Chapter Text
Cinching her corset by herself was not easy. Marty took a deep breath, sucking in her gut as hard as she could, and pulled mightily. Admiring her handiwork, she was pleased with her newfound waist and cleavage. Next would come the petticoats, followed by the tawdry, red and black, bare-shouldered dress. She had already spent an hour laboriously applying the garish, achingly feminine makeup that her costume required. She had found it was best to do that first and save dressing until it was nearly showtime. The final touch was the cascading blonde wig to hide her short-cropped, steel grey pelt of hair.
When at last she was ready, Marty viewed herself critically in the mirror. She looked every inch the glamorous saloon girl circa nineteenth century Earth, only she was on Hestia, a frontier planet, in the year of our Lord was 2297. As much as she hated this getup, the anachronistic set-up of the place had served her well. Although she had been heavily courted, she hadn’t needed to put out so far because the planet had also adopted the morality of the period. That blessing was worth her current discomfort.
The things I do for money, Marty shook her head at herself in the mirror.
Augustus Eggemeyer, her current target, was the mayor of the town of Willow Springs. He was a prosperous but conveniently lonely widower who had in his possession a priceless piece of jewelry that Marty had been hired to liberate from him. She had been wooing him for nearly four months, ever since shortly after she had scoped out the town to develop her current persona. Dear Augustus thought he was romancing one Sarah “Sally” Hetterick, a 25-year-old entertainer from Mars, who had come to Hestia seeking her fortune.
That last part isn’t wrong, she smirked.
Marty supposed she should feel bad about misleading him, since he seemed to be a fairly decent sort, but she had no desire to spend the rest of her life in such an overbearingly patriarchal setting. Augustus was looking for a wife who would keep his home and bear his children, neither of which held any appeal for her. The latter was not even possible. He would be surprised to discover that she was two decades and some change older than she appeared and had dispensed with her fertility long ago. The last thing she needed in her line of work was a baby.
She had been acquiring valuable items for others, by fair means or foul, for the past twenty-five years. Marty had accumulated a significant number of credits over that time. If this job went as planned, that total would climb generously upward. However, she still wouldn’t have enough saved yet. The life she longed for was not so far from that of this frontier town. She wanted to own a homestead in the country on some far-flung planet, buy herself some livestock, plant a vegetable garden, and live off the land. When she was small, before she had become the only survivor of a terrible fire that had claimed the rest of her family, her grandmother had told her stories about the farm her grandparents had owned. They had been self-sufficient, needing no one beyond themselves, a circumstance that sounded ideal to Marty. It was no longer possible to do that on Earth, but with the invention of what came to be known as the McEllery propulsion system, humans had spent the past century and half expanding out into the universe. There were plenty of sparsely populated planets for her to choose from to realize her dream. All she needed was enough money to make it a reality.
A knock startled her out of her reverie. “Five minutes,” Lena, the saloon’s owner, bellowed through the door.
Dousing herself with some cheap but alluring cologne, she reflexively wrinkled her nose at the smell. Marty opened the door and headed downstairs to give her nightly performance to a bar full of horny men. She found it highly ironic that, had she been an honest woman, she could’ve lived well here on what she made performing at the saloon every week.
But I’m not an honest woman, she thought, as she extended one leg seductively from her perch at the bottom of the stairs.
Among her many talents, Marty had discovered her powerful alto voice could belt out a song. It was endlessly fascinating to see how her figure and voice could hypnotize a whole room full of the opposite sex while she didn’t feel even the faintest stirring between her legs. After her number was over, she watched as some of the men shoved at each other for the chance to help her off the stage. She could’ve set her antique timepiece by the regularity of the ass grope that came next.
Once her feet were on the floor, she headed towards Augustus’s table. They had established a comfortable routine. While she performed, he ordered her dinner. Always the same. Steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, and sweet green peas. Luckily for Marty, she liked this meal, because he had never once asked her if this was what she wanted to eat. As was also customary, Marty leaned over to kiss his ruddy cheek before adjusting her dress so she could sit down.
“Wonderful as always, my darlin’,” he cooed, making no attempt to keep his eyes from roaming over her décolletage.
Stifling her disgust, she deliberately leaned farther forward to improve his view of her breasts. “Why, thank you, sugar pie, for sayin’ so.”
Mercifully, the food smelled too good for him to ignore for long. They spent several minutes in companionable silence, but for the clinking of their silverware and the occasional appreciative hum, enjoying their repast.
Presently, Augustus straightened up, lifted his napkin from his lap, and patted his mouth, daintily. “I got somethin’ to say to you, Miss Sally,” he said, nervously.
Please let this be it, she pleaded with the Powers That Be.
Marty noticed that his face was sweating as he wrestled in his pocket, indicating the likelihood of a momentous proclamation. He finally freed the little box from his trousers and set it on the table in front of her. Even though she had been waiting for this for ages, now that it had finally arrived, she felt as apprehensive as she might have had this been of any importance to her.
“Open it,” he insisted, sotto voce.
She deliberately fumbled with the box, to draw the suspense out, before opening it to reveal what she expected to be an engagement ring. What she beheld instead took her breath away. There, on a crushed, red velvet bed, lay the brooch she had been sent here to obtain.
Who says all things don’t come to those who wait? she crowed, internally, her smile completely genuine.
******
Marty admired the brooch that night in her room. Augustus had hinted heavily that he wanted her to sneak off to his house for a private celebration. With dread, she knew that meant sex. While Augustus was sometimes charming and treated her as well as she could expect in Willow Springs, where women were not far above chattel, she felt nothing for him below the waist. Ever.
It wasn’t that he was ugly or ill-mannered. This was how she felt about nearly everyone. She had tried sex while still a teenager, because everyone kept telling her how great it was. There had been nothing good about it, let alone great. Not the first, second, or third time. She tried not to think about what it had been like when she was first forced out of the orphanage upon becoming an adult. Later in her life, she determined that maybe the problem was that her partners had all been male, but women had been no better. She would’ve thought there was something wrong with her body, except that she had no trouble pleasuring herself.
For many years, she’d assumed she was asexual. Then Marty met Jamison, who was the liaison between her and a high-profile client. Although he was always all business with her, he was never unkind. She felt no more spark with him than with anyone else, but she would’ve had to be blind to miss how handsome he was. Gradually, she found herself daydreaming about him while she was out on jobs, which wasn’t something she had done before. After experiencing this curious behavior for some time, she determined that she missed him when she was gone, which was alarming. Seeing him made her so happy it must’ve been obvious to him, because Jamison started to spend more time talking to her. They became friends. Eventually, he asked her out to dinner. The evening was a smashing success, ending in the first kiss she didn’t loathe.
For the first time in her life, Marty pictured a real person when she slid her fingers between her legs. She couldn’t stop thinking about Jamison when she was out of bed, either, missing him with such a terrible intensity that she nearly bungled the job she was on. When she laid eyes on him after successfully completing her task, her crotch ached, and her knees grew weak.
Jamison seemed somehow to be aware of her state, because after they went to eat, he took her to bed. Unlike every other tryst Marty had been on, sex with Jamison had been glorious, everything everyone had sworn to her it should be. She couldn’t get enough of it. Or him.
The morning after, however, he had left early. The next time she saw him, Jamison had been disappointingly distant. Weeks later, when she saw him again, she worked up the courage to confront him about it. While he agreed with her that it had been a nice evening, it was over as far as he was concerned. Marty, who had experienced the best night of her life, didn’t understand how Jamison could be so casual about it. They never got together again, but a dozen years later, Marty still thought about him and that night. She often wondered what magic he had used to awaken her desire, and if there was anyone else out in the wide universe who possessed it.
Augustus, most assuredly, did not.
Marty fought a fierce urge to flee, because she needed him in a circumstance that would give her a good head start before he raised the alarm. He was the mayor, after all, and would undoubtedly send the sheriff and his deputies after her once he realized she had gone. Travel on Hestia was in keeping with its anachronistic tone. There was not a motorized vehicle to be had. She had a choice of walking or stealing a horse to reach the spaceport and her little ship. Unfortunately, the easiest route to securing that head start would be to get Augustus drunk and take him to bed. If she was lucky, he would pass out in an alcoholic stupor before he had the chance to do anything to her. If not, she would have to endure an act that she had zero interest in but had become quite accomplished at faking pleasure during.
His stammering marriage proposal came during dinner two days later. As if the Powers That Be were with her, it took Augustus the consumption of half a bottle of wine for him to ask the question. Because he had already given her the brooch, he promised her an equally impressive ring on their wedding day. By the time they had made their slow way to the mayor’s house to celebrate, he was three sheets to the wind. After a series of slobbery, booze-ridden kisses and a little breast groping, Augustus descended into an inebriated slumber. His snores were music to Marty’s ears.
She waited three nerve-wracking hours, until it was well after dark, before she quietly left Augustus’s house. She took the back stairs to the upper floor of the saloon to her room, to retrieve the clothes she planned to change into and a few items she wanted to take with her. The latter were small keepsakes, nothing that would make it obvious that she was leaving town. Before she left, Marty showered, scrubbing herself briskly to remove all traces of makeup and perfume, paying particular attention to ensure any scent that might link her to Sally Hetterick was gone. She donned a fresh frock before heading out the door.
She didn’t dare take a horse from Willow Springs, or it would be obvious she had left of her own volition, so she walked the ten miles to Jessop. By the time she arrived, Augustus would’ve found her unrecognizable. Gone was any trace of a feminine identity. In a stand of trees, Marty had changed into a binder, a button-down shirt, faded brown trousers with suspenders, and beaten-up work boots, her formerly hidden thatch of grey hair now exposed. Burying her dress and her other female clothing had given her a faintly sweaty, dusty scent more appropriate for that of a farm hand. She had deliberately done some of the digging with her fingers instead of the small trowel she had brought with her, forcing dirt under her nails as well as rendering them ragged.
Marty was glad for the times Augustus had taken her horseback riding. She had an affinity for horses that served her well this night. Whickering softly inside a barn drew an answer from one of the horses within, prompting her to choose that one. She walked the roan mare well away from the farmhouse before mounting her bareback and galloping off into the night. Unlike what she had done to Augustus, she had no qualms about taking the animal. She was borrowing her rather than stealing her, because once she reached the city, she would turn the mare loose to find her own way back home.
By the time she reached her destination, dawn hadn’t yet broken. Giving the horse an affectionate slap on the rump, Marty sent her on her way. With unerring assurance, the mare turned and sauntered back the way she had come.
City was too grandiose a term to describe the throng of buildings and homes that had sprung up around the spaceport. The planet was so sparsely populated that the spaceport, like everywhere else on planet, wasn’t open to outbound traffic during the night. Those who landed during the dark hours found themselves without amenities or transport from the spaceport until an hour after the sun rose the following morning.
As the breeze ruffled her thin shirt, Marty was glad for the planet’s temperate climate. While the predawn air held a slight chill, her discomfort was minimal. She found herself a spot in the shadows to wait and tried in vain to keep from thinking about what she had done.
Her legitimate trade in small valuables was much less fraught with emotional baggage, but correspondingly less lucrative. She could never retire to her dream farm doing only that. It was pieces like the one Augustus had innocently gifted her that would one day afford her the life she wanted.
It wasn’t even as if he came by it honestly, she insisted to the conscience that pricked at her.
While to Augustus the brooch was only a family heirloom, Marty knew it had been stolen by his grandfather from a family member of her current employer. To Augustus, it was a pretty bauble to give to his lady love, not an ancient artifact worth thousands of credits. His grandfather had died shortly after bringing his pregnant wife to Hestia, before he’d had a chance to sell it, and she had kept it in remembrance of him, unaware of its true value. She had passed it on to her oldest son, who had wisely passed it on to his only son rather than listen to her four daughters bicker over it.
It might not have been Augustus’s fault he had this ill-gotten piece of jewelry in his possession, but he’d made prying it loose by any means other than romance impossible. When she had first arrived and convinced Lena to let her prove she could be the saloon’s star attraction, Marty had naturally drawn nearly every male eye in town. For her to suck up to the mayor, the most powerful man in the room, made perfect sense. While she did it, she made a point of voluminously praising every bit of jewelry she saw on anyone in Willow Springs, woman or man, hoping to draw out of Augustus that he had the target item in his possession. He hadn’t ever uttered a word about it—and surreptitiously searching his house had not revealed it--but her mountain of words about how she loved jewelry hadn’t gone unnoticed. The night he proposed, he told her he knew she’d adore the brooch because of it.
It’s a shitty thing to do to him, Marty admitted to herself, but I’m not in love with him, and I can’t make the babies he wants, so what would be the point in marrying him? It’s time to take what I came for and get on with my life.
As the new day dawned, outdoor vendors began pulling up, carts loaded with wares to display in the square in front of the spaceport once it opened for the day’s business. They wanted to be the first thing newcomers to Hestia would see, since they usually needed supplies and foodstuffs. Marty found herself wishing one of the food vendors would show up soon. Since she’d been up all night, her tired body was demanding food to make up for the sleep it hadn’t gotten. It would be nice to breakfast on a savory stick full of beef chunks and cut vegetables on her way to her ship.
All at once, there was a commotion at one end of the square. Marty nearly panicked when she saw a half dozen men on horseback, a wild-eyed Augustus in the lead, until she remembered that she no longer resembled his beloved Sally. She ambled nonchalantly towards a stall that appeared to have some jewelry on display, just to have somewhere to focus her eyes that wasn’t on her furious jilted fiancé.
I bet he woke up to go pee and realized I wasn’t there, Marty surmised. He must’ve been mad enough I skipped out on our engagement night to go over to the saloon, only to discover I wasn’t there either. And neither was the brooch.
Marty studied the purplish glass bauble hanging before her at an outdoor market stall intently, steadying her breathing. It was outwardly lovely, but as fake as her intense focus on it. Pounding steps came down the narrow aisle between the stalls, followed by snatches of breath.
"She has to be here somewhere!" Augustus bellowed, voice full of fury and frustration.
The seller raised a brow at her before naming her a price for the item that only a novice or a fool would consider paying. She was neither a novice nor a fool, but she needed the cover this transaction would buy her. Considering the treasure she had just liberated, she could more than afford it. So as not to alarm him or end the transaction prematurely, she issued a counteroffer that was almost as ridiculous as his initial price. The seller shaded his eyes knowingly towards the approaching commotion, suggesting he knew that she was somehow involved in it, and countered with a price much closer to the original. Marty knew, as he could not, that the frantic group of men were searching for a decidedly female-appearing human with long curly blonde hair, not a gender-indeterminate individual, with short-cropped steel gray hair and loose-fitting, typically male clothing, like the one who stood before him. The moment of truth came when a hard hand grasped her shoulder.
"You seen a woman run by here?" Augustus nearly spat in her face. "A blonde human?"
Moment of truth, she thought as he stared belligerently at her.
Marty dropped her voice even lower than the one she had used with the seller. "Nope. You?" she jerked her head towards the vendor in the stall.
The man may have had his surmises, but Marty's current appearance cast too large a doubt for him to act on them. "Not that I saw," he agreed.
"Shit!" Augustus exploded, with uncharacteristic vulgarity, before storming off.
Marty countered again, offering a more reasonable price. The seller eyed her shrewdly and brought his price up a hair. "Sold," Marty replied, pleasantly, telling him both everything and nothing at all.
He took down the bauble and wrapped it carefully before scanning her credit chit, the one that listed her name as Felix Matterhorn, a human male. Handing her the package and her chit, he added the perfunctory, "A pleasure doing business with you, sir," before Marty sauntered away.
As soon as she was out of his sight, Marty fled into the now opened spaceport. Even though she had passed the test with Augustus, she wanted off this planet immediately. The brooch she had purloined was worth a significant amount to her and she wouldn’t feel it was safe until she was on her ship with it. She used a combination magic/verbal sleight-of-hand she was well-practiced at to get it through customs before swinging out towards the terminal to the berth where her small ship was docked. Within half an hour, she had boarded it, done her customary pre-flight checks, gotten clearance to leave, and blasted out into wide anonymous space.
After an hour of careful observation for potential pursuit, Marty let herself relax. She washed the dirt from her hands before kicking off her work boots. Next, she removed her shirt, binder, and pants, donning a comfortable silk dressing gown. Then, she broke out a bottle of her best wine, pouring herself a healthy glass. She dug out her prize out to admire it once more at her leisure, before situating herself comfortably in her hammock. The pearlescent stone in a golden teardrop setting winked at her in the overhead lighting. The bounty she had been offered to retrieve this piece was significant, putting her one step closer to her dream of purchasing a small place where she could live off the land and keep a menagerie of animals.
"How could I forget?" she mumbled to herself.
Setting her glass down on a nearby shelf, she retrieved her wrist communicator, strapped it on and tapped out a coded message to her client. Next, she shut down her little ship's engines. It would be a while before she got a response, so there wasn't much point in traveling further since she might well be headed in the wrong direction. Settling down again in her hammock to wait, she took up her full glass and considered her life while slowly draining it.
Marty had spent almost all her adult life procuring and selling valuable items. Sometimes, she acquired them by legitimate means and sometimes, like today, not. She had become a treasure hunter by accident, taken in by Paul Bastian, a shopkeeper, once she had been kicked out of the orphanage at eighteen, with a dubious education and not a penny to her name. For the price of fucking him regularly, Paul had taught her what he really did to make money behind his front of a shop. From him, she had learned how to separate the valuable from the merely shiny and how to get the best price for both. While she appreciated the skills he imparted and the shelter and food he provided her with, she hated the demands he made on her body. Their sex was always about his satisfaction. He had been unconcerned with her pleasure or even her consent. Not that he could’ve provided her with any pleasure, since she felt nothing for him, but Marty would’ve appreciated it if he had at least made the attempt. She hadn’t felt a moment’s remorse when, three years later, she struck out on her own, taking a few of Paul’s choice pieces with her. It was fair recompense for odious services rendered. She used the money she made selling them to buy her first ship, a tiny coffin of a thing compared to what she had now.
Unlike her tutor, who preferred to work with items others brought to him, Marty decided she would rather find the items and do her own selling or trading. It served her purposes to define the term "find" rather loosely, which sometimes meant close calls. A few had been too close. She'd paid with a pound of flesh more than once, although--so far--she hadn't lost any real body parts. She had also managed to escape potentially lengthy jail sentences on half a dozen worlds.
Overall, Marty was quite satisfied with the life she had built. However, there were times, like today, when she wanted somebody to crow to about the outcome of her latest escapade. She was never anywhere long enough to make friends. Although she knew plenty of beings in her business, they were all as shady as she was, bad bets for anything beyond a night of carousing and the occasional odd fuck, should she ever desire it.
Since what she did was often dangerous, she had chosen to minimize her vulnerability as a female by cultivating a carefully nonbinary appearance. Her above average height and naturally alto voice had been helpful in that regard. Her plain appearance meant she wasn’t often approached for sex, which was just how she liked it.
Marty chose to ignore her loneliness, instead focusing on her ultimate destination. She imagined the farm she wanted to own, her mind able to paint a more vivid picture since her recent stay on a rustic planet.
“Maybe I’ll get a horse,” she murmured, thinking fondly of the roan mare that had made her most recent escape possible.
She felt only relief when she realized that she had left that cursed corset and those frilly dresses behind forever, but she sighed unexpectedly at a different thought. “I’m gonna miss those steak dinners, though. Aloysius sure could cook.”
It couldn’t be helped, though. Marty didn’t want the limited life Hestia offered to women, not even for the comfort and security it would have provided her. After a miserable childhood spent in an orphanage and her difficult years with Paul, she didn’t want to be beholden to anyone ever again.
Feeling sleepy, Marty set her empty glass down so it wouldn’t roll off and shatter on the floor when she dozed off. She was drifting into somnolent bliss when her wrist rang. Her client had responded sooner than anticipated.
The message contained a single word: Arborea.
Marty hadn’t been there in several years. It was a world covered almost entirely by old growth forests, but it bore one further distinction. It was wholly owned by a lumber conglomerate and, as such, had no law enforcement because there were no laws to enforce. Its employees lived in corporate housing and significant infractions were dealt with by eviction from the planet. It housed one public building that included an all-purpose store for the purchase of items the company didn’t provide, and a bar called Sylvan Spirits for the lumber workers to use when they were off the clock. Naturally, since there was no legal authority on the planet, it was an ideal location for all sorts of illicit transactions to take place.
Her client wanted her to meet someone there who would transfer her the credits she was owed and take the precious brooch off her hands.
Completely awake again, Marty entered the coordinates. It would take her three days to arrive. Checking the weather, she noted unhappily that it was also winter there, meaning it would be cold outside. She had always hated the cold.
“You won’t be there long,” she chided herself. “Just long enough to drop off this brooch and get your money.”