The Price of Desire (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 1) Read online

  No matter what.

  FIVE

  When the door opened some time later, Kisten was perfectly composed.

  “Commander.” Lieutenant Commander Ybarra saluted stiffly.

  Kisten made a small, offhanded gesture and the other man relaxed. “Yes?” he inquired.

  “The men have been interrogated.” Ybarra was talking about the slavers, several of whom had been taken alive. “They’ve reported some useful information, evidently, some of which might even prove accurate.” Kisten did not share Ybarra’s optimism, but he offered the man a chair and invited him to continue. He listened in silence as Ybarra then outlined what they’d learned during each grueling session.

  The slavers had been in Kisten’s possession now for some forty-eight hours. During which time Aria had been mostly unconscious. He’d been concerned, naturally, but the ship’s surgeon was optimistic.

  And then Ybarra finished his recitation. Kisten was, he had to admit, pleased—if not with the slavers’ honesty then with his men. He demanded a great deal of them, and they gave it to him. He was proud of them, and he’d miss them. Not that he’d admit to such, sentimentalist pap being bad for morale.

  “You said you wanted to see them?” Ybarra waited.

  “So I did.” Kisten stood up and, coming around to the front of his desk, followed Ybarra to the brig.

  The brig aboard Atropos was more luxurious than some officers’ clubs he’d dined at, further proof that a flagship wasn’t a real ship.

  He stepped into the guardroom and its occupants snapped to attention. He waved them off, uninterested. Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Abdul Hakim smiled wolfishly. The duty brig supervisor was a hard man, and famous for it. Kisten approved. Every day, Hakim made sure that his charges wore a squared-away uniform, ate three separate and equally nutritious meals, and received counseling about education and military opportunities—assuming of course that they ever had the opportunity to reintegrate. He inspected them at reveille and taps, holding them to standards that would have made the upperclassmen at the naval academy flinch, and when they misbehaved he beat them. All in all, he made imprisonment a productive and no doubt edifying experience.

  Any brig, reflected Kisten, even one masquerading as a hotel, should be a place where grown men broke down and cried for their mothers. Suddenly, being told when to eat, when to sleep, and what socks to wear seemed like unheard-of levels of freedom. Every day was exactly the same. The monotony drove some men insane; an excellent metaphor for space travel.

  Kisten had heard the stories, of course, about what happened in brigs: drugs, rape, murder. He’d done nothing to discourage their spread, as they motivated his men to behave. But every brig on every ship that he’d commanded had been a model of order and discipline and he had men like Hakim to thank for that. Kisten had had his issues, but one issue he’d never had was picking the wrong man for the job.

  “They’re down at the end of the hall,” Hakim commented.

  Kisten nodded curtly.

  He traversed the well-lit, dust-free hall, flanked by Hakim and a small detachment of staff correctional officers.

  The brig was sparsely populated. A few droopy, bored-looking men whose units wanted nothing to do with them glanced up to watch him pass before returning to the cards, magazines, and other things that more or less kept them occupied. Most of these men would rejoin their units, chastened for the experience. But for some men—if one could call them that—there was simply not enough discipline in the world. Kisten stopped at the end of the row, facing the cells that held the slavers. They’d been placed in separate cells, so they couldn’t compare stories.

  One man, according to Ybarra, had been particularly anxious to chat. Tapping out a complex code, Hakim lowered the forcefield and Kisten stepped into his cell. Hakim joined him.

  Kisten studied the man in silence. Hakim had knocked out most of his teeth. Kisten saw that as no great loss; none of these men appeared to have visited a dentist in their lifetimes. The man’s shaved head was mottled with angry blotches, blood trickled from his lip and his right eye had puffed shut. With his other, he regarded Kisten dolefully.

  Kisten sat down on the edge of the metal table, expression pleasant. “Now, my man tells me your name is Walid Shah. Is that correct?”

  Walid nodded cautiously.

  “Do you prefer Master Shah,” Kisten clarified, “or may I call you Walid?”

  Taken back by his abrupt change in circumstance, he shrugged. “Walid is fine.”

  “Would you like a glass of water, Walid?”

  Walid stared, not understanding. Kisten signaled for a glass of water and one of the guards brought it to him, along with a muffin. Both were presented to the unfortunate man. Well, thought Kisten, he could gum it; muffins tended to be soft.

  “Please.” Kisten smiled encouragingly.

  Sitting in the chair as he was, Walid had to bend his neck back to meet Kisten’s eye. He did so now, but with difficulty. He’d been worked over fairly thoroughly, and by professionals; he was in a lot of pain, but he wouldn’t die. Kisten accepted a cup of coffee from the same guard, who also provided one for Walid. After glaring at them for a few minutes to prove his point, Walid sampled all three items. The muffin proved just as soft as Kisten had hoped.

  “My men can be…enthusiastic,” he said apologetically.

  “I told them what they wanted to know,” Walid grumbled.

  “Yes,” Kisten agreed, “I’m sure you did.” He sipped his coffee; scalding hot and bitter, just how he liked it. He took neither sugar nor cream. “But are you quite sure that there’s nothing you wish to add? No information about, perhaps…your rendezvous with Captain Dahn?”

  The man stared.

  Kisten nodded indulgently. “We’ve been eavesdropping.”

  “Then you know that wasn’t none of our doing! He contacted us, the sick son of a bitch!”

  “Indeed.”

  Kisten listened in silence as the man poured his heart out about the ins and outs of his group’s arrangement with the man who’d very nearly succeeded in betraying Aria Hahn and her friends into slavery. Hahn. The syllable felt strange on his tongue; theoretically they spoke the same language, but five thousand years had made a good bit of difference in how those languages sounded. Her people’s names were as different as their culture. Aria could have been a Bronte name; it rolled off the tongue and sounded beautiful. But he had more important things to think about right now than women. He put her out of his mind.

  He smiled again, indulgently, encouraging the slaver to continue. Which he did, at last sensing a kindred spirit. “So you see,” he finished, “we’re just middlemen.”

  “Of course.” Kisten’s tone was mild. “Just middlemen, just doing your job.” He put down his coffee and folded his hands across his knee as he regarded Walid from his seat on the table. “You can’t help it if the world is a corrupt and hostile place. You don’t make these men what they are; you don’t give them their perverse tastes, or encourage them to act on them. If there were no demand, there would be no supply.”

  Walid nodded eagerly. Hope shone in his eyes. Kisten felt vaguely nauseated.

  “The problem we have, Walid,” he continued, his tone changing slightly, “is this: show me a man who’s morally ambivalent about the rape of children, and I’ll show you a man who rapes children.”

  Hope died in Walid’s eyes as he realized that he’d been duped.

  But his information had been useful. Kisten’s tone was almost regretful. “Now perhaps you’re thinking, I never raped any children. But you see,” he told the man, “you did.” His eyes flashed, hardening, and suddenly Walid saw, really saw Kisten for the first time: the specter behind the polite façade, the man who’d terrified so many.

  Kisten began to pace. “This is a topic that makes any normal man, however much of a scumbag he turns out to be, tremble with rage and disgust. I have a sister, a young and beautiful sister, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you
what I’d do to the man who taught her that the world was a hateful and untrustworthy place and that men saw women as little more than playthings.” He paused, reflecting. Walid’s eyes were now as wide as saucers. “Now, on Brontes we understand how to treat girls—and the women they grow up to be. Out here, I realize, I have to make some allowances for the fact that you’re all little better than savages.”

  Walid swallowed.

  “What planet are you from?”

  “Kedion,” he whispered.

  One of the rim planets, claimed by neither the Union nor the Alliance and desired by both. Kisten nodded. “I’m sure that you find yourself surrounded by offensive images, graphic language, victim blaming and lack of law enforcement—all the things that suggest, to you, that violence against women is normal; so normal, in fact, as to be all but inevitable.”

  His gaze grew colder. “You persist in believing, as you explained to me not a few moments ago, that the capture and sale of children is just the way things are. And therein lies the problem. It’s men like you, Walid, who make the situation what it is: who first supply the children and, occasionally, adults and then rape them again by dismissing their condition as the status quo. You convince these ultimate predators that their circular, self-serving logic has merit; of course their actions are normal, see how no one condemns them.

  “They feel even more free, the next day, to come out of the shadows and attack children—because they know that people are willing to look the other way . People like you.” Grabbing Walid by his ripped, threadbare shirt, he hauled him to his feet. The slaver was trembling, now, and he stank. Good; in his last few moments of life, he’d get some small taste of the pain he’d inflicted. Pushing him stumbling toward the door, Kisten gestured to Hakim. Hakim released the forcefield and Walid all but fell into the hall.

  The guards closed in around him. Within minutes, the other surviving slavers had joined their little group. Kisten was silent now, further discussion being unnecessary. He’d said all that was required and, more importantly to these girls and others like them, learned all there was to learn.

  Turning on his heel, he strode down the hall. The prisoners, prodded by guards, hurried after him. Kisten didn’t glance behind him; he didn’t need to. He trusted his men to do their jobs.

  They reached their destination.

  He saw horror dawn in his prisoners’ eyes as they realized where they were. He smiled. Uncomfortable shuffling became pleas for mercy, which in turn became frenzied attempts at escape. Kisten ignored them all, letting the guards deal with the problem while he spoke to the lieutenant in charge of SP1—Space Port One. Nodding, the lieutenant punched in his access code. The double doors swished open to reveal a long, featureless tunnel. Twin tracks ran along its wide, flat bottom. This was a shuttle bay, primarily, but it was used for other things as well—such as disposing of garbage. Right now it was pressurized; when the second set of double doors opened at the far end, releasing the contents of the tube to the vacuum of space, it would not be.

  The men were herded out into SP1. Screams became wails, which in turn became high-pitched, almost inhuman howls of rage and despair. Kisten stood at parade rest, his hands clasped loosely behind his back, watching without comment.

  He’d stood before other space ports, at other times, watching similar spectacles. They caused no particular emotional response, then, either. Only boredom, coupled with a certain sense of satisfaction. The double doors swished shut. The lieutenant nodded, signaling his readiness to proceed.

  Instead of nodding in return, Kisten joined the young officer at the console. He was a man who believed in carrying out the sentence himself. Neither did he hesitate as he entered the code.

  A window of night appeared at the end of the tunnel. He watched the now former slavers: their eyes grew wide as their arms splayed. Their feet left the floor as, as one, they sailed feet-first into space. The almost balletic performance ended in seconds, their bodies quickly diminishing into specks. They’d sail away endlessly, flipping end over end like bowling pins. The image gave Kisten immense satisfaction, as did the knowledge that his former prisoners were almost certainly still conscious.

  SP1 had been sealed and repressurized and the slavers’ bodies long since lost to sight, but Kisten hadn’t moved.

  He stared into the void, and he thought about what had happened on M-30501, the so-called “jungle planet” that was actually a moon, and wished that he were back aboard the Nemesis. The slavers, by rights, should have been brought to trial; but trials presupposed judges, and juries, and police forces that weren’t corrupt and no such things existed out here. On the frontier, there was no law.

  Alliance writ wouldn’t hold until he made it hold.

  When the human body was exposed to the vacuum of space, a number of injuries occurred immediately. Gases within the lungs and digestive tract expanded and, finally, ruptured those organs. He’d learned about deep space survival at the Imperial Naval Academy at Mirzapur, where he’d graduated second in his class. The first and most vital step was to exhale. In the absence of atmospheric pressure water—in this case, in the form of saliva, mucous membranes and blood—spontaneously converted into gas. If the process was left unchecked, within minutes a man’s eyeballs would vaporize into nothing. Certain muscles, too, would swell to twice their size as blood vessels burst and their contents evaporated.

  By now, he mused, multiple contusions had turned the slavers’ bodies into bloated blue husks. About five minutes ago, by his calculations, their blood had begun to boil. He turned and walked back to his office.

  SIX

  Aria hadn’t appreciated Solaris. No one owned anyone there.

  No one took anyone captive and held them against their will on a strange ship—or, if they did, they were arrested. Here, apparently, it was the people in power who did the kidnapping! And no one batted an eyelash! Her doctor, so far the only other person she’d seen, had seemed to take the fact of her presence aboard ship as a matter of course. Which begged the question, how many other women had this man kidnapped?

  Did he have what, a—a harem?

  And who was he? And where was he? If he was so interested in her, why hadn’t he made an appearance?

  Not that Aria was complaining. She was in no rush to meet this man. That Doctor Nandi had described him as not wantonly cruel was hardly reassuring; if that was the best his supporters could do in selling his virtues then he must be a hateful man indeed. In her mind, she pictured someone old and undoubtedly fat. He’d be gross and sweating, just like the slaver who’d almost killed her, with foul breath and oily, matted-down body hair and no teeth.

  She wasn’t sure how she’d worked out this picture in her mind, only that once it came to life it stuck. Commanders were never young men; people in power were never young. And this so-called commander would be leering and disgusting and ill-educated, a dissipate cad who wanted to breathe on her and grope her. Yes, her wounds had been seen to and she’d been given clean clothes—if this shapeless linen sack could properly be termed clothes—but that could all be dismissed as conscientious caring for property. She fed her cat, too.

  Was she a slave, she wondered? What, exactly was her place here? What was going to happen next? The uncertainty, more than anything else, was what tormented.

  Finally feeling well enough to leave her bed, she’d found the one chair that wasn’t bolted down and pulled it up to the massive chart table. She slammed her fist down on the scarred surface, frustrated. An hour before she’d been eating lunch—at least, what she thought was lunch. With no sunrise or sunset, no visitors and a clock she couldn’t read, she’d lost all sense of time. There was a window, but the view was always the same.

  Which fact recalled her most immediate problem: boredom. She’d been terrified almost since she first woke to discover herself in a strange place, but even the most mind-numbing panic was no match for having nothing to do. Eventually her jumbled thoughts faded into background noise, a low susurrus of
anxiety-fueled imaginings that wasn’t enough to occupy her brain but that made doing anything else impossible. She’d tried to think about other things; she’d tried to read. But after realizing that she’d read the same paragraph five times and had no idea what it was about, she found herself once again asking: what next?

  So far, her biggest excitement had been spotting a piece of space debris.

  She stared glumly at the remains of her food. She might have only seen Doctor Nandi, but someone was arriving with fresh food and clean clothes at regular intervals. They just had the magic knack of doing so when she was asleep, or in the bathroom. And the food hadn’t been bad, exactly, just unrecognizable. She’d eaten several meals, now, and so far she hadn’t recognized anything—unless she counted bread. It had been flat, and soft, and had tasted of garlic and cilantro.

  She picked up the remains of today’s offering and raised it halfway to her mouth when another picture of a fat, sweating man flashed before her. She put the bread down. Part of her was too frightened to consider the future, and part of her too lethargic from despair. Whatever happened, she’d be powerless to stop—unless she found an airlock and the courage to use it. Except unfortunately, she wasn’t a courageous person. She didn’t want to be raped, or enslaved, but she did want to live. Most of all, she wanted to go home.

  She wondered what the girls were doing. Doctor Nandi said they were fine, but what passed for fine in a culture where women were chattel? She hadn’t, she had to admit, been treated poorly. But she knew, equally, that this halcyon period of solitude couldn’t last forever. If nothing else, her captor would want his room back—and he hadn’t kept her locked in here just to ignore her. Her fingers tightened on the edge of the table until her knuckles turned white. If he’d done anything to those girls, she vowed, she’d kill him.

  She pushed her chair back and stood up. She might be a prisoner, but she could at least be a clean prisoner.