Moro's Price

by M. Crane Hana

  Too late, Moro remembered he’d configured the auto-room for sex. Its systems had responded by unlocking all the censored entertainment channels.

  The Diamond’s larger-than-life advertising portrait flashed on the wall screen. It was surrounded by an intricate collage of arena graphics, fight ratings, and excited reporters standing in front of the Vaclav 17 main entrance.

  Moro moaned and slid down to sit on the tiled floor, unable to look away as the main picture changed to highlights of the evening.

  Meng and the Leopard were wounded, poorer by thousands of credits each, and dragged forcibly from the arena.

  Bazo stood erect and spurting in the seconds before he died.

  Kott was poised at the moment of entry, his face suffused with lust and grief.

  Moro looked upon his own face distorted in pain and pleasure.

  He heard his voice overdubbed with the fast, sexy club beat, his scream as Kott took him, and his escalating groans and cries. “Your first master wants you back,” Kott said again. Moro watched and listened to terror stripped bare, to a mind fleeing into mindless release.

  No, the very worst of it was watching Val’s stunned face, the youth driven backward against the headboard by the sheer force of the images and sounds. Val’s right hand, still holding the remote, jammed against his lips. The other fell to his straining cock, pumping it with rough familiarity.

  Moro spasmed, crashing back into the plastic shower door.

  Val dropped the remote, looking down at Moro with startled recognition. “Oh, Cama. How did I not see it? You’re the Diamond!”

  Moro curled up to shut away the world and put his face in his hands.

  Val killed the holos, sound and all. The white room went quiet.

  Val’s warm, gentle hands held Moro’s shoulders. “It’s all right, Moro. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. See, it’s off now. You’re safe.”

  Eyes still shut, Moro shook his head. The Diamond wasn’t dead yet, and the stain of Lyton Sardis would never wash away.

  Val cuddled beside him on the damp floor. “I know. You’re not safe. You can’t go back. I see why you wanted to jump off the roof.”

  Moro forced himself to breathe evenly, to open his eyes. Not trusting his ability to speak, he looked at Val and nodded. He took Val’s right hand and brought it to the back of his neck. Pressed it against the neural ports.

  “Dear Cama,” Val whispered.

  Nothing happened. Worse, Moro realized Val’s cock was now as limp as his own.

  “CAMA HELP ME,” Val whispered, nauseated by his first, instinctive reaction to the holo. It had been one thing, pleasuring himself in private to the recorded arena battles and rapes. Now it felt as if he’d somehow participated in every one of Moro’s defeats.

  “You did. You watched them. I let you watch them, but I warned you, Valier,” said his symbiont. “Alys warned you. Your Guide warned you. Our folk don’t believe in divine retribution. Personal morality is our only guideline. The universe has its own sense of irony. When you played your oh-so-secret recordings, when you fantasized about forcing and being forced by this very man, did you think there would be no future price for your silly games?”

  “Cama, no. Please,” Val moaned aloud.

  She was cold, just, and rational. “The price? Now you must do it in real life. To him. So he can die. Or rise again, to ask you why you know so much about the famous and beautiful Diamond.”

  “I won’t rape him. I can’t,” Val thought back.

  “Oh, you will. He and I can see to that!”

  MORO WATCHED AS Val went silent for a moment, his young face apprehensive, shoulders cringing as if he listened to an angry voice. Then he stood up, shucking his wrecked clothing. Smiling sadly down at Moro, Val held out a hand. “Sit on the bed with me,” he said. “I can at least share my blood. It might be enough. Cama doesn’t think your stomach acids will stop her symbionts.”

  A few more credits bought a hypodermic to draw Val’s blood, neatly taken from inside his left elbow. Moro didn’t even feel the needle enter him in the same place. Val thumbed the plunger down, driving Cama’s infection deeper.

  It would not be enough. Moro didn’t have time to coddle himself or Val.

  He reached for the remote and ruthlessly keyed up the last selected holo on the wall screen. He set it playing in a silent loop and did not look at it.

  “Moro!” hissed Val. “What are you thinking?”

  Moro settled on his back, staring away from the wall screen, his hips lifted on the wedge pillow. He pulled his knees back with one hand.

  Val avoided the screen and looked down, his nostrils flaring. “You’re bleeding.”

  Moro snapped his fingers, drawing Val’s horrified attention, and pointed back at the screen.

  “I can’t do this!” Val sobbed, trying to look at Moro’s face and not the images on the screen.

  But Moro, who had already observed otherwise, chose that moment to key up the audio. His broken voice filled the room again, gasping, begging, straining for release, and then delivered into despair.

  Val groaned in his ear. “How can you ask this, you bastard? Just because I had stupid fantasies about you before I knew who you really were? Just because you being tied to a pole and fucked off your feet was absolutely the most horrible and hottest thing I have ever seen? I will not commit rape!”

  Moro pulled his hair out of the way. He turned his head so Val could see the steel and plastic neural ports drilled into Moro’s neck. Rape had already been committed many times over.

  Val flinched, shaking the bed.

  Moro looked back, silently begging. If they didn’t infect him right now, the collar would go back on and his nightmare would never end.

  “I know.” Val knelt before Moro’s spread legs. “I have to do this. It’s the fastest way to set you free.”

  Moro nodded.

  “Camalians are not supposed to believe in souls, in a life after death,” Val said over the recorded noises. “But Moro, I hope your soul forgives me for this. Because I won’t.”

  “I d-d-do.” Moro lifted his legs over Val’s shoulders. With one skilled hand, he squeezed Val’s cock to hardness, slicked it with more lube, and guided it to his entrance.

  Val kissed one muscled thigh and then the other. He leaned forward, putting his weight on both arms. His tapered cock sank into Moro, piercing the astringent-enhanced tightness.

  Moro relaxed his body and closed his eyes against new pain, keeping his face expressionless as a statue’s. He could bear this, just as he’d borne Kott and all the others. An easy price for a fast death. Something in his chest felt already broken.

  “No, damn you,” hissed Val, lifting the remote from Moro’s limp hand. “Look at me while I kill you.”

  The command shocked Moro out of numb acceptance. He couldn’t look away from Val’s wild, tear-hazed eyes.

  The holo shut off again. Val pitched the remote across the room, giving Moro a madman’s grin when the device sent bottles crashing off the table.

  Deep inside Moro’s torn body, Val moved in tiny swivels. “To every League hell with the Diamond,” he chanted. “Same goes for Kott, and every bastard who forced you. I’m not them! I don’t know who you are yet, Moro, but I want you. I want to feel you laugh around my cock as you suck me off. I want to hear you groan in real pleasure, like we had before that damned holo ruined everything. For the next two hundred years or so, I want to wake up next to you, thinking ‘this is my Moro.’ And I’m not lucky enough to get that, am I? Because you had to be a damn human.”

  His hot tears hit Moro’s face, and still Moro couldn’t look away. The ache inside his heart and core began to change, less agony than an absurd, dawning pleasure. Twisted but real.

  “So if I’m going to kill you, you’re damned well going to feel amazing while I do it. Remember how you felt when we kissed?”

  Panting now, Moro nodded.

  Val drank his unsteady breath in a kiss far less tentative than th
eir last. Moro’s pain was an afterthought, measured against this new impossibility. He shifted under Val, bending at a better angle. Val rewarded him with a light nibble on his lower lip and then pulled away.

  “Remember how you felt when I made you scream,” Val ordered, thrusting easily now, one hand seeking Moro’s erection. “Remember when you came for me and me alone.”

  Remembering it, Moro felt the maelstrom drag him once again into blind, shaking, obedient release.

  Eighteen

  IMRAITHI AKSENNA SONTA stood at the bridge of her flagship, watching the enraged star-eater Aksenna rape a sun.

  High above the plane of the Milky Way, a hundred sixty thousand light-years away from its spiral shape, a round cluster of suns burned like a beacon. Gas rich, metal poor, the cluster contained the same mix of young and old stars as the larger galaxy spinning below them. Solar systems held rocky planets and gas giants. Nebulas glowed, ignited by newborn stars. Ragged clouds of gas and dust marked the pyres of dead or dying suns.

  On the outermost edge of the globular cluster, a bloated red star and a smaller blue-white star orbited around an invisible point in space. The shattered remains of several rocky planets circled the companions. Two vast gas giants swung in elliptical paths near the system’s edge.

  A long spiral plume coiled out of the large sun, feeding into the central point. The blue sun was, as yet, untouched.

  Closer examination would have revealed thin black threads swirling into the red sun, from the same invisible point.

  Tickling its corona.

  Skimming its surface.

  Sinking deep into its straining core.

  Magnetic arcs flung solar matter upward, fiery lashes attempting to unseat the invader. Several dark tendrils curled out, easily absorbing those unimaginable energies.

  As more and more tendrils sank into the core, they would stimulate the natural progression of the star’s life, greedily converting its last hydrogen reserves to helium, then heavier elements.

  In just a few more years, the star would gutter down to an iron core and inevitable gravitational collapse. Then the tendrils would be poised to savor the final throes of a supernova, and devour the newborn black hole at its heart.

  The Sonta had picked this target carefully, not long ago. The red star was already old enough for its innate sentience to be nearly incoherent with dementia. No life had ever evolved upon or within the rocky planets. The gas giants and the blue sun would survive; Aksenna’s Sonta never allowed her to eat too much in any one system. When they left, they’d direct Aksenna to gather the planetary remains, seed them with the supernova’s leftover riches, and forge new worlds to orbit the traumatized little blue sun.

  “My lady, we depart,” said one of Imraithi’s consorts.

  She turned from the window, enjoying the sight of the mixed-tribe man in tight black trousers. A black mesh top left his reddish-brown arms bare. His hair was short, black, and silky. His large eyes were the ravishing turquoise blue bred in the Danil tribe, and his tall, pointed ears carried the trembling fringe of dark whiskers found in the Singers’ tribe. He had the Singers’ semi-retracting claws, black as his hair.

  Not born to the Aksenna Sonta but adopted in because of his temperament and affinities. New blood.

  Two of her own daughters had not met her exacting standards. They now lived and bred with tribes more suited to their natures, the gregarious tribe of Danil and the sentimental, creative folk who followed Tena.

  Inside their worldships, the Sonta left off the swaths covering them against lesser eyes. They were all beautiful, whatever their tribe, shape, and coloring. They had to be.

  For a moment, Imraithi couldn’t even recall this poor man’s name. He must be a paragon of fearlessness, standing this close to her without flinching.

  One of his upper arms bore a dark bruise in the shape of her clenched fingers, and he limped a little when he moved.

  She remembered.

  He was Savinilan. Made hers and Aksenna’s in one savage wedding night almost a year ago. She wished she had time to enjoy his body for her own pleasure. He’d breed strong children. Daughters or sons? Perhaps one of each, she decided.

  “We shouldn’t leave this system until it is reseeded,” she said. “How stable is the red star if Aksenna withdraws now?”

  “It won’t expire immediately, my lady,” he said. “She hasn’t taken much yet. It may even recover, with a little reprieve.”

  Imraithi nodded. “Then I am ready. This is a matter of family honor. The star will wait.”

  Her consort conducted her to a place deep within the worldship. Close to its vast engines, a lovely suite of rooms awaited her. It contained a bathing chamber paneled in peach moonstone, a bedroom hung with black silk and pale orange gauze veils, and an elegant office with desks, banks of monitor screens, and antique books and trophies on carefully dusted shelves. A monolithic black-glass chair waited in an alcove of the office.

  Imraithi did not pause to assess herself in the black mirrored walls or in the eyes of bowing Sonta crew members as she passed them.

  She knew what they saw. Her body’s allure was merely a weapon their ancestors had honed.

  She was young, barely past her three-hundredth year, though she had already created four children to gestate in heavily defended incubator tanks. She was short for the normal Sonta range, slender and small-breasted, with whiskerless, delicately pointed ears and clawless fingers and toes. She had no fangs. Her pale skin was never sullied by the touch of unfiltered ultraviolet light, and her hair fell in blue-black waves to her knees.

  Her eyes, if she had looked in the mirrors, would barely even show whites, their irises were so large and dark.

  She wore nothing but her hair unless she needed to shield her flesh within her research labs. The Vessel of Aksenna was beyond meaningless modesty.

  “Rest well, my lady,” said the consort, kneeling before her as she sat in the chair.

  Imraithi lay her small, slender hands along the chair’s arms, resting her fingertips in grooved channels.

  Veins of shimmering pink-orange light surged to life along the chair’s surface. Then thin black tendrils eased out of the glass, piercing her fingertips, coiling into her nose, mouth, eyes, and ears. They probed gently into her body from below. There was no blood. If there was pain, Imraithi did not reveal it.

  For perhaps seventy fast heartbeats, the Sonta queen sat motionless in her black chair.

  The orange glow faded from the glass and woke within the pupils of her eyes. She gasped, focusing first on the time stamp flashing on a nearby monitor, then on the kneeling man.

  “Aiyon’s Vessel has gone?” asked the Ksala Aksenna. “You let him leave? After such insults?” Her body’s blood pressure rose to the anger that had triggered her automatic withdrawal to her true shape. She breathed more slowly and unclenched her hands from the chair.

  “Yes, Ksala Aksenna,” he answered, not looking at her. “It was the Ksala Aiyon, after all. We cannot hold captive another Ksala’s Vessel. Certainly not while they ride it.”

  “Much as I’d wish,” she muttered. She hooked a bare foot under his chin, forcing his face upward. His features were carefully controlled, showing no fear, only a waiting calm. His mind was extraordinarily strong. She could not sense his deeper thoughts.

  “What of the message he delivered?” she asked.

  “The genetic material has already been sent to your laboratories, where it will be tested against our samples. The Ksala Aiyon might have lied about its provenance. There is no further need to involve yourself.”

  She pushed him sprawling onto the black-glass floor and stood up.

  “Of course there is, Savi. Family honor is at stake, as my stern and dutiful Vessel would say. Aiyon never outright lies. Anyatisa was Imraithi’s greatest triumph, and I was fond of Merrick. Besides, those human children of apes are too close to things they shouldn’t even know about. They need a few lessons in respecting other people’s property.
Have the other Sonta listened to my proposal?”

  Savinilan picked himself up off the floor. “Ksala Aiyon has abstained from comment. Ksala Danil and Ksala Tena have reluctantly agreed to stay away. Should the apes get too close to our territories, the areas of contention shall be destroyed. Provided we comport ourselves honorably, none of the other Bound Ksaloni shall intervene.”

  “I don’t want to smell my siblings within twenty light-years of me, Savi. If any one of them butts in, I will lose my temper. I can do this without their help.”

  “Yes, Ksala Aksenna.”

  “And get me some damned clothes. This wench is never dressed when I need her to be!”

  WITHIN AN HOUR, three of the huge black worldships swung away from the five remaining to guard Aksenna’s current larder.

  Black tendrils retracted smoothly from the red star. Mass gathered, was folded otherwhere into a pocket dimension, until only a ten-thousand-mile-long black spindle remained. It extruded dozens of filmy black fins, and pink-orange lights shimmered along every fin’s edge.

  The star-eater settled tamely into the center of the worldship formation, a leviathan guarded by minnows.

  Garbed now in a simple black tunic and trousers, her hair gathered into one long braid, Aksenna stood beside her desk. She focused more than her mortal Vessel’s eyes on the rapidly shrinking red star behind her.

  Perfect lips smiling, she blew a mocking kiss back in its general direction. Outside the ship, the star-eater mirrored her motion with one sinuous fin.

  “Until later,” said Aksenna-enfleshed, sitting down to read reports about the Terran League’s latest machinations.

  As she read, she sipped a clear, sweet drink tasting of flowers and berries. Hungry as she always was, the sensations of mortal enfleshment were even more enticing than gorging on hapless old suns. Food and drink were suddenly more than bits of different complex carbon molecules. They had savor and scent; they combusted in warm chemical reactions in her gut.