Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative Read Free

‘leave’ a
muffled pistol shot punctuated his monosyllabic sentence.
    Then he reached her. He stopped. His wide, thin-lipped mouth
opened in a grin. She became fascinated with the gold designs etched into his
teeth. His big hands reached out and ripped open the front of her blue work
shirt. Air touched coldly on her young, bare, just-budding breasts.
    “Gettin’ there,” his lank voice said, pulling out the short
vowels. “Yep. Gettin’ there.” He bent down to where she couldn’t avoid his
eyes. “What’s your name?”
    “Loralynn Kennakris.” To her ears, it sounded almost as if
someone else had answered for her.
    “Fucked-up sorta name, Kris.”
    The man straightened.
    “Take.”

Chapter One
    Eight years later (GAT) . . .
Contract Slaver Harlot’s Ruse
    Kris tried to brush a pesky strand of hair out of her
eyes using the cleanest place on the back of her arm. It didn’t work; her arms
were covered in bilge muck to the elbows. She thought about asking the woman
next to her, but decided against it. No talking among the cleaning crew.
    She gave up and returned to washing the big conical
recycling filter. After all these years, she still couldn’t believe how much
they stank. The greasy gray-green muck had a clingy feel as if it had been
polymerized. Maybe it had. She’d never figured out what the recyclers did
exactly—why, when they were supposed to squeeze every useful organic compound
out of the ship’s waste, there was so much of this left over. She wasn’t
supposed to know. Slaves weren’t supposed to know anything—anything, that is,
except how to do what they were told.
    That’s how she’d ended up down here, in the ship’s bowels,
working in scum on the slime line—not doing what she was told.
    Well, not exactly not doing what she was told.
    God Damn! this stuff stank. She wondered why her nose
hadn’t gone dead. Maybe it had—a little. For the first hour she’d gagged
almost constantly. Strich, the line boss, had spiked her a couple of times over
it—not bad, just reminding. But she’d thought she would be used to it by now.
After all, the whole ship stunk like this—well, not quite like this ,
not near this bad—and this wasn’t the first time Trench had sent her down here
either, although he hadn’t done it often. Only when he was really pissed.
    Well, she had been trying to kill him.
    Maybe it was a stupid thing to do, she considered. Trench
wasn’t that bad to her; she had slave life easy and she knew it—occasional
trips to slime line notwithstanding. She was well-fed, given light work, even
allowed to read some or check out the vids. It’d always been that way. For a
year, she hadn’t understood why. Trench had kept her by him ever since that
first morning; the morning he’d looked at her and said Take . When she
was thirteen, she found out why.
    She had kicked and screamed and clawed and tore that first
time. Thrown things, broken things. Tried with all the strength of her young
body to kill him.
    Trench just laughed. He’d pinned her wrists in one coarse,
long-fingered hand and wrenched her quivering legs apart with his knees. She
bit him and he loved it.
    When she figured that out, she quit. It hurt too much, and
his pleasure made the very notion of a heroic resistance seem silly, even
obscene. She’d tried laying still, a limp masturbatory doll, but Trench hadn’t
liked that at all. He let her know it in the most brutal fashion possible. That
hurt too much, too. So she concentrated on trying to please him and that
worked.
    Things got better. He sometimes got her things she asked
for, if she wasn’t too greedy about it. He kept the others off her. She didn’t
get shared much unless he needed to grease a deal. He even let her alone once
in a while. This was special and she used that time to learn everything the ship’s
systems could teach her. She was looking for a way to kill him—kill all of
them. This was not the first time she’d tried.
    She didn’t