***Zorakk

Future Shock
Second version

Chapter One
Brian

Someone out there in the half telepathic/half cybernetic-occult realm known as cyberspace [where we are currently, my dear reader] asked: "Who the hell are you?"

To which I of course immediately responded: "Who the hell want's to know?" Or, in other words, who the hell are you?! The adrenalin had begun to flow in my veins, preparing me for glorious combat – but then I realized that since this story is being told in first person that this was only natural curiosity of an 'earther' and not a blood challenge. Earthers tend to think they are the only sentient life in the universe, and all the rest of us are bit players on the stage of reality. What arrogance! But I ramble. Someone asked who I was.

My name is Pete Reynolds. I am the owner-operator of a small, short range interstellar orbital truck about the size of a Federation runabout 3;

What's that? What year is it? Oh, I get it – a hypersleep customer are you? Been asleep since the late 20th century? Well, brace yourself bub. It's June 27, 2397 in your reckoning. We don't use that system any more, too constrictive for an interstellar culture. We use a system called stardates 3; but you can get all that data from your councilor, just assume that Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and all the other SF you've ever heard of is all fact.

Now back to who I am. I make my living hauling small, valuable [and sometimes illegal] cargo between relatively closely spaced star systems on the Kardasian-Federation frontier, things that the larger freight lines won't touch. My primary ancestry is Star Nomad – a member of a class of people who left earth a long, long time ago and have been carrying on the proud traditions of the gypsies and nomads ever since. Racially am a real Hienz 57 mix, about 5/8 Terran human [mostly North American Amerind stock, with a pinch of Corellian thrown in. 1/8 Klingon-human fusion, 1/8 Imperial Klingon [my maternal great-grandfather was a Klingon-human fusion married to an Imperial Klingon] the son was my maternal grandfather; and 1/8 Romulan [my paternal great-grandmother]. I identify myself ethnically as an Amerind on my official papers and such.

Confused? Well, welcome to the future 3; talk about future shock. Now hold onto your socks, you're from the dark ages, the 20th century, so you have no real concept of sentient rights or freedom of choice; and so the following may shock you badly: I'm also a boylover. I like my boys skinny and young; my motto is: "If he's old enough to pee he's old enough for me." I'm especially fond of the six to nine year old group.

Are you shocked? Revolted? Ready to try to kill me for Jesus?

Such feelings or actions could lead directly to a lengthy stay at one of the Federation's attitude adjustment centers like the Tantalus planetoid, the Alcatraz of space. Yes, that's right, I stay free and you go to prison.

AH-HAH! HAH! HAH!

A big change from your era right? In the dark ages of pre-stellar Terra, people like me were often persecuted, framed for crimes we did not commit {or even contemplate}, and sent to prison – where many of us met a bloody end under the kicking and stomping feet and punching fists of robbers and murders – while our *guards* turned a blind eye to what was happening, secretly wishing they too could participate in this righteous punishment of the *baby rappers*.

The first thing you will have to do if you are to 'fit in' is loose all of that 20th century mind-set you have. Get used to it, things are different now – a lot different. And here on the Kardasian frontier you could wind up dead real fast by spouting those politically correct slogans you learned in church. First off, a boylover is not a rapist, nor someone intent on destroying a child, either physically or emotionally. People who are like me can obtain a license after passing a very exhaustive complete psycho-sexual probe via telepathy by a Vulcan or Betazoid practitioners. It's draining and very uncomfortable, but in exchange for this hell, the power and the glory of the Federation is behind us, and fossils like you who can't seem to accept the current environment are slowing being rounded up and 'adjusted'. Believe me though, after the 'adjustment' by a psi-cop at someplace like Tantalus, you're never quite the same again.

But for now, just try to sit back and enjoy the trip. After all, you can't go back!

This past week, I was involved in hauling a consignment of Denebrian Flame Crystals from the mines on Denebia IV half way across the galaxy and a dozen warp gate jumps from Sythe III, the armpit of the galaxy. I had delivered my consignment, been paid [yes, in bricks gold-pressed latinum. It seems the deal was somehow extra-legal, though how I couldn't imagine] and after depositing the swag in the Bank of Bajor, where I maintain all my liquid assets, I had gone on, to Eder's Cock-n-Bull, a starport bar where the local Star Nomad port captain usually hangs out, holding court with a ring of old cronies who between them control most of the traffic in and out of Sythe III's class D starport. I was there to russel up a cargo headed closer insystem – hopefully all the way to the Terran Imperial Core Worlds where the real money is to be made.

Anyway, I'd met this Klingon merchant – Kah'Quiopat – a good-joe; he turned me on to a new location on the galaxy wide web for decent tridees of Klingon boys. Surprised? Yes, the Klingons have boylovers too, and we all like to collect tridee and holovid images of boys, either that we've known, or just for vicarious thrills in the 'what if 3;' universe. My Klingon friend needed a fast ship to take a consignment of live ggaahhh [a grub-worm Klingon delicacy served live] to Grunn B-761. Well, the Klingon and I got to drinking prune juice and telling war stories and I happened to mention that I thought Sythe III was the armpit of the galaxy; and my Klingon friend, raised the stakes, telling me [in a loud voice] that in the Komerex, it was widely regarded as the asshole of space.

The crowd of local hill billy rednecks [come to think of it, they were probably a lot like you – ignorant, haughty, and provincial] were becoming more and more agitated as we continued and escalated our disparagement of Sythe III. At some point I said I wouldn't want to be caught dead on Sythe III. At that point, a local comedian muttered that in that case maybe I'd better not hang around too long 3;

It was here that we left the bar and headed over to the starport's outgoing cargos area, so my friend could pick up the ggaahhh crates and hire a stevedore droid to load them. I collected the paperwork and lifted off for Grunn B-761, where I find myself now, for the beginnings of this story my faithful reader.

Grunn B-761 was a tiny, non-discript M8v dwarf star at the edge of the Tokueikibois Badlands. The Badlands is a huge molecular cloud 6.28 light years by 21.4 light years by 5.9 light years, within which lay both Bajor Prime and Kardasia Prime which actually form a loosely coupled binary star pair separated by a simi-major axis of over 53,000 aus. The volume of space between Bajor Prime and Kardasia Prime, and surrounding it, is filled with a superdense nebula of hydrogen, helium and exotic gases such as dichronium-oxide, and triple ionized sodium. The solar winds of each star have pretty well cleaned our a sphere of space around each star with a radius of 120 aus. In spit of this however, the inner solar systems of both stars are dusty in the extreme, making it difficult for unpowered craft to maintain a newtonian orbit. Bajor Prime and Kardasia Prime are located slightly off center by 1.05 light years with Kardasia being slightly closer to the exterior wall of the nebula.

As if the normal space environment were not chaotic enough, both the hyperspace and subspace environments are littered with tachyon cross currents, plasma-ionic storms, and gravitational anomalies that make the ftl approaches to the two planets nearly as hazardous as the normal space approaches are. After years of warp surveys, fourteen separate narrow passages through the chaos of warp space have been charted. Five of these are between Bajor and the exterior of the nebula, four are between Bajor and Kardasia, and the remainder link Kardasia with the exterior of the nebula. Grunn B-761 was less than a half light year from the widest of the corridors leading to Bajor, and so the Federation had established a major presence in the system, Star Base 288, to help defend the Bajorian sector from aggression from the Dominion and their warrior drones, the Jem-Hadarr.

Star Base 288 was one of the busiest Federation outposts in the sector, it was built in two sections, one a titanic orbital fortress/drydock station and the other spread all over, and under the surface of a large moon-sized object in orbit around the primary star. The moon was airless and a radioactive hell because of frequent x- and gamma-ray bombardments caused by flares on the primary star, but it was still a 'gold-rush' town to hundreds or perhaps thousands of civilian businesses which contracted out to support the Star Base. It was one of these that my friend Kah'Quiopat had sold his shipment of ggaahhh to, and who I would happily deliver them to in the morning.

After securing my orbital truck in the consignee's mall loading zone, I decided to take advantage of the 'special shopping privileges' that the mall offered. I knew shopping here was special, a sign on the main entrance gallery said so! Haw! What a crock of 3; well you know what I mean. But after all, I was going to be stuck here until at least 10:00 tomorrow, so I might as well enjoy myself until I could dump the load of ggaahhh I was carrying.

The Ferengi Merchants Association seal of approval was also prominently displayed on a large teakwood and brass plaque in the same entrance gallery. That of course meant: 'hold onto to your latinum with both hands' [or all three if you happened to be a tripedian]. Not that the Ferengi would outright cheat you, not often anyway, its just that they lived by the old axiom: 'Let the Buyer Beware!' Ferengi merchants often worked on the gray side of the law – where profits were maximal – but this also meant sometimes they got burned and when this happened the Ferengi's first impulse was to burn the next guy down in the feeding chain, so as not to loose profitability. "Shit rolls downhill" was another of the hundreds of 'Rules of Acquisition' that served the Ferengi as a Bible.

I wondered into a general merchandise shop and I bought a couple of new avr-chips for my entertainment center, some junk food, and a new comic book. After paying for my purchases, I wandered around the mall some more and came upon a game room, crammed full of vr-video games and a hoard of kids of both genders, both pre-teen and teenagers, and of virtually every Federation race, dependents of Star Fleet personnel and children of the civilian workers at the base – hence the through mixture of kids in the vr-arcade.

I stood close to the entrance for several minutes gazing at the butts and crotches of several preteen human boys and a couple boys I figured who were part Romulan and 13 or 14 years old. Some of these boys had little tiny butts that hardly showed through their jeans and/or shorts, and some had nice round butts that filled the seat of their jeans/shorts quite nicely. Nice and squeezible.

It was just about this time that I began my favorite pass time – 'tracking'.

Tracking is a game to me, combining boywatching and stealth. It involves the selection of a target – in this case it was a small human boy about eight or nine years old – and then stealthily following [some would say: 'stalking'] the target. I had been 'tracking' this little human kid for a few minutes through the human and alien crowds and maze of escalators, grav-tubes, transporter nodes, and shops of the Grand Mall, just off the active perimeter road which ran around the circumference of the giant atmospheric domes of the Star Base's ground complex.

I'm a connoisseur of boys, and I know what a good looking boy looks like. With this in mind, you can appreciate how beautiful this kid was when I tell you he was absolutely 'drop dead gorgeous', with a body that was slim and lithe, with a cat-like grace to his movements, almost like a zero-gee ballet dancer.

He had medium length walnut colored hair with a slight reddish coloration, The overall effect was that of a deep glowing brown with just a hint of strawberry-blond mixed in. His eyes were ice-fire electric blue eyes. He was dressed in a 'Star Fleet' gold over black Bajorian-style winter playsuit which clung to his beautiful long, lithe arms and legs, and accented the cutest little round fanny.

Sometimes tracking leads to active contacts with the subject, sometimes it merely generates fodders for kick-ass fantasy, and my dick was as hard as an outcropping of durillium ore on some frozen moon in the outer Coridonn system. It was causing a quite noticeable bulge in the front of the neo-synthetic fabric of my jumpsuit-style flight suit and I paused for an instant to get my autonomic nervous system under control.

Normally I do not push this mode of contact too far. You see I am a licensed Boy Lover, and tracking can seem like stalking, and stalking with a boner is a practice which can get my license pulled by the local constabulary. Although boy lovers are an accepted part of the gay sexual orientation of humanoid populations of the United Federation of Planets, and although we still have to obtain a license involving soul-deep telepathic probing by a panel of Vulcan and Betazoid telepaths; boy lovers are still considered sexual predators in many parts of the Federation. Ergo, we tread lightly around law enforcement types.

I was about to press the point with this boy, however, because it was becoming clear that he was in some kind of distress. He had already approached several people, both human and alien adults in the crowds that surged and ebbed around him – but in each attempt he had been rebuffed, with varying degrees of irritation by the adults. I lengthened my stride and quickly came up behind the youngster. He was crying. Not bawling, but his face, when he turned to me was streaked with tears and his noes was red and running.

"Got troubles?" I asked him.

He nodded, sniffing audibly.

"Maybe I can help," I said. "Wanna tell me about it?"

The little boy nodded slowly and tried to get his sobbing under control, wiping his noes on his sleeve.

"My name is Pete Reynolds," I said and put my arm around the boy's small shoulders.

He immediately snuggled against me, and in a small voice said: "I'm Brian 3; Brian Shimosuwa."

"So what is so bad 3; ?" I asked.

The small boy slowly dug into an inside pocket of the playsuit and took out a small iso-linear chip for a pda and held it out to me. I was in no way prepared for what was on the isolinear chip that he handed me. We sat down on a bench beside the pedestrian walkway and I pulled my xl-3100 Personal Data Assistant out of the left breast pocket of my flight suit and put the chip in and powered up. I took the isolinear chip and hefted it in my hand. A simple rectangular piece of plastic 2 centimeters wide by 4.8 centimeters long [¾x2 inches] and a few millimeters thick which contained a complex microprocessor and several hundred megabytes of rom/ram designed to move data simply and accurately from one computer to another.

"Let's see what we have here," I said and settled myself into a comfortable position with Brian curled up tight against me so we could both see the visual display panel of the 10 by 25 centimeter pda. My dick, which had been simi-erect since I first saw him; became brick-hard and erect as Brian squirmed, rubbing his bonny little fanny against me. I shoved the isolinear chip into the socket and clicked the run icon. On the computer's small 9 cm [3½ inch] high-rez screen, the chips id and authentication data began to snake its way across the display. The first few lines that appeared on the screen were essentially Brian's id card:

lcars – Starbase 288 – Authentication correct. Proceed.

Brian Shimosuwa – Age: 8.83 years Terrestrial Standard.

Terran Imperial Citizen, born on USS Saratoga, s/d: 8709.20

Color Eyes: Brown; Color Hair: Brown; Ethnic: Cau/Oriental

Height: 1.31 mtrs [4' 3"]; Weight: 26.79 kg [60 lbs]

Genetic subgroup:

de3f c09a
ccff 0216
4ee1 5591
09fc aabf

"My name is Deniese Shimosuwa, I am 31 years of age, Terrestrial Standard, and the biological mother and primary guardian of Brian Shimosuwa. I am not under duress nor under the influence of any intoxicating or hallucinogen substances; I am of sound mind and make this statement of my own free will. I do declare my intention to transfer guardianship of my son, Brian Shimosuwa, to the bearer of this document, because I am no longer able to take care of this child properly. This transfer of guardianship shall become in force as soon as registered in any branch of the Terran Imperial Circuit Court. This transfer is final and non-rescindable by either party."

"Black, black 3;no trades back!" I murmured as the screen displayed the 'end of visual content' icon and the directory of documents contained on the chip appeared.

"What was that 3;?" Brian asked.

"Huh? Oh! 'Black, black 3; no trades back.' That was what we said when I was a kid after a trade, for comics, toys or whatever. It usually meant that the kid who said it first thought he or she got a really good deal and there would be no trade-backs. That's kinda what your mom said at the end, except in grown-up speak."

"Oh," the boy said subdued. "I promise I won't be any trouble Pete, I want to stay with you forever." Then he discreetly put his little hand against my bulging dick to get an idea of how big was, then asked in a whispered voice: "Do you like to suck little boy's wieners?"

"Absolutely! Do you like to have your wiener sucked?" I asked him.

"Yes," he whispered without a pause, and leaned his head against my shoulder, "I'm so happy I found you – I'll do you – anything you want," he said, "if you'll do me!"

I put my arm around his shoulders and let my hand rest on his rounded little boy tummy. "When?" I asked softly into his ear.

"Right now!" Brian said decisively and began to unzip his playsuit.

I laughed and pulled Brian into my lap and wrapped both arms around him in my patented 'el oso loco' bearhug, "Well, maybe we should wait until we're in a little more private area, like my Tomahawk," I said. "I think your mom was the one who got cheated in this deal – and I feel like the luckiest man in the galaxy."

"Really?"

"Yes, really!" I said. "Now just lets see what else your mom sent along with you on this chip."

The storage area of the isolinear chip was nearly full, Brian's mom had sent 78 Stellars in Brian's savings account, his complete medical records and dna/rna scan, birth certificate and Imperial Citizen status indicator with a Terran passport; virtually everything I would need if I decided to adopt Brian legally.

"Pretty complete," I said simply. Brian nodded, sniffing loudly.

"But look," I said still reeling at the thought of a parent giving away a child – especially one as good looking and intelligent as Brian. "Are you saying that your mother wants to get rid of you?"

"Yes," the boy said simply. "Its because I'm gay. She doesn't want me around, and her new boyfriend is a real homo-phobe! Mom said I should go out today and find someone who would look after me, or she would turn me over to Federation Social Services. I don't want to go to an orphanage, or a gay hostel, Pete! You've gotta let me come live with you!!" Brian was coming close to tears again, "She doesn't care anything about me and she hates the fact that I'm gay! That's why I can stay out late at night. She'd be glad to see me gone!"

"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "You're way too young to say you're gay, it doesn't mean anything until you go through adolescence – a good six or seven years away for you yet – and I don't understand. Your mom gave you away? Your mom sent you out to find a new family 3;?"

Huge crystal tears suddenly cascaded down Brian's cheeks, and he nodded.

"Why?" I whispered in astonishment. I was totally shocked that anyone could do something so cruel to this beautiful kid. The most horrible thing a parent can do to a child is abandon it.

"My dad was in Star Fleet, and he was killed in an away mission on some planet, I don't even know the name of. That was when I was five. My mom found a boy friend right away. They 3; they loved each other 3; b-but her boyfriend said he di-didn't want a gay Star Fleet brat around 3; so my mom asked my dad's sister to look after me. That was last year. But she always told me and everyone she knows, that she really didn't want to be tied down with a kid, especially a boy kid. She says I'm more trouble than she wanted to have to cope with. Not that I give her any trouble, or get in trouble 3; but finally she kicked me out and sent me back to my mom, and mom said I had to find somewhere else to live 3; 3;"

The word were simply tumbling out of his mouth and he was on the verge of tears as he told me this.

" 3;and just having to buy extra food, extra this and extra that, is more than she wanted."

Brian took a few minutes here to wipe his eyes and settle himself. I wrapped my arms around the small eight-year-old in a protective bearhug.

"It's okay, Brian, now I understand 3;"

"She'd be glad to give me to anybody that wanted me." Brian said, with his sunshine smile half returning. "Hint, hint 3;," he added.

"And the reason you think you're gay is your mom's new boyfriend said so 3;?"

"Uh-huh."

"Sounds more like mom's boyfriend doesn't like Star Fleet," I said slowly.

I had to think about this for a minute, this was better than I had dared hope for 3; Ahhh Geeze! Will you lay off that tired old 20th century morality. I wasn't even thinking of the sex now, just how pitiless parents could be sometimes. I told you things have changed, and that they had changed for the worse as far as you homo-phobes were concerned. The truth is that nearly 5% of the human race is gay. You can't change that, I can't change that. Hell, God Almighty can't change that!! Given that fact, the odds are against a gay kid having gay parents. I know less about how it works for girls and so I will restrict my comments to the male half of the spectrum, the important thing is that you remember that we boylovers have our mirror image, the girl-lovers, in fact perhaps we are all really just 'kid' lovers; because I would have no real objection to a cute little eight or nine year old girl climbing into my rack either.

The reason Brian's hints were so troubling was that although in a 'normal' relationship, a boylover serves as a friend and mentor in addition to a lover to the boy. In fact with a very young boy, like Brian, its more likely that he's just going through the phase in his life where he's experimenting with the gay lifestyle and indeed will eventually join the 95% strait human community. With a boy as young as Brian, the 'sex' part of the relationship is pretty benign, consisting of 'touchie-feelie' masturbation and some lite oral sex.

Parents normally love their children more than life itself and will do virtually anything to advance their child's chance at survival in the galaxy at large. With this in mind, normal parents who find that they have a child who is gay will normally seek out someone like me to help with their child's growing experience. But that is in the context of the extended family environment. Running away by children is still frowned upon by the Galaxy's human society – and it is still a criminal act to entice a boy or girl to run away. So you can see why I was anxious about exactly where this conversation was leading.

After a few minutes of awkward silence while my brain worked overtime trying to put together future projections, financial obligation spreadsheets and so on, Brian asked, "Are you a truck driver? You said you had a Tomahawk, and you're warring a pilot's flightsuit, but its not Star Fleet. That must mean your a truck driver." Suddenly the eight year old grinned, "–unless you are an Amerind with a hatchet!"

"Yep, sure am," I was favorably impressed with his deductive intelligence, and deliriously glad of the change in subject. "An Amerind {Cherokee} and a truck driver! I pilot my own rig, a Tomahawk 2080. I'm an independent. Are you into big trucks?" I asked. "Oh yeah, and no, I don't have a hatchet on me," I grinned at the little boy.

"Well sort of, I've always been really interested in how big some of those orbitals freighters are, and I've seen some with some really cool paint jobs on them." he replied. "I used to go down to the loading docks and watch them take off and land."

"My Tomahawk isn't as big as those huge inner system jobs, but it has both standard ion impulse drive and a fwma miniature warp drive, I can make warp five on a good day," I fibbed a little. The Tomahawk in stock condition has a warp drive governor that limits it to warp five – but that was one of the first things I had pulled off my rig and re-routed the antimatter plasma flow to a more efficient design, more in line with the specs of a Star Fleet runabout. I can easily hit warp eight now; but that is illegal, so I don't brag about it in public.

"Wow!" the little boy sighed in admiration.

I asked him if he'd be interested in seeing the truck that I piloted, and mentioned that it had a unique paint scheme on its thermocoat, one that I was particularly proud of because I had designed it myself. The Tomahawk also had a double sized walk-in sleeper, and ancillary equipment in it and we would be alone – alone to do whatever we could conceive of.

His eyes got big and I knew he had gotten the subtile suggestion of a bit of slap and tickle. He smiled and said, "Really? Cool! Are we going to be gypsy truckers and roam the galaxy in search of cargo and adventure 3; just like Rocky Jones, Space Ranger?"

As far as Brian was concerned, the transfer of guardianship had already taken place.

I laughed, "Well, kinda," I said, "but remember, that's a holovid, and this is real life. Most of the time, I just barely get enough to cover expenses 3; but I guess I have had some adventures too."

"Kewl! How long are you going to be around here? To at least 1900? I gotta get some stuff 3;"

"Sure, " I said. I told him that I'd be in the mall's loading zone until morning, because I had Kah'Quiopat's load of ggaahhh to deliver in the morning.

"Ugh! ggaahhh – what a disgusting, slimy mess," my new friend said and wrinkled up his noes.

"Yeah, but the Klingon's eat it like spaghetti 3;"

"Aarrghh! Gross! Now I'll never be able to eat spaghetti again," he laughed.

"I feel the same way about kimchee." I chuckled and dug around in my flightsuit's left chest pocket and produced a blank electropass for my truck. I quickly entered the data into the pass and handed it to him.

"Here's the data on my truck, just in case there are more trucks out there in the truck park 3; and this'll get you through the gate into the loading zone."

The little boy studied the card seriously and then stuffed it into his pocket.

"I have to go to my fort first and get some stuff," he said smiling. "But I can be back about 1900 or around there, and then we can have some fun!"

"I'll be waiting," I promised him.

The eight-year-old hopped off of my lap and with a single backward glance and a wave – he was gone, virtually vanishing into the throng of pedestrians and shoppers around us.

The paint job on my Tomahawk is unique as far as I know in this quadrant of the galaxy – it consists of a painted mural of a woodland scene with an old Cherokee style log cabin in the middle, and a small creek flowing nearby. But before you jump to conclusions on where this scene might be set, you should look at the deep purple-blue of the sky over arching the scene. The three moons of Bajor [not the single moon of old Terra] race towards grand convergence over the small village in this mural. 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 scantily 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, and moccasins, and had an arm around the man's waist, and a contented smile on his face, making people who see the mural wonder what he and the man have been up to.

I kept myself busy in the cockpit of the Tomahawk doing all the thousand and one routine little things that I mostly put off until they either became serious, or I was faced with a period {like today} with a few hours to kill while I waited for Brian to return from whatever chores he had set for himself as a prelude to leaving Star Base 288. I was beginning to daydream about starting another long term relationship with a boy as I sat there in the Tomahawk's cockpit, the pilot side gull-wing emergency hatchway/canopy open to let the cool evening breeze generated by the Star Base's celss waft over me in almost sensual waves.

My last such experience had been over five years ago and half a galaxy away, and Brian was very like Douglas. I foresaw many years of good times.

A shrill little boy whistle jerked me back to the here and now and I saw Brian running down the access street through the mall's loading docks. He skidded to a stop just below the canopy hatch and shouted at the top of his lungs: "I'm all ready! Let's go!!" He had his clothes and some favorite toys in a large Star Fleet issue duffle bag. His father's perhaps? And he was clutching a small antistatic bag in which another isolinear ram chip was visible.

"Alright, partner, go on around to the airlock, it'll be easier to get that giant duffle bag in through there."

"Okay," Brian said and dashed amidships. I closed and sealed the canopy hatch and went aft to unlock the Tomahawk's airlock and waited as the lock cycled open, thinking: 'Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly 3;'

Brian bounded up the gangway to the airlock and held out the anti-static bag with the isolinear chip in it. "See!" he almost shouted. "I told you she'd do it!" There was a tone of victory in his voice, but overlaid by sadness and doubt. He must have been wondering at that point what it would take to make me give him away also.

"Hmmmnnn," I mused as I took the isolinear chip Brian was holding out. I fumbled in my pocket and dug out my padd and shoved the chip into the i/o port. It was megabyte after megabyte of Federation legal papers – to be filed in a Federation court regarding the custody and guardianship of Brian. His mom was obviously serious.

Brian climbed around me and into the airlock and then stopped – looking in towards the sleeper. He hauled his duffle bag in and I came in right behind him, and closed and locked the airlock's outer hatch.

"Go ahead on in and look around!" I encouraged him. "It crowded here in the airlock alcove, especially with this duffle bag! Let's stow your stuff in an In Flight Storage bin for now, and we'll get you settled in proper later this evening."

"Okay," the little boy said and hauled his bag into the tiny 3x2 meter [10x6½ feet] storage area of the truck. We put the duffle bag, still packed into one of the in-flight storage bins and went back forward towards the control cab.

" 3;And this is the nerve center of the uss Igotcha!" I said as we came into the the compact and efficient cockpit of the Tomahawk.

"uss Igotcha," Brian said wrinkling up his noes. "What a dorky name!"

"Well," I said sprawling in the pilot's acceleration couch and swiveling around to face the boy, "I never got around to giving the ole gal a real name, she's just vp 3886 kp – a registration number."

"Yuck," Brian said flopping down in my lap in front of the pilot's instruments. "That's even worse. And why she? we're all boys here.

I laughed. "Ships are always 'she' – ever since the non-powered sailing days on old Terra in pre-atomic times."

"Well we've gotta name her something besides Igotcha, or vp 3-whatever," Brian insisted. "How about Dream Walker?"

I pulled Brian into my lap and wrapped both arms around the little boy and started kissing him on the cheek and the back of neck, and unzipped his playsuit, gently easing his arms out of the sleeves leaving him bare from neck to waist.

"Well, I'll leave the honor of naming the Victor Papa 3886 Kilo Papa. If it's Dream Walker you want – Dream Walker it shall be," I said, running my hands all over his tummy and slid my right hand down inside the legs of the playsuit to access his bare thighs.

"Mmmmm 3; feels good. Keep doing what you're doing 3; 3;" Brian said with an almost whine in his voice. So I kept rubbing his thigh with my right hand, as I used my left hand fingers to gently trace designs on his bare chest, and gently caressed his upper tummy and chest, and little nipples. I pulled my right hand up and out of the pocket formed between Brian's underpants and the playsuit, and playfully dove beneath the elastic of his underpants, seeking his soft scrotum and the tiny testicles within.

"Oooooooow! That tickles! No! Don't stop, it feels gooooooood." he cooed. I continued exploring his small testicles and found that his wiener was already hard as a nail. And so were his nipples, for that matter.

I said: "It doesn't take you long to get ready for some fun does it?"

"Nope! I'm almost always ready for this kind of fun. It's just hard to find anybody to have this kinda fun with though." He replied as the eight year old continued to explore my body with tiny expert hands. I had the feeling that this was not my young partner's first time playing with a man or older teen this way. That was a surprise, mostly with me liking the younger register of boys, I find that they may have experimented with naked games in their own play group, but I had never yet come across a boy so young who had already been with a man. However, the sophistication of his moves and the way he knew just the right places to touch and stroke to turn me on indicated that he had some experience.

"No, it isn't too easy, is it?" I said looking into his turquois bluegreen eyes. "You ever play like this before with someone?"

"Yeah," Brian said almost dreamily.

"Wanna tell me about it?" I asked

"I will," the boy said, "but later."

"Okay, I guess we might as well head on into the sleeper and have some real fun, don't you think?" and I slipped him off my lap onto the deck between the pilot and flight engineer station.

Brian nodded and quickly wriggled back into the sleeves of his playsuit. I held his hand and led him back to the sleeping/living area of the Tomahawk.

The connecting passage between the control cabin and the sleeper was a narrow one meter wide passageway that gave access to all of the main areas of the Tomahawk's somewhat small biosphere. It took a special kind of person to be able to withstand the stress and rigours of months of flight in such a compact environment. Just behind the control cabin to starboard is the head; on the portside is the ward room and mini-galley which is the largest open area of the Tomahawk's biosphere. The other two compartments on the port side hold the airlock and a storage area for vacuum armor and other eva equipment. On the starboard side is the utility room, with the laundry and clothing storage areas, and just beyond that is the in-flight storage lockers, followed closely by the single most important compartment of the Tomahawk – where I spend most of my time on long haul trips, the living/sleeping quarters, a 3.4 meter [11 feet] wide compartment 5 meters [16½ feeet] long, and jammed with every recreational bit of electronic vr-wizardry I could afford in addition to the built-in king-size captain's bed with its storage compartments and bulletins.

I could see that Brian was quite impressed, as I pushed back the bead curtain that separated the sleeping area from the companion way. I had a dreamcatcher hanging over the double-wide bed, and a leather shield hanging securely on the back wall, and other such Native American craftwork here and there. Brian's eyes were as big as saucers when he saw a three dimensional halogram of the same Cherokee man and boy from the Tomahawk's exterior mural, laying naked in a 69 position, seemingly embedded in the wall of the cabin, giving each other a blowjob with the man's hands caressing the boy's fanny. The man's whole dick was in the boy's mouth and boy's wiener and nuts were completely enclosed in the man's mouth.

I touched the holocontrols and the scene shifted. "If you liked that one, you'll love this," I murmured in a low, seductive voice. The hologram on the rear wall had changed and now Brian saw a hologram of the same two in which the boy was on all fours and the man was on his knees with his entire cock in the boy's butt. Brian then looked at me, his face contorted somewhat as he saw the bulge in my jeans and the way my hand was rubbing it.

"So what do you think?" I asked.

He stammered a minute, and asked if I was into doing stuff like that with boys.

I grinned like a raving lunatic and nodded my head. "Sometimes," I said, putting an arm around his waist and pulling him close against me.

For the first time since I had met him, Brian resisted my advances and I stopped 'dead in space', unsure of how to proceed. I'd made a tactical error somewhere – and upon how quickly I could diagnose and fix the problem would hang the future status of our relationship. I broke out in hives mentally – thankfully for the last shred of composure I had, there were no physical manifestations!

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Getting fucked in butt hurts! I don't want to do that!!

"You are a little bit young for anal sex, but I can see no reason why we can't message each other, wrastle a little and maybe give each other a blow job."

"But you won't want to stop there," Brian said in a voice that was suddenly older than his years. "You'll want to go on to butt fucking, I know. You'll start out saying that you won't – but eventually you will do it." Brian was again near tears. To him this seemed a terrible betrayal, he thought I was someone who would love and cherish him – something he desired perhaps more than life itself right now – but it seemed to him that I had betrayed that by being interested in sodomy.

I pressed the dissolve switch on the electro-mural, and it returned to its default mode, an excellent view of a deep woodlands meadow with strongly filtered sunlight poking its way through the hundreds of feet of branches and leaves overhead.

"Brian," I said, and then paused. The eight year old was silent. "Look, whoever it was that hurt you by going to far with you was wrong. If we are going to be together – even just as traveling companions – you have to trust me."

"I want to, but 3;"

"I know. You trusted this other guy too. Brian there are some things that you should know. First butt fucking – or sodomy – is fun for some people. But you are way too young, too little, to get any enjoyment out of it. Your partner should have known that.

"Also, you should know that I am a licensed Boy Lover. Over time I might ask you to do something that you do not want to do, but you always have the right to say 'NO'. It's my sworn duty to respect that and I take that oath very seriously. I will never ever force you to do something that you do not want to do, but its your responsibility to tell me when we hit those things 3;"

"You 3; you mean like butt 3; I mean sodomy," Brian said wiping his eyes.

"Exactly," I said.

We were still standing in the entry-way to the sleeping area, and Brian put his hand in mine again and looked up at me.

"I want to be with you, Pete," he said. "Even if you want to butt fuck me, I still want to be with you, but it's just that that 3; sodomy 3; hurts so much 3;"

"Then we won't ever do it," I said.

The little boy sighed and leaned against me. It appeared I had cleared this hurtle, but my heart was still pounding in my chest as I realized how close I had come to loosing out here.

I sat down on the mattress of the bed and asked Brian to stand in front of me as I sat on the double-wide bed. He did and I slid his arms out of the playsuit's sleeves again and motioned for him to raise his hands over his head. When he was standing there grinning with his hands stretched for the sky, I began to peel off his playsuit – slowly, ever so slowly to prolong the moment. Next I removed his sneakers and socks one at a time, tossing them into a corner. Brian began to laugh outright, perhaps something I was doing was tickling him, I wasn't for sure, but it was a happy laugh; the laugh of a little boy – not the much older entity who had inhabited Brian's body a few moments ago for our discussion of sodomy.

The white cotton/synthetic of his underpants contrasted with the light brown color of his suntanned skin. His penis, now unconfined by the constriction of his shorts, had caused the material of his underpants to tent out quite impressively. I could see the outline of his erection under them and I could almost swear I saw it throb and pulse with each heartbeat of the boy. I knew that my own dick was. I stood up and quickly stripped down to my own shorts and then pulled Brian across my knees. I gently rubbed the tiny bulge in front of his shorts. He jumped a little as my hand first made contact with the bulge; it made him squirm and sigh in pleasure. At last I could wait no longer and I rolled him over on his tummy. He was still laying across my knees and I grasped the elastic of his underwear, slowly pulling his underpants down to mid thigh level, exposing the two perfectly formed hemispheres of his small fanny. I began to knead the soft warm flesh of his fanny like bread dough, interspacing this with tickling the crack between the cheeks of his rump. I slide the underpants down his long slender legs. A shiver ran through me as I pulled the pants totally free of Brian's legs and looked at the eight-year-old laying there in just his birthday suit.

I grabbed the boy around his waist and in one quick motion, rolled him onto the bed with him laying on top of me. I reached over to caress Brian's fanny which quickly brought the boy into a heightened state of arousal. Then I turned Brian over onto his back and with a quick flipping motion brought him down on to the bed next to me. I watched as Brian's wiener, now unconstrained by the weight of the boy, sprang up at attention, like the flagpole at Mt. Suribachi. Brian's penis was as beautiful as the rest of him, hard, excited, a flawless shaft and perfectly formed circumcised head. There it stood, almost 7 centimeters [2¾ inch] of boyhood perfection, standing proudly at a sixty-five degree angle pointing toward the ceiling. It was the prettiest piece of boymeat I could have imagined.

"Now what?" Brian asked innocently.

"Wait and see," I said mysteriously and wriggled out of my shorts also.

"Wow!" Brian said, looking intently at my 17 centimeter [6¾ inch] dick which was also fully erect.

I rubbed my hands all over his beautiful little chest and upper tummy, feeling every ripple in his tight yet silky skin. Brian closed his eyes and sighed in pleasure as my hands explored his sides and the small of his back. I ran my fingernail lightly down Brian's chest from just under his chin to his belly button and circled his navel several times before pressing on it lightly.

"Beep!" Brian imitated the computer's request for attention signal.

"Wooaaa, what was that!?" I teased.

"Borg-unit-BRIAN-on-line, ready-for-orders 3;" the boy said in a robotic monotone.

"Uh-oh!" I said in mock terror, "a Borg! Gotta shut it down again." I began tickling Brian all over his upper body. The eight-year-old shrieked with laughter and managed to stammer between bouts of near hysterical laughter: "Borg-unit-BRIAN-off-line-in shut-down-moodddee," he stretched out the last word as though power had suddenly been interrupted to a voice synthesis circuit.

With the immediate threat of the Borg incursion thwarted, I went back to my exploration and message of Brian's body. Lower and lower went my hand and at last I was I caressing the lower portion of Brian's tummy and his pelvic region, just above the root of his penis.

I reached over and gently grasped Brian's erect wiener. An electric thrill ran up my arm from my fingers to set off shivers of extescy in my brain. I could see from Brian's reactions that my touch had done similar things to him. I rubbed the skin of his penis up and down over the exposed glans, masturbating the small boy slowly and gently. Brian moaned and shifted his hips into a position that was easier for me to continue to masturbate him.

At last I placed my lips on the tip of his hot meat and pushed down the shaft allowing my tongue and lips to feel every millimeter of this wondrous boydick as it slipped into my mouth. Brian moaned a little as he felt his penis enter. As slowly as I had inserted Brian's wiener into my mouth I now pulled my face away, applying suction all the time and causing a loud pop like a champaign cork when Brian's penis slipped out. I began licking on the inside of his thighs. I could see goosebumps forming and felt him shiver. I licked my way all around his testicles and nuzzled the shaft as I licked at its base as well.

I love the smell of a little boy – an odor that was like no other perfume in all the worlds, fresh, innocent and yet lusty; kinda like talcom powder and cedar wood chips. I began licking his balls, two perfectly formed nuts in a soft hairless sack. I licked his shaft and he shivered again. I had sucked dick before, but I attacked this one with abandon. He was awesome. I loved the feel of the hard velvety smooth shaft in my mouth. I was waiting for the boy's impending orgasm as I felt the slender dick throb and expand. I swirled my tongue around the blunt knob of the kid's shaft and concentrated on the smooth silky glans of the circumcised penis. I could feel Brian respond as he started bucking towards me, forcing my face against his belly as I swallowed him to the root.

"Uhhh," Brian moaned and went into a frenzied passion of lust. His long legs twitched and lost strength as he could intuit an explosive feeling rising up from his nuts and exploding through his wiener. I felt the jerking of the young boy's penis as he experienced an intense pre-adolescent orgasm. Brian had a dazed look on his face as he leaned against me, his legs still wobbly from his earth-shattering experience just a moment ago.

Brian lay on his stomach, still trying to catch his breath from his best-yet orgasm. Finally after about a few minutes, the naked boy sat up on the edge of the bed and looked over at me. "Now it's my turn – to repay you. Our deal was if you did me, I'd do you," the small eight-year-old said.

"You don't need to," I said. My own dick was so hard I could have pounded nails with it, but the last thing I wanted after having made such a horrible error with the sodomy hologram was for him to feel forced into something because of ill advised promises made in a mall rest area.

Brian looked at me and said "No, I really mean it, I want to do you now."

"If you're sure 3;" I said. "Remember what I said about being able to say 'NO.'

"Don't be silly," Brian smiled sweetly up at me, "I made a fool of myself crying about a hologram. I'm sorry I embarrassed you. But I've done this before, lotsa times. How'da'ya think I make enough latinum to hang around the arcade all the time?"

I lay back on the bed and in an instant Brian was on top of me. My dick was as fully at attention as it had been throughout the last few minutes. Brian gasped my hard meat in his young hand and began stroking softly. I was watching my dick slide up and down in his hand, almost mesmerized. He started slowly, taking two or three seconds to complete a single stroke. Then he began to accelerate the pace, it was wonderful and I felt my juices building to the climax.

My own enormous load fired almost to the ceiling, eventually splattering down on my chest as Brian kept milking me for all I was worth. The boy grinned at me mischievously and said: "Now that it's unloaded 3;" Brian took as much of my shaft into his mouth as he could and then with a strong suck slowly backed off of it. I was in a trance and there was nothing to wake me out of it. He began to pump up and down on it while using his tongue to circle the head, particularly focusing on the tender underside of it.

When I was finally spent, he took his lean young body to the bathroom, brought back a hand towel moistened with warm water and wiped me clean. I mewed like a H'Rumbian cub and simply laid their, virtually unable to move, so overloaded had my autonomic nervous system become. Then he tossed the towel aside, reached up and turned out the reading light and then lay down beside me and put his head on my chest. I could feel the softness of his hair on my nipples as he snuggled in next to me.

"Thank you," I said and brought my face near his. I softly kissed his young lips and was again surprised by the passion as he returned it.

Brian looked up at me across his chest. "That was incredible, Pete!"

"I'll never forget it for as long as I live." I said truthfully

"Me either," Brian agreed.

We dozed off in each other's arms, exhausted and happy.

It was 01:08:42 local time when I again awoke. Brian was still sleeping at my side, snoring softly. I certainly hoped that he was right about his mom not caring when or if he came home. The documentation that she had prepared on the second isolinear chip that Brian had brought had gone a lot further than a simple verbal statement of her desire to transfer guardianship. It was as far as I could see a iron-clad custody contract, stoping just short of adoption – but leaving that option open at my convince. This joker she had paired up with after Brian's father's death must be some-thing – that she was willing to completely give up her son.

I sat up and swung my big hairy drumsticks over the side of the bed. Careful as I was, the motion was enough to wake up Brian.

"Sorry," I said. "Didn't mean to disturb you."

"S'okay. I'm a night owl – I just don't like getting up in the morning!," Brian squirmed around in bed and put his head in my lap, "I've never had as good a time as I just did," the boy said.

"It felt great to me too." I rolled Brian over back on to the bed and stood up.

"Where'ya going?" Brian asked. His voice was tinged with a small amount of apprehension, and I realized that from his point of view he had taken an enormous risk in offering himself to me. If it turned out that I did not want him for some reason, I might alert the authorities – thereby complicating any hope he had of getting away from his unhappy situation at home.

"Not to worry," I said, trying to reassure him. "I just want to check up on a couple of things. I stood up, butt naked, and walked forward to the control cabin and sprawled in the pilots acceleration couch. I could hear Brian's bare feet slap-slapping behind me on the neolyte tiles of the control cabin, and in a few seconds the nude kid jumped into my lap.

"Ahhhh–-" I sighed. "Perfect! A boy-kid, naughty, nine and naked, just the way I like 'em!"

"Almost nine," Brian corrected me, and snuggled deeper into my lap, grinding his nude butt against my semi-erect dick. "What're we gonna do?" he asked again.

"Like I said, just check a few things," I repeated. "Computer," I said in my 'official' voice that the computer recognized was me inputting data or commands.

"lcars on line, ready." the computer's AI verbal interface said.

"Establish qlr link with Memory Alpha."

"Working," the computer replied and within a very few seconds said "Link established, two way digital video datalink unavailable, insufficient bandwidth. Data transfer possible via eieio format."

"OK. Search records. Keywords: Star Fleet, mission records, Shimosuwa, personal logs."

Brian's eyebrows shot up at that, but he remained silent.

"Establish temporal limits," the computer prompted.

"Uhhhh 3;"

"Unrecognized command, restate."

"Stardate 3/6501.01 to present," I said clearing up the ambiguity. That is the trouble with voice recognition computer input, you had to be very precise.

"Working. Records located, 196.518 megabytes of unclassified archival data in compressed format, 32.950 megabytes of classified data."

"Download unclassified data, path = eoeio-htp://D:\SHIMOSUWA."

"Specified directory, SHIMOSUWA, does not exist. Do you wish to create directory?"

"OK."

"Download in progress, estimated time: 00:21:49."

"OK. Autodisconnect when finished."

"Confirmed." lcars said.

Brian elbowed me and squirmed his bonny body around to look at me, "Why did you do that?" he asked.

"Well, you said your father died when you were five, and you didn't remember much about him, I thought you might want to know a little bit more about him – its my way of saying thank you for choosing me to help."

Brian's eyes were shining with moisture as he said: "Thank you, Pete."

A soft "bong" chime indicated that the download was complete. I slid a blank isolinear chip into the computer auto-transcriber slot and said: "Copy contents of directory "SHIMOSUWA" to isolinear chip."

"Working 3; task completed."

"I think we'de better turn in, though. We're going to have a hell of a day tomorrow!"

"Awww, but it's only 1:20 3;."

"Nope, bedtime, now," I insisted.

lcars sounded the alarm clock at 07:00:00 just as always, Brian was lying on his side curled up in a semi-fetal position with his cute little buns against my crotch. I started to roll out of bed, but Brian objected, still 3/4 asleep, with a loud whining grunt and threw his arms around me. In truth, it had been a long and eventful day yesterday and I would have liked nothing better than to lay back in the warm bed and doze off for a few more hours. The problem was I had to get the truck around to the back of the mall building complex – where I was due to deliver the load of ggaahhh.

I leaned over and kissed Brian on the left cheek of his cute little face, and said, "Brian, it's time to get up and at 'em, little guy."

Brian opened his sleepy eyes, looked up at me, and smiled a big contented smile. Then he asked, "Can we cuddle for a little bit first? I like to wake up slowly."

It was tempting, "Well, we still gotta get things going pretty quickly. I gotta get this truck around to the loading dock right away so I can have the ggaahhh unloaded soon as possible."

"Just five minutes," Brian begged, pulling me back into the warmth of the bed, and then crawling up on top of me, stretching his four foot long body out on top of me.

I wrapped my arms around Brian and hugged him. "Okay, but only five minutes 3; or we'll be eating ggaahhh until Christmas!"

"Yyuuucckk!" Brian laughed – and then he turned serious. "You're not mad at me are you, Pete?"

"Silly little kid," I said. "Why should I be?"

"Because of the butt fucking thing – I was thinking – and I've decided if you want to do that I'll try it again 3;" his voice trailed off.

"Brian," I said slowly, "I meant what I said about not forcing you to do anything that you do not want to do."

"Yeah, I know, but I also know how hard it is to stop once you start 3;"

"That's why we don't start anything without talking about it first – so neither of us gets an unpleasant surprise. Brian, there are a lot of messy adult details in a relationship like ours. The kind of details that kids really should not have to pay attention to yet, that is why the Federation has laws covering situations like this. And it's why there is such a thing as the Children's Bill of Rights."

Brian squirmed around and said: "Yeah, I learned about that in my psychobriefer class."

"And Article II has to do with cross-generational relationships," I said. "There's a part that says: I understand that my body is my own. No one has a right to tell me what I can and cannot do with my own body. That also means that no one can force you into anything you don't want to do. That would be rape."

"And you believe this?" Brian asked.

"Of course I do, it is part of what I promised when I took the Boy Lovers Oath. There is a part that says: I will never use force, either physical or emotional against a child; I will always express nothing but affection and respect for the child I am associated with."

I looked at Brian and he snuggled closer to me. "I love you, Pete," he said.

"And I love you, but we have to get started now 3;"

Brian and I helped each other get dressed, then I went to the front of the control cab and settled into the pilots couch. The whine of the fusion reactors bootstrap apu greeted me as I turned on the pre-ignition circuits and waited while the computer went through its post and began the digital ritual of bringing the 185 mw fusion reactor, which was the truck's main power plant, from parking stand-by to full load. The engineering christmas tree panel on the engineer's side overhead slowly began to have more and more green led indicators on it than amber and red, and within 30 seconds the trucks was ready for engine main-startup.

By this time Brian had come forward and flopped into the navigator's seat.

"Can I fly it?" Brian asked, nodding at the main flight controls of the Tomahawk.

"I dunno," I drawled. "Can you play vr-games?"

The youngster did a double-take at me, I think I had succeeded in surprising him.

"Of course!" Brian said proudly. "I'm an ace in Wing Commander xxxvii."

"That's good, it means you've already handled a standard Star Fleet control interconnect to the computer. Dream Walker's is virtually the same control lay out. Here take a look," and Brian came over to stand beside my couch as I explained the flight controls to him. "There's really nothing to it," I concluded. "It requires a good sense of timing, flawless 3d sense and a steady hand on the collective and cyclic."

"I'm ready!" Brian said excitedly.

"How about you watch me this time, and I'll start you on active flying once we're on the way to Deep Space Nine."

"Oh," Brian said, a bit disappointed, "okay." He settled into the Navigator's acceleration couch on the starboard side of the cockpit.

I reached up and hit the three engine arm/fire switches and the truck's nuclear-electric ion drive came explosively to life.

"Engine arm/fire switches," Brian said. "They control the initial generation of the Ion Drive's plasma flame."

"Yup," I agreed. As soon as the engine intermix ratio was flight grade, I eased back on the collective and pushed lightly but steadily on the port side foot pedal. The truck's antigrav pads responded by lifting a few meters off the concrete slab it had been parked on and drifting over the chainlink fence that separated the loading zone from the mall's main parking lot. The main lot was virtually deserted this early in the morning, so I turned to Brian and relented.

"No traffic," I said. "You can take it once around the mall parking. Slowly and no higher than ten meters."

"YEEEE-HHAAAAHH!!!" Brian shouted and grabbed the Navigator's secondary set of atmospheric maneuvering controls.

"Okay," I said, grinning at the little boy's enthusiasm. "The collective controls the pitch and strength of the antigrav pads; the cyclic is the countergrav, forward and aft thrusters and the rudder; the foot pedals are port and starboard thrusters 3; and remember action equals reaction and a little bit of thruster is a lot to a pseudo-mass, inertialess ship."

I had expected a bumpy ride as Brian handled the controls, but he was rock steady on both the collective and the foot pedals, rigidly holding the Dream Walker's antigrav pads to five meters above local terrain as he expertly used little puffs from the maneuvering thrusters to make the 32-meter Tomahawk truck slowly cruise around the perimeter of the parking lot.

"GREAT!" I shouted, every bit as excited as Brian was himself, "I'll have you getting your restricted usage licence by the time you're ten!"

"Think so?" Brian said dreamily.

"Of Course. Okay, take her up an over the back fence to the loading docks. We're looking for Dock #21 – that's the Klingon restaurant."

Brian floated the truck on its antigrav pads over the fence and then let it settle back down towards the ground. Dock #21 was easy enough to recognize. It was obvious that the Klingons were accustomed to be resupplied via craft like the Tomahawk – Dock #21 was arranged for easy parking and ease of access to either its starboard or aft cargo pod. The ggaahhh was in suspension vats for the trip in the rear cargo bay, and Brian did a very passable job of aligning our aft cargo bay hatch with the landing dock.

I sounded the Tomahawk's blast horn outside the Klingon Delicatessen where I was to deliver the ggaahhh and growled several choice Klinonee phrases into the Omnicomm. I was immediately answered by the proprietor who was very happy to see us.

Unloading the ggaahhh went faster than I expected. The Klingon proprietor's servitors were a unsavory mixture of galactic races, but among them were several Klingon-fusions who were sampling the boss's wares while he wasn't looking. From the amount of lip-smacking that was going on, I'd guess my boylover Klingon pal on Scythe III was raising a premium crop of ggaahhh 3;.

Well, to each their own, I guess.

Brian was outside the Dream Walker and to the aft watching the Klingon work crew unloading the ggaahhh, and to my surprise shouting words of advise and defamatory contempt in the rough battle-speak dialect of Klingonaase used by soldiers and lower classes of Klingon society. The Klingons themselves were amused at the small human boy shouting orders and insults in acceptable Klingonaase.

When the Klingon had finished unloading the ggaahhh and we had drunk a flagon of blood wine to seal the deal on the Klingon side; and gold pressed latinum had changed hands to seal the deal on my side, I made my farewells and brought the truck back to my assigned parking slot out by the mall's exterior perimeter fence.

With our treasury once again fat with latinum, I sent Brian on a foraging trip to the mall commissary to replenish our galley's stock of gourmet foods, beverages and goodies which were devilishly hard to get right out of a food replicator. I also had an ulterior motive, I wanted to do a little in depth investigation to try and find out some more about Brian's mom.

"Computer."

"lcars on line and ready."

"Access station files, keywords: Shimosuwa, personal logs, public data."

"Working 3; files located, 87 mb of public data."

"Download and save. Path = D:/SHIMOSUWA/auntee_grazelda."

"Working, time to completion is 00:00:49."

"OK." And so I waited for the 49 seconds it took to reveal all that was public about Ms. Shimosuwa. After lcars had completed the transfer, I brought up her bio-sheet first. It turned out that Brian's mom was a highly placed para-legal secretary for some hyperpower law firm on New Chicago; not a frumpy old house-frau or a beer-swilling junkie as I had imagined when I found out she was in favor of deep-sixing Brian. She had been posted here at starbase 288 because the tiny moon-sized planet also had extensive dylithium crystal deposits which several Federation mining conglomerates were mining; she was here to make certain that her firm's client was not being snookered by the evil competition.

The upshot was that she knew how to draw up transfer of custody papers on children either being released for adoption or foster care that would stand up in any court in the Federation or ancillary stellar power who recognized the Federation's Legal Code as being valid.

I took a look at the forms in the packet which Brian's mom had sent on the isolinear chip and began to fill them out, so that they would be ready. I was almost finished with my end of the paperwork by the time Brian returned with a loaded down antigrav cart piled high with goodies. While he took care of stowing these items, I finished up the forms.

"What're'ya doin'?" Brian asked as he plopped down into the chair across from me in the Dream Walker's ward room.

"I'm getting the last of these form to transfer custody done," I said looking up at my beautiful boy. "I think we can get this registered right here, if you want. The Courts should have a branch here on a starbase. But are you sure you want this? This is just one step away from being adopted, you know."

"Yes," Brian said seriously. "I'm sure."

I took a deep breath, "Okay," I said. "Computer."

"lcars active and on line."

"Search local directory, keyword: Terran Circuit Court, records."

"Located."

"Establish contact." Brian and I walked forward to the control cabin.

"Working," lcars said. The main screen on the instrument cluster between the pilot and navigator station glowed to life. "Connected."

On the screen was an older woman with an extremely stern countenance, "Court records," she said.

"I have a document to file with the court."

"Yes, sir. There is a 15 Stellar fee."

"I understand. Computer effect transfer."

"Thank you, sir. And the document you wish to register?"

"Computer, upload isolinear chip contents."

"Working," lcars intoned as the megabytes of data were transferred from the truck's main computer to the Court's download buffer.

"Yes," the records clerk said. "I see. Are you Pete Reynolds?"

"I am," I said, butterflies in my belly.

"And the boy I see behind you is Brian?"

"Yes 3; I am," Brian squeaked.

"Alright, these papers seem in order. Do you swear and/or affirm under penalty of perjury, that the data contained in these computer records are accurate and valid to the best of your knowledge?"

"I do."

"Transmit your right thumbprint, please."

I pressed my thumb against the computer's optical scanner and was rewarded a few seconds later by the whirr and click of the small hard copy printer under the pilot's couch.

"Thank you, Mr. Reynolds, I have transmitted your notarized documents to your computer. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

"No, thank you," I said and the clerk terminated the link.

I grinned and held up my thumb in the ages old sign of success.

"That's it?" Brian asked. "Am-am I your little boy now?"

"Yep, all signed, sealed and legal." I said.

Brian crawled into my lap and laid his head on my shoulder; I automatically put my arms around him and hugged him. We sat together there like that for a time before Brian asked:

"Now what?"

"Well," I began, "believe it or not, if you are going to go star wandering with me we have to get you outfitted correctly and safely. For example there is the question of vacuum armor in case we ever ran into something too big for the navigational deflectors to handle and we lost celss."

"Hmmn. I haddn't thought of that. Vacuum armor for kids must be pretty rare."

"Well, not really," I said. "You know the bigger Star Fleet ships all carry crew dependents, including kids, so they all have to have emergency equipment, but we'll probably have to go 'upstairs' to use the replicators of the main base complex to get it, I think."

"Wow! That means we're going into space, right?"

"Yep, that's a roger," I said and indicated the navigator's acceleration couch, "Git yer bonny li'l butt ov'r dare and strap in," I said in my best hill billy voice.

Brian laughed and scrambled over the mid-hump instrument cluster and wrapped himself in the acceleration harness, which quickly adapted to his small frame. I pulled my harness down over my shoulder and snapped the harness's stainless steel plug into the floor receptacle felt it tighten across my chest and shoulders.

I ran through the pre-flight checks quickly and fired up the ion-impulse drive. I turned my head to glance at Brian, "Navigator?" I said.

"All clear forward and up."

The flight computer agreed and I pulled back on the cyclic and opened the drive's throttles wide. Four gees of acceleration slammed us back against the couches as the ground dropped away quickly and we headed for the dome's exit portal 15,000 feet [4,500m] overhead. The Tomahawk shot through the last wisps of artificial atmosphere and then through the electrogaravitic forcefield that marked the outer boundary of the habitable area of planetoid Grunn B-761 [a], and into the vacuum of space, angling toward the starbase's orbital operations complex, still visible only as a tiny smudge of reflected sunlight some 1,000 kilometers [620 miles] away.

The great odyssey had begun, but little did I suspect then where it would eventually lead to and finally end.

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