Companion 3000

It was the Goddessdamn outfit they had her in that had done it, Pierce thought angrily, banging his fist on the console. Seeing her in those tiny red strips of material with the gold rings around her nipples had been too much. And when he’d looked down and seen her soft wet pussy spread open and her little pink clit encircled with the same kind of ring, he’d pretty much lost it. All he had wanted at that point was to touch her, to claim her as his own. Buying her from the slaver hadn’t seemed like enough. He’d wanted to put his hands on her and proclaim to the entire galaxy that she was his.

Well, so much for taking up where they’d left off. Pierce sighed and leaned forward to start the liftoff sequence. Leita had obviously been upset about the way he had touched her, the way he’d forced her to come in front of a room full of people, and he didn’t blame her—there was no excuse. It was over now. He’d drop her at her life pod with the supplies he’d gotten for her in the first place and leave, never to return again.

With only one quick stop to attach a tow beam to Leita’s little shuttle, he got the Jaunter up and in the black, lifting away from the Galleria ship like a single pebble floating away from a huge asteroid. He’d always heard rumors of a darker side of the huge shopping ship but it had staggered him to find that there was a whole section devoted to black market goods like organs and unwilling slaves. Finding exactly where Leita had been taken would have been impossible without Dal’s information.

Thinking of Dal made him wonder if the big ET had found his missing chips. They were rare and each one was stamped with an indelible ID, which would’ve made them hard to move even on the black market part of the Galleria. Pierce had been fairly certain that the shifty-eyed guy who had cheated him in the first place had probably held on to the loot. Finding a suitable buyer for so precious an item wasn’t easy, especially if the rightful owner of said item was an angry Pteregoid crime boss.

He charted a course for Leita’s life pod and put on a tracer lock before punching Dal’s coordinates into his monitor. Just in case his hunch had been wrong, he didn’t want Dal to be able to trace his call.

Dal answered on the first ring, almost as if he’d been expecting Pierce’s call. “Well, well, Pierce,” he burbled, the tentacles around his blowhole waving contentedly. “The conquering hero calls, vindicated at last.”

Pierce suppressed a sigh. “I take it that means you found the chips?”

“Every last one—exactly as you promised.” The tone of Dal’s voice meant he would have been smiling if he had lips and a mouth to smile with. “Of course, the information as to their whereabouts took a bit of extracting. But at last the individual you mentioned was persuaded to answer my few simple questions.” He shrugged. “Regrettably, he did not survive the questioning process.”

“Yeah, that’s a real shame.” Pierce didn’t like to think about the hideous pain the shifty-eyed guy who’d passed him bad chips had gone through but it was his own fault for being stupid. Messing with someone like Dal was like playing with fire in zero-G. There was no doubt you were gonna get burned, the only question was when and how badly.

“I was most pleased to recover my property,” Dal said, breaking into his thoughts.

“Pleased enough to take the bounty off my head?” Pierce asked with a scowl. For six long months he’d been persona non grata throughout the entire galaxy with bastards like Shie-lu and his crew gunning for his scalp. Living life on the run was getting old.

“Indeed. Consider it removed.” Dal nodded, burbling peacefully. “In fact, I would like to offer you a new job as a token of my renewed good faith.” He leaned forward a little, his greenish-brown tentacles waving in excitement. “The pay for this particular venture is quite substantial. I can give you the details if you wish.”

Pierce sighed. Did he really want to go back to his old life? Smuggling and heists and staying one step ahead of the law? He remembered vaguely promising himself that he was going to retire. Remembered thinking that he would like nothing better than to leave all that behind and just spend the rest of his life fixing ships all day with Leita and loving her all night. He missed the quiet, relaxed atmosphere of the life pod, the intense sex at night, the feel of her in his arms, warm and soft and trusting. He even missed that furry little asshole Schneider a little. A very little but still…