Creations 1: The Perfect Creation

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The Perfect Creation

ISBN #978-1-906590-49-9

©Copyright Marie Harte 2008

Cover Art by Anne Cain ©Copyright May 2008

Edited by Claire Siemaszkiewicz

Total-e-bound books

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

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The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

Published in 2008 by Total-e-bound eBooks 1 The Corner, Faldingworth Road, Spridlington, Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, LN8 2DE, UK.

Warning:
This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has been rated
Total-e-burning
.

To Claire. Thanks for the opportunity
.

Planet Mardu, the Vrail System

A cautious glance around her showed Erin she’d picked the right establishment.

Raucous music and drunken carousing made it nearly impossible to hear anything anyone said. The illegal haze of
popper
smoke sat over the din like a blanket of obscurity, and the intentional darkness in the gaming bar more than told her the law was just as welcome, as say, someone like her.
Not at all.

Furtively keeping to the deepest shadows in the place, she kept her eyes open for the one person she’d been guaranteed could help her. The prisoners on Eyra had assured her that for the right price, Cheltam would do anything. And if it meant crossing System law, so much the better.

Studying the slop of a watering hole, she had less and less confidence in the infamous Cheltam. Unwashed, hard looking men and women dotted the area. Shockingly, couples engaged in sex wherever and whenever they pleased, while others placed bets on anything from vid-displayed
threll
races to which woman over the bar would orgasm first. Not the best place to find herself a saviour. But with no other option, Erin would do what she had to in order to survive. A large body bumped her, and as she turned to apologise, the sight that met her stunned her into silence.

A large male shoved his trousers to his knees. He stood between the naked thighs of a heavily made-up female, one currently moaning and groaning as the male latched onto one of her bared breasts with a slick, open mouth. Slurping and sucking noises grew, grunts and straining flesh pressed at each other in odd places, and to her surprise, Erin felt heat rush to her face.
What? I’m surprised? Embarrassed?
Another thought occurred to her.
I’m sexually
aroused?

Curious, as she’d never before felt the sensation, she watched the couple slam up against the wall, oblivious to their audience. The male pressed into the female, and without further pause gave in to her demands. He lifted her against the wall, wrapped her legs around his waist, then… Erin and several others shifted to get a better look. The male gripped something between his legs, probably his penis, and shoved inside the female with a long, drawn out groan.

They moved against one another, and the male began pumping his hips. The joining ended rather quickly, with the male’s sudden stillness, a groan, and the female’s cries for more. Much like an animal coupling, Erin thought, no longer intrigued by the act itself. The pleasure the male appeared to have received, however, made her curious. In all her studies, she’d never quite exhausted human reproduction. Oh, she had the basics from books and such, and her sister was a font of information, but a live demonstration had been deliberately avoided. Even her schooling on the subject had been brief. Why had Canunn left off that part of her education? And why had Synster been so adamant to instruct her in the act? Was this male’s pleasure the reason her Handler constantly looked at her so oddly?

And why am I wasting time on this crap when I have more important things to do? Like keep
my damned neck out of a peacemaker’s collar?
Disgusted with her rampant curiosity, which, if she weren’t careful, would be the death of her, Erin bypassed the ragged couple and sought the tall, scarred man she’d been told would lead her to Cheltam.

Trying to make herself appear much smaller, she hunched her shoulders, tucked into her stolen black netter’s jacket, and carefully stepped through the bar, trying hard not to invite undue attention. In addition to the darkness and smoke, the long collar and drape of her jacket sufficiently covered the parts of her not encased by long trousers and a thin sleeveless shirt. Boots and gloves hid her extremities. And the dark glasses on her face hid the unusual, mismatched hues of her eyes. One glimpse at her unique colouring and System law would be all over this place. The sinful denizens around her would have to be insane to pass up the exorbitant reward Blue Rim Labs offered for information on one of their ‘scientists gone rogue’. An out and out obvious lie, but they knew she’d never tell anyone the truth… not if she wanted to live.

She grimaced at thoughts of the prison she’d recently escaped. Four hellish years, almost her entire life, spent surrounded by drab green walls and Eyran scientists. Everything had a reason. Everything, down to the last detail, was planned. Tests, tests, and more tests.

Pain and numbness, followed by experiments that even now made her shudder in remembrance. And Canunn thought she would come crawling back ‘home’ if given enough time in the
real
world?

Erin huffed and moved faster through the bar. With her brother and sister now taken care of, she had no other thought than vengeance on her mind. Too bad the law couldn’t be trusted worth a damn. She glanced back over her shoulder and narrowed her gaze, calling on her second sight. In seconds the haze in the room cleared, and she plainly saw a pair of peacemakers—the ones she thought might have been following her earlier—talking to one of the huge thugs working as bar security. The guard, a Ragga, one of the System’s strongest inhabitants, would be invaluable in a place like this. Very few could defeat a Ragga, and though Erin’s own manufactured strength had been tested, she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out if the practical application of what she’d been taught would hold.

Quickening her pace, she all but ran into the man she’d been looking for.

“Sorry.” She coughed and deliberately lowered the pitch of her voice, fixated on the distinctive scar marring his left cheek. “You Drekk?”

“Maybe.” The man wasn’t thick enough about the torso and arms to be Ragga, but he had height and strength of presence. Something told her he could hold his own in a fight, and as she instinctively sized up a potential enemy, her body automatically readied to protect itself. It was with some effort that she maintained calm and held back her pheromones in the face of this dangerous male. Drekk’s eyes were gunmetal grey and flat, the scar on his cheek pinching the corner of his mouth into an unhappy grimace. “Your contact?”

“Wheller.”

Drekk stared at her a moment. Then he nodded, and she released the breath she hadn’t been aware she’d been holding. He motioned for her to follow him, and they left out of a side door she hadn’t seen when she’d previously scouted the bar. Drekk opened the door of a nondescript rover, and she hesitated before getting in. Her instincts were screaming at her not to enter the vehicle, where her defensive manoeuvres would be limited by the constrained space.

“You come with me, or you don’t see him.” He waited.

If she’d had anyone else she could turn to she would have. But she’d only been on the outside for four measly months, and two of them had been spent healing and evading the law. It had taken her a month to track down Cheltam, and as long to find a ship to stow away in to Mardu. She’d made it this far. A little courage would get her where she wanted to be soon enough.

Taking a leap of faith, she entered the vehicle. Drekk closed the door behind her and entered. He started the vehicle with the sound of his voice and set a course to their destination, then leaned back to let the conveyance lead the way.

“We’ll be there in twenty minutes, standard time.” Drekk turned to face her. “Not Eyran time, which I’ve been told is much more accurate than the common timestamp the rest of us use.”

Her pulse sped and her heart raced at his mention of her homeworld. Eyra, a place she never wanted to see again, unless she stood at the controls of a Melan Warship with enough firepower to burn Blue Rim to the ground.

Erin tried to shrug it off but kept her attention on his face and hands.

“I can’t make out much more than your hair colour. It’s what, red-black? But natural, I’ll bet, not dyed like the whores on Nebe6.” He narrowed his gaze. “And it’s funny, but your skin doesn’t seem to glitter the way it does in the description Blue Rim gave to the mercs.”
Shit.
How the hell he knew she didn’t have time to figure out. Because before she could move, he had a hold of her throat in one large, callused hand. “No sudden moves, pretty lady. I know all about what you’re capable of. If we’d wanted to send you back to Eyra, we could have shipped you off with those peacemakers in the bar.” Drekk closed his hand tighter, and Erin fought the urge to struggle. Instead, she adjusted her body to need less air and deliberately calmed.

“What do you want?” she rasped quietly.

Drekk studied her, his gaze impassive. “Not what
I
want. My boss wants to see you, and to see how high Blue Rim is willing to go. A hundred thousand beks is nothing to laugh at. And if you’re worth that much, he figures he can make you worth more.”
The bastard
. She wanted to rage at the unfairness of it all. That even a low-down criminal mastermind would take Blue Rim’s side before hearing her out. Drekk gave a warning squeeze and let her go, nodding when she did nothing.

“Good. Remain steady and silent and this will be relatively painless.” He smiled then, and the darkness in his gaze stirred her to an uncomfortable anxiety. Again, forcing herself to relax, she breathed evenly, gradually allowing herself a full intake of air. Erin hadn’t escaped a lifetime of imprisonment to walk placidly into the arms of a lying, cheating scoundrel. All the while scheming, she kept her eyes downcast and away from Drekk. She also cued her body to occasionally shiver, and to curl in on itself, as if in fear.

Unfortunately, that fear wasn’t all feigned. The instinct to please Drekk, to do what he said, whispered at the back of her mind, and she fought the urge with satisfying success. Erin had been bred and trained to follow orders. First her Creator’s and then her Handler’s. Going against her need to please had been harder than anything she’d ever had to face in the labs, especially since she’d done it in secret, with no help from anyone but her brother Ryen. Hell, the scientists had no need to lock her in, not with that submissive imperative buried deep in her psyche. It had taken two years of constant trial and error before she’d been able to resist even the simplest of tasks, but nothing that would alert Blue Rim to her plans.

Most of those outside Blue Rim that she’d come in contact with had been easy to ignore and evade. Drekk, however, bothered her on a fundamental level, so she did her best to give him no reason to exert undue authority.

The rest of the ride passed in silence. When they finally came to a stop, she remained frozen, pleased when Drekk gave her no more than a glance before leaving the vehicle. He opened the door and pulled her out gently, to her surprise. They walked together towards an unremarkable house on the edge of what looked like a once-respectable neighbourhood.