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“Please hurry.” He shouted at one of the clerks who was chatting up a guest. The conference is about to start and the king himself has asked for me,” and he finally got the clerk’s surly attention.
The clerk slid the key chip toward him. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” he asked, his nose stuck up in the air.
Blake snatched up the chip and sprinted to the elevator and he was only a few minutes late. With any luck, he’d just barely make it. When the elevator doors opened and he finally arrived, he was thoroughly searched by the guards, and his ID was suspiciously inspected again. Finally, he was directed to the huge ballroom, a luxurious area with raised ceilings and big windows along one wall, overlooking the busy traffic passing outside.
Only a limited number of hovercrafts were allowed downtown, so close to the hotel where the king was staying. Blake had heard all about it earlier on the news broadcast. The hovers all had to stay at a low altitude, and use only a fraction of their speed, which ensured that little street noise reached the ballroom.
At first, he thought the security guards stationed at the doors might not let him in, since the proceedings had already started by this time. The guards were Tygerian, though, who could at times be persuaded by an apologetic air and an exaggerated expression of contrition—they had no idea at all of irony—along with a flirtatious smile. That is, if you were handsome enough, and Blake had lucked out in that department. His golden blond hair, streaked now with a few platinum strands, but his blue eyes were as bright as ever and they seemed exotic to the Tygerians, even though his good looks were beginning to fade a bit since his fortieth birthday only a few years earlier. In Blake’s opinion, anyway. Still, he’d been lucky that morning and as soon as the guard inspected his press credentials, he had allowed Blake to go in. Blake slipped past him and went toward the front of the hall.
The press conference with the Tygerian general in charge of Atrillia had already started by the time he’d managed to spot a bench with an empty seat close to the front and maneuver his way toward it. He needed to find out why he was here, and it was imperative he get close enough to find a seat where he’d be noticed. He’d also like to be recognized for a few questions.
It wasn’t until he sat down that Blake realized just how clear a view he had of the front. And how plainly they could see him too. He also realized just who it was that was sitting at that head table. The one man he’d hoped never to see again in his life—King Davos of Tygeria, supreme leader of the Axis Forces.
Up until that very moment, he been holding out hope that the king himself might not be there, though the invitation had been from the king’s office. He still thought it might be one of his sons or his battle commander, but never King Davos in the flesh. This was an amazing development in itself as he was never seen much on Earth and rarely came to visit. Blake was shocked that they’d been able to keep his visit today so totally under wraps.
Worst of all, Blake saw King Davos not only noticing his late entrance but continuing to stare at him after he sat down, his amber eyes flashing a little, with a slight tightening of his lips. He didn’t look pleased to see Blake. Not exactly, though he seemed to have definite feelings about it. But surely, that was just Blake’s too-vivid imagination. There was no way he would have remembered him after all the years that had passed since they’d seen each other.
Blake had never seen the king up close and personal since that time so long ago on Tygeria, and this was his first time covering a news conference that Davos had attended. Had he really offended the Tygerians so much the king himself felt the need to come? He’d been careful, but they were highly sensitive to any negative remarks—or even just ones they perceived as being negative.
Rumor had it that Davos didn’t like Earth, or humans, for that matter. That was one reason, people said, why the martial law he’d imposed on Earth at the end of the war had been so harsh. His son, Prince Mikos hated humans for sure, and made no bones about it.
Blake had heard that the royal family had lost family members during the long war between the Alliance and the Axis, which the king blamed mostly on Earth, a key player in Alliance leadership.
Join the club. Blake had lost people he cared about too. Who hadn’t, considering millions had died? Blake had little loyalty to the former leadership of Earth who had arrogantly started the war all those years ago with their aggression against a planet that was technologically inferior, but four times the size of Earth. The war that had gone on for over a hundred years came with enormous losses all around. Blake himself had been captured by the Tygerians many years ago, when he’d served on an Alliance ship, taken over when they ventured too close to Tygerian airspace. It had been sheer good luck that Blake had survived and been sent back home. Luck and the intervention of one notable person—the man sitting in front of him today. He wondered if the king had any recollection of it at all.
Blake had managed to survive the remaining years of the war too, and he had been mustered out at the end of the fighting and sent back home. It had been difficult at first. All humans on their defeated planet had been required to register with Tygerian authorities and wear a red armband. They had to carry an ID card called a citizen’s license to mark who they were whenever they were out in public at any time.
The Tygerian rule was harsh. Nightly curfews were strictly enforced, and the only jobs humans were allowed to work at first were limited to non-managerial positions. Any and all protests were strictly forbidden, and if they occurred anyway, the punishment was swift imprisonment. The laws had loosened up marginally in recent years, but they still needed a complete overhaul, which was unlikely to happen while the king and his son Mikos were in charge.
Today’s news conference was supposed to be about lifting a few of the harsher restrictions still in place. Finally, after ten long years of them. Blake had his questions prepared ahead of time and was anxious to get a chance to ask a few of them.
But he’d had no idea he was going to see King Davos again, or he’d have found a way to get out of it. He had hoped never to see Davos again.
He noticed the king glancing over at him again, and he decided to try the same smile he’d used on the guard at the door, just to see if it might work, but Davos gave him only a cold stare in return, before returning his attention to the proceedings.
Surely, it wasn’t because he’d recognized him—was it? Surely not, after twenty years. There was no way he’d remember a lowly lieutenant that he’d once saved long ago in the Exhibition Games on Tygeria. Not after all this time.
It wasn’t a pleasant memory—not for Blake. Though Davos had saved his life, it had been a terrorizing experience that he’d never forgotten, even after so many years. The so-called Games, which were really just another way to execute prisoners, had been “played” in an arena, filled with jeering spectators. Captured prisoners from the Alliance were brought in to “fight” the Axis soldiers there, and the fights were almost always to the death.
At that time, Davos hadn’t even been the king yet. Blake later learned that he was the Dyson, a Tygerian office that was similar to the supreme battle commander of the entire Tygerian forces. On that night, he was the one in charge of the Games, aka, the executions.
Davos had been very young, back then. Only around twenty, as Blake recalled, while Blake was just a few years older at twenty-three. Davos’s uncle was the supreme leader, yet it was Davos who had already distinguished himself in several battles in order to win his coveted title.
That night in the arena wasn’t much of a contest. The Alliance prisoners were mostly in bad shape, injured and mistreated by the guards, half-starved and stripped naked as a means of humiliation and demoralization. Some were older men, because at this time in the war, so many soldiers had been killed that the army was taking anyone they could get, many of who were either too young or too old. The Tygerian soldiers, on the other hand, were all young and in their prime. The size difference between the humans and the Tygerians was considerable too. Most of them, on average, were about six feet five inches tall, using Blake’s measurements, with heavy muscles, refined and perfected by constant training. The Dyson was even a couple of inches taller than that.
Not every captive was killed in the Games, though most were. Occasionally, a younger, better-looking one, like Blake, was sometimes taken as what they jeeringly called a sex slave, though neither fate was desirable in Blake’s mind. The Tygerians used the term “slave,” because they knew human history and how much modern humans abhorred the idea.
That night, Blake had been up against a huge young warrior, who attacked him with a frenzied cry and fierce brutality. He fought back as well as he could against the huge warrior but was still losing—badly. Davos stood watching all of the fighting with an intense gaze just inside the gate. Blake had paid little attention to him at first, worried only about dying in that arena. He was terrified but trying hard not to show it.
Blake had defended himself fairly well at first, but he made the mistake of defiantly cursing the other warrior after one blow and telling him to “kiss his ass.” Hell, the warrior was going to kill him anyway, so why not? It seemed to enrage the warrior unduly, and the Tygerian struck Blake across the face so hard that it felt like the blow had broken his jaw. Blake was stunned and only half-conscious, on his back in the dirt, when a deep voice rang out nearby.
Blake’s attacker turned to look, and Blake raised up on one elbow to see the handsome, stern Dyson striding across the ring toward them. He was huge and rippling with muscles, wearing only a brief garment called a teruga that mostly covered his groin. His long, wavy red hair was unbound and swept across his shoulders. His amber eyes gleamed with some strong emotion as he stared down at Blake with disapproval.
He turned then to the soldier Blake had been fighting, and they had a brief, but loud and angry exchange. The Dyson kept gesturing toward Blake. Finally, the other soldier bowed to him, and Davos gave Blake one more glance before turning on his heel and walking away.
That was when the soldier changed tactics, stopped trying to kill Blake and instead grabbed him around the waist and began to sexually abuse him by sucking him off. It was a common enough tactic with the Tygerians in the arena. The homophobia of the Alliance leadership was well known and often extended to the soldiers, so Tygerians used these tactics to demoralize them. Blake wasn’t a homophobe, but he was humiliated by the treatment and tried to bat the man away. The Tygerian was far too strong.
It was then that Blake cried out in shock and pain and despair. “Won’t anyone help me?”
