by A. C. Ellas
* * * *
Pleased to realize that he’d be able to experience this session again, Nick pumped his hips, thrusting himself in and out of Cai in long strokes that rubbed over Cai’s prostate in both directions. He didn’t work himself too fast, but he wasn’t giving weak thrusts either. He rocked Cai’s body with the power of his inward thrusting, stabilizing Cai’s position by grasping his hips. He pulled Cai back into his thrusts, increasing his penetration that extra sliver of an inch, but he was really doing it for the sense of domination.
Nick got a hand under Cai when he sensed his partner was close. He stroked the long pole of Cai’s cock until he felt it quivering and just barely moved his hand up in time to catch the wad. Awash in Cai’s pleasure, he brought the semen to his lips and tasted it as he continued his deep, languid thrusting in and out of Cai’s hot, velvety warmth. He sped up once Cai relaxed post-orgasm, thrusting with real urgency for another minute before he stiffened and shot his load into Cai. The sensations were glorious and all the better for being shared. He gently pulled out of Cai and gathered the Gator into his embrace. Eventually, they got around to enjoying the hot tub.
* * * *
Cai was warm, relaxed and mostly recovered from his foray into the despicable minds of the pirates. He returned to his chambers only to discover that his privacy had been violated. The cabin boy, Mouse, was in his social room, clearly waiting for him. “How did you get in here?” Cai asked as he paced the distance from the door to the couch. He was careful to keep his tone even and not to let a trace of anger show.
“Twasn’t hard,” Mouse told him. “Just had to bypass the security protocol and tickle the lock a little.”
“Tickle?” Cai cocked his head at Mouse. “Show me.” He gestured to the door.
Mouse came up out of the couch, and Cai was pleased to see that he’d been scrubbed and given a clean ship suit—a highly adaptable one-piece garment. He followed Mouse back out his own door, made sure the door was locked then studied Mouse with all his senses as the young man picked his lock.
Mouse used computer skills to bypass security, and Cai wondered what he’d be capable of with a real data port in his head. But he used telekinesis to tickle the lock open once security had been bypassed. Cai followed him psionically, noting, among other things, the boy’s very light psychic fingerprint. Now, Cai was torn. He had a duty to report Mouse to the Guild. The Guild would claim the child in a pico, for they had uses for all psionic abilities. But by doing so, he would essentially strip Mouse of his freedom—something that the young man had just barely gained at all.
Cai indicated that they should enter his chambers again, and once inside, he led Mouse to the dining room where the six were laying out a snack. Not Nick’s cooking, but a damn sight better than anything Mouse had ever had on the pirate ship or as a slave on Sparta. Mouse fell into it with a hearty appetite, though Cai monitored him to make certain he didn’t eat too much. Small, frequent meals were the best way to treat starvation, and Mouse wasn’t far from that state.
As Mouse relaxed around a bellyful of good food, Cai asked, “Why did you break into my chambers?”
“Safe here,” said Mouse shyly. “Capt’n can’t get in here. Used ta hide with Lin sometimes, but when the capt’n found out, he got angry and didn’t let Lin have any Synde for days. Gator nearly died and when Capt’n did let him have some, he had to suck it off everyone’s cocks.”
Cai winced. He couldn’t help himself. He knew that in Lin’s place, he’d have done the same. No Gator should ever be put in a position like that, he told himself, while at the same time wondering how many Gators were in a similar position across the galaxy.
“I see,” he said at length. Too little, too late. “You are welcome to stay with me; I have a spare bedroom.” Cai wasn’t sure why he had a spare room, but he did, nonsensical as it was. Gators didn’t have visitors as a general rule and certainly not houseguests. So why have a spare bedroom at all? Cai was planning on turning it into an old-fashioned library of real books, but at the moment, it still had a bunk and all the features of a bedroom.
Chapter Four
Mouse waited until the Astrogator was sound asleep before he crept out of the spare bedroom and into Cai’s room. It had been difficult to hide his real memories behind the telepathic screen of false ones he’d woven so carefully for Cai’s sake, but he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Cai accepted him as a victim and didn’t probe more deeply. He’d even managed to pass himself off as fifteen rather than his actual age of twenty. He was just a small man, and this time, he’d been able to use that flaw to his advantage. The Gator had even seen him use his teek and remained hesitant about sending him to the Guild—out of pity.
Gators were soft, weak creatures. He enjoyed making Lin suck his cock to get his daily dose of Synde. Soon, he’d have two Gators to play with. Once he released his father and the rest of the crew, they’d take this ship easily. But he needed time to work, and so he slipped into Cai’s bedroom and plugged a device into the Gator’s data port. Cai would be trapped in a full simulation of himself at the mercy of the pirate crew, sucking cock to get Synde and pumping ass to get fed. The device, one of Mouse’s own design, locked into place and couldn’t be removed without a combination. It had a large stock of sex simulations it could put Cai through, all of them casting the Gator as the bottom. It would run continuously so long as it was plugged into Cai’s port, rendering the Astrogator helpless and totally unaware of his surroundings.
Cai was moaning softly and humping his blanket already. Mouse licked his lips, turned on by the sight. He couldn’t ignore it, even though time was an issue, and quickly climbed into bed with the naked man. Sometime later, he reached into Cai’s interface, the data port that every Gator had, and touched a few circuits, made a change or two, a back door he could access at will. Next time Cai saw him with his own eyes, outside of a sim, Cai would find himself overwhelmingly attracted to Mouse. He would find true joy in sucking Mouse and ecstasy at being allowed to bend over for Mouse. He finished and left Cai to the tender mercies of the sims.
Mouse slipped into the main room of Cai’s chambers and approached the Gator’s personal console. He quickly accessed it, bypassing the security easily. He rifled through the files, looking for real, hard information about the ship. This was no freighter but a frigate, he discovered. Laughing Owl. He found full schematics and dumped that into his data port’s memory. He also found sim files personally recorded by Cai, and he accessed those out of curiosity.
What he found was sex sim after sex sim. Most of them showed the ship’s captain in bondage, begging for cock, but some of them showed the Gator in a similar position. Mouse quickly made hard copy of those sims, storing them on a twenty-sided data crystal, related to a neurologic crystal but without the psionic imprinting, it was just a means of storing copious amounts of data. He decided that, once they took the ship, he’d have the captain collared so he could serve beside his Gator. He figured they’d make a bundle of hard credit selling the sims Cai’d already recorded, and if they had both men as slaves, they would have a ready source for many more.
Whistling a cheerful tune, Mouse strolled out of Cai’s chambers and headed for the weapons locker.
* * * *
Cai knelt before Captain Dread. He trembled with pain as the Synde withdrawal made his very bones ache. Dread gripped him by the hair, tilted his head back. “Need something, slave?”
“Synde, please,” Cai whispered, another spasm causing his muscles to contract painfully.
Dread showed him a vial of the drug. Not much but enough to ease the spasms and soothe the ache in his bones. “This? This is what you want?”
“Yes, please.” Cai strained toward it, but Dread’s grip on him was implacable and he didn’t even shift forward so much as an inch.
Dread’s boot lashed out, causing Cai to try to curl up from the pain that shot through him. He couldn’t curl up with Dread’s hand holding his
head up; all he could do was whimper piteously. “How many times do I have to remind you to call me master?”
“I’m sorry, master,” Cai wailed. “I won’t forget again, master. Please, master, I need it, master.” Dread let go of him. He almost fell to the floor, but something told him that would be unwise, so he remained in position before the captain, swaying from the effort.
The captain opened the vial of the life-giving drug and smeared the liquid all over his erect cock and balls. “Here’s your Synde, slave. Suck it off.”
Cai quickly leaned in, his mouth opening.
* * * *
Nick tossed and turned in his bunk, restless, trying to fall back asleep, but sleep denied him. Something was wrong. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he knew. He stood up and silently dressed. If this were a false alarm, the bridge crew would get a scare and perhaps a drill. If it weren’t a false alarm, if it were real... Nick worried. Mentally stilling his racing thoughts as best he could, Nick concentrated on Cai. Sometimes, he was able to touch Cai’s mind. Usually, he was able to at least sense something about Cai, such as whether he was awake. Tonight, all he got was nothing. That happened sometimes, but Nick felt a chill.
He walked quickly to the bridge and slipped into his chair, calling up his protocols as he meshed into the shipnet. The first thing he did was reach for Cai over the net. Cai did not answer. Cai was not available the shipnet insisted. Nick triggered his command override. If he was mistaken, he’d happily spend a month apologizing for breaking into whatever Cai was doing. Static squealed on the overband like nails on a chalkboard, giving Nick an instant headache for his pains but also the knowledge that something was very wrong.
He quickly checked the ship, much as Cai often did, skipping from sensor to sensor, though he was limited to the security cameras. He still saw more than enough. The pirates were being let out of the brig, the guards he’d set on them were dead and Mouse was handing weapons to the pirates as they filed out of the cells. Nick instantly accepted the betrayal and activated the silent alarms shipwide, but he felt a cold grue creeping up his spine. Mouse had been sleeping in Cai’s spare room. What had he done to the Gator?
First, Nick alerted the crew. He used the shipnet to wake each crewman, presented the images of the pirates breaking out of the brig and the commands, “Set condition red, general quarters. All hands to battle stations, internal disaster protocol. Maintain physical silence as much as possible.”
Next, he closed all the hatches and changed the lock codes. The internal disaster protocol would tell the crew what the new code was or, rather, how to calculate the new code. Laughing Owl was highly compartmentalized, standard for a warship. There were hardened, sealed hatches every ten feet in the corridors, and the door to each and every room was also a sealed, space-grade hatch. Every room also had a wall panel behind which was stored two standard adjustable-size pressurized suits and enough tanked oxygen to last two people three hours.
The last member of the bridge crew slipped in, two minutes after Nick had called the alarm. He was very pleased with the fast response. The pirates still weren’t aware that they’d been found out, for they remained in the brig, talking and planning, a schematic of the Laughing Owl spread before them. Nick listened in—they planned to storm the bridge. Nick triggered the bridge security doors—an additional six inches of solid steel that slammed down behind the sealed pressure hatch. Nobody would be getting in or out for a while.
“What about the Gator?” asked a pirate, and Nick’s attention immediately switched back to the security camera he was using to eavesdrop.
“He’s been dealt with. Locked in a sim loop; he’ll keep until the ship is ours,” Mouse said cockily.
“Oh, really?” Nick growled. He used the shipnet now like a weapon, concentrating everything he had on one single thrust message: “Cai! Wake up!” He screamed this with his heart and soul as well as with his consciousness over the net and prayed it would work, would be enough to break through to the Gator.
The pirates had just discovered that the hatch was locked. Nick smiled as Mouse immediately accessed the shipnet to query the system. Nick sent back false data, indicating the doors had closed automatically in response to a tripped sensor at the airlock which seemed to think that the docking tube to the other ship was improperly sealed and was venting to space. A common enough malfunction, but Mouse verified that the airlock was intact before squelching the alarm associated with the automatic closures. Mouse seemed to believe that nobody important had been alerted to the pirate breakout, and Nick would do his best to keep it that way until it was too late for the pirates to change their plans.
* * * *
“Cai! Wake up!”
Cai startled, recognizing Nick’s voice. Nick wasn’t there, and he wondered why. He looked over his shoulder. It wasn’t Nick using him, it was Captain Dread. He’d agreed to it in exchange for food, he remembered. That’s what his life was now, an exchange of sexual service for his body’s basic needs of Synde and food. He hated it, but he wanted to live. He wanted to return to Nick. He tried to recall what had happened to Nick when the pirates had taken Laughing Owl, but all he drew was a blank. There was no memory there and that bothered Cai.
One of the things that made him an exceptional Astrogator was his perfect recall. Cai just didn’t forget things. Ever. I have no memory of being taken, Cai thought. I have no memory of what happened to Nick. He wasn’t killed, he wasn’t enslaved, he’s not here, and yet, I heard him. This is a sim.
Logic led him there. He glanced at Dread again and tried to pull away. He couldn’t. He couldn’t pull away because the poor sop whose body had been where he was when this sim was recorded hadn’t pulled away. That was the downfall of sims of this type—they didn’t allow for freedom of movement. But it was full sensation—Cai could feel every millimeter of Dread’s cock pounding his aching ass. He could feel the itchy patches of drying semen on his skin, left there by other crewmembers. He could still taste the musky maleness of the last pirate to grab his head and fuck his mouth. He moaned as a hand played with his erection.
The sensations were so distracting, so pleasant, that his sexual need was at a fever pitch. He could feel his internal tension; he needed the relief of orgasm. Once Dread had finished him, then he’d break out of the sim. He wanted to throw himself into it, to speed Dread to his conclusion, but he couldn’t do that either. He resolved to program a better sim while he was forced to the pace dictated by the sim. Eventually, Dread came, and with that, Cai found the relief he sought.
Cai turned his attention inward, focusing on separating what signals were internal, from his own self and what signals were external, being imposed from without. The sim feed was being projected directly into his mind via the pathway of his data port. The data port was, technically, redundant. His body was riddled with neurologic circuitry a hundred times more advanced than the quaint data port could boast, but it did make interfacing with some older systems easier. Cai could function as an Astrogator without the data port, but he was loathe to harm himself if he didn’t have to. He reached out and attempted to touch Tri-ess.
He was surprised at how ridiculously easy it was. His attacker had made no effort to prevent him from using his adjuncts. Was it possible that he didn’t know of them? Cai focused now on what Tri-ess saw and heard, and although he kept his eyes open as he traversed his chambers, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. He did check the spare room; Mouse was gone. Cai didn’t want to believe that Mouse had betrayed him, but what other logical explanation could there be? He must have used psi to fool my probe. I didn’t lean on him very hard because I thought him a victim.
Tri-ess glided into Cai’s bedroom, and Cai experienced the usual momentary disorientation of viewing himself through other eyes, though in a real sense, Tri-ess was himself. Ignoring the mess he’d made on the sheets, Cai immediately identified the problem, as he thought, a device had been affixed to his data port. He reached down with Tri-ess’
hand and tried to pull it off. It remained firmly clamped to the data port, though a light on the side of it flashed red.
Fine, it’s locked, Cai realized grimly. The device was trying to force him back into a sim of sucking a pirate’s thick, long, uncut cock, and fighting the pull of the sensory immersion was both difficult and painful. Cai tried pressing various buttons on the device, but all he succeeded in doing was giving himself pain. In the sim, the cock was pounding down his throat while he gasped for breath on the back thrusts, a cruel hand gripping the back of his head, the fingers clawing into his scalp in synch with his efforts at removing the device.
Furious now, Cai desisted from his attempts and focused his telekinetic ability on the data port itself, he burned the circuits and destroyed the contacts that let the device feed data into him. He felt the data port die, and with it, the sim, which cut off so abruptly Cai was left bewildered at the sudden absence. He sat up and pulled the device off. It was as dead as his data port, but he’d keep it for evidence. The device was hardly even a consideration at the moment, for now that he was free, he was well aware of the attack in progress.
Chapter Five
“Mouse, why isn’t the door opening?” Dread’s voice was deceptively calm. Being Dread’s son wouldn’t necessarily protect Mouse from the man’s temper, as he knew all too well.
“Let me try,” he replied and slipped up to the door, probing it via his connection to the shipnet. Somehow, the shipnet was still responsive to them. During their initial attack, their battle computer had taken the ship’s internal network with surprising ease. Mouse had found that odd, and it was even stranger that the Gator hadn’t reclaimed control of his network after taking them down. It certainly didn’t mesh with what he’d observed of Cai, who was as dedicated and perfectionist a Gator as he’d ever heard tell of.