Sarai

by Jarli Grey

  He had a good idea where that food would be coming from, knew the queens gathering would spell the end of his world. He thought of the thousands of Zill readying themselves for the coming attack. He thought of the billions of lives that were shortly going to be lost.

  “Bram,” Tig stuck his head around the door and said angrily, “he didn’t need to know that.”

  Tig was wrong, Jamie knew. Even if he wished he could unhear it, he needed to know it.

  Bram wiped his face with a warm cloth and was helping him to stand again when Jamie heard the sound of someone else coming into the bedroom. He nodded his thanks at Bram and then staggered a little, his knees dipping uncertainly.

  Then Alekyn was there, lifting him into his arms. Jamie was too drained to resist or to stand on his anger. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he mumbled into his mate’s chest. A rumbling answered him and a gentle hand soothed his back.

  “Shock, dearest, but it all be well, Jamie,” Alekyn’s deep voice comforted him. “I am here now and all will be well.”

  He laid Jamie down on the bed. Bram had disappeared, shutting the doors quietly behind him. Alekyn tucked him under the covers and then hesitated. Jamie blinked at him, wanting to be held close. He tried not to analyze the feeling too much. Alekyn was right. It was shock, he knew, at the news of how close the Zill were to Earth. Maybe he had waited too long, because Alekyn turned to go.

  “No, don’t leave,” he thrust his hand towards the Naferi. “Could you just…sit for a while. Just next to me.”

  A small smile curled Alekyn’s lips. “With pleasure, my sarai.”

  For some reason the word didn’t annoy him for once. He plucked at the coverlet, staring at his Sarat. How big and reassuring he was — it was such a girly thought, he cringed internally, but that was how he felt. He needed comfort, he realised, comfort from Alekyn. He needed his Sarat’s arms wrapped tight around him, holding him safe. Then maybe he could believe his world would be safe too.

  Alekyn sat down next to him, his bulk dipping the bed slightly. Jamie sighed, snuggling up to him, his heart heavy with worry and fear.

  “Eled tells me the latest news has disturbed you.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Jamie replied. “I know you told me about the difficulties with the United Nations and Earth’s governments accepting the threat of the Zill, but it just…it just…,” he swallowed, his throat tight. “I just thought things would work out, but they’re not, are they?”

  Alekyn sighed. “Your world’s leaders are resistant to the idea of sarai.”

  “They feel the way all of us feel — sending people off like slaves is just wrong. It goes against everything we’ve learned over generations.”

  “But they wouldn’t be slaves.”

  Jamie reached up and cupped the side of Alekyn’s face. “Says the Naferi who didn’t let me read and kept me isolated …”

  Alekyn looked shamefaced. “I’m sorry, my sarai. I thought I was doing the right thing, protecting you from bad news and unwanted attention. I thought if I kept you to myself, it would be easier for you to adapt to your new life.

  “I think,” said Jamie in a considering tone, “that it’s just as well you’re a soldier because you’d make a terrible psychologist.”

  “So I’ve been told by Arakin and Tain.”

  Jamie blinked. “The Adan’s brother and your commander?”

  Alekyn sighed. “Yes. They are working closely with other PanGal representatives, trying to reassure your world’s leaders that we are sincerely concerned with the Zill threat and wish only to help humans. Arakin,” he added thoughtfully, “seems to adore humans, and they seem to relish his presence.”

  Jamie blinked and thought about that for a moment. He shook his head. “Psychology is right,” he murmured, “I’ve been thinking about this the wrong way, and I’m not the only one.

  “The leaders of your planet won’t accept what we say about the Zill just as you won’t accept what I’ve told you about being a sarai.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jamie replied, “but I can’t help what I feel, and what I feel is that this concept of sarai is wrong.”

  He rubbed his belly; the child within was stirring, little butterfly flicks of movement that still stunned and amazed him, until the baby decided to play football with his insides which is when he really wanted the baby out and born. The baby. His child, and Alekyn’s. New life, precious life.

  Alekyn deposited a soft kiss on Jamie’s nose. “Your people are stubborn, like you, my sweet.” He sat back on his haunches, his expression serious. “But time is running out fast. Two days ago, one of our ships intercepted a Zill raider. The crew boarded it and killed the Zill. In the hold, they found human bodies in cocoons, mostly dissolved.”

  Jamie stared at him, horrified. “What! But according to the news broadcast, the Zill are still aggregated beyond Neptune, waiting on their queens to arrive.”

  “This was an outlier raider, heading back to the Zill’s mother universe. According to its computer log, it had visited Earth shortly before you were taken. As well as the humans, there were other Earth creatures — like the ones that appeared on some of the vids we uploaded from your internet. They’d all been partly digested.”

  Jamie felt sick. “Like in that vid you showed me of the Lyrians. Like some types of wasps on Earth do to other insects. Shells of living creatures.”

  “I didn’t know about the Earth wasps, but, yes, the dissolved ones were shells of what they’d been. I’m sorry, Jamie. You know what will happen once the queens arrive. The Zill will swarm and it won’t take them long to attack and destroy Earth. It’s only a matter of time now.”

  Jamie sucked air into suddenly constricted lungs. Suddenly all his grievances about being a sarai, about being dislodged from his life’s plans seemed kind of, well, trivial. The child in his belly kicked him as if counterpointing this. He grimaced. Footballer. AFL, he wondered, NFL, Gridiron? He hoped it wouldn’t be soccer.

  “Do the human leaders know about this raider and its cargo? If they knew, surely they’d agree to become a PanGal protectorate. They must know they couldn’t fight off an alien invasion force.”

  Alekyn stood up and offered him a hand to get off the bed.

  “That’s the problem, Jamie. They think were the alien invaders — they don’t realize the Zill are their enemies, not us.”

  That sounded like his people, Jamie thought, feeling sick. They’d add two and two together and get five, just like he’d been doing almost all the time he’d been with Alekyn, except in this case what they’d get would be the death of their entire world. They’d be so distracted by the Naferi and the Keinyn and the other PanGal species that they wouldn’t believe in a credible threat from anywhere else. They’d only see what was in front of them. They wouldn’t notice the wasps sneaking round the back of their world and attacking by stealth.

  “So what is PanGal doing?”

  “We’ve sent more diplomats, but your leaders refuse to accept anything we say. It’s frustrating. They’ve completely rejected our overtures. As soon as we mentioned sarai, there was an uproar in your United Nations. Some of the humans there were totally against us taking sarai.”

  “Imagine that,” Jamie said dryly. “How did your diplomats phrase their request?”

  “Our representatives suggested that if the Naferi were able to take a few hundred thousand men and women as sarai that would be a good indication of our honorable intentions. We told them the sarai would be well cared for and cossetted; they would never have to do more than please us and bear our children.”

  Alekyn’s eyes narrowed slightly, as if remembering something not very pleasant. “For some reason some of the humans were outraged by that. There was much yelling,” he paused. “They were very rude. It wasn’t very pleasant for our people.”

  “No,” Jamie muttered. “I expect it wasn’t. What else happened?”

  Alekyn shrugged. “One of the Keinyn delegates then suggested
we could easily take the humans we wanted and simply leave Earth to the Zill…”

  Jamie winced. “I see. Not very nice of him. I guess everything went to hell in a handbasket then, huh?”

  “I don’t know what that means, but if it is that no-one listened to anything and everybody yelled some more and there was a threat of violence, then yes, that is what happened.”

  Jamie brooded for a little while. This was so not good.

  Since his aborted kidnapping, he’d watched the vids and holograms of Lyris both before and after it was invaded by the Zill.

  Hell, he’d seen images transmitted from other cities and spacecraft as they were invaded by the Zill.

  It had been awful.

  The vid he’d mentioned had one scene he remembered with absolute horrifying accuracy — an image of a queen’s boudoir…it wasn’t anything like a cosy, comfortable retreat, however, it was a feeding station. The queen of that particular Zill hive had been surrounded by white columns dripping with some sort of filmy white stuff — like wisps of material all shredded and rent. Alekyn said the Zill worker drones wrapped living creatures in a sticky discharge they excreted. Their captives were kept alive for the queen to feed on.

  When the image was focused more tightly on these columns the viewer could see the empty indentation where those poor creatures had been stored, sometimes for days, until the queen pierced the cocoon surrounding them with her beak-like proboscis. She then injected her victim with an acid that slowly dissolved them. She consumed them by sucking out their innards and dissolving their bones until only a thin scale of keratin was left — a husk of skin that showed their empty shape, like the shed skin of a snake. In one of the vids a would-be rescuer had reached out and touched one of the shapes. They’d turned the face of the victim to the camera and in that pale, transparent mold you could see the now-empty face of someone who’d died in great fear and unimaginable suffering.

  It was beyond horrible. He’d had nightmares almost every night since he’d seen it, knowing that could have been his fate. And now other humans and even other earth species had been caught and were dying the death he’d been saved from by Alekyn and his pard.

  What if some of those victims had been his brothers or his friends? Hell, it didn’t matter who they were — it just mattered that their deaths could have — should have — been prevented.

  Matt had been right all those years ago. He was a self-indulgent little toad, he realized. It was time he stopped feeling sorry for himself. He needed to do something to help convince his fellow humans that PanGal, stupid as its representatives were in their approach to the Earth authorities, was the best hope for their planet. He took a deep breath and stood a little straighter.

  The humans — he tried not to think why he was thinking of them as humans as if he didn’t belong to them — needed to know, needed to see, just what was in store for them if they didn’t heed the Naferi and PanGal.

  He breathed out slowly. Now was the time to say something every kid interested in scifi had ever dreamt of saying.

  “Alekyn,” he said firmly, “take me to your leader.”

  Chapter Ten

  OF COURSE IT WASN’T THAT SIMPLE, but after much argument he persuaded Alekyn to take him to the palace the next day.

  Seft, the city in which the palace was located, was more crowded than it seemed from the air. The size of the trees the buildings were built among really hid the extent of the city and its population.

  The palace itself was built into a nearby mountain, but again the impact of the Naferi on their environment seemed minimal. It was only when the pard’s large flyer started hovering over a raised landing field that Jamie realised they’d arrived at their destination.

  He unbuckled the seatbelt Alekyn had insisted on strapping him into and stood up, shaking out the folds of his coat. He sighed, looking down at himself ruefully. His outfit reminded him of Japanese traditional costume. The overcoat was haori-like, a loose long jacket that fitted over a sort of kimono and baggy trousers that reminded him of hakama. It was nowhere near as masculine though — soft cream in colour, it had pale silver and pink embroidered flowers, the overcoat was pale green. It made him feel like an oriental Ken doll.

  Alekyn, of course, thought he looked fabulous. When he’d grumbled about wearing it, Alekyn had attempted to placate him. “The flowers are nefan — your scent reminds me of them. They grow in patches of sunlight in the forest and are so, so beautiful — ”

  “They’re pink,” Jamie replied, rolling his eyes. “Not my color. Can’t I wear what you’re wearing?”

  Because of course Alekyn, Bram, Eled and Tig were wearing much more sober outfits. Manly outfits. Alekyn had shaken his head. “We’re wearing our uniforms, sweetheart. It’s not for you — you’re a sarai. My sarai, my beautiful sarai,” he added quickly, kissing Jamie on the mouth before he could say anything.

  Jamie fumed a bit at the memory, and fiddled with the bands at his wrists. The pale green-colored stones matched his overcoat, which was pleasingly fashionable, but still —

  He squawked with outrage when Alekyn suddenly hooked the bands together, his wrists locked submissively in front of him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Alekyn’s look of confusion was almost funny, except Jamie didn’t feel inclined to laugh. “You can’t go to the palace without the bands being on display, sarai. We’ve had this discussion before”

  “And we agreed I wouldn’t have to wear them,” Jamie snarled. “If I didn’t have to wear them on the streets of Altas, why do I have to wear them now?”

  “The palace is full of battle thanes, all of them fascinated and frustrated by humans — you’re too much of a temptation, Jamie.”

  “Rubbish,” he retorted. “You just don’t want to lose face in front of other warriors.”

  Eled then took it upon himself to chime in helpfully, “Jamie, some of the warriors will think you are ownerless.”

  “And they’d be right,” Jamie roared. “Nobody owns me.”

  Exasperated, he tried to unhook the bands, but to no avail.

  “That won’t work, Alekyn-sarai,” Eled was trying to be helpful again. “The bands can only be opened by someone who isn’t wearing them.”

  Jamie lost his temper and swung his hands aggressively towards him. Eled dodged the blow, which landed on Bram standing beside him. Bram staggered back and collided with Tig, who stood his ground and stared narrowed-eyed at Jamie.

  “Alekyn, your sarai is misbehaving,” he said repressively. “Again.”

  Jamie glared at him and then at Alekyn. “I’ve told you before, humans don’t like to be chained up. Unhook the bands now.”

  Alekyn snorted. “Enough, Jamie — you wanted to see the king, but I don’t want to risk losing you in a challenge. The bands stay on while you’re in public.”

  Jamie’s face reddened. “Take them off now.”

  Alekyn shook his head, sighing internally. His sarai had a real problem with submission. He tried again, saying slowly as if talking to a small child. “The bands have to be linked, and because we are going to the palace where there will be many warriors, the bands will need to be joined to this.”

  He produced a fine chain and proceeded to attach it to a small eye on the hook. For a moment there was a deathly silence, and then Jamie hissed, “Take it off now, right now! If you don’t, you can kiss goodbye any notion of me ever cooperating with you ever again. I’ve told you before I will not be chained and hooked together in public like a criminal. Do you understand me? Plus I won’t tell you how to approach the humans and that means your pardmates won’t ever find their sarai. “

  Alekyn glanced at Tig, who stared back at him, face now pale, eyebrows raised. “A word privately?” he suggested. His pardmates nodded quickly. They retreated to the end of the ship.

  Five minutes later, after a frantic whispered conversation of which Jamie, craning his ears, heard only fragments — “He means it… he won’t help unless …�
� — “We can’t let the humans die” — “I want my own sarai, Alekyn, just not one as bad-tempered as yours…” — That was Bram, still rubbing his chest. Jamie grinned — and then Alekyn was unhooking the bands.

  “You will stay close to us, Jamie,” he said sternly. “Do you understand?”“

  “Sure, no worries,” Jamie smiled sweetly at him and Alekyn felt himself melt. His sarai had him totally wrapped around his little finger.

  ___________________________________

  THEY LEFT THE LANDING FIELD and with Alekyn holding his hand and Bram, Eled and Tig sticking close walked briskly along a paved promenade lined with shops filled with exotic and beautiful things. It was very like Altas in that respect, except Seft seemed to have even more aliens wandering about, but these were dressed formally and looking self-important. According to Bram, Seft’s spaceport included a void gate to the PanGal hub, a huge, heavily guarded satellite at the center of the universe, so the place was full of diplomats and politicians, which probably explained the self-importance and air of privilege.

  As in Altas, Jamie was the subject of a great deal of interest. While initially Jamie was absorbed in studying his surrounds, eventually as they walked through the crowds along the promenade leading to the palace entrance he became aware that small pools of silence were growing and expanding around him and his pard.

  It seemed worse than Altas, but he thought that might have been because of his heightened self-consciousness. Almost everyone seemed to stop and stare at him, and he began to feel acutely uncomfortable at the whispers and covetous looks. Several Naferi, obviously known to Clan Furis, approached the pard to ask questions of them.

  That was okay up to a point, but then a tall red-haired Keinyn, accompanied by another Keinyn and a Naferi wearing a Naferi Starfleet commander’s uniform, actually reached a hand out to touch his hair. Jamie flinched away — this was the first time since the attack on his farm that he’d been anywhere near a Keinyn and he felt nervous; it would be a long time, he felt, before he could see a Keinyn and not feel anxious.