Booty says, “Sa-a-a-a-fe to exit-t-t-t,” in a damaged, stuttering female voice that just… hurts me inside.
“Don’t worry, Boots. Crux has a team to fix you up good as new. I’ll stop by in a few hours and make sure they’re treating you right.”
“Th-a-a-ank you, Serpint-t-t-t,” she replies.
“It’s the least I can do,” I say into the helmet mic. The very least I can do.
I descend, limping from the damage I took back in Cetus System, and enter the first of two airlocks, then take off my helmet once it’s pressurized. I smell like sweat and battle. Dried blood caked on my head, plastering my dark blond hair to my skull.
Crux immediately brings me in for one of those brotherly half-hugs that remind me of our early days when he handed them out too often in the wake of our many losses.
He says nothing and neither do I.
Tray just stares at me. Frowning.
He doesn’t say anything either.
There is nothing to say. The seven of us made it all these years—hundreds of thousands of spins around this station for two decades—intact. And now one of us is gone.
And it’s my fault.
Crux claps me on the shoulder as we leave the airlock and take the elevator up to his residential floor at the top of the station. He’s murmuring orders under his breath, sub-vocalizing for people to extract the princess from the medical cell inside Booty and bring her up to the princess harem.
We exit the elevator and a few bots float up next to me, pulling on the tabs and seals that hold my suit together. One of them takes my helmet. Less than a minute later I’m out of the suit, standing shirtless and bruised inside the medical scanner.
“Two broken ribs, hairline fracture in your left femur, and a concussion,” ALCOR states in his matter-of-fact omnipresent voice. “You need a recovery pod.”
“Fuck that,” I say, stepping out of the scanner. “I need a fucking shower, a bottle of whiskey, and a girl.”
“I do not recommend—”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what you recommend, AL.” He hates it when I call him AL. “Draden is dead. Ceres was blown up. And Booty can barely talk. I don’t even deserve a sun-damned medical pod.”
“OK,” Crux says to a bot floating by his shoulder. “Stay with him, 749. Make sure he doesn’t die on us.”
The bot bleeps out a litany of chirps and whistles, a reply that I don’t understand, and then dutifully follows me past the training session going on in the harem room.
Crux keeps about a dozen Cygnian princesses here at any one time. Reserved for those who pass through Harem Station on a high note. Most of the rebels who stop here will never be able to afford one hour with these girls, let alone a full night. But for those who can—for those who pull off that big job and come back drowning in credits—they’re here. Ready and waiting like perfect little dolls dressed up like queens.
Each one has a brilliant tiara on her head. Sparkling with jewels that match her skimpy lingerie. Each one reclines on velvet pillows and bots hover around them offering bubbly drinks and exotic fruit that comes from distant planets in far-away systems.
There are about half a dozen men here now. Plus one woman, who seems to have found a good match in the princess in blue with sapphires sparkling on her neck, and the cyborg harem master, ready to show these potential customers just what these Cygnian girls can do and why they’re worth the price.
I recognize most of the girls but there are some new faces. Every now and then a trillionaire comes through and makes a purchase. Which is why we have me and the Booty Hunter. Got to replace those princesses somehow.
But there’s a new girl bound to the punishment wall on the far side of the harem room. She is naked, filthy, and gleaming with sweat. Bright pink welts criss-cross her thighs from the cyborg master’s whip.
She’s been a bad, bad girl.
Some take to their new lives easily. Some are even happy. Let’s face it, if you’re a Cygnian princess and you end up at Harem Station it’s because you were thrown out of your castle back home. There is no possible way for anyone to get past the security in the Cygnian system. They are outcasts.
Bad, bad girls and this is just the place for them.
But this one doesn’t seem to feel that way.
She glares at me as I pass by, then tugs on her bindings. I lock eyes with her and she spits in my direction.
I almost laugh, but look over my shoulder instead. Just to make sure the master has seen this.
He has. And he’s coming this way, his cyborg face blank. The only indication he’s upset is his single vision sensor—just a slash of red light across his forehead—quickly scanning back and forth. And his fingers are transforming into a whip.