CHAPTER EIGHT

Aiden

I spent ten minutes finishing off my report on the mission and sent it off to HQ. I’d already compiled most of the relevant information out in the jungle, spending the evenings typing while Nichols and Vosh bickered and Kade tended diligently to the fire. All I had to do now was reread it and add a few minor adjustments, to compensate for the arguments I knew Kent was going to create in his version of events.

That job done, I took the little drive with Kade’s operations manual on it out of my pocket and linked it to my comm. It flashed, then beeped, letting me know the information had been transferred, and I opened the file, bracing myself for goodness knows what. The initial screen was nothing out of the ordinary; details of Kade’s name and his age – twenty years old, I noted. He had a hell of a lot of confidence for someone who was only twenty. There was also a brief contract, which largely stated that the buyer took all responsibility for Kade’s care, upkeep and behaviour from the point of imprinting onwards, and then… Holy fucking shit! I tensed in my seat and gasped. Kade noticed the sound and turned to me, abandoning his scrutiny of the jungle outside the window. “Master? Is something wrong?”

“No. Nope. Everything’s fine,” I said. “It’s all good.” He looked doubtful, but turned his attention back to the window. I returned my gaze to the information on my comm’s holographic screen. It listed the price that Kade’s intended owner had paid for him, and my heart shuddered in my chest. I damn well hoped that his owner never came looking for him, demanding a refund. Fucking hell, what kind of training had he gone through to warrant that kind of price?

I read through the rest of the information, relieved to find that it was nothing unexpected, given what I’d already learned about Kade. There was a long list of military skills, weapons he was competent in using, domestic skills, like cooking and basic appliance repairs, plus a range of what I could only categorise as entertainment skills; various types of dancing or musical abilities. And finally, at the bottom of the page, was a list of sexual skills he’d been taught. I skipped over that bit, not wanting to know what twisted kind of sexual abuse he’d been subjected to, in the name of pleasing his future owner. I had no intention of ever having sex with him anyway, given that he would be incapable of truly consenting.

With that bit complete, I turned to the more complex part of my self-assigned mission. Nichols’ comments back in the jungle had got me thinking. And the long hours of trekking had only strengthened my conviction. Like he’d said, it made no sense for all dimari to self-destruct within a couple of years. And there were plenty of journalists who covered non-Alliance news, traveling to distant and exotic locations in pursuit of a story. So there had to be plenty of information on the grid about the dimari, if one only knew where to look.

I started with a couple of basic searches. As I’d predicted, they started by bringing up articles about people from Rendol 4 who had accidentally had a dimari bond with them. Most of them covered the same basic ground; their dimari had started out healthy and happy, then, over a period of months or years, had become more and more depressed and unresponsive, before finally taking their own lives.

Working off a vaguely formed theory, I started looking for more detailed information; what a daily or weekly routine looked like for an Alliance-owned dimari. Where their owners lived. Whether they had their own bedrooms, or were required to share. My thought process was to find out what other people had already tried, in terms of providing appropriate care for a dimari, and crossing off anything that had consistently failed. There were dozens of articles on dimari who had committed suicide, and I created a quick checklist on my comm, adding ideas and ticking them off when they popped up in one of the articles.

As my research went on, I started feeling more disheartened. Given that slavery was illegal in Alliance space, I hadn’t expected the dimari owners here to have been unnecessarily cruel or negligent towards their charges. But a strong picture was developing of the exact opposite. Almost every single case described extensive efforts by the owners to treat their dimari with respect and compassion. They were given their own bedrooms, to ensure adequate privacy. In most cases, they were asked to assist with basic household chores, but the workload was shared with other members of the household. They were offered books to read and taken on excursions into the city. Multiple reports detailed the owners’ refusal to take advantage of the dimari sexually, almost universally stating that since they believed the dimari unable to consent, sexual activity of any kind was inappropriate. But even then, in every case, the dimari had slowly sunk into depression .

One woman had even resorted to an intense kind of honesty with her dimari, explaining to him calmly and gently that she hadn’t actually bought him, and that his arrival on Rendol 4 had been an accident of circumstance. She’d also explained to him that she intended for him to have as autonomous a life as possible, allowing him to make his own decisions about his food, his clothing, his occupation.

Her dimari had killed himself a week later, and I made a firm mental note to do everything in my power to prevent Kade from finding out that I hadn’t been his intended master. That style of brutal honesty had occurred to me as a potential strategy, but I clearly wasn’t the first person to have thought of it, and I firmly crossed it off the list.

At the end of the reports, I was reaching the same conclusion that most of the other owners and much of the media had already reached; no matter how well one tried to look after their dimari, the Vangravians inevitably descended into depression and eventually succumbed to despair.

But I was no closer to finding out why. Feeling my hopes sink, I started looking for articles from other systems, other species, people who had deliberately bought a dimari, to see if I could find out how long they lived and what kind of lifestyle they were subject to.

It took a bit longer, but eventually, I had a list of articles that originated from non-Alliance planets. I read through one article, in which an intrepid journalist had travelled to Polvros and ventured into a dimari owner’s house, pretending to interview him about his newly opened winery, but actually determined to expose the abuse and subjugation going on inside.

A particular section of her comments caught my attention, and I read with wrapt interest.

The dimari appeared to be clean and well fed , she had written. He stood upright, he looked both me and his master in the eye, and he was not afraid of engaging in polite small talk. He appeared calm, even cheerful as he offered me a slice of cake and a cup of tea. I accepted, and then he returned to his master’s side, kneeling on the floor beside his chair and leaning into his hand as his master stroked his hair. The open display of subjugation was disturbing, but even more unsettling was the dimari’s apparent adoration for his master. I asked the man how long he’d owned his dimari. He said it was coming up to twenty years.

I stopped reading, staring at the page in astonishment. Twenty years? A Polvron had owned his dimari for two whole decades? I read the article again, this time sifting through the heavy handed opinions of the journalist to tease out the bare facts. The dimari had appeared calm and cheerful. He had given the appearance of enjoying his master’s attention. He had served his master’s guest without resistance or complaint.

I started making a new list, of the exact tasks that this dimari had performed. Offering a guest tea and cake. Sitting by his master’s feet. Cleaning the cups and dishes after the morning tea was finished .

I read the next article and started adding to the list. Washing clothes. Mopping floors. Another article. Tending to an extensively landscaped garden. Bathing children. Providing sexual services to… Holy fucking hell! I swallowed a wave of nausea, forcing myself to reread the last paragraph again. That particular dimari had been trained as a… an erotic companion? Fucking hell, what did that entail? And he was used to provide sexual services to visitors to a large estate on Basub, a system some two hundred light years from Rendol. According to the journalist, the dimari had been owned by that master for fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years as a fucking sex slave, when we couldn’t get them to last three years by treating them like real people?

There was something here that I was missing. For all that the articles were coloured with bias, the dimari were generally described as calm, cheerful, and willing in their obedience to their masters. A cynical part of my mind wanted to believe that it was just an act, that they were putting on a positive front because it was expected of them. But the contrast between their demeanours and those of the dimari on Rendol 4 was too striking for me to dismiss it as an anomaly or a performance.

The strange and disturbing picture that was emerging here was that treating them like slaves made them happy, while treating them like people made them miserable.

It couldn’t be that simple. For one thing, if I tried to convince anyone on Rendol 4 to start treating their dimari like slaves, I’d be locked up in jail for breach of anti-slavery laws. But aside from that, the reasoning just didn’t make sense. Okay, so perhaps giving the dimari a huge range of freedoms was going down the wrong path. After all, they’d spent their lives being controlled and guided. Too much responsibility was probably overwhelming. But surely abusing them and treating them like shit wasn’t going to make them love their masters, either?

“All passengers, please fasten your seatbelts and secure your personal belongings. We will be descending into Hon in the next five minutes.”

Damn it, I was out of time. But this wasn’t over. I bookmarked a dozen of the articles, determined to come back later and see what other information I could tease out of them, then I shut my comm off and tried to get my mind back on track for my meeting with Colonel Henderson.

But with my head full of ideas and questions, that was no easy feat either. I glanced at Kade, his attention still fixed on the sights out the window, as we passed over a large section of the city. He would know the answers to a lot of my questions, I was sure. He’d spent the better part of twenty years being trained for his new role, and he’d have some well defined expectations about the way his master should treat him.

But asking him for information about his own training was going to be fraught with problems. The woman who’d tried going the honest route had proved that. I was fairly sure that Kade already suspected me of being not quite the master I was supposed to be, and if I started asking all sorts of questions that I should already know the answers to, I feared tipping him off the edge of his own sanity all the sooner.

But there was one thing I’d picked up on in the articles that I might be able to work with. “Kade?” I said, before I could start second guessing myself too much. He turned to me with an expectant look.

“Yes, Master?”

God, it broke my heart to see him so eager and attentive, knowing that if I wasn’t very, very careful, I would soon destroy it all. “I’ve been doing some reading. And you might be aware that humans are not the typical species that buy dimari.”

“Yes, Master,” he replied. There was no particular inflection in his voice, so I wasn’t sure whether the news was a surprise to him or not.

“So there are a number of cultural differences between humans and the planets that you might have expected to end up on. Polvros, for example, or Basub.” He didn’t respond, apparently waiting for me to get to the point I was trying to make. “Now, my understanding of your training is that you were taught to call me Master as a title of respect, is that correct?”

“Yes, Master,” he replied. But there was a hint of uncertainty in his voice now. I prayed that my next request was going to go smoothly, rather than sending him into a spin, the way I had when I’d asked him to call me Aiden. “I’m a member of the Alliance military,” I ploughed on. “And my subordinates generally call me sir. And I call my superiors sir, as well. Or ma’am, if they happen to be female,” I added. I’d never heard of a female dimari, but there were certainly articles in which they’d had female owners. “So I was wondering if you would be comfortable calling me sir, instead of master? It’s more appropriate for Alliance culture, but it’s still an indicator of respect,” I explained, hoping I wasn’t making a grave mistake. If I could get him to call me sir, it would arouse no suspicion whatsoever on any of the military bases, and it would be overlooked a lot more easily even on civilian turf. And as an added bonus, it would stop making me feel like an absolute scumbag every time he addressed me.

Kade regarded me with a curious tilt of his head. Then a sly grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, sir,” he said, warmth infusing his voice as his eyes sparkled with what seemed like mischief.

“Excellent,” I said. I swallowed and blinked. He was looking at me like I was a dessert he wanted to devour. “That would be fantastic.” If that was the case, then why was I suddenly feeling so very off-balance?