K’rra stepped away from the autodoc. The Fury Jae looked down at her elder lying unconscious on the exam table. The servo arms focused along the burned scar running across his torso. As they reopened it K’rra saw Jae flinch.

Touching the Fury’s shoulder, K’rra said, “Don’t watch. It will make you emotional. Walk with me instead.”

Jae turned to follow, struggling to tear her gaze away from her wounded mentor.

K’rra went to the exit and moved back down the ramp onto the dirt landing pad the Outlander parked upon. She turned and faced Jae, surprised at how young the Fury was.

“Take a deep breath. You can’t let the rest of them see you upset. You have to be the pillar they rest on. Let’s do a lap around the ship to catch our breath.”

Jae nodded and said nothing.

Considering her starship officer’s training, K’rra recalled the instructions for leading crews during difficult times. As they walked K’rra found herself breathing, trying to clear her mind and remain focused on being as stoic as possible. She knew the Furys could read and sense emotions, and so had to be careful not to accidentally reveal too much.

“Is this your first command?” K’rra asked.

“Command?”

“Whether you are, or not, all those people on the ship are looking to you for guidance.”

“I’ve just graduated my trials this last year. I’m in no position to lead.”

“The universe does that, hits you with challenges you don’t think you are ready for.” They had circled the ship and K’rra continued her pep-talk, “I thought the same thing when I graduated and found myself in charge on a science vessel.”

“You’re a captain? You don’t look that much older than me.”

“Not a captain, I’m a commander, a doctor on a science ship. But all the scientists… and medical personnel…” K’rra flinched inside, she was supposed to be playing a doctor, not a scientist. She had a doctorate degree making her a Doctor of Physics, but that did not confer the same honorific as a Doctor of Medicine.

She pushed on trying to smooth over her fumble, “They all looked to me since I’d graduated Academy and had the heaviest bars on my collar. Some of them, had been doing field work for years. What was I supposed to know, next to their actual experience? But that didn’t matter, they’d been told I was their leader, and I had to pretend every single day that I was. Any hesitation, any show of doubt, and the façade would be over.”

Jae stopped and looked into K’rra’s face. The younger woman looked conflicted. She took a long breath.

K’rra kept her mind as clear as possible, reciting natural laws to keep her mind clear and emotions steady. If the Fury caught so much as a whiff of insecurity in the science officer, the game would be over.

“Why don’t you take a moment and catch your breath. Let the port master know the Outlander is ready to take off and have our ground lock lifted. It will give you a few moments. I’ll check up on your Maester.”

The Fury nodded and turned heading across the dirt landing pad to the starport command building. It was a shack really, nothing more than a room with some fancy nav-computers and a desk. K’rra turned and walked methodically up the ramp. She wanted to exhale a sigh of relief, the most dangerous person was now off her ship. Off Kaster’s ship. She forced herself to walk slowly up and inside.

Instead of going to the wounded she turned and entered the cockpit. Sitting in the pilot’s seat she saw Jae at the command shack, arm lifted to enter, when she turned suddenly and looked back. K’rra reached out and activated the scrambler. The ground lock switched from red to green, indicating that take off was now possible.

K’rra slammed the controls spinning the engines up from idle to full power. She grabbed the flight stick and yanked back, pulling back on the engine throttles the ship kicked up off the ground in an instant.

There was a single moment where her eyes locked with Jae’s. A moment of wounded hope.

As the ship rocketed into the sky, K’rra knew Jae would call the attendants and warn them. There were four of them still in the ship. Even without weapons they’d be able to overpower K’rra easily. She reached out to the gravity controls, and flicked them off. There were yelps and cries for help from the rear of the ship.

Blasting straight up towards space K’rra did g-force calculations in her head. The sound barrier would be somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve hundred kilometers per hour. This was muddled by the fact she wasn’t completely sure of the atmospheric density, safe to guess that anything around nine hundred would be safe. Accelerating that fast spread out over five seconds would create roughly four to five g’s of force. It was easily enough to knock down everyone in the back. At that speed they would hit space in under six minutes, then zero g would render everyone helpless.

K’rra eased off the throttle and lowered the elevation of climb. There’s still be more than one g of force, making it an uphill climb for anyone in the back to get to the cockpit. The floor felt like it was tilting down at a crazy angle, making it difficult to traverse. She was prepared, having set the ship this way on purpose. She just hoped none of the attendants were Furies-in-training.

She forced herself out of the pilot chair and swung down into the cockpit door. When it slid open, she almost fell into the common room. Catching herself on the frame she saw that nobody was in the room, they were all still in the middle sick bay room.

Using her grip on the frame, K’rra swung herself through the door and to one side of the crazily sloping common room. The furniture was all held fast with magnetic gripping. She played a game of hot lava swinging to a couch, then leaping from it to the table. From there it was just a quick tap dance downhill to the equipment lockers. The lockers she’d just organized days prior.

Ripping the locker she needed open, she grabbed a blast pistol then slid on her ass down the floor to the wall of doors. She hopped over the door to her room, then slammed the controls for the medical room open with her heel.

Straddling the door with each foot she aimed the blaster down into the room below. As she’d hoped, the attendants were in heap along the far wall of the room, and the two doors there. Sule was held in place by the autodoc still performing surgery on him, but Kaster lie in a crumples heap with the attendants. Good thing he’s sedated, she thought.

“Open those doors and get in!” K’rra screamed down at them. She saw one attendant had a comm unit in his hand, obviously communicating with Jae already. They all looked up at her wide eyed.

K’rra fired the blaster into the ceiling near the puppy pile. The attendants were a lot less sluggish in opening the doors and sliding into the two cells. She aimed carefully and slid down on her ass to the wall they’d been struggling on. Landing between the openings, she aimed the blaster through the gaping doors at one then the other. Kicking the control panels the doors slid shut.

There was a well warranted exhale of relief, then the g forces started fading. The ship had hit its set speed and was no longer accelerating. It was now simply maintaining nine hundred kilometers per hour. She wanted to rush to Kaster, but he’d have to wait a little longer.

Scrambling back the way she came she felt her struggles getting easier and lighter with every moment. The ship must be nearing space. Her scrambles became long leaps from hand hold to hand hold. By the end of her journey, she was practically weightless.

Pulling herself into the pilot’s seat, she flicked the ship grav back on and things returned to normal. Turning to the nav computer she pulled up a local star map and selected a system at random. It was a three-hour jump away, something that close should take no time for the computer to plot the course. In her mind’s eye she could imagine Jae commandeering a ship and closing in on the Outlander with every passing second.

It took six long minutes for the computer to plot the jump course. K’rra ignore the multiple hails sent to the ship, and knew the attendants were busy making calls with whatever comm units they had. When the ping sounded, she yanked back on the collective launching the ship into hyperspace.

She sat in the pilot seat for three hours debating courses of action. In the end she decided she was out of her league, she needed help, and Kaster was in no condition to offer it. She weighed all her options, fleeing back to Coalition space would require dodging Federated patrols. Coalition space wasn’t far, but it was still dangerous. Once there what would she do? She could use Kaster funds for hospitalization or go back to Hol Vydon for help. Neither sounded ideal. Remaining in Federated space was also dangerous, she couldn’t take Kaster to a hospital, he’d now been in multiple fights with deaths and casualties. Knowing he was injured, law enforcement would be searching for him at hospitals. She also didn’t have any underworld connections. She’d been a Naval Officer, not a criminal.

After agonizing for hours, she finally decided she would have to reach out to Hol Vydon for help. When the ship lurched out of hyperspace, she immediately checked for a comms buoy and made the call.

“Operator,” a scaley snaky Ryptos woman on the comm channel answered at the Vydon residence.

“This is Indigo. I’m in need of medical aid near the Brandak system. Any local help would be greatly appreciated.” K’rra said. She’d edited the comms program so that her voice and image would be scrambled in transmission. If the Feds picked up her transmission there would be little to give her away other than the system name.

There was a static filled pause, then, “Message received. Sit tight for instructions.”

Nearly an hour ticked by with K’rra getting more nervous by the moment. When the comms light blinked, she answered immediately.

“Operator for Indigo.”

“This is Indigo, go.”

“Help is waiting. Instructions follow. If standing in the Hr’ythian Solarium, look to the hall of great minds, underneath that, you will find your clan. In the outer pool on the rimward side there will be help. Proceed with haste.”

The message was coded, Vydon wouldn’t give the Feds easy instructions on where to find her. The Federation had experts, and expert systems however, that would be able to decode the message if given enough time.

The solarium was in the Gythian Temple of Thought, the hall coreward. She called up a regional map and scanned the star systems nearby. From Brandak she looked coreward and saw a series of six systems, only one of them began with the first letter of her clan, R for Ry’attahk. She spotted a single system called Riimos. Zooming in she saw two asteroid belts, the outer pool must be one of those. She set the computer to plot a course.

The jump took eight hours. She got Kaster back on his stretcher and made sure he was kept in slumber through drugs. The Fury Maester was no longer undergoing surgery, but the autodoc fretted like a worried mother, its arms scanning, and shifting, and picking at him. The prisoners tapped on the doors hoping for interaction, she ignored them.

K’rra tried sleeping in the pilot’s chair. It seemed disrespectful to Kaster to try napping in her bed while he lay on a stretcher on the floor. She napped infrequently, mostly worried, mostly assessing how things should have gone better.

When the double ping sounded K’rra was relieved. She was nervous about the type of help that Vydon could muster inside Federated Space, but that was out of her hands now. She pulled the collective back, and the ship launched into real space. Before her stretched a massive ring of floating rocks. She cruised toward it, wondering if she should broadcast, or wait to receive one.

The comms light flickered, and she answered hastily.

“This is Indigo.”

“Prepare for docking. Cut engines and wait. Out.” A gruff voice demanded.

She did exactly as they said, pulled the throttle back and waited sitting silently. After a few minutes a corsair ship eased out of the asteroids. It was a wicked looking beast, black as the void around it with splashes of red splattered across stubby wings bristling with weapons. It looked like a pirate ship that had run down a great giant and left its blood across the hull.

The corsair loomed over the Outlander, it was a much bigger ship. K’rra wasn’t certain of the exact make, but she guessed it had a crew of several dozen, maybe forty all together. There was a massive clang as it connected, and the hatch above the exit ramp lit up.

K’rra hesitated only a moment before hitting the control that would open the Outlander to the other ship. Whoever Vydon had sent for help was already operating in this region. There was no way they had enough time to jump here from Coalition Space. That meant they were raiders, slavers, or pirates.

The hatch opened with a blast of air rushing in from the larger ship. As it swung open K’rra stood her ground, anxious to have invaders come aboard.

At the front of the pirate crew stood a tall humanoid, two heads taller than K’rra with a wide bare chest. She first noticed the green tint to his bald head, then the impossibly long ears sweeping back past his skull with little tufts of fur at their tips. It was the first Xuriant she’d ever seen. A beast people from a low-tech world known for their violent honor system.

He sauntered over to her slowly, each step spanning two Human sized ones. His dark eyes scanned her up and down, assessing her. She pegged him on that alone as a slaver determining her worth.

She waited for him to speak, growing ever more nervous as his crew drove into the ship past him. They all had nasty looking blast weapons at the ready as they fanned out into the interior of the Outlander.

Unable to bear the silence any longer K’rra asked, “Hol Vydon sent you?”

“I’m no dog, girl!” The towering green skinned man barked. “You’ll be paying dearly for our services. No?”

K’rra nodded frantically, feeling small, helpless, and at the mercy of this slaver. “Of course. I just wanted…”

“Silence! Are you not a slave?”

“Yes. I am the prop…”

He cut her off again, “Why do you address me as equal, slave-girl?”

“I...”

“Inspect!”

K’rra snapped out of her terror and into a slave’s primary pose, feet spread, hands behind neck.

“This is better.” His dark eyes glowered down into her. She had to look away. “And that is even better. If a slave was my own, a beating she would get for looking up at me. You understand this?”

K’rra nodded keeping her eyes downcast.

“And why is this one clothed? Show yourself to me as a slave should, girl.”

Her fingers flew to the fasteners of the jump suit stripping it off with a practiced efficiency. In the next room, she could hear yelling as the raiders found the attendants in their cells. In just moments K’rra had gone from commanding a ship, albeit poorly, to nothing more than a slave once again.

The tall Xuriant walked around behind her. “Bend!”

She bent at the waist while moving her hands back to her ass cheeks. Opening herself she knew his eyes were on her holes. The thought of it made pangs of ache that she hadn’t felt in days explode in her belly.

Long delicate fingers, much larger than a Human’s cupped her making K’rra gasp. He worked her, massaging her roughly until she juiced up slickening his digits. When he slipped one inside her she moaned loudly.

“Now this! This is how a slave acts.” His buried finger explored her intimately, making her gasp and cry out as he continued, “A slave is wet, this is good. Will make having you so much easy. Is good that you wet so easily. A well-trained slave. I will enjoy you for as long as we offer our hospitality. No?”

“Whatever your price,” K’rra moaned.

She worried what Kaster would think when he woke, but knew in the end, she was just a slave, his to use or sell as he wished.

First:

Rogue Fury – Part 1