Slave World

The radiant glare of Slave World’s double suns, one yellow the other a fading orange, dipped low over a lush tropical rainforest that stretched as far as the eye could see. Despite the diminishing light the air was still oppressively thick, a smothering blanket of pregnant humidity that could literally suck the life from a person if they weren’t careful. Colonel Nathan R. Burke, Fleet Strike, Retired, was long used to it by now, having spent the last three years bathed in this perpetual sauna.

He pressed the ice cold beer pack clutched between callused fingers to his brow, leaving behind a distorted puddle in the middle of his washboard stomach.
Damn that feels good.
A flurry of squawking Egrin passed noisily overhead, drawing his lazy attention from behind an antiquated pair of mirrored sunglasses. Vibrant shades of red and green, and the high-pitched calls that bordered on annoyance, quickly faded into the background ambience of the jungle. Another day of monotony induced apathy was drawing to a close.

Burke scowled from the comfort of his memory-gel lawn chair, quietly antsy with inactivity after a lifetime of living at the sharp end. Work only occupied a fraction of his time more often than not, and you could only spend so many hours at the gym, or the shooting range, or running endless laps around the ranch, before even that became old and tedious.

His beer pack became the target of a cagey leer, a disgusted snarl of self-contempt. He tossed its half-full remains into the small recycler several feet away.
I gotta lay off the juice, been making a habit of that lately. Inactivity leads to boredom, which leads to slovenly conduct and needless indulgence, which leads to inevitable degeneracy, which leads to…
He refused to allow himself to sink to the same level as the other inhabitants of this insanely perverse circus of a world. A few hours hitting the weights later tonight, would be his penance for a momentary lapse of reason.

A faint sonic boom drifted down from the heavens, bringing him to instant awareness. Predatory intentness swept the sky laced with fluffy shades of cotton candy, focusing on the reflective glint of metal descending towards the ranch landing-grid. It was moving far too slowly to be anything, but a civilian freighter.
A ship like that would be dead meat in an assault. What, maybe four seconds, before they bought it?
And that was if the planetary defense network was asleep.
Burke made a gun with his hand, pointing his finger, taking aim at the rapidly growing image. His thumb dropped, pulling the trigger.

“Bang.”

Burke’s wrist communicator/computer, commonly referred to as a wrist-com, beeped to life, pulling him from his reverie of imaginary destruction.
Gee, what a surprise.
It was Carol, the bubbly communication tech from Ranch Central Control. He rose his wrist to his mouth, letting the voice activated controls accept the call.

“Burke, here.”

“Sorry to disturb you, Nathan, but Mr. Todd has requested your presence for the inprocessing.”

The unexpected request caused him to sit up in surprise. “I thought I wasn’t receiving any new slaves in this shipment?”

“You’re not, but we do have a shipment of M’ithincti arriving with them, and Rupert wants you there in case there’s any trouble.”

“Give me a break,” Nathan groaned, flopping back in his chair. “He has more than enough security. Just tell Harry to send an extra team over, and everything will be fine.”

“He was very adamant that
you
be there, Nathan. I don’t think he’s going to take no for an answer this time.”

“Christ on a crutch, tell him…tell him I’m busy or something, tell him I’m drunk!” Nathan really had no desire to witness another group of beings, human or otherwise, initiated into a life of forced slavery. He saw more than enough of that on a day to day basis as it was.

“You know as well as I do,” Carol began with a slight whine of annoyance. “That your B.A.C. is way below the impairment level. Rupert also wanted me to remind you of your obligation while under contract to Mr. Savota. No excuses this time, you seem to be making a habit of those lately.” He rolled his eyes, accompanied with a painful sigh from her partially veiled accusation.

“Fine, let me grab a quick shower first.”

“You better hurry, the freighter has already landed, and-”

“Yes, Carol, I can see that. I’ll be there in ten minutes, Burke out.”

“Wait! Nathan, I-”

Burke ended the transmission before another proposition for dinner and a night of dancing in Port City would have to be awkwardly deflected again. As cold as it may sound, he just didn’t know how else to deal with her persistent attention anymore, except trying to ignore it. But then again, he’d never been good with women. Babbling incontinence and uncertainty when confronting the opposite sex outside of anything but a professional setting, made strange bedfellows for a man considered almost fearless by those that knew him.

Burke pushed himself out of the chair, quick and deadly graceful, stretching, hands locked above his head. Living steel rippled, overlaid by weather-beaten, coppery bronze. The upper corner of his lip, lined with a neatly trimmed mustache that matched his military regulation length brown hair, curled into a nonplus frown. One of the nearby security pods with a visual feed was pointed directly at him.
I’ve never even laid a hand on her… It’s starting all over again.

This wasn’t the first time Burke had been the target of computerized stalking by one of the women in the employment of Michael Savota. Things had gotten so bad with Vanessa nearly two years ago that he’d been forced to remove all the artificial intelligence, or AI controlled monitoring gear from his quarters.

He had to admit that Carol wasn’t bad compared to most: cute, about fifteen years his junior, and brunette, which happened to be his preference. Her above average intelligence mixed with a personality of bubbly friendliness and a generous endowment of curves, made for an appealing combination in any woman. Carol stood out among the rest, making her a tempting choice, but Burke still had his doubts about her motives, and looks, in his experience, proved to be nothing but a superficial lie more often than not. Torri Richards was a prime example of that.

Torri was the perpetual horn-dog of the ranch staff, and made no efforts to conceal it. To make matters worse, she’d found a loophole in his tightly regulated circle of forced acquaintances recently as his unneeded and unwanted assistant. Burke couldn’t stand her. Beside the fact that she had her nose so far up Savota’s ass that she knew what he ate on a daily basis, she was a power hungry, ruthless bitch. Torri’s cruel arrogance was matched only by a fiendish sex drive, contained within a tall, panther-sleek body behind the face of an angel. She was a devil in disguise and her malicious brutality overflowed to the treatment of the slaves whenever the fancy struck her. They’d already butted heads several times because of it, but what really put their working relationship on ice happened only last week.

Burke had found her waiting in his bed one night after work, her intentions as obvious as the fingers buried between her legs and the glassy look of stoned arousal in her eyes from one too many hits of Euphoria X. That was when the fur flew and he’d put his foot down with her at last. The fact that Torri could be so presumptuous, so misguided in her assessment of him to the point of invading his privacy really grated Burke the wrong way. Besides, all she wanted to do was fuck, and a rampant life of casual sex had never been one of his missions in life. In all honesty, Burke could count the number of women on one hand that he’d had relationships with over the years that even made it to that point.

Despite his surprising naiveté in some regards to women, Burke wasn’t dumb. He knew exactly what drove women like Torri to pull a stunt like that. He knew exactly what Carol, Vanessa and all the others over the years were secretly after. They were all the same in his opinion, every last split tail alive: greedy gold diggers with a visceral lust for a physique that had won the All Fleet Triathlon three years running, and the Combat Survival Skills Championship (augmented category) during his career.

Burke’s desire to hone is body to the point of near perfection had nothing to do with attracting a woman, it never had. It made him a more efficient soldier, and in war, when the lives of his Marines depended on it, that was all that mattered as far as he was concerned. Finding a suitable female acquaintance had always been a secretive, yet secondhand objective, when the fate of humanity as he saw it, always seemed to be teetering on the brink of collapse.

Well,
that’s someone else’s responsibility now,
he thought bitterly
.
Retirement, what a joke.
The life of a glorified babysitter had never been on his list of aspirations.
At least I have Donna.
If it weren’t for her, Burke would have been gone long ago; happily leaving this place to the people it had been created for.

Burke was silently fuming by the time he entered the cool interior of his modestly decorated, Spartan, single story bungalow. Michael Savota, Donna’s degenerate excuse for a husband, and unfortunately his employer, didn’t deserve a woman like her. Their marriage had digressed to the point of a legal formality, and he ignored her for the most part now. Good, it just meant that she and Burke could spend that much more time together instead.

His nightly visits to Donna had become a routine that you could set your watch by. Most times she fell asleep nuzzled to his chest, safe in his protective arms, content with the knowledge of being loved by at least one man in her life. Spending time with her was the only thing that Burke had to look forward to in this tropical paradise engineered to fuel the insatiable avarice of the mega-rich. This was Slave World: an entire planet dedicated to the fulfillment of every perversion and hushed debauchery known to man. Burke could have cared less about those things; this may be his home, but it was also his prison, one he was bound to by the love of a woman who meant more to him than life itself.

Burke stepped into the shower cubicle, activating the pre-programmed sequence that pelted his body with the cooling sensation of presciently controlled eighty-degree water. He closed his eyes, letting the lukewarm bliss rinse the sweat and accumulated grime of his dirty job down the drain. The filth always returned though, day in and day out. It always did when you were a slave Overseer, a trainer, a small god to those poor unfortunates that fall under the leash of tentative authority. He hated this place and his job with a passion.

Burke’s quarters really weren’t all that different than when he’d been aboard ship, being clinically sterile to the point of bland necessity. People were generally creatures of habit, even unintentionally, and Burke was no different than anyone else in that sense. Besides, habit becomes a lifestyle all in itself, if given time. He took a fresh pair of undergarments and lightweight khaki shorts, from among the other precisely folded contents of a dresser. A matching short sleeve shirt with razor-sharp creases, followed from the closet that still looked as if on display and inspection ready, at a moment’s notice.

Like most old soldiers, Burke had a coveted collection of family holo-photos. In many cases, they were the sole reminder of a life left behind forever. One contained his deceased parents on their honeymoon: majestic, waving happily with the surf lapping around their ankles. Burke’s older brother, a brother he hadn’t spoken to in years by mutual choice, stood self-assertive and contemptuous in his University gown. A beautiful brunette, proud and confident, rode a sorrel mare in a lazy canter under a blazing sun. His sister was such a different person now, after her accident twelve years ago.

Burke’s fingers paused at the buttons of his shirt, lips pursing at the image of youthful beauty, with an innocently crafty smile. The dizzying array of cheerleader poses continued with energetic insanity, as they had since the photo was taken six years ago. Ashley, his one and only niece, had sadly become a constant source of silent disappointment and impending failure. Too wild, too out of control… Sooner or later the walls would come crashing down, and her world of frantic partying and hormone-driven sexcapades, would come to a screeching halt of grim reality.

His brooding thoughts of Ashley’s recklessly indulgent behavior awoke a pleasant apparition from the past. She was a Fleet pilot, a rare breed of woman that he’d thought about quite regularly for years, yet had sadly drifted away with time. His memory of her was nebulous, and regretfully only vague at this point, but still enough that it sent a shiver straight to his cock; he’d masturbated to her imaginary attention over the years more time than he could remember.

Burke had never spoken to her other than when the rare instance of duty demanded it; he’d never had the courage to approach her outside of anything but that. Burke chuckled, remembering that she
did
have a gap between her two front incisors that were several sizes, too large. They gave her simplistic, girl next door beauty a slight chipmunk appearance, that he’d always found cute in some oddly intriguing way.

Maybe it had been her lurid reputation that kept him at a distance? It wasn’t uncommon for Fleet personnel to be promiscuous on board ship, during the Seth’Kelain War. With the casualty rate as high as it was in those first four years, chances are you may not be alive in the next few minutes, let alone tomorrow. She’d been a real terror though, almost as if she was immersing herself in it, becoming drunk on it to hide from some unimaginable demons. In a way he’d felt sorry for her, without even knowing why.