Chapter 55 – When the Fight Ends

Content Warning: slavery, submission, violence, sci-fi
 
Hol Vydon looked down through the haze, not bothering to hide his smugness, “You could have made me so much money. And you threw it all away for a slave. A tight little hole.”
Kaster saw dim light flickering across the warlord’s face. In the warlord’s fist was the bloody knife. The room beyond Vydon was hard to focus on as it spun.
“There are fires burning, Lord.” An armored guard said.
“Put them out!” Vydon yelled in unbridled fury. “And give me a moment with this… scum…”
The thick haze blurred Kaster’s vision, making it hard to keep track of the portly man, the one who would take his life, slowly and methodically. As if the spinning room or dimming lights weren’t already threatening him. Kaster could feel himself dying. The jittery waves of Focus told him organs were already starting to fail. 
Thick smoke swirled around the man standing over him. Kaster wanted to lift his hand, but it was so heavy he couldn’t get it off his chest. He was too tired to even speak at this point. Given a choice between being tortured to death and just letting his organs fail, he was considering using the last of his Focus to let himself go peacefully. A euphoria washed through him, a feeling that everything was as it should be. He wanted to relax into that feeling and cast aside the universe of pain and frantic action.
But K’rra was not here. The thought of her made him fight the euphoria. He refused to succumb. The image of her kneeling before him drove him back from the soothing dark.
It made no difference. He could even turn his head. He was forced to stare up at Hol Vydon, who was calling for a medic. Whisps of haze obscured the warlord. The dark shapes of armed men surrounded him, guards still willing to fight. It was a shame he and Kae hadn’t been able to do more damage. Kaster would happily let go if he’d been able to kill Vydon.
As the last vestiges of light faded Kaster saw a WaveBlade ignite just beyond Vydon. The noises sounded far away, the Blade arced in neon swoops, men scattered and fell. Vydon ran clumsily, heavily away. 
The WaveBlade danced with precision and speed. Too much to be handled by Kae, he knew Jae had completed her mission. That meant K’rra was nearby. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. 
A second WaveBlade danced in the murk. Blaster bolts flashed. It was getting hard to see the people moving around, dancing, falling. Their noises were distorted and so far away.
K’rra’s face filled his vision. She was blurred, as if someone had shifted all the colors to grey. When he smiled painfully, he saw the terror in her eyes. She knew how close he was to slipping away. He had to let her know that saving her was enough for him. Nothing else mattered. He drew in an excruciating breath.
K’rra worked her datapad scanning his vitals. Her face twisted in horror as the device reported his injuries. He was suffering from a lacerated diaphragm and liver. “Oh no… Hang on, Sir… please! Hang on…”
K’rra looked around frantically for anything that might help. A thick haze hung in the room from the smoke manacles, blaster shots, and small fires still burning. There was nothing that resembled a first aid kit, nor had they brought one. Even if they had, she would need specialized gear to stop the massive internal bleeding. She needed hemostatic gauze, or organ repair nanos, neither of which would be in a run-of-the-mill aid kit. She leaned over him, apologizing, and pressed down on his newly cauterized wound. 
Kaster thrashed violently, groaning loudly. His eyes focused on K’rra but with a fevered cast. He tried to speak but couldn’t around the pressure K’rra was placing on his abdomen.
“Shh, relax, Sir. Please just relax. There’s massive internal bleeding, your liver’s been punctured. Pleas sir…” Tears flowed down K’rra pale blue cheeks in rivers, as she continued applying pressure even though it was causing agonizing pain in her master.
He struggled feebly, then froze concentrating on nothing else but drawing a breath. “I’d offer you freedom, but I know it’s not what you want… Go…  be a good slave to someone worthy… 
The words she said were unintelligible. Wet drips dotted his face.
“I just wish we’d made it to that library…” 
And his eyes lost focus, staring up past her into the gloom.
K’rra pressed down on him desperately, “Fight, Sir. Fight it damn you! Just hang on until we can get to the ship.”
She begged his internal bleeding to stop, the din of battle faded around her. Someone screamed her name and tried to pull her away, but she refused to leave him. She stayed there until darkness took her.
A pale, blue-skinned woman in translucent silks knelt before her Master.
*****
“I’m getting tired of the moping. Is she ever going to snap out of it?” Kae asked.
“She needs time,” Jae said.
“You’ve been saying that for months.”
“You sound anxious.”
“I am,” Kae said. “It’s grinding me down, she’d like a robot. We tell her to clean, she just goes through the motions. Tell her to kiss or fuck, it like touching a mannequin, there no soul. No to mention this creepy shit.”
Jae said nothing, just glanced into the medical room of the Outlander where K’rra knelt in front of the autodoc. On the medical table of the autodoc lay Kaster. The machine was locked down in full stasis, suspending him in a timeless state. No cellular activity could occur, as if frozen in time.
“She’s becoming a liability,” Kae said. “We blew that last job on Farquaat babysitting her.”
“It sounds like you are leading up to something.”
“I am. A no-pay bounty is going around the commsweb right now.”
“We’re not selling her to Hol Vydon, we swore to finish the job on him,” Jae said, crossing her arms. She turned to look her sister in the face.
“It’s not Hol Vydon. He’s still offering a cool million for her, which is why we keep getting jumped by hunters. Look, we could kill two birds with one stone, give her to the pay bounty and we no longer have to babysit…”
“And,” Jae finished the thought for her sister, “If she’s not with us there won’t be as many hunters sniffing around.”
“Exactly,” Kae said. 
“The Outlander is her ship. Are we supposed to hitchhike once we deliver her?”
“She’s a slave, she can’t own property. Besides, if we accept the no-pay contract, we can negotiate the ship in lieu of payment.”
Jae signed, she knew she was in no position to care for K’rra. The slave hurt to her very soul. Two fugitives on the run would never be able to look after her, care for her, and provide her the support needed to help her heal. But neither would slavers. Then again, no-pay bounties were often charity cases, family hoping to find a kidnapped victim, aid workers absconded, or simply a long shot hop of find a missing person. 
“Who put up the no-pay?” Jae finally asked.
“The Crimson Fleet.” 
“Why would they want her?” 
“Don’t know. Gyth’s are very rare slave stock. Maybe she was stolen from them.”
“Gythians also don’t work for pirates,” Jae said.
“The bounty claims she’s a lost sister. Maybe they do work with pirates? It’s hard to know what a Gyth would do… they never even really leave their homeworld, yet here’s one tight in front of us.”
“A lost sister…” Jae considered the implications. A Gyth on a pirate fleet would exponentially increase the competency. Maybe that's why the Crimson Fleet was making waves with its relentless raids into Federated Space. The Federation had thrown small fleets and bounties at it, but came up empty-handed. Meanwhile, the Crimson Fleet grew in strength, more ships and crew pledging to it every passing month. 
And as she had said earlier, two fugitives were not providing K’rra with the care she needed. If she were a member of the Crimson Fleet and Hol Vydon had stolen her away, well, that might add an ally in their fight against the gangster. 
Jae finally said, “Alright. Let’s talk to them. If K’rra was one of them, they might actually be able to help her where we cannot.”
Kae smiled, “Excellent. I’ll set a course.”
*****
K’rra followed along as she had been told. The twins took her from her Master’s ship to a space station on the edge of Coalition Space. As with many Coalition infrastructure, it was privately owned, run down, and barely maintained. It catered to pirates, mercenaries, and criminals. Everyone was armed, and no one took a second glance at a naked slave being led on a leash through the corridors. What caught a few eyes was the pair of exceptionally fit twins in skin-tight bodysuits, one with a blaster on her hip, the other with a pommel of a WaveBlade.
The hotel existed as nothing more than a meeting place for all manner of illicit deals. Its client rarely actually spends a full sleep cycle. K’rra was led to a room and told to kneel in its center. The twins were alert and paced, K’rra paid no attention, intent only on keeping her mind blank to dull the pain of loss.
A man entered and began negotiating with he twins. K’rra couldn’t be bothered even to look up. She didn’t care what happened to her, only about the memories of her Master. Even thinking the word brought such heartache that she closed her eyes, whispering her new mantra a hundred times, “I will not let you die.”
At some point in the long conversation, K’rra realized she was being sold. As a slave, this was of no concern to her, nor to any of her property. Service, actively performing any act told of her, was a small release allowing her to focus a small part of her mind away from the all-consuming pain.
When the group talked of her Master, she interrupted them, “I will not leave him. I may be a slave, and will perform as such for my owner, but I will not leave my Master behind.”
The group was quiet for a long moment after that, then negotiation began again. In the end, the man agreed that they would take Kaster in stasis along with the slave.
K’rra was led from the hotel deck of the station by a new owner. The occasional tugs of the leash gave her direction, but she still refused to look up. Eventually, the two made their way to a shuttle deck. There was a short ride through space, then K’rra entered a new ship. From her experience in the Federated Navy, she could tell the ship was newly constructed. It was clean in a way that only a vehicle can be in its first year of service.
Taken to a luxurious stateroom, she was told to kneel. It was only right for K’rra to do so. A new owner would want to claim her, judging from what little she’d seen of the room, he must be the captain. He sat down on the massive bed that dominated the room, but she still refused to look up at him. She could only think of Kaster’s stateroom, tiny, with a bed that barely accommodated the two of them.
The door hissed open, and K’rra heard a familiar but long-unheard voice.
“K’rra? Is it really you?”
Confused and afraid her mind was playing tricks on her, K’rra turned, losing all composure demanded by protocol.
“Science Officer K’rra of clan Ry’attahk?” Captain Riley asked. She was naked, her face harder than K’rra remembered. Eyes that had once been wide with wonder now held a shadowed intensity, carrying the ghosts of choices that could never be undone.
“Captain!” K’rra cried out in equal parts misery and joy. She jumped to her feet and rushed into Riley’s arms, burying her face on the human’s pale shoulder. The tears came in river flows as she tried to crush herself into the woman she’d once considered a friend and colleague. “I’ve done such terrible things… and lost people because of it…”
Captain Riley stroked her friend’s bare back, “Shhh, you’re my crew. You’re among friends…”
For the first time in months, K’rra dared to hope. Life would go on.
 
Fini