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cypra
Back in the room I was staying in, one of the local bungalows that functioned like hotels, I was propped up against the headboard of the bed, looking at a holographic image of my current contact with the resistance, a woman named Sienne Dlach. She wasn’t a boss or a handler or anything, but she was the person I talked to. There was very little in the way of centralization with the resistance, so messages were often delivered by use of a chain of people, and always orally, never in text form. There were also layers of security that needed to be set up in order to make sure the messages weren’t recorded.
Sienne had warm brown skin and short curly black hair. She was a human like me, and she was married to a ccael, which was a species of alien who had a mess of tentacles. They’d actually given me a ride to Ohkk. If I got what I was looking for, they’d probably pick me up again at the rendezvous point.
But considering I wasn’t going to get it, I was going to need a ship to come get me sooner, I thought.
“Get a guide of a different species,” said Sienne.
“No other species go up there,” I said. “I guess those vvoln are scary as all fuck and the only reason anyone went up there was to mate.”
She considered. “Well, how necessary is a guide at all?”
“I just said the vvoln were scary,” I said.
“You know how to use a blaster, though, right?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“And you can program the coordinates into a speeder,” she said. “You just go up there on your own.”
I sucked in a breath. It was dangerous, of course, but everything about being in the resistance was danger. “That’s what you think I should do? I was thinking… you know how sometimes women volunteer to do those longterm spy arrangements where they have to, like, infiltrate the Toth by posing as sex workers? By, um, bybeingsex workers?”
“Uh, yeah, but that’s a volunteer thing,” said Sienne. “I would never volunteer for that.”
“Maybe this would kind of be the same thing, though,” I said. “I have to fuck this guy, you know, for the cause.” I squared my shoulders.
She raised her eyebrows. “How long has itbeen?”
“That’s not the point.”
“What does helooklike?”
I blushed. “That’s also not the point.” I shook my head. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He won’t do it. He wants more credits than anyone could ever get him for the job.” I didn’t tell her I’d broken cover. That was a bad thing to have done, and it wouldn’t go over well.
“I thought you said it was like an out-of-control thing, anyway. Sounds…” She considered. “I don’t know. Maybe from a certain perspective, I could see the kink factor there, but overall, no, it sounds insanely dangerous.”
“Well, so is going up there on my own with a speeder and a blaster,” I said.
“If he ruts out or whatever, I’m guessing he’s going to be useless against those vvoln things, so then you’ll be in the exact same place as you are now. No, worse, because they’ll be coming for you, and he’ll have you pinned down with his—”
“Okay, seriously, Sienne, I just said he’d never do it. I really don’t have any options. I have to go out there on my own.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” said Sienne. “If this is too much for you, we’ll assign someone else.”
“Yeah, and I’ll have to find my own way off the planet,” I said. The resistance was strictly voluntary, but I’d been in so long that I depended on them for transportation and funds. They didn’t so much pay as they just bought me food and places to sleep and that sort of thing. Maybe if I was that dependent on them, it wasn’t strictly voluntary, but it didn’t matter.
The Toth needed to be stopped, and I was going to do my part.
Back only a generation ago, things were very, very bad in this galaxy for humans. The Toth lost all their women to a weird virus and they bred with humans instead, but not in a nice, respectful way. In an abduction-sex-slave way. In a we-think-all-other-species-besides-us-are-basically-animals-even-as-we’re-using-them-for-reproduction way. The Toth took us from our homeworld, Earth, which is in another galaxy, and used to be easily reachable through a wormhole in space. Except that closed up, and now, we humans in this galaxy were just stuck here. It was fine with me.
I’d never been to Earth. My grandmothers were both abducted, and so this galaxy had always been my home.
Sometimes, you heard stories from other humans about Earth, how it was so much better there. But what did it matter? We couldn’t get there, so we needed to makethisgalaxy better.
Both of my grandmothers were bred by the Toth after they arrived, so I had half-Toth relatives somewhere, I guessed. Sometimes Toth let the human mothers stay with their kids. Lots of times, though, once they decided they were done with the humans, they dumped them. I grew up in the Colony, this humans-only settlement on Jenthe. It’s a desert planet, but the little area where the humans live is an oasis, and it’s nice there. Sort of. I mean, it’s hard to escape the fact that no matter what, you’re living in a prison, basically. I had to get out of there.
There’s lots of ways out for a human girl in the Colony, but most of them involve selling your body for sex in one way or the other. The Toth rule the galaxy. We humans are very similar to Toth. The basic differences are just that the Toth have no hair and that their skin color ranges all over, instead of the muted sort of tones humans tend to have. Toth will be bright green or pale purple, that kind of thing. Anyway, they only wanted to breed with us, and it’s a known fact that if the ruling class of a society wants something, then the people in the lower classes covet it, too.
