Salvation for Three

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"Welcome to the Endlands," a smooth female voice announced from the drone that circled the cargo bay.

The drone continued to spin overhead and search the space, red lights blinking, camera monitoring activity when little occurred. Keer flicked a glance at the whirring machine and moved into one of the jump seats wedged tightly against a bulkhead. She felt the ship lurch as the auto-captain began a slow descent, straight to the nearest flat surface. She tensed, holding her breath. Auto-pilots were the generally accepted captains of freighters but she'd rather place her trust in a human or alien pilot. Unfortunately, no human being could land this bucket of bolts without it falling apart. Still, she didn't like being the only breathing decision-maker on a freighter this size.

Autopilots were eerie.

"Okay, tinhead, get this thing on the ground." The drone zipped over and blinked its red lights at her, camera focusing. Keer raised a gloved hand and slapped at the whizzing dome, which ducked. "Get lost, mud fly, or I won't miss," she muttered under her breath.

"Mud flies are not prevalent in the Endlands." The information files loaded quickly even in an auto drone. "However, precautions should be taken to wear protective shield gear in case of lunar wind

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exposure. Shield gear is available in the..." The drone's files clicked, searching for inventory on the empty freighter.

"Shield gear in place." Keer decided to let the drone off easy. It would hover, searching its data files and find nothing. The hold of the out-of-service cargo ship would have no protective gear. Cavernous and empty, it had been a cheap rental. She had only what her backpack contained to venture into the Endlands.

The ship thumped against the ground soundly. She relaxed her tense posture and leaned into the seat. The drone moved on to weather. "Temperatures in the Endlands on your arrival, 6 degrees Celsius measurement. Remember to protect from lunar wind blast, which will alternate in forty-eight minute cycles with each moon passing. Equipment should be fiber tied. Endland's landscape is shifting constantly. Please refer to your microcompass for bearings.

"Etah, third moon from the planet, provides supply ports and recreation bays for all Endlands travelers, featuring entertainment, credit gambling and automated pleasure for visitors. Consider visiting Etah for your recreational needs." The drone sounded almost cheery at the prospect. "Return travel to Etah is not available."

Keer stopped listening after a moment. The drone couldn't provide her with any information above what she'd already gleaned from the colonists' reports. Just as well she wouldn't be traveling to Etah for supplies or recreation. She carried what she needed in her jump suit and pack. Etah, a moon for space sailors from any port, filled with sex and pleasure droids had never appealed to her, although both human and alien races indulged in the habit.

Keer had read the science behind the droids and the theories of the Terran scientists. The automation of sex with toys and bots was believed to have contributed to the shortage of female humans. She bore witness to what automated sex droids had done to the Alliance ranks. Child-bearing women became scarce in the Inner Planetary range. Sex for pleasure seemed far easier than the emotional entanglement of a marriage contract or love. And then fertility began
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to diminish and alarming rates.

While ova could always be fertilized by the machines in the labs and the nursery droids could raise the human and alien offspring, a female of any species who could carry an egg to term was treated alternatively as a goddess and a prisoner.

Keer squelched the thoughts as they crept in. She'd stayed hidden in the human populace of space bondsmen for over ten years. No one would assume a small human female would be capable of tracking fugitives from the Colony Alliance prison ships, much less bear healthy offspring. Her pheromones, carefully masked, had no discernable scent. Scent could give her away to human or alien. Her mother had seen to that.

After being held in a near-prison cell during her child-bearing years, Lhan Teho had resumed her Alliance position as a scientist.

Most of her lab time, Lhan spent researching how to mask her natural daughter's fertility. Lhan had implanted the pheromone mask nodule behind the marker chip that all women subjected themselves to at fourteen earth turns.

Keer remembered hearing her mother whisper to soothe her under her breath as she made the laser incision herself, typed in the monitoring data and then calculated the years of possible fertility.

Before she slid the chip into place, she placed the tiny nodule in Keer's wrist.

Keer watched in fascination, her arm numbed by the nurse droid that Lhan had then distracted with a "Stop drip" command. The droid recorded only the placement of the monitor chip. The nodule remained unseen. Four more nodules had been made and stored carefully for Keer's use should the mask fail. She carried one with her at all times, hidden in her skin suit or in her sting gun.

Her mother had told her she would have to laser her own skin, without the numbing gel and replace the nodule if she found herself in dire straits. Keer knew if it meant saving her own life and guaranteeing her freedom she could slice her wrist without blinking.

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No one would put her in the bondage of a fertile cage to be used by human males and alien alike. Failure was not an option.

Keer shifted in the jump seat, squirming at the thoughts. The nodule might mask her pheromones, but for the time when her fertility peaked, the burning for a mate became nearly unbearable.

After the age of eighteen she had taken to becoming a hermit during her fertile period. She would hide in her living quarters, prowling at night, watching blue vids and attempting to soothe her restlessness. She tried the sex droids but the coldness of a bot's touch had been bewildering.

Keer had been with one fumbling teenage boy in an attempt to stop the burning. He grappled with her in the supply cabin of her mother's lab, his breath smelling of pseudo alcohol and his skin clammy to the touch. Keer found his kisses bearable, praying he could ease that burning that had grown between her thighs. After he'd clumsily kissed her, shoving his tongue farther into her mouth than a Neld Warrior, he had squeezed her breasts to bruising, biting her nipples and handling her so roughly she had nearly screamed at him to get on with the fucking.

She wanted him to ease that scalding heat that no amount of her own rubbing seemed to relieve. It had been over with so fast she barely felt his small cock penetrate. A sharp pain, and then he hunched over her, groaning and crying out in seconds.

"Gods, Keer," he'd said as he pressed his damp forehead against her chest. "You are incredible! I knew you were a hot female!" After that, she used the sex bots until the humiliation of burning the energy unit out, not once but twice during her fertile cycle, had driven her back to suffering alone through her peaks. If a sex bot couldn't keep up with her drive then how could any human male or alien, if she'd even consider it? Her own hand and portable sex toys would have to do.

Over the last three hundred earth turns, males had become experts at finding the fertile females. They banded in groups believing they
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could "save" the human race if they imprisoned the remaining fertile females. Then women rebelled.

Women planet-wide took to hiding the fertile females in safe houses that moved from zone to zone to protect the fugitives.

No one questioned Keer's refusal to help hunt her sisters. No one, in this dangerous time, thought a thing of her failure to act as a bond hunter for females at risk.

"They aren't breaking any Colony laws. Have murdered no one, stolen credits or air-pirated a cargo ship," she blandly told her supervisor, Drak Voi. "I didn't know you were such a devoted Alliance citizen, Keer. Are you tellin' me you do this gig because you're a frustrated policing droid?"

"Piss off, freak hunter." Drak left it at that. Keer then resorted to planet gutter talk in a rare show of temper. Drak had hired her and gained her loyalty for as long as he employed her and he knew when to leave the small hunter be.

The other bondsmen laughed when she showed up for the bonding exam. A human female with little bionic implanting other than retina plants and a steel plated arm, the result of a fall from a Terran trawler as a child, couldn't be worth considering. A human who weighed no more than forty or fifty kilos going on a bondsman hunt? Not likely in the world of hunters who trained with Neld Warriors as recreation.

Drak watched Keer stand, spine like steel in her jump skin, with no weapons. Black hair wisped around her jump hood, she barely topped five foot-three. She had more curves than any licensed sex droid he'd seen and well equipped to fill out a skin suit the way Terran Nature had intended. He made no secret that, should she need a volunteer, he would be happy to help her out.

Most males favored the tall Amazon-like females that dominated the bondsmen trade, along with the hissing aliens, natives of Neld. A Neld female came equipped with two legs resembling any human female and two breasts, huge by any species' standard, but skin almost reptilian in nature, cold to the touch with the texture of scales.

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The Neld were prized as lovers for their other talents, which included a coiled tongue said to drive aliens and humans mindless.

Keer assumed that Drak would be attracted to anyone but a small, seemingly helpless human like herself. Certainly a tall, leggy alien could meet any sexual perversion he cared to engage in.

Drak's tastes ran to protection. He was a bear of a man, nearly as big as the Neld warriors he tested. Drak sported a spiked black and silver earring in one lobe the same color as his military-issue hair.

Keer had seen Drak in torn jump skins before. His chest, muscled and masked with crisp hair, was certainly eye popping to any female, much less one with four days a month of miserable driving heat to contend with. Drak's eyes, the color of a black Terran night, crinkled with laugh lines that gave away his humor. She knew he'd be good in any sleeping quarter he chose to jump.

It crossed her mind at times, thinking surely a man that size could at least ease her feminine needs. She pushed the thoughts away. One didn't dip one's skin gun in the company pool.

Drak realized there would be no sex play with Keer and took a stance as guardian and friend instead. Keer's small stature brought the male combatant innate in Drak's character to a rise. Right up until he saw her take two alien warriors down as they stood over her laughing.

The warriors, over seven feet in height were unprepared for how fast Keer could move. Vulnerability was an illusion Keer had crafted carefully over time, working in front of the reflecting walls of her cabin. She had gauged everything from response time to the angle needed to hit a warrior from below when an alien or human male could be nearly two feet taller than she stood. To be a success, her mother taught her she must use the skill she had been given or implanted. She might need them to save her own skin one day.

The Nelds, unknowing of the retina implants and the strengthened arm, made perfect victims. One warrior even dared to allow his lengthy alien cock to rise from the shields he wore, a direct taunt to Keer and an insult akin to being flashed by a rec port pervert. She
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scanned reported weakness in shield armor, blinking as the sensor in her eyes flashed the information to her synaptors. Then she used that to her advantage, striking at them like a viper, one foot flashing out and a sharp elbow used in upswing. The warriors, unprepared for attack, had grunted on hitting the mat, and then reached for sting guns.

"Cease!" Drak interceded. "You two!" He pointed at the Nelds.

"Come back next month after you learn to gage the speed of a gifted human female." The warriors' snake-like eyes narrowed, and they hissed curses at him as they left. Drak had dropped a large hand on Keer's shoulder. "Bondsman, you have a job. Report to processing for sign up."

Keer's grudging respect for Drak had grown, and they became friends over time, learning each other's habits.

Drak found that he could send Keer in to snatch a running fugitive who would assume she was defenseless. Eventually those fugitives would find themselves fiber tied and tossed in a cargo hold on their way back to a prison colony faster than a Neld could slip his skin.

The last alien fugitive she had snatched had not been surprised by her attack. He fought her with every slime trick at his disposal. After cutting her jump suit and drawing blood with a sting gun she had finally razor bound him, ignoring his bleeding arms and legs.

"Continue to move and you will sever a leg. Even a Neld warrior wouldn't fight this capture." She tsked at the alien who continued to writhe against the razor.

"Human bitch, I've heard of you. Bondhunter." He spat at her.

"Word is out. You won't be tracking much longer."

She'd been a bondsman for ten years, so she reasoned the alien probably spoke truth. But as long as the pheromone mask stayed in place, she would hunt, or she would be forced to run.

This runner had ripped her newest jump skin, drawing blood across one breast. She'd seen the sick desire rise in his eyes when he encountered her blood flowing. She had nightmares about that look