we had it delivered to the hangar bay and placed next to the shuttle. We’d take it with us, but we didn’t want to have to carry it through the station.
The whole excursion was pretty uneventful. Even the castoff Unit. I wasn’t impressed at all with anything we saw. I don’t know why. It just didn’t excite me. You’d think that a space station would hold a lot of new experiences. It didn’t. It was like an underground shopping mall in London or Tokyo. No big deal. I wanted to get back to Eevona and back into space.
Ee welcomed us back aboard and we unloaded our packages into the entry room. I wondered why we only had the one entry and why it seemed like a side door. Where was the main entrance? Well, this was it. There were maintenance ports and a small receiving dock, but according to Bailey, it was inconvenient and required spacesuits. This entry was the friendliest.
By the time we got things stowed away, I felt like it was time for sleep. Before we retired, Bailey wanted to talk about an idea she had. I didn’t pay that much attention. She wanted to have Ee go somewhere and she wanted to take a short planetary excursion. Ee told her that where she wanted to go was no trouble at all. As long as it was safe, I didn’t care. Bailey seemed excited about it and I assumed it was more shopping or something.
Michelle and I went to the stateroom and undressed. Michelle deemed it time to give Alison the stimulant so that she would start waking up. I sat on the edge of the bed near her and Michelle administered the injection. A few seconds later, Alison’s eyes fluttered and then opened wide.
I said quickly, “Eevona barada nikto,” and she calmed down and relaxed into the mattress.
Something was different.
I peeked under the blanket and said, “Her skin is getting some color already. Are her breasts bigger? I thought they were a little smaller before.”
Michelle pulled back the covers and said, “They are bigger. We didn’t discuss any modifications. She must have decided it on her own. Her hair is coming in already, too. Sort of yellow-blond. That will look good on her. I guess it makes sense. Not that it’s blond, but that she decided on her own. And I guess the changes to her breasts are reasonable as well, given her circumstances.”
I said, “What circumstances?”
Alison opened her eyes and smiled and said, “Do you like them? I hoped you would like them. I just had a feeling that you would. Touch them and make sure,” and she pulled her blanket down farther and waited, grinning.
When I hesitated, she said, “I know you like them. I can tell. I can feel you now. When you look at me it excites you. I like being loved. I’m going to do everything I can to make you happy. I’m so happy. My leg is broken. Captain, you love me. I can tell. Is this your bed? Oh my gosh, am I in your bed? She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she? Is she going to sleep with us? I’m so sorry, I don’t remember your name. But you were there. You helped me. I love you. What’s your name? Oh, what’s my name? Do I have a name?”
I said, “Alison, this is Michelle. Your name is Alison. I’m Jimmy. The ship is Eevona. We call her Ee.”
Alison grinned and said, “What about the other one? The one who helped me? Is she here?”
I said, “That’s Bailey. She went shopping or something. Michelle is the First Mate. Bailey is the Engineer and Diplomat. I’m the Captain.”
Alison said happily, “What am I? Besides what I am? Am I something besides what I am?”
I said, “What are you, Sweetie?”
She said, “Um, well, I’m real. I’m a real girl. I’m your…well, I don’t know what. I know what I want to do, but not what to say. Oh, wait! I do know! They thought I was an Entertainer, but I’m not. That was awful. I was confused. They told me I was, but I’m not. I must be a Concubine Unit. Oh, that’s nice. That’s like being an Entertainer, but just for you and you don’t laugh at me because,…because,…because,…um, because it isn’t right. Is that what I am? A Concubine Unit? I feel like I am. Do you like my boobies? I made them just for you because you are my hero and I love you and I want to do what you like because I feel happy if I do that.”
I said, “Sweetie, you aren’t exactly a Concubine Unit. Here, with us, you are a person, not a Unit. You were born a Unit, but that’s changed now. You are a woman. And if you want to be, you can be one of our um, mates, spouses. That’s what Michelle and Bailey, and even Ee are. I’m their husband. What do you think of that?”
Alison turned on her side and propped herself on her elbow and frowned for a second.
Then she smiled and said, “That doesn’t make sense. I know what a person is and what a spouse is, and how can I be that? But if I think about it, how can I not be that? How could I be, but how could I not be. So I am. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you call it. I’m Alison and I’m yours and if Michelle, who’s very pretty by the way, and do you want me to have tits as big as hers? But if she and Ee and Bailey are yours then so am I because that’s what I want because you’re my hero and I love you. Is that what you want?”
I said, “I would like that very much. It just seems right.”
She grinned and said, “OK. I’ll work on making my boobs as big as Michelle’s!”
I said, “Whoa. No, I meant that I want you to be with us. Your breasts are fine the way they are. They are beautiful. Where I’m from, we’d call Bailey a size D and Michelle and size F, and I think you would be a Size E. I think you are beautiful.”
She said, “But you don’t know if you like them. You didn’t touch them.”
I sighed and thought, “What the hell” and reached out and grabbed Alison’s boobs, one in each hand as she rolled back onto her back and let me fondle her. She was so insistent that I didn’t bother with subtlety. I squeezed her firmly and then played with each nipple, pulling and lightly pinching her. I didn’t stop there. I figured that Alison was going to bring it up eventually so I pulled the blanket all the way off of her and slid my hand down her stomach toward her crotch. When I brushed over the top of her mound, which was smooth and hairless, she grinned and thrust her pelvis upward and threw her knees to the side, giving me full access and invitation. I had planned to just fondle her and show her that I accepted her, but maybe I wanted to rethink my plan.
I rubbed Alison’s vulva lightly and said, “Michelle, how is she? Is she strong enough to be awake for a while? For me to spend some time with her and for her to get to know me?”
Michelle grinned and said, “I’d say so. She should be fine. Do you want me to stay, or maybe I should go and find something useful to do for a while?”
I stared at Alison, lying on the bed, naked and open, and said, “Why don’t you give me a few minutes alone with Alison to make sure that she understands where she is and what’s happening. You guys bought lingerie, didn’t you? Nightgowns? Maybe you could go and unwrap our new clothes and get them ready for us to wear.”
Michelle said, “Aye aye, Captain. Alison is fine for normal activities, except that she should be careful about how much weight she puts on her foot. Keep her in bed for a while. Have Ee call me if you want me for something that Alison can’t do yet,” and she left the room with a giggle.
First Recruits Page 16