Chapter Text
It takes three minutes for an orbital strike to breach the atmosphere and hit the surface of New Canaan. I know this because I read about it.
The owner of the Waystation calls me his “fixer”, and that name was the second to last thing I ever took from him. I was the one he would call when the mood was dancing on the razor’s edge and liable to slide into danger at any moment. When a local pulls a pistol, the farmers barely look up from their drinks. But when an offworlder does it, that’s trouble the man in the office doesn’t want. Offworlders have powerful friends and they don’t think twice about committing violence against the rustics. And god forbid one of them takes a bullet, you know that retribution will be on the next freighter.
Can’t have that. So I’m the one the man in the office calls to settle things down. “Alice, you give a man pause,” he used to say. “Some things just look expensive, even in a backwater like this. “The way those constellations float in your eyes makes a stupid man get smart real fast. Gets him thinking about his prick instead of his pistol. Helps him remember that one of the finest things in continued rotation around the sun is being balls deep in some high-class pussy.”
I knew what he was telling me - that I was beautiful enough to tame the savage beast. Some girls look sweet, and some look like trouble. Me? I look like I have consequences.
I don’t take that for granted, even now. The farmers out here have a certain way they all talk about me. They say my hair is the color of wheat, that my skin is as fair as moonlight on the lake, and that I move like a colt. When they’re in the bottle they do their best to compliment my ‘womanly attributes’ but it always comes back to livestock, because that’s what they know. Healthy-looking, full rump. Big udders. Would make a heck of a breeder. The more they drink, the more graphic they get with the animal husbandry.
I’ve gotten used to it. I smile when they talk about me as an object. It’s camouflage. The less they know about what I’m really thinking, the better. And that goes for the man in the office, too.
How many plantings and harvesting had gone by when I first learned how to fuck? I don’t know, but I do know that my daddy sold me for 100 credits and a case of fancy offworld liquor, and by that time, I knew how all the secret parts fit together. Since I wasn’t his blood, he didn’t see fit to hold out for 200. He took in orphans and got paid for it by the Company. He was a drunk, no good to anyone, especially himself. I remember him slurring about how he looked after me through the kindness of his heart, all while drinking away the money that was supposed to be for my food and clothing.
He was a son of a bitch, and mean. He used to curse me out for reading books, while the only thing he ever learned was how to ignore the bottle’s lessening weight. When I went from being a girl to being a woman, I did my best to hide it from him, cause even back then, I knew what he would do. I was planning to run off, but I never got the chance. The man in the office came calling in his fancy vest and carrying his polished walking stick, and I was moving out a week later. The last words my daddy said to me were: “You send me something back when you can.” I said I would, and then I moved to the Waystation and only saw him one more time.
But we’ll get to that.
I learned the business from an older girl named Ruby. She took me into the back rooms when I first arrived, and told me how it worked - that I would stick my hand down their pants and start fiddling around with what I found, with a nice firm grip, until they would shoot out some sticky white stuff. She was dancing around the words, so I had to tell her that she could say “cock” and “cum” and “fuck” and “suck”, because even if I looked cherry, my mind was old and my cherry was long gone. I told her that I took care of that bothersome thing with a crop-picker boy named Caleb who used to drink water at a stream near the house. He was older than me, but not much - we were both growing and ready to explore what we’d grown into.
I’ll always remember the way we apologized to each other. His thing looked like a big ol’ snake that got loose, and he blushed and said he was sorry it was so big. And I told him I was sorry too, because by then I’d started to have to tie my chest down with bandages so my dresses would fit. And I took off my dress and showed him, and he took off his pants all the way, and we both just started laughing like two old friends. That was when I knew he wasn’t like my father, or most of the other men I’d met on New Canaan.
He still tried to apologize, though - when I couldn’t get my mouth open wide enough on my first try, and when my hand wouldn’t close all the way around it, and gosh, how he apologized when I spread my legs and it seemed like I hadn’t grown enough down there to match how much he’d grown. But I just took his hand and told him “Don’t never apologize for having a big ol’ cock and big ol’ balls, and I’ll not apologize for having big ol’ titties that I have to hide from my father, and we’ll just be done with it and get to the fun part.”
He liked that idea, and I guess I did too, because we grew together from then on, that whole summer. I started by using my hands, and then my breasts, and then my mouth, and then finally I told him to put it inside me, and the apologizing started again, so I just said: “Caleb, don’t worry about sticking it in, just worry about pulling it out again in time. And there’s a whole lot to pull out so don’t be late, or we’ll wind up in a lot of trouble.”
He said “Yes ma’am,” and we got to fucking, and I guess he listened to my warning, because when it came time that were both moaning and grabbing at each other, he pulled his big thing out of my pussy and just about covered me from head to toe with the thick, sticky white stuff I’d heard about but not seen until that point. He apologized for that, too, but I forgave him. I kinda liked it. It was proof that he’d enjoyed himself as much as I had.
We fucked quite a lot before the weather turned cold. Ruby asked how I liked fucking, and I told her that I took care of every inch of that big boy, though my jaw ached and my pussy was throbbing when it was over. But after a while, there was no more pain. She asked when the pain stopped and I told her it was tolerable after the third time, and barely noticeable after the tenth. And by the fiftieth time, I started to like it. Her face lit up with a laugh at that, and she told me I was going to fit right in at the Waystation.
Maybe because of those first experiences, fucking was never the hardship for me that it was for some. I liked how it felt, mostly. And I’ll let you in on a little secret - the men who come into my receiving room were popping off to things that weren’t anything close to the textbook definition. Sometimes they just like to hear me talk, sometimes they like to watch me undress and show off my breasts. I have at least five customers who just like to pull their pricks and spurt into my hand, or my rear end, or on my face… and none of that is fucking in the strictest sense of the word.
I learned the ropes and I heard all the gossip. Ruby tipped me off to who was packing something special in their pants, who were the rough and nasty ones to avoid. I kinda saw them as a challenge, and sure enough, I was able to gentle them down and squeeze a little money out of it. The boss liked that, which was good. Ruby told me to always keep the boss happy - his opinion of me would affect whether my time at the Waystation was easy, or hard. I asked her if the boss liked to fuck. She replied that he liked money and he liked being rough with girls, and if the first didn’t show up, he was liable to start in on the other.
I took to it like a duck to water, to tell you the truth. Something about my face, my voice, and my body just made men want to spend money. Even when things would get tense because of drink or the usual male territoriality, I was able to cool it out and turn acrimony into cash. About three months in, I already had the racket figured, and one of the new girls asked me, tearful from a run-in with some aggressive booze-mouth: “Alice, how can you do this job when everyone is always trying to fuck with you?”
I fixed her hair for her and, thinking of everything my drunken father had put me through, told her: “Darlin’, you just have to learn to be un-fuckwithable.”
The rates for The Unfuckwithable Alice started at 10 credits for a suckjob, 5 for a handjob, and 2 to just muck it up with kissing and groping. For 1 credit I might pull down the front of my corset and give hopeful gents a view of the front porch. But those were just ‘I’m new, so get to know me’ prices. By the end of my first week I had a line out the door.
So the man in the office stepped in and doubled my rates. A month later he doubled them again. I could see the gleam in his eye when he watched me work the lounge. When I was on duty, business tripled at the bar. By word of mouth alone, bigger and bigger fish started to swim into our little pond. And all that made my boss very happy… and very paranoid.
Early on, after the fourth in what would be a string of record-breaking nights, he pulled me aside and told me sternly that I was taking very well to the job - and that if I listened to him, I could go far. He was a man who always carried an ornate walking stick and dressed in his best jacket, his new boots and his gold watch chain. Before bringing someone one, he tended bar himself, and he had a keen eye for spotting the big fish.
For a very short while, I deluded myself into thinking he might be different. A better class of man than my father. But then I saw him get cross with one of the other girls for resting too much and receiving clients too little. He scolded her and pointed her in the direction of a drunken roughneck who had had to know was trouble, and told her to hustle him.
It went badly for the girl, and I’ll never forget the look of satisfaction on his face as she wept on the floor with her shattered jaw. The bouncers took the roughneck outside and beat him half to death, and robbed his money, which went right into the boss's pocket. The girl didn’t see a dime for her busted face. I met his eyes and saw not a drop of shame for what he had done. Instead, they carried a warning - that the same could happen to me if I stopped making money.
He was a tried-and-true son of a bitch. He would buy a drunk a drink, and then have an off-the-books bouncer roll him. He would encourage a gambler to wager his last coin, and then put him in debt trying to get back. And he would encourage a cunt-struck offworlder to betray his girl and get prick-deep in Waystation pussy, then blackmail him. He knew all the angles, he played all the games. His name was Mr. Alistair, or Mr. Klay, or Mr. Blake. I heard him use all three, but I never found out which one was real. Probably the one that wasn’t on the warrant. To the girls, he was “boss”, or “sir”.
To me, he was the man in the office. I’ve come to realize that the world is full of men in offices. Seems sometimes that they run everything. And sometimes you have to feel a little pain to deal with them.
So I worked, and I made money, and I tried to find my pleasures where I could. Along the way, men proposed to me. Tried to recruit me. Promised to save me. And sometimes, once in a great while, they told me something worth hearing. One day a cargo hauler told me that the lord of New Canaan was taking more than his share of this harvest, and he was to pick it up off the books. He said the lord was greedy, and even though some galactic council big shots had put a limit on how much he could take, the lord wanted more anyway, so he was there to take it. He told me it was shitty work, but it was a living.
That was the first time I heard of a galactic trade treaty violation while fucking. It’s amazing the things you hear sucking on an offworlder’s cock in a clawfoot bathtub full of suds. I told him I knew what he meant about it being shitty, because the man in the office was going to take ninety percent of the credits he was paying me to slurp on his prick. He bit his lip and groaned and spurted in my mouth and called me by a name that wasn’t mine, and then offered me a little something extra, money that the man in the office wouldn’t know about.
Money, and a handwritten note. I’ll tell you what it said a little later.
I took the money and squirreled it away in my corset, and told him he had a big cock for an offworlder, even if it wasn’t really true. I told him I’d buy myself a new dress with it, and that wasn’t true either. But it made him smile. It was an easy smile, and I could tell that he wasn’t doing his job because he liked stealing, but because he had no other choice. And that’s when he said to me: “There’s other suns and other planets, Alice, and other worlds than this.”
On New Canaan, we don’t even own our own planet, we only work it. The men work the fields, and bosses work the men, and the whores work the bosses, and the man in the office at the Waystation runs the whores. That’s about the shape of it. Always has been, probably since the galaxy was born. I’d never known anything else, but I’d sure read plenty… and I wanted more than anything to get on a ship and sail the stars to frontiers I’d seen only in my imagination.
After servicing that cargo hauler I knew the boss expected me to drop in and give him his ninety percent. The office at the Waystation is way in the back on the first floor. A fella ascending the staircase to the whores receiving rooms could juuuuust catch a glimpse of the door if he had a mind to snoop. Except that door is almost always shut. I tarried a little before going there, though, to read and re-read the handwritten note I’d been given.
WANT OUT? It read. FIRST, TWO KILLERS WILL HAVE TO DIE. ONE WORKS FOR THE COMPANY AND SHOOTS FARMERS WHO TALK UNION. THE OTHER YOU KNOW.
TAKE THE KEY FROM AROUND HIS NECK. USE IT AT LOT S-233, NEW CANAAN LIVERY.
I didn’t know much, but I knew that a key to a lot at New Canaan Livery could only access one thing.
A starship.
I came out of the bathing room, still adjusting my frillies, tucking back in what needed to be tucked, trying to act natural while my heart was beating like a drumline. I glanced into the entryway, where the horny newcomers wait to be seen by their favorite Susans and Colleens. That was when I saw him - a tall, dangerous looking man in a long duster coat, skin burned dark by some desert planet. Our eyes met, and I know he saw the glimmer of stars in mine. In his, I saw violence.
His hair was long. His muscles were lean and rippling beneath his vest. He had a knife in a leather holster on one hip, and wasn’t hiding it. Strong jaw, hair in braids.
Off-worlder.
Bodyguard.
Killer.
I had a feeling this man, too, was a fixer. But his method of conflict resolution was different from mine. A shake of my tits could quicken the hearts of farmers. He could only stop them forever. I had him clocked, as surely as I could see the glint of a metallic access card around his neck.
Did he look back at me and know I was more than the cocksucker he expected? No. I saw in his expression no more recognition than any other whore might get. That was when I knew my plan had a chance to succeed. Knowing that I was taking a tiger by the tail, I shot him a wink and blew a kiss before I walked into the office… and was confronted immediately by the man within - the man I knew for certain was Killer Number Two. My boss. Who else could it be? More than anyone else, in order for me to leave the planet, he would have to be clay. He would never let me go otherwise. I only hoped that he couldn’t see that knowledge in my eyes.
“You stayed with that last call a good while, darling,” he said, and poked his walking stick against my thigh. “I hope you took something extra for your trouble.” Still friendly, showing no hint of hostility. Not yet. That would come later. I reached between my breasts and took out the wad of bank notes I’d been handed. Stellar paper. The stuff that off-worlders exchange their currency to get and spend on New Canaan.
But I didn’t grab all of it. And my bodice was loose enough to give him a few down between, where I’d tucked away some of the money even deeper. A normal man might not have seen it… but this man was a viper. His expression changed and his hand shot out to grip my wrist in the blink of an eye. He was not the physical equal of the man in the lobby… but he was still larger than me, and he twisted until it hurt.
I gave a yelp of pain and staggered against the door frame.
“Don’t mistake me for a mark, Alice,” he growled. “The suckers are out there.”
I let fear fill my eyes, not trying to hide it. I started to make an excuse. “I didn’t-”
What was I going to say? It didn’t matter. I knew he would interrupt me, and he did, with a rough slap to the face that sent me to my knees. It reddened my cheek, it split my lip. I could taste blood. The door to the office was still open, and I knew that others could hear my cry of pain. I had made him so angry that he hadn’t bothered to close it before disciplining me.
He pulled me to my feet and slid his hand between my breasts, tearing my dress from my shoulders and letting my chest fall free, collecting the rest of the bank notes I’d stashed. I whimpered as he did it, and cringed away when he said: “Don’t do that again.”
And though he was in position to drive his point home by inflicting pain on my bare chest,, he already had what he was after. It wasn’t sex that interested him. It was money. I said I wouldn’t ever steal again, praying he didn’t see the satisfaction in my face. He had reacted precisely as I thought he would.
I retreated to the whores quarters to fix my face, tossing a wounded glance at the tanned ruffian in the main lobby. It was perhaps twenty minutes later when I returned to the main room, with my hair fixed and my dress back in its proper place. There was no hiding the damage - my lip was split and my eye was developing a purple bruise. The girls watched me warily, knowing that if I - the famous beauty - had been punished for keeping extra tips, it could happen to them as well. No doubt that had been part of the reason that the man in the office had reacted the way they did.
He was watching me with satisfaction. No doubt he considered me ‘tamed’. From his point of view, the light that surrounded me had dimmed considerably, and I was, in that moment, just another beaten whore under his thumb. I went unerringly to the harrier with the long coat and sat down beside him, pouring him a drink of the local popskull. “I can make you feel good,” I teased him, and rubbed my leg against his beneath the table. Above, I clutched his arm with a little more desperation than I’d usually show. “Would you like to join me in that room over there?”
I pointed to the receiving room that was across from the office. The one the boss wanted me to use so he could keep tabs on me, and make sure I wasn’t skimming any more tips. He wanted to hear me get done to me that dark and sinful thing he thought I deserved. The Waystation was a tin can, but the interior walls were wood, and he wouldn’t have to press his ear against them to know what was going on next door.
He wanted to hear the slap of flesh, and the moaning, and maybe some cries of pain from my customer getting too rough. He wanted to hear me getting fucked raw, and doing my song and dance to make him his ninety-percent, and when he heard how low I was, and how desperate, the part of him that denied it was a sin to keep me in a cage would feel vindicated in the belief that I had no inner light at all.
I decided he would hear. He would hear more than he ever wanted. And before the night was done, one of us would be dead.
The harrier in the long coat was a rough man, and receiving him was like playing with explosives. I had clocked that he would set me free, but not in the way that I wanted. He would take me back to his homeworld, and make me part of his clan, and take me as his wife, and force me to bear his children. Another man in another office - only with wilder hair and a darker complexion. He was a shaped charge that I had to aim carefully, lest I get caught in the blast.
Before the door was even closed he started in with hungry, devouring kisses. They were loud, and breathy, and I fed him all he wanted. He told me that in his world, I would be a queen, and that any man who struck me would taste death at the end of his blade. His breath was loud and so was the smacking of his lips as he licked my neck, then down to my tits. He started to suck them. Moaned. I felt his teeth close around my nipples and I cried out:
“Yes… bite them… suck them as much as you like!”
He made noises like a thirsty animal, and I was glad, because I wanted him to be loud. I wanted him rough. And already in my mind I was counting up the rates. Five credits to muck it up, ten to suck my tits. Ten extra for biting. Twenty for a suckjob. Fifty to fuck, a hundred for an ass-fuck. And I knew my boss was counting, too.
I got on all fours because I knew he’d like it like that, and I know the sound I make when I bounce off of a hard pelvis. Some men are loose as a tumble of old laundry, but not this one - he was carved out of wood. There was a rhythm to what he did to me, a song played in slaps and moans and my own calculated cries:
“Ah! It’s so big!”
“Fuuuuuck you’re stretching out my pussy!”
“You want to stick it in my ass? Go ahead...”
I was painted in his sweat with my hair undone and my clothing piled on the floor. All the while he told me about the children I would bear him, and how the sons would grow up strong, and the daughters would bear more generations to carry on a name I still didn’t know. To be barefoot and pregnant in this man’s possession was no escape at all, but of course, that wasn’t what I intended.
I didn’t have to fake my cries of pleasure. He was big, and intense, and I’ve never minded them large and rough, as long as I was leading them by the muzzle. We made the headboard rattle and I heard the springs bust in the mattress. When it was over, we laid for a moment like spoons, and he had a good view of the purple bruise that had formed a ring around my eye.
“Your master marked your face,” he said. “He’s a fool.”
I whimpered that he had, and I was scared of him. I kept my voice low so it wouldn’t bleed through the walls at more than an inaudible murmur. I didn’t need to ask if he’d ever killed a man over a woman, because I knew the answer. Playfully, I took the chain from around his neck, the one with the access keycard dangling at the end like a silver talisman, and put it around my own neck, so that it fell between my breasts. Then, I laid on my back and spread my legs for him, raising my voice back up for the eavesdroppers to hear:
“Fuck my wet pussy again, why don’t you?”
He did, and it was good. I let myself enjoy it, because I didn’t know if I’d ever have the chance again. I hoped we sounded passionate, and when I hissed low in his ear about bearing his children and being his concubine, and wishing he would take me as his woman, I knew it would sound conspiratorial; that paranoid ears would turn it into a plot to commit fraud.
When it was done, the mattress was soaked with sweat and cum, and I knew that the receiving room would need a thorough turn before anyone else could use it again - always the sign of a good fuck. Over the course of an hour I’d given him mouth, breasts, pussy and ass, and I even got him up for a third go-around with the Special, which is when a girl puts her tongue where the stars don’t shine. We claim it’s a special technique from some distant pleasure planet, but I know better - I think it’s done everywhere, by all sorts. And at fifty credits, it’s a good deal. I think that sealed it, honestly. I did always tell the fellas that if you ever meet a gal who’s willing to dust your back porch, she’s a keeper.
I turned on the waterworks. Not too much. Just a trickle. He asked me why, and I whispered that I was worried my boss would beat me again when I went to give him the money, since he’d been cross with me. The dark-skinned man, half-dressed in his boots, trousers and dangling suspenders, told me that he would be the one to pay instead.
“How much?” he said, his lip curling a little at the idea of dealing with the man in the office. He had his own twisted code of chivalry, you see, and was already envisioning a future where he’d possess me and never have to pay again.
“One-hundred fifty,” I told him. And he headed for the door. The office, as I explained, is just across the hall. “Just… don’t make him mad or hold back. Because he gets mean.” He scoffed and departed, leaving me to put on my leggings and garters, still wearing his access card around my neck. No doubt he’d meant to come back, finish dressing, and collect it. But he’d taken his knife. That was important.
I had told him a hundred-fifty. But to kiss, and suck my breasts, and fuck me from behind, and then the normal way, and fuck my ass, with suckjob and a Special in between… that was closer to four-hundred. I knew that, and my boss knew that, because he’s the sort of guy who could listen to a man fuck through thin walls and tally up every thrust and spurt to the nearest penny.
I’d lit the fuse. I’d made sure to gag and choke on that big prick because I wanted him to hear just how many times my throat was cock pumped. I made my boss hear that muscled body banging off my ass and making that big clapping noise; the moans weren’t just for show, they were an audio guide to everything that was happening in that room. I made sure that he could hear how full my mouth was after I was done sucking, because it’s extra to swallow instead of spit. I wanted to make sure he heard it was thick as axel grease and my mouth was full to the brim, so he could add that to the ledger.
Men do love to listen, and a girl can go far by controlling what they hear and when they hear it. But it wasn’t jealousy I was aiming for. The man in the office didn’t care who fucked me, or how. He cared about his percentage. And I knew he heard that deep-voiced harrier call him a fool, while I was keeping my voice low. His conspiratorial mind would fill in the rest.
So when this shirtless man, slick with fuck-sweat, walked up to him to drop a hundred-firty credits on his desk when it should have been over four-hundred, and he knew it, that paranoid man reacted just the way I expected.
Voices were raised almost instantly. The payment amount was viciously disputed. I heard one man called a ‘dirty offworld thief’, and another called a ‘backwater yellow-belly’. All the while, I was making my preparations, throwing my dress back on and tying my hair back into a ponytail, not bothering with the corset. I tucked the keycard down into my bosom and pressed against the wall, just out of sight.
I heard the dark-skinned man say that I belonged to him now. I had enchanted him, filled him with fantasies of breeding me and fucking me every night with that big prick of his, of sons and daughters with beautiful star-filled eyes like mine. As soon as he said that, I knew the deal was sealed. Because nobody takes a woman who belongs to the man in the office. That grasping, greedy son of a bitch.
I didn’t see it, but I heard it. A pistol came out, and then a knife. There was a cry, a struggle, and then shots rang out, with one of them blowing a hole right through the wall I was leaning against, causing a beam of light to cut across my face. There were more struggles, more wheezing… and then a heavy, mortal thump as bodies fell to the floor. Some of the other girls screamed, while the bodyguards and some of the customers bellowed to call the law.
I dared to look and I saw it… the man in the office - Mr. Whatever Name Isn’t On The Warrant - laying empty-eyed and still, with an eight-inch blade buried to the hilt at the place where his neck met his shoulder, and blood pooling beneath him. The tanned man, half-dressed, was shot but still alive… but only just. He knee-walked toward me and reached out, unable to speak because of the fist-sized hole in his guts.
How could this happen, his quivering eyes seemed to say. I was going to take you back to my planet and make you a queen. But of course, he’d intended to do that whether I liked it or not, and fuck me whether I like dit or not, and breed me whether I liked it or not. Concubine of a man who killed for the Company. It would have been trading one hell for another.
He keeled over onto his face, this violent man, having been cooled the same way he’d cooled so many others. I had his keycard, and his big long jacket, and I ran out the back door. In all the commotion, I’m not sure anyone even saw me go.
So that’s my story, up to this point.
I’m in a new place right now, a place I’ve never been. Low orbit. The ship that belonged to the tanned man is old, but it’ll do to get me from here to there. It has food stores, a bunk, a bathroom, and even a fancy computer that talks to you. I’m not enough of a rube to be astounded by the sight of New Canaan as a big, round dustball in space - I read all about planets and starships in those books my father used to scold me for - but it’s a beautiful view, nonetheless.
I only made one stop before I went to the spaceport, and that was to my old house - the falling apart shack with abandoned properties on all sides. My adoptive father was still there, still drunk, and still mean.
It was the first time we’d seen each other in nine months. He stumbled bleary eyed to the door, and said, “Alice, you better at least share some fuck-money if you’ve been slutting it up. You weren’t ever any good for anything else. Always reading books when you should have been cooking and cleaning. Slutting it up and putting out to the boys who pick the crops.” Hey then looked me up and down with unsubtle lust, and said: “Hell I should have broken you in my own self, since you’re not my blood.”
I was only visiting, I told him, to make sure the government hadn’t seen fit to allow him to care for any other children. He took great, mean-spirited pleasure in telling me that he didn’t have any more young wards yet, but he was expecting two of them, a boy and a girl, within a month. “And the state will pay me a pretty penny, too - for raising them right.”
“I’ll send you something when I can, daddy,” I said, after peeking around to confirm the house was empty except for empty liquor bottles. Then I left.
It takes three minutes for an orbital strike to breach the atmosphere of New Canaan and hit the surface.
And I told him I would send him something when I could.