Alien Conquest: (The Warrior's Prize) An Alien SciFi Romance Read online

  Chapter Five

  The cursii barracks were in something of an uproar after Domina Lennai’s announcement. It had been so long since any of their masters had offered a donara. Once their training for the solar was finished and they had retired to their barracks, the cursii could talk of nothing else amongst themselves. The mess hall broiled with boastful cursu and cursana discussing what they would do with the strange alien creature the domina had presented to them, as well as what kind of creature she might have been. What she felt like, what she tasted like. What she hid beneath her dress and if it was the same as theirs. If she was intelligent or primitive. Only a handful of them had ever seen another human, and those who had claimed to know everything about them. What they ate, how they procreated, that the slightest breeze might kill them if one wasn’t careful.

  All of it annoyed Vega beyond measure.

  It was a cheap ploy, the donara. He didn’t know why the rest of these idiots couldn’t see that, but he could. It was the domina’s way of distracting them from what should have been their goal: to fight to the top of the lists and win their freedom. Instead, she had them falling all over each other to get to another link in the chain holding them all to House Chara. As for the donara herself, she was a slave just like the rest of them, and he had no desire to link her fate to his. But, as the lists currently stood, he was the highest ranked of Chara’s cursii, and if he won the games he’d have to take the donara or insult the House itself. That wouldn’t do, either. So the entire thing had put him into a black mood.

  “Don’t worry, Vega,” Bathari laughed, elbowing down to his table in the mess. He set a cup of sweet wine in front of him. “If you win her, I’ll take her off your hands.”

  “Fuck off,” Vega grumbled, ignoring the cup. He never partook before a day of games.

  “I saw you looking at her,” Bathari persisted, his tall antlers casting shadows on the far wall in the low lights. One of his antlers was broken, cracked in the last games. Vega remembered how he’d screamed in pain, writhing in the sands.

  “We were all looking at her, Bathari.”

  “But she was looking back at you.” Bathari grinned.

  “I just want to win the games. I’ve no desire for that sort of thing. And if you had any sense about you at all, you wouldn’t either.” He slid the wine cup back in front of Bathari, grunting irritably.

  Bathari picked up the cup with a shrug and took a gulp. “We must indulge where we are able to, friend.”

  “No, we must win. That’s all there is.”

  Bathari indicated Lohar, another Errai cursu, at a table across the room. “Mind you keep an eye on Lohar tomorrow,” he said lowly. “I hear he seeks to unseat you.”

  Vega sighed. There were always fighters who sought to kill him in the games, by accident. He had no doubt Lohar wasn’t the only one. Sometimes they got brazen enough to try and take him out in the practice yard, well ahead of the real fight. None had succeeded, because for Vega, every fight was a real one. He eyeballed the red-scaled Errai for a few seconds, before looking back at Bathari with a shrug.

  “Good luck to him.”

  “You’re so dour all the time,” Bathari complained.

  “If you don’t like it, go bother someone else.”

  “You can’t tell me you aren’t the least bit curious.” Bathari’s laughing, dark eyes glimmered at him. “I mean a donara, after all this time?”

  “I’m curious,” Vega admitted. “But not enough to really care.”

  “The last donara was given more than five years ago,” Bathari went on. “I heard Gurun telling the story. She was an Errai, and she was given to the winner in the Jambanar Conflict. They said she was kissed with luck. A year later, she and her cursu gained their freedom.”

  “And so the dominus stopped giving donaras or donarums, thinking it inspired his fighters to freedom too quickly,” Vega muttered, looking pointedly back at Bathari. “You don’t see why I’m suspicious?”

  “Domina Lennai is not her father,” Bathari pointed out.

  “But she is still a Chara domina. This is a distraction.”

  Bathari snorted. “Think what you like. I will fight all the harder tomorrow just to see if I can get my hands on the alien.” He mimed squeezing. “My hands all over her.”

  “You’re far too disgusting for a Jiayi.” Vega sighed. He got up from his seat, frowning at the Jiayi warrior, and turned away. “I’m going to bed. And if you get drunk tonight, I’m not saving your ass on the sands tomorrow. You’ll die because you couldn’t hold your cups. Think on that.”

  “Yes, yes,” Bathari crowed. “Get your beauty sleep, sweet Vega! And don’t worry about me, I’ll fight better tomorrow than I ever have before. You’ll see!”

  Vega just growled at him and left the table, heading out of the mess hall entirely.

  Idiots. They just couldn’t see. None of them could see. When Vega had volunteered to fight for his planet, House Chara had offered the best deal of all the high families. Fight, win, be free. But Vega had been young and he hadn’t thought about it enough, hadn’t looked closely. Hadn’t seen. You couldn’t just win once. Couldn’t just top the lists in one bout of games, no. You had to climb higher and higher, and you could never fall —not once— or you started back at the bottom all over again. Vega was only four game days away from his freedom. Unlike these useless shitpots, he wasn’t about to let some pretty alien thing distract him from what was his. From going home. At last. He left the uproar of the mess and headed for his bunk, thankful he had risen high enough that he had one to himself. He needed the quiet, needed to focus now, on the fighting to come.

  Chapter Six

  Day and night were not words that existed on the station. Alaina discovered that quickly enough. She could not have said how much time had passed since she’d woken up on Rua’s ship. She cried for a while, and then the crying started to make her feel more helpless, and so she stopped. In an effort to reinforce her practical nature, she got up from the bed and began exploring. She started with her room first. Though it felt like a cell, it wasn’t, and it was on a space station. Alaina kept telling herself that over and over again to remember it, and to find a weakness somewhere. It was a small room, but the adjacent bathroom was fully functional. The shower poured that same milky white water from the bathhouse, which Alaina assumed was the space version of bodywash. There was a closet full of clothes, but all the clothes were more or less the same as the sheer dress they’d put her in at the slave market.

  There was also a control panel embedded in the wall, which told her what time of solar it was, whether the station’s life support program was running night or day and, she imagined, it was some part communication device but she couldn’t figure out how to work it. Tapping at it gave her the time and other pertinent information on the station, market activity and when the games would take place, but if there was a way to call for someone, she couldn’t find it. She considered that maybe it only went one way. She could be summoned, but couldn’t summon back.

  Eventually she gave up on the control panel. According to its information, it was night now, and she’d spent enough time crying and feeling sorry for herself. Now the slave quarters was dark and quiet, and the palace seemed to have gone to bed. If she wanted to escape before the games the next solar, she had to do it now. But she had no plan, no weapons, no actual method of getting off the ship, not even a basic understanding of where she was or how to work the station’s technology. Perfect. But there was an urgency in her heart and a determination to seize any moment she could. So she left her little room and worked her way back through the darkened servants’ quarters, down twisting low-ceilinged corridors lit only by dim overhead lights, and back to the gate Lennai had walked her through earlier.

  It was, predictably, locked.

  The portcullis was shut, the bars heavy metal grating, and Alaina could see another control panel on the other side of the gate. She managed to get one arm throug
h the bars but couldn’t reach the panel, and nearly got her arm stuck for her troubles.

  As she yanked her arm free, stumbling back from the gate, she heard a soft snicker behind her and whirled around. There was a slave girl a few feet down the corridor, and when she moved beneath the lights Alaina could see flicker off her yellow scales.

  “You’ll never get out that way,” the girl laughed quietly. “Nobody ever does.”

  “Is there another way?” Alaina asked.

  The girl drifted closer and Alaina was struck by her face. The yellow scales covered most of it, save for her a pair of shrewd blue eyes. The girl flashed her a smile. “Maybe.”

  “Will you help me?”

  The girl shrugged. “You’re the donara. Why should lowly I help you?”

  “I don’t want to be the donara,” Alaina insisted. “Please. I just want to get out of here. I have literally nothing to offer you, but please help me if you know another way out.”

  The girl made a sad face. “Poor, sad donara. All right. Because I am kind, I will help you be free.”

  Relief flooded through Alaina, and she smiled a little at the girl. “What’s your name?”

  “Nyssa.” She put extra emphasis on the sss in the middle. These creatures, Alaina thought, were all so very snakelike. “I am a cleaner. Come with me.”

  She waved a hand and then turned, ducking back down the corridor, and Alaina had to hurry to catch up to her before she turned a corner. “Thank you, Nyssa. Thank you. Seriously. I just need to get out of here.”

  “You don’t belong here.” Nyssa seemed to agree.

  “No, I definitely do not.”

  Nyssa reached over and poked her in the arm as they walked. “Delicate human.”

  Alaina frowned. “I wouldn’t call myself delicate, but I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anyone’s prize.”

  Nyssa shrugged. “Many of us would kill to be the donara. If you don’t understand, or don’t want such an honor, then yes, you should be gone.”

  “Well, that I can’t agree with more,” Alaina muttered.

  Nyssa led Alaina through so many twists and turns in the servants’ quarters Alaina felt completely turned around. She was pretty sure that if she had to find her way back to her room, or even to that locked gate, she would be unable to. Everything looked the same. Just the same dark, metal corridor again and again that never seemed to lead anywhere but to another dark, metal corridor. No signs or numbers or anything. Door after unmarked door which might have been other slave rooms, or closets, or airlocks for all Alaina knew.

  She tried, but there were no landmarks, not even stains on any of the pristine walls for her to make a note of, and her sense of direction was no sense at all here. East, West, none of that mattered because there was no sun to dictate it.

  Finally they turned a corner and Nyssa led her to another gate. There was nothing but darkness beyond it, though Alaina squinted, trying to make out the shapes of things.

  “Stairs,” Nyssa told her. “They lead down to the sanitation chamber, which leads out to the incineration bay, which leads to the hangar bay where maybe you could steal a ship.”

  “You’re sure?” Alaina asked her.

  “I am a cleaner,” Nyssa said, arching her eyebrows. “Of course I’m sure.”

  It made sense, Alaina reasoned. Only the communal section of the ship held things like the market and the hangar bay and station-wide resources like sanitation. And if Nyssa was a cleaner, she must have known intimately how all of that worked. Alaina touched the gate, gave it a shake, but it didn’t budge.

  “It’s also locked.”

  “Yes.” Nyssa smiled and held up a wrist. Looped about it was a copper bracelet glinting in the dim. “But I have the key. Because I am a cleaner.”

  She slid the bracelet off her wrist and held it out to Alaina. “Here. It will unlock any door on your way, because I am allowed to move through the sections of the palace to clean.”

  Alaina took the bracelet, turning it over in her fingers. It looked like simple enough jewelry, but when she held it higher up, in the light, she could see the flicker and bounce of tiny blinking electronic lights through the gloss of its exterior. More technology she had no hope of understanding. She slid the bracelet onto her wrist and looked at Nyssa again.

  The girl indicated the control panel to the left of the gate.

  “You just wave it,” she explained. “And the gate will open.”

  Alaina felt lost for a moment. Once she got out of this palace, she still wasn’t sure how she would get off the station, but it was a step. A huge step. And this stranger had just given her a key to open the locked doors that had seemed to suddenly cage her in. She was grateful and terrified and she knew if she didn’t act she would freeze altogether and spiral into panic, and it would be all for nothing.

  “Thank you,” she said to Nyssa, heart in her throat.

  Nyssa smiled, the expression sharp. “Better hurry.”

  There was something about the girl’s smile that disconcerted Alaina, and gave her pause. That sharpness, as though she should have had fangs instead of normal teeth. Or what Alaina thought of as normal. The yellow scales covering her face certainly made her look like a viper, or like a dragon. A small, blue-eyed, smiling dragon. A predator. And it make Alaina feel starkly like prey. But she told herself it was just the strangeness of it all. The foreignness of the space station and the, well, alienness of all of its inhabitants. She was just being prejudiced because nobody in this place even looked like her. And she couldn’t take this gift for granted.

  So she nodded, clutching the bracelet to her chest, and gave Nyssa a grateful smile. “Thank you,” she said, again, and then she turned to the control panel.

  As Nyssa had explained, just a wave of the bracelet in front of the panel summoned the sound of the gate’s lock clanking open. The gate slid away.

  “Go straight down,” Nyssa told her. “You’ll see signs.”

  Alaina marshaled her courage and hurried into the darkness, and the gate slid closed and locked again behind her.

  Chapter Seven

  Vega couldn’t sleep, his mind clogged with thoughts of the games. It happened every time. No matter how early he retired, or how much he meditated, at some point the night before he was to enter the Arena, he came awake in wee hours and could not get back to sleep. Nerves or anxiety, or perhaps anticipation, he didn’t know, but his mind was a nest of insects. Thoughts all writhing one on top of the either, hissing and buzzing about his skull. Over the years, he’d given up trying to silence it all in the night. By the time he set foot on the sands, those thoughts would extinguish, and there would be nothing in his mind but a quiet stillness, and then the rage of battle.

  So he gave up trying to nod off again and got up, pulling on the light linen pants all the cursu wore in the comfort of the barracks, and left his room to walk the anxiety off. The barracks were silent at this time of night. Even the fighters who burned through the sleep cycles, like Bathari, who would rather spend the night drinking and fucking whomever he could get his hands on — out of some fear, Vega suspected, that it would be his last opportunity — had retired.

  Vega didn’t blame them, in the end, not really. They had the right of it to some extent. Any one of them could enter the Arena and never leave it. Every fight could be their last. Cursii died on the sands every game day. Only Vega couldn’t live that way. Day to day, moment to moment. He had to hold onto some kind of dream for the future, and that future would take him home.

  Vega preferred the barracks this way. Silent, ponderous. He passed bunk after bunk, some with multiple people piled into one bed, some with hammocks swinging from the ceiling. His fortune in the Arena had earned him the only single bunk in the barracks, and he had maintained its occupancy for a full year now. He hoped never to leave it, unless it was to walk freely out of the Chara palace altogether.

  The hallways of the barracks were silent
and dark. Even the mess was quiet, the few cursii there sleeping it off on tables or benches, the soft huff of snores pervading the air. Vega walked on. The barracks were essentially looping tunnels winding around underneath the Chara palace, connecting the training yard to the slave quarters to the long walk down the lower level tunnel to the Arena itself. Vega walked the length of it, from the training yard back through the barracks towards the gate that led to the tunnel, knowing he would do it all again the next solar, and then into the Arena for real. The only sound that accompanied him was the soft fall of his own bare feet across the metal floor.

  Then he heard steps behind him and stopped. And waited, letting them catch up, before he turned and in the darkness could make out the bulky, heaving silhouette of Lohar in the black.

  So he wouldn’t even wait for the Arena, it seemed.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Vega warned him. “You should wait until tomorrow.”

  “You’re not gonna see tomorrow,” Lohar growled.

  Then they both heard, from down the hall and up the stairs that led to the slaves quarters, the sound of voices. Soft, feminine.

  Vega paused, listening, and heard the gate at the top of the stairs slide open and then closed again. Lohar heard it, too, and took a step back. Vega stood as he was, expecting to see one of the guards turn the corner. Instead, in the wan light of the corridor’s single overhead light, he saw the donara herself appear, having come down the stairs and turned the corner. He saw her, and she saw him, and she froze. Lohar saw her too.

  What madness was this?

  Why would this creature be coming to the barracks in the dead of night? And who had helped her get out of the slaves quarter? Certainly not the domina. Fraternization between the house slaves and the cursii was strictly forbidden. The stupid human was going to get herself killed, or at least whipped, if she got caught down here. Then Lohar was moving, and Vega bit down on a curse, because the big Errai cursu was bowling right for the donara instead of Vega himself. No doubt to claim a prize he certainly had not yet earned.