by Alyssa Hope
‘The humans have some work to do there, Nevi, but it isn’t up to us to interfere. We can only pass the information on. And we can petition to set up a trade embargo, to put some pressure on them to stop them from selling their children into slavery.’
‘The slavers that were buying him, they probably will have bought others and will have a ship in orbit, sir, and that may be something we can do something about. And it may be where our Children are.’
‘We can’t just board their ship, Nevi, without at least a little bit of proof. We are not pirates.’
‘No sir, but maybe we want to buy more of these,’ he gestured at Deven, ‘and if they admit to buying and selling humans …’
Deven backed into a corner of the bed, and then cursed his stupidity, because now he was farther away from the guns.
‘You’re not going to get our guns, little one, trust me on that. And I didn’t say we were going to sell you. We would never, could never, sell our beloved. Just if we pretend that we want to buy more, we can make those men admit to being slavers. That is illegal, in your world or anywhere else. Then we can arrest them, search their ship and free all their slaves.’
Deven thought about his friends who had disappeared, but they would be long gone. They wouldn’t be on this ship.
‘No, but there may be records, and maybe we can find out where they went, and try and get them back. And there will be others on the ship that we can set free.’
The Captain person stared at Nevi in surprise. ‘How did you teach him to mindtalk so well, so quickly?’
‘We didn’t, he knew right from the beginning.’
‘He’s clever.’
‘Yes.’
No-one had ever told Deven that he was clever before, and he blushed.
Nevi laughed. ‘And we can read him because he blushes so easily, with that pale skin.’
Thinking about what the slavers had said about that took the blush away, and Deven curled up in the corner again.
Nevi sighed. ‘We won’t hit you just to mark up the soft skin of yours, little one. You are beloved, and beautiful.’
Eva agreed. ‘Anyone hits you and I’ll kill them.’
‘Because I belong to you and only you can hit me?’ he asked resentfully.
‘No, because we love you.’
He remembered his parents, and how his father treated his mother, especially when he’d been drinking and wanted to use her. ‘Loving is using, hurting.’
‘Not in our world. Never.’ Nevi struggled for words. ‘Someone help me here.’
A smaller one of the blue people came into the room, and sat down beside Deven. He made soft soothing noises, noises that sounded like he was purring, and then glared at the bigger blue people.
‘Have you been harassing him? He needs to rest.’
‘Yes, beloved’, the Captain said, ‘but there may be a whole ship full of slaves we can rescue, if we can figure out how to go about it legally. I should introduce everyone. The new human, who mindtalks very well, is Deven. Deven, I am Oki, this is my beloved Suki, the Medical Officer is Karo. Deven is from the planet we are in orbit over, and Nevi and Eva rescued him, he is their beloved, but doesn’t understand the concept.’
Suki glared at him. ‘Of course he doesn’t, beloved. And you’ve all been talking at him at once, and he’s scared silly, and he doesn’t know what’s going on. And he keeps trying to get close enough to Nevi’s gun to take it away from him.’
Much to Deven’s surprise, it was Nevi who got in trouble for that, not him, and Nevi was just laughed at, not hit. These blue people seemed to think that it was perfectly logical for him to want a gun. This was indeed a strange new world.
‘Fine, you explain us to him, sweet one. Fairly quickly, because we need to figure out how to make contact with the slave ship and get on board to search it before they disappear.’
Chapter 3.
The little blue one they called Suki shrugged his shoulders.
‘Alright, Deven, stop me anytime you don’t understand something, and I’ll explain in more detail. We blue ones are the People, a different kind of intelligent beings than the earth humans that your people are descended from. There are a few others as well, but we are the important ones, yours and ours. Our people love, make love and have families just as yours do…
Nevi interrupted. ‘But with no hitting, no violence, and families all stay together and love each other.’
Suki looked puzzled. ‘Well, yes. Of course they do. Anyway, we mate in triads, in threes, which for us are as normal as pairs are for your people. We know our beloved ones as soon as we are close to them, and we start to morph through several different stages, and only become sexually mature when we are with both of our beloved partners. In my case, Oki and Caleb, in Karo’s case, Jevan and Tad. And Nevi and Eva have recognized you as their beloved.’
Suki paused. ‘Does that make sense?’
Deven thought about it. ‘You need a human to form this triad?’ He was beginning to see why he had been taken.
‘What? No, there are many triads with no human, many more than with. But we can bond with humans, and there are a few such triads on this ship now. Our triad lovers are predestined, by the universe.’
He looked up at Oki. ‘Alright, this is more complicated than I thought.’
Nevi reached out and took Deven’s hand, stopping him from pulling away. ‘Little one, will you trust me, please? We are going to play a game with the traders to free the slaves they have. If we show them that we have caught you and ask if they have any more of your type, they’ll probably show us what they have, and offer to sell them to us. This selling is illegal, so it will give us grounds to board the ship and free all of the slaves.’
Deven winced at the memory. ‘I don’t want to go near them, the way they touched me …’
Eva saw the picture in his mind, and nodded. ‘I’ll kill him for you, sweet one.’
‘You won’t have to leave our ship, Deven,’ Oki assured him. ‘You’ll be safe, and Eva won’t have to kill anyone.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind, sir.’
It didn’t take them long to come up with a plan, of sorts.
Deven joined the officers on the bridge of the ship, although Karo would have preferred to dress his wounds first. Deven would have been distracted by the many different work stations and maps and panels if he hadn’t been so scared.
One of the officers was busy searching for the slave ship, and called to Oki when he found it on the screen.
Oki nodded at him, and then at the others. ‘Places, everyone. This is just a game, Deven, it’s alright.’
He wasn’t so sure it was alright, and he was shaking by the time they got the communication link through. Nevi was having to hold him up so he didn’t fall over, although that did indeed make it look like Nevi had caught him.
The faces of the two men who had bought him from his father appeared on the screen, and they broke into broad grins when they saw him.
“Our little runaway! We’re so glad you found him, we were worried! But what’s happened to him, he is a bit, um, damaged, now?”
Oki looked down his blue nose at them. “Yours? I don’t think so. We found him like this, running around loose. I think if he belonged to someone he’d be in better shape, better taken care of, you know? He is rather sweet, though, and the men like him. Do you have any others of this type that we could purchase?”
The slavers looked at him with blank faces. “Purchase? You want to purchase a sentient being? That would be illegal, sir!”
Oki shrugged and turned away. “Sorry to inconvenience you, gentlemen …”, and then, as though he wasn’t aware that the comm link was still up, said to someone off screen, “Not them, then. Maybe we can just buy some more right off the planet …”
“No wait, we were just checking, one can’t be too careful …”
Oki turned back in surprise. “You’re still there?”
“Yes, and I have suddenly remembered that maybe w
e do have one or two others of this type. How many would you want?”
Oki shrugged again. He did a great job of looking indifferent while he was obviously seething with anger, Deven thought. “We have two hundred officers and crew on board, and we won’t be home again for a long time. But if all of yours are in this bad a shape they won’t suit us at all.”
“No, no, that one just had a bit of a mishap. Why don’t you bring him over, and just to show good faith we’ll trade him for a better one, and we can talk about how many more you’ll need.”
Deven heard them, in his mind, ‘Good, we can dump all the damn brats on them, top coin. This’ll be a very profitable trip if we can get rid of this batch before they start dying!’
‘Or take their money at gun point?’
‘I doubt we’ll get away with it, Ral. Didn’t you hear him? Two hundred of them? But we have a surprise for him – those two precious little blue mutants, and I think he’ll want those to live. So we’ll have some leverage. But I want that little red-head back, I’m going to teach him a lesson or two that he won’t forget as long as he lives. Which won’t be very long.’
And the shorter one laughed, in a most unpleasant way.
Oki nodded at the screen. “Fine, I’ll put a team together and they’ll transport to you. We’ll be there in five. Out.”
Off to one side a group of the blue people were rapidly arming themselves for the trip to the slave ship, and Deven was impressed by how quickly they could get ready, and how many weapons they could hide under those loose fitting tunics. He shivered thinking of the blood-shed that those suggested.
He looked at Oki. ‘But your people, the two they have there – they’ll kill them, won’t they? You can stop them from doing that?’
The Captain stared at him. ‘What do you mean? You heard something?’
Deven shut his eyes and repeated on the whole conversation, word for word, shuddering at the end. When he opened his eyes they were all looking at him with new respect. ‘You hear more than we do. Maybe you should come with us.’
‘No!’ Then he thought about it, and the risk to himself against the good he might be able to do. ‘What if they try and kill all the slaves, the young men, when they are still trapped?’
‘It’s been tried before,’ Oki admitted. ‘But we can prevent it. Kaji, do we have a schematic of that type of ship? Where would their slaves, their cargo, be held? Can you get a reading on warm bodies over there?’
Kaji turned back from the computer, and a minute later had the answers. ‘Two groups of about twenty or twenty-five here and here, which would be the slaves, and separately up here, just two, but their body temperature is lower – I think those would be ours, sir, if they’re unhealthy. They’d be more of the Lost Children, probably the ones who are showing up on Caleb’s Map. Four crew on the bridge, two more moving through the halls here, and two others moving here, and all of those would be the traders. So eight crew? That sounds about right. They won’t have had time to set up a trap yet.’
‘We’ll have to set up for an evacuation to our ship. Medical, food, sleeping accommodations for fifty. It’s a lot. Veria will take most of the humans, I imagine, but it’s a lot to transport, and some of them might not be in good shape.’
‘Why not just send the whole ship?’
They all turned and stared at Deven, and he wished for the floor to open up and swallow him. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have … I didn’t mean …” He braced for a hit.
Captain Oki smiled at him, and then at Nevi and Eva. ‘A clever one indeed. We take over the ship, run them all through Medical, and Veria can send us out a crew and a few Medical staff to get the whole lot home to them. They’ll thank us for the cargo ship as well as the citizens.’
Deven didn’t want to ask, but Eva saw the look on his face.
‘Veria is a planet full of good people, little one. A new colony, and growing ... What?’ Eva looked at Deven as his face went white.
‘They said – they said they were going to sell me to a mining colony after they …”
Nevi moved carefully over beside him, and put an arm around him. ‘Deven? You’re safe now, and always. And there are many colonies and many mining colonies, and most of them are good places, just as there are many families and most of them love each other. Trust us?’
At some point he had to, he realized. These people had been kind to him, and being with them did make him feel safe, in a way he hadn’t felt for a long time.
‘I have to come with you,’ he realized. ‘They’ll try and cheat you or kill your people, but maybe I can read their minds and help.’
Nevi shook his head. ‘You’re safer here, little one.’
‘And you are safer if I come with you. And we are all one, you keep saying that.’ He was remembering how good it had felt being in Nevi’s arms, and that Nevi had leapt off a cliff to catch him.
The argument looked like it could go on for some time, but the Captain stopped it.
‘Our time is up, and we don’t want them to get suspicious. And Deven’s an adult. He has the right to make his own choices. Kaji, you’ll lead the first group. Nevi’s team and Deven will be with you, and we’ll have more teams ready to go into the halls once you can give us a visual on those. Full attack force on stand-by.’
‘Captain?’
‘Yes, Suki, beloved?
‘I have a number of crew here who are suddenly restless and looking for their beloveds who are on that ship.’
‘Interesting. Alright, we won’t send anyone off without checking first. Thank you.’
Deven stared at him, and Oki smiled. ‘It happens, just like that. We have no choice in who we love. The universe just brings us together. It brought me Suki and Caleb, and that was wondrously right.’
‘Alright, contact the Valdez again, but don’t give them a visual. Tell them we are ready to transport over, and we will be six to their bridge.’
Chapter 4.
It went down surprisingly smoothly. Deven gritted his teeth and hung onto the back of Nevi’s tunic, trying not to look at the two men who were leering at him.
The one who introduced himself to Kaji as their Captain was a different type of person altogether, and he didn’t seem to care about what those two who were looking at Deven wanted. He didn’t even glance at Deven. He just wanted to make a sale, yet somehow he made Deven even more nervous than the other ones did.
“We have thirty or so from the same planet as this one, mostly in good shape, although a few are high-strung and have hurt themselves in minor ways. And maybe another twenty young male humans from a different planet, although basically the same bloodlines. We can give you a good deal on the whole lot if you’re interested.”
Kaji shrugged. “Why don’t we go and have a look at them. I’m not about to buy anything unseen.”
There was some hesitation, but the Captain assigned the two the Deven knew to take them down to the cargo holds. As they went through the corridors he felt a wash of pain from one room, and knew it must be the two blue ones. He pretended to stagger, and slowed down.
‘Kaji? Here. This door.’
‘Thank you. Captain? Did you get the visual on the hall here?’
He tried talking to the two in that room, and somehow wasn’t surprised when he could. ‘Blue friends? Are you alright?’
‘Alive.’
‘Can you walk?’
‘Maybe one can.’
‘We’re coming for you, we’re already on this ship, and we won’t leave without you. Hang on.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I am Deven, beloved of Nevi and Eva.’ It sounded right, when he said it like that. ‘We’re here for you.’
‘Kaji? Did you hear that? I don’t think they’re in good shape. One can maybe walk, the other not.’
And then they were at entrance to the cargo holds, and walking through them looking at the human merchandise. All the young men in the two holds looked dull and numb, as though they had been drugged, and
maybe they had. They were all wearing the leather collars, and many had sore and bleeding necks, and some had other wounds as well. They were sitting curled up, or hanging onto each other, and they all looked miserable.
Kaji looked around in disapproval. ‘Deven? These boys are drugged, aren’t they? Are they gassing the cargo holds? Can they kill all of them that way when we take over?’
Deven thought about it.
‘Kaji? Can you just ask these pigs outright if the boys are drugged? Maybe tell him you like them with more spirit than this?’
Their team walked through each group, faces expressionless. Kaji finally turned to the men and shook his head. “I’m sorry, but our men won’t like these, they have no spirit, no fight in them.”
Both men had become quieter when Kaji had barely looked at the young slaves, but at that the taller of the two brightened up. “Oh, we just give them a bit of a sedative until they settle down. It’ll wear off in a day. No problem.”
‘He’s telling the truth, Kaji, that it’ll wear off. Although they keep giving it to them, in their water. But they can’t gas the holds, kill them all in any way, that’s not even in their minds.’
Kaji looked around. “That’s it, that’s all you have?”
‘Yeah, that’s it. Fifty, give or take a few, and all of them prime stock. What more could you want?”
“Hmm …” Kaji looked doubtful and went silent, and the men were beginning to look worried by the time they re-entered the bridge.
“Was there something special that you were looking for, that you didn’t see here?”
“Well, to be honest, our Captain is a bit of a purist, and he always wants a blue-skinned one, and we’d take several, if you have them. The ones that aren’t full-blooded don’t last as long, you know? But he likes his blue cabin boys … He won’t be happy if we come back with play-things for the crew and none for him.”
