by Cathryn Cade
But that early failure also taught Joran a valuable lesson—always make sure he was armored in more than righteous anger. This meant never going in to a fight without backup. And good backup depended on rewarding those who stood at his back.
Which meant he always made sure he profited from an operation in some way—credit, goods or favors. As he’d told Qala, they couldn’t save everyone. He only took ops he could win and profit from.
This caper, he was going to purely enjoy—a righteous theft, if there was such a thing. He savored the irony.
“We’re in place, boss,” Var’s deep voice said in his ear.
“Good,” Joran muttered. “Sit tight. We have lots of transactions to get through before we move.”
He pulled a trio of spybots from an inner pocket of his cloak, and keyed them to the slaver. Then he set them loose. They zipped off above the crowd, dancing through the dust and smoky haze.
He leaned against a rock pillar, watching for Qala. He couldn’t spot her even in the readouts from the spybots, which pleased him. If he couldn’t see her, likely no one else would. Though if one of those Mau guards moved toward the gold cruiser, Joran would drop the behemoth in his lumbering tracks and damn the consequences.
The two Tygeans were purchased and rode a hovie-pad down to their new master, a burly human with the battered face of a fighter under his silver hair, and the leathers and jewelry of a well-to-do brigand. The Tygers smiled saucily as they each took one of his arms and he looked pleased as hells with himself.
Joran shook his head. “Takes all kinds to make a galaxy. That old pirate will be lucky if those two don’t scratch his balls right off.”
“If he doesn’t treat them well, he’ll deserve it,” Riley grumbled. “I have never seen Tygeans on an auction block before. I wonder how they ended up here? They appeared willing.”
“Maybe turned out of a bordello, for scratching up the clients.”
Riley laughed, a grate of sound, and Joran allowed himself a small grin. Tygers were feisty as hell. During their mating moons both sexes shifted into half-cat and became flat dangerous to anyone but another Tygean. Some loved that kind of thing.
Himself, he preferred to have women who were closer to human all the time. Not to mention free to leave when he tired of them, which did not usually take long. He loved pussy, he loved the feel of a female in his arms, and the sound of a soft voice. He also didn’t mind a good row now and then, but he had no patience for pouting, clinging or demands for more time, bigger gifts or especially the ultimate—marriage.
He was Il Zhazid, lord of the plains, wandering wild and free with his band of pirates and their hangers-on, blowing like the storms over the wild lands, if he wanted to believe his own myth. He was not a man to be tied down to one location or one female, or any one particular cause. And if he occasionally suffered from boredom, capers such as this effectively jerked him out of his ennui, for a while at least.
“You about done, Q?” he asked, gaze on the gold cruiser. He thought he saw a shape slip past the ship’s rear vents, but wasn’t sure.
“Am now,” she breathed.
“Good. Get your ass away from there.” He settled back against the column and waited as more unfortunates were auctioned. A trio of Pangaeans went next, their pale green skin sickly with fear. Meek and biddable, with an affinity for all things veg, they were probably destined to be home, garden or food service workers. He hoped.
Qala appeared at his side as stealthily as she’d left. “Time to move? Only one big group left. We can get them out with us.”
“Mako’s not far away with the transport,” Var rumbled in his ear. “Can be out of here before anyone knows which way they went.”
“The next bunch are meant for sex slaves,” Ilya put in, her voice tight with disgust. “They’re nearly nude, and painted up like whores.”
Joran sighed. “All right, all right. But you three stop ganging up on me.”
“Thanks,” Qala breathed.
There was a small disturbance behind the auction stage. A scuffle.
“That’s not us,” Riley commented. “They have a feisty one back there. I hope she doesn’t get herself hurt.”
“So speaks the medic,” Joran said.
The small hoverflat appeared again, over the back of the stage. Joran’s chest seized, as if he’d been punched with a huge, icy fist.
“Yeah, I hope so too,” he added. Because this slave was not only young and lovely, she was human, and clearly out of her mind with fear.
“Quark,” Qala hissed. “Poor kid. She’s terrified.”
She turned to Joran. “Buy her before someone else does. Sister Lettie can take her back to Frontiera City.”
He shook his head. “Hold on, not yet. Var, are you and Ilya in place?”
“Yeah,” Var rumbled. “And every eye is on the stage. This is as good as it’s gonna get.”
“Then go,” Joran ordered. Ilya didn’t have to touch the com being used to receive credit from the buyers’ accounts; she just had to be in range with the tech that only she understood. This meant they needed other things for the guards to focus on besides a small woman loitering nearby while the slavers’ techs totted up their profits.
Joran leaned against his pillar, stance relaxed as if he were immune to the surge of dangerous tension that had seized the crowd. They watched avidly as the next sale was wrestled off of the flat and shoved to the middle of the stage, her Mau captor close behind her.
Ilya had been right—the slavers were definitely peddling flesh, and they’d saved the best for last. Against the Mau’s bulk, the girl was all soft curves and pale skin, her head reaching only to his middle.
The slavers had dressed her in someone’s idea of a dancing girl’s costume—a tiny, shimmering top that barely contained her full breasts and a loincloth with beads and feathers that framed her slanting hips and bared her little waist and the curve of her belly.
However, they hadn’t bothered to clean her up. In her giant holovid image, her long hair hung in coils, and although her face had been made up, her limbs were smudged with grime, or bruises. Probably both.
Her eyes, a soft blue like the evening sky over Frontiera, were dilated with pure terror, her face pale as bone under the glitter of makeup, her soft, full lips trembling. She looked down at the crowd as if facing a pit of ravenous serpents.
Which in a way, she was, because in this crowd, her obvious innocence and fear would only attract the kind of purchaser who enjoyed inciting fear and pain as well. And every male in the place and probably many a female were ogling her, wanting her lush mouth and what her little thong covered.
“Skrog shit,” Joran muttered. It didn’t matter if they put a tracker on this one, with the lust pervading the very air, the poor kid wouldn’t even be in the sky before her triumphant captor raped her.
Chapter 3
Her memory began on a hard cot in the shadowed belly of a transport. Weeping and moaning rose over the deep thrum of an air system, as around her others also returned to consciousness. The air was hot and fetid with vomit and other things she shrank from naming.
The first face she looked into had been pale Pangaean green, eyes glazed with terror and drugs, cornsilk hair flipping erratically as he struggled to lift his head. A sign of agitation for his race—she knew that.
Just as she knew that the eerie keening from behind her meant a Barillian was with them in the huge, barracks-like hold. And that the vibration under her cot meant that they were in flight.
“Where are we?” the Pangaean pleaded, grasping her arm with his cold, damp hand. “What’s happened?”
She forced herself up onto her elbow, swaying as everything dipped and swung around her, swallowing hard against the nausea that rose as she moved. “I ... don’t know,” she mumbled, her tongue thick and clumsy as if it didn’t belong in her mouth.
He moaned and clutched her arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. “Oh, Mother Goddess. I ... I think we’ve been k
idnapped.”
At this, she let herself fall back to the hard cot, pressing her free hand to her mouth to hold back the fluid trying to force its way up her throat. She swallowed again. She just needed to close her eyes and lie still. That always worked when traveling.
The Pangaean peered into her face. “Do you...do you know me? Do you know who I am?”
She shook her head.
“Well, who are you?” he asked.
She opened her mouth and then stopped, bewildered.
“I ... I d’know tha’ either,” she managed.
Then the dizziness swept her under and she passed out again.
***
The next time she woke, she was no longer moving. The air was now hot, nearly unbearably so. She held still, sweat trickling down her chest, her gaze darting through the tangled hair lying over her face. When she moved her arm, something sharp bit into the tender flesh of her breast and her inner thigh. She peered down at herself and gasped.
She wore nothing but a tiny, jeweled bra on her top half. Reaching down, her questing fingers met bare skin, clear to the swell of her hip, where a strip of jeweled cord bisected the bare flesh. When she struggled to sit up, soft fibers tickled her bare thighs—feathers.
Why was she wearing this horrid excuse for a costume? It hid hardly anything, instead emphasizing her breasts and hips, while revealing nearly all of her skin. She was certain it was not what she would ever, ever choose for herself, nor something she’d be allowed to wear even if she did choose it.
Then her head spun, and she pressed her hands to it, moaning as pain lanced beneath her temples.
“C’maah! Sabaat hamano-graah!” a voice roared.
A huge, rough paw grasped her arm and yanked her from the surface where she’d lain. With a stifled shriek, she fell to the dirty carpet on her hands and knees. It hurt, but not as much as the blow that fell on her back—the strike of a hard staff. Pain reverberated through her body.
“C’maah!” the deep voice roared again.
What was she supposed to do? She peered around her. She was in a small room crammed with clothing and accessories of all kinds, as if a shipment of gaudy fashion accessories had exploded.
On one side was the table she’d been dragged from, on the other, the huge feet and thick legs of the being who had felled her, a gleaming truncheon dangling beside them.
She whimpered in terror, her limbs shaking, guts full of ice. Nearly naked, in the power of a terrifying being—her world had spun out of control.
“Stop it,” a feminine voice snapped. “She can’t understand you. They shut off her comlink. I gotta turn it back on—the translator at least.”
She turned eagerly. Another female would help her. But the face she peered into was pretty, hard and utterly bored. The Serpentian female grabbed her chin, jerked her head to one side, and yanked on something that was attached to her ear. It hurt, and she cried out.
“I can’t get it,” the woman said, ignoring her.
“Let me,” said a new voice. A man knelt beside her on the floor. Hope fluttered. She’d seen him before, moving silently through the cages at night, when it was quiet, and the only sound was the weeping and animal-like moans of the captives.
He was dressed as scantily as she, a piece of yellow silk wound about his loins and a heavy gold collar with a signal blinking in one of the red jewels inset in the metal. But his dark eyes seemed to hold a guarded compassion.
“Shhh,” he soothed, his hand gentle on her jaw. “Let me fix your comlink.”
“Don’t turn the com on,” the Serpentian warned, scowling from behind him. “Just the translator.”
His gaze flickered. “I won’t.”
‘Translator on,’ a soft voice said in her ear.
“H-help me,” she pleaded, lifting one hand to touch his arm. “I don’t understand. What’s happening? Why am I here?”
The Serpentian smirked at her over his shoulder. The smile didn’t reach her dead eyes. “You don’t need to understand, immi. Just smile pretty for the buyers. Then someone will help you understand what they want you to do.”
The dark-eyed man looked into her eyes, and for a moment, the pressure of his hand on her jaw increased, a silent reassurance. “Just do what they tell you, and stay strong.”
Stay strong? When her world was cold and heat, pain and hunger and thirst so intense she was nearly mad with it? She gaped at him. “But, I…”
“You’ll be all right,” he whispered. “Soon. I promise.”
The Serpentian beckoned impatiently. “She’s ready. Bring me the next one.”
The huge hands grabbed her again, set her on her bare feet, and dragged her from the room, away from the only kindness she’d known in this nightmarish present, and toward the terror of further unknown.
“Shalaah! Sabaat hamano craadat.”
‘Hurry it up,’ the voice translated pleasantly in her ear. ‘Time for you to be sold.’
She screamed then, and tried to set her feet and resist as she was hauled across the stretch of hot sand, passing other beings milling about.
But no one listened. Her captor twisted her arm until the pain sent her to her knees. Then he shoved her into an enclosure with other beings in equally scanty dress, and a power grid sprang up around them, hissing and crackling as if hungry for flesh to singe.
She looked back for her new ally, but he was gone, as if he’d never been there at all.
Now she was balanced on a tiny platform, high above a maw of hungry faces, like predators waiting for her to fall into their grasps, so they could tear her apart.
Alone, ashamed and powerless, she was no longer a person, but a thing.
***
Beside Joran, Qala moved restively, as did the crowd around them. The tension continued to mount, thick and dark.
“Boss, Qala?” Var murmured in his ear, a warning note in his deep voice. “Hold steady. Ilya’s having trouble getting in, not ready to stream.”
“What’s the holdup?”
“They’ve got layers of security on their accounts that have to be worked through with precision, is what,” Ilya snarled. “I have to finesse this, not blast through it. Now if you’d all get busy and buy me some time—”
“Keep going,” Joran soothed, while tension tightened his shoulders and sweat prickled under his arms despite the cooling suit. “I’ll think of something.”
“Do it fast,” Var warned. “Or I’m pulling Ilya out of here.”
“No, you’re not,” she said. “Just shut up and let me work.”
“You need us to do something, boss?” Riley rasped. “Start a fight?”
“No.” Joran straightened as an idea clicked solidly into place like the tumblers on a lock. “Better idea. I’ll join the bidding on this girl.”
“I’m right below the stage,” Riley pointed out. “And as a medic, I can tell you that’s no girl. She’s a woman grown, with all the equipment.”
“Right. Well, that will liven things up in my tont,” Joran quipped. Hells, he hated waiting for things to happen anyway. This way he got to make it happen, even though it was going to cost him part of their profits.
“She won’t be in your tont,” Qala said instantly. “She’ll be away to F City, with Mako.”
“Look at this little beauty,” the Vulpean gloated, his hovie gliding around the girl and her captor. “A human, lovely and ... untouched.”
“Dammit,” Joran said. “That’s just gonna make her more expensive.”
He didn’t know where the charm lay in being the first to get into virgin pussy, but many valued it. Himself, he preferred a female who knew what she wanted, how to ask for it, and how to give pleasure back, in any number of inventive ways.
Not that he wanted this female anyway. She was just a distraction—a curvaceous, nearly naked distraction in a tiny jeweled excuse for a costume.
Qala snorted. “Like you’re not going to get every cred back.”
Joran smirked. “True.” His cred
it would just take a little trip and loop right back in his accounts. Well then, this was going to be good fun. He got to play hero—something that rarely happened in his line of work—and shove his hands in the slaver’s capacious pockets. Although he’d rather shove a boot in his smug ass.
The bidding began, fast and furious. Evidently plenty of the buyers had credit left.
“Need more time,” Var warned again. “Whatever you’re gonna do, get on it.”
“Keep going. I’m on it.” Ignoring Qala’s restless stirring by his side, Joran waited until the bidders narrowed to two, a Serpentian flashing gems on his long, narrow hands and a human, his face hidden in a floppy hat and upturned collar, his movements sharp and frantic.
“Riley. Can you get a image on the one in the hat?”
“I’ll try,” Riley replied. “Got a direct line of sight here.”
The bidding went on.
“Quark, I could buy a new cruiser for that,” Qala muttered.
“He’s human,” Riley said. “That’s all I can tell you. Not a known criminal, and not from Frontiera.”
Finally the Serpentian shook his head, leveling a vengeful glare on the other man.
“Him I found in the database,” Wega said. “Runs a brothel on Serpentia. Caters to creepers.”
Qala made a sound of disgust.
“Going once,” the Vulpean exulted. “But wait! Will no one else give a little more for this lovely, innocent, sheltered young morsel?”
“Boss,” Var warned. “Do something! Got guards eyeballing us, and my trigger finger is itching.”
Joran stepped forward. “Here!”
His voice rang out deep and strong over the babble of voices and alien tongues. He raised his arm, holovid signal shooting up from the device in his hand. “I’ll raise two hundred credits.”