The twelve lower-ranked women - personal assistants, teachers, chaperones and secretaries - had already been assimilated into the crew. That was different, however; they had ultimately been given unwavering and uncompromising orders from their young mistresses to cooperate. The girls weren't stupid and could see perfectly well that they were safer with me running the show. And I needed the dozen extra head-count on my staff, partly because there were plenty of unskilled semi-technical jobs they could perform and partly due to the fact that I'd have had a mutiny on my hands. Delimiter implants or no, there would have been trouble for me if the hundred or so thugs now under my command didn't have access to the women on board.

On the prison ship's voyages, the spacemen's main entertainment and virtually the only perk of a tedious and underpaid trip had been derived from the fact that the owners turned a blind eye to the abuse of the female transportees. As long as they were still fit to be sold off as workers, slaves or prositutes when the ship reached the penal colonies, nobody in the corporation cared what transpired in transit. I never lived in an ivory tower while I was on Earth, like so many good citizens of the empire: I'm a conscientious student of human nature, I know what makes people tick and how much unpleasantness sometimes resides under the surface. Not that it prepared me for what happened on the first couple of weeks of that voyage...

The moment the Guardsmen had left after escorting us out of Earth's territorial space, the women had become fair game. We were all lined up in the hold and the names of the female prisoners were called out. Perhaps ten to fifteen per cent of the total of close on two thousand deportees. One by one they were called up onto a low podium by the bulkhead, from where all the events were being recorded by a couple of audio-video drones and projected up onto the high bulkhead wall above. There they were made to strip naked; only the first one or two dared refuse - after that it was patently obvious that there were plenty of warders eager and ready to do the job, with or without a few zaps of the neural whips as a most painful reminder. The younger and prettier ones were segregated off and given a bright yellow armband to wear. About half the remainder received a green one.
I don't think many of the inmates can have expected what followed. It certainly frightened me, driving home how little we mattered and how totally we were in the power of these slavers. An older man was also called up. The first mate told us that according to his records, this man had a heart condition giving him not more than three years to live, which meant that it would cost more to feed and transport him than the company would get at their destination. "This is also, incidentally," he said to the mass of prisoners, "what happens when people break the rules." He turned the zapper up to full, casually pointed it at the grey-haired man's chest and fired. Five seconds later the old guy was dead.
The captain gestured that the body should be carried away, and then went over to the group of naked women wearing the yellow armbands. Wordlessly, he selected a petite honey-blonde girl with large breasts and shaved pubic hair and led her to the middle of the rostrum floor. Almost exactly the spot where the execution had taken place. She was made to lie down on her back and spread herself; there were one or two whistles and cat-calls from the inmates as the pre-programmed drones zoomed in on the view and a shot of her pussy suddenly filled the twelve-meter square wall projection. But not many: like the killing a minute earlier, the act of violation was designed to shock and scare us rather than provide pornographic titillation. The captain himself raped her first, followed by his senior commanders.
Not a word was spoken until they were finished, after which the captain explained what he termed the 'house rules'. The instructions were simple: the yellows were reserved for the use of the officers and the captain, the greens were also designated for the crew and the warders, and the rest had to fend for themselves for six weeks against not only the ship's management and personnel but also their fellow inmates. Other than where restricted by the armbands, the guards and crew could in their off-duty hours do as they chose with any prisoner. Male or female, singly or in groups, privately or in public on the podium in the cargo hold. As long as the final resale value wasn't affected, no-one cared.

So, given the crewmen's expectations and attitudes, it had taken a lot of hard arguing and negotiation to come to any arrangement at all. During the talking I found myself as intermediary, with the noble ladies on one side and the ship's officers on the other. The former tried at first to stand up for their lower-ranked women (but don't forget that rank was relative, of course: those were court employees who had themselves all been far higher in the hierarchy than the mere grunts and teckies who crewed a civilian starship). Whereas the latter would naturally have loved to be let loose on the highborns and violate them as well as their servants. The risk was quite clearly that if I took no steps to control and manage the women's sexual favours, it might degenerate into violence with even less desirable outcomes. We finally ended up with a rota system, in which each of the twelve would accept one man each night, consensually in private and with no violence and no harrassment outside of the agreement. The key to getting the officers to accept it was an additional rule that the junior officers would come up on the rota twice as often as normal crew, and the seniors three times.
I personally was reluctant to share women with the barbarians who crewed my ship, not wanting to have my lack of expertise in violent rape compared with theirs (or my reluctance exposed, more to the point). Nor, despite our medical facilities on board, did I fancy risking any esoteric social diseases coming my way. The crew unfortunately immediately decided that my non-participation meant I was homosexual and the lack of respect in which they held me began to plumb new depths; to my surprise the High Princess herself brought that up in one of our one-on-one discussions, along with a solution. "Droit de seigneur", she called it. I placed myself on the top of each woman's rota for the first couple of days and nights, and after that they went into general service. It made little difference to the crew - in fact, I think they were surprised I wasn't nearly as autocratic in my demands as their former captain would have been - and the unfortunate women themselves were if anything relieved to have their new role broken in relatively gently.

That meant that for the best part of a month as we fled the pursuing navies, I was in the unaccustomed position of having a different highly attractive woman in my bed every other night. Any and all of them far superior specimens both in manners and looks, intelligence and cultural knowledge to any of the half a dozen citizens who had been contracted to me in the past. I mean, I had been a well-paid professional scientist in a big-name industrial corporation and so I had done allright; None of my partners were ever ugly - I knew well enough what a pretty girl looked like in the nude and how to keep her happy. But these women had been courtesans for the nobility and highborns, selected not only for the necessary social skills and training, but also at least partly for their looks in the expectation that the youngs dukes and princes might avail themselves of their services; on the part of the women in question, the hope was presumably that they might be rewarded with a brief marriage contract from one of the young lords, or possibly even a permit to bear a child.
It was a revelation for me: a succession of desirable females, the stuff wet dreams had been the made of in the past, appearing in my quarters for sex like some cheap hooker ordered up from the seedy districts. And I didn't even have to spend ages chatting them up and being nice to them. It was simple and unfettered and businesslike.
Well, after the first one anyway.
I was quite nervous as I led her off from the bar to my quarters. A couple of the crew, don't ask me who, whistled and jeered and called out after her. "Give her one from me too." A wolf-whistle. "Teach the snooty bitch a lesson." Obscene gestures. And so forth.
Her name was Olivia, I had learned, and she was a dance instructor. A voluptuous redhead who was absolutely terrified of me and clearly expected some kind of savage mishandling. But I don't get off on that kind of thing. Anyway, this was the first time I'd gotten laid in six months and she was easily the sexiest woman I'd ever been with. I wasn't interested in hurting her, just giving her a good rogering. So once we were safe in the privacy of my quarters, I politely asked her to strip for me, barely able to believe my good fortune when she did just that. Not that there was any desire or lust or sexuality in it: just a clinical exposure of pale soft skin, a splendid firm-breasted figure, a neatly trimmed auburn triangle at her crotch and a gynaecologically emotionless display of her genitalia. Once I could finally tear my eyes off the lovely torso laid out before me spreadeagled on my bed, it took just one look in the woman's tearful green eyes so see how petrified she was. I threw her a house-coat, poured us each a scotch, and sat down next to her with an arm round her shoulders. I let her put on a comedy show for half an hour, at the end of which she gave me an uncertain but genuine smile and then an experimental kiss, before permitting the white dressing-gown to slide sensually from her shoulders and happily letting me take her as I pleased.

All went well after that. Olivia presumably passed the word on to the others that there was nothing nasty to fear. They would even end up sometimes pleading to be allowed to stay on with me, instead of being passed on to the pirate crew.
I confess that it was with some regret that I saw the last of them leave my bedroom three or four weeks later.