by Eric Thomson
“Let’s start, shall we.”
Half an hour later, Decker figured he’d disgorged every bit of gunnery data he’d ever accumulated. His stomach felt hollower by the minute, and he hoped the tests were over for the day.
Cyone, aside from identifying the item, said nothing. She didn’t nod, smile or otherwise give any sign that he was right, wrong or just plain useless. Tempted as he was to probe her about her past, he decided that it was best to follow the rules and kept strictly to the answers she was expecting. Daran had returned and observed the last few minutes of his test, her face equally expressionless as she leaned against the wall, arms crossed. When Zack fell silent, she looked at Cyone.
“And what is your verdict?”
“He has the knowledge one would expect of a human master gunner.”
“Very well.” She pointed at Zack. “Your permission to speak freely has ended. You will follow me.”
He bowed in acknowledgment, wondering what would happen now. Daran led him out of the armory and across the parade ground to a long building whose walls were pierced with numerous windows.
“This is the food hall,” she said. “We will enter by the cooks’ door. Once inside, you will sit at the table I designate. You will be given a meal that you will eat quickly and in silence.”
He nodded, relieved to finally get some nourishment. With any luck, it’d be better than the tasteless paste he was fed on the slaver ship.
The kitchen staff, a motley collection of humanoids, stared at him curiously as they walked in. One of them, perhaps the head cook, nodded politely to Daran and asked a question in the same alien language he’d heard before. Upon her reply, he turned to one of his helpers and issued instructions. Meanwhile, she pointed to a scarred steel table.
“Sit.”
Moments later, the helper deposited a tray with several lumps of both hot and cold organic matter on it, handing Decker a utensil closely resembling a spoon. He murmured something that Zack couldn’t understand and left.
The food didn’t smell particularly appetizing, nor did it look very edible, but he took a chunk from the brownish substance and popped it in his mouth. It tasted awful, indescribably so, and he realized this was yet another test.
He suppressed a retch with great difficulty and swallowed. The piece from the next lump was heavily spiced and burned his mouth, yet he swallowed that too. In the end, Decker mixed up all four piles into one multicolored mash and shoveled the resulting mess into his mouth, swallowing convulsively so it spent as little time as possible in contact with his taste buds.
Throughout the meal, Daran had watched him with expressionless eyes, but didn’t speak, nor did she eat anything herself. If this was the chow hall’s usual standard, he couldn’t blame her, although he suspected that he’d just been given food that appealed to someone like the orc Swordmaster.
As long as it didn’t give him the runs or make him puke, he’d be okay. They’d have made sure not to feed him anything that could harm a human, otherwise what had been the point of testing their newest merchandise all afternoon?
When he was done, Daran nodded her head towards the door.
“Come.”
This time, she led him to a two-story building made of cut stone sitting at the other edge of the parade ground. A pair of sentries guarded the glass door at the top of a short flight of stairs, and they acknowledged her with a polite nod as she took Decker inside. Once in the atrium, she pointed at a hard chair pushed up against the wall.
“Sit. Remain there until you receive new orders.” Then she disappeared up a curving stairway, and he was alone.
After a ten minute wait, she re-appeared and motioned him to follow her.
“You will be brought into the presence of your owner, the Atabek. He may ask you questions, and you are to answer those as precisely and concisely as possible. Otherwise you are not to speak. You will stand at attention and keep your eyes to your front, even when answering the Atabek.”
She preceded him into a lavishly decorated office and held out her arm to stop him a few paces in front of a large desk. Zack’s fixed his gaze on a faded banner hanging from the wall, but it was a hard-won battle against his curiosity at examining the being who considered him his personal property.
The quick glimpse he’d had as he marched through the door had been of a nonhuman with indistinct features and a pale hide. The Atabek also had what seemed like a shock of reddish fur on his head, the only one he’d seen so far who wasn’t bald.
“My advisers tell me you are very likely what you claim to be, Decker,” a sibilant voice said from somewhere below his line of vision. The Anglic was distorted but perfectly understandable.
“They tell me the price I paid for you was not too much, even if you did not, in fact, serve in your Marine Corps. But whether or not you will make a useful silahdar remains questionable. A human of your skills will not have the right disposition to be a slave until he has been carefully trained and therefore you will not be admitted to the Kashdushiya until my training masters are satisfied you will obey all orders. I can see in your stance, your eyes and the way you breathe that your will must be broken. Only when you have fully accepted that your life belongs to me, and your destiny is to die as a silahdar, will you become a soldier. Until then, you are as dangerous as a caged predator and not much more useful.”
He paused, to let the words sink in before continuing.
“All who come here from the slave market dream of escape but there is none. We are surrounded by a dense jungle that no one can cross alive. If by some miracle, the jungle doesn’t get you, the Rekar tribesmen who live on its far edge will, and if the Rekar don’t get you, we will. Be assured that if we get you, you’ll wish you had been flayed alive by the Rekar.”
He switched to his own language and spoke to Daran, but Zack understood that she was to take him to the training barracks and his heart sank. All day long he’d been hoping he could pretend to be reconciled to his situation, and had apparently failed. He wouldn’t be placed with the fighting units and thus in a position to escape anytime soon. Now, it would be recruit training all over again, but without the restraints placed on sadistic sergeants by the naval code of discipline.
“You will execute an about turn,” Daran ordered, “and then follow me.”
“Try not to fight it, Decker,” the Atabek said as they were about to walk out. “You are a warrior, and I am giving you a warrior’s life. The alternatives for a slave on this planet are much, much worse.”
Five
Daran led him to the far end of the garrison, where a high palisade split the installation into two separate areas. Signs in a runic alphabet hung on either side of the barred door. For all Zack knew, they could be telling him to abandon all hope as he entered here.
The thought made him smile briefly. He’d endured basic training, he’d survived Pathfinder School, and he’d been through combat many times. What could they do to him without ruining his value to the Atabek? He wasn’t running his slave soldier operation for shits and giggles. He was running it for profit. Every sentient species known to humanity understood that concept and practiced it, some with far more abandon than others.
Daran rapped on the door twice. When it opened to a bald human with the same type of tattoos on his scalp, she issued orders in the Atabek’s language and then turned to Decker.
“This is where our ways part. Whether or not they will rejoin is up to you. While the Atabek does not wish you to die in training or be deemed suitable only for the mines, he cannot afford to let a feral ex-Marine join the ranks of the Kashdushiya.”
The guard barked an order at him in an alien tongue and then smiled cruelly.
“That was in Danjori. You will learn to speak it. What I just said was follow me. I will give you one translation of each order, and one only. If you fail to memorize it on the spot, you will be punished. Now, what did I say to you?”
Without missing a beat, Decker repeated the order in Danjori,
right down to the guard’s accent. He knew how this game was played.
“Funny,” the guard grumbled, “real funny.”
He shut the gate behind Zack and prodded him with his stick.
“It’s too late to begin your training today, slave. You’ll be confined to barracks until tomorrow. Take it as a chance to make some new friends.”
When Zack didn’t reply, the guard looked disappointed. It was a clear indication that the preferred training method was a variation of writing the test before getting the lesson; in this case, a misstep would earn him a beating before he got an explanation of what he’d done wrong. Though it was an effective way to instill utter subordination in people who hadn’t stared death in the face as often as he had, the method wouldn’t do much for Decker. While the guard led him across the compound, Zack took the occasion to examine his newest surroundings.
The recruit school, well-lit now that night had fallen, was a more modest version of the main base, but was as spotlessly clean and well maintained. Wooden barracks, classrooms, and a large chow hall flanked a smaller parade ground, while shooting ranges and an obstacle course edged the fence separating it from thick jungle vegetation. It looked like every other low tech boot camp Zack had seen and his spirits lifted. He definitely knew how this game was played.
They stopped at the entrance to one of the long barrack blocks and the guard unlocked the door by placing his palm on a keypad. It clicked, and he opened it with his stick.
“Inside with you. Take one of the spare bunks and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a day like you’ve never experienced.”
Decker stepped over the threshold, and the door swung shut behind him. He stepped out of the small, airlock-like lobby into the barracks proper where the smell of several dozen unwashed bodies assailed his nostrils.
A furry Darsivian jumped up from a cot next to the entrance and growled something in his tongue. It didn’t sound complimentary.
“He says we have fresh meat,” a raspy voice informed Zack from the other side. He glanced briefly at the speaker, a gray-skinned Kardati tribesman who was leering at him.
“Thanks, but I’ve already eaten,” he replied.
“No, human, he means you.”
“How about you tell your friend that I’m too tired to turn him into a rug, and we’ll call it a night.”
“He hates humans. Humans captured him and sold him to the slavers.”
“Big fucking deal,” Decker said resignedly. He was going to have to do this the hard way. “I’m human, and I got sold into slavery by other humans, yet you don’t see me beating myself up.”
The Kardati seemed genuinely puzzled by Zack’s statement, and he took the opportunity to slip between the two humanoids, to give himself room to move rather than be pinned between them and the locked entrance. They were slow to react, and he had time to look around for other threats, but the beings he saw were either watching with interest or moving away from what they expected to be a bloody battle. Darsivians and Kardati were fierce fighters, but they weren’t known for being disciplined. The trainers were going to have fun with those two, Decker figured.
If they really wanted to take their anger out on him, they should have attacked the moment he walked in, not wasted precious seconds with dumb posturing. They’d lost their advantage but were too stupid to realize it.
“Seriously, guys,” he said, adopting a relaxed fighting stance, “if you’re that desperate to take a beating, you should have sassed the guards when they brought you here. Those sticks they carry aren’t just so they can poke at anthills.”
The Darsivian shook himself and advanced on Decker with the lumbering gait of his species. His interpreter was climbing over a few bunks to take Zack from the side, forcing him to make a quick decision.
He pivoted on his left heel and charged at the Kardati, aiming the top of his head at the tribesman’s nose slit, where he knew it would hurt the most without causing permanent damage. Breaking the Atabek’s possessions wasn’t likely to be a good survival strategy, and there was no doubt in his mind that they were being watched by the staff via hidden cameras. Slaves whaling on each other was all right as long as they could still train effectively the next day, but sometimes that meant the guards had to wade in with their batons.
The impact momentarily stunned Zack, and he overbalanced, pushing the Kardati against the wall. His opponent roared at the blinding pain, hands reflexively going up to his face. Zack took advantage of the opening to land a couple of punches in the midriff, and the tribesman dropped to the floor like a sack of rocks.
Unfortunately, that had given the Darsivian enough time to close the distance, and Decker felt a pair of powerful paws take hold of him from behind. He dropped into a crouch, grabbing his opponent’s thick wrists and pulled him over his shoulder, using the alien’s own bulk against him. The Darsivian rolled on top of his companion with a surprised roar that was abruptly cut off when Decker’s right foot lashed out, catching the side of his shaggy head and knocking him out.
Zack cautiously approached the pair and looked into the open eyes of the Kardati, wondering whether the Darsivian had squashed the life out of him, but his nictitating membranes flicked as the tribesman focused on him.
“See what you’ve made me do?” Decker’s voice was a low growl. “The next time, it won’t just be some love taps. I’ll be breaking bones and then what use do you think you’ll be to our owner? He’ll probably turn you into pet food. I hear he has a herd of vorpal bunnies at home that eats a hundred kilos of kibble each day.”
He saw the Darsivian stir and gave him another sharp rap on the head with the tip of his boot, sending the ursine slave back into unconsciousness. Leaving the duo sprawled on the floor, Decker found an empty cot at the far end of the barracks among half-dozen humans who looked at him with fearful respect.
“Buggers make a lot of noise,” he told them, grinning, “but the only thing that’s dangerous about them is the stink when they haven’t been hosed down for long time.”
When none of them reacted to his attempt at humor, the grin vanished, and he frowned.
“You guys understand Anglic?”
A few of the young men nodded.
“We do understand you,” the brawniest among them, who was almost Decker’s size, replied, “but we do not see why this is funny.”
His accent was a thicker version of Mala Daran’s as if he came from a place where the language had evolved separately from the human mainstream.
“I’m going to guess you folks aren’t from the Commonwealth.”
The young man nodded.
“You are correct. Are you from this Commonwealth, sir?”
“Yep, and I’m not a sir. Decker’s the name. Born and bred on Mykonos Colony.”
“We are from Nelva, but our legends tell that our ancestors came from a place called Earth. My name is Krath.”
“That’s where all of our ancestors are from, Krath. This Nelva must be a lost colony. How long have your people been there?”
“We do not know. Several thousand years, it is said.”
“Bull!” Decker laughed. “The first sublight colony ships left Earth no more than five hundred years ago, so even if your ancestors got sucked into a wormhole and spat out in these parts, you’re not talking thousands of years.”
“Perhaps, Decker,” Krath replied, “but I have seen the ruins of the first settlement, and it is much older than five hundred years.”
“Huh, interesting.” He shrugged. “But since we’re not getting out of here, it’s kind of academic. Tell me something, those idiots I just played with, have they been pulling the fresh meat thing on all newbies?”
“They have, but you’re the first to best them in the time since we arrived.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry much about the buggers for now. Bullies slink back into their holes when you give them a good whacking.”
He settled back on the cot and closed his eyes.
“If you
guys wouldn’t mind warning me of any trouble you might see coming my way, I’d sure appreciate it.”
Decker fell asleep within seconds, his battered and bruised body screaming for rest and regeneration. He woke hours later to the muffled sounds of a scuffle a few meters from his cot and was instantly alert. The Nelvans, having taken heart from his example the previous evening, were facing off with the Darsivian and his Kardati comrade. But before it could erupt into a full-scale melee, the door burst open and half a dozen silahdars entered the barracks in a single file, their discipline batons at the ready.
The first one, a green armband prominent on his biceps, shouted an order in Danjori and even though Decker didn’t understand the words, he knew what the senior instructor wanted. He jumped up and stood at attention at the foot of his cot, mentally repeating the phrase to memorize it.
Batons flew as the others proved too slow in reacting until there was complete silence once everyone had imitated Zack. He could play the boot camp bullshit all day long if that’s what they wanted.
It wasn’t.
The head silahdar walked up to him and stopped so close he could feel the man’s breath on his cheek.
“Decker.”
Zack nodded, keeping his eyes staring straight ahead.
“You will follow me.” He repeated the order in Danjori, then spun on his heels and walked towards the door.
As Zack stepped out of the barracks into the early morning mist that hovered over the garrison, he noted another silahdar standing to one side of the door. Before he could process the thought any further, the man punched him hard in the right kidney.
Though his knees buckled at the unexpected violence and pain, he remained upright and kept his eyes on the one with the green armband. If they hoped to provoke retaliation, they were going to be disappointed. In this too, Decker knew how to play the game. They must have watched him take down the two nonhumans the previous evening and knew he could lash out hard and fast.