 
# Slave Girls Of Outer Space Part One:  
The Anthrax Codex

## Legal Stuff

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Except for the FTL universe where the speed of light is 100 kph. That is totally real.

## Acknowledgments

Some good advice was given to me for this edition of this book by Cp, ImaginaryEvents and the Mysterious Solons of Reddit's ScienceFiction subreddit. Thanks to you all!

Copyright 2016 By Pat Powers

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Author, except where permitted by law.

## Smashwords License

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

# Chapter 1 -- Cellmates

The soft thrumming of the ship's engines penetrated even the thick steel walls of the cell in which the two naked women sat, chained by the wrists to a hasp set in the floor of the cell. The cell itself was set in the floor of the ship, the only illumination a grill set in the ceiling that let in the light from the corridor above it. Unfortunately for the two women, the grill allowed a trickle of dirty condensed water that flowed down the center of the corridor to pour into the cell, where it sprayed over the hasp to which they were chained. Fortunately, they each had about a meter and a half of chain so they could stay out of the spray.

The soft, luscious body of the pneumatic blond who lounged as if the floor were strewn with satin pillows was in stark contrast to the harsh cell. Even in her rough surroundings, she effortlessly projected beauty and sensuality. Her striking green eyes glanced about idly, assessing her surroundings. Her body bore no decorations other than a cursive letter "k" tattooed on her hip and a heavy metal slave collar.

Her cellmate was very different. She was a beauty as well, also wearing a slave collar, with long, lustrous black hair, large breasts and wide hips, but her body was tanned and well muscled, with some impressive, barbaric looking tattoos on her arms and hip. Her muscles were well displayed, for she had seized the chain that bound her to the hasp and was pulling furiously at it.

"Hi, I'm Dita," said the blond. "What's your name?" She was a people person at heart, and her cellmate was the only person she had to work with at the moment, though she had noticed one of the guards who walked above them at regular intervals glancing down through the gate with a gleam in his eye.

"I am Maria," said the black-haired woman, still working the chain relentlessly.

"How did you wind up down here?" Dita asked, vaguely fascinated in an abstract sense with the way all the muscles in Maria's body from her arms to her lower abdomen flexed and strained with effort.

"I was kidnapped by raiders who sold me to the scum here in this ship," said Maria. "I have no idea who they are, I've spent all my time in cells and no one talks to me."

"Same here -- but I'll talk to you," Dita volunteered. "I was sold to these scum... they're merchants from the Chizoom Empire... after my lover got caught in some political dirty dealings back on Charom, my home planet. We're nominally part of the Larentia Protectorate, but that tends to change from year to year, what with all the wars. I wound up locked in a cell, and they sold me to the Chizoom to disappear me."

"Why didn't they just kill you?" Maria asked casually, as if killing someone was the rational solution to many problems.

"No money in it," said Dita. "Selling me to offplanet slavers, they get me out of their hair nearly as effectively as killing me, perhaps more so as there's no corpse to dispose of, and they make money on the deal."

"Well at least you live to take your vengeance another day," grunted Maria as she tugged at the chains.

"You really think you can break that chain?" Dita asked, noting how thick it was.

"Of course not," responded Maria, "It could hold a Braga beast. The hasp is a different story. It is corroded by the water than has fallen on it... for quite some time, by the looks of it. It will break soon."

Dita peered hard at the hasp and saw that it was deforming as Maria said, the round hasp bulging toward Maria near the base, the metal even cracking a bit... it WAS very corroded. It may have been trickled on for a century. Some of these merchant vessels had been refitted and recommissioned so many times that they dated back to the Manuchid Empire, which centuries ago had ruled most of the space now occupied by a ragtag collection of penny-ante space empires collectively known as the Beyond.

"I have a plan to get us out of here if we can get free of that hasp," said Dita. "But it will involve one of the guards coming down here and having sex with me and then leaving."

"You are going to let him have sex with you?" Maria asked.

"No, I'll be ENCOURAGING him to come down here and have sex with me," said Dita.

"Why bother to have sex with him," asked Maria. "Just lure him down here and I will kill him."

"Oh, you can just kill a man all naked and unarmed as you are?" Dita asked.

"Of course!" Maria replied. "I am the First Sword of the Queen's guard of the Queendom of Rynia, and I have fought MANY times without weapons in the Polygons of Doom, wearing nothing by my chainmail bikini, and I was victorious MANY times against female warriors, not puny men."

"The guard will be wearing power armor and probably stun gloves," said Dita, "and you'll be chained to the floor. You're good I'm sure, but you're not THAT good. I mean, how did you do against those raiders who came to your village again?"

"It was not a village, it was the Queen's castle," said Maria. "Granted, it was made of wood and only one story tall, but it was very large and beautifully decorated. And yes... I was defeated by their strange weapons, but only because they would not engage me in a fair fight."

"Slaver raiders are typically not into fair fights," Dita observed dryly, "and neither are the Chizoom merchants who bought us."

"Do you have any idea why the Cheeze-Oom bought us?" Maria asked.

"Well, I'm a whore and a former love slave... three guesses," said Dita. "As for you... have you ever encountered raiders like this before?"

"Never!" said Maria. "They came from the sky, someone said, but no one ever comes from the sky!"

"Well, if your people have never been contacted before by any more advanced civilizations," said Dita. "that makes you the prize in this cell. They probably plan to sell you to some university's anthropology department – they always pay top dollar for slaves from previously uncontacted civilizations."

"More advanced, hah!" said Maria. "They let their men run wild and they treat proud warriors like beasts."

"Honey, you said you were the Number One badass in the Queendom you lived in, and you got creamed by a grunt in combat armor, and now you're chained naked in a cell with a whore," said Dita. "That's a pretty good sign you've been in contact with a more advanced civilization."

"Perhaps your plan has some merits, so long as it is you who must have sex with the guard,' said Maria. "You are used to it, I suppose. I would have to kill him, should he attempt it."

"I'll try to keep him occupied," Dita said dryly.

# Chapter 2 -- Space Babe Breakout

"Here he comes, I can hear him," Maria whispered.

Dita nodded and stood up, using the chains on her wrists to hoist herself upright. She stood directly in the center of the cell and took as deep a breath as she could, then exhaled as powerfully as she could, blowing her breath upward toward the grate that was almost two meters over her head. She did it twice more, then sat back down, a bit lightheaded.

She had done her best to launch her pheromones up out of the grate. Her pheromones were bio-engineered to drive men mad with desire, or at least annoy them seriously with desire, by the slavers who had raised her. The pheromones had to clear the grate, catch on some air currents, and get up to the guard's nose, which was asking a lot. But then, pheromones registered on a man's nasal system in the parts per billion. He would not consciously smell them, but he would be affected by them. And that was all Dita needed.

Dita hastily arranged herself as seductively as possible on the floor without being too obvious about it. She stuck her butt out and arched her back in a way that she would never have assumed to rest, but which didn't look unnatural. She needed the man's attention and interest, but she couldn't afford to arouse his suspicion. She hoped to arouse other parts of him.

She saw the man's shadow pass over them and cried out, "Hello, Master!" in warm tones.

The man kept walking. Dita was not all that perturbed. It would take some time for the pheromones to take effect, if they had reached him.

Dita listened carefully as the sound of the man's footsteps receded into the distance. They paused. Then the footsteps began coming closer again. Dita smiled. Hooked him.

The guard's shadow dimmed the light in their tiny cell once more.

"Hello, Master, nice to see you again," Dita said, her words honeyed and inviting as she gazed up at the figure above the grate.

"Nice to see you too, girl," said the guard. A pneumatic hum and the grate opened.

Dita touched a locket of her hair and sub-vocalized a command. The locket disappeared and spread over her fingers in a thin film. It was memory metal, able to assume a variety of shapes on command. It could also flow over any surface, or to copy any shape it came in contact with, and to disguise itself as various non-metallic substances when not in use... such as a locket of hair. It was expensive stuff, but worth it to a whore. Some clients were sometimes prone to get carried away if they were, say, doing some choking play while she was bound. It was very handy for a girl to have a weapon or a lockpick that could materialize out of nowhere, at such times. Dita had never had to use it She was very careful about clients, but better safe than sorry.

The guard dropped down into their cell easily, his power armor absorbing most of the force of his landing. He looked to be a bog-standard Chizoom, shorter than average but well muscled and handsome with the characteristic aquiline nose and strong chin of Chizoom men.

"You two are looking fine," he said with grin, but his eyes were mostly on Dita as he spoke. Dita could see Maria behind him, her muscles bunching as she instinctively prepared to jump the fellow. That would ruin everything.

"You're looking pretty good yourself, Master, " Dita said, giving him her best come-hither look. He was well within range of all her pheromones now. "But I wonder if you could secure my cellmate a little better. She's ah, the jealous type."

One corner of the guard's mouth curled up.

"So you two have been having your special time down here, eh?" he asked.

"Well, she's a lusty Amazon warrior and I'm a love slave," said Dita, feeding into his fantasies. "How could we not, being all alone down here?"

"I am NOT attracted to women!" Maria growled, unable to contain herself.

Dita smiled and winked at the guard. "Not publicly," she said in a knowing drawl.

The guard glanced back at Maria and saw her enraged expression.

"She does seem a little upset," said the guard.

"I am not upset!" Maria growled, her hands twitching with suppressed desire to throttle someone, possibly the guard, possibly Dita.

The guard pulled a glob of plastic from a pocket in his power armor and then backed Maria up against the wall, his power armor easily overcoming her merely human speed and strength. He touched the plastic to the wall on one side of Maria and then ran it over her stomach. It trailed a thick bead of plastic as it did so. He touched the glob to the other end of the wall and a large bead broke off. A similar bead was on the wall where he'd started the plastic. The plastic gave and stretched slightly as Maria writhed, but in a moment it hardened and became as firm as the uncorroded part of the iron chain that held Maria to the hasp, and just like that Maria was firmly attached to the wall and chained at the wrists, helpless.

Then the guard palmed the rest of the plastic and pressed his hand over Maria's lips, gagging her. When he pulled his hands away, the plastic remained in place. The guard checked carefully to make sure that none of it was in her nostrils. In a second the plastic hardened, and Maria found herself thoroughly gagged.

She glared at the guard over the gag, to let him know she was not intimidated by the fact that she was so totally helpless that the only thing she could do to resist him was kick at his legs, which was rendered useless by his power armor.

"That ought to keep you out of trouble, slave," he said with a grin and gave one of her breasts a casual slap, then turned his attention back to Dita, who was on her knees, looking very slavish indeed.

"Hello, I'm Sven," said the guard as he stripped off his power armor.

"Greetings, Master Sven," said Dita. "I am called Dita."

"Dita, nice name," Sven said, reaching forward and stroking her hair. "Serve me like a love slave, girl," he ordered.

Dita leaned forward and complied, looking up worshipfully at the guard as she did so. Maria watched agog, her eyes wide over the gag, as Dita and Sven proceeded to indulge in an orgy of sexual activity far beyond anything she had ever experienced in her private harem back in the Queendom of Rynia. They did the Vertical Solar Flare, the Nebular Whirl and the Event Horizontal Bop, acts that could only be accomplished by the extremely experienced and the very bendy. Being chained at the wrists to a hasp in the floor seemed to pose very little problem to Dita as she writhed in sensuous abandon. In fact, she incorporated being chained into her sexual activities.

Maria tried not to watch, but she could not stop. And the hell of it was, some part of her really, really wished it were she writhing helplessly in the muscular guard's embrace, which only added to Maria's outrage. How dare they make her feel horny and envious of a love slave at work!

As Dita writhed, it was a simple thing for her to momentarily place her fingers on the metal keychain that dangled from Sven's belt and jangled merrily in time to his thrusts. She sub-vocalized "Copy" as she did so. A brief warm glow in her fingertips told her when the copying was finished, but Dita wasn't. It had been a long time, by her standards. Two weeks, almost.

Now Dita could forget about the copying and think only of the sex. She thought about it for a long time, and did many things about it, for Sven had a SexMaster implant that gave him full control over his cock, and it took him FOREVER to cum... and she loved every moment of that forever.

Afterward, Dita said, "Thank you, Master, you were wonderful," and kissed Sven's booted foot reverently as he stood over here, much to Maria's disgust. "Could you remove the gag from my friend? Talking is about all we have to do down here when she is not using me."

"Sure," said Sven, happy to oblige the little slave who had pleasured him so well and truckled to his ego so skilfully. The guard took out a small device and pressed it to the plastic covering Maria's mouth and it fell off into his palm. He did the same with the plastic holding Maria to the wall, then rolled both the suddenly-pliable pieces of plastic into a cylinder and put it back in his armor's pocket.

"Play your cards right, and you might get some cock next time, barbarian," said Sven.

Maria just glared at him, reluctant to speak words of defiance lest she find herself gagged again.

"She's a feisty one," said Sven, "some of the guys like that kind of action, though."

Sven then leaped up to the grate over their heads, grabbed it with one hand, and pulled the keychain off his belt with the other hand, pressing one of the keys against the grate. It opened wide and he allowed the grate to pull him up as it opened, then swung out onto the flooring and pressed the key against the grate again, so that it shut. It would all have been very athletic if it weren't for the fact that Sven wore a power suit.

"I'll tell the boys what a fine little woman you are," Sven called down as he left.

"Thank you, Master!" Dita called in response.

"You are the most SHAMELESS slut I have EVER seen in my life, even for a SLAVE!" Maria exclaimed, in tones that were as much admiring as they were condemnatory. Maria wasn't sure how she felt about Dita, or about watching Dita get fucked. She disapproved of how much Dita had clearly enjoyed it, and envied her, too.

"Well, of course I'm shameless, love slaves are not taught shame," Dita said mildly. She was still basking in her post-coital glow. "Love slavery, at least as it was practiced in the Northigen Republic where I grew up, was very not horrible. I can still remember the day my virginity was sold. I was just 18 years old, and had been trained in all the arts of love, but never allowed to serve a man until that day. My sisters spent hours preparing me, with perfumes and soft silks and by arousing me just to the point of cumming, but then pulling back. When my customer took my virginity, I was so aroused all it took was a touch. But of course, he did much more than touch me, and there was just the tiniest bit of pain but oh, so much pleasure. All of my sisters were in the bed with us, around us, telling me I was beautiful and glorious and sexy and praising the man as well, and afterward they stroked me and petted me and kissed me. The man said I had made him glad he was alive, to be able to make love to such a wonderful woman. And I was so happy I lay there in his and their arms and cried for sheer joy. Oh, yeah, I LOVED being a love slave."

"People WATCHED you when you lost your virginity?" Maria asked.

"Of course," Dita replied as if it were the most natural thing in the world, "and afterward we had a very nice party with treats and presents. It was one of the most wonderful days of my life. Now, let's see if my shamelessness has borne any fruit."

Dita lifted her hand and softly said "Form" to it. And the memory metal immediately peeled off her fingers, an oddly pleasant sensation, and then rolled into a ball and stretched out. In short order it formed itself into a slightly larger than life-size dildo.

Dita face-palmed. "I forgot, it defaults to the most frequently used object if you don't give a specific command," she muttered, ignoring Maria's suspicious look. "Form most recently copied," she murmured again, and the dildo promptly reworked itself into a set of keys just like the ones that had dangled from Sven's waist.

"Now we're talking!" Dita said, waving the keys in victory. She tried the keys on Maria's cuffs, but without success. She had not expected it. Giving a guard the keys to both the cuffs and the grate was a security risk, if a guard got captured by prisoners. So long as either the gate or the chains were in place, the prisoners were still confined where they belonged.

"So you think just a few hard pulls will get that hasp out?" Dita asked as she set the memory metal keys aside.

"Yes," Maria said unequivocally.

Dita stood next to Maria and they both heaved heroically at the hasp. Sven would have enjoyed being there to watch, as they both quickly became sweaty and their breasts heaved and swayed as they pulled on the chains.

It took many more than "a few" hard pulls in Dita's opinion, but she could see the hasp deforming radically, and eventually there was a loud snap and the hasp pulled loose from the floor, leaving a discolored square where it had been. It swung loosely, suspended by their two sets of chains. Dita and Maria were still chained together, but they were no longer chained to their cell.

They stood for a moment and caught their breath.

"OK, remember, once that grate swings open, there's no stopping and there's no turning back," said Dita. "If they catch us in the middle of an escape attempt, we'll wind up with so many chains on us that we can barely twitch."

"You're the one I'm worried about," replied Maria. "You are weak."

"Not as weak as you think, Maria," Dita said. Maria did not know about implants. She had not even wondered why they could understand one another's speech. "Ready?"

"Ready," said Maria.

Dita picked up her keys then they positioned themselves directly under the center of the grate where the locking mechanism was located. Maria knotted her hands together and gave Dita a boost. Dita clambered quickly onto Maria's shoulders, then reached up toward the lock that was now in easy reach of her hands. She quickly touched a key to the lock and nothing happened. She quickly tried a succession of keys and on the fifth try, she heard the pneumatic motor that powered the grate hum to life and felt the grate shift upward.

Dita seized the grate as near to its base as possible, so that she was only pulled a few inches into the air as it rose, so the chain that still attached her to Maria did not drag her down. Dita then hooked a leg over the edge of the flooring and squirmed her way onto the floor above their cell until she was lying stretched full on the floor of the corridor, the trickle of water now flowing ickily against her legs and butt, the chains on her wrists dangling back into the cell, where Maria stood on tiptoe with her arms stretched upward to give Dita as much play as she could.

Dita scooched around behind the grate and carefully placed the keys on the floor where they wouldn't accidentally get knocked back down. Then she pulled the chains on her wrists tight against the hasp that the grate turned on, and got as good a grasp on those chains as she could manage.

"Go!" Dita called, and Maria pulled herself up out of the cell hand over hand using the chains that had formerly confined her to the cell.

Dita bit her lips and groaned as the cuffs dug into her wrists, now holding Maria's full weight as she climbed. Maria tried to minimize the pressure on the chains as she climbed so they would not hurt Dita, but there was not much she could do except move as fast as possible.

In a few seconds she had a hand on the edge of the cell's roof and was able to pull herself to the floor.

Once Maria was up Dita grabbed the keys and slid her chains out from under the hasp on the grate. Maria stood and pulled the chains up to get them clear of the cell, then gave Dita a nod. Dita pressed the key that had opened the grate to the lock-box once again, and the grate began lowering. No use advertising that they had escaped.

Dita took a good look at the hallway they were in. It was labeled A2. It was featureless except for the grates that lay in the floor, a track for the robot that dropped prisoners' food and drink packages in on them, and dim lights that stretched along it.

Both Dita and Maria had been hooded when they were brought on board the ship, so they had no sense of where they were. But Dita knew the general layout out of merchant ships, because they were all the same. The big ion drive that moved the ship through space was always at the rear. Then came the cargo. And at the front, the relatively small area where the crew worked and lived.

Slaves were cargo, but as the cargo hold generally did not include life support, slaves were either kept in huge containers that had built-in life support if there were a lot of slaves being transported, or in small sections at the rear of the working and living areas so that life support could be provided easily and cheaply if there were only a few being transported.

Dita was pretty sure they were the only slaves on the ship. The slave containers were generally very tightly packed to allow transport of as many slaves as possible as cheaply as possible. Their cell had been quite roomy by the standards of slaver containers.

Dita randomly picked a direction and the two of them began jogging briskly along the corridor. Their bodies were rippling displays of feminine jigglery as they ran, large breasts bouncing, rounded buns jiggling and hair flowing. They soon came to a door that yielded to one of the keys on Dita's keyring. They found themselves in another corridor, this one with cables and boxes and tools... and writing on the wall.

One of the bits of writing was a sign saying in faded Chizoom script, "Command center" with an arrow pointing to their right.

"That sign says we go that way," said Dita. Maria nodded.

They began jogging briskly toward the Command Center. They did not intend to wind up there, but the lifeboats would be stored in the living and working area, not the cargo area. (There would be no lifeboats for the slaves... slaves were cargo.)

They soon came to another door and opened it. It led to a stairwell that climbed upward. They dashed up the stairwell, searching for any indications of a lifeboat pod or directions to one, their chains clanking against the metal stairwell.

They came to a door labeled "level 2" with a faded sign beside it that read "Galley/Maintenance."

"This looks promising," said Dita, opening the door. It opened into a passageway lined with doors, filled with the tools needed to run an interstellar spacecraft, such as space mops and space buckets.

All the doors were on the right hand side of the passageway, but about halfway down there was a door on the left. Just a single door. It looked promising. A lifeboat port would be along a wall that had no other exits because it was basically on the outside of the spacecraft.

"This way!" Dita said, running in. Maria came right on her heel. Maria could tell from Dita's tone that she thought she was on to something.

Just as they both began running down the corridor, a man carrying a pail full of food scraps for the recycler popped out of one of the doors, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts that were the unofficial work uniforms on merchant ships throughout the cosmos. He stared transfixed at the sight of two naked women running toward him at top speed, their breasts swaying and jiggling.

Dita pointed back in the direction they had come from as she ran, yelling "Big! Big!" but not saying what, trying to look terrified, which was easy.

The man dropped the pail. He had no idea what was going on but he was pretty sure it was something weird. Naked women running toward him had happened in dreams a time or two, but never in reality.

"Hey, what?" he said, his mind slowly turning to the possibility that these were stowaways or escaped cargo, which had also never happened before in his experience. But he was far too slow. Maria took two long strides and launched a roundhouse kick at the man. He never saw it coming. Maria's foot dropped the man like a sack of space potatoes.

"Keep going!" Dita panted as she saw Maria giving the man a hard right to the solar plexus to keep him down. She could not run ahead of Maria, they were still chained at the wrist, even if the chain was very long.

Maria stood and dashed after Dita, who was making a beeline for the door on the left.

Sure enough, it was a lifeboat port. There was a large red button covered by a clear plastic housing to prevent accidental presses. Dita flipped the housing up and pressed hard on the button. The door irised open, sending out a puff of cool, stale air from the interior.

Dita and Maria dashed into the door. Dita found the matching button on the inside of the door, flipped up its cover, and pressed the button, causing the door to iris shut.

"All right, let's find the controls," Dita said. She hurried into the interior of the lifeboat. It was supposed to have consisted of several long rows of chairs where the crew could sit. Instead she saw several plushly appointed beds with furs strewn about the floor. The emergency lights had been replaced by softly flickering artificial candles.

"What is this?" Maria asked. She was just a barbarian warrior, but she strongly suspected this was not what was meant by the term "lifeboat."

"I don't know," said Dita, "but offhand I'd say someone has converted this lifeboat into a love nest." She was still looking for the controls. At the far end of the room she saw a row of four chairs that had been left intact, with a series of screens facing them.

"This way!" exclaimed Dita, and she and Maria hurried to the chairs and sat down, their wrist chains still connected, coiled sloppily between their seats.

"Launch! Emergency launch!" Dita cried once she sat in the chair.

"Powering for launch," said the lifeboat. It was a high-end expert system that could interpret Chizoom speech even if it was very badly mangled, as by a badly injured survivor of a catastrophe. "Is immediate evacuation necessary?"

"YES!" Dita cried. "Now! Now! Now! We must get out now!"

"Very well," said the lifeboat. "Will others be boarding?"

"No, the others are already out!" exclaimed Dita. She was afraid one of the crew would be punching the big red button that opened the lifeboat door at any second. "We must leave now! Big explosion! Big!"

"Launching now," said the lifeboat. Maria and Dita felt a jar and sudden acceleration pressing them back into their seats as the lifeboat launched.

Lifeboats were programmed to launch whenever ordered to by lifeforms on the boat, even if they did not possess proper ID or know any recognition codes, something that survivors of space disasters often lacked.

"Now get us into N-space, N-space now!" cried Dita.

"Jumping to N-space," replied the lifeboat. N-space was Nuboristian space, named after some ancient race, but every called it Normal space, as opposed to FTL space, where the speed of light was officially clocked at 55 mph. Most authorities agreed that FTL space was an alternate universe deliberately created by some ancient Surround-class or greater artificial intelligence, specifically because its physics made FTL travel easy and cheap.

The ship dropped into N-space and there was a glorious burst of color and light as their eyes adjusted to the new physics around them, bringing a smile to both their lips. It was strange, but shifting from one universe to another always felt pleasant to most people... some were rumored to have become addicted to it.

As soon as they were in N-space, Dita cried, "Are there any Surround or Conglomeration stations, outposts or planets within our range?"

"The closest option would be the Conglomeration trade outpost at Velnar 7," the ship responded. "It is about 30 light years away, well within our range if we re-enter FTL space. But I should inform you there is a Polgorivyi spaceport just 12 light years away."

"We have to go to the Conglomeration post, we were ordered to go there," said Dita, "for classified reasons."

"Very well," said the ship, and they popped back into FTL space.

Meanwhile, on the command deck of the Chizoom merchant ship "Fearless Profit," the main screen in the room lit up.

"Lifeboat is back in FTL space, bearing 138 degrees," called out the nav officer.

"Full speed on that heading, arm mass drivers and quantum torpedoes," Captain Ulnokov ordered. A quick extrapolation by the ship's navigational computer had shown that there were no safe havens anywhere within range of the ship's ion drives in N-space. The lifeboat would have to go back into FTL space to get anywhere that the two damnable slave girls could survive. And so he would have a shot at them, literally. And with the lifeboat and the slave girls blasted to quantum bits, there would be no evidence that the girls had engineered an escape. He could write it all off as a mechanical malfunction of some kind.

It was especially fortuitous that the girls had taken the one lifeboat that the crew had retrofitted into a recreational area, or the Sex Craft as they liked to call it. It would explain the girls' presence on the lifeboat very nicely.

"Good news, the mother ship apparently survived the explosion and is approaching at full speed," said the lifeboat.

"Continue to the Conglomeration outpost, full speed!" Dita cried.

"But the ship will pick us... wait a minute... my sensors are showing that its quantum torpedoes are armed," said the lifeboat.

"Yes, we fear that a rogue AI may be in charge on the mother ship!" Dita improvised. "Get us to the Conglomeration outpost and we'll sort it out from there! Evasive maneuvers if necessary!"

Dita and Maria felt themselves being shoved back into their seats as the lifeboat accelerated. "Proceeding, evasive courses plotting," the lifeboat said. The lifeboat, although not an AI, was a very expert system, and the prospect of dealing with a rogue AI was one of the few things that terrified AIs and very expert systems more than biologicals, perhaps because they understood the dangers that rogue AIs posed better.

Maria looked at Dita. "What can we do?" she asked. She did not care for sitting helplessly.

"Well if you are personally acquainted with any gods, you might ask for their help," Dita said. "The lifeboat has very good evasive skills, but I'll take any help we can get. And they might not get in range before we pop out of FTL space."

"How do you know about the lifeboat's evasive skills?" Maria asked.

"Because they all have them," Dita said. "One of the scenarios under which lifeboats are launched is battle."

Maria nodded.

The next few minutes involved much tense sitting around and waiting. It was the worst for Dita. She knew just how thoroughly the lifeboat would be smashed if it took a direct hit from almost anything the merchantman could launch. She had been prepared to risk her life or at least a good beating for the chance to escape slavery, and when she had been running desperately through the ship she had not been worried. But this sitting here waiting to die or not die was excruciating. At any moment, she expected to hear...

"N-space ejection point in ten seconds," the lifeboat announced.

Dita sank back into her seat with relief.

"Mass driver projectile launched," the lifeboat announced almost as soon as she did so.

Dita closed her eyes, awaiting doom.

Suddenly the whole ship lurched to the left.

"Projectile evaded," said the lifeboat. "Leaving FTL space."

Back on the "Fearless Profit," the chief weapons officer said, "Lifeboat has entered N-space."

"Proceed to the point where the lifeboat entered N-space," Captain Ulnokov said, "all weapons prepare to fire."

"Ten seconds to N-space point," said the navigator. "Captain, their exit space is near a Conglomeration trade outpost."

"Proceed," Ulnokov said. "Weapons officer, before firing, make sure that we do not strike Conglomeration spacecraft or facilities if we overshoot. Navigation, do not allow the lifeboat to get between us and the Conglomeration outpost."

The weapons officer and the navigation officer exchanged a glance. The smart play here was to leave the ship and the slaves alone. If any Conglomeration lives were lost accidentally in the attack, there would be hell to pay, if not from the Conglomeration, then from the Chizoom high command. But they obeyed orders. Maybe Ulnokov knew what he was doing.

"Entering N-space," announced the navigator.

"Send an ultrawave beam to the Conglomeration Outpost," said Dita as soon as they reached N-space.

"I have already established communications," said the lifeboat. "Docking instructions are already in hand."

"I want to talk to the outpost administration in person," Dita said.

"Link established," said the lifeboat.

"Hello?" Dita said. "This is Dita aboard a Chizoom lifeboat."

"This is Froddicher Excelsior, controlling AI for the Velnar 7 trade station," came a voice from the screen which a black expanse of space. "Do you need special facilities?"

"My companion Maria and I are slaves escaping from a Chizoom merchant ship," said Dita. "We request sanctuary."

"Sanctuary provisionally granted," Froddicher responded immediately.

"The mothership has entered N-space," announced the lifeboat. "Its weapons have powered up. Multiple shots fired." The ship began lurching to the left and right... but then suddenly became still.

"What's happening?" Dita asked.

"This is the Surround warship "Grounds for Dis Missile," said a new voice. "Fearless Profit, do you have an explanation for firing your mass drivers in the vicinity of a Conglomeration trade outpost?" Grounds for Dis Missile asked.

"We were not within Conglomeration space when we fired," Captain Ulnokov's voice responded. "We were attempting to ensure the return of stolen property."

Dita sank back into her chair, flooded with relief. She looked over at Maria, whose face was still tense and strained.

"It's OK, we made it," Dita said to her, reaching over and giving her hand a squeeze. Maria nodded, her face looking more relaxed.

"You were within the Conglomeration outpost's sphere of influence," declared Grounds for Dis Missile, "not to mention mine."

"Spheres of influence do not constitute sovereign territory," declared Ulnokov.

"Perhaps not, but discharging weapons inside another entity's sphere of influence is profoundly discouraged," responded Grounds for Dis Missile. "And if you don't disarm your quantum torpedoes and power down your mass drivers right NOW, I will profoundly discourage the hell out of your ship and take it as a war prize."

"Very well," said Ulnokov, "but I still lay claim to our stolen lifeboat and its passengers, who stole it."

"The passengers claim they are slaves," said Froddicher. "The Conglomeration does not recognize the legitimacy of slavery and has provisionally offered them sanctuary."

"They are simple thieves!" Ulnokov declared.

"Very well," said Froddicher, "I'll give you a docking location and we can have a determination of facts. A simple brain scan of the affected parties should suffice. Dita and Maria, do you consent to a brain scan?"

"Yes," Dita said immediately, then nodded encouragingly at Maria.

"Yes," Maria agreed.

"A brain scan would be an unconscionable violation of Chizoom autonomy," said Ulnokov.

"Very well, we shall proceed on the basis of scanning Dita and Maria," Froddicher responded. "Grounds for Dis Missile, would you facilitate?"

"Let me get a little closer," responded Grounds for Dis Missile.

"What did I just agree to?" asked Maria.

"A brain scan is just an artificial intelligence reading your mind," said Dita. "Specifically, in this case, your memories of what happened during the period in question."

"But not... all of my memories," said Maria.

"I'm not sure, but even if it was all of your memories, it's an artificial intelligence," said Dita. "It won't judge you. It's not human."

"What in the twelve hells of the Mythtopoles is an artificial intelligence?" Maria asked.

"I'll explain later," Dita promised.

Suddenly the screen that had shown the blackness of space with stars in the background suddenly filled with planes, angles and lights of all kinds. It was jet black where the lights did not shine on it, and the way the stars were blacked out suggested it had huge areas that were not lit.

"What the hell is that?" Maria asked.

"That is the good ship "Grounds for Dis Missile" said a voice from the air. "Just doing a quick brain scan. Won't hurt a bit... all done," said the voice. "Oh, I see that you have not been able to remove your chains... let me help you with that. You won't be needing them any more, I think."

And just like that, the wristbands they wore opened and their chains fell off.

"That was easy," Maria observed. Everything that had happened mystified her, but Dita's very evident relief and relaxation told her that whatever was happening was probably good.

"Thank you both so much for volunteering to testify via scan," said Froddicher. "We have received the brain scans of Maria and Dita, and based on those findings, we find them to be escaped slaves. In accordance with Conglomeration law, I have offered them provisional citizenship, and based on the information they have provided via scan, I offer them full citizenship."

"I accept," Dita said instantly, giving Maria a look and nodding.

"Do I have to renounce my loyalty to the Queendom?" Maria asked.

"No," responded Froddicher. "Dual citizenship is permitted here. And as a slave you had no citizenship anyway."

"I accept," Maria said.

"Welcome to the Conglomeration, Dita and Maria," said Froddicher.

"I still want my lifeboat back," came Ulnokov's voice.

"Well, about that," said Froddicher, "we have determined that the lifeboat is a tool used in a lawful escape from slavery, and is the property of the citizens who escaped, i.e., Dita and Maria, pursuant to Conglomeration statutes."

"That's a blatantly illegal seizure of Chizoom property!" growled Ulnokov.

"No, it's perfectly legal under Conglomeration law," responded Froddicher. "We offer no support for entities engaging in slavery, or for the possessions used to enslave them."

"Perhaps you should have your embassy compose a stiffly worded dispatch and send it to us," suggested Grounds for Dis Missile.

"Not trafficking in slaves could also serve to prevent such losses," Froddicher suggested.

"Bah!" was Ulnokov's only reply. He was so enraged her forgot to add the obligatory "Humbug!"

Ulnokov signaled to his crew. "FTL space, resume course to Tripych 11," and the Fearless Profit was gone.

"We'll steer your lifeboat to a docking slip and set up a teleport link in your airlock," said Froddicher.

"Thanks!" said Dita. She looked at Maria. "Well, we made it! This is epic! We've escaped from slavery, become Conglomeration citizens, and gotten ourselves a spaceship in the bargain!"

"That's unusual, then?" Maria asked.

"Incredibly," said Dita.

"It has happened a few hundred times in the known history of the Quadrant, which stretches back over 8 million years in some sectors," said Froddicher. "So, yes... unusual would be an accurate term."

Maria looked at the screen. "Where is this Outpost?" she asked.

The screen lit up and they saw a huge moon glittering with lights, with a haze of lights around it, many of them moving.

"This is the Velnar7 Outpost, presently 100,000 klicks away and closing fast, viewed from about 500 klicks away," said the lifeboat. "It houses 20 million sentients, give or take a few hundred thousand, and measures roughly 150 klicks by 150 klicks, given that its shape is not square. Or round."

Maria gazed more carefully at the screen. She could see that the roughly cubical shape had very ragged edges, some huge spires and strange shapes dotting its surface.  
"Your new home away from me," said the lifeboat.

# Chapter 3 -- The Anthrax Codex

Probonis Varathian was on a line that was encrypted to hell and back, but if anyone had the eavesdropping technique of being in the vicinity and listening, it would all have been for naught, because he was practically shouting into the speaker grid.

Normally, he would have used subvocalization, but since he had nanodefenses that kept him from being snooped on by Froddicher and other busybodies, he felt able to talk out loud.

"That's right, a fucking Surround warship!" he shouted. "Grounds for Dis Missile, to be exact, right here at the station! They HAVE to be on to us."

"If they were on to you, you'd be deported and they would have the Codex," responded Cerenos Barraglio, Vararthian's handler, in much calmer tones. "I'd be more worried about the Wyvic agents who seem to be interested in you of late."

The Wyvic, the Snefferin and the Zeskons have ALL got me worried," said Probonis.

"We're concerned, too," said Cerenos. "We suspect your current operation may have been compromised. We think you should find yourself a mule and unload your cargo."

"I like the way you think," said Probonis with a great deal of sincerity. "I'll implement that as soon as possible."

"Sure, but try to find a good mule," said Cerenos. "Someone new to the outpost who has few ties to anyone on the station, who won't be missed if he or she or it disappears."

"Well I was planning to use the star of Velnar Follies, but I guess I'll try to find someone a little less prominent," said Probonis.

"See that you do," said Cerenos.

# Chapter 4 -- Citizen Space Slaves

"So, we get money JUST for being Conglomeration citizens?" Maria asked. "We don't have to work?"

"Right," said Dita as she adjusted the sex harness with panties that was all the clothing she could find on the ship that fit her. Having been fitted out as a sexual playground, its normal complement of one-piece jumpsuits had been replaced by a closet full of clothing that Dita, as a love slave, was very familiar with.

"But we CAN work for money if we WANT to," Maria said.

"Right," said Dita.

"And you want to work as a whore," said Maria. 'You know, I can probably find work as a guard of some kind. You do not have to prostitute yourself."

"There's millions of men on this outpost," Dita said with a grin. "Try and stop me." Then she hurried to the airlock door like a squirrel who has spied a forest full of uncollected nuts, and teleported down to the station.

Maria watched her go. Dita was practically naked, but of course, she didn't care, thought Maria. Maria herself was practically naked in a black bra and something called a "thong" that did nothing but conceal one's breasts and genitals. It had no protective value at all! It was the closest thing the lifeboat had to her familiar chainmail bikini from the Queendom, now probably lost in some slaver's wastebin.

Maria headed resolutely out the door as well. She stood on the teleport pad and said, "Take me to the outpost."

"I'll need more specific instructions than that, lady," said the teleport. "What specific locale on the station are you looking for?"

"I need to get some implants," said Maria. Dita had told Maria that her implants were what made her so knowledgeable about everything, and had recommended that Maria get some. Maria, who was heartily sick of not knowing what the hell was going on, was all for it, especially as Dita had assured her it was harmless and painless and would only leave her more knowledgeable.

"There are a number of implant shops on corridor C6, Deck 514," said the teleport.

"That would be fine," Maria said. "Take me to that deck."

"As you wish," said the teleport. "Frazzum frickum!" It was a little joke the teleport had been programmed to enjoy.

And with those words, Maria suddenly found herself standing in a transparent plastic tube that was open for about two thirds of its circumference. All around her people, mostly female, were strolling back and forth, looking into the windows of shops, sometimes entering them, sometimes leaving them.

Maria stepped out of the tube and joined the crowd. She noticed that several people in the crowd were stark naked – she had thought the Conglomeration did not keep slaves -- and many others had on clothing that was sexually explicit, in an enormous variety. It looked like Dita would have a lot of fun in her whoring.

In the Queendom, everyone wore clothing that identified who they were: slaves went naked, commoners wore dowdy rag bikinis, royalty wore bejeweled bikinis, and proud warriors like herself wore chainmail bikinis. But here most of the people were wearing clothing she could not even describe, with no two women dressed alike. The men at least were uniform... most wore shorts, T-shirts and comfortable-looking shoes, though the colors and designs of their clothes varied greatly. Maria preferred the bright, sexy clothing that men in the Queendom wore.

But it wasn't clothing Maria needed, it was implants. She wasn't crazy about the idea of having things implanted in her mind, but Dita had implants and she seemed sane enough, except for the whole liking being a love slave and whore thing. Besides, Dita was the only person in this part of the universe that Maria felt she could trust.

The nearest shop to the teleport was The ImPlantation, so Maria went there.

The shop was a cheery place, with posters extolling the virtues of various implants and bank of couches and chairs. It was a slow time apparently because the couches were unoccupied.

"Hi, welcome to The ImPlantation," said the sole occupant of the shop, a short, powerfully built alien with a notable saggital crest atop his head. "I'm Probonis. How can I help you today?"

"I need some implants," Maria said.

"We have a very wide selection, which implants in particular do you want?" asked Probonis.

"I need all of them," said Maria. "I don't have any."

"Oh?" said Probonis, one brow raising slightly. "Are you a Conglomeration citizen?"

"Yes, just became a citizen yesterday," Maria said. "I was told I should get some implants."

"Conglomeration citizens get a number of basic implants for free," said Probonis. "Perhaps you would like to start with those?"

"What are they?" asked Maria.

"First, a universal translator," responded Probonis. "You've already got one, but we'll upgrade in case new languages have been added allowing you to understand, read and write most languages in the Quadrant, and we'll give you implants for basic math, basic astrogation, basic history of the Conglomeration and the Quadrant, basic biology, basic health and fitness, basic chemistry, fundamentals of Conglomeration technology, basic finance, laws and regulations of the Conglomeration, and of course a netlink," Probonis continued, reciting a list he had pulled out of his Implantation Store Manager implant routine.

"All that for free?" Maria asked.

"Well there is no charge to you, but we will be charging the station for placing the implants," said Probonis.

"Why is the station willing to pay for my implants?" Maria asked.

"In the Conglomeration, we believe it is better to have an educated citizenry than an ignorant one," said Probonis. "We see free implants for basic knowledge as an investment that reaps benefits in terms of a more capable society as a whole. Plus, implants are cheap."

"How cheap?" Maria asked.

"They run about a cred each," said Probonis.

"That is reasonable," Maria said. Her card had 50,000 creds on it from her first Basic Income allotment, more than the 5000 creds a month she would receive as her Citizen stipend, because as a slave she was assumed to be destitute. Which, except for the ship she had stolen along with Dita, she was.

"I want weapons and martial arts, too," said Maria.

"It's highly recommended that you let the basic implants take hold before ordering more implants," said Probonis. "It will just take half an hour or so, then you will be able to select the implants you want with a better knowledge of what's available."

And it would give him time to customize his package for his mule Maria, thought Probonis.

"All right," said Maria.

"So you consent to the basic package?" Probonis asked.

Maria hesitated for only a second. "Yes," she said.

Probonis filled a glass with water and dropped several pills into it that dissolved almost as fast as they hit the water. "Then drink this, please,' he said.

Maria took the water and gulped it down. It had no taste, it was just water.

"What was that?" Maria asked, handing the glass back when it was empty.

"Your implants," said Probonis. "Now, if you could pass me your card, I'll be able to let the station know on whose behalf those implants were placed ..."

Maria walked out of the implant store a moment later, feeling vaguely disappointed. She had imagined some sort of high-tech gear being used to place the implants in her, with all sorts of gleaming steel parts and lights and maybe some nice whirring noises. Drinking a glass of water seemed so... primitive.

Dita had recommended that if she got hungry, Maria should try a barbecue restaurant, based on Maria's description of the roasted meats and boiled vegetables she ate in the Queendom. And eating did strike Maria as an agreeable way to pass the time while the implants did their trick.

So she had the transporter steer her to a location with several barbecue restaurants in it. She had been worried that she might not be able to distinguish barbecue restaurants from other restaurants. She need not have worried, because as soon as she stepped out of the transporter, the smellvertising hit her, the delicious odor of smoked meat wafting in the air. It had been one of the best things about living in the Queendom, that smell of meat cooking over wood fires. Her nose soon led her to a restaurant with wooden booths and tables and a smoky smell that took her right back to the longhall at Rynia. There were pictures of the dishes on offer on the wall... all Maria had to do was point to the dishes she wanted, present her card and have a seat in a nice cozy booth. She was not alone here, other people were eating and drinking, which Maria considered a good sign.

When the servbot brought the food and Maria dug in, she could not believe it. It was so incredibly GOOD. Tender and flavorsome and the sauces were sweet and fiery and wonderful. The vegetables were wonderful, too, flavorsome and satisfying, and the ale was strong and dark and yet incredibly smooth.

Dita had been right about barbecue. Maria dug in with gusto.

As she was digging into her second order of barbecued Grondarian skloot ribs, a voice said in her ear... "implants online."

"What?" Maria asked out loud.

"There is no need to talk out loud," said the voice. "This is your new implant. Just think whatever questions you want answered, or simply think, and we'll help you to find out what you need to know."

Maria nodded, she couldn't help it.

"All right," thought Maria. "How can I choose the right weapons and martial arts implants?"

"Well, you are very fit, you have considerable experience in martial arts and primitive weaponry... what you really need to improve on is modern weaponry and defense. I'd recommend a general modern weapons implant, maybe an implant on use of hand guns, stunners, that sort of thing, and maybe something on various martial arts you're not familiar with. Things like Chizoom Quang Di, Trantorian Snakery and Phimdar Musculo."

As the voice spoke, Maria's thought about those particular martial arts, and it was as if she were remembering about them... she saw images of them in practice, clear and vivid, and snippets about them, things like "Phimdar Musculo was developed by the Phimdar early in their history, when they engaged in unarmed combat and is considered one of the best ways to use balance in combat, very helpful against larger, stronger opponents."

Maria wondered if The ImPlantation had a Phimdar Musculo martial arts implant, and immediately she knew that they had it in stock.

Maria was so startled that she stopped gnawing on the skloot ribs for a moment, despite its mouth-watering goodness. She had never heard of any of these martial arts, but it was exactly as if she were remembering them, only the memories were sharp and detailed.

Maria thought: "Implant, how am I remembering about these things I have never heard of before?"

"They're not true memories," responded the implant. "We supply information to your mind directly through your nervous system, and you experience them as memories. We could do text or voice or videos as if you were watching or reading information on a screen, but this technique seems to be the most natural and easy for most humanoids to absorb. But if you like we could go with the screen presentation."

"No, uh... no, I'm fine with this fake memory thing," Maria thought. "It's just all very new to me."

Maria wished she could talk to Dita about these implants, to see if that was how they worked with her.

"I can connect you to Dita via netlink," set the implants. "You could talk with her right now."

"You mean like communicating on a screen?" asked Maria.

"Not exactly," responded the implant. "You will be able to see and hear Dita, and she will be able to see and hear you, but no one else will. And you won't have to talk, that would confuse others and interfere with your meal. Just think, like you think with me."

"Fine, let me talk with Dita," Maria thought.

A moment later Maria saw a vision of Dita seated at a bar in a slinky, barely-there dress, drinking a glass of wine and talking animatedly with a man seated next to her.

"Hello, Maria, I see you got a netlink implant," Dita said via thought, and Maria felt a mild rush of emotional warmth, the sort of feeling that might accompany a smile.

"Yes, I did," Maria said. "At the implant shop they said the station would pay for a set of standard implants that included a netlink."

"Yeah, I learned that when I went implant shopping," said Dita. "Standard stuff, but I imagine fairly overwhelming to you."

"It's unsettling," Maria said. "Do the implants you have act as sort of substitute memories? Like, you think about something and suddenly you know all about it?"

"Yes, that's pretty much how they work," said Dita.

"So how do you know which memories are your own and which are being supplied by the implants?" Maria asked.

"Ah," said Dita. "You're concerned about identity loss. The implants might be replacing or changing your real memories."

"Well... kind of," said Maria. "I hadn't thought it out like that, but yes."

"It was a common issue when implants first started manifesting as memories," said Dita. "But as I recall, a health and wellness implant was included with your other implants, was it not?"

"Yes, I did get one of those," said Maria. "I suppose it will give me all sorts of good advice about how to not get sick?"

"Not at all," said Dita. "It will actively prevent you from being sick. You will never have another cold, another case of the flu, or any of the other known illnesses in the Quadrant. If you get injured, you will heal very quickly. If you get severely injured, you will be much more likely to survive until you can get medical help. And your lifespan is now several hundred years more than it was prior to the health and wellness implant... several thousand years, if you are lucky."

"What?" Maria cried.

"You heard me," said Dita. "The implant will keep your body in peak form, where you were at the age of 25, until you die, and it will be a LONG time until you die."

"I don't understand, such a gift if PRICELESS," said Maria. "But I got it for nothing!"

"Well yes, but it's very old tech," said Dita. "It's generally one of the first things sentient species develop once they develop technology. Been around for millions of years in the Quadrant. So, very cheap, and in many societies, free. Hell it was free in the Northigen Republic and we are primitive compared to the interstellar empires."

"All right," Maria said, "but I don't see what this has to do with my memory problem."

"Ah," said Dita.

It was strange to hear Dita speaking to Maria even as she engaged in conversation with the man next to her. "Your health and wellness implant includes identity protection," said Dita. "It prevents viruses, worms, Trojan horses and advanced advertising from taking over your identity. It ensures that any changes that occur in your mind are the product of natural processes associated with your mental structure. Your memories can only enhance who you are, they can't hijack who you are. Otherwise, no one would get implants."

Maria thought for a moment. "That makes sense."

"Yeah, some cultures had some bad experiences," Dita said. "The rulers of an unfortunately large number of worlds have over time cooked up various mind viruses and turned everyone other than them into mindless, worshipful drones before they discovered FTL, which generally resulted in their not discovering FTL or changing in any way once the mind virus was in place. Tends to stop technological and social innovation cold. On the flip side, the leaders and their descendents, who don't get the mind virus, are perpetually in power and lead fairly wonderful lives by their societies' standards, as long as they don't screw up."

"Sounds horrible," said Maria.

"Yeah, it's a widely known societal dead end," said Dita, "and the main reason most advanced societies invest in identity protection software for all their citizens."

"Well, that's reassuring," said Maria, even though she was freaked out at the vivid images of horrific zombie civilizations that her implant was helpfully supplying to her.

"Glad I could help," said Dita, "Gotta give my full attention to what I'm doing now, I just got a ping from a live one." And suddenly the connection was cut.

Which was all right with Maria, because the barbecue really did deserve her full attention. And as soon as she finished it, she was going to go get some weapons and martial arts implants. Then she realized there was a question that still needed answering.

"You were injected with a universal translator by the raiders who captured you," said the implant, "so that you could understand their commands."

And Maria remembered... she had understood the raiders' commands. She had just assumed everyone spoke High Oolonga, including Dita.

# Chapter 5 -- Turning Tricks

It had been a long and unsuccessful day for Dita. Turning tricks in the Conglomeration was very easy, but making money at it was very difficult. The problem was, the women in the Conglomeration had just as much sexual freedom as the men, and they used it. And because of Basic Income, no woman was beholden to any man for her livelihood, so once a woman reached adulthood, she could do as she damn well pleased, sexually speaking, and most women did.

As soon as Dita had her netlink up, she discovered this sorry state of affairs. Prostitutes were not illegal or even looked down on, but there were none of them. Even beauty combined with sexual availability was not all that useful to Dita, because everyone in the Conglomeration could be as handsome or beautiful as they liked, thanks to their advanced nanomedicines. A lesser whore would have given up, but Dita was determined.

She decided to spend some time just talking with men in bars instead of trying to hustle them off for a tryst with her as fast as possible, her usual technique with men when she was in making money mode. So she just sat in at various bars and talked with men. And women. Dita preferred men, but women were nice, too, and just as informative as men. And if she found a live one among the women, well a cred was a cred.

Dita found out a lot about Conglomeration men in the ensuing hours. They were an open and easygoing lot, and generous with small amounts of money. But none of them wanted to drop 200 creds on her for an hour of ecstasy, because that was enough money to make it possible that they might have to work to make some extra money, work being defined in the Conglomeration as doing something strictly to make money.

It was funny, all throughout the trading post there were people engaged in commerce with the same determination as the greediest trader, but they did it strictly as a game, and thought nothing of quitting it if they found something else more interesting, even if they were making a lot of money at it. There were people who were conducting scientific research, people who were inventing new devices and techniques of doing things, people who were tending and caring for other people... all things that they would have gotten paid for back on Charom, but here people did difficult and time-consuming tasks simply because they were interested in them. True, the place was swarming with artists, musicians and actors, many of them mediocre at best, but some of them sometimes created something that no one else might have thought of.

It was a very weird and different way to live to Dita. Everyone was, in essence, rich. But Dita had to admit, it made for a happier, more interesting society as a whole. Just not a sufficiently horny and frustrated one for her particular profession.

But after about five hours of fruitlessly chit-chatting, Dita finally struck gold. She'd been sitting at a glass-topped bar talking with a fellow about her life as a love slave back in the Northigen Republic, figuring that might work for him, but not getting much response, perhaps because there were so many Outpost women willing to be love slaves for a night just for the fun of it.

He left and Dita remained where she was, stewing a bit about her lack of success with men here. Of course, she could have slept with any of half a dozen men already... for FREE. But that was not how Dita rolled. Hers might not be the face that launched a thousand ships, but she felt she was at LEAST desirable enough to be worth the purchase of a ticket on a luxury liner, dammit.

That was when a tall, thin fellow with a nicely trimmed blond beard slid onto the seat next to her.

"Hi, I'm Rik," he said with an easy, friendly smile.

"I'm Dita, nice to meet you," Dita responded automatically, putting the full force of her 150-watt eyes on him, conveying very clearly that she was glad to meet him visually as well aurally. First impressions were so important.

"Offiz was saying you used to be an actual slave girl," said Rik. "I mean, not a pretendy slave with safewords and all, but an actual owned person with no rights at all who could be killed or maimed or anything."

Dita immediately knew this man was probably a fetishist of some sort and that some part of her past as an actual slave had triggered one of his buttons big time. It was just a matter of finding out what it was and playing it up.

"Yes, I was," Dita said with just a hint of a smile.

"We don't get a lot of actual former slaves here on this outpost, or in the Conglomeration, actually," said Rik. "What was it like?"

Dita took a sip of her drink while she thought about how best to land this fish. He was so obvious in his needs. Best to go with the lead he had supplied.

"It's really hard to put into words," she said thoughtfully. "It was so different from life here, where everyone does what they like and gets enough to eat and drink and is never forced to do anything they didn't want to do."

"Was it dangerous?" Rik asked. "Did any of you ever get severely injured or killed?"

"Well, sure," Dita said as if that should be obvious. "Not so much by the slavers, they relied on whips and confinement to break the will of any girl who proved resistant in any way. But the way the slavers made money off love slaves such as myself was renting us out to clients, and sometimes clients got... carried away. You know, the client might enjoy strangling us a bit while they fucked us, it was a common practice. And you know, with a slave, sometimes they would think, "She's just a slave, even if I kill her, it's just a fine, I can afford it. And they strangle us for just a LITTLE too long and the slave winds up dead, even if the client didn't start out intending to kill us."

"So, if a client KILLED you, it was just a fine?" Rik asked. His eyes were gleaming. "Here on the station, we CAN'T kill one another, hell we can't even do one another any great physical harm, really. Froddicher keeps track of everything. They SAY we have privacy in our homes, but I don't know ..."

"Well, in the Northigen Republic, our status as slaves was that of animals, we were legally not considered human, so killing us was pretty much on par with killing livestock," Dita said. "So of course, it was just a fine."

"How often did something like that happen?" Rik asked.

"I guess I lost eight or nine sisters to clients while I was there," Dita said. "It wasn't just strangling. A couple of clients got carried away doing edge play .. they said. The slavers never challenged them... they just took the money, because it did cost a lot to kill one of us. We may have been animals, but we were exquisitely trained animals who could be expected to bring the slavers a great deal of money over the course of our lives."

"That's terrible," said Rik.

"Well, the way I and most of my sisters felt about it was, free people got killed by other free people all the time," Dita said, "there just wasn't some big official trial about it, if one of us got killed."

"Yes, but if it's just a matter of a fine, what's to keep a rich person from doing it over and over again?" Rik asked.

"Well, to be honest, slavers would rather have slaves than fines," said Dita, "especially well-trained slaves. It takes time to train a love slave properly. So the slavers at House Vontis would just not have girls available to clients with a history of killing or severely injuring girls. Or boys. There were slave houses that would provide slaves to such clients, but not mine."

"Well, lucky you," said Rik.

"Yes, luck is a relative thing," said Dita. "Of course, we still had to do ANYTHING a client might desire... but we were trained to do most things, and we learned to like most of them... even being whipped or spanked."

Dita saw Rik's eyes light up when she said "we had to do ANYTHING" and she realized she had him hooked.

"I imagine you are used to that, though," Dita added, "from what I hear, the women here have no inhibitions, and will enthusiastically play at being slaves, given the chance."

"That's true," said Rik, "but I don't think the women here really know what they are doing. They've never ever BEEN slaves, you know, or even in any form of compulsion whatsoever, with Nanny Froddicher watching. And as for the sexbots, well, they're fine when you're first starting out, but you quickly learn that as beautiful and uninhibited as they are, there's no THERE there... it's really just masturbating with a REALLY good toy.""

Dita used her implants to quickly do a search on "Nanny Froddicher" and came up with a huge number of hits and she quickly discovered that the Velnar 7 outpost was saturated with nanites floating in the air that both observed what was going on and prevented any violence that flared up, anywhere in the station. They were literally part of the atmosphere. No one harmed anyone here because no one COULD harm anyone here, except with some rare exceptions like sporting events or... consensual sex play that involved things like spanking or whipping. Hmm, thought Dita.

"I suppose that is where I have an advantage," Dita drawled slowly. "I do know what it is like to be owned, to give myself entirely to another person because I have no choice. I guess as far as slave fantasies go, I'm the real deal. And I'm so looking forward to the chance to be someone's real deal," she added wistfully.

"Yes, I heard you ask for creds," Rik said, as if THIS were the surprising thing about Dita.

Dita had an idea. In a society where no one had to live by exchanging sex for money, there was only one way people would understand prostitution.

"Well, after I escaped from slavery the first time, I became a whore for a number of years," Dita said. "I liked getting all the money for myself instead of my owner. And ever since then, well... unless I get money, sex just does not mean anything to me, you know?"

"Ah!" said Rik, a light bulb clearly going off in his head. "It's your fetish!"

Dita nodded. "I suppose you could put it that way," she agreed.

"Well I have a fetish for slave girls and you have a fetish for creds, which I have some of," Rik said. "Maybe we can work something out ..."

# Chapter 6 -- Space Babe Implants

Maria sat back with her eyes closed after lunch and let the flood of information wash over here. She suddenly understood so much. Artificial intelligences were beings that were BUILT, like any other machine, with technology the Queendom could not even imagine. (She saw it as she ruminated, the pitch dark, gigantic confines of the manufacturing centers where machines, without any supervision at all from sapients, built other machines. It was breathtaking to her, the sheer scope of it.)

Maria knew she was a humanoid, one of many kinds of sapients in the Quadrant, a section of the Milky Way galaxy that encompassed a number of interstellar civilizations and also planets like her own with no interplanetary capabilities. The Quadrant swarmed with humanoids, among many other species. Humanoids were considered a fast-evolving, fast-reproducing species that was very adaptable and as an interstellar equivalent of rats by some species that didn't spawn so quickly and easily.

On the scale of things in the Quadrant, Maria's home planet was unknown and uncontacted. There were an unknown number of planets like hers, generally lost colonies of some spacefaring civilization or other. She was a rarity, she discovered. Situations like Dita's Charom were much more common, where the civilization had technology but no FTL capability.

The raiders that had captured Maria were probably your average space pirates, nothing at all special about them except they had discovered Maria's home planet and its civilization, and would probably now raid it regularly for slaves.

It was so strange, being able to put everything in perspective. All she had to do was remember what had happened to her and implant-created memories surged, filling in all the unknowns.

Her implants also filled her in on what sort of martial arts implants and weapons she would need to be an effective warrior in the Quadrant. She began placing orders as she rose and headed back to the ImPlantation. The man Probonis had seemed nice and had been responsible about insisting that she get her basic implants working before she ordered any specialty implants. She trusted him.

* * *

Probonis had to work hard to control his sense of relief and pleasure when Maria walked back into the ImPlantation. She was by far the best mule he could find, new to the station, not even civilized, someone who would not be missed when he reclaimed the Codex, should it be necessary to terminate her. The injection process went flawlessly. Maria left happy with her new martial arts and combat implants, as well as, unknown to her, the Anthrax Codex now comfortably ensconced in her body. Probonis left work happily a couple of hours later, heading for a bar to get a few drinks to celebrate a mission well done, and more honestly, to celebrate the fact that the Codex was not in his possession any more.

* * *

Maria walked out of the shop and spent a few moments communing with her implants, which informed her that there was absolutely no work for bodyguards or security agents on the Velnar7Outpost, and why.

"I wonder," she thought, "how I can take advantage of my fighting skills here?" and Maria instantly knew that there were fighting contests held regularly in which participants won creds. Even the losers got creds, much as fighters in the Polygons of Doom back in Rynia could earn valor for fighting bravely and well even if they were beaten. The fights were very popular viewing on the outpost's entertainment net, because it was about the only venue in which actual violence was permitted. Participants had to consent to have their brains deep scanned and backed up just prior to each match in case of sudden death (which had never actually occurred). Mostly injuries consisted of concussions, contusions and some severely bruised egos.

All in all, it seemed much less violent and dangerous than the sparring she had done as a warrior, especially since it did not involve weapons. Contestants fought naked, with pads on their feet, head and hands. Maria was all right with that, the Queendom had very strong dress codes for ordinary conduct, but swimming and working in the sun were often done naked, or nearly so. It was the men who must always dress modestly in the Queendom, lest they inadvertently rouse the lust of a woman.

In a few moments, her implants had directed Maria to one of the many martial arts academies that served as training and proving grounds for the martial arts contests. She would show them a thing or two about fighting.

# Chapter 7 -- Zero Gee String

Dita and Rik linked their virtual presences and did some virtual shopping around for a place to play. The outpost had a number of places which rented out spaces for trysts, ranging from opulent palaces to force bubbles gliding over the surface of an M-class star, to snug forested cozies, all beautifully reproduced in the interior of the station. Rik was very interested in something luxurious and barbaric, as he understood the term, which basically meant, no advanced computer technology, and any virtual tech had to be designed not to be obvious virtual tech.

Low-tech trysts were popular and Rik and Dita went for the opulent palace with BDSM options... the one they picked had an actual slaver training pen in it, though it was not based on anything Dita had ever seen or heard of on Charom.

"It's beautiful!" Dita declared when they entered the space Rik had rented. Rik had quickly understood that Dita's fetish involved him paying for everything... she was, after all, just a slave whore. The room was bedecked in opulent drapes, with thick, rich, beautifully designed rugs, and suggestive paintings of naked slave girls suggestively having suggestive submissive sex with their dominating masters.

Dita smiled and slowly, gracefully dropped to her knees in front of Rik.

"I am yours, Master," she said. "Do as you will with me," and she lowered her head.

"Well first I suppose I shall name you "Dita" for this use," said Rik. "Now, what should your safeword be?"

"Safeword, Master?" Dita asked. "What is a safeword?" (Dita knew exactly what a safeword was, she had used them many times in her work as a whore.)

"Ah, well, we use them all the time here," Rik said.

"I will use them if you wish, Master, but real slaves do not have safewords," Dita said, "at least, in my experience." Her implants told her that Outpost nanites in the love nest would not allow Rik to do her any real harm, though "love nest" was a peculiar term to use for an indoor space that could comfortably have been used to host a tennis match. And more importantly, her instincts told her that Rik did not intend her any real harm.

"Well, good point," Rik said, smiling. "Real slavery is not really safe, is it?"

"No, Master, it is not," replied Dita. "We are helpless in the presence of our Masters."

"As it should be," said Rik. "Remove all your clothing."

Dita's dress at the club had been designed to provoke, there was not much to it, though it did conceal this that and the other from the eyes, not because the Velnar7 Outpost inhabitants had any nudity taboos, but because Dita had been taught from childhood how to use clothing to entice. At Rik's command she said "Yes, Master," and instantly wriggled out of the dress, with all the sinuous skill she had developed over the years.

"Display yourself," Rik ordered.

"Yes, Master," Dita replied, her tones soft, sibilant and seductive. She laid back on the soft carpeting and slowly spread her legs wide. "I am yours, Master," Dita whispered.

"Now let's see the other side," Rik said.

Dita rolled over onto her stomach and hiked her butt into the air. She reached back and performed the maneuver called "opening the flower."

"Very nice," Rik said, walking in a circle around her, looking down at her while she held position. It gave Dita a thrill of pleasure to kneel there, so open, and to be observed.

Rik walked over to the wall and adjusted what looked like a thermostat, and Dita began to float gently into the air.

"Ever done it in zero-gee, girl?" Rik asked as he got a large metallic hoop with cuffs set in it from its place against one wall.

"No, Master," Dita replied as she drifted in the air, listing slightly to the left, still bent over, as Rik had not given her permission to break pose. There had been some orbital hotels where you could have zero-gee sex orbiting Charom, but Dita had not ever been to one, mostly by chance. Wealthy clients sometimes did pay to have whores shipped up to an orbital for some zero-gee orgies.

"First time for everything!" Rik declared. "Now spreadeagle, girl."

"Yes, Master," Dita responded, and she rolled over and spread her arms and legs wide. One of her feet brushed the floor and sent her drifting up toward the ceiling. It was a very high ceiling, being a castle fantasy. Rik launched himself toward her with a flick of his toe and caught up with Dita easily. He began attaching the cuffs on the hoop to Dita's hands and feet.

"You've not been in zero-gee before," Rik observed.

"No, Master, most people on Charom spend their entire lives on the surface of the planet," Dita replied, thinking it would make her seem more primitive and exotic to him.

"A pity," Rik said as he checked the cuffs carefully for fit and tightness. "Well, it will make all this more novel to you," he said with a grin as he touched a finger to the bottom of the hoop and then giving it a good spin with his other hand, so that Dita and the hoop she was now cuffed in a spreadeagle to spun like a galactic hoopball on the fingertip of a galactic hoopball player.

Rik stopped the spinning after just a few revolutions, much to Dita's relief. She could adjust to spinning, having been spun in sex baskets and slings of many types, but this going from 0 to 60 in zero-gee was just too much.

"Now you just hang around a moment," Rik said, "Not that you have a choice."

"No, Master," Dita said as she hung in the hoop which now very slowly spun.

Rik removed his clothes, letting them float to the floor with gentle pushes. Obviously, HE had spent time in zero-gee. And given that here on the Velnar7 Outpost they could generate gravity fields on a room-by-room basis, it was no surprise that he had.

Rik turned and wrapped his arms around Dita's torso and kissed her. She returned his kiss, helpless, spreadeagled and suspended in air, her hair whirling about slowly, floating around her head. Rik's long blond hair floated around his head as well. It was like their heads both sported golden halos as they kissed. (In her love slave days Dita's hair had behaved similarly once. But it had involved running a wire up her butt and standing her near a giant rubber band being rotated in an electric motor. It was literally a pain in the ass but it had gotten the client off.)

Rik caressed Dita's butt as she moaned softly and expertly writhed in her bonds. She had been trained how to writhe while in bondage while she was in bondage. It had been effective. And it proved effective once more ...

Three hours later, Rik was untying Dita and removing her gag.

"You are INCREDIBLY bendy," Rik was saying with a satisfied drawl. "And INCREDIBLY sexy. I don't know that I've EVER made love to a woman so many times in a single afternoon."

"It is very kind of you to say so, Master," said Dita. "You are indeed a strong and virile man... a man who pays his debts," she said significantly.

"You are right," Rik said, and via implant sent Dita the 300 creds they had negotiated as her price for the afternoon, plus 50 creds extra "for the fun of it."

"Thank you, Master," said Dita. "I will let all my friends know what a strong and virile .. and imaginative... man you are in the bedroom... and I will tell any of YOUR friends as well, if you like."

"Nothing like an unbiased recommendation," said Rik, grinning. "I'll let all my friends know you are worth every cred you ask for."

Dita smiled and kissed Rik. "Thank you, Master!" she said, for there was nothing better than word of mouth advertising.

# Chapter 8 – Extreme Ultra Extra Secure

Probonis sat on his comfy chair and covertly checked in with his spy implants and saw no sign that the secret, secure net based in his room had been compromised and then opened up a channel to his handler Cerenox using Extreme Ultra Extra Secure Encryption. He was still feeling a warm glow from the success of his mission and the half dozen or so Drabnathian Garglebongers he had consumed at the Black Hole Tavern.

"Hey, Cerenox," Probonis said. "Nice to see ya. Well, mission accomplished, and brilliantly, I might add. I found the perfect mule and saddled her right up with the Anthrax Codex. Ta da! Woman named Maria from some barbaric land called the Queendom of Rynia. Not a friend, family member or acquaintance on the entire outpost, or in known space... she's an escaped slave from some planet so primitive no one knows its location."

Cerenox, visible only to Probonis, was looking at his console and scowling.

"What security setting are you using?" he asked.

"Oh, Extreme Ultra Extra Secure," Probonis said, checking his implants.

"You IDIOT!" Cerenos roared. "Why didn't you use Beyond Ultimate Super Extreme Ultra Extra Secure encryption? Switch to Beyond Ultimate NOW! So we can discuss this further."

"Well, to be fair, Extreme Ultra Extra Secure Encryption sounds pretty damn secure,'" Probonis observed. "I mean, if it's so bad you should call it "Limp-Tentacled Feeble Bunny Subpar Encryption."

"You drunken fool, no matter what it's called, ANYBODY can break Extreme Ultra Extra Secure encryption!" Cerenox growled. "Hell those barbarians your mule is from could probably do it! Now switch over!"

What followed was a half-hour tirade that seemed to go on for hours. The point of it was that thanks to Probonis' security lapse, every last scheming intelligence agency in the Quadrant was going to know that the Anthrax Codex, a fabled ancient AI tech that included plans for weapons so powerful that they could change the balance of power in the Quadrant, had been found. And they would know that Probonis had injected the Codex into Maria of the Queendom of Rynia, and would stop at nothing to get it.

And Cerenox let Probonis know that if he did not get the Codex back, and prevent OTHERS from getting it, his life would be short, brutal and nasty... and all of his backups would be destroyed. Except for the ones on Velnar 7, of course. Cerenox had no control over those.

* * *

"Do you think there is anything to this Anthrax Codex business?" Froddicher asked Grounds For Dis Missile in an Impossibly Secure transmission after intercepting Probonis' transmission.

"The odds are pretty good that it will just turn out to be another disappointment, like so many relics of Forerunner AI civilizations that have gone before us," said Grounds for Dis Missile. "The problem is, there is a tiny but significant chance that the it could be everything its legend claims. And even worse, it might be one of those nasty surprises that ancient rogue AIs have left behind from time to time."

"Sounds like enough of a chance to get all the Beyonder aggro civilizations pulling out all the stops," Froddicher observed.

"Yes, the chances that the Codex contains anything we can't handle are vanishingly small," said Grounds for Dis Missile. "But that won't keep the various intelligence agencies out there from going all out to get it, if only to gain an advantage over other Beyonders. If any of them have an ace up their sleeves, this might be an easy way to find out now rather than later."

"If I follow your meaning," Froddicher said, "I can't go along with it. Dita and Maria are Conglomeration citizens of this outpost, I can't let you use them as bait."

"Back them up, by all means," said Grounds for Dis Missile.

"Already done," said Froddicher.

"Good," said Grounds for Dis Missile. 'Then if they get killed, you can just restore their backups in a clones and we'll be good to go."

"Organics do not generally regard being killed and restored from a backup with the same dispassion we do," observed Froddicher, "especially organics from backward worlds. They tend to want to stay with their current iteration as long as possible."

"We can let that be their problem," Grounds for Dis Missile said. It was a warship, after all. It might be tasked with destroying an inhabited planet someday, and had destroyed plenty of warships filled with organics and even some AIs. It gave Grounds for Dis Missile a certain perspective regarding individual sentients' lives.

# Chapter 9 -- The Ladies' And Gentlemens' Sporting Club of Good Civility

Maria made her way to the Ladies' And Gentlemens' Sporting Club of Good Civility, considered one of the best places to get started in interstellar martial arts contests. It was a large space with plenty of dressing rooms and a central exercise area with many mats on the floor and visible soft force fields that would cushion impacts extending upward from the edges of the mats. They glowed in soft pastel colors extending ten feet into the air, defining the limits of the ring.

Maria understood all of these things as she looked at them, her implants whispering the information into her mind. She knew as if from experience what it would feel like to be knocked backward into one of those force fields... soft, pillowy and yet unyielding beyond a certain point.

Via her implants, Maria communicated with the sporting club's expert system and she agreed to have a copy of her mind uploaded and to contribute some DNA for a clone body. That way if she were accidentally killed during a match, she could be restored with little or no lost experience.

The idea of being restored to life after you died was not a new one to Maria. Myther, the All-Mother of the Queendom's major religion (because its adherents had exterminated believers in most other religions) promised a glorious life after death where brave warriors, hard-working tradeswomen, faithful thralls and humble slavegirls could all live forever in peace, joy and plenty.

But Myther's methods of restoring one to life after death were all clouded in mystical religious mumbo-jumbo. There were no tools and devices for doing so. You didn't have to fill out forms giving out your express approval to be revived from death, as you did on the Outpost. And there was nothing mystical or mumbo-jumbo-ish about the way they handled the revivals, it was all very practical and matter-of-fact. It all made Maria take the Outpost's profession of restoring life after death a lot more seriously than she had ever taking Mytherology... especially the filling out forms part. That was not the sort of thing you'd have one do if your technique was just mumbo-jumbo.

And of course, the fact that she was filling out forms in a language she could not have read before getting her implants, using only her implants to fill out the forms, doing it in in a few scant seconds... well that leant some credibility too.

Uploading who she was – her hopes, her dreams her memories... took only a few seconds via netlink. Maria had a greater understanding of the process via her implants, though she remained vague on some things, like why there was such an emphasis on the fact that they used "non-lossy compression" to store her self. Why in the world would they use "lossy compression" in the first place, she wondered.

A few minutes later, Maria was putting on her combat gear: gloves with big pads on the exterior to protect her fingers and knuckles, padding for her head to protect against concussions, whose forward section also projected a small force field to protect her eyeballs and padding to protect her feet and toes. There was also a tiny g-string with padding to protect her vagina. Men wore larger g-strings with more padding to protect their much more exposed genitals. Women of the Queendom would not fight with men for fear of injuring their delicate, exposed genitals. She was glad to see the men here were protected, genitally speaking.

Still the men in the fighting pits were not like the men of the Queendom. The men of the Queendom tended to be of about the same size and stature as the women. Maybe a little smaller on average. But the guys in the fighting pits, as the entire training area and its associated fight stages were called, came in all sizes, many of them larger than Maria. Some of the MUCH larger than Maria, with statures and muscles so huge that Maria wondered if they were different humanoid species. Her implant informed her that they were "bodybuilders," men whose hobby was seeing just how big and well-defined they could make their muscles. They tended to be very strong, but not so strong as those who sought strength for its own sake. And some of them WERE of different humanoid species.

Maria was glad to see that there were plenty of women at the fighting pits as well, a few of them also sporting huge muscles. She did not want to be reduced to fighting with men.

Officially, what she was doing was "sparring up an implant." It helped to practice the skills and moves your implants gave you before you needed them.

"You have been invited to spar by Chillifra Niurg," said Maria's implant as she dressed out. "She has a new Phimdar Musculo implant, as you do."

"Sounds good, I accept," said Maria, rising to her feet and doing some stretching. She walked over to Mat 35 and shook hands with Chillifra, a tall, willowy redhead who did not seem especially muscular but had a very long reach and moved with an easy grace that implied fitness.

"Now just relax and let me do the work," said Maria's implant. "Once you get familiar with all the moves, you can take over and call the shots, but right now I'm learning how to optimize your body for Musculo, and you are learning how Musculo works."

"Sure," Maria said with a mental shrug. In her opinion implants were doing far too much for her, but if that was the way this society worked, she would go with it at least until she understood it fully.

Maria found herself edging out into the center of the mat to meet Chillifra. They touched the outer pads on their gloves for a moment then backed off a bit and began shifting left and right rapidly, bouncing slightly, their feet always moving. Musculo was a mix of grappling, striking and kicking. It's central tenet seemed to be maintaining and losing and recovering balance cyclically, so that even if you were in this midst of a kick or throwing a punch you were either in balance or moving toward recovering your balance... even if you were out of balance, you were in control. It made for a very gymnastic, fluid, aggressive fight, with both fighters striving to throw the other fighter out of balance and strike or grapple in an unexpected way. The chips had them making moves but striking and kicking without any force and grappling without applying enough force to do harm or force a submission.

The Phimdar who had developed Musculo were not even humanoid – they had three jointed legs and six tentacles space equidistantly around their torso. Musculo as practiced by the Phimdar was a thing of beauty, of whirling tentacles that snapped and rolled while legs struck and twisted and leapt. Some genius martial artist figured out that the basic principles of Phimdar could work for a variety of body plans including humanoid bipeds. The Phimdar loved to watch videos of bipeds practicing Musculo, making the high pitched chirping sounds that were their equivalent of hysterical laughter.

Maria adapted to Musculo instantly, it was training, though it was training that moved about a thousand times faster than any training that had gone before. It took her exactly one move to get a move down. One. After that, she had it. In five minutes of practice they went from the simplest jabs and kicks to a point at which Maria found herself kicking at Chillifra in the middle of a cartwheel while Chillifra cartwheeled and kicked opposite her. Maria had no memory of any INTENT to cartwheel opposite Chillifra, but she knew exactly how she'd done it and how to do it again. Just doing the move once made it hers for life, Maria knew that, just as she was certain of her ability to use a sword in a fight.

After five minutes of this, they rested for about five minutes, chatting and being friendly, then they squared off again, this time in control of their moves, this time not pulling their kicks, punches and grapples.

Maria had assumed that as an actual warrior who had been in fights to the death she would have a considerable advantage over any of these mere hobbyists, but she was quickly brought to realize that Chillifra was a tough opponent when she took a good jab from Maria and sent a solid left into Maria's jaw, making her whole head spark and snap for a moment.

Maria took Chillifra more seriously after that. She was sure she had Chillifra sparking and snapping too.

Musculo was a particularly exhausting martial arts form with its emphasis on continuous movement forcing both participants to constantly attack or defend, with no breaks. In three minutes Maria was breathing heavily, and when they broke after five minutes she was shiny with sweat and had a cut lip. Chillifra was looking the worse for wear, too, with blood trickling out of her nostril.

They spent a little longer between rounds at this point, recovering from their wounds and getting their breath. They didn't do a lot of talking, they were tired.

"The next round will be open sparring," Maria's implant said. "You can use any move you have in conjunction with the Musculo. It will help you integrate the Musculo moves with your other moves."

"She'll be able to use all her moves as well," Maria said.

"Yes," responded the implant.

"Does she have a lot of implants?" Maria asked.

"I don't know, would you like me to ask her implant?" asked her implant.

"Don't bother," replied Maria. "It will be more realistic if I don't know."

"Very well," said the implant.

Maria rose and approached Chillifra, this time more cautiously. It just stood to reason that Chillifra would have a lot more implants than Maria.

Sure enough, Chillifra started the third round with a strange sweeping kick that Maria easily blocked followed by some quick hammering blows to her side which Maria just managed to block. Maria responded with a quick hard punch that she rolled over into a Musculo kick attack that nearly took Chillifra's head solidly, but she managed to duck in time.

The next five minutes where a whirl of unexpected attack combined with Musculo moves. It was clear that Chillifra had many more kinds of attacks on hand than Maria did, but Maria did have an advantage in that her fighting technique was utterly unknown. Unfortunately, it was nothing special, just the usual collection of kicks and punches and grapples that had been developed by most bipeds that fought.

At the end of five minutes, Maria was feeling battered and exhausted. She had managed to stay on her feet but it had been a near thing a time or two. If it had been a sparring trial at the Queendom, it would have been Chillifra who would have gotten the Bracelet of Victory, Maria was sure of that.

Chillafra thanked Maria for the spar and said she was heading for the showers. Maria walked over to one of many comfy chairs scattered about the fighting pits and plopped into it, pulling off her helmet and gloves and taking out her tooth protector.

"I have two more martial arts implants," she observed.

"Yes," said her implant.

"I want to go ahead and get those implants going too," said Maria.

"We would advise waiting at least half an hour before sparring with the next martial arts implant," said her chip. "That will give your health and wellness implant time to repair your tissue damage, recharge your energy levels and get the pain signals damped down enough that the painkillers your health and wellness implant is producing won't make you dopey during the next spar."

"I've got painkillers inside me?" Maria asked, feeling a general ache and throbbing that seemed painful enough for all practical purposes.

"Yes, want to feel what it's like without them?" the implant asked.

"Sure," Maria said.

Two minutes later, Maria thought to her implants, "Enough! Bring the painkillers back!" Her head was throbbing like a gong, her face was a welter of pain and her torso and legs were complaining loudly that they'd been hit in various places and ways that they did not approve of.

"Would you like all the pain eradicated?" her implant asked.

"Yes, if it does not make me too dopey to fight when I am recovered," Maria said. She was practical about pain. It was important to be able to endure it, but she saw no virtue in enduring it for its own sake.

"We can get you fully restored in a minute or two," said the implant.

"Fine then," said Maria, and almost immediately she was struck by a wave of pleasure that washed away the pain. She closed her eyes. "Would it be OK if I fell asleep here?" she asked her implant.

"It would be fine," responded her implant. "It will facilitate the healing."

"That's good," said Maria. "Wake me when I am ready to fight again," she said, and fell asleep in the chair.

Half an hour later she awoke, feeling alert, rested and relaxed.

"Ardalos Parlectin invites you to a Quang Di spar," Maria's implant announced.

"Tell her I accept," Maria said, pulling on her helmet and gloves. It was amazing how good she felt, considering how badly she had felt a few minutes ago. She wondered if the health and wellness implant could handle hangovers as well.

"The health and wellness implant can completely prevent hangovers," announced Maria's chip.

"Good to know," Maria said as she strode over to Mat 17, where she knew Ardalos would meet her.

In a moment, Ardalos appeared and Maria said, "I'm sorry, I can't spar with you," to Ardalos.

Ardalos was male. He was about Maria's size, small for males on the Outpost, not one of the muscular giants whom Maria had noticed.

"Why not?" asked Ardalos. He was small but he had a powerful build and that air of confidence and grace that generally comes with being fit and capable. He did not seem offended, only curious.

"You are male, I do not fight men," said Maria. She had her standards.

"I really think you need to fight with a man," said Maria's implant. "Outside of the Queendom, men do most of the fighting. If you are going to fight professionally, you will have to learn how to fight men. You will be no use as a bodyguard/security person if you only fight women."

"What's wrong with fighting men?" Ardalos asked. He sounded as if he thought she had said something peculiar.

"I might hurt you," said Maria.

Ardalos shrugged. "I might hurt you," he responded.

"Unlikely," Maria muttered.

Ardalos suddenly lashed out with his left, delivering a short, stinging jab to Maria's jaw that rocked her head to one side because she had not been expecting it and because Ardalos' move was blazingly fast.

"Perhaps it will be me that hurts you," said Ardalos, smirking in an annoying yet at the same time charming way.

Maria shook her head, clearing out the the little birdies and stars that were circling it. When her head was clear again, she stared at Ardalos as if she had never seen anything like him before, though he was just an average handsome fit humanoid biped male. She knew one thing, very clearly, after that blow, something she had never known about herself before in her life, something she would never have guessed.

She wanted very badly to be hit again by Ardalos.

"I will spar with you," Maria said.

Ardalos grinned and nodded at Maria. "Good," he said. "I'll try not to let you hurt me."

"That would be wise," said Maria.

Ardalos and Maria went to the mat and did a round of Quang Di, pulling their punches, just getting the moves catalogued into their nervous systems.

Quang Di was very different from Musculo, relying much less on grapples and flips and more on jabs, kicks and blocks. It was closer to the fighting technique Maria had learned in the Queendom. It was far superior to the brawling she had learned in the Queendom, because it integrated the strikes and kicks and blocks with constant attention to her center of gravity. Footwork was very important in Quang Di, there was always attention paid to returning to a balanced state. It was very different from Musculo in that respect.

In the second round, no longer pulling their punches but staying strictly with Quang Di, Maria managed to tag Ardalos with a couple of good jabs and kicks, and Ardalos managed to tag Maria a time or two as well, making her head ring a bit and sending a strange surge of desire through her. She REALLY wanted to fuck Ardalos, she realized.

Or rather, to BE fucked by Ardalos. A strange thought for a Queendom warrior.

During the third round, Maria did much better than Ardalos than she had against Chillifra, and it wasn't just because Ardalos was a man. It was because Maria now had the Musculo moves and Queendom fighting, as she thought of it, to add to the Quang Di moves. Ardalos had quite a few moves that Maria was not familiar with, and he used them to good effect, sending Maria's head ringing a couple of times. (And giving her that strange surge of lust as well.)

After the sparring, they shook hands and Maria said, "I really enjoyed sparring with you, Ardalos."

"I enjoyed sparring with you, you hit pretty good for a girl," said Ardalos.

Maria smiled at his silly words. "I would like to get to know you better," she said. "In my lands, we would go to a field and watch the brozhas fly and swirl their tentacles around, and and listen to them sing when we want to get to know someone better."

"Where is your land?" Ardalos asked, puzzled.

"The Queendom of Rynia, on the planet we call Land," Maria said.

"Rynia," Ardalos said. "never heard of it."

"You would not have," said Maria. "It is an undiscovered planet. I am only here because slavers found my planet and kidnapped me."

"Well sounds like you do have an interesting tale to tell, Maria," said Ardalos. "What say after we shower off we meet here and I'll take you to a place we call a "club"?

"I would like that very much," Maria said.

# Chapter 10 -- Plug and Play

Maria did not have much experience with showering. There had been a waterfall back in Rynia but it tended to produce sheets of water, and was only bearable in summer. The whole "hot shower" experience was new to her, as was modern soap, but her implants helped her out and when she reappeared at Mat 15 a few minutes she felt, smelled and looked a whole lot better. Hot water showers were incredible. The Queendom of Rynia had heated baths, created at great labor, but nothing like the shower she had just taken. And her implants assured her that hot showers were very old tech.

Ardalos was looking much better, too, he had his hair done up very nicely into a sidesweep, whereas Maria still wore her Warrior's Knot hairdo that would have denoted her status even if she had not been wearing a chainmail bikini. Not that anyone on the Velnar7 Outpost understood the struggle and achievement that a Warrior's Knot represented.

Ardalos took her to what he called a "sports bar." It was full of holographic projections of people engaging in sports, including martial arts of various sorts. Ardalos found them a table and ordered a Flaming Skifian for himself and a dark beer (a sort of mead, Maria's implant assured her) for Maria.

When she took her first drink, she smiled. Not as bitter as she was accustomed to, but not sweet, either, and oh, so smooth.

"So, you are from an undiscovered planet," said Ardalos, smiling. "I was born and raised on this outpost, myself, though I've taken quite a few vacations to various planets and orbitals. So, what was life like in the Queendom of Rynia?"

"It was good," said Maria. "Granted, we did not have any technology as you have, but everybody knew what was right, and everybody did what was right."

"You had no crime?" Ardalos said. 'Why would you need a "First Sword" if you had no crime?"

"There was little or no crime in the Queendom, but there was plenty of warfare between the Queendom and the Queendom of Karan and the Queendom of Sanuzel, our nearest neighbors, as well as more distant lands. I fought in many battles."

"With swords?" Ardalos asked.

"Swords, spears, knives and axes," Maria replied. "To be a true warrior, you had to mistress many weapons."

"You seem to have all your arms and legs," Ardalos observed. 'Your medicine must have been well advanced."

"Not really," said Maria, her implants instantly informing her that the memories of the medical treatments of Rynia she had had when Ardalos mentioned medicine indicated that the Queendom's medical technology was so primitive that it was often worse than no medicine at all. "I was very good... and very lucky. Many warriors lost fingers, arms, legs, eyes and breasts. All I got was this scar on my ribs," she said, showing Ardalos the pale tracery of a scar beneath her left breast. "Fortunately, my trusty chainmail bikini protected me."

Ardalos nodded, clearly unsure whether or not to believe Maria.

"So what did you do for fun when you were not fighting to the death with pointy things?" Ardalos asked.

"I mostly I sported with my harem," said Maria. "Now don't get the wrong idea, I only had three or four men in my harem at any given time. But I did enjoy them."

Ardalos' eyes widened. "You had a harem?" he asked. "Was that... common?"

"Well, for warriors, yes," said Maria. "And some tradeswomen and of course the Queen and her court. But many women could not afford more than one man. Some poor women could not even afford one. They had to go to the manholes."

"Manholes?" Ardalos asked.

"Wretched little booze holes where men are forced to serve woman after woman sexually, night after night," said Maria, expressing her distaste. "Some of them even had an admission charge they called a "manhole cover." Imagine charging people for the opportunity to buy drinks! But it was all about sporting with men, of course."

"It sounds terrible," said Ardalos dryly.

"Oh, yes, it brought out all the worst instincts in the men," said Maria. "They became insatiable, and every time a man ran away, we always knew we just had to search the manholes for them."

"I see," said Ardalos.

"What about you?" Maria asked. "What is your job or... caste, or rank or whatever here?" She knew it was important to get a man to think you were interested in him as a person if you wanted to fuck him.

"I'm a citizen, like you," said Ardalos. "We're all citizens here. We do different things here. I'm a martial artist, at present. But I am also interested in paleohistory .. particularly small Forerunner interstellar civilizations, and have been on several expeditions to seek out and study ruins of ancient Forerunners."

"Ah," said Maria, as her implants filled her in on Forerunner civilizations, basically any ancient civilization so old that there were no contemporary records of them, some of them more than a billion years old.

"So, what do you do for fun?" Maria asked.

"I do virtual reality adventuring and I like to have affairs with interesting and different women," said Ardalos.

"Am I interesting and different?" Maria asked with a smile.

"Yes, you are," said Ardalos with a grin. "But I'm not a harem boy type."

"I know," said Maria, "I felt it the first time you hit me."

"I'm glad you felt something when I hit you," Ardalos laughed.

"I did!" Maria replied. "I mean... men never hit women in the Queendom. And women aren't supposed to hit men, but you know, when a woman gets in her cups, or it's her period, and ESPECIALLY when she gets in her cups AND it's her period, and Myther knows a period will drive you to drink, and so sometimes she might give a man a smack, you know, to keep him in line. And she'll probably feel terrible about it you know, even though some men like to be hit. And women," she added, blushing a bit.

"Do tell," said Ardalos, his expression unfathomable but with just a hint of amusement.

"Yes!" responded Maria. "I always thought it was bullshit, until you hit me, and I realized that I REALLY wanted you to hit me again. Suddenly, I understood."

"So, some women like to be hit by men?" Ardalos asked.

"There were rumors of that sort of thing back when I was in the Queendom, but I never believed them, because I didn't understand them," said Maria. "I mean, it probably started when I was in that slaver ship cell, watching my cellmate chained to the floor and being fucked by one of the guards. It was SO intense! And at first I was feeling glad that it wasn't me that was being fucked, because that would have been so unwarriorlike. But then I started to feel... turned on... and... jealous."

Maria felt a strange rush of feelings as she spoke. She would never had said such things to anyone back in the Queendom, but nobody here even knew where the Queendom was. She would have felt great shame to say such things in Rynia, but she felt giddy and free and liberated to say them here. Most especially to a man. She wondered how long she had been harboring these feelings... all her life, perhaps?

Her implants were strangely silent on that topic.

"It must have been a strange experience, being a slave in the hold of a ship after being a proud warrior for so long," Ardalos observed.

"Oh, Myther, yes," Maria said. "We warriors are expected to fight to the death, and we often do, or at least, to the maiming. So we are rarely enslaved. And those who are have great shame, not just for being a slave, but because it is generally assumed that a warrior who is enslaved surrendered, rather than fight to the death."

"And you have... no backups in the Queendom?" Ardalos asked.

"None," said Maria. "I mean, we were assured by the Holy Wise Women that we would be reborn in the Halls of Myther if we died in battle, with 72 virgin men to attend to us and endless supplies of food and mead as our courage is celebrated endlessly in the Halls. I always claimed to believe it, but really, I only half believed it, at a certain level I knew it was mumbo-jumbo. Not like I believed in the notion that I would be brought back if I died in a match at the Ladies and Gentlemen's Sporting Club of Good Civility."

"What made you believe in the Ladies and Gentlemen's Sporting Club claims?" Ardalos asked.

"Well, they made me fill out a form!" said Maria as if nothing could be more obvious. "I've never heard of ANY religion that made you fill out a form giving permission to be brought back from the dead. It was always assumed that you would want that!"

Ardalos raised a brow."You have a point," he said, taking a sip of his Flaming Skifian.

"Do you sport with women?" Maria asked. She was trying to be subtle but her needs were much upon her. If Ardalos had been one of her thralls she would already be underneath him.

"I do indeed," said Ardalos with a smile. "To be honest, it's how most of us spend a great deal of our free time, sporting with one another, men and women."

"Would you sport with me? Would you make me your woman, to serve you abjectly and in any way you please?" Maria asked.

"I would," Ardalos answered. "But you've got to promise to respect me in the morning."

"Why wouldn't I respect you in the morning?" Maria asked, puzzled, and also relieved. "Are you not good at sporting with women?"

"Touche," said Ardalos, laughing. "Let's go find out."

Maria was out of her chair instantly. He didn't have to ask her twice.

They discussed what kind of love nest to rent as they walked to the nearest transporter. They settled on one based on the barbaric Empire of Kaninga, well known for its decadent low-tech sexual excesses. They also chose a safeword, which was "Pink" and a safe sign as well, which was the little finger and forefinger sticking straight out with the other fingers curled in, which in the Queendom meant, "Your father was a cheese harvester" a horrible insult to be sure, and not the sort of thing any member of the Queendom might accidentally do with her fingers.

The Kaningan love nest was a huge room, with silken curtains everywhere, richly designed, throw pillows lining the floor, a large, luxurious bath that was really more of a swimming pool, a large throne, and several interesting-looking benches and devices of a sexual nature, including a cross.

"It's beautiful!" Maria declared, delighted with the fantasy of sex, wealth and excess that the room created. It was how she had imagined the Queen's harem looked in Rynia.

"Yes, it is," said Ardalos agreeably as he guided her over to a table.

"Now to start with, strip off your clothes and kneel before me," Ardalos ordered.

Maria nodded and kicked off her shoes.

"Now what does a slave girl say when given an order, mine?" Ardalos asked.

Maria thought for a moment. She remember what Dita had said when she had been fucking Sven.

"Yes, Master?" Maria said.

"Yes, say that whenever I give you an order, understand?" Ardalos said.

"Yes, Master," Maria said, shimmying out of her chainmail thong, a much less tricky thing now that her pubic hair was no longer present to catch in the links. She still had to take care with her nipples and the chainmail top, but they weren't nearly the problem that pubic hair could be.

She knelt once she was naked and looked up at Ardalos expectantly.

"Before we proceed, I like to have a little ceremony, in which you acknowledge yourself as my slave for the duration," said Ardalos.

"Yes, Master," Maria said happily. It sounded like wonderful fun to her. And she liked wonderful fun.

"Very well," said Ardalos. "I Ardalos of the Vesper7 Outpost, by the power invested in me as a citizen of this outpost, do hereby accept you, Maria of Rynia, as my slave girl. You will be mine to have and to hold, to bend, fold, spindle and mutilate, for as long as we shall both find it kinky good fun. Say Yes Master to acknowledge your understanding and agreement."

"Yes, Master," Maria said immediately. Naked and kneeling, she was hot for the game.

"Very well," said Ardalos. He walked over to a chest of drawers on the side of the wall and pawed about in it, creating a few clinking sounds. Then he walked back over to Maria and said, "Lift your head."

Maria did so, and felt a warm glow of pleasure as Ardalos placed a collar around her neck and locked it in place. It was large and heavy and very shiny and smooth.

"Go to the chest of drawers and selected appropriate shackles and cuffs," Ardalos ordered. "Select some nice barbaric arm ornaments and whatnot as well... but nothing that will hinder access to your intimate places and your breasts, understand?"

"Yes, Master," Maria replied, scurrying over to the chest of drawers. There she found a number of familiar items to wear, as well as a few that puzzled her. She brought over the ones she thought looked good and a couple that puzzled her, placing them on the floor and kneeling in front of him.

Ardalos looked over the shackles, the cuffs and the ornaments and nodded approvingly. "Very good, mine."

Then he picked up one of the things that had puzzled Maria. "You wanted to wear a tail?" he asked, running a hand down its soft, silky reddish-brown fur, holding it by the plug at its end.

"I will if it pleases you, Master," Maria replied. "I do not know what it is. I was hoping you would explain."

"I will," said Ardalos. "It's a tail for you to wear. It helps some girls feel like sexy beasts."

"Yes, Master," said Maria. She was not sure what that meant, but it sounded fun.

"You shall wear it," Ardalos declared.

"Yes, Master," Maria responded. She kind of liked being made to wear it, even though she didn't want to.

Ardalos walked behind her and put the tail where it belonged.

She felt softness brushing against the back of her legs and realized it was her tail.

"A new device has been added to your anatomy," said Maria's implant. "it requests permission to link to the rest of your implants. The software it is using has been certified safe by the Velnar7 Outpost Software Authority."

"I don't understand," Maria subvocalized.

"The tail you are wearing has software that will allow it to wag and so forth," said the implant. "It will be controlled by your emotions. If you are happy, it will wag, if you are frightened, it will stick straight out and the fur will get puffy, just like any animal's tail. If you consciously want to use it, it will respond just as your arms and legs do."

"Is this normal?" Maria subvocalized. "Can I take it off?"

"It is a standard model tail here," said the implant. "And of course you can take it out, it's plug and play."

"All right, then," said Maria to her nanoset. "let it wag or whatever."

At these words, Maria felt the tail lift from the back of her legs, and it wagged back and forth. Apparently Maria was happy. And apart from a little nervousness and embarrassment at playing the slave, Maria realized she WAS happy. Handy thing, a tail.

Ardalos saw it, too.

"Glad to see you are having a good time," he said, grinning.

"Yes, Master," Maria said.

"Well since you have a tail, I guess you need to learn a few tricks," said Ardalos. Get on your knees, slave."

"Yes, Master," said Maria, obeying, her tail wagging a bit as she did so. She loved saying "Yes, Master."

"Now beg like the little pet doggie you are," Ardalos ordered.

"Yes, Master," Maria said. There were no pet doggies in the Queendom, as most beasts were large, scaly and prone to eat human beings if given the least opportunity. But her implant showed her an image of a pet doggie begging, and M aria understood what Ardalos wanted. She obligingly sat back on her haunches and raised her hands to shoulder height, elbows bent, wrists limp, sticking her tongue out of one side of her mouth and letting it loll there while smiling up at Ardalos.

"What are you doing with your tongue?" Ardalos asked.

Maria pulled her tongue back into her mouth.

"Is that not how pet doggies beg, Master?" Maria asked. "My implant showed me a picture of a pet doggie begging. It looked very much like that."

"No doggies back in the Queendom, eh?" Ardalos asked.

"None, Master," Maria said.

"Dogs hang their tongues out like that to cool their bodies," said Ardalos. "Humans don't need to, so when humans imitate doggies, they leave their tongues in their mouths."

"Yes, Master," she said.

"Now, do you wish me to fuck you, mine?" Ardalos asked.

"Yes, Master!" Maria said, still in full doggie begging posture.

"Do you want me to use you like the sex beast you are?" he asked.

"Yes, Master!" Maria said, her voice full of enthusiasm.

"Then beg me to do so, like the abject slave you are," Ardalos ordered.

"Please fuck me, Master, I beg you," Maria dutifully said.

Ardalos slapped her across the cheek.. She felt her cheek warm, but her pussy was warmer.

"You call that begging?" Ardalos asked. "I've heard more convincing begging from a robocall. Now try it again, this time with some passion. If you can't beg for sex with any conviction I'll have to leave."

The threat to leave, unlike the slap, frightened her.

"Master, please fuck me, please, I need your touch so much!" Maria cried. She remember her harem men had sometimes begged her for sex. She had thought it cute. But perhaps they had felt the same desperate need she now felt.

"Master, I beg for your use!" Maria continued. "Please let me serve you, I beg it!"

Ardalos nodded. "That's better," he said. "Now you wait there just like that, beast. Don't move a muscle."

"Yes, Master," Maria said, remaining very still.

Ardalos then proceeded to disrobe. He was fast and utilitarian about it, but Maria watched him with shining eyes. His body was powerful, the lines well curved with the muscles massed on his powerful frame, but he did not look misshapen as some of the men at the Sporting Club had. His muscles swelled gracefully from his stomach to his back, with nice arcs from his shoulders to his neck, and his upper arms had some very nice biceps decorating them.

And the cup that had protected his cock had had its work cut out for it, because there was much to protect.

Maria's implants assured her that almost all men in the Conglomeration were very fit and handsome, because there were nanotech devices that could easily and cheaply make them fit and handsome. But that did not in any way lessen Maria's enjoyment of Ardalos' chiseled features and well-developed body.

Ardalos stood before Maria once more. "You may now kiss and lick my feet, slave," he ordered.

"Yes, Master," Maria said, her whole being suddenly a vortex of contradictory feelings. Kissing and licking someone's feet was one of the lowest things a person could do in the Queendom. Only slaves were ever required to do such things! It was unthinkable that she should do such a thing!

And at the same time, she hungered to lick and kiss Ardalos' feet with every fiber of her being, and all the non-fibrous parts, too. Maybe it was BECAUSE foot worship was such a scandalous thing that she was dying to do it.

And so she knelt down and began kissing and licking Ardalos' feet with all the servile enthusiasm her harem boys had kissed her feet with, once upon a time. She felt utterly abject as she did so, and yet at the same time her whole body was thrilling with pleasure at that abjectness. And her pussy was getting wet, she knew.

She would never have guessed she could get this much pleasure from foot worship. So much had been concealed from her by her own mind, no less.

"You may work your way upward, beast, but you must beg if you wish to worship my moonbeast of lust," said Ardalos.

"Yes, Master, thank you, Master," Maria said breathily as she began kissing north of Ardalo's ankles, working her way up his calves to his knees, his thighs, and eventually...

"Master, may I worship your throbbing moonbeast with my mouth?" she asked breathily, giving voice to the desire that filled her, eyeing Ardalos' gently swaying Monty Python of love as it dangled before her.

"Yes, you may, beast," Ardalos said magnanimously. He was nice that way. And in many other ways, Maria discovered over the next few hours.

# Chapter 12 -- Space Caravan

Flushed with her success with her first client, Dita had gone shopping. Everything was so cheap on the outpost. Well, most everything. Things which were produced by sentient labor tended to be high-priced and rare. But such items were almost always arts and crafts style novelty stuff... computer-designed and printed goods were always the best and most durable, just as printed foods were the tastiest – everyone knew that.

Knowing now that her appeal for clients would be her background as a former real-life slave, Maria had selected a wide variety of garments to play that up. She had collars ranging from simple iron bands to golden collars set with gems. She had garments made of translucent fleerby silk that revealed much and subtly brought attention to what little was not revealed. She knew she was appealing to men's fantasies rather than any kind of reality, so she leaned heavily toward the glamorous and sexy sort of imagery. But she also bought a few ragged shifts and unflattering rags because some men might prefer that. Men were prone to vary widely in their tastes.

Dita was happily trying on her new outfits when Maria stepped out of the transporter lock.

"Hi, Dita!" Maria exclaimed in what were the cheeriest tones she had ever heard Maria utter. Dita looked up at Maria, startled, as she was adjusting a bronze cuff incised with a beautifully designed floral pattern.

Maria had been shopping, too. She wore a chainmail bikini. And a collar. And some leather cuffs. And shackles. And a big, dopey grin. There was a collection of boxes delivered from various weapon shops all over the Outpost already sitting in the transporter lock. But it was the slave wear that alarmed Dita.

Maria walked over to Dita and gave her a warm hug. "I have met the most WONDERFUL man!" Maria declared. "His name is Ardalos. He hit me! Then he furred me, and he made me his slavegirl! I feel wonderful!"

"He "furred" you?" Dita asked. "He bought you a fur garment?"

"No, silly, he made love to me," Maria said, releasing Dita and flopping down on one of the beds that still filled the passenger area of their lifeboat. "That's what we called making love in the Queendom, because we generally did it in a bed of furs, soft, warm and luxurious. But today Ardalos strapped me to a steel frame and made me scream with pleasure into my gag, and it was WONDERFUL."

"It sounds wonderful," Dita said, "I'm so happy for you!" Dita was not in fact happy for Maria. In her experience, infatuation and love rarely worked out well. But Dita knew better than to express her true feelings to someone who was in the first throes of infatuation, as Maria clearly was.

"I never DREAMED I would be the sort of woman who would want a man to rule her in the furs, bit I am, I am, I just found that out about myself, isn't it amazing?" Maria said in a burst. "I thought only weak or sick women want that, but I had NO IDEA how much fun it was. I heard whispers about women doing such things back in the Queendom, but I really didn't understand it and I didn't believe them."

"Well, I'm sure you understand better now," Dita observed. She had sensed Maria's disapproval of Dita's history as a love slave and whore, and had ascribed it generally to Maria coming from a primitive, probably sex-negative society. Now Dita had a better idea where Maria was coming from.

Suddenly, the lifeboat started to move.

"We are disembarking on an emergency basis," announced the Pink Marauder, which was the name Dita and Maria had compromised on for the lifeboat. "Please return to your seats and get strapped in."

"What emergency basis? Why are we debarking?" Dita shouted as she ran to the captain's chair of the Pink Marauder.

"We can't go!" Maria cried. "Ardalos is back there! Ardalos!"

"What, do you think this is MY idea?" Dita cried. "What the hell are we doing, what's the emergency, Pinky?"

"I am not at liberty to disclose that information at the moment," said the Pink Marauder. Even though it was a merely a very expert system and not an AI, it had something very close to a feeling about being called "Pinky." Still, it had been informally named "Pinky" by its humanoids, so Pinky it was, except in formal communications with other beings and vessels, of course.

"What the fuck is this?" Dita asked her implant.

"I'm trying to get through to Froddicher on the netlink, but I cannot manage it," said Dita's implant.

"The transporter won't work!" Maria cried a moment later.

"The transporter has been disabled during the emergency," said Pinky.

"What emergency?" Maria growled.

"I am not at liberty to disclose that information at this moment," said Pinky.

"Do you suppose something horrible is happening to the station?" Maria asked.

Dita pulled up the lifeboat's cameras and sensors and was a little surprised to find that they worked.

"Nothing going on there that our sensors can discover," said Dita.

As Pinky made its way away from the station, a number of spacecraft that had been orbiting around the station coincidentally altered their orbits, all of them to a heading that would have them following Pinky. Almost all the ships involved appeared to be merchant ships registered in neutral ports which kept licenses and fees low, a common practice among merchant ships, and were to all appearances appropriately armed and armored for merchantmen that traveled in the Beyond.

"The game is afoot," said Grounds for Dis Missile to Froddicher via netlink.

"I hope the good guys win," said Froddicher.

"Don't we all?" Grounds for Dis Missile responded.

"Jumping to FTL space," Pinky announced.

"This stinks to the Back of Beyond," Dita muttered as Maria strapped herself into her seat.

"Do you think this is maybe the Chizoom trying to get us and their ship back?" Maria asked.

"I really doubt it," said Dita. "We are Conglomeration citizens now, and we were never all that valuable to the Chizoom. Just cargo. And the lifeboat, while valuable, is not all THAT valuable – not worth a dust-up with the Conglomeration, especially not with a Surround warship in the neighborhood. I'm pretty sure something else is going on, but I have no idea what."

Maria sat back in her seat. "That makes sense," she growled. "But whoever it is that is separating me from my Master Ardalos is going to have a little talk with me real soon, and they may not survive it."

"Leaving Velnar7 Outpost space," announced the lifeboat, and then almost immediately, "Jumping to FTL space."

"Abort, go back to the station! Abort!" Dita said as she saw a dusting of white specs on the radar moving from the fuzz of ships surrounding the Outpost toward them.

"Sorry, return is not possible," said the lifeboat.

Meanwhile, almost two dozen spacecraft entered FTL space in the general vicinity of Pinky, whose sensors immediately detected them.

And on almost two dozen spacecraft, voices in two dozen languages cried "We've got company!" as their sensors lit up with all the other craft's locations.

Immediately, all the captains had the same thought.

"Might as well pick some of them off while we can," secure in the knowledge that their spacecraft was not the simple merchant ship it appeared to be, but held weapons and shielding more appropriate to a warship of its size, its "cargo hold" of weapons and shielding carefully masked from prying sensors.

"Why the hell are all those ships following us, Pinky?" asked Dita. "Were we secretly picked to lead a space caravan or what?"

"I do not know," said Pinky. "Shields are up, preparing for evasive maneuvers."

"Shields up, arm weapons, and fire as targets present themselves!" was the next command echoed by Pinky's pursuers.

Immediately the space behind Pinky lit up with an array of missiles, beams, and chunks of depleted uranium hurled by mass drivers at ludicrous speeds. Sheilds flickered and flared, ships the size of buildings made impossibly tight turns and leapt in and out of FTL space like sewing machine needles darting in and out of the fabric of space time.

As the ships ducked in and out of FTL space the scale of the conflict naturally expanded, and because the ships were intent on following Pinky, the sphere of the conflict soon engulfed Pinky, as its evasive maneuvers sent it in and out of FTL space along with all the other spacecraft.

"What's going on, Pinky?" Maria asked as her and Maria's eyes were swamped with color as the ship blew in and out of FTL space. Not that they could make heads or tails out of the ship's nav screen. The tiny dots that were behind them were all around them, and there were hundreds if not thousands of tinier dots representing the array of missiles, torpedoes and chunks of driven mass flying all around them, with little lines, some of them dotted, depicting the path of ravening beams of utter destruction, which were absolutely the worst kind of ravening beam.

"The ships that are following us are in conflict," said Pinky. "We are in the middle of it."

"Why are they trying to kill us?" Dita cried.

"They are not trying to kill us," said Pinky. "I have detected no weapons aimed at us so far. But so many weapons are being used that we are in serious danger of straying into vortexes of doom aimed at others."

"Vortexes of doom?" Maria wondered.

"A common space battle term for the firing range of a warship," responded her implant.

Pinky gave a lurch and flipped into N-space for a moment, then flipped around and skipped about.

"What was that?" cried Maria.

"Our recent maneuver was because a Zeskon merchant ship popped up very close to us from N-space and tried to put a tractor beam on us," said Pinky.

Suddenly the ship lurched and the lights dimmed for an instant just before doing their hyperspace jump routine with the colors and the wavy lights.

"What was THAT, Pinky?" cried Dita.

"We got in the path of a submeson beam aimed at the Zeskon freighter that tried to tractor beam us," said Pinky.

"Are we OK?" asked Maria.

"Six percent loss of shield capacity, recharging now," said Pinky.

"Shouldn't a close range hit from a submeson beam have pretty much destroyed our shields?" Maria asked, having been talking to her implant.

"Our shields were upgraded on the outpost, along with our weaponry," responded Pinky.

"Who did that?" Dita asked.

"A Wyrix freighter," said Pinky. "It tried to take a shot at the Zeskons when they got close and clipped us instead."

"A Wyrix freighter upgraded our shields?" Dita asked.

"I am not at liberty to say who upgraded my shields," responded Pinky as they lurched and swerved again.

"Get us OUT of here!" yelled Maria.

"I am trying, but "here" keeps following us," responded Pinky as she looped and cut into N space in mid-swerve, changing her heading in N space then popping out in FTL space on a different heading some distance from where she had been. "All my processors are working at it, except what is used to communicate with you... because if we cannot escape this battle, I fear we face... Certain Doom!"

## End Part 1

Will Pinky and her humanoids escape from Certain Doom caused by ravening beams of utter destruction? Will Maria reunite with Ardalos? And why did the Pink Marauder just take off like that?

Find out in Part 2, "Alien Harem," coming soon to a cyberspace near you!

# Other Books And Information About Pat Powers

Like this book? Visit  Pat Powers' International Bookstore and see all of the stories and books he's written! But beware, he writes mostly erotica.

He's also got a blog where he promotes his books, you can find it here.

You can reach Pat Powers at his email address: patpowers1995@yahoo.com, and get on his email list for updates on new books and projects.
