Chapter 4:
Dammit, the last thing he wanted to do was take Margie along. Every time he even looked at that human, all he wanted to do was take her, kiss her, and lay her in his bed—do everything he had ever learned of sex with her.
That was the problem.
He was about to have to pretend that she was his slave; whom he controlled, and not only that, she was the woman least likely to concede control, ever, but she was the woman that he wanted the most.
That would present a problem. A large one.
How was he supposed to parade her around for everyone to see while pretending he cared nothing at all for her?
“I don’t care for her,” he muttered as he strode into his hut. “I want her, yes, but that is not at all the same as caring for her. I am going soft in the head if I think I care for her. No way. She’s a giant pain in my ass most of the time. There was that time she bit a Mecalan in the face when he tried to stick his organ onto the stage by her feet. Everyone knows that race has a foot fetish and they love human feet and worship them for some reason I never figured out.
“Then there was the time she slapped a Harlender for taking a credit back when she wouldn’t smile at him. As I recall, she shouted, ‘You smile you ugly four-faced motherfucker!’ but why she would think he fucked his mother is beyond me. Their kind isn’t born of mothers; they come from eggs.”
Margie was a foul-mouthed, highly-tempered creature who just happened to have a body that drove him mad—and why wouldn’t it? She was elegantly petite and thin with a set of firm, high breasts and a swell of hips that drew his eyes and made him want to travel his hands along the dangerous curves of her skin. He wanted badly to let his fingers come to rest there between her thighs, to see if she would be wet and willing for him. And that hair, like the finest spun silken web, how it would feel tangled into his fist was something that he often found himself pondering. That smile of hers, all red lips and shining and strong white teeth, made his eyes go right to her mouth and think of kissing it until she was breathless and weak against him.
Those thoughts weren’t making it any easier for him to reconcile himself with the fact that she was the one his siblings had chosen to go along with him. He had argued until he had literally gone blue in the face, but they had pointed out that she was the best suited to it given that she had been a gurley girl, had been aboard a slaver ship, and would absolutely know how to talk to people who were held as slaves, whether willing or not.
The crux of the matter was that there was no way in the world that that woman was going to even attempt to pretend to be happy to be with him.
Of course, that could actually be a large selling point for their ploy. They left in the morning and he did not have time to think the situation through as much as he would’ve liked.
He had to go for various reasons. That gift of his would be incredibly helpful if they found somebody who might have information that they could use to discover what it was The Federation was now planning. It had to be something big. They had to move quickly, and they had to be able to decide whether or not it was worth going to war or if they should adopt a wait-and-see attitude about the current situation.
His muscles stiffened as he walked. With The Federation, there was rarely any use in adopting a wait-and-see attitude. He knew that. Even his brothers knew that. This new martial rule that they had laid down was chafing the hearts and minds of quite a few races that held their planets and systems outside of Federation role.
It was chafing quite a few under Federation rule as well.
But those most used to the yoke were usually the last to throw it off, and he knew that too well to hope that those who had been under that rule the longest would ever do anything more than mumble and grumble about the situation.
There was little to be gained by entering into The Federation at this late date. Once upon a time, The Federation had been created for good—it had been created in order to keep war at bay and to assist all citizens regardless of race or system or planetary origin in living in peace and harmony with other races and planetary systems.
But that Federation was long gone. Over the last few centuries, The Federation had existed solely as a profiteering company. They took what they wanted by either force or credit. They subjugated those who would fight against them. They destroyed those that they could not subjugate. They were violent, and they had a massive army at their back. Many of those in The Federation’s service had no love for The Federation. They did, however, have massive amounts of love for their planet, and they did not want to see that planet destroyed.
They also had a strong sense of self-preservation and didn’t want to die, the punishment for refusing that service. All living creatures had a natural instinct to do whatever it took to survive, to extend their lifespans, even his race—which had the added advantage of being some of the longest-lived beings in the universe.
The Federation was known for destroying the planets of those that rebelled against them or who refused to be a part of their ruling class.
They were known to kill any and all who refused them anything, especially if that something was something The Federation thought it was owed.
There was no way to know if the universe would simply accept this new development or rebel against it. Given the history of The Federation’s rule, and the way they had always just kept right on making things worse for the very beings they were supposed to care for, and the way that those beings just continued to allow them to govern, it was unlikely that The Federation would grow less tyrannical, ever.
That Federation had to be wiped from existence.
He had heard that centuries before, from his grandfather, then a very ancient being that had watched The Federation warily over the centuries and rather accurately predicted that they were growing in power. His grandfather had also said that when it came to something that powerful, one must not just kill it but burn the very earth it had stood upon, even if it meant giving one’s self to the fire as well in order to ensure that that thing could never grow again.
This thought stayed with him as he strode to the small hut that was now his home.
He entered slowly, all of his senses tingling as they always did. It had been so long since he had had a space that was solely his own that the strangeness of it hit him again as he settled the door closed behind his body. He looked around the one room carefully. Everything appeared to be in place, and nothing looked disturbed. He sniffed the air, letting his mouth open widely so he could taste the air on his tongue. There was no scent there, and no sign that anyone or anything had been within the room.
His sleeping pallet sat high above the floor with the aid of a platform that he had built with his own hands. There were a few small shelves on the wall that held the things that he liked the most, mainly books. There was a small wardrobe that he had also built for his clothes and a small area for bathing.
His lips twitched as he surveyed that area. Once upon a time, he had bathed in freshwater as a daily routine, but then he’d gotten used to a life aboard a ship and then in the mines. Freshwater had been either a luxury or something unknown. The cleansing units aboard ships used a combination of ionized water droplets hurled through a dispenser at high speeds and air as well as scrubbing brushes to clean whoever stepped within those chambers.
He much preferred the freshwater bathing method to that. The cleaning units, especially the ones upon ships and on pleasure planets, always held a stale, flat smell. They stunk of antiseptic and antifungals as well as water that had been used and re-filtered, not just hundreds, but probably thousands of times. His skin always felt raw and flayed after being in one of those things, which he supposed equated to feeling clean if one had no other choice but to clean themselves that way.
There was, along with the ocean, a massive amount of freshwater upon the small planet. The water did not come in rivers or in streams like he had seen on some planets. Instead, it was centered within long and clear circular pools that could go hundreds and sometimes thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface, plunging downward toward the core. Nobody knew exactly how deep they were.
