“Yes, sir,” Kade said, easily rolling with the change in plans.
“Jai?” I called, heading back to the living room. Jai was in the courtyard out the back, pulling a few weeds out of the garden, and he came to the back door at my call. “Emergency at the base,” I told him. “I’ll be gone for a couple of hours. If you need anything in the meantime, ask Kade.”
“Yes, sir,” Jai replied, with a far more cooperative expression than I’d been expecting. Until now, he’d mostly just scowled and snarled.
With that, I bolted out the door and ran all the way to the train station. But I wasn’t going to catch a train. As efficient as the transport system was, in the middle of the day on a weekday, a car would still be quicker.
I found a taxi outside the station, waiting to pick up a passenger from the constant flow of foot traffic, and I leapt into the passenger seat. “The Hon military base,” I told the driver, tapping at my comm to link my account to the payment system. “And I’m in a hell of a rush, so I’m not saying break any trafficlaws, but if you could get me there as quickly as possible, I would greatly appreciate it.”
The Wasop woman in the driver’s seat gave me a wicked grin, then checked her mirrors and put her foot on the gas. “I’ve always wanted someone to do that,” she said cheekily. “Jump into the car and yell ‘Drive, just drive!’ Well, okay, that’s not quite what you said, but it’s close enough.”
“I’m glad I’ve made your day,” I said, able to see the funny side of the situation. “Seriously, though, this is a real emergency. But even so, I’d prefer we both make it there in one piece.”
◊◊◊
Tiki – the taxi driver – pulled to a rather abrupt stop in the visitors’ section of the parking lot at the military base. “Thank you so much,” I said to her, as I hit ‘confirm’ on the payment option, then leapt out of the car like my ass was on fire. I’d given her a brief rundown of my job on the way here, and she’d told me a story about her sister, who’d found out that her fiancé had been lying to her about his job for the past two years. It was a relatable story, surprisingly similar to a dimari finding out the truth about their master, and she’d seemed genuinely sympathetic to the fact that I now had to go and try to get said dimari to understand the real situation. While the story didn’t help me in any practical sense, it had bolstered my mood a little, and I walked into the conference room where James and Sora were waiting, feeling apprehensive, but also hopeful.
Sora was sitting at the table, his head down, his scales shimmering with flutters of purple and teal. James was slumped in a chair on the opposite side of the table, looking like someone had just run over his dog.
“Ah, Aiden,” he said, when he saw me. “Thank you for coming.” There was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the words – which I took no offence to whatsoever.
“How did he find out?” I asked first, because exactly what Sora knew – or thought he knew – was going to have a significant impact on this conversation. I didn’t bother trying to hide anything from Sora. At this point, the only way forward was to tell him the raw, stark truth, and then try to get him to understand that he was very much valued and appreciated, despite the situation.
“It was one of the other pilots,” James said, shaking his head. “There’s a lot of banter that goes on over the radios. We went on a test run to the Gema system – to see how Sora handled the ship and to make sure there were no issues for taking a longer run. Once we came back through the Rendol wormhole, Horley and Baz were shooting the shit, and Baz let it slip that we found a crate of dimari that came out of a Eumadian ship we shot down. Sora heard everything.”
I nodded slowly, then I skirted around the table and took a seat beside Sora. He didn’t look up.
“Must have been quite a shock, huh?” I said to him. “To find out that your master didn’t actually buy you?”
Sora shuddered and hunched further in on himself, but said nothing.
“I’d like to know what you think that means,” I said to him gently. “The raw facts are that we shot down a Eumadian ship, found the crate of you and the other dimari inside, and assigned you to masters here who hadn’t specifically chosen you. But I want to know what you think thatmeans. What does it mean about your master? What does it say about you?”
James was glaring at me, and I could understand why. Rather than trying to soothe the wound Sora was feeling, it must have sounded to him like I was ripping it further open. But that was one of the ironies about dimari. They were too smart to be placated with shallow reassurances and more layers of lies. Once they knew the truth, the only way out was to acknowledgethe real situation – but at the same time, we needed to twist it in a way that reaffirmed their place in the world. I’d stumbled into a similar situation when I’d been forced to tell Kade the truth, roughly two years ago. I’d solved the problem by pinning him to the bed, sticking my dick in him and demanding to know whether he thought he knew better than his master. That certainly wasn’t a strategy I was going to recommend to James, but nonetheless, there were a couple of sound principles behind the idea.
“My master does not want me,” Sora replied, his voice a mere whisper.
“Now, I know for a fact that that’s not true,” I said. “You see, slavery in the Alliance is illegal, but despite that, there’s still a steady trickle of dimari arriving here, due to various accidents with Eumadian cargo ships. We have about a hundred dimari living very happily on Rendol 4, all of whom arrived here largely by accident.
“So we know that new arrivals are going to keep coming, and we know that we need to find you suitable homes. The reason slavery is illegal here is that we’re very concerned about slaves being mistreated. The dimari are all trained to serve your masters to the very best of your abilities, but there are some people – some potential masters – who would still take pleasure in beating you, in over-working you, in denying you food or shelter for no better reason than pure spite. There are someveryevil people in the galaxy, and our laws are designed to prevent them from being able to harm any dimari.
“But at the same time, there are some very kind and very diligent people here, who would benefit greatly from the skills the dimari learn. You’re a pilot, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Sora said. I was determined to keep nudging him to participate in the conversation, even if it was only one or twoword answers, to make sure he couldn’t just tune out and ignore me.
“And I happen to know that dimari pilots are some of the best in the galaxy. You just took one of our ships on a test run, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you ever flown an Alliance ship before?”
“No, sir.”
“And do you think you did it well?”
I didn’t expect Sora to answer. Dimari were generally very bad at assessing their own skill levels. They depended on their masters to tell them whether they’d done well or not.
“How did Sora do?” I asked James, when Sora didn’t reply. Just in case James hadn’t picked up on the subtext of where I was going with this, I gave him a very obvious expression of ‘enthusiasm, please!’ Given that Sora was still staring at the table, he wouldn’t notice the obvious lead.
