***Zorakk

Future Shock
Third version

Chapter Two
David

"Captain's Log, Stardate………"

'Captain… what a hoot.' Pete had never considered himself the captain of the Tomahawk interstellar trucking rig, but he thought now that Bryan had joined his 'crew' that was exactly what he was. He had been sitting here in Dream Walker's control cabin, lounging back in the pilot's acceleration couch with his feet proped up on a odn circuit junction hump thinking about the dizzying pace of things had been happening at just now. 'Crom!' the young Nomad thought, 'What have I let myself in for? Me, card carrying member of fist [Freebooter InterStellar Truckers], a gypsy-trucker with no roots or support system. I have taken on responsibility for a very precious young boy,' whom he already loved more than life itself.

Life had been particularily good to Pete over the past six months. First he had turned the corner on the truck payments, he was over halfway to outright ownership of Dream Walker Then had come his very lucritive trip to Syftilious Minor, which had led indirectly to the crowning glory, his trip to Starbase 288 and meeting Bryan. He decided that he would not trade his life for that of any of the super wealthy nobility at the Terran Imperial Court. Pete was one of those odd hybrids you see and hear about on isn every so often, half Corellian, half Terran Amerind – Cherokee Nation, half Imperial Klingon, half human-Klingon fusion and for spice, half Romulan. Now if one were counting, it was obvious that this added up to substantially more than the average person were willing to accept. Pete just thought of it as a list of the more prominent galactic races in his genetic background.

Pete was also a Licensed Pederast, affiliated with the Galactic Pedophylic Institude on Raisa, and of course had a long time attraction to pre-pubescent little boys, and also little girls for that matter. This was the 24th century, the century of equality and all that was good and pure, even though it is still a dangerous place in many sections of the galaxy for boy lovers. The general population had slowly come to acknowlege that there is a difference between the motivations and emotions of a true boy lover and those of their more sadistic cousins, the predatory pedophyles.

Sexual preditors still prowled around the edges of the civilized, gentel galaxy that the Pedophylic Institute was trying to establish. The preditors were still raping unwilling children, rather than seeking out those who truly need the special attention 'Crom help us,' Pete thought, 'there are plenty of those out there, both straight and pre-gay and who are willing to share sexual experiences with a gentle lover.'

Fortunately there were now entire worlds ruled by enlightened boy lovers. A true boy lover these days could submit to the week-long telepathic testing and evaluation session administered by high level MenTalts on Betazed and obtain a license. It was degrading to have to obtain a license for ones sexuality, but it was much better than being persecuted by the state, and until the pedophyle predator problem could be licked, it was the best compromise so far, and it would have to suffice for now.

Pete had known since his pre-adolscence days that he much prefered the company of younger boys, to a mixed group of his own age group; and all through his teenage years when he was always the captain of a company of younger boys who virtually ran wild in the lower tiers of the vast Star Nomad supply and factory ship Sagamahara.

Then eleven years ago, he had his first serious interaction as a boylover, things were diffrent for him then, Pete was on his own and had just finished my mandatory six-years of service with the Imperial military. Pete had been a photon grenadier in an Imperial Marine grunt infantry regiment, he'd even risen to the rank of buck-sargent and was in line to become a squad leader, but had decided the military life was not for him.

Pete mustered out on Telluria IV, a third generation imperial colony set on an Earth-prime class M planet, which had very attractive homesteading rights for Imperial veterans; and went to school at the Shivajanus Warp Drive extention on Telluria IV. Pete had just graduated from the advanced training course as a quantum-warp engineering mechanic and had started working for a Star Nomad run maintenance company on Telluria IV when he first met Douglas.

While he was in school, the Star Nomad had taken a job toutering an 11-year-old in exchange for room and board from a single mom with three boys, and another foster kid. Douglas was the foster kid. His mom had some troubles with the local child welfare people and had lost custody of Douglas temporarily. Douglas was at this time eight years old. The other kids that were living there were all older than he was and delighted in torturing him, both physically and psychologically.

Pete instinctivly sided with Douglas, and Douglas looked up to Pete as a his protector from abuse. The following six or seven months that Pete spent living there were… well… interesting to say the least. About the same time Pete graduated from Shivajanus, Douglas's mother, a single mother, regained custody of her son.

Too many children across the galaxy still lived in 'broken' homes with only one parent trying very hard to make economic ends meet. Douglas's mom worked as a bargirl at a starport speakeasy called the 'cock-n-bull' – her shift included Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and so Pete got asked to become a full time babysitter for Douglas – an arrangement that both Douglas and Pete approved of.

Pete was involved with Douglas for six years, from midway through his eighth year to well into his fourteenth. They had begun the physical portion of the relationship on that very first weekend shift. Douglas was a very affectionate little boy, and they progressed in their relationship from 'playing doctor' to lite oral sex and mutual masturbation fairly quickly. Over the next six years they slept together nude and played virtually every sex game known to the sentient life of the galaxy, but mostly it was about shared good times at the tri-dees, going on special trips together, and just being there for each other. Douglas was one of the vast majority of boys who needed a little semi-homosexual activity in his pre-teen and early adolescent life to round out his personality, but as mid-adolescence approached, so did the changes.

It came one year in which they had slowly drifted apart as Douglas entered the second stage of his adolescence and became more and more interested in girls than in playdates with his older Special Friend. About five percent of the galaxy's human population is homosexual, the other 95% is straight, and this same ratio applied to the little boys that boylovers are attracted to. This of course means the the 'big' brother in this relationship has to periodically say good-bye to his 'little' brother as the younger boys outgrew the relationship and moved on.

Douglas eventually drifted off to blend in with the 95% of humanity that was straight. They had mutually agreed that although they would remain friends, the days of nude-intimacy together were over.

It was about this same time that Pete got a chance to take over the payments on a circa 2373 Tomahawk truck – and since his relationship with Douglas had run into its 'Twilight of the Gods' stage, Pete liquidated all of his assets and left Telluria IV. That was five years ago, and the Star Nomad had ranged far and wide through the Milky Way – and even had made a few extragalactic runs – but he'd never returned to Telluria IV, and neither had he found another Special Friend – until he met Bryan.

There were similarities between Bryan and Douglas that made Pete's heart ache, but this time it was much different. Pete really was on his own out here, it was not like when he was a kid on Vandfel-ailsborg or on board the Sagamahara, in the Marines, or even on Telluria IV. There he had family, friends and others to help. Here and now on the Kardasian boarder he was truly on his own and totally responsible for Bryan's well being. Pete was not sure that the life of a gypsy-trucker was right for a small boy. Pete decided that he would have to look around carefully at this winter's ingathering of the Clan to see what kind of more settled life he could start within the bounds of Star Nomad culture.

But the problem with all that was the obvious fact that Reynolds Interstellar Freight Forwarding was finally begining to show a consistant black bottom line and was running along a now pretty well established triangular route, hauling compressed oxygen, nitrogen and other atmospheric celss gasses from Bajor and ds9 to the wormhole and through it to the Treaty Monitoring Station on the Gamma Quadrant side. Built as it was on the face of the small nickel-iron asteroid that supported the physical instrumentality of the base, it was always in the market for celss gases which were virtually dirt cheap on Bajor and ds9. After offloading the liquid hydrogen or oxygen, and picking up a load of miscellanious mail and depot level maintance for the repair shops of ds9, it's just a quick hop back through the worm hole to ds9 and Bajor. From there it was on to the Triangle Sector via several warp gate transfers and then to the Klingon Trade World at Sherman's Planet deep within the Organian Treaty Zone. From there, Pete high-tailed it back across the Federation boarder and to Starbase 118's freight terminal and checked for small partial lots of freight headed in to Bajor and ds9.

He had worked long and hard to build his customer base, and his customers liked his service because he was fast, cheap and Pete could keep his mouth shut. Pete was not wealthy, but he made enough to meet the truck payments, insurance and operating expences, in addition to a profit margin large enough to support a comfortable living wage working only nine months a year. Although he always complained about money, the truth was that the Odd Gods had also been good to him economically. He took one month in four off to putter around the galaxy, persuing his own little projects in exploration and xt-archeology. Not many could lay claim to so much freedom. Home port for Reynolds Interstellar Freight Forwarding was Deep Space Nine, purched precariously on the lip of the only known naturally [? There was some question about that!] stable wormhole known to exist in the universe.

Pete was a Star Nomad, and the name was descriptive. The Nomad people had left old earth at the dawn of the interstellar age in the opening decades of the 21st century and most of them lived a gypsy life ever since – riding the currents of hyperspace and the ripples od subspace in their often home-brew starships for generation upon generation. To be certain they had colonized a few planets, including Valhalla – the motherworld – which circles Mu Cassiopeia in the Core Worlds, where most Nomad heavy industry, centralized government and ship yards were. But for most the Star Nomad way of life was one of hopping from star to star, bringing trade and culture to the frontier worlds who are not yet rich enough to attract the larger shipping companies. Many Star Nomads spent their entire lives aboard a wide variety of starships – from small trucks like Pete's to the huge itc Alpha class asteroid vessels which are marvels of 23-24th century starship engineering wherein an entire asteroid, sometimes quin-tillions of megatons of raw inertial mass was brought under the influence of a bank of several super-powerful warp field generators.

Pete was interupted in his daydreaming by Bryan, walking into the contrtol cab yawning and totally naked. He was carring one of his favorite stuffed animals, a Tyranodonn, named Crunchie with a tattered main-seam – this critter had been with my young friend for a long time. Bryan sat down in the navigator's couch.

"What'cha doing?" he asked, clutching Crunchie to his skinny little chest.

"Oh, just thinking,"

"Yeh," he giggled, "I can smell the burning insolation."

In their first few days together, Bryan had come to trust that Pete was indeed serious about the two of them attempting to form a lasting partnership and staying together. The boy had begun to relax and loosen up. In that same time, Pete had discovered that the little boy was a master of the one line zinger. You could almost hear the snare-drum rimshot after his zingers.

"Are you coming to bed soon?" Bryan asked yawning.

"Yeah, I was just coming," Pete said and stood up, scooping Bryan up with one hand and arm and tossing the boy over his shoulder, "Come along, slave-boy." Pete growled playfully.

Bryan squirmed and shrieked in mock terror as Pete carried him down the companionway toward the sleeping quarters. Pete thought that he might have trouble in getting Bryan to go to sleep. But evidently, the day's activities, which had included Bryan's first eva [extra vehicular activity], a walk around the exterior of the Dream, Walker in his new vacuum armor, had pretty well worn the small boy out.

Pete had bearly crawled under the covers before Bryan was snuggled up against him and already asleep.

<< TWO >>

David Pasce was an untrained MenTalt, but even he could see that Bonehead was simply no damned good. Why was his mom, much a more more powerful telepath than he was, able to see this. Dave had long ago come to realization that his beautiful, wonderful mom had a huge jagged hole in her psi-armor, a blind spot that every day grew wider and deeper. David's mom was an addict, hooked on Chromium-X, the modern wonder drug-slash-happy pill that everyone was after these days. The side effects and indeed the main trouble with Chromium-X was it was a tailored drug, the trouble was it worked, did everything the designer said it would. Yes, it worked, too well for Terran-stock humans, it drove its victims litterly insane looking for the next fix of the potent phartmacuidal that promised the ultimate in pleasure and extasy.

Nothing else mattered…

… Not the Power…

…Not money…

…Not sex…

…Not even family.

David doubted that his mother would even notice that he was gone, until one of her frequent crash-landings between Chromium-X highs; and then she would notice alright, there would be no one to clean up after she had messed herself. Did she really expect the Bonehead to do that?

David and the Bonehead had instinctivly hated each other from the moment his mother had brought the hulking weight-lifter/bar bouncer home as her latest sexual conquest, totally unaware that it was the Bonehead who was in control by doling out just enough Chromium-X to keep her airbourne and functional as his whore. She now averaged between eight and ten tricks a night, and some of the Johns were put off by the fact that their 'date' had an eleven-year-old son.

So this morning, early, but after his mom had gone out to score her first trick of the day, Bonehead had come into his room and snatched him out of bed while he was still half asleep. The two meter [six-foot-seven] tall, 104 kilogram [230 pound] Norwegian giant had him by the neck and was squeezing. David felt himself blacking out but finally Bonehead had thrown him to the ground and kicked at him.

"Get up, Little Shit. Much as I would like to kill you… your time is not today. Pack what you want to take with you. You're leaving. You have five minutes."

Crying and messaging his sore throat, the boy began to throw some clothes into a bag, Four minutes, fifty seconds later Bonehead was back, reached out and grabbed David and bodily threw the boy over his shoulder and walked outside and threw him in the back of the jetcar that Bonehead drove. David stopped struggling when he saw his jetscooter tied down on the roof.

Bonehead bound his hands behind him with a cable tie and then covered the boy's head with a black bag that bore the strong aroma of starweed. Bonehead climbed ito the driver's side of the jetcar and they rode in silence. Finally they arrived in a non-discript alley in an automated urban-industrial region. The Norwegian had then dumped all of his stuff into a dumpster and cut the cable tie, binding David's wrists. Bonehead snatched him up and slapped the boy, knocking him off his feet. For several minutes Bonehead pummelled the small boy, beating him half to death.

"Remember," Bonehead growled, punching the boy in the midsection, "I don't want to see you again. Next time I'll do much more than just rough you up and abandon you." The adult got into the jet car and lifted off.

David sat up and propped himself against the dumpster and sat there panting from the effort put upon his injured body. He dug into his pocket and took out the surplus medipak that the boy always carried with him and popped the seals. The medical nanites swarmed out of the protective plastic case and began to around David, like a swarm of fireflies. Within seconds, the medipak nanites had encased his torso, left arm and head in the superstructure of their healing array.

David sat there quietly and let the nanites do their work. David wanted to join Star Fleet when he got older, and he always carried emergency gear, such as the surplus medipak. Always be prepared was what David believed in and this time it had sure payed off. The young boy listened intently for a few minutes, but aside from the dull pounding of an automated tool and die works somewhere up the block there was nothing. David assumed Bonehead had dropped him in the loneliest, most out of the way area he could in the city, hoping he would die from the beating.

Had Bonehead tried to abandon him in the wild outback of one of Bajor's wilderness regions, the boys life signs would have been detected by the planet's search&rescue satellite net; those signs would have then triggered an anti-smuggling alarm as being anomalous, and the rangers would have investigated. But here in the city, human life was so dense that isolating out one hurt boy – even in a relativly deserted areas as this – was an impossible job.

In a very few minutes, the medi-nanites were finished with their outside duties and were absorbed into the eleven-year-olds blood stream, thus supercharging his immune system for a few weeks as they one by one broke down and were ejected by the boys body. The silk-like medical cocoon disolved and David stood up warily on his feet.

He felt great!

No, he felt better than great – He felt invincible. The nanites had shot him full of erectizine, a powerful stimulant, originally meant to give the wounded Star Fleet Marine the ability to return to action immediatly. Luckily the pharmacidical nanite had scaled down the dose so that David only felt euphoric, not homicidal.

Ten minutes later he had hauled his stuff out of the dumpster, and stuffed most of it into a rucksack filled with the rest of his wordly possitions except for the only thing he owned except his clothes, a Jayneway j97k – Thunderbuns – jetscooter. David grinned as he thought of the jetscooter model's name, virtually super fart. Someone in Jayneway's marketing department had known its customers well, pre-adolescent boys, still too young to qualify to ride more powerful jet-assisted vehicles, but able to appreciate a great joke. j97k's small monohydrozine engine did sound a bit like a long, loud fart when it was running.

Whistling, the boy jammed on the crash helmet and stuffed his longish brown hair that was threating to fall down in front of his eyes, up under its rim and adjusted his riding pads on boney knees and elbows. The eleven year old flipped the sensor visor down and made a few calibration checks and then, satisfied that he could now ride as far as his fuel {two thirds of a kiloliter of monohydrozine} would carry him.

Over the next few hours, David gradually got his bearings and eventually rode his jetscooter bike down to the shore, being careful to stay under the four meter [13 feet] height restriction on under-twelves as riders. He sure would be glad three years from now when he could get his 14-year-old class "C" licence which omited the altitude limitation, and increased the potential number of jet-vehicles he could get certified to operate. While there were not many beaches here on the Northwest Penusulia of the Dakor Province, where he found himself – hidden coves abounded and David could amuse himself by exploring them.

He'd gotten an early start, Bonehead had made sure of that. So as long as he was here, he might as well steal some time from the ratrace and just be a kid for a few precious moments. He couldn't go home this evening, that might enrage Bonehead to do something David might not be able to walk away from. But if he could catch the him unaware, David was sure he could overwhelm Bonehead's 'peabrain' and hold him in thrall – as he had for some of the dumber bullies at school.

It all rested on David being able to catch the hulking giant by surprise, hitting him fast with a psi-hammer and then ceizing control of the stunned brain. If everything went right, David would then have the upperhand – at least until he fell asleep. By that time he had to make his mom acknowledge that Bonehead was a creep and that they had to get away from him… But that was all in the future, he would have to make Bonehead believe that he was not coming back before he could achieve the surprise necessary. For now, it was playtime.

He he had decided to ride further than he had ever done before, all the way out past the point and back in where the coast formed a series of coves and inlets and before long found a likely spot and set the jetscooter down and per Star Fleet Regulation atp 51-3 {camouflage of shuttles on alien worlds} parked it between two rocks that formed a neat 90 degree angle and pulled off his helmet and riding pads, stashing them in the shooter's rear cargo carrier; then piled brush and sand over it to conceal the jetscooter from casual observation.

In his mind, David was already a grown up. He had completed his days at the Imperial Star Fleet Academy and now Lt. Pasce was leading an away team exploring the ancient ruins of a long vanished civilization on some forgotten planet in a far off galaxy, on the very edge of explored space. He scrambled down the rest of the way to the sandy beach below on a well worn path that indicated he was not the first person to discover this seemingly isolated cove. David kicked idley at some beer cans half burried in the sand. The small beach which ran perhaphs a hundred meters around the calm tidal pool was deserted now, but the deteris indicated it was frequently used for beach parties. Probably mean teenagers who would try to chase him off, David scowled. Well, Lt. Pasce ran from no one, man or monster.

David continued his mock-awayteam exploration and was almost immediatly rewarded with something beyond his wildest imangination – a cave! While concealed from the road, the cave that David had found actually seemed to be quite deep in points. After poking around for a while, David was ready to leave when he heard a jetcar pull up; the whine of its turbochargers slid down the octives toward inaudiblity. Once or twice, while exploring, David and his friend Timmy had been yelled at by people who claimed that they were on private property, so he prudently hid in the bushes that partially masked the cave's entrance. His jetscooter was still hidden, so there was no chance of that being seen. Once he got a good look at the men you stepped out of the car, a Ferengi and a Nausikaan, he was glad that he had chosen to hide himself. They did not look nice at all. Despite the fact that both of them were well dressed, they gave out an aura of slimy evil and danger somehow, as if they were just trying to cover up their ugliness with window dressing. The Nausikaan was carrying a briefcase and the Ferengi was looking anxiously at his gaudy gold watch.

"You think they gonna be here, Quinahn-targ?" the Ferengi asked the tall Nausikaan, "They only got five minutes… and I don't see nobody."

"They'll show, you can be sure of that. We got the latinum."

The Ferengi seemed to take comfort from this fact. "Yes," he sighed, and fished through his pockets to find the small box of bettle snuff he always carried. "The First Rule of Acquisition… 'He who has the latinum, makes the rules'."

Now David was really worried. Whatever these men wanted in this hidden cove, they were up to no good. Granted, it was a bit exciting but he had enough common sense to know that he would be in real deep kimchee if he were caught. Looking around, he tried to find a possible avenue of escape, but there was no way he could get back to his jet-bike without being in the open. Best to sit tight and try to remain unseen. At least he was wearing a mostly white T-shirt and green shorts. If he'd been wearing red, he'd have stuck out like a sore thumb.

"See? There comes the boat now," Quinahn-targ was saying, pointing out over the bay at a small spacecraft slowly aproaching from the west. "You think there's gonna be any problems, Boss?"

"I can handle them, they're only hew-mohns," the Ferengi said in a low growl. "You just keep your eyes open and back be up."

David heard the mutted rumble of an ion-nuclear engine in whisper mode and saw the approaching boat. A starship's shuttle, the youngster guessed. He could make out three men through the crystal-steel viewport of the miniature spaceship. They pulled right into the cove, switched the engine off, and drifted right into the sandy shore on their antigrav pads. The airlock hatch of the shuttle cycled open with a hiss of comressed air and a Terran came out and stood at the top of the gangway. "You picked a hard enough place to get to," the Terran grumbled.

"Yes, hew-mohn," the Ferengi said. "It is private, located in a rare gap in Bajor's planetary sensor net – it is a perfect place to do business. Let us begin to do the business."

"What, no 'Hello'? Don't you want to know how our trip was?"

"Ames, let's just make the exchange. We aren't in this business to be polite to each other," the Nausikaan growled. It was obvious to David that the man called Ames was the one in charge of the shuttle crew. All three of them were clearly Terran; they had strong accents in their interlingo speech, and their olive-brown coloured skin marked them as spacers, having spent most of their lives exposed to the hard ultraviolet radiation of countless stars. Ames himself was squat 5'6" [1.68m] and overweight, but his two henchman were firmly muscled, and both were armed – one with an 9mm [1/3"] energy carbine and the other with a h-k&k over-n-under atomic blaster and mini-photon granade launcher. Ames wore an old-style phaser II pistol from the last century clipped to a magnapin under his left arm. The Terran contingent walked down the gangway of the shuttle and faced the other two.

"All right, here's the goods," Ames said as his man with the energy carbine slug it over his shoulder and handed Quinahn-targ a large tote bag. The Nausikaan took it and handed it to the Ferengi. As David watched, he took out a bag filled with a pale orange-yellow powder that could only be dexolitamine, a powerful narcotic effective on virtually all carbon-based life – a valuable painkiller in skilled medical hands – or a potent and adictive drug in the distribution channels of the Orion Syndicate. The man took out a small sample and fiddled with it. David couldn't see what he was doing, but he'd seen enough holovids to guess that he was checking the quality.

"It's good, Boss," the Nausikaan said as he stood up and zipped the bag shut again.

"All right," the Ferengi said, "give him the cash."

He handed Ames the briefcase and one of his henchmen opened it on the gangway of the shuttle and began counting the latinum inside. When he was done, he closed it back and whispered to Ames. David could see the man's face get red with anger.

"It's short," he accused the Ferengi.

"We made a deal. You upped the price. I'm splitting the difference between what the original price was and what you asked for," the Ferengi said calmly. Then his demeaner changed. "It's fair, and more than you deserve, hew-mohn."

"Fair!" Ames shouted, "Fair! I don't care about fair! I want my latinum, you Ferengi schwein!"

"Shouting will do you no good," the Ferengi purred, "If you don't want to sell at that price, give me back my money and I'll give you back the drugs. End of story."

Ames was clearly furious, but he stopped yelling. He took several deep breaths and then seemed to make a decision.

"O'Khanon, give our Ferengi friend back his property," he said to the man who had taken the briefcase. O'Khanon raised his eyebrows, but turned around and reached for the briefcase. When he turned back around, David saw that the case containing the latinum was still where it had been, but now, both O'Khanon and the other plug-ugly had lowered their weapons at the two others.

The Ferengi never had a chance. O'Khanon pumped two energy bolts in him before he even knew what was happening, the smoking half skeletal remains feel into a heap, like a pile of rags. Quinahn-targ was a bit more alert; cursing, he threw himself to the side and reached inside his jacket pocket, obviously going for his own gun. He got it out, a Webbley Optronics .875 laser blaster, and managed to get off one shot, but it went wide, grazing the shuttle's upper hull. Ames' other henchman took aim and nailed him three times in the chest. Quinahn-targ grunted and went still, his gun falling from his twitching fingers.

David was horrified. He had to shove his hand in his mouth and bite down to keep from screaming. The echoes of the blasterfire were still bouncing around in the cove and the two dead men were sprawled on the sand, blood and body parts scattered everywhere. Only the fact that he'd taken a leak about half an hour before prevented him from pissing his pants. Blind panic started to set in and he wobbled backwards. It was the root just behind his left foot that proved his undoing. The back of his shoe got hooked and he felt himself losing his balance. With a crash that sounded like a thunderbolt, he fell backwards on the dry leaves.

"Don't move!" Ames shouted from the shore, whirling and pointing the phaser aproximatly where David was. "I'll fry you if you do!"

David should have run at that point, but he was flat on his back and scared to death. O'Khanon and the other man approached him with their weapons at the ready. When they got up to him, they looked puzzled. "It's just a kid, Boss," O'Khanon said.

"FRAK!" Ames swore. "Okay. Bring him out."

O'Khanon slug the 9mm over his shoulder and the other man yanked David up by his arm and dragged him down to the shore. When he reached Ames, he let go and the boy slumped to the ground.

"Who the fuck are you? You don't look like no kid of Quinahn-targ's with that skinny-build you got."

All three of the Terrans broke into laughter at the thought of the Nausikaan and the small human boy being related.

"So what are you? Did the Ferengi hire you to play lookout?"

"No!" David assured him, "I didn't know those guys. I was just here in the cove playing when they came. I hid 'cause they looked scary."

O'Khanon went over to the Nausikaan's corps and kicked him over so he was laying face up. "Huh – the Nausikaan don't look so scarey now."

"Please, don't hurt me, Mister. I won't tell anybody anything, I swear!"

"Great!" Ames swore. "A witness. Now what the hell am I supposed to do?"

"You want me to take care of him Boss?" the third man asked. The boy could hear the autocharge circuits in the energy weapon whining, building up to a full charge.

David cringed.

"No, I don't think so," Ames said. "I don't believe he's got anything to do with Quinahn-targ. And a dead kid might complicate things too much for us with the local constabularily. A dead Ferengi dope dealer and his hiered off-world thug won't raise any eyebrows – but a dead kid? No, I think we'll just take him with us. With any luck, Jamal won't push us out the airlock nakkid. The kid'll be a profit item when we get to the slavepens of Korlandan Cor – I hope that'll be enough to cover for this mess."

"Oh, please don't," David begged. "Please, Mister Ames, just let me go home!"

"Fantastic," Ames swore and slapped his balding forehead. "The kid knows my name! Sorry, brat, but you gotta come with us. If you behave you won't get hurt, we'll turn you into a quick couple of bricks of latinum with the slavers. You're parents can ransome you from them – if they have the latinum. But believe me, you don't want to fuck with me… and that cubed you don't want to screw around with the Captain."

O'Khanon motioned David toward the airlock of the liter. Crying silently, David climbed into the shuttle. The other man picked up the bag of drugs and brought it as well. Once everyone was in, the pilot fired up the the engine. Lopez, the third man in the smuggler crew sat David on the floor between his knees and kept the blaster pointing at him. Every thirty seconds or so, the high squeel of the charging circuit indicated the photonic core was toping off the charge in the firing chamber, maintaining the weapon at peak readiness. The boy was terrified that it would go off by accident.

Lopez kept the gun against David's back for the whole trip into orbit. As they made their way out of the planet's upper atmosphere and into the pristine clear reaches of the vacuum of space, David saw a large cruiser anchored in low planet orbit. It's station keeping thrusters fired briefly as the cruiser adjusted its orbit slightly – attempting to mask the returning shuttle from one of Bajor's orbital sensor stations. At any other time, David would have been thrilled for a chance to go onboard such a warship as this obviously was, but right now he felt like he was being taken on board a pirate ship and expected that he might well be made to walk the plank.

David managed to study the electronic image on the shuttle's forward screen during the twenty minutes or so that the shuttle used for matching orbits. The boy had always been intensly interested in stellar technology, especially as it related to the military and so he recognized the profiles of the vessel they were aproachimng easily enough. It was a salvaged Narn cruiser from the last century. Old the Narn warship was, but it still had potent teeth and claws.

In his mind, the page from Jayne's Fighting Starships of the Galaxy floated in front of him. The G'Karr class heavy cruiser was based upon even older designs from the Shadows War of 2156-2172. It was armed with six class XI phaser cannons and duel photon torpedo tubes, one facing forward, the other aft. The G'Karr-class also had large powerful tractor beam projectors that could cast a force net a million kilometers [600,000 miles] wide at 200,000 kilometers [125,000 miles] and generators that could resist the stuggles and overwhelm the main drives of an itc Alpha-class freighter or luxery liner. It was sixty-two thousand tons rest mass and two hundred meters [650 foot] from the tips of its bow sensor antennae to the aft thrust vectorals of its sublight drive and fully a third of that at its greatest beam.

As O'Khanon, the suttle's pilot matched velocity with the pirate corvette, David could clearly see the bold white skull and cross bones of the Jolly Roger painted on the black optical stealth coating of the vessel's main hull, and he made out the name; Tiger Claw. It's home port was listed as the planet Nova Aberdeen, a part of the Affiliation of Outer Free Worlds in the Triangle Sector. David doubted that the Corvette had ever seen Nova Aberdeen, the Triangle was notorious for pirates and renegades from all over the galaxy, including the three local superpowers, the Federation, Romulans and Klingons. David returned his atention to looking out the port. A man in vacuum armor was waiting at the airlock that O'Khanon was making for, to help secure the shuttle for warp travle. The G'Kar-class was not equiped with a hangar bay, but had two external docking clamps and airlock assemblies to carry runabout or shuttle class vessels.

"Well, get going, boy," Lopez said, giving David a light, glancing blow from the muzzel of the blaster and prodding him from behind, "Get on in there, we don't have all day!" he motioned toward the shuttle's now open hatchway which led directly into one of the Tiger Claw's cavernous cargo bays. David got unsteadily to his feet and made his way forward. As he stepped into the smuggler's hold, he could feel the men working in the bay stoppinr their tasks and turning to staring at him.

O'Khanon and Ames were talking over by the hexagonial axial shaft that led to the bridge.

"So," O'Khanon grinned, "What're ya gonna tell the Cap'n about," and here O'Khanon pointed over his shoulder at the youngster who Lopez was bringing over.

"I dunno," Ames said annoyed. "Shut up and let me think… okay, I got it. Strip the kid nakkid, and tie his hands behind him. Now look kid, both our lives depend on you not fucking things up with Jamal. You try to cross him and he'll toss you outa the airlock, nakkid like you are now…"

As Lopex pealed off David's clothes easily, using a razor sharp Klingon Lev'ek to cut them off, the work crew in the cargo hold let loose with a bartage of catcalls and whistles.

"Chicken De-light for supper tonight!" the pirates roared in unison.

Ames turned angerily and sputtered: "Awright. There is nuthin' here for youse space crawlers. Back to work!"

The cheers and yodelling died away as the pirates returned to restowing some cargo in the bay.

The little party marched down the axial shaft toward the bridge. David's head hurt from the clout that he had recieved from Lopez's gun barrel, silent tears streaked his face as he followed meekly along behind Ames and twisted his wrists excperimentally, half testing Lopez's skill with knots {it was excellent} and half tryinmg to restore circulation in his hands. Within minutes they reached a large polished oaken door set into the durasteel from of the ship's bulkhead. On the door was simple silver sign with black letters: captain it read.

Ames knocked softly on the oak door, half hoping that Captain Jamal was occupied somewhere else, but his luck had run out as a seemingly larger than life voice boomed out "Come!" and the door lid aside. Ames took a deep breathe and steped in, followed by O'Khanon, who carried the two dispatch cases, and Lopez, who dragged David along, painfully grabbing his hair. Inside the office, Lopez pushed David to his knees. David knelt on the plush shag carpet of Jamal's office/cabin onboard the smuggler. Jamal was a tall, well built black man, his head shaved bald, except for a single braid of hair which sprouted from the middle of the back of Jamal's skull. His mutant amber eyes glowed and flashed as if lit from within by some unknown source. He was dressed in a black and gold jumpsuit with a silvery metalic sash on which was a Klingon Lev'ek three bladed knife at chest level.

"So, Ames, tell me again how you screwed up this deal with the Ferengi?" Jamal purred.

"Er… I didn't. He tried to cross us, boss," Ames frantically motioned for O'Khanon to bring the dispatch cases and set them on the Captain's endtable. "And I did bring back the Latinum…"

"Yes, Jamal sighed, "point in your favor. But it was short, by two dozen bars."

It was obvious that either Lopez or O'Khanon had been waring a wire for the Cap'n, so Jamal knew everything that had happened on the surface. That was bad, Ames thought, it substantially limited his wiggle room.

"As I said," Ames was sweating and mopped his brow with a kerchef he produced from somewhere in the vest of his white suit, "He was holding out on us. And I brought our product back."

"And a witness," Jamal said, looking pointedly at David.

Ames coughed and looked at the ceiling for a second before returning to Jamal. "Uh… yeah. We found him in some bushes by a cave on the beach the Ferengi wanted to use. As far as we can tell, he just happened to be there, playing."

Jamal, snapped his fingers and Lopez jerked the boy to his feet and gave him a rough shove toward Jamal's desk. David nearly stumbled but recovered his footing only a foot or two in front of the tall black man's desk.

Jamal, Pirate Captain and Smuggler of all sorts of contraband from illiciet drugs to slaves studied the nude blue eyed boy. Terran humanoid, probably Corellian from the slim arms and legs and positivly willowy torso; maybe a thirty to fifty bars of Latinum at the slave markets of Kolandan Cor, Jamal thought – calculating if it were worth the effort of keeping the boy alive.

"Alright kid. What is your story?"

"Please, Mr. Jamal," the child pleaded. "All I want to do is go home. I swear I'll never tell anyone about anything."

"It's Captain Jamal," the black man said softly, "and I know you won't tell anyone. We're not going to give you that chance. Come here boy." Jamal motioned for the boy to come around the desk.

David complied, and Jamal scooped the small, skinny kid into his lap and began to masturbate him. David's penis instantly became hard and the boy struggled to get away.

"Noo-oohh!" David whined.

"No whining!" Jamal said in a cold emotionless voice and clamped down, hard, on David's left testicle. Instantly excruiating pain radiated out from the eleven-year-old's groin and sent wave after crashing wave of pain against his mind. "Do we understand each other?"

David resisted the urge to bawl openly, somehow he thought it would not go over well with Jamal. He nodded in responce to the Pirate Captain's question.

"Good," Jamal said, and turned to Ames. "He gets hard almost at once, so he likes guys jerking him off, he'll bring maybe a thirty bars at Kolandan Cor. You have lucked out this time Ames, Your operation shows a profit… "

David unleashed his psi-attack against Jamal in mid-sentence. The black's eveys popped out of their sockets as the full impact of David's assault washed against the barriers of the blackman's mind. Wave after wave of searing hatred the boy directed at the captain of the pirates. But after his initial surprise, Jamal had not seemed to be much effected by this psi-slashing.

"Aaarrgghhhh!" The blackman growled in muted pain. "So, the dog has teeth! Well dog, so do I." Jamal took a pocket sized Klingon Marine agonizer from his left hip pocket and applied it to the base of David's skull. Fire and pain overwhelmed the boy's primitive psi-shields in a few milliseconds and the 11-year-old lay in convulsions of pain on the deck.

"The kid's a T+ mentalt," Jamal said. "That'll kick up his value at the slave market – or I may decide to keep him for myself. If what I felt is any indication, he might even be T+3 or +4. but untrained. Lopez, pass the word that the kid is a psi. No unnecessary crew contact, and issue out those Klingon psi-shields we got from Khan-singh Vor'Dathe."

"Aye, Cap'n," Lopez said and left the skipper's cabin.

"And so, Ames you even earn a bonus on this op for bringing in something of value. But the Ferengi was a useful contact – all the way back to Faringnar and the Tower of Commerace. So you also loose the bonus by your ineptitude. Don't let this happen again."

"But, Captain…"

"The reason the Ferengi tried to short you is that he thought you were weak. The Ferengi are predators, not like us or the Klingons in a physical way, but on an economic level they're the sharks," Jamal said and leaned back in the specially designed acceleration couch. "Okay, get the kid something to eat and then lock 'em in the brig… and get those psi-shields distributed. I don't want the kid to cause anyone to fold at a critical time."

<< THREE >>

"How long you been awake?" Pete asked sleepily.

The little boy grinned, "I dunno, maybe an hour or so."

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"'cause."

"'cause why?"

Pete was a past grandmaster of the 'why'-game, having 'raised' or helped with a half dozen pre-adolescent boys already, during his years as a licensed Boy Lover.

"Cause I was enjoying being next to you and feeling the heat of your body against mine. Daddy and I used to cuddle like that a long time ago."

"I liked it too," Pete admitted.

"Me too," Bryan re-affirmed. Then he wrinkled up his noes.

"Shit!" Bryan complained.

"What's the matter?"

"Gotta take a leak."

"So go. I'll be here when you get back."

"Yeah, well there's another problem," Bryan half mumbled.

"What?" Pete asked.

"I can't."

"Huh?"

"I can't," the nine-year-old repeated.

"Why not?"

"You ever tried to piss with a hard on?"

"Oh," Pete laughed. "Well I guess there's only one way to deal with that…"

Bryan looked at him as a strange combination of mirth and concern crossed his face.

"What?" Pete asked.

"I dunno if I can hold it that long."

"Hah! You don't have a choice. Besides, you said you can't piss with a hard on."

"Yeah, I know, but… I don't know." By this time Pete's hand had managed to slip between them and he was already stroking Bryan's stiff wiener. Bryan quit his protesting and rolled onto his back.

"MMMMMM, that feels soooo good."

"I'm glad."

Pete continued stroking away on Bryan's small penis. Pete had often jerked off in the morning before going to the bathroom and knew that the urge to piss can add a different kind of feeling and pleasure to the act. Bryan moved his arms down and Pete felt the boy's hand gently touch, then grab hold of his stiff member. The position wasn'treally right for Bryan to start jerking Pete off so Bryan just held Pete's dick, gently squeezing and releasing his grasp.

Pete pulled the blanket down and then rested his head on Bryan's skinny chest. From there Pete had a perfect view of the boy's wiener as he worked at it. Pete repeatedly worked his hand up and down that six or seven centimeters [2½"] of boymeat. The boy's wiener became even harder as his sympathetic nervous system built toward orgasm. Pete released Bryan's wiener and gently cupped the little boy's balls and moved them in my hand, lightly squeezing his scrotum. Bryan responded with a soft groan and placed his hand on Pete's head.

As Pete massaged the kid's balls, Bryan's wiener bounced up and down slightly with each beat of his heart. Pete could hear Bryan's heart pounding in his small chest as well as the increase in his breathing. The Nomad returned his attention to the throbbing penis and picked up the pace substantially. Bryan groaned louder and his hips began to buck slightly meeting each stroke of Pete's hand with a thrust of his own. Bryan's grip on Pete's hair increased as he pulled the adult tighter to him.

With each stroke, Bryan's hips were nearly clear of the bed now and there was little doubt that he was on the final approach. Bryan gave a few final whimpering groans and suddenly thrust his hips completely off the bunk. His legs went stiff and Pete heard his breathing suddenly stop. His wiener began to pulse in Pete's hand. Bryan's body collapsed in on itself and he slowly released the bear hug he had on Pete head and sighed.

"God, that was awesome. I never dreamed it would be that good to have someone else do that for me," Bryan panted.

"It felt good doing it too," Pete said. "I always like playing with little boy's wieners."

"Pete?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you want me to do you?"

"Do Kardasians shit in the woods?"

"Huh?" the boy looked puzzled.

"Never mind," Pete chuckled. "It's an ethnic joke at the expence of the Kardasians because of their Dominion status. It was a mean thing to say, and you shouldn't learn stuff like that…"

"Uh, okay," Bryan brushed it aside. "Can you wait till I go out and piss? I don't think I can wait any longer." The boy grabbed at his own wiener.

"Sure," Pete laughed.

Bryan didn't bother putting on any clothes. He just squirmed over Pete and jumped out of bed, darting through the access door and into the Tomahawk's axial corridore, headed toward the head. Pete watched those perfect little boy buns of his disappear through the door and moments later I could hear the sound of his piss splashing into the toilet and then the tell-tale swoosh-whish of the vacuum toilet flushing. Seconds later he was back with that smile on his face. The smile that made Pete melt.

'God, he is beautiful!' Pete watched as Bryan crawled back into the bed and laid down beside him. He looked into Pete's eyes as he positioned himself and the Nomad felt Bryan's hand sliding down his chest and stomach as the boy felt for Pete's dick. Pete's stomach tightened at the touch of his cold hand and he gasped out loud.

"Ee-yyoowwww! Cold hand Luke!" Pete shrieked as his hand found it's target and his smile broadened at my reaction.

"Ah-hah! Gotcha!" Bryan said.

"Well, don't stop now," Pete added. "It's not that cold."

"So, you like that, eh?" he asked, grinning evily.

"Oh yeah," Pete groaned as Bryan's fingers wrapped around his waiting dick. "OH Y-E-A-H!!!"

Bryan laid his head on Pete's chest and continued to stroke his dick. As the nine year old worked at Pete's dick, the Nomad gently rubbed the boy's back. They were both purring like kittens.

'Yes,' Pete thought to himself, 'so much better than doing myself.'

"This is wonderful." Pete said. He could already feel his balls getting tight and a tension building in his dick with each additional stroke. Bryan grunted with concentration and redoubled his efforts on the stubborn dick. Without warning Pete's dick started to pulse and suddenly there was an rushing feeling throughout his groin and Pete could feel gobs of cum shooting up it's length and then landing on his stomach. One shot went clear over Bryan's head and landed on the Nomad's chin. His legs were stiff, and toes curled and Pete held on to Bryan's head with all his might. Pete was breathless! Bryan kept at it until he had milked the last drops from the adult's stiff dick.

"Good one?" Bryan asked.

"Yeah, no shit."

"No, not shit," Bryan laughed. "Cum, you dick head."

"Yuck," Pete groaned, "Let's go get cleaned up."

Man and boy grabbed up towels and headed for the hot water of the autowash. They had only just finished the serious part of the shower and were begining to play in the cascading warm water as the alarm went off. Both scrambled out of the autowash and headed for the control cabin, still butt-naked.

BRANGAH-BRANGA-BRANGA!

WHOOP!! WHOOP!!

BRANGAH-BRANGA-BRANGA!

As soon as they entered the control cabin, Bryan instinctively dived for the navigator's station and began to wrap the acceleration harness around himself, as Pete had taught him to do in a crisis. His wiener was fully erect. Pete was still trying to determine what had made the computer's alarms so crazy. Searching the densely packed instrument array in front of him, his eyes fell on the Warp Engine sub-systems monitor. It was a awarsh in red light.

Bryan's sexy big blue eyes were wide with fear. "W-what's wrong?"

BRANGAH-BRANGA-BRANGA!

WHOOP!! WHOOP!!

BRANGAH-BRANGA-BRANGA!

"This is defiantly not good!" Pete thought. "Computer, disable audio alarm, and reset." The crowded control cab of the orbital truck Dream Walker was suddenly silent as the 120-db alarm klaxon fell silent.

"Has there been a warp core implosion? Are we going to explode?" Bryan asked. He could see the engineering christmas tree as well as Pete could. They hadn't progressed that far in the boy's training in the operation of the truck yet, but he knew that red on an indicator indicated a fault or something that needed attention.

"Bryan, you've been watching way too many holovids. A warp core breech is so rare that there hasn't been one in the past century, except in combat."

"Then what is wrong?" he asked, still not convinced.

"Let's find out," Pete said, motioning for Bryan to get out of the accelerating harness and come over to him. The nine-year-old crawled into Pete's lap, and an involuntary shiver shook his small frame.

As Pete enveloped him in a bearhug, he could actually feel Bryan's heart pounding inside his skinny chest. Holovids were a big-part of the modern nine-year-old's life, and the events shown there struck deep for better or worse.

Pete rubbed Bryan's tummy briefly and said: "Bry, Bry, there's nothing to be scared of. We've just dropped out of warp, that's all. We're flying through a particularily rough piece of subspace, full of discontinuities, quantum potholes, the works. We probably just hit a space-time inversion that destabilized the warp field coils. Okay, lesson time – attention on deck."

Bryan giggled and stiffened his body eve as Pete redid his bearhug.

"So then, where are we?"

"Err… ummnh?" Bryan fumbled.

"Nope! Wrong question. Fifty minutes in the brig for the Captain," Pete scolded himself. "What I mean is what was the last warpgate we went through? Last night about 23:00 hours."

"Perseus X-1!" Bryan shouted enthusiastically.

"Very good. And we're bound for?"

"Ventax II."

"Great. Now for the sixty-four thousand stellar question… What is this area of space especially known for?"

"Umnnh…?"

Pete grinned. "Think about what the Perseus X-1 gate orbits."

"A black hole…" Bryan said.

"Yes, but not any old run of the mill Einstein-Rosen-Hawking Black Hole. What is special about Perseus X-1? Why are half the cosmologists in the Federation there?"

Bryan looked puzzled for a moment, then his face brightened as he hit upon the answer. "I know!" the nine-year-old babbled excitedly. "Perseus X-1 has a weird event horizon. It isn't spherical like it would be if Perseus were rotating correctly. It's very slow, takes almost a week to complete one revolution and it wobbles about 50 degrees in the 'yaw' and 'pitch' axis. The gravometric waves boiling off it are virtually unpredictable."

"Good boy!" Pete said squeezing his young companion. "We're flying through some of the roughest subspace topography in the known galaxy, almost as bad as around Eta Carinae."

Another shiver ran through the boy's body and Pete realized he was a little apprehensive also. Although warp core breeches were only statistical anomalies in the real world, a modern starship's warp drive was perhaps the most complex and sophisticated piece of electro-cybernetic machinery ever devised by man; and it was far from fool-proof and Dream Walker's had gone long past the 10,000 hour inspection and maintenance point, all this in addition to the fact that the region of space they were currently flying through, the aproach corridor through the Bad Lands to Bajor was among the most dangerious streaches of space in the Federation.

"Let's see if we can determine what went wrong," Pete said, smiling for Bryan's benefit, determined to get some teaching out of this. Pete got up, with Bryan clinging to him like a spider monkey, his small nude body plastered against Pete's own. Pilot Reynolds went over to the flight engineer's station and sat in front of the engineering diagnostic test panel and typed in the command for the main computer to coax the much older duetronic engineering systems computer into determining what had caused the warp drive to shut down. The diagnostic spreadsheet loaded all right. Then almost immediately generated the error message:

ENGINE SYSTEM GENERAL FAULT – SYSTEM HALT

"Hmmn," Pete said with mock seriousness, stroking an imaginary beard. "Hmmn, Vell, Herr Doktor Bryan; vot ve haff here ist eine problem mit der varpenpropullsorensystemski. Das ist kapoot!"

Bryan laughed and playfully socked Pete's arm, which was the entire idea of the 'Mad Doctor' routine. A lot of the boy's fear was beginning to dissipate now.

"What do you think we should do now?" The Nomad asked Bryan.

"Call for a tug," Bryan laughed.

Pete laughed also, "Yeah, right!" he said grinning. "If we were Star Fleet and didn't have to pay for the towing charges. Nope. You'll have to do better than that."

Bryan thought for a moment, "Try to re-initialize the warp system?"

"Bingo!" Pete said proudly, Bryan was without a doubt among the brightest kids I'de ever known. "A lot of times, especially if you're way past time for a maintenance check, the warp drive will encounter some condition in subspace that is incompatible with the warp bubble, and it just collapses. The result is we drop out of warp."

"Can I do it?"

"You know how?" Pete asked.

To the spacer's surprise, Bryan pointed to a large double circuit breaker on the main engineering panel which was in the tripped position and had a large red indicator beside it.

"Yes, that's the engine master reset, that's where we start."

"Now?" Bryan asked, his fingers poised over the circuit breaker. Pete nodded and Bryan snapped the breaker into the engaged position. Instantly, most of the christmas tree's ocean of red indicators turned green or amber [in start-up mode]. Significantly several main subassemblies remained with red warning lamps illuminated.

"That's a good sign," Pete sighed, studying the densely packed indicator panel.

"But how can that be?" Bryan asked. "There are still so many red 'fault' lights on."

"Because the Engineering Computer ran its startup program and re-innitialized the energining systems, it means that the problem is not with the engineering systems computer."

'That would have been a mess,' Pete thought as the diagnostic began to scroll numbers and symbols down the small 14" [35cm] Hi-rez screen embedded in the flight engineer's station. "And that means that we can use the computer to narrow down our search – instead of ceawling around on our bellies through very small access crawlways that are always charged a little from the residual effects of the warp drive."

"Sounds like it might be fun," Bryan smiled.

"That's because you haven't had to do it yet. It makes all of your hair stand on end, and the charged field feels like insects crawling all over your body. Plus, if your not real careful you can touch lotsa stuff that can give you a nasty-shock."

Pete shuddered at the rememberance of the last time I had been forced into manually diagnosing a problem with the warp drive. No, despite Bryan's enthusium, it was not an experience he would care to repeat any time soon.

About midway through the test, the problem was found:

<Pan 0928 SPN 3:>

<Warp Field Stabilizer Test: FAILED>

<Diagnostic Fault Wr-43 at memory location>

<FF0003 73A4C1 AA401E >

<System Error.>

<General Protection Fault.>

<SYSTEM HALTED>

"Alright, Engineer Shimosauwa now what?"

Bryan twisted around in Pete's lap and arranged his nude body so he was facing the engineering console. Tentative, the boy tapped out a few lines of command code on the engineering computer's keyboard. He was rewarded with a dozen screens of data on what the diagnostic program had found.

Bryan sighed. "The problem is that I don't understand a third of what the computer is trying to telling me."

"Yeah, but I bet their aren't too many nine-year-olds who could get this far," Pete said impressed. He studied the computer's diagnostic and recommendations and sighed. "It's bad, but not terminal thank the Odd Gods."

"What is it?" Bryan asked.

"Last month, just before I met you, I was returning from a highly lucrative run to one of the Bajorian fortress-colonies still in the Gamma Quadrant despite the displeasure of the Founders and their Jem'Hadarr thugs. I was jumped by a Jem'Hadarr gunship corsaire and had to really overtax the warp drive getting away."

"Wow!" Bryan said impressed. "Tell me more."

"The maintenance droid is going to be a few hours doing some patch together work so we can get to a port. It's all going to be outside on the portside warp nacelle; why don't we take some Pictures and I'll tell you while we work."

"Okay!" Bryan said enthusiastically.

In the few days that they had been together, both Bryan and Pete had begun to introduce each other into the complexities of their respective lives. Bryan had introduced Pete to the boy's twin nightmare guards, a threadbare stuffed teddy bear named simply 'Bear' and a fierce-looking stuffed reptillian horor named 'Crunchie'. Pete in turn had begun taking Pictures of Bryan. The significance of 'Pictures' with a capital 'P' as opposed to just normal run of the mill holographs was that: Pictures refered to nude holoscans of Bryan [or virtually any other kids Pete could talk into it].

One of the quasi-legal issues related to this was the question of freedom of expression [which was guaranteed by virtually every human governmentin in the galaxy], and one of those ways of expressing oneself was through nude holography, and in Pete's case, holography of nude children. In some places, like Raisa, holography of nude youngsters was considered natural and was encouraged, in others, like Zackariaha's World it was illegal and was a serious crime. Most governments took the middle position of evaluating each case on its own.

Since nude holography of children was legal in some places, and illegal in others it created quite a lucrative market for nude holography, especially on the galaxy's cyber infrastructure; and especially of humanoid children. Dream Walker's profit was always a bit anemic, and since Bryan was so very cute and even 'normal' holoscans of him in playsiuts generate sales, nude holographs of him were already in great demand.

The United Federation of Planets, was formed in 2087 from a group of eight vastly different alien cultures. It had been hard enough to agree on things like trade and mutual defense, and so the founders had wisely left such taboos as sex completely alone. Federation courts have ruled time and again that no government, no matter how benign should be allowed any say in sexual relations between sentient creatures.

This enlightened position has been adopted by most of the Federation's member states, including the Terran Empire, and the Star Nomad Alliance. The trouble for Boy Lovers, like Pete, among the human population came from trying to define 'sentient' and answering the question "are children 'sentient creatures'?" and, when should a government intervene in sex, to protect the helpless, and of course are children helpless?

These were still hot legal questions in the human galaxy.

Bryan led the way walking back to the sleeping area of the Dream Walker, and immediatly jumped on the bed. Since Bryan was already nude, Pete suggested that he get dressed again.

"Why?" the boy asked puzzled.

"Well, today I was thinking we'd do a strip-layout," Pete said. "There has been a lot of interest in you doing one of those."

"Hey! Yeah, like in that Chippenditty holovid we watched last night," Bryan 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." Pete said. "Easier for me to do also. To do a holovid we need a lot more complex lighting set up than I want to do now."

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

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

He had a really good, near studio-quality holocam, it produces as its output both a pristine tiny hologram cube, 5 centimeters [2"] on a side for use as a viewfinder and focusing functions, and of course the standard 21.8 megabyte digital scaning signal for recording on an isolinear chip. He found that if he set the equipment so that it gives a nice clean scan with an image that fills about two-thirds of the viewfinder's volume this holocam produces near-life size images, even running a compression algorism so that two dozen holoscans will fit on a single 620-meg chip.

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

Pete set up the neutral blue background for the holograph, basically it was 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 was Pete's own personal favorite.

"Okay," the Trucker 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?" Bryan asked.

"Just where you are," Pete said swiveling the holocam around on its tripod to face Bryan, who was still seated cross-legged on the bed. "Smile pretty," Pete said, and stepped on the floor pedal that engaged the neon-laser flood lamps. He 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.

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

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

"I wasn't," the boy 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," Bryan said. "What's next?"

"Hmmn, I think maybe standing over here," Pete said and indicated a nice flat area of the blue backdrop that would be perfect for the woodland lake and waterfall scene he 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.

Bryan came over and Pete posed him. It was getting easier to work with Bryan as he began to anticipate what the Nomad might want in a scene and started to take on some of the composition work himself. In this shot Pete 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.

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

"Okay," Pete said. "Holography ready. Talent?"

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

Pete 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," Bryan reminded him.

"Alright " Pete said. "I did didn't I? About six months ago, I got mixed up with a Ferengi merchant, named Quark on ds9. He is 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 school. I'm still in Phase One," Bryan boasted.

"Yes, and I imagine you'll keep on 'running into them' all through Phase II, III, and IV," Pete 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," Pete 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," Pete laughed. "But you still have to pass the Federation standardized tests. It won't be so bad though, I've met Ms Kathcarz, the Phase I teacher/advisor on ds9. She has to put up with starship kids ariving and leaving all the time, so she must have a pretty flexible schedule we'll work something out – you'll see…"

"Maybe," Bryan did not sound very optimistic. "Now back to the story!"

"Let's see where was I…?"

"The Federation Dominion war ended in 2376…" Bryan 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!" Brain said appreciatively. "Do you think we'll have any adventures like that this time?"

"No," Pete 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," Pete made whip noises and flicked his wrist as though cracking a bullwhip over Bryan's head.

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

"Ah," Pete said to Bryan, "Now for the piece de resistance, the stripping of the young boy completely naked. Pull down those underpants! And smile," Pete 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."

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

<< FOUR >>

Not good, he was locked in the Tiger Claw's brig – behind a solid steel door, which he suspected was backed up be a forcefield. This was because of the prickley sensation all over his body that he got whenever he experimentally touched the cold durrasteel of the hatch. David had read hundreds of holonovels where the Good Guy is imprisoned in the brig. By the vast consencious of holo-writers, this prickling feeling was the result of a hastily erected, poorly shielded electro-weak forcefield.

Also in the not good category was the fact that he had played his most powerful trump card and the giant black bonehead had shaken it off like a weak phaser sting. There had heen talk of psionic shielding equipment manufactured by the premier psi-phobes in the Galaxy, the Klingons. In the Komerex Klingon such things as psi-shields and broadband trialic jamming were common place as Klingon Households and the Imperial government each took steps to insure that the other was not using psi-sensors or weapons.

Still laying still, hoping to fool any watching guards, David glanced around the dimly lit brig-cell. There was a steel shelf on which David had napped. Through the gloom of the steel room David could see, thanks to the feeble glow of an illumination panel set on its lowest setting: a single thread-bear blanket; his clothes, minus his sneakers; and in the corner a toilet/sink combination. David hurridly sat up and pulled on his teeshirt, underpants and pants and was in the process of putting on his socks when there was a loud ratching sound sound from the steel door, and it was pulled open by the pirate known as Lopez.

Lopez grinned at the small boy. "Okay kid, the Cap'n wants you again."

"Why?" David asked.

"Doan worry, ninjo – he'll tell you!" Lopez laughed.

Outside were two other crew men, dressed in combat armor and with phaser rifles at the ready. The silver-steel mesh of the psi-shield was plainly visible. David, the guards and Lopez marched down the Axial Shaft forward again. They arrived at the oak door to the Captain's office and marched right on past about a dozen hatchways down to one marked: Captain's Quarters. Here Lopez stopped and knocked smartly.

"Come," and the steel door slid open.

"Get in there, boy," Lopez said and shoved him through. Lopez quickly stepped in behind David, leaving the guards outside as the door sighed shut behind them, and David was looking into Captain Jamal's quarters. Lopez quickly and unobtrusivly entered the cabin as the door to the Axial Shaft sighed shut.

Jamal was seated in a robe at a desk crammed with repeater instruments from the ship's bridge. The far bulkhead had been optically replaced with a large three-d holographic dispay, divided in half, one half showing a tactical display of the surrounding ten light years and the Tiger Claw's orbit, while the remainder was devoted to an optical repeater from the main screen on the bridge. At the rear of the room was a six-person conference table with comfortable-looking chairs arranged around it and at a right angle to the this was a pair of upholstered couches flanking a mini-bar, complete with food replicator, cold dring storage and liquor cabinet. Alvarez was sprawled on one of the couches. Ames and another of the pirates lounged comfortably on the other couch.

"Over here boy," Jamal said. "I've made a decision about you."

David quickly and quietly went over to where Jamal was seated. Glancing around, the boy noticed that the cabin was opulently furnished, but there was no opportunity to appreciate it. Lopez pushed him down to his knees and then stood over him.

"You like to watch things," Jamal was saying as he methodically pulled down his zipper, "Well, so do I. And right now I want to watch you suck my cock."

David was thunderstruck. He realized that he'd been kidnapped. He'd thought that he was probably going to be hurt. He'd tried not to think about it, but he realized that there was a good chance the men might even kill him. But the last thing he expected from these macho pirate drug dealers was this. Jamal's overly large, uncircumcised, sweaty prick was starting him in the face. He just looked up at the black in uncomprehending shock. Jamal responded by slapping him across the cheek hard.

"Suck it boy!" he shouted. "Wrap those pretty white lips of yours around my cock! And don't you dare let me feel your teeth if you know what's good for you!"

He couldn't do it. He tried, but his mouth wouldn't open. David began to search for other ways out of this perdiciment. He wished he had paid more attention to his mother when he was younger and before her Chromium-X days. She had tried to teach him things about the telepathy and other latent psi-powers that lerked deep within his mind – but he had been too interested in playing and had not absorbed much of his mother's frenzied, unskilled lessons. He did have one more trick that might work here, the mindfog. But now because he had first tried the slash & burn attack, Jamal was aware of his psi-talent. And unfortunatly that made this doubly not the time to try the mindfog on him.

Jamal reached down and grabbing the boy painfully. "We still have our lesson in obediance. Suck my dick, and no more psi-schicanery."

This was only going to bring him more trouble he knew, but the thought of putting that rank piece of flesh in his mouth made him want to faint. Jamal reached over onto the table and brought up a Romulan disruptor pistol. He held it right up against David's temple.

"You know the Romulan disruptor is said to be the most pain-inflicting modern weapon available. It operates by blasting molecular bonds in the body, it takes about fifteen seconds to do the job totally, and the medical people have confirmed that the target is alive, conscious and in horrible pain the entire time. Now suck my dick, and no psi-tricks!" he said in an iron voice. "Suck it, or die."

David closed his eyes and opened his mouth. Leaning forward, he missed his target and realized that his lips were pressed against Jamal's droopy balls. He had to open his eyes. The pirate's expanding penis was winking at him. This time he got it in. The smell from the man's scratchy, sweaty, pubic bush nearly overpowered him, but he tried to ignore it. The cock itself didn't really have a bad taste, at least not after the first moments, but the odor took a big more getting used to. Plus, the dick was uncomfortable. It was tickling his gag reflex at the back of his throat and this was getting worse all the time.

"Suck, boy!" Jamal commanded. David tightened his lips around the base and sucked. The horrible cock was continuing to grow in his mouth.

"No, not like that, you bonehead! Move your lips up and down on it."

David tried to do what the man said, but he'd only had a rough idea of what was involved in a blowjob and this wasn't the best circumstances under which to learn. Not only that, as Jamal's dick grew to it's full size, he couldn't no longer keep it all in his mouth. He couldn't breathe properly with it in there.

"You don't have the slightest idea what you're doing, do you?" Jamal said.

David shook his head.

Jamal stared at him a minute, if as he thought the boy might be making fun of him, but slowly it dawned on the pirate, this kid really was a babe in the woods. "Alright, then I'm going to give you a free lesson. Pay close attention, boy, because there will be a test later. You just keep your pretty lips wrapped tight around my dick and I'll do the rest."

Jamal put down the gun and took hold of David's head with both hands, holding on to his longish brown hair with his fingers. With no warning, he pulled him forward and shoved his cock all the way in, bashing his lips against his teeth. David gagged, but there was no relief; the man yanked his head back until his dick was nearly out of it and then shoved it down his throat again. David struggled to get air in his lungs as the man brutally raped his mouth. After a while, he figured out how to do that, but it brought no relief to the back of his throat, which felt as if it were being bruised by the thrusting tool. His hair hurt from Jamal pulling on it and his knees were sore. The man grunted once and he felt hot, salty liquid filling up his mouth and throat. He tried to spit it out, it was like drowning, and Jamal kept his prick mashed up against his face and he had to swallow most of it. At last the man let him go and he collapsed on the floor. Taking deep breaths, he replenished his starved lungs.

"That was the worst blowjob I've ever had," Jamal told him. "You got plenty to learn, boy. Well, I'll make sure you get plenty of practice. Ames, come over here."

Ames moved over and stood in front of the prone boy. David watched in horror as he pulled his meat out of his pants. The bastards were going to do it to him again!

"You get back up on your knees and blow Ames," Jamal told him. "After that, you'll do Manuel and then maybe I'll get Rico down from engineering so he can have a turn. Get to it boy, you have a lot of cock to suck!"

At first David didn't move. He was too overwhelmed, but when he saw Jamal reaching for the gun, he sprung up. His knees were not covered by his shorts and they were already getting sore from the carpet, but he had to ignore it. Ames shoved his dick forward and he put it in the boy's mouth. At least this time he knew what was expected of him; he moved his lips up and down the shaft, trying to get his throat used to this new intruder. Ames' cock didn't get as big as Jamal' had done, and so it wasn't as bad. Ames also put his hands on the back of David's head, but didn't pull his hair or yank him back and forth. Instead, he moved his hips back and forth, making his balls bounce off of David's chin as the man fucked his face. It didn't seem to take as long before he felt another load of juice filling up his mouth. Again he tried to spit it out and again he was made to swallow it.

Next, the man called Manuel came over and presented him with another prick to suck. Crying silently, David did what he had to do. His knees were really starting to bug him, as were his throat and jaw but he was ever aware of the gun laying on the table. While he was having his third taste of dick, Jamal sent Ames to relieve Rico in the Emergency Manual Monitor in Engineering. Just as Rico came into the cabin, Manuel was shooting his load down David's throat. Rico had a nasty grin and pulled out a monster cock. David cringed; how was he going to take that thing in his mouth?

"You see, boy," Jamal laughed, "If you can take Rico, you can take anybody. And you better take him… and he better have a big smile when he's done."

Rico stuck his dick in David's face and the eleven year old managed to get it halfway in before he stopped. It was just too big and too wide. He looked up at Rico, pleading with his eyes.

"Take it all, boy," the man hissed, "You'll regret it if you don't."

He tried again, but it just wouldn't fit. Rico lost his patience and grabbed David by the ears, forcing himself down the boy's throat. It was agony, both on his ears and his mouth, but there was no mercy. Rico raped his throat hard, smashing his balls and pubic hair against his chin and nose. David was terrified that he was going to choke to death, but somehow he got enough air in his lungs. If there was one plus, it was that the man came quicker than all the others, but there was so much sticky white cumm that David simply couldn't swallow it. Rico let go of his ears and he fell on the floor again, a stream of sperm dribbling out of the corner of his mouth. At least it was over.

Or was it? Jamal was moving back into position.

"Okay – now is the time for your test, boy. I want to see what you've learned."

David knew better than to beg, so he got back up on his aching knees and went back to work. His jaw felt numb and his tortured tonsils felt so sore he could hardly swallow.

"Do a good job, or I'll make you practice some more," Jamal said as the little boy started sucking on him. David didn't think he could take anymore, so he summoned up all his reserves to deal with this rock hard tool that demanded his attention. He ignored all the pain and concentrated only on the cock. It seemed to take forever, but finally he heard the pirate Captain gasping in pleasure. Much to his surprise, he man pulled his dick out of his mouth before filling it with cumm.

"You did good, boy," Jamal said as he stroked his dick. "Here's your reward: I've decided that we won't sell you off at Korlandan Cor, I'm going to keep you as my own personal cabin boy – so I can have you suck me off everty night, and I can fuck you whenever I want. Ain't that great? NAhhh hahh hahh! Ahh hah! hah! hah!"

He moved forward again and David felt a hot jet of liquid shoot over his scalp. There was another and another and then Jamal pulled back and held his rod right in front of David's face. It's head was a deep purple colour and it was still leaking white fluid from its gaping mouth. Jamal wiped the head against David's flushed cheeks, leaving patches of sticky juice. He rubbed his hand through his hair, massaging the cum over his head and making his short hair stick up in spikes. Jamal looked around the small cabin and then pointed and shouted: "Lopez! You didn't get your turn!"

Lopex grinned:"Si, mi Capitan," Lopez said in Neo-hispanic, and moved over and stood in front of the prone boy. David watched in horror as he pulled his meat out of his pants. They were going to do it to him again?

"Okay, Dog. Now you show Mr. Lopez what we have taught you." Jamal laughed. The rest of the Pirates joined in the harsh belly laugh.

Lopez shoved his prick forward, it was considerably smaller than the others, not much larger than his own, David thought. Compaired to the others this would be simple. Lopez put his cock in the boy's open mouth, and David was surprised when Lopez' cock got as big as Jamal' had done, almost at once. Lopez was also much more animated, always moving around, forcing David to continually follow on his knees to keep the adfult's cock in his mouth.

When he had climaxed, Lopex pulled up the spacer's coveralls he was waring and grinned at Jamal, "gracious, mi Capitan."

"And what did you think?"

"He's got the knack," Lopez rubbed his crotch, "It could use some work on the technique, but for sheer suckpower, he's number one."

Jamal turned to the boy, hard black eyes drilling into him. "Yes, I agree. That's why I'm going to keep him." The Pirate Captain motioned to David, who immediatly scooched his way over to Jamal without getting to his feet.

"That was good enough for now, Dog," Jamal said, and took a dog's collar and leash from somewhere. "From now on," Jamal intoned, "you are my Dog. Let all who are witness to this act of ownership go forth and tell the Galaxy. This dog is mine!"

With that Jamal attached the collar around David's neck. It was made of solid durrasteel and was in the choke-chain configuration; so all Jamal needed do was give a light tug on the leash to communicate his every wish in large, loud letters.

"Alright, Dog. Get over in the corner and stay out of the way. Alvarez! Brewski's all around, council of war."

David quickly scrambled over into the indicated corner and sat down, his knees pulled up under his chin with his skinny arms wrapped around them.

Alvarez got to his feet and opened the refrigerator door on the mini-bar. He took out several beers and passed them around, then got a can of soda. "Here you go, brat," he said as he rolled a Martian Fizz across the floor to David before settling down at the confrence table. David eagerly took it and popped it open. The cold, sweet soda felt like so good as it went down his abused throat. Also, it was great to get the taste of cum out of his mouth. Soon the Pirates were deep into planing their next raid, almost none of which David undrstood and so he tuned it out. The boy became drowsey and soon was asleep.

"Come on, Dog, wake up. I think it's time for some more practice," Jamal said with an evil grin. "Yes a little bedtime practice to celebrate our aquisition of another priceless treasure, the itc Alpha Geminorium." David startled awake and then froze, hoping against hope that the man wasn't talking about him. His eyes sought out the ship's time chronometer, 22:18:05, it read. He'd been been asleep almost four hours.

"Come over here, boy," the man said, "Passage on this ship isn't free. You have to earn your way."

David crawled over on his hands and feet. He didn't let his knees touch the carpet; they were still too raw and this meant that his bottom was raised high. The men laughed at his awkward movements.

"Please," he begged, "My throat hurts. Please don't make me do it again."

"Your throat hurts that bad?" Jamal asked with a touch of false concern. David nodded, doubting that he would be let off, but still feeling the need to try.

"Would you really be happy if I didn't fuck your mouth again?" David's internal alarms were going off, but he nodded again.

"Oh, well then, I won't" Jamal said, "As a show of my good-will to you, my Psi-Dog – and because I and my officers have just netted another million bars of latinum for our retirement fund. Think of it, Psi-Dog! A ten thousand bricks of latinum."

He picked David up by the scruff of his shirt and lifted him off the ground. "No, I will not claim my right as Master of this vessel for my nightly blow job. There are other ways to satisfy my urges. And I suspect that since your knowledge of blow jobs was so rudimentry that you will also require instruction in the joys of sodomy…"

Jamal dumped him in a heap on the couch. David cowered there, wondering what would happen next as Jamal strode forward in the cabin. When he came back he was holding a large Klingon Lev'ek, tripple bladed dagger. Jamal unsheathed it and the blade glowed in the afternoon sunlight recreated by the cabin's polyarcs.

"No, please," David blubbered as he threw his hands up in front of his face. "Don't cut me, I'll do it, please don't hurt me!"

"You think I'm going to cut you up?" Jamal laughed. "No, boy, don't worry. If you play nice, and if you keep your witch-powers in control, you won't get hurt at all."

He pulled a chair up next to the couch and sat down, holding the blade out so David could see it. "Absolutely fantastic knife, dagger and sword makers, the Klingons. That is one thing the Klingons and Imperial Terra have in common, they both know the value of a good edged weapon, even in the time of beamed energy weapons."

Jamal grabbed hold of David's left hand and forced out his thumb. While the child watched in shock, the pirate gently ran the edge of the knife over the skin on the end of his finger. David felt a slight pain and saw the red line of blood as the razor sharp blade cut him. Then Jamal let him go and he held his wounded digit against his chest.

"If you don't want to feel my knife again, you just lie there and do what I tell you. If not, next time, I may cut your ball off."

David couldn't have moved if he had tried. He had been literally scared stiff. Jamal pulled the boy's legs out from underneath him and yanked his socks off. Then he held David's T-shirt at the base and pulled it out from his body. The pirate held the knife in his other hand, and David cringed as he moved it toward his stomach. But Jamal didn't cut him; instead, he hooked it underneath the shirt and cut upwards, slicing the fabric as it went. David whimpered as it got near his neck, but the blade only parted the collar and then the man moved it away and started cutting one of the sleeves up to the shoulder. All David could do was keep very still. He could almost feel the cold radiating outward from the steel as the Lev'ek cut his shirt off and it made his skin crawl. When Jamal put down the knife, David's shirt was in tatters. The man casually yanked them away, pulling out the portion that David was still laying on. The chill of the air-conditioned cabin along with the feeling of increased vulnerability made David shiver. Jamal picked up the blade again and touched David's right nipple with the flat of it, making the boy jerk as if he had been shocked, so cold was the steel.

The other crewmen were watching the show, smiling evilly as Jamal took hold of David's pants leg. His shorts were made of sturdier cloth than his shirt, but the dagger had no trouble cutting it. It made a purring sound as he sliced up the side of the leg, only having to exert more effort when he reached the waist. He repeated the process on the other side and David whimpered again as what was left of his shorts was taken from him. His white underpants didn't feel like much protection from the cold or the men's eyes.

"Please, don't," David whimpered as he saw the man reaching for his underpants. He knew he was risking the man's wrath, but he was very much afraid of being naked in this company.

"Dog! Shut up or I'll cut you for real," Jamal muttered as he pulled out the elastic waistband and started slicing down. Silent tears started to fall from David's blue eyes as he cut them on both sides. Then the pirate very slowly peeled away the front section, taking away the rest of David's dignity. The small boy blushed in shame as his wiener and tiny balls were exposed.

"That thing's sure tiny and bald," Lopez sneered, "How old is he, six? I've seen babies with bigger dicks. And those balls may as well not even be there, for all the good they look."

David had secretly been proud of his wiener up to this point. He'd seen his friend Timmy naked and it was bigger than his. Once they'd even gotten hard together and compared and he'd beat the other boy by a full centimeter (½inch]. But here in the cold and in his fright, everything was all shriveled up. Plus, compared to the cocks he'd had to suck, his was tiny. As the men laughed at his boyhood, another piece of his self-esteem shattered.

"You think we should cut it off?" Alvarez was asking. "Make him like a dummy in a store? Hell! He'd never miss it!"

Jamal looked as though he were considering this option seriously as he reached out and grabbed the boy's penis between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it out away from the child's body. Then he touched the side of David's penis with the center blade of the Lev'ek and the boy broke down, blubbering uncontrollably.

"Oh, please, please, please, please don't!"

"No, I guess not," Jamal said. "Looks like it's been cut already!" he laughed, flicking the circumcised head of the little boyhood. "Anyway, enough warm-up. Time for the real fun! Stand up boy."

Very slowly, the naked boy got to his feet. More than anything, he wanted to cover up his little jewels with his hands, but he sensed instinctively that this was the worst thing he could do. The men were all watching him and that was what they all seemed to be staring at. He felt defiled by their hungry leers, and freightened by their blazing eyes.

"Lay over the arm of the couch, Psi-Dog," Jamal said, "Face down."

David did as he was told. His middle was draped over the bolster and his feet were barely touching the floor. It wasn't overly uncomfortable, but having his bottom raised up like this made him feel especially vulnerable. A dark thought of what the drug lord had in mind had formed in the back of his mind and was fluttering about, threatening to escape. He heard a zipper and turned his head to see Jamal smearing petroleum jelly on his prick.

"Oh, no," he moaned. David's life up to this morning had been somewhat sheltered, even though he lived in an urban ghetto on a frontier world. Plus the boy was very bright and had learned a fair amount in his eleven years. And one of those things he'd heard stories about was getting fucked up the butt. The ultimate act of domination of one male over another, it rarely was described as a pleasent experience, and instinctivly David knew that he was about to experience it first hand.

"So, you didn't want to suck it?" Jamal was saying. "That's what you got two ends for. When one gets sore, you switch to the other. I was planing to break you in the evening in bed anyway, so I don't mind."

All fear aside, if he'd been able, David would have gotten off the couch. In his boy's nightmares, being raped up the ass was almost as terrifying as being dead and he would have risked death to try and get away. But he couldn't; all his muscles had lost their strength. He was draped over the couch like a piece of limp spaghetti and could do nothing as the man moved in behind him. He felt Jamal's hands on his thighs, spreading them apart and lifting his feet off the ground. The man's knees held them open and then he felt his ass cheeks being parted. His mounting terror combined with the pressure of the couch against his middle combined to give him a new shame; he lost control of his bladder and piss flowed out of his cock, soaking the couch underneath him and running down his leg.

"Christ, Cap'n," Ames laughed, "The little baby's pissed himself."

"You pissed on my couch, you little shit!" Jamal yelled. "You're going to pay for that, but not before I have your ass!"

The man pulled his butt cheeks harder and David felt as if the man was trying to rip him in half. He could feel the cool air moving against his sensitive, puckered anus. But then he felt heat there, and knew that the man's greasy cock was knocking at his back door.

"Time to get fucked, Dog!" Jamal sneered as he started pushing forward. David clenched down, trying to defend his last outpost against the invader, but the pressure was beginning to mount. There was a blast of pain and Jamal's thick cockhead entered him. He screamed in horror and pain.

"Ah! You like a big prick up your little, white, baby-smooth ass!" Jamal said. "Get ready, because you're about to have it all!"

There were ten seconds of raw agony as Jamal pushed his cock all the way up David's bottom. He screamed and felt another squirt of piss shoot out as his insides were forced open. Even in his nightmares, he couldn't have imagined this. It wasn't just the pain, bad as it was. It was the feeling of helplessness and shame. What Jamal was doing to him made him feel dirty and worthless. He clawed at the cushions as he felt the man's sweaty balls spank up against his own.

"By Crom, but you got a tight ass," Jamal panted. "This is going to be the best fuck I've had in months."

David felt the man pull back, but there was no relief. Right away, he slammed his tool back in, filling David up with thick sausage and slamming his pubic bush against his crack. David hoped that it would become easier as the man fucked him, but it didn't. He was rough and David did not know how to loosen up his internal muscles. It felt like he was having his anus deflowered by an iron bar. He'd stopped yelling; it had made his throat hurt again and it hadn't done any good, but he was crying softly as the brutal rape continued. Jamal cock seemed to grow even bigger inside of him and for one awful moment, David thought he was just going to tear right through him and come out his stomach, but then he felt a hot stream shoot deep inside his bowels as Jamal shouted in pleasure. The drug lord pulled back and his softening prick made a farting sound as it pulled out of David's abused boy hole. David felt a hot liquid draining out of his bum and he didn't know if it was blood, sperm or both. Any relief he felt was short-lived.

"Can I have a go, Cap'n?" Ames asked.

"No, his ass if mine alone for the moment. Later you can have him suck you off again, but I have to punish him for pissing on my couch right now."

David wondered how any punishment could be worse than what just happened to him, but Jamal was quick to inform him. He moved to the side of the boy and took off his leather belt.

"You pissed on the furniture, brat," he said. "And to think I was gonna take a bed-wetter into my bed, geeze! You Pissed On The Furniture!!" Jamal raged on at the cowering boy. "My dog knows better than that. But I had to teach him not to and so I guess I'll have to teach you the same way. You may have a dick and balls like a baby and a smooth baby ass, but you won't piss like a baby if you know what's good for you. But, hey, you're lucky. I beat the dog with a stick, but that'd kill you, and I'm not ready for that… yet!" Jamal said meanacingly. "No sticks or stones for you. You should feel honored, you get a three hundred dollar designer belt. Your ass only gets the best, brat. First my dick and now my belt. Guess you just got one lucky ass."

Jamal had doubled the belt over in his hand and moved into position. David was crying, but ouldn't even form the words to plead for mercy. He'd been spanked with a belt before, even bare bottomed once or twice, but he knew that this was going to be much worse. The belt whistled through the air and struck him in the center of both buttocks. He screamed again. The man had used all his strength and it felt like it. There was another blow, this one just above the first and again he shrieked.

The next one his him just above his thighs, right on the underneath of his bottom. It was the worst yet, but the blows kept coming. David tried to move, but he couldn't. From somewhere, he'd gotten the strength to kick his legs, but they scraped uselessly along the floor while his bare bottom was pulverized by the belt. His mind became a red haze of pain and he wondered if it was possible to be spanked to death. He had no idea of how long it went on, but at some point he was aware that though he was still making hoarse croaks, the belt was no longer falling.

He opened his eyes and saw someone drop a roll of paper towels next to him.

"You got five minutes to clean up that mess – and yourself," Jamal said. "Then you better get up and clean up that piss…. geeze! Pissing on my couch! Next time, I'll make you lick it up."

David had no sense of time, but as soon as he could move, he rolled off the couch. He couldn't stand properly; his bottom hurt too much. Wiping his pee from the floor wasn't too hard; there was no carpet there for it to soak in to. The couch was a problem because he'd wet up the whole arm. Helplessly, he dabbed at it, but there was no way to dry it.

Alvarez came over and handed him a spay cleaner. "Here, use this," he said. "Spray it, wipe it, do it again and then just let it dry. That should take care of it."

"Thank you," David whispered, nearly overcome by the minuscule bit of kindness. He did what the man said and then put the cleaning tools down. They had gone back to ignoring him and so he happily crawled back to his corner and hid.

At some point he got the nerve to wipe his bottom with his hand. There was some blood, but not a lot. He'd thought it would be much worse. His cheeks, on the other hand, were badly welted. He was curled up on his side, facing the bulkhead, trying to keep his bottom from coming into contact with anything, but every little move he made hurt him.

"WHAHOONK!" the address intercraft screached and everone in the room immediatlty turned toward it.

"Battle stations torpedo! Freighter sighted, bearing 129 mark 30 degrees green. Captain to the bridge."

A double blast door cycled open, revealing the pirate corvette's main command and control center.

"Well, Dog, now you get to see why I have the power to own you," Jamal gave a hard tug on the leash as he walked past the boy the hatchway on his way to the bridge and C-I-C.

The Tiger Claw's C-I-C was buzzing with activity and a huge alpha-numeric display to the left of the main screen screamed red alert in foot high red letters. Jamal took his place on the quarter deck, raised meter and a half above the rest of the cruiser's bridge, to give the Captain a commanding view of all that was happening about him.

Captain Jamal sat back in his acceleration couch and for a moment or two studied the 3d tactical situation plot, a half meter globe in the Captain's heads up display floating in front of his command chair. "Mr. Cookson."

"Aye Sir," the scan engineer replied.

"It is itc Alpha Scorpio?" Jamal wanted to know. "We're gonna score two Alpha-class itc buckets on one run?

"None other, Cap'n Sir." The pirate said with a touch of pride.

"Far fucking out!," Jamal exclaimed. "Mr. Starkie, come about to 189 mark 65 degrees, Engines ahead incept speed."

"Aye skipper," Starkie, the helmsman, said and made the adjustments to his instrumentation.

"Attention itc Alpha Scorpio, this is the Customs Police. Heave to and prepare to be boarded," Jamal commanded.

In spite of himself, David grinned at the outragious whopper. Customs Police indeed. The freighter's captain was not so easily fooled. It probably had something to do with the large jolly roger painted on Tiger Claw's hull.

"Navigator!" Jamal yelled, "Time to intercept at optimal weapons range?"

"Five minutes, eighteen decimal zero, five, niner seconds," Ames said almost immediatly.

"Very well. Mr. Jukes! Weapons status?"

"Torpedo tube forward ready to fire, aft torpedo on standy, all phasers charged to 100% efficiency, ready to fire, sir."

"Very well." Jamal said and

The boy cautiously crawled through the blast doors and wriggled around to a point, still well to aft of the quarter deck in the midsts of auxilliary and backup equipment, from where he could get a clearer view of the heads up display.

Jamal noticed this movement. "So, Dog! You are interested in stellar tactics? Alright, Come."

David quickly got to his feet and came over to Jamal's command chair, half expecting the Pirate to slap at him again for the pissing accident, but Jamal's mercurial character had already carried him far past that point and he was semi-jovial.

"You can stay as long as you do not get in the way. This is very serious business… do you understand?"

David nodded.

"Cat got your tongue?"

"No sir."

"Then when I speak to you, I expect an audiable responce, understood."

"Yes sir."

"Alright. Now go sit in that corner and keep out of my way." Jamal growled at David.

The boy instantly crawled over to a gap in the instrument bins between the Mass Proximity Indicator, and a holographic situation display. The boy looked at his knees, they were rubbed raw from the carpet. Gingerly, he touched them as he tried to will himself invisible.

"Mr. Jukes," Jamal was saying. "I want to run past the target at 0.96 light speed. I want you to launch our forward torpedo two seconds before intercept. Think you can destroy one of the warp engines for a 0.5% bonus.

"No worry sir," The chief gunner said, "For 0.5% I can do it."

"Well, susposing you miss, Mr. Jukes, better bring the aft tube up to 'Ready to Fire' from 'standby'. This is an itc Alpha class, I don't think Mullins and Lopez can bring her down with just phaser fire."

"Aye aye, Sir."

Jamal mashed down on the qlr radio transmit switch and again issued his challeng: "itc Alpha Geminorum, this is the Customs Police, heave too…"

Just then a resounding KAH-WHANG echoed through the Tiger Claw as it was pitched around as its inertial stabilization failed for a few millisecond. David was thrown against the bulkhead hard enough to make his nose bleed.

"Now, see the folly of attacking Jamal," the pirate grinned. "Mullins! Jukes! Lopez! Stand by your guns, fire as we pass."

"Aye aye," the gunners sounded from their vr gunnery stations.

"Mr. Mason. I need those turbos of your's now. I want sol decimal nine six velocity in three seconds."

"Aye, Cap'n. Ready when you are," the address intercraft sang out.

"Two… one… Mark!"

The Tiger Claw suddenly jumped ahead, tripling its acceleration curve and within seconds was in optimum phaser firing range. The freighter attempted to go into warp, aborting its stop in this system, but it was already too late.

"Torpedo away!" Billy Jukes roared. "Tracking hot, flat and nominal."

"Running time?"

There was was a bright flash on the main screen.

"Zero, sir. Direct hit on the starboard drive pylon… I think I blew it clean off."

"Well done indeed, Mr. Jukes – you've more than earned your 0.5%." Captain Jamal said.

"They are still trying to go to warp, Captain," the scan engineer reported.

"Mr. Lopez – Mr. Mullins. What are you waiting for." Jamal wanted to know. "Put them out of their misery."

Mullins held up a hand, his face burried in the vr targeting hood. "Wait for it… wait… Fire!"

Beams of coherent energy played across the bridge area of the freighter which errupted into a hugh fireball as the bridge's interior atmosphere momentarily supported combustion. A second phaser beam raked the freighter's port warp drive. For a minute, it appeared that the pirate's phaser had no effect, but a closer look revealed mini-lighting discharges and aurora fields roaming over the surface of the drive. Suddenly the main screen whited out as the drive's warp core breeched, allowing matter and antimatter to mix freely and en masse.

"Gottim!!" Lopez roared.

When the Tiger Claw optical sensors reset, it was apparent that the freighter was not going anywhere – ever again.

"Great!" Jamal said, genuinely pleased. "You see, boy, it does not pay to resist the will of Jamal."

"Yes, Master," David said and half cringed in case Jamal should think he was making fun of him.

"HAW!" Jamal roared, "Hey Alvarez! Did you hear that? The dog has advanced back to the rank of boy. He has figured out how things are on his own."

"I always had confidence in him," Alvarez said.

"Alright Alvarez," Jamal grinned. "Round up the boys and go on over there and steal everything that's not bolted down…"

"Okay, boss."

"And if its valuable enough and is bolted down…"

"I understand," Alvarez said. "What about survivors?"

David felt a chill run down his back as he heard Jamal's reply: "What survivors?"

<< FIVE >>

"It's beautiful!" Bryan exclaimed. He was waring a pair of vr-binoculars and was studying the night side of the planet. "I can see the main streets in the cities – they're like tiny threads of light criss crossing the city."

Is this is your first look at a class-M planet from space?" Pete asked.

"Yeah. At least live-action. I've seen vrs of plenty of planets in my psychobriefer study, but this is the first live one."

Pete grinned at his young friend and pulled the naked nine-year-old onto his lap, "Better go get dressed. Less than a half hour to touchdown."

"Okay," the little boy said, slowly and reluctantly taking off the vr device and replacing in in its storage receptical on the armrest of the navigator's station. Bryan got up and made his way off the cramped flight deck and back into the living area of the Tomahawk.

The Quantum Link Radio signalled the reception of a message directed at the Dream Walker. Pete reached up to the comm controls overhead and toggled the accept button. On the 9-inch [23cm] high resolution commweb screen in the lower corner of the comm console was the leering vissage of a pointy-toothed Ferengi merchant.

"Quark!" Pete exclaimed. "What do you want?"

"I just called to check on my favorite hew-mon, Reynolds."

"And no time-lag? How much does Interstel-Telecom charge for a temporeal-doppler signal like this Quark?"

"Far too much, but my need is urgent – and as you have already guessed I'm sure, I need you."

"Whoa! Hold it. Last time I worked for you I had to duck Jem-Ha'darr warships on the wrong side of the wormhold. Dream Walker isn't up to another confrontation with an enemy cruiser."

Bryan silently entered the flight deck and slid into the navigator's seat, now dressed in his favorite outfit: marine stealth-boots, shorts and a black and gold teeshirt that mimiced a Star Fleet jersey.

"Who is the hew-mon boy, Reynolds?" Quark asked as Bryan came into range of the com's visual pickup.

"My son, Bryan Shimosauwa," Pete said, and Bryan smiled his brightest smile.

"Your son?" Quark asked.

"Bryan this is Quark, a very influential Ferengi merchant at Deep Space Station Nine."

"Your son?" Quark repeated. "I thought hew-mon surnames were the same within a family grouping…"

"Quark, he's my adopted son, not a biological. The papers just became final on this trip."

"Ahh, well. Congratulations, hew-mons. I wish you whatever blessing by whatever gods is appropiate now…"

"Thank you," Bryan said in a still voice and bowed toward Quark.

"Ahh, and then we come back to my need to hire your ship, Reynolds – or may I call you Pete?"

"Maybe we'de beter remain formal," Pete grinned.

"Very well. You are approaching Ventax II with a short layover in the commerce center of Ventax City, are you not?"

"Yes, that's right. I've some fine crystal to drop off for a consignment job."

"And your flight manifest shows you'll be deadheading back to Bajor and ds9. No cargo. Correct?"

How do you know all that?" Pete asked

The Ferengi grinned, showing the double row of ting sharp pirrana-like teeth. "Hew-mon! Think who you are talking to, brother of the Grand Nagus, and son of his First Advisor. It was easy to pull up your transaction records." A deadhead return across nearly a hundred parsecs… no profit in that!"

"And so…?"

"I'm here to offer to fill your cargo bay with a very important shipment. One I'll pay a premium price to have here… or rather on Bajor… by the end of the week."

"Okay, Quark. What is the cargo?"

The Ferengi's eyes shifted first left then right as he considered. "You don't need to know that. Suffice it to say that I'm fulfilling a promise made to the old bat herself."

"General Kira? First Administraitor of ds9?"

"Herself."

"What about customs?" Pete asked suspitciously.

Quark shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "You needn't worry about customs, you'll be landing directly on Bajor…"

"What!? You know that's illegal! The orbit guard will shoot me to pieces," Pete roared.

Bryan gasped!

Quark made 'shut-up' motions at the screen as though someone mght overhear. "It's not illegal, only highly frowned upon by the Bajorian military after the Kardasian Invasion…"

"Yeah, but they've got these orbit guard cutters with turets that have two and three 40cm [16"] phaser cannons…"

"Relax, Reynolds. I told you the Old Bat had authorized this. You'll get the ed carpet treatment with the codes I have for you. Plus I'll pay a year's rental on your leased docking bay here on ds9 and 300 bars of Latinum."

"Three-tenths of a brick," Pete muttered. "Plus the lease paid up."

"All right," Quark muttered. "It has something to do with the Prophets, this might even be an orb," Quark said. "All I really know is a contact on Ventax II and that Kira is wild with the idea of presenting it to Keie Nar'Toz, a highly regarded Vedic who's speciality is ancient archeology."

Pete let a whistle excape his lips. "Okay, Quark, you've hired a ship and crew. Now all you have to do is tell us where and when to pick up, what kind of security you need and who to deliver to."

"I'll send all that in an encrypted file. You've got my pge public keys, this'll be in Merchant's Gold Ultra."

"Whew," Pete whistled. The Ferengi were the galaxy's acknowledged code-masters for transfering encrypted information over interstellar distances. Merchant's Gold Ultra was top of the line encryption. in secods the megabytes of code had been shunted across interstellar distance and deposited with lcars.

"Encrypted data file. Reciept confirmed," lcars reported.

"All right," Quark said, "These tempeoral-doppler charges are eating into my Dom-jott profits, so I must bid you a sad good-bye." And with that the screen faded to interstellar static before lcars disabled the system.

Pete reached over and ejected the disk from the comm's encoder and slipped it into his flight suit's left chest pocket.

"Ready to do some work?" Pete asked Bryan.

"Aye aye, sir," the boy responded.

"Okay then, Mr. Shimosauwa, plunk your boney little fanny in the navigator's seat and get us clearence to make planetfall at the Ventax II central aerospace port."

"Aye aye, sir, Bryan said and began to set the Tomahawk's navicomp to prepare a landing. "First, acquire beacon signal," Bryan muttered to himself as Pete sat back, seemingly oblivious to what the nine year old was doing, but in reality checking very closely each step.

Bryan remembered his lessons very well and soon was rewarded for his effort with a green light and a three toned beep.

"We are cleared to descend to the surface and approach the city from the northwest. Our parking area will be on ramp 56 west."

"Clear to decend, approach from northwest and park on ramp 56 west. got it," Pete acknowledged and took the steering yoke in his hands and settled his feet on the aerilon controls and began their re-entry.

"Now, contact Hayes, Martinez and Stanton, Terran exporters and tell them we've got their titan crystal, invoice # 311874091 from Rhamorald Exploration and Mining."

"No sweat, Skipper," Bryan said and put on the comm-web's headset and fiddled with the controls. After a few minutes of quietly speaking into the boom mic, the boy turned to Pete. "I just got an answering machine. They say that they are closed and they'll have someone there in about a half hour."

"Yeah, I guess it is kinda early local time. Okay, we'll set her down and then call," Pete said

The Tomahawk burst into the planet's troposhere with a horrendous sonic boom 1500 kilometers [930 miles] out at sea from Ventax City, and began to slowly descend as it approached the northwestern coast of the continent while shedding its hypersonic orbital velocity as it came. By the time the truck was crossing the coast line it was moving at subsonic speed and a mere 10,000 feet [3,000m] off the surface and begining its final approach to the aerospace port.

"Wanna try your hand at a landing?" Pete asked.

Bryan did a double take at Pete.

"Are you serious?"

Pete nodded motioned Bryan to sit in his lap. "I'll handle the ailerons and breaks, since your legs are not long enough yet for that."

Bryan crawled over the sins and comm gear hump between the pilot and navigator's station and settled himself comfortably in Pete's lap.

"Okay, you ready to take over?" Pete asked.

Bryan nodded and Pete let go of the steering yoke and Bryan grabbed it. The Tomahalk bucked and pitched in protest to Bryan's firm handling of the flight controls.

"Easy, easy," Pete coached. "First we're loosing airspeed pretty quickly now, we'll go through our stall point soon. Turn on the antigrav pads. Bryan touched a switch on the steering yoke and several green indicators on the overhead engineering repeater board winked on, indicating the sucessful engagement of the small truck's antigravity subsystem that supplied most of the lift its stubby wings could not at subsonic velocities.

"Now get a feel for the flight controls. Pull the noes up slightly and then bank to the portside… keep it coming, come around to a heading of 180 degrees relative."

"So we're flying in the exact oposite direction?"

"Yeah, that's right. But don't worry, we'll get back on the port's glide path in a minute; this is to give you a 'feel' for the way the flight controls respond to your touch. You're also 'teaching' lcars what you 'feel' like on the controls."

"Kewl!" Was all Bryan said as he concentraited on completing the slow wide turn to a flight path completely opposite what they had been on.

"Okay, now bank starboard and drop the nose. Bring it back to 133 degrees magnetic." Pete said. "Good, good! You've got talent, boy-kid."

Bryan blushed and responded by momentarily leaning back and kneeding Pete's chest with his shoulder blades.

Four minutes later, Bryan was less than three kilometers [2 miles] out from the end of the horizontal landing strip [the port had provisions for vessels arriving in both horizontal and vertical drive configurations. Most smaller vessels like Dream Walker used horizontal drives, while most larger vessels used vertical orientation]. In the cabin of the truck a three-toned bo'sun's whistle beep sounded.

"That mean's you're over the inner marker," Pete explained. "Put out the landing skids. Chop power and flare the nose up 50 degrees. We're still comming in too high and too fast."

The muscles in Bryan's shoulders tightened in knots of stress as the youngster struggled to impress his Special Friend. The nose of the truck lifted, and it shed virtually all of its remaining forward momentum and quietly slid out of the air to settle a bit unsteadily on its landing skids.

"Now, give us a little countergrav and bring our inertial mass down to about 2,000 kilograms [4,500 lbs]. Pull back on the stick slightly and…" Pete eased the thruster throttles forward a bit, and with a boyant bounce the Dream Walker was agin airborn and slowly accelorating down the landing ramp toward the parking area. On the hud overlay on the pilot's side of the front canopy was a small blinking quadrangle which grew in size as they approached it.

"That's parking ramp 56 west," Pete said. "Think you can bring down dead center on that painted rectangle?"

"No sweat, Skipper!" the boy grinned, and set his jaw in concentration as he guided the towards the edge of the field and the narrow off-ramp that would be Dream Walker's berth while they were on Ventax II. Moments later the landing cycle was complete and all power except for the auxilliary had been cut.

"Great landing!" Pete said and gave Bryan a huge bearhug. "C'mon," the spacer said hefting Bryan over one shoulder and geting up from the pilot's acceleration couch. "I'll show you how we log in and get set up with the port services."

Outside, the air of Ventax II was cool and sharp with the taste of the nearby ocean. The sky was crystal clear, with not a cloud anywhere and was the same deep indigo-blue of the high mountians. Overhead, an orange sun blazed away on the horizon signaling the begining of the local day. Pete and Bryan walked around to the aft starboard side of the Tomahawk, to where an apparently solid two meter [7½'] tall by a meter [3'] wide and half that deep stood.

"What's this?" Bryan asked, rubbing his hand over the smooth stainless steel front panel.

"Our link to the port services," Pete said.

"Okay, but how?"

"Magic," Pete said, taking out his cash/ident card. He placed the card flat against the featurless surface of the monolith and there was a whirr and a click. A pannel slid open to reveal a complex keypad, 2D high-rez screen and numerious switches and other controls. From somewhere within its innards the point of purchase droid [as Bryan now realized it was] said: "Authenticate please."

Pete pressed his thumb against a scanner plate and there was a bweep and the bottom half of the droid opened to reveal three heavy cables with universal power connectors on the end; and a large 25 cm [10"] rubbery hose connected to a twist on connector.

"C'mon, apprentice spaceman Shimosauwa, shag those power lines aft and plus us in while I connect the refueling line."

"Aye aye, Skipper," Bryan said and snatched the three power cables and ran around to the Tomahawk's external power embellical inputs. The truck's power plug and the cable's jacks were both manufactured by the same company and totall fool proof being both color coded and shape-sensitive. Seconds later Bryan was scampering back to Pete and reporting mission accomplished. Pete had also connected the refueling line and instructed the port's computer to deliver 87 metric tons of its best liquid atomic hydrogen and to turn on the electric embelical and the computer and communications links. Satisfied at last, Pete flipped a switch and the stainless steel over slid back down over the control areas of the droid.

As Pete and Bryan walked back toward the airlock and gangway, Pete put his arm across his Special Friend's shoulders and the little boy grinned up at him, putting his arm around Pete's waist.

"How about a little 'Cuddling' before we call those guys to come pick up the crystal or make contact with Quark's people?" Pete suggested.

"Sounds damned good to me," Bryan giggled and began to tug Pete toward the sleeping area across the narrow corridor from the interior airlock hatch.

"All right," Bryan said, "Let's play space pirate and slave boy." The nine year old immediatly clasped his hands behind his back as if they were bound and kicked off his boots. Pete slipped his arms out of his jumpsuit and rolled it down around his waist and sat on the edge of the bed, removing his boots and heavy sweat socks. Bryan meanwhile slipped out of his socks and knelt in the middle of the bed.

"Aaarrgh! Be ye ready, slave boy?" Pete growled from his pirate persona.

"Yezzir, Cap'n Petie."

"Avast! Ye knows I doane like you callin' me 'Cap'n Petie'."

"Yezzir, yer protrubance."

Pete reached out and grabbed Bryan under the elbowes and made motions as if untieing his hands, and then retieing his hands to the bed's crossbar. The boy thrashed his feet and yelled curses that would have made a Star Fleet Marine blush.

"Belay all that," Pete commanded, swinging an imaginary belaying pin at Bryan. "Konk!" Bryan said. "Knocked out." The struggling stopped and Bryan let his skinny little body go limp, eyes closed. Pete leaned over the boy and raised one eyelid.

"Out," Bryan said. Pete transfered to the other eyelid and raised it. "Cold." Bryan said. Pete let out a maniacial laugh and pretended to cut off Bryan's tee-shirt as he raised it over his head and pulled it loose. Pete also stood up and droped his flight suit and underare before crawling back on the bed, nude and kneeling beside the little boy.

Bryan continued to pretend to be unconscious as Pete slowly unsnapped his shorts and pulled down the zipper. After what seemed an inordinately long period of time to Bryan, Pete finally hooked his fingers under the waist band of his shorts and tugged them down, leaving the small boy in only his underpants.

As soon as he had Bryan's shorts off, Pete immediatly jerked off the boys underpants. Summerily freed from its cotton prison, Bryan's six centimeters [2½"] of circumsized boyhood immediatly jumped to full erection standing up away from his goin and belly like a flag pole. Pete rolled over the top of the boy and streached his two meter [six-foot-seven] body out beside Bryan's more modest one point three meter [four-foot-three] length, and immediatly curled around it. The spacer's hand sought out and found the boy's wiener and Pete began to masturbate his Special Friend. Meanwhile Bryan's hands were not idol as he skillfully massaged Pete's chest and the front of his shoulders. Pete knew exactly what Bryan liked and within a fw minutes of concerted effort he had brought the nine year old to a powerful pre-adolescent orgasm.

Bryan's back arched, thrusting his hips and wiener forward as his brain was flooded with sexual endorphins and electro-chemical charges flowed strongly down his autonomic nervous system, and also triggering a specialized annex of the penile gland buried deep in the frontal lobes into action. Bryan shuddered and collapsed limp, cuddling against Pete.

"Whew," Pete sighed. Pretty good for an early morning session…"

Bryan just grinned up at him and crawled on top of Pete, cuddling closer while Pete gently stroaked his back, from neck to fanny.

"Eeeee-boop! Eeeeee-boop! Fire!" lcars fire alarm shrieked, followed by three strings of numbers that precicely located the ingnition point in three-dimensional space, relative to lcars central processing core. In the corridor outside the sleeping area the small bonzai-forest that Pete had cultivated as a part of the Tomahawk's celss system was ablaze. Already one of lcars mobile firefighter droids was on the spot, floating on its own deadicated antigrav pad and spraying the entire two meter by half meter square plot of tiny forrest with water.

"I wonder how the devil that happened?" Pete mused after they were back laying together naked on the bed. Bryan was in his accustomed position, laying on top of Pete on his belly.

"Err-uh. I – well – I think I might know what happened," Bryan stammered. His eyes were misting over with the precursors of tears.

"Huh? What?" Pete asked.

"Its my fault!" Bryan said. "When I got my rocks off, I wasn't careful, and the fire got out."

"Huh?"

"When I was little, my mommy used to tell me that I was really a baby dragon, and that I could breathe fire. And that I'd have to keep that ability secret or the bad men would come get me and take me away from here. But then she died anyway, and for a long time, the fire didn't come… only once when I was with my aunt. Last year, a younger friend of mine taught me about sucking dick, and that felt so good the fire came out then too…"

"Whoa," Pete said. "Wait a minute. You're going way too fast for me to get what you're saying… lcars!"

"On line."

"Analyze orign of fire in bonzai forrest."

"Unable to comply."

"What? Why not?"

"No known physical phenomena could account for observed facts."

"Explain."

"Hot point appeared at 03:51:04 gmt at co-ordinates…" lcars respecified the x-, y-, z- co-ordinates that corresponded with the bonzai forest and went on to explain that although the fire had occured, its cause had been a sudden 5,200 K increase in the local air tempature for a 3 microsecond pulse. The superhot spark then completely diappeared without leaving any of the normal tell-tale signs of a high temperature event.

"Alright if no physical phenomena fits the profile, scan all data bases and report on any profile that does fit," Pete said. Tears had started to roll down Bryan's cheeks and Pete gave him a reassuring hug.

"Working… confirmed. Observed phenomena conforms to Mentalt observed ability called 'pyrokensis'. Minimum level to manifest T+3."

"Hokey Schmokes!" Pete exclaimed. "I thought there might be something there." Pete gave Bryan a second hug and said: "lcars, pull medical and encephilograph profiles. Subject: Shimosauwa, Bryan. Scan and compare to known Mentalt encephilograph profiles." Pete also gave Bryan an extra squeeze and continued to cuddle with him.

"Working…" lcars reported.

"Pete," Bryan said in a small voice. "I – uh – can show you."

"Wow!" Pete said excitedly. "Really, now?"

"Yes."

"Analysis complete," lcars reported. "No match found at T+7 or T-Prime levels."

"Dhuh!" Pete said. "If Bryan were that hot they'de have spotted it at birth."

"Unrecognized command: 'DHUH'," lcars chided. "Bad syntax. Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?"

"Ignore," Pete grinned at Bryan. "lcars is pretty litteral, you have to watch what you say, she's not as bright as a big Galaxy-class's main computer… Continue."

"No matches at T+4, T+5 or T+6…"

"We're there any matches?"

"Preliminary information not totally conclusive. Subject's Torgleson Brain Circuitry Scan indicated the strong potential for MenTalt activity…73% probibility of match at T+3 potency."

"Wow-ow!" Pete said in a low voice. "The Vulcans are T+1, The Betazeds and Membari are T+2, the Gray Council a little more maybe…"

"Watch," Bryan said.

The two lay back on the bed, and with Pete totally quiet, a twinkling rainbow spark of light appeared and shimmered in the air over the desk and workstation beside the sofabed in the living quarters. Bryan's eyes were closed and his wiener was again totally erect and stiff.

"Warning!" lcars shrieked. "Hot spot, effective temperature 3.925 K, detected at…"

"Take no action," Pete said "Fire surpression on standby."

"Not recommended…"

"Execute order."

"Possible conflict with Asimov's Second Law…" lcars muttered.

The spark of rainbow color had grown into a tiny sphere about 3cm [1-1/8"] in diameter of roiling light and leaping red-orange flame. It looked like a tiny copy of a spectral class B0 giant star, complete with prominences and a glowing corona that extended 10 or 12 centimeters [4-5"] from the tiny star's photosphere.

"Warning. Hot point's effective temperature now passing 11,000 Kelvin. Biosphere heat sinks unable to compensait, air temperature now 41 degrees Celsius [106°F]."

Bryan was sweating now, his wiener throbbing in rythim with his heart. Then suddenly as quickly as it had formed, the miniture sun was gone in a final flash of energy. Bryan collapsed across Pete, and he was surprised to find that suddenly he was very sleepy… as though he had put in a full day's hard labor at a Rytaxian forge. Pete let his breathing return to normal and stroked Bryan's nude body.

"Some demonstration," Pete said, squeezing one of Bryan's butt-cheeks. "lcars, can you analyse the events of the last 120 seconds?"

"Working…" lcars reported.

"There was no place to put the fire once I called it," Bryan murmured, almost deleriously. "I had to shunt it into hyperspace."

"Minor hyperspace fold confirmed at 03:55:37…."

"I thought a Mentalt had to be a T+5 to fold space…" Pete muttered as he slowly drifted off to sleep. Bryan was already softly snoring.

<< SIX >>

It seemed that excape from the Tiger Claw might be easier than the boy had dared to dream. The first day that the pirate corvette had arrived at the Ventax II starsystem, Jamal had gone ashore with Ames and a few others to negotiate the sale of the hundreds of tons of stolen goods from the freighter that he Tiger Claw had destroyed last week, leaving his xo, Alverez in charge. Because of the overloaded condition of the Tiger Claw, it had been decided that the corvette would off-load its cargo to a fleet of orbital trucks, hiered by the commedities broker on the surface, rather than risk a direct planet landing. And of course things officially passing through the Port of Ventax II's transmat system might attract unwanted attention to Tiger Claw.

Over the past week, David had more and more managed to become invisible due to the happy coincidence that the rest of the crew recognized him as the personal property of the Captain, David had steadily been working on fading his memory and preception of his presence from the skeleton crew onboard the pirate corvette. This was possible because the Klingon psi-shields were heavy and most of the crew after the innitial 'mutant-menace' pacic had stopped waring them and Jamal had been much too busy assessing the value of his windfall from the freighter hijacking to notice such periphial thungs – especially since David was careful never to again send psi-tendrils toward Jamal again.

As the first of the orbital trucks began to arrive and load cargo, a wild excape idea, bourne of watching too many action-adventure holodramas, began to form in his mind. Even though his 'quarters' were still in the brig cell, Alvarez had taken to leaving the heavy steel door unlocked, a fact that David had quickly discovered. Another useful fact was that because Tiger Claw was manned by a skeleton crew anyway – and several of them were planetside, the pirate corvette was a graveyard after about midnight, with Alvarez and the rest of the pirates on board asleep in their cabins and the ship's systems set to automatic. David had once snuck up to the bridge, and, finding it deserted, obtained the information that they were currently in orbit around Ventax II, deep within the Federation sector boundedd on one side by the Romulan Neutral Zone, and another by the Triangle Sector, and still a third by the Organian Treaty Zone – beyond which lay the frontier sectors of the Komerex Klingon. David, despite his current situation was extremely excited, as many of his favorite holovids took place in this remote corner of the Federation.

About 0300 ship's time on the second night of prowling, David located one of the ship's emergency equipment lockers. Although all of the vacuum armor was adult size, and he was much too small to fill it out enough to get an accurate seal, there were also breather masks there, good for three hours of live giving oxygen-helium breathing mixture. This was the primary piece of equipment he would need to make his excape plan work. David was planning to climb inside one of the 4x10x2 meters [13x33x6½ feet] tall cargo units ripped from the hold of the unfortunate freighter, and then ride along with it to the planet below where he would make good his excape and then… and then… well, he'd figure that out when it came time.

Then…

Then he had just done it, with his breather for atmosphere and dozens of specially designed thermal shroud blankets covering the sub-arctic temperature sleeping bag, zipped all the way shut, now he could only wait, he had committed himself, either he would make it to the surface, or he would die in the minus 230 degrees F [-145°C] cold and virtual vacuum of low orbit around Ventax II.

Suddenly there was a queeziness in his stomach and a strange feeling of falling into an endless abyss. Weightlessness! They had left the influence of the Tiger Claw's pseudograv field, that meant they were on their way. As if to confirm the boy's conclusion, pseudo-weight returned to David in the form of unbuffered acceleration. Now instead of laying on his back, David found that he was 'standing' in a 1.5 or 2 gee deceloration, the braking burn. It lasted 40 seconds and at its termination, the boy was weightless again.

Re-entry into Ventax II 's upper atmosphere was a lot bumper than David had anticipated, and the boy was soon glad of the thermo-blankets packed around him for their shock-absorption qualities as well as insulation value. The ride from orbit to surface was about twenty minutes long and went un-eventfully. Less than an hour after having left the Tiger Claw, David Pasce, waring nothing but an oversized tee-shirt that he had stolen from the Tiger Claw's humungus engineer, Rico, was standing alone and free for the first time in two weeks on an industrial street in N'althgr [capital city] on Ventax II. It was an exhillerating feeling to finally be free of the pirates!

It didn't last long.

"Lopez! LOPEZ! Look, there he is!"

David recognized the voice of the short sawed off pirate with the foul mounth, called Ames.

Lopez raised his weapon and snapped off a shot at David. A royal-blue phaser beam sizzled over his head by only a few centimeters. David immediatly flattened himself against a permaplast wall and looked around himself. It looked depressingly the same everywhere he looked. There was no help from the lay of the land.

"You big M'gato! You missed 'im!" Ames cursed.

"Shut up, Ames. We've gotta bring psi-dog back in good condition or Jamal will have our arses."

David took a deep breathe and took off running as fast as he could. He tried to stay as close to the walls of the buildings as he could, and tried to turn every second corner on the street, always zig-zaging to the west south west.

Within a few minutes, Ames and Lopez were joined by other members of the Tiger Claw's crew, all with explicite orders from their Captain that if they not let his pet dog-boy excape that they would pay for it dearly. Once or twice, pirates got close enough to fire at him. Once the phaser beam had partially reflected back on him from the reflective solar insoluation on an office bulding. Good thing Jamal wanted him alive and the phasers were set on low stunn. The reflection of the beam was scattered and not colimated like the direct fire of the weapon, and so he was not knocked instantly unconcious from neural shock; but even so the whole of his small body felt as if circulation had been shut off to his limbs for an extended time and was only now returning. It was all he could do to keep moving.

Cursing, Ames crawled back behind the wheel of the rented jetcar, and whirled the small car around and in a short parabolic hop over a row of warehouses and set down again on a parallel street, at a point he hoped was again ahead of the slippery child.

<< SEVEN >>

Bryan smiled up an his Special Friend and yawned, "Okay," he muttered and put his hand in Pete's as they turned to go outside to the cabstand. A flicker of moment caught his atation and he was instantly awake and alert again.

"Hey! Who's that?" Bryan asked.

Pete also snaped into high alert status and scaned the surrounding landscape. It was immediately obvious who Bryan was talking about. A dozen meters away in a corner formed by a warehouse and a commercial store of some kind was what Pete thought at first was a young girl – but he saw that he was mistaken immediately, this was a young boy. He was dressed a green adult-sized teeshirt that basically covered him, toga-like from neck to mid-thighs. The boy's slim, lithe legs were exposed, and readily inspectable. The upper half of the boy's torso was clothed in the teeshirt, and so it was hard to get a reading on what his overall bodyshape was, but he was obviously human, perhaphs Corellian because he had large eyes.

The boy himself looked very uncomfortable and his body language indicated he was embarrased and angry about having to parade around in clothing which made him stand out even more than being naked would have done. There was also an overall sence of urgency and need for flight in the way he tried to keep to the shadows as he moved.

Standing by the cabstand, Bryan and Pete watched the boy as he came on down the street, ducking in and out of storefront alcoves and under trees that supplied deep pools of rich darkness for the fugitive to hide in. There was definately something wrong with this picture and both Pete and Bryan senced it. the boy was definitely not comfortable and very, very scared.

"That kid is in trouble," Pete said.

"Dhuh!" Bryan goaded. "That's a no-brainer."

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

Bryan paused and considered this seriously. Even though he wasn't nine yet, Bryan was a very perceptive, and thoughtful kid. He always thought carefully about things like this before making his decisions. At his age, Pete had been constantly in trouble because of his impulsiveness. He was glad Bryan would not have to learn the hard way [as he had] not to be overly impulsive.

Finally, Bryan sighed and said: "How can we not help?"

He was right of course, and Pete had known from the instant he saw the angry/scared little boy that he'd try to help, no matter the risk. Plus there was alway the chance for a little slap&tickel if this did turn into a rescue mission of some sort. Pete had developed a quite noticeable bulge in the crotch of my flightsuit.

"Pervert!" Bryan teases. He giggled and knudged Pete in the ribs.

A dark feeling suddenly decended on Pete and a thrill of adrenalin ran up and down his spine, as though readying him for compat. "I've got a bad feeling about this," Pete whispered to Bryan.

"Yeah, I know," Bryan said simply.

"I want you to get over to the Arcade and go in, keep watch on me. If anything goes bad, you yell for the cops."

"Okay, Pete."

Pete, seeing that Bryan was relativly safe, went out to meet the mystery wrapped in an enigma of the starnge boy. Pete got within a few meters of the boy, using the same slow, meticulious stealth methods. The boy, startled, froze into position in the current patch of shadow he was hiding in. Pete stepped out from the side of a large shaggy tree onto the cracked sidewalk and into a faint pool of light from a half a block distant street light.

"I'm not trying to hurt you," Pete said. "But I am extremely curious about you."

There was silence for maybe thirty seconds, while the boy remained frozen in place in the shadow of the storefront. Pete was about to try another tactic when a small half whisper from out of the darkness reached him.

"Why?"

Pete was framing an answer to that when suddenly from around a corner about three blocks down, the noise and confusion caused by a jetcar running through some Ventaxian's backyard chicken coops errupted out onto the sleepy side street and roared toward them, searchlamps ablaze, horn bellowing at 90 db or more. The jetcar settled to a rough landing and two trench-coat dressed figures got out and began running at them. Phaser fire errupted from the two persuiers and Pete immediatly hit the ground and rolled behind a 30 cm [1 ft] high retaining wall seperating the walkway from the motorway. The boy who had captured Pete's curiosity swirved and jogged out of the way. The phaser fire was clearly directed at him, and from the color of the pale-blue beams, these phasers were set on heavy-stunn. Whoever these new pieces of the puzzel were they meant business.

"Ames!" Lopez yelled, "He's trying for the…"

His words were drowned out by the angry warble of Ames phaser pistol, as a third pirate fired from the driver's seat of the jetcar that was just settling to the ground again after its third or fourth time being moved to keep abreast of the flight. The beam swept over Pete's restraining wall and super-illuminated the permaplast of the warehouse wall behind him. The smaller figure had slipped in a moisture slick on the street as he attempted to duck the phaser stun beam while crossing to the opposite side of the street.

"HELP!" David yelled. "They're pirates and I'm being kidnapped. HELP!"

Pete loosened the blaster in its shoulder houlster and drew the potent looking weapon. The Star Nomad stepped out from the shadows and said in a loud, commanding voice, "Gentlemen, I think we need to have a talk," The blaster was concealed in his hand behind his back.

Lopez had reached David and grabbed him by the tail of the shirt – hauling back on the impromptu toga, causing it to ride up, showing everything from the boy's belly-button down. Lopez, keeping his grip on David's shirt turned to face Pete.

"Gringo puto!" he snarled in neo-hispanic and brought up the phaser, while thumbing up the beam intensity to 'demateralize.' He was raising the phaser to firing position as Pete whipped out the plasma blaster from his shoulder houlster and fired off two quick shots, while diving to the side – quickly rolling into the kneeling pistol firing position drilled into him by his six years with the Star Fleet Marines.

David seeing his chance, instantley threw his hands over his head and ducked out of the adult-size teeshirt, running a few steps into a vacant field and disappearing into a prone position amid the wild folliage.

"CARUMBA!" Lopez ejaculated and hit the ground as he returned fire.

KKER-OOMMMMPPHH! The first of Pete's plasma bolts ignited the jetcar's propellant tank, sending a huge ball of redish-orange fire into the twilight sky.

"My car!" Ames wailed, scrambling out of it, as the tylium propellant tanks continued to feed the fire.

Lopez's phaser beam went wild, continuing off into the air, while Pete's second bolt shot through the space where Lopez had just been and impacted against a trash dumpster which explouded, raining burning rubbish over a large radius, including Ames and Lopez. The blast also incapasitated the third pirate, who now lay spread-eagle on the street 60 meters [200 ft] away

Pete jumped up from his down on knee firing position and rushed up on the two pirates.

"Hey – you can't…" Ames started sitting up from where the explosion of the jetcar had thrown him; but shut up as Pete swong the plasma blaster in his direction.

The small boy had come out of hiding, and somehow found the tee-shirt and had again slipped it on. He inched toward Pete. Lopez's claw-like hand reached out and snagged a large wad of Rico's hijacked tee-shirt, which caused the boy to shriek in terror.

"Uh-uh, spick – leave the kid alone."

Hatred burned bright in Lopez's piggy little eyes, but he relieced his hold on David.

"I think you both better get out of my sight before I forget the fact that I'm a Federation Citizen and have to give you a chance."

"You'll regreat this, Nomad," snarled Lopez, "Our Cap'n eats putoes like you for breakfast.

"I already regreat having to deal with loosers like you."

"Chinga tomadrai…," Lopez growled.

"Just remember," Ames said, slowly crawling to his feet "The Orion Syndicate has tentacles everywhere!"

"Yeah, fatboy? Well I'll worry about that next time I'm in Orion Space. And now I'm going to be generious and not burn you down to smoldering skeletal remains. In return, you're going to get the fuck out of here as fast as your pudgy little legs will carry you," Pete said swinging the plasma blaster toward Lopez, "You too, la raza," he growled.

Lopez turned and followed Ames down the street.

"And don't forget your pal…." but neither Lopez or Ames stopped to help their fallen comrade. The Orion Syndicate was tough on underlings, they were totally expendable.

From somewhere far off, Pete could hear the wail of Public Saftey Service vehicles roaring to investigate a dozen panicked Ventaxians reporting everything from the Return of Arda to the gunfight at the OK Corral. Pete glanced over at the small boy. "Well, kid, you wanna come with me or wait for the Ventaxian Authorities and go after those thugs?"

"I'll go with you, sir."

"Okay," Pete said, replacing the still warm plasma blaster in his shoulder houlster. "Then we had better get outa the area. I don't want to answer the kind of questions the Ventaxian Authority is going to ask. and I don't think your friends are going to waste much time going for reinforcements and comming back…"

"…And when they get here, we'd better be gone," the boy finished. "You're right. They work for about the meanest, most cruel…"

"Okay," Pete said, extending his hand to the boy, "Lets go."

David looked at the entended hand, like an adult taking a toddler's hand while crossing a street. David hadn't done that in years, but just now he was feeling especially small and vulnerable; and the protection that the Star Nomad was offering looked really good to David. Slowly, the eleven-year-old put his hand in Pete's and they began to trot away from the intersection where the gun battle had taken place.

Bryan came running up to them, and David kind of shied away, but still held tightly onto Pete's hand.

"The robocab just arrived," Bryan announced and looked the new boy over from head to toe. "Wow! where were you? A toga party?"

The new boy let go of Pete's hand and turned away from Bryan, crossing the street without lifting his eyes off the pavement in front of him.

"Bryan!" Pete hissed. "That wasn't very kind……"

Bryan looked contrite and shrugged.

As the new boy went, Bryan said in his most consilatory voice: "You should look before crossing the street. You could get hurt."

The brown-haired boy turned quickly back on Bryan. His voice was full of false bravado. "So? You don't care…"

"C'mon, kid," Bryan said "I'm sorry I acted like a jerk, but afterall, you are in kinda a toga."

The other boy was silent.

"You don't look so happy right now," Pete said softly.

"So?" The boy's voice was still defiant, but it was beginning to waver and crack with indecision and uncertianty, as fear of Jamal again began to reassert itself as his prime motivation. Who knew what kind of torturious death the Orion Thug might order if he ever got his hands on David again.

"Want to talk about it?" Pete 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 fear and digust that this boy was broadcasting, charged the psyche environment around him to a uncomfortable point so that even a relativly non-sensitive like Pete cold feel it.

"No, not really," the boy said quietly.

A long period of silence followed. Bryan looked helplessly at Pete, his blue eyes pleading with him to do something. Pete knew that Bryan's level of psi-awarness was a lot deeper than his own, and that even as an untrained MenTalt, his Special Friend had to very distressed by David's mood.

The robocab arrived and moved to the curb opposite of Pete's small group. As it arrived Bryan immediately claimed the front seat and Pete helped the other boy into the rear passenger section. Pete followed, but not before looking back over his shoulder at the burning dumpster. A crowd of Ventaxians was begining to gather, now that it was clear that the gun-play was over and the jetcar from Planetary Safety had arrived.

The robocab pulled out into traffic and the three semi-fugitives left the seedy corner behind as Pete gave the droid driver instructions where to take them. First to an all-night shopping center and then on to the aerospace field at the edge of the city.

"You guys hungry?" Pete asked the two boys.

"Starving!" Bryan piped up. Bryan and Pete both turned to their guest.

"Yes," he said simply.

"I think we have something I can cook up at home." Pete said, glancing over at Bryan. He didn't tell the boy that 'home' was a Tomahawk interstellar truck parked on a small rural aerospace field just south of the port city, or that about all they had left in the pantry were cases of old combat e-rations.

The little boy still looked dubious. Pete did not know what he was coming out of, but he figured that perhaps the boy did have a right to be apprehensive about what was in store for him.

Pete studied the boy as the jetcab wove its way in and out of crosstown traffic. 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 brown and his eyes were deep lusterious brown, with tiny specks of gold embedded in them.

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

"Been there, done that!" the little boy said cynically in a soft half whisper.

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

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

"What's your name?" Pete asked.

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

"David Pasce," he said simply.

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

David raised his eyes and fixed them on Bryan, 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 Bryan trusted the Nomad, he could also.

"How old are you, David?" Pete asked. The boy again gave him 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 month."

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

"You said that those Syndicate thugs were trying to kidnap you,"

Pete said. "You don't have to worry. Bryan and I will make sure you get back home."

Bryan's head bobbed up and down in an exaggerated nod as Pete spoke. But still their guest did not say anything.

So Pete picked up the ball again. "But before we go anywhere you need some decent clothes to wear. That tee-shirt affair make you look like a hooker."

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

The Star Nomad burst into laughter and collapsed fully into the robocab's seat. Then, without any prompting, David crawled into Pete's lap and leaned against his chest.

"Aren't I suspossed 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," Pete said rummaging around in the hip pockets of his flight suit for some of the junk-stuff he'd bought at the theater.

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

The trucker 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," Bryan smiled as he attacked the candy bar with savage little boy aggression.

Minutes later, the robocab pulled into a nearly 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. Pete directed the cab to park under cover of some heavy shadow in the lot, so as to excape casual optical scanns.

"We can get you some better clothes here." Pete said to David. "That way you can get out of that 'costume' – we can't have you looking like a two bit whore."

David tugged off the teeshirt, tossing it out the rear window of the robocab; and sat there totally naked.

"You look better already," Pete said.

"Thanks." David said, "My mom always used to say I had a great body…" He sounded a bit better now.

"Fine, David," Pete said. "Do you live here in the city?"

"Well… er… not exactly…"

"Okay, where do you live?"

"Kilkamec City…"

"Kilkamec? That's Dahkor Province on Bajor."

"Uh… yeah."

"That's okay," Bryan chimbed in. "Pete is a trucker. Yer in luck! We're on our way to Bajor right now."

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

"Can I come with you to the store?" Bryan asked.

"David is going to have to stay in the cab, Ventax is a pretty relaxed culture, but its a long way from being a 'clothing optional' one like Risa or Beowulf. Why don't you stay here and keep him company while I zip into the store and get some stuff."

"Will you get me some stuff, too?" Bryan asked.

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

Inside the store, Pete went straight to the boy's department.

"Let's see. They'll need a decent pair of pants, a shirt, at least one playsuit, socks, shoes, underwear…" Pete swept up and down the isles, tosing thing into a servocart that dutifily followed Pete and totalled his purchases as he went. Several pairs of pants with several shirt combinations, some all-purpose playsuits and various other accessories, Pete also found an impressivly ellegant dress ensemble that he really liked on the mini-similcrums representing a standard slim boy, size 8 and another size 12.

All things considered, the shopping trip was a grand success, the whole thing came to only two hundred fifty Federation solars. It was a good thing that the N-Mart was tied into the Bank of Ventax II so that Pete could use the Federation credits I had on deposit, he was not certain after paying for Dream Walker's overhaul that I had even this much latinum left.

Anyway for the two hundred fifty the Spacer figured that they 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 [Bryan's favorite color] button down dress shirt in Bryan's size; two pairs of imitation Starscream sneakers [the real ones, imported from Terra itself would have cost a king's ransom here on Ventax II 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. Quite sucessful.

Meanwhile, as Pete left for the N-Mart store, Bryan crawled over the rear edge of the front seat into the rear section of the jetcab. For a minute, the two boys just looked at each other, unsure of how to proceed.

"My name is Bryan," the younger boy started.

"Yeah," David said. "You said that. My name's David."

Again there was a pause.

"Is that guy really your dad?" David asked.

"Well, not exactly," Bryan said. "My mom kicked me out of the house and I was really lucky that I found Pete. He really is kewl."

David shrugged, "I have not had a lot of luck relating to older guys. They all want to hurt me in some way."

"How come those guys were chasing you?" Bryan asked.

"That's a long story," David began. "Y'see I come from a pretty lousey home environment too. My mom and dad got divorced a long time ago. For awhile it was just my mom and me – and that was mostly alright – but then she fell in love with this slimeball who hooked her on Chromium-X…"

"Chromium X!? Isn't that…?"

"Yeah," David said. "Chromium X is a really bad halocenogen."

"I'm really sorry, man."

"Stuff went downhill from there. She finally got hooked up with a real stupid-lookin fool, I called Bonehead. He didn't like it much. In fact we hated each other from the first. Finally he got mad enough to beat me up…."

"He hit you?" Bryan asked.

"Yeah. But he wasn't that bad, Jamal is really cruel."

"Who's Jamal?"

"Jamal is the Captain of the Pirates who kidnapped me…"

"Wow! Pirates?"

"Yeah, the Orion Syndicate, I think. How do you think I got here from Bajor? I lived on Bajor for most of my life – after my real dad divorced my mom." And suddenly the whole story of David's life for the past three years just tumbled out. How his mother and father had ended their marrige and how his mom had taken him to first to ds9 while she worked in the station's administration section as a civilian emplolyee of Star Fleet, and finally to Bajor when that job had been down-sized. On Bajor they were looked uppon as aliens and work for non-Bajorians was scarce. That was why mom had translated her excellent looks into first an exotic dancer, then a barmaid and finally a hooker on the streets of the Bajorian capital. Then had come the long slide into addition to various drugs, ending with Chromium-X, David and Bonehead's 'agreement' about his future and then his three weeks as a vertual sex-slave aboard the Tiger Claw.

Bryan sat there quietly and listened; interjecting questions only when absolutely necessary either to clear up a point, or to move the dialogue forward, at the end throwing his arms around David's shoulders, his own eyes misty with tears.

Pete returned from the shopping trip and bundled everything into the trunk of the robocab.

"C'mon Pete," Bryan argued, "we want to see what you bought."

"Yeah, I know," the Spacer replied, "But I think we'de better get back to the Dream Walker first. If David's right and these guys are Orion Syndicate… well let's just say they hate to loose… at anything."

"So…?" Bryan asked.

"I'll feel a lot better when we're back on ds9, where I have friends to back me up if I need it – even in the Orion Syndicate."

"YOU!?" David suddenly made a dive for the door, "You're Syndicate…"

Bryan grabbed David and held onto him tight.

"No, I'm not a member of the Syndicate, but I know people who are… and my goods buddy Quark probably knows a lot more. Don't worry you'll be alright."

David calmed down after that and the rest of the trip to the aerospace field was uneventful. The teasing banter was quickly allowing Bryan and David to form mutual bonds and cement their growing friendship. I was using the time to study David. Defiantly older than Bryan, 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 blue eyes. He was 143 cm tall [4'8"] and weighed about 34.40 kg [77 pounds]. The latter two guesses were based upon the assumption he was eleven as he said and a normal Terrestrial human, which he certainly appeared to be. His walnut brown hair was in a rather longish cut, coming down to his shirt collar, but it was no longer in that pony tail which combined with his slim build had given him the appearance of a young girl instead of the very good looking boy he really was.

His eyes seemed very large, although all children's eyes did. But there was something about the shape, size and the intense cyan-blue that was almost royal purple that caused Pete to think that perhaphs there was more than a little bit of Corellian in the boy's past. And in the almost 500 years since the Corellian evacuation arc had stumbled into pre-stellar Terra's solar system after fleeing the distruction of their homeworld by its sun suddenly going nova, there had been so many cross-marriages and just sex between the two specsis that their two genepools were roiled and mixed. This vast genetic invasion occured in 2006, only 11 years after the crash of the slaveship Garushka, loaded with 250,000 Techtaneese slaves and their Dilgar masters had crashed on earth. One of the first things learned about the Techtaneese was that although their bodily organs were substantially different than Terran humans, it was possible with minimal bio-tech supervision to produce viable hybrid people able to breed with either race. Although with present bio-tech it was possible to separate out the three strands of differing dna, Federation medical and biological texts now listed only Homo-sapiens Galactic which was the genetic montoge that the Terran Humans – Corellians – and Techtaneese had become.

Like Bryan, David's vocabulary seemed a weird mixture of juvenile slang and sophisticated adult verbage in both interlingo and the native Bajorian dialect. Pete had read somewhere that this was the normal outcome of kids who had few playmates their own age and associated mostly with adults.

Minutes later, man and boys were climbing out of the robocab in front of landing ramp 56 west.

"Wow!" the David said admiringly, "a Danube-class runabout. You must be Star Fleet Intelligence."

Pete, who was busy manipulating the Tomahawk's manual gangway reliece burst out laughing. "Not quite, boy. Take off the rose-colored glasses and look again."

As the gangway slid down to meet the concrete of the landing ramp David turned back to Pete, his confusion obvious.

"I'm not Orion Syndicate and I'm not Star Fleet Intelligence, I'm a Star Nomad Free Trader," Pete explained. "Although the Danube-class and the Tomahawk-class are distant cousins; the Danube is a military vessel, while the Tomahawk is a civilian truck – and this one is even a used truck. But look't that hull paint job, kid, when'dya ever hear of a Danube-class in anything but super-reflective white, neutral gray, or stealth-black?"

David looked up at the ship, its hull was painted with an elaborate mural from Terran pre-space history. The mural consisted of a woodland scene with an old Cherokee style log cabin in the middle, and a small creek flowing nearby. On the very back of the habitat module, just in front of the cargo module, was a picture of a Cherokee man dressed in a wrap around long shirt tied in place with a finger-woven belt, breech cloth and deerskin leggings, moccasins and a turban, and holding what most non-Indian people call a 'Peace Pipe' with feathers hanging from the stem. At the man's side, was a young cantily dressed boy wearing no more than a one piece breech cloth that goes between the legs and drapes down over a narrow belt in the front and back and extends to just above the knees. The boy had an arm around the man's waist, and a contented smile on his face, making people who saw the mural wonder what he and the man have been up to.

"Wanna see the inside?" I asked, already pretty sure of what his answer would be.

"Sure! I'd love to," he said and I unlocked the Tomahawk's airlock and waited as the lock cycled open, thinking: 'Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…'

David climbed into the airlock and paused at the inner lock, looking in towards the sleeper, with Pete right behind him. The airlock outer hatch closed and locked as the inner hatch slid open with a sigh of compressed air. "Go ahead on in and look around!" Pete encouraged him. "It gets pretty crowded here in the airlock alcove."

David again paused just inside the inner hatch, his eyes staring at the chrome-steel surfaces worn mirror bright in most places by age.

"Hustle, hustle, boys. I want to be in space in ten minutes and warp 90 seconds later.

"But – but I'm still naked," David pointed out.

"Don't worry, David," Bryan bragged. Pete and I always go around naked on the ship."

"Plus," Pete added "I don't want you old friend Jamal to catch us on the ground. At least not here." Pete motioned for David to sit at the flight engineer's station, and Bryan showed him how to adjust the straps of the acceleration harness. Minutes later Dream Walker was begining to go through her pre-flight checklist.

<< EPILOGUE >>

The address intercraft system sounded a bo'sun's pipe signal and squalked: "O'Khanon to bridge. The last of the trucks are away, all the cargo has been transfered."

Jamal stabbed at a large button on his armrest pannel, "And the latinum?"

"All 10,000 bricks, present and accounted for," O'Khanon said confidently. "I'm on my way to the vault room now,"

"Good," the Pirate chief purred, "At least something is going right for me." He swung around to confront Ames and Lopez. "And you two boneheads loose my psi-dog to a two-bit Star Nomad freebooter?" Jamal fumed for a few seconds in silent fury. "Then this pahTOC has the gall to call me and tell me has the boy?"

"Er… yes sir," Ames mumbled, "It looks that way. I ran a check with a contact I have in the Tal Shiar, he told me the only Star Nomad ship in port now is a small modified Danube-class runabout, crew of one: Pete Reynolds, 34. Member of the Strarn faction of the Nomad Bear clan."

"And that's him?" Jamal asked jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the armrest instrument pack.

"That's the guy who shot at us," Lopez said in a low angry voice.

"Well, we will just have to pay Mr. Reynolds a visit and retrieve my psi-dog."

"Cap'n," the scan engineer said suddenly, "that guy's truck is leaving the surface. Hauling ass to, he must be pulling 200 gees."

"On screen." Jamal commanded, and a tacticle plot of the Ventax II orbital traffic patern was displayed. "Hilight the target."

Mullins bent over his instruments and the trac representing the Dream Walker appeared as a red streak with a ruby-red dot moving swiftly across the screen.

"You can run, but you can't hide, skum," Jamal snarled. "I'll have your balls decorating my mantle before the week is out! Mr. Mason," the pirate captain signaled his chief engineer.

"Aye sir?"

"Fire up the reactors and go to preheat on the drives, we're leaving."

"Aye, Aye, sir. Engines at your disposal in three minutes."

"Sound general recall, all crew to return at once."

Alvarez glanced up from his densely packed instrument suite and reported. "All crew present, ready for departure sir."

The ghost of a smile flickered over the swarthy Orion's features. "Geeze, Glen! You mean this crew has really done something right for a change?"

"It appears so…" Alvarez laughed.

"Alright then, take out of orbit, Mr. Alvarez. Let's catch our friend Mr. Reynolds."

"Aye aye, Sir. Secure all hatches, cast off aft and bow, gyroes to 000 mark 90 degrees, stand by for main engine ignition."

Tiger Claw swung slowly around on its lateral axis and its wide exhaust ports glowed blue white as the corvette's powerful ion engines kicked in, accelerating it away from Ventax II.

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