Introduction.

The intricate necklace tattooed on her lean neck and chest distorted under here sleek muscle tone as she shifted the drive sticks and corrected course to cause minimal disruption when the guidance system kicked in.  She felt as if the tattoo had always been there, but she’d had it inked so other could see it last year, just before signing on with Kincaid Industries.  Its symmetry and use of her skin tone as light lines resembled the back of an old fashioned deck of cards.  Her skin was tanned from working in the drive core.  The radiation had a tendency to do that though it never gave off lethal doses.  Some men thought she was sexy; others that she had spoilt her looks by covering herself in black ink.  Tail preferred the prior anyway.  Tatts filtered out the soft, especially in her industry.  She had greasy blonde hair pulled back tight in a short pony tail and her Ukraine features were angular, giving her the look of a young ballbreaker.  There was no crew to break the balls of though.  Her cargo and the clandestine nature of the drop meant minimal staff was requested.  Also, an un-split pay check bought Tail closer to getting off this shit detail.  She had once hoped to get out before it got to her.  Too late.  Now she just wanted to cash in, get more tattoos and fuck sailors who came into port on the small pacific island she would retire too.  She was one lucky job away from achieving that simplistic goal.

Tail looked over the console of the Raven class Transport and made her final checks as she approached the perimeter of the Satellite trading Post, Ghetto.  Ghetto was located in a Polar orbit of Pluto, right above its weak North Pole.  The dwarf planet and its moon Charon represented the edge of Earths solar territory.  The Kuiper belt and the interstellar space beyond remained the equivalent of international waters, only on a stellar scale.  Ghetto was a city of steel, tungsten and tin hives built by the Centuri’s as a contact point for the human race.  Seemingly built far out to allow Humans to control their solar system without the interference of a more advanced race, but really far enough out to prevent unwanted traffic.  The lack of gloss and polish space dreamers of the past had envisaged was of no importance to the Centuri’s.  They had built the outpost as a dropping of point for the Human’s to trade resources from their solar system to the Centuri’s.  Distant operations were expensive.  Better to get the third world systems to do the work and cash in on the unreplaceable bounty.  In exchange for Helium 3, heavy and rare earth minerals the Centuri’s trickle fed the Corporations of earth technology from the Universe at large, not enough to allow them to expand further into the Galactic Community, but just enough for them to improve the standard of living on earth and become very wealthy to keep the trade route viable. 

“Ghetto tower, Captain Tail of Earth Transport Adelaide requesting permission to dock at bay 41.”  Tail double checked her safeties and trajectory.  She had done this run a dozen times and each time it gave her the chills to hear the Centuri’s speak to her in English.

The voice, though distorted by the static of Pluto’s weak magnetic field came back to her, an eerie mixture of base and shrill vowels.  “Transport Adelaide we have you on Lidar.  Docking bay 41 is clear.  Please state cargo for log.”

“Ghetto Tower, nature of cargo is sensitive.”

There was a pause.  Obviously the traffic controller knew what she was referring too, he/she/it probably hadn’t bothered to load her ship data up at his console.  A hidden section of the station was dedicated to Tail’s cargo.  “Just give me something for the log Transport Adelaide” the unwanted voice stated.

Tail bit her lower lip.  “Livestock.”  She said.  She felt the pang at the back of her mind that had once been guilt, but had turned to irritation at culpability.  She had signed on for a dozen runs.  Twelve transports and she would retire on enough money to live out the rest of her days on a beach in the Pacific.  She could have sworn she heard the Centuri tower operator giggle.

“Understood.  Activate inertia dampeners and cut engines.  We’ll guide you from here.”

Tail flicked the series of switches into the off position.  The jolt of the tractor beam focusing on her ship kicked in and she slid the Captain’s chair back and turned away from the mangled hunk of tungsten she was being guided towards.  Even if something went wrong she wouldn’t be able to do anything.  All that remained was to do a final check on the cargo.

She flew naked except a pair of black cotton panties.  Life support and the deflection field were essential to keep her alive and prevent micro particles from cracking through the hull, but pleasantries like the cooling through the air filtration unit would overtax the already antiquated electrics.  The Adelaide still housed a copper skeleton of wires instead of beryllium alloys.  It meant the wires could burn out if too much juice ran through them.  Not a problem for a car or boat, but a serious issue when you are flying through space, sling shotting off Jupiter and Saturn to pick up speed.  She had a couple of minutes.  She put on her cargo pants and black singlet.  The fabric instantly became drenched with her sweet.  It wouldn’t be a problem when she signed over the cargo and picked up payment.  The Centuri’s loved the smell of woman sweet.  It was in fact one of the reasons for this trip.

Tail put her boots on and walked the cargo section.  Forty-eight incubation chambers housed young human females in cryogenic sleep.  She whipped the condensate from one and inspected a sleeping redhead girl no older than twenty.  Tail didn’t let herself feel onus.  The Centuri’s used the young female to extract a variety of natural compounds.  Pheromones, endorphins, hormones.  Some were even given doses of medication to make them lactate to provide rare and exotic delicacies.  The forty-eight woman on Tail’s ship would be harvested like cattle for by products that gave the Centuri’s a narcotic high.  They had obviously attempted to chemically synthesise all these compounds in their labs, but the market and enhanced effects of the substances from a natural source made the trade in human females viable, though highly illegal.  When the girl’s glands and tissues could no longer produce the desired substance the girls were either sold off as intelligent pets, or sold off for exotic sex puppets.  There was even a rumour that some Centuri’s had taken a liking to human females as ingredients for alien meals.  Though Tail had only heard rumours she knew the Centuri’s thought of humans as humans thought of pigs; filthy but useful and delicious in so many ways, there intelligence not worth a note.  The people she worked for disguised her manifest and Tail knew better than to ask where the girls came from.  She didn’t check all the others visually, but went to the service panel.  All Forty-eight cyrotubes were functioning perfectly.  Now all she had to do was unload, collect her receipt and head back to earth to be done with this shit forever.

“Maybe the Cook Islands.”  She said to herself.  “Hawaii?”  She pondered.

A large clash burst through the ship like a focused earthquake.  Tail found herself falling back onto one of the incubation chambers.  “Fuck!”  Tail shouted and ran up the deck to the cockpit.  Already the blinking red lights told her she had struck something on the way in.  The Control Tower still had control, attempting to pull away from the tractor beam would tear the hull open.  Tail switched off all systems, except for the cyrotubes, even life support.  She would have enough air to dock, she needed everything down less something overloaded.  “Tower, what the fuck was that?”  She said into her radio and put her harness on.

More giggles, but from a Centuri that could be the sound of embarrassment.  “Sorry Adelaide.  Minor Malfunction.”

“Minor malfunction?  I just hit something.”

Again, giggles.  “Nothing important.  An emergency pod malfunctioned a came into your trajectory.”

“Visible damage?”  Tail needed to know if she had to eject.

“The pod is destroyed.  Is cargo intact?”

“The pod?!  Who gives a fuck about the pod?  Is my ship damaged?”

“Is cargo intact?”  The Tower repeated.  They didn’t give a fuck about Tail or her ship, all they wanted was forty-eight more bitches to harvest and keep the flow of narcotics coming.

Tail knew they wouldn’t give her anything unless she told them what they wanted.  “Cargo is intact.”

There was a pause.  “You have some aft damage.  Better get it looked at.”  The giggling noise came over the two-way again.

“Christ.”  Tail said.  “This was your fuck up Tower.”

“We know.  We’ll run a maintenance suite once you dock.  You may…” the Centuri in the tower giggled for almost twenty seconds.  “You may be here a while.”

Tail switched off the radio.  “Anteater Cunts!” she exclaimed.  The Adelaide was only a priority until the cargo was delivered.  Once they had unloaded it could take weeks for them to get around to fixing her ship.  She had to hope the needed the dock.  Tail again slid back in the Captain’s chair.  She went to her locker and removed her leather jacket and put it on.  Before she buttoned it up she took her Tesla stun pistol and placed it in her inside pocket.  As the docking clamps came down and fastened the ship in dock she quickly slid a slender blade into the inside of one of her ex-army boots.  Ghetto was no place for humans and she didn’t have any friends here.  Her best bet was to find out where the Ore freighter crews, or Marines, hung out and lay low.

Chapter 1.

Tail was pissed.  She hit the aft cargo realise and walked down the gangplank into the cold metallic docking station.  As she walked down, boots clanging and cold misting air replaced the recycled oxygen she headed past the two Drill storemen and their version of a forklift.  The Drill were the equivalent of migrant workers on Ghetto.  They were short but strong round creatures with three thick, brown and wrinkled fingers that grabbed at thinks like tendrils.  Tail ignored then, but walked to the side not getting in their way.

“Fuck-nuts.”  She called to the Centuri with the data pad.  He was the head storeman and Tail needed to exchange signatures.

The Centuri, a large upright anteater without the hair, stood seven feet tall and peered at her curiously.  Beneath the long protruding nose was a small round mouth with linked shark like teeth.  The Centuri’s had wiped out all large herbivores on their home planet a millennia ago and lived on small scaled rodent like scaly creatures.  They had no natural predators so hadn’t evolved any defensive attributes.  Clearly he did not understand the significance of the term “Fuck-nuts.”  He looked back at the data pad as the Drill confirmed each cyrotubes integrity remotely.

“Fuck-nuts, my ship.”  Tail could now see the damage to the rear of her ship.  The hull hadn’t been breached, but she was lucky her engines were cut.  One of the three rear thrusters was completely mangled and she wouldn’t be able to power it up… Wouldn’t have enough air to get home if she ran on only two.

The Centuri ignored her till she got close.  As the smell of her sweet beneath the cargo pants and leather jacket reached him he gasped and nearly dropped his data pad.  The hand he used to confirm the Drills inspections report dropped to his peni and he rubbed them enthusiastically.

Tails anger was curtailed by three things.  The obviousness of the Centuri’s nudity, the norm amongst there species; the stiffing of the twin peni that now protruded like a double penetrating rubber sex toy; and the realisation her pheromones were getting the Store Managers high and highly aroused.  The last thing wasn’t a problem.

As Tail moved within feet of him he moved closer to sniff her.  Tail put up her hand to prevent him.  His nose attempted to close the short distance between them.  He stood a foot and a half taller than her, but they were not strong creatures having fed on tiny herbivores until they expanded out into space.

The Centuri gasped again and tried to get a hold of himself.  “Hot flight?”  He said regaining some composure.

“Old ship.  No cooling.”  Tail replied and applied force on the Centuri’s smooth round belly to prevent him from getting too close.  “I need repairs.”

The Centuri’s tiny head stretched out on its short neck and the elongated nose rose and its nostrils pulsated hungrily trying to get as much of her salty smell as possible.  “Not a…”  The Centuri increased the pace with which he stroked his double shafts, “…not a priority.”

“Make it one.”  Tail said.

“For a sniff.”  The Centuri requested.

Tail glared at him.  Her anger had no effect.  He was lost in her smell.  “Two minutes and you make it a priority.”

“Two minutes.”  The Centuri said in acquiescence and Tail dropped her arm allowing him to envelope her with his weak velvet arms.  His nostril explored her neck and arm pits whilst he held her close.  Even through her leather jacket Tail could feel his peni pulsate.  Squeaks and giggles came from the alien and start to ply Tail’s jacket off.

Tail suddenly pushed him back.  A snail trail of yellow Centuri come ran down her leather Jacket unnoticed.  The Centuri’s didn’t come at orgasm.  A steady, weak flow of ejaculate came from the peni during arousal.  They could impregnate without prolonged intercourse, but evolution had seen fit to make sex so pleasurable for them that they engaged in marathon sexual encounters that meant fertilization was a given.

“You said two minutes.”  The Centuri exclaimed interrupted from his act of self-gratification.

“One minute now, the second when my ship is fixed.”  Tail said firmly.  Despite this being the Centuri’s station and Tail being the same species they were buying as cattle, Tail had the advantage that the Store Manager didn’t know this was her last flight, nor could her ship lay dormant on a busy docking bay. If her ship didn’t return her company couldn’t send another shipment.

“It will still take some time.”  The Centuri said composing himself.  He stopped rubbing his peni and went back to his data pad.  “The office will issue you a temporary Visa and Comm unit.  We will call when the ship is ready.”

Tail moved past him and away from her ship.  She didn’t want to see where her cargo was being taken.  “How long will that be?”  The potbellied, bald alien obviously had a schedule as he did not engage Tail again. 

“We don’t have parts for human ships.  We’ll have to inspect to see what need to be fabricated.”  The advantage of being on Ghetto meant there was raw material and shops to rebuild or build damaged components.  “Look Fuck-nuts”, Tail used the term freely.  It was an obscure insult the Centuri would not pick up on.  “No ship.  No more cattle.”

The Centuri was clearly already aware of this.  “Understood.  Please move to immigration.”  He looked away from the data pad and gave Tail one last inspection.  “And you still owe me one minute.”

Chapter 2.

The Centuri’s never did any lifting.  The Drill at the counter inspected the temporary Visa to see the black light ink had printed correctly and then placed it in Tail’s passport.  Even from behind the glass Tail could see the Centuri immigration officer sniffing at her, trying to catch a scent of her.

She needed to shower as soon as possible.

As the Drill slide her passport back under the Perspex glass Tail took it without thanks.  The Drill then passed through a small Comm-boy, a curved square with a button and speaker.  It could not send calls, but would beep when they wanted to speak to her.  Tail looked at the Drill and it small black eyes.  “Where do the Humans hang?”  She asked and didn’t realise it was the first time she had spoken to one of the Drill’s.

The Drill startled and looked around nervously then looked back to his Centuri supervisor.  The Supervisor was working away, but his noose was curved around to smell Tail.  There was an awkward silence and Tail realised language was clearly an issue, or perhaps the Drill wasn’t allowed to speak.  After an awkward pause which indicated Tail wasn’t going away until she knew where she was headed the Centuri Supervisor turned his head.  Tail realised along with sniffing he was running his tongue back and forth over his triangular teeth.  “Go to Level 191.  That should be safe.”  The Centuri rose and walked towards the glass.  Instantly Tail could see her scent had aroused this Centuri as well.  Twin erect peni pointed at her.  This Centuri seemed to have the decency not to stroke them in front of her.  “Avoid Level 13 at all costs and don’t go above the Hive.  We need you to fly the ship out of here.”  The Centuri took a long slow look at Tail.  The Hive was the Tungsten industrial section of the station.  A small cone sphere at the upper levels was called the Spire.  It was where the Centuri lived and their crap flowed down into the station.  He stared coldly while still cleaning his teeth.  Tail started to feel a little anxious and so turned quickly and took her leave.  The Centuri’s eyes followed her as she headed to the elevator shoot.  An advantage of not going through customs was that Tail still had her Tesla and blade.  The makeshift immigration office of the freighter decks funnelled into a single hall leading to the lift and only exit.  Tail walked with haste.

“Level 191”.  She said to herself.  It was a side effect of solo flight that you started talking to yourself.  Monotony could easily wipe your memory and fixating on a piece of information could have it repeat over and over, boring them into long term memory.  Tail could still remember the cool down rate of the matter shields of the first ship she had flown.  Countless useless numbers clogged her brain.  As she waited for the lift she turned back and saw the Drill out the counter peering down the hall after her.

She gave him the finger.

He leaned back out of view.  The lift didn’t chime.  Centuri could feel vibrations from there evolution hunting rodents in burrows.  Her only indication the lift was at her level was the door silently opening.  She stepped in alone and was grateful not to be stuck in the lift with a Centuri.  She needed a shower that meant making a friend with a shower.

Chapter 3.

Kincaid Industries did not have an office on Ghetto.  They had a cubical in Cyanide Corps building.  The Centuri at immigration had been true to his word, level 191 was populated solely by humans with the exception of a few alien vendors selling knock-off tech and foods Tail wasn’t even sure humans could digest.  Marines on leave from assignment walked in groups through the laneways and building that seemed to be constructed of tin and aluminium.  The cheap metals were reserved for the humans.  Only the Corp buildings were ceramic, chrome and steel.  She checked in at Kincaid cubical.  Cyanide Security took her Tesla but the steel buckles on her boots concealed her blade.  They weren’t interested in handicapping her and after a brief report to a tired and dodgy clerical officer she left and was handed back her weapon with a dirty look.  She walked to the bar directly opposite.

She couldn’t get a bunk with a Marine, they weren’t permitted company outside their units.  She was a pilot and knew the unwritten law that favours only counted if they could be collected on.  The Corp staff all had hermitically sealed quarters, her best bet was to ask one of those for a shower and a couch she could crash on.  From the looks she was getting there weren’t a lot of women on Ghetto.  Those she saw offered there services for credits, obviously bought here for that purpose alone.  This meant she had the advantage of being a rare commodity, but meant her sex would be considered valuable and might be expected for the favours she sought.

A neon sign over lit bar indicated a stable supply of power.  It ran off a Corp Substation which meant it was a Corp. Bar and had Corp patrons.  She headed across the street.  A group of about six Marines all followed her ass as she walked past them.

“Baby!”  One of them said to grins from his comrades.  “Hate to see you go; love to see you leave.”  Not even drunk and an ass.  Only the poor and the dumb signed on for extra extra-solar tours.  Humans were used as second wave’s soldiers because they had five fingers that could pick up fallen enemy weapons.  We were only a couple thousand years out of being preyed on by predators, we hadn’t evolved soft yet.  Making us soldiers meant the Centuri’s had to give away weapon technology, the good stuff, not the crap VI consoles and antiquated spaceware the housewives of the First world all had to have.

Tail walked past the Bouncer posing as a Cyanide Corp security guard and realised she was the only non-working woman in the bar.  This meant a lot of looks.  Her sweet matched the greasy brows of the clientele.  The human level had most likely grown too quickly for the climate system to adjust.  It was humid on this level.  Tail wondered if a shower would save her for more than a couple of hours, but couldn’t think of a better plan.  She bee-lined for the bar and sat on a stool with vacancies either side.  She didn’t want anyone thinking she was sitting next to them just yet.  The bartender came up.  His barber cut hairstyle was fresh, but the cuts on his clean shaven face meant that luxuries like razers were in short supply to the working class.  Tail gave him points for effort and ordered.

“Whisky.”

“On the House.”  The bartender replied and poured her a shot.

Tail frowned.  He obviously wanted to keep her in the bar, tattoos and all, she was something soft to look at.  Tail didn’t like the thought of being soft.

As he slid the glass forward Tail leant in.  “I need a nice guy with a shower.”

“Centuri’s giving you a hard time?”  He questioned.  “They come down for the working girls at the end of their nights when they’re dirty.  They make more getting sniffed than they do turning tricks.”

“I’m not a working girl.  I would really not like to have to deal with that.”

“What Corp you with?”  He asked.

It hadn’t occurred to Tail, but the bartender was gaging her response.  A woman on Ghetto would be the best corporate spy imaginable.  Even if she was steeling information a clerk might not send her away least he be without an essential service.  She didn’t see the harm in being honest.  “Kincaid Industries.  Only an industry by name.  It’s a chicken shit operation that has found a niche.  Small cargo’s, big pay-offs.

A greasy Chinese suit leant on the bar next to Tail.

“Fuck off.”  She said and a trace of a long lost accent pricked on her words.

The man’s smile faded and he slinked back to his cubicle defeated before having spoken.

The bartender seemed to regret given her the free drink.  She wasn’t going to make the patrons compete for free sex.  “Try Hemmingway over in the corner.”  He nodded to a man in a suit, nicer than the others in the bar, reading a tattered copy of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.  He comes in and reads.  Buys a drink every chapter then goes home to a deluxe suite.  You want a place to crash away from the Centuri’s, you should try your luck with him.”

The advice was to get her away from the bar before she rejected anyone else.  Tail took the hint and head over to the pressed suit in the corner hiding his eyes behind water stained leafs of printed text.  She pulled out the seat opposite him.  He didn’t look up. 

Tail saw a glass of a brown liquor in front of him.  She leaned forward and took it.  As the book came down and a relative handsome man who had access to fresh razors looked at her with minor distain Tail put the glass to her lips and drank it.  Cognac.  She smiled.  She looked quiet pretty when she smiled, but the symmetrical ink on her arms and neck gave her a lived quality at conflict with the mildly attractive conservative who liked to read in a public bar. 

Tail put his glass down and in politeness rare for her said, “I need a shower from a man who’s not going to try and to have sex with me.”  She had his full attention.

None the less, “Get a room.”

“They charge by the hour I imagine.”

“Then pay by the hour.”

“I get a shower.  You get to walk out of this bar with the only, non-prostitute, female on this level.”

“I don’t need an ego boost, you have no leverage.”  Typical middle management on his way up.  Probably a non-violent psychopath.

Tail frowned.  “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”  Tail both quoted Hemmingway and hinted at the reality that she was perhaps something to have a conversation with that didn’t charge by the hour or practise how to assemble a pulse rifle in thirty seconds.

Now the man frowned.  “Who do you work for?”  Could have been caution, or an accusation.

“Kincaid Industries.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Cubicle on the third floor of your office.”  Tail informed assuming he was with Cyanide.

The man smiled seemingly placing the company.  “Did you know that your clerk has the only working stapler in the building?”

“How much are staples going for these days?”

“Two tokens for the vending machine or a sealed bottle of water.”  The man mused.

Tail changed tact having established repour.  “I just don’t want the Centuri thinking I’m Viagra.”

“I sympathize.”  He looked around.  The attention he was receiving for having a live talking woman had the effect of pulling up to a red light in a Ferrari.  “You can have a shower in exchange for dinner.”

“Just dinner.”  Tail informed, making it clear.

The man smiled and opened his jacket to put his book away.  He didn’t mark the page.  When new books were unavailable re-reading wasn’t a problem.  “This way Captain…?”  He said having guessed Tail’s occupation. 

“Tail. I’m monoymous.”  Tail tried something.  “I’m just going to call you Hemmingway.”

The man took it as flirtation.  “My name is…”

“No.  We’ll stick to Hemmingway.”

He rose and started out of the bar.  Tail followed.  It was the first conversation the man had had with a woman, who was either enlisted to a regiment or governed by a pimp, in nine months.  It was the first conversation Tail had had without saying the word fuck in nearly twenty-three years.

“How old are you?”  The man queried as they left.

“Twenty-five.” Tail replied.

Chapter 4.

A deluxe suit consisted of a hermitically sealed apartment with bedroom, study and ensuite.  Tail was only interested in the ensuite, maybe the study floor as a place to sleep.  Hemmingway’s bed was between single and queen-size, probably as big as they got on Level 191.  Hemmingway stayed in the study that also served as living room as Tail stripped off her sweet soaked clothes and stepped into the ensuite.  The problem that hadn’t occurred to her was that she would have to place the clothes back on, unless… She opened a cupboard.  Sure enough it was a compact chemical laundry.  She dropped her clothes in and set it on ‘Clean & Sanitize’.  The climate control kept the apartment cool and as she stepped into the ensuite she saw the Goosebumps freckle her ink.  Flight rations left her lean, but kicking the gravity to 1.1 of earth’s gravity meant her muscles were tone; waif bellied with graceful legs and arms.  Tail admired herself for only a moment and then stepped into the shower.  It was not ideal.  Water rations meant only a fine jet came out and a digital timer announced her daily allowance.  She was face with the conundrum of screwing with Hemmingway and taking the long shower she needed, or being conservative and leaving him enough to wash himself.  Tail didn’t like anyone, but didn’t know how long repairs would take so thought leaving him some might permit an extra night’s stay.  She found soap and lathered using it to wash her hair also.  Once she clicked the water off on the digital pad there was a moment as the coils above her heated, then the sealed shower became an air tunnel with warm air passing over her body, drying her.  She stepped out of the shower and back into the bedroom.

Lying on the bed was a satin red dress and a pair of red pumps.  Tail’s eyes narrowed.  “Cunt” she whispered through her teeth at the thought Hemmingway had been in the room.  He was trying to dress her in threads bought to polish his whores.  She checked the chemical laundry unit.  Her clothes were missing.  Tail didn’t like being played.  Her leather jacket had disappeared too, that meant no Tesla.  She checked under the bed.  In his haste he hadn’t collected her boots.  The courtesy of a short shower seemed like a betrayed compromise.  Tail, not shy, just pissed, marched into the adjoining study naked.

Hemmingway was at the extranet terminal, watching the financial report of earth’s economy.  His eyes were immediately drawn to the tanned softness and dark tattoo lines of Tail’s skin.  Tail dropped all manners and resumed her usual dialect.  “Cunt-biscuit.  Where are my clothes?”

Hemmingway remained cool.  “You can’t go out to dinner like that.  Well you can, but…”

His nonchalance pissed Tail of more.  “What’s your game cunt-biscuit.  The deal was dinner for a shower.”

Hemmingway played down his innocence and Tail’s figure.  “Yes, and you can’t go out to dinner dressed like a freighter pilot.”

Tail’s head sharply turned to the side like a bird of prey examining an animal up close.  “Come again?”  It was rhetorical and a dare for him to repeat the statement.  Tail wanted a low profile and not to be stained by the stench of Ghetto.  Whatever Hemmingway had in mind was not what she wanted.

“I have to go to dinner in the Spire to talk contracts.  The deal was a shower for dinner.  You can’t go to the Spire dressed like a freighter pilot.”

“Fuck you.”

“I doubt I’ve made that kind of impression.”  Hemmingway rubbed his brow.  His attention to Tail’s lithe form was void of the attention of a cad.  “I’m sorry.  Even showered the Centuri I’m meeting is going to be so distracted by you, I’m going to make a killing.  You want a place to stay without having to perform coitus then come to dinner.”  Hemmingway now looked her up and down, stopping at her thighs and the light curly hairs above her sex.

His moment of human nature reminded Tail she was on Ghetto.  “I am not a whore.”

“No sex.  Just dinner and a safe place to stay on Ghetto.”  Hemmingway responded resuming eye contact.

Tail said something Ukrainian.  Something that couldn’t be expressed in English and turned back to the bedroom.  She slide into the satin dress, but skipped the pumps in favour for the boots, retaining the slender blade at least.  It was not obvious to her in her mood, but the intricate necklace of ink contrasting the red dress made her look exotic in the low cut dress.  She walked back out into the study and Hemmingway smiled despite the combat boots.

“I get to stay her as long as I like.”

“With no advances I promise.”  Hemmingway rose and walked over to her.  “You don’t even have to smile, or talk, just sit and eat and then you crash here, eat room service and go whenever you like.”  Hemmingway extended his elbow for Tail to take.  She marched to the front door leaving him hanging and started down the hall. 

Hemmingway sealed his apartment and called after her, “Wrong way.  Elevators going up are this way.”  Tail had her fists clenched in fists.  Going up was a bad idea; this dress was a bad idea, but being on the Streets when the Centuri came down for the working girls was a very bad idea.  Hemmingway pressed the button for the Spire gate level and the lift silently moved up.  Tail opted for angry silence.  Hemmingway, either out of discomfort, or anxiety spoke.  “You’re going to see some things up there.  These aren’t the types of Centuri you can insult.”  He straightened his business suit.  “We’re cattle to them, but we have things they need.  Be polite and don’t speak unless spoken to…”  He glanced back at Tail.  “Even then, maybe just smile.”  He was asking for things he’d said Tail didn’t have to supply.  He was trying to see his reflection in the lift doors as they approached it.  He wasn’t nervous, but this deal was obviously… a big deal.  Maybe Tail could get more out of him if he was desperate.

The elevator as fast as it was silent gave the mild sensation of stopping.  “No smiling.” Tail said as one last ‘fuck you’ before the doors opened.

The Spire was not like Level 191.  The architecture was as alien as it was intricate and Tail immediately realised the lift did not go to the Spire, but rather to a check point all Aliens had to go through to get to the Spire.  It was then she realised her Visa was in her leather coat.  Hemmingway had taken more than her Tesla, he had taken her papers.  In protest she remained in the elevator as Hemmingway stepped out.  He turned around and frowned as if she was embarrassing him.  Tail again narrowed her eyes on him.  “What?”  He said showing the first signs of impatience.

“My papers.”  Tail’s expression came from the neck up and it was a very intricate neck.  The patterns on her tattoo signed a complicated language as her head subtly tilted and turned.

“You won’t need them, we have an invitation.”

Tail liked this less and less as her deal evolved.  What had been a plan to avoid as many Centuri as possible had turned into a business dinner at the Centuri’s home.  Her Xenophobia had, since her first encounter with the Centuri and their Aliens servants, turned into a racism.  Far be it for her to like a culture that saw them as cattle.

Hemmingway’s desperation for the deal started to show as the Centuri at the checkpoint took an interest at the scene.  “Listen I can sweeten the deal.”

“Credits.”  Tail said.

“Not a percentage on the deal, but yes; credits.”  Though they had meet at a chance encounter Tail suddenly realised despite playing coy Hemmingway had a thin vale of hopefulness about him.  The upper hand made Tail more confident.

“5000 Credits and a Cyanide Industries License.”  A License meant she could sell items owned by Cyanide Industries.  Since Apple at the turn of the second millennium Industries had taken to never selling items, but leasing them.  It meant products could not be modified or resold, new ones had to be purchased to replace them.  A Licence gave its bearer a reprieve from the lease and ownership to modify and resell products.

Now it was Hemmingway’s turn to frown.

“You said me as a distraction would help the deal?”  Now Tails tattoo expressed a language of confidence.

“Fine.” Hemmingway said with haste.  The game was exposed.  Tail was the lottery.  If Hemmingway had come up with a Marine or Working-girl he would have been looked down on by the Centuri.  A free independent date meant he was a man of success and could obtain hard to get items.

Tail smiled.  She walked out of the elevator with a strut and extended her elbow for Hemmingway to take.  For a License she was in, she just hadn’t picked Hemmingway as desperate, a sign he was a good negotiator at least.  As a couple in appearance, but really in mutual despise they approached the Security who had now lost interest in the couple after the short scene at the elevator.  Tail even smiled as the intricate pattern in the digital invite was scanned.  The Centuri on guard waved them through and they walked into the Elevator bay to go into the inhabited regions of the Spire.  These elevators were translucent and polished.  A Drill attendant was present to ensure the Centuri’s didn’t have to go to the effort of pressing a button.  Hemmingway, not speaking Drill presented his invitation again and the Drill stretched up to the desired button.  Though operated by Drill, the Centuri designed for themselves, as to pretend they didn’t need the other races.  The lift started to go up through the thick ceramic ceiling and into a bright light of opulence.

Globes, not sold on earth, lit every corner and there were no shadows.  No heat came from the light hinting at filaments from an alloy not shared with humans, or too expensive for them to fabricate.  They only went up two levels, but as the glass of the elevator lift Tail could see the Alleyways of Level 191 were slums in comparison to the wide boulevards of the Spire.  Plumbing and Cooling units were hidden and no Humans walked the street other than business men marching in the wake of a disinterested Centuri.

“Welcome to the Business District.”  Hemmingway informed as Tail played her part.  “The real Business District.”

Tail’s intimidation and fascination was not evident.  Before her parents had made it to Australia as refugees, Eastern Europe had long been exposed to the Chinese onslaught.  As Russia surrendered, Chinese soldiers swept into the Baltic Independents States and she had run from House to house under gunfire.  The Chinese had a policy, if someone is afraid they have something to be worried about so her escape into Germany came by casually walking past Chinese soldiers as if she had nothing to hide.  It was earth’s final resource war.  Australia and Canada had survived, America had gone bust and Tail saw the Ocean for the first time.

Hemmingway lead them to a Silicon crystal Restaurant and for the third time showed his invitation.  As the Attendant, a Centuri, scanned it Tail leaned in and whispered in Hemmingway’s ear, “You are such a cunt.”  She wanted to remind him she was here against her will, though her favour had temporarily been bought, and may need to be maintained.

A Drill came out and gestured with poorly imitated human gestures for them to follow him.  As they walked through the Restaurant to the seated Tail spied a naked girl, about the say age as those she freighted at the feet of a sitting Centuri.  She was on a leash, her hand farnsened behind her back eating out of a chrome dish like a cat as if she hadn’t been feed for days.  The Centuri who held the leash was running his figures down her back and then sniffing them.  The final thing Tail noticed before Hemmingway guided her out of view was a chrome plate at the back of her skull, with her hair draped around it.  It had a hole in its centre.  Tail knew what it was for.  The girl, the Centuri’s pet, was injected with Opium from Afghanistan then a vial was placed in the hole to collect the chemicals the girl’s brain produced to give her owner a smooth high.  It was the reason Tail was able to retire when she got back to earth, she’d just never seen it before.  Perhaps she had transported that very girl.

Her attention was immediately refocused as they approached a table with a Centuri already seated.  He puckered his small mouth showing his teeth, a sign he was not happy.  Tail’s protest at the elevator had made Hemmingway slightly late instead of punctual.  “My apologies Steve.”  The Centuri’s who did business with humans adopted business names humans could pronounce.  They were still no-senesical, like calling a Rottweiler ‘Gaven’.  “I had to let my date shower so she did not distract you.”  Hemmingway sat in the seat and Tail was confused.  She suddenly realised that it was intended she sit on the floor at Hemmingway’s feet.  She hide her distaste and knelt down.  She was getting paid for this after all now and she had done a lot worse for money.  As her knees hit the ceramic plate that was the immaculate restaurant floor her anger kicked in.  She rose, walked over to an adjoining table.  It was vacant.  She collected the smaller chair, the one suited for humans and noisily dragged it across to the table.  Hemmingway shot her an angry look.

Steve seemed confused for a moment and then racked back in hic-cup like chuckle.  Tail amused him.  Steve was no longer interested in Hemmingway’s lateness.  He peered down at Tail over his long nose.  Though he was trying to be discreet his nostrils were flared as he tried to get her scent, or he already had it and wanted to savour it.  Tail looked back defiantly.  Steve extended his velvet fingers and reached for Tail.  Though appearing passive, her right hand by her side drifted back to her boot and the blade hidden in it.  The Centuri ran a finger across Tail’s neck, tracing her tattoo.  It seemed to fascinate him.

“You’ve never seen one tattooed before?”  Hemmingway said politely composed at Steve’s complacency at Tails sexual equality.

Steve did not answer, but drew his hand back and sniffed his finger.  Despite her shower Tail could imagine his peni beneath the table grow hard.  The Centuri’s eyes became softer.  Hemmingway had exactly what he wanted, a distracted Centuri at a business dinner.  He wasted no time.  “Let’s get right down to it Steve.  Earth’s moon has oceans of Helium 3, the problem is distance.  It’s not economical to transport from the inner solar system so you don’t take Cyanide’s stakes on the moon seriously.”

Steve was listening to the pitch, but his eyes kept drifting back to Tail.  Tail smiled at him, but the submission made her blush, not from shyness but anger.  She was imagining beating the shit out of Hemmingway on the lift ride down and taking the key pass to his apartment.

“Our Marines have seen your long range drones fly in nukes as we bug out of snatch and grabs.”  Hemmingway held up his hands passively.  “We’re not worried about a few irradiated Marines, it’s what they signed on for.  But, if you give us that long range VI drone technology and we can automate the Lunar harvesting of Helium 3.  Delivery will be slow at first, but we are talking a big investment.  Enough long range drones to keep a steady supply and if you invest, we can build more.  More drones, more Helium 3.”  Hemmingway was cut off by the arrival of a Drill waiter with menus.  Steve barked something in Centuri at the Drill and he entered it into the data pad that went straight to the kitchen.  Hemmingway took his time.  Tail correctly deduced he would be ordering for both of them.  Hemmingway scanned the menu for food he could digest.  From his three options, he chose the one with some protein.  He asked for two, but Steve yelled out in Centuri at the Drill waiter and he hastily changed the order.  Hemmingway looked a little shaken, but then smiled.  Tail realised the Centuri had ordered for her and didn’t like it one bit, less when he started to giggle.

“5000 Credits, a License and I’m definitely beating the shit out of Hemmingway in the Elevator”, Tail thought to herself.

Steve said almost nothing for the next quarter hour and Tail tuned out.  Hemmingway’s almost autistic recitement of figures and projections from a small fleet of two tone Drones was boring and agitated her in the uncomfortable environment.  Steve listened, but kept twitching his eyes back to Tail at her seat.  Tail, not wanting to engage Steve at all took to looking around the room.  Apart from the girl she had seen coming in she was the only human female in the restaurant.  It occurred to her that the Centuri Culture was chauvinistic.  No Centuri females were present in the Restaurant.  In fact Tail couldn’t recall seeing one ever.  The obscene display of their two peni told Tail that there must be a female of the species.  All of the conversations were in English as if the Centuri were insulted by the pretence that a human could speak their language.  Tail tried to listen into each conversation, none were going as well as Hemmingway’s, most had a plea to them and Tail realised just how desperate for technology her species were.  It was like they knew when Sol’s system had no resources left to offer we would be left alone to fend for ourselves with nothing, yet they strived on begging for scraps, offering more and more for just a little taste of tech.

The Drill waiter, or another approached the table carrying silver flat discs with food on them.  Centuri table manners amounted to eating the food in any manner.  The only rule seemed to be never letting a scrap off the side of the disc.  Therefore it was usual to eat the outer food first and work your way in, least you embarrass yourself.  Steve was naturally given his first.  Tail expected him to tuck straight into it, it was not like the Centuri to wait for humans.  He sat back though and eyed Tail as if anxiously waiting for something.  His thin tongue peeped out between his circular jaws of teeth and traced the serrated tips.  Tail thought it best to look away, but that didn’t stop Steve from maintaining his stare.  The Drill provided Hemmingway with his plate next, beans in gravy and rehydrated mashed potato.  Tail glanced at the gravy as it crept out from the centre of the plate and risked coming over the edge.  The logical this to do was pick up a utensil and scoop the gravy back into the centre of the plate, but Hemmingway could pick up a utensil until Steve did.  Tail’s was the last to be served and she slowly closed her eyes and repressed the obscenities as a plate of steaming purple leaves was set before her.  Instantly she smelled the zesty tang of the cooked alien plant followed by the smell of menthol.

‘It’s not even fucking edible for humans.’  She thought.  How sick was this going to make her.

Steve seemed to be at excitements edge and Hemmingway, usually so calm clenched his fist as his gravy ran ever closer to the edge of his plate.  With a twinkle in his eyes Steve leant back and picked up his utensil.  Hemmingway quickly did the same and saved tarnishing his immaculate impression by successful pushing back the tide of gravy.  Tail was naturally the last to eat, not with any mind to Centuri culture, but out of a distinct revulsion for the meal that lay before her.  Had Hemmingway not started eating, or the silver flat discs could be picked up from the table with ease, she would have openly picked up hers and swapped it with Hemmingway’s.  Her reluctance was noticed.

“Problem?”  Steve said narrowing his tiny bead like eyes at her.

“Is there a problem?”  Hemmingway followed with and rubbed his fingers and thumb together signifying money.  The gesture was alien to Steve, but Hemmingway made it clear.  His deal was going well, acquiescence from Tail at this point would mean greater payment; protest would break the deal.  From what she had heard of the scope of the deal, her pay was chicken feed compare to the killing Cyanide would make.

Tail picked up her utensil and pierced a purple leaf with it.  It was soggy and broke apart into a bight size portion.  Tail played with it on her plate as Steve resumed eating.  Hemmingway was watching intently still though as if to make a threat.  Tail took the leaf to her lips and it tingled like chilling.  She opened her mouth and placed the leaf inside.  She chewed while breathing in through her nose, then lurched forward suppressing a gag.  Chewing was a bad idea.  Pushing aside her imaginations of what it would do to her gut she swallowed and immediately looked around for a glass of water.  There was none.  Hemmingway picked up on this and softly spoke to her without looking at her. 

“There are no drinks for the first course of a Centuri meal.”  He said in an attempt to prevent her from breaking the cardinal rule of requesting it.  Tail found it difficult to swallow the saliva that pooled in her mouth.  One bit was playing havoc with her senses.  Almost instantaneously she felt hot and flushed.  She knew she was about to start sweaty and her throat grew tight.  Her discomfort started to outweigh her need to play along.  She blinked rapidly and looked around at the other tables for a vacant glass of water.  The now unstoppable reaction to the food broke down her dislike for Hemmingway and his manipulation.  She hunched forward and whispered, in submission to win his favour.

“I need a glass of…”

“No.”  Hemmingway calmly replied with.

“Hemmingway please.”  She begged through a whisper not wanting to embarrass him in front of Steve.  Something was very wrong and she needed his favour now.  Tail felt like she has as she escaped the Ukraine.  Small; weak; helpless.  ‘Was that why you sold woman as cattle.  To be safe.’  The voice was her own and it came from the back of her brain as if passing final judgement before…  Tail realised she was about to pass out.  She stood up suddenly, an action mirrored by Hemmingway, and took a step towards the exit.  She needed to be someplace cool, someplace with humans.

As her legs gave way she turned and feel.  Hemmingway caught her in his arms as if he’d dipped her in a dance.  How many times had he performed this execution?  Tail’s eyes looked up at him for help, or mercy, she couldn’t judge which.

“I’m sorry Tail.  Just go with it.”  Steve had finished his plate and slapped the table for the Drill waiter to return.  Hemmingway held her cloth and shushed her soothingly.  As the waiter came Steve pointed to the incapacitated Tail and barked something in Centuri.  Tail was left looking at Hemmingway’s driven and desperate eyes.  “Centuri meals consist of four meals, and I’m sorry, but you’re the main course.”

Tail couldn’t comprehend.  She was weakly aware of her weight being shifted as she was carried by Hemmingway, led by the Drill waiter, towards the kitchen.

Chapter 5.

The hollow pucking sound of clashing grapheme pots woke Tail and the screeching abuse of a Centuri voice that followed and made her aware.  The first thing she did was inhale deeply and realise the sickness of… however long ago had left her.  The next thing she did was try to sit up on the chrome table she lay.  She couldn’t move.  A small ceramic device on her long, slender neck beeped and distracted the head chef, a Centuri, from yelling in his language at a clumsy Drill kitchen hand.  He moved to the side of the table and peered down at Tail unwrapped from Hemmingway’s red dress.  Tail stared up in horror, paralysed and exposed, at his circular mouth.  Though his lips were closed the points of his teeth were still visible as their mouths never closed properly.  A sickening feeling came over Tail and she got the distinct impression the circular lips were smiling at her malevolently. 

“What the fuck are you playing at cunt?”  Her paralysis was from the neck down and caused, Tail suspected, by the devise attached to her neck.

The Centuri chuckled and indulged in a momentary sniff of her naked body, letting his elongated nose trace her soft skin from sex to breasts.  Tail tried to process her nudity as the Centuri Chef turned and barked some orders with stiffening members.  Whatever had motivated his anger at the clumsy Drill slipped away as a priority.  Tail had the uncomfortable feeling that her consciousness made her the centre of attention.  The Drill waddled over carrying a white convex plate; one side lined with LED’s and a protruding handle with dials and trigger.  The other end was metallic with holes like a shower head.  Tail turned her head and watched the Drill nervously as he test fired it at some kind of alien produce.  As the LED’s lit up in a pattern the fruit remained consolidated at first, but as he test fired it for the third time a steam like shimmer appeared above the fruit and its integrity failed.  The Drill adjusted a digital setting as if he was fine tuning it for… what?

Tail was distracted from the scene of the perfectionist Drill as the Centuri returned and cracked open some kind of egg above her belly.  There was no yoke, but the oily contents started to pool over her firm belly.  As the Centuri chef took a brush and started to spread it over her tanned flawless tanned skin he made sound between a cat pouring and a man gurgling water.  Tail didn’t know it but the Centuri was singing, an intimacy rarely shared outside their own kind.  As the chef continued Tail became aware that despite being paralysed she could feel.  She could feel the warm oil coating her bellies skin, she could feel the cold table below; and she would be able to feel… she looked back across at the Drill.  As he touched a second fruit with the device and fired the strange pulse at it.   The change was minimal.  He now held down the trigger and it took a good thirty seconds before the vapour appeared above the fruit.  He turned with no acknowledgement of his helpless witness and placed the device on the cold table beside Tail.  She now knew what it was for.

Tail bartered.  “I’m Captain Tail of the freighter Raven.  Licensed under Kincaid Industries.”  The Centuri was ignoring her applying a healthy coat of the oil over her sex.  “If you cook me there will be no one to bring you cattle.  You’ll run out of…”  The Centuri placed his hands behind Tails neck and pinched a nerve.  Her jaw burst open and she started to cry out.  As if from practise the Drill hastily grabbed one of the alien fruits he’d tested the device on and plopped it in her mouth.  The chef released one of his fingers and as Tail’s mouth bit down on the fruit he tapped a button on the device on her neck.  Her jaw froze rigid, clasping down on the ornamental fruit like a suckling pig.  She wailed, but her cry was muffled.  The Centuri went back to singing and started basting her breasts.

Tail hadn’t cried for years, but as the Centuri finished basting her a single tear rolled from an eye.  The Centuri placed the brush down and gazed at Tail making sure he had her attention.  He made a double puck with his mouth and lifted the showerhead side of the device to her belly.  Tail tried to vocalize a protest, but all that came out was a whimper, pitiful for her pride.

The LED’s on the device lit up, nothing at first, as Tail strained to see.  She felt a tingle, a tickle, then her eyes burst wide with a sudden explosion as her belly erupted in searing pain.  Had she mobility her back would have arched and her legs kicked.  She found herself gasping for air but the contraction of her diaphragm echoed the pain of her belly.  Somehow through the fruit she found the courage to scream.  Rapid and muffled she wailed, as her screams started to subside the Centuri moved the device to a fresh, virgin, section of her flesh and the LED’s flashed again.  ‘Jesus, fucker mother cunt, Christ.  They’re cooking me alive.’  The dots were starting to be connected as the device shifted around her mid drift.  Each pulse bought fresh pain and the intermittent tease between bursts from the device never gave her enough time to recover from the last.

The efficient two minutes, that seemed like hours came to an end and Tail finally panted weak on the table.  It seemed to be over.  The chef turned to a pallet of spices and with three radial fingers clutched at a blend of alien spices.  He held his hand over Tail’s marinated and steaming belly and grinded them together, painting her skin with speckles of red and green spices.  Tail closed her eyes, the pool of tears ran down her checks and she fought to concentrate through the linger pain throughout her abdomen.

The Centuri chef barked another order in his language, his voice less like a guard dog protesting proximity.  Tail found the Drill and the Centuri grasping at her ankles and manipulating her wrists above her head.  Tail’s mind went dull.   ‘They’re going to eat you now.’  She realised.  ‘Steve is going to eat you now.’  She tried to cry out again, but with her weakened belly the unsatisfactory whimpers were all the she could make.  She was placed on a chrome flat tray.  She could not see the manipulation of any controls but after some beeping her helpless form started to rise up as the tray started to hover.  With a Gentle push the Drill pushed her along and the white ceramic wall ahead parted silently and the commotion and light of the restaurant returned.

The only thing more surreal than her situation was the total lack of interest any of the alien and human diners gave her.  No one gave her a second glance, let alone a first.  The Drill navigated the maze of tables towards Steve and Hemmingway.  Steve had undergone a resurgence talking at length of the benefits to both parties of the deal, cemented by Tails sacrifice.  The plates of the earlier courses had been removed.  In desperation Tail stared at Hemmingway, alien fruit still in mouth.  He fidgeted with the remains of his table settings, halting his pitch to allow Steve to eat.  When he finally did make eye contact with Tail there was shame in his face.  It could be no clearer to him that extreme ransoms of conduct had been paid.  Humans were selling their own kind to barter for the advanced technology of the Centuri, and were they even the most advanced race in the galaxy, or just those with the proximity to exploit the human resource.

Tail’s wish of a plea to Hemmingway was cut short as Steve reached for a three pronged fork.  Steve wavered the tiny trident over her belly as is wondering where to start.  With a pure of Centuri song he darted at her belly.  Tail didn’t feel the prick, but she saw Steve raise it back up with a tiny nibble of her flesh on the end.  She whimpered again.  The absolute nature of the situation bought resolute terror.  Human’s had been at the top of their food chain since before history.  Tail was a pioneer of a lost realisation.  Steve took his first bit and shuffled excitably in his seat.  He was savouring her.

Chapter 6.

With one hand Steve was caressing Tail’s neck in admiration of the art necklace on there.  With his other hand he curled his fork to capture another portion of the divine meat from the cavity formed over her belly.  Tail had gone cold, in a daze she stared up with Steve and his appreciative eyes.  The process had not permitted Tail to go into shock, to have her heart allow her to escape her attendance at the table as dinner.  Hemmingway sat back, watched politely in silence.  As Steve started to relax further into the intimacy of eating a living human Hemmingway seized his chance.

“You’ve agreed to our deal, haven’t you Steve?”  It was loaded question.

Steve was tipsy of Tail’s biology.  Some of the hormones, and even amino acids, in her physiology were alien to Steve.  They replaced those used in regular Centuri, they had an effect like heroine, binding to receptors and sedating the Centuri.  Steve nodded not taking his eyes of Tail’s neck tattoo.  To him the intricate pattern was dancing, the shapes playing with his Centuri perspective as he tripped on her flesh.

“Could I get your marker for the contract?”  Hemming pulled a slim data pad, a tablet, with the contract noted on it.  Steve left the beautiful tattoo and placed his equivalent to a thumb on the data pad.  His DNA served as signature and he imparted it without reviewing the contract.  No doubt Hemmingway had added unmentioned clauses prior to dinner.  For once the humans were getting a good deal.  With the momentary distraction Steve sat back, surrendering his meditation with his meal.  He seemed dazed.  The restaurant was closing and like a bar tender cutting of a drunk client the Drill came and activated the tray that Tail laid on.  Again and less conscious she found herself being glided away from the table back to the kitchen.

As the wall silently parted again to consign Tail to the kitchens horrors she noticed more Drill.  They were clambering about cleaning up for the evening.  The one that had escorted Tail back in left his post and went to work, fighting for a position to clean pots.  Tail, damaged and disorientated looked around to see her fate.  The Centuri Chef appeared by her side, he’d been relaxing and watching whilst the Drill carried out the menial tasks.  His eyes looked at hers as a human may look at a slaughter lamb.  Tail cringed her face in anticipation of what came next.  The Centuri relaxed.  He picked up and popped a tin canister of gel.  He poured the gel into the cavity created by Steve’s fork.  Steve had not gone deep enough to harvest Tail’s organs and indeed they had been raw.  The instrument used to cook Tail had been calibrated to only go as deep as her waif muscle on her belly.  The Centuri, with no heed to sanitation spread the gel throughout the wound.  Once spread he pulled a mat, segmented like the tracks of a tank and lay it over the cavity.  Tail shut her eyes and expected a new pain.  The flash of light like a photo copier ran back and forth between the mat and Tail’s eroded belly.  The Centuri left his post and wandered about the kitchen leaving Tail alone.  She opened her eyes.  There was no pain.  She started to feel a numbness in her gut, were the absence of flesh meant there should be no feeling at all.  The numbness turned to a tingle; pins and needles; finally she felt the uncontrollable twitch of muscle.  The Centuri returned and red a bar on the upside of the mat.  Satisfied he raised the mat.  Contrasted to the drive core tanned skin was a blotch of fresh white skin.  The wound had been healed, new muscle and dermis generated from the gel.  Tail panted in bewilderment, relief mingled with fear that this regeneration would allow another helping; another processed of being cooked and having to lay there as she was picked at with a tiny trident.

For once the Centuri did the lifting.  He pushed Tail through the swarming Drill to another wall.  This one opened after a click of a lock.  Tail found herself in a white room with a shelf.  Hemmingway’s red dress and her boots were on the shelf and the Centuri paused.  Her reached over and gave a tap on the device on her neck.  Tail lurched into mobility.  Her immediate desire was to roll away from the Centuri.  As he collected the device for another use she rolled of the hovering tray onto the floor.  The force jarred her and though repaired she realized her belly was weak.  The muscles were brand new and had no strength.  With a gasp and a yell she spat the alien fruit from her now free jaws.  “Mother fucking cunt!”  She yelled at the Centuri as he exited the room like a zoo keeper placing a wild boar in an enclosure.  Tail struggled to her feet and stood as the wall sealed behind him and the click signified a lock.  She stumbled to the door, knocking the tray which hoovered into an adjacent wall of the small room.  “Mother Fuckers”, she pounded on the wall.  “Fucking Alien Cunts.”  Her pounds turned to punches and she felt a crack in her hand as it smacked into the sealed exit from the kitchen.  The pain in her hand reminded her of threat.  She turned, leaning against the wall and slumped to the floor crying naked and alone.

After a couple of minutes she had the presence of mind to again worry about her vulnerability.  The presences of a door on the opposite side of the room signified this was not a cell.  Her clothes being returned to her confirmed she would walk out of her.  She slipped on the dress.  Only after the contrasting pale skin was covered did she touch her belly.  She tried crunching her muscles.  She couldn’t make her abdomen as hard and she knew the fresh muscles were weak.  She checked her boots.  The thin silver blade had been taken.  There would be no weapon to commit an act of revenge with.  She sat on the bench and placed the boots on.  When she had finished she rose and with apprehension at what she would find walked out the exit.  She came out at reception.  On a row of chairs, too high for humans to sit on Hemmingway sat looking nervous despite the killing he had just made.  Tail charged.

It was a blur for her as she ran.  Hemmingway rose in shock, though he should have seen it coming.  The first punch was from her good hand and it caught Hemmingway square on the nose with an appeasing crack.  The second fist was aimed at his temple, but the pain from the injured hand bought back some level of awareness.  Tail continued with a fail knee to the ground that landed on Hemmingway’s calf.  His brief cries were situated with his logic.  “You need me to get out!”  Tail knew she should have cared.  She bought her good fist down above his eye.  “YOU NEED ME TO GET OUT.”  Hemmingway insisted and his logic caused Tail to calm.  She was perched above him as he lay on the floor.  Beyond her anger Tail found the reality that she was in the spire.  She was trapped in the Centuri’s home and if Hemmingway didn’t walk her out she would be a stray animal trapped until claimed.  And for what purpose…  Tail slumped back on the floor panting in anger and fear and trepidation.

Hemmingway picked himself up.  Totalitarianism compelled him to be outraged at the attack.  “Jesus Christ”, he exclaimed the name of the forgotten deity.  “Do you think I wait for the whores I bring up here?”  His hand went to his damaged nose; blotted the blood trickling from above his eye.  “We fucking secured their drone technology tonight.  Do you know what that means?”

Tail didn’t care.  Now his anger meant a delay in leaving.  She wanted off this level and out of this station.  She almost felt regret at retaliating.

“We can modify them.  Make contact with other races who aren’t going to exploit us.”  Extra solar space flight in now an option.”  Hemmingway got madder.  “Not to mention we can now produce stellar transporters at a fraction of the cost.”  Hemmingway had made a killer deal.

A passing Centuri caught a whiff of Tail’s scent.  As he walked his nose crept of to the side and his peni started to stiffen in response.  Tail didn’t care about the reasons behind Hemmingway’s ploy.  She no longer cared about what he had done or what she had gone through.  She just wanted to get off this fucking Station.  “Just get me the fuck away from here.”

Hemmingway pulled a handkerchief from his pocket.  He tried to clean the blood from his face leaving a crimson smudge.  “Yeah.”  He said moving past the assault.  “Come on.”  As he walked past her the trembling Tail turned and walked silently by his side towards the elevator.

Prologue.

Even back on level 191 Tail didn’t escape the Centuri.  They had come down to sniff the prostitutes on the streets corners, messy from their nights entertain the marines and corporates.  Hemmingway walked close to her and as the fourth Centuri approached the pair with a credit stick Hemmingway’s stern refusal made some grounds for convalescence in her immediate need for security.  They entered his building then his sweet.  Tail’s trembling was yet to subside even behind Hemmingway’s locked door.  Hemmingway was passive, sympathetic after his gain.

As Tail stood in the corner, back against the wall, he went to his extranet terminal and loaded up a cred stick.  “Fifty-thousand.”  He said holding it out to her.  “More than the deal.”

Tail didn’t want to take it.  She closed her eyes and prayed for a beach and palm trees; warm sun and simple locals she could abuse in English without them understanding.

“Take it.”  Hemmingway imparted, a hint of sternness in his voice.  He wanted it all tied up in a nice deal.

Tail chanced eye contact.  Hemmingway had justification in his eyes.  He truly believed the non-ethical conduct was permitted by the unparalleled gain.  Tail snatched the cred-stick and immediately regretted it. 

“And your license.”  Hemmingway now extended a data pad.

Tail took it without checking.

Hemmingway lifted a cushion of his sofa and produced Tail’s original clothes.  “You can take the bed.  Hopefully your ship will be fixed by tomorrow.”  Tail added then to the load in her hands hugging them close like a security blanket.  Her belly twitched, the new muscles a reminder of what had happened.

As she turned to Hemmingway’s bedroom he called after her.  “It’s not that different you know.”  Hemmingway sat down on his sofa where he would spend the night.  “Offering you up to the Centuri for a deal.  It’s a lot better than transporting women for the same fate.  At least I collected you.”

Ghetto 2.

By ninja5

She walked the unmade road past the mud brick houses, tiny in interior, but housing entire families.  Here there was a real sense of community.  The buildings matched the claustrophobia of the Adelaide, her old freighter.  It was already seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit and the sun was just waking up.  Tail hated the metric system, but couldn’t shack the habit of conversions in her head.  Inch, foot, chain, yard, furlong… Mile – and most appropriate of all, leagues.  It was 47.017 leagues to Tahiti and her shipment was due to arrive at her home of the Commune of Bora Bora.

As she headed to her bar in the cove as far away from the resort as it could be a couple of small children ran out in front of her kicking a worn soccer ball.  Tail had always hated children, but the ‘natives’, if you wanted to use the term the minor Corp that ran the last surviving resort used, were like junior versions of the adults.  Ever polite and eager to become the friendly islander giants that their parents were.  She allowed herself a smile as one of the boys attempted a tackle only to fall on his ass.  Bora Bora had no resource other than its beauty.  The big Corps could find nothing to exploit and sell off to the Centuri.  Only Neptune, a minor company that invested solely in tourism, settled on Tahiti AND Bora Bora and built the resorts.  Cyanide, Toyota, Sinopec and alike didn’t bother crushing the niche Corps.  They’d just wait till they were tender enough to buy out and gut.  That’s how the minor Corps and start-ups operated.  Get big enough for a payout and then live the cosy life… Just like she had.

The sun-dried timber of her bar welcomed her.  As she stepped up the veranda she leant over and lifted the mat to reveal the key.  She didn’t have to worry about burglary.  Theft just didn’t occur to the locals and the tourists all hid in the resort at night so they could enjoy incremental climate control.  Wankers were all hopped up on Soma anyway.  ‘Fuckers don’t even know they’re addicted’, Tail thought as she pushed the door open and stepped inside.  She took of her baseball cap and pulled away her leather jacket.  She still wore her freighter pilot’s uniform.  Cargo pants, despite the heat, and a singlet – only instead of the military surplus singlet this one had more fabric on the shoulders.  It was more blouse like, gave her a feminine look so the Chinese, Japanese and handful of Australasians didn’t back out of the bar upon looking at her.  She flicked the switch lighting up the antique neon open light and stepped into the bar.  Her bar.

***

When she was a kid in the immigration camp on Christmas Island the steroid hopped ‘orderlies’ had made the children do the cleaning.  There were only two things Tail had ever been able to clean without remembering the desire to break the mop over the pseudo securities guards heads and they were the freighter she’d jockeyed and her bar.  The bar was made from pine, cheap timber, as anything else had been harvested to near extinction, but the countless layers of varnish and polish she layered on it gave it a rich, worn look.

The entrance bobbed open.  “Good morning bro.”  It was Khutoot.  Khutoot was the friendly islander and human forklift who made the alcohol delivery from Tahiti.  He called her bro, the Islander equivalent of ‘mate’, because, as Tail had found, she wasn’t in the least bit sexualised to him.  “Record time, hey bro.  Water was as flat as your bar.”

Tail gave a rare smile.  “How’s Rhonda Khutoot?”  Tail asked and put her cloth down.  She started walking around the bar.  Khutoot had three cases of Hangzhou beer and was placing it by the door – human forklift.

“Ah, she’s all good bro.  Hey Tail…”  As Khutoot tried to impart a piece of information when a middle aged man wearing a straw fedora, bright Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and black leather suedes stepped into the bar.  It was the suedes that gave him away, and the dark opaque sunglass covering the methodical and cold eyes gave him away immediately as a Corp in the guise of a tourist.    Tail stopped walking around the bar and stood defensively.  Khutoot picked up on the tension instantly.  “This guy says he’s been island hopping looking for ya.  Say’s he owes you some money.”

Simple Khutoot – simple, friendly Khutoot had lived on the island all his life.  Like an animal on an island with no predators he hadn’t even sniffed the man for the stench of one of the big three.  Tail’s eyes narrowed and she remembered the baseball bat taped under the bar.  She’d put it there when she’d first opened, but sedate tourists and harmless islander meant she had never had to pull it out.  Her eyes glance to Khutoot.  Last thing she wanted to do was get him caught up in Corp business.  “How much more Khutoot?” She asked, not taking her eyes of the Corp lackey.  He stood in a rigid stance.  It was a fault of these Corp negotiators.  They thought they were Samurai facing battle.

Khutoot, never having seen Tail’s antagonised face before answered innocently.  “’Bout a dozen bro.”  He turned to fetch the rest.  “Business is good, hey!”  He left the bar to carry the rest in.

The stoic faced Corp spoke up.  His skin was oily from the heat, which meant he was used to climate control.  “If it’s not too early, mind if I have a beer.”  He remained where he was standing.

“Sure.”, Tail said watching the tone of her voice least Khutoot should overhear.  She turned her back and pulled a Hangzhou from the fridge beneath the spirits.  She popped the top on the stainless steel opener and placed it on the bar.  The Corp stepped forward.  He seemed to relax a little and Tail wondered what he had been told about her.  A dossier file existed on her she was sure – both with Kincaid and Cyanide.  Did it label her aggressive?  The fact dealings with Kincaid were clandestine, and her brief service to Cyanide resulted in her leaving Ghetto with her head down traumatised from…

Tail had dealt with the anger from her time on Ghetto.  Even out of contract she’d spent a good year getting drunk to blur that memory.

Khutoot came in with another three cases of beer and stacked them next to the others.  The Corp lackey was playing the game, staring forward through his shades.  He was keeping Khutoot out of the pending conversation.  Tail too wanted Khutoot to think everything was natural.  She picked up her cloth and methodically started wiping down the bar top again.  The Corp couldn’t have known, but she concentrated on the area above the baseball bat.

Finally Khutoot finished.  With only a mild huff he exhaled as he dropped of a box of spirits to replenish the top bar.  “All good then bro?”  He asked.

Tail gave a nod of her head.  “All good Khutoot.  You want a credstick or transfer?”  She stopped wiping down the bar and tried to smile, her hands on the counter.

“Ah, transfer bro.  Rhonda’s terrified I’ll drop it over the side of the boat again.”  Khutoot smiled and turned to leave.

As he stepped out of the bar, not at all concerned that Tail might stiff him his fee, Tail called out.  “I’ll put it through tonight.”  Khutoot gave a wave of his arm as the door closed behind him.  Tail’s transformation was instantaneous.  She reached out and grabbed the Corp lackey’s beer.  Bringing the next to her mouth she spat mucus into the bottle and placed it back.  The Corp’s eyes could be seen at the edge of the shades narrowing.  Tail turned to him, discretely dropping one arm below the bar within reach of the bat.  Slowly and in an unmistakable tone of unwelcome she stated, “What. The. Fuck. Do. You. Want?”  The F word had a particular resonance.

“Baby doll” the man said unphased in a Brooklyn accent.  “I’m just a messenger.”  He reached forward and took up the tainted bottle of Hangzhou and drank from it.  He was all smugness, not a negotiator.  If he was making an offer, it was an ultimatum.

Tail felt a pang like a stitch forming in her abdomen.  The hand below the bar grasped the handle of the bat.  She waited the Corp out.

“Not much tech here.”  He seemed to muse.  “I bet that’s why this place makes such a steady profit.”  He was referring to the island as casually as he might the bar.  “The plebeians come, they soak in the sun – get a tan.  A real tanned, not one of those salon jobs.  Have you ever seen one of the salon jobs?”  He waved his hands around to act casual about the intensity his visit must be imparting on Tail.  “It’s like they air brush you with UV – paint you show your body; muscle is highlighted.”  He took another sip of Tail’s special brew beer and seemed to enjoy it.  “You know who I represent?”

At least the mandatory Corp bullshit had been kept to a minimum.  From the experiences Tail had had with them it could go on for hours.  Each Corp lackey believing he alone had the observational perspective to explain the chaos that was the post-neo world.  “I’m guessing Cyanide.”  She spoke through rigid lips.

“Not Kincaid.  You know it wouldn’t surprise me if Kincaid came looking for you.  You do know their dirty little secret after all.  What was it you used to list as your manifest…? Livestock!”  He finished the beer.  “Now you seem pretty happy here.  I’m just wondering what these carefree Islander’s would think if they found out you used to transport abducted girls to Ghetto for the Centuri.”  He was getting into his drawn out threat.  “I mean, they’re not wasteful bastards like we are.  They harvest their drugs, they modify them – I mean they completely drain them dry.  And when they’re finished with them, they don’t let them die.  They pass them down to poor cousin Joey so he’s got something to eat – regenerate them – eat again.”  The Corps body was rigid but his head body freely and the accent added to the account making it seem all the more emotive.  “I bet not one of the women you took up there is dead yet.  Sure, they all wish they were, but they’re not.”

The discovered happiness of the last two years was soiled by the recanting of things buries under alcohol and the tranquilizing effect of Bora Bora.  Tail was breathing heavily though her nose, her lips pursed tight.  Beneath the counter her knuckles were white as she squeezed the bat.  Already the thin tap that held it in place was coming lose as her hand shook.

“I am here to firstly remind you that we own you.  Secondly, to explain…”

The bat swung down with a crack.  The Corp lackey’s arm was crushed between the bar top and the solid wooden shaft.  The man screamed as his forearm bent the bones splintering into his flesh.  His shades half came off and now the man’s eyes could be seen, not in the smarmy glint of authority, but in the panic of trauma.  Tail was around the bar as them man hunched forward and clutched at his arm with his good one.  Tail didn’t stop.  As she rounded in on the crumpled figure she drew back and swung the bat again.  The cry turned to another scream as the Corps hat flew off and his kneecap shattered.  The stool toppled to one side and the man fell to the floor.

Tail wasn’t finished yet.  Two years of happiness, but she was still an angry bitch.  As the man gasped for air to fight his agony Tail jammed the end of the bat into his mouth and pushed down cutting of his air and forcing his mouth open.  There was a chorus of snapping sounds as his teeth snapped one by one and the confident eyes of an all-powerful Corp agent suddenly realised they were very close to being beaten to death.  Tail held him this way long enough for any trace of power to be stripped away and then lifted the bat out again.  The man started crying and spat blood onto his chin as he lay on the floor suffering.

“Say it again Yankee… Who owns me?”  Tail steadied than man’s rocking face with the side of the bat.  She stood above him.  There was no mistaking that long term advantage meant nothing in this instance.  She would kill him if he didn’t submit.

“We…”  The man was distort.  His ego had been shattered along with his bones.  “We need you for a deal.”

“Ok.”  Tail calmed slightly, but didn’t let it show too much.  “What deal?  Give details.”

“A man you know as Hemmingway and a Centuri made a killer deal.”  He gasped for air, spraying blood on Tail’s steel capped boots.  “We got drones – really good drones.  They got Helium 3 – lots of it.  We both won.”

“I know this already punk.”  Tail drew the bat back as if she was about to pile drive the Corps head.  His good arm came up defensively and he squealed.

“The Centuri liked you.  He’s obsessed.  We tried to get women like you – even tried to replicate your tattoo, but he’s…”  Now the Corps eyes pleaded innocent, like he wasn’t a monster.  “He’s like a connoisseur.  None of them are what he wants and now he’s shutting down deals unless we get you.”

Tail relaxed her stance.  Knowing the score put her an ease for a moment, but slowly the sickening realisation that if Cyanide needed her that badly and that this agent was the polite way of asking.  The follow up would be a stun pistol in the back from the shadows and waking up on Steve’s dinner plate.  She lost all interest in the man and dropped the bat, walking to the bar to get a drink.

As she poured herself a triple of her best whiskey the crippled Corp bleeding on her bar floor panted out his compromise out of relief.  “You’re leverage.  Hemmingway doesn’t want to give you up.  He wants to dish you out in doses and cash in.  We’re taking you anyway, at least with him you’ll get out - he says he’ll get you out.”  Desperation came over the man’s voices.  “He says you know he’ll get you out.”

Tail sunk half the whiskey and looked around the timber bar.  The sensation of being on Ghetto was coming back to her.  Already the tropical island seemed the wrong type of claustrophobic.  Her pine walls seemed like the tin and tungsten of the station; the light through the windows seemed to flicker as if from neon bulbs.  Cyanide would take her one way or another.  The obnoxious Corp on the flaw suddenly seemed like a curtesy compared to how the girls Tail had transport must have been picked up.  The deal did seem like Hemmingway’s kind and going along with it gave her best – no, her only way through.

The door to her bar swung open.  The first batch of Chinese tourists stepped into the bar.  Their eyes immediately went to the crippled man, bleeding and crying on the timber floor.  Tail finished her whiskey.  “Sorry folks” she said calmly.  “We’re closed today.”

***

“I love me the sexy bitches.”

Tail stirred but she was coming out of an incubation sleep, not waking from a restful night.  Her eyes fluttered but they were heavy.  As they opened briefly she saw a white and bright room.  The overhead lights with alien filaments made the whitewalls look sterile and the rays bounced of them and stainless steel making giving the impression of an afterlife.

“I mean check out that tatt.  She totally scarred herself just to look the part for her twenties.”  The voice was young and immature.  Behind it Tail could hear the tell-tale beep of a heart monitor it’s pace picking up.  As Tail managed to open her heavy eyes and take in the surrounding room she saw a spectacled young man in a lab coat with scruffy hair turning away from her.  She blinked and went to raise her hand to rub her eyes.  The leather restraints held her done and she stirred, adrenaline suddenly making her more awake.  The heart rate monitors tempo increased.

From the back of the room a brown haired figure also wearing glasses and a lab coat turn.  “Christ Josh you retard she can hear you.”  The woman started walking briskly towards Tail.  She was slowly becoming aware she was strapped to a table in an almost upright position.  She was naked and her wrists, head and… and yes her ankles were strapped to a cushioned tray.  Tail started to become agitated.  The last thing she remember after meeting the Ore transport crew in Karlgoolie was laying back in the cryo pod – the very kind she had transport her ‘livestock’ in.

“Cyanide policy.  All non-essentials have to be put into cryo”, the transports Jockey had said.  When she’d been put under she still had on her clothes.

Tail started to struggle against the restraints.  There was one around her head too.  Her eyes stung from the bright lights of the room.  “Miss.”  The brown-haired woman spoke in a calm but insistent voice.  Tail was slipping into panic.  This wasn’t the deal put forward by the Corp lackey as she stood over him in the Bora Bora hospital.  Another date with Hemmingway and Steve, that was the deal, only this time she would be unconscious and hopped up on pain meds.

“Fucking unstrapped me you four eyed cunt.”  Tail snarled.  Aggression was her way of dealing with helplessness.

The woman ignored her language.  The young scruffy man, Josh, was in the back ground grabbing something out of a pill jar and trying to open a sealed bottle of water at the same time.  “Miss, we’re going to give you something to stay calm.”  She was close to Tail’s face looking into her eyes.  “Do you have a headache?  Do either of your eyes feel funny?”  She pulled out an old fashioned pen-torch and shone a light in each of Tail’s eyes as if looking for something.  Josh appeared by her side with a pill in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.  The brunette reached over Tail’s eyes and released the strap holding her head back.  “Ok, lean forward and take the pill.”  The daze Tail felt in her head was subsiding and was replaced with anger.  She saw the pervert Josh hold out a little purple pill – a soma.  Tail’s eyes narrowed and the light in the room became tolerable.  She acted docile and opened her mouth.  As the fingers came with reach her eyes took in the pervert Josh.  He had a greasy film on his brow and his clothes smelled of a chemical laundry.  She knew she was somewhere in Cyanide Corps headquarters on Ghetto.

When the pill was just in front of her open mouth she darted her head forward and snapped her teeth on Josh’s finger and thumb.  She bit down hard – as hard as she could.  Josh screamed and dropped the bottle of water.  The brunette lady startled back and started fumbling on the stainless steel table for something.  As Josh screamed Tail let her anger out and tightened her jaw.  She could feel the flesh shear to the bone and held lab tech securely in agony.  He flailed and submitted afraid to pull back less the flesh and muscle be stripped from his bone.  Tail felt warm liquid pool in her mouth.  It ran down her chin and dripped onto her breasts.  Her anger subsided and she opened her mouth.

Josh fell backward and the Brunette still fumbling for the needles injector with sedative, any belief of a cool head under fire was stripped away from her.  Josh had far more serious injuries.  Blood flowed freely from his mangled fingers and Tail took a good look around, the outburst knocking the sedatives out of her head.  She spat the purple soma out with a spray of Josh’s blood and watched it bounce and roll across the lab floor.  The brown haired lab tech finally found the injector and turned to face Tail with held up as if she were a cop with a pistol about to shout ‘freeze’.  Though still restrained Tail had succeed in making the lab techs confinement in the room with her perilous.

“I want to talk to Hemmingway”, Tail snarled.  The brown haired woman gave a look of surprise and rightfully so.  Hemmingway was not his real name.  It was just what Tail called him.

The door to the lab slid open and a familiar figure in a pressed suit stepped in.  From a hidden camera or one way transparent wall he had seen the whole thing.  Hemmingway had an extra skip in his step since he’d made the big time.  His eyes were annoyed.  He stared directly at Tail, pinned to the upright lab table and completely naked.  He took no interest in her body, or the lab tech’s; one injured; the other terrified.  He stepped past Josh crumpled on the floor as he knelt clutching his fingers to stem the bleeding.  “Pleasant trip?”  He asked coldly.

“Fuck you” Tail spat back.  There last encounter had played out cordially.  Obscenities had been kept to a whisper, but Tail remembered wailing into him outside the Restaurant.  She’d spent the last two years dreaming she’d kept going.  She wanted to hear his skull crack against her knuckles – feel it cave inward as she kicked him with her boots.

Hemmingway walked over to the brunette lab tech and gently took the injector from her shacking hands.  “Hard life” he said explaining away the viscous assault Tail had just perpetrated and started walking towards her.  Tail crept her head forward as far as she could bearing her teeth.  They were stained pink from Josh’s blood.  “Relax Tail.  I mean it.  When this is over, I’ll get you out.”  He held the injector against her bare, flat belly.

“I fucking hate…”  As Tail spat the words Hemmingway pulled the trigger.  The sting in Tail’s belly was followed by a wave of warmth and her tense jaw relaxed. “…you, you cunt.”  Her voice became deeper.  The muscles in her neck relaxed.  Hemmingway stepped back.

“You check her eyes?”  He said to the Brunette as Josh finally started to pick himself up off the floor.

“No signs of surgery.”  The brown haired lab tech replied in a stutter, though she was calming now that Tail was sedated again.

“Take Josh to the infirmary.  I’ll unstrap her.”  As Hemmingway’s words the brunette’s eyes widened.  “It’ll be Ok.  I know how to talk to her.”

***

Tail was still naked.  Hemmingway didn’t know Tail half as well as he claimed if he thought it was wise to keep her that way, but the sedative dulled her.  Despite the cotton mouth and inability to move at any speed other than cold lizard slow she stared at him intently with drunk, hate filled eyes.

“I’m sorry” he opened with.

“Fuck you.”  Tail slurred the words.

“We had to do some things before dinner tonight.”  He causally explained away Tail’s captivity in the room; being taken dragged back into a world with Corps and Centuri in it; offering her up as an alien meal.  Hemmingway reached for a mirror.  Tail sat on a stainless steel bench.  The bottle of water Josh had tried to make her swallow the pill with was half empty by her side.  He held up the mirror for her to see.  Four metal stud and a ring had been added to Tail’s features.  Her lower lip had two; two where either side of her nose.  Only the ring through her right nostril broke the symmetry.  “And also…”  Hemmingway tilted the mirror show Tail her pubic region.  It had been shaved smooth and given a dose of UV.  She’d been given the very salon tan job the Corp lackey had spoken of in her bar.  They were trying to make her look as healthy and tasty as possible.  “The rings are a Centuri thing.  Claimed females are pierced along their trunks.  It’s a sensitive part of their body.  Probably more so than the male peni.”

Tail didn’t blink.  She was fighting to pay attention.  It would be so like a Corp to give her the details while she was drugged and leave her to navigate a risky situation.

“It’s good that you came willingly.  If we’d had to take you by force then we couldn’t let you go after.”  Hemmingway put the mirror away and slowly started unbuttoning his suit jacket.  He pulled a small comm pad from his pocket.  “I want you to look at that wall.”  He pointed to a wall.  Tail was beyond co-operating.  She continued to stare at him with stoned contempt.  Hemmingway sighed and tapped the comm pad.  Despite her resolve Tail jumped.  A heads-up display like she had in her freighter appeared before her eyes.  Texted danced across the left hand side of her peripheral vision and Tail recognised it as a boot sequence.  Hemmingway knew he held all the cards.

“What the fuck did you do to my eye” she slurred.

“Implants – both eyes.  We want to be able to see what you’re seeing.  Also if we need to give you instructions we can pass them onto to you without vocal queues.”  Hemmingway types something on the data pad.  There was less than a second delay as the signal transferred and the firm wear translated.  Text appeared before Tails vision.  A simple message.  ‘Smile.’

Tails pupils closed in anger despite the sedative.  Hemmingway got the point not to push any further.

“We wired them into your nervous system.  We you receive high thresholds of nociceptive pain a modified meso-opiate will be released.  IT’s short lived and won’t screw with your cognitive functions, but you won’t suffer.”  Hemmingway was becoming serious now.  They are going to wonder why you’re not in pain so try to pull an anguished expression… or something.” 

Even through the sedative Tail’s mind ran a dialogue – slower than usual, but it still ran.  ‘I’m gonna kill you.  I don’t know how, but I’m going to kill you.’  It was Hemmingway’s casualness about the scenario.  The pain of being cooked last time wasn’t what haunted Tail.  IT was watching Steve dip his fork into her cooked flesh and casually take bits.  The Centuri had savoured her.  Despite the resolve the question of Cyanide coming back her nagged at her mind.

“Tail” Hemmingway followed up with.  “Payment.  One million credits, already transferred into your account.  No contract.  Post-tax.  That’s twice what you made in the time you were freighting for Kincaid.”  Hemmingway truly believed he was being generous.  By paying Tail a small fortune he was clearing his conscious of forcing her into having to witness a Centuri pig have an orgasm driven meal from her live, witnessing body.

“Then I’m out?”  Tail had dabbled with uppers and downers; stims and barbiturates.  Part of being streetwise meant you still needed to be able to read the situation even when high, because that was when most people came at you.  When you were dosed.

Hemmingway’s reaction was practised, but the practise made it part of the sales pitched and Tail remembered he was a good salesman.  “We just need you for the next forty-eight hours Tail.”

“Then you’ll lose my file?”  She couldn’t act all co-operative.  “You’ll get these fucking eyes out?”  She put venom in and let the sedative slurred her words.  She didn’t want to be a surveillance platform for Cyanide post job.  See didn’t want to wake to surprise instructions printed before her eyes ten years from now.

“…Sure” Hemmingway replied.  With an immediate confirmation Hemmingway would have been able to suppress a giveaway gesture.  He’d gambled for the delayed response and a false tone of reassurance. 

Tail recognised it, not as a corporate promise, but as a street hustler buying time.  ‘Sure babe, I’ll get your money’.  Tail had all she needed to know about the deal. 

Hemmingway took her silence as a chance to move on.  “We’re going back to the Spire, but not the restaurant.”  Hemmingway seemed almost proud.  “Steve wants to…” Hemmingway almost said it.  “Steve wants to enjoy your company at his residence.  I’ll be there.  To them, you are mine.”

Despite the sedative Tail couldn’t help but go rigid slightly.  She was dimly aware of Hemmingway picking up the sedative injector and holding it in case she tried to get up… And it would be try.  Despite being able to concentrate more than they knew Tail was acutely aware her muscles were retarded in relaxation like an overdose of diazepam.

“You’ll spend the night, but I’ll be back again in the even to finalize a deal with Steve.  After, I’ll take you back down and you’ll be out.  The heads-up display will translate any text and you’ll be able to read anything they say like subtitles.  You’ll know what’s coming.”

Tail continued to sit there staring intently at Hemmingway.  The mark of hatred was still on her glare.  Hemmingway didn’t seem to mind.  Maybe that was what Steve liked about her – maybe bitches tasted better.  Hemmingway dipped his head and checked his watch.  It wasn’t uncommon for a man like him, one who read paper books and dressed up prostitutes, to still wear a watch.  He’d clearly risen up the ranks since Tail had made the deal to have dinner with him in exchange for a place to sleep on Ghetto.  Hemmingway was letting it be known he was taking his leave.

“A couple of people are going to come in and get you ready for tonight.  They’re just doing their job and you might not want to treat them the way you treated Josh.”  He reached forward with the injector.  Instead of the power play of injecting it into her belly this time he placed it against her shoulder.  There was a slight prick and the warmth came over her body again like a wave.  “Co-operate with them Tail.  No one, who doesn’t work for Cyanide, knows you’re here.  Try to show a little respect.  We’re about to become the biggest of the big three” He walked towards the door and touched his finger to a panel.  As the door slid open two people walked in carrying clothes and a silver case.  They were the barbers and tailors of Ghetto.  The ones who did the best they could with blunt razors and worn through clothes.  Today they were the guys in the kitchen, putting the finishing garnishes on an alien meal.

***

“That sedative had a half-life of fifteen minutes.  I know you’re putting on an act.”  Hemmingway stood by Tails side in the lift.  Hemmingway wore a tuxedo with a black bowtie.  The suit was pressed and had been cleaned in house.  The chlorine smell of a chemical laundry was absent.  The Centuri had sensitive noses and would easier take offence at the smell.  Hemmingway had stepped up his game with the aliens, so to had Cyanide.  Despite knowing she was on Ghetto she had yet to see the rust, coolant leaks, and tin of the hive level 191 the humans lived on.  Cyanide it now seemed had an elevator that travelled directly to the ground floor of the Spire.

Tail hadn’t so much been called out on acting stoned, but rather realised there was no advantage in acting docile if Hemmingway knew she wasn’t.  She stopped wobbling on the spot, stood up straight and prepared her eyes to look forward so she wouldn’t have to make eye contact with any of the vulgar aliens.  The silence in the elevator spoke volumes.  Assaulting the Corp lackey in Bora Bora; nearly biting off Josh’s fingers, all this Tail could get away with.  What the Corp wanted from her involved her having dinner with Steve.  As long as she did that, she knew anything else she did was an acceptable irritation.  The lift slowed and came to a stop.

Despite having the status of their own lift to the Spire Tail soon realised Cyanide only was only pretending to have it in big with Centuri.  The lift opened onto the alien equivalent of a service corridor.  Planar white walls lead down a corridor.  Ahead of them a Drill with a data pad was entering a door.  The scene looked very much like a mall worker entering a staff restroom on their break.  Tail’s lip curled and she was about to take a notch off Hemmingway’s façade when he cut her off.  “Save it.  It’s more than the others have.”  He grabbed Tails wrist aggressively, probably worked up at the embarrassment and yanked on her to follow him out of the lift.  Tail went along with it, not giving a repeat performance of the last time she went to the Spire with Hemmingway. 

She did offer him a piece of her mind though.  “He’s going to be eating me, but you’re still sucking his cocks.”

Hemmingway acted as if he hadn’t lost composure.  “Not when we’re out in the open.”  He said as he led her down the maze of halls.  The smell of ammonia as the past the door the Drill worker had gone in confirmed it was in fact the Drill’s toilet.

Tail allowed herself and angry laugh.  “You’re not coming back for me.”  She knew the Centuri smacked down his ego.

“I will.”  Hemmingway seemed to need to hold onto the belief that he was a decent guy.  Maybe he was.  Tail, as he knew too well, was scum; a slaver – or at the very least the former Captain of a slave ship.

“Ass-wipe.  He’s going to offer you something for me if he likes me enough for you to fly me out past Neptune.”  Tail was no longer being dragged behind.  Her footfalls became that on a gladiator marching in to face its opponent.  She wasn’t really about to strike out at Hemmingway.  Not with her only way back a lift that led to the heart of Cyanide Corps headquarters.

“It doesn’t matter what you think.”  Hemmingway acted confident, but was wary of Tail now keeping pace by his side.  ‘A desperate person…’  “This is happening.  You know your only chance out is to play along.”  They exit the corridor into the open space of glinting allow and ceramic tiles that was Centuri Architecture.  Tail took a look back.  The humans, even the welcomed business partners, came from a service corridor where the Drill workers took a shit.  All the success Hemmingway had bought the Cyanide Corps and we were still the dregs of the Universe.  Nothing had changed in two years.

The strapless black dress that showed of her intricate tattoo and delicious tanned skin.  The immediate reaction to the work the barber and tailor had done would have turned heads on earth.  Men, if even as a cursory glance, would have noted her beauty.  It was a direct contrast to the image Tail tried to project herself, she wanted men to back the fuck off on earth.  Here it gave her an edge of appeal dressed up to the few business men heading to meetings with the Centuri.  To the Centuri instead of heads turning their nose immediately picked up her scent – delicious and arousing to them.  As their short snouts followed the particles of her pheromones their heads turned slowly.  They had a carnivorous curiosity to them – was she available for tricks like the whores on level 191.

“Might be a market for you to go into.”  Tail uttered in a disgusted tone.  “Take-Away bitches – free delivery.”  She’d been here before.  The Centuri equivalent border control to stop unsavoriness from entering the Spire.  Hemmingway still had a firm grasp on her wrist as if he wasn’t going to let her get away now.  It also told Tail he was more desperate than he let on, just like last time.

“The Centuri are like us.  They generally reserve their xenophilia for socially accepted settings.”  Hemming reached for his invitation to Steve’s with his free hand and continued to walk towards the Centuri at the security gate.  Several Drill wobbled around him scanning items, checking ID’s – generally all the work so the Centuri was just there as a figurehead.

“Like level 191?”  Tail said in reference to the Centuri coming down to sniff the working girls after a night of filth with the pilots and marines.

“Level 191 is a back alley of Sunshine Boulevard.  The classy ones never go there.  You should be proud – Steve’s upmarket.”

“Well fuck me”, Tail said sarcastically.  “You saying I’m a Five-thousand credit escort Hemmingway.”  It was a strange back and forth.  Tail was on edge because of what was about to happen.  If she broke away from Hemmingway here she would be a stray with no idea where she would end up.  Hemmingway was equally nervous.  If the implants in Tail’s eyes showed up on the scan he too was a corporate spy in Centuri territory.

“Baby”, he said out of character.  “You are Grade A USDA approved.  Nothing more to them.”  They had reached the checkpoint.  Hemmingway held out the invitation.  As the Centuri glanced at, then passed it onto a Drill for the real check.  Another Drill waved his short three fingered hand for Tail to move through the scanner.  Hemmingway let go of her wrist and she slowly stepped through.  Every human looked nervous so Tail didn’t seem out of sought to the Aliens.  They couldn’t have picked up on the tells anyway – wouldn’t have cared that Tail was under duress if they could.

Hemmingway followed through and they head straight to the elevator.  A Drill attendant stood inside and looked them up and down as they walked in.  Again Hemmingway showed his invitation and the Drill had to go up on the tip of his tiny feet to hit on of the highest buttons.  Tail felt no sympathy for the Drill and his servitude.  The Drill were completely incapable of any form of intimidation.  Perhaps that is why the Centuri had uplifted them and imbedded them into their society.  The Drill could never effectively revolt.  They were the perfect hoplites to their masters.

The elevator moved at velocity, but the Spire appeared taller than it was.  After only a short pause, not long enough to build up the appropriate level of nerves and low voltage inertial dampers dialled down and the smooth ride to Steve’s level was over.  The doors opened silently and Hemmingway against grabbed Tail’s wrist and pulled her out into a short walkway.  The hall had only two doors coming off it, one at each end.  Steve either lived in a penthouse, or so far up the cone shaped Spire that only two apartments could fit.  ‘He’s either rich or powerful’ Tail thought.  ‘Or both.’  Hemmingway lead her down the hall to the left to a frosted door made of a material that resembled glass.  He pressed a panel to the side.  After a short pause the frosted glass cleared, but no one was at the other side.  There was movement down low and Tail’s eyes dropped to a small brown figure.  Hemmingway bent over and showed the invitation.  Tail didn’t get a good look at the figure, but it was about the size of a Drill so she expected a butler of sought to open the door.

As the panel slide sideways a pigmy Centuri with brass like studs along her tiny trunk stood and chirped something in her native language.  Suddenly the boot sequence from her ocular implant ran as if triggered by the language.  Two, maybe three seconds of text and a as near to English translation appeared “Enter.  Expected, you” in digital text was artificially projected for an instant and then vanished.  Hemmingway entered - Tail pulled in aversely, momentarily distracted by the realisation that the pigmy Centuri was most likely the female of the species.  Her conclusion was derived by Hemmingway’s explanation of her new piercings.  It denoted being owned to the Centuri.  The chauvinism of the aliens suddenly made sense.  The females were so small, so fragile in comparison to the males that they probably lived off the scraps the males discarded.

‘Fucking ass-licker, cunt biscuit. I’m going to kill him!’  The door opened into an asymmetrical room.  The walls perpendicular to the entrance could best be described as Feudal Japanese Architecture, but with silver Chrome and polished ceramic tiles instead of wood and rice paper.  The joints in the tiles were seamless, only the way they reflected the bright lighting gave any indication of discontinuity.  The walls of whatever the Centuri called the ‘living room’ extended outward to a curved observation glass that was to exterior of the Spire.  Pluto and Charon could be seen as two giant spheres and one of the two lesser moons was visible setting behind Charon.  The sense that they were but a glass widths from space was not what made Tail flush angry enough to forget the dire predicament of rebellion.  It was that Steve, the giant ant-eater Centuri who had fed of her two years ago was not alone.  Two other Male Centuri turned and surveyed her as she walked into the Lion’s den.  She wasn’t dinner this time.  This time she was a banquet.  All three male Centuri’s pair of peni started to grow stiff as they caught her scent.  Tail’s anger made her smell even more delectable.

“Gentlemen, how are you?  Hemmingway said stepping forward.

Steve bounded forward on a direct course for Tail.  She stood her ground, but did not disguise the venom in her eyes.  As Steve past Hemmingway he gave him a shove and almost sent him toppling backward.  He towered of Tail breathing deeply through his nose, his twin peni erect.  Already the yellow seminal fluid flowed from then at a constant trickle.  He sniffed at her neckline making soft grunts tainted with hedonism.  The tip of his trunk was moist like a dogs.  With his meaty hand he grabbed at her blond hair pulling her neck back.  Tail’s gut reaction at the assault by human standards was to grab one of the long peni and bend it till the muscle made a snapping sound.  She grit her teeth as his snout touched her skin – traced a line along the low cut dress.  Once he’d identified her by smell he peered with his beady little eyes at her tattoo necklace.  He was checking she was the genuine article.  The strange thought that her face was indistinguishable to him came over her.  The tattoo was how he knew her.  He grunted loudly and chirped and whistled in a deep tone.  Again the start-up text flashed through Tail’s ocular implant and the translation appeared.  “Her good meat.  Much much good.”

The other two Centuri made the base filled giggling sound.  Steve released her hair and stepped back.  In a compromise as he walked back he slapped Hemmingway on the back.  Tail was immediately forgotten and grateful for that for a moment.  The tiny female came forward and pulled on the high hem of the black dress.  Tail looked down at her perplexed.  Her tiny chubby fingers had trouble grasping the smooth fabric but it became obvious she was trying to pull Tail somewhere.  Anxiety and apprehension tensed every muscle in Tail’s body as she realised she was to be guide to the Centuri equivalent of a kitchen.  The situation made her angry and the anger made her shake.  To someone who didn’t know Tail it would appear she was afraid.  It didn’t matter that she wasn’t, it was the same psychosomatic reaction.

There were seven tiny female Centuri in ‘kitchen’.  Not all of them belonged to Steve.  It was not like the restaurant.  One of the two longer walls was lined with perplex cages in which a variety of species of rodent like creatures ran back and forth.  The staple of the alien diet.  ‘At least we’re not one of the five fucking food groups yet’, Tail thought.  The prep table was only a couple feet of the floor so the tiny females could work on it.  The one who had guided her in by pulling on her dress started tugging on it more aggressively.  Tail realised she wanted her to take it off.  Out of sight of Hemmingway and the male Centuri Tail was less contained.  She reeled back her leg and gave the female a healthy kick in her… ribs she guessed.  The female yelped and tumbled backwards.  The six other females beady little eyes jumped.  “You little fuckers”, Tail said reaching around behind for the dress zipper, “are only still alive because I very much want to settle a score with some other cunt’s.”  The dress dropped to the floor revealing Tail’s naked body to the alien housewives.  Chirps and giggle like sounds, higher pitched than the males made chorused and Tail’s eye flashed through translations of the one word exclamations and short derogative remarks.  Tail needn’t have read the translations, but as the alien’s conversation continued the remarks started to turn ominous. 

Before the females set to work the final translation to appear on the head up display ominously remained without need to refresh.  ‘Let’s cook her underside extra tender.  The masters won’t think to turn her over.  Tail was jolted back to the reality of the situation.  The male Centuri would feast on her and talk business.  The females would pick at what was left of her.  They were subversive little submissives.

The Centuri female she had kicked pointed to the long lower table and Tail understood she was to lie on it.  She didn’t seem offended at the abuse.  With heavy ‘I could tear you apart’ movements Tail stepped onto the table; sat; lay down.  A familiar device was placed on her neck.  The simple ceramic plate adhere to her skin and Tail remember all too well soon she would be helpless to the situation.  She took a deep breath and the Centuri female tapped a button.  Tail’s feet flopped at ease and her hands dropped flat.  She blinked and tried to wriggle her toes.  Once more she was paralysed by the device on a Centuri cooking table.  She looked across with her eyes to see one carrying a device similar to the one she had seen in the restaurant kitchen.  ‘You fucking cunts better not be lying about the pain blockers in these implants’.

***

It was like reading the subtitles from a really bad Christmas special.  The females chattered about alien literature and the behaviour of their mates.  They victimised individuals of the group and it became obvious there was a pecking order.  Cyanide had been true to their word, Tail had felt a string as the ‘auto-human-cooking-thingy’, or whatever the aliens called it was placed over her body.  The females had obviously never cooked a human before because they didn’t seem surprised that Tail was not wailing in agony as the top inch of her muscle was microwaved and tenderized by the device.  Again, and totally lacking in originally one of the females tried to place a fruit in Tail’s mouth.  She bit into it and spat back at the female.  With what seemed a total lack of pride she fetched another and this time was faster on the paralytic device on Tail’s neck, fixing the garnish in place.  Tail was left staring at a shelf against one of the walls.  As the females cooked her marinated body, just right, she stared at a spherical container her head up display flashed a border around the alien text scanning it.  Tail had nothing else to do but read it whilst on of the alien commented she her cooked flesh smelt a little like… She guessed there wasn’t a translation for it.

A molecular formula flashed up.  Tail knew something of chemistry.  Enough to know what was a good high and what was a bad high.  Then text below the formula appeared. ‘Dextrose: D-Glucose.  Toxic highly’.  Tail contemplated the display.  Even for humans it was stupid to keep poisons in the kitchen.  One of the rodent creatures ran up and drank from a feeding tube.  They fed it to what they ate.  The ‘D’ before the molecules name denoted a chain of the molecule went off to the left instead of the right.  The distinction between organic and chemically produced.  Humans could metabolise both, and Tail guessed the rodent like animals could too, maybe the Centuri couldn’t.  That was why they ate live food, synthesized molecules were poison to them.

Tail felt a warmth spread over her left calf.  The warmth spread and grew to a sting, then a burning sensation.  Though she couldn’t move her head to see Tail realised the amount of meso-opiate in her implant was finite.  ‘Jesus, fucking, Christ’ She realised.  ‘The pain blockers had been exhausted.  Cyanide didn’t know Steve was going to invite friends for dinner.  Already her body had required too much of the pain blocker.  Her breathing became rapid as she fought back the urge to scream.  Now sooner had the sensation started than it subsided?  Tail had experienced the final pass of the cooking device.  The Centuri concubines had finished their cooking.  Tail calmed.  ‘Ok bitch”, she said to herself.  ‘Just shut you fucking eyes when they’re eating you.  Shut them until they put you back together.’  Tail squinted her eyes closed.  After a few minor adjustments to her resting position the females seemed happy and gathered together to pull the table out to the Centuri discussing business so they could eat.

Tail was blind to her movements, but not to the sounds.  The high-pitched chirps of the females was replaced with the deep giggles and barks of the males.  It seemed as if they didn’t regard Hemmingway high enough to speak English.  Tail was aware she was moving and then when she was in the centre of the male voices she was aware she was stationary. 

She tried to think of Bora Bora, her bar, the one Kuhtoot and Rhonda were working till she got back.

She heard Steve bark an order.  One of the females squawked and Tail felt an alien’s skin on her eye lids.  She squeezed her eyes harder, but the stubby fingers forced them open.  A couple of beeps from the paralytic device on her neck told she had been frozen again.  As the fingertip pulled away from her eyes she realised they were glued open.  Steve wanted her to watch them eating her.  His beady little black eyes seemed to be smiling at her.  Frantically Tail darted her eyes around.  The conversation amongst the males continued freely in Centuri.  The conversation ran across the head up display only she could see.

“Most succulent flesh ever I… (Emphasis boasting).”

“… as good as smell they? (Emphasis disbelieving).”

“Better, much. (Emphasis proud)”

“The belly, try.  Best part. (Emphasis Sincere)”

The alien body language was that of unmistakable excitement.  Steve was sharing a real treat with the two other male Centuri… and Hemmingway… Hemmingway sat beside Steve intentionally not making eye contact with Tail.

Nothing more was said.  The three aliens all held up their trident like forks and together pierced Tail’s skin.  They twisted the forks, curling them to detach portions of her butter like flesh.  Ceremonial all three collected their bite size portions and brought it to the circular mouths.  Moans and sighs of delight, in any language, escaped their pursed lips as they savoured her unique flavour. 

Steve broke the reflection of the aliens.  In a series of chirps and giggles he digressed to his two counterparts.  He spoke thinking only they could understand him, but Tail saw every last word in digital text scroll before her eyes.

“You can slice of the flesh – sear it, but nothing tastes as good as a living human female.  Watch the eyes as the euphoria sets in.  Her terror makes her all the more delicious.  This one is the finest bouquet I have tasted.”

Another of the Centuri interjected.  He was wavering slightly, Tail’s biology getting him high.  “But they have such simple biology.  How does a flavour so rich come from something so primitive?”  Tail was beyond noticing, but as the Centuri rode the high of her biology there language became more understandable to translation.

Steve was drunk.  One bight each and they were all tipsy.  Hemmingway was just sitting back waiting for them to become stupid.  “It’s the variety of their diet and the environments they move through.  That is why we will never be able clone them for production and why you cannot eat the young.  They take in particulates of what is around them.  Clones have staple diets and accelerated growth.”  Steve finished his auditory ejaculation and leant forward.  He ran his fingers over Tail’s tattoo.  Again he was fascinated by the pattern.  He dipped his fork in and sampled another piece.

Tail’s eyes began to water as she could not blink.  Her eyes darted between the three aliens around the table, all delighting in Tail’s intoxicating nourishment.  Still Hemmingway looked away or watched the three aliens.  He almost seemed unwelcome at the table.  It was obvious Steve wanted no business with him.  He was only there to deliver Tail.

And as if at that realisation, Tail saw him stand.  “Well Steve.  You, Justin and Gab seem to be enjoying yourselves.”  Only Steve looked up with dazed eyes as Hemmingway took a step away from human sacrifice.  “I’ve got to be going.  Why don’t you keep her overnight and I’ll pick her up tomorrow.”

“One of the aliens to Tail’s left abandoned his fork.  He picked up Tail’s forearm and brought it directly to his mouth.  The intimacy of Steve’s apartment not calling for the manners of the restaurant.  Tail tried to cry out in protest.  This didn’t make any sense.  Where was the deal?  Where was the purpose behind her being offered up?

Steve nodded dumbly at Hemmingway’s words.

“I’ll pick her up tomorrow evening.  That should give you a chance to have some breakfast and lunch.”  As Hemmingway casually passed off Tail’s consumption she realised that the meso-opiates in her implants had been depleted.  It was no longer a matter of merely having to endure the horror of being eaten, but she would feel the cooking again.  Tail tried to cry out through the alien produce locked into her mouth.  All three aliens giggled at Tail’s distress.  It seemed it was overdue.

***

What they lacked in size they made up in appetite.  The male Centuri had eaten their fill of Tail’s surface flesh, but the females… The females ate as if they didn’t know when they would get their next meal.  Tail was faint from hyperventilating.  ‘How many humans did these fucker dissect to know just how much they could consume without killing us?’ she thought.  The females ate in silence and it was a relief not to read detailed descriptions of how good she tasted.  One female, the one with the brass piercings abstained from eating.  After the entire front portion of Tail’s body had been stripped of skin and surface muscle she called out.  The Tec display on Tail’s ocular implant read “Enough.”  She was the matriarch of the subversive and servantile sex.  The drunk females stumbled away from the table, one taking one last chuck of her thigh, and parade out the room.  Tail couldn’t have comprehended, but three males were in the dining room luxuriating with erect alien peni that needed tending.

The final female came forward.  Tail’s breathing calmed when she saw she had abstained from eating so she was sober to regenerate Tail’s consumed flesh.  Eyes with superiority twisted repressed by her status as female regarded Tail with contempt.  She fetched a blade and found a portion of Tails anterior region.  She sliced a steak from Tail’s body.  She wasn’t going to miss out on a meal.

The process of regeneration took much longer than Tail was comfortable with.  The miracle gel, a slime of amino acids and proteins that could save every marine who fought under the Centuri banner, but was reserved for allowing second helpings of females, was applied in sections.  The same device used in the restaurant was placed over the ravaged regions.  This one was a different model.  It was translucent.  The beryllium gold allow wiring could be seen and three laser like beams of UV light intersected.  As it lay flat, just above her lower left leg, the stylus made of light  dated back and forth like at three-D printer and the cook and consumed flesh was laid out afresh.  It was less horrifying than being eaten, but still darkly surreal.  She had been dissected and was being put back together a layer of tissue at a time. Section by section Tail was being rebuilt… for breakfast.  To her side the Matriarchal female started consuming her fillet of earth woman and chirped delighted at the flavour.  Her reward for restraint.

The injury of consumption was purely visual trauma, what ached were her eyes.  Since being served, to being fully regenerated, Tail had laid with her eyes open for four hours.  When finally the Centuri female removed the tissue printer from Tail’s body and released the ceramic paralyser from her neck Tail chose to collapse onto the kitchen table.  Before she could revolt or recoil she felt something being placed around her neck.  She should have protested – resisted.  There was a beep and a new kind of restraint of unknown design was put on her.  She’d been collared like a dog.  She closed her eyes and tears finally lubricated her course eyes.  She panted and tried to steady her breathing.  The female who had healed her waddle out of the kitchen and Tail was left unpoliced in Steve’s home in the spire.  Tail realised she was like a pet cat.  She was to just wonder around and would be called upon when it was time to eat.  They gave her such little regard as to consider her a null threat.

When finally Tail rose the quest Centuri had gone along with the majority of the tiny females.  The crocodile like growls and despite high pitched squeaks from what Tail assumed was the bedroom told of the rumour of the Centuri marathon sex sections.  Tail was beyond sympathy for the females who had silently, and with utensil nibbled away at her flesh, but couldn’t help but understand that the two giant peni of the Centuri forcing their way into one of the tiny females meant the harem of claimed Centuri didn’t have happy nights.

She was exhausted and her heart rate was erratic.  She felt like she should investigate every ceramic panel that lined the now dim room for hidden wiring that could hotwire the door controls.  ‘Start with the basics’ she told herself.  She sat on the very couch Steve had sat on whilst her ate her.  She felt the collar around her neck.  It was lustrous like aluminium, but flexible.  Another alien allow the Centuri either didn’t share, or only leased out for earth Military.  With her finger nail she could feel a discontinuation in the band, a fine line were it connected.  She tried pulling on it to test for weakness.  As she flexed her neck to act as an anchor she pulled hard keeping her nail in the hairline join to feel for any give.  She thought she had some when a bolt of pain shot down her spine to her finger tips and toes like electricity searching for earth.  She cried out and crumpled onto the couch laying there panting.  It wasn’t that she thought she could escape, she just need to know she could get herself out if Hemmingway fucked her over any further.  As Tail caught her breath with her eyes closed laying on the couch she was aware of light through her closed eyes.

“Miss me?”  The text rolled along against the blackness a red dots fading after the shock.  Tail flushed angry.  Tail had read a Corp interrogation manifesto when she first signed with Kincaid and had access to their extranet.  Talk to the interrogated – establish repour… This was Hemmingway and his ‘repour.’ 

Tail spat a sequence of faint obscenities.  She knew it was one way communication and the last thing she wanted to do was make too much noise.  At the back of her mind she pictured an overt stoned Steve with no inhibitions becoming curious about inter species hanky panky.

“Get up.  Go to Steve’s console.”  The jaunt before the crux confirmed it was Hemmingway sending through the message.  Tail didn’t move.  Her fortitude was down and it seemed very reasonable that it should be.  There was a break in Hemmingway wiring her instructions, but his patience finally wavered.  “There was no deal with Steve, Tail”, the text was only up briefly.  “The deal is with you.”  Again the text quickly disappeared.  “Get up and go to his console.  I won’t collect you to you do.”

Tail wanted bite at Hemmingway.  She wanted to gnaw at his face and viscerally scar him...  Her entire personality was built around avoiding people and Corps placing her in positions where she had to do as they commanded.  She opened her eyes and sat up.

The noise was still coming from Steve sleeping quarters.  The pitch of the female’s distress had shifted telling of another recipient of the everlasting boner her scent and biology had given him.  She was an overdose of Viagra to a nymphomaniac.  She looked around the dim room.

“To your left”, the text prompted.  Tail turned and saw an asymmetrical curved platform like a sculpture.  Yellow and orange light was faintly glowing from its surface.  As she started walking towards it the sentence “Good girl” appeared.

“Fuck you.”  Tail vocalized softly and by coincident the female Centuri being torn into wailed at a particular high pitch.

Tail moved around to the console and stood over it.  The screen was tiny.  What was stranger was a thin piece of cloth like papyrus with Centuri text scribbled on it.  As Tail glanced at it the heads-up display highlighted the text and the translation rand across her eyes.  “Illustrious father so noble…”  Tail ignored the rest, but knew what it meant.  The Centuri still wrote on tangible surfaces for intimate letters.  A Chrome and bulbous shaft was to its side and Tail deduced they burnt the manuscript into the substrate.  Totally useless trivia… except.  She picked up the ‘pen’ and awkwardly, because of its size, wrote, “Opiate depleted.”  There was a pause.

“Touch the console.” 

Hemmingway was a cunt.  Tail shook the manuscript as a means of conveying urgency.

Again, “Touch the console.”

Tail closed her eyes signalling she wouldn’t co-operate.  She had what Hemmingway wanted right in front of him.  She knew despite being cool in negotiations he was always hungry for the deal to go through. 

There was another pause and then, “Later.  Touch the console.”  Tail’s exhausted face was furious.  She slapped her palm on the console.

An intricate hologram of a three dimensional interface projected upward.  Instantaneously the ocular implant highlighted the countless alien glyphs, translations steaming across her readout.  It had a disorientating effect Tails started to feel dizzy on top of the trauma.

“That one” the bolder text of Hemmingway read.  The green light of the readout turned read around a particular glyph.  The readout below it as translation read “Cyanide”.

“Cunt biscuit.”  Tail said under her breath.  This was all about corporate espionage all along, but she was more interested in getting back to the topic of getting out before breakfast.  She reached forward and the static from her finger mingled with the holographic glyph.

Flickers of streams of data cascaded, scrolling down from the holographic interface.  Tail felt a blunt spreading pain at the back of her eyes.  It seemed they were heating up.  She shut her eyes.

“Open your eye!”  Came the command from Hemmingway.

Tail tried.  For some reason she tried to give Hemmingway what he wanted, but she could stand the pain.  The cycle finished.  The display reset.

“Ok.”  She could almost hear the reasoning behind the text.  This fuck-whit had traumatised his personality unto her psyche.  “It’s too much bandwidth to not get flagged as it travels out of the spire, so we can’t get it remotely.  The processors in your eyes need to record the data.”  Tail caught her breath and looked at the interface again.  “This is how you know I’m getting you out.”  It was a sickly reassurance.  “We need to manually download from your implants.”  He gave Tail a few seconds.

Tail opened her eyes.  The same streaming of the interfaces start-up screen commenced.  “Ok” Hemmingway texted.  “Touch it again.  This time keep your eyes open.”  Tail complied, panting and gritting her teeth as the tech that Steve had banked up to trickle feed Cyanide poured into the memory of her implants.  Cyanide was accelerating their position – making Steve bring fresh tech to the table to get earth’s resources.  Cyanide would be the biggest of the big three.  The whole process only took two minutes, but seemed like longer.  “Good girl” flashed before her eyes when she was finished.  Tail hated being called a girl – it was derogative. 

From the sleeping chamber that Steve had retreated to ravage his female property Tail still heard alien grunts and cries.  They had retired for the evening – the sex would go on for hours.  Now more than ever Tail wanted to collapse, but there was one more pressing matter to attend to.  One survival dictated.  Again she held parchment with the message of having no opiates.  She held it waiting for a response.  Finally one came.

“Can’t come early.  Will look suspicious.  Just get through breakfast.”  Tail slowly scrunched the parchment up into a tiny ball and through it to an obscure corner of the room.  Her head burned against the trauma and adrenaline told her she was escalated beyond the point of reason to the point of searching for a weapon to use on Hemmingway.

The weapon was an idea.  She had something Cyanide wanted very badly, the data stored in her eyes.  Hemmingway was no longer necessary.

***

The Centuri woke like children on a school day.  They stumbled out of bed rubbing their tiny black eyes.  Steve bumped and knocked his three little females around with null regard.  The females seemed to be waddling extra wide.  Steve’s epic, and highly audible, performance last night on Tail’s biology had given them all an internal chafe.  She wondered if they harboured resentment to her for her passive part in Steve’s induced arousal, or the delight of eating her outweighed their discomfort.

All this Tail saw from the corner of her right ocular implant.  Steve had abandoned communication.  Tail felt sure someone from Cyanide was watching, but the grand cunt himself had retired to his deluxe apartment and his shower with water rations and, as comfortable as they got on Ghetto, bed.  Tail had spent a couple of hours familiarising herself with Steve’s console.  She was not mining for data to download but used the translate facility to load up Steve’s calendar.  The firmware of the console was like that of mobile phones companies of the early twenty-first millennium.  Everything was integrated.  It was inescapable on earth.  The devices your parents handed down to you dictated which of the big three you subscribed to and like a football team fan you were in for life.  Each upgrade, new device, linked in with the old in a seamless stream – the Corps capturing your whole life on a data stream, mined for patterns and weakness to exploit and capitalise on.  It seemed the Centuri civilization followed the same path, except long ago one group had risen and taken over everything.  With only one common firmware, Tail had tapped into the Centuri equivalent of a camera on the console unit.  She watched them from the kitchen.  The matriarchal female picked up a small tablet and pressed a button.

Tail felt a mild jolt of electricity shoot down her spin.  From her vantage on the kitchen table, that was rolled out to be dined off her, she spasmed, but was grateful she had the rubber handle of an alien utensil in her mouth to bite down on.  She now knew where her leash was at least.  She blinked twice, the camera display disappeared from view.  All that she need to know for timing was when the Centuri would rise.  She didn’t trust Steve’s calendar after a night of taking in a large dose of human biology.  She looked up at the spherical jar of Dextrose.  She didn’t care if it killed Steve or just made him sick, but she needed the onset to be delayed.  The old fashioned syringe she had found was hidden behind one of the alien rodent’s cages.  She’d injected about three point five fluid ounces into her thigh.  The sting a welling of the non-poisonous fluid to sapiens didn’t make her angry, what did was the fact the Centuri used a base ten measuring system like Europe.  At the point of Hemmingway going silent last night she had become so angry she could only escalate the situation and now that anger helped her. 

As another jolt coursed from the band on her neck, the Matriarch summoning her for their morning feed Tail gave a tell, gutheral yell from the kitchen.  She picked up the alien device, the one that had been used to tenderise and cook her flesh twice.  The Matriarch followed the Tails earlier vocalisation.  As she walked into the alien kitchen she startled at the sight of Tail placing it over her calf and pulling the trigger. 

It must have appeared to the female Centuri as a pig greasing itself and rolling onto the grill to be barbequed.

Tail’s body racked with pain, the opiate dose from her eyes depleted by Steve’s unexpected guests.  Her arms wavered and she almost dropped the device and collapsed.  Anger drove her to trace the device over her flesh that had been consumed only last night.  The nerves in her regenerate body were fresh, but Tail had to remain an active participant in her cooking.  If the paralytic plate was placed on her neck again and she were made helpless, the rest of her plan would fail.  Tail panted and screamed through teeth clenched on the utensil.

The Centuri female stepped back.  Tail made one pass, but realised she couldn’t do it.  She couldn’t draw the cooking device over her naked leg again.  Much to her surprise the suppressed female cried out almost musical and ran forward.  Her tiny hands caught the device as Tail was about to drop it from the pain.  The female with the brass piercing seemed to chirp a song.  Tail’s implants flashed a translation.  “Good meat. Good meat (Emphasis comfort).”  The female was encouraging Tail’s efforts at self-harm.  In the Centuri’s eyes this was the correct behaviour for Tail.  Tail felt sick from the pain and sheer hatred for every last Centuri, but it worked.  The Matriarch female with the brass piercing took over the task of cooking Tail’s upper leg, without applying the paralytic plate.  With each pass of the device, and as Tail’s leg turned to the consistency of butter, the pain became less as Tail’s flesh cooked and the nerves died.  She was aware of the female handling a silver fork, the one seemingly designed for dining on humans, and Tail limped out into the main room where Steve was at his console, seemingly puzzled at the something being out of order.

Tail’s smell was an immediate distraction.  She moved towards him in a mix between a limp and a hop, her head clouded with the trauma of being cooked.  Steve’s twin flaccid peni grew erect and Tail’s unwashed scent.  She continued forward as Steve made a puckering motion with his circular mouth flashing his teeth.  He was hungry.  He’d worked up an appetite last night.

Tail sat on his lap placing one arm around his giant neck.  With the other she pulled up her useless and poisoned other leg.  She handed him the fork, which he took gently, and waited for him to sample her flesh and her narcotic affect to kick in.  If she’d been trying to seduce him, she would have succeed.  Steve made a long chirping sound of a higher than usual pitch.  Her ocular implant merely displayed (Emphasis Happy).  He looked at Tail, willing serving herself up to him and seemed satisfied, as though this was what he expected from humans.  Tail played along with the scene and leant into him, touching her brow to his trunk, partly to show false submission and partly so she didn’t have to see Steve raise the fork and did it into her tender thigh.

“You can’t trust him Steve”, she whispered softly.  Steve was going back for his second bite when she broke the xenophile intimacy.  Steve was already taken in by her biology – her hormones, endorphins and amino acids binding to receptors in his alien physiology.  He huffed distracted, but Tail’s approach was such he didn’t object to Tail, a walking smorgasbord and meth lab, addressing him.  “He made me go onto your console.”  Tail stroked Steve’s trunk.  She remembered it was as sensitive as the peni, if not more.  The high pitch chirp came again and his peni dripped the yellowy seed in a steady stream.  “He’s playing you for a fool.”  Steve grunted and almost stood up.  Tail quickly realised he was like a drunk deciding whether to finish his beer or start a fight.  He took the junky trail and Tail realised the path of self-abuse was perhaps universal.  He feed on her, but faster.  He wanted to eat Tail quickly so as to investigate what files Hemmingway had gone through.  As he rapidly shovelled in chunks of Tail she knew he was consuming unmetabolised Dextrose.  Whether it would actually harm Steve, and to what extent she was guessing.  Her entire plan was based on chance, but she was angry enough to take it.  She leant back on Steve’s chair and closed her eyes as he finished his breakfast.

***

Appearing unsuspiciously early for Hemmingway meant coming about two hours past Steve had feast on Tail’s succulent right thigh.  When the chime of the door came the house of Steve, the Centuri, was in such chaos it sounded another two time before one of the lesser females ran to see who it was.  Tail sat on the sofa with her eyes closed.  She didn’t want the implants giving away the surprise.  By chance the symptoms of the poisonous Dextrose hadn’t hit Steve until the Matriarchal female had regenerated her leg.  When the female made the entrance door transparent to see the caller saw Hemmingway she made it opaque again and ran back to aid her Master, who was lying on his side, Tail’s regurgitated flesh oozing from him mouth as he choked and moaned in agony.  Tail took the initiative to open the door.  The ocular implant in her eye read the symbols and she tapped the one to open the door.  The females, scurrying about their sick, or dying, owner didn’t give her a second thought as she moved about the apartment – she was just meat after all.  Can a sheep kill a shepherd?  As the door slid open she greeted Hemmingway with eyes as cold as the vacuum of space.

“What the ..?” Hemmingway opened with.  Tail did a visual check of Hemmingway as he peered over at the gravely ill Steve and the females wobbling around him.  Her clothes had vanished upon striping in the kitchen.  Tail had a pretty good image of Hemmingway, but now she checked to see if the suit pants and jacket would suitably cover her.

“Problem”, she lied and took a hasty step into the apartment.

“What kind of fucking problem.  What have you done…?”  She only needed Hemmingway to step into the apartment.  Once is hind leg was through the door she rounded, fist curled tight.  There was a satisfying crack as her fist landed square on his jaw.  Hemmingway dropped to the ground.  Tail bought her heel up and crashed it down on his ribs; once; twice – the cracking noise gave way to a satisfying squash that told of internal injury.  Hemmingway cried out through his daze from the blow to his jaw.

It was already coming together.  The Matriarch had abandoned the control over her collar in favour of comforting her mate.  Tail retrieved it and again the ocular implant told which bottom released it.  Free from the apartment her neck step was to be free of the Spire.  As Hemmingway curled up into the foetal position protecting his damaged ribs she pulled at his jacket.  He wouldn’t roll to get it off.  Another healthy kick with her heel and he complied.  He’d given up struggling as she pulled at his pants.  The belt held up the slack on the pants around Tail’s slender waist and she buttoned the jacket.  Shoes she could do without.  Before she walked out of the apartment she checked Hemmingway’s jacket pocket for the invitation – the pass to get her through the checkpoint.  She took one last look at Hemmingway and Steve.  Both males were crumpled up on the floor and agony.  IT gave her some satisfaction, but her anger was still a sharp blade.  She left the apartment and walked towards the elevator.

If Steve lived he would have the crippled Hemmingway to take his anger out on.  Tail was out of here.

Unescorted Tail had finally turned some Alien heads.  She let the Centuri in charge of the check point have a sniff.  She let his trunk linger over her letting him know she was a good submissive creature how just needed to pass through.  The invitation checked out.  She marched towards the back corridor that led to Cyanides private lift.  She wasn’t about getting away from Cyanide.  She knew getting of Ghetto with the data she had in her eyes was near impossible.  So she marched straight to their elevator.  She figured about, now, one of the females would have called for whatever the Centuri had as an ambulance, or doctor on call, would be sent for.  Hemmingway would be largely ignored in his half naked and injured state.  He wasn’t getting out of the Spire anyway.  If he could have picked himself up the Centuri on guard wouldn’t let him past.  If Steve recovered he would be investigating what Tail had told him of instructions to go through his console.

Tail reached Cyanide’s lift.  A man in a black suit with a military haircut was waiting there - waiting for her.  He tapped his ear and sounded “She’s here” like an old fashioned secret service agent.  Tail didn’t hinder her step in any caution.  She marched up to the man who was holding the elevator for her.  IT would seem they wanted to get her back to level 191 before the trouble Hemmingway was in resulted Tail being detained on this level.  She knew the Corps too well.  They’d already written Hemmingway of as an unfortunate expenditure.  Tail entered the elevator and the man joined her, pressing the only button, the one that took them to Cyanide Corp headquarters on Ghetto.

***

Tail had surrendered the suit jacket and lose pants that had concealed her nudity.  She was back in the lab she had woken up in on Ghetto.  The familiar lab-techs were present; the brunette with the glasses; Josh with his bandaged fingers; and a new man, not like Hemmingway.  This man seemed more serious, less about working his way up and being the man, and more company buy-line.  ‘Market domination – at all costs’.

This new player both put Tail at ease and added some risk.  This man didn’t give a fuck about what had happened in the Spire, nor that she had returned without Hemmingway.  This man only gave a fuck about the data they were downloading from her ocular implants.  This was good, because once they had it he wouldn’t see her as a piece on a chess board to be manipulated.  Bad, because he could just terminate her – cheaper than freighting her back home.

“Data integrity?” he finally spoke.  The room had been a silent one.  The lab-techs hadn’t engaged Tail and Tail knew she had to not be a problem at this point in time.

“One-hundred percent integrity, but the software’s translation get some things wrong.”  Josh took the electrode from the side of Tail’s face.  “Transcription errors” Josh made a gesture that there was nothing they could do.  “Should be able to go over the log and correct for the software.  You know it’s an alien language, and I mean alien….”  The man in the room held up his hand for Josh to stop.  He made eye contact with Tail.

She sat naked on the operating table.  The tan job they had given her to make her look delicious was intact around her neckline and shoulders.  Steve had eaten from the artwork Tail was so proud of.  The front of her body was patch worked pale and tanned.  Fresh, newly generated tissue had been grown and was visible by distinguishing the tone.  He seemed to want to ask Tail something.  Tail didn’t like his eyes examining her naked body.  She was sick of being naked, helpless… Tail felt the desire to look around the room for a scalpel; needle; bone saw – something she could level the field with.  Attacking an employee in the Cyanide headquarters was suicide, but if they weren’t going to be on the level she believed she had established a pattern of behaviour to justify them holding up their end of the deal.

“Does it hurt?”  The man finally asked.

Tail remained mute.

“When they eat you, does it hurt?  Or is it just watching them dine on you that brings out such… distasteful behaviour.”  There was contained vexation in the man’s voice.  If Steve was alive he was obviously very angry and Tail knew Hemmingway would have made an appearance by now if he’d gotten out of the Spire.

Tail swallowed back the bile she should have spat at him.  She decided to say nothing.

“Get her, her clothes.”  The man finally said.  “Get her off this level.”  He turned and walked out of the room.  Tail was left with the two anxious lab-techs who seemed eager not to set Tail off again.  They fetched a marine cooler that contained her personal effects and left the room.

***

Dressed in the cargo pants, surplus boots and leather jacket Tail felt like she was wearing armour again.  These were clothes she liked because you charge through terrain evading something or take a minor assault without having to worry about exposed skin.  Her escort, two Cyanide Corp security guards stood behind her, like they were about to jump her, in the lift down to the hangers.  Cyanide wanted her gone before she could be used as a piece of evidence against them in the sticky situation with Hemmingway and Steve.  She tilted her head to the side and wondered.  Was Steve dead?  Are the Century using some alien technique to interrogate Hemmingway?  Did they just leave him on the floor of Steve’s apartment to bleed internally whilst they tried to save one of their own?  There was a nagging suggestion at the back of her mind that she might regret not knowing.

The ocular implants couldn’t be removed.  Something Josh whimpered out about bindings to the ocular nerve being a one way thing.  It didn’t really matter.  She was a nobody.  Who would bother to active the cameras at the back of her eyes and see what she was seeing – and this translation software might come in handy.

The lift was silent running.  It was only the cursory look at the panel that told her they were at the hanger’s level… but the light dropped down a level lower.  Tail tensed her body, but not noticeably.  She wasn’t being taken to the hangers.  Her mind raced.  ‘An airlock’.  No, if they were going to just throw her out an airlock, why not use the one on their level.  Tail didn’t know what, but she was being taken somewhere low in Ghetto’s levels.  Casually she scanned the labels next to the numbers on the lifts panel.  She could feel the guards tensing up behind her.  They were either expecting a fight, or were about to make their move.  The elevator stopped at level 19.  Tail had a distant memory of the first time she visited Ghetto, a Centuri at immigration warning her against going to level 19.

Tail curled her hands into fists as the door glided open.

A once freshly painted sign was stained with rust and the humid stench of human swe at met her as she read the sign – Kincaid Industries Pty Ltd.

“Shit.”  Tail said out loud.  Fuckers sold her to the company she used to slaver for. 

She took a step out casually as if nothing was wrong.  With room to turn she spun around and raised her fist.  Her eyes went dark.  She found herself stumbling forward blind.  They had switched her eyes off via the implants.  Tail cried out.  She felt two sets of hands grab her arms and pull them behind her back.  She kicked and threw her weight around, but it was pointless without the ability to see where she might make an exit.  Cold metal on her wrists told of shackles and now the two Corps guards pulled at her with direction.  She was being taken somewhere - blind and bound.

At least she was going to find out what happened to all those girls she had freighted.