Scavenger barter.

"I'm sure we can come to an agreement." said Elias with a smile.

"How so? You can't use the only thing that I have to pay you with. And we have nothing to trade for your services. Unless you would be ready to offer them for free..."

"Let's stay civil please. I'm a businessman like you. You know very well that if you start to give gifts to people you can't make any money. I have expenses and fixed costs you know. The hypercom fees, the fuel used to get here, the delays in my operation that is caused by the situation, all of these add up. As per the FPA charters I'm required if requested to take stranded spacers on board and let them go the next time I reach port, you would be liable for the various living expenses on board. Use of coms or towing come at a premium," he explained.

"I get it, but that leaves us at square one."

"On the contrary, you have to think different. I have a service that is in high demand due to local scarcity and you have a good that is of very low value to you, we can do some business together."

"I can't possibly give you the ship, it's the property of the Group," mumbled the administrator.

"I don't mean the ship, I'm talking about her!" Elias pointed at the naked maid.

"The i-maid45? Don't be ridiculous, this an advanced piece of technology. It's brand new and the retail price is of 15000 reward points!"

"Don't try this with me. First it's second hand, not brand new. It's been tampered with, so it will cost you a fortune to refurbish it for resale. And you will never be able to resell it at retail price. There's also the issue of the history. Who will buy a maid, to take care of their house and children that has been used for that!" Elias said, trying to play on the stigma of reselling a non sexual object that had been used for sex, should hit a chord with them if they were ready to enslave someone for that.

"Even then. There are regulations, it's proprietary tech that we can't give to outsiders. You're not a registered user, you don't have an account!"

"Confirm this for me. The girl used to create this technologic marvel has to be officially registered as a ****? Otherwise you couldn't sell her. The FPA are pretty lax on some stuff, they are not like the United Terran Directorate, but they still crack down on illegal slavery operations."

"She was indeed a **** before processing."

"So the deed for ownership of the i-maid45 includes the one for the girl. You repo the unit, use the commands to put her to sleep. We remove the tech you don't want me to have. Then you write her off as too damaged for refurbishment. You sell her for scrap to a scavenger for 2500 credits, which I will then bill you for the transmission. End of the line, your message is sent, you didn't sell restricted tech, I own the girl and I have a nice legal bill of sale plus the deed for her. Ain't that great?"

"Didn't you say 1000 earlier? And can something like this really work? The girl will be useless if we remove the tech!" the man sounded alarmed but did not reject the offer so far. Elias often had to negotiate hard, either to scrounge a few more credits on a deal or convince mobsters that he was worth more alive than dead.

"I said 1000 thinking that was as much as I could get when I thought you had some money. We're past that. You don't want your bosses to think you sold it dirt cheap and having my services be that expensive will give credence about why you had no other choice than to sell it. And for me having a bill of sale will a reasonable price will make it look less suspicious. It's the best offer you'll get. Think about it, if you offload her to me you'll even save on life support and food while you wait for the ship your firm will send. Everybody wins." While negotiating he had been typing on the holographic interface for his wrist mounted computer. Satisfied with his work he sent 2 files to the ship's computer on the same channel he used to communicate before.

"What are those?" asked Tim, displaying both documents on the wall.

"Bill of sale from you to me of the organic component of a scrapped i-maid45 for 2500 credits, you'll have to sign it and join the deed for the **** contract of the girl. Second one is an invoice for emergency, out of operator range hypercom messaging to the Cupertino colony with delivery receipt and relay of the reply if it arrives within 24h of sending it. Let's shake on it and get to work. Get whatever message you already tried to sent, update it with the new situation, join the 2 bills, I'll add my contact info for the reply when I sent it." Corporate drones love paper trails. The modified message were quickly ready and sent.

There was still the issue of scraping the maid and getting her on his ship. Thankfully he always had salvage bags on him. They kinda looked like body bags and were designed to be able to be used as one. They were rated for void exposure and short thermal and radiation isolation. A simple rebreather could be clipped inside and connected to someone else's suit on the outside to transport wounded people or those with breached suits over short voidwalks to the safety of a ship or station.

After receiving the delivery receipt, the administrator made the maid lay down in a bag and after putting her to sleep he begrudgingly disabled the various items she was wearing. The high technology was some bad joke. The ear piece was a regular com implant, just one of their proprietary design, removing it revealed some standard ports alongside the one that were used by their device. The girl wasn't an Intoshi, they probably had some sort of way to buy slaves on the outside if they were mass producing these. The collar was a compliance collar, like one could find on most slaves that were not born slaves (those were usually implanted with chips at birth). The nipple pieces seemed to have no other use than to be decorative, stop people from playing with them and probably justify having the girl around without clothes on. The one bellow had a similar function and was held in place by a long tube that formed an inflatable ball at the end and some sort of suction device.

Finally totally naked, Elias took a closer look at her. She was a not a tall and slim supermodel, but a short, comely girl with massive tits and a beautiful ass. If it ended well she would probably be the best piece of salvage from his short career, for so many reasons.

Rebreather in place, bag closed and air tube clipped in place, he dragged her to the airlock and then flew over the short gap between the two ships. He had to be quick, he was well within the length of time the bag could protect her from the void, but he didn't want her to wake up in the dark in a bag floating weightless.

Once inside he opened a bit of the bag and carried her to a bed. Not his own of course. His cabin was less than clean and a bit cluttered. The small ship he grew up in had two cabins, the main one for the captain and another for the crew that once had bunk beds for 6 people. It had been transformed into his room when he was a child with a single medium size bed. It had been cleaned when Elias moved to the main one after his dad passed away and had not been touched since.
As she slept there was a serene expression on her face, rather than the **** neutral face imposed by the compliance collar. He had put a cover on her and she had reflexively snuggled herself into it in her sleep, rolling on her side in a way that made her beautifully shaped ass peak from under the covers.

He informed the other ship that he was going to move to a nearby asteroid while waiting for the reply from Cupertino but would remain in com range.

Now all that remained to be seen was how the girl would react when waking up. He had some spare com implants on board but he could not get a new compliance collar before getting to port on a station, days from now.