4. Medical Malpractice

"Can't do it, I'm afraid."

I got to the station and I found a doctor. The doctor is a human male, which made me feel a bit better at first. There's always something comforting about interacting with your own species. That should have been the end of my intrepid journey, but here I am, yet again being told why my very simple plan can't work after all. What the hell is going on with reality that I can't seem to ever get my way?

I am lying on a bed held together with metal tape and bits of other beds. I am still wearing the frilly nightgown, though it doesn't look quite as pristine as it did when Atlas first gave it to me. The bottom hem in particular has picked up a range of interesting staining and debris. I have managed to find some boots, though they don't actually match. I have one sheepskin boot on one foot, and a tight leather boot on the other. I look like a dominatrix shepherd. I look like a mess.

What I look like is the least of my worries. The nanobots are what I have to worry about, and why I apparently can't get rid of them.

"Why the hell not?"

"Because the nanotags that outfit uses burrow into flesh. They're not designed to be temporary. They're designed to be permanent. To get them out, we'd have to not only locate each of them, we'd have to punch five separate holes in your body to get at them, and those holes aren't just going into fat and muscle. Looks to me like several of these tags have lodged themselves into organs."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

He gives a shrug. "They're nanotags. They're tiny. So, no. Hopefully not. But it does mean I can't get them out. As for deactivating them, the amount of radiation I'd have to bombard you with in order to achieve that would make you sicker than you already are. Best advice I can give you is wearing shielded clothing. An inert material that reflects signals would do the trick."

Ileave the doctor's back office wearing a tinfoil hat. I also have a tinfoil jacket, and tinfoil pants. I have my doubts that they will work, but they're better than the literal nothing that the doctor could otherwise offer me.

I still have the scythkin shuttle for now, but of course that's trackable too. I'm going to have to trade that. I decide to take care of that right on the docks. They're crowded enough with reprobates of all species, cashed up pirates with more money than sense. The scythkin vessel is getting a lot of attention from the wrong sort of people — but it's possible one of them might have the coin to take it, or better still, a ship in trade.

I stand up on some crates and raise my voice to the crowd.

"Anybody interested in the keys to a scythkin runabout? Authentic technology. Straight from the belly of a scythkin spaceship."

There's a murmur of interest, but no actual takers at first.

"Come on, this is a once in a lifetime chance. You'll never see another one of these for sale, I can guarantee you that."

I'm making some good points. A scythkin shuttle could really be bad news in the wrong hands, and every single pair of hands in this place is certifiably wrong.

An alien comes out of the crowd. Pale, lizard-type skin, brilliant blue eyes, and a smirking expression that I know all too well bodes ill for me. He's wearing good armor, the kind that costs money, but I'd bet every credit I have he didn't pay for it.

"I'll give you ten thousand credits."

"It's worth well over a hundred thousand."

His forked tongue flickers out of his mouth for a moment, tasting the air for potential weakness. "It's worth nothing because you have to get rid of it, which means you need to sell it quickly. You're lucky I'm offering you ten thousand."

"I'm not selling it for ten thousand."

"Then I guess I'm taking it for nothing."

He's sized me up, decided I'm a small human female wearing a tinfoil outfit, and figured I'm no threat to him. It's therefore a real surprise when a hole appears in his midsection. A perfectly round sphere representing a plug of flesh and innards that are no longer there. He dies with a look of shock on his stupid face.

"MURDERER!"

God, why do they always scream that? No matter what the circumstances. No matter how much the guy deserved it. No matter if it was him or me and of course I was going to choose him, they always act so fucking surprised when a bit of him blows away.

"SHE KILLED HIM! SHE KILLED HIM FOR NO REASON!"

Right, no reason. He was going to steal my only means of transport and leave me stranded on a hostile lawless station wearing tinfoil and lace, but he's the victim in all of this. Not me. Not the woman who just wanted a fair fucking shake for once.

It takes all my self control not to pull the trigger of my weapon again. You'd think, in a universe where Reverse Polarity weapons are a thing, people of all species would be a little more fucking careful about who they mess with. Death is only ever one stupid sentence away, and yet some of these guys run their mouths like I'd have to manually club them to death with a rock to stop them.

They can scream all they like, we all know that there's no justice to be had on a lawless station. Everybody here seems generally cowardly, which is good. It's also possible that I'm a monster in the eyes of the onlookers who might very well think that it was nothing more than a financial transaction going slightly sideways.

Every once in a very great while, I wonder if I might be what used to be called a bad guy.

I am a woman, of course, so that makes me immediately not a bad guy, but a bad… woman? Lady? Gal? Bad gal has a pretty good ring to it.

"Get back!" I yell the words even though nobody is actually close. I also wave my hand around in a demented sort of way. I'm making a scene. Felt like a scene was already in progress, though. I've been making scenes for a while, I guess. There was a pretty big scene at the diner where the aliens first found me, and there was a pretty decent scene outside Owned Mates.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the wide glassy eyes of a passing alien. I see a woman of average height and average weight dressed like a Victorian child's doll, wielding a very illegal weapon she found in the weapons array of the scythkin ship. I look like a menace to all kinds of society. Hell. I look like a menace to the very concept of society.

Having cleared the way, I sigh, turn, and walk into the shuttle. I don't bother rushing. There's no point. Nobody is coming for me. Nobody is capable of handling me. Anybody stupid enough to try is going to end up in several unique pieces.

I can hear conversation going on behind me. There are some aliens who look like they thought being security might be fun once upon a time and are now absolutely regretting that decision.

"There's a murderer!"

"There're a lot of murderers," says the alien, who is doing his level best to ignore me. He's a tall, gangly, purple sort of creature with skin like an octopus and eyes like an octopus, and eight pretty squiggly wiggly arms. He's basically an octopus, but with a face capable of speaking rather than crushing crustaceans with a beak.

The other one is just some guy. Probably. I don't know. I can't really be bothered looking. I'm trying to work out if the octopus guy is going to extend one of his tentacles in my direction and make things increasingly interesting. It doesn't seem like it. He's got eight arms and absolutely no interest in —

Do I want to fuck an octo-alien?

I might.

I might not.

I don't know. Everything has been very sexual lately, and there's nothing more sexual than death. Best not to say that out loud too often. That makes people think you're very, very strange.

"There's a recent murderer. Like, an immediate murderer. One we could stop."

"We can't stop anything. We've got no authority. We've got no jurisdiction."

"Then what do we have these handcuffs and hats for?"

"Because it makes people feel safe. That's our job. Making people feel safe. Right now, the easiest way to have people feel safe is to let that absolute sociopath get on her stolen scythkin ship and leave."

Octo-alien has my number, I muse to myself as I board the shuttle.

The other security guard decides to make one last ill-fated attempt at getting control of the situation. He doesn't move, which is smart, but he does yell after me.

"COME BACK HERE!"

"NO!" I yell back in much the same tone.

"You killed a man! You are liable for compensating his family!"

"His family is liable for raising such a fucking idiot!"

On that pretty sick burn, the hull door closes behind me.

There's nothing stopping me from making my escape, so that's what I do. I put the ship into drive and I zoom my way the hell off that useless outlaw station.

I'm afraid to take the tinfoil off, though I'm also pretty sure it is entirely useless. If a few thin sheets of foil could stop the nanobots from transmitting my location, that would be a little too convenient. But hey, maybe it's time I started believing in good things.

"Good things can happen to me," I say, giving myself an affirmative pep talk. "Now sure, they very rarely have, if ever, but that doesn't mean they can't. Maybe this is actually a break I'm catching right now. Maybe this is the first step in everything working out for the best."

I did just kill someone. I wish it was the first time, but I've been forced into situations like this time and time again. I might look like an innocent little human, but there's a darkness of necessity I haven't had the luxury of avoiding.

"You are so much trouble."

I scream in shock as a voice comes from behind. It's such an irritating simian reaction, and I truly loathe that it happened. I swing around and see absolutely nobody standing behind me.

"Who the fuck was that?"

Raz appears from the wall, grinning. "Keeping up with you has been almost impossible," he says. "I hitched a ride with Emrys and managed to tail you across when you stole this shuttle. Just in case you're wondering how I got here."

"I was wondering that, actually," I say, taking a deep breath. I'd forgotten one of my alien owners was an invisible spy. "You scared me."

"You scared me," he says. "I saw what you did to the alien on the station."

"The one who was trying to steal my ship and strand me, leaving me a sitting duck for Emrys and the Sheriff and Atlas the scythkin who wants to lock me up in his personal mental prison doll house for the rest of my life?"

Raz smiles broadly, easily, as if he's not worried about anything I'm saying. Maybe he's not. He's not the one in the firing line, after all. I'm the one whose life could end in several different unpleasant ways if I am not very careful. He's going to be fine no matter what. He's going to merge back into the scenery and be safe and sound forever.

"I think it would be best if we all sat down and had a calm and rational discussion," he says. "It's becoming apparent that this is getting entirely out of hand. Atlas, as you call him, has suffered significant losses to his ship, both from Emrys' attack, and your absconding. He's probably ready to negotiate."

"No. He's probably more convinced than ever that I need to have my brain wiped and be put in a human jail."

"That would be such a waste of a mind." Raz grins charmingly.

"Yes. It would."

He closes the distance between us, smiling down at me with those enchanting golden eyes. "Well, now I've found you, I think it might be a good idea if I gave you a taste of what happens to human women who make that kind of trouble for their masters. Chasing you around the universe is no easy task."

"Oh well." I shrug carelessly. "What are you going to do about it?"

I am issuing a challenge of a kind I know he will not be able to resist. Raz might not be as overt in his possessiveness as some of the others, but I can see it in his eyes, and it is more than clear that he is putting a lot of effort into tracking me.

He folds big, blue, muscular arms over his chest and regards me with an expression I can only describe as indulgent.

"You are a hot little thing."

His tendril is twitching again. The sight of it moving makes me far more stupid than I should be. I remember how hard I came the last time I let him fuck me, and after the day I've had, all I want is a good, mind-erasing orgasm.

"Sit back and spread your legs," he says, grinning at me broadly.

I don't take orders from anybody, but I find my ass perched on the nearest hard surface, my pants down, and my legs spread more quickly than anybody with good judgement would imagine possible. In a universe where everything sucks, a good fuck can save your life.

He kneels down before me, swings his tendril over his head and proceeds to sucker his pleasure organ to my pussy like a fucking face-hugging suction grip of some kind of marine mammal. The vibration and heat starts immediately. My eyes start to roll back in my head as my clit is plugged directly into the source of ultimate pleasure. It is seconds, not minutes, before I start wailing and announcing my impending release.

"I'm gonna… I'm gonna… I'm gonna commmmmeeee…."

In the aftermath of another round of incredibly hot sex, I find my mind suitably cleared for the task of planning what the hell to do next.

I have a plan to avoid capture. There's a part of local space which is avoided by all interstellar traffic because there's a near constant magnetic storm that rages across light years. Smugglers are the only vessels who dare travel through it, and even then most of the time they'll do anything to avoid it.

The intense fields should block any leaking signals from the nanobots inside me using my internal energy to constantly tell on me. It will scramble a lot of the ship's systems, probably. It will be uncomfortable. It will be dangerous. But it will provide respite from the constant chase that I have been suffering since the diner.

"SURRENDER, HUMAN FUGITIVE!"

I am napping when red and blue lights start flashing through the universe, and a frustratingly invasive voice comes over the ship's systems.

I wake to jarring hues intruding upon my retinas as the Sheriff's numahn vessel slides in front of me and attempts to put a tractor beam on the shuttle. Not for the first time, I give thanks for the fact that I stole a scythkin shuttle. This thing can't be tractored. Taking one of these things is basically impossible. In spite of that, I am immediately furious with the kind of anger that can only ever arise from a deep-seated fear.

Jumping out of bed and running for the controls, I curse the question that is absolutely burning its way through my brain.

"How the fuck did he find me?"

Every step of the way so far, I have been found. There were reasons for that, but this time I am running quiet through an unscopable part of space. Radar doesn't work here on account of the magnetic eddies. I should be undetectable here, nanobots, nanotags, or not.

"How did he find me, Raz?" I turn to the spy who is standing next to me, shirtless and sexy and suddenly very suspicious.

Raz gives a subtle shrug. I don't buy it. I don't let it show, but I am pretty fucking sure this asshole not only fucked me, but fucked me over. It makes sense, now that I think about it. Sheriff showed up at the Owned Mates asteroid and Raz kept well out of his way. I bought the nanobot reason then, but there's no nanobot excuse now. If it was about the nanobots, I'd be absolutely swimming in alien owners. But the ship's systems aren't picking up on any other vessels.

"Time to give up, little lady…"

Sheriff's drawl comes over the comms. I really need to work out how to turn that off so random alien males can't talk to me whenever they feel the urge.

"Surrender,"Sheriff says. "There's no way out of this."

I let out an incredulous laugh.

"We're in deep, uncharted, unstable space. There's nothing but ways out of this."

I take the controls and deploy a barrage of fire in Sheriff's direction. I am in a scythkin vessel. This thing is designed to be two things: fast and brutal. Several of the shots land true, giving Sheriff something to worry about instead of me for a moment.

"Raz?"

"Yes?" He's followed me, and now he turns to me with a deliberately blank expression. He is trying to school his features into making me think he is innocent in all of this, but there's literally no other explanation for the Sheriff's presence here. While I was asleep, this blue bastard was calling my location into the law.

"Get the hell off my ship."

"I don't see how I'm going to be able to do that," he laughs. There's a smugness about him now. I used to think it was a kind of confidence, but now realize it was nothing more than arrogance. He thinks he is smarter than I am. Maybe he is. Maybe he seduced me into being stupid. Maybe his mate connection made me the kind of dumb that gets girls of any intellectual capacity into serious trouble. It doesn't matter. I can guarantee that I am more ruthless than he is. At the end of the day, that is what matters.

I reach for the same weapon I used on the alien in the station, and Raz's golden eyes narrow, slightly catlike. Does he suspect what I am about to do to him? He should. He should know better than to cross me after what he has seen.

"You're not going to shoot me, are you? After everything we've experienced together? I've claimed your body. I've made you mine, I've…"

"You're working for him, aren't you."

It's not a question. I'm not expecting him to answer. If he did answer, it would be a lie. I've already put two and two together. Every time Raz shows up, Sheriff shows up shortly thereafter. He's stolen me away from Emrys, and Atlas, and Kronos, but he's always ever so passive when Sheriff is around. This fucker is working for my worst enemy, and the employee of my enemy is my enemy.

I waggle the weapon at him. I'm not going to shoot him. I don't want to make that much of a mess in the ship, plus I don't want to accidentally blow a hole in the side of my own vessel. Nobody in their right mind would use this kind of weapon inside a ship in space. But he doesn't know that I am in my right mind. I'm sure I don't look like it.

"Get in the airlock, Raz."

"No." He refuses, but I'm not giving him a goddamn choice.

I take a step toward him, ushering him off the bridge. He steps back, no doubt with the image of the guy on the outlaw station in his mind, but he's not moving fast enough. He keeps hesitating, stalling for time, and that is pissing me off. I can hear Sheriff issuing threats from the bridge comms. I'm sure he heard me threaten Raz too. Good. I want him to hear all of this. I raise my voice so it carries to Sheriff. These two really thought they had me. They picked me off from any protector or ally, and they were going to bring me in and kill me. That makes what I am about to do eminently reasonable.

"Get in the fucking airlock, or I'm going to pick the limb I delete with this gun. If you don't do what I say, I will shoot your arms off, and then your legs off, and then I will roll your torso into the airlock. This weapon cauterizes where it hits, so you'll probably stay conscious the whole time."

Raz looks shocked. "You are a brutal, twisted little thing. You didn't deserve the kindness I showed you."

"Probably not. Get in the fucking airlock."

He betrayed me, but of course he doesn't see it that way. Guys like him never do. They think the women they lie to deserve to be lied to. They think their intelligence and lack of morality makes their actions not only justified, but even admirable.

As he realizes the game is over, he starts telling me what he really had in store for me.

"You're going to be hanged, human. You're going to get what you deserve. Creatures like you are the ones who deserve to be deleted."

"Right. So it can't exactly get worse for me, can it? I can do whatever I want to you. Get. In. The. Fucking. Airlock."

He does as he is told. He's got to be terrified, but he is wrestling with himself not to beg me for his life. He knows Sheriff is listening, and he doesn't want to die a coward. Apparently dying a liar doesn't bother him nearly so much.

"Here's the thing, Raz. I'm going to open this airlock, and you're going to be sucked out into space. There will be a split-second in which Sheriff can save your pointless hide by transporting you to his ship. That will slow him down long enough for me to make good my escape. Let's hope Sheriff values your help, otherwise he's probably going to shoot me into oblivion, and you'll be turned inside out in about three seconds."

"Reckless, cruel, foolish little human," Raz says. He isn't nearly as cheerful as he was before. That easygoing, suave demeanor has been completely erased. In its place is his true face. He is cunning. He is full of guile. And he is dangerous, or he would be if he wasn't on the wrong side of the airlock door.

I kick the door shut and hit the purge lever.

The outer door swings open, and Raz is gone like a bug being sucked up a cosmic vacuum. I wonder if he's been erased from existence or saved by his ally. I don't particularly care either way.

I run for the controls and hit maximum speed, heading deeper into the violent storm of magnetic eddies. The ship is thrown around dangerously, but I want to go where I truly cannot be followed. Sheriff wants me dead, but he's not going to put his own life on the line to achieve that. He's a persistence hunter. He'll follow. He'll find me again eventually. But not today.

I'm alone again.

The ship is tossing about like an old-fashioned ship on ocean waves. It's nauseating. It's terrifying. That's what freedom feels like. It feels scary and gross and it makes me wish I'd never chosen it, but it is also the only choice.

I ride that storm for days, letting the eddies of the interstellar currents decide my path. Pretty hard to be intercepted if you don't know where you're going. I feel violated by Raz. There was no part of his being he was not prepared to turn over in order to help Sheriff kill me. I wonder why. I wonder what Sheriff had on him. Guess I'll never know.