***Zorakk

Future Shock
Second version

Chapter Two, second part
David

"Why?" the boy asked puzzled.

"Well, today I was thinking we'd do a strip-layout."

"Hey! Yeah, like in that Chippenditty holovid," Brian grinned.

"No, I was thinking of just a series of holographs, I'm greedy, we'll get more for a series of two dozen holographs than for a five minute holovid." I said.

"Okay," Brian said. "What should I ware?"

"Just underpants, shorts and teeshirt, no need to bother with shoes and socks." I answered while getting the holocam set up.

I have a really good, near studio-quality holocam, it produces as its output both a pristine tiny hologram cube, 5 centimeters [2 inches] on a side for use as a viewfinder and focusing functions, and of course the standard 2.1 megabyte digital scaning signal for recording on an isolinear chip. I find that if I set the equipment so that it gives me a nice clean scan with an image that fills about two-thirds of the viewfinder's volume this holocam gives me near-life images, even running a compression algorism so I can get two dozen holoscans on a single 620-meg chip.

"Ready," Brian said sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed.

I set up our neutral blue background for the holograph, basically just a big pale-blue sheet, but it works as well as the much more expensive and bulky holographic screens. It drapes over everything in the background, bed, truck bulkheads, etc; and it gives a neutral background for superimposing a custom backdrop, say a day in the woods, which is my own personal favorite.

"Okay," I said finally satisfied with the set up of the equipment, "I think we'll start our series with a couple of basic shots."

"Where do you want me first?" Brian asked.

"Just where you are," I said swiveling the holocam around on its tripod to face Brian, who was still seated cross-legged on the bed. "Smile pretty," I said, engaged the neon-laser flood lamps and made a few minor focusing adjustments while watching the 125 cubic centimeters of viewfinder and finally satisfied with the composition, squeezed the hand trigger. The laser lamps flared for a 1/1,000 sec flash and the holoscan was recorded for posterity on the isolinear chip.

Brian blinked several times, "Geeze!" he swore, "Those laser lights are bright."

"Come on, Brian. I told you not to look at them…"

"I wasn't," he said. "But they're still too bright."

"Okay, but be sure not to look at them. I don't know how much the human retina can take, but let's not take chances, ok?

"Okay," Brian said. "What's next?"

"Hmmn," I thought. "I think maybe standing over here," I said and indicated a nice flat area of the blue backdrop that would be perfect for the woodland lake and waterfall scene I had in mind, and would not take a lot of post production work to smooth out wrinkles in the backdrop, as the shot on the bed would. I guess that is the advantage of the more expensive holographic screens, huh?

Brian came over and I posed him. It was getting easier to work with Brian as he began to anticipate what I might want in a scene and started to take on some of the composition work himself. In this shot I was striving for the boy who after a long hot day hiking in the woods comes upon a pristine lake in a wooded glade with a distant waterfall feeding into it in the background.

Brian poised himself, as if standing on a low bank overlooking the lake below. I was set up 2/3 rear quadrant shot for a spectacular shot of Brian's cute little butt and his slender arms and legs in this shot.

"Okay," I said. "Ready?"

"Quiet on the set," Brian giggled, "Camera, action!"

I triggered the laser strobe and holoscan No. 2 was on the chip.

"Pete, you said you would tell me about your last trip for Quark while we were taking Pictures," Brian reminded me.

"So I did," I said. "Alright, about six months ago, I got mixed up with a Ferengi merchant, named Quark on ds9. He was in a very profitable position for a Ferengi, poised as he was on the rim of the Bajorian wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant. Actually, I knew that damned Ferengi was trouble, but the deal he was offering was SO sweet that I ignored my queasy feeling as he started talking about going through the wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant and dodging Jem Ha'darr patrols.

"Its been 20 some years since the Dominion absorbed the Kardasians and tried to conquer the Alpha Quadrant in the Federation-Dominion War of 2372-76."

"We learn about the Dominion in Phase One," Brian boasted.

"Yes, and I imagine you'll keep on 'running into them' all through Phase II, III, and IV," I said. With the exception of the Four-Years War fought with the Klingons a long time ago, it is the closest the Federation has come to being defeated in a war, and so its pretty important."

"My advisor back on Star Base told me that the Dominion might try again some day."

"They might, that's what makes them so dangerous," I said. "And that reminds me, we'll have to see about getting you back in school. How close are you to graduating Phase I?"

"About a hundred hours, I guess – but do I have to Pete? I think I'd learn a lot more here on Dream Walker…"

"Good try," I said. "But you still have to pass the Federation standardized tests. It won't be so bad though, we'll work something out – you'll see…"

"Maybe," Brian did not sound very optomistic. "Now back to the story!"

"Let's see where was I…?"

"The Federation Dominion war ended in 2376…" Brian prompted.

"Oh – yeah! Well anyway, after the conflict ended, the treaty recognized the legitimacy of the Kardasian government set up under Dominion rule; but in exchange Bajor was allowed to build a string of fortress colonies in several star systems strategic to the Gamma Quadrant entrance to the wormhole. Among the Federation built facilities was a huge spacestation similar to Deep Space Nine which monitored the Gamma Quadrant side of the wormhole. Both stations were administered by a triumvirate consisting of a Dominion member, a Federation member and an administrator from Bajor.

"Lately however the Founders have beefed up their Jem Ha'darr presence and have begun to unofficially blockade Vymann-kor, one of the Fortress-worlds that the Bajorians had built. This of course is where Quark wanted me to go and pick up a non-discript 5 tons of something, which he assured me would fit in the cargo bay of my Tomahawk.

"Anyway, the long and short of it is I made it to Vymann-kor, and picked up Quark's cargo, all packaged in a neat durrasteel container. But coming back out, a Jem'Hadarr fighter jumped me and I had to seriously redline the warp drive to get out ahead of the fighter. The son-uva-bitch followed me right through the wormhole and had to be chased off by ds9's weapons grid."

"Wow!" Brian said appreciatively. "Do you think we'll have any adventures like that this time?"

"No," I said firmly. "Quark assured me this was just a docking with a freighter and a quick trip down to Bajor to deliver the cargo. Now back to work," I made whip noises and flicked my wrist as though cracking a bullwhip over Brian's head.

The next holoscan we did was of Brian pealing off his shirt and then one with his pants half way down and a very seductive look on his sweet little face.

"Ah," I said to Brian, "Now for the piece de resistance, the stripping of the young boy completely naked. Pull down those underpants! And smile," I encouraged him. "I don't want it to look like you're a slave being forced into this; that's for the "Slave Boy" series."

Brian put on his best 100 megawatt smile and wriggled out of his underpants as I flashed the laser strobes.

Our warp drive problems not withstanding the meeting with the unknown freighter in the inner Bajorian planetary system went well. Basically it simply involved opening the Tomahawk's rear cargo hatch. The Tomahawk's cargo configuration allows for a modular arrangement of it's eight by ten meter [26x33 feet] bay, currently my Tomahawk is configured with a single eight by ten bay. We simply let the three guys in vacuum armor from the freighter shunt a connex container over the one hundred meters separating our two vessels and then securing the connex. The reason we did not use the transmat – which would admittedly have been easier – is the trasmat effect, the local generation of a two-lobed wormhole in three-d space, would immediatily have been detectable from a wide variety of common sensors, and would have drawn a lot of unwanted attention to us.

The contract that Quark had forced upon me called for on planet delivery to a small Bajor kobbutz out in the Rittmahn Wastes of the Dahkur Province, it also specified payment in full and in gold plated latinum on delivery. That was the only reason I had accepted the delivery 'on planet' clause.

The Bajorians are paranoid about alien landings after the Kardasian invasion in the early part of the century. It takes a lot of political juice to get clearence for a direct planet landing for a vessel not under the command of a Bajorian crew. Mostly the Bajorians have all of their off-world trade carried out on Deep Space Nine, or through special alien broker firms in Kilkamec City, the Bajorian open city.

There is also a large contingent of both Federation and Bajorian customs officials there, and I suspect that is why Quark wanted to spend the extra latinum to get a discrete planetfall. It is very likely that the cargo would not pass a customes inspection. What it was I did not know, except that it was not drugs or weapons. Dream Walker has specialized embeded scanners in the cargo bay to detect these things.

Brian spent a half hour hunched over the mission specialist's control interface which was connecting him via vri [Vertual Reality Interface] mittens and hood through lcars to the cargo-handling droids about a dozen meters to the aft, in the cargo module. As we made our way ever closer to Bajor itself, he was making sure that the single 3 meter by 5 meter [10x16½ feet] connex container of Quark's cargo was securely tied down. The one drawback in the Tomahawk's design was the fact that its cargo area is not easily accessable from the biosphere – this has been a pain more than once, but it is susposse to allow the biosphere to stay an isolated system, seperate from any kind of contamination brought aboard with a cargo.

Sometimes atmospheric re-entries for a craft as small as a truck can be rough, without the hundreds of thousands of tons of rest mass that the larger ships have, atmospherics can be a big factor – with upper atmospheric winds and storms buffeting a ship around – hense all the activity.

"Everything is tied down good," Brian said as he shed the vri equipment and came forward again, sitting in the navigator's couch, pulling the acceleration harness down around him. He was wearing his favorite playsuit, a single-piece coverall with short sleeves and made out of a nearly indestructible synthetic industrial fiber that was silky soft on the inside and tough as cured leather on the outside. It was light blue on the upper half and black from the waist down, mimicking a Federation Starfleet uniform, it even had a cloth patch that looked suspiciously like a communicator pin over the left breast.

"Ready to take her down on the deck?" I asked.

"Can I do it?" Brian asked, his big blue eyes begging.

"Maybe next time," I said and buckled the acceleration harness around myself, and slipped on the omnicom headset. I settled myself in for entry into a planetary atmosphere, taking the collective in my left hand and the cyclic in my right, while settling my size 13 boots on the aileron pedals. I took a breath and looked over at Brian who held his thumb up.

We started our re-entry. Dream Walker came in assfirst with the ion-drive venturi glowing blue-white as we finished the deceleration from interplanetary velocity to re-entry. As our velocity dropped below 5 kilometers [3 miles] per second, I flipped the nose of the truck over and dived strait down for the surface.

"Uh-oh," Brian said, studying the qlr detector screen at the navigator's station. "Pete, there's a Bajorian Orbit Guard cutter challenging us."

"Put it up on the speaker," I said.

Brian had learned quite a bit in his three days with me. He expertly reached over on the central instrument complex between our acceleration couches and turned a switch.

"…alien vessel, this is the Bajorian Orbit Guard cutter Wankade. You are ordered to heave to and prepare to be boarded. Failure to comply will be met with deadly force. Unknown alien vessel, this is…"

"Cool your jets, cutter," I said reaching into my flightsuit's top left pocket, taking out the isolinear chip Quark had assured me would answer all Bajorian official questions of my actions; and plugged it into the iff socket of the omnicom.

"Pete!" Brian said worried, "They're powering their forward phasers. Do something…"

Brian was watching a group of instruments which comprised my elint/ecm [That's electronic intelligence and electronic counter measures to those of you who do not recognize the acronyms] cluster, a bit of hijacked Star Fleet technology that allowed my seemingly normal civilian grade sensors to do several advanced [and for civilian craft – illegal] functions. One of these was to detect the increase in neutrino flux that accompanied the powering up of a directed energy weapon like a phaser cannon; another was to detect the unmistakable qlr signature of a weapons tracking array illuminating my poor old Tomahawk.

"Wow, the Bajorians are really spooked these days. We must have set off every alarm in Bajor Orbit Guard sector hqs because they don't often scramble a cutter to do an intercept – we're not even inside the 1,000 kilometer [600 miles] inner defense zone yet."

"They don't seem to care," Brian said hunched over the elint/ecm screen on his right and aft. "Now they are painting us with missile tracking sensors. I think it's past time to do something!"

"Not to worry." I set the rig's iff transponder to squirt the clearance the Feringe had gotten for me to the cutter. There were a few anxious seconds while the cutter bore down on us, its missile launch ports open and phasers fully charged.

Then the omnicom spat: "Victor Poppa three eight eight six November Kilo, do you copy?"

"Victor Pappa three eight eight six November Kilo, go." I said into the headset's boom mic.

"You are guilty of an illegal high-gee re-entry, a felony under Bajor law…"

I began to sweat for the first time, the Orbit Guard was taking this far too seriously. I wondered if there was something special going on down on Bajor – an important meeting or something else that had caused a heightened security level for the Orbit Guard; and of course I wondered how good that clearance Quark had given me was…

"… however, in deference to your clearance by arch-vedic Mihran, the Bajorian Orbit Guard will not press charges. You are officially warned to transmit clearances in a timely manner in the future."

The hundred meter, 12,000 ton cutter came within a half kilometer of us in its arcing return to a heading for its orbital station. That's almost a sideswipe collision at orbital velocities, I figured it was meant to intimidate us.

"Wow-oww!" was Brian's comment as he pressed his face up against the crystal-transparent aluminum forward viewport of the Dream Walker. Brian got to see a rare sight, the cutter up close enough to read its markings and see the individual viewports embedded into its durillium hull.

We crossed the Dahkur coast just south of Kilkamec City at 125,000 feet [38,000 meter], just beginning to exit the leo inner defense zone and enter the Bajorian atmospheric realm. Remembering the cutter's warning [which I took very seriousl] to transmit our clearance in a timely fashion, I decided it was time to wake up the local ground ils controller.

Brian was already fumbling with the latest hard copy of the Bajor Sector Aerospace Area Control soi, which we had downloaded from ds9's lcars, on our way into the Bajorian system. He found that the nw quadrant of the Dahkur Province was controlled by the Kilkamec Star Port Authority.

I let Brian dial the initial contact frequency into the omnicom and gave the boom mike a >> thawack << with my index finger.

"Bajor Aerospace Control, this is Victor Poppa three eight eight six November Kilo, do you copy?"

"Victor Pappa 3886 from KilkCom, go."

"Bajor, I'm an independent with a consigned cargo from Vymann-kor to kobbutz Rittmahn; from Vedic Hijarski at Defense Command, Gamma Quadrant to Office of Special Intelligence, ka'butz Rittmahn…"

"Sorry Victor Poppa, kobbutz Rittmahn is a restricted destination. I show no authorized civilian traffic this afternoon."

"Yes, I know, Bajor, but my landing permit follows." I plugged in a second isolinear code chip from Quark into the Dream Walker's Omnicom and pressed the send switch and transmitted the second part of the authorization that the Ferengi had supplied me with that had turned the Orbit Guard cutter around in its tracks.

"Wait one, Victor Poppa."

I twiddled my thumbs and slowly rocked the Tomahawk's steering vanes to ease my boredom as the landforms of Bajor came ever closer to me at almost 5 km/sec [3miles/sec].

"Victor Poppa, you are cleared to kobbutz Rittmahn, descend immediately to Angles 35 and contact kobbutz Rittmahn Control on 119.685 mHz."

"Roger Bajor control, Victor Poppa out."

"At least they didn't try to shoot us down," Brian chortled, having recovered from his fright.

Less than five minutes later I was reducing my airspeed even further and making more and more use of my countergravs to stay in the air. The Tomahawk is not an aerodynamic design, it has only vestigial stubby wings and rudder functions. She's built for efficiency of loading and for essentially deep space operations, it is only because of her powerful countergrav generators that I can do the things I do with the Tomahawk in an atmosphere with gravity tugging at her.

I set the Omnicom for the kobbutz Rittmahn frequency and made contact with the control tower. They were expecting me, I was told. Vedic Hijarski had shot Bajor Space Central a QuantumLink Radio telegram to expect me and asking them to notify kobbutz Rittmahn upon my arrival.

I winced as I heard the name of Quark's phoney Vedic. Did he really have to be so flamboyant? It was only the Bajorian's devotion to the Prophets that let them turn a blind eye to virtually anything done with the blessing of a Vedic. Mihran was bad enough, but at least it sounded kind of like a Bajorian name, but Hijarski? A Polish Vedic?

Too late to worry about in now, I guess. Anyway, the controller had accepted the Vedic's authority to authorize a landing at a Bajoran Defense Directorate field instillation, and according to the headers on the permit files, kobbutz Rittmahn was involved in counter intelligence work. I'd certainly be glad to get this last of my backlog of Quark's consignment cargoes out of the way. The money was good, but now I had Brian to think about also. Quark's couriers had a distressing tendency to end up dead or in Federation [or worse] detention.

I came in low and fast over the grasslands south-west of the main landing field. As we approached the base, we were aquired by several weapons tracking systems, but there was no indication of active weapons, so I assumed that this was stanard proceedure for the base. Then we were over the landing field and I flared the noes up almost 80 degrees to shed the last of my re-entry velocity.

"YEE-HAHH!" Brian yelled as I stabilized the Tomahawk and brought it's velocity down to under 100 kph [60mph].

"Like that, huh?" I grinned at Brian.

"YEAH! I can't wait till you teach me…"

I turned to make the final approach to the main landing strip, now totally dependant upon the Tomahawk's powerful antigravs for lift and the coutergrav field to make maneuvering in an atmosphere possible with the small steering jets. I hovered over the main strip and finally brought all four landing skids down together on the concrete and nikolyte of the main landing ramp only a few meters away from the port's lso.

The Landing Signals Officer signaled his satisfaction with my landing and directed me off to the northwest with his light batons toward a ramp leading down toward a huge hangar with the insignia of the Bajorian Federal Republic on it and rittmahn machine parts painted on its side in fifty foot [15 meter] high letters.

I held up my thumb to indicate that I understood and raised the skids up about a hundred and fifty centimeters [5 foot] and slowly drifted toward the indicated ramp. When we got over by the large warehouse, a group of Bajorian stevedores came out and all I had to do was open the rear cargo hatch and watch over the Tomahawk's internal video monitor while the Bajorians brought in an antigrav pallet and muscled the large connex on to it. When they were finished, I sealed the rear cargo hatch and hovered back out to the main runway of the base. I wanted to refuel before lifting off again and called the control tower to ask about refueling.

"Wait one, Victor Pappa." The tower operator said and there was the sound of a hurried conversation in hushed tones, just beyond the normal range of the omnicom's pick up. "I'm sorry, Victor Poppa 3886. Permission to refuel is denied. You are cleared to immediate liftoff, destination of your choice, but you must leave now! Without delay."

Brian immediately sat forward in his seat and stabbed a small finger at the propellant supply indicator. Good call, Brian, I thought as I glanced at the propellant levels in the Tomahawk's tanks. Not enough to make orbit and then match orbit with ds9.

"Negative, control, I need to refuel first. Insufficient propellant to achieve orbit."

"Victor Poppa, I say again, by order of the security lancer you must leave kobbutz Rittmahn at once. Suggest you do a sub-orbital burn to Kilkamec."

I was about to complain about how 15 minutes couldn't do any harm when Brian nudged me and pointed again, this time at the elint/ecm cluster. A large red indicator light had winked on and the signals analysis screen showed the telltale signature of a tracking sensor. This told me that somewhere a phaser cannon had powered up and its targeting sensors were now painting my truck. Someone was deadly serious about not wanting us around. I must be getting slow in my old age not to have picked up on the edge in the tower operator's voice.

"Er…roger, control. Commencing lift off – destination Kilkamec City," the tell tail remained glowing hot angry red on the elint/ecm overhead board. I revved up the neids and to quote an ancestor of mine, "Got the hell outa Dodge!"

I fought paranoia, the urge to hug the ground and go into evasive maneuvers as I sped away from kobbutz Rittmahn – but within thirty seconds the sensor telltale went out and I breathed a little easier. What the hell had that little Ferengi conman gotten me into?

Several minutes later I was lined up on the final approach to a small suburban flight field just south of the urban center of Kilkamec City. Brian was busy using lcars and looking up the Bajorian Aerospace Assistance Association encyclopedia.

"If I'm reading this map right, this is Xanthe-hove…" Brian said.

"Don't worry, you're reading it right, Bajor is a civilized world, while we're here, we are tied into the planetary nav-grid, pull up any map and lcars will automatically tell you where we are in reference to the map," I explained. "See that blue and gold circle and cross-hairs on the screen?"

"Yeah."

"That's us. Now what's it say about Xanthe-hove?" I asked as I swooped in low over a few small villiages and such and came upon the landing field.

"It's listed it as a class 'F' port, no instrument assisted landings, and no live attendants, only automatic refueling and communications hubs," Brian said.

"Good," I muttered. After the bum's rush at kobbutz Rittmahn, I was not anxious to run into anyone else right now anyway. I pulled up and shed airspeed in a long wide arc over the area. We were below 1,000 feet [300m] and both Brian and I could see people on the ground coming out of their houses and pointing up at us. I guessed Xanthe-hove was a quiet little rural landing field used by the local wealthy to park their air planes and perhaps a few light spacecraft like the Tomahawk; but the arrival of a stranger would be bound to cause a commotion as I again lined up on the field.

"What about it, Brian? Want to try your hand at landings?"

"Really?" Brian asked excitedly.

"Well, not quite solo yet," I said. "But c'mon over here and sit on my lap."

"You let me do it solo in the parking lot," Brian reminded me.

"Yes, and that's why I think you are ready for this. The reason that I think you'd better sit on my lap this time is we're not in a deserted parking lot, there are other spacecraft and airplanes here."

"Okay," Brian immediately squirmed his boney little frame ontop of me and grabbed at the cyclic.

As I had done back on Star Base 288, I quickly went over and explained the operation of the Tomahawk's maneuvering controls to Brian. The arcade vr-sims that Brian loved to play used Starfleet standard command and control sequencers in the sims, and so Brian was already fairlyfamiliar with the Tomahawk's control surfaces.

He did a very good job of bringing the Tomahawk down and equalizing our momentum with the ground and finally letting the Tomahawk settle onto a suitable concrete slab and let the truck's unloaded 70 tons settle down on her four oversized landing skids. As Brian released the countergrav field the full mass of the truck settled on the hydraulics of the landing skids and there was a satisfying audio signal from the system's status board that indicated that the hydraulics had successfully taken over the load from the countergravs and it was safe to shut down main power.

"Congratulations, BRIAN!!" I said enthusiastically, squeezing him in a bearhug.

"Thank you, thank you," Brian smiled, taking mock bows from my lap. He immediately hopped off my lap and darted over to the Flight Engineer's station. "I almost forgot!" he said. "Shut down the main drives and set the apu to standby."

"Good kid," I said, stretching leisurely in the pilot's couch. "Go ahead and do it."

After completing the shutdown of the drives and placing the main photonic batteries in standby mode, Brian tapped the propellant levels indicator. "We just made it, less than four minutes propellant left."

We climbed down from the Tomahawk's main airlock hatch and out onto the dusty, windswept ramp and I showed Brian how to do a post flight walkaround inspection. This walk around is to ensure that re-entry has not jarred loose anything, or compromised the truck's thermocoat of high temperature heat shielding.

The small port was in a huge clearing in a wooded grove. The landing field was perhaps a kilometer long and a quarter that in width. The field itself was ankle high in grasses and weeds. Along the west edge was a deserted two lane blacktop road. Across this from the field was a small grouping of houses. A sagging perimiter fence ran along the inside of the field against the blacktop and then turned south and ran along the southern end of the field which was littered with parking ramps, like the one Dream Walker was currently occupying; hangars, some open and empty, other sealed tight; and various other non-discript buildings.

From one of these non-discript buildings about the size of a small hangar thirty meters [100 feet] away came the sounds of a vr holo-vid game of some kind. Suddenly a group of young boys, perhaps 8- to 13-years-old exploded from around a corner of the long low field maintenance building. The boys shouted and waved toy lasers around in a simulated military operation, maybe reenacting some famous battle of the Kardasian occupation.

The whole pack skidded to a halt perhaps five meters [16 feet] away as they saw us. There was some initial shuffling of feet indecisively, and then one of the older boys came forward and ignoring me completely addressed Brian:

"Hey, kid. Wanna play?"

Brian looked over his shoulder at me questioningly, "Can I?" he asked.

"Of course. Take off," I smiled and like a morning fog the kids including Brian were gone. Off to combat the evil Kardasian foe.

I walked over to the slab's control and comm panel and took out my cash card and put it in the slot. There was a soft tinkle of a chime and the services panel came to life. I punched in the code for refueling of the neid's propellant tanks with top quality liquid atomic hydrogen and told the port-droid's cpu to do a full diagnostic on all systems; but to hold for authorization on any repair work.

I went back into the Dream Walker to finish up all the house keeping chores that accrued at the conclusion of a contract delivery. Normally, my business is all cash on delivery, but Quark's loads are different. In most cases the people I'm delivering to would as soon cut your throat as pay out good latinum, so I bill Quark and let him add the delivery charges onto whatever he's charging the customer. This method, however, requires that I maintain pretty complete records of all my expenses. So, much as I detest all the work involved, I maintain a multi-entry log book.

I was about to close the logbook program when the port's droid signalled for my attention. The diagnostic I had ordered had found the warp drive problems and was asking if I would authorize repairs which would cost…

"Holy carbonized fish parts," I muttered as I saw the estimate of repairs plus parts. It was a good thing that Quark was picking up the tab on this.

I authorized the repairs and then called Quark.

The Ferengi's somewhat dazed continence appeared on the screen. I had the distinct feeling that he was not expecting to hear from me."

"Oh!…er…Reynolds. How'd it go?"

"Not bad, except for nearly being shot down by the Bajorian Orbit Guard, and then getting the bums rush from Kobbutz Rittmahn, under threat from a phaser cannon fifteen seconds after dropping the consignment. Anyway, I'm here for payment Quark. With expenses it comes to 216 bars, 41 slips of latinum." I slipped my cashcard into the data socket on the omnicom.

"W-H-A-T??!!" the Ferengi exploded, "that's almost four times what we agreed."

"Yeah, but it includes repairs to the warp drive that ducking those Jem'Hadarr fighters last time caused." Quark snarled something about I should send the bill for that to the Founders, but as I watched the readout on my cashcard, it jumped almost 217 bars of latinum. "Thanks Quark," I said.

"Are you available for another charter? I need a fast, discrete courier to deliver…"

"No, hold it, Quark. I'm back on vacation as of this minute."

"Huyew-mons are always on vacation," he said and broke the connection.

After finishing with Quark, I leaned back in the pilot's couch and focused the external optical sensors on the landing field. It being a warm early Sunday afternoon the field was crowded with kids of both genders, both pre-teen and teenagers who obviously viewed the landing field as their playground. The kids kept swarming around each other forming and unforming alliances. It was rather like watching a flock of birds in random flight. For the most part the youngsters remained in the open part of the field in the central region of the facility, but periodically a group would break and come boiling across the grass toward the landing pad the Lighter was parked on.

The group that had kindly 'adopted' Brian into its midst was playing a variation on Laser Tag. In the original game, it is just a free-for-all, with the objective being just not to get 'hit', but almost immediately after its first release, the game had been adopted by underage soldiers across the galaxy. Laser Combat was a hell of a lot of fun. I had even indulged in it a time or two. It allows the individual to vent his inborn blood-lust in a non-lethal fashion. Each participant wares a playsuit vest with laser-light sensitive target sensors woven into the onepiece outfit; and each participant carried a small laser pistol which emitted a 50 mw pulsed laser beam, not enough to burn with, but more than enough to set off the sensors in the playsuits, even in dusty or heavy fog conditions.

Thereafter it was up to each wanna-be infantry platoon leader to lead his troops to victory. Yes, good clean fun. I was glad that Brian was being given the opportunity by the local Bajorian kids to participate. I got up and went to the galley quickly for a cold one, and returned to the control cab, busying myself attempting to pick out Brian in the riot of children on the field.

As I walked through the perimiter of the village, at various places there was also the smell of remarkably good things to eat. Bajorian quisine is probably among the best human quisene in the galaxy. My mouth began to water and I was suddenly aware of the fact I was ravioniously hungry. Although by Bajorian hospitality costumes, Brian and I could have virtually knocked on any door in the village and invited ourselves to supper, I did not want to push it, Kilkamec City was only a few dozen kilometers up the road and there we could quickly find a restaurant where we could pay our way without infringing on an ancient tradition ment to aid indigent transients.

The Primary Sun had begun to set, and the laser combat game was also begining to break up as parents hollered for their children to come home to supper. Brian stripped out of the laser sensor vest and handedit back to the Bajorian boy from whom he had barrowed it and the mock weapon, thanking him and then and then ran up to me, flush with the excitement of the laser game.

"Wow!" the nine-year-old panted. "I've never had that much fun before… and guess what? They invited me to play again tommorow…"

"Sounds okay to me," I said. "I had planned on taking off a little time anyway. But now, how do you feel like raising a jetcab and going into Kilkamec City for some supper?"

"I'm as hungry as a Vulcan Lamantya," to which Brian added a fierce trebble growl. "Can we go exploring afterwards, please – just for a little while?"

So, twenty minutes later, after a harrowing ride in the local jitney cab, we were in Kilkamec City, in the Dahkur Hill Country on Bajor, gateway to the Gamma Quadrant. Since end of the war between the Dominion and the combined sentient races of the Alpha Quadrant, over twenty years ago, Bajor had become one of the Federation's wealthiest trading planets. And as such, it had attracted a fair cross-section of Federation and alien races, including most of the big powers of the alpha quadrant, including the Komerex Klingon, the Terrans, and even the H'Rumbians; and the more exotic races of this area of the Perseus Arm of the galaxy – the Thranx, the Vorlons, the Ferengi and the Membari. In fact even those races which more often than not were at odds with the Federation – the Romulans, Centauri and Tholians had established trade missions in Kilkamec City – the Bajorian 'free city', located between the Trilar Peninsula on the coast and the rugged mountians of the Dahkur Province – it was Bajor's busiest port.

With Bajor fast becoming a center of galactic commerace, rivaling the Orion trade colonies in the Rigil starsystem, where the galactics from both sides of the wormhole had set up their trade missions and embassies, Kilkamec City was about as cosmolitan a city as existed anywhere in the galaxy. Here in Kilkamec City were also the Bajorian run bars, casinos, flop houses, pawnshops and brothels that invariably sprang up around such places. In other words: "a more wretched hive of skum and villainy would be hard to find."

But Brian, bless his little heart, was oblivious to all the graft and corruption around him and was having the best time he could remember exploring an alien city; window shopping at toy stores and military surplus shopes; sampling all of the street vendors wares; and stopping to contribute a few slips of latinum to a begger. I simply tagged along where ever the eight-year-old led just to make sure that he was safe.

We passed by a holovid theater with a double bill of action-adventure features – one of which was about the brave Bajorian Resistance Fighters of Dakor Province against the evil Kardasians [yes, despite the official 'peace' between Bajor and Kardasia, Bajorian memories were long when it came to the Kardasian Occupation, and Kardasia is still a member of the Dominion.]

"Can we go, I, please!" Brian begged.

"Yeah, I guess so, if you want to," I grinned and threw an arm around the eight-year-old's shoulders and guided him toward the ticket booth and entry alcove. Brian leaned in against me and allowed himself to be pushed along. Four hours and two holovids later we emerged from the movie theater. I was totally exhausted. Brian, however was apparently still revved and ready for at least another six hours of wondering around Kilkamec City.

My first indication that Brian too was beginning to run down came seconds later as he stifled a huge yawn.

"Have a heart, Brian," I begged. "I'm pooped, and we've still gotta get up bright and early to lift off for ds9."

"Well, ok, if you want," he said agreeably, yawned again and streached his arms up over his head. We strolled over to a public commweb terminal, intending to summons a robocab and go on back to the rural areodrome and catch some sleep before lifting off for ds9 bright and early tomorrow.

My first indication that Brian too was beginning to run down came seconds later as he stifled a huge yawn.

"Have a heart, Brian," I begged. "I'm pooped, and we've still gotta get up bright and early to lift off for ds9."

"Well, ok, if you want," he said agreeably, yawned again and streached his arms up over his head. As we strolled over to a public commweb terminal, Brian cought sight of a vr-arcade, almost hidden between a wharehouse on one side and an office building od some kind on the other.

"I'll be over here, watching," Brian said and let go of my hand to dash acros to the entry way of the vr-arcade. Yawning, I continued on to the commweb and summoned a robocab and go on back to the rural areodrome and catch some sleep before lifting off for ds9 bright and early tomorrow.

I wondered over to where Brian was standing and put my arms around his shoulders, crossing them just over his heart. The vr-arcade was bright, noisy and crammed full of vr-video games and a hoard of kids of both genders, both pre-teen and teenagers, but there were a lot ok kids here, they were definitely the minority. This late in the evening the arcade was dominated by adults, of virtually every Federation race and most of the known non-Federation ones also. On the whole though these were an unsavory lot, most of whom looked like they would cut your throat for a cup of raktajino.

We stood close to the entrance for several minutes – me gazing at the butts and crotches of several preteen Bajorian boys and a couple of boys I figured had to be part Kardasian [because of the distinctive Kardasian skull structures] and 13 or 14 years old. Some of these boys had little tiny butts that hardly showed through their playsuits and/or shorts, and some had nice round butts that filled the seat of their playsuits quite nicely. Nice and squeezable. As I was gazing at these boys, Brian was being just as impolite staring at the wide assortment of galactic races represented by the adult patrons of the arcade. It was while we were standing there waiting for the cab that Brian first saw the boy and pointed him out. "Who's that?" He asked, trying his best not to physicaly point at him.

He didn't have to. It was immediately obvious who he was talking about. A dozen meters away in a corner of the arcade was what I thought at first was a young girl – but I saw that I was mistaken immediately, this was a young boy. He was dressed in green spandex short-shorts that were so tight that I could easily see the outline of his pre-adolescent pubic bulge containing his penis and testicals, and the curve and crack of his tight little fanny. Another advantage of the shorts was that they left his slim, lithe legs exposed, and readily inspectable. The upper half of the boy's torso was clothed in a pink half halter top that was obviously female clothing and exposed him from belly button to half way to his nipples. Stiletto boots with fishnet stocking completed the clown's outfit the boy was waring. He was about eleven or twelve – or so I thought.

The boy himself looked very uncomfortable and his body language indicated he was embarrased and angry about being paraded in the prostitute-type clothing which made him stand out even more than being naked would have done.

Standing by the cabstand, Brian and I watched him for a while. No, he was definitely not comfortable and very scared.

"That kid is in trouble," Brian said.

"Yeah, I think so too," I agreed. "The problem is that we do not know exactly what is going on. There could be a lot of reasons why he is standing over there. How do you feel about it, do you want to try to help him?"

Brian paused and considered this seriously. Brian, even though he isn't nine yet, he is a very preceptive, and thoughtful kid. He always thought about things like this before making decisions. At his age, I was constantly in trouble because of my impulsiveness. I was glad Brian would not have to learn the hard way [as I had] not to be overly impulsive.

Finally, Brian sighed and said: "How can we not help?" he asked.

He was right of course, I'd known from the instant I saw the angry little boy that I'd try to help, no matter the risk.

Meanwhile, I had developed a quite noticeable bulge in the crotch of my flightsuit.

"Pervert!" Brian giggled and knudged me in the ribs.

I'm a connoisseur of boys, I know what a good looking boy looks like. With this in mind, you can appreciate how beautiful this kid was when I tell you he was absolutely drop dead gorgeous. He was every bit a match for Brian. His body was slim and lithe, and he had a cat-like grace to his movements, almost like a zero-gee ballet dancer. His hair was… well, multihued. No, that's not the right word, because that brings to mind those tridee clowns in the music business with the dyed hair in multiple shades of purple and green. No, the boy's hair was basically the color of polished chestnut wood, but with blonde and red strands mixed liberally into the mix. The overall effect was that of a deep, rich brown with a hint of strawberry-blond mixed in. His eyes were deep lusterious brown, with tiny specks of gold embedded in them.

I was so absorbed in staring at this godling, that at first I was unaware that the attention had become resiprical, and the boy was throughally checking me out also. When my eyes refocused on the real world, we immediatly made eye contact. The boy smiled and continued to glance repeatedly at the lower part of my body.

Suddenly out of nowhere, he did a chippendiddie bump and grind, while licking his lips. He then put his left hand down to his own crotch and started rubbing it as he looked at me, then pointed at my crotch. I looked down and saw how obvious the bulge actually was.

I looked back up at the little boy and made eye contact, with him and shrugged, grinning. He smiled back, stuck his tongue out and casually flipped me the bird. I mouthed out the words, "I'm ready anytime you are."

To my surprise I found that someone else was watching all three of us. I heard someone yell something in an unintelligible alien grumble. The boy jumped nervously and looked across the arcade at a large black antique sedan-chair, complete with black netting-veil, and four tough looking Nausicaan warriors who were presumably hiered to carry the sedan chair – as well as provide security. The chair was parked unobtrusively in a shadowed alcove a few dozen feet from where the prostitute-boy was standing.

If you did not know the chair was there, or were not specifically looking for it, it would be easy to miss it – as I had done. I was definitely not comfortable with this, it pointed to a deplorable lack of awareness about my immediate environment.

I don't like these kind of surprises, because although being a Licenced Boylover guarantees me a certian latitude with local law enforcement… it does nothing to protect me from the bubba'-types of the galaxy – those who join such right-wing fundamentalist Christian groups as the Back to Earth movement that advocates a return to the homeworld and shunning of Galactic civilization – or the Puritan Fundametalist Christian Full Gospell Vigalantee Committee [a terrorist group] which advocates the distruction of galactic civlization by force – so that the Kingdom of God can come into being in the ashes.

Most of these kind of degenerates think that children – far from being gifts from God – are necessary evils and that boylovers like myself are spawn of the devil. Bajor has a 'laissez-faire' attitude concerning all things sexual, and so although most Bajorian adults are revolted by the idea of boy lovers [and on a deeper level of gays in general] they officially leave us alone unless we do something overt to violate some other portion of Bajorian law or the teachings of the Prophets.

I took Brian's hand and we moved across the small feeder street to the robocab stand. Just in case something nasty was brewing here. I had a good thing going with Brian and I had no intention of screwing things up. The boy seemed to be conducting a conversation in sign language with whoever was in the sedan chair – he shook his head slightly and had a pleading look on his face, which said he did not want anything to do with carring this charde any further. The door of the antique transport opened and a big hairy leg came out. The boy stepped back and with an audiable intake of air looked like he was preparing to run. Then a hand came out of the car and pointed at me. This was followed by more shouted invectives and expletives in hill-Bajorian.

The new boy turned toward Brian and crossed the street without lifting his eyes off the street in front of him.

As the new boy approached Brian said: "You should look before crossing the street. You could get hurt."

"So?" The brown-haired boy's voice was full of false bravado.

"You don't look so happy right now," I agreed with Brian.

"So?" The boy's voice was still defiant, but it was begining to waver and crack with indecision and uncertianty.

"Want to talk about it?" I was really beginning to feel empathy for this very frightened and disgusted little boy. The waves of terror and need for flight, along with an undertone of embarrased digust that this boy was broadcasting, charged the psyche environment around him to a uncomfortable point so that even a relativly non-sensitive like myself cold feel it.

"No, not really," the boy said quietly. A long period of silence followed.

Brian looked helplessly at me, his blue eyes pleading with me to do something. I knew that Brian's level of psi-awarness was a lot deeper than mine, his Torgleson Brain Circuitry Scan indicated the strong potential for mentalt activity. I meant to get Brian to Vulcan or Betazed to look into this soon.

The boy looked back over his shoulder at the car across the street.

"Do you want some company tonight?" he asked, but he wasn't at all enthusiastic about it.

"I guess we could find something to do."

"Okay," he said. "It's a bar of latinum all night, or twenty slips per hour."

I dug into a pocked and took out a golden ingot of gold plated latinum 7 centimeters [2¾ inches] long and 2 centimeters [¾ inches] high and wide and handed it to the boy. He slowly walked over to the sedan chair and there were some growls and a few shouts and waiving of fists; and then the brown-haired boy was walking back toward us.

The robocab arrived just then and Brian immediately claimed the front seat and our guest climbed into the rear passenger section. I followed them, but not before looking back over my shoulder at the sedan chair. The four burley Nosikanns had picked it up and were now marching out of a side door of the arcade.

I directed the robocab around to the sidestreet that faced the door through which we had just seen the sedan chair exit. We were just in time to see a tall, thin humanoid in a long robe and hood climbing into a countergrav jetcar cruiser. It was just pulling out away from the curb and floating up toward the crosstown airtraffic lanes fifty meters above the ground transport system. I half crawled out of the robocab's rear passenger compartment and watched the jetcar as long as it was visible, one foot in the cab and the other on the pavement.

"Sir?" the r3 unit in charge of the cab vocalized, "are you ready to depart? You must be fully in the vehicle and seated in an upright and forward position."

"Sorry," I mumbled and re-entered the robocab fully. The robocab pulled out into traffic and we left the seedy corner behind as I gave the droid driver instructions where to take us. First to an all-night shopping center and then on to the aerospace field.

"You hungry?" I asked.

"Starving!" Brian piped up. We both turned to our guest.

"Yes," he said simply. A real orator this one I thought.

"I think we have something I can cook up at home." I glanced at Brian and didn't tell our guest that 'home' was a Tomahawk interstellar truck parked on a small rural aerospace field just south of Kilkamec City, or that about all we had left in the pantry were old combat e-rations.

Our guest still looked dubious. I did not know what he was comming out of, but I figured that perhaphs he did have a right to be apprehensive about what was in store for him.

"You don't have to worry about anything," I said trying to reassure the boy. "I will not hurt you or try to force you into anything."

"Been there, done that!" the little boy said cynically.

Brian twisted around to a kneeling position in the front seat facing the older boy, "Pete is kewl, you'll see."

Our guest just stared out the window dejectedly at the passing urban scene.

"What's your name?" I asked.

The boy looked at me for a minute, before he dropped his eyes to the floor of the cab.

"David Hiller," he said simply.

"Glad to meet you, David," I said. "My name is Pete, and that's Brian, my son, beside you."

David raised his eyes and fixed them on Brian, trying to understand the situation he was currently in. Finally he sighed and sat back in the seat.

He seemed to relax a little, as though he had decided that if Brian trusted me, he could also.

"How old are you, David?" The boy again gave me a searching evaluation, as if he were gauging whether or not I could be trusted with real data – or if he should make something up.

"I'm eleven," he said finally, "I just turned eleven last week."

"I'll be nine next month," Brian said, but fell silent when the new boy said nothing.

So I picked up the ball again. "But before we go anywhere you need some decent clothes to wear. Those make you look like a hooker."

The little boy looked up at me, smiled sweetly and said: "Hi, sailor. Looking for a good time?"

I burst into laughter and collapsed fully into the robocab's seat. Without any prompting, the little boy crawled into my lap and leaned against my chest.

"Aren't I supposed to say something like: 'want some candy, little boy'." I asked.

"I guess so. Do you have any candy?"

"As a matter of fact I do," I said rummaging around in the hip pockets of my flight suit for some of the junk-stuff I'd bought at the theater.

"So!" Brian said in mock-irritation, "Holding out on me, huh?" Brian socked me in the arm.

I brought out a couple of candy bars.

"Great! Butterscotch and granola, my favorite!" the new boy said.

"Yeah, I could practically live on 'em if I had to," Brian smiled as he attacked the candy bar with savage little boy aggression.

Minutes later, the robocab pulled into a deserted parking lot of a semi-rundown, all-night mall with a large general merchandise store anchoring it. The garish neon sign over it said: N-Mart. I opened up my flight suit and pealed off the sweatshirt I had been waring under it, and handed it to the young boy.

"We can get you some better clothes here. Why don't you get out of that 'costume' – we can't have you looking like a two bit whore."

David tugged off the halter top, tossing it in the rear cargo compartment of the robocab; and put on my sweatshirt and then abandoned the short-shorts, fishnet stockings and hooker boots. With just this oversized sweatshirt on and the hooker boots off, David looked almost like any other little boy wearing an adult size sweatshirt with "Property of the Klingon Defense Forces" stenciled on it.

"You look better already," I said, hoping he would not connect the double meaning of the words on the sweatshirt.

"Thanks." He sounded a bit better now.

"We'll have to get you some more clothes…," I started.

"Can I get some stuff, too?" Brian asked.

"Yeah," I said, "I guess you're wardrobe is also pretty thin."

Inside we went straight to the boy's department.

"Let's see. You need a decent pair of pants, a shirt, at least one playsuit, socks, shoes, underwear…" Brian and David tried on several pairs of pants with several shirt combinations, some all- purpose playsuits and various other accessories, I found an ensemble that I really liked on my two proteges, and both boys also found stuff that they liked. All things considered, the shopping trip was a success, the whole thing came to only a hundred fifty Federation solars. It was a good thing that the N-Mart. was tied into the Bank of Bajor so that I could use the Federation credits I had on deposit, I'm not certain after paying for Dream Walker's overhaul that I had even this much latinum left.

Anyway for the hundred fifty we got: Two pair of black denim jeans one size eight and one size twelve that fit the boys like jeans should, a white silk short sleeve shirt, not usually found at N-Mart.'s boys department, in size 12, and a nice pale blue [Brian's favorite color] button down dress shirt in Brian's size; 2 pairs of imitation Starscream sneakers [the real ones, imported from Terra itself would have cost a king's ransom here on Bajor three warpgate jumps from the Terran Core Worlds]; two size 12 playsuits, one in tiger-stripe camouflage design and one charcoal gray, two size eight playsuits, again in tiger strip camo design and charcoal gray, a dozen assorted white and colored socks with a six pack of size 8 and size 12 Funpals.

A half hour later, walking out to the robocab David, with a much more buoyant and bubbly disposition wanted to put everything on, leaving all vestiges of his recent past behind him.

"Not yet David, we need to wash those first. And you too." I turned around to Brian, who was pawing through the bags looking for his pair of Starscream sneakers.

"Why?" David asked.

"Because," I said "you never know what those clothes have been treated with when they were manufactured. For that matter, who knows where they were made. They might have been manufactured on a world with a toxic atmosphere. Some of those toxins could be still in the fabric… And you need a bath, I'm not going anywhere with you stinking like perfume."

Brian roared with laughter and David blushed deep crimson red.

"Okay," David said subdued. "I guess I do reek – but you guys don't smell like roses either!"

"Haw! Haw! Haw!" I guffawed, raising my arm to appraise my armpit. The kid was right – we were all in dire need of a good scrubbing.

We spent the ten minute ride out to the aerospace field villifying each other's personal hygiene and devising extreme solutions involving wire brushes and starship hull treatment fluids.

The teasing banter was quickly allowing Brian and David to form mutual bonds and cement their growing friendship. I was using the time to study David. Defiantly older than Brian, about eleven had been my initial guess – and that matched what he had innitially told us; but he could be as old as fourteen, depending on his exact genetic and ethnic/racial background. He had said he was eleven, and that also was well within the range of possibilities, so I accepted that as fact for now. He also had sun-golden brown hair and bright, intelligent brown eyes. He was 147 cm tall [4'10"] and weighed about 37.10 kg [83 pounds]. The latter two guesses were based upon the assumption he was eleven and a normal Terrestrial human, which he certainly appeared to be. His brown hair was in a rather longish cut, coming down to his shirt collar.

Like Brian, his normal vocabulary seemed a weird mixture of juvenile slang and sophisticated adult level verbage. I'd read somewhere that this was the normal outcome of kids who had few playmates their own age and associated mostly with adults.

The robocab turned off the main cross-province highway and almost immediatly pulled up at the areodrome. Brian immediatly jumped out and ran to the Dream Walker, dragging David by the hand.

"How do you like it?" Brian bubbled over.

"It-it's a spaceship," David said in awe.

"Yup," Brian said and manipulated the exterior lock plate by the airlock hatch. With a hiss of compressors and the whine of electric motors the Dream Walker's airlock cycled open and the gangway extended to the ground. David allowed himself to be towed up the gangway by the younger boy and I followed behind and sealed the airlock.

"Here's the bathroom," I said to David. "You and Brian get started getting in the shower, and I'll get the packages into the bedroom and then join you guys."

"Yezzir, Cap'n Petey," Brian said, ducking as I aimed a swing at him. Closing the bathroom door I went to the Tomahawk's tiny laundry area in the utility room just next to the bathroom, and tossed the boys new clothing into the wash tub and set the controls for wash-n-wear – normal cycle. The truck's little washer would take several loads to accomplish the task, of decontaminating the new clothing, but then dinner was also going to consume some time.

I slipped out of my clothes and joined David and Brian in the Dream Walker's autowash. The autowash is really three fixtures in one molded into a 9 cubic meter volume, including pumps and filtrs. The shower area is oversized, a meter and a half wide by two long with two high volume showerheads and several sonic emitters, in an emergency it can be used as a decontamination area with the erection of forcefield shields. The rim of the shower area is also raised three feet [except for the entry portal] and can therefor double as a large hot-tub; and with the addition of correctly focused sonic beams can be converted into a fist-class jacuzzi.

I got my first real look at David in the raw here, although his hooker's costume had left little to be discovered. The eleven-year-old was as he had appeared, with a slim, athletic body, already starting to show some adult muscular development, especially across his chest, shoulders and back. I watched as he slowly soaped his body, watching David run his soapy hands over his chest and nipples, his cute hairless underarms, his buttcrack, and finally his wiener and balls. He gently washed his hairless 8-cm circumcised penis (which was absolutely perfect, I thought, the head a rosy pink in color). His balls were small and drawn in tight to his body, in a preadolescent scrotum.

He turned to me with a grin of pure mischief, and said "Would you wash my back?"

"Sure," I said and began to soap up my hands.

"When Jamal dropped me off, I was kinda scared…" David said. I looked at this as a kind of crack in the shell of protection that the eleven-year-old had put up since our first meeting.

"Both Brian and I could see that," I said and Brian nodded for emphesis. "That's why we tried to go as slow as possible."

I took the soap and began to wash his back. His skin was so soft and warm that I nearly lost control of myself. I had a raging, pounding hard on that felt like it would explode any second. I finally finished with his back (I had not gone down any further that the waistline where his tan stopped). He again turned to face me, and noticed my pounding dick. I found him grinning at me.

"You have a stiffy!" he giggled at me.

I decided that I would try to keep David talking for an extened period this time. I looked down at my erect dick. "I believe you're right," I said with an almost undetectable pelvic thrust.

"Here," Brian said, "I'll show you what to do." He reached out, wrapping his smooth little hand rather firmly around my throbbing member; I reached out to touch his slender 7 cm [2¾ inches] erect wiener. We simultaniously began to masturbate each other. Brian was a savage there in the autowash, working my dick like it was a mechanical pump or something, within thirty seconds he had the results he was searching for as I howled and emitted a quantum-torpedo of seman and sperm that splattered against the far tiled wall of the autowash.

"THAR SHE BLOWS!!" Brian shouted and David laughed until he couldn't stand up strait. "And now… suck my dick!" Brian ordered in a commanding voice and thrust his pelvic area out at me, his small wiener was erect and stiff.

"By your command," I panted and snatched Brian off his feet and swong him off his feet, holding him above me for a moment before transfering my hold on the litle boy to under his arms and lowering him to the correct level for sucking boy dick, and swallowed Brian's wiener and balls all at once. Brian squeeled with pleasure as I did body-presses with Brian's 25 kilogram [55 pounds] body as I sucked his wiener.

"Okay – okay," Brian said suddenly. "Let me down – I gotta pee!"

Brian scampered out of the autowash and over to the toilet and David and I heard the stream of water hitting the pool in the bottom of the toilet.

I got out just after Brian flushed and went down the short passageway to the sleeper and pulled out a clean pair of shorts and pulled them on. David was right behind me.

"I-I want to thank you for buying me the neat clothes," David said. "They're better than anything I've had for a long time, ever since…" and then David cut off the flow of conversation as though he had turned off a switch.

KLIK… on.

KLIK… off!

"Nothing to it," I said. "But it's still gonna be awhile before your stuff is out of the drier. Better wrap up in this while we're waiting." I tossed a clean beach towel at the boy.

Meanwhile, Brian had been poking around in the cold pantry.

"Err…Pete?" he called from the entry to the galley, "We really don't have anything but ice cream in here…"

"Try this," I said, coming into the galley and digging into the oversized drawers of the galley overhead storage area. Brian was right though, we were seriously understocked in the grub compartment with two healthy growing boys on board. I made a mental note to lay in supplies when we docked at ds9. I tossed Brian a foil packet about 15 centimeters long and 4 centimeters thick [6 x 1½ inches].

"What is it?"asked Brian.

"Combat E-rations," I said. "Not too bad really."

When David finally came out of the bathroom wearing a huge towel wrapped around his waist, I could hear his stomach growl.

"So, feel better now?"

"Yeah, it felt good. Are the clothes done yet?"

"In the dryer as we speak – they will be done soon. Here, sit down and eat up! You have not lived till you've tasted Terran Imperial Marines combat rations."

Brian was already sitting at the Dream Walker's small meter square table in our 'ward room' as David came in from the adjoining galley. The young boy tore the combat ration pak open and stuffed the beef jerky-like stick of emergency rations in his mouth. "Not bad," he said, his mouth full.

David nodded and opened the package and tentative took a bite. "Pretty good," he agreed. Brian turned over the foil wrappers of the E-rations. On the foil was the red, white and blue banner of the UnitedStates and the words:

"Yeah, I know." David said, "I read about it in a comic book. This stuff is suppose to keep for a century. More if its stored in a vacuum."

"Oh yeah? How?"

"They sock it with gamma rays to kill all the bacteria.

"Yuck, you mean the stuff is radioactive?"

I had joined the two boys in the galley by this time and the exchange between Brian and David seemed to indicate that the relationship between the two young boys was progressing apace.

I laughed at Brian's conclusion about the food processing that combat rations were subjected to. "No, Brian, the gamma rays go right through it and kill all the bacteria and then keep on going. It takes a special kind of material to become radioactive itself."

"Oh," Brian said.

"Whatcha get?" David asked. "They have 12 basic meals."

David seemed well versed in the Imperial Marines… another mystery I would inquire into later, if I remembered.

"It says 'Type C Turkey Dinner', so I guess it's thanksgiving," Brian said.

"Good enough for me!" David said, "let me have another of those Rations, Combat Emergency, Type II."

We all had a second round.

"Hey, okay," Brian said. "I got fried chicken and french fries. Authentic junque food!"

"I got 'steak, salad, baked potato, and biscuit'." David said reading right off the foil pack.

The boys nearly inhaled the ration sticks and sat around smacking their lips.

"Okay, who's up for ice cream?"

"Me–me–me!" both boys were squirming all over each other waving their hands in the air. David's towel was slipping a bit and I caught a glimpse of his exquisite boyhood. As I sat two heaping bowls of ice cream in front of the two boys, they both attacked the ice cream.

I was still chewing on a ration bar. I looked up from my 'steak'. "Damn! You must have been hungry." All they did was nod as they wiped ice cream from their chins.

The buzzer on the dryer rang indicating the load was done.

"Ahh," I said, sitting back in my chair. "Time for the fashion show. You two go get your stuff out of the laundry room and come show me how they fit. Moments later, the two boys were back, Brian was wearing the tiger-stripe camouflage playsuit and the Starscream sneakers. Brian came over and sat beside me as David came in from the bathroom.

David stood there in front of me. A little less than a meter and a half tall, sandy brown hair, with a lot of bronze-red mixed into it, not really the golden brown like I thought originally. Rich brown eyes that reflected his intelligence. His skin was fair to the point of being pale. You can spot a spacer right away ground side, because of the heavier exposure to UV radiation tends to brown the skin pretty well. Because David was so pale, it was obvious he'd been here on Bajor for some time, yet he was obviously a Terran human. I wondered how this had come to be. No matter, he looked spectacular in the new clothes.

"WOW." Was all I could say.

The silk shirt fit him like a glove.

I could see his shape under it but it did not squeeze him. His pants gripped his butt like a lover. Holding, cradling but not skin tight. I let my eyes wander up and down his beauty and came to rest on his feet. I knelt down and tied his left shoe.

"Don't want you to trip l'il guy."

"Thanks. Thanks for every thing, the clothes, the food. It almost makes me forget why we are here…"

I placed my finger on his lips stopping him. "I meant what I said when we first met. I will make you do nothing you don't want to. If all we do is spend the evening watching a movie and cuddling, I will be happy."

"But…"

Again I laid my finger against his soft, sweet lips. "No, for now there is no 'but' – the only thing is for you to just enjoy and feel safe. And to know, deep down in your being that I will never hurt you. I know you're frightened, and you think that you've heard all these empty promises before – but Brian will tell you, maybe it will be more believable coming from another kid. I will not hurt you. I subscribe to the Federation's Children's Bill of Rights as part of my oath as a Boy Lover."

"What's that?"

"Let's see when I got my licence, I could recite this from memory. That's been a while, but let's see if I can still do it – alright?"

David shrugged, still puzzled.

"Okay," I said, "Here goes:

• I understand that my body is my own. No one has a right to tell me what I can and cannot do with my own body.
• I understand that sex is among the most powerful physical drives my being is subject to. This drive is normal and good, it is neither moral nor immoral. I understand that it is my right to satisfy this drive however I see fit, provided only that I do no harm to another.
• I acknowledge the fact that I am a child and that I am vulnerable to outside pressures exerted by the adults around me. I promise that I will always listen carefully to the advise of my parents and those adults that I love and trust.
• I have the right to say NO to anything that scares me or makes me feel uncomfortable when it comes to personal interaction with other people…"

"Oh there's more, then there was the Oath that I had to swear to get my licence as a Boy Lover. I'm pretty sure I can still recite that one:

1. I have read and acknowledge the truth of the Children's Bill of Rights.
2. I will never use force, either physical or emotional against a child; I will always express nothing but affection and respect for the child I am associated with.
3. I understand that although sex is a big part of life, it is not the only thing that is important. I promise to faithfully attend to the responsibilities of friendship also.
4. I realize and acknowledge that children are gifts from God and that my relationship with them, either as a parent or lover is built upon a spiritual foundation, not just a physical one. I promise never to do anything to violate the trust given to me by a child.
5. I understand that the violation of any of these principles will be grounds for the immediate revocation of my licence and privileges granted thereby. I further understand that violation of this covenant is punishable under criminal and civil law."

Both David and Brian were impressed with the solemn words of the oath. Brian had never heard of licensed Boy Lovers either. When he had come up to me in the vr-arcade on Starbase 288 he thought he was being very naughty and living on the edge.

"David," I said softly, "We – Brian and I – want you to join our little family."

David shot a surprised look at Brian, who nodded.

"Y-you want me to come with you – you mean when you leave Bajor?"

"Uh-huh," Brian said.

David turned to me, and it was my turn to just smile an nod.

The young brown-haired boy burst into tears, "I-I can't," He said. "The thing I was worrying about, that I can't forget any more…" David threw his arms around me and said: "I'd really like to… but I can't!"

I suggested that the boys get ready for bed and as David got down to his underware, I scooped him into my arms, and with Brian following, I carried him into the sleeping area and laid on the bed. Brian on one side, and I on the other – David was sandwiched between us. Brian stroked David sympathetically.

"Tell me what it is, maybe we can figure something out," I said.

"I really am a faggot-whore. I like doing it with boys. Not the butt fucking of course, but I like to be sucked… and I like to play with other boy's wieners."

"David," I started, searching for the words that would suave over the gaping emotional wounds in David's psyche… unfortunatly, there did not seem to be any magic words like that; and so I fell back on a well rehearsed speech from a nambla interstellar pamphlet.

"You know that Brian and I enjoy playing with each other like that," I said. "All boys mess around with each other sometimes," I said as comfortingly as I could. I hugged him again. "It's a natural part of being a little boy. It's way too early for you to say one way or the other if you're gay, xt-sexo, bi-sexual or hetro. You have to be a grown up before those things mean anything – and you decide that. While you are a kid you can experiment with anything and its ok."

David looked up at me, face twisted into a mask of pain. "I'm trying to tell you it's true. I do like boys. I never get excited about girls; and aliens…? Yeech!"

Brian leaned over and put his arm around David's shoulder. "You can play with my wiener if you want…any time you want. I think its fun too – and I want you to be happy again."

He looked at Brian, "Thanks, Brian," he said. Then he looked like he was trying to stop crying.

"You know what I am. I'm a whore. I get paid to let people fuck me. I belong to Jamal, and if I don't do what he says – Jamal is gonna beat me up again.

"I don't see any 'Jamal' here," I said softly.

" –- So if you don't fuck me tonight he's gonna beat me up." The tears were starting to flow again. "But I don't wanna get fucked! It hurts! But I don't wanna get beat up! I don't know what to do! I don't want you to hurt me but if you don't I will get hurt anyway."

"I wont hurt you." I said.

"Nor me," Brian echoed solemnly. Brian dug around in the storage bin that formed part of the bed's headboard and dug out Crunchie.

"But if you don't he will! Maybe even worse."

"You can use Crunchie to help protect you," Brian said. "He's never failed me……"

David reached over and hugged Brian, momentarily sandwiching the stuffed toy terror between them. "Thanks," David managed to get out and Brian immediatly reached out and hugged David.

"How long have you been doing this?" I asked David gentley.

"A week… today."

"How many men have "fucked" you?"

"One."

"Jamal, right?"

He nodded. "It hurt so much! He just threw me on the bed and hit me – cause I wouldn't suck his cock! He tore off my pants and shoved his dick in my butt! He hurt me so bad I screamed for him to stop but he wouldn't!"

Now the tears would not stop. I just held him and waited. I wanted to kill this Jamal. How could anyone do this to a child. This Jamal person was a real monster, one of the 'predator pedophyles' I had heard of and had always dismissed as christian propaganda. All this beast cared about was his own pleasure. He was willing to hurt this little boy, maybe even kill him to satisfy his own needs. For an instant my head whirled, there was a rushing in my ears and I caught a glimpse of what motivated the 'other side' – those few thoroughly anti-boy-lover bigots in their jhad of hatred and bloody retribution against people like myself.

Yes, my fossilized readers, if you are truly a member of that tiny minority of infinitely insane pedaeophobes you too can find comrades out there in the infinite expanse of the explored universe. The Vulcan's have a saying for it – "infinite diversity in infinite combinations": idic. Perhaps you came from a background such as David has just narrowly escaped… how then could I, a boy lover, try to condemn you for your insane hatred of us all? I can't. All I can do is to be ever vigilant and try to help children like David.

Brian had cuddled up against David and was holding him in his arms, tears were rolling down his cheeks. I was very proud of Brian and his compassionate reaction; he had the emotional constitution of a fine member of a future generation of boy lovers. Even though I secretly suspected that when his time came, Brian would choose to meld with the 95% of strait humanity in the galaxy at large.

"After he did it to me, he said I had to suck his cock." The word was even uglier coming out of David's beautiful mouth. "So he locked me in the closet and told me I wouldn't eat till I sucked him and anyone he told me to. I got so hungry I told him I would do anything he wanted me to – anything at all." David looked at the ground. "He took me into a room with a lot of other boys in it. He told me to get on my knees and suck them all…"

David hesitated. "And I did. All of them, even the little baby. He made me swallow the cum from the older boys. That was all I would get too eat till I learned how to suck real good, he said. He put me back in the closet. Every day he would get me out and make me suck off a bunch of people. The only thing I had to eat was their stuff. I was so hungry I would have let him do my butt again. then today he took me out and gave me a 'test'. He made me suck his dick. he shoved it down my throat and I couldn't breath! I thought I was going to die! He just kept shoving it in and out till he cummed. After that he finally let me have a bowl of oatmeal. I never liked oatmeal before, but I gobbled down every last mounthfull. He made me dress up like you saw and took me out. He told me what to charge and if I didn't come back with my butt full of stuff he was gonna fuck me till I was dead!"

David hugged against Brian and I even harder. He had a deathgrip on Crunchie.

"I DON'T WANNA DIE!"

I just held the boy. Brian cried softly.

My mind was on fire. I was ashamed of what had happened to this boy and I was enraged at it as well. I lay on the bed holding a boy in my arms trying to figure out what to do. Realistically all I could do was comfort him. I probably could have alerted the Bajorian authorities, but it was obvious that they assigned a very low priority to such problems. I could – and would – notify nambla and ibln of the problems here on Bajor… nambla, the oldest boy lover organization on Terra has its roots in deep pre-space times and has many of the aspects of a shadow government, including an assassination bureau. But Bajor was a rich and powerful member of the Federation's plans for the defence of the Alpha Quadrant against the Dominion, and it was highly unlikely that any real pressure would be brought to bear, politically or economically…and the chances of getting nambla's Assassination Bureau to assign one of its very limited number of mechanics to "fix" this problem were not good either.

Soon though, David's sobs subsided. "So you gotta fuck me," he said resolutely.

"I will never fuck you." I said resolutely.

"BUT!"

"No. I will never do that. I told you about my Oath as a boy lover. I take that very seriously. If push came to shove I would terminate this Jamal-creature before I let anything happen to you."

His eyes got wide.

"If we do anything to each other, you will decide what you want to do. If I stick it in you it will be by your decision, and I will never 'fuck' you. If we do it, I will make love to you."

He looked puzzled. "I don't get it."

"S'okay," I murmured, stroking his hair, "you don't have to. But I need your contact number for Jamal." I said, sitting up and moving across to the sleeping area's mini-couch.

"No! No, you mustn't……" David sat bolt upright and Brian looked startled and frightened.

"Okay, okay, calm down," I said "But I can't believe that your parents or someone isn't worried about you."

"They're not," David said instantly, his face twisted into a scowl.

"Well, I'm worried about it. How about humoring me and giving me their commweb number if you won't give up Jamal's." I said, taking a small portable commweb from the receptacle just to the left of the archway leading to the Tomahawk's central core walkway. "I'm calling just to let them know you're okay and see what they say."

David made a rude noise. "C'mon Pete, you know as well as I do that if I give you a comm number, you can find out virtually everything from the planetary-web – everything about anyone from name to last three fuck-dates."

"Well, maybe so. In theory – if I were Federation Security or a private investigator – but I'm not. Believe me David, my only interest is in letting your people know that you are safe."

"They're not worried, Pete," David said solemnly. "Jamal bought me from my foster-mother, a Bajorian Jiggsigg junkie. He paid her 35 slips of latinum and a week's supply of Jiggsigg – she doesn't even have a comm number and I doubt if she knows I'm gone."

"I see," I said thoughtfully. I still wondered how David had come to be in a Bajorian foster home, and how he had come to be on Bajor in the first place, but that could wait for now, I sensed that David was cruising on the edge of breaking down again; and I wanted to spear him that if I could. "There was no one to help?"

"Like with so much else to do, the cops would give a bleep about a kid like me," David sighed gustily and then he reluctantly gave me a Comm number. "But it'll only cause trouble…"

"Who's this?" I asked looking up from the commweb.

David glanced at Brian, and shrugged. "Jamal's."

I sat down on the edge of the bed, opened the portable comm-web and dialed the number.

"Pete!" Brian' voice was edged with terror. Startled I looked toward him.

"Cut off the video pickup! We don't want him to see us – I know!"

Instinctively I touched a control button on the bottom of the commweb and the tiny video led over the ccd screen went out. I've learned to trust Brian's hunches. He's right more times than he's wrong.

"Hullo?" a guttural male voice said after the third ring. The small 6 cm [2½ inch] screen showed an unshaven hairy obese Bajorian about 50 with thick eyebrows and a prominent sneer etched across his philistine features.

"Hello, is this Jamal?" I asked.

"Who wants to know?" the voice asked roughly. "What's wrong with da vid?"

"My name's Pete and I picked up a kid you might know: his name's David. I just wanted to let you know he's okay and see if there was anything you wanted to tell him," I answered.

"Oh ya did, huh? Listen you cocksucker I don't give a flying fuck if da little faggot is alive or dead, I gots lots of 'em. You paid da latinum, he's yours till sunup. Then ya put 'im back on da corner. Da sniveling' li'l mutie's gotta earn his keep aroune here. Ya hear me snotnose?"

"I don't think so. You see David's decided to stay with me," I said.

"WHAT!!?? Why I'll have yo killed, ya thievin' two bit hustler, I have friends in the resistance, dey'll hunt youse down like a Kardasian voll! I'll have him back, and that other little piece of ass you had with you. They'll both die of some horrible xt-clap or some other xt-std before dey see de twelvth birthday. You betta just be smart and hand dem over. Den mabbe I let you live."

"In your dreams fatboy," I growled.

"WHAD YO SEZ!? I kill you ––––"

"Sue me," I said and pressed the disconnect switch. I looked at the "transmission terminated" icon on the tiny ccd screen for a while with an obviously shocked expression before I pressed the off button and watched the brief flash of light as the ccd cells of the vidscreen discharged. A slow rage was building in me and he had to consciously try to avoid throwing a non-productive rage-tantrum right there. How dare that subhuman slime say such things against a pair of sweet little boys like David and Brian? To hell with the bureau of assassinations, I'd waste this piece of dogmeat myself.

David looked pained. "See? He said he didn't care, didn't he?" David's face was an unreadable mask of intense emotion seething within his being.

I nodded.

"He called me a faggot didn't he?" David asked in a quiet voice.

I nodded again.

"And a mutant… that part was true at least. I'm a filthy mutie," David said.

As I looked at the two boys beautiful faces I saw large tears begin to roll down their cheeks again, almost simultaneously. That was all it took, I could hold out no longer. I sat on the bed next to them and put an arm around each boy. "Hey Brian, David, it's okay guys. It's gonna be okay."

Brian threw his arms around my neck and crawled into my lap. The almost nine-year-old buried his face against my shoulder, crying in huge, wrenching sobs.

David, for a few minutes, managed to just lean against me with tears rolling down his cheeks freely, but soon he was openly bawling again also. I hugged them and let them cry. Through his sobs, David swore for the first time in front of me. "That son of a bitch! That fucking son of a bitch. I hate him! I tried like crazy to please him –- so he wouldn't hurt me any more; but I couldn't do anything right. He beat the shit out of me every other day! I hate him! I hate him!"

I hugged him tighter, petting his soft brown hair.

At last, the emotion spent and the crying over, David released his hold on me and sat up. "I should just off myself and be done with it!" he said.

"David! NO!" Brian literately screamed through his tears. The atmosphere in the room became suddenly electric and I could sense more than see a pale blue-green aurorae surrounding Brian and reaching out toward both myself and David.

Now of course I know all about MenTalts and the amazing things that are possible to the human mind, but I'd never encountered one before, a true MenTalt is a one in a million reordering of the human genome to produce something… well… different but still human, and as far as I knew there was nothing in Brian's medical or genetic records that indicated that he might be a T+ talent, but the past few seconds were fast making a believer out of me. There was a distinct possibility that Brian Shimosuwa was a MenTalt, and judging from this display, a fairly high potency level one also.

"Don't ever even think or say that!" I exclaimed, holding David even tighter. "I promise no matter what you tell me and Brian, you can stay with us as long as you decide to."

"Amen," Brian sobbed through his tears.

"What about when you have to leave with your ship?"

"Well," I said momentarily taken aback by the starkly analytic question. "I won't lie to you, that could be complicated with the Bajorian authorities, but when the time comes, if you want to come with us, I promise you will."

David hugged me tightly and then released me and looked right at me, his gorgeous polished walnut brown eyes brimming with tears. If it had been any other circumstance, I would have been instantly erect at the thought of this little boy coming with us and beating his meat with Brian in front of a holocam. But this wasn't erotic. This was deeply sad.

Brian snuffled and wiped his runny nose on a kleenex from the pop-up dispenser beside on the bed's wide bookcase headboard. "And I – I think I may be a mutant, too! Not a useful Talent that can be trained, but a dangerous mutant. I wanted to tell you when we first met, but you were so kewl, I wanted to stay with you. And the Federation Security Agents will come and take me away and put electrodes in me and cut me open to see what makes me tick. My aunt told me."

Both David and I sat their and simply stared at Brian. If this was some plan of his to get David's mind off suicide, it had worked well. The eleven year old's tears had dried up completely as he tried to comprehend what the words Brian was saying meant in the cold hard reality of the multiverse.

"Brian that is absolute nonsense! What makes you think you're a mutant?" I asked.

"Watch!" the 9-year-old commanded, pointing to the used complementary kleenex in the wastebasket a meter away. A distracted look came over Brian's face and then his eyes seemed to blaze electric emerald for an instant, as the sea-green flecks in his blue eyes reacted to whatever commands his mind had just issued. The deteris in the wastebasket suddenly burst into flame and then settled down into a single large orange-yellow flame as it burned the paper and cotton fibers of the used kleenex.

"Warning!" lcars chided. "FIRE!"

"Hoe–lee Sh–-" I said softly, still staring at the now flickering flame. "lcars, stand down."

"And I can make myself invisible," Brian said matter-of-factly.

"G'wan…" David muttered.

"I don't mean really invisible, like bending light or something; but I can make people just ignore me, and not pay any attention to what I'm doing, and just forget that anything happened. But it takes time to prepare, and it leaves a humungus headache. That's why I couldn't use it too often, I have to have time to prepare…"

"Aww, Brian, I know how you feel…" David said and hugged Brian.

I looked at Brian, his face was anxious. "That is some demonstration," I said. "I think the invisible trick could be called telehypnosis, and the trick with the kleenex would be telekenesis. Neither of these things make you a monster, or dangerous, they just make you very special. As far as I know you need to be a T+3 to make telekinesis work constantly."

"What's T+3 mean?" Brian asked.

"When humans first went out into the galaxy and started to meet other people, they learned that the universe itself is alive, and that what is called "psi" or extrasensory perception is a part of this universal life force and common among about half of all sentient life – especially among non-humanoid forms. We humans like to measure and compare things, and psi was no different. So back in the 21st century they established a group of tests and measurements that could compare the relative potencies of different people with psi-powers. They called these special people "MenTalts" which stands for MENtal TALenTs, and established a scale called the T scale. Because we thought of it, we set ourselves at the center with T=0. From there the table is logarithmic – do you know that word?"

"Of course!" Brian snorted. "I'm not a baby, I'm almost ready to pass my Phase One tests later this year!"

"Ooohhhhh – tuff guy, Phase Two are you. We'll find out when you start back to school next month," I teased Brian and grinned.

"School!?"

"Yes, school. Anyway, the T-scale is logarithmic and goes up to T+8 or down to T-4. Plus numbers are greater than Terra norm, and minus numbers are less than norm. Example: Betzoids are all T+2 and some are T+3 or T+4…"

"Okay, David," I said, "You're turn. Tell me about being a mutie."

David looked something like a small trapped animal in the headlites of an oncomming jetcar. "Do I have to?" he asked in a small voice.

"Well, it will help," I said. "It always helps to have someone to talk to about problems."

Again the young boy paused, as though marshaling his thoughts. "I was born on Emris Prime, it is a cold, dark planet circling a dim infra-red giant star in the Star's End Quadrant…"

Brian jumped up and ran forward to the control cabin. "WOW!" Brian shouted. "80,000 light years away at the training edge of the Cygnius Arm of the Milky Way!"

"The people are very supersticious, the colony has been there for almost a hundred years, but it has de-evolved, the colonists are at about the same level technologically as the mid nineteenth century… agriculture is all manual using horses and oxen," David paused to judge how his presentation was going, and Brian rejoined us.

"I can talk to animals." David said as his climax.

"Neat!" was Brian's quick comment which I echoed.

"And I can do one other thing, but its not very useful."

"What is it?" Brian asked.

"Well…" David paused. "Watch." He picked Crunchie out of Brian's lap and stood the stuffed animal on its hind legs. I sagged sideways slightly. David closed his eyes and deep furrows formed in his forehead. As with Brian's big demonstration, at first it appeared that nothing was happening. However this was not the case I realized as I looked closely at Crunchie. The Tyranadonn had 'fleshed-out' some, and his tail, which had been slack and limp behind him suddenly whipped out at the air.

On the bed between Brian and David was a perfect three dimensional representation of the reptile. At first I thought it was a hologram, but no, it was solid and had substance, the tiny terror's long tail lashed the air in confussion and it reared back on its hind legs and roared its defiance to the world.

"Kewl," Brian whispered and reached out toward Crunchie.

The mini-tyranadonn snapped its jaws full of razor sharp tiny fangs shut, and Brian drew back, unsure of himself.

David suddenly let out a tremendous sigh and Crunchie returned to his status of much loved stuffed toy.

Brian picked up his toy off the bed and hugged it close to his breast.

"I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like that before," I said.

"Way kewl," Brian said. "It means you can really make your toys come to life…"

"Except that the others on Emris Prime thought I was a witch, and sold me to an Orion slaver when I was five. I had a lot of 'masters' utill I was eight and bought by a Bajorian merchant, who brought me here to Bajor. He bought me because of my powers, and for awhile I was proud, but then we got to Bajor, the merchant got me tested, I scored about T+0.05 or something stupid like that and the merchant found out that I would never be able to preform like he wanted… so he kicked me out on the street."

David was starting to cry again here.

I stroaked David's shoulders and said: "Well, this doesn't sound like anything that we cannot deal with. As far as I'm concerned, the offer to join up with us still stands if you want it. Brian? Your oppinion?

"David should come with us, it's the best thing!"

David sniffed and wiped his nose. The boy shifted and laid out full length on the bed and said: "Then I'm in," David said simply and we all three hugged and began an impromptu wrastling match.

A half hour later, panting, I had to admit defeat at the tiny hands of my advisaries. Without resorting to force, I could not vanquish them. Laying there against me, also panting David asked: "Pete, you said you would not 'fuck' me, but you might 'make love' with me. What's the difference?"

"Hmmn! That is really a tougher question than it sounds like," I said. "OK. You can break sex into several parts. It in itself is an act. But it is what is inside the people that are doing it that makes it different. What Jamal did to you was rape. You did not want it and he forced it on you, he hurt you even when you told him no. THAT is illegal, you know what it is like on your side of it and that tells you it is the ugliest of things that exist. Do you understand all this?"

He nodded in agreement. "I'm in the middle of Phase Two he grinned."

"Yeah, school for you too," I grinned.

"Fucking is simply one person getting what he or she wants without caring about the other. No love or caring involved. but both people agree to it. Having sex is where two people want to have pleasure but they aren't really in love with each other – they both want to have pleasure and they decide to use one another to get it."

So what's 'making love' mean?"

"That is the most beautiful of acts. The exact opposite of rape. It is where two people decide to give pleasure to each other. Neither caring for their own satisfaction, just their partner. The ultimate goal is to make the other as happy as possible, even if it means denying oneself."

"You said you want to make love to me but not fuck me. How can you do that?"

"I want to explore your body and find all the things that make you feel good. I want to take you to heaven and never come back. If you don't want to do anything to me I would be just as happy. My pleasure means nothing to me, Just yours. I might not be able to do any thing about what is going to happen tomorrow, but I can make sure you feel loved tonight."

I looked at the two boys, "Come here, guys," I said softly, watching the boys leap up from the bed without even a hint of any hesitation. They crawled into my lap and snuggled against me, I put my arms around them and sighed. "None of this alters how I feel about you guys at all, I still love you both, very much."

"Really," David asked.

"Yes, I mean it."

"Pete, you're the first man that has said he loved me since my dad died, fighting off the elders of the church when they came for me, on Emris Prime. He and I used to wrestle and play around with each other," David said wistfully, wiping the tears away.

"I like to wrestle too," Brian added shyly.

Suddenly I launched myself at the bed, on a trajectory that carried me into the middle of the queen-sized bed. I reached out and enfolded the two boys in my arms, caring them along with me and finally flopping down on the bed. "Me too," I said simply, renewing my challenge to the two boys.

David and Brian squealed with laughter and both began to squirm and attempt to free themselves from the my powerful grasp. David managed to wriggle out of my grasp.

"N'yahh, N'yahh! Can't get me!" David chanted.

I ignored David and increased his hold on Brian, being careful not to apply too much pressure to the 8-year-old. "Papa bear has captured baby bear number 1, and will soon get number two," I predicted.

"Not this baby bear!" David laughed. While I was busy with Brian, David maneuvered around and came up quickly behind me and skillfully applied a headlock to me. Unfortunately, his forearm was too short to successfully complete the maneuver. I quickly pinned Brian' legs between my own, then released my grip with my right hand on Brian and reached around to peel David off my back and flip the eleven-year-old down beside Brian. I then pinned the boy's legs beside Brian's and wrapped my massive hand around the boys' four wrists and stretched the two little boys out full length.

"That didn't take too long, baby bear #2," I grinned.

Brian was waring his old gray short shorts from the first day I had met him. He had started to use these as pajamas now. These shorts had a broken zipper, which I had noticed earlier; and now the pants snap had also come undone, revealing the snowy white of Brian' underpants. I reached over and pushed Brian' shirt up and began to tickle the nine-year-old's tummy.

"You can undress me if you want," chirped Brian.

"Want me to?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," the little boy grinned.

David also squirmed around and smiled playfully up at Pete.

"Me too," the boy said.

I scooped Brian into his arms and stood up, walking over to the bed, laying him down on the bed. I knelt beside Brian and removed his shirt, marveling at the smoothness of his little boy chest; then slid the boy's shorts over his hips and down his legs. I then returned to David and lifted him onto the bed also.

I reached under the boy's undershirt to caress one of Brian' nipples which became quickly erect, springing for attention. Then I rubbed my hands all over David's beautiful chest and upper tummy, feeling every ripple in his tight yet silky skin. David closed his eyes and sighed in pleasure as my hands explored his sides and the small of his back.

"Hey, do me!" Brian explained

I set about removing the boys' sneakers and socks one at a time, tossing them into a corner of the room. I ran my fingernail lightly down David's chest from just under his chin to his belly button and then transferred to Brian, repeating the maneuver as the 8-year-old shivered in excitement under my messaging.

I unbuckled David's belt and unziped his pants and slide them down his long slender legs. A shiver ran through me as I pulled the pants totally free of David's legs and looked at the twelve-year-old laying there in just his underpants. I then returned to Brian and slowly removed the boy's undershirt, so that both little boys were laying there in just their underpamts.

The white cloth of Brian's underpants contrasted with the bronzed-pink color of his suntanned skin.

David's penis, now unconfined by the constriction of his pants, had caused the material of his undershorts to tent out quite impressively.

"Hah!" David laughed at Brian, "C'mon Brian, you're falling behind."

The eleven-year-old momentarily pulled down the front of his underpants and his young penis sprang free before the boy again pulled his underpants back into place.

"I know!" Brian said distressed, "I can't get it alive. Can you help?"

I bent over Brian and softly rubbed the semi-erect front of the 9-year-old's underpants, slowly Brian' penis began to swell.

I could tell that David was already fully erect, even through the thin cotton of his underpants. I stood up and stripped down to my own shorts and then laid down beside the two small boys. I gently rubbed the tiny bulge in front of David's shorts.

At last I could wait no longer and I rolled Brian and David over on their tummies. I sat up beside them and grasped the elastic of Brian' underwear, slowly pulling the boy's underpants down to mid thigh level, exposing his tiny pink fanny. Then I reached over Brian and pulled David's underpants down and completely off, tossing them in the corner of the sleeping area.

Wriggling around and kneeling at the foot of the bed straddling Brian and David's slender legs between my own, I began to knead the soft warm flesh of their fannies like bread dough, interspacing this with tickling the crack between the cheeks of their rumps. Removing Brian's underpants, I then turned the boys over on their backs.

I watched as David's wiener, now free of his underpants, sprang up alive and throbbing. David's penis was as beautiful as the rest of him – hard, excited, a flawless shaft and perfectly formed circumcised head. There it was, almost 9 centimeters [3½ inch] of boyhood perfection, standing proudly at a ninety degree angle pointing toward the ceiling. It was the prettiest piece of boymeat I could have imagined.

Brian was stretching his arms over his head and arching his back, thrusting his hips upward slightly in an attempt to make his own more modestly erect 7 centimeters [2¾ inch] of penis seem larger.

David laughed and smacked the younger boy on the belly flat handed, causing him to double up momentarily before Brian retaliated by gabbing at David's wiener, and the two youngsters began to wrestle on the bed.

I pulled my boxers all the way down and allowed them to drop to the floor beside the bed, and joined my two young friends on the Tomahawk's queen-sized bed.

"Now what?" David asked innocently in a lull in his mock combat with Brian. Brian's face was radiant with expectation and he reached over and hugged David around the shoulders.

"You'll see," the almost 9-year-old chortled.

"Wait and see," I said agreed mysteriously.

"Wow!" David said, looking intently at my rather modest 19 centimeter [7½ inch] cock which was also fully erect.

"I thought Jamal was big. Can I touch it?" David asked cautiously.

"Only if I can touch yours," I laughed, and laid down on the bed full length beside David.

As David reached over and started rubbing my penis, I reached over and gently grasped Brian's erect wiener. The 8-year-old's wiener became even firmer as I gently masturbated the boy.

"Now, Brian," I said, "You start doing David."

The boy nodded wordlessly and reached over for his friend's member and began rubbing the skin back and forth over the glans of his penis. This made David squirm momentarily and sigh in pleasure.

"Whooo," David muttered as an electric thrill ran up his arm from his fingers and genitals simultaneously to set off twin shivers of escetsy in his brain that then shot up and down his spin several times. He momentarily lost co-ordination of his body as the dry pre-adolescent orgasm hit. The youngster paused in strokings my dick, but I was too busy with Brian to do much about it at the time. I rubbed the skin of Brian's circumcised penis up and down over the exposed glans.

"Uhhh," Brian moaned. He went into a frenzied passion of lust. His long slender legs twitched and lost strength and the young boy could feel an explosive feeling rise up from the base of his balls and explode through his wiener. I felt the jerking of the young boy's penis and his entire body as he also experienced an intense pre-adolescent dry orgasm, just as David had at the manipulation of his member by Brian. Brian had a dazed look on his face as he leaned against the older boy, his legs still wobbly from his earth-shattering experience just a moment ago.

David suddenly recovered from his post-orgasm stopor and realized that my dick was as fully at attention as it had been throughout the last few minutes. David gasped my hard meat in his young hand and began stroking softly. He was watching my dick slide up and down in his hand. He started slowly, taking two or three seconds to complete a single stroke. Then he began to accelerate the pace, it was wonderful and I felt my juices building to the climax.

My load fired almost to the ceiling, eventually splattering down on my chest as David kept milking me. When I was finally spent, I rolled out of the bed and went to the bathroom and used a hand towel moistened with warm water and wiped himself clean. I crawled back into bed with the two young boys and this time pulled the bed's blankets up over them. I reached up and turned out the reading light which an intergral part of the queensize bed's bookcase headboard, and then rolled on my side and put an arm around the two nude boys protectively. Brian cuddled next to me, laying beside me, he put his head on my chest.

I could feel the softness of his hair on my nipples as the boy snuggled in next to me. David wrapped himself around Brian, spooning him and sighed, draping his arm around Brian's waist and using his hand to cup the nine-year-old's penis and testicles.

"Thank you," I said and brought my face near to first Brian' and then David's. I softly kissed the two young boys lips and was surprised when David returned it passionately.

Brian looked up at me across his chest. "That was incredible, Pete!"

"I'll never forget it for as long as I live." I said truthfully.

"Me either," David agreed. "That was a circle jerk, right? I've heard of them but…" he let his voice trail off.

"Yes," I sighed contentedly, "A perfect one, everyone got off. Now sleep…" We three companions dozed off in each other's arms, exhausted and happy.

I wasn't sure what had awakened me, but I suddenly found myself awake, my heart pounding and with a growing sense of unease as I slowly sat up in the bed. Out of habit I glanced at the Tomahawk's chronometer on the bulkhead beside the open inner hatch to the air lock.

0545 local time about an hour before sunrise. I slowly crawled out of bed, being careful not to awaken David or Brian, and sat on the edge of the bed pulling on my boxers and then walked barefoot over the thick pile carpet of the Tomahawk's biosphere toward the big double viewports in the control cab.

Sensing that I was awake and up, lcars began to bring the biosphere up to daywatch standards from the inactivity of the evening. I felt warm air softly blowing from the vent at floor level, taking the chill out of the air. Tiny mouse-sized cleaning droids scurried for their wall socket homes.

Outside the Dream Walker's viewports, twilight was already beginning to give way to predawn light as Bajor's bright class G3 III primary star began to rise above the horizon. The smaller, much fainter M3 dwarf companion was at the closest point to Bajor in its orbit, but was only a very bright ruddy star hanging low on the eastern horizon.

I watched for a minute the cloud of birds which rose from their night's roosting in the woods to the east of the aerospace field and marveled at the coordination of the flock as several hundred of the avian whirled and dove in a complex ariel dance to greet the new morning.

The Tomahawk's planetside weather sensor module, built into the clear titan crystal of the forward viewport, glowed softly deep within the crystal as the computer stimulated several dozen light emitting segments to display a readout in the extreme lower right of the navigator's side viewport.
 
Temperature: -2 C [28 F].
Wind Velocity: 28 km/hr [17mph].
Windchill Factor: -7 C [19 F].
Relative Humidity: 24%

Barometric Pressure: 27.78 (falling) Perhaps that was it, I thought as I walked back to the bed. Somewhere I'd read that extreme changes in air pressure could trigger changes in brain chemistry, and cause symptoms like anxiety. Maybe it was that – the extremely low barometer making me feel so uneasy, so vaguely apprehensive. I intended to get at least another half-hour cuddled up with Brian and David in the warm bed before actually getting up. I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute and thought about heating some water so that the three of us could have hot chocolate when we got up…

Without warning, the outer airlock door exploded inward with a loud crash and an actinic flash of some type of explosive charge.

"What the hell?!?" I roared and dove toward a small, non-discript drawer in the inflight storage unit a meter from the edge of the bed, where I kept my personal arsenal.

An insane laugh filled the room and I stared, momentarily paralyzed…

Through the airlock hatchway came a vision out of hell itself!

It might have been human at one time, but no longer. Something had radically mutated both the physical appearance and the mental/emotional structure of the creature which paused in the hatchway for an instant, snuffling at the air. It was now totally alien. It was over six feet [1.80m] tall, its body completely covered with course curlie ashe-gray hair. It's snout and jaw had fused to become slightly elongated to resemble a wolf's muzzle. It had an enormously potent set of teeth, including three centimeter-long [1¼ inch] upper and lower fangs. Its eyes glowed hot, angry orange-red; long boney fingers ended in slashing talons which savagely ripped out at me as I stumbled backward, falling across the bed and my two terrified companions.

Werewolf! was all I could think of as I struggled to regain my footing while at the same time dialing a lethal setting on the Marine military phaser pistol in my hand.

The beast bellowed its rage and lust for blood. It came through the fragments of the airlock's outer hatch on cloven hoofs; a reptilian tail switched to and fro behind the nightmare as it paused for a second, surveying the room.

David scrambled to his feet and ran for the far corner of the room, attempting to lead the horror beast away from Brian and I. The creature lunged at David, its jaws gaping, dripping saliva; its claws slashing at the boy's skinny chest. The creature came after him with uncanny speed and raked its talons across David's bare shoulders. The eleven-year-old screamed as the claws dug deep into his flesh. The jaws snapped shut with a loud KLACK!! and then opened again in hungary anticipation.

ZWOWW!!

The morning twilight which was began to seep into the room through the viewports was washed out by a brilliant pulse of actinic blue-white energy from my phaser pistol.

The nightmare roared in pain and fury as the phaser beam touched its upper shoulder; It turned toward where I was still sitting on the bed, one foot on the floor and rapidly dialing a higher intensity setting on the phaser pistol.

Brian hid half behind the me, his eyes wide with fear.

The creature took a hesitant step toward Brian and me.

David screamed: "FIRE!"

ZOW! ZOW!! ZWOWW!!!

I pressed the trigger three times in rapid succession. The first shot hit the creature, ripping a 7 cm [3 inch] wide crater in its fur-covered body, setting some of the course fur ablaze. The second shot also hit the creature, this time in the upper left quadrant of the skull, destroying the creature's left eye and blasting away much of the skin and fur from the white bone of its skull. The third shot caught the creature in the midsection, again doing grievous damage to it. The creature turned and raised its taloned claws to strike at David again just as I shot it again, this time right between the ribs with the phaser set to full lethal intensity – just one step below the ultimate setting – demateralise. The phaser blast caused the beast to jerk once and fall over backwards, to lay sprawled in the airlock among the blood and body parts that the earlier lower phaser settings had blasted off it.

Brian was at once kneeling beside David, crying with both fear and relief that his friend was still alive.

"Thanks, Pete." David managed in a weak voice. He winced as the younger boy gently touched the claw wounds across David's shoulder and thin chest. They were moderately deep and beginning to ooze red blood that trickled down his chest.

"I think," Brian said, "that I'd better get a medipak on this."

"And then we'd better get out of here," David said.

"I don't think so," I said hesitantly. "I don't know how long it'll take to get someone to repair that airlock hatch. We can't take off with it like that. The Tomahawk has a built in override, the engines won't engage unless the airlock is fully gas-tight."

"But-" David tried to object. "What if it had friends?"

"Forget it. I know we have to use full phasers on them now. Next one fool enough to show up will not get half as far as this one did."

Pulling on my clothes, I said: "You're going back to bed until we can get a doctor to look at those claw tears. Brian, will you stay with him and make sure he does get in bed?"

"Aye, aye, sir." Brian saluted.

I absently returned the salute and walked over to the shattered airlock hatch. I began trying to extricate the creature from the airlock.

"Okay, Doctor Brian," David said and grinned, crawling under the covers and then pulling them down so as not to get any blood on them. The wound on his shoulder had almost stopped bleeding, but the deep claw rakes across his chest were still welling up fresh blood slowly. Brian got a warm damp towel from the bathroom and washed down David's chest and shoulder, then went to the inflight storage lockers in the cargo section to get a medipak.

Minutes later, Brian returned and popped open the medikit, which looks like a huge plastic baggie. Brian spread it out over David and the medipak's ai-diagnosis circuitry went to work, examining the boy and determining the extent of his injury and automatically configured itself around the wounds on David's chest and shoulders. Brian ran his thumb quickly along the piezoelectric activator and there was a soft pop and a faint, almost inaudible humm as the medipak began treatment.

"You're lucky," Brian commented as he looked up from the diminutive led readout on the medipak. "The pak says it can get you back up to 100% healthy in about 4 hours. That means we'll be on Deep Space Nine in time for supper."

The detonation of the explosive charge the thing had used to gain entry had awakened the entire village which was slowing beginning to cluster around the southern end of the aerospace field, and of course it wasn't long before the village constable showed up.

"Ay-yup, looks like a Gon'jahh alright," the elderly Bajorian constable said kneeling beside the carcass that I had dragged out of the airlock.

"What's that?" I asked.

The Bajorian shrugged. "I dunno. It was probably a man… once. But somehow he been mutated… probably the result of some kind of biowar weapon that the Kardies were using during the occupation. We run into these things ever so often. We call 'em 'gonjahs' which means 'cursed ones'. They mostly live by themselves in the highlands. Rarely see them this far down in the valley."

"This one used an explosive charge to blow open my airlock," I said.

"Oh ay-yupe, they're smart enough to use technology. Sometimes they're used as expendable hit men for the Assassin Guild. You haven't stirred anyone up – say in Kilkamec City – have you son?" the Bajorian eyed me suspiciously.

"Not that I know of," mentally crossing my fingers and wondering if that 'Jamal' character was a member of the Bajorian Assassins Guild.

"Well, I'll have Doc Bashire come over to look at your boy. He's a Terran too, retired Starfleet. He was one of the Emmisarry's original crew – came out here just after we'd chased the Kardies off Terrak-nor… and I'll ask Tal Narkotz, our chief artificer to come see if there is anything he can do for your airlock hatch; but to me, it looks like you'll be staying for a few days until he can get parts shipped out from the main starport at Lehnoorji City. Ay-yupe."

The Bajorian constable strolled back over to his gev and turned off the flashing blue strobes on his roof and floated off down the field silently on whisper mode.

Back inside, Brian had started some breakfast, scrambled eggs and toast, which now totally depleted our pantry until I could go shopping. I sat down in the sleeping area's chair and Brian brought me a plate of scrambled eggs also and then sat on the edge of the bed with David.

"So, Dave," I started, "Felling any better?"

"Yes!" David said and sat up – immediately wincing as his sudden movement caused a spike of pain to shoot down his spine.

"Pete," Brian asked.

"Yeah?"

"Tell us a story?"

"Yeah!" David agreed enthusiastically. "From when you were in the Marines."

"Hmmn," I began, "There was the time the co tried to settle this war out on the frontier between two primitive interplanetary – no stardrive – races. We almost all bought it that time…"

Next chapter only in the third version