Y
10
Lieutenant Larr Wirry was angry, bored, and frustrated. It was a combination of emotions he had never so intensely felt prior to his being stranded on the planet Y. He blamed Serry Garrant for his troubles, and if he had his way, he would see his superior officer made a Yn slave.
The Centauri officer swerved his head, narrowly avoiding the sword swung at him. The Yn warrior he was fighting bore down on him. Twisting to one side, and presenting an even smaller target for the red hulking figure, Larr dodged the sword’s return swing and riposted with one of his own. Their two blades slapped up against each other hard. Larr felt the impact go all the way up his shoulder.
With an almost indifferent show of strength, the Yn thrust his weapon out again, pushing Larr back into a defensive position. Slowly, the warrior moved his weapon back and forth in an intricate, almost hypnotic rhythm. Larr, blood trickling down his face, sweat stinging his eyes, tried his best to emulate the pattern. The Yn was holding the sword in his right hand. On his fifth swing, with the tip of the weapon pointing to the left, and the edge horizontal across the warrior’s body, Larr charged and struck.
He ducked below the wide outward swing, using his smaller size to advantage and hit the Yn in the stomach. A surprised yelp disturbed the placid arrogance on the Yn’s face. He brought his elbow down hard on Larr’s back. The lieutenant’s knees almost gave out. The room spun before his eyes: smooth gray walls, archaic wooden furniture, glassed-in windows out of reach for most human beings. In the corner, the bag Larr had sewn together out of their old uniforms and filled with soil from the indoor garden hung by a hook. For a moment, in his confused state, it looked like a hanging body.
The lieutenant blinked and cleared his head. He dodged a blow by falling to the left. He slashed at the Yn’s thigh, missed, and then, instead of falling back, as he desperately wanted to do, yet knowing the Yn fully expected, pressed forward, leaping to his feet. Their blades connected again with bone-rattling force. Larr screamed—“AHHHHHH!!”—and whirled his sword at the Yn’s face, managing in his fury to drive the larger figure back three steps before the warrior rotated the blade in his hand in an almost magical display of martial skill. He swept down with it, knocking the sword right out of Larr’s grip.
Again, the lieutenant deliberately did the unexpected. He ran full tilt at the Yn’s legs, shoulders out and tackling and succeeded in knocking the warrior down. Larr jumped away, eyes searching for his fallen sword. There, he thought. He reached for it.
The Yn grabbed Larr by the back of his shirt and pulled him back. Larr’s hands sought fruitlessly for the weapon just out of range. With his other arm, the Yn pinned Larr beside him to the cold stone floor.
Larr roared again, for he knew he was beaten. The Yn’s superhuman strength held him completely immobile. “Shit!” The Yn laughed and after a few seconds let him go.
Despite how tired he was, despite the heavy breathing and his skin glistening with sweat, Larr began chuckling and, eventually, thanked the Yn guard for his daily workout.
He knew the man didn’t understand him, anymore than he himself understood the Yn’s language, but he also knew tone carried across. Getting to their feet, Larr slapped the Yn good-humoredly across his huge forearm. In turn, the red giant bellowed his own coarse laughter and slapped him as gently, for a Yn, on the shoulders. Larr’s knees nearly buckled again, but he stayed on his feet and even managed to laugh back, if painfully.
Larr had been sparring with this particular guard off-and-on for weeks, usually at night after the guard’s duty was over. They practiced with what the Centauri officer assumed were training weapons for Yn boys: wooden swords, blunted knives, padded clubs, though not that padded as Larr’s many bruises and aches and pains were testament. The first time they fought, the Yn guard hadn’t known how much force to hold back when sparring with a frail human. The look of dismay on the guard’s face when he broke Larr’s arm with his first “light” blow would have been funny under different circumstances. The accident nearly ended the sessions before they began, but Larr managed to pantomime his feelings and get across to the Yn how much he wanted this training. A week later, after a liberal use of their medkit’s calcium knitters, Larr began again. He knew the guard was still more or less toying with him, treating him like a kid, but Larr was satisfied that he was actually learning something, a little, about how to fight like a Yn.
It was more than anyone else among his crewmates was doing.
The guard left shortly later, and Larr fell to the floor for a moment, laid down, and closed his eyes. He just lay there for a few minutes, groaning yet smiling at the accumulation of another well-earned set of bruises. After about a five minutes, he sat up and did his customary post-training stretches. It took him only about five minutes now to recover. At the beginning, the oversized guard’s blunted strikes and unending endurance had taxed Larr to the limit, and he was incapacitated for hours at a time. Garrant and Halc had each spoken to him at different times about the self-inflicted abuse they perceived, but so far neither of them had strictly ordered him to stop the training. He didn’t think either of them quite dared; they weren’t sure if he would have followed such an order, and they really had no means to enforce it had he refused. Larr wasn’t sure himself what he would have done.
They’re weak, he thought contemptuously. They don’t have what it takes to survive here. He, on the other hand, was only getting stronger. At first, he hadn’t even been able to land a blow to the guard. Now he was holding his own, a little. When the time came for his first Yn duel, he would have an advantage over the others. That such a duel was in his future Larr had no doubts whatsoever.
It had been six months since the Floran ambassador’s initial visit. After describing their possible fates under the Yn, the ambassador told the stranded crew he had arranged with Tolaam’s Council of Rexes a special castle to be reserved for them near the city. They would have freedom of movement within this keep. Its interior would be protected from Y’s atmosphere. They would be guarded there, but until the Council made its decision concerning their disposition, there the six of them would have to stay.
They went. What other choice did they have?
A half-hour after the fight Larr was toweled and his aches coated with liniment. It was late at night, but he wasn’t sleepy yet, so he went over to the makeshift punching bag he had set up in his “gym” and started working at it.
Punch!
The Floran had come back on the day they were transferred and then a third time briefly a few weeks later to inform them that the Rexes were still divided over what to do with them. Half of Tolaam’s council wanted to just convert them into Yn and be done with it. The other half thought they would be of better use remaining as they were. As the only pure-bred humans in this entire star system, the Floran had explained, the Centauri crew were seen as both novelties and potential prizes of war.
We’re treasure, Larr thought, pounding his punching bag. The prize specimens in the Yn zoo!
Punch!
That last meeting had been five standard months ago. They hadn’t heard from the Florans since.
Punch! Punch! In those first few days on Y, Larr could admit now that his hopes had been raised.
Yes, The Flags of Centauri Independence has been destroyed, but the six of them were still alive and reasonably well, and, in a backwards-sort-of-way, they had even accomplished their primary mission: they had made contact with the advanced culture of the Flowerworld. Surely a race as technologically capable as the Florans would be able to send them home. The danger they were in had even added a bit of spice to the proceedings. Sure, it was a tragedy that so many of their people had either been killed or transformed into red alien monsters, but what could he do about it? Cry? It was done.
Punch! Punch!
Larr had joined the Expeditionary Force for such excitement. He was too young to have fought with the Free Centauri Army during the Solarian Occupation. The E.F. had offered him the promise of adventure and glory he wanted, and he seized it. Now, indeed, he had been thrust into an epic adventure, and once over the initial shock of being stranded, Larr even began to enjoy his stay on Y.
He would have such fantastic tales to tell people when he got home!
Punch! The bag rocked back and forth. Punch! Punch! But as the days had turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, without further word from either the Florans or their unisexual ambassador, the safety net they offered first frayed and, in their absence, fell completely apart. Larr had been on Y for six months, and he no longer believed in happy endings.
He really began to lay into his makeshift bag as he thought about it. Larr wasn’t a religious man. He wasn’t a follower of the Hereditarians. He couldn’t have cared less about his “Divine Forerunners.” The past, to him, was dead. However good and competent Commander Serry had been in her role before coming to Y, she was a nothing but a liability to them now.
If he was anything, Larr considered himself a pragmatist. With each punch, the lieutenant pragmatically did the mathematics of their situation. Punch! Nine-and-a-half years from Centauri to Epsilon Indi.
Punch! Another nine years and change would pass before the message the Centauri Independence was supposed to have sent would be missed at Force Command. Punch! The Sovereign would dither for a few months but, eventually, send a tightbeam inquiry.
Punch! Punch! Punch! Naturally, that inquiry would take another nine years and change to get here.
His blows came faster and faster. Punch! There would be no reply to this message because their ship had been destroyed. All the same, that lukewarm Sovereign Peter would wait another decade before sending a heavily-armed rescue vessel, just in case a message did come. Punch! Punch! The sweat started to sting Larr’s eyes; his hands were staining red. Even so, he continued to rain hits madly.
It would take another nine-and-a-half years for a rescue vessel to cross space from Centauri. At least nine-and-a-half years. Punch! Punch! At the barest minimum, then, assuming a preternatural level of preparedness and foresight, it would be nineteen years before a rescue ship could possibly arrive.
Much more likely, Larr could expect his rescue team only sometime after his thirty-eighth year on Y.
Punch! Punch! Punch! Faster and faster the blows fell. His hands were aching, yet still he continued to punch. Punch! Thirty-eight years.
Punch! Thirty-eight fucking years!
Punch! Punch!
Thirty-eight (Punch!) motherfucking (Punch! Punch!), godsdamning (Punch! Punch! Punch!) years!
“FUCK!!!” Larr screamed, and he struck the bag so hard he knocked it off its loose hinge.
The lieutenant just stood there for a minute, fists clenched, veins pulsing in his head, seeing only red. He expected nothing from the Florans. He didn’t trust them. They weren’t human. Even if they were human, they had some kind of godsdamning deal going on with the golden blobs that had demolished the Centauri Independence. The “Brahma,” they were called. The Florans had nothing to gain, and a lot to lose, maybe, by helping them. He knew Serry Garrant had pinned her hopes on the fucking Florans, but she was an idiot who had been sitting on her ass reading books for the last six months.
If the Florans really wanted to come to their aid, they would have done so already.
So far as Larr could see, there was only one real option.
Thirty-eight years, he thought. He looked at the sealed-in window above him. No way I’m going to spend thirty-eight years under glass here.
They had to go native. They had to become Yn. That was all there was to it.
Too bad for Garrant, but better she be made a slave than him. And the faster they made a deal, the better their chances were they would get one with terms favorable to them. The longer they waited, the worse things would get. Why couldn’t Garrant see that? Why wouldn’t she make the godsdamned sacrifice!?
Someone might have to make it for her, soon. If he could only get the guard to help him . . . .
No sooner had the notion gone through his mind then Larr saw a bright flash go off somewhere beyond the sealed window. He frowned. A half-second later the ground shook so hard it knocked the lieutenant off his feet. A great bellowing noise hurt his eardrums followed by a second and then a third.
Explosions.
What the hell . . ? The ground rumbled again. Dust from the previously flawless crystalline ceiling rained down. Larr looked up. He saw a huge crack spreading above him in the dense material.
The window blew in with the sound of the fifth explosion.
Larr screamed as the roof fell in on him.
Five hours earlier:
“You should join us for dinner tonight, Serry,” Eben said as they parted. They were in the corridor connecting her part of the keep to that reserved for the others. “It would be good for the men. It would be good for you, too.”
Serry gave her friend a half-hearted glance and slowly shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow.” She read the contours of Eben’s face: That’s what you said last night.
She touched his hand gently. “I can’t. I just . . can’t. Not yet.”
Eben took a quick look behind them to make sure no one was eavesdropping. They had a whole castle to themselves, but it was close-quarters anyway. Someone was always around the corner.
“Is it Larr?” he whispered.
“A little, but it’s the others too. Even . . . you sometimes.”
She didn’t give him time to reply; his shocked expression was clear enough. “It’s not deliberate, except maybe with Wirry, but . . . you all look at me differently now. I’ve seen you looking at the Yn women. You must all be thinking the same thing.”
You would be made a Yn sex slave, my dear, the Floran had said. Even weeks later, the bluntness of the phrase haunted Serry’s dreams.
Eben shook his head vehemently. “It will never happen. I’ll never let it happen.”
“You can’t make that promise,” Serry said. “But I can.” She still had her death capsule.
Eben was a Centauri Force officer too. He knew what she meant. “No. It won’t come to that.”
“Tomorrow night,” Serry said, turning to leave. “I’ll join you tomorrow night.” She could feel Eben’s eyes on her as she crossed to her own suite. She closed the heavy wooden door behind her, shutting off that unsettling look for another day.
She used the facilities, then, after dressing for bed, instead went to her study desk. It was still early in the evening—after six months, they had all accustomed themselves to the longer Yn day—and there was a lot of reading yet to be done. The desk was loaded up with old-fashioned books and the papers Serry had been using for her writing. She was getting used to writing without a chemiprocessor too.
She sat down and looked out her glassed-in window.
I shouldn’t have said anything to Eben, she thought. And he’s right. I should interact with the men more. I’m senior officer. I’m responsible.
She sighed, then diligently went back to work.
The differences between her native Centauran and the indigenous tongue of Y were so great that for the first few weeks of her project it had been an almost insurmountable chore just to tell the difference between an “I” and a “me.” But she had persevered. What had helped a lot was that Yn books—big, antique things bound in parchment and hide—used many, many illustrations to make their points.
Most Yn men, she had since discovered, didn’t find knowing how to read all that useful to them. Yn books therefore had to be made simple enough even for Yn men to glean something. Exact translations were still beyond Serry’s capabilities, but she had enough of the lingo down to understand basic meanings. For months, Serry had set before herself the task of learning as much about Yn culture and geography as possible. It was impossible to say what small bit of information might help them one day.
She opened the volume she had bookmarked. The book’s writing may have been simple, but its maps had been drawn with satellite precision. Such contrasts between Y’s medieval and space-age technologies were sometimes startling. Laid out before her was the Planet Y.
It had only the single landmass. A huge, Pangaea-like body, Y’s only continent occupied a good fifty percent of its planetary surface. Like that primeval body millions of years ago on Earth, it was destined to split, too. A section to the west had already divided from the main, allowing an inner sea to form that extended all the way to the southern pole, which the continent covered. Most of Y was ice locked. A great glacier, known, so far as Serry could determine, as simply the “Great Glacier,” divided the huge landmass into two major regions: the West, which enjoyed the most agreeable climates due to the warm currents of the inner sea, and the East, where Matricharate cities ran along the entire coastline.
It was just as the Floran ambassador had said. On Y, the men ruled the west, the women the east.
Why the Yn had settled on such an inhospitable planet, and why they had allowed their world to remain so inhospitable in the centuries since, Serry had no idea. According to her loose translations, the Yn had accompanied the Florans on their flight from Sol over a millennium ago. The Florans settled the warm innermost planets. The Yn, by choice or coercion, had colonized the sixth and last Indi world.
The Florans, Serry knew, had once been a high caste of the Solarian Empire. They had been actual members of the Congress of Species. The Yn, in contrast, had likely been a vassal caste of some kind, if not actually slaves. What they were to one another now, she had no clue.
The illustrations in her book were confusing, the accompanying text largely a mystery despite her hard work. Sitting at her desk, Serry examined some antique pictures she had found of red men and women—she noted that long ago the Yn genders had been more equal in size—separating.
That had been her weirdest discovery. For some reason, the first colonies on Y had either been exclusively male or exclusively female, and it was centuries before the sexes began commingling again.
Along with the red figures in her history books, there were lots of tinier figures in bright multicolors Serry took to be the Florans. There were also many female outlines in purest black she thought referred to the Brahma. Just seeing the black female figures filled Serry with an atavistic dread. She hated drones and androids, with good reason. As she still did on occasion, Serry thought of poor Lieutenant Norena.
No trace had ever been found of her old shipmate. Serry had searched long after what had happened to them on the Ulysses Olandros. She knew Norena still served somewhere, either in Solarian space or Centauri, as a sexual plaything. Serry thought about her often. Eventually, the Centauri officer rubbed her eyes. When she looked up again at her crystal-sealed window she was surprised to see it had grown full dark. It was late. She yawned deeply as she finally got up to go to bed.
Her research into Y’s past and its geography had not been inspired from an academic curiosity. Serry was looking for a place to go. Although he probably didn’t know it, Serry agreed with Larr Wirry on just about every one of his points, save, that is, for their chances of survival as Yn.
She wasn’t nearly as optimistic. Serry had decided long ago that an escape from Tolaam was their only viable alternative. They simply could not stay. It was a Forerunner miracle they hadn’t been seized already. Serry had discussed plans with Eben but kept them from the others, partially for concern of what Larr Wirry might say or do—it galled her that they had to keep secrets from a fellow Force officer—mostly because no plan the two of them had worked out had any chance of success. They couldn’t breathe the bloody air! Nonetheless, they had to escape. They had to get out of Tolaam. If they didn’t, it meant a transformation into Yn for all of them. Wirry saw that as a chance for life. Serry saw only death or enslavement for her men and an absolute certainty of abject slavery for her.
Neither outcome was acceptable.
In bed, Serry huddled around and pulled her blankets over her in an effort to get warm. This was always a chore on Y. She tried to sleep, but her thoughts kept returning to her exchange with Eben.
I hurt him when I said he was like the others, she chastised herself, curling in a ball beneath the sheets. The fact of the matter was, Eben Halc was the only friend she had, not merely on Y but in life in general. Serry’s lack of acquaintances was one of the primary reasons she had joined the Expeditionary Force. The E.F. actively recruited people like her because, unlike the Defense Force or Patrol Force, whose missions centered in and between the Three Centauri Systems, any Expeditionary mission meant years, if not decades, away from home, with all that that entailed. The E.F. didn’t want people with families waiting twenty or thirty years for them to come home. Muniqi Base had wanted people with no emotional attachments for the Epsilon Indi mission, and like it or not, Serry fit that description. It hadn’t always been so. Serry had had friends, once. She had been close to her brothers back home.
All that had changed following what the Solarians did to her . . . what they had transformed her and Lieutenant Norena into.
Serry had been twenty-three at the time of her capture and assault at the hands of the Solarians, at the seizing of the privateer Ulysses Olandros. She had no memory of the terrible things she must have experienced. The years her body spent fucking, sucking, and serving the oppressors of her people were mercifully a complete blank. For all intents and purposes, Serry had been rendered unconscious in that horrible cylinder and its pink transforming sac—she still suffered nightmares of those terrible last minutes—and when she was awakened close to sixteen years later in a hospital in Saqlawiyah City, it was as if from the depths of a hibernation capsule. She had still only been twenty-three, physically.
Sixteen years had passed, though, and much had changed in that time. The Occupation had ended, for one thing. The Solarians had been decimated at the Battle of Proxima Five, and thousands of . . of what she had been turned into were left behind. After surgery to restore her appearance, and many sessions with the psychists for counseling, Serry had returned to duty on board a spaceship. She had had nowhere else to go. Her parents had died in the interim, and her little brothers had grown up and begun their own lives. They had been distant to her when she came back, too, no doubt on account of the embarrassment and shame over what she had been made to do. At times, Serry had hated them for that coolness. Occasionally, she had sympathized. Mostly, she had tried to think about other things.
In the six years between her unspooling and the departure of The Flags of Centauri Independence on its maiden mission, Serry served in the newly formed Defense Force, went back to school, became an officer, rose in rank, and, eventually, transferred into the Expeditionary Force, for which her lack of friends and familial ties had been considered an advantage. In a way, Serry was overqualified. From her perspective, Serry was still only twenty-nine years old. Chronologically, she was twice that. She was as out of touch with her so-called “peers” as they were with her. Eben had been the only one she had made an effort to get to know on a personal level, and that was only because he had given so much of an effort to get to know her. She remembered their first meeting. She had been on a tour inspecting the CO2 scrubbers of the partially completed Centauri Independence, and when she got to Eben’s battery, she had expressed a mild criticism of their organization. They weren’t bad, just not in the most efficient order. Eben hadn’t said a word, but within twenty-seven hours, entirely on his own, he had not only reformatted his own battery but every other battery on the huge starship, just to impress her.
The ironic thing was, that morning, Serry had been planning on replacing the processing system in its entirety. It would be a complete gutting, too. Eben’s hard work had all been for nothing. Again, though, he didn’t say a word to her. In fact, Eben had pitched into the replacement project enthusiastically, agreeing that it was a good idea. Only later did she discover the truth on her own.
They had both been Senior Lieutenants at the time. Later, when Serry got the position of Life Support Chief, of all the people up for the same position, only Eben congratulated her, and it was an honest congratulations, she had felt, warmly given if awkwardly received on her part. By jokes and degrees, the two of them had become friends. While the six months they had spent so far on Y made Serry want to curl up and isolate herself again, as she had in those lonely years following the Solarian Occupation, for her own protection, Eben kept working at her to open up. She recognized that she could not afford to draw away from the others. So far as she was aware, the six of them were the only true human beings in the entire star system. Her responsibility as their leader was one thing; her own sanity was at sake if she alienated herself from the only family she had left. But the thought of being transformed into a slave, and not just a slave but a sex slave, and that her crew would be likewise transformed into creatures that habitually used sex slaves like she would be then, well, it had a naturally estranging effect.
Larr Wirry was the worst. Whenever he looked at her, Serry knew that he was imagining her on her knees before him, that he was actually looking forward to all of them being transformed into Yn. The others were more polite about it, more circumspect, but the fact of the matter was, she was the only female in the group, and the females on this planet were not equal.
She shouldn’t have said what she had said to Eben. But it was true nonetheless. Even he looked at her sometimes as if he was picturing what she would look like as a Yn slavegirl.
Serry tossed and turned for more than an hour. She didn’t know when she finally fell asleep.
The quarry shook with the sound of the explosions. As the invading hoverships soared overhead, the former Lord of Elshwa raised his fists in glee.
“Smash it all!” Reuben yelled. He raised his voice for the first time in weeks and didn’t care. “Blast the city to the ground!”
A spray of rubble fell across his head. He laughed uproariously. He would have been dancing had he not still been chained to the quarry floor.
“Smash it! Smash everything!!”
Another nearby explosion made the ground tremor. Less than a kilometer away, the city-state of Tolaam was under attack. Great wooden airships, like ancient sailing vessels of the sky, propellers spinning underneath, were firing cannons and dropping explosives on the castle closest to the pit. The usual dark Yn night had turned red and yellow from the fires and the bursting stonework. Soldiers ran out of the city gates. They were met by raiders dropping from the sky. Even at a distance, Reuben could see the hand-to-hand fighting going on.
Typical for Yn, it was being fought at close quarters with axes and swords. It made Reuben excited.
He felt a hand pat him familiarly on the ass. The good feeling he had passed.
“What’s happening?” Molhorz asked sleepily, crawling round to kneel beside Reuben, their ankle chains clinking behind them. The fact it had taken his flabby bedmate this long to wake to the sounds of war probably said much about why he was a prisoner too.
Reuben didn’t bother answering. The view was answer enough. “Those are attack ships from Woom,” Molhorz muttered after a minute watching.
“Where’s that?” Reuben asked.
Molhorz grunted a reply. Rumor had it the old Yn soldier had shirked his duty in battle by being drunk. Like Reuben, Molhorz had been stripped of his name and sent to the labor camps. Everyone in this mine outside Tolaam was in disgrace. Even the guards set over them wouldn’t descend into the pit; they just walked the border of the quarry above them, firing a rifle as needed to maintain order. Molhorz wiped a hand across his vapid and sagging face and ducked back inside their tent. His hand brushed against the insides of Reuben’s thighs.
“Come back here and suck me,” his bedmate drowsily ordered.
Reuben groaned. “Do I have to?” he whined. For six months he had been at this creature’s beck and call. Whenever he wasn’t digging rocks out of the ground or moving freight or performing any of the other of hundreds of backbreaking labors at the pit, he had to service Molhorz or his buddies. Reuben had fought the first time they forced him to his knees, but even an out-of-shape ex-drunk like his collar buddy was stronger and a better fighter than he was.
And Reuben was still afraid of real fighting. He could get hurt in a real fight.
Molhorz pulled on their mutual chain. Reuben closed his eyes, shuddered, and made his way in the glowing dark to his master. The battle for the offworlders’ keep raged on behind him.