The little Earth female was really getting under my skin. I knew I shouldn’t let her but it was extremely difficult to keep my distance for some reason. The night before, for instance, it had taken every ounce of my willpower not to cup her full breasts and suck her ripe pink nipples…not to stroke lower and cup her sweet sex in my hand. I’d been able to smell her heat—a warm, feminine scent that drove me wild. I’d wanted badly to dip my fingers deep into her wet well, to pleasure her and to taste her.
But if I did that, I knew it would only make it that much harder to trade her away to Tazaxx. Already I greatly regretted the fact that I couldn’t keep her for myself. If I’d had enough credits and more time, I would certainly have gone back to buy another Pure One to trade to the crime lord so I could save Zoe.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough of either.
I hoped to at least solve my credit problem during this meeting with the collector of medical artifacts. As for time, there was no helping that. Even once (if) I got the malfunctioning hydrogen scoop panel fixed, I would have to push The Celesta to her limit in order to get to Giedi Prime before the auction took place.
If Tazaxx decided Sellah wasn’t right for his private collection, if he decided to auction her off instead…well, the males who liked to abuse females I had told Zoe about were very real. And Earth females were not the only ones they were interested in. If Sellah got sold to a T’varri for instance…
But no. I couldn’t let myself think such things. I pushed the worried thought to the back of my head as I left the ship and went down the long corridor which led to the spaceport proper. Ducking through to the unaccompanied males doorway, I bypassed the Majoran males and their treasured females. I would get my ship fixed in time to save my little sister, I told myself—I had to.
My only regret was that I couldn’t save Zoe too.
* * * * *
Zoe
You wouldn’t think you could get bored on an alien spaceship light years from Earth, surrounded by amazing new technology you’d never seen. But you’d be wrong. I was bored—bored to tears.
I had nothing to do but sit on the silver bed and stare at my hands, still bound in the thick, heavy manacles. I didn’t even have Al to talk to because he had taken his golden dragonfly form and gone with Sarden to meet the prospective buyer for the old medical junk they were trying to sell.
Plan B had seemed like a good idea at the time but look where it had gotten me. Maybe if I hadn’t tried to brain Sarden and cuff him I might be out with him at the spaceport right now. I could be seeing things no other human had ever seen. I might even have found a way to escape—maybe a friendly alien freighter who wouldn’t mind giving me a lift back to the big blue marble I called home.
Instead I was sitting around staring at my hands waiting to be sold.
The glowing blue light on the chain between the heavy cuffs blinked and glowed, almost seeming to taunt me for my stupidity. I couldn’t help remembering what Sarden had said—that I couldn’t have held him with the manacles, even if I’d been able to get them on him. Because they were keyed to a Vornish skin signature or something like that. “One firm touch of the lock-light would have set me free,” he’d said. Or something to that effect.
So Plan B was doomed to failure right from the start.
Staring at the light, I remembered the way he’d touched it—getting it to glow first green and then purple. When the color changed, the properties of the manacles seemed to change as well.
But the light turned green for you last night too, whispered a little voice in my brain. Don’t you remember? Before you snuck into Sarden’s room?
I sat up a little straighter. It was true. They had turned green and popped open when I pressed the light. Sarden had seemed so sure that the manacles wouldn’t work for anyone but him or another Vorn. But what about the way I had popped them open when I was examining them? Had that been an accident?
I wasn’t Vorn but the question wouldn’t leave my mind and I was plenty bored enough to entertain it. What if I could somehow unlock myself? Well, it was worth a try—it wasn’t like I had anything else on my busy social schedule at the moment.
Experimentally, I tried to reach the glowing blue light with one of my fingers. But the cuffs were too thick—no matter how much I reached and stretched, I was still half an inch shy from making any kind of contact.
Well, do you have to use a finger to press it? whispered that sly little voice again. Try something else. Don’t give up!
I didn’t intend to. Feeling slightly foolish but also very determined, I lowered my head and pressed the blue light firmly with the tip of my nose.
At first there was nothing but a ticklish buzzing in my nose, the faint, metallic smell of the manacles, and the sound of my own breathing. Then I heard that faint chiming sound I remembered from the night before and the thick cuffs popped open and fell from my wrists.
“Yes!” I jumped up and almost fell off the floating bed which swayed dangerously with my erratic motions. That didn’t stop me from doing the happy dance on the silver beanbag, though. I jumped and danced and pumped my fists in the air—they seriously felt so much lighter now. I hadn’t realized how much those damn manacles had been weighing me down!
“Suck it, Sarden!” I said aloud, as I finally sat back down on the bed, panting. My victory dance had been the most aerobic exercise I’d had since the big red jerk had captured me. I normally try to hit the gym with Charlotte at least three times a week, just for stress management. Only here on this stupid alien ship I had all the stress and no way to manage it. I felt better just for getting my heart rate up.
Once my elation faded a little though, I realized I was just as stuck as ever. My door was still locked—Sarden had made sure of that before he left. So yes, I was uncuffed, but I was still confined to my room.
“Great going, Zoe—you’re still trapped,” I muttered to myself. And still no closer to ever seeing Earth again.
In a fit of irritation, I picked up the heavy manacles by their chain. Squeezing the stupid lock-light as hard as I could, I threw them at the locked door.
I expected them to smash and scrape against the door, hopefully leaving a nice, long scratch in the shiny silver metal.
Instead, the door whooshed open and they flew out into the hallway with a musical clatter.
“What the…?” I hopped off the bed again, stumbling in my haste. What had happened to the door? Why had it opened? Did the manacles have something to do with it?
Walking over, I bent over and examined the empty, open manacles carefully. The light on the chain between them was now glowing a deep, steady red. Huh. What did that mean?
I didn’t know but I sure as hell intended to find out.
Scooping up the heavy manacles, I went to another door I was pretty sure was locked—Sarden’s. Sure enough, when I passed my hand through the invisible beam, nothing happened and the door stayed closed. But when I put the manacles through the beam, it slid open at once. Yay!
I stared down at the heavy cuffs in my hand, thinking hard. Okay, so I had a way to unlock doors and get wherever I wanted on the ship. But I probably had a limited time before Sarden came back and found me out of my restraints and wandering the halls. Or hall, really, since the ship was mostly just a lot of rooms leading off one long hallway. What should I try next?
My first thought was to get out. I went for the door where Sarden had brought me in, through the confusing maze of claustrophobically tight passageways into the place where the little shuttle was docked.
Sure enough, there was a door—a really big hatch, actually, that looked like it was made to open and let the shuttle out. Heart pounding in my chest, I walked up to it and waved the glowing manacles in every direction, trying to break the invisible beam and get it to open.
Only it didn’t work. No matter how wildly I waved the heavy metal cuffs, the door stayed obstinately closed. I grew more and more frustrated until I fin
ally saw something blinking in one corner of the large hatch door. Kneeling down, I saw what looked like some kind of combination lock. It had a dial with alien markings in glowing green script all around it. Of course, I couldn’t read them. I had another moment of regret that the translation viruses the Commercians had sent through the hole in Earth’s ozone layer only affected spoken language and not written.
Still, even if I had been able to read Sarden’s language, it probably wouldn’t have done me any good. I still wouldn’t know the combination or code or whatever was needed to get out of the ship.
I tried twisting the dial this way and that anyway, unwilling to just give up. I even put my ear next to it and tried to listen for clicks the way burglars always do in the movies.
I may be a lot of things, but a safe-cracker I’m not. After a few minutes of futilely twisting the dial, I gave up. This thing wasn’t going to budge for me and it was time to stop wasting my time.
Strike One but I wasn’t done yet. Time to find another way out of this ship.
I threaded my way back through the narrow passages and into the main corridor. It was weird how quiet it was—except for the soft hum of the ship’s engines, I couldn’t hear anything at all. At least Sarden had left the lights on—it made the long, empty hallway a little less spooky.
A little. God, I really wanted to get out of here!
The next thing I tried was the control area of the ship. The manacles opened the door for me with no problem but then I was faced with a bewildering array of blinking, glowing, buzzing instruments. What was all this? It made the control panel of the shuttle look like a kiddy car. There was no way I could get any of this to work—even if it hadn’t been voice locked to Sarden’s voice. Also, there was no door anywhere—at least not any I could see.
Strike Two. But I still wasn’t ready to give up.
I left the control area with its crazy Christmas light display instrument panel and went the other way down the long hall. After the food-prep area, the entertainment room (which had some really intriguing-looking tech that would have made any gamer pee his pants with excitement) and the bedroom and storage room doors, there was nothing for a long way.
Then, just as I was beginning to wonder if the ship went on forever, I came to a small door at the very end of the corridor. Suddenly I had a thought—when Sarden had first brought me aboard, he had specifically told me to stay out of the storage area in the back because it was dangerous. Was that what this was? And what had he meant by dangerous?
Maybe he just wanted to keep me out of a place that had a possible exit, I thought. I wouldn’t put it past him, the big red bastard. I didn’t care what he had said—I was going to take my chances.
I pushed the manacles through the invisible beam and the door slid open with more of a wheeze than a whoosh. It seemed I might have come to a part of the ship that wasn’t used very often. Well fine, that didn’t bother me as long as there was an exit door.
The room revealed by the open door was dim—almost dark, in fact. There was, however, a faint yellow rectangle of light at the very end of it. The glow reminded me of sunshine—of daylight.
A-ha! My heart jumped in my chest and I took a step inside and nearly tripped. The big dark room—it was seriously almost as big as a football field—seemed to be packed with all kinds of objects.
I held the manacles up, using the faint glow of their lock-light to try and see what they were. I saw lots of shiny metal and glass—or plastic maybe, I couldn’t tell—but none of it made sense to my eyes. There were many large, complex machines and some smaller ones as well. I lifted a small, heavy device from a shelf and held it up to the manacles’ light. It looked like a round blue glass paperweight but it had a silver corkscrew-looking arm sticking out from the center of it.
I studied the small instrument carefully, looking closer. There was a reddish-brown stain on the sharp, jutting end of the corkscrew. Was it just rust…or something worse?
Then, a faint noise began. Soft, at first—so soft I could barely hear it. It was a tinkling melody kind of like an old fashioned music box. I frowned—was that coming from the corkscrew paperweight in my hand?
It seemed that it was. I brought it closer to my face, examining it, trying to figure out how it could make music. The blue glass part of it was clear and I didn’t see any kind of mechanism for music inside, but the soft, tinkling tune was definitely coming from the strange device.
That was when it came to life in my hand, the corkscrew stabbing out at me with no warning.
“Oh my God!” I gasped, feeling a line of fire slice across my cheek. I dropped the thing as a bolt of terror surged through me, and hopped back a step as though I’d seen a spider. Or something worse than a spider.
I expected the blue paperweight part of it to shatter but it didn’t—it bounced once and then lay there on the floor, retracting and stabbing the bloody metal corkscrew over and over as the soft, inviting tune played on and on, echoing eerily in the vast, dark room.
I waited for a long, breathless moment to see if the thing was going to grow legs and come skittering after me, but the stabbing motion appeared to be the only movement it was capable of. Well, that and the weird song, which now reminded me of the kind of music you hear in a horror movie when the doomed character opens an ancient, cursed puzzle box they’re supposed to leave strictly alone.
Anyway, it answered my question over whether the reddish brown stuff on the corkscrew end was rust or blood. I put my fingers to my cheeks and winced—it had really sliced the hell out of me! What a horrible device—who would invent something like that?
I wondered if it was a Vorn thing but somehow I doubted it. I didn’t know Sarden very well, but he struck me as a straight-forward kind of guy. If the rest of his people were anything like him, they wouldn’t invent a device so subtle. One that invited you to get closer and closer with its faint, tinkling music until you were within stabbing distance.
What about the Eloim then? I didn’t think so. To hear Sarden describe them, they sounded stuck up and priggish. This kind of weapon or whatever it was, would probably be considered crude.
Another thought occurred to me—maybe this was part of the medical equipment Sarden had gone to the spaceport to try and sell. That seemed most likely although I couldn’t imagine any medical exam that would require you to be suddenly jabbed in the face with a metal corkscrew. Another inch to the left or right and the damn thing would have burst my eardrum or popped my eye like a grape! Ugh!
Okay, enough messing with the equipment, I told myself. Sarden hadn’t been lying—it was dangerous. So from now on I was going to keep my hands strictly to myself and just try to get to that rectangle of light I saw at the end of the huge room.
I stepped carefully over the stabby-stabby corkscrew paperweight and picked my way carefully through the room, being extra careful not to touch a thing. Though I tried to blot it with my sleeve, blood was running down my cheek from the long, shallow scratch on my face. I really hoped I wasn’t going to need stitches—I was millions of miles away from the nearest E.R.
Shaking my head, I kept going.
Sarden
I didn’t know why, but I had a bad feeling as Al and I made our way back to the unattached males district. It’s a small area of synth-sex shops and delusion parlors that the Majoran peace keepers usually don’t bother to patrol. In contrast to the rest of Gallana, there were almost no females here and I could see why. The whole district was about males getting their most savage needs met without female interference.
Synthi-whores trolled the streets, crying their wares in cracked, mechanical voices. Cloning-mechs called that they could make the female of your dreams…and you could do anything you wanted to her.
Anything at all.
A male cloaked in a shadow-coat whispered to me from a dark alley, asking if I wanted any dream dust. Further down the dirty, rutted road another male offered me fantasy implants.
&nb
sp; “See yourself as you want to be…live the life you cannot have in reality,” he rasped hoarsely, dangling the long, silvery synthec-worms which would burrow into a host’s eyeballs and attach to the optic nerves. While he lived—while they fed on him—they would send him the sweetest of visions, stimulating every part of the brain in turn even as they devoured his neural function. They would refuse to let go until he was effectively brain dead—a useless husk with nothing left to give. Then they could come slithering out of his skull and return to their master who would sell them to another fool wishing to escape from reality.
I passed them all by and kept on walking, keeping my head low as I looked for my destination—a bar the buyer had named. At last I found it.
Outside the bar—The Suck Hole—was a row of artificial mouths mounted on adjustable metal poles. The red lips gleamed obscenely and made sucking and kissing noises when I got close enough to trip their sensors.
“A credit a minute—best blow job this side of Endora Six, big boy,” one of the mouths said. I ignored it—public gratification holds no interest for me. And besides, who knew the last time those things had been cleaned? Like everything else in the unattached males district, they were dirty and disreputable.
Not everyone was as fastidious as me, though. Down the line, a male—a Xlexian by his greenish brown, mottled skin—stepped up to a mouth and slid a cred-card into the slot on the side.
“Mmm, give it to me, baby!” the mouth moaned and the Xlexian obliged by unfastening his trousers and shoving his engorged member between its lips.
Obscenely loud sucking sounds began as the mouth took him in. The Xlexian groaned and pumped his hips enthusiastically, oblivious to anyone watching his pleasure. I looked away, disgusted.
“He seems to be enjoying himself,” a voice remarked beside me.
I jerked around and found myself facing a tall male with smooth, even features. His skin was tan and didn’t change color—a sure sign that his lineage was closer to the Ancient Ones than mine—but I couldn’t immediately tell his people. His hair appeared to be a deep, Majoran blue, though it was hard to tell with my sepia-toned vision. Maybe a half-breed like myself then? He had a long, boney nose and a thin mouth—barely more than a slit, which was currently turned up in a sardonic smile.
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