by T. J. Quinn
CHAPTER TWELVE
Scarlet
We worked for probably eighteen hours straight getting the rescued slaves settled. The first load of bunks arrived about halfway through that stretch. Engineering went to work immediately setting them up and fastening them to the floor. They also partitioned off a section for the women with tarps so they could have a little privacy. The whole group was in worse condition then we had been with the Farseek Mercenaries rescued us. These people had been worked to exhaustion in the months since they’d been captured.
Most of them had never been in space before their capture by the Sargans. A few had flown civilian starships, mostly freighters. The rests were mainly farmers, technicians, and craftspeople. Once we got bunks set up, and they picked their beds, they laid down and went to sleep amid the controlled chaos.
Zoey and I were almost as exhausted as they were by the time we had all our rescues checked in and recorded. I’m sure the crew was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be any of their family members among the two groups. But, the rescue operation was no less spectacular. They did it all with only minor casualties.
As much as I wanted to wait up for Pyrr, I simply stripped and fell into our bed when I got back to our quarters. I woke hours later cuddled against Pyrr, wrapped in his arms.
I smiled to myself and sighed contentedly as his breath fanned across my shoulder. I didn’t want to move, but my bladder was telling me I’d better. That and his hard cock pressing into the crack of my ass. After everything we’d been through in the last twenty-four hours, a good fucking would probably be first on our morning agenda, and I needed a shower and mouth cleansing.
Pyrr
I had gone to sleep with my woman in my arms and woke up alone with an intense hardon. Then I heard the shower running in the bathroom with the door opened and grinned. Had she not wished for me to join her she would have closed the door. Sleep and the nanites in my bloodstream had rejuvenated me so that I wasn’t even sore from my endeavors the day before.
Since they generally survived for about 48 hours, it was a perfect opportunity to share some of the benefits with my mate through my semen. That was as good a reason as any to slide my cock deep inside her tight tunnel---that and the fact she is my life mate, and I love her. Someday I might find the words to tell her how much she means to me. For now, I would tell her with my body instead, giving her as much pleasure as I could.
“Hey, Scarlet,” I said after I relieved myself. “Ready for company?”
“Ready for you,” she assured me. “Mist!” she commanded, and the door slid open, so I could enter behind her.
I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her against me from behind, pressing the length of my cock into the crack of her ass. She squeezed it between her rear cheeks and moved my hands to cup her ample breasts. They seemed a little smaller and tighter since she had begun the grueling physical training to become a member of our company. Her nipples already raised to hard pebbled peaks. I squeezed them and rolled between my thumbs and forefingers while nibbling and kissing her neck and earlobe.
Scarlet moaned in delight and leaned heavily against me while reaching back to stroke my sides. After a time, she took one of my hands and pulled it down to her pussy for some attention to her swollen clit. She was wet and ready as I slid a finger between her slick folds. I dipped two fingers deep into her opening and rubbed her clit. Scarlet crooned her approval and pressed her pussy against my hand. I pressed my other arm against her right breast and teased her left nipple with my fingers while I made her cum with my other hand.
I held her tight against me as she squirmed and shuddered, moaning her pleasure. I loved the way she surrendered so completely to my lovemaking and how she expressed her enjoyment. Even more, she wanted to please me as well.
When her orgasm finished, she turned in my arms and pressed her breasts into my chest. I cupped her face in my hands and kissed her a deep, tongued exploration of her mouth as her soft lips opened for me. My cock was so hard by then I needed to get it inside her. I turned her away from the showery mist toward the blank wall, lifted her, so her legs parted for me to slide my shaft deep into her.
If anything had ever felt better in my life than straight on sex with Scarlet, I couldn’t think of it. At that point, I could no longer think of anything but driving my cock in and out of her, taking us both to that point of ecstasy that I only ever found in her arms. It seemed like we created our own universe each time we came together. Solmatu! Beloved solmatu.
My love, my life! And then we came, and I pumped my nanite laden semen into her enhancing her pleasure beyond what I had ever given her before. Eventually, we finished our shower together so we could go to a first meal together.
“That was way more intense than before,” Scarlet said quietly as we started eating minutes later.
“It was the nanites,” I told her. “They pump us up for our missions. I shared them with you when I came.”
“That’s how the commander recovered so fast,” she said astutely.
“We use them to heal more quickly as well. I know you worked just as hard as I did so I decided to share them with you.”
She smiled at me, her eyes sparkling with affection. “I do feel more rested and more energy than when I first got up.”
I smiled back at her. Despite the excellent fucking earlier, my cock stirred again, so I decided a change of subject was needed.
“So, tell me about the being that knew you and your friends were from Earth,” I said, spooning some hot gruel into my mouth.
“Yes. He claimed to have been stationed there with his alliance law enforcement protecting Earth. He knows where it’s located, but only in relation to his planet. We are still in the same galaxy, but sectors away from our homeworlds.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” I said, feeling suddenly possessive of her.
She frowned at me, then her expression changed as she reached for my hand. “Even if we found Earth today, Pyrr, it wouldn’t change my commitment to you. I wouldn’t leave you even if I could. Billy is the only reason I would want to go back, but only to get him and bring him with us. My life is here now with you.”
“And you know I would help you get your Billy back if I could,” I assured her and clasped her hand in mine. That would have been a good time to tell her I loved her, but the words wouldn’t come out. All I could do was squeeze her hand and hope she would somehow know what she meant to me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Pyrr
After we had been on course headed toward Farseek for about a day, Admiral Degatu and Commander Maktu decided to pull our ship out of FTL and call a meeting of senior staff.
“There has been a change of plans,” Commander Maktu announced. “After the women from Earth collected information from the people we rescued from Breskaa they informed us that our people did not want us to take them back to Farseek now. They think we should conserve our resources and go after the thousands of our people taken to Julconi the Sargan Prison colony.” He paused. “Admiral.”
Admiral Degatu stepped forward. “There are two things we will need first before we tackle this mission. We have sent a coded message for our remaining dreadnaughts to respond with their status and to set up a rendezvous for this mission. Before we can embark on the rescue, we need to procure a ship large enough to carry a few thousand people back to Farseek. We have located a shipyard in the Tigores system three weeks out from we are right now.
“I’m not going to sugar coat it at all. What we’re planning is blatant piracy because the payoff from the Kyanna Guryon mission is not going to buy us a freighter. We are going in under the guise of a mercenary ship needing repairs. Commander Maktu’s teams will run recon to find us a ship. Then members from one of my teams along with civilian volunteers will take it---as in steal it along with anything we think we will need to pull off the rescue.
“We didn’t sign up to become pirates, but if that’s what it takes to bring our peopl
e home that’s exactly, we will do. Anyone who has any objections, signify by calling ‘nay.' Anyone?”
Not a single person made a sound. Why would anyone object? The Sargans stole our families and destroyed our world’s infrastructure. I doubt there was a single person on the any of our ships who would object to taking what we need from the Sargans to get them back. We would bring down the entire empire if we could. But all our forces alone couldn’t defeat them.
So, we would wreak havoc where we could and take whatever we needed to find and free our people. After the bitter losses, we suffered on Farseek, we all felt whatever means necessary could be justified. The Consortium would pay for some of the rebuilding on Farseek, but they would not pay for us to go after those taken. There was no need for our company to return to Farseek. We had all seen the ruin of our world first hand.
Despite the extra people housed in the cargo bay, life on the ship went back to a routine closer than normal. Of the six women rescued from the slave auction house, four of them had mated, sharing quarters with their mates. The other two females, though they looked very human, not from Earth. They were assigned their own cabins, and our rec room, gym and conference room were again available to normal operations.
About two weeks into the journey, we receive encoded messages from the other six dreadnaughts. Excitement rippled through our entire brigade because now we had accounted for all our ships. Our force was small, but the best in the Consortium. Two of those dreads headed for Julconi to recon for us while we went after the ship we would need. We felt pretty safe in our communications because they were encoded in a rare, ancient Uatu language known only to our people.
The rest of the time we had to make our own entertainment when we were not on duty or training. The women continued basic training and volunteers from the contingent we rescued from the mining planet joined them. The miners were given a couple weeks of rest and full rations beforehand. They had been treated as a disposable commodity, and some of them were barely able to stand. Our food was not the best for flavor and variety, but it was good quality. We took all that the overseers had in their stash and the food processors.
We were going to need a lot more food and supplies for the prison planet rescue. We had two of the dreads pursuing supplies because they didn’t have a hundred people bunked in their cargo holds. Finally, we arrived at the starship manufacture and repair station. Most of us had never seen anything like it. There were ships of all shapes and sizes strung out in orbit between two planets. It looked like a starship graveyard where ships were abandoned to drift into space for eternity---or until they could be salvaged. There were even a few ancient battleships in the mix with whole sections missing and interiors opened to the vacuum of space.
The ships closer to the salvage station were organized according to size and shape while those farther away were in no particular order or grouping. We had no idea of the number of ships strung out in orbit around the red giant. There must have been 100k or more wrecks. There was a section of empty space between the derelicts and the repair station that was as big as some planets. It looked like a giant creature with several “arms” stretching out into space where giant ships were tethered to repair bays. There were many more ships clustered around the station apparently waiting for a bay to open.
With the number of workers needed to run an operation of this size, it occurred to our superiors that most of their labor force were probably slaves. There could well be many of our people right there to rescue. I think they were also starting to see that finding and rescuing all our people was probably an impossible task. Maybe we couldn’t rescue them all, but before we finished, the Sargan Empire was going to know they messed with the wrong people.
Beyond the repair station, there was another structure almost as large building new ships, mostly warships. We tooled around the repair station arms for a few hours before we found a passenger freighter that would carry the number of people we planned to liberate from Julconi. The logistics alone were mind-boggling, but it wasn’t my job to figure it out. My job was to run interference with my company to get our pilot team into the ship to liberate it.
It looked like we were in luck with their low level of security. The Commander figured the Sargans would never consider the kind of heist we were planning. There were battlecruisers in various stages of repair, but none in service in the Teglia system. Once we staked out the ship, we wanted command requested and received docking clearance. Our ship got in ahead of others because it was smaller. We soon discovered Tegliar Station was not just a repair station but also had many pleasures available to customers while they waited on their repairs. Many came to the station for the recreation as well as the repairs.
Partly for recon and partly for recreation, our companies took turns going out into the station. Only a few of us had left the ship at Halor, and there was little time for recreation. Scarlet got her language chip and fertility suppression implant along with the other Earth women and two Deltoin females. Soon as we finished that, we shuttled back to Dread One and headed for Breskaa.
Scarlet and I went out with the commander and his mate Harper. This was the only the second time the women had been off the ship since we rescued them. We did a bit of shopping and got a meal in one of the pubs of the food section. While we were reconnoitering, our AI was assisting our analysts to obtain information about the ship we were going to steal. Other teams were out and about looking for our people. Their skin tones and exotic hair colors would help identify them. Getting them off the station could be a different story as this station could support a hundred thousand or more.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SCARLET
“I thought Halor was an experience, but this is right out of Star Wars,” I told Pyrr. “Without the arms, it looks just like the Death Star.”
“Deathstar? That sounds ominous.”
“It was in the story. It could destroy a whole planet---completely obliterated it.”
“I would like to see such a weapon,” he said. “It would be useful against the Empire.”
“Well, there is no such weapon that I know of. It was just a story. This station is real, and it’s the size of a whole planet,” I told him.
“It’s probably only the size of a large asteroid, but it’s one of the biggest I’ve seen. This tour should be interesting,” Pyrr said as he led me toward the designated pedestrian beltway from our itinerary. He downloaded it to his tablet before we left the ship. This was my first recon mission for the Farseek Mercenaries. I was as excited as the tourist I was pretending to be.
I felt like a tourist in an alternate reality, though with each passing day, my old life on Earth was becoming a distant reality. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would join up with space alien mercenaries let alone marry one. Maybe they called it mating, but it meant the same thing. It felt right. The connection I felt with Pyrron wasn’t wearing off one bit.
The beltway to the sky train passed through an area that looked like a shopping mall with some interesting looking specialty shops, red light district, and a cluster of food vendors in what made me think of a food court. There wasn’t a lot of attention to aesthetics such as plants, trees or parks until we got away from the outer levels. As we went deeper into the complex of the artificial world, we began to see tiers of field crops being tended by slave labor.
“There!” Pyrr whispered vehemently. “Uatu in that field, and there.” He pointed.
We were moving so fast, I didn’t know how he could tell, but I believe him. I glanced around to see if people were looking at us. No one seemed to notice over the chatter of the other passengers. It was kind of like riding a subway or a bus. With the discovery of Uatus there, our mission suddenly became a lot more complicated.
Using his tablet in its most compact form, Pyrr took pictures of the people in the fields through the window. In the months since their people had been taken the Uatu of Farseek could have been spread far and wide. It made sense that many would come to
a station like this to staff all the services they provided and grow food for the staff and the patrons. There could be thousands here to rescue. It wouldn’t make sense to head out to Julconi and leave them here. Once we stole the ship, the risk would probably be too great to come back.
The logistics alone boggled the mind, but that wasn’t my area of expertise. There must be records in some system here that would tell us where all their slaves were from and where they were kept. At least here, they didn’t look like they were being abused like the ones on the mining colony. There weren’t any overseers yet, the workers all seemed to be going about their business. The guide for our tour seemed cheerful and cordial, but something was just a little off.
“Mind control,” Pyrr whispered in my ear.
That was it! They seemed a little stiff and forced, with smiles that didn’t reach their eyes. Made me think of “Stepford Wives.” We had language biochips surely mind control chips wouldn’t be that farfetched. Later Pyrr told me they did indeed exist but were outlawed in the Consortium except for use in mental illness, but that was rare because things like schizophrenia were cured with gene therapy.
It turned out that this artificial world had been built over a few hundred years, beginning with a framework of modules that were connected to form a ball on the outside with layers of connected modules on the insides. There were power stations at each of the poles with solar collectors on the outside to supplement the power stations. The explanation of how the place was powered was way beyond my ken. The gist of it sounded like something like the star drives in their spaceships.
The tour took all day, and we did see some parks and a few botanical gardens of which we toured one. We also saw many more Uatu people. Pyrr saw one young man he recognized and knew by name. But when Pyrr called him by name, the other man seemed not to recognize him. We were about halfway through the tour at that point, and Pyrr was anxious to get back to the ship to report our findings back to the commander. Command assumed our coms would be monitored so no vital info could be exchanged except in person.
