Her Daddy and Her Master

by Katie Douglas

  Flin had no idea what she was talking about, but apparently he was the hero of her own little drama.

  “The girl… she’s very important. Do you know which direction the men took her in?”

  “Yes, I always watch the agents of the orange triangle, I want to know where it’s hiding, so I can avoid it. They went past me, and then turned around—trying to cover their tracks, you see, but I was watching them, I was. They went over that way, then they turned right at that intersection.”

  “Thank you,” Flin said.

  “Luck to you, you’ll need it, should you encounter the orange triangle. It took my candle from my arms, it did.”

  “I… am sorry for your loss. I must go.” He didn’t know what to say in the face of the bizarre conversation about an orange triangle. It really made no sense, but her directions might take him to Laila, so he turned and left. Basil caught up with him as he ran down the street toward where the men had apparently gone. Flin stopped at the corner.

  “Got an idea?” Basil asked. Flin didn’t answer.

  The next street was long, and lined with deserted buildings either side. Flin looked on the ground and focused. With his heightened half-elf senses, he saw disturbances in the dust on the ground, which looked like traces of footsteps. Two men carrying something heavier than the normal weight for their shoe size. A displacement of dust where a droplet of water had fallen. Had Laila been crying?

  He followed the footprints; Basil was right behind him. They came to a filthy building with two large men standing in the way of the door. They weren’t quite as tall as Flin, but certainly wide enough to give him pause.

  “Excuse me,” he said, indicating that he and Basil wished to pass.

  “We’re closed for business,” one of them said.

  “Yeah, go to halbardet,” the other added. Flin had no patience for idiot humanoids with untranslatable cusswords today.

  “Get the fuck out of my way.” He shoved them both away from the door. They still decided to try to fight. They ended up face down in a dumpster, groaning and clutching various body parts. Flin might have used some finesse, had he not been so keen to find Laila. Basil touched his arm; Flin glared at him.

  “Let me do the talking, Flin.”

  “Only if they’ll talk,” Flin growled.

  They went through the door. It was dirtier on the inside. There was one man sitting at the ancient, rusty bar, drinking something brown from a grubby glass. This place was everything Flin hated about interplanetary colonization. Earth, along with some of the Prime planets, had thrown its idea of culture far and wide; it had dirtied everywhere it terraformed, like maggots eating the flesh of a shiny red apple, leaving only the veneer of civilization coating the damage.

  “Hey there, so I’m looking for a girl with brown hair, last seen wearing a sailor dress and being carried by two men,” Basil said, leaning on the bar beside the man.

  “Wouldn’t know anything ‘bout that.” The man tried to get up but Flin pushed him back to his barstool and held his arms firmly. Flin leaned over the man’s shoulder so their faces were inches apart.

  “Funny, I saw a man leaving the hotel matching your description,” Flin snarled, having no idea whether the man had anything to do with it or not.

  The man gave him that deer caught in the headlights look that he’d seen so many times before. Being over seven feet tall in a world of six footers often had that effect on people.

  Flin twisted his arm. The tough guy screamed in pain.

  “Where’s the girl, chatterbox?” Flin growled.

  “I don’t know. Arrrgh! Okay, okay! I’ll talk. To you,” he nodded at Basil, “just call your chimp off!”

  Basil looked at Flin with a raised eyebrow. Flin rolled his eyes and released his grip on the man’s arm.

  “Talk to him,” Flin said sharply.

  “I brought her through here. The belle’s being held in a warehouse not far from this bar. They said we’d split the cash, but they took my cut. Nasty place; men with blasters everywhere.”

  “Can you tell me the address, please?” Basil asked.

  “Twelfth dock, warehouse twenty-one.”

  “Why’d they take her?” Basil wondered.

  “There’s been an advert online for a few weeks. Man on another planet wants the belle. He’s payin’ good loot,” the man said. “It was only a matter of time, at that price.”

  Flin resisted the urge to pummel his face into the bar. Instead, he turned and left, accompanied by Basil.

  “Any idea where dock twelve is?” Basil asked.

  “Not dock twelve; twelfth dock. They’re two separate places.” Flin knew he was being pedantic, but he was also correct. “It’s a half mile from here.”

  They walked down the browned, filthy pavement made from some sort of opaque stone. There was no glowing, glassy road here. The old buildings were falling down, remnants of the first settlers, who hadn’t expected to stay for long. The best thing that could happen to this part of town would be for it to get torn up and replaced with pod housing; self-contained, affordably tiny homes for single people. Flin knew it was a matter of time before a construction company bought this whole area and evaporated it, and he couldn’t wait.

  The docks were not built by the sea, a fact that had surprised Flin when he first arrived on Minos Kerala. Since they were space docks, designed for the loading and unloading of vast cargo transports several times larger than The Great Gig, vast swathes of the inland wilderness had been turned into huge warehouses with great, open paved areas that could land spaceships big enough to carry several of the huge nuclear fusion devices that humanoids had insisted on using on all their terraformed planets.

  When they got to the edge of the warehouse, Flin held up his hand. Basil stopped.

  “See something?” Basil looked up at Flin, who shook his head.

  “I can sense a few lives in there,” Flin said. “Heat traces from four blasters. Nothing we can’t handle.”

  Basil nodded, and asked, “Are we going to use a strategy or just go in?”

  “I was just going to walk in. Blasters can’t harm me.”

  “What about Laila? They could start shooting at her the second the doors opened and she’d be dead before we got to her.”

  “Fuck. Ideas?”

  “Dead Tourist?” Basil hazarded. Flin thought for a second, then his face broke out into a sardonic grin.

  “Dead Tourist,” Flin nodded.

  “You go,” Basil said.

  Flin went to the door and knocked on it. A man opened the door ajar so the blaster Flin knew the man must be holding was hidden behind the door. Opening the door was the man’s first mistake.

  “What d’ya want, tit-ears?” he demanded. Tit-ears was a highly offensive term for elves. Speaking to Flin in an impolite tone was the man’s second mistake.

  “Pardon me, folks, but I’m all turned around! Could ya help a fella… oh… oh…?” Flin clutched at his chest and fell forward. The man let go of the door he’d been holding, as he instinctively stepped back to avoid seven feet and three inches of half-elf crashing toward him. Flin fell through the doorway and hit the ground, hard. He stopped his heart just in time to feel someone pressing against his wrist for a pulse.

  “What’s the disturbance?”

  “It’s a dead tourist!”

  “What? Quick, get him inside, close the door. No one can see a stiff on the premises!”

  Rough hands pulled Flin into the warehouse, and he heard the door close behind him. That was their third mistake. They dragged him about forty feet then dropped him onto the ground. Flin listened intently.

  “What should we do with him, boss?” The voice came from exactly two feet to Flin’s left.

  “Bag him and chuck him.” The other voice was eight feet away, in a diagonal to Flin’s front and left.

  “Is he definitely dead?” A third voice was at the back of the room. When he really strained his ears, Flin could hear stifled sobbing from near h
im. That would be Laila, trying not to show she was scared, he surmised.

  He waited until someone tried to move him again, then he sent a spark of energy to restart his heart, and swiftly moved to immobilize the person nearest to him.

  He snapped his eyes open; there were three men in the room, and Laila, who was tied up. One of the three men was now on the floor, groaning in pain. Flin launched himself at the man who’d been called boss, and got him on the ground, unable to move. The man beside Laila pointed his blaster at Flin, who made a show of throwing his hands up in mock-defeat. Basil had to be close to making an entrance.

  A thud through one of the high windows made everyone look for the source. That was when Basil came in through the back door. Basil lifted the blaster out of the hands of the man beside Laila and kicked him over. Flin was so angry, he was about to break the boss’s neck, but Basil fired the blaster in their general direction. Flin deflected the energy beams before they hit. Basil had clearly been trying to stop Flin from killing the boss—his abilities weren’t a secret.

  “Don’t kill him. We need to know who sent them,” Basil called from where he crouched next to Laila, trying to untie her. Flin was annoyed, but he conceded that Basil was correct. Flin collected himself and glared at the kidnapper.

  “Talk,” he snarled to the man he was holding down.

  “Why?”

  “Look, you can either talk with your fingers, or without, it’s up to you. Personally, if I had a face like yours, I’d do anything to be able to keep jacking off.” Flin spoke casually, now. He felt a lot better for having found Laila, but he wasn’t going to let these crooks off lightly. The gangster glared pure hatred at Flin, but the man knew he was beat. Flin had no intention of removing his fingers, of course; it was far too messy for his tastes, but the crook didn’t need to know that.

  “Man called Gar-Kon, on Pombos. Offering a million universal credits for the belle, alive, or half a mill if she’s dead.”

  Flin heard Laila gasp when she heard this. He knocked the man out and went to Laila and Basil.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked; Basil had already untied her.

  “Just scared,” she replied. “I’m so sorry, I never should have left my room.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. I did tell you never to go anywhere without Basil or myself.”

  “I just wanted a hot chocolate, and I was so proud I’d woken up early. I didn’t want to disturb either of you. I’m sorry. Now my lovely sailor dress is ruined.” She looked down and Flin noticed that the men had torn her dress in places; presumably she’d tried to escape at some point.

  “Looks like you put up a good fight.”

  “I bit that man.” She pointed at the one on the floor. “He tried to… tried to… but he didn’t, and you’re both here now, and we can leave this place.”

  Flin glared down at the man she’d pointed out. He could well imagine what the man had tried to do to Laila. Flin aimed a particularly nasty kick at the man’s ribs and was rewarded with a satisfying crunch. Nobody got to mistreat Laila like that. Flin picked her up, savoring the feeling of her soft warm body as he carried her out of the warehouse.

  Walking down the dirty, dusty street, Flin started to voice some of his thoughts.

  “I would have been less disturbed to take you downstairs for a hot chocolate at daybreak than to search Minos Kerala City for you. You’re due a spanking for doing something that put you in a dangerous situation. However, it’s not entirely your fault, because nobody could reasonably expect that to happen, so I’m not going to punish you anywhere near as much as I would have done if you’d walked out of there,” Flin said. Laila nodded.

  “I knew I’d never escape Gar-Kon.” She stared at her fingers morosely.

  “We’ll fix this,” Flin promised.

  “Don’t you worry about Gar-Kon, princess,” Basil added.

  “I want to move to a different hotel,” Flin said. The security lapse at their hotel was a deal-breaker for him. “I can’t believe they let those men carry Laila out of there without saying or doing anything.”

  “We’re going to need to do more than that, aren’t we?” Basil’s words were surprising. Flin had expected Basil to try to make excuses for the hotel staff. His world view was less clear-cut than Flin’s.

  “We are?” he asked.

  “I think we need to go and talk to Gar-Kon. Get him to quit putting out a reward for Laila,” Basil said.

  “You mean, go back to Pombos?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “No! Please don’t go back there!” Laila begged. “I’ll die!”

  “We have to. We need to stop Gar-Kon from trying to find you. He’s got every criminal in the galaxy looking for you, honey.” Basil stroked her hair while Flin carried her.

  “I agree that would be the best long-term solution, but what about Laila? We can’t just leave her here. Someone could kidnap her again,” Flin observed.

  “She’ll have to come with us on the ship.”

  “What if it gets taken?”

  “We’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  Flin nodded. There really was no choice, but it didn’t mean he had to like it.

  “I don’t want to go back near there. Please, can’t I just stay here?” Laila, who had been so brave while they rescued her, looked stricken.

  “Sweetheart, the ship is the safest place for you to be until this is all straightened out. You have to trust us to keep you safe. When we get back, I’ll take you to the zoo like I promised, how does that sound?” Basil was so good at reassuring her; Flin supposed it was probably because when she was around Basil, she often reacted to things the way a child would. He could see a subtle difference in the way she behaved around himself. It wasn’t like her personality was totally different, there was just an exaggeration of certain characteristics that became less pronounced when both Flin and Basil were around her at the same time. Flin was willing to bet that she hadn’t noticed these slight differences in her behavior and responses yet. One of his plans for her was to help her become more aware of her actions and reactions, but it would have to wait until the current crisis was over.

  Chapter Ten

  Laila brushed her hair on the edge of Basil’s bed, lost in thought. She was sad they’d had to leave Minos Kerala, and she felt pretty guilty since it was her fault. If Basil had never rescued her and brought her on board the ship, she reasoned, both men would have been able to live their lives without her being a nuisance to them.

  As a result of her guilt, Laila had been listless since they set off for Pombos. Of course, the fact that they were going back to her home planet also made her miserable. What if they changed their minds when they got there, decided she was too much trouble after all, and just put her off the ship so they could get on with life? Laila had known this whole escape had been too good to be true.

  She hadn’t told Basil or Flin, because it was bad enough that Basil was making her go to a doctor about her sleep problem, but since she’d left Pombos, she’d never been completely sure that all of this was real. It seemed far more likely, given her track record for having a horrible life, that she was actually having some sort of extended episode of insanity. She was afraid that she would wake up in an asylum one day soon, and discover that all these months had passed while she’d been in this dream, or whatever the doctors would call it. She knew her mother would visit, drawing all the attention to herself and getting around the doctors. Her mother would simultaneously pretend that she was blameless and long-suffering, and that Laila was a bad egg and totally irredeemable. Laila worried about this, because she thought that, if they returned to Pombos in the ship, she would wake up when they landed. The whole idea of getting to safety and living happily ever after just wasn’t sitting right with her, and while she wasn’t certain about whether this new life was real or not, she had enough doubts for it to worry her. If this wasn’t reality, she wondered if it was even worth waking up to life in an asylum, with visits
from her mother and Gar-Kon, and with no hope of seeing Basil or Flin again. If they even existed. She was trying very hard not to think about it, but it was rapidly becoming her biggest fear.

  In the face of this, let alone the prospect that this was reality, and that Gar-Kon might kill Basil or Flin, or both of them, Laila was finding it harder and harder to participate in anything outside her own thoughts. She brushed her hair aimlessly, hardly paying attention to which bits were done and which were still knotted. There was a knock at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Flin,” Flin’s voice said, as the door opened. Laila didn’t bother looking up.

  “What?” Laila asked, staring into space and brushing the same piece of hair still.

  “I wanted to check—”

  “You wanted to check if I’m okay, or if I need anything, or if everything’s all right. I’m sick of hearing it from Basil. I’m not going to be anything close to okay until we’re speeding away from Pombos again. Preferably with the whole place on fire.”

  “I wanted to check if you were wearing your butt plug,” Flin said, and he fixed Laila with a steely gaze. She felt herself getting quivery under his glare.

  “Sorry. And no, I forgot,” she said.

  “I specifically told you last week, that first time we played together, that you were to wear one every day for a couple of hours. You’re due a punishment for not following instructions. I’ll add it to the punishment you’re due for leaving your room without telling us at the hotel. Please come down to the cargo bay in an hour. Don’t be late.”

  Flin left again, and Laila stared after him, then looked up into the mirror. She realized she’d brushed the same piece of hair long after it stopped being tangled. When had she last remembered to wear her butt plug? As she thought back, she knew it had been the day before she was kidnapped. She had been so preoccupied with the prospect of returning to Pombos that she’d repeatedly failed to follow a standing instruction.

  How had he known? Was it usually visible through her clothes, or something?

  The idea of getting two punishments at the same time was scary, especially from Flin. He was much harsher than Basil in a number of different ways.