Sold to the Alien Prince

by Viki Storm

  The guard with the blood crusting around his nose says something and the blond girl’s eyes go wide with fear. The doctor gives him a verbal reprimand, but he just sneers. The doctor looks at the girl, shrugs his shoulders in a gesture that is so human it’s disorienting.

  “He says I can tell you.” She cocks a thumb at the sneering guard. “This one here, he says that we need to practice standing up straight and…” she hesitates. “And saying ‘Yes Sir’ because after we land, we go straight to the Auction House.”

  Seventy-nine days. There is no way he is still alive after all this time. My father is surely dead.

  But still.

  Without the body, it’s easy to fall prey to hope.

  Hope. The draught of fools. He’s dead. I know it. Everyone in the High Council knows it. The weaponsmiths sweating in the low-end workshops know it.

  But still.

  I roll out of bed and feel my skin crack and stretch. I should perform my ablutions, but I cannot bring myself to do it. The effort seems too much.

  I can’t bring myself to do much of anything lately.

  Like the High Council meeting this morning. I know what they are going to say. I know what the vote will be.

  I find my breeches in a crumpled heap on the floor. I slip them on, not caring that I will appear slovenly before the council.

  My council.

  Because after the vote this afternoon, they will be my council.

  My father will be declared dead. We will begin preparations for funerary services. We will burn an empty capsule, of course. The ashes we will launch into orbit will be the caustic polymer ashes of his empty capsule.

  And I will be king.

  Honestly, I’d rather crawl back in bed and sleep for a few more hours.

  Maybe a few more days.

  I fill my basin with hot water and dunk my head into it. It does little to clear the foggy feeling inside my skull. Too many cups of freykka last night. And the night before. And the night before.

  Seems like every morning I wake up with the feeling of magma cooling inside my head and the rhythmic energy of a pulsar behind one eye. And every morning I swear to lay off the freykka and get a good night’s sleep.

  Then every night when the shades go up and block the light of the suns, when my eye is still pulsing and my head is still hot and thick, I tell myself ‘just one cup.’ Just one drink to get back to normal.

  But now, I fear, this is normal.

  But not anymore. Not tonight. Not after the vote.

  I open the window and look out into the sky. It’s mid-month and the suns are aligned, Horsa Minor is in revolution and is completely blocked out by Horsa Major. It happens every month, but still it’s eerie to look in the sky and only see one sun radiating its bright white light.

  I take it as a bad omen.

  There is a knock at my door, but before I can turn around to ask who it is, the seal breaks and it slides open. I don’t need to ask who it is. There are only two people in the whole galaxy who would barge into my chamber like that, and one of them is my dead father.

  “What do you want Droka?” I say.

  “It’s already time,” Droka says back. He’s been looking out for me since we were fighting in the training yard with deactivated anankahs. Even now when I’m supposed to be able to look out for myself. My father appointed Droka the captain of the Imperial Guard, knowing that I’d need an honest and true friend inside the fortress.

  “I know,” I say. I reach up and stretch, trying to loosen my muscles and joints.

  “Then let’s go,” he says. I notice he’s holding a steaming cup.

  “Unless that’s verpap root,” I say, “I’m not interested.”

  “It’s khoro milk,” he says. “This is going to be a long session. You’ll need something in your stomach besides your own sour spit.”

  I start to formulate a reply that compares Droka’s fretting to that of the nursing khoro that gave the milk, but I see the honest concern in his face. I’m not the only one with dark circles under my eyes, not the only one who’s had trouble sleeping lately.

  My father’s disappearance—death, really, though no one wants to call it that—has upset the delicate balance of power in the capitol. He was a good man and a fair man—and there are plenty of Zalaryns who equate that with weakness. My father wasn’t weak. He beat many a man with his fists and gave the capsule makers and prayer singers plenty of business.

  “Thank you,” I say and take the steaming cup of milk. I loathe the stuff, so thick and tasting of the barnyard, but my friend is right. I should have had a good night’s sleep and woken up early and eaten a haunch of meat and fresh apples and taken a walk around the fortress to get my wits about me. Instead I lied in bed drooling onto the pillow.

  The council chamber is located on the top floor of the fortress—seventeen floors high. One story for each of the fabled Zalaryn warriors that conquered the capitol and settled the planet back in year 110110. The room is only accessible from one small staircase that winds around the entire building. The builders were given instructions that no rulers should be able to take the tele-lift to the top floor, that they should climb the stairs to remind them that ruling the Zalaryn people is an arduous task, no shortcuts allowed, only hard work and strength will prevail.

  That’s a nice story to tell the children, but when you’re hungover and ready to hurl hot clotted milk onto the staircase, you realize that the old warriors were a bunch of high-minded prigs.

  I open the double-doors without noticing them. My first closed council meeting, I was in awe of the towering polished epidiode stone doors, intricately carved with scenes with the Battle of the Founding. Now, they’re just heavy hunks of rock. The other men on the council are talking—some very passionately—but the chamber quiets immediately as I enter.

  “Crown Prince Xalax,” Noxu, the High Merchant says. He’s got about as much honor as a clump of earwax, but he controls the commerce in the capitol and oversees trade with our outpost planets.

  “Fifty neus,” I say. “And fifty nights.”

  “Fifty-one,” he says, “to you and yours.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I pull out my seat and plop down. I wish Droka was on the council. Hell, I’d give the woman who launders my underpants a seat just so I could see a friendly face up here. The chamber is made of glass so we can see out into the city sprawl below, another reminder of the people we are tasked to rule. But the practical effect is heat. Especially now, when our planet’s orbit is closest to the suns, the heat at the top of the fortress is stifling.

  It always puts us in a foul mood.

  Probably another trick of the Founders. If everyone is too hot and ill-tempered, no one will agree or compromise and any significant changes will come slowly—if at all.

  “First order of business,” Jata, the High Judge says. “Before we can address anything else…” there is grumbling at the table. There are seventeen seats on the High Council and my father only had alliances with a few of them. His oldest and most loyal advisers do not wish to declare him dead for foolish, sentimental reasons. His bitterest rivals do not want to declare him dead until the capitol is in a nice position of leaderless chaos.

  But mostly everyone else, like the High Judge, wants to get on with things. In general, we are not a patient race.

  “We cannot put this matter off any further,” the High Judge calls over the din. “It has been seventy-nine neus. Almost a full month. We have had no contact from the High King. We must conclude he is dead.”

  More rabble, more dissent. My fingertips feel numb. This is really happening. The day I’ve dreaded my entire life.

  The day I become High King.

  The arguments and petitioning passes in a blur. I cannot rise to speak on my father’s behalf. I cannot rise to speak on my own behalf.

  The next thing I know is the words, “All in favor?” are spoken and arms fly up, signaling their assent.

  “It is settled,” High Judge Jat
a says. “Crown Prince Xalax, your coronation will be held two months hence, during the aphelion, provided that you have secured a mate in such time.”

  “Mate?” I blurt out. It is the first thing I’ve said all session. Who in the never-ending void said anything about a mate? Judging from the way that they are all staring at me, all of them said something about a mate.

  “Yes,” the High Merchant says. “You need to be mated before your coronation. Look how much your father’s death has disrupted things, and he had an heir.”

  “Sorry about that,” I say, that sour spit in my stomach churning violently. “I hate to hear that the death of our king has disrupted your trade deals.”

  “I will take your sarcasm for misplaced grief,” Noxu says casually, but I know a man like him knows how to hold a grudge. “But you should care about our trade deals. You should care about our mining operations. You should care about relations with the outpost planets. You should definitely care about the newest shipload of female tributes we received from Earth. You should care about all of it, because it wasn’t the fact that your Father’s perfumed ass sat on the High Throne that made our society prosper. Zalaryns prosper because of Zalaryns—we prosper regardless of whose ass is in that chair.”

  I hold my tongue, mostly because I don’t have anything clever to even remotely match that reaming the High Merchant just delivered to me.

  But it’s okay. I can hold a grudge too.

  The High Healer clears his throat, but it’s clear from the dry, raspy sound that he is doing so to get us to shut up, not because of any excess buildup of phlegm.

  “You should be mated as soon as possible,” the High Healer says. The High Healer, an ancient male named Hanyz, has about as gentle a disposition as a Zalaryn can have. “I can take your DNA and provide you a list of suitable available females.”

  I let out a dry bark of laughter. He wants to assign me a mate. That’s mostly how the upper-classes do it. Those who can afford it, at least.

  “Would you prefer a Conquest Mate?” the High Healer asks. He’s earnest and that makes me feel like even more of a bumbling royal idiot. “That could possibly be arranged, but time is a factor.”

  I sigh. “No,” I say, knowing it’s absurd. I just always assumed that I’d find a female while I was out raiding. She’d be cowering in a corner and I’d pluck her up and throw her over my shoulder. I’d earn my mate. The way a true Zalaryn male should.

  Well, the way a true Zalaryn male used to.

  After the Sickness spread through Zalaryx and neighboring planets, Zalaryn men had to range far to find a compatible mate—and he had to win her through combat, fighting her father or brother for the right to claim her. My great-grandmother was a Conquest Mate. Occasionally, a war party will return with a few females won in combat by the younger warriors. But the rest of us…

  We go to the Auction House.

  A steady supply of compatible human females are given to us from Earth. It is the most efficient way for us to reproduce. Not many other races are compatible with Zalaryn DNA. In the early days of the Sickness, many generations ago, when our females were made barren, but before we had the arrangement with planet Earth, we would have to capture human females. They were abducted from the streets, from their homes, from the wilderness. We brought them back and imprisoned them. The fittest warriors were chosen to breed with the enslaved females. The offspring were taken away and fostered in Zalaryn households. And the females were impregnated again, by a new warrior. Over and over again. A good female was able to produce ten or twelve offspring. It wasn’t enough to sustain our population. Our numbers dwindled. A few generations ago, we heard of the Kraxx invasion of Earth. In exchange for our military aid, they send us females. We get so many more females this way we are able to auction them to any warrior who desires one.

  “And after you’re properly mated and the Fendans are properly satisfied…” the High Merchant is saying.

  “The Fendans?” I ask. Maybe Droka did put some verpap root into my hot milk and I’ve been hallucinating this entire council session.

  For the first time, the High Weaponsmith speaks up. Uctin is a brutish man, old enough to remember the ways when blood was often shed in the fortress over minor disagreements and raiding parties decimated entire planets to smoldering lumps of coal in the sky. “For the love of the void,” he shouts. “Please tell me that our new High King is going to have a little more common sense about him. Do you even know which direction the planet revolves around the suns?”

  “Please hold your tongue,” the High Judge speaks.

  I want to say something in my defense. But I can’t—not without exposing anymore of my own ignorance. And I’ve already exposed more of that than was strictly necessary.

  “The Fendans are being persuaded to let us have access to their mines,” the High Healer says. He doesn’t mention the fact that I should know this. “Your father was brokering the deal, along with the High Merchant. However his disappearance has made the Fendans uneasy. Mineral contracts are hundred-year deals. They want assurance that the contracts will be honored by his heirs.”

  “By your heirs,” the High Merchant says. “We need a nice long line of baby Xalaxes so those cowardly Fendans will bend over and let us plunder their qizo minerals.”

  And it all makes sense.

  Minerals. The void-damned minerals.

  It’s about qizo. Without those precious, rare minerals, our spacecraft are nothing but ugly chunks of polymer that could only fly to Jorrakh and back.

  The minerals are more important to us than food, water, even females.

  Because if we can fly, we can fight. If we can fight, we can take whatever we want. We can take food. We can take water. We can take females.

  But if we can’t fly… we can’t fight.

  And that’s really the only thing Zalaryns are good at.

  I stand up, not caring that the meeting hasn’t formally ended. “Crown Prince,” the High Healer starts to say, but I ignore him. I know he has kind words for me, but I don’t want to hear them.

  I don’t deserve them.

  I’m in the sort of mood where I want someone to bump against me so I can pull my anankah and push it into his eye socket.

  See what I mean, I don’t deserve kindness right now.

  Maybe never.

  But as I storm down the stairs, I see Droka loitering at the tenth-floor landing. He’s bracing a young cook’s girl, running his hand up and down her bare arm, but I know he’s just waiting for me. The cook’s girl has a polymer leg and one of her eyes looks towards the wall. The Sickness has touched her—not as bad as some, but pretty bad. She looks relieved when he turns to me and calls my name, as if she thought she would have to submit to his desires. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe she was excited to have someone desire her and it was not relief but disappointment I saw in her eyes. Well, in her good eye.

  “How’d it go?” he asks me as I go past, taking the stairs two and three at a time. “Was that a stupid question?” he asks.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say. As I reach out my leg, expecting to feel the thud of the stone stair below, I am jerked back. Droka has grabbed my arm and pulled me down. I land hard, the edge of the stairs digging painfully into my back. I am struck breathless for a moment, but before I can say anything, Droka is hovering over me. His eyes are wild, real anger is underneath and for a second I know the fear that his foes on the battlefield must have felt as they met him screaming, wielding his glowing and bloody anankah.

  “Too bad,” he says. He leans close enough so flecks of spittle hit my face. “You have some responsibility now, so you better attend to it. No more wallowing and feeling sorry for yourself like an untouched maiden. You are the High King now whether you like it or not.”

  This is why my father made Droka the captain of the Imperial Guard. No one else would have the nerve to assault the Crown Prince in the stairwell to the High Council chamber.

  “Actually,” I say, offe
ring my hand to my oldest friend. Perhaps my only friend. He takes it and helps me to my feet. “I am still the Crown Prince. My coronation is contingent upon being mated.”

  “Mated?” he says and a slow smile spreads over his face. “Well of course. How many bachelor kings have we had?”

  “None,” I say. We set down the stairs at a more sane pace. “I know, it’s just everything happened at once. I would have been more prepared if, you know…”

  “I know,” he says and I’m grateful he doesn’t voice my own shortcomings. “If you hadn’t been a selfish spoiled drunken little wretch,” he says. And my gratitude evaporates. But coming from Droka it doesn’t feel like an insult.

  It feels like the truth.

  “So what now?” I say.

  “It’s obvious,” he says. He’s still wearing that stupid smile of his. “We go to the Auction House.”

  “Shave,” the voice says. Even though I can understand the language, it still sounds so harsh, like their teeth are in their throat.

  I am in a room. Although room is a generous term for it.

  Cell is more like it.

  I still haven’t seen the sky or breathed fresh air. The girls were shuttled out of the spaceship through an expanding tunnel into the back of the auction house. The doctor told us that while their planet’s atmosphere kept them warm and made the air breathable, it was much thinner than Earth’s atmosphere. Their tough Zalaryn skin was adapted to be exposed to the harsh rays of their suns. Yeah, they have two suns.

  Basically, he told us, we can’t go outside. Never.

  As if we didn’t already feel like prisoners.

  “What?” I ask. He wants me to shave? Shave what? In my village, men shave their faces, but rarely. It’s too much hassle. Another thing my grandmother rambled about (drunkenly, of course) was that women in her time shaved their legs and armpits and (she would only mention this to me if she had quite a few cups of wine) they would shave all of their pubic hair. It seemed so absurd to me. Why bother with removing all that hair? Then again, to hear my grandmother tell it, her era was quite decadent and most people had a lot of free time on their hands.