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  “Do you two think I’m some kind of idiot? That I’m weak? I’m taking this fucking planet, and I’ll do what I want with it. It belongs to the Union. It belongs to me.” Flecks of his spit hit my face, and he leaned in close to my ear. “As do you.”

  His hands released me and I gulped in air, with a sharp ache in my balls again. I hadn’t come last night or the night before. In fact, I don’t think it had ever been so long after having so much done to me.

  “Ukko,” he said, “get on your damn knees.”

  Ukko obliged, and Turo ripped open my trousers and pulled them down, leaving me exposed, tied up, and with my rock-hard dick pointing straight out.

  “Now, Lieutenant, do as you are told. Suck your little friend here.”

  Ukko turned in shock to Turo at the demand. When Ukko and I had sex, I’d only touched myself, as I almost always did. He’d never touched me.

  Ukko hesitated for a moment. Without warning, Turo booted him in the ass, then plopped down in my captain’s chair. Satisfied with himself, Turo slid a gloved hand under his trousers.

  Ukko inched forward, his eyes creeping toward mine. His face tinged with confusion and sadness. He took me in his mouth, and I almost screamed with pleasure. I was so close, so constantly close for so long, I could barely contain myself. He worked me well. He knew what he was doing. I bet Turo knew that too. This seemed like old scores being settled.

  Turo watched with a morbid enjoyment of the scene. His stare locked with mine, thrilling himself at his perverse games. It kind of worked for me. All the shit of this trip ran through my head, the galinium, the Union, and I realized I didn’t care. This wasn’t my fight. This wasn’t my trouble. Let them take the galinium, let them take the damn planet. Just let me come.

  Minutes went by and Ukko only got faster. A hand joined his mouth working my dick. As he watched me get closer, Turo stepped over. He took his gloved hand out of his crotch and covered my mouth again to stop me moaning, while forcing me to smell it. My legs shook, everything tensed up, my skin prickled…

  “Stop,” he told Ukko, who enjoyed one last lick before removing me from his mouth. I yelled a muffled scream into the gloved hand that covered my mouth. I’d been seconds away from coming, but Turo knew that.

  “Now get out, and I don’t want to hear your name ever again.” Keeping his attention on the floor, Ukko wiped his mouth with his sleeve, picked up his rifle, and hurried away, the ship’s door opening automatically for him, then slamming shut again and leaving the two of us alone. I’d calmed down but still ached. His hand moved from my mouth, and I breathed again.

  “What do you want from me, Turo?”

  “I told you. I want you. You’re a fantastic smuggler and a good captain. You know your way around the Verge. You have skills. I need them.”

  “So take one of your knucklehead lieutenants, or another trader. What the infinity do you need me for?”

  “Dammit, Ales. You can see the fools I have to deal with. I need a real second-in-command. I need someone who I can trust completely, who I can rely on, who understands me.” His voice grew soft, and he gazed at me the way he had last night. “I need someone who can give me what I need, and so do you.”

  “You want to rule the Verge through fear? Through intimidation? It won’t work. You can’t save freedom by restraining it, by destroying it like you are going to do here to Jansen.”

  “Ales, what do you know about freedom? You’ve been flying around this place for six years. Alone, unhappy, unfulfilled. Dammit, you are the last of your people. Are you really satisfied with this miserable existence you call a life?”

  He turned away from me, angry. There’s nothing I could say to it.

  “I’m going to lead the Verge to a better future, and I want your help. Don’t you think your people, the friends you lost, your mother, your father… Don’t you think they’d want you to be someone? You know, you were talking in your sleep last night. I didn’t understand the language, but you sat up, said some words for a minute, and went back to sleep. Do you really want your language, your history, to die with you, here, today?”

  I stayed silent for minutes, taking it all in. I didn’t know whether to be afraid of his threats or intrigued by his offer. My trousers slipped down to my ankles. My arms ached. My balls throbbed with an intensity beyond anything I could’ve imagined.

  “Don’t destroy the planet,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Don’t destroy the planet. Don’t attack, don’t bomb, don’t harm a single fly on this world, and I will join you. I will submit to you…master.”

  Turo stepped over to me, his face awash in what seemed like relief, even joy.

  “I will be a master you will be proud of. Trust me. Together, we can do so much, achieve things you never thought possible.” For the first time, he touched my dick, stroking one finger along the edge. “I will be your oxygen. I’ll always protect you. I’ll always cherish you. You might even come to love me.”

  He paused, staring into my eyes. I didn’t know what I’d done but I had no other option. I couldn’t bear the thought of harm coming to this world, for the first time even more than the thought of harm to myself.

  “I need the ship’s controls.”

  “Miri?”

  “Yes, Ales?”

  In Tevian, I said, “Give Turo full access to the ship and respond to his requests and orders in whatever language he uses.”

  “Settings changed.”

  “I assume that’s it?” he asked.

  “Yes. That’s it. Her name is Miri. She will respond to you in your language and the controls will be readable for you as well.”

  “You’ve made the right choice.”

  Before I could say another word, an explosion outside rocked the ship. I lost my footing and yelled out as the cuffs yanked my shoulders. Turo grabbed his side weapon and jumped to the door.

  I wanted to call out to him, tell him to stay inside where we were safe. But my shoulders seared with pain, and I could barely breathe as I scrambled to get my footing back, my legs tangled in my trousers.

  The door slid open to the sound of shooting. His weapon raised, Turo jumped out to flashes of gunfire. Weapons fire hit the ship again. I lost the inch of footing I’d regained and my left shoulder took the brunt of my weight. My screams of agony fell as a whisper as soft as ash compared to the yelling outside.

  Searing hot pain threatened to steal my consciousness. Hanging by my arms, naked and exposed from the waist down, the fear of being abandoned began to suffocate me. It sounded like twenty or more soldiers were attacking. My blurry vision made it hard to see the figures who were running past the ship. The gunfire sounded even closer. I wanted to cry out for help but feared who might come.

  Footsteps clattered on the gangway, and I tried to see who was coming.

  “Ales!”

  Ukko had come. I tried again to stand, to see him. The light outside blinded me, but I could see the outline of him in the doorway.

  The next shot sounded the loudest of them all. The laser fire crackled as it dissipated against a hard surface. Ukko froze in the doorway. He’d taken a direct hit.

  “No.” The sound barely escaped my mouth as he fell face-first onto the floor of my ship.

  I gasped for breath, but it hurt too much. My stomach wanted to explode outward. Sweat drenched my face and stung my eyes. Two shapes moved along the gangway. They threw Ukko’s body aside like it was nothing.

  “Miri…”

  They ran toward me. I wanted to scream for help, but my face met with the butt of an assault rifle. I tasted blood. They were trying to pull my hands through the ladder. It’s no use, I wanted to tell them, get Turo if you haven’t already killed him.

  The sharp screech of the ladder being ripped from the ship pierced the buzzing in my ears. My cuffed arms twisted horribly as they dragged me across the floor. My bare ass scraping against the ground.

  “Ales, the ship is damaged.” Miri’s voi
ce sounded broken too. Her power failing. I tried to open my mouth to say something, but only blood poured out.

  The flashes of light in the docking pod blinded me as I was dragged over a pair of legs. Ukko’s legs. I forced my eyes open. The top half of his body hung off the gangway. His hands drooped to the floor. Blood dripped from his face. I retched but coughed up my own blood. Turo…where is Turo?

  “Get him out of here,” a harsh voice roared behind me. They tried to yank my hands from the cuffs. Cuffs I realized now they probably didn’t know were there. White hot pain stabbed every part of me. I retched again and nearly choked.

  More black shapes of soldiers swarmed around, circling my ship. Let me go, I tried to say, not even sure if any sound came out of me.

  “Blow it,” the harsh voice roared again. A blast of a dozen heavy weapons being fired at once deafened me. I could only hear ringing; my vision went white. Heat blasted my face and the smell of burning metal made me cough for air. Every beat of my thundering heart blasted inside my head.

  Focus, focus. Ales, open your eyes. See what’s going on. Open your damn mouth. Talk your way out of this. Give them the galinium. Do something. I forced my eyes to focus, tried to get the bearing of what was going on. My arms were still attached to the ladder behind me, and the pain only grew worse.

  My vision filled with fire. My ship lay in ruins. The Loukas a wreck of twisted, flaming metal, burning to this cursed ground of Jansen.

  “No,” I cried out with the last of my power. Something hard smacked me in the head.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’D BEEN TRAVELING through the void for a hundred hours. A hundred hours since I’d pulled away from the Crejan fleet at the slipstream and headed in the opposite direction to them, wherever that would take me.

  I’d survived so far on stale biscuits I found in the hold, but it didn’t mean I wanted to live. No, I needed the energy to say the prayers for the dead. Each one took about ten minutes, and despite bouts of involuntary sleep, I must have said 500 or more.

  I hadn’t even finished with my extended family, the aunts and uncles that raised me, and the cousins I’d grown up with, although so many had already died in the war. I said the prayers for them anyway, now their souls were gone too. My mouth dry, my body tired, I sat in the chair, my father’s chair, my father’s ship, and stared out the viewscreen into a cold nothing. Completely alone on this ship, completely alone in the universe.

  “Warning, warning. Approaching Ingvarian space.”

  I jumped in utter shock at the crisp female voice coming from all around me. “What the infinity? Who are you?”

  “Hello, Captain Ales. I’m the ship’s AI. My serial number is M.I.R.I. six-five-nine-two…”

  “Okay, I got it, thanks. So where are we?”

  A multidimensional map of the galaxy appeared on the viewscreen. The dot that had been Teva glowed red in a sea of stars. A thin yellow line traced our voyage all the way toward the bottom left of the screen, with fewer stars around us than the central belt of the galaxy where Teva…had been.

  “To complete our voyage to the Outer Verge, we must access the Ingvarian slipstream.”

  “Hold on…Miri. We’re going where?”

  “I assume that’s the course you set when we left the Tevian system?”

  “Uh, sure. Okay, that seems a good a plan as any. So how long?”

  “Accessing the slipstream will take us to the border systems of the Outer Verge in the next six hours.” The map highlighted a line of systems across the bottom edge of the spiral arm that connected the Verge to the galaxy. A thin white line represented the slipstream, so close to our current position, that would take us right there. But between us and the Verge glowed a block of menacing red.

  “However,” Miri continued, “the latest travel reports warn against entering Ingvar space due to the current violent rebellion taking place across ninety-three percent of the systems there. The Crejan occupation force is currently engaged with Ingvarian rebels…”

  “How long to go around it?”

  “Approximately ten point three years.”

  “Well, I don’t have that kind of time.” I touched my fingers to our position on the map and the galaxy spun, zooming in to our location. “We can enter the slipstream right beside that moon over there. Let’s stop there and find out how dangerous it is.”

  Half an hour later, I docked the ship at an Ingvar moon base orbiting a far planet of the system. Half a dozen other ships sat in the docking station, so at least I’d have company. Whether that would be welcome or not, I wasn’t yet sure. I headed along the cramped, twisted corridors of the base to find signs of life. I smelled food and followed my stomach the rest of the way. The dining room was windowless, cramped, with low ceilings, cheap tables, and an air of a battered barracks. A dozen or so exhausted, war-weary occupants sat around quietly nursing scars or picking at food.

  I took a stool at the bar counter, my back turned to the others. More than a few had fresh injuries. At a table off to the side, a man held a cloth to a woman’s bleeding face. I wondered if they weren’t survivors from Teva. Across the bar, a young guy with the scruffy beard and dirty overalls of a ship engineer gave me a weak smile and lifted his drink in quiet acknowledgement of my presence.

  “Can I get you any food?” A young woman appeared behind the bar. Her skin was white and crisp, like she’d lived every day of her life under an artificial climate. She had a shock of red hair and a smile just as wild.

  “Please,” I said, my voice broken and hoarse from praying. “But I don’t have any money.”

  She seemed surprised I’d even offered. “That’s all right, honey. I’m not charging nothing. I’ve been looking after soldiers here for months. You’re fighting for our freedom.”

  I swallowed hard, confused at first about why she would care about the war on Teva half a galaxy away, but then realized I’d flown into the middle of another war. Against the same enemy.

  “I got caught in a Crejan attack,” I offered loudly, suddenly concerned what might happen if they found out I hadn’t been fighting for their side. “They ambushed us. I don’t know if anyone else survived.”

  She reached out across the bar and put a hand on my shoulder. The touch of another person was almost too much. “In the end, we’ll win. Freedom will always win.” She took in the room of disheveled, exhausted, battered fighters with a streak of pride. “Victory to the rebellion!” she exclaimed, her eyes alive with hope.

  Even though only a soft murmur of agreement rumbled through the room in response, in that moment, I swore to survive. Maybe to extract revenge on the Crejan Empire one day, maybe to only keep the memory of my people alive, but having made it this far, I would survive.

  The young man in the overalls at the bar climbed off his stool and wandered over to me. He smelled of beer, sweat, and metal, but with a hint of more emanating from his half smile. “You look like you need a place to wash up.”

  I touched my face and my fingers came away with layers of grime. My heart sunk, knowing it was probably the last traces of Teva.

  “Come with me, I’ll show you. Liv here will get your food ready in the meanwhile.”

  Liv nodded and smiled proudly as I followed him through narrow corridors. He talked in one steady stream about the advances the rebels had made against the Crejan forces across various Ingvar systems I’d never heard of.

  “We’ve just taken back Aldegar. Blocking their access to the megacollider is the end game. You’ll see.”

  I followed him four levels down a stair shaft to a bathroom and shower block while he ruminated that “we” only needed a few more victories to finally free all the Ingvar systems from occupation.

  He pointed out a set of showers and kept on talking. Overwhelmed by the desire to get clean, I stripped off right in front of him and gorged on the instant relief of hot water coursing over my taut, tired skin. He sat in front of me, happily staring into the open shower block, and talked and talked.r />
  I don’t know why or what combination of emotions drove me to it, but after I stepped out of the shower and he handed me a thin towel, I looked him dead in the eye.

  “Fuck me,” I said, taking a gamble and grabbing his cock through the overalls before he could react. But he grinned and began to unbutton himself.

  Against the cold tile of the shower block, he fucked me hard and quickly. For the first time, a man took me. For the first time, my desires could be unburdened from Tevian guilt and shame. The religion of my world, the words of my father, the horror that would have awaited anyone on Teva doing such a thing, all of it completely dissipated in the pounding he gave me. None of that mattered anymore anyway. I truly lost myself to his rapid thrusts. My mind took a pause from the trauma as my body became no more the sole witness to tragedy but the tool of someone else’s pleasure.

  It ended with a satisfied grunt from him and the opening of a new chapter in life for me. I dressed, and he grinned at me, wider than before. This man knew nothing about my past. I smiled, aching for a soothing slice of calm, only for this minute. For a lull in the horrors that had befallen me, just for this second.

  We headed upstairs and through a maze of corridors to return to the diner area. He screamed when he set eyes upon the horrific sight that awaited us. Screamed and leaped straight over the bar. He lifted Liv’s bloody, lifeless body and cradled it in his arms. Her shock of red hair plastered over the open gash that had caved in her skull. Around the diner, men and women slumped over blood-splattered tables or lay quite simply dead on the floor.

  The man whose name I still didn’t know turned his head to me. “Did they follow you here?” he said, his voice lifeless.

  “I…I don’t know.”

  He laid her body down, stood slowly, and turned to me. Tears streamed down his twisted face onto the now bloodstained overalls.

  “You’re a spy.”

  “No, really no. I came from Teva. The Crejans destroyed it too. I’ve been traveling for days, lost…”

  “You’re a spy!” he screamed. In the same moment, I fled, smacking into the walls as I navigated the twists and turns of the moon-base corridors to return to the ship. His footsteps pounded the metal floor after me.