Objects in Motion (1/4)
Title: Objects in Motion
Pairing: Gabe/William
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This is purely a figment of my imagination.
Warnings: Violence, slavery, self-indulgence.
Notes: William bit Gabe. Gabe choked William. I wrote this fic. Thank you to cupiscent for the spectacular beta, and to everyone else for putting up with my endless talk of sex slaves in space.
Summary: “Gabey,” Pete said when he answered, grinning. “How’s my favorite slave master today?”
The brothel was like any other, on any other space station. Gabe swiped his Ident card at the front desk, and apparently the number of gold stars next to his rank was enough to entice the owners themselves out to greet him. They were middle-aged, probably legally partnered; the man had a scraggly goatee and yellow teeth, and his wife had the falsely charming, hard-bitten look of someone who’d grown up working the back rooms before graduating to the front.
“Good evening,” the man said, smarmy with deference. Gabe used that tone himself, upon occasion. “How can we serve?”
“Specialties of the house?” Gabe asked offhandedly, tugging the fingers of his glove off one by one.
The woman’s eyes fell to Gabe’s gold-handled walking stick, held under his arm so that the cobra’s fanged head and spread hood faced forward. Someone who knew his reputation, then, or had at least recognized something off his Ident card. “A few exotic beauties,” the woman crooned. “Boys and girls. Every shade of skin, foreign features.”
“One fully trained in the eastern arts,” her husband added, with a yellow-toothed smile.
Gabe made a bored noise, and the woman switched tacks hastily. “Two who are experienced with the more savage pleasures,” she offered, giving him a look that suggested he was meant to be imagining himself as a hunter on safari chasing gazelles rather than slave whores.
“Either of them good for a few hours?” Gabe asked idly, and offered his most practiced leer. “I don’t mind a few marks on the merchandise.”
“None like that, sir,” the woman said proudly. “All of ours are perfect outside and in.”
A choice of two was better than nothing, but still less than promising. It sounded like the brothel didn’t cater to BDSM in the extreme, which were usually the slaves Gabe tried to save first. No one had it easy here, but the ones who’d been marked up enough to lower their value tended to be offered to none but the most dangerous clients, and therefore had the shortest life expectancy.
His disinterest must have been obvious, because the man spoke up suddenly. “We do have a virgin, fresh in from the outer colonies,” he said quickly.
His wife turned on him, clearly not expecting that, and then caught herself and tried with little success to sweeten her expression. “He’s not trained yet, I’m afraid,” she said, with another brief warning glance at her husband. “I wouldn’t want to offer you an imperfect experience. And the price would be considerably higher, of course.”
Gabe waffled for all of two seconds before making his decision. “I’ll take it,” he said, pulling out his bank card and tapping the edge lightly against the counter. A virgin would probably be treated well for the first few months, relative to the other unhappy residents, but if this one hadn’t even been broken in yet, maybe Gabe could actually get one out before their spirits were completely crushed. Not to mention, virgin usually translated as barely legal, and Gabe couldn’t stand to think of a teenager in this place.
“This is for purchase,” he added casually, which made her eyes go wide and her husband’s practically dance with greed. “I don’t like others playing with my toys once I’ve chosen them. I’ll just want a test run, first.”
“Of course, sir,” the man said, deferential again now that Gabe’s prospective spending limit had gone up considerably. “Anything you prefer.”
The woman ran his card - and she wasn’t kidding about the price - before handing it back. “He’s a little high-spirited,” she warned.
Gabe let his smile turned wolfish. “Just the way I like them,” he promised. Hey, if this added to his reputation, so much the better. Maybe he’d get a few other kids as a result. He knew enough about the standard brothel training process - starvation, caning on the soles of the feet, anything and everything so long as it didn’t leave a mark - to be glad he could spare anyone some of that.
“Room 15,” she said, with only the slightest hesitance in her smile. Maybe she thought Gabe was going to ruin her virgin beyond all repair. Which was fine, because Gabe wasn’t planning on returning him anytime soon. “Fingerprint here.”
Gabe pressed his right index finger against the proffered pad, which would give him access to both the room and the toy cabinet inside. “I’ll call you if I need anything,” he told them, and whistled on his way up the stairs.
The occupant of room 15 was older than Gabe had expected, but not by much. He was too pretty to have been marked for anything but the brothels since enslavement, hair hanging in loose-winding curls around his face and lanky all over. He wasn’t kneeling, which Gabe hadn’t expected, but hovering near the opposite wall at the head of the bed, as far away from the door in the tiny room as he could get. He was wearing the traditional white, flimsy tunic of a virgin bedslave, a garment providing easy access that didn’t conceal a lot, and his chin had a cleft in the center which caught the light when he tilted it defiantly up.
“Well hello,” Gabe said pleasantly. The lock clicked behind him as the door shut completely, giving them the illusion of privacy behind paper-thin walls.
“I’ll bite your fucking dick off,” the kid said in return.
“Wow, you are new,” Gabe said, impressed. “They weren’t kidding.”
There was a gold chain around the slave’s neck, one with the delicate appearance of ornamentation but strong and thick enough that the kid wouldn’t be able to break it off. The beaten-gold pendant on the end said William in elegant calligraphy. A slave collar, prettied up for the higher-end market.
“William, right?” Gabe said soothingly, smiling and walking slowly forward. This was always the hardest part; new slaves were usually skittish and frightened, hard to coax into trusting him. “All I need,” he started gently, which was when William threw a punch and clipped him on the jaw.
Gabe was shocked enough that he didn’t move to defend himself, which meant that by the time he recovered from the surprise, William was going for his throat.
“Fuck,” Gabe managed, barely warding off the long, skinny fingers clearly bent on strangulation. William was stronger than he looked, probably in part because he was desperate and cornered, and Gabe was able to keep him marginally at bay but couldn’t stop them from toppling sideways onto the bed. That apparently sparked a whole new level of panic, because William stopped struggling and started kicking.
“Shit, wait, just,” Gabe tried, breaking off in a grunt when William’s knee connected with one of his kidneys. Gabe grabbed his ankle, only to realize belatedly that William’s ankle was really the least of his concerns, because now he had both hands free.
William lunged for the bedside lamp, only to find that it was bolted to the table, which in turn was bolted to the floor. He struggled with it for half a second, then tried to get through the metal cage housing the light bulb to break the glass - Gabe had to give the kid points for ingenuity - before giving up on that and just trying to hit him again.
The punch missed, because Gabe had been in more bar fights than this kid ever had and knew when to dodge, but he still only had a handful of seconds to roll off the bed and get into a more defensible position. By that time, William had found the only thing in the room that wasn’t locked or bolted down: Gabe’s walking stick.
“Shit,” Gabe said again, right before William realized what he had and took a swing at Gabe’s head. Gabe ducked again, and the stick thudded into the wall with enough force to chip the plaster, and likely also enough to break Gabe’s ribs. William went to swing again, and by some freak twist of luck, his fingers slid over the trick catch just below the handle, triggering the hidden compartment that housed the six-inch knife blade in the base.
Both of them froze. Then William’s expression shifted from shock to determination, and Gabe had just enough time to recognize that his window of opportunity had just passed before William tried to drive the blade into his chest.
“Fuck, would you just…” Gabe attempted, but he knew all too well that in brothels like this one the walls had ears, and he couldn’t risk his entire operation just to explain to one slave why he shouldn’t be trying to kill him. The most he could say was, “I’m not going to hurt…” which William clearly didn’t believe anyway, because the next thrust of the walking stick was aimed for his jugular.
Gabe sidestepped, got hold of the stick, and sent them both slamming into the wall next to the door. William tried to pin him with the walking stick across Gabe’s throat, which was a good move, but Gabe had more experience with this particular weapon and he knew how to apply the right sort of leverage.
Sensing that he was about to lose the fight, William shoved his knee into Gabe’s stomach, which hurt like a bitch and drove the air out of his lungs, and then made a desperate break for the door. Gabe tackled him, the walking stick rolling safely out of the way for the moment under the bed. William grappled with him for long enough to squirm out from underneath him, and then did his very best to single-handedly gouge Gabe’s eyes out.
“Fucking fuck,” Gabe yelled, and was busy enough fending off William’s clawing fingernails that he didn’t immediately recognize that William’s focus was actually on his other hand, and that the eye-gouging was being used as a distraction technique, because what William was really trying to do was get Gabe’s fingerprint on the pad to open the toy closet.
For a moment, Gabe had to stop and be seriously impressed. Then he didn’t have time to do anything but fight, because he knew - and he suspected William did, too - what sort of things were in that closet, and furry handcuffs were the least of it. If William got his hands on anything that could draw blood or electrocute, they were both fucked. Gabe didn’t really doubt at this point that William would kill him if he could, and there was no way William would survive after killing a free man.
He gave up on trying to reason with William, because his half-assed pleading was falling on deaf ears anyway, and instead threw himself completely into subduing William before he got them both killed. Playing nice wasn’t going to do it, so he got in a couple of punches of his own; one glancing blow to William’s sharp cheekbone, and another to his collarbone that was going to bruise spectacularly. He twisted out of the way right as William tried to castrate him, and grabbed for William’s hand a split-second after he dove for the bed and the protruding gold cobra head of Gabe’s walking stick.
He missed, but he got a handful of William’s hair, and yanked that back far enough to keep the stick temporarily out of reach. William kicked out at him again, which was when Gabe heard the timid knocking on the door and the hesitant, “Sir?” of the brothel’s mistress.
“Fuck,” he gasped, which turned into a strangled yell when William twisted like an eel and sank his teeth into Gabe’s wrist hard enough to draw blood.
Gabe let go of William’s hair like it was on fire, but when William jerked away towards the bed again, Gabe’s hand landed on the gold chain around his neck, solid and sturdy. He yanked the pendant sideways, turning the necklace into a choke-chain the way it was designed to be used, and hauled back with all his strength to keep William from reaching the knife blade.
William choked, both hands going to his throat to scrabble at the chain constricting his airway, and Gabe took the opportunity to grab his walking stick and stab his fingers at the catch, sheathing the knife. He rolled up to his knees, sore in more places than he wanted to think about, and dragged William across the floor to the door, jamming his index finger onto the pad controlling the lock.
The brothel owner stared at him, her mouth gaping. Gabe loosened his grip on the chain and William flopped at his feet like a landed fish, gasping. There were bruises forming bright and angry around his neck, and his tunic had been ripped halfway down his chest. At least there wouldn’t be too much question of what Gabe had been doing with him in here, not after the racket they’d just made.
Gabe put one foot on the back of William’s neck as a warning, smiled sweetly at the flabbergasted woman, and said, “I’ll take him.”
-
It was going to be a long fucking trip to the Decay ring.
William made another break for it when they were nearing the dock, which Gabe had been expecting because it was a fuck of a lot easier to get away even in a crowded space station dock than it was aboard a starship in the middle of a cold, empty vacuum. He’d managed to get William subdued and under control again, but not before William had raked his fingernails across Gabe’s neck hard enough to draw blood, jammed an elbow into the same kidney he’d targeted before, and kicked him in the shin so hard that Gabe was still limping.
The closest scrape, in fact, was getting William on board his ship before local law enforcement decided to take matters into their own hands and discipline William in one of the public slave stocks for disturbing the peace. If he’d injured another free person in his bid to escape, Gabe might not have been able to save him from it, but luckily for everyone but Gabe, William seemed to have a very clear idea of who he wanted to incapacitate. Luckily for everyone including Gabe, his rank held enough sway, along with the argument that he wanted to get his newly-purchased bedslave stashed away in private as soon as possible where he would most definitely not be causing any more trouble, to get them off the dock without William experiencing firsthand how law enforcement chose to punish unruly slaves.
“If you try that again,” Gabe said in an undertone as he marched William up to the docking checkpoint, fingers biting into his arm hard enough to bruise and hopefully discourage further escape attempts, “they will strap you to that bench and tape electrodes all over you, and there won’t be a fucking thing I can do about it, do you understand? So stay still.”
If Victoria ever found out he’d spoken to a slave like this - threatened one, even - she’d have his head, and not just the one on his shoulders. He hoped she never did, or at the very least, that she only found out after she’d met William. Gabe thought he might be granted some leniency for that.
They made it through the checkpoint without another incident, and from there onto the boarding ramp, which was lowered while they were docked and Gabe was off-ship.
“Now look,” Gabe said as soon as they were inside the hatch. “I don’t want to lock you up, but I will if I have to, so if I let you go free, are you going to stop trying to kill me?”
William nodded slowly, eyes wary and darting quickly around the small space.
“Good,” Gabe said, relieved. “Now then…”
He realized his mistake - and the proximity of the dock-hook - a split-second too late. William lunged for the hook, swinging it around in a move that by all rights should have spilled Gabe’s guts all over the metal deck, but Gabe blocked it with his walking stick at the last second and both weapons smashed into the grates lining the hatch, the hook skidding across with a metallic screech and a small shower of sparks.
If William got loose, Gabe wouldn’t be able to protect him, and besides that, it had been a long fucking day. Gabe was running somewhat low on patience. He caught the hook with the stick’s cobra head, twisted them sharply around until William’s arm wrenched in its socket and he fell to his knees trying to keep hold of the hook without dislocating his shoulder, and then Gabe stepped in to yank William’s head back by his gorgeous hair, triggering the trick catch on his stick and pressing the knife blade to William’s throat.
“We’ll work on this,” Gabe said optimistically, driving William forward on his knees and shoving him into the first storage room they came across that had a lock. He slapped the panel to secure the room and then sagged against the wall, suddenly keenly feeling like he’d just been run over by a hoverjet.
His crew was in the lounge awaiting his return, and they all looked up when he hobbled in, pulling off his gloves and smacking them down onto the metal table. Ryland's eyes sharpened almost immediately, clearly taking in the worst of Gabe's battle scars. “Trouble?”
Alex was more direct. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“Our new acquisition is less than cowed by my presence,” Gabe answered grimly, yanking open the freezer door in search of a makeshift icepack.
Nate's eyebrows rose. “A slave did that to you?” he asked, as Gabe slumped back with relief against the counter and clapped a pound of broccoli stalks against the swelling bruise on his jaw.
Victoria snorted in a decidedly unladylike manner. She took the broccoli away to get a good look at Gabe's injuries, then apparently dismissed them as trivial enough not to be a concern and said, “I like this one already.”
“Good, you deal with him,” Gabe replied, knowing he sounded petulant and unable to make himself stop. His shin still hurt like a bitch where William had kicked him, and any sympathy he may have started out with had throbbed away after he’d banged it on the ladder climbing up here.
“Where is he?” Ryland asked cautiously. Gabe understood the reaction; they’d lost a slave once before, when she’d thrown herself off the top of the ship before Gabe could talk her down.
He was quick to reassure, therefore, before anyone got the wrong idea. “Storage room A,” he answered, then realized how odd that sounded, and added sheepishly, “I needed somewhere to lock him in.”
Victoria’s voice was razor-sharp. “What the fuck, Gabe.”
“Hey,” he protested, raising his hands defensively before the bruise started aching again and he had to replace the ice. “I know, okay? It’s not like I wanted to, but I really think this one would kill all of us in our sleep, and I’m sort of fond of you guys.”
Alex looked troubled. “Have you talked to him?” he asked, with the doe-eyed empathy that was the reason most of their soon-to-be-liberated passengers opened up to him first. “Did you explain things?”
“Well…” Gabe hesitated, but there wasn’t really a good way to answer that, or at least not one that wasn’t a lie. “Not yet.”
“Gabe.” Victoria didn’t sound reproving; she sounded like she was going to finish what William had started, preferably bare-handed.
“He’s probably terrified,” Alex said, with a look that was skirting the edge of ‘accusing.’ Ryland had a similar expression, although he was keeping his opinions to himself for the moment. “You know how they’re treated.”
Gabe didn’t know how this had all gotten turned around so that he was the one in the wrong. He was a knight in fucking shining armor, liberator of slaves, rescuer of the oppressed, defender of the weak. He was a fucking hero. His crew were a bunch of disloyal traitors who should be strung up for mutiny.
“No locks on the doors,” Ryland pointed out. “That’s what we always tell them. So they start to believe they’re free.”
Gabe wanted, very badly, to suggest that one of them go deal with the kid. It was on the tip of his tongue, but that was too close to suggesting that Victoria go deal with him - which was what he wanted, anyway, for someone who knew what the kid was going through to explain things, get him to open up to them, share stories and hug and cry and whatever to start the healing process - but he couldn’t do that. They never, ever mentioned the fact that Victoria had been a slave. Ever.
“Fine,” he said, with ill grace. “I’ll go talk to the kid.”
He took his time about putting the broccoli away and exaggerated his limp, but no one volunteered to do it for him. Bastards.
He paused before unlocking the door to the storage room, but everything was quiet inside. In fact, when he opened the door, there was no sign of William at all. Maybe he’d worn himself out trying to escape and was lying on the floor having a breather. Gabe poked his head inside cautiously.
“William?” he called tentatively.
Something heavy and solid slammed down on the back of his neck, and he barely caught himself on the floor as he fell. He twisted enough to see William, face set in determination, raising the burnt-out engine cylinder for another strike.
Damn, I forgot we left that in here, he thought dizzily, and then everything went black.
-
Consciousness came roaring back with a bright surge of pain at the base of Gabe’s skull, one that increased tenfold when he opened his eyes and nearly blinded himself looking up at the diode lights in the ceiling.
“Fnargh,” he snarled weakly, squeezing his eyes closed again and flailing out until his hand smacked into flesh.
“Easy,” Ryland’s voice said, in close proximity to the length of skin and muscle Gabe had been thumping. “You’ve just had your head cracked open, give it a minute.”
That and the few extra seconds were enough for Gabe to remember why everything above his shoulders hurt so much, and more to the point, who was responsible. “Where is he?” he croaked, struggling upright with a fist strangling Ryland’s jacket.
“In the lounge. It’s under control,” Ryland answered, which let Gabe relax a little bit. At least there wasn’t a psychotic pleasure slave on his command bridge, preparing to jettison them all out into empty space.
“Everyone okay?” he asked, cracking one eye open to a squint and instantly regretting it. The world tipped a little sideways when he tried to focus on it, so he rocked forward and faceplanted into his own knees, cradling his throbbing skull.
“Alex is about where you are and Nate’s going to have a black eye, but we’ll all live,” Ryland reported, placing something blessedly cool on the back of Gabe’s neck. “He didn’t make it past Victoria, so the ship is still sound.”
Gabe squinted blearily up at the blurred, looming silhouette that was Ryland. “He got me, Alex and Nate, and Victoria took him down?” He knew he sounded petulant, but honestly, he’d be hearing about this for months. Years, even. They’d never let him forget it.
“Well, to be fair,” Ryland pointed out in a reasonable tone, “she had a gun, and he didn’t.”
“Blargh,” Gabe replied, and struggled - with further clutching at Ryland’s coat and application of leverage - to his feet. He swayed slightly, and then the world realigned enough for him to snarl, “We need to have a talk with the new recruit.”
William was, as promised, seated in a chair in the lounge under the watchful eyes of the rest of Gabe’s crew. The pistol across Victoria’s lap twitched slightly when they entered, but slid right back to its primary target once she took them in. William watched it warily, held fast with metal o-ring cuffs clasped around his wrists and the chain threaded through the bars of the chair back. Nate’s work, no doubt; Ryland was too much of a gentle giant to use metal cuffs and Victoria wouldn’t have given up the gun trained on William’s narrow chest.
Alex had Gabe’s package of broccoli stalks held to the side of his head, where Gabe could see a trickle of blood smeared across his cheek. Nate was standing guard, arms crossed as he leaned against the counter, but the skin around one of his eyes was swelling, starting to turn dark.
“All right,” Gabe announced, pulling his own chair up to sit across from William, arranging it slightly to one side so that Victoria still had a clear shot. “It’s time we get a few things straight here.”
William looked at him through bedraggled strands of silk-fine hair, glaring absolute mutinous murder. Gabe smiled pleasantly at him just to show teeth. He started to lean forward to shove some of the hair out of William’s eyes so he could see, and William flinched back against the hard metal back of the chair.
“Hey,” Ryland interjected, his voice the practiced soothing tone they had all cultivated at one time or another to deal with situations much like this one. He knelt down in front of William’s chair, close enough that Gabe twitched a little, conscious of William’s kicking range, and held both hands up. “We know you must be frightened, but I promise, we’re only here…”
William didn’t let him finish. He tossed his hair back, eyes flashing fire, and spat in Ryland’s face.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Gabe snapped, standing and crossing the few steps across to them in a matter of seconds. He was conscious of Victoria tilting the pistol in his peripheral vision, pointing the barrel away now that Gabe was in her line of fire, but he didn’t think it would matter all that much. William was a bloodthirsty little piranha, but it was five-to-one odds in this room, and he was cuffed to a fucking metal chair. Gabe didn’t think even he would be stupid enough to try anything.
William’s chin tilted up defiantly, his neck craning back so he could meet Gabe’s eyes. It was a spectacular show he was putting on, but up close Gabe could see the fear he was trying to keep hidden in his eyes, and the way his muscles twitched and tensed once Gabe was within striking range. Not surprising; with anyone else, William would have been beaten black and blue by this point. Lucky for him, Gabe was prepared to be forgiving.
His head chose that moment to swim, the sudden movement of standing up making the world slosh around like he was on his seventh shot of Juggernaut. He winced. Mostly forgiving, anyway.
“You’re in a horrible fucking situation, I get that,” he said, in a considerably less soothing tone than Ryland had used, but at this point, Gabe couldn’t be fucked. “But these are good people, and they already have to take all my shit without you adding to it and they get crap pay to put up with it, so if you’ve got a problem, you take it out on me.” Well. On second thought, “Verbally. We have a talk, settle it like men. You can scream at me if you want to. Only not right now, because my head is fucking killing me. Thanks for that, by the way.”
William was starting to get that cornered look again, the one Gabe recognized now as the last pit-stop before desperation set in and he did something wildly unpredictable and possibly stupid. He shifted incrementally to the side, and heard Victoria’s exasperated huff of breath as he blocked her shot completely.
William’s flimsy white tunic had ridden up when he’d flinched back, exposing enough leg to be indecent by almost anyone’s standards. Gabe held both hands up in the universal gesture of coming in peace, and then reached out slowly to deliberately tug it back down over William’s thighs. William watched him, breathing fast, not relaxing yet but not lashing out, either.
“We don’t do slavery on this ship,” Gabe said plainly. Best to lay it all out now, before William tried anything else and got himself killed in the process. “You’re on board, you’re part of the crew. You don’t have to work for your keep, but if there’s something you’re good at, like cooking or plotting navigational charts, minding the engines, you’re welcome to pitch in. You don’t take anyone’s orders but mine, and that’s because I’m in command of the ship, not because you’ve got a collar around your neck. You got that?”
William nodded very slowly. Gabe held eye contact, searching William’s gaze, trying to figure out what he was thinking. He wasn’t won over yet, Gabe could tell, but that was all right. They had time.
“We’re not just going to drop you anywhere, either, or sell you off along the way. This isn’t temporary. We’ll get you somewhere safe where you can get that chain taken off, and you can decide on your own what you want to do from there. While you’re on board, you get an equal share of the food and proper clothes. Mine ought to fit you, I should think.” He sized William up as well as he could without it looking lecherous, and mentally ran through his wardrobe. They ought to be fine. “You’ll have your own, private room, and a door that locks from the inside. All yours.”
William’s gaze sharpened. Gabe had no fucking idea what he was thinking until he said slowly, “The only door that locks from the inside on a ship this size is to the captain’s cabin.”
“That’s right,” Gabe confirmed, and when William’s expression didn’t so much as flicker, Gabe realized exactly what he was hearing. I’ll dress you up in my clothes and you’ll sleep in my bed.
And fuck, he wasn’t new at this. He knew exactly how to phrase things to keep slaves from hearing his words differently than he’d intended. For some reason Gabe kept getting twisted around with this one.
“I bunk with the crew,” he explained, keeping his tone casual like he’d never caught on that William had suspected anything else. “Keeps them out of trouble. Or lets me in on it when they get into trouble, either way.”
William’s gaze was evaluating. “If that’s what you intend, why not just take the collar off now?”
One corner of Gabe’s mouth quirked upwards. “I’m sure you’ve heard the story about what happens if a slave tries to cut their collar. It’s not a rumor. If any of us tampers with that necklace of yours, law enforcement ships will converge on us in minutes. We need to get you to people with special equipment.” He held up his hands again, nice and slow. “No hoax.”
“Convenient,” William said, still watching him cautiously, “that you don’t have any way of proving what you say.”
Back on the script; Gabe had heard that one before, in a number of varieties. “It’s a better chance than anyone else will give you,” he said easily. “You’ve got nothing to lose by going along with us. Freedom on board and a door that locks. Even if you don’t believe anything we tell you, it’s better than where you were.”
William had recovered enough aplomb to arch an eyebrow at him, although Gabe saw him brace himself as soon as he did it. “Freedom.”
It was loaded with enough irony that even Gabe nearly rolled his eyes. “I cut you loose,” he said, warning plain in his tone, “you behave yourself. You don’t attack my crew, I don’t let Victoria shoot you. Deal?”
William’s eyes flicked to the gun, considered, then darted back to Gabe. “Deal.”
-
“He’s a liability,” Alex said, a neutral statement without anything behind it that Gabe could hear. “We can still ditch him, we won’t be cleared for takeoff for another hour yet.”
“He won’t last ten seconds out there,” Gabe pointed out, which wasn’t, in itself, a rejection of the idea. “He’ll either get tagged as a runaway or we resell him, and pickings on this station aren’t the best.”
“We’re not selling him,” Victoria said sharply, her fingernails clicking against the barrel of the pistol as she twisted the cylinder open to clean it. Gabe didn’t argue. She had the right to say it, and anyway, she was the one currently holding the firearm. Gabe tried not to talk back to Victoria when she was holding lethal weapons.
“He doesn’t trust us, but they never do this early,” Ryland chimed in, joining them at the table. “It might work in our favor. If he stays suspicious and out of the way, he won’t be any trouble.”
“Oh, he’ll find a way to be trouble,” Gabe promised, pressing gingerly against the bruise on the back of his head and instantly regretting it. For such a skinny fucker, the kid had an arm on him. He squinted an eye open at Ryland. “You think we’ll make it all the way to Decay with him running loose on board?”
Ryland’s fingers steepled meditatively on the tabletop. “I think he easily could have killed you, Alex and probably Nate before Victoria ever got near him,” he answered, arching a wise, pointed eyebrow in Gabe’s direction. “And he didn’t.”
It was something Gabe had been keeping in mind, certainly. After seeing William poised over him to strike that second time, he hadn’t ever expected to wake up. It would have taken one more well-aimed hit and a few extra seconds to make sure he was out of the way permanently, that was all, and it would have been safer for William in the long run. All that meant was that the kid wasn’t a killer. Yet.
“I think there’s still a chance we go to sleep tonight and he murders us in our beds,” Nate commented. “But I’m still okay with having him around. It beats the alternatives.”
“You break it, you buy it,” Ryland agreed, looking over at Alex, who shrugged one shoulder.
“Right,” Gabe said, pushing his chair back and standing up. “Make sure he knows it takes three people minimum to fly this thing, we’ll all sleep better at night. I’m going to radio Pete.”
Pete’s number was classified, his location unknown, his contacts next to impossible to get hold of. Luckily, Gabe had him on speed dial.
“Gabe,” the grinning face on Gabe’s audio/video monitor greeted him. “It’s been a while. Are you bringing me a present?”
“You know me, baby, I can’t stay away,” Gabe crooned, sliding his chair across the deck to lock it into place in front of the monitor screen. “How does next week look for you?”
“Looks like I’ll need a clean guest room,” Pete answered. “It might be more like two weeks, though. I’ve got a present for you too.”
“Sugarpuss, you shouldn’t have,” Gabe replied automatically, already tapping out the keystroke commands to authorize a direct information transfer. “And here I was thinking you never bring me flowers anymore.”
“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” Pete agreed with great solemnity. “Should be coming through now.”
The data itself was shorthand, but enough for Gabe to piece together the overall puzzle. Freeing slaves was actually the least offensive of their illegal operations, when you looked at the big picture. Flashing currency and buying up high-end commodities wasn’t a cheap business, and they had to finance it somehow. Smuggling was something they were essentially doing already, and it paid well enough when the cargo was valuable. Or hot.
“Stolen?” he asked, just to be sure. Pete nodded; just a dip of his head, enough to confirm. Two crates of antiquities and another six of solid gold bars, fresh from the forge, unpressed and untraceable.
Gabe did the math and whistled. It would take them out of their way, but not by much, and the payoff would be worth it three times over. It would be enough to cover William, balance their expenses, and finance the next run.
The only problem he could see was…
“It’s a five-man job,” he said half an hour later, laying out the intelligence Pete had sent over on the lounge table for the others to look over. “Or rather, four men and one woman, sorry Victoria.”
“Lucky for us we have five men,” Nate replied, with an expression that said he was waiting for the catch.
Gabe grimaced. “Yeah, well, that means we’d have to leave our evasive friend on board alone and unattended.” He looked at Alex, knowing already that he’d see the same thoughts in Alex’s eyes that Gabe had already entertained. “I can only think of about a hundred ways that could go badly.”
“He can’t fly it on his own,” Victoria pointed out, leaning back and crossing her legs, cool as ice water. “He wouldn’t even be able to get clearance to take off.”
“No, but he could take us out with the big fucking laser beam up in the gun turret,” Gabe said. “Or he could radio the authorities and have them do the dirty work for him.”
“He doesn’t have to know our business there is illegal,” Victoria said.
“No, there’s not going to be anything suspicious about this at all,” Alex replied before Gabe could. “Come on. He’s not blind, he’ll pick up that something’s off.”
“So we take him with us,” Ryland said. Gabe joined everyone else in staring at him, and Ryland shrugged a lanky shoulder. “What’s he going to do? Run?”
“It would solve our problems if he did,” Nate commented.
Gabe ran a hand through his hair. His scalp itched vaguely; it was about time to touch down on a planet with a water supply. “Are we all agreed, then? We do this, we take him with us?”
“He could fuck it up,” Alex pointed out, again without any obvious bias.
“He could fuck it up if he stays,” Victoria replied, blood-red lips pursed. “I say we bring him.”
“Right, okay,” Gabe acknowledged, pushing back from the table. “Time to teach the newbie about basic smuggling.”
-
“This is a bad idea already,” Gabe said under his breath, keeping one eye on the doorway through which William ought to be joining them as he struggled into a drab, mass-produced suit.
“It isn’t a horrible idea,” Ryland replied, tugging his bow tie through the final loop and examining it critically in their tiny slice of mirror-glass. “We’ve definitely had worse.”
William walked in before Gabe could say anything else, which was just as well, because Gabe promptly forgot what it was he’d been about to say. He was wearing another one of their generic, non-tailored commercial suits, but he did the cheap fabric much more justice than it really deserved. He was about seven kilometers of leg in the tweed trousers, and his cravat was as neatly knotted as if he’d been doing it his entire life. Which Gabe now suspected he had; ordinarily he would have credited Victoria, but he very much doubted William was willing to let anyone else near his unprotected throat.
He tucked a strand of hair self-consciously behind his ear as Gabe stared, and the other difference in his appearance finally clicked. “You’ve cut your hair.”
William’s eyes darted warily to him and away again, keeping tabs on everyone in the room. “This morning,” he answered. He looked as though he was expecting to be chastised for taking the liberty, but honestly, Gabe couldn’t have cared less about that. What he was wondering was more along the lines of who the fuck let him loose with a sharp blade?
There was time enough to worry about that later, and possibly search William’s room for potentially threatening pointy objects. Gabe had a scheme to attend to. “You’re with me,” he told William, checking his reflection one more time before turning to the hatch with satisfaction. “Let’s go.”
The Myrmidons were a string of dwarf planets well out of the way for most galactic travelers. They were picking up some interest as a tourist destination, but it was expensive enough to make the journey that the primary visitors were those with business of their own to conduct. The local governments, wisely recognizing what sort of people their location attracted, had set up a customs net to rival that of the most affluent planets in the galaxy. That in itself, however, held a certain appeal to those whose business was not strictly licit. If you made it out of the Myrmidons, as far as law enforcement was concerned, you were golden.
They emerged into the dull, watery light of a typical Myrmidon day, boots crunching on the thin layer of ice at their feet. “Keep this with you,” Gabe told William, holding out a crisply-folded piece of plastic writing paper. William’s eyes flicked to the paper and back to Gabe before he took it cautiously, thumb running over the waxy seal. “It says you belong to me, and that I’ve given you dispensation to run errands unattended. I know you’d rather burn it and choke me on the ashes than hold onto it, but if we get separated, it’s the only guarantee I’ll have that you can make it back to the ship without harassment.”
Ryland gave them a wave and split off. William watched him go, and slowly tucked the paper into the inside pocket of his coat. Gabe allowed himself a brief internal sigh of relief. William might still ditch the paper and run, of course, but for the moment Gabe seemed to be winning the battle, which was enough for him.
“You shouldn’t need it,” Gabe continued, keeping William in his peripheral vision while making a show of studying the signs and available travel routes. “If all goes according to plan, you won’t have to do anything but tag along for the ride. We won’t send you off alone.”
William studied him sidelong, which Gabe pretended not to notice. “You don’t trust me.”
Gabe turned enough to grin at him, wide and toothy. “You don’t trust me either.” He nodded toward a side road, and they detoured away from the heaviest foot traffic, leaving Victoria to disappear into the throng. “That’s not why I’m keeping you with me, though.” Well. Not completely. “Everyone else has done this before. I didn’t send Victoria out alone on her first run. Or Ryland and Alex.”
William was quiet for a moment, pondering. “What about Nate?”
Gabe grinned again. “Nate was doing this before I was even in the game. He would have spiked my next drink with something unpleasant if I’d tried to tell him he needed supervision. Here, this is us.”
The cart was on the thirteenth floor of a building that looked as though it wouldn’t support more than two or three. As promised, it was loaded with crates and ready to go. Gabe hit the brake and hauled the cart around, steering it back toward the airlift. “This is what you came for?” William asked, like he didn’t believe it could be quite that easy.
He was right. “This is what we ostensibly came for,” Gabe corrected, “as listed on our landing declaration of purpose. What you and I are really after is something else entirely.”
“The antiquities,” William finished, because he’d apparently paid attention to the briefing Alex had given him. “How will you get them out?”
Gabe hit the button for the door and walked out whistling. “If we play our cards right,” Gabe said, trundling along ahead of William with the cart but not going so far that he lost sight of him, “we walk right through customs.”
It was a busy day on their particular dwarf planet, which was all for the better. They headed for the line of merchants, business people and cargo freighter captains with something to declare, which currently stretched around the block.
“Believe it or not, this is the easy part,” Gabe said, nodding to their stack of crates. “Nate and Alex have the harder job by far. It takes one person each to counterbalance a hover-lift with as much gold as they’ll be carrying, and then they have to melt the bloody stuff down.”
William glanced over, clearly startled. “You’re moving it molten?” he asked.
“Sort of,” Gabe hedged. They joined the end of the customs line, and Gabe stalled in replying for long enough to determine that the ladies ahead of them were both deeply involved in their own conversation on how to convince the customs officials that Aurora fox-mink fur had dropped dramatically in value over the weekend, and also having said discussion in another language. Satisfied, he nodded up to the pipelines criss-crossing the sky above them. “See those? Aqueducts, on the old Roman model. They’re the only thing on this rock that doesn’t have to pass through the security blockade to the ports, and that’s because they have filters to catch anything solid someone might try to dispose of in such a fashion.”
William’s gaze followed the line of one of the pipes, stretching on reinforced pylons high over their heads. “Liquid gold,” he said quietly.
Gabe snapped his fingers. “Exactly. One of them has been temporarily diverted for our cause, and is set to empty out into the carrying case of our very own Victoria Asher.”
“Beyond customs,” William finished, staring ahead of them down the long line of crate-toting business people waiting impatiently for permission to depart.
Gabe’s mouth quirked sideways. “Nate and Alex will meet up with her on the far side, and, lacking complications, we should be out by what passes for nightfall around here.”
It wasn’t a test, exactly, but Gabe was very aware that he was giving William enough information and leeway to be dangerous to them if he chose. He’d timed it carefully; the transfer wouldn’t have started yet, and if William said something to the officials, angling for a reward or just hoping to have Gabe arrested and taken away, law enforcement wouldn’t have enough to go to pin any of his people down. They’d be able to vanish without any proof of wrongdoing. He was hoping, however, that William would choose instead to try using this as evidence that he was trustworthy. Whether Gabe believed that or not, it would be a step in the right direction. He couldn’t expect trust without giving a little in return.
“Here we go,” he said aloud, and plastered on a smile for the two officials waiting with clipboards in hand to go through their crates. The women stalking away toward the port didn’t look too happy; they must have lost their battle over the price of fur.
Served them right, Gabe thought, cracking open the top two crates for inspection. Anyone who dealt in animal pelts didn’t deserve to be cut a break.
“Tigris secret-boxes,” he reported to the men, pulling one out to show them. “Family trade. These were made by my grandfather himself. Over fifty compartments in each one, made from gorgeous softwood to match any room. There are places to keep any treasure of any size.” He passed the box to William, who looked briefly startled but was quick to catch on, holding the box up to display it while Gabe opened up another one. “Might I interest you in a few? They make great gifts for anyone of any age or gender. You can hide things inside them for your loved ones, they’re the gift that keeps on giving. You can also personalize them, with the exterior and compartment designs made to order.”
The officials looked unsurprised to have him deliver a sales pitch; they’d clearly been through the last-ditch attempts of departing artisans many times in the past. They also looked appropriately dismayed, although one of them was hiding it better than the other. “Fifty compartments?” the younger one asked. “How many do you have?”
“Enough for friends, family and loved ones,” Gabe assured him, opening up a few more hidden doors and drawers to show off. “I can also take an order if you’re interested in more than I have here with me, and guarantee production and delivery within a matter of days. Easily by the holidays; I have a large family and we are all expert craftsmen, I assure you.”
The older man sighed, setting aside his clipboard. “Let’s get started.”
-
It took nearly two hours, which caused the line behind them to build up to a considerable distance. Gabe opened cabinets and demonstrated various types of hinges and hidden spring-catches, running off at the mouth ceaselessly without providing the customs men much actual help. William had somehow settled brilliantly into the role of new and largely clueless assistant, and was ‘accidentally’ closing more drawers than he was opening, fumbling around with the boxes and even dropping one, which provided Gabe with a welcome respite of chastising him for clumsiness for twenty minutes straight.
Finally every compartment was opened, every drawer inspected, and the officials were practically drooping with relief to see them off. The merchants behind them had reached extremely vocal levels of pissed-off at the wait, and Gabe didn’t foresee an easy hour of polite and respectful business people in the officials’ future. He resisted tipping William a wink, but just barely.
“That’s forty-one boxes, no export tax,” the older official announced, signing their customs form with a flourish. “You’re cleared for departure within…”
“Wait, hold up,” Gabe interrupted, tugging at the man’s clipboard. “That’s forty-eight boxes. Four crates, twelve boxes per crate.”
“Forty-one,” the official corrected. “This crate here only has five boxes in it. Now, if you’ll sign this here…”
“What the fuck?” Gabe said, rooting through the crate in question and looking accusingly at William. “Did you pack this one? Was it those moronic cousins of mine? We’re missing seven boxes. Are they…they’re the ones from the display, aren’t they? The engraved boxes with the gold inlay? We have models with gold inlay on the lid,” he told the customs officials in an aside, for what had to be at least the eighth time, before continuing. “Including the one made by my great-great-grandfather Tiberius? Fuck, now we have to go back.”
“Sir,” the older official said, sternly but not without a trace of panic underneath, “if you return to the city, you will have to pass through customs again.”
“We’ll do it,” Gabe replied, hammering down the lid of the half-filled crate. “We’re not leaving without those boxes. Those imbeciles, I wonder if they thought they’d be able to sell them on their own or if they really are just that stupid…”
He kept up a steady stream of aspersions cast on the character and intellect of his invented relatives until they passed by the entire grumbling line of impatient travelers and rounded the corner onto the main thoroughfare. Then he grinned at William, who was shaking his head and staring back at him in bewildered amazement.
“Keep up, we’ve got to move fast,” Gabe warned, steering them left into an alley. “If we don’t get back through before the shift changes, this was all for nothing.”
“You really think they won’t check them again?” William demanded, walking briskly at his side. At least he wasn’t going to slow them down; those legs were more than a match for Gabe’s pace with the cart.
“Oh, they’ll check them again,” Gabe confirmed. “The top few new ones, and the ones on the bottom, which is where a less subtle smuggler would be sure to hide something. But will they check all fifty compartments of each crate of forty-eight Tigris secret boxes, for the second time in four hours?” He shook his head. “Not likely. Heads up, here we go.”
“What…?” William began, but he was cut off by the large crashing collision of their cart into a book-trolley.
“So sorry,” Ryland insisted, practically supplicating himself at their feet as Gabe cursed and kicked at his cart and the crates that had spilled all over the frozen surface of the road. “It’s the ice, I never can seem to brake suddenly, and you just appeared…”
“No harm done,” Gabe allowed, stacking the crates again with disgruntled resignation. “Is that all of yours?”
William helped him to heft the last crate, smaller but considerably heavier than the rest, atop their load. “I believe so, yes,” Ryland answered, adjusting his spectacles and bobbing his head, running long-fingered hands over his own crates as if to reassure himself that the books inside were undamaged. “Thank you. May you live long lives, my friends.”
“A religious nut,” Gabe said as they started off again. “Figures.”
William was eyeing him again, and Gabe couldn’t help enjoying it just a little bit. “Customs?” William guessed.
Gabe shook his head. “Not yet. In here, we have a swap to make.” He pushed the cart into a dead-end alley and from there into the rotted-out shell of an abandoned shack, the wheels squeaking and groaning under the added weight of the fifth crate. “First we have to repack the crates, get rid of the extra one and redistribute its contents into some of our very own secret boxes.” He held up a box to admire briefly. “Handy little fuckers, aren’t they?”
The work went quickly, faster than Gabe had expected, with William pitching in. Gabe kept an eye on him, but he didn’t see anything amiss; no doors left ajar to create suspicion, no hidden messages left in drawers or scratched into wood. If William was planning something, Gabe couldn’t spot it.
“These are the last three,” William told him, holding up a box of bronzed statuettes. “Where do you…?”
The creak of wood stopped him mid-sentence, and the muffled bang of the back door closing. William looked at Gabe with a question in his eyes, but Gabe shook his head quickly. No one was scheduled to meet them, and they all had their own business to take care of. Following them here would only create suspicion. If it was one of Gabe’s crew…
It wasn’t. “In the name of the law, who’s in here?” a booming male voice called. “This is private property, you’re trespassing.”
Gabe froze for a moment, thinking rapidly and not coming up with any viable excuse. They were in an abandoned building, surrounded by crates and with three obviously valuable statuettes still in plain sight. It didn’t look like anything but what it was.
William caught his eyes, clearly thinking the same thing. Then he dropped to his knees.
Gabe’s first instinct was to protest, but he wasn’t a fool, and William’s idea wasn’t actually a bad one. He didn’t know that it would keep them from being arrested, but it would at least give them a shot.
William fumbled with the front of Gabe’s trousers, obviously unused to working the hooks and buttons from that angle. Gabe tried to help him but gave up after a half-second, using the time instead to tug his shirt loose, run a hand through his hair to rumple it and lean back in a wide-legged stance against the wall. He couldn’t tell if William’s hands were shaking or not, but they felt determined enough when one slid inside his trousers to give him a quick, fleeting squeeze.
He knew instantly why, too. Gabe’s brain might have gotten with the program quickly enough, but his dick was another matter, and not entirely clued in to their cover story. William’s groping helped, but not enough. At least not until Gabe looked down and saw William between his legs, looking up at him through mussed hair and long lashes, blinking once slowly as he wetted his lips.
“Fuck,” Gabe breathed, dropping his head back against the wall as William tugged at his undergarments and opened his mouth, which was how the law enforcement officer found them a second later.
“What’s going on here?” the man demanded, as though it weren’t obvious enough from the enthusiastic bulge in Gabe’s undone trousers and William’s position on the packed dirt floor. “What’s all this?”
William reacted before Gabe could. “I have a pass,” he said quickly, holding up his hands in a gesture of unarmed surrender. “I have a paper from my owner, I’m allowed to be out on my own.”
The officer looked to Gabe, who was almost as flummoxed before he caught on to the game they were playing. The only way a pleasure slave would be doing favors in an abandoned building would be if Gabe didn’t have a bed in which to properly tumble him at his leisure. “He’s not mine,” Gabe said belatedly. “I’m just passing through. Leaving town today.”
William shrank back a little, and the officer’s expression turned knowing. “Making a bit on the side, are you?” he asked, tapping his baton against William’s arm as he neared them. “Working freelance?”
William bit his lip, letting silence damn him. Fuck, he was good, Gabe thought. If they could turn him, he would make a decent addition to Gabe’s crew. That was, if they could also convince him to stop trying to kill them. “Look, I don’t want any trouble,” Gabe said, tucking himself back in and ignoring the twinge of protest from his neglected dick. “I didn’t know it was trespassing, I’ll leave right now.”
“Just appreciating the local flavor?” the officer suggested, his gaze roaming freely over what William currently appeared to be offering. “Can’t say I blame you, for a taste like this one.”
The hand currently out of sight on Gabe’s far side curled into a fist. Fuck, he really didn’t want to risk a fight. Knocking out an officer would be noisy, messy, and it would probably come back to bite them in the ass well before they could clear the customs line. But if the bastard tried following up on what Gabe could see in his eyes and decided he wanted to sample William for himself as their price of freedom, Gabe would do it.
“I won’t do it again,” William promised, and thank fuck he’d turned off the coy act, staying skittishly at a safe distance from the wandering tip of the officer’s baton.
The officer himself snorted. “Oh, I’m sure.” He jerked his head toward the door. “Just don’t do it in here. Get out, get yourselves a room. Take it out of whatever you’re paying him for his pretty mouth.”
“Yes sir,” Gabe agreed, already grabbing for his cart. William had either made the statuettes vanish somewhere on his person or abandoned them in the emptied crate, and Gabe didn’t honestly care which. They’d already pushed their luck on this one; he wasn’t taking any more chances. “Go,” he told William under his breath, pushing their cart of smuggled treasure back onto the road, and headed for customs.
part two
Pairing: Gabe/William
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This is purely a figment of my imagination.
Warnings: Violence, slavery, self-indulgence.
Notes: William bit Gabe. Gabe choked William. I wrote this fic. Thank you to cupiscent for the spectacular beta, and to everyone else for putting up with my endless talk of sex slaves in space.
Summary: “Gabey,” Pete said when he answered, grinning. “How’s my favorite slave master today?”
The brothel was like any other, on any other space station. Gabe swiped his Ident card at the front desk, and apparently the number of gold stars next to his rank was enough to entice the owners themselves out to greet him. They were middle-aged, probably legally partnered; the man had a scraggly goatee and yellow teeth, and his wife had the falsely charming, hard-bitten look of someone who’d grown up working the back rooms before graduating to the front.
“Good evening,” the man said, smarmy with deference. Gabe used that tone himself, upon occasion. “How can we serve?”
“Specialties of the house?” Gabe asked offhandedly, tugging the fingers of his glove off one by one.
The woman’s eyes fell to Gabe’s gold-handled walking stick, held under his arm so that the cobra’s fanged head and spread hood faced forward. Someone who knew his reputation, then, or had at least recognized something off his Ident card. “A few exotic beauties,” the woman crooned. “Boys and girls. Every shade of skin, foreign features.”
“One fully trained in the eastern arts,” her husband added, with a yellow-toothed smile.
Gabe made a bored noise, and the woman switched tacks hastily. “Two who are experienced with the more savage pleasures,” she offered, giving him a look that suggested he was meant to be imagining himself as a hunter on safari chasing gazelles rather than slave whores.
“Either of them good for a few hours?” Gabe asked idly, and offered his most practiced leer. “I don’t mind a few marks on the merchandise.”
“None like that, sir,” the woman said proudly. “All of ours are perfect outside and in.”
A choice of two was better than nothing, but still less than promising. It sounded like the brothel didn’t cater to BDSM in the extreme, which were usually the slaves Gabe tried to save first. No one had it easy here, but the ones who’d been marked up enough to lower their value tended to be offered to none but the most dangerous clients, and therefore had the shortest life expectancy.
His disinterest must have been obvious, because the man spoke up suddenly. “We do have a virgin, fresh in from the outer colonies,” he said quickly.
His wife turned on him, clearly not expecting that, and then caught herself and tried with little success to sweeten her expression. “He’s not trained yet, I’m afraid,” she said, with another brief warning glance at her husband. “I wouldn’t want to offer you an imperfect experience. And the price would be considerably higher, of course.”
Gabe waffled for all of two seconds before making his decision. “I’ll take it,” he said, pulling out his bank card and tapping the edge lightly against the counter. A virgin would probably be treated well for the first few months, relative to the other unhappy residents, but if this one hadn’t even been broken in yet, maybe Gabe could actually get one out before their spirits were completely crushed. Not to mention, virgin usually translated as barely legal, and Gabe couldn’t stand to think of a teenager in this place.
“This is for purchase,” he added casually, which made her eyes go wide and her husband’s practically dance with greed. “I don’t like others playing with my toys once I’ve chosen them. I’ll just want a test run, first.”
“Of course, sir,” the man said, deferential again now that Gabe’s prospective spending limit had gone up considerably. “Anything you prefer.”
The woman ran his card - and she wasn’t kidding about the price - before handing it back. “He’s a little high-spirited,” she warned.
Gabe let his smile turned wolfish. “Just the way I like them,” he promised. Hey, if this added to his reputation, so much the better. Maybe he’d get a few other kids as a result. He knew enough about the standard brothel training process - starvation, caning on the soles of the feet, anything and everything so long as it didn’t leave a mark - to be glad he could spare anyone some of that.
“Room 15,” she said, with only the slightest hesitance in her smile. Maybe she thought Gabe was going to ruin her virgin beyond all repair. Which was fine, because Gabe wasn’t planning on returning him anytime soon. “Fingerprint here.”
Gabe pressed his right index finger against the proffered pad, which would give him access to both the room and the toy cabinet inside. “I’ll call you if I need anything,” he told them, and whistled on his way up the stairs.
The occupant of room 15 was older than Gabe had expected, but not by much. He was too pretty to have been marked for anything but the brothels since enslavement, hair hanging in loose-winding curls around his face and lanky all over. He wasn’t kneeling, which Gabe hadn’t expected, but hovering near the opposite wall at the head of the bed, as far away from the door in the tiny room as he could get. He was wearing the traditional white, flimsy tunic of a virgin bedslave, a garment providing easy access that didn’t conceal a lot, and his chin had a cleft in the center which caught the light when he tilted it defiantly up.
“Well hello,” Gabe said pleasantly. The lock clicked behind him as the door shut completely, giving them the illusion of privacy behind paper-thin walls.
“I’ll bite your fucking dick off,” the kid said in return.
“Wow, you are new,” Gabe said, impressed. “They weren’t kidding.”
There was a gold chain around the slave’s neck, one with the delicate appearance of ornamentation but strong and thick enough that the kid wouldn’t be able to break it off. The beaten-gold pendant on the end said William in elegant calligraphy. A slave collar, prettied up for the higher-end market.
“William, right?” Gabe said soothingly, smiling and walking slowly forward. This was always the hardest part; new slaves were usually skittish and frightened, hard to coax into trusting him. “All I need,” he started gently, which was when William threw a punch and clipped him on the jaw.
Gabe was shocked enough that he didn’t move to defend himself, which meant that by the time he recovered from the surprise, William was going for his throat.
“Fuck,” Gabe managed, barely warding off the long, skinny fingers clearly bent on strangulation. William was stronger than he looked, probably in part because he was desperate and cornered, and Gabe was able to keep him marginally at bay but couldn’t stop them from toppling sideways onto the bed. That apparently sparked a whole new level of panic, because William stopped struggling and started kicking.
“Shit, wait, just,” Gabe tried, breaking off in a grunt when William’s knee connected with one of his kidneys. Gabe grabbed his ankle, only to realize belatedly that William’s ankle was really the least of his concerns, because now he had both hands free.
William lunged for the bedside lamp, only to find that it was bolted to the table, which in turn was bolted to the floor. He struggled with it for half a second, then tried to get through the metal cage housing the light bulb to break the glass - Gabe had to give the kid points for ingenuity - before giving up on that and just trying to hit him again.
The punch missed, because Gabe had been in more bar fights than this kid ever had and knew when to dodge, but he still only had a handful of seconds to roll off the bed and get into a more defensible position. By that time, William had found the only thing in the room that wasn’t locked or bolted down: Gabe’s walking stick.
“Shit,” Gabe said again, right before William realized what he had and took a swing at Gabe’s head. Gabe ducked again, and the stick thudded into the wall with enough force to chip the plaster, and likely also enough to break Gabe’s ribs. William went to swing again, and by some freak twist of luck, his fingers slid over the trick catch just below the handle, triggering the hidden compartment that housed the six-inch knife blade in the base.
Both of them froze. Then William’s expression shifted from shock to determination, and Gabe had just enough time to recognize that his window of opportunity had just passed before William tried to drive the blade into his chest.
“Fuck, would you just…” Gabe attempted, but he knew all too well that in brothels like this one the walls had ears, and he couldn’t risk his entire operation just to explain to one slave why he shouldn’t be trying to kill him. The most he could say was, “I’m not going to hurt…” which William clearly didn’t believe anyway, because the next thrust of the walking stick was aimed for his jugular.
Gabe sidestepped, got hold of the stick, and sent them both slamming into the wall next to the door. William tried to pin him with the walking stick across Gabe’s throat, which was a good move, but Gabe had more experience with this particular weapon and he knew how to apply the right sort of leverage.
Sensing that he was about to lose the fight, William shoved his knee into Gabe’s stomach, which hurt like a bitch and drove the air out of his lungs, and then made a desperate break for the door. Gabe tackled him, the walking stick rolling safely out of the way for the moment under the bed. William grappled with him for long enough to squirm out from underneath him, and then did his very best to single-handedly gouge Gabe’s eyes out.
“Fucking fuck,” Gabe yelled, and was busy enough fending off William’s clawing fingernails that he didn’t immediately recognize that William’s focus was actually on his other hand, and that the eye-gouging was being used as a distraction technique, because what William was really trying to do was get Gabe’s fingerprint on the pad to open the toy closet.
For a moment, Gabe had to stop and be seriously impressed. Then he didn’t have time to do anything but fight, because he knew - and he suspected William did, too - what sort of things were in that closet, and furry handcuffs were the least of it. If William got his hands on anything that could draw blood or electrocute, they were both fucked. Gabe didn’t really doubt at this point that William would kill him if he could, and there was no way William would survive after killing a free man.
He gave up on trying to reason with William, because his half-assed pleading was falling on deaf ears anyway, and instead threw himself completely into subduing William before he got them both killed. Playing nice wasn’t going to do it, so he got in a couple of punches of his own; one glancing blow to William’s sharp cheekbone, and another to his collarbone that was going to bruise spectacularly. He twisted out of the way right as William tried to castrate him, and grabbed for William’s hand a split-second after he dove for the bed and the protruding gold cobra head of Gabe’s walking stick.
He missed, but he got a handful of William’s hair, and yanked that back far enough to keep the stick temporarily out of reach. William kicked out at him again, which was when Gabe heard the timid knocking on the door and the hesitant, “Sir?” of the brothel’s mistress.
“Fuck,” he gasped, which turned into a strangled yell when William twisted like an eel and sank his teeth into Gabe’s wrist hard enough to draw blood.
Gabe let go of William’s hair like it was on fire, but when William jerked away towards the bed again, Gabe’s hand landed on the gold chain around his neck, solid and sturdy. He yanked the pendant sideways, turning the necklace into a choke-chain the way it was designed to be used, and hauled back with all his strength to keep William from reaching the knife blade.
William choked, both hands going to his throat to scrabble at the chain constricting his airway, and Gabe took the opportunity to grab his walking stick and stab his fingers at the catch, sheathing the knife. He rolled up to his knees, sore in more places than he wanted to think about, and dragged William across the floor to the door, jamming his index finger onto the pad controlling the lock.
The brothel owner stared at him, her mouth gaping. Gabe loosened his grip on the chain and William flopped at his feet like a landed fish, gasping. There were bruises forming bright and angry around his neck, and his tunic had been ripped halfway down his chest. At least there wouldn’t be too much question of what Gabe had been doing with him in here, not after the racket they’d just made.
Gabe put one foot on the back of William’s neck as a warning, smiled sweetly at the flabbergasted woman, and said, “I’ll take him.”
-
It was going to be a long fucking trip to the Decay ring.
William made another break for it when they were nearing the dock, which Gabe had been expecting because it was a fuck of a lot easier to get away even in a crowded space station dock than it was aboard a starship in the middle of a cold, empty vacuum. He’d managed to get William subdued and under control again, but not before William had raked his fingernails across Gabe’s neck hard enough to draw blood, jammed an elbow into the same kidney he’d targeted before, and kicked him in the shin so hard that Gabe was still limping.
The closest scrape, in fact, was getting William on board his ship before local law enforcement decided to take matters into their own hands and discipline William in one of the public slave stocks for disturbing the peace. If he’d injured another free person in his bid to escape, Gabe might not have been able to save him from it, but luckily for everyone but Gabe, William seemed to have a very clear idea of who he wanted to incapacitate. Luckily for everyone including Gabe, his rank held enough sway, along with the argument that he wanted to get his newly-purchased bedslave stashed away in private as soon as possible where he would most definitely not be causing any more trouble, to get them off the dock without William experiencing firsthand how law enforcement chose to punish unruly slaves.
“If you try that again,” Gabe said in an undertone as he marched William up to the docking checkpoint, fingers biting into his arm hard enough to bruise and hopefully discourage further escape attempts, “they will strap you to that bench and tape electrodes all over you, and there won’t be a fucking thing I can do about it, do you understand? So stay still.”
If Victoria ever found out he’d spoken to a slave like this - threatened one, even - she’d have his head, and not just the one on his shoulders. He hoped she never did, or at the very least, that she only found out after she’d met William. Gabe thought he might be granted some leniency for that.
They made it through the checkpoint without another incident, and from there onto the boarding ramp, which was lowered while they were docked and Gabe was off-ship.
“Now look,” Gabe said as soon as they were inside the hatch. “I don’t want to lock you up, but I will if I have to, so if I let you go free, are you going to stop trying to kill me?”
William nodded slowly, eyes wary and darting quickly around the small space.
“Good,” Gabe said, relieved. “Now then…”
He realized his mistake - and the proximity of the dock-hook - a split-second too late. William lunged for the hook, swinging it around in a move that by all rights should have spilled Gabe’s guts all over the metal deck, but Gabe blocked it with his walking stick at the last second and both weapons smashed into the grates lining the hatch, the hook skidding across with a metallic screech and a small shower of sparks.
If William got loose, Gabe wouldn’t be able to protect him, and besides that, it had been a long fucking day. Gabe was running somewhat low on patience. He caught the hook with the stick’s cobra head, twisted them sharply around until William’s arm wrenched in its socket and he fell to his knees trying to keep hold of the hook without dislocating his shoulder, and then Gabe stepped in to yank William’s head back by his gorgeous hair, triggering the trick catch on his stick and pressing the knife blade to William’s throat.
“We’ll work on this,” Gabe said optimistically, driving William forward on his knees and shoving him into the first storage room they came across that had a lock. He slapped the panel to secure the room and then sagged against the wall, suddenly keenly feeling like he’d just been run over by a hoverjet.
His crew was in the lounge awaiting his return, and they all looked up when he hobbled in, pulling off his gloves and smacking them down onto the metal table. Ryland's eyes sharpened almost immediately, clearly taking in the worst of Gabe's battle scars. “Trouble?”
Alex was more direct. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“Our new acquisition is less than cowed by my presence,” Gabe answered grimly, yanking open the freezer door in search of a makeshift icepack.
Nate's eyebrows rose. “A slave did that to you?” he asked, as Gabe slumped back with relief against the counter and clapped a pound of broccoli stalks against the swelling bruise on his jaw.
Victoria snorted in a decidedly unladylike manner. She took the broccoli away to get a good look at Gabe's injuries, then apparently dismissed them as trivial enough not to be a concern and said, “I like this one already.”
“Good, you deal with him,” Gabe replied, knowing he sounded petulant and unable to make himself stop. His shin still hurt like a bitch where William had kicked him, and any sympathy he may have started out with had throbbed away after he’d banged it on the ladder climbing up here.
“Where is he?” Ryland asked cautiously. Gabe understood the reaction; they’d lost a slave once before, when she’d thrown herself off the top of the ship before Gabe could talk her down.
He was quick to reassure, therefore, before anyone got the wrong idea. “Storage room A,” he answered, then realized how odd that sounded, and added sheepishly, “I needed somewhere to lock him in.”
Victoria’s voice was razor-sharp. “What the fuck, Gabe.”
“Hey,” he protested, raising his hands defensively before the bruise started aching again and he had to replace the ice. “I know, okay? It’s not like I wanted to, but I really think this one would kill all of us in our sleep, and I’m sort of fond of you guys.”
Alex looked troubled. “Have you talked to him?” he asked, with the doe-eyed empathy that was the reason most of their soon-to-be-liberated passengers opened up to him first. “Did you explain things?”
“Well…” Gabe hesitated, but there wasn’t really a good way to answer that, or at least not one that wasn’t a lie. “Not yet.”
“Gabe.” Victoria didn’t sound reproving; she sounded like she was going to finish what William had started, preferably bare-handed.
“He’s probably terrified,” Alex said, with a look that was skirting the edge of ‘accusing.’ Ryland had a similar expression, although he was keeping his opinions to himself for the moment. “You know how they’re treated.”
Gabe didn’t know how this had all gotten turned around so that he was the one in the wrong. He was a knight in fucking shining armor, liberator of slaves, rescuer of the oppressed, defender of the weak. He was a fucking hero. His crew were a bunch of disloyal traitors who should be strung up for mutiny.
“No locks on the doors,” Ryland pointed out. “That’s what we always tell them. So they start to believe they’re free.”
Gabe wanted, very badly, to suggest that one of them go deal with the kid. It was on the tip of his tongue, but that was too close to suggesting that Victoria go deal with him - which was what he wanted, anyway, for someone who knew what the kid was going through to explain things, get him to open up to them, share stories and hug and cry and whatever to start the healing process - but he couldn’t do that. They never, ever mentioned the fact that Victoria had been a slave. Ever.
“Fine,” he said, with ill grace. “I’ll go talk to the kid.”
He took his time about putting the broccoli away and exaggerated his limp, but no one volunteered to do it for him. Bastards.
He paused before unlocking the door to the storage room, but everything was quiet inside. In fact, when he opened the door, there was no sign of William at all. Maybe he’d worn himself out trying to escape and was lying on the floor having a breather. Gabe poked his head inside cautiously.
“William?” he called tentatively.
Something heavy and solid slammed down on the back of his neck, and he barely caught himself on the floor as he fell. He twisted enough to see William, face set in determination, raising the burnt-out engine cylinder for another strike.
Damn, I forgot we left that in here, he thought dizzily, and then everything went black.
-
Consciousness came roaring back with a bright surge of pain at the base of Gabe’s skull, one that increased tenfold when he opened his eyes and nearly blinded himself looking up at the diode lights in the ceiling.
“Fnargh,” he snarled weakly, squeezing his eyes closed again and flailing out until his hand smacked into flesh.
“Easy,” Ryland’s voice said, in close proximity to the length of skin and muscle Gabe had been thumping. “You’ve just had your head cracked open, give it a minute.”
That and the few extra seconds were enough for Gabe to remember why everything above his shoulders hurt so much, and more to the point, who was responsible. “Where is he?” he croaked, struggling upright with a fist strangling Ryland’s jacket.
“In the lounge. It’s under control,” Ryland answered, which let Gabe relax a little bit. At least there wasn’t a psychotic pleasure slave on his command bridge, preparing to jettison them all out into empty space.
“Everyone okay?” he asked, cracking one eye open to a squint and instantly regretting it. The world tipped a little sideways when he tried to focus on it, so he rocked forward and faceplanted into his own knees, cradling his throbbing skull.
“Alex is about where you are and Nate’s going to have a black eye, but we’ll all live,” Ryland reported, placing something blessedly cool on the back of Gabe’s neck. “He didn’t make it past Victoria, so the ship is still sound.”
Gabe squinted blearily up at the blurred, looming silhouette that was Ryland. “He got me, Alex and Nate, and Victoria took him down?” He knew he sounded petulant, but honestly, he’d be hearing about this for months. Years, even. They’d never let him forget it.
“Well, to be fair,” Ryland pointed out in a reasonable tone, “she had a gun, and he didn’t.”
“Blargh,” Gabe replied, and struggled - with further clutching at Ryland’s coat and application of leverage - to his feet. He swayed slightly, and then the world realigned enough for him to snarl, “We need to have a talk with the new recruit.”
William was, as promised, seated in a chair in the lounge under the watchful eyes of the rest of Gabe’s crew. The pistol across Victoria’s lap twitched slightly when they entered, but slid right back to its primary target once she took them in. William watched it warily, held fast with metal o-ring cuffs clasped around his wrists and the chain threaded through the bars of the chair back. Nate’s work, no doubt; Ryland was too much of a gentle giant to use metal cuffs and Victoria wouldn’t have given up the gun trained on William’s narrow chest.
Alex had Gabe’s package of broccoli stalks held to the side of his head, where Gabe could see a trickle of blood smeared across his cheek. Nate was standing guard, arms crossed as he leaned against the counter, but the skin around one of his eyes was swelling, starting to turn dark.
“All right,” Gabe announced, pulling his own chair up to sit across from William, arranging it slightly to one side so that Victoria still had a clear shot. “It’s time we get a few things straight here.”
William looked at him through bedraggled strands of silk-fine hair, glaring absolute mutinous murder. Gabe smiled pleasantly at him just to show teeth. He started to lean forward to shove some of the hair out of William’s eyes so he could see, and William flinched back against the hard metal back of the chair.
“Hey,” Ryland interjected, his voice the practiced soothing tone they had all cultivated at one time or another to deal with situations much like this one. He knelt down in front of William’s chair, close enough that Gabe twitched a little, conscious of William’s kicking range, and held both hands up. “We know you must be frightened, but I promise, we’re only here…”
William didn’t let him finish. He tossed his hair back, eyes flashing fire, and spat in Ryland’s face.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Gabe snapped, standing and crossing the few steps across to them in a matter of seconds. He was conscious of Victoria tilting the pistol in his peripheral vision, pointing the barrel away now that Gabe was in her line of fire, but he didn’t think it would matter all that much. William was a bloodthirsty little piranha, but it was five-to-one odds in this room, and he was cuffed to a fucking metal chair. Gabe didn’t think even he would be stupid enough to try anything.
William’s chin tilted up defiantly, his neck craning back so he could meet Gabe’s eyes. It was a spectacular show he was putting on, but up close Gabe could see the fear he was trying to keep hidden in his eyes, and the way his muscles twitched and tensed once Gabe was within striking range. Not surprising; with anyone else, William would have been beaten black and blue by this point. Lucky for him, Gabe was prepared to be forgiving.
His head chose that moment to swim, the sudden movement of standing up making the world slosh around like he was on his seventh shot of Juggernaut. He winced. Mostly forgiving, anyway.
“You’re in a horrible fucking situation, I get that,” he said, in a considerably less soothing tone than Ryland had used, but at this point, Gabe couldn’t be fucked. “But these are good people, and they already have to take all my shit without you adding to it and they get crap pay to put up with it, so if you’ve got a problem, you take it out on me.” Well. On second thought, “Verbally. We have a talk, settle it like men. You can scream at me if you want to. Only not right now, because my head is fucking killing me. Thanks for that, by the way.”
William was starting to get that cornered look again, the one Gabe recognized now as the last pit-stop before desperation set in and he did something wildly unpredictable and possibly stupid. He shifted incrementally to the side, and heard Victoria’s exasperated huff of breath as he blocked her shot completely.
William’s flimsy white tunic had ridden up when he’d flinched back, exposing enough leg to be indecent by almost anyone’s standards. Gabe held both hands up in the universal gesture of coming in peace, and then reached out slowly to deliberately tug it back down over William’s thighs. William watched him, breathing fast, not relaxing yet but not lashing out, either.
“We don’t do slavery on this ship,” Gabe said plainly. Best to lay it all out now, before William tried anything else and got himself killed in the process. “You’re on board, you’re part of the crew. You don’t have to work for your keep, but if there’s something you’re good at, like cooking or plotting navigational charts, minding the engines, you’re welcome to pitch in. You don’t take anyone’s orders but mine, and that’s because I’m in command of the ship, not because you’ve got a collar around your neck. You got that?”
William nodded very slowly. Gabe held eye contact, searching William’s gaze, trying to figure out what he was thinking. He wasn’t won over yet, Gabe could tell, but that was all right. They had time.
“We’re not just going to drop you anywhere, either, or sell you off along the way. This isn’t temporary. We’ll get you somewhere safe where you can get that chain taken off, and you can decide on your own what you want to do from there. While you’re on board, you get an equal share of the food and proper clothes. Mine ought to fit you, I should think.” He sized William up as well as he could without it looking lecherous, and mentally ran through his wardrobe. They ought to be fine. “You’ll have your own, private room, and a door that locks from the inside. All yours.”
William’s gaze sharpened. Gabe had no fucking idea what he was thinking until he said slowly, “The only door that locks from the inside on a ship this size is to the captain’s cabin.”
“That’s right,” Gabe confirmed, and when William’s expression didn’t so much as flicker, Gabe realized exactly what he was hearing. I’ll dress you up in my clothes and you’ll sleep in my bed.
And fuck, he wasn’t new at this. He knew exactly how to phrase things to keep slaves from hearing his words differently than he’d intended. For some reason Gabe kept getting twisted around with this one.
“I bunk with the crew,” he explained, keeping his tone casual like he’d never caught on that William had suspected anything else. “Keeps them out of trouble. Or lets me in on it when they get into trouble, either way.”
William’s gaze was evaluating. “If that’s what you intend, why not just take the collar off now?”
One corner of Gabe’s mouth quirked upwards. “I’m sure you’ve heard the story about what happens if a slave tries to cut their collar. It’s not a rumor. If any of us tampers with that necklace of yours, law enforcement ships will converge on us in minutes. We need to get you to people with special equipment.” He held up his hands again, nice and slow. “No hoax.”
“Convenient,” William said, still watching him cautiously, “that you don’t have any way of proving what you say.”
Back on the script; Gabe had heard that one before, in a number of varieties. “It’s a better chance than anyone else will give you,” he said easily. “You’ve got nothing to lose by going along with us. Freedom on board and a door that locks. Even if you don’t believe anything we tell you, it’s better than where you were.”
William had recovered enough aplomb to arch an eyebrow at him, although Gabe saw him brace himself as soon as he did it. “Freedom.”
It was loaded with enough irony that even Gabe nearly rolled his eyes. “I cut you loose,” he said, warning plain in his tone, “you behave yourself. You don’t attack my crew, I don’t let Victoria shoot you. Deal?”
William’s eyes flicked to the gun, considered, then darted back to Gabe. “Deal.”
-
“He’s a liability,” Alex said, a neutral statement without anything behind it that Gabe could hear. “We can still ditch him, we won’t be cleared for takeoff for another hour yet.”
“He won’t last ten seconds out there,” Gabe pointed out, which wasn’t, in itself, a rejection of the idea. “He’ll either get tagged as a runaway or we resell him, and pickings on this station aren’t the best.”
“We’re not selling him,” Victoria said sharply, her fingernails clicking against the barrel of the pistol as she twisted the cylinder open to clean it. Gabe didn’t argue. She had the right to say it, and anyway, she was the one currently holding the firearm. Gabe tried not to talk back to Victoria when she was holding lethal weapons.
“He doesn’t trust us, but they never do this early,” Ryland chimed in, joining them at the table. “It might work in our favor. If he stays suspicious and out of the way, he won’t be any trouble.”
“Oh, he’ll find a way to be trouble,” Gabe promised, pressing gingerly against the bruise on the back of his head and instantly regretting it. For such a skinny fucker, the kid had an arm on him. He squinted an eye open at Ryland. “You think we’ll make it all the way to Decay with him running loose on board?”
Ryland’s fingers steepled meditatively on the tabletop. “I think he easily could have killed you, Alex and probably Nate before Victoria ever got near him,” he answered, arching a wise, pointed eyebrow in Gabe’s direction. “And he didn’t.”
It was something Gabe had been keeping in mind, certainly. After seeing William poised over him to strike that second time, he hadn’t ever expected to wake up. It would have taken one more well-aimed hit and a few extra seconds to make sure he was out of the way permanently, that was all, and it would have been safer for William in the long run. All that meant was that the kid wasn’t a killer. Yet.
“I think there’s still a chance we go to sleep tonight and he murders us in our beds,” Nate commented. “But I’m still okay with having him around. It beats the alternatives.”
“You break it, you buy it,” Ryland agreed, looking over at Alex, who shrugged one shoulder.
“Right,” Gabe said, pushing his chair back and standing up. “Make sure he knows it takes three people minimum to fly this thing, we’ll all sleep better at night. I’m going to radio Pete.”
Pete’s number was classified, his location unknown, his contacts next to impossible to get hold of. Luckily, Gabe had him on speed dial.
“Gabe,” the grinning face on Gabe’s audio/video monitor greeted him. “It’s been a while. Are you bringing me a present?”
“You know me, baby, I can’t stay away,” Gabe crooned, sliding his chair across the deck to lock it into place in front of the monitor screen. “How does next week look for you?”
“Looks like I’ll need a clean guest room,” Pete answered. “It might be more like two weeks, though. I’ve got a present for you too.”
“Sugarpuss, you shouldn’t have,” Gabe replied automatically, already tapping out the keystroke commands to authorize a direct information transfer. “And here I was thinking you never bring me flowers anymore.”
“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” Pete agreed with great solemnity. “Should be coming through now.”
The data itself was shorthand, but enough for Gabe to piece together the overall puzzle. Freeing slaves was actually the least offensive of their illegal operations, when you looked at the big picture. Flashing currency and buying up high-end commodities wasn’t a cheap business, and they had to finance it somehow. Smuggling was something they were essentially doing already, and it paid well enough when the cargo was valuable. Or hot.
“Stolen?” he asked, just to be sure. Pete nodded; just a dip of his head, enough to confirm. Two crates of antiquities and another six of solid gold bars, fresh from the forge, unpressed and untraceable.
Gabe did the math and whistled. It would take them out of their way, but not by much, and the payoff would be worth it three times over. It would be enough to cover William, balance their expenses, and finance the next run.
The only problem he could see was…
“It’s a five-man job,” he said half an hour later, laying out the intelligence Pete had sent over on the lounge table for the others to look over. “Or rather, four men and one woman, sorry Victoria.”
“Lucky for us we have five men,” Nate replied, with an expression that said he was waiting for the catch.
Gabe grimaced. “Yeah, well, that means we’d have to leave our evasive friend on board alone and unattended.” He looked at Alex, knowing already that he’d see the same thoughts in Alex’s eyes that Gabe had already entertained. “I can only think of about a hundred ways that could go badly.”
“He can’t fly it on his own,” Victoria pointed out, leaning back and crossing her legs, cool as ice water. “He wouldn’t even be able to get clearance to take off.”
“No, but he could take us out with the big fucking laser beam up in the gun turret,” Gabe said. “Or he could radio the authorities and have them do the dirty work for him.”
“He doesn’t have to know our business there is illegal,” Victoria said.
“No, there’s not going to be anything suspicious about this at all,” Alex replied before Gabe could. “Come on. He’s not blind, he’ll pick up that something’s off.”
“So we take him with us,” Ryland said. Gabe joined everyone else in staring at him, and Ryland shrugged a lanky shoulder. “What’s he going to do? Run?”
“It would solve our problems if he did,” Nate commented.
Gabe ran a hand through his hair. His scalp itched vaguely; it was about time to touch down on a planet with a water supply. “Are we all agreed, then? We do this, we take him with us?”
“He could fuck it up,” Alex pointed out, again without any obvious bias.
“He could fuck it up if he stays,” Victoria replied, blood-red lips pursed. “I say we bring him.”
“Right, okay,” Gabe acknowledged, pushing back from the table. “Time to teach the newbie about basic smuggling.”
-
“This is a bad idea already,” Gabe said under his breath, keeping one eye on the doorway through which William ought to be joining them as he struggled into a drab, mass-produced suit.
“It isn’t a horrible idea,” Ryland replied, tugging his bow tie through the final loop and examining it critically in their tiny slice of mirror-glass. “We’ve definitely had worse.”
William walked in before Gabe could say anything else, which was just as well, because Gabe promptly forgot what it was he’d been about to say. He was wearing another one of their generic, non-tailored commercial suits, but he did the cheap fabric much more justice than it really deserved. He was about seven kilometers of leg in the tweed trousers, and his cravat was as neatly knotted as if he’d been doing it his entire life. Which Gabe now suspected he had; ordinarily he would have credited Victoria, but he very much doubted William was willing to let anyone else near his unprotected throat.
He tucked a strand of hair self-consciously behind his ear as Gabe stared, and the other difference in his appearance finally clicked. “You’ve cut your hair.”
William’s eyes darted warily to him and away again, keeping tabs on everyone in the room. “This morning,” he answered. He looked as though he was expecting to be chastised for taking the liberty, but honestly, Gabe couldn’t have cared less about that. What he was wondering was more along the lines of who the fuck let him loose with a sharp blade?
There was time enough to worry about that later, and possibly search William’s room for potentially threatening pointy objects. Gabe had a scheme to attend to. “You’re with me,” he told William, checking his reflection one more time before turning to the hatch with satisfaction. “Let’s go.”
The Myrmidons were a string of dwarf planets well out of the way for most galactic travelers. They were picking up some interest as a tourist destination, but it was expensive enough to make the journey that the primary visitors were those with business of their own to conduct. The local governments, wisely recognizing what sort of people their location attracted, had set up a customs net to rival that of the most affluent planets in the galaxy. That in itself, however, held a certain appeal to those whose business was not strictly licit. If you made it out of the Myrmidons, as far as law enforcement was concerned, you were golden.
They emerged into the dull, watery light of a typical Myrmidon day, boots crunching on the thin layer of ice at their feet. “Keep this with you,” Gabe told William, holding out a crisply-folded piece of plastic writing paper. William’s eyes flicked to the paper and back to Gabe before he took it cautiously, thumb running over the waxy seal. “It says you belong to me, and that I’ve given you dispensation to run errands unattended. I know you’d rather burn it and choke me on the ashes than hold onto it, but if we get separated, it’s the only guarantee I’ll have that you can make it back to the ship without harassment.”
Ryland gave them a wave and split off. William watched him go, and slowly tucked the paper into the inside pocket of his coat. Gabe allowed himself a brief internal sigh of relief. William might still ditch the paper and run, of course, but for the moment Gabe seemed to be winning the battle, which was enough for him.
“You shouldn’t need it,” Gabe continued, keeping William in his peripheral vision while making a show of studying the signs and available travel routes. “If all goes according to plan, you won’t have to do anything but tag along for the ride. We won’t send you off alone.”
William studied him sidelong, which Gabe pretended not to notice. “You don’t trust me.”
Gabe turned enough to grin at him, wide and toothy. “You don’t trust me either.” He nodded toward a side road, and they detoured away from the heaviest foot traffic, leaving Victoria to disappear into the throng. “That’s not why I’m keeping you with me, though.” Well. Not completely. “Everyone else has done this before. I didn’t send Victoria out alone on her first run. Or Ryland and Alex.”
William was quiet for a moment, pondering. “What about Nate?”
Gabe grinned again. “Nate was doing this before I was even in the game. He would have spiked my next drink with something unpleasant if I’d tried to tell him he needed supervision. Here, this is us.”
The cart was on the thirteenth floor of a building that looked as though it wouldn’t support more than two or three. As promised, it was loaded with crates and ready to go. Gabe hit the brake and hauled the cart around, steering it back toward the airlift. “This is what you came for?” William asked, like he didn’t believe it could be quite that easy.
He was right. “This is what we ostensibly came for,” Gabe corrected, “as listed on our landing declaration of purpose. What you and I are really after is something else entirely.”
“The antiquities,” William finished, because he’d apparently paid attention to the briefing Alex had given him. “How will you get them out?”
Gabe hit the button for the door and walked out whistling. “If we play our cards right,” Gabe said, trundling along ahead of William with the cart but not going so far that he lost sight of him, “we walk right through customs.”
It was a busy day on their particular dwarf planet, which was all for the better. They headed for the line of merchants, business people and cargo freighter captains with something to declare, which currently stretched around the block.
“Believe it or not, this is the easy part,” Gabe said, nodding to their stack of crates. “Nate and Alex have the harder job by far. It takes one person each to counterbalance a hover-lift with as much gold as they’ll be carrying, and then they have to melt the bloody stuff down.”
William glanced over, clearly startled. “You’re moving it molten?” he asked.
“Sort of,” Gabe hedged. They joined the end of the customs line, and Gabe stalled in replying for long enough to determine that the ladies ahead of them were both deeply involved in their own conversation on how to convince the customs officials that Aurora fox-mink fur had dropped dramatically in value over the weekend, and also having said discussion in another language. Satisfied, he nodded up to the pipelines criss-crossing the sky above them. “See those? Aqueducts, on the old Roman model. They’re the only thing on this rock that doesn’t have to pass through the security blockade to the ports, and that’s because they have filters to catch anything solid someone might try to dispose of in such a fashion.”
William’s gaze followed the line of one of the pipes, stretching on reinforced pylons high over their heads. “Liquid gold,” he said quietly.
Gabe snapped his fingers. “Exactly. One of them has been temporarily diverted for our cause, and is set to empty out into the carrying case of our very own Victoria Asher.”
“Beyond customs,” William finished, staring ahead of them down the long line of crate-toting business people waiting impatiently for permission to depart.
Gabe’s mouth quirked sideways. “Nate and Alex will meet up with her on the far side, and, lacking complications, we should be out by what passes for nightfall around here.”
It wasn’t a test, exactly, but Gabe was very aware that he was giving William enough information and leeway to be dangerous to them if he chose. He’d timed it carefully; the transfer wouldn’t have started yet, and if William said something to the officials, angling for a reward or just hoping to have Gabe arrested and taken away, law enforcement wouldn’t have enough to go to pin any of his people down. They’d be able to vanish without any proof of wrongdoing. He was hoping, however, that William would choose instead to try using this as evidence that he was trustworthy. Whether Gabe believed that or not, it would be a step in the right direction. He couldn’t expect trust without giving a little in return.
“Here we go,” he said aloud, and plastered on a smile for the two officials waiting with clipboards in hand to go through their crates. The women stalking away toward the port didn’t look too happy; they must have lost their battle over the price of fur.
Served them right, Gabe thought, cracking open the top two crates for inspection. Anyone who dealt in animal pelts didn’t deserve to be cut a break.
“Tigris secret-boxes,” he reported to the men, pulling one out to show them. “Family trade. These were made by my grandfather himself. Over fifty compartments in each one, made from gorgeous softwood to match any room. There are places to keep any treasure of any size.” He passed the box to William, who looked briefly startled but was quick to catch on, holding the box up to display it while Gabe opened up another one. “Might I interest you in a few? They make great gifts for anyone of any age or gender. You can hide things inside them for your loved ones, they’re the gift that keeps on giving. You can also personalize them, with the exterior and compartment designs made to order.”
The officials looked unsurprised to have him deliver a sales pitch; they’d clearly been through the last-ditch attempts of departing artisans many times in the past. They also looked appropriately dismayed, although one of them was hiding it better than the other. “Fifty compartments?” the younger one asked. “How many do you have?”
“Enough for friends, family and loved ones,” Gabe assured him, opening up a few more hidden doors and drawers to show off. “I can also take an order if you’re interested in more than I have here with me, and guarantee production and delivery within a matter of days. Easily by the holidays; I have a large family and we are all expert craftsmen, I assure you.”
The older man sighed, setting aside his clipboard. “Let’s get started.”
-
It took nearly two hours, which caused the line behind them to build up to a considerable distance. Gabe opened cabinets and demonstrated various types of hinges and hidden spring-catches, running off at the mouth ceaselessly without providing the customs men much actual help. William had somehow settled brilliantly into the role of new and largely clueless assistant, and was ‘accidentally’ closing more drawers than he was opening, fumbling around with the boxes and even dropping one, which provided Gabe with a welcome respite of chastising him for clumsiness for twenty minutes straight.
Finally every compartment was opened, every drawer inspected, and the officials were practically drooping with relief to see them off. The merchants behind them had reached extremely vocal levels of pissed-off at the wait, and Gabe didn’t foresee an easy hour of polite and respectful business people in the officials’ future. He resisted tipping William a wink, but just barely.
“That’s forty-one boxes, no export tax,” the older official announced, signing their customs form with a flourish. “You’re cleared for departure within…”
“Wait, hold up,” Gabe interrupted, tugging at the man’s clipboard. “That’s forty-eight boxes. Four crates, twelve boxes per crate.”
“Forty-one,” the official corrected. “This crate here only has five boxes in it. Now, if you’ll sign this here…”
“What the fuck?” Gabe said, rooting through the crate in question and looking accusingly at William. “Did you pack this one? Was it those moronic cousins of mine? We’re missing seven boxes. Are they…they’re the ones from the display, aren’t they? The engraved boxes with the gold inlay? We have models with gold inlay on the lid,” he told the customs officials in an aside, for what had to be at least the eighth time, before continuing. “Including the one made by my great-great-grandfather Tiberius? Fuck, now we have to go back.”
“Sir,” the older official said, sternly but not without a trace of panic underneath, “if you return to the city, you will have to pass through customs again.”
“We’ll do it,” Gabe replied, hammering down the lid of the half-filled crate. “We’re not leaving without those boxes. Those imbeciles, I wonder if they thought they’d be able to sell them on their own or if they really are just that stupid…”
He kept up a steady stream of aspersions cast on the character and intellect of his invented relatives until they passed by the entire grumbling line of impatient travelers and rounded the corner onto the main thoroughfare. Then he grinned at William, who was shaking his head and staring back at him in bewildered amazement.
“Keep up, we’ve got to move fast,” Gabe warned, steering them left into an alley. “If we don’t get back through before the shift changes, this was all for nothing.”
“You really think they won’t check them again?” William demanded, walking briskly at his side. At least he wasn’t going to slow them down; those legs were more than a match for Gabe’s pace with the cart.
“Oh, they’ll check them again,” Gabe confirmed. “The top few new ones, and the ones on the bottom, which is where a less subtle smuggler would be sure to hide something. But will they check all fifty compartments of each crate of forty-eight Tigris secret boxes, for the second time in four hours?” He shook his head. “Not likely. Heads up, here we go.”
“What…?” William began, but he was cut off by the large crashing collision of their cart into a book-trolley.
“So sorry,” Ryland insisted, practically supplicating himself at their feet as Gabe cursed and kicked at his cart and the crates that had spilled all over the frozen surface of the road. “It’s the ice, I never can seem to brake suddenly, and you just appeared…”
“No harm done,” Gabe allowed, stacking the crates again with disgruntled resignation. “Is that all of yours?”
William helped him to heft the last crate, smaller but considerably heavier than the rest, atop their load. “I believe so, yes,” Ryland answered, adjusting his spectacles and bobbing his head, running long-fingered hands over his own crates as if to reassure himself that the books inside were undamaged. “Thank you. May you live long lives, my friends.”
“A religious nut,” Gabe said as they started off again. “Figures.”
William was eyeing him again, and Gabe couldn’t help enjoying it just a little bit. “Customs?” William guessed.
Gabe shook his head. “Not yet. In here, we have a swap to make.” He pushed the cart into a dead-end alley and from there into the rotted-out shell of an abandoned shack, the wheels squeaking and groaning under the added weight of the fifth crate. “First we have to repack the crates, get rid of the extra one and redistribute its contents into some of our very own secret boxes.” He held up a box to admire briefly. “Handy little fuckers, aren’t they?”
The work went quickly, faster than Gabe had expected, with William pitching in. Gabe kept an eye on him, but he didn’t see anything amiss; no doors left ajar to create suspicion, no hidden messages left in drawers or scratched into wood. If William was planning something, Gabe couldn’t spot it.
“These are the last three,” William told him, holding up a box of bronzed statuettes. “Where do you…?”
The creak of wood stopped him mid-sentence, and the muffled bang of the back door closing. William looked at Gabe with a question in his eyes, but Gabe shook his head quickly. No one was scheduled to meet them, and they all had their own business to take care of. Following them here would only create suspicion. If it was one of Gabe’s crew…
It wasn’t. “In the name of the law, who’s in here?” a booming male voice called. “This is private property, you’re trespassing.”
Gabe froze for a moment, thinking rapidly and not coming up with any viable excuse. They were in an abandoned building, surrounded by crates and with three obviously valuable statuettes still in plain sight. It didn’t look like anything but what it was.
William caught his eyes, clearly thinking the same thing. Then he dropped to his knees.
Gabe’s first instinct was to protest, but he wasn’t a fool, and William’s idea wasn’t actually a bad one. He didn’t know that it would keep them from being arrested, but it would at least give them a shot.
William fumbled with the front of Gabe’s trousers, obviously unused to working the hooks and buttons from that angle. Gabe tried to help him but gave up after a half-second, using the time instead to tug his shirt loose, run a hand through his hair to rumple it and lean back in a wide-legged stance against the wall. He couldn’t tell if William’s hands were shaking or not, but they felt determined enough when one slid inside his trousers to give him a quick, fleeting squeeze.
He knew instantly why, too. Gabe’s brain might have gotten with the program quickly enough, but his dick was another matter, and not entirely clued in to their cover story. William’s groping helped, but not enough. At least not until Gabe looked down and saw William between his legs, looking up at him through mussed hair and long lashes, blinking once slowly as he wetted his lips.
“Fuck,” Gabe breathed, dropping his head back against the wall as William tugged at his undergarments and opened his mouth, which was how the law enforcement officer found them a second later.
“What’s going on here?” the man demanded, as though it weren’t obvious enough from the enthusiastic bulge in Gabe’s undone trousers and William’s position on the packed dirt floor. “What’s all this?”
William reacted before Gabe could. “I have a pass,” he said quickly, holding up his hands in a gesture of unarmed surrender. “I have a paper from my owner, I’m allowed to be out on my own.”
The officer looked to Gabe, who was almost as flummoxed before he caught on to the game they were playing. The only way a pleasure slave would be doing favors in an abandoned building would be if Gabe didn’t have a bed in which to properly tumble him at his leisure. “He’s not mine,” Gabe said belatedly. “I’m just passing through. Leaving town today.”
William shrank back a little, and the officer’s expression turned knowing. “Making a bit on the side, are you?” he asked, tapping his baton against William’s arm as he neared them. “Working freelance?”
William bit his lip, letting silence damn him. Fuck, he was good, Gabe thought. If they could turn him, he would make a decent addition to Gabe’s crew. That was, if they could also convince him to stop trying to kill them. “Look, I don’t want any trouble,” Gabe said, tucking himself back in and ignoring the twinge of protest from his neglected dick. “I didn’t know it was trespassing, I’ll leave right now.”
“Just appreciating the local flavor?” the officer suggested, his gaze roaming freely over what William currently appeared to be offering. “Can’t say I blame you, for a taste like this one.”
The hand currently out of sight on Gabe’s far side curled into a fist. Fuck, he really didn’t want to risk a fight. Knocking out an officer would be noisy, messy, and it would probably come back to bite them in the ass well before they could clear the customs line. But if the bastard tried following up on what Gabe could see in his eyes and decided he wanted to sample William for himself as their price of freedom, Gabe would do it.
“I won’t do it again,” William promised, and thank fuck he’d turned off the coy act, staying skittishly at a safe distance from the wandering tip of the officer’s baton.
The officer himself snorted. “Oh, I’m sure.” He jerked his head toward the door. “Just don’t do it in here. Get out, get yourselves a room. Take it out of whatever you’re paying him for his pretty mouth.”
“Yes sir,” Gabe agreed, already grabbing for his cart. William had either made the statuettes vanish somewhere on his person or abandoned them in the emptied crate, and Gabe didn’t honestly care which. They’d already pushed their luck on this one; he wasn’t taking any more chances. “Go,” he told William under his breath, pushing their cart of smuggled treasure back onto the road, and headed for customs.
part two