Tribute: Captives of Kazir

by Sophie Kisker

  Voices cried out in protest, much louder this time. Suddenly, there was total silence, even as people strained to talk. The voice paused until they gave up.

  “You can protest all you want, but we know you almost better than you know yourselves. You may not show a submissive personality to the world, but it resides within you. Therefore, we made an arrangement with your captain. In return for a place to start over, he would supply us with the humans who would make the best slaves. This decision is final, and there is no appeal.”

  Even if they had been allowed speech, Mena wasn’t sure the shock of what they’d just heard wouldn’t have rendered them speechless, anyway.

  The ship began to rumble as white streaks raced by the portholes, and they entered the atmosphere.

  Mena’s hand grabbed Addy’s, and she screwed her eyes shut as she struggled to grasp that her whole life had just changed. She’d probably never get the home and family she’d traveled across the galaxy to have.

  The Hope II had left Earth just as it fell apart. The five thousand people had been secretly selected in the years before, with the numbers heavily weighted toward older teens and young adults, who would be the right age to reproduce when they arrived.

  Mena had been fifteen. The grief of leaving her family behind had faded over the years. Even with the additional five years on board, she couldn’t remember a time in her life she’d been so happy and part of something hopeful.

  A gentle bump and the hiss of escaping air told her they’d arrived.

  But the planet was occupied, and her future wasn’t as part of a new beginning for her people, but as a slave to an alien.

  She should have stayed on Earth.

  2

  Mik'kal

  Mik'kal prided himself on remaining calm under most circumstances, but when he was summoned to Dirac Ortan’s office yesterday, he lost that calm within moments.

  “A human slave?” Mik'kal roared. “No fucking way! I have no time and even less interest in coddling a human. In case you didn’t know, I voted to blast them out of the sky before they arrived.”

  The Dirac regarded him across the large translucent desk in his enormous round office. It was perched at the top of the Senate building, with windows placed between elaborate pillars, and it overlooked the entire city.

  “No, Mik'kal, your vote was secret. That surprises me, knowing you worked on the plan to relocate them to Kalnų Sala.”

  “I worked on it so that if the worst-case scenario happened, which it did, at least I knew they’d be isolated there and not allowed to infect our way of life.”

  “What do you hate about them so much?” The Dirac settled back in his chair, looking patient and reasonable, which made Mik'kal angrier.

  “They fight and murder each other. We Kaziri accept that we are violent and must have outlets for our violence, but it’s honorable. It’s achieved in battle, by winning games of skill, or by besting ourselves. When we let it out, our nirza is calm, and our society flourishes. But humans—they deny they have a need for violence, even as they murder each other! We saw their entertainment that celebrated uncontrolled and irrational brutality. We read reports of the cruelty against each other on their planet. They destroyed themselves. They are like children with a dangerous toy. Letting their violence out does nothing to improve them as a species.”

  “Is that all?” the Dirac asked, his eyebrow raised.

  “No. They betrayed the values they claim to hold by securing safety for some at the expense of others.”

  “This is the angriest I’ve ever seen you.”

  “I accept my violence, and I know how to deal with it. I have control of it. They don’t.”

  “Mik'kal, do you think perhaps the violence you’re feeling is precisely the reason you need a human? You’re not as calm inside as you pretend to be. Your anger is eating you up, the same way the anger is mounting in our people.”

  “I don’t agree that anger is increasing, sir. I think we’re doing well. As for me, when I need to let my nirza out, I punch things, not real people. It works fine.”

  “But lately, not even punching things has calmed you. I think the challenge of owning and training a human slave might. That isn’t unusual, you know. It’s just that slaves have become so much less common. Mik'kal, you know how much I trust you, and I need you calm and focused. When those in charge are calm, the calmness radiates to the population.”

  The Dirac sounded placating and reasonable, but Mik'kal knew there was a dark reality behind the words. The Dirac was a powerful man. He wasn’t offering the slave as a gift. Once Mik'kal had taken possession of something the Dirac had pressed upon him, the Dirac would see Mik'kal as being in his debt. He started to refuse again, but the Dirac held up his hand.

  “That’s why I am officially informing you that you will be given a human slave when they are auctioned. You may choose her if you want, or she will be selected for you.”

  Mik'kal stared at the other man, knowing he had few options. They were the same age, had been childhood friends, and were both two of the youngest senators ever elected. But Dirac Ortan’s rise to become the leader of the most powerful party in Kaziri history had been astonishingly rapid. Rumors of ruthlessness swirled around him like a mist. To defy him was to commit political suicide, or worse, even for a senator as high up as Mik'kal.

  Mik'kal held his anger in check long enough to stand and give a curt nod.

  “I serve Dirac Ortan.” Without waiting for dismissal, he turned and walked out, an action most others would never dream of doing without permission. Mik'kal, though, knew better than to linger with the foul mood he was in.

  “And the Dirac is grateful—” The bang of the closing door cut off the rest of the response.

  He walked back to his senatorial apartments, almost a kilometer away. His anger hadn’t abated when he got there, so he changed into a battle uniform—a grey featureless tunic and pants made of almost indestructible protective fabric—and grabbed the ceremonial sword off the wall that he’d been given when elected a senator for the first time. He called out to his datapad to summon transportation.

  When he arrived at the BattleSim field, he saw that the battle to be fought today was a re-creation of the final battle between his people and the alien Tana race. Though the real battle outcome was settled history, a BattleSim could be won by either side.

  The fighting had been going on for a while, with people joining and leaving as they had time. Mik'kal checked in and was assigned to be a Kaziri. He could have been assigned to be Tana, but he always found it easier to ‘kill’ beings who looked different and not like his next-door neighbor. As he emerged from the check-in building, he touched the button on his collar that activated a protective head shield and simulator. In his display, the beings that swarmed up the rocks and toward him abruptly changed into Tana, upright creatures with tentacles for arms and a fearsomely thick layer of scales that made them very hard to kill, even with blasters.

  Using a sword meant he’d need to get closer than usual to deliver a killing blow, but with the mood he was in, that was fine by him. He charged the nearest dark green alien, who had picked that moment to look away and couldn’t react in time. A horizontal slice through the air caught the alien at his only vulnerable point, where his head and torso joined, separating the two and sending the head flying through the air. The alien crumpled to the ground, the bluish blood spurting onto the yellow rock.

  A moment later, the alien vanished. He wasn’t really dead, nor was he an alien. He was another player like Mik'kal, well-protected by his own simulator. When Mik'kal had swung the sword, the force field around his head had absorbed the blow, merely knocking the player to the ground. While Mik'kal’s display showed a severed head, the other player’s head was very much still attached, and once he registered as dead, he vanished in Mik'kal’s display and was free to return to the staging area to be reassigned.

  Mik'kal fought until he was panting and dripping with sweat. He was killed
once, something that didn’t happen often, but he was unusually distracted today. By the time he checked out and summoned a transport to go home, he was exhausted. His nirza, though, was still restless.

  He padded into his expansive bathing room, stepping down into the warm pool of water. Settling on the seat, he let his head fall back and tried to relax.

  He knew he’d overreacted to what the Dirac had said, but the Dirac knew nothing about Mik'kal’s Adenję Trials so long ago. He didn’t know about the darkness inside Mik'kal that had risen to the surface that week and how long he wrestled with it for control of his mind. Nor did he know how much Mik'kal feared letting the darkness out, even a little. Mik'kal would never share that with anyone, forever keeping it locked away in his mind.

  He wondered what favor he would owe the man. He was as close as a person could get to the Dirac, both personally and professionally, and he generally supported the policies of their party, but the rumors of the methods to accomplish those policies had bothered him for a while. If Dirac Ortan really had done what the whispers said, he wasn’t much different from the humans Mik'kal scorned. But the proof was nowhere to be found.

  So much for relaxing. He gave up, opening his eyes and catching sight of the metal sculpture to one side of the pool. A large water pipe, fashioned to look like the trunk of a tree, rose straight up. Toward the top, smaller pipes extended out over the bath, fashioned to look like limbs and branches. Each branch would spray water if he desired to stand instead of sit. Native Kaziri loved bathing, and almost every home had a room like this, some with tree sculptures, and others with abstract designs or even mythical beasts with tentacles that hung out over the water.

  A woman—a human woman—stood under the tree, arms tied above her head to one of the branches, crying as he spanked her soft skin…

  His cock was in his hand without conscious thought. Groaning as he fisted its length, the cries of the woman in his mind spurred him to rub faster, tighter. He hadn’t had a fantasy this overwhelming since he’d purposefully repressed them after his Trials.

  She’d done nothing to deserve the spanking. He merely enjoyed placing stripes of dark pink and crimson across her unmarked flesh, relishing the sound of her whimpers turning to cries, and then to shrieks.

  When he was done spanking her, he would plunge his cock into her tightest channel, pumping furiously until he spilled his seed deep within. His knot would expand, locking her to him, her struggles only increasing the pain.

  A groan erupted from his depths and grew to a bellow as thick ropes of cum shot into the water. He continued to stroke until, at last, he fell back against the side of the pool, idly watching the water current sweep the evidence of his fantasy into the outflow pipe and away.

  He awoke later, his hand still on his soft cock. Heedless of the trail of water, he stepped out of the pool and across the floor, back into his bedroom, where he almost fell onto the big bed. As he let himself slip away, he had the brief thought that his nirza was unusually calm.

  3

  Mena

  Sounds registered in Mena’s brain first—murmuring voices, the sound of something being set down heavily with a bang, a muffled cry from a distance. Then smells intruded, sharp and disinfectant-y. She was horizontal on something… not hard. Her mind tried to focus, to find a pattern to what her senses were telling her, but she couldn’t gather up the swirls of thought to organize them.

  She finally forced her eyes open. The room was white, all white, and bright. She squinted, noticing the figures with their backs turned, bent over a counter and talking quietly.

  A beep sounded, and the two figures turned. One of them frowned and approached. It was tall, strangely thin, and light green, and Mena was sure she was dreaming. She blinked and tried to refocus, hoping this illusion would resolve into reality.

  “Hello, Mena. I’m Dr. Steris.” The voice was soft, reminding Mena of wind chimes in a gentle breeze. “I know your thoughts are all mixed up right now. You aren’t supposed to be awake yet.”

  The doctor nodded to the other figure, who was also tall and green, but with broader, more angular features. She blinked again and tried to will them into becoming the human shapes she understood.

  It wasn’t working. The broader one pulled her wrists over her head, and before she could react, they were secured tight. Something wasn’t right. Fear washed through her muddled thoughts. This wasn’t like when Daniel—

  Daniel! Her mind snapped back into place and everything came flooding back. She pulled on the restraints.

  “Nooo! Stop! Let me go!” She rolled her hips back and forth under the sheet in an attempt to get free.

  “Mena! Stop it!” The gentle voice that had greeted her was gone, replaced by something much harsher.

  Mena paused in her struggles to glare up.

  “You can’t do this. I don’t want to be a slave! Let me go!”

  “Mena, I’m familiar with every vid you’ve watched and every book you’ve read for the last ten solars. You’ve fantasized about being owned your entire adult life. I even know how hard Daniel spanked you last week because he wrote about it in his shipboard journal, and I read it.”

  “That was private! You had no right! And anything we did together was consensual. This is not!”

  “No, Mena, this is not. And there won’t be anything consensual about your life from now on. I’m sorry.” The alien’s voice softened. “My mother was a slave, taken in a war fought when she was a child. She adapted. You will, too.”

  “No!” Mena aimed a kick in the doctor’s direction, narrowly missing. The doctor nodded to the other alien, who grabbed the sheet and yanked it off the bed, leaving Mena naked on the table.

  The male—she assigned a gender because she was too distraught to contemplate nuances, and he looked stronger—pulled up a strap from each side of the table and joined them over her waist, where they promptly tightened and stopped her hips from rolling. He picked up something from a nearby table and Mena didn’t realize what it was until it came arcing through the air to snap against her nipple. She screamed.

  “I didn’t want to punish you quite yet.” The doctor’s softer, higher voice, which sounded female to mena, held a note of regret. “But I have to insist on obedience, even if you are confused and scared.” She nodded to the male, and the narrow strap landed hard on Mena’s other nipple.

  Mena screeched in rage and pain as the strap fell twice more. She hardly noticed when the doctor pushed her legs apart and slipped long, slender fingers into her folds.

  “Look.”

  Still gasping, Mena forced her eyes open. The doctor held out one of her fingers. A droplet formed on the tip and fell off to land on Mena’s stomach.

  “You are terrified, angry, and in pain, yet you are soaking wet. You are exactly the kind of slave we’re looking for.”

  “Nooo!!” Mena cried out.

  “Now, there’s a lot more I need to do, so I’m going to help you relax again.” She pressed an object to Mena’s arm.

  “Don’t touch me! You have no…”

  Her words trailed away as she forgot what she was angry about and could no longer speak or hold thoughts together. She floated as the doctor worked, watching her insert things and call out numbers. When the doctor forced an orgasm from her body she saw herself spasm, but it was as though she were watching another person.

  Pressure and pain in her tightest hole brought consciousness closer again, but then she felt a touch on her clit and she floated away once more, deeper, into a quiet and peace she somehow understood would be the last one for a while.

  When she woke again, her head was raised, her arms were by her side, and she was once more covered with a sheet. The green doctor handed her a cup.

  “It’s just water. Drink.”

  Mena ignored the instruction. “You’re an alien.”

  The doctor closed her eyes and made a movement with her lips that looked like a fish’s mouth opening. Mena was sure it was a chuckle, though she di
dn’t know how she knew. Mena didn’t feel like laughing.

  “Well, we would say that you are the aliens.”

  “Are you female?”

  “I am right now. When my body is receptive to carrying a baby, I become softer and rounder. My voice rises, and my breasts enlarge. When I pass out of that cycle, my muscles return, my breasts go away, and I’m stronger. Niola, over there,”—she nodded at the other alien—“can impregnate a female now, but in another few lunars will be the one ready to carry the baby.”

  “Are you all green?”

  There was that expression again.

  “No. Kazir is part of the Allied Worlds, so there are many species who call this planet home. Native Kaziri—the people who have lived here for a long time—are almost like you but have patterns across their skin that are the remnants of scales they had many millennia ago. And they have four fingers and four toes. My species—the Aldanna—are taller, green, and have three fingers and no toes.”

  “How do I understand you?”

  “Feel behind your head, where your hair meets your neck.”

  She touched a slightly tender bump. “A translator?” If these aliens were as advanced as they claimed, of course they’d have something like this. Strangely, having something planted inside her body didn’t bother her.

  “Yes,” the doctor confirmed. “Now, drink.”

  Mena drank the water in several big gulps, suddenly thirsty and grateful for the coolness. And now, she had to ask the question she’d been avoiding. She closed her eyes because it was easier to ask something so personal when she couldn’t see the person she was asking.

  “What did you do to me when I was asleep?”

  “I was taking a series of measurements. How far your tissues could stretch before pain, how far beyond that until they were in danger of being torn.”

  “Why?”

  “Male appendages come in many sizes. We needed to know what sizes your body could accommodate.”