Tribute: Captives of Kazir
Page 1
Copyright © 2020 by Sophie Kisker
Which means if you upload part or all of this book to any site without my permission, it is illegal, and you are stealing, even if there is no monetary compensation to you.
Just don’t do it.
Synopsis
Mena is trapped in a dark alien nightmare.
Kazir was supposed to be a sanctuary for the weary, desperate humans. But the alien race that already occupies the planet demands a terrible sacrifice to let them stay.
Mena is that sacrifice.
Now she belongs to a harsh alien master, destined for a future of endless suffering.
And yet, bending to his demands strikes a chord of desire that she doesn't understand.
Mikkal knew agreeing to take a human was a bad idea. The darkness inside him has never been easy to keep hidden. Now it has begun to escape his control.
And the worst part?
He’s never felt more alive.
~ ~
Caution: steamy aliens go to dark places to compel human affections.
Cover art by Mayhem Cover Creations
Free Book with Newsletter Signup!
Get news, advance looks at new covers, story excerpts, and deals. I only send a about 10 per year, mostly around new releases, and your email is never shared.
Click to Get Your Free Book!
All The Usual Warnings
IMPORTANT: Return this book if you don’t like male protagonists who are dark bas**rds at the beginning of the story (but HEA guaranteed!)
This book is FICTION for readers who enjoy fantasies, and who realize they are a normal part of a woman’s mind, and do not show how she wants to be treated in real life. I also don't mention condoms or safe sex practices.
Nothing in this book is a guide for how to live your life, or treat other people.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Request for Reviews
Free Book with Newsletter Signup!
Memories of Surrender Chapter 1
Also by Sophie Kisker
Prologue
Mik'kal
Mik'kal threw the senatorial robe around his shoulders as he hurried down the hall, adjusting the clasp at the left shoulder with practiced ease before arriving at the ornately carved door. The final vote on the fate of the humans when they arrived at Kazir was today, and there was still no agreement among the Kaziri Senate whether to let them live or die. But time was growing short. They would be here in one lunar.
A wave of angry voices hit him as he slipped in. He stood at the top of the chamber, looking down at the one hundred and fifty women and men milling about, arguing and waving two or four arms in animation. A soft bell signaled the resumption of the session, and conversations died out as everyone sought their seat, and the debating resumed.
“We cannot risk letting them land here!” A tall, thin man with grey skin and hair was the first to thrust himself to his feet. “Those of us whose parents were alive when the last humans came grew up hearing the stories. Surely, the rest of you studied this in school? Taking the first group of humans as slaves seventy-five solar orbits ago was one of the darkest periods in our history! Why do you think this time would be different? We need to end them before they get any closer!”
Another older man, shorter but just as grey as the first, pushed himself up with effort. “We may have a violent nature, Senator, but we do not collectively decide to end the lives of a large group of innocents. We kill in honorable battle, where the enemy has a chance to defend themselves, but survivors are taken as slaves, not killed. Simply eliminating the humans without giving them a chance to fight back is a betrayal of the values we hold as Kaziri.”
Mik'kal caught the rolled eyes of some of the younger senators, though they didn’t dare contradict the elder statesman out loud.
“They still have no idea this planet is already occupied?” asked one of them to Dirac Ortan, sitting at the front.
“We’ve been able to listen to their communications inside the ship, both spoken and recorded, for the last solar. The captain knows now, as well as a few crew members, but they are hiding the information from the rest of the colonists. The crew believes we are a technologically naive species, few in number, and easy to remove because that is the image we choose to show their sensors. Their arrogance has led to a plan to take over the planet by force.”
Angry exclamations and disbelieving shouts erupted from every corner. Kaziri had been traveling in space for hundreds of solars, and when force was used, they were the ones doing the conquering.
“Senators,” the speaker’s rough, gravelly voice intoned from below Dirac Ortan’s chair, “you have three choices before you. The first is to destroy them before they enter our space. Their death will be quick and painless.”
A willowy woman with greenish skin stood, her deep purple senate robe looking almost too heavy for her delicate frame. “What about the humans who come after them? And after that?”
The Dirac shook his head. “There will not be any more humans for a long time, if ever. Shortly after they left, a planet-wide nuclear war erupted, most of the population died, and the environment collapsed. The few who are left are living in dangerous and primitive conditions. The Allied Worlds have declared them off-limits indefinitely.”
The murmuring was quiet and shocked. For a species to destroy the only planet they could live on was unheard of. More senators stood to voice opinions.
“If they are that stupid, perhaps they do not deserve to live.”
There was a rumbling of agreement.
“These might be the last humans in the galaxy. I believe they deserve a chance, even if they are arrogant. We would do the same for animals who are about to become extinct!”
“Animals don’t destroy their own home.”
“Species can change!”
The senator from Adlia stood with the seriousness that presaged one of his famous impromptu speeches. Muffled sighs could be heard, but he ignored them.
“Destroying them doesn’t help us. We need them—at least some of them—as much as they need us. Conquests of other planets have grown rare since we joined the Allied Worlds. While it is good for our people to take our place among civilized planets and find other outlets for our violent natures, our physical need for conquest and dominance has grown strong in recent times. By releasing that need upon the humans, we will allow our culture, our arts, and our intellect to stop the inexorable slide they’ve been on these last solars. If we don’t find a way to let it out, our natures will grow more violent, and the beauty inside us will be trapped. We will decay from within, and our society will return to the days when we were feared and despised around the galaxy.”
Mik'kal and everyone else had heard this argument over and over, but frankly, he thought the senator was being dram
atic. It was true the Kaziri people needed to calm their nirza, the life force that inhabited every person and the planet itself. The nirza needed to release violence to be at peace, as strange as that sounded. Fierce games of skill and battle reenactments had become wildly popular and kept most people’s nirzas sated. As far as Mik'kal was concerned, humans and Kaziri were so different that allowing them to mix was a recipe for disaster to their way of life, with no guarantee the nirza would be calmed.
The speaker touched a glowing dot in front of him, and the soft bell rang again. The room fell silent.
“The second option is to enslave them all, which will require a measure of ruthlessness. We learned lessons from enslaving the first shipload of humans that may allow us to better handle this group. Regardless, humans as a group seem to be unsuited for slavery, and this choice may also ultimately lead to their extinction.”
Angry shouts rang out once more from senators on both sides of the issue, some arguing it served the humans right for being so arrogant, and others proclaiming the Kaziri could never let that happen to another civilized species.
The speaker resumed reading.
“Option three is to isolate them on Kalnų Sala Island, and in exchange for a place to live, they agree to the following conditions…”
Mik'kal let his mind wander. He could recite the details by heart because he’d been in the planning group that forged the details over many, many lunars.
The debate on the last option raged for so long, the sun had moved a quarter of the way across the chamber floor before they were done. At long last, the speaker called for silence again.
“Vote for your first and second choices, please.”
All around the room, senators lifted their hands to touch screens that hovered in the air before them. The results didn’t surprise Mik'kal.
“Twenty-two votes to eliminate the humans before they arrive. Forty-four to enslave them all. Thirty for letting them remain free but isolating them. Option one, eliminating them, is thrown out.”
Exclamations from older members erupted, furious their counsel was being ignored. Mik'kal knew the youngest members, whose violent natures had barely been contained for a while now, would vote for enslaving them all, and damn the cost to the humans or the Kaziri.
It remained to be seen if humans would be slave or free.
“Quiet!” Dirac Ortan yelled, an unusual eruption from the normally staid politician.
“The second round of votes is as follows,” the speaker resumed. “Fifty-three to let them live in isolation, forty-six in favor of enslavement for the entire group.”
It appeared that by a very slim margin, the humans were going to get a chance to make their own life on Kazir.
Once again, angry voices broke out. The speaker called for quiet twice before the Dirac took the extreme step of turning on a Zone of Silence. Suddenly, no one could hear anyone else, and the chamber fell silent until he lifted the Zone.
“I will make contact with the humans and deliver the decision and the conditions.”
“And if they refuse the conditions?” one senator called out. “An honorable people would.”
“If they choose the honorable option, we will simply take what we demand, showing them they have no choice.” He stood. “The Senate is released.”
The entire room stood. “We serve the Dirac Ortan,” the crowd of women and men recited.
Their leader inclined his head, finishing the traditional declaration of loyalty, “And the Dirac Ortan is grateful for your service.”
1
Mena
The portholes on the shuttle were small, but it wasn’t difficult to see the large ship receding as they pulled away. The Hope II, their only home since leaving Earth ten years ago, grew smaller and smaller until it was lost from sight, just one more point of light in this vast area of space.
The shock of what was happening had at first stirred cries of anger and indignation from the forty-odd passengers, demanding to know what was going on. When it became clear that no one on the shuttle knew why they were there, they mostly fell silent, and waited.
Mena Clarke, strapped tight in her seat, gripped the hand of her best friend, Addy. Twenty minutes ago she’d been reading an erotic romance in her tiny cabin and contemplating removing her shorts to continue reading one-handed. Then a glowing blue light had simply appeared in her room. She found out quickly that to touch it or go past it was unpleasantly painful. It herded her out the cabin door and down a number of halls usually buzzing with activity. When she realized she was being pushed into a shuttle, she balked, but the buzzing that surrounded her body when the blue light continued forward was unbearable and she moved across the threshold to escape it. The light stayed behind.
She looked around in confusion at the others in the chair-filled cabin as they looked back in confusion to her. Almost all the inhabitants of the shuttle identified as women, a few identified as men, and several, she knew from living with the same people for ten years, were gender fluid.
She spotted Addy and ran over, the two women embracing.
“Is Daniel here?” Mena finally pulled away enough to ask.
Addy shook her head. “We were in the gardens, doing soil testing. Then he suddenly stopped moving. At the same time, that blue light showed up and pushed me to this shuttle. Mena, what’s going on?”
A loud bell interrupted them and a soft voice emerged from the ceiling. “Please take your seats. We will explain in a moment.”
The shuttle door swung shut with a bang, and Mena heard hissing noises.
A woman close to the windows whipped her head around toward the noise. “Fuck, people, find a seat, this baby is about to release, and we’re gonna lose gravity!”
A moment later, it happened. Dozens of people collided with each other and the ceiling until, one by one, they were hauled down by the more experienced crew.
Someone cried out, “Look!” and they turned to the portholes in disbelief to watch as the shuttle detached from the ship and moveed away.
This was not what was supposed to happen. They had just arrived at Allos, an uninhabited planet, except for the first group of humans who’d left Earth five years before Mena’s group, in Hope I. The ship that carried Mena, the Hope II, had fallen out of hyperdrive multiple times on its five-year journey, needing extensive repairs, and the five years on board the ship had stretched to ten. Thanks to the Law of Relativity—no longer the Theory of Relativity, now that space travel was faster than light—the ten years they experienced had been decades longer to the humans already on Allos, who had probably ceased to expect them.
But no one had mentioned this, whatever it was. Mena couldn’t imagine anything except they’d been chosen to go down early, without warning, in secrecy. Even as she thought it, the idea seemed absurd.
The bell interrupted her thoughts.
“Humans. Welcome to Kazir, the planet you call Allos.” The voice was soothing, though the accent was strange. “This planet is not uninhabited, as your primitive observations led you to believe. The Kaziri people have lived here for thousands of years. We have sympathy for your dismay. It's not easy to find out that you are not alone in the universe, nor is it pleasant to hear that the planet you believed was yours to conquer belongs to someone else. The first group of humans who arrived seventy-five solars ago were just as shocked. Had they simply asked for sanctuary, we would have welcomed all of them. But, they believed we were technologically inferior, and made plans to defeat us by force and take over the planet. They did not get the chance.
“As you may have surmised by now, we are far superior to humans. We subdued them with ease and kept them as slaves, something our culture has a long history of doing with the worlds we conquer.”
A feeling of dread ran down Mena’s spine, and she heard the quick intake of breath from others on the shuttle.
“We learned that most humans are unfit to be slaves. Those few solars were a dark period in our history.” The voice hesitated as
though it meant to say more, then went on.
“So, when your captain also decided upon a course of invasion, we had to make a decision. The vote was close, and you need to understand how near you came to being destroyed without warning. In the end, we decided to compromise. The majority of humans will be settled on a large, uninhabited island. You, however, will not be joining them.”
Protests sprang up from all over the cabin.
“Silence!” The word echoed through their bones. “We have been listening to your conversations for a solar, which you call a year. Yes, we are able to do that. We’ve been monitoring what you read, what you watch, and who you have sexual relations with.”
Shit. Mena’s cheeks grew warm. The last vid she’d watched was Haunted House Punishment, something she’d been embarrassed to have wasted time on. The last book was Alien Captive, and the last time she’d seen Daniel, one of her favorite fucking partners, he’d spanked her, at her request. She looked over at Addy. Her best friend, and other favorite fucking partner, was staring back, the horror on her face probably a mirror to Mena’s.
“Each one of you has a submissive personality.”