...“I really wish I didn’t have to do this.” Fletcher Gray’s lament and long-suffering sigh echoed through the cavernous hold of the Mogarthan pod carrier he and his partner, Ganymede, had just confiscated.

“Lying.” The disembodied reply came from Ganymede over the ship’s communication system.

Fletch shook his head, annoyed at his partner’s insightfulness. Actually, he did want to do it. He just didn’t want to admit it to himself. Wanting to do it made him feel guilty because he knew it was wrong. “No, there’s a deep, chivalrous part of me that really feels uncomfortable with this.”

“Testicles?” This word was accompanied by a strangled sound, the equivalent of Ganymede’s laughter. Fletch rolled his eyes as he continued to stroll down the narrow corridor that ran down the center of the ship’s cargo hold.. On either side of him rose the luminous, tear-drop shaped stasis pods that filled eighty percent of the Xector IV’s bulbous hull. He asked himself again what he’d done to warrant being saddled with a Metrian as a partner. While Ganymede’s intelligence and stealth skills exceeded that of any other known race, his acerbic attitude and often single-word communications became tiresome. Conversation with a Metrian was mostly one-sided and usually pointless.

“Leave my testicles out of this, Gan. None of this would be necessary if you had a decent pair of hands.”

Another snort of laughter. Fletcher Gray argued to himself that he really didn’t have a choice in the matter and therefore he shouldn’t let it bother him. He needed help running the damn ship. He only had two arms and it took four to run a pod carrier of this size. Since Metrians existed just slightly out of phase with the rest of the universe, Ganymede was almost entirely incorporeal and therefore largely useless as anything other than a talking brain.

Hence, it was a vital necessity that Fletch decant one of the twenty-five females held in the ship’s stasis pods and recruit her to help him with navigation and helm controls. That would be after she calmed down enough to sit through a brief lesson in pod carrier piloting and assuming he could still walk, talk, and breathe when she was finished with him.

With his luck, he’d pick a wild cat who’d literally fuck him to death before he could get a word in edgewise.

He could think of worse ways to go, but he had a mission to accomplish, so he wouldn’t really be able to enjoy it. Just another reason why he hated the Mogarthan sex slave trade.

“Let’s make this less personal. How about you pick a number and that’s the pod I’ll open?” Fletch scanned the nearby pods. He didn’t have a preference. Each pod held one body, floating in a carefully maintained mixture of oxygenated, poly-mechanoid, bio-luminescent gooze. The females were all perfectly formed, exotically beautiful, and naked—since the gooze tended to dissolve the polyblend fibers of most clothing over time.

Four entwined tubes attached each pod to the central processing unit that controlled the chemical makeup of the gooze. One tube delivered nutrients. One tube oxygenated the liquid. One tube carried sedative and stasis chemicals, and the final tube carried a constant, hyper-amplified dose of U-4EA, the most powerful aphrodisiac in the galaxy. A little of the semi-legal compound went a long way toward heightening any sexual experience and the legitimate producers of the stuff made quadrillions of credits selling it to recreational resorts all over known space. The Mogarthan slave trade used tubs of it to turn illegally captured females into sex-starved maniacs.

“Thinking.”

“Come on, pick a number and let’s get this over with. Then turn off the com. I don’t want you listening in and getting your jollies vicariously when you’re supposed to be searching the ship’s database for its destination coordinates.”

“Seventeen.”

“The coordinates?”

“Pod.”