Tamed By the Alien Pirate by Celia Kyle Page 0,15

of Thrase.

The club is crowded, so I order a watered down Geigerbrau and mingle. Most of the patrons don’t feel chatty, their eyes intent on the naked dancers, but I find one elderly Vakutan with drooping eyelids who just won’t shut up.

I have to indulge his penchant for speaking about the good old days in order to pump him for information. This means I learn a great deal more about his life than I really want to.

“…so that’s when I quit working for Lanz and started breaking knees for his brother Ganz instead. The pay wasn’t quite as good, but Ganz doesn’t get drunk and shoot his own people on accident. Or at least he didn’t when I worked for him. Bastard fired me a few years back, said I was getting slow. Did pay me decent severance though, which is rare in my line of work.”

“That’s rough, Cyd. Real rough.” I take another drink of my half empty beer. “So, you seem like a man who knows what’s what in K’Patel.”

“Oh, I don’t know all the much, not really.”

I place one of the hard currency coins on the table between us and slide it toward him.

“Anything at all you could share would not go… unappreciated.”

I jingle the other coins in my pocket for emphasis. Cyd makes the coin disappear and furrows his ridged brow.

“Well, the weirdest shit going on right now is the fact that these damn humans seem to come in like nothing else when you least expect them. I remember a time my granddaddy used to tell me back when they were only on their home world. Now they’re spread out all over the place. Them and their Interstellar Human Condemnation or whatever the hell they call it. You know that the IHC has their shock troopers—what they call them? Seamen?”

“Marines.”

“Right, Marines. Well, they’ve got them on M’Kal now. They came in, a bunch of them, and they’re guarding the old Starcorp building. And you know that don’t make a shit lick of sense.”

“Remember, Cyd, I’m not from around here. What’s so special about the Starcorp building?”

His eyes go wide.

“You didn’t hear? It was all over the media and the holonet. See, the Star Corporation manufactured inertial dampening matrixes for the League, the Helios Combine, pretty much any client they could get, for a fraction of the cost of the nearest competitor. They worked well, too, only the reason they were so all fired cheap was they left out the radiation insulation circuits.”

I set my beer down and gape.

“But that would inundate the crew and cargo with small levels of radiation. Over time it would prove fatal.”

“Exactly. Exactly.” Cyd points at me like I’m just the smartest boy in class. “Star Corporation lost its shirt in the resulting lawsuits and had to close down. The building has sat empty for a long time, but now there’s armed guards outside. Be mighty interesting to find out what goes on in there…”

I slap a few more coins on the table between us.

“Thanks, Cyd. If I find anything out, I’ll be sure to pass it along to you.”

“Be careful. These IHC goons aren’t like the normal ones. They’ll shoot at you just for hanging out in front.”

I can tell he’s speaking from personal experience. Finishing the beer, I prepare to rise from my seat and go find Thrase.

Then the lights dim and a spotlight glows on the glittery curtain separating the stage from the back of the club.

“Gentlemen, put your manipulatory limbs together for our hottest new edition… THRASE.”

No. She didn’t…

Thrase pushes awkwardly through the curtain, dressed in a long elegant seeming evening gown and elbow length gloves. Someone has smeared garish cosmetics over her face, and the result makes her seem very…available.

Even as I cringe on the inside at how she managed to gain access to the building, my pants grow tight as she starts shaking her hips with more aplomb than I was expecting.

Thrase, what are you doing?

Chapter Eight

Thrase

What the hell am I doing?

My mind flashes back to how I got into this predicament, and it’s not one of my finer moments.

I had gone around the block, watching carefully for any more thugs, and searched for a rear entrance to the club, perhaps one maintenance or employees used for their ingress. What I discovered was that the club was not nearly so glamorous and glitzy in the back. Plain unadorned masonry walls frame a featureless metal door. There was no way to open it from this side without