The Ship Avenged

Chapter Five

"Clan Lord," Karak called.

Belazir paused on the threshold of his quarters and turned his head to look coldly at his approaching son.

"May I speak?" Karak asked him.

Belazir considered the request, wondering what aggravation his eldest son had in store for him. Then he surrendered to curiosity, gave a short nod.

"The scumvermin female languishes in her cell, Great Lord, ignored and lonely."

Belazir sighed and turned towards his son, contempt visible on his face.

"When I was your age, child, I too was excited by the terror of the prey. But I am older now and have known the pleasures of conquest often. I refuse to feel obliged to take every screaming, worm-colored girl I come across simply because it is expected of me."

Karak's face was expressionless, but the stiffness of his posture told Belazir that he was humiliated by his father's response.

Had his son asked for the girl outright Belazir might well have given her to him. But this behind-the-back way of asking annoyed him. He had never been easy to manipulate and this exceedingly clumsy effort was an insult.

"Leave her to my pleasure, Karak. See to her health and well-being, but do not touch her."

Let the young hot-head chew his spleen over that, Belazir thought in amusement. With a nod to his son he turned and entered his quarters.

Soamosa paced her small cell, seven paces one way, five the other. She counted her steps. She had walked nine thousand one hundred and fifty four steps since waking. The cell was featureless save for its minimal furnishings, a neutral-gray box of ship metal. Doubtless intended to weaken prisoners by sensory deprivation.

The thought came to her that she should be praying. That she should find solace on her knees instead of on her feet. But she had tried that and it didn't work. Soamosa found herself praying for things that reminded her of the terrible fate that she and the Benisur Amos and the Captain shared.

At first, the prayers had been for deliverance, and for the safety of the Benisur, and then she had prayed that she not be raped, or locked in and left to starve. With every prayer Soamosa had brought herself closer to mindless panic. And so she paced and counted her steps, to keep her mind cleared and calm. And that worked.

Her back was to the hatch when it opened and she froze. Soamosa had made it her habit since being imprisoned in this cell not to look at the Kolnari who brought her food.

She had found them disturbingly beautiful, uniformly tall and blond, with shapely figures and stern features. Her mother had warned her not to be fooled by their appearance.

"You can tell that they are not human by the way that they despise all that is. If ever you should be so unfortunate as to meet them do not let their beauty blind you. They are devils in the world of flesh, inhumanly cruel and selfish. You dare not look upon them lest you should be lost."

Their leers and gloating remarks had made her all too aware of her torn dress and unbound hair and she had been unable to keep the tears of shame out of her eyes. Her only means of preserving her modesty and her dignity was to keep her back to them when they came.

Besides, she did not want to see their faces as they attacked her; which she knew they might do at any time. She had resolved to keep her eyes closed if it came to that. And she would sing a hymn, the one about smashing the enemies of God like pottery. That would show them what Bethelites were made of.

"Turn around, scumvermin," a stern voice commanded.

Soamosa stiffened, and after a moment complied.

"Look at me, scumvermin."

She bit her lips to keep them from trembling.

"No," she said coolly and clasped her hands before her.

Karak was astounded. It had never occurred to him that this tiny female would defy him. He was honestly puzzled and completely put off his stride by her refusal. What would his father do? And how did he make her obey without touching her? Coercion he knew all too well, of persuasion he was ignorant.

She turned her head away from him and looked up at the ceiling before lowering her eyes again.

"What do you want?" she asked haughtily.

Karak frowned. He'd lost the initiative and must wrest it back from her. This is not like the simulations. One did not allow prisoners to ask questions. He felt a spurt of anger. It wasn't as if she was a person.

He stepped close and began to circle her, allowing her to become aware of his bulk and to feel him looming over her.

Soamosa fought her trembling, fought to keep her eyes lowered and her feet firmly in place while her heart hammered and mind demanded run, flee, hide! She could feel the floor vibrate under his heavy tread and the heat from his near-naked body was extraordinary. He felt like a dark sun orbiting her.

The girl wasn't intimidated in the least that Karak could see. She kept her place, her face a mask of cool disdain.

His own face warmed in shame. All of his life he'd been laughed at and called soft because he lacked ambition in the arts of war. "The Poet" his agemates had named him and made his life a hell of mockery. Only his elder brother had befriended him:

"You will be a perfect second to me, brother. We will be a team," so you said. But you died, and I must stand in your place.

A place that everyone, from his father on down, knew he could never fill.

He came to a halt before her, looking down on her and quivering with rage. Lucky for you I have been forbidden to touch you. Because I would rip you limb from limb.

He said softly, in a deep uneven voice, "Your dress is very torn."

Soamosa clutched at the worst of the rents in her gown without thinking and she felt the color rise in her face. She was very ashamed.

"Yes," she forced herself to say, "it is."

"Perhaps I should find you something better to wear," he taunted.

"Thank you, that would be very kind," she replied automatically, while her mind screamed in panic, Be silent! Don't provoke him!

Karak blinked. She was either very brave or very stupid. Within him curiosity began to bloom and feelings of amusement and admiration mixed. It pleased him to be generous, he decided.

"I shall see to it then," he said and left her without a backwards glance.

Soamosa looked up when she heard the hatch close behind him. She stood staring at it for a long minute with her hands pressed hard against her rib cage, as though to hold in her frantically beating heart.

Then she turned and stumbled to her cot, falling back on it to gaze at the ceiling.

I did it! she thought. I faced down the enemy without flinching!

And then she burst into tears.

Belazir laughed until tears ran down his cheeks and he began to choke. At last the spasm passed and the laughter slowed to sighing chuckles until he could once again get his breath. Then he sat smiling before the surveillance screen.

"Perverse," he said to himself, chuckling again. "Utterly perverse. Yet oh so amusing." He knew he should be mortally offended, furious almost beyond his own iron control.

But he had never been close to this particular child of his loins, nor to the wife who had bred him. And the girl had shown incredible spunk, given the circumstances.

He wondered if he was going to kill Karak the next time he saw him.

Belazir knew that, for his honor's sake, he should. But, he thought with a sigh, since The Great Plague ravaged the people we have bred but slowly. Our numbers are as nothing and worse, the children are puny. And Karak has four healthy brats. He concluded that satisfying his honor with Karak's blood was a luxury the people couldn't afford. Yet.

Would that Karak's brother had lived instead. Belazir's lips curled in a wry expression. He had better use for a decent second-in-command than he did for comic relief. On the other hand, the boy's brother would have been a threat.

But he also wanted to see how this foolishness with the scumvermin female played out. He smiled again. His sense of curiosity had always been one of his besetting sins. He decided to indulge it in this case as he could not see any way in which it could become too costly to do so.

He'd intended to amuse himself by experimenting on the girl with the other new drugs he had bought and taunting Simeon-Amos with holos of her reactions. Well, obviously he couldn't use her so and also have her available for amusing episodes with his son.

No matter, he'd have a technician cobble together some sort of holo, extrapolating from the predicted responses that had been described to him.

That would be better, in fact! He wouldn't be distracted and could truly enjoy the Benisur scumvermin's reactions. No doubt opportunities for live experimentation would arise in the course of events; and it would add a certain frisson to known that Amos's despair and anguish were for nothing at all…

"Yes," he murmured. "Let him think the scumvermin girl destroyed-and then I shall show her to him, whole and well. And destroy her again!"

Belazir sighed contentedly. Surely anticipation is one of life's true pleasures.

I hate my father, Karak son of Belazir thought, as he paced through the corridors of the Kali-the Dreadful Bride, his sire's old warship.

A pack of Kolnari children went by, in the wake of something bulge-eyed and long-clawed that squealed and snarled as it ran. They dashed after it with high shrieks of excitement, long razor-sharp knives in their hands. The sight distracted him for an instant; how long had it been since he was an innocent child, with nothing more to concern him than lessons and running down a drgudak with his friends? All of five years, now; since he turned eight and came to manhood. The infancy of Kolnar was brief.

I hate my father. What child of the Divine Seed didn't? But it's worse than that. I hate them all. He shivered. He was weak, too weak, hiding in his quarters and watching the tapes of the scumvermin female. He told himself it was honest lust, but it was not. She is weak. Yet she does not despair. The strangers were like that. His father had thought them weak, when the High Clan took Bethel, when it took SSS-900-C… and found that its meal was eating its way back out.

Decision crystallized as he fingered the injector in a pouch. He slapped palm against a communicator.

"Duty officer," he said. "I shall be unavailable for the next hour."

"No," Soamosa pleaded, "please don't." Her blue eyes were full of tears and terror.

She was held by two Kolnari, her slender form dwarfed by their muscular height. One of them held out her arm with the inside of her elbow uppermost. Despite her increasingly frantic struggles the arm didn't move. So that when the nozzle of the injector was placed on her arm it was right against a vein.

"Don't, please don't," she was weeping helplessly now. "No! No, NO!"

She tore herself free and huddled in the comer of the room; there were streaks of blood on her arms.

Belazir leaned down and grasped her chin in his huge hand.

"In only a moment, Benisur, it will begin," he said and turned to smile at Amos.

"No!" Soamosa insisted, holding her hands up defensively.

Karak smiled at the gesture, it was completely absurd. Seated beside him she looked like a creature made of gossamer and air, frail as a candle flame. And yet, he knew that she was the one in control. At all of their meetings it was she who had set the tone. Deep within himself, Karak sighed.

"You have nothing to fear from me," he said aloud. "I will not harm you."

Soamosa looked suspiciously at the earnest young Kolnari. Even in the midst of her fear his beauty struck her; and the lost look in the yellow eagle eyes.

"I do not trust you," she said severely.

Karak brushed back his long silver-blond hair distractedly.

"I am concerned for you," he said. "It is terribly dangerous for me to even offer you this protection. If my father knew," his lips tightened, "death would come to me as a friend."

Soamosa narrowed her eyes.

"I do not believe you," she said. "It is some Kolnari trick. My mother told me all about the Kolnari sense of humor."

"Lady," he said and the expression in his eyes firmed. "It is my intention to save you, not to harm you. I will set you free." Karak blinked rapidly and swallowed hard. "And your companions if that is possible. I swear it."

By the sound of his voice, the oath might have been flayed from him. She raised her arm, the inside of her elbow uppermost and he placed the nozzle of the injector unerringly over the vein.

"Now that I've submitted to your injection, you must tell me what it does," Soamosa demanded, radiating poise and dignity and the mysterious power she held over him.

"It will keep you safe from a most dreadful disease," Karak told her. "My father means to use it against your people."

Suddenly, like a splash of cold water, Karak realized that with those words he was forever cast adrift from the Kolnar. He had betrayed them. Even if he failed to save Soamosa and her companions, if it ended here with his leaving her and never returning, he was a traitor. And he was glad. He felt freer than he ever had in his life, liberated from impossible expectations and deeds that he was not proud of. He was free. And the unnameable feeling he bore for this tiny young woman was the cause of it.

Karak leaned forward and Soamosa gasped in alarm. He closed his eyes and very tenderly kissed her forehead in gratitude.

Amos stiffened as the image of Soamosa screamed. Screamed until her mouth sprayed blood, as though she had burst a vein in her throat. And still she screamed, writhing in agony, until at last she lay still, gasping, her eyes rolling back in her head.

Tears ran down Amos's face unchecked. His arms held the weeping Captain Sung who clutched him in terror. The Captain had soiled himself in his fear, not understanding the screaming, nor Amos's soothing words.

"You are evil," Amos murmured, "and you shall be destroyed by your own evil. He shall break you with a rod of iron."

Belazir appeared before him.

"We shall let her rest for a bit," Belazir said in a conversational tone. "Then, if you like, I have some other drugs whose effects might interest you."

Sung whimpered and screwed his head tighter against Amos's ribcage, trying to hide from Belazir.

Amos glared at the Kolnari Lord. "She is only an innocent young girl, Master and God. Why do you torture her so? Is there no pity in you at all?"

Belazir crossed his arms on his chest.

"How can you ask that, scumvermin? Have I not given the Captain there to the only person on this ship who would care for him? It would be more convenient to space him than to feed him."

Amos tightened his grip on the Captain's quivering shoulders.

"Captain Sung has been injured in my service, Master and God," he said humbly. "It is my duty to care for him as best I can."

Belazir's lip curled. "How touching. And he stinks so." Then the Kolnari smiled, he glanced at Soamosa where she lay at his feet. "Why, you have touched me," he said as though in surprise. "I believe that we shall give her a more relaxing injection this time." He looked back at Amos. "It will intensify feelings of pleasure and give her an overwhelming desire to please." He grinned evilly. "So you should enjoy watching this."

Belazir burst out laughing as the image of Amos and the brain-scrubbed spacer faded, to be replaced by his son in the cell of the Bethelite woman. He'd seen sleazy adventure holos created for scumvermin fools that were more believable than what he was watching.

Belazir pounded the arm of his control couch and shouted laughter. Ah, the rock-jawed righteousness of that Amos, he thought. And Karak, mooning over a piece of walking meat barely fit to serve a moment's pleasure and breed slaves.

It was pleasant that Amos was totally convinced by the holos his technicians had prepared from a pirated Central Worlds program. There were flaws, but Amos appeared to have missed them. Due, no doubt, to the harrowing content of the recording. And it was exactly the sort of thing Belazir would do. Always easier to believe what one expected.

He really would have to think of something suitable as a punishment for Karak. And yet, he wanted to see just how far this… romance, for want of a better word, would go.

He sat shaking his head in amazement as he watched Soamosa looking in wide-eyed wonder at Karak's stoic face. Then, tentatively, she placed her small hand on his and smiled.

Belazir began to laugh again as he started the next holo for the Benisur Amos's edification. His youngest wife called from the chamber within:

"How I yearn for you, lord of my life!" There was a waspish note to her voice.

"Anticipation heightens pleasure," he called back, "And silence averts beatings."

Yes. This compendium of erotic fantasies. Tame to Kolnari eyes, but it would torment Amos unceasingly, playing on the insides of his eyelids when he squeezed them closed to shut it out. Run a modification program here-