“Remember what you said to me during our interview?” Suzanne asked her. “You said, ‘everybody deserves a second chance.’ So let me give you one now, Jilly. You deserve to get away from this mess and start fresh. Come up to the Mother Ship with me and leave all this crap behind.”
With a mixture of relief and regret, Jillian had agreed. A week later, after wrapping up her life on Earth and quitting her job at The Palms before she could be fired, she stepped onto a Kindred shuttle driven by one of Suzanne’s new husbands and went up to the Mother Ship to start a whole new life.
2
And that’s how I ended up here—in this mess, Jillian thought to herself, staring at her accidental purchase and wondering what the huge bodyslave, still kneeling in the dust before her, was thinking.
Though honestly, it was a little more complicated than that. She could blame Brad for her choice to come to the Mother Ship in the first place, but the reason she had accidentally bought herself a bodyslave was because Pat-ar had won the right to host the Kindred High Council’s dinner with the Nebrian Ambassador.
Nebrians were notoriously picky eaters. Instead of a regular mouth, they had a long, curled proboscis like a butterfly, which had a pair of large, sensitive lips at one end. This meant that all of their food had to be either pureed, liquified, or powdered and served in long, thin vessels, so that they could suck it up with their curly mouth parts.
“And the thing they like best to eat is jumja soup flavored with thaelite,” Suzanne had told Jillian, when they were planning the VIP menu.
Jillian had frowned. She’d been working aboard the Mother Ship at Pat-ar for about two years at that point, and she’d learned a lot of new cuisines and handled a lot of exotic ingredients, but she’d never heard of thaelite.
“Thaelite?” she said. “What’s that?”
“It’s pretty expensive,” Suzanne admitted. “It’s the inner core of the Ruthian passion flower—or rather, it’s a lot of inner cores, all compacted into a really dense, solid mass. It takes millions of flowers to make a single brick of it, which is one reason it’s so expensive.” She shrugged. “But the Kindred High Council is picking up the bill and Commander Sylvan told me to buy whatever was necessary to impress the Ambassador. Apparently they have a deal on the table which could be really beneficial to the Kindred if it goes through.”
“Okay, no pressure then,” Jillian said dryly. But she wasn’t really worried—she was used to cooking for human VIPs—how different could aliens ones be? “So you need me to add a brick of thaelite to my weekly shopping list?” she asked. “Can I get it at the Buy-All-Sell-All Market?”
The huge food market—so named because you could get literally any ingredient in the galaxy there—was located a few solar systems away on Prius Six, a neutral planet which welcomed everyone, which was one reason the market had been established there. Jillian went there weekly to pick up the more exotic ingredients on Pat-ar’s menu.
At first she’d been nervous about going to a whole different planet by herself and one of Suzanne’s husbands had accompanied her. But then her friend’s twins were born—and turned out to be triplets instead. In addition to the Dark Twin and the Light Twin, Suzanne gave birth to a Shadow Twin—an extra baby that sometimes came along during Twin Kindred pregnancies.
After that, it had been all hands on deck at Suzanne’s suite. She needed both her husbands to help her out and between the three of them, they just barely managed the triplets, who were a real handful.
At that point, though, Jillian was much more comfortable with going to the market on her own. She couldn’t fly a Kindred spaceship, of course, but that had been solved by getting a small shuttle with an autopilot option.
The ship had a large, refrigerated section in the back for storing delicate ingredients. It was programmed to go straight to the Buy-All-Sell-All market on Prius Six, park, and wait for Jillian while she shopped. Once she returned with her purchases, she simply pressed the Home button and the shuttle called the Mother Ship, requesting a fold in space and took her directly back with her ingredients.
Jillian had been shopping this way for over a year now, and she was totally used to it. That didn’t mean she wasn’t still thrilled with her new, exciting life, however. It was amazing that she got to travel every week to the huge, exotic market which was as big as a small city. And Suzanne gave her free rein in hiring, menu creation, and picking new ingredients to work with—of which there were plenty to choose from at the Buy-All-Sell-All.
“Just stay out of the Dark Market at the far end,” Kind, Suzanne’s Light Twin husband had warned her. “That place isn’t safe for a female on her own. Seven Hells, it’s not safe for a warrior on his own! But other than that, you should be all right as long as you stay in the main part of the market.”
Jillian always heeded his advice scrupulously. Though she visited a few stalls near the edge of the Dark Market—the area cordoned off from the main part of the Buy-All-Sell-All by a web of pain threads—she was careful never to go through the archway into the forbidden and dangerous area.
In fact, the stall where she’d come to buy the thaelite brick, was right up against the edge of the Dark Market, but she hadn’t expected any trouble. In fact, she hadn’t expected anything at all out of the ordinary to happen to her that day…and now she had accidentally bought herself a bodyslave!
It had all started so innocently, too…
Jillian had risen early that morning—it was a Monday, her usual day to go to the Buy-All-Sell-All, since that was the only day of the week Pat-ar was closed. She’d gone to the huge, echoing Docking Bay of the Kindred Mother Ship and found her trusty little remote shuttle parked exactly where she’d left it the previous Monday.
Getting herself strapped in, she’d sent a quick remote message, asking that the Mother Ship fold space for her to Prius Six and had gotten confirmation—an affirmative message flashing on her viewscreen.
Jillian had been nervous at first, flying through the red gash in space that would take her instantly from one point in the universe to another, but she was used to it now. Her little shuttle went through the fold and came out in a close orbit to Prius Six, as always. And, just like always, the shuttle descended and set itself down in the parking area on the outskirts of the market.
Getting out her large expandable straw tote, Jillian had stepped out of her shuttle—which was print-locked to her hand—and headed into the vast marketplace.
The Buy-All-Sell-All was enormous, taking up an area as big as a good-sized city back on Earth. However, there was a fairly accessible, open-air tram which ran on a regular basis. Jillian had made this trip so often, now, that she knew exactly what to do. Entering the large front entrance, she hopped aboard the tram after paying her fee—a single slotted coin made of Prius Six copper-nalite. After paying her fare, she pressed her thumb to the print scanner, which would enable her to ride for the rest of the day.
The tram was really nothing more than an automatic hover-train that ran around the entire perimeter of the market. The track was laid out in a vast square and the train had so many cars that Jillian had never actually seen the engine. The cars themselves were open-air—meaning there were no sides at all—just a floor, a ceiling, and a lot of evenly-spaced metal poles to hold on to. People paid their fares and hopped aboard from either side of the train, climbing on and off at the various stops along the way.