The second door stopped opening, and Basil wondered if Mr. Shoe Polish had used the manual override. Basil switched cameras on the view screen above the front window, so he could see what was going on behind him. The first airlock door was opening again, while the second one had frozen ajar, with a gap of about four feet. From here, Basil could see Gar-Kon climb out of the control room’s emergency hatch, then he jumped onto the ship bay’s floor. Basil leaned over to the console in front of Laila and pressed three buttons together. Then he flicked the comms system in a particular order. In the view screen, the first door began to close again. Gar-Kon was still running across it when the first door banged closed behind the ship, then the second one began to open again. Basil taxied forward, waiting for the third air lock. The sound of blaster shots against the first door carried into the ship, and Basil suspected that Gar-Kon would get that door open again soon, or else Mr. Shoe Polish would. People seemed to do whatever Gar-Kon told them to, and Basil wondered if it was down to fear or leverage. The final door opened, and he rolled out, turning immediately left. He waited the mandatory five seconds before he fired up the Evanescent Mode Drive, and floored it away from Pombos.
“Annnnd we’re outta there!” he declared, expecting Laila to cheer up. She just stared at the stars morosely.
“It’s not far enough.” She began to cry again. “Nowhere is far enough away from him. He’ll find me anywhere in the universe!”
“It’s fine, he’s probably halfway to the nearest drinking establishment by now. I’m sure he’ll find someone more available within the next few hours, then you’re off the hook.”
“You just told him he can’t have me! He’ll never stop looking now. Gar-Kon always gets what he wants; telling him no seems to make him want it more.”
“You’re blaming me for rescuing you? Would you rather I’d left you at security check-in?” He was flabbergasted that she was pinning this on him.
“I don’t know! I just had to get away! If I’d married him… I could feel my soul screaming that it was wrong, that I had to escape, that he was crushing my spirit.”
Basil sighed. The way she’d lashed out had been unreasonable, but he could see she was clearly not in a good state. The questions were, what could he do with her once he’d picked up Flin, and how could he get her to snap out of dwelling on the immediate past?
“Where’s the rest of your family?” he asked. “Surely your mother or grandparents won’t let him treat you like this?”
“It was my mother’s idea,” she said ruefully, and fresh tears fell. “She wanted the financial security that a marriage to Gar-Kon would attract. He paid her a good price. I’ve got three younger brothers who she sold to go down the phosphorus mines.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” He looked at her in horror. He knew Pombos was behind the times, but surely no one actually sold their children like that?
“According to whom? Everyone on Pombos knows the Interplanetary Alliance doesn’t care about what happens on our planet, so long as their precious station is safe and Pombossian mineral exports remain cheap. It’s not a Prime planet, after all.”
It was an uncomfortable fact, not unnoticed by those such as Basil who traveled around the galaxy a lot, that the Interplanetary Alliance only protected the Prime planets—the richest planets, which happened to all be situated in the same star system. The other planets, the outposts, and the frontiers of civilization, had to fend for themselves, but taxes, of course, were still due, and the IA’s tax enforcers were the only officials who would venture out there. All planets had to pay tax, regardless of the levels of poverty there, or even if they had a currency. It was a larger-scale protection racket than Gar-Kon’s, but it was a scam nonetheless. The Prime planets just kept getting richer and that made them more influential. Anyone who tried to leave the Interplanetary Alliance would find twelve disgustingly rich planets and about a hundred poorer ones had been browbeaten by the Interplanetary Alliance into declaring war on them. Given the lack of help available, Basil decided the best thing he could do to help Laila was to get her away from Pombos. At least most of the other planets saw women as equals to men.
“I’m putting her on autopilot for a little while. We got about nine hours to Tefan, let me show you around.” He unfastened his safety belt. She looked at him helplessly, causing his heart to melt.
“You just press this red button and it opens; watch.” He pressed the release on her harness and it sprang open, just like his had done, retracting into its anchor points. She looked surprised.
“Where did it go?”
“You’re kidding?” The look on her face told him she was, against all probability, serious.
“It’s on a roll that springs back when it’s not being held,” he tried to explain. She nodded, but he wasn’t sure if she understood. He remembered that Pombos had barely achieved steam power before being informed that there was life on other planets, that it was more intelligent and advanced than Pombos, and that Pombos now owed the Interplanetary Alliance a huge tax bill for protection against alien invasions. The Pombossian economy had been crippled and further technological advancement had stalled immediately after the steam locomotive had been refined. The IA owned all of the transports between the space station and the planet surface, and they had guarded their technology well, although some very wealthy Pombossians had paid to import ships for their own use. Basil wondered what else he would need to explain to Laila.
“You’ve seen the main door,” he said. “Back here’s my room; that one’s Flin’s room. Bathroom’s through there, with your typical features.”
“Typical… features. Uh… of course.” She stared at the brushed steel sink and toilet unit, then jumped and screamed when her hand touched the flush sensor on the toilet, causing a rush of water.
“It’s okay, it’s just the toilet flusher.” He put a reassuring hand on her arm but she stiffened again.
He’d always been rather proud of his ship. He’d even paid the money to re-register it with a better name than ‘Garagok Mining Vessel 283,’ and he thought it was pretty exciting to have someone to show it to. Flin thought it was just a rusty old tin can. That was pretty much the only thing, aside from sex, that Flin and Karissa, Basil’s ex-little, had agreed on, but this girl had never been off her planet until this misadventure, and her eyes seemed to light up in amazement as she discovered what everything did. The bathroom’s walk-in shower seemed to delight her, and she spent several minutes waving her hand over the light sensor to make the water turn on and off. Basil just watched in adoration. She was the cutest little creature he’d ever had aboard the ship, that was for sure.
The bed was another surprise.
“This bed… it’s all yours?” She didn’t seem able to believe that one man might have a king-sized bed to himself.
“Yep. It’s a classy ship,” he said proudly. She sat on the edge of the bed.
“Oh! It’s soft!” She bounced on it with her bottom, setting her breasts in motion. He stood in the doorway, amused. Laila lifted her petticoats to her knees and climbed onto the bed, then jumped on it with her feet.
The little giggle she made was adorable, but Basil was worried that she could fall and hurt herself. He walked over to her and she tripped. She was about to fall onto the hard metal floor, so he put his hands around her waist.
“Get off me! Don’t touch me!” She panicked and tried to struggle free.
“It ain’t made for jumping on.” He lifted her up, intending to put her on the floor, but she kicked and screamed.
“Laila! Hey! Hey! Quit it!” He deposited her on the floor.
“Don’t touch me!” she reiterated, backing away from him.
“You were falling. I stopped you from hurting yourself.” He wondered what had gotten into her; she was acting like a cornered animal.
“I… I’m sorry. I thought you were going to…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Look, I ain’t gonna harm you. If you’re gonna st
ay on my ship, you need to behave. And I want you to stay on my ship,” he said. “For starters, don’t do anything else dangerous, then get mad at me for helping you out. You were about to hurt yourself just now. Think about how you’re responding to things.”
Laila stared at him then shook her head.
“You only have to put up with me until we reach Tefan.” She looked away from him, but Basil was willing to bet she was crying again. He wasn’t going to give in.
“Don’t challenge me on my own ship, missy,” he stated. He wasn’t angry, he just wanted to be clear that he wasn’t going to be wrapped around the finger of some lost little waif without a daddy. Who was he trying to prove that to, he wondered; her or himself? He walked out of his bedroom, shaking his head to try to clear it. She was right behind him.
“This is the kitchen. On a spaceship, we call that a galley, which confuses some people.” He waved around the galley, trying to think of all the reasons it was a bad idea to be attracted to a young lady he’d just met. She could have a venereal disease, he tried to tell himself, but everyone knew that those had been wiped out when smart viruses had been developed in the late twenty-first century. A smart virus targeted another, unwanted virus, removed its genetic material, and replaced it with some useful characteristics. Suddenly everyone with AIDS had been cured and turned into unfortunate individuals with an incurable case of mathematical genius. Humanity had advanced rather quickly after that. Every planet humans made contact with had eliminated disease because the smart viruses were unintentionally highly contagious.
Okay, he thought, maybe she couldn’t have a venereal disease, but she could be a gold-digger. Not that she looked like the type, and anyway, she wouldn’t be digging for very long to find the meager savings he’d stashed in a sock under his bed. He kept meaning to invest his cash in a bank on a Prime planet with a strong economy, but somehow, work always led him to the most unstable and undeveloped backwater planets in Andromeda, and these days the Milky Way was mostly full of outposts that orbited gas giants. Before terraforming had been banned, some bastard had invented un-terraforming technology, and gone on a rampage in the Milky Way, leaving dozens of ruined planets in his wake, including Basil’s parents’ home planet, Earth. It had once been blue, but now it looked exactly like Venus, the uninhabitable planet next door. When the Alliance had been formed, all work on terraforming technology had been destroyed, and astro-archaeologists were now given huge funds to piece together the remnants of the lost civilizations.
He realized his brain had very neatly tried to distract him from thinking up reasons not to be with this girl. It all boiled down to one universal truth. She was trouble. How did he know? Because he was attracted to her, and he invariably fell for the cutest, most troublesome girls on any given planet.
Basil was fighting a losing battle against himself and he knew it. He briefly thought about the times when he and Flin had shared his last little, and how Flin had often been able to see things about the situation that Basil had been blinded to. His only hope was that Flin would talk some sense into him when Basil reached Tefan and rescued him from the gangsters that were holding him hostage.
Chapter Two
Flinar Leif—or Flin, as his friends called him—was handcuffed on a crate facing the wall of a dingy subterranean hideout, waiting for Basil to make the exchange of some slightly dubious cargo for Flin’s life. Any time he liked, he could snap the handcuffs and fell everyone in the room; the pseudo-gangsters on Tefan were no match for Flin’s superhuman strength or size, but he was trying very hard to be civilized, and civilized people didn’t go around killing one another. They drank tea, played cards, and maybe ate a sandwich. Plus, dead men pay no bills, as Flin’s mother had reportedly said, when asked why she’d left the mayor of a particular town alive after leveling the rest of his town to a smoking ruin, and Basil wanted the cash for this delivery.
“Mister Flinar, your friend is late with the drop-off.” Big Vince was straight from the old school of gangstering: veiled threats, silly voice, the lot. Flin was fairly sure Vince’s real name was Trevor, but he liked to have these affectations. It was probably how he kept evading the Prime Law Enforcement squads who, according to the wanted posters Vince had pinned on the wall in front of Flin, had warrants for Vince’s arrest as Geoff the Squealer, Fat Sal, Little Ringo, and Granny Hopkins. Each holo-photo was totally different, aside from the vivid green complexion and a proliferation of warts, both key characteristics of everyone who was native to Tefan, but in each image, there was something about the whole that gave away a fundamental Trevor-ness.
“I’m sure he’s just held up in traffic,” Flin quipped. One of his bad habits was a total weakness for one-liners.
“He’d better be coming, Mister Flin, or you’ll be going… to a morgue!” Big Vince must’ve known that was a terrible answer, because he decided that was a good time to choke on his cigar. Flin thought it sounded completely fake.
“Uh… boss? There’s a Mister Basil here t’see ya.” A short, wide man with a monobrow was pointing a blaster at Basil’s chest as they walked in. If they pulled the trigger, Flin knew he couldn’t save Basil from this distance. Even if it was on ‘stun,’ Basil would be furious if this job cost him one of his suits. Flin knew how much Basil liked to look professional when he was on a job.
“You got my goods, Mister Basil?” Big Vince couldn’t seem to grasp the concept of surnames. Basil Rhodes! Flinar Leif! Flin’s brain protested at Big Vince’s dumb speech. Unfortunately, despite his other abilities, Flin wasn’t psychic.
“Sure I do. In my ship. Got anyone who can help me unload?” Basil asked.
“Lemmy, Frankie, go get my delivery.” Big Vince snapped his fingers and Basil was turned around and led back out to the ship. The whole setup was pretty amateur, Flin thought, but for a company like Basil’s, there was a lot of money to be made from amateur organizations with no real competence for moving things from A to B. The downside was dealing with so many big fishes living in small puddles. Flin liked to let them think they were the ones in control; it scared people to know they were only inches away from pissing off a half-elf.
It would scare them even more if they knew what the other half was.
Once the cargo was shifted and Big Vince had paid up, he predictably turned nasty.
“Follow these two and put holes in their heads, then get my money back,” Vince muttered under his breath to one of his gangsters. He obviously didn’t know half-elves had excellent and precise hearing.
Flin was bored of this.
Standing up, Flin handed Big Vince his cuffs, now mangled beyond repair, and left slowly. Basil ran ahead to clear the route. At over seven feet tall, Flin dwarfed everyone in the room. Outside, the blaster shots glanced past and the casual observer might think no one had aimed properly, but redirecting energy was actually one of Flin’s special abilities. He got straight into the copilot’s seat and helped Basil get the ship going.
“Move move move move move!” Basil urged the ship, as it had one of its moments. The ship was a rust bucket but for some reason that Flin failed to comprehend, Basil loved it. Blaster shots bounced off the cargo bay’s doors as they achieved liftoff and accelerated out of the atmosphere.
“You got held up?”
Basil nodded, still working to get one of the dials to light up. Flin tapped it, and it worked again. It was just a matter of getting the energy to flow properly, and he’d never understood why the other humanoids weren’t able to do it.
“Customs snatched the ship.”
It made sense. Luckily, Big Vince’s delivery was unusual but not technically illegal. Although Big Vince wasn’t a farmer, dozens of containers of fertilizer were easily explicable as a farming delivery if any customs officials inquired.
The dashboard lit up as they stabilized into an orbit around the planet.
“Anything else happen while I was… bored?” Flin asked.
“Yeah, she’s in my cabin.” Basil waved a han
d in that direction. Flin rolled his eyes.
“Another girl? Really? I was only gone for two days!” He couldn’t believe it. “You said after Karissa that you weren’t going to try and keep another girl on the ship!”
“This one’s different. She’s in some sorta trouble.”
“That’s not different. Karissa was in trouble when you found her.” Flin pointed out. He remembered how Karissa had Basil wrapped around her tiny fingers. All it took was pigtails and a wobbly lower lip, Flin knew, and Basil would lose all sense of reason.
“No, not with the law. Laila’s on the run from Gar-Kon, this gangster wannabe on Pombos. He’s got a lot of sway, so I thought she needed help.”
“You need help, Basil. You collect stray girls. You’re like a crazy cat lady when it comes to cute chicks.”
“Look who’s talking! You weren’t complaining when you were fucking Karissa. Or watching me fuck her, for that matter.”
“She was a cute chick,” Flin shrugged unapologetically. “She looked sexy as all fuck in handcuffs. Look how it ended, though; she wanted to settle down, we wanted to keep on doing what we do, and she left and took up with that Damaskan with four arms.”
“Just meet her, ‘kay?” Basil seemed to care about Flin’s opinion. Of a girl. That was weird, he thought. She must have gotten to him already. The girl must be a smooth operator.
* * *
It wasn’t Laila’s looks that got Flin when he first saw her… it was something about her, the way she held herself, maybe, or the expression on her face? It was the shy vulnerability of her. It was attraction at first sight. A need to find out what was inside her, what waited beyond the masses of hair. Seriously, the hair was so damn long. Was it everywhere? Usually he hated long hair, but on her it just added to her sexiness. Despite being stained, the floaty petticoat dress thing wasn’t helping his cock stay in his pants, either.
Her Daddy and Her Master Page 2