Space station of the sluts
“That may be our best option,” she admitted. “Depending on the price. I won’t be signing my station’s autonomy away. I’ve heard stories.”
Shaylan sighed and ran a hand over his dark hair. “So have I,” he said. “Euphrosyne, Nereid; Waypoint IV? Slave-trades and viral bio-circuitry? They’re stories. Just stories.” He tapped his fingertips one by one. “Euphrosyne was already a slave outpost. Those people were literally brainwashed. The Consortium ‘freed’ them into desk jobs at a decent wage and we still had to plow their wages back into a fund for their descendants, because they wouldn’t touch it. Then we found out they couldn’t reproduce, either. So yeah, we ended up with free labor, but it wasn’t on purpose.
“Nereid didn’t have any survivors to enslave in the first place. Everyone that came off the surface was a Consortium worker because everyone that went down was a Consortium worker. No conspiracies, no forced buy-outs, just a whole mess of frozen corpses. And a pile of extracted metals that would have bought the repairs they needed a dozen times over — god only knows why they didn’t call us sooner.