(I am thinking of this as the opening to a series of science fiction stories revolving around humanity’s first wars in space. Fair warning, lots of rough language and discussion of sexual slavery involved.)
“AHHHHHHHH!!!”
After all the effort she’d put into riding him, ‘Angela’ was happy the fat bastard had finally managed to get his rocks off. She tightened the right muscles, let an inarticulate moan out, trying her best to fake the orgasm he no doubt wanted to believe he’d given her. All she really wanted was a shower, but instead, she made herself lie atop his sweating carcass like a satisfied lover.
Her efforts to satisfy her customer were rewarded by him throwing a flabby arm around her before kissing her forehead. “Thanks, Angela, that was great, like usual. You sure know how to make an old man feel good.”
“No, sweetie, it’s you who know how to make a woman feel good. That was the best sex I’ve had in a long time.”
From the way his arm tightened around her, ‘Angela’ knew the fat idiot must believe at least some of what she’d said. If she was lucky, he might tip her some cash on top of what he’d paid the agency for her visit. That was the whole reason for engaging in the charade. Now, she had to get out of his apartment so she could get ready for her next appointment.
Angela pushed herself upright, swung her leg over, and stopped to remove the spent condom. She hated disposing of the filthy thing, but like sucking and fucking, it was part of her job as a prostitute. For all her disgust, she slapped a smile on her face as she feigned examining it. “Wow, sweetie, you shot a lot. I’m glad you had this on, or I’d be on the ‘nine month count-down’.”
Her john actually smile, like he was pleased by the thought. “That might not be so bad. My wife doesn’t want any more kids, and ours are nothing but spoiled brats. How about it, would you be willing to let me make one with you?”
Did this moron really think she wanted him to fuck his kid into her? Not a chance in hell! She fought the wave of disgust that swept over her and smiled wider. “But what would happen with your wife? And what about your career? It’s a tempting idea, but I don’t want you to ruin your life to give me such pleasure.”
His face scrunched in, reminding ‘Angela’ less of a man thinking than someone struggling to take a shit. “Well, there is that…I guess I just got caught up in the moment, baby. Thanks for thinking that through for me.”
“Any time. Wouldn’t want the best member of the Colony Board of Governors to lose his job over me now, would I?” ‘Angela’ slipped backwards off the bed and walked into the spacious bathroom attached to the bedroom, closing the door behind her. That a moron like that could be trusted to help govern one of the biggest of Earth’s orbital colonies never ceased to amaze her. She relieved her bladder, dropping the tied-off rubber in before flushing all the waste away. Supposedly condoms sold on the colony were biodegradable, so flushing one shouldn’t raise any flags. Not that she really cared. After all, his name on the lease to this space, not hers, so any official repercussions wouldn’t land on her.
The shower she stepped into was nearly as large as her apartment. It also didn’t have the five minute limit on water usage the shower she shared with ten other people in her block did. Just as well, because she spent more time than that under the stinging-hot spray, sluicing the lingering stink of her customer away. She had never understood why some people stank even fresh from a shower, while others barely registered to her nose after hours of hard labor. Whatever the reason, ‘Big Bill’ Hannity smelled like something long-dead, even fresh from a shower, and “Angela’ was happy when she could no longer caught his sent on her.
She let herself take a moment to luxuriate in the pulsing jet setting the shower offered. Letting the spray play over her slender body was close to heavenly after all the exercise she’d put in making Bill cum. But even with the sort of luxurious allowances a suite like this had, there was a limit to how much water she could use. Part of the wall changed to a screen, displaying a countdown to the point where the system would start charging extra. ‘Angela’ allowed herself one final splurge on Bill’s tab: she washed her short hair using some of the expensive shampoo his wife normally used.
Done, she thumped the water cut-off bar, and the intelligence controlling the shower took over, bringing a warm swirl of dry air up around her while it sucked every drop of water from the surfaces and the air that dried her. All the showers on the colony did this. Water being something that had to be harvested in far more distant portions of the Sol system, the colony’s life support systems wasted none of it. At her apartment, the shower often dried her in air colder than the surroundings.
Her skin dry, she stepped out to face a portion of the wall that had been programmed to become a mirror. ‘Angela’ had no memory of her parents, no memories earlier than growing up in a refugee camp in war-torn Thailand. So she had no notion of how she came to possess her dark skin, nor a face one of her clients had said looked fit for a Chinese goddess. It had been more john bullshit, but as she looked at her reflection, with it’s small nose and up-tilted eyes, the thought occurred to her that perhaps this is what her mother had looked like. Or maybe her face was just some random chance, as so many other of the poor living on Mike-Lima Forty-One, as everyone called the ML4-1 colony.
‘Angela’ gave her head a shake, ran her fingers through her hair to get it roughly going the same way, and pulled on one of the robes stacked outside the shower. She’d love to comb her hair, but “Big Bill” had strict rules things like that. Outside of the stall, hair and other things her body might shed weren’t automatically collected. And while his wife might not notice a few stray skin cells that didn’t be long to her, a single unfamiliar black hair among the bottle-blond hairs already littering her brush would be a dead give-away. Bill didn’t even like her using the robes, but she knew well that if she came out of the bathroom naked, the old goat would pester her for ‘another shot’, and she’d had enough of fucking him. So she’d accept the dirty look for wearing the robe and make sure to toss it into Bill’s automated laundry system before she left.
The door was hardly a crack open, but the stranger’s voice was loud enough to be understood. “Bill, what the fuck do you expect me to do? I’m head of security for the colony, but we both know the real power lies with the corporate security teams. I’ve got twenty guys who are supposed to police a population of over two hundred thousand. The smallest private security force has three hundred members, and most of them are ex-military. My force is just a joke, and we both know it’s that way because the colony founders wanted it that way. So what am I supposed to do about your ‘threatened violent take-over’?”
Every time ‘Big Bill’ talked around her, he strove to sound decisive, in control. But she heard none of that as he replied. No, if anything, he sounded like a street hustler who’d found out they accidentally conned one of the ‘Founding Families’. “Juan, you don’t understand. These people are dangerous! I mean yeah, I took their money, and accepted their support to win my place on the board…but I never, ever thought they’d go through with this bat-shit crazy plan of theirs. Hell, if they carry out their plan, you’re going to be taking a space walk without a suit on, and so will a lot of other folks. These fuckers are insane, seriously insane. They think the Founding Families made a mistake when they allowed what they call ‘non-European mud creatures’ onto the colony. These assholes are talking about spacing everyone who doesn’t fit their idea of a ‘proper’ citizen. That, or reducing them to outright slaves, even they can’t make up their minds on that point.” Bill stopped talking, whether to catch his breath or gather his thoughts ‘Angela’ didn’t know, but the person he was talking to cut him off.
“Bill, if you’re serious, why the fuck did you call me? Why not contact the head of the Paulus family? Or the O’Hannlon’s senior? I mean if someone needs to know this, it’s the household heads who sit on the Founder’s Council. They have the authority to take control of the private security firms in an emergency, not me.”
“You don’t get it, do you Juan? Some of them are involved in this….and I’ve got no fucking clue who is and who isn’t involved. So what do you think happens to me if I complain to the wrong person?Think they’re going to just sit back and wait for me to find someone who will act? I’d be dead before the end of the day, that’s what would happen.”
There was a long silence, long enough that ‘Angela’ began to suspect the conversation was over. It wasn’t. “All right, Bill, then you should contact the Earth government. Lay it all out. Even if you don’t know anything more than the person you’re in contact with, they can get troops, or peace keepers, or whatever the fuck they want to call them out here to stop this from happening. As a member of the Colony Board of Governors, you should have enough juice to get someone to listen to you.”
Big Bill didn’t respond right away, and ‘Angela’ knew why. The fat son of a bitch is trying to figure out an angle that won’t just leave him in power, but that will get him more power. She had to get out of the apartment, fast. But her clothes were lying by the front door, where Bill had forced her to strip for him. And she could neither get to them without whomever he was talking to seeing her in their holo-imager, nor avoid them getting a good enough look to ID her later. Her brain was scrambling around, looking for a solution, when Bill finally spoke.
“All right, but I can’t just send the message through my official account. I’m pretty sure they’re monitoring it. So I’ll contact a guy I know in the Communications branch and arrange for him to send it out under his ID. He’s got enough reason to communicate with the Earth government that it shouldn’t draw attention. Hopefully nobody will notice if he forwards a message for me to the Security Chief at the UN Colony Administrator’s office.”
“Fine, whatever. Just keep your head down, and quit getting in bed with murdering sleaze, for fuck’s sake!” The double-chime of a disconnected holo-call told her it was safe to come out, but ‘Angela’ waited for a count of fifty before fully opening the door. She found Bill sitting on the end of the bed in his boxers looking like he’d landed in a mine field with no map of how to get out. She stopped for a second to kiss the top of his bald head.
“Well, sweetie, I got to get going. Want to set up another visit now, or would you rather wait until you know you’ll have the free time?”
Bill didn’t respond right away, and when he did, he didn’t raise his head to meet her eyes. “No, I think I’ll wait. Looks like I’m gonna be busy for a while, so until things get a little less hectic, let’s just leave it open.” ‘Angela thought that might be it, but Bill stood, walked over to the night stand, and pulled a couple of bills at random from his wallet. “This is for being extra nice today, baby. I appreciate the effort. You take care now, hear?” And with that, he headed for the bathroom, no doubt to shower too. ‘Angela’ looked at the bills, and nearly fainted when she saw they were two hundred new-dollar bills. It was nearly as much as Bill had paid for her to come, and she was getting all of this in cash that the agency couldn’t get a cut of. She folded the bills before stuff them into the purse she carried. Not a bad hour’s work.
Dressed and out the door, ‘Angela’ became the anonymous Prostitute #3094 from the Heavenly Body’s Entertainment Corporation. The transparent dress she was forced to wear while working left no doubt what she did for a living. She was thankful no one was in the corridor. She’d become almost inured to the mix of lecherous stares of the men, and open hostility of the women, that followed her and every other prostitute who worked on Mike Lima Forth-One. Almost was the operative word. Just like she almost made enough to pay off the debt colony officials held over her for allowing her to enter the colony as a refugee. That she hadn’t had any choice about whether or not she came didn’t matter to Mike Lima’a officialdom. No, people who couldn’t afford to buy a place on the colony were required to work off any and all costs associated with them coming to the colony. So even a ten year old, half-starved Thai refugee who ‘d been stuffed into the orbital elevator car against her will had to cover the cost of allowing her to enter the Mike Lima economy.
And there’d been no charity even before then. Back when she was still Lee Bik, she’d temporarily gotten into an orphanage. But charities had to have money, and the orphanage fed the majority of it’s kids by selling cute ones to pedophiles. Bik’s first taste of sex was being raped by some white sex tourist. She still remember he stank far worse the Big Bill, and to an eight year old’s eyes and body, how he’d had a tree trunk sprouting between his legs. Half a dozen more encounters just like that proved to Bik that the orphanage was worse then the streets. But street whores were something devoutly Buddhist Thailand wanted to make a thing of the past. Bik had been picked up in one of the sweeps the Thai military ran through the streets of Bangkok. As a child, she got slightly better treatment than the older street girls, but the UN-run refugee camp hadn’t been a paradise. Bik had stayed alive fucking the older boys in exchange for extra food.
Then the day had come when the loudspeakers blared an announcement in Thai, Chinese and half a dozen other languages ordering the residents to assemble at the camp’s central square. There, she had undergone a quick medical exam and been shunted to one side of the square with most of the other children and young adults. The old, the sick, and a few Bik knew to be involved in the camp’s thriving criminal underworld, they had gone to the other side of the square. Those with Bik had gone to Sumatra to be stuffed like cattle into one of the cargo pods going up the orbital elevator. Random chance decided that she ended up here.
She slipped out the same discrete side door she’d used before, and found the usually deserted alley occupied. That occupant caused her to pause. He was a muscle-bound, pale-skinned monster, easily head-and-shoulders taller than her. Like a few white men, he shaved his head clean, but unlike most, his head gleamed like he’d polished it. But none of that was what brought her to a stop. No, what stopped her in her tracks was the look of complete contempt he aimed at her. He looked at her like he was watching a strange dog take a shit in front of him. Anxious to be away from that hostile stare, she turned her back on him and headed towards the street.
