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CHAPTER 1
Chalondra
The Vionians liked girls from my planet. Specifically, they liked to requisition us from our villages, prepare us for sexual service, and transport us to the concubine auctions on Vion Prime. There they liked to sell us at a fabulous price to the ruling class of the empire. That’s what the merchants liked about us, anyway.
What the ruling class liked about us was that Kamnian girls—girls like me—could, once purchased and conveyed home to their palaces, be subjected without legal consequence to whatever form of erotic depravity and brutal discipline they chose. At the time of the Magisterian Civil War, as my master taught me to call the conflict that I later learned the Magisterian Federation called the Vionian Revolt, several hundred Kamnian concubines served the Vionian nobility.
That changed, of course, in highly dramatic fashion, when the empire fell as a result of supporting the Federation rebels.
I had no idea, though, when the village chief’s men took me from my family home and brought me to the village house, that my fate would take me anywhere but Vion Prime. The imperials who ensured that Kamnos remained almost entirely primitive compensated—as they maintained, at any rate—for that oppression by providing all Kamnian children with a basic education until age nineteen. I had turned nineteen the previous day.
Even at my school-emancipation party, where I’d received the Certificate of Learning that meant I could, if I chose, seek employment offworld, I’d heard other girls whispering that I’d be requisitioned. They’d used that word, the Vionian merchants: requisitioned.
The Tri-System Mercantile Company, under imperial writ given governing authority over Kamnos’ star system, maintained my planet as a highly efficient farm for the production of owned concubines, after all. The Vionians liked Kamnian girls so much that Tri-System could afford to spend their resources generously on keeping my world in exactly the fashion they had found most conducive to raising nineteen-year-old girls whom they could simply take—requisition—from their villages for a nominal sum, with the purpose of auctioning them at a fabulous profit.
The moment the chief’s men informed me of my requisitioning, I became—the textbooks supplied by Tri-System laid it out very clearly—property. Not just property: I was aluxury good, which meant according to imperial law, that I had a highly protected status. To attempt to steal me from the company represented a capital offense. The Vionian ruling class took their pleasures, and their plans to continue enjoying them until the heat death of the universe, very, very seriously.
“Wait,” I said, to Elder Harta. “Can’t…”
The kindly middle-aged man, father of my friend Lopanda, shook his head, a look of compassion on his lightly-lined face. I could see that color had come into his cheeks, staining them a slightly pinkish hue. Elder Jusalon shifted uncomfortably on his feet, his eyes refusing to meet mine.
I could feel a much deeper blush suffusing my own cheeks: I knew my face must be almost scarlet, a color that showed up very vividly on my face, thanks to the sky-blue tint of my hair. I remembered my teacher in Vionian Culture class telling us, almost casually, that the Vionians prized complexions like mine because they showed our blushes better.
Second daughter, with looks admired by everyone in my village, I had known that the girls at my school-emancipation party had only spoken the truth: I had come into the world withrequisitionalmost stamped upon my forehead. Tri-System didn’t take eldest children; they could afford to wait, because they had outlawed contraception on Kamnos, just as they had introduced the modification to our DNA that over ten generations had turned our hair a sort of blue they said a dye could never rival.
It made Kamnian concubines exotic. It also made it nearly impossible for us to escape.
I hung my head, looking at the red, iron-rich Kamnian dirt beneath my bare feet. I cursed inwardly, wondering what had possessed me to come outside to weed the front garden. A desperate thought rose in my mind of turning and trying to run into the house, begging my mother to call my father in from the fields to protect me from the elders.
Insanity.The Tri-System Mercantile Company didn’t like to show its capacity for violence and destruction very often, but novillage elder, let alone a village chief, would want to give them the chance—not for the sake of a young woman who should have expected to be requisitioned anyway. My parents loved me, but they had known it too: in fact, they had favored me over my older sister Mathaea in many ways, and she had borne it—with the unspoken truth hanging over me from the moment I first learned of what it meant to be born a Kamnian, that when I came of age the company would take me from my homeworld and sell me on Vion Prime. If I made a scene, it would simply tear my parents’ hearts out. It wouldn’t save me: it would only get my village and my family in trouble.
But…I thought.But…
Despite everything—despite the history of my world and the excellent company-sponsored education, despite my parents’ quiet acknowledgment of my fate, despite the whispers of the other girls—I had possessed a shred of consolation for the past four moons, as the rumors of current events in the heart of the empire had reached Kamnos.
I chewed on my lower lip, considering, wondering whether it would do the slightest bit of good to tell Elder Harta and Elder Jusalon why I had hoped I might avoid requisition.
Elder Jusalon apparently knew what I was thinking, though. He said, in a weary voice, “The war hasn’t changed anything, Chalondra, I’m afraid. In fact, it’s made the company more demanding. The navy needs Kamnian girls for the officers in the front-line systems. This requisition involves thirty-six young women from Kamnos, one from each village.”
My eyes went round, and I looked up into his face to see that the elder’s expression had turned grim.
He shook his head, clearly reading my mind again. “As you can imagine, I don’t have any way of knowing where they’ll take you. I would guess the company agent doesn’t know himself.”
I swallowed hard. The Imperial Navy? To my dismay, a perverse thrill of excitement surged in my chest. Our early school lessons had involved a healthy dose of adventure-tales, many of them centered on the dashing exploits of admirals, captains, commodores, and even common enlisted star-sailors, who of course earned promotion at least to lieutenant by the end of the story. On Kamnos, the thick clouds of the atmosphere meant that we never saw the stars at all: for as long as I could remember, I had longed not just to see them but to go out into them, travel there like the heroes and heroines of the stories.
“May I…?” I started to ask, as I felt the color come and go in my cheeks.
“Yes, of course,” said Elder Harta. “Go in and say goodbye to your sisters and your mother. Don’t be long, please.”
I felt my forehead crease hard. Tears welled up in my eyes and I blinked, looking down again at the soil, at my bare feet. The idea that I should feel outrage over the injustice of it occurred to me, as a sort of exercise in metaphysics, rather than anything I truly felt on the inside. Here, I suddenly realized, lay part of the genius of the Tri-System way of doing business.
All Kamnian adolescents had to take a course called “Galactic Ethics” in their final year of school. In that course, our teacher Mrs. Grelinqua—a Kamnian woman who had passed the legendarily difficult engineering qualifying exam and traveled within the empire—had repeatedly raised the question of whether the company treated Kamnos fairly. We had spent weeks debating the issue on a theoretical level, surrounded byall the benefits the company bestowed on our world. Our teacher had ended the course with what amounted to a shrug, though: why did it matter, she had asked us, if it was fair, when it was simply the way the company chose to operate?
I turned and walked into the house, remembering as I did so that my father had held me especially close that morning before he went out to work. I felt my cheeks warm once again as I realized what it must have meant: the elders had told him what would befall me today. He had been saying goodbye.
Part of me wanted to fling that in the face of my mother, but when I saw that face, and realized that she, too, knew exactly why I had come back in from the garden, all I could do was let myself be swallowed up in her arms one final time, while my sisters joined in for a tearful group hug.
“Don’t let them take your spirit,” my mother whispered into my ear. “Whatever they do.”
