Booty Hunter (Harem Station 1)

“Why?” I ask, leaning forward in my seat to get a better look at the giant screen in front of me.

She doesn’t answer. But she doesn’t need to. Because I see why for myself. The gate defense system is armed and there are hundreds of SEAR cannons pointed at us.

“We’re not even gonna make it through the first gate!”

Code starts spilling down the screens like a green waterfall made up of numbers, and symbols, and letters.

She’s hacking it, I realize. The Harem Gate defense system.

But that should be impossible. She shouldn’t be able to…

We fly through the gate with a burst of light and I’m driven back into the soft gel cushion of my chair with the sudden acceleration, my head pounding and light leaking off of my body like some force is squishing it out of me.

I’ve only ever been through a handful of gates, but I know the trips are almost instantaneous. So the moment I register all this discomfort is the moment it stops.

I realize I was holding my breath and exhale.

“Don’t relax,” Booty says. “Gate number two—”

And then it starts again…

This time when we come out of it, I can’t see. And in that same moment, we enter another gate, this time with no warning.

When that trip is done we slow. My vision is still black, my body slumped in my chair, and my head is pounding so hard, I can’t hear what Booty is saying.

“What?” I ask, barely able to hear myself.

I don’t think she responds, but it wouldn’t matter. It takes long minutes for my vision and hearing to come back. Long minutes of spider web flashes across a black background in my eyes and my heartbeat thumps in my ears.

I’m suddenly grateful for the cryopod trip when that old man stole me.

This is horrible.

When Nyleena and I escaped we avoided gates until we had to use them. Those were the instructions I was given and now I know why.

High-speed space travel sucks.

Finally, when the sounds of the ship are almost back to normal, she says, “We’ll go slow for a little while now, but don’t relax. We have three more gates to jump through before we get to Bull Station. Normally I’d take an easier route, but we need to catch up with Dicker.”

“They left hours ahead of us,” I say. “What if they’re already there? What if we’re too late and something bad already happened?”

“Dicker won’t take the route we just did. It’s too much for her. She hasn’t been upgraded the way I have and it’s almost too much for me. So we should be catching up to them.”

That answered my first question but not my last. So I repeat it. “Booty, what if we’re too late?”

She’s silent for so long, I’m about to repeat myself a third time. But then she says, “We won’t know until we get there. So get ready. And be prepared for anything.”

Something tells me there’s more to this little mission than she’s letting on.

But just as I think that thought, she accelerates hard, and there’s no turning back.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE – SERPINT

“One more gate,” Dicker says, once we come out of the one we’re in. I used to hate gate travel and would make Booty go out of her way to use as few as possible. But I’ve gotten used to it. A few seconds of immense discomfort is always worth it once you get to the other side and realize you just traveled light years.

Bull Station is in a busy area of the galaxy and there’s a million ways to get there. But we take a long way, trying to avoid checkpoints so ALCOR won’t have to hack us through any really tight security until we have to.

Which gives me way too much time to think about what I was just told.

Breeders. We’re capturing them for breeding.

“We’ve never had a pink or a silver before,” I say to no one. But everyone is listening.

“No,” ALCOR says. “Not until Lyra.”

“So… we don’t know—”

“We know,” Jimmy says. “It’s not a big deal.”

But it kinda is. Breeders. I don’t know how I feel about that. I wouldn’t mind putting a baby in her, but… breeding. It feels so… sterile.

It’s very easy to not get a woman pregnant when you’re an Akeelian man because not only do both cocks have to be engaged and inside her pussy at the same time, both cocks have to ejaculate at the same time as well. Our sperm has to mix to be active inside a woman. And simultaneous ejaculation of both cocks is almost unheard of.

Until Lyra came along, that is.

“Who else knows about this?” I ask. “Besides us?”

“All the Akeelians know,” ALCOR says.

“Then why the fuck didn’t I know?”

“Because we left when we were kids,” Jimmy says.

“Crux knew,” Valor says. “I knew a little. I knew he and Corla were together and that’s why we had to leave.”