Accidental Acquisition Read online

  “Maybe if anyone could catch him, but he was in the wind an hour after I found him in my bed with a bimbo,” Jillian sighed. “And unfortunately, he took pretty much everything with him. I’m cleaned out, Suze. And my house is double mortgaged—I’m going to lose it. I’ll probably have to declare bankruptcy too, since he ruined my credit, and…and…”

  But at that point, she had broken down in tears.

  “I just don’t see how I can start all over again,” she had sobbed. “That bastard was stealing Wagyu steaks and lobster tails from the walk-in and selling them, too. So now my job’s on really shaky ground. They don’t believe I wasn’t somehow involved, even though I told them how he screwed me too. Management thinks it ‘reflects poorly on my judgment’ so I don’t think I’m going to be running the kitchen at The Palms much longer. And how I’m ever going to get another job with a black mark like that on my resume, I have no idea…”

  The tears kept flowing but Suzanne had hugged her and held her while she cried. When Jillian finally got hold of herself, she said,

  “Why don’t you just forget all of this and come up to the Mother Ship?”

  “And do what?” Jillian had asked, swiping at her eyes with her apron. “Just hang out with you?”

  “No, silly—get a job and live there,” Suzanne said, smiling. “And I know just the gig for you. The boys and I just bought a restaurant on the edge of the Common Area in the Kindred Mother Ship. I was going to run it myself, but then these two came along…” She rubbed her swollen belly fondly. “Of course, the Kindred are very supportive of working mothers, but honestly, I think I want to stay home with the babies. So we need a new head chef for Pa-tar—that’s the name of the restaurant. It’s kind of a fusion place with a mix of classic Earth dishes and Kindred food, too.”

  “I don’t know…” Jillian had shaken her head. “It sounds like a really big change.”

  “Well, maybe a big change is what you need,” Suzanne told her. “Look, I know it’s kind of a step down—going from running a palace like The Palms to a little place that only seats fifty on a good night. But right now it sounds to me like you could use a little less stress in your life. “Who knows—maybe you’ll even find a Kindred or two of your own and settle down like I did.” She grinned at Jillian hopefully.

  “No—no more settling down for me,” Jillian said grimly. “I’ve had enough romance to last me a lifetime, thank you very much. The one time I try to open my heart, look what happens—I get scammed.” She shook her head. “No, I have absolutely no interest in ever getting married or even dating ever again!” She sighed. “But I could use a fresh start.”

  “Then let me give you one,” Suzanne said gently. “You gave me one—remember? You took a chance on me when no one else would.”

  Suzanne had come from a pretty rough background. When she was only nineteen, she’d been tricked by an abusive boyfriend into becoming a drug mule. When she’d been caught, her boyfriend had thrown her under the bus completely and she wound up serving several years in prison. After that, she’d had a really hard time finding a job but she had worked in the prison kitchen and had some rudimentary skills.

  Revealing all this in her interview to Jillian, she had broken down sobbing. Her rent was past due and if she didn’t find a job soon, she was going to be in trouble with her parole officer. She had begged Jillian to give her a chance and Jillian had—and she had never regretted it. Suzanne had worked her way up the kitchen hierarchy from dishwasher to line cook to Jillian’s personal sous chef and she had never once let Jillian down.

  “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 ingredient
s 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.

  Well, people was a relative term in this case. The Buy-All-Sell-All was home to vendors from many different planets and customers came from all over the galaxy. There was a Triblian to Jillia’s right who had to fold his long, giraffe-like neck on itself in order to fit in the tram. To her left, was a Gougan that only came up to her knees and was covered in long, green hair. Jillian thought this kind of alien looked a little like “Cousin It” from the old Adams Family TV show.

  Further down, on the tram just ahead of hers, she saw a Trollox climb aboard. The tram groaned alarmingly under the huge creature’s weight and both of its heads cursed at the people who were scrambling to make way for it.

  Jillian winced in sympathy with the scrambling passengers. Though interspecies fighting was disallowed and the rule was strictly enforced by the Master of the Market—an omniscient being who lived in the very center of the Buy-All-Sell-All—she was especially careful to avoid Trolloxes.

  “They don’t give a fuck for rules,” Hard, Suzanne’s Dark Twin Kindred husband had warned her. “And they like to steal humanoid women to gestate their young in. The problem is, once the Trollox fetus is mature, it chews its way out of the host mother, killing her in the process.”

  Jillian had shivered at the awful thought.

  “It’s a damn good thing I’m too old to be attractive to that kind of creature,” she’d remarked.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Hard had remarked, looking at her. “There are plenty of warriors who would like a chance to bond with a mature Elite like yourself, Jillian. In fact, I believe that’s why the bride draft age was changed to include females that were older than the original age limits.”

  Jillian had thanked him for the compliment, though she thought the Dark Twin was wrong about any Kindred warriors being attracted to her. She’d dreamed of maybe starting a family with Brad during the brief time they had been married, but now she was really glad she hadn’t. Having a child with that bastard would have been a real nightmare.

  And anyway, she was happy on the Mother Ship and pretty much adjusted to the fact that she was never going to do the motherhood thing. She liked her life—cooking and being creative with wild new alien ingredients and getting to go to the huge Buy-All-Sell-All market on a regular basis—which was very safe, as long as she gave the Trollox and his kind a wide berth. Sure, she was lonely sometimes and wished she had a man to hold her, but that just wasn’t in the cards for her, she thought, as she stepped off the tram at its next stop.

  Jillian had her usual routine all marked out. Since Pat-ar got its regular supplies in scheduled deliveries, she was only here to get the more exotic things she needed for specialty dishes. First she went to the vegetable and produce side of the market. Here, hundreds of stalls selling fresh alien produce covered at least five city blocks.

  Jillian pulled her poison checker out of her tote— it was a hand-held device that looked like a stubby pencil with a light at the end of it. When trying new ingredients, you couldn’t be too careful. A fruit from an alien planet that looked luscious and succulent might be stuffed full of some kind of natural poison which was harmless to the native species where it grew, but deadly for humanoids.

  She passed the checker over any ingredient that looked interesting enough to try. If the light was red, she left it strictly alone, not even touching its outer skin. But if the light at the end of her poison scanner turned green, she knew the ingredient was safe to use and she would often get some to try.

  On that particular day, she looked through the stalls, buying a few verbeena fungus clusters—basically big purple mushrooms that grew together with their stalks entwined—(they had a beefy flavor that tasted like rare steak,) as well as an oing-oing fruit from Veepnur. It had bright pink skin and dark blue flesh that tasted like a cross between watermelon and lychee with some hot cinnamon notes thrown in. Jillian planned to use it for a simple sorbet to cleanse the palate between courses for the VIP dinner. She got a few more things and then she was ready to go.

  After finding what she needed in the produce side of the market, she hopped back on the tram and rode it around to the back of the Buy-All-Sell-All. Normally, she would have stopped at the protein and seafood side as well, but she had all the meat she needed back at the Mother Ship. The only thing she lacked for the VIP dinner with the Nebrian Ambassador, was the famously expensive and hard-to-get thaelite.

  The back side of the Buy-All-Sell-All was reserved for exotic ingredients. It was also where the entrance to the Dark Market was located.

  Jillian had been to this end of the market before, looking for hard-to-get spices and herbs, so she wasn’t worried about getting into any trouble. As long as she stayed back from the pain threads that cordoned off the area and away from the ominous arching entrance to the forbidden zone, which was covered in a long, black curtain cut into foot-wide flaps, she was just fine.

  Exactly what went on in the Dark Market, neither Kind or Hard had ever told her. But Jillian got the idea that there
might be some kind of humanoid trafficking or illegal substances being sold. Whatever it was, she wanted no part of it and she was quite content to pass it by—though she did notice the huge, two-headed Trollox she’d seen earlier entering the arched opening. It paused before pushing the long black flaps of the black cloth barrier aside.

  For a moment, one of the creature’s heads turned and looked directly at her, its yellow eyes narrowing as it scanned her body. Jillian shivered and looked away hurriedly. The Trollox was ten or twelve feet tall and it had grayish-green skin and long yellow tusks sticking out of its drooling mouths. It looked like a cross between an ogre and one of those weird pig-men guards in the Star Wars movies, she thought.

  Resolutely putting the giant Trollox out of her mind, she started looking for a stall that sold thaelite. But every proprietor she asked shook their heads.

  “Sssoory. Too rich for my blood,” hissed a Saurian, his long, alligator tail swaying gently in negation. “But you might try the Yonnite Missstresss at the end of thiss row of stallss. She often has rare and expensssive ingredientss for ssale.”

  Jillian thanked him, making sure to stay well clear of his long, snapping jaws, and made her way to the end of the row. There, she found a rather gaudy-looking shop hung with golden cloth and decorated with rare venga healing crystals in all the colors of the rainbow.

  The crystals caught the weak sunlight of Prius Six and spread rainbows over the smooth golden brocade, which covered the front countertop. It looked more like a place that you might find incense and balms and salves with dubious medical properties than actual, usable ingredients to Jillian. But she thought she might as well ask if they sold thaelite, since she was having no luck at any of the other stalls.

  There was a tiny silver bell attached to a long rope hanging from the top of the stall’s sunshade. Jillian rang it and waited until the gold brocade curtains at the front of the stall rustled and the Mistress of the stall came out.