by Viki Storm
Table of Contents
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
About the Author
© Viki Storm 2019. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written consent of the author, except in the case of brief quotations for critical reviews and certain noncommercial uses permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, locations, and events portrayed in this work are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Sold to the Alien Prince (Zalaryn Raiders Book 1)
Captured by the Alien Warrior (Zalaryn Raiders Book 2)
Claimed by the Alien Mercenary (Zalaryn Raiders Book 3)
Conquering His Queen (Zalaryn Conquerors Book 1)
Kidnapping His Rebel (Zalaryn Conquerors Book 2)
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The overseer is shouting at someone, but he’s always shouting, so I pay no mind.
I hunch a little lower in my seat, trying to focus on the wiring in front of me. My fingers ache, and the tips of my thumbs and forefingers are cracked and raw, but I braid the wires, coil them around the transducers and try not to wince when one of the stray ends jabs into my flesh or grazes my palm, leaving a hairline slice that burns with the chemicals the wires are coated in.
I hunch down, I focus, because I do not want to draw the overseer’s attention.
Vuchos, the overseer, is the worst one of the lot. The Trogii who run the factory are heartless and indifferent towards the plight of the human slaves. They are squat with short arms and legs and prodigious midsections. Their brown skin is covered in tubercles that absorb oxygen from the air. Their wide, lipless mouths are either drawn down in a sneer or pulled up in a cruel grin.
All the overseers are strict, cruel and quick to correct a slave, but Vuchos is the sort of creature who enjoys his petty little dominion because it satisfies his two greatest lusts in life: inflicting pain and inciting fear. The other overseers carry around thin polymer rods that they call morgors, which loosely translates to ‘correctors’—and they don’t hesitate to bring them down on your bared arms or the back of your neck if they catch you lollygagging or, worse, assembling coils incorrectly. That’s not good enough for Vuchos. He carries a morgor, sure, but he’s made some modifications, embedding small spines along the surface of the polymer. He’s perfected his technique, too—no quick lashing for him. When Vuchos corrects a human, he slaps the corrector onto the skin, then drags it down, trusting that the little spines will tear through the flesh in a ragged trail.
I weave the wires together, my fingers knowing the task inside and out. As well they should. I don’t want to know how many hours I’ve logged in this hellhole, how many days and nights I’ve spent within the factory walls breathing in the hot smoke from the furnaces and the caustic steam from the acid baths. I’ve developed a crick in my neck and a slope in my shoulders in addition to the ravages on my hands.
We don’t have mirrors in the slaves’ quarters, and that’s probably for the best.
“What are you looking at, kerklo?” the overseer yells. The air cracks as the corrector makes contact with someone’s skin. My ears fill with the screams. Another crack. “Shut up,” Vuchos says, and even though he’s a few rows behind me, I can practically see the smug smile of satisfaction on his face. “You’re lucky I caught this mistake and not the Boss. He wouldn’t be so kind. He’d throw you into the scrap furnace like the faulty piece of machinery you are.”
I take a deep breath and hold it, trying to block out the whimpering from the sad-sack worker behind me, trying not to scan my brain for a match to the voice. There’s not a lot of time for socializing—and laughter will get you a quick slap with the corrector—but all the humans are in close quarters, and it’s hard not to get to know each other.
“Apologies, sir,” the human says, and I know the voice at once. I wish I didn’t.
Because now I’m going to have to do something about this.
I feel for the locket around my neck, not daring to open it and risk a look at the portraits inside, one of my mother and one of my father.
My mother was taken when our planet was raided. I was young, about ten years old, and she’d been pregnant. But that didn’t matter to the Rulmek, the evil race of slavers who took her. My father looked for her tirelessly and did find her about five years later. She’d lost the baby and had been sold to a pleasure house on some planet I’d never even heard of.
At first, I was overjoyed to have her back. We tried to return to our simple life on our farm, but my mother was not the same. Whatever spark of divinity that humans are supposed to have—the spark that the prayer-singers talk about—was gone. She was a wraith. She killed herself a few months later.
I think of all that my mother endured after she was captured. She was weak, but on days like today, I can’t muster up enough strength to blame her for killing herself.
I won’t be like her. I’ll make it. I won’t let these bastards win. If they break you, they win. If you kill yourself, they win. If you try to escape and they punish you, they win.
All the time I’ve been here, and the best I’ve been able to manage is a tie. A grim stalemate.
Not today. This is too much.
“If I wanted your apologies, I would have asked for them,” Vuchos spits. He’s just getting warmed up. He’s as excited as a fisherman who’s felt that first exploratory nibble on the end of his line. “What I want is your competence. Humans do have brains inside their ugly little heads, don’t they? The way you lot act, I have a hard time believing it. Should we split yours open and see if it’s true? I just got my blade back from the weaponmaster, and he says it’ll cut a rock. What do you say? Donate that skull of yours to science? Let me see for myself some proof that your race is actually an organism capable of complex thought? Get your face on the table. Now.” Another crack of the corrector. Another scream. Another frantically mumbled plea for mercy.
I don’t think that Vuchos is going to split anyone’s skull on the work floor—despite his bravado, he would get in trouble for killing one of the workers. We’re a valuable commodity, after all. Well, maybe ‘valuable’ isn’t quite the right word for it. When something’s valuable, you take better care of it.
I rise from my workstation slowly, waiting for the muscles in my back to adjust to an upright posture.
“Suse,” someone whispers from the row in front of me, but I don’t look. I can’t. If I see the pleading fear in their eyes, I’ll probably lose my nerve. But I can’t let Vuchos do this. Not to Mara.
I push in my chair and shuffle behind my row of fellow workers. Most of them hunch low, not wanting to be mistakenly associated with me. I don’t blame them in the slightest. Then I feel a hand clamp down on my wrist, surprisingly strong. It’s the old woman that everyone just calls Granny, though I was horrified to find out one night that she’s really only 46 years old. She’s our equivalent of a
village elder. This life, you don’t live to a ripe old retirement age.
I expect to see fear in Granny’s eyes, but I’m wrong. It’s anger. Hot and blazing.
And it’s directed at me.
“Sit back down. Now,” she hisses. “I can’t allow this. The retribution will be vested upon all of us. So you sit back down. Remember Jora?”
I do remember Jora. Everyone does. They made us watch. Jora got thirty minutes with The Blade—the longest anyone had ever gotten. They also cut everyone’s rations for a month after that, nothing but one vita-pack envelope and a squirt of water per day. They didn’t say the rations and Jora’s behavior were related—but they didn’t need to.
He didn’t last long after his time with The Blade; he died about six months later. It wasn’t infection or anything physical. They just broke him. Granny herself had to do five or ten minutes once, but that was before I got here. I’ve seen her scar in the washrooms, and it’s not pretty. It’s like a shiny pink burrowing worm on the sallow, wrinkled flesh of her leg. But she only had a few minutes, and she was probably more physically fit (or, perhaps more importantly, mentally fit) than Jora.
Jora, they took his whole leg.
I don’t even remember what Jora did. Did he try to palm an extra protein bar at dinner? Did he insult one of the overseers?
He sure as shit didn’t do anything as crazy as I’m about to do.
“It’s Mara that he’s abusing,” I whisper back. Mara is a new arrival and seven months pregnant on top of that. I sneak her some extra rations when I can, but I fear that she and the baby won’t make it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Granny says. “Sit down and get back to work, or we’ll all pay the price.”
Granny is right, but I can’t help it. I’m self-aware enough to realize this is all some weird personal issue of mine. The pregnant captive being brutalized—it’s obvious that Mara is a stand-in for my own mother. And my determination to be strong and fight is so that I will not be a stand-in for my own mother.
Just because I’m rational enough to see that doesn’t mean I’m rational enough to stop myself right now.
I jerk my arm and shake off Granny’s grip. The rest of the workers are stunned into silence as I stride up the aisle, towards the overseer and Mara. My feet are numb, my head is swimming, and this all has the quality of a dream. The sort where you’re screaming to your dream-self to stop, but it’s no use.
Vuchos has Mara face down on her work surface. As I get closer, I see that a sheaf of wires is pressing into her cheek, and I know how much that must burn. The wires are coated with anti-corrosive chemicals that react with the moisture on the skin to create some sort of hellish compound that feels like your skin is being held to the side of a woodstove. He’s got his corrector hanging back on his belt, exchanging it for the dagger that most of the Trogii overseers wear. He’s tracing the blade up and down the back of her skull.
“Hello, brains,” he says, “are you in there?” He grabs a hank of her limp blond hair and slices it off at the root. “Let’s take a peek inside that skull of yours and find out. Gotta get this greasy hair out of the way first.”
He starts hacking at her hair with wild swipes of his dagger.
He’s so in love with this, so engrossed in his task of torment, that he doesn’t hear me approach. I’m light on my feet, mostly because I’ve lost more weight that I could afford since I’ve been here. But I have some muscle. No matter how exhausted I am at the end of the day, I make sure to do my calisthenics routine before I collapse into my bedroll.
As he pulls his arm back for another slash at Mara’s hair, I grab onto his arm. I have the element of surprise on my side—and that’s the only thing I have on my side, so I have to make it count.
“What in the name of Oona is—” But he is stunned into silence when he turns around and sees me. Me, a scrawny, half-starved human with murder in my eyes.
“Enough,” I say. I bring his arm down and my knee up. The backside of his elbow connects with my knee, and I hear his tendons creaking like the scree of a rusty cog in the factory machinery. The dagger drops to the floor, and the echo in the factory as it lands seems like the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. Everyone is silently watching, too scared to breathe.
He howls in pain. It must hurt like a son of a bitch to bend his elbow backwards like that, but I don’t think I broke anything vital. These Trogii are stout and hefty, not suited for much except brute force. Like most stout and hefty races, they are very slow, and as he’s stumbling around, clutching his elbow in shocked pain, I get a stupid idea.
I bend over to grab the dagger from the floor.
The moment my fingers graze the haft, I feel sickening pain trickle down my entire body, filling me up with the urge to curl up into a ball and vomit. As the initial wave passes, the pain concentrates into a hot throb at the base of my skull. Maybe he’ll get to set his eyes on a human brain after all, I think wildly.
“Human,” he spits. I try to roll onto my back, but he puts his boot on my back, all the weight of his thick leg leaning into my spine. I feel a twinge of something in my back, like a white lightning bolt, then a numb pins-and-needles sensation spreads down my left leg. “You are hereby charged and found guilty of the crime of possession of a deadly weapon—a crime which carries with it summary sentencing. When the clock strikes three, you are to stand for one hour with The Blade.”
I land my ship on the outskirts of Crene, blanching at the heat. I can handle heat—my home planet, Zalaryx, orbits very close to its binary star system, and our suns almost never set—but the heat on Crene is oppressively thick. I feel like I can take a bite out of the air, the atmosphere is so thick with moisture and Void knows what other foul molecules. I imagine the cast-off dermal cells and hacked-up sputum of the inhabitants suspended in the air, the way bits of fruit are suspended in a jar of marmalade.
Not that I ever eat marmalade, but those decadent humans on Lekyo Prime seem to love the stuff slathered all over their morning grains. I read up about the history of Lekyo Prime, and it’s very confusing to me. Several generations ago, humans left Earth by the shipful, fed up with the degeneracy and decadence of their planet. They founded a settlement on Lekyo Prime where humans could return to a simple life based on family and hard work.
They do have large, sprawling families, and the poor bastards do work hard to eke a living out of the stingy planet. But some of the decadent human habits endure, like the marmalade. Aren’t they capable of eating anything that’s not drenched in sucrose? Don’t they even know that grains are glucose anyway and it is nutritionally redundant and inefficient to add a sucrose topping?
Some habits must just be hard-coded in the human DNA. Like the insistence to eat meat at every meal even if it is energy inefficient to do so, and taking off two days of work for every five that they contribute. Some habits are learned, but others have to be ingrained into the species memory itself, the way arachnoids don’t need to be taught how to spin a web.
I trudge into town, not wanting to pay the exorbitant prices for a tele-lift shuttle. There’s all manner of species on Crene, and the only thing they all have in common is their likelihood to swindle you—which is to say very high.
When I get to the tavern that I seek, I’m slick with sweat and my tongue is naught but a dried hunk of jerky in my mouth. “Water,” I demand of the barkeeper. “Lots of ice.” Alcohol is another vice of the humans; the louts find any excuse to imbibe. There are many on Lekyo Prime—the supposed paragon of human virtue—who imbibe to inebriation every single night.
The barkeeper, a human male of about seventy years, gives me a foul look, grunts, and fulfills my order.
“Three coin,” he says when he puts down the cold glass.
“Three coin?” I ask. “I knew this planet was full of cheats and usurers, but three coin for water? We’re not somewhere where it only rains twice a solar cycle. Water’s free here.”
“Yeah,” he says, his gruff voice loud en
ough to attract the attention of the other patrons. “But my charming company and witty conversation isn’t. Three coin.”
I reach into my waist pouch and get the coins, scattering them on the bartop in an admittedly immature show of irritation.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” he says as he sweeps them into an unseen pocket in his grease-splattered apron.
I take my cup and turn around, surveying the room. All these planets are the same, small clustered towns sprung up around taverns and various criminal enterprises. Unless you’re on a major homeworld planet or a planet with important industry, the only difference is the weather. Nothing but taverns and seedy, dishonorable folk waiting for their next heist.
This is exactly the sort of place that Pior, the Three-Star Rebel pilot, would spend his days. No one’s wearing the Three-Star insignia, but that doesn’t mean his comrades aren’t here. I drink my water, the cool refreshment quite satisfying after the long trek in the heat, and I listen to the conversation. There’s not a lot, but it doesn’t take me long to pick up a few fragments of promising dialogue.
“No one knows where she is,” one of the humans says to another. “She was trying to sabotage a damned warship, so if she’s lucky, she’s dead.”
I know who they’re talking about: Lia, former captain of a Three-Star Rebel ship. It’s true that she’d been Void-bent on sabotaging a large Rulmek host, but she is not dead—and she is very lucky indeed.
She allied herself with one of my fellow Zalaryn conquerors, Bantokk, and with a not-inconsiderable amount of help from me, they did manage to thwart the Rulmek host and free over a hundred human captives. Lia’s alive and well on Lekyo Prime, the proud bonded mate to Bantokk.
Lucky beyond all measure I’d say. Very few in the Universe are able to find their actual bonded mate. And Lia, a human, is luckier still to bond with a Zalaryn male, with superior DNA and strength to protect her and her future offspring. Bantokk? I’m not sure if he’s as lucky as Lia. He sure struts around with a dopey grin on his face—just like Vano since he bonded with Queen Bryn. Both of them utterly devoted to their human female mates. Both of them would break the kneecaps of anyone who threatened the safety of their mates or unborn offspring. Both of them—if asked—prattle on and on inanely about the transcendent joy of The Bond.
