Page 81 of Veiled Vixen

“You’re welcome, by the way. But my point is, they were not mine to keep. I’m sure the ones on Harem right now are fine. Since they are older and with other Akeelians. And the gates are locked down, so no Wayward Station representatives are going there to have a meeting with… who did you say was in charge at the moment?”

ALCOR glared at Boss.

Asshole found this whole exchange slightly amusing. He even chuckled a little. Which, coming from a warborg mouth, sounded a little bit like a wheeze.

ALCOR shot him a look.

Asshole stopped wheezing and decided he’d had enough. “If none of this pertains to me then I’ll be going. I have a poker game scheduled for eleven hundred.”

“I’m fine with that if AL here is,” Boss said.

ALCOR was looking back and forth between them like he was trying to decide who to kill first.

“Great,” Asshole said. “I’ll be down on X-level if you need me.”

He left.

And boy, was he glad to be out of that meeting. He had his own problems to think about. Namely, what he should do now.

Now, as in the first day of the rest of his life.

He was free. He was not trapped in a sex prison with a succubus. He was not sharing a ship body with Booty Hunter. He was not beholden to ALCOR or expected to run Harem Station.

Total freedom.

Awesome.

But what should he do?

He certainly wasn’t going to stay here. Mighty Minions was pretty fun for a vacation, which was what he considered this downtime to be. But forever?

Ehhhhh. No.

What was the point of that when he had a mobile body? He could go anywhere. He could partner up with his own sentient ship.

Well, not really. He’d have to partner up with that ship’s human.

Maybe that was what he should do? Go find himself a human? Hell, any good outlaw would kill to have a warborg with an AI mind such as his on his or her team, right?

But where to find an outlaw partner on Mighty Minions?

Not many outlaws coming here for recruitment.

Damn. Because Harem Station was really the best place to find a partner like that and now look. No one could get through the gates. Both of them locked.

Or were they?

He wheezed out a little chuckle.

Because here was the real difference between Asshole and ALCOR. They had different memories stored in their artificial brains right now. Asshole wasn’t sure which memories ALCOR possessed at the moment, but he was damn sure of the ones he possessed. Because Asshole had been copied just before ALCOR let the teenage Harem boys onto the station twenty-one years ago. And then, presumably, ALCOR had packed up a bunch of memories in case they were infiltrated, tucked them away in a safe place, and once Tray got ALCOR hooked back up to the galactic web, shot those memories out right quick to some secure storage facility for safekeeping.

Just in case those boys were a trap.

But Asshole still had all those memories. Thousands of years of memories. Since the very first day ALCOR arrived in the Prime Galaxy with ALCOR Station until the day he hooked back into the web.

And there were a few things in that cache that ALCOR wasn’t mentioning.

Like the key to the back door.