My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire

by Colin Alexander

  Chapter 6

  The list that Hvath gave me when we finally found him seemed neither too lengthy nor too onerous. Hvath didn’t say he was done, however, when he stopped speaking. Instead, he came to a drawn out pause before starting up again.

  “There’s one other that you’re stuck with. It’s not a very good one because it means that you won’t be able to eat at the same time as most of the crew.”

  Hvath actually looked sorry about it. Kolgorinn had not been popular, most bullies aren’t, and Hvath had come up with a device to keep him away at mealtimes. Up to this point, I had taken it as a minor stroke of luck that Kolgorinn was rarely in the mess when I was eating.

  “What is it?”

  “You’re the one who brings the meals in to the prisoner.”

  “Prisoner? You mean the Little Mistress?”

  “That’s the one,” he nodded. It’s only temporary, obviously, which is good for you because I doubt you can trade it.”

  I didn’t see why it should be such a problem, but Hvath was explaining even before I asked.

  “You pick up the meal at the mess and bring it down to the cabin. The guard there will let you in and you take it in. Once you do, you stay until she finishes it and you see that she finishes it. She’s no good to Carvalho if she starves to death. Same reason, anything that goes in with you comes out with you. And finally, hands off! Just think of it as valuable cargo. Mess it up and Carvalho will mess you up.”

  That, I thought, was clear and to the point.

  The late meal that day was my first time on the job. The covered tray was waiting for me at the mess. There was a bowl of pureed something that looked like oatmeal and smelled like cabbage. Dull as shipboard food was, this was duller. The single utensil the Srihani favored had been altered. The tines were clipped short and the cutting edge had been removed, converting it into little more than a soupspoon. Whatever little potential it had for being used as a weapon was gone.

  I took the tray to a corridor in the area where the officer quarters were, up near the bridge. With a single female prisoner on a ship full of male pirates, Carvalho wasn’t about to put her in the brig. Since there was no place to run to on a ship in interstellar space, it was more important to keep her isolated from the crew than to prevent her from running away. The brig, although secure, was really just a holding area. Had Carvalho used it for the Little Mistress, there would have been no place to put the rowdies while they cooled off. Instead, they’d sealed off a stretch of corridor and put her in one of the rooms. The entrance to the corridor slid open when I pressed my hand to the plate. It slid closed again as soon as I had passed through.

  Seated outside the door was one very bored looking guard. Quite possibly, that was the worst duty on the ship. I waited at the door for him to leave his seat, having been told that the door to the room hadn’t been keyed to my hand.

  “You got Kolgorinn?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He shook his head, as though reluctant to believe it. “I’d have bet the wrong way if I’d heard it was coming. I wish I had seen it. Don’t worry about this job. It won’t be forever. Anyway, you’re only stuck here for the meals.”

  He let me in, then closed the door between us. The best word to describe the cabin inside was barren. It was a standard ship’s cabin, but almost everything that was not an integral part of the walls and floor had been removed. A bathroom was set into the inner wall of the cabin, proof that this had belonged to one of the upper officers. Its door had been fixed in the open position. The only furniture in the cabin was the bed, a Srihani bed being like a large beanbag filled with gelfoam, and a small table next to it. The room reminded me of the modified utensil. Carvalho intended to leave no possible way for his prisoner to commit suicide.

  Wouldn’t it have been easier to put a camera in the cabin? Yes, if the proper equipment had been available. The ship hadn’t been designed with internal security in mind. While the materials necessary to create such a system could, no doubt, be found on the ship, it would have required some ingenuity to put it together. Carvalho’s freebooters, educated or not, were using equipment they could manipulate but didn’t really understand. It’s not such a strange situation. After all, I didn’t need a certification in gynecology in order to have sex. It was much the same with the ship. They could fly it, fight it and repair parts of it, but jury-rigging a surveillance camera, which required creative thought, they wouldn’t even consider. It was simpler to find a way to work without one, which accounted for the strict instructions about keeping my hands off.

  Given the lack of furniture in the cabin, the only place for the Little Mistress to sit was on the bed. She was there when I came in, although it would have been easy to mistake her for another piece of furniture. She sat utterly motionless, and no part of her was visible, thanks to a gray cloak that shrouded her from neck to ankle and had a deep hood that completely hid her face. All I could see, other than the cloak, was a pair of black half-boots, the type that was worn with a shipsuit. She didn’t acknowledge my entrance in any way.

  I felt awkward at being ignored. How do you introduce yourself to your kidnap victim when she doesn’t greet you?

  “Hi,” I said, “I’ve got your dinner.”

  For all the response I got, I might as well have stood there, as silent as she. Had I waited for her to say something, I would probably still be standing there. I was there to bring her dinner, so that’s what I did. I walked the tray over to the table, put it down and pushed the table in front of her. Even up close, the folds of the hood were too deep to see her face. Having left the tray, I retreated to the door and waited. And waited.

  Finally, I said, “Look, you know that I have to see that you eat it,” while wondering how I was going to do that.

  To my immense relief, there was a fractional nod and she began to comply. By virtue of picking up the utensil and the cover, her hands became visible. Their normalness was a bit of a surprise, since that all-encompassing cloak had built up fantasies in my mind about what type of being might be underneath it. The hands, however, were Srihani. They were small, which matched my estimate of the figure under the cloak, and covered with pale, white skin. One of them brought the food from the bowl up into the recesses of the hood. When the bowl was empty, the hands disappeared again. The meal finished, I was free to take the tray back and have my own dinner.

  At first, her silence didn’t bother me. In fact, I preferred it that way. I was ambivalent about holding a hostage; no matter what the empire was really like, it wasn’t her fault. By not talking to me, I figured she wasn’t going to make me feel any more guilty than I already did. I was glad for that because icing Kolgorinn had gained me a measure of acceptance from the crew, which I appreciated. Although I hadn’t fought alongside them yet, the standard by which they measured everyone, they did admit me to the social life of the ship. The humor could be a little rough, but I began to feel a part of the team.

  Except, that is, for the time I spent watching the Little Mistress eat. It got old fast, standing there with nothing to do while she ate and not reaching the mess until almost everyone else was done. Guilty feelings or not, I began to wish she would say something.

  The silence led me to invent conversations we could have. That was bad for me, because somewhere in each conversation would be the accusing question, “Why are you doing this to me?” No answer sounded good, even in the privacy of my head. Before too long, I really did want to talk with her, if for no other reason than to get the accusation out into the open. But she said nothing. I wondered if she was just too afraid of me to talk, my predecessor having been Kolgorinn, but my elaborate attempts at politeness and kindness met with no response. I could have turned in a different direction and spoken my lines to one of the walls for all the impact they had.

  One day, I brought the late meal in and announced in the grandiose fashion I had adopted, “Dinner is served, Little Mistress.”

  She said nothing, as usual, but I t
hought I saw a twitch of the shoulders at the phrase. Possibly, she didn’t like it. Irritating someone was a hell of a way to start a conversation, but what alternative was there? Throughout that meal, I “Little Mistressed” her to death. Outwardly, there was no more response than I had obtained by standing quietly next to the door. Still, by the time I left, even though I had been the only one talking, I was certain from her posture that I had made an impression. I decided that when I came back the next time, I would keep at it until something happened.

  “Mealtime again, Little Mistress,” I said as I came through the door.

  “I wish you would not call me that,” she said.

  I almost dropped the tray when she spoke, I was so convinced that it would take forever until I heard her speak. Temporarily, I forgot the line I had worked out to follow up any opening. Fortunately, I’m good at thinking on my feet.

  “What should I call you then?” I asked.

  “Nothing would be fine,” she answered, “but if you have to call me something, use my name.”

  Her reply surprised me a bit. Not for its content, but for its tone, which was low pitched and completely controlled. It was a peculiar role reversal, given the situation. My voice was the shaky one.

  “I need to know your name before I can use it,” I said, reasonably.

  “Jaenna a Tyaromon is my name,” and there was defiance in her voice.

  “Well, then Jaenna, here is your meal.” I set it down on the table and backed off against the cabin wall. “I’m Danny Troy.”

  “Dannytroy,” she said, making one word of it. “Do you not claim an ancestor?”

  I wasn’t accustomed to Imperial naming. People used a given name and the name of an ancestor, usually but not always the father. The “a” stood for a long word that meant “descended from.” Introductions and formal speech called for the full name. I seemed to remember from the Teacher that females rarely “claimed an ancestor.” The forcefulness with which Jaenna gave her name made me wonder why.

  “I should have said Danny a Troy,” I apologized. “Where I come from, we drop the ‘a’. You can call me Danny.”

  “I do not see why I should call you anything other than the freebooter skurlur you are,” she shot back.

  Skurlur would lose its colorful connotations in translation. It’s an odoriferous species of slime mold found on many Imperial worlds. I had not been complimented.

  I had the feeling that if I let the conversation lapse into silence, those were the last words we would have. So, I tried again.

  “Look, I’m not trying to pretend you’re enjoying yourself, but it has to be boring as hell to sit and stare at the walls. You can talk to me.”

  “And why should I talk to a freebooter?” There was an edge forming under the soft voice. “You attacked my ship, killed most of the crew, and I am simply going to sit here until Carvalho wants this cabin back and kills me too.”

  “Wait, just wait a minute,” I began, rather defensively. “I can’t say anything about what happened to your ship, I joined this one after that fight. I’m not trying to say it was right, it wasn’t. But that’s past and done. Your father will pay off Carvalho and you’ll be swapped back. Carvalho hardly went to all that trouble just to kill you.”

  “Dannytroy,” she asked, “are all you freebooters cretins as well as murderous thieves?”

  Jaenna did have a way with words.

  “No,” I told her, “I’m not stupid.”

  “Well, you talk as though you are. My father is a great ruler in the Inner Empire, one of the most powerful to give first loyalty to the emperor. What is the real value of a daughter to him: to create a tie to another family or kvenningar for alliance or to consolidate power. For that, you want a desirable daughter. I am nothing much to look at and I have too independent a mind to make a tie when there are alternatives. To my father, I am worthless. Certainly, I’m not worth the embarrassment of paying ransom to a freebooter. He will not pay Carvalho’s ransom and when Carvalho finally figures that out, he will kill me.” Nowhere in that speech did she let me hear any hint of emotion.

  That was the end of our conversation. I protested that it wasn’t true, that it wouldn’t happen that way, all to no avail. Jaenna had decided that she was through talking and had turned back into stone.

  I left with my head a little woozy. Jaenna had given me a lot to think about in a short of time. It was inconceivable to me that a father would value a daughter only as a political pawn, and would leave her to die if she could not be used that way. In fact, it twisted my stomach so badly that I was at loose ends until I could go back with the next meal.

  When I did go back, as much as I wanted to talk Jaenna out of her convictions, I felt that I had to talk about something less gloomy first. Nothing I thought of on the way sounded right in my head, if you can imagine Danny-boy Troy without a ready line, so I fell back on something Jaenna had said before.

  “You told me you aren’t worth looking at. Is that why you sit there buried in that cloak?”

  “If it is, it is my privilege,” she said.

  “Well, I’d like to judge for myself what you look like.” Yes, I was curious. There was no immediate response, however, and I wondered if she was going to go back to ignoring me.

  In fact, there was no answer until she had finished the bowl. Then, just as I was ready to give up and leave with the tray, she stood up and said, “Wait Dannytroy.”

  I waited. Standing, I could see she measured no more than five one or two. After a pause, she pulled the hood back on her shoulders.

  After the buildup, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but whatever I was expecting wasn’t what I saw. As with most Srihani, there was the same mixture of features that, on Earth, I had associated with discrete racial groups. Jaenna’s face could have graced a Thai princess, with a soft helmet of black hair behind. The curves at her cheeks and the smooth sweep along the jaw to her chin looked delicately sculpted, but it was a sculpture of stone. Her complexion matched her hands, a pale, Irish cream with a few freckles across the nose and onto the cheeks. The eyes that looked out from mildly slanted lids were chips of emerald.

  As I looked at her, she raised her arms in a shrug and the cloak fell open. Beneath, she wore a formfitting shipsuit of the same neutral gray as her cloak. The figure it revealed was slim with graceful curves at breast and hip merging at a slender waist. Her youth showed in her face, but hers was the body of a young woman, not a girl. There was no question in my mind. Jaenna a Tyaromon could have stopped the action in any Earthside bar just by walking in.

  She didn’t seem to share my opinion. “As you see,” she said, “too small, too skinny and the face is wrong.”

  “Jaenna, I don’t know anything about styles in your empire, but where I come from, you could start fights.”

  At that, I saw a hint of dimples under the high cheekbones. There was even humor in her voice when she asked me what hole in the Outer Empire I came from. When I told her it wasn’t in the empire at all, her eyes lit up.

  “At the next meal, Dannytroy, tell me about your home. I’m sure you have other weird ideas as well.”

  “I’ll trade you stories,” I promised.

  I wanted to know everything about what it was really like to live in the great Galactic Empire of the Srihani. It was the same question I’d had from my first day on the ship, but my shipmates had been of little help. Jaenna, though, had actually lived on one of the most important Imperial worlds. The empire was her home, so she would see it differently than a gang of ruffians whose interest revolved around what could be grabbed and how much it could be sold for. When I brought Jaenna her next meal, all of my questions came out in sort of a babble, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her soft voice filled the otherwise quiet room as she talked about her homeworld.

  Surprisingly, to me anyway, it was difficult at first to develop a feel for the empire from her description. Jaenna was young (not to imply that I was old, mind you, but Jaenna was younger) and had nev
er lived anywhere but home before leaving on her ill-starred trip. Seen through her eyes, and then filtered through my perceptions, her world sounded a lot like mine. There were mountains and oceans and plains and cities, and if they all had strange names, so did the ones in China when I had first learned to read a map. People woke up in the morning and went to their jobs, families had children that grew up in fits and starts, businesses produced goods and services. It was like reading the Lonely Planet guide about a distant country and trying to feel, from that alone, what it was like to live there. So, I asked her to tell me about herself.

  “I am the youngest of four daughters and a son,” she began. “My father, Tyaromon a Vinoya, is the governor of Kaaran, one of the richest worlds of the Inner Empire.”

  “Inner Empire?” I asked. “Why do you call it that?”

  Jaenna shrugged. “I suppose you wouldn’t know. It’s the part of the empire where the Fleet is able to prevent freebooter raids and, while the kvenningari play their Game of Empire, open fighting is rare. It’s called ‘inner’ just because it’s on the inner side of the spiral arm. Kaaran is one of the Independent Worlds, which means our first loyalty is directly to the emperor, not to any kvenningari. Of course, since one or another kvenningari represents the interests of the emperor, my father might as well be ruler in his own right. My brother will succeed him as ruler. Technically, the emperor appoints the new governor, but for centuries the governor has made the decision himself. My sisters, now they are truly beautiful. They are all tall, have much more in the chest and hip than I do, and they have rounded eyes. My father will use them to create ties to strengthen his position. Now, I will agree that my father is powerful enough that he could create a tie with me, but with three older, more attractive sisters, why would he bother?”

  “Jaenna, what do you mean by a tie?”