Page 1 of Gairo (Intergalactic Surrogacy Agency #5)

TRANSPORT SHIP

VERONICA

T he omega inoculation churned in my blood. There was another human girl on the ship who didn’t look thrilled to be there. Sarah wouldn’t give me many details, but I got the impression that I’d like her if she bothered to open up.

When I was negotiating to get away from the Puritanical colony where I was going to be trained into a perfect housewife in something similar to Stepford, I took my one chance from the illicit tablet. There was a program for warlords to have children with women who could genetically match with them. There had been a judge who would have taken me as a twelfth wife until I could get with the program, and he seemed to think that it was fitting for me to be punished by becoming the bride of a barbarian alien warlord. I did too many things that they considered unbecoming of a woman. I wasn’t the kind of person who could be a docile housewife. I got in trouble for fist-fights, gambling, and a little bit of heists on the side of all of that. I tried to escape the colony before, but I couldn’t manage to get the credits to get off planet until I was sentenced to go to the Intergalactic Surrogacy Agency in this transport ship. My representative was happy to see the last of me. He had seen me too many times, and I still had managed to get to age 19 unmarried. My father had given up on me when I refused to learn how to embroider, and I thought that my mother and aunts quietly cheered for their little rebel. They didn’t have a problem cleaning up my peccadilloes until they got big enough for me to be exiled off the planet. The court had not realized that the Intergalactic Surrogacy Agency paid as well as it did. I was exiled from my own birth colony for breaking their rules. Instead of being forced into a mold that I would never fit into in a terrifying rehabilitation facility, I convinced them that I would go ahead and have a savage’s baby. Frankly, the warlords sounded less scary than the men who had twelve wives or more.

I felt stifled when it came to the rules that the men imposed on the colony. The women had certain pockets of safety, and I had been a heathen, running around barefoot and always going foraging. It was tolerable before I hit puberty, but as an adolescent, the men had more rules.

My mother and aunts had set up a rotation so that I was an apothecary and had a reason to go here, there, and everywhere. They had helped put me through minor rehabilitation programs when I started to play around with heists on the richest of the men. Unfortunately, they were fond of me, but they couldn’t save me from myself. I stole from the wrong guy, the one with 11 wives already, and that’s why the judge at that tribunal had been ready to correct me as a twelfth wife. I had escaped him by getting on this ship.

If I could save the money that I got paid, I could take another ship after the year of service. I had been a midwife and apothecary for enough years to know that raising a human child or part human child mostly was stopping them from putting themselves in mortal peril. My niece at age 2 had a serious fascination with knives. We had to let her decapitate strawberries with her own designated butter knife. Otherwise, she would have gotten into more trouble.

I had rolled around after my coming out party with some of the boys that I’d gone to school with. After I came of age, I could pick between husbands. None of them seemed like great husband material, and some of the elders had way too many wives. The younger boys could become soldiers or space marines; the older men tended to pick up wives at a young age. Plenty of them had shipped off planet, while the girls had far more limited choices. They came back from their travels for Christmas at times, and I had watched more than one of the colonists get married to a man who had seen more of the universe. The guy who had thought that having a savage’s baby was a suitable punishment looked at it the wrong way. I wouldn’t really mind getting involved with a space marine or warlord at this point in life. I was bored of the same old things, over and over ad nauseam. I was about to meet some warlords, which meant that there was plenty of mystery in my future.