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1 SELLING MYSELF
Fertile human female available… I type my little description into the text box while kicking my legs happily off a seat that is way too high for me. It’s designed to standard alien sizing, which is about twice as high as a chair that fits me would be.
“Yum.”
I shove a spoonful of triple chocolate sundae into my mouth and enjoy the thrill of freedom along with the taste of rare and illicit food. This alien diner is pretty busy at the moment. Drone waiters zip between tables, dropping off plates of food, some of which looks good to me, others of which wriggles as if it’s still alive. Less palatable, but some aliens can only consume live prey.
I’m watching credits roll into my accounts in real time and trying not to giggle and kick my feet in glee, because this is a public diner and I don’t want to draw attention to myself any more than I already am. There are dozens of eyes on me right now. Six of them belong to one guy who literally has a pair in the back of his head and two on on the front. He’s watching me with the back eyes directly, and the front four are catching my reflection in the steel wall. There are plenty of others, too. You don’t often see a human female alone in illicit territory.
One half of my screen has my sale ad. There’re some very cute pictures of me there wearing the kind of lingerie you sort of can see through but also sort of can’t. Basically a sexy screen-door for my privates. I’ve really gone all out, but the truth is I could have taken pictures of myself wearing a full beekeepers suit, and I’d still be getting bids. The demand for human females in this sector of the universe is off the charts. There are practically no females of any species here. There’re several reasons for that. The biggest among them is that we are currently outside of what they call inhabited space. This is a sector of the galaxy where sentient life briefly considered arising from primordial goop, then decided better and just sort of went away. The only creatures here now are settlers looking to claim land, mineral extraction teams, and people on the run from dubious pasts. This is a sector of pure crime and anarchy. Good girls don’t come here, and bad girls don’t last long.
“Keep it moving,” I say, waggling my weapon casually in the direction of the alien who has been doing slow circles of the diner for a while now, working out what his best angle of attack is when it comes to me. I’ve been aware of him the whole time, just as I have been aware of every other pair of male eyes that intermittently locks on me with a curious and potentially predatory intent.
There’s a wary curiosity about me. I’m like a piece of meat hanging in the middle of the forest, tempting, and yet suspicious. Single human women don’t sit in places like this. The only reason I’m not getting more trouble is that most of the aliens here probably assume I am already owned, or that I am dangerous in a way that is not worth messing with. Uninhabited space is no place for stupid people of any gender or species, so most of the aliens I encounter have a healthy sense of self-preservation.
BING!
I glance back at my tablet and discover to my pleasure that my listing is marked as CONFIRMED SOLD. That’s good. It means my bank has confirmed payment with the auction house. I check my account and it’s impossible not to grin broadly as I see that this is actually working. The same balance that was practically zero a few days ago is starting to look really healthy.
Selling people is illegal in civilized space, but out here in the middle of nowhere, companies like Owned Mates are able to assist in the conveyance of sentient species to one another. They’d never keep their offices here, of course, but this is where they operate.
I check my bank balance, which is also held in civilized space. There’s twenty thousand credits so far. It’s a start. A good one, too. But it’s not nearly enough for a speeder ship. I need at least fifty thousand for the most basic model, which I’m going to need if I hope to put enough distance between myself and the things I need to run from. I need something with hyperspatial capacity, the ability to disappear entirely from one location and end up in another without any way of tracking my movements.
This plan is working — and the money in my account is proof of that. I’ve sold myself twice already. I have two other active listings with good bids on them. Time for another.
I start a new listing immediately, this time using a different set of photos with a new blurb.
The last ad was for a sex kitten. This one is for a wife and helpmate. I’ve edited the photo to represent me as a domestic type. I look like I’m baking bread, which is good because bread is popular throughout most of the universe. They say you shouldn’t feed it to aquatic avian aliens, but they love it more than anybody else.
Can till soil of any hardness or consistency, I write in my description. Or you could plough my field.
I start uploading pictures of myself in overalls. You might think that the aliens would get suspicious that there are so many human females of the same age, height, build, and general appearance being sold in quick succession, but at this point, most humans look the same to aliens. We even look about the same to one another. We mostly have brown hair, brown eyes, and rounded faces with a sort of guileless expression. Human evolution converged at a certain point, mostly because our population was forced through a bottleneck in which the vast majority of humans perished. The mass near-extinction was argued against viciously while it was happening. Some said it was an environmental crisis, but others said that was stupid and all we had to do was get outside the environment.
It turned out that, while everyone was arguing about how they probably weren’t actually dying, while definitely they actually were all dying, a ship of thirteen interstellar explorers was launched by a private, eccentric billionaire. He was not getting nearly the amount of attention he wanted to get on Earth. The thirteen explorers’ mission? To go tell aliens on other planets how cool and smart he was.
All humans today are descended from the crew of that ship. That means we’re always on the verge of some very spicy inbreeding. And that’s where alien mates come in.
Without being overly crude about it, humans are sort of the universal fuck receptacles. We are made for sex. We are capable of copulating with over a hundred and one other species as officially documented at last count in Sasha Amore’s nearly comprehensive 101 Alien Cocks and how to take them, a guide to surviving a cold, unfeeling universe through rampant copulation.
It’s a long title, but it’s great bedside reading. And it gave me the idea for what I’m doing now.
See, most aliens need a female of their own species in order to mate in a satisfying way, but we human females, being so soft and adaptive and stretchy in various ways make for excellent bedroom companions. That’s what I have to trade on, and that is what I am going to keep trading on until I have enough money to get out of this hellhole and get back to inhabited space.
The music I didn’t notice in the background changes. It goes from a sort of pleasant general melody to a dark, percussive beat. At almost the same time, the saloon-style doors swing open. They’re not made like saloon doors, but that’s how the alien who comes through them opens them, like he’s the bad guy in an ancient western.
Screeeeeee….. BAM!
Valkers know how to make an entrance. This one is dressed from head to toe in slick-black armor, the kind that develops protective scaling if you need it and shows off your musculature the rest of the time. He has long, dark hair sweeping back from a pronounced widow’s peak, and an aura of darkness around him that makes the shadows fall more intensely wherever he goes. His face is pale, almost gray with dark blue hues in the hollows of his cheeks and eyes. He has very high cheekbones and a powerful jaw. When his mouth parts even slightly, two fangs are visible set in a mouth of razor-sharp teeth.
Humans call these aliens vampires for obvious reason. I suspect valkers were visiting Earth for centuries before we worked out that they weren’t from our world. That happened a lot with a lot of different alien visitors. We used to mistake them for supernatural creatures all the time, never suspecting they were just idiots from other galaxies. Humanity took a really long time to catch onto the existence of other sentient species. If you read the histories, it’s endless reports of aliens and then most people ignoring them because they thought they had better things to think about.
My species is known throughout the settled universe for its odd collective decision making. We developed space flight and then more or less forgot about it in favor of fighting resource wars. Anyway. My brain digresses. My first buyer is an alien of the kind that has been terrorizing my species for years. He probably purchased me because wants to drain my blood. That would be an expensive drink, but he looks rich. Very rich, actually. He is wearing a circlet on his head, a sort of royal insignia woven in white gold.
Conversation wanes as every eye in the place goes to him. The aliens with their eyes on stalks retract them as far as they can, then wrap them around the furniture to peek out in a sneaky little way. The presence of a valker in a place like this is of concern. Valkers don’t need to hang out in illicit space. They’re one of the dominant species in the universe, which means they’re lawless and they get away with it.
Something in my stomach tells me that this is very bad news for me specifically. I tap back through my purchase history. I never pay attention to that. I don’t care who I’m selling myself to, as I never intend to cross paths with any of them. Technically I’m supposed to surrender myself to the nearest Owned Mates sales depot, but obviously I’m not planning on doing that.
Royal Valker Emrys
