Quaranteam Damaged Goods Ch 03

This is a story set in the Quaranteam Universe created by CorruptingPower. It is strongly recommended that you read at the very least the first half of the original work (and the earlier chapters) or it won't make sense. You should probably just read all his work and only come back when you're desperate for more.

My thanks to CorruptingPower for letting me play in his pool, and to the rest of the QT writers room for their input. Particularly The_Licentious_Laureate, BreakTheBar and AgathonWrites who has donated way too much of his time

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++++ Thurs 8th Oct 2020 ++++

I'm quite glad I started recording these diary entries, I've actually listened back to them to help me keep the last month straight in my head. Specifically, it's only been two weeks since Val arrived but it's been so eventful compared to my old solitary life that it feels much longer. Pixie's arrival was a shock to the system but it was eased by our previous relationship. Val has been something completely new to me and I've been so focused on her interactions with Pixie and my being a good partner to her that I haven't had time to process my own feelings about it. They've become some sort of combined entity in my head, "the girls" are the centre of my life now even when they're not in the room.

My third partner, Cynthia March, knows how to make one hell of an entrance. The Delphi notification system is slowly getting better; this time at least I knew her age as well as her name, but the bio section had a bunch of odd blank spaces. When I signed the paperwork and invited her in, the girls were both busy working in the office. They were still not getting along as well as I would have liked but they weren't actively fighting, and Val wanted to use my PC while her laptop was updating. Just as Pixie and I are beginning to get out from under the worst demands of work, Val's stress has gone through the roof. You would think that manufacturing the vaccine would be the hard part, but getting it into the veins of millions of survivors before they die is no mean feat. Val and the people she works with take every delay like it was a personal failure that had just cost more innocents their lives.

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She was wrapped up in what most non-medical folks had to use these days instead of the increasingly rare proper protective equipment, thick clothes that covered the whole body. In her case that was a wide brimmed hat pulled down low to meet a scarf wrapped around her neck, sunglasses, and a black facemask. A bulky long-sleeved raincoat that came down to somewhere near her ankles and black gloves left a total of about a square inch of her skin that I could see. I was taking it on faith, and a glimpse of a pair of high heels, that there was a woman under all that. She slipped past me into my living room while I was signing the paperwork and she went and stood at a distance not saying a word. I stepped outside to grab her suitcase and pulled it in as the Averna delivery people went back to their medical bus.

"Hi," I said as I closed the door, "I'm Steve". As I turned back towards her the scarf and mask were already on the floor. She simultaneously took off her sunglasses and hat and, with a practised flick straight from a shampoo commercial, she shook out a mane of deep red hair that fell to her shoulders. She was beautiful. A delicate, oval face with perfect features. Jade green eyes met mine with a look that I can only describe as smouldering.

"You," she paused as she pointedly looked me over, sizing me up like a piece of meat while she unbuttoned her coat, "can call me anything you want, but most people call me Sin." She put her arms back and rolled her shoulders, dropping the coat smoothly to the floor. I don't think my eyes literally popped out on cartoon stalks but it must have been a close thing. She was twenty four, about five foot six and had a tanned, mediterranean complexion. She wore a lacy, black and red basque, stockings and suspenders, the whole nine yards. Her matching knickers had a little red heart on the front, and it had to be a little one because there wasn't enough fabric for more than that. The heart matched a cascade of red cartoon heart tattoos on both arms from forearm to shoulder.

As she turned artfully to the side, the stockings perfectly highlighted her long legs and phenomenal, curvy body. The basque's plunging neckline barely contained her large breasts and pressed them together to create cleavage that never seemed to end. She effortlessly lifted one leg straight out to rest her high heeled foot on the back of the sofa like a ballerina using a practice bar and pulled off her gloves with her teeth while she let me take in the view. It was as if a lingerie model had popped straight out of a photo into my house. All the blood in my body was headed towards my cock so fast I wasn't in any position to think clearly, let alone speak.

"It's not every day you meet a man who's going to fuck you into a coma." Her accent was upper class London with an indefinable foreign inflection. She put her leg down and walked, no, prowled towards me. Forget lingerie model, there was an actual succubus in my living room. If her suitcase hadn't been against the back of my legs I might have backed away from the predatory look in her eyes. "Do you like it? I thought I'd make a little effort," she pressed herself against me and lifted one leg again, somehow caressing me with her thigh as she wrapped it around me. She took my hand and placed it firmly on her hip so that suddenly I was the one holding her against me. She used her other hand on the back of my head to pull my face close until our lips were just millimetres apart "...just for you," she breathed, and before I could respond she gently bit my lower lip.

Letting me go, the sex goddess slowly twirled as she stepped away, letting me get a good look from all angles. Stopping just within arm's reach and with her back to me, she bent at the waist, legs straight and spread slightly and pressed her palm to the floor. The pose showed off her flexibility and her fucking incredible arse as it was clearly intended to. My hands began to reach out for her shapely cheeks of their own accord. "You're so quiet. Don't you like your present?"

"He's in shock love," Pixie spoke up from the office doorway with a leer. "Although if you're not careful he's going to take your eye out with that boner." Neither of us had noticed the girls coming in but I think I had a pretty good excuse for that.

"Not something you see every day, that's for sure," Val was standing beside her. Her expression was unreadable, but I was having trouble tearing my eyes away from the floor show anyway. Sin straightened up, momentarily startled, but recovered quickly.

"Oh my, I didn't know there was going to be a crowd!" Hips swaying, she sashayed over to the new arrivals. "That's fine with me," she stood between them and turned back towards me. She rested an arm across Pixie's shoulders and put a hand on Val's back as she looked up at her. A move that put the shorter woman's face right next to her left breast and made Val look down at her where she couldn't fail to get an eyeful of that glorious cleavage. "I'm certainly not averse to a little... audience participation either."

Pixie was practically drooling but Sin didn't know about Val's body confidence issues and the move backfired a little as Val leaned away. Sin was hardly thrown off though, she came back over to me and put an arm around my neck. Draping herself over me she stood on tiptoes to touch her cheek to mine and whisper in my ear.

"Why don't you drag me off to the bedroom and make me yours? You can have anything you want after all. Don't you want to... plant your flag," she squeezed my bulging jeans "and claim your prize?" I don't remember moving them, but I had my hands on her back, feeling her skin along the edges of the lingerie. "What would Sir like me to do for him? Should I call you 'Sir'?" She licked her lips. "Perhaps it should be... 'Master'?"

That was probably what broke the spell. As much as my inner caveman wanted to snarl and drag her off to bed to do whatever it wanted, my inner critic had seniority and was screaming at me that I'm not better than her and I didn't deserve to be treated like I was. I'm nobody's dom and I doubt I ever will be, some things require a level of arrogance that I'm simply not capable of. I'm not the most perceptive guy in the world so maybe it was because the whole sex show had been so strong that I caught it when a millisecond of hesitation flashed in her eyes. Was that tiny tremble in the hand on my face from arousal or fear? Why would this bombshell be afraid of me?

"That sounds... great. Really great," I cleared my throat. It took all the willpower I had to let go of her body and take her hand instead. "and believe me I really,

really

want to take you up on that, but we should take a little time to talk first. Get to know each other while there's still time to make other arrangements if we need to." I led her over to the sofa and sat down. How the fuck I managed that without grabbing anything warm and soft is beyond me.

"You don't want me? You're turning me down?" her composure cracked and now she really did seem uncertain. "No, you can't. You have to. You're my best chance." She sat beside me and lunged towards me to kiss me, "I'm yours."

"It's not that," I had to firmly push her back. Light dawned in my lust-addled brain and I knew that it wasn't me she was afraid of, it was rejection. "I'm not saying no, trust me I'm not that strong, but you're not 'mine'."

"But you took them, didn't you?" She looked at Pixie and Val as they came to sit nearby. "Why not me?" She was visibly upset, a note of hysteria creeping into her voice.

"I'm going to pretend that didn't sound super judgmental and ask you to go back a bit," Val interrupted. "You called him your 'best chance'. Best chance for what?"

"To get in, of course." Sin looked at her like she was taking the piss. "If I can't make him want me there's only so many other options. If he sends me away, I'll have no choice at all." She seemed to be physically shrinking, no longer the larger-than-life goddess who had walked in just a minute or so ago. "Then what happens to me?"

"Stop a moment and calm down. No one is sending you away." It was obvious we were talking at cross purposes, but I couldn't figure out where these reactions were coming from. I held her hand and tried to get her to meet my eyes, but she kept looking away or down, anywhere but at me. "Treat me like I know nothing for a second and tell me exactly what it is that's going on here." She hesitated, but I waited patiently for her to answer.

"Guys like you are picking groups of girls to get vaccine protection." She seemed dejected, as if resigning herself to some fate I didn't understand. "To get the protection you need a guy to take you as one of his seven girls. There's only so many spots, but me and my friend Carly didn't pick the guy the computer said we should. We picked our alternates and if we don't get them then there might not be any spots left. You wouldn't regret taking me, you know." She leaned closer, pushing her impressive chest towards me again. "I meant it when I said you could have anything you wanted. Anything." When she turned it on like that, her voice just dripped with sex.

"Wow!" Pixie was stunned. "How the hell did anyone get this close to imprinting with such a skewed picture? When I got the jab there was a ton of info literature to wade through. Videos even."

"'Guys like me'? What does that mean?" Every time she spoke some new detail jumped out at me.

"You know... rich guys and powerful, connected guys... the kind that get to have their own... harems," she was fumbling for words. I got the feeling she was trying to find a way to make 'entitled arseholes' sound flattering.

"It's not like that, it isn't just up to me," I was being as gentle as I could, but I needed to put her right. "We all have to agree together if someone is a good fit for the team."

"Oh! Oh, of course," she brightened a little as she thought she understood what I wanted. "I've worked with women before too. I can make sure none of you regret taking me." That seductive vibe came back and hit me like a lightning bolt to the pants. "Do you want to watch us or join us?" She slid off the sofa onto her knees in front of where Pixie was sitting and leaned forwards running her hands up Pixie's legs. "I can do anything you ask me to... mistress."

"That's not what I meant..." I started.

"Well let's not be hasty," Pixie swallowed, staring down at the vision submissively kissing her on the thigh. "Maybe we should hear her out?"

"Not helpful Pix," I patted the sofa again to encourage Sin to sit back down. "Look. Somehow you've got a screwed up idea of what all this is about and we need to straighten things out. I'm not some bastard auditioning for a new fucktoy. They've brought you here because you picked me from a list, right? The algorithm thinks we might make good partners but it's up to us all, including you, if we go ahead with it. If you don't like us, you should still have time to go meet someone else from your matches list. You just need to be open and honest with us and we'll do the same."

"You won't take me!" She held her head in her hands. "You won't like me, and I'll have to go back and hope he'll still take me."

"Who is 'he'?" Val had been pretty quiet so far, but she had heard the same tone of despair that I had.

"The guy the computer said we should go to," Sin sniffed. "Ninety nine percent it said, but it was one of the sketchy guys that came to see us at the centre so Carly said we should take a chance on our alternates and hope they took us instead."

"Ninety nine?" Pixie was incredulous. "When we were testing that system, I didn't get a ninety nine percent match with myself, let alone with some rando. You and your friend both got the same guy, at ninety nine percent, and you'd already met him?" Sin nodded.

"He was some kind of driver for the lawyer who came to make us sign the anti-disclosure forms. They said if we signed, we'd have a chance to get vaccinated and if we didn't, we'd get locked up and probably die with everyone else. This guy stood in the doorway leering at us the whole time he was there, like he was one of the bouncers at the shittier sort of clubs we used to work. The kind that always thought they were entitled to something from us."

"That is

not

good," Pixie looked at me meaningfully.

"Ergh, you think we've got a real red case, don't you?" I wasn't really asking, just mentally processing the possibilities myself. Something was certainly screwy.

"Red or black," she said. After what she said about this bouncer guy there's no way it's blue." I could almost see the wheels turning behind Pixie's eyes.

"Pretend some of us aren't in on your geek thing," Val said. "What's a red case?"

"It's a threat assessment system we came up with at work," Pixie explained. "If you think about it for too long, what they're doing with this partnering process is bloody terrifying. They take single women and send them into positions of extreme vulnerability with men they don't know, and there is literally no way of ever getting away from it if it all goes tits-up. It must have occurred to you that our sweet, doting man over there," she waved at me, "could force either of us to do literally anything he wanted just by denying us sex until we were desperate enough. Sorry sweetie, you're just my token male in the room." She stuck her tongue out at me, and I couldn't help but smile despite the grossness of the topic.

"It's about sex and power," I chipped in, "so the potential for abuse of the system has been a constant agenda point in every work meeting we've had since the project started."

"The various Delphi teams have all put a ton of work into analysis and brainstorming sessions trying to identify flaws and potential loopholes," Pixie continued. "Looking for ways we could spot anything fishy in the all-knowing algorithm's output, or to prove and undo shenanigans after they happened. To make it easier to talk about, we have a bunch of colour coded case studies. Nine different ideas about how it could go wrong that we use to try to plug any holes. For example, purple is a backdoor in the algorithm code itself, something malicious the original American devs left in, but no-one really believes that's likely. Blue is an education problem, either patients getting bad information or just not reading what they're given. Since our web portal work is the public facing front line, we mostly worry about a black case. That's an external digital hack. We've put a lot of late nights into making sure that it isn't possible to breach our security and, if it somehow happened anyway, we've got three different auditing and monitoring systems that would set off alarm bells."

"So what's a red case?" Val asked as Pixie got up and fetched her phone from the office.

"A red case is much scarier, harder to defend against and it just has to be what we've got here. It means someone inside Delphi, Averna or the MOD has access to something they shouldn't have. Not only has someone manipulated match reports to put this guy at the top of her list, which shouldn't be possible, but they must have somehow influenced the educational material she was shown to make her believe this was some rich-guy-harem thing she would have to compete to get into. This fucker's tried to terrify her into accepting the bad match without stopping to question it. Sin... I'm guessing that's not your real name?" she prompted.

"It's Cynthia. Cynthia March." She was wide-eyed and panicky as the focus of the conversation changed and left her behind somewhat. I held her hand to try to keep her anchored. "I used to dance under the name 'Original Sin', so all my friends just call me Sin. I know it's not actually remotely original, but clients don't really want originality. A bit of cheesiness is like an ice breaker."

"Well, we are definitely coming back to that 'dance' comment in a minute, but first," Pixie found a number in her contacts. "Do you remember the guy's name? What he looked like?"

"Err. Higgins or Hitchens, I think? Definitely began with an H. Bodybuilder looking guy, shaved head, suit, creepy and threatening."

"I'm going to ask the boss to order an audit report and kick off the data analysis process. Sarge, can you try any contacts you've got at Averna and see if we can pause this guy getting any more partners until we're done? Something like this could derail the vax rollout completely if it's not stopped." Pixie and Val left us alone to make their calls.

"So... err..." I tried to fill the awkward silence. Sin was almost hyperventilating now and I had to get her attention. "If he was ninety nine percent, what did you and I rate?"

"Forty six," she said, "but you were the next best."

"Well that's definitely not right either. I've never seen a set of matches come out that heavily slanted before." I turned to the office and shouted, "Pix? Ask them for rush rematches for both Sin and her friend. Make sure you remind them that she's already been vaxxed so we need it fast." She waved back at me from the office doorway, still on the phone. "What err... what do you do for work? You mentioned dancing... it sounded like maybe you were a stripper?"

"I was," she said quietly and screwed her eyes shut, "and an escort." When I didn't immediately respond she opened one eye and looked at me hopefully. "Not any more though, I got out of that life. It was all Sean's idea, he was our boyfriend and we needed him but he wasn't a good guy and we left London to get away. I'm clean too! We got tested at the clinic and it all came back negative!" Her nerves were shot and she was babbling.