CHAPTER FOUR

Aiden

A n hour later, I stared at the fire, chewing on one of the protein bars from Kade’s container and watching as the western sky turned from orange to black. The food was actually pretty good, less chalky than the local variety usually was, and it made a change from the jerky we’d been chewing for much of this trip. As the light faded and the gentle sounds of night set in, I was also resolutely ignoring Kent’s glare, though he’d been doing his best to mentally strangle me for the last twenty minutes.

Over to my right, Vosh and Nichols were securing a tarp to the roof beams of the room we were going to be using as a bedroom, to give us protection from the weather, since the forecast was predicting light rain late in the night. “Hey, Kade,” I said, finally deciding to bite the bullet and let Kent get his rant in, before we all hit the sack. “Could you go help the others fix the tarp? I think Vosh is going to murder Nichols if he doesn’t remember how to tie a bowline in the next thirty seconds.”

Kade gave a small smile, amused at the two younger soldiers’ antics. “Yes, Master,” he said, and I was once again amazed that there was nothing at all resentful in the way he said the words. In fact, I’d been rather startled by his mannerisms overall.

After the Culrads had left and we’d finished with the crates, I’d introduced everyone to each other properly, and Kade had somehow decided that he fitted into this motley group somewhere in the middle of the ranking. He obeyed me without question, of course, but as we’d scouted the nearby area and set up the camp, he’d asked for Kent’s opinion several times, and followed his general directions – so long as they didn’t conflict with anything I’d asked him to do – while he’d offered gentle guidance to the two younger soldiers, after having learned that Vosh was a private and Nichols was still just a recruit. His confidence in himself and his own abilities was surprising. And while he was quick to obey my orders, and even offered suggestions as to how he could be helpful at times, there was nothing simpering or fawning about him.

Kade stood up from his place by the fire and jogged over to the others, easily hoisting himself up onto the beams. The instant he was out of earshot, Kent gave voice to the opinions he’d been holding back all afternoon. “Do I need to remind you that slavery is illegal in Alliance space?”

I rolled my eyes, swallowing my mouthful. “Well, it’s not like I fucking bought him, is it?”

“Oh, so you somehow just missed the giant sign on the crate saying ‘There’s a dimari slave in here’?”

I cringed at that one. Because yes, I had actually just waltzed right on past that very large, very obvious sign. “I was paying more attention to not getting shot by the Culrads,” I told him. Which, to be fair, was also true. “And the phrase ‘dimari slave’ is redundant. A dimari is, by definition, a slave.” Was I being a brat? Yes. Did I have any intention of stopping? No, not really. “And besides which, there wasn’t any other option. If I’d left him there, he’d have slowly starved to death, and I fail to see how that’s any more humane than taking him with me and trying to give him a decent life.”

“A decent life?” he scoffed. “By pandering to your every need and not having even the slightest hint of autonomy?”

“I’m not justifying the slave trade,” I snapped at him, tiring of his belligerence. “I didn’t buy him, I didn’t ask for him, and I sorely wish that the Eumadians would stop the whole barbaric practice. But the fact is, he’s here and he’d been activated to imprint on his master. As far as the Alliance is aware, there’s no way back from that. So what do you want me to do? Lock him back in his crate and tell him that the master whom he’s willing to devote the rest of his life to doesn’t actually want him? I may as well just shoot him in the head if I’m going to do that.”

Kent avoided my gaze. “You shouldn’t have given him your gun,” he said, sounding almost sulky about it now.

“He’s been trained for combat,” I stated, though I’d already told Kent that earlier. “He’s not going to shoot me, and he’s not going to harm anyone on my team unless it comes as a direct order from me. And if you recall, he’s the one who broke that standoff we were having.”

Kent didn’t reply.

“Look, I don’t like the fact that Kade’s bonded with me any more than you do,” I said, trying to find some kind of middle ground. “And I particularly don’t like the statistics about how long dimari survive on Rendol 4. I know we have this awful tendency to end up fucking them up. But I’ve got two options. I can try and look after him sensibly, or I can kill him. That’s it. ”

“Why don’t dimari survive long?” a new voice asked, and I looked up to see Nichols standing on the other side of the fire, apparently having been sent away by the other two. A quick glance in their direction confirmed that Kade and Vosh were both still working on the tarp, Kade dangling upside down from one of the high beams, while Vosh tossed a rope to him.

“And what’s a dimari?” Nichols went on. “I thought you said he was a Vangravian.”

I sighed. At only eighteen years old, there was a lot about the galaxy that Nichols had yet to learn. “His species is Vangravian,” I explained, keeping my voice low enough that Kade wouldn’t be able to hear me. “Dimari is more like his job title. It’s a Eumadian word that means slave, but a very particular type of slave. The Eumadians capture them as children and then brainwash them. But it’s not just training and positive or negative reinforcement. They have neuro-engineering technology that changes the structure and chemical functioning of the Vangravians’ brains. That’s how they get them to imprint on their masters. Once a dimari has been activated, they imprint on the first person they see, and then they’re irreversibly compelled to obey them for the rest of their lives.”

Nichols plopped down onto the ground beside the fire, then looked at the half-eaten protein bar in my hand. “Where did you get that?” he asked, sitting up straighter and leaning forward.

“Kade had a small supply of food with him when I found him. We brought what we could fit into our packs.”

I half expected him to ask if he could have one, but he switched back to his previous topic. “How do you know all about the dimari? I’ve never even heard of them before today.”

“Do you actually watch any of the news channels?” I asked, suspecting that I already knew the answer. Men his age wanted to know about the latest private space shuttle designs or the best hoverbikes, not which species were committing galactic code violations.

Nichols shrugged. “Sometimes. But not very often. But you said there are dimari living on Rendol 4, right? Then I should have at least heard of them.”

“There are only about a hundred on the entire planet,” Kent informed him, finally deciding to rejoin the conversation. Hopefully, that meant he was over his little tantrum and was willing to accept that Kade was here to stay. “In a population of a hundred million, that doesn’t make it very likely that you’re going to run into one.”

“And a lot of their owners keep them behind closed doors,” I added. “Either because they’re ashamed to have them, or because they don’t know what to do with them, so they leave them at home.”

“And why don’t they survive very long? ”

“You could just look this up on the grid,” Kent told the young man. “There’s a wealth of information if you bother looking for it.”

“I could just go and ask Kade,” Nichols said, moving to stand up.

“Sit down,” I snapped, a little more harshly than I’d intended. “You will not, under any circumstances, be interrogating Kade about his status or his history. Or telling him anything about the situation with dimari on Rendol 4.” I glared at him, but I also knew that if he was going to listen to the advice, he would need to know the reasoning behind it. “Without exception, dimari bonded to Alliance owners commit suicide within a couple of years of arriving here. We don’t know why. Every couple of months, there’s a news report about another one that’s killed himself, and a heart-wrenching interview with the owner, stating that the dimari just kept getting more and more depressed, no matter what they tried to do to care for them.” My gaze flickered across to Kade and my gut lurched. He seemed so at ease today, confident, focused, even amused at times. Was I going to be forced to watch him deteriorate, until he eventually found life to be too horrendous to tolerate anymore?

“Do all dimari do that?” Nichols asked. “I mean, even the ones that aren’t with the Alliance?”

The question stopped me in my tracks. It was something I hadn’t ever really thought about. “I don’t know,” I said dumbly.

Nichols frowned, tilting his head as he thought about it. “It wouldn’t make much sense if they did,” he declared, after a few moments. “Why would the Eumadians put in all that effort to train them if they’re just going to self destruct within a couple of years? And why would anyone buy one? It would be like buying a hoverbike, knowing you could only use it for two years before it exploded.”

It was a somewhat insensitive analogy, but the point Nichols was making made a lot of sense. I pulled up my comm, adding in a reminder to look up the question once we arrived back at base. A weird little glimmer of hope flitted through my mind. If he was right, if other species who bought dimari managed to keep them for longer – for decades, maybe? – then perhaps the answer to how to look after them lay within the other species’ treatment of them.

“Why can’t we undo the imprinting?” Nichols charged right on, and flaming hell, the kid needed to learn to read a news report. I added another reminder to my comm, to speak to Colonel Henderson about implementing some sort of general knowledge education for Nichols, and perhaps for the other recruits at the same time. Alliance education was very thorough on the topics of Alliance politics and technological advancement, but anything that happened outside Alliance space was generally considered not important enough to fit into an already over-stuffed curriculum .

“Mind control technology is illegal in Alliance space,” Kent said. “Which is good, because it means that none of our colonies are going to start enslaving each other. But the downside is that it means none of us have a clue how the Eumadians actually achieve the results they do, therefore we have no idea how to reverse them.”

Footsteps got my attention, and I glanced up to see Kade and Vosh on their way back, having finished securing the tarp. “Don’t talk to Kade about this,” I reminded Nichols sharply. The kid was unpredictable at the best of times, so I was relieved when he merely nodded.