The First One's Free (15 page)

The last thing Laral wanted was Evart using
the drones in the northernmost city for target practice.

“I want you in the plains,” said Laral. “Try
to keep these dregs from tearing up the place once there are no
more Tianese to shoot at. I will be returning to Hanar to resolve
an important matter for the Sovereign.”

Evart’s expression brightened at the word
“Sovereign.” “Does this mean…”

“It means that Cyal had better be pacified
when I return. Otherwise, I will pacify you.” He turned and marched
off the command deck.

19

The heat rose from the tarmac as Laral
stepped off the shuttle. The air hit him in the face like a wet
blanket. Essenar might have been a rainy, mud-clogged acidic hell,
but no one had warned him of Hanar’s oppressive summers, at least
where the Tianese had settled.

No honor guard met him. No music played. His
own civilian governor made no appearance. Instead, two law
enforcers and a short little man in the gray robes of the Legal
Caste awaited him.

“General Jorl Laral,” said the little man.
“You are required to surrender your sword to these enforcers until
further notice.” He glanced at one of the law enforcers. “Take him.
Place him under house arrest until Council and the heir
arrives.”

“Has anyone pointed out that Lattus Brac
already took his share of his family’s inheritance?” asked Laral.
“That he forfeited his share of Kai’s estate?”

“I think you know less about your situation
than you think, General.” He reached in and withdrew Laral’s sword
from its sheath. “Blooded. I take it the most recent blood is that
of Lattus Kai? Or did you find someone else who got in your way
while at Cyal?”

The enforcers bound him and led him away.

It took him a few moments to realize the
enforcers were human.

*****

They kept him in a slum. Four rooms, a water
closet, and no servants. He would have to cook his own food, such
as it was.

“These people live like animals,” he said as
his guard escorted him inside. “Disgusting apes.”

The guard said nothing. Why would he? He
clearly didn’t speak the Mother Tongue. “So they feed you well, ape
man?” he said in his unpracticed Tianese. “Where’s your leash?”

The guard thrust his fist into Laral’s face.
Then he spat at him. “Butcher.”

It took a second to realize that the alien
was not speaking the Mother Tongue, but that degenerate language
Laral had extrapolated from several prisoners. It sounded different
coming from an angry person. “How…?”

The alien kicked Laral between the legs. He
acted surprised that Laral remained standing. “Oh. Right. That’s
not where you keep your balls.” He punched Laral in the throat.

For the next ten minutes, Laral felt like he
was suffocating.

*****

Brac finally appeared around sundown. He
looked around the shabby settler’s dwelling that now served as
Laral’s prison. “Still taking all the prime property for yourself,
I see.”

“You realize this challenge will result in
your death,” said Laral. “You’ve never been able to handle a sword
without hurting yourself.”

Brac moved into the dwelling’s tiny kitchen,
not even a room unto itself and helped himself to some Tianese
fruit. “Have you tried one of these? The Tianese call them
‘oranges.’ They’re delicious, if a bit acidic.”

Laral grabbed him by the arm. “What is it you
want, Brac? You’re lazy, indifferent. To you, High Born status is a
burden. Why are you doing this?”

Brac set the orange aside, its juice now
leaking out onto the counter, and removed Laral’s hand from his
arm. “First of all, don’t touch me. Those humans guarding the door
to your house? They know stamping out their colony was your idea.
They’ve even forgiven Kai now that they know his heir.”

“How did you achieve this? You’ve never shown
the slightest inclination toward leadership.”

That made Brac laugh. “You underestimate me,
General. I guess you get to keep your rank. Anyway, you forget. I
can talk a High Born daughter out of her dress and into letting me
kneel with her all night long.” He flicked his tongue at Laral, an
obscene gesture in Gelt culture. “This tongue has tasted the
daughters of everyone from the poor dirt farmer praying his creeper
weed will cover his field to one of the Sovereign’s nieces.” He
stopped as if suddenly lost in thought. “Oh, I forgot to mention,
the Sovereign will be presiding over your retrial. Guess you wish
you showed my brother more respect now, don’t you?”

“You will not win this challenge, Brac,” said
Laral. “You’ll be dead, and I’ll have your estate, your brother’s,
and your parents’.”

The smile Brac gave him in return chilled
Laral in a way nothing else could, except the words that followed.
“I never said I was the heir, Jorl. In fact, that’s what I came by
to tell you.” He grabbed the half-eaten fruit and headed out. “Hey,
thanks for the orange. I’m hoping we can make a treaty with the
humans. I want more of these.” He looked at it. “If not, I hear
Metis is pretty nice. They apparently grow these there in vertical
farms.” He patted Laral on the shoulder. “Be nice to the humans.
Maybe they won’t punch you in the throat again.”

What were
hew-maans
?

*****

“Here’s your knife, butcher.”

The
hew-maan
taunting Laral sported a
weapon of some sort, bluish-black metal with a mechanical trigger
and a long tube. Stripped of his armor, Laral decided not to push
back against it, puny as it was.

The
hew-maan
shoved a short sword,
nearly a child’s weapon, at him. It was a child’s weapon. Laral
recognized his own personal crest on the sheath. “What is
this?”

“Hell if I know, butcher,” said the
hew-maan
. “I only know your own people are mad at you, and
some nice lady is giving us our farms back.”

Lady?
What lady?
Did Brac find
a female Warrior to defend his challenge? But then Brac had said he
wasn’t the heir in question. Then who…?

Laral dare not let the thought tickling his
brain form.

*****

Kai’s challenge had taken place in the square
of Hanar’s makeshift main settlement. Not this time. For this
challenge, two
hew-maans
and two Gelt Warriors escorted
Laral to one of the saucer-like colony transports that hovered over
the plains just outside of what was once the main settlement. What
usually served as the transport’s processing center had been
cleared into an arena. Thousands of Gelt and a smaller number of
hew-maans
filled the temporary seats ringing the room. The
Gelt stamped their feet and chanted. They did not sound as
triumphant as they had a few weeks earlier.

A long makeshift dais had been setup at the
far end of the room. Upon it sat Council, nine members on each side
with the Sovereign sitting dead center. Laral tried to mask his
contempt for the Sovereign. He remembered him when he had a name,
when Laral’s own sister cared for the young Heir Apparent, when
that little boy cried and sniveled because the bigger kids beat on
him. How could such a soft man lead such a hard people?

“Laral,” He said. “You have drawn Council
here for a second Confab. This time, you have drawn the Presence
Itself.”

“The Presence Itself,” a royal affectation
dating back millennia, always annoyed Laral. The Sovereign seemed
to relish it.

Under a holo projector’s cone of light, an
image of the Tianese man known as Marq appeared.

“Tell me,” said the Sovereign, “who is this
man?”

“He is Marq Katergarus,” said Laral
neutrally. “He is from Juno.”

“Juno is not a world,” said the Sovereign
Consort. She did not sit with her husband, or rather Her Husband,
because she herself represented the Scholar Caste on Council. “Juno
is merely an entity, of what kind no one here is entirely
sure.”

“Tell me, General,” said Fulsaad, leader of
the Medical Caste, “do you know what happens to an indentured
servant when his or her Master takes that servant into space where
the authority does not recognize our system of servitude?”

“Why should I care?” asked Laral.

“We remind thee that thou art the defendant,”
said the Sovereign in the Archaic Tongue. “Thou wilt answer
questions as put to thee.”

The woman translating what was said for the
hew-maans
sounded strange babbling in their language. It
almost distracted Laral from the moment at hand.

“I have never had to concern myself with that
issue,” said Laral. “I do not permit my indentureds to leave Realm
space.”

“And yet,” said Brac, emerging from an
entrance near the dais and strolling toward Laral, “you said before
this very Council that you considered my brother’s concubine your
property.”

“Wherever she is,” said Laral, “she belongs
to me. And she is my property.”

“Even if Kai placed her in custody of the
human Katergarus?” asked Fulsaad. “And sent her to Metis as
Katergarus’s possession?”

Brac wore that smirk of his, the one that
told the worlds that he was rich and drunken and idle and no one
could do a damned thing about it. “The humans do not recognize
indenture. Slavery, they call it. They’re quite self-righteous
about it, actually. I understand even those who find a way around
the ban get a bit pious about it.”

As the translation finished for the humans,
the crowd on that side of the room broke into laughter.

“Prove this,” said Laral. “Show me the
deed.”

Another cone of light appeared from the
holographic array above, almost lighting up Laral as well. In front
of his face hung the image of a document outlining Tishla’s
agreement to submit to become Kai’s property in exchange for her
education, the chain of ownership that led to the
hew-maan
Marq, and an electronically-added addendum nullifying the deed as
Marq Katergarus took her to a planet called Metis.

“Are we sure this deed was nullified before
my challenge?”

“I am more than sure.” This voice was female.
And familiar.

Tishla, dressed almost like a female Warrior
but stopping just shy of usurping the garb of the Warrior Caste,
emerged from the entrance opposite where Brac had entered. She
carried a sword.

Lattus Kai’s sword.

“I am Lattus Tishla. I agreed to become
Lattus Kai’s concubine and bear him a child in exchange for my
honors in genetics.” She turned to the dais, crossed her left arm
across her chest, and bowed to the Sovereign. “Our Master, if it
pleases Thee, the conditions for my Freedom and my obligation to
Master Kai have both been met. By giving me to…” She pointed at the
hologram of Marq Katergarus. “… That and sending me with him to the
entity known as the Compact, I have been Freed. However, before
this happened, Kai knelt with me every day.” She smiled. “Several
times a day he tasted me when my fertility peaked. As a result, he
sent me away pregnant. I carry his twins.”

For the first time since he was a squire
undergoing his first trials to become a Warrior, Laral Jorl felt
real fear. “How do we know the
hew-maan
Katergarus did not
get her pregnant?”

The translator had barely finished repeating
Laral’s words when the
hew-maans
groaned. One even shouted,
“Seriously? They don’t teach biology on your planet?” That, in
turn, caused a ripple of laughter from the Gelt side of the
room.

Unfortunately, it also brought a couple of
laughs from the dais.

The Sovereign rapped on the table before him.
“Silence.” He repeated this in the
hew-maan
language.
“General Laral, as you can see, there have been some changes on
Hanar in your brief time at Cyal. The surviving humans here have
been integrated into this world. You are not only in the custody of
the House of Lattus but of these aliens themselves. Who told you
this world was not a legal colony under our laws or the
humans’?”

Laral pointed to Katergarus’s hologram. “That
one. He assured us that…”

“Both you and Lattus Kai have been
exceedingly stupid. Kai I can understand. He was given a
water-logged acidic bath for his first possession, and the Lattus
family does not have the expertise nor the inclination to create a
mining colony. However,
you
, General, knew better. You took
the word of an alien whose species we were barely aware of only
three turns ago, and instigated a military operation. Hence, if
Lady Tishla, the true heir to the House of Lattus, is willing, We
will place this planet under her protection. You will cede ten
thousand troops of her choosing to serve as this protectorate’s
defense…”

“Protectorate? Those people were conquered.
We should have exterminated the-…” He stopped when the translator
said the
hew-maan
word for “exterminated.” Were it not for
the Warriors ringing the room between the crowds and Laral, Tishla,
and Brac, the
hew-maans
might have charged him.

“Lady Tishla,” said the Sovereign. “The
choice is yours. You may continue your challenge against General
Laral, or you may agree to cede Hanar and Cyal to him.”

“I press my challenge, my Sovereign.”

“You expect me to carve up this child, this
pregnant
child, with a boy’s knife?” asked Laral. “I’d win
my challenge only to become a pariah.”

“Maybe you should quit lusting after your
friends’ concubines,” said Brac.

“Silence,” said the Sovereign. “General, your
challenge against Lattus Kai has been lawfully contested by his
heir.”

“
She is property!
”

“Not under the laws of indenture. Now, accept
Lady Tishla’s challenge, or forfeit all your holdings.”