Then the attendants left and closed the door behind them. None of the slaves were bound, Alaina realized. No one expected them to fight back, or even to try to run. Which meant that they were so good at putting a stop to that kind of thing that it never happened. Or maybe nobody ever really tried. Alaina knew it wasn’t worth the effort yet. Even if she’d gotten out of this room, the space station itself was such a mystery to her, she’d never have been able to find a way off it. So she stood, hands at her sides, beside Yfia, and waited.
After what felt like forever, but couldn’t have really been more than a few minutes, the curtain began to move, withdrawing to one side of the room and folding neatly up against the wall. About a dozen aliens lounged on low couches, and standing in front of them all was Captain Rua. He extended a hand, displaying the slaves, and smiled.
“Welcome to the auction, your graces,” Rua said, flashing his white teeth at them. “We will begin with Amat Riglor, a fierce Ankaa warrior.”
Alaina tuned him out as he began to describe the other aliens in the line. She looked from alien to alien, attempting to sort them out.
There were several Jiayi like Yfia. But unlike Yfia, they all had tall, twisting, sharp-edged antlers instead of small ones. They seemed to be in pairs, and Alaina couldn’t tell if they were all of the same family or not. Probably different, because each couple wore different colors of purple, blue, or green.
Then there were several Ankaa, and Alaina thought they must have been mostly interested in acquiring gladiators. They all wore armor like the Ankaa on Rua’s ship, but this armor was chrome and black, highly polished, and looked much better made. The Ankaa were there for fighters, Alaina decided, and likely wouldn’t spend their money on her unless they wanted someone to polish their armor, maybe.
The last group of aliens, and the ones closest to where Alaina stood, were Errai. Several men Alaina thought must have been bodyguards of some kind, all in black and gold armor, standing behind one sofa where a girl lounged in a dress almost as sheer as Alaina’s. She sprawled with one arm on the back of the sofa, looking bored, watching as Rua moved down the line of slaves. She was beautiful, too. Her hair was a vivid red, not like the red of Earth’s humans, but fire engine red. She was pale-skinned, save for where evergreen scales wound over her arms, over her collar bone, disappearing beneath her shimmery-gold dress. While Alaina was staring at her, she looked right over, and their eyes met. Alaina blinked, surprised.
The girl blinked back, an eyebrow arching slowly.
“And this is Alaina, the only human on the ticket today, arriving all the way from my home planet, Earth,” Rua was saying.
Then Alaina realized that not only was the Errai girl looking at her, but all of the aliens in the room were. She did her best to stand still and promptly lowered her eyes, wanting to seem meek and obedient. She couldn’t be elegant in it like Yfia, but perhaps if she at least looked harmless enough, it would inspire the other Jiayi to want to purchase her.
“Alaina has no Arena training,” Rua said. “But as you can see, she is a very fine specimen all the same. This color, her hair, is blond. Very desired on Earth. She would make an excellent bed slave.”
Fuck you, Rua, Alaina thought, jaw tightening. What a prick.
“Please enter your bids for each of our offerings today on your tablet, and once the auction has closed, your treasures will be released to you.”
The rear door opened, then, and the attendants returned. One of them took Alaina’s arm and walked her into the corridor, but she managed to throw a fierce glare over her shoulder at Rua as she went. He looked back at her, smug.
The attendant pulled her one way down the corridor, and Alaina realized that another attendant was taking Yfia in the opposite direction.
“Yfia?” Alaina called, alarmed. Was this it? Would they ever see each other again?
Yfia looked down her arm at Alaina and smiled. “Best prayers for you, human child,” she said. “I hope I see you again.”
And then Yfia’s attendant led her around a corner, and she was gone.
Chapter Four
Alaina was placed in a similar room to where the auction had happened. Carpeted, with furniture low to the floor, and a pair of wide windows. It was like a lounge, Alaina thought. Without Yfia to explain it, Alaina was rather at a loss. Maybe this was where slaves waited to serve new masters. Or where people just kind of hung out after a bath. She had no idea. But once the attendant left, she was too anxious to sit.
The silent auction meant she had no idea who had bid on her, if anyone. She had however long it took them to tally the bids, to determine who had won what, and then she was going to be passed to a master. And would that dog Rua manipulate it somehow? Would he make certain she ended up with someone awful or was he more interested in the cash? Whatever form cash took in space.
When she got bored of pacing, she sat down on one of the couches. It was soft, but it wasn’t even a full foot off the floor. Everything was so low to the ground, the sofas and the tables, it was like the old paintings of Ancient Rome Alaina remembered studying in high school. Couple that with the Arena and she briefly wondered if she’d traveled back in time, too. But, no. It made sense, she reasoned, that if there were ancient alien cultures and they’d been to Earth again and again, stealing people or whatever, that some of their culture would have rubbed off on early humans. So, she reasoned, it wasn’t that this place was reminiscent of Ancient Rome, it was that Ancient Rome had been reminiscent of this place. Insane.
Finally the door opened, and Alaina shot up to her feet. Captain Rua strolled in, holding the door open for one of the aliens. To Alaina’s utter dismay, it was not one of the Jiayi.
But to her equal surprise, it was the Errai girl.
“Your grace,” Rua said, nodding to Alaina. “I present your prize. Look down when your domina is present, slave.”
Alaina blinked and looked down, but felt her temper rise at that. She wasn’t going to live long, though, if she couldn’t play the part. So she stared at her feet, even when she heard the girl approach her. Sandaled feet stopped across from hers. Her toenails were scaled, the same evergreen, and looked like they’d been painted that way.
“I am Lennai of House Chara, your new domina,” she said. Her voice was light and airy, sweet, but Alaina remembered Yfia calling the Errai vicious. “Captain Rua tells me that you are new to our world, new to the work of a slave, even. That’s all right. We’ll make sure you pick it up quickly.”
Alaina had no idea what to say to that. “Thank you, domina.”
The girl clapped her hands. “See! She’s a natural. Rua, I assume you are happy with my payment?”
“Yes, your grace,” Rue replied. “Very happy, in fact.”
“Excellent. We’ll be going then. Alaina, you may escort me.”
Alaina lifted her eyes, but only so far as Lennai’s collarbone, because she had no idea what to do.
Lennai sighed and held up her hand, then let it rest on Alaina’s shoulder. “Now you walk, and I walk with you. You can keep your eyes for this. Try to look proud. You are now owned by the most powerful family on the station.”
Alaina stole a glance at Rua, who no longer looked smug, and then she walked to the door with Lennai drifting along, more or less at her side. In the corridor, Lennai indicated which direction to go, and the bodyguards in red and gold fell in behind them. When they emerged from the bathhouse and the roar of the market hit them, Alaina faltered, but Lennai just let go of her and walked past her, towards a hovering phaeton at the base of the bathhouse steps. Alaina followed, watching Lennai climb through the curtains and into the little transport. Then one guard climbed into the front driver section of the phaeton, but the rest of the guards flanked Alaina and she was made to walk behind it with them.
The walk through the market was a tough one.
It was loud and full of people, and all so strange Alaina found herself teetering on the edge of a panic a
ttack. Past the slave blocks, the market itself was popping with stores and stalls, full of brilliant colors and noise. Aliens hawked their wares, shouting out articles of clothing with names Alaina didn’t recognize, waving food she’d never seen before. Children darted here and there, some of them begging, some of them stealing, she was sure. It was a bustling metropolis on a space station, and Alaina looked around at all of it as she walked behind the phaeton, escorted by armed guards.
The phaeton wound its way up a long, narrow street, and eventually the sounds of the market began to fade. Buildings rose up all around them, several stories high, glistening metal walls with gates barring every entrance. When Alaina could peek through a gate here and there, she saw gardens with wild fronds and blooming flowers from other planets. Some of them had mouths. Guard flowers. It was a crazy juxtaposition of old and light-year new. The houses were shaped like what Alaina thought Roman villas would have looked like, but they were all made of futuristic materials and contained these strange aliens. Then the phaeton passed beneath another portcullis much larger than the one that had separated the bathhouse from the slave quarter. This one was painted in the red and gold of the Errai. They must have been passing from the central part of the station to the Errai-only section.
And sure enough, beyond that gate, all she saw were Errai.
On the other side, it was like a castle. A palace. Banners and huge windows that let in spacelight, carpets and curtains and chandeliers. The phaeton stopped in a gigantic foyer and Lennai climbed out of it, brushing out the skirt of her dress with one hand while extending the other towards Alaina.
“Come along.”
Alaina went to her but didn’t take her hand. Which seemed just as well, since Lennai didn’t appear to want her to, just to answer her beckoning. She turned and started walking and Alaina followed her, trying to keep her eyes low, when all she wanted to do was look around at everything. Servants hustled this way and that, in clothes similar to the dress Alaina wore. Not servants, she corrected herself. Slaves. They must have all been slaves. Serving slaves and guarding slaves.
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked suddenly, as Lennai led her down a twisting marble staircase.
“Domina,” Lennai said sharply, looking at her. “You always call me 'domina.' And I don’t like it when slaves ask questions, but given your background, I’ll let it slide. This time. In the future, you will trust that I will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it, to properly serve me.”
“Fine,” Alaina muttered. “Domina.”
“Rua recommended you as a bed slave,” Lennai went on. She shrugged, and fiery red curls slipped across her shoulders. “But I have plenty of bed slaves. I don’t need another. Despite all of his insistence.”
Alaina exhaled, relieved.
“However, I do need an exceptionally unique donara, and I think you will do perfectly.”
Alaina hesitated. She had no idea what a donara was, and now she was afraid asking would get her snapped at again, or worse.
In the minute she spent struggling with whether or not to ask, Lennai led her to the foot of the staircase and then out a pair of glass doors, onto a high porch that overlooked what Alaina realized was a training yard. Two dozen men and women populated the yard, all of them practice fighting in a miniature arena scattered with soft sand. Lennai went to the porch’s railing, settling her hands upon it, and looked down at the fighters with pride.
Not just fighters, Alaina reminded herself. These were gladiators. The gladiators Yfia spoke of, who fought whole wars in the Arena to keep interplanetary peace. Alaina saw Errai and Jiayi and Ankaa among those training in the yard, and felt an anchor of dread drop right through her stomach. Was she going to be made to fight? Would Yfia’s prediction come true? If she had to fight, surely she would die. She had no idea how to fight the way these aliens were fighting. Some of them had weapons she’d never seen before, could not have even imagined how they were used. She’d barely ever thrown a punch in her life.
Lennai lifted her hands and clapped them three times.
The fighters reacted instantaneously, as if whipped, all stopping what they were doing and falling into a tight, straight line before the balcony, looking up at Lennai. Shoulders straight, hands at their sides, chins high. They’d moved almost in concert, and swiftly, until they were perfectly positioned beneath their domina’s gaze. And they were all rippling with muscles, even the Jiayi, who were still slender but chiseled. Even in the women, there wasn’t an inch of body fat on any of them. Scarred, sandy faces, and eyes hardened by bloodshed and determination. Alaina was terrified of all of them.
One of them in particular drew her eyes, and then she couldn’t look away. He was Errai, she could tell, and the scales that wound over his shoulders and chest were black, shiny, like obsidian. He was gorgeous, Alaina thought, and that single thought was very jarring. Along with his black scales, his hair was black and long, braids and baubles threaded into it, pulled back from his face in a short ponytail. He was tall, shoulders broad and every inch of him was one defined muscle after another. He had violet eyes, so bright Alaina could see them all the way from the balcony. But his expression was dark, ferocious, and angry.
“Cursii of the House of Chara,” Lennai announced, smiling. “In preparation for the upcoming games, I have bought a gift to further inspire you along your path to glory. This,” and she indicated Alaina, “is to be your donara if you win the day. Whosoever of you reaches the top of the list, that is the cursu or cursana who will claim this very exotic creature.”
Claim.
Alaina was starting to think she knew exactly what a donara was.
The gorgeous black-scaled Errai fighter looked right at her, then, and a chill when down her spine. She shivered.
“Does this please you?” Lennai asked them.
The gladiators roared their approval, so loud Alaina jumped in spite of herself, staring at all these screaming aliens who wanted now to win her. All except the violet-eyed Errai, who stood still, glaring up at the balcony, at her, in what Alaina could only think of as disgust. She wasn’t sure which was worse. Desire or disgust, from any of these creatures.
Lennai clapped some more, pleased with herself, and then lifted her hands again. The line of gladiators fell silent.
“Back to your training,” she called, her voice sing-songy.
The line of gladiators broke apart and they went back to their sparring. Save for that one Errai, who Alaina simply could not stop looking at, though he scared the shit out of her. He kept looking up at the balcony, at Alaina, and she stared back at him, until Lennai took her arm and pulled her towards the balcony doors.
“Now that we’ve motivated them,” Lennai was saying. “Let’s get you prepared.”
“P-prepared?” Alaina stammered.
“Yes. The games are tomorrow. You will be given the rest of the solar to rest and clean yourself properly. You’ll be given new clothes and styled to my liking, and then you’ll join me in the morning when I go to the Arena, and sit beside me to watch the games. Isn’t that generous?”
“I…” No fucking way. “...yes.”
“Being a donara is a great honor,” Lennai chatted on. “You’re very lucky. Any number of slaves in this house would kill for it.” She looked at Alaina, and Alaina realized her eyes were yellow, sunset against the fire of her hair. “I am being very kind to you, human.”
Alaina managed to get the words, “Thank you,” out of her mouth.
Lennai smiled, and it was almost serpentine. “If you do well as donara, really anything could happen.”
“How do I do well?”
“You please the cursii, and they win fights for me, bring glory to themselves and to my house, and to you.”
“I see.”
Lennai laughed, leading her down a corridor away from the balcony instead of back up the stairs. “It’s better than pouring wine, believe me.”
�
�And how exactly am I meant to please them?” Alaina asked.
Lennai arched an eyebrow at her. “However they want you to, Alaina. A donara is a gift slave. Obviously. If they want to bed you, they bed you. If they want you to wash them, you wash them. If they want to weep into your hair, you let them. Whatever they want. Understand?”
Alaina’s stomach turned. “Yes.”
“Good.”
So Rua had made good on his promise after all. Not a bed slave to just one master, but apparently a bed slave to possibly dozens, depending on who won in the games. And how many games they had. And how long Alaina lived to be given, again and again, to the gladiators. Gift slave. It was disgusting. There was no honor or glory in slavery in being given, no value in a life without personhood. Alaina hated this place and these people, these creatures, and she knew then she could not stay here. Whatever the risk, she had to escape.
Lennai escorted her through another portcullis, another locked gate, into what Alaina assumed were the slaves’ quarters. The room she was given was small but comfortable, with a bed and a writing desk, her own bathroom, and a small porthole looking out at the stars. It also had a door that closed, which Alaina saw was not always the case, because room after room that they’d passed on the way had no doors at all.
“Dinner will be brought to you in a few hours,” Lennai said. “And I will not step foot in this room again. From now on, the head slave, Gurun, will fetch you when I desire your presence. Do as he bids, for he is my arm down here. The rest of the solar you may pass in solitude, and Gurun will wake you and prepare you. I will see you bright and early —and ready— in the morning.”
“Yes, domina,” Alaina muttered.
Lennai left it at that, and left the room, clearly more than eager to get out of the slaves quarters. Alaina, spent of her courage and hope, and completely out of her depth, shut the door, sat down on the bed, and put her face into her hands to cry.
Alien Conquest: (The Warrior's Prize) An Alien SciFi Romance Page 3
