Updated 24 March.
Due to continued circumstances beyond my personal control, this story will probably not be updated for a while.
I will do my best, and will notify of any updates at the TUGs site:
http://www.tieupgames.net/index.php
AUTHOR'S NOTES - UPDATES, REVISIONS AND REVIEWS

QUEEN OF HEAVEN

The Rise and Fall of the Tyranna Alysha Ishtar

If you do not open the gate to let me enter,
I will break it down, I will shatter the bolts,
I will smash the doorposts, I will force the doors.
I will raise up the dead to devour the living.
– The Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld (Ancient Assyrian hymn)

See how terrible is the place ruled by a woman, they said. The only way to be safe is to allow male gods, and men, to have the real power. Only we can protect you from the darkness. Erishkegal probably represented the place inside women that men cannot control, the line that, when crossed, turns a fearful woman into a raging Fury. The dreary land of the dead was the perfect place to banish a goddess one wished to be rid of, or at least discredit, but who refused to go away entirely.
– BellaDonna, White Moon Gallery Presents: Erishkegal, Lady of Shadows
http://www.orderwhitemoon.org/goddess/erishkegal/index.html

1. Adastra

They had taken two hits portside, and the ship had begun to list. In free fall, up and down have no meaning; but they were in such a tight orbit that misaligned thrusters could send them spiralling inwards, to blistering, blazing destruction. Yet as she watched the grey, corrugated hull of the corsair loom larger in the viewscreen, the young ensign wondered if that might be the kinder fate.

“How long?” the Captain asked, her voice barely above a hoarse whisper.

Alysha studied the readout. “Our trajectories will intersect in four minutes and thirteen seconds.”

“Is the identification confirmed?”

“Yes, ma’am... It’s the Bellatrix.”

Captain Stannec did not respond. She paced back and forward in front of the screen, absently brushing back a few idle strands of hair plastered by perspiration to her furrowed brow. She stared vacantly around the bridge, everywhere but at the approaching spacecraft.

Suddenly, she was composed and resolved. “Power down,” she commanded. “Take all weapons offline. Prepare for docking.” She began tapping at the keyboard on her console.

“Captain...”

“Those are my instructions, Lieutenant. I have logged the orders, so there won’t be any...”

“I know, Captain. Initiating power down sequence.” The Lieutenant’s voice began to choke.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. You have the bridge.” The woman was already heading for the exit, closing and straightening her tunic.

“Captain,” Luzi Charnas called out after her. “The commander of the Bellatrix wishes to open a voice channel.”

Jemma Stannec paused in the doorway, turned and frowned. “No, we’ve nothing to say, and we know what they want. Carry on, but keep monitoring. Inform me immediately...” She did not need to complete the sentence. Instead she turned to Alysha. “Ensign, accompany me please.”

Alysha closed down her station and ran her fingers along the smooth, shiny surface of the panel. As she left the bridge, she glanced back. The planet Neptune’s vast, magnificent blue crescent dominated the viewscreen, but it was defaced by the sinister, ugly silhouette of the raider vessel. The Bellatrix was substantially bigger now, and so close that it was rapidly expanding to fill the entire display. Alysha took what was almost certainly her final look around the bridge, which had been the centre of her universe for the past few months; but she avoided the faces of her fellow officers. There was nothing there to see that she did not feel inside herself.

She followed the Captain to the wardroom. All of the passengers and the civilian crewmembers had assembled there. It was a small room, located in the core of the ship, so it was the safest, or at least the most consoling place to be. It was crowded, the air was heavy with tension, and the despair was palpable. Alysha felt a momentary surge of contempt as well as pity for the frightened, cowering wretches; but she knew that this was a projection of her own fear. The Captain, who could not afford the luxury of any such emotions, had begun addressing them in clear, concise, controlled language. She calmly explained what was likely to happen, and while there was no indication of impending panic, there were moans and stifled cries, especially from the women.

“No chance of putting up a fight?” It was one of the stewards. Like every member of the crew, he had been thoroughly briefed on situations like this and already knew the answer. Alysha guessed that he was asking on behalf of his charges.

The Captain slowly shook her head. “We can’t match their firepower, and we cannot outrun them. It’s the Bellatrix.”

There was a howl of dismay from one of the passengers. Alysha knew why. The infamous “Warrior Woman” was the swiftest and strongest vessel in the spacer fleet, capable of taking on all but the most powerful of the Federation’s battle-cruisers. Against her, their own ship, the Adastra, was little more than a well-appointed hulk. In the coming encounter, they faced but two options, surrender or destruction.

It had been a calculated gamble, to attempt the dash to interstellar space without a military escort, but these were desperate times. The fifty-year voyage to Zeta Doradus, farthest outpost of the shattered galactic empire, represented, for those willing to rebuild, the last best hope for humanity. Yet the risks increased a hundredfold during the perilous dive into the giant planet’s gravity well, required to fuel up for the long, lonely traverse across the cold, dark void between the stars. It was their misfortune that the Bellatrix had been waiting in ambush. The Adastra was quickly overhauled, and two shots into her fuselage put a swift end to any thoughts of resistance. There was no escape.

“Stay here until summoned,” the Captain said. Her words had ominous import. No one had any doubt that they would, indeed, be summoned. She strode from the cabin and Alysha followed close behind. Along the corridor, several of the crew had armed themselves and were awaiting orders. Alysha studied their expressions with admiration – there was apprehension, naturally, but also an iron-willed determination to defend their ship till the end of days.

“Stand down! Return the weapons to the armoury,” the Captain snarled. “Those of you who are supposed to be on duty, go back to your posts. The rest of you, report to the wardroom. You may be needed to maintain order.” She scanned their uniforms to see who had seniority. “Arturos, do you have a station to go to?”

“No ma’am.”

“Then you’re in charge.’

“Yes, ma’am.” But the Captain, with Alysha trailing after her, was already at the end of the corridor.

“They’re brave, and they’re loyal,” she sighed, when Alysha had caught up, “but we have to be realistic. There’s no virtue in meaningless sacrifice.”

The passageway narrowed. Alysha felt a grinding shudder as the two vehicles made contact, and the blunt nose of the Bellatrix clanged against the Adastra’s docking port, and the shock absorbers groaned to cushion the huge inertia, and the coupling bolts banged into place. She arrived on the cavernous hangar deck just as a wailing siren announced that the outer airlock gates had slammed shut. The hiss of air flooding the chamber could be heard clearly through the bulkhead. As the inner doors began to slide open, she felt a tingle of anticipation, curiosity, excitement and dread.

She had never beheld a spacer in the flesh. She was hardly out of the Academy at the outbreak of the latest war with the spacer alliance; she was on the Majestic to share in the Federation’s unexpected, illusory, victory at Ganymede; she was cruising beyond Saturn when the enemy smashed through Earth’s defences to occupy the Lunar bases. Newly assigned to the Adastra, she witnessed at first hand the scattering of the great refugee convoy to the stars, and she watched in helpless rage as the Majestic and her valiant crew fought against overwhelming odds until reduced to a molten shell. She experienced the searing clash of lasers and missiles as the battered escorts, the Adastra among them, lunged repeatedly into the melee to rescue survivors. In her twenty-two years, just six since entering the Academy, Alysha had seen more than her fair share of triumph and tragedy. But this was new to her, to be so close to the foe, and to feel so utterly desolate.

Yet if she had been anticipating monsters, she would have been confounded. As the boarding party gathered on the deck, they appeared anything but. They were well-armed and well-equipped. They were clad in an assortment of costumes, some showy, others purely utilitarian; but none wore pressure suits – an indication of their self-assurance, and their arrogance. Few were much taller than Alysha herself. This was adaptation to centuries of breeding in the confines of their spaceships and asteroid bases, and to long periods of weightlessness before pseudo-gravity became standard. The men were squat and muscular, the women lean and lithe. Their faces were hard but unlined; most were probably not much more than Alysha’s age. Their clothing, though varied, was not dissimilar to the fleet uniforms in function and form, which made sense given the exigencies of living, working and warring in the uncompromising vacuum of space. Some were, improbably, wearing swords on their belts. Perhaps bladed weapons made sense in hand-to-hand combat in a pressurized environment where piercing of the hull meant certain and instant death. But Alysha guessed it was more an affectation. The spacers liked to emulate the flamboyant buccaneers of old, even if their victims held a less romanticized view of their predations.

The spacer commander stepped forward, and so did Captain Stannec. Both knew very well that there was no time to engage in formalities. At this moment, Fleet would have dispatched its warships. But just as armed opposition had been pointless, so there was nothing to be gained by any attempt at delay, with the formidable weaponry of the Bellatrix trained upon the helpless cruiser. Inside Adastra, the intruders were heavily outnumbered and likely outgunned, but that counted for nothing.

Stannec began to speak, but the man cut her off with a curt wave of his gauntlet.

“Assemble all personnel here, now.”

The Captain did not move, nor turn away from the spacer, but she tiled her head in Alysha’s direction, in a way that the ensign understood. She licked her parched lips, took a couple of breaths to compose herself, and made the terse announcement. “All passengers and crew are to report immediately to the main hangar; do not resist; these are the Captain’s direct orders; authentification seventeen-epsilon-blue.”

It did not take long for the sixty-eight souls on board the Adastra to be gathered together, facing no more than a dozen spacers. There were a few mutterings but no defiance. The crewmembers drew up in front of the passengers, and the males edged protectively in front of their womenfolk. The smaller children peered inquisitively from behind the legs of their elders.

The spacers were efficient and methodical, showing no signs of agitation despite the urgency to complete their business. Their leader had been studying the freight manifest and had selected what he desired. Two of his troopers were dispatched with one of Adastra’s crewmen to expedite the transfer. The rest of the hostages were split into two groups, men and boys to one side, women and girls to the other. The Captain started to protest, but her objection was met with a cold stare. Unflinching and inscrutable, she followed and stood beside Alysha.

One of the teenage girls had been hastily disguised as a boy by her parents, but her sweet face, her crudely chopped hair and the unmistakable swelling under her shirt betrayed her. She was dragged from her father’s arms. He, courageously and foolishly, lashed out at the spacer who had seized his daughter and was clubbed to the floor. A boy, not more than ten or eleven, tried to tackle the man who was dragging away his sister, and was swatted down. No one else intervened – not because of cowardice, but rather simple prudence. The terrified girl joined her mother, tears streaming down her face.

A ripple of alarm and rising horror passed among the huddled females as one of the spacers, a diminutive, flaxen-haired, waif-like female in a bright orange jumpsuit – a spacerine, as those of her sex were known – took on the job of sorting the captives. Her face showed no expression except grim determination as she separated a dozen or so of the older women and the youngest girls and sent them back to be reunited with their fathers, brothers and husbands. These would be of little value in the slave markets of the spacer colonies, so weren’t worth the cost of transport. Among them was the weeping girl’s mother, who tried to stay with her daughter but was forced to go. Alysha watched in agony and revulsion as their trembling hands parted and the distraught woman whispered her daughter’s name, Larissa, over and over.

Twenty women, including Alysha and Jemma Stannec and seven other crew, remained on their side of the hangar. The spacer commander nodded with satisfaction and ordered them to remove their clothing. At first none moved a muscle, too appalled to react. The man snarled and tapped the butt of his sidearm. So Captain Stannec, with an audible sigh, slowly removed her tunic and let it drop to the floor. She watched it fall and stared straight at her opposite number – a tiny, futile but absurdly gratifying gesture of insubordination. Alysha began to undress. As she did so, she felt inclined to bow her head or to turn away in shame, but she resolved not to. The disgrace was not hers.

Most of the men across the room averted their eyes, though a few could not help but watch, the boys in particular. Seeing their mothers and sisters, and the Adastra crewwomen – veterans of the Space Wars whom they’d held in such awe – nude and degraded, inevitably awoke a primal urge that was too strong to suppress. Alysha could not blame them for their curiosity. On the other hand, the spacers seemed to have no interest at all in the naked bodies. She guessed that the stripping was not for titillation; it was probably nothing more than an expedient, a security measure. But the teenage girls were exposed as well, yet they could not have posed a threat. So perhaps the intent was to taunt the powerless men, or to intimidate and demoralize the women. If so, it was effective.

A few of the women refused. Luzi Charnas was one of them. Captain Stannec ordered them to obey, but the spacerine had already taken the initiative. Brandishing the club that she’d carried on her belt, she stuck Luzi viciously across the temple. It was a well-aimed blow, missing the face so as not to disfigure valuable merchandise. Luzi collapsed, and two of the spacerine’s male comrades set upon her, wrenching the uniform from her convulsing body. When she was naked, they hauled her to her feet and spread her arms and legs, slowly rotating to display her to everyone present. The recalcitrants quickly began shedding their clothes.

The humiliation was not over. The women were instructed to form a line facing one wall, close enough that Alysha’s breasts were pressed against the cold metal surface. To her disgust, she felt her nipples hardening from the stimulation. Her arms were grabbed and pulled behind her back, and her wrists locked into handcuffs. It was a tight fit. Her elbows were drawn together so that they almost touched and her shoulders were pulled sharply to the rear. This had the effect of constricting her chest so it became difficult to breathe properly, and of pushing out her breasts, in their embarrassing condition of arousal. Alysha felt her face becoming flushed.

The entire procedure took no more than two or three minutes. The spacer commander was growing impatient, and was admonishing his men to speed it up. Once each captive had been bound, she was hustled into the docking chamber. Many were quietly weeping, but there were no hysterics and, bereft of hope, nobody offered resistance. Wives, mothers and daughters called out final good-byes to their loved ones. Crew members, including Alysha herself, did what they could to dictate quick messages for shipmates to deliver to their families. Captain Stannec continued to issue orders and guidance to her deputy even as she disappeared through the hatchway; and the spacer commander, amused and perhaps even flustered by her self-possession, did not intervene. In any case, it didn’t matter. Within a short time the Bellatrix and its female cargo would be far out of reach of the swiftest Federation interceptors.

Alysha knew there was no realistic hope of rescue, ever. In a hundred years, neither the Federation nor any of its ill-starred predecessors had broken the renegade alliance, nor taken a single one of its strongholds. Dominion over the Asteroid Belt had long since been ceded to the spacers. She, the Captain, Luzi and the others, like countless numbers before them, were destined to spend the remainder of their existence as slaves in one or another of the asteroid communities – if they were lucky, sold to a wealthy trader household, or else to be consigned to one of the factories or barracks for... Alysha chose not to think about it.

According to reports she had read, a few – a very few – slaves had achieved status in spacer society, though they could never be the equal of their captors and would never be free. Since the abolition of male servitude decades ago, the sons of slaves had grown up to share in the egalitarian spacer culture, and many had attained eminent rank; but daughters continued in the shackled footsteps of their mothers, so far unto the fifth generation. Was that to be Alysha’s ultimate fate, as breeding stock, producing sons for the spacers’ marauding fleets and daughters for their slave markets?

In her childhood, not so far in the past, she had dreamt of exploring new worlds, of finding adventure and romance out among the stars. Those dreams had seemed fulfilled when she enrolled in the Academy, won honours at the top of her class, been awarded a prize assignment aboard the Federation’s flagship, been selected above a thousand candidates for the interstellar run. She’d known that meant departing her home, the Solar System, forever, leaving family and friends, and it was a harsh price she’d been prepared to pay for the wonder and glory of the pioneering imperative. And it had all come to nothing. She would live and die a slave in the claustrophobic bowels of an asteroid or in the stinking, noisy encasement of a spacer merchantman.

Inside the Bellatrix now, she heard the clanking of the airlock doors, and she felt the gangway vibrate as the two ships pulled apart. It was likely that the propulsion engines of the Adastra had been disabled, but the ship and its diminished complement would be otherwise unmolested, left to drift in a safe orbit high above Neptune until help arrived. Though the spacers were callous and could be brutal, they were not wanton killers. The commerce of the heavens did not require that sort of toll.

Deep within the ship, the captives were taken to a compartment just big enough for two dozen bunks to be lowered, in tiers of three, from the wall recesses. The only other furnishings were a crude open toilet and a washbasin. The captives’ hands were freed from behind their backs but metal collars were placed around their necks, with cables attached which leashed them to their bunks. The tethers were long enough to allow them to move about the room but not to proceed beyond the doorway should it be open. No clothing was provided. Alysha wondered if they would be contained here for the entire journey – it was at least ten days to even the nearest spacer base via the circuitous route that would need be taken to evade Federation pursuers. And she wondered if they would, in the meantime, be visited by lonely or lustful crewmembers.

She felt a hand gently stroking her bare shoulder. She looked up into warm, sympathetic eyes. The Captain forced a reassuring smile through pale, tensed lips. Stripped of her uniform, her freedom and her future, the woman retained her dignity and her strength. Alysha smiled in return. The other women were comforting each other, and the teenage girls were being consoled as best they could. There was one woman with her daughter, and the mother was promising that whatever happened they would be together. At that moment the woman looked up and stared directly at Alysha. Her face revealed the awful truth.

The Captain moved over to tend Luzi’s wound. The junior ensign had been dumped unceremoniously on the floor and was still only half-conscious. Alysha lay on her bunk, eyes closed, feeling numb. She stroked her collar, rolled the cable between her fingertips, felt the warm, clammy currents of air from the overhead grill brush over her naked skin. There was a sudden jolt and an invisible hand squeezed her body into the thin mattress, as rapid acceleration momentarily overcame the artificial gravity. The Bellatrix was now moving swiftly away from the Adastra, on a course that would take Alysha and her fellow prisoners into the heart of the spacer imperium.

2. Bellatrix

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed since they had been taken aboard the Bellatrix. In the austere confines of their cramped quarters, the light never dimmed and the routine did not alter. Sleep was sporadic. Even when she started to drift off, Alysha was pulled back to consciousness by the soft sobbing of someone still awake, or the cries of a dreaming cellmate, or her own hideous nightmares. Every few hours – or what she took to be every few hours – the monotony was interrupted when food was brought. It was the greasy, gelatinous, green-grey mélange of protein, carbohydrates, minerals and vitamins in which the spacers took such a perverse culinary pride. To Alysha it looked and tasted like the off-scourings from the cadet mess back at the Academy. Of course, no one had any appetite; but the Captain insisted that everyone should eat, to keep up their strength if not their spirits.

Alysha’s respect for Jemma Stannec had grown even more since their abduction. The woman seemed tireless and indomitable. It was impossible to lift morale, but at least she could try to maintain some equilibrium, to keep them all from sinking into the pernicious apathy of despair. With the bunks lowered into position, there was very little room to move about, and their inactivity, on top of their depression, made them alternately irritably restless and broodingly lethargic. Yet there was little that could be done. The Captain thought to take their minds off the awful future by getting them to recall the happy past, to talk about their homes and families, about life and love; but that was a bad idea. It just reminded them of what they had lost and of those they would never see again.

As they settled into dull routine, for Alysha the most peculiar of her reactions was how she felt when using the toilet, open and exposed. At first, whenever any of them had the need, the others would discreetly turn away; but after a while anything becomes familiar, and modesty and embarrassment began to seem like petty indulgences. However, the biggest adjustment she had to make was to the nature of spacer ablutions, which employed a bidet for the cleansing part of the operation. To Alysha, raised in a Venusian colony, educated in the Lagrangian satellite base and reconciled to strict rationing and recycling on Federation ships, this represented a frivolous waste of precious water; until she remembered the history of the spacers. It was their first asteroid home, Ceres, with its ice-rich mantle, that had been the original source of the renegades’ mercantile power and the wellspring of their arrogance.

The nudity was a different matter. As a naive colonial and cadet, during her infrequent visits to the surface of sophisticated Earth, Alysha had been somewhat shocked by female fashion. It followed two trends, opaque and skin-tight, or billowing and transparent. It was this sort of decadence, she knew with all the certainty of the self-righteous, which had undermined the First Federation. On Lagrange Delta, three hundred thousand kilometres above the corruption, the military code dictated discipline and decorum; and in the restricted environs of a spacecraft, with men and women sharing quarters and amenities, privacy, modesty and discretion were not a choice but an imperative.

Her shame in having to strip in front of the males on the Adastra was at least mitigated by the threat – and in the case of poor Luzi, the application – of brute force. It was the same with using the toilet – the mind adapts. However, incarcerated with twenty naked women and girls, Alysha felt the full humiliation of her exposure. Clothing, she realized, is not just covering and decoration, it is a symbol; and even bare-skinned displays, if uncompelled, had their own dignified logic. The converse explained why, in many spacer colonies, slaves were never permitted to wear clothing, to distinguish them from free women and to serve as a constant reminder and token of their status as property. Alysha wondered what that was going to be like.

Whenever one of the guards came with a meal, the beds automatically folded upwards and the cable tethers retracted, so the women were forced to stand, shrinking against the walls, not knowing if the men were there to deliver or take away. The spacers looked, of course, and some leered, but while cold-hearted they were not gratuitously cruel. In fact, most showed a casual indifference to the nude bodies. The sharpest response was on the face of the petite blonde spacerine. About a third of the Bellatrix crew were females, so far as Alysha could determine, and this one had authority. Although in many ways radically egalitarian, spacer society was strictly patriarchal, so this tiny specimen must have been especially well-connected, or especially fearsome. Her eyes were the colour of steel and just as hard. Her upper lip curled subtly upwards in contempt of the helpless captives. And yet there was something else, the way she looked at the naked women, the way she allowed her gaze to wander slowly over their parts. It was the only time her eyes sparkled rather than glinted.

Nurtured in the conservative culture of Port Ishtar and schooled in the monastic ways of the Space Academy, Alysha had nonetheless heard and read of such deviations from the familiar patterns of orientation and desire. Indeed, it had been rumoured that a few of the students on Lagrange had – well, the word that was used, in appropriately hushed tones, was “experimented”. But for her, sexual intimacy was the slightly distasteful yet strangely satisfying mechanism for consummating man-woman unions and for reproducing the species. Granted, she had, just the one time of course, shared a bed. It was in her second year as a cadet and she had been feeling lonely and homesick; but they had both agreed that it should not happen again, that such relationships interfered with the serious business of study and training. Still, it had felt nice, and she wondered where Cadet Nyota was now, and if he ever thought about her...

Alysha pulled herself out of her reverie. This was no good, thinking about such things, for it only served to taunt her with hopes and dreams and ambitions that would never be fulfilled. She tried to focus her mind elsewhere, and when she was able, to blank it completely.

What continued to trouble her – and, she could tell, the other women too, though none spoke of it – was the motive of their captors. She had no doubt that their destination was one of the slave markets in the asteroid commonwealth. This was the spacers’ way, their raison d’être. Yet there was no profit in the traffic enough to justify the present cost. Although slave labour sustained the factories and workshops, automation would have been cheaper and more efficient. Womanpower was used instead only because it had become available in such plentiful supply. Slavery kept the factories running and the brothels well-stocked, and released spacer families from the impositions of domestic drudgery, but the price had been a century of unrelenting warfare with the Federation. No government could make peace while a hundred thousand of its citizens remained in bondage. So in reality, the spacers took women as trophies. Slavery was not so much an industry as a projection of spacer power and a demonstration of their disdain for the effete lifestyles of the planet-bound. Even so, the Bellatrix was the pride of the spacer fleet and the scourge of the United Worlds. To deploy their mightiest warship on a simple raiding or trading mission seemed an extravagant investment of the spacers’ finite resources.

Alysha was aware that there were other slaves on board. All spacer ships carried a few. It was probably why the Adastrans hadn’t been molested. These were usually captured Fleet personnel. It made sense to employ women who were familiar with the rigors of extended space travel, and who would not panic in the midst of battle. And their presence made it problematical – though not impossible – for Federation warships to fire on the spacers. (In a hundred years of intermittent conflict, no enemy ship had ever been taken intact.) And it was a measure of the spacers’ audacity that they felt no unease at having on board their ship, in servitude, highly trained military women – it really did not concern them at all.

The change to their routine, when it finally came, was not for the better, but at least it put an end to the protracted agony of uncertainty. Alysha had counted seventeen mealtimes. Assuming that the prisoners were fed twice a day gave a reasonable estimate of how long they had been coasting. She had detected no sudden accelerations, which meant they had been travelling on a ballistic trajectory since leaving the Adastra stranded in Neptunian orbit. So they could not be on a direct heading for any of the asteroid colonies. Therefore it came as no real surprise when the first alteration in velocity was followed shortly afterwards by the unmistakable tremors of another ship-to-ship docking.

When three guards entered the cell, two men and the spacerine, the women were ordered to face the wall, and their hands were pinioned behind their backs. The tethering cables were detached, but the collars remained on. They were marched in single file down a long, dimly lit corridor which, judging by its length, must have run parallel to the spine of the Bellatrix. Like those of the Federation, spacer vehicles were shaped as an elongated, tapering tube. This was not for aesthetic reasons, nor for aerodynamic streamlining – since only shuttle craft left the vacuum of space to venture into planetary atmospheres – but to present the smallest possible cross-section and thus a more difficult target in battle. Alysha could tell that they were moving towards the stern, because the deceleration was high enough to slightly skew the artificial gravity field.

They emerged into a large, circular, high-domed area, the cargo hold. The floor was covered in metal grating, for anchoring loads in the event of a pseudo-grav failure. Under Alysha’s bare feet it was jagged and painful. At one end of the chamber was a pile of containers being arranged and restacked by a dozen naked women. They worked under the supervision of a single spacer, who was loafing on one of the crates, staring languidly out of a porthole into the impenetrable dark. He was not much more than a boy, and his expression, which Alysha could see reflected in the glass, showed boredom and resentment. He had not signed up to spend the voyage overseeing a clutch of wretched females.

The women looked up with vacant faces when the newcomers arrived and immediately returned to their task. Though disheartened by their servile demeanour, Alysha was no longer disturbed by the nudity. However, she was shocked to see that the slaves’ pubic hair had been removed. On her home world, depilation was the mark of a prostitute. That these women, who had served honourably and bravely in defence of the United Worlds, should be reduced to such a squalid condition shocked the young ensign more than just about anything else she had seen since the ominous profile of the Bellatrix first appeared on Adastra’s viewscreen.

“Pay attention!” one of the guards barked. Alysha jerked, but the reprimand was not aimed at her alone. Most of the other women, in particular her shipmates, had also been distracted by what they saw. As they toiled, the slaves showed not a flicker of defiance; yet not only did they vastly outnumber their lone keeper, even the smallest of them was bigger than him, and years of servitude had visibly toughened their bodies. They could no doubt have overpowered him with little effort, and might even have done some vital damage to the ship. Yet they meekly took orders, and as they laboured they kept their eyes humbly downcast. They had been cowed into abject submission.

Alysha, Captain Stannec, and no doubt every one of the women from the Adastra had the same thought, that this was to be their fate as well. Each might tell herself, “No, that will not be me” – but for sure those degraded, docile creatures had once said the same of themselves.

The prisoners were ordered to form two ranks in the centre of the chamber. Alysha found herself at the right end of the front row. As she took her position, heavy boots clattered on the grate behind them. A man appeared, wearing the spacers’ gold sash of senior command. He was typical of his breed, short in stature and broad of shoulder. He sported, unusually, a luxuriant black brush on his chin. Spacer males, like their Federation counterparts, were almost universally clean-shaven. Beards were rare and a sign of uncommon bravado – sealing emergency breathing apparatus on a hairless face was hard enough.

He strode up and down both lines, taking his time to study each of the women and girls in detail. In front of, to the side of and behind Alysha, he examined her every curve and crevice. Though she dared not look anywhere but straight ahead, she knew she was being assessed. From lectures on the subject at the Academy – which Alysha and the other female cadets followed with an appalled fascination – the most valuable prisoners of war were not necessarily the most beautiful. In space, where opportunities for physical exercise are limited, a well-toned body means a disciplined mind, and a disciplined mind can be properly trained.

The man never deigned to touch the merchandise, but the spacerine was trailing behind him, and when he stepped back she pressed something into each woman’s crotch. Alysha flinched as it penetrated her, and yellow hair turned to black beard and shook her head. Alysha understood immediately – not a virgin. She wasn’t sure whether that was, for her, a good or a bad thing.

The inspection complete, the commander took a position to the fore. There were still just five spacers on the deck with more than thirty women, slave and slave-to-be. Again it occurred to Alysha that, with the assistance of the dozen slaves, even with their hands shackled behind their backs they could have put up a fight, and likely prevailed. But where to then? The cargo bay could be quarantined from the rest of the ship in less time than it took anyone to reach the door controls, and could be depressurized from without to disable or to kill those within. So they would be faced with exactly the same options they’d had on the Adastra, capitulation and retribution, or futile suicide. With civilians, including youngsters, in her charge, Captain Stannec had no choice. She had no right to decide for all that there was a fate worse than death.

The commander spoke in the spare, brusque style that veteran spacers cultivated: “Jemma Stannec, forward.” He did not address her by rank. The Captain stepped out of the second line and stood before him. With her hands shackled behind her, she could not offer the conventional salute but dipped her head. He did not return the courtesy, and Alysha was angered by such a vulgar breach of protocol. Stannec was not deserving of his disrespect; she had surrendered her ship to save not herself but her passengers.

That was not the only difference between the spacer commander and the Federation Captain. She was tall and slender, he was squat and burly; she had the noble bearing of a senior Fleet officer; he was neatly attired but he about him an unkempt, disreputable air befitting what he was, a pirate. She maintained her dignity; his behaviour was boorish and his demeanour uncouth. Except that she was bound and stark naked, it might have been the woman confronting a surly subordinate.

He said something to her that Alysha could not pick up, but the Captain shook her head vigorously and swung around to glance at the women and girls behind her. Even as this was happening, the spacerine had begun hauling out individuals and putting them in a separate queue – first one of the teenagers, Larissa, the girl who had been wrenched from her mother’s arms; next, one of Alysha’s Academy classmates, Günsel; then two of the passengers; finally, two more of the Adastra’s crew. With stricken expressions, they stared at the Captain and turned to gaze at the remaining women, as one of the guards trussed them in line with a strand of cable looped through their collars.

Alysha felt an absurd twinge of affront that the six most attractive of the prisoners had been selected and that she had been passed over. She could only imagine – though she tried not to – what fate awaited them as they were taken out of the cargo hold, in the direction of what was likely to be the docking port. (She never saw any of them again, never heard anything from them or about them.)

By now the twelve slaves had finished their assignment. They were ordered into a single file and led away. Without being told, each put her hands behind her back to grasp her forearms. Their heads were still bowed, but they marched with straight backs and firmly set shoulders. After who knows who many years in captivity – most appeared to be older than any of Adastra’s crew, although that could have been the ravaging effects of hard labour and ill-treatment – they still maintained some vestige of pride. However, their young custodian, who had been aroused from his torpor by the new prisoners, was visibly annoyed to be going. He seemed the type who would take out his frustration on his hapless charges.

Alysha’s attention returned to Jemma Stannec, who had been commanded to kneel. The spacerine stood behind her with one hand on the back of the woman’s head, and parted her hair. With the other hand, she placed something against the neck, what looked to be an injector or an old-fashioned syringe. The Captain’s shoulders tensed, but nothing happened for a few seconds. Then suddenly she moaned and pitched forward, collapsing onto the floor. She flipped onto her side. Her eyes rolled and white foam bubbled from the corners of her mouth. Her body began quivering, then twitching, then wildly convulsing. The paroxysm continued for several minutes, as the spacers looked on with a detached interest – except the spacerine, whose expression was one of unconcealed amusement – and the prisoners with horror and pity. Gradually, the convulsions subsided into trembling and spasms; and eventually the woman lay motionless, still making low guttural sounds, lathered in sweat, saliva and urine.

As terrible as the spectacle had been, it was about to get worse. As Alysha and the others were instructed to get on their knees, a chorus of dismay echoed around the grey walls of the chamber. She felt just a slight sting as a needle pierced her skin. Nothing happened for several minutes, until everyone had received the injection or implant – it was impossible to say which. This indicated that the seizure was remotely controlled – it could be activated at long range. Helpless and afraid, the women could only brace themselves for their ordeal. The only mercy was that the two teenagers were to be spared this torment – though not, Alysha surmised, out of compassion. She had heard that the spacers used devices such as these for the punishment and training of their slaves. Whether this was merely a demonstration of the penalty for disobedience or the first phase of a conditioning process, it was obviously not deemed necessary for application to the young girls. They were more pliable, easier to tame and train, than the adults.

It started with a sense of unease, which quickly amplified to nervous agitation. Alysha felt her chest tighten and her breath quickening. Dizziness and nausea swept over her in waves of steadily rising intensity. Her skin began to prickle and a tingling sensation that started in her fingertips and toes rapidly moved into her hands and feet, then up her arms and legs, and into her torso. The pain began as dull and localized in various parts but swiftly spread and grew excruciating. Her muscles began to flutter. She felt her vaginal and rectal passages dilate and contract, and she found herself, despite her best effort, losing control of her bladder. To maintain a last shred of dignity, she prayed that her bowel did not empty as well.

Even as her body jerked and twisted, Alysha’s mind remained perfectly clear. There was no loss or diminution of consciousness, and her subjective time must have slowed down, because it seemed like a very long time had passed before she’d been hit with the full impact of the punisher, and yet this had taken just a matter of seconds for Jemma Stannec. That, of course, was the very idea, to magnify and prolong the suffering.

When it was finally over, the women lay on the metal grating, panting and groaning, as the spacerine, with a malicious gleam in her eye, trained a hose on them and the floor around them, to clean up their mess. The hard jet of water playing over her naked body felt to Alysha, after her torture, like the most sensuous massage. Yet they were given no more time to recover. Ordered to their feet, the prisoners were marched back to their cell, wobbling and staggering . None of them spoke of what had occurred, but their eyes said everything it all. However, the two girls were magnificent, tending to the exhausted, prostrate women, soothing and comforting them during their slow recovery.

Alysha marvelled at how much Fariza and Elsbeth had matured in the past few days, especially the latter who did not have her mother to give her comfort. She remembered them on the Adastra – one overindulged and irresponsible, the other ingenuous and impulsive. How they had grown up! It was such a pity that their blossoming into womanhood came with abduction, captivity and enslavement.

3. Vesta

A change of pace and mood among the spacers was a signal that the Bellatrix was nearing her objective. Even the spacerine seemed to have improved her disposition as she drew nearer to home. At the same time, there was an air of rising tension, as the ship left behind the security of the vast emptiness of the Outer Solar System and entered the more constricted space of the Asteroid Belt.

Of course, the prisoners’ feelings were also mixed – relief that their incarceration in the cramped confines of their barren cell was nearing its end, mixed with the dread of their impending slavery and the sadness of inevitable separation from each other, women on whom Alysha had come to rely during her darkest moments of despair, and to whom in turn she gave her support. Yet there also remained that nagging doubt about the nature of the attack on the Adastra, that it must have been more than a routine slave raid.

An answer of sorts came on what Alysha estimated to be their twelfth day. Since six of their number had been taken off the ship, the monotony had been replaced by a gruesome ritual. At various intervals each day, scheduled randomly to maximize the uncertainty, one of the spacers, most often the spacerine, visited to activate the punishment implants. Alysha was by now sure that this was a conditioning exercise, but it was one of the things they avoided mentioning in their conversations. It was too awful to think about, let alone talk about.

On the other hand, having become resigned to their fate, they discussed openly what life was going to be like as a slave. Sometimes they even made jokes at their own and each other’s expense. The levity helped palliate the harsh reality.

A subject which they did not avoid concerned the two girls, Fariza and Elsbeth. They were virgins, as were two of the adults. Alysha was heartbroken for them, that for each her first experience of a man inside her would not be an act of love or passion. She was thankful for that single night five years before with Cadet Nyota. For all of them, however, there was a more daunting prospect, that some were destined for one of the slave bordellos which proliferated throughout the spacer colonies. Panyra, one of Adastra’s civilian crew, claimed that for her it was a likelihood, because she had the attributes. She did not elaborate, but she assured Fariza and Elsbeth that their value would be as household slaves, the most benign form of servitude. Listening to her, Alysha was amazed at Panyra’s stoicism, and it made her so angry – not with Panyra, but with the men who would condemn a woman such as this, the very embodiment of pride, dignity and compassion, to such ignominy. And at that moment, she vowed that, whatever befell her, she would never, ever be reconciled to her slavery.

The Fleet officers – Jemma Stannec, Luzi Charnas, Cailín Sherval and Alysha – could well end up like the slaves they had seen in the cargo bay. That, for Alysha, would be the worst prospect, a savage mockery of her childhood dreams, to sail the airless currents of space not as intrepid explorer or daring pioneer but as the chattel of men.

This was indeed the topic when the door slid open and they scrambled off their retracting bunks. It was not mealtime, so they braced for the latest dose of the punisher. Instead, the two spacers seized the Captain, unhitched her from her tether and secured her arms behind her back. As she was being taken out, she must have suspected what awaited her, because she looked back, her eyes darting from one cellmate to the next.

When she was returned many hours later, she lay quietly on her bed and no one disturbed her. There were no visible marks on her body, but there was no question that she had been brutally interrogated. Jemma Stannec was one of the highest ranking officers of the Federation on operational duty. Command of the Adastra had, ironically, been her reward for distinguished service. So she was the prize the Bellatrix had sought. The mission had been intelligence-gathering; Alysha and the others were nothing more than a fringe benefit.

The time that Stannec was gone was hell for Alysha. She had no doubt that the Captain would never give up information willingly, even under the most horrendous torture; but she was haunted by the image of the woman she admired more than any other human being, somewhere in the ship, screaming and begging for mercy. Yet there were more subtle ways of extracting secrets, especially since the use of the punisher had rendered all of the women, if not immune, then resistant to physical pain. So while she did not ask and the Captain did not say, Alysha was convinced that the silence was guilt-ridden. Had Stannec believed that she might have been put in a position to betray the Federation, she would not have allowed herself to be taken alive.

On the other hand, the spacers were not complete savages, and there was no more use of the punisher. The lesson had been taught and learnt, that the women had lost control not only of their lives but of their bodies. Nevertheless, there would be a final degradation.

Four guards including the spacerine came and lined everyone up against the walls. Each of the three males selected one of the women; the spacerine took two, Alysha and Cailín. When none of the virgins was chosen, Alysha knew what was going to happen. They were bound with rope rather than handcuffed, and taken to a part of the ship they had expected to see much earlier in the voyage. It was a slave who took the two women into the spacerine’s cabin, a sparsely furnished compartment not much larger than the bed it contained. They were made to lie on their bellies – the slave never spoke, instead making use of gestures. She never looked them in the eye. She untied their hands and lashed their wrists to the headboard which, Alysha noted, had metal rings fixed for this purpose.

When sometime later the spacerine entered, she blindfolded her captives. With wry amusement, Alysha understood the reason for this. She was taking off her clothes, and it would not do for lowly slaves to see a free woman naked. Thereafter for the entire night – or what passed for night in the endless day on board the ship – the spacerine entertained herself with her two playthings. Some of what she did was painful and humiliating, other stuff so pleasurable that Alysha was surprised by the spacerine’s tenderness and astonished by her own responses. She was also astounded by the tiny woman’s energy and creativity.

Afterwards, none of them talked about what they had been through. For Alysha it was unaccountably strange. She had been violated no more or less than the other women, but she did not feel defiled. In fact she felt nothing, not outrage, not sorrow nor disgust, not even numbness. And in that realization, she discovered that she had a rare talent, the ability to switch her emotions on and off, turn them up or down. Such an aptitude might help her to not just survive the coming ordeal; she might use it to make herself stronger. So the spacerine had, inadvertently, given Alysha Sarton an inestimable gift.

Yet there was no time for pondering. Already they could feel the walls and floor beginning to vibrate as the ship decelerated, making the transfer from hyperbolic to elliptical orbit. They were approaching one of the spacers’ fortified asteroid bases. Although Alysha still had no clue as to which it might be, the home base of the Bellatrix was Vesta, third largest of the colonies.

When it was time to go, as usual their hands were shackled behind their backs, and they were leashed together with a chain linked to their collars, each just half an arm’s length apart. The Bellatrix crew had changed from their motley of attire into black and green dress uniforms and for the first time looked dashing rather than scruffy and soiled. Looking at them, the naked Alysha wistfully recalled how important she had felt striding across the Academy parade ground in her Cadet ceremonial blues, and how proud she was, receiving her commission as a Fleet Officer of the United Worlds Federation in her crisp white breeches and gold-braided tunic. As a slave, when would she again feel clothing of any kind against her skin?

The crew were given an official reception, standard procedure for a warship returning from its mission. A welcoming party greeted them as the spacers, their slaves and their prisoners filed down the gangway. Alysha saw, for the first time, the full complement of the Bellatrix and was surprised that there were no more than forty men and women, apart from slaves, a fraction of the number aboard a Federation vessel of comparable size. And as the spacer crew went to their festivities and their slaves were put to work, the captives were sent directly to the market.

Every space colony had one central emporium for the buying, selling and renting of female property. Until purchase, all slaves belonged to a single authority, a syndicate run jointly by the governments of the nine independent states. By necessity, the spacers operated as a collective. Profits from trade and piracy were allotted equally among all crews, except for bonuses paid according to rank. Thus disputes were avoided, and no ship’s company would be disadvantaged by performing essential military or escort duties. In the marketplace, however, private enterprise was the rule, and even the military had to compete in the bidding, since slaves were not part of the official complement of a space vessel. Crewmembers pooled their funds for the purpose, but very often the commander paid out of his (or her) own pocket.

Because of the egalitarian pretensions of spacer society, strict controls and limits were placed on slave sales to prevent the wealthiest individuals, corporations or a big consortium buying up all the choicest specimens. Every spacer family of even modest income and status aspired to own at least one woman, and for this reason manumission and emancipation had been outlawed. A female captured and enslaved or born into slavery remained in bondage for the term of her life. Furthermore, some fifty years ago, when fresh sources of slaves began to dry up as the Federation improved its defences, it became law that the daughter of a slave inherited her slavery, rather than this being at the discretion of her father. Thus, a new industry appeared, slave breeding. This was open to such abuse that in the year of Alysha’s birth, the vending of “pedigree” slaves (those born into slavery) became strictly regulated; and at the same time the sons of slaves acquired rights equal to those of any spacer.

Granting sons citizenship made them eligible for conscription alongside both males and females of more conventional spacer lineage. It also solved a long-standing dilemma that could be traced back to the beginning of slavery, almost exactly a hundred years before the Adastra’s misfortune. At that time, the most powerful of the asteroid communities was located on Ceres. Growing in wealth, power and arrogance, the Cerians attempted to dominate the spacer alliance, and their overbearing conduct brought disaster. Attacked and occupied by its former allies, the colony was evacuated of its 180,000 inhabitants, and repopulated with refugees from the disorders then sweeping the Federation. The deported Cerians became the first legal slaves since the eradication of the institution on Earth almost half a millennium before. A few years later, a second spacer world, Egeria, fell victim to internecine rivalries and another 100,000 slaves were added to the register. Yet six decades on, facing critical manpower shortages in both the military and merchant fleets, and fearing civil unrest with one in eight of its population enslaved, the alliance abolished male servitude, and at the same time decreed that no spacer female could be enslaved. However, the latter edict was not made retroactive, and by the time of Alysha’s capture there were a hundred thousand fifth-generation slaves.

Alysha had learnt about the history of slavery as a child. Brought up on Venus, in a scientific station dependent on interplanetary commerce for its existence, she was never far removed from spacer lore. She read books and watched videos, and she talked with her friends in horrified, thrilled whispers about what wicked space pirates did to captive women. Of course, the threat was exaggerated. All but one in a hundred vessels passed between the worlds unmolested, and even during the intermittent full-scale wars the chances of capture were slim – few spacer craft were powerful enough for an interception and boarding. But as the passengers and crew of the Adastra had found to their cost, ships not travelling under escort or in convoy did occasionally fall prey to a wandering marauder. On this occasion, twenty women and girls had paid the price.

The fourteen who remained were handed over to their new keepers immediately upon exiting the ship. They had found themselves in a colossal “dry” dock – a strange misnomer on a waterless world, but the vestige of a bygone era when ships sailed only upon the seas of Earth. It was large enough to take the Bellatrix, but this time she was left moored on the arid, airless surface of the asteroid. Entry to the underground world was gained through a series of portals, airlocks and corridors, opening onto a gantry suspended a few metres above the deck. They had indeed, as Alysha recognized from photo images she had seen, arrived at Vesta.

The dock was busy. At least a dozen small craft were laid up in berths being tended by human workers, rather than robots as would have been the case in any Federation workshop. Alysha was not surprised that the spacers relied so heavily on manual labour. It was their way of motivating and mobilizing the population, to avoid the descent into indolence and decadence which had brought down the 400 year-old First Federation. There were a handful of slaves, easily identified by their nude bodies, but most were citizens, men and women, industrious and disciplined. Alysha had to admit to herself that she was impressed. A few paused to inspect this new batch of slaves, but such were surely not an uncommon sight in the dockyard, and they did not attract very much attention.

Their new escort consisted of a boy and a girl, who could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen years of age; and while Alysha was by no means statuesque, she was half a head taller than the girl, who was slightly the bigger of the two. They were dressed in the grey uniform of the spacer junior cadet corps, and Alysha surmised that such menial tasks as herding females to the marketplace was not deemed important enough a task for regular cadets, let alone adult guards. Nevertheless, this may have been their first escort detail, because they insisted on posing for pictures with their prisoners.

A contingent of journalists was on hand to record the proceedings. The spacers made regular propaganda broadcasts to the United Worlds, and they flaunted their victories. The return to her home port of the alliance’s most celebrated warship was news worth reporting. Many times in the past, Alysha had viewed the news videos, feeling pity and shame for the despondent women being marched naked and bound to the slave markets. Now her watching family, friends and former comrades would be feeling pity and shame for her. Jemma Stannec was at the front end of the tethered line, and the boy fixed a leash to her collar. With this, he led his captives in a pageant past the cameras, while the girl strutted alongside, every so often prodding one of the women with her baton. It carried a mild electric charge, and when her time came Alysha jumped and yelped, to the amusement of her audience. It was thus a release from the humiliation when they left the dock and passed down a long, narrow passageway.

As they emerged onto a wide balcony overlooking the city, they were treated to a vista as stunning as just about anything Alysha had ever seen. Spacer cities were true engineering marvels. The Vestian capital occupied a giant cavern, ten kilometres in diameter and several hundred metres in height, hollowed out of the regolith and sealed by heat fusion of the rock walls. Buildings, roads and monuments had been fashioned from the excavation debris. Aerial highways arched across the sky and curved between and around the tallest towers. However, the greatest wonder was almost invisible, and yet it was what made this minuscule world inhabitable. A vast artificial gravity system underlay the entire city. The field was so calibrated as to decrease sharply about halfway up so that aircraft could climb towards the roof and drift almost weightlessly, while the pressure of the air itself maintained a breathable atmosphere throughout the entire dome, from floor to ceiling. Meanwhile, the dock facility had its own grid which could be turned down or off, so that a ship as large as the Bellatrix could be floated in and set down with ease.

Almost in spite of herself, Alysha was dazzled. Yet she did not have much time to take in the scene. A broad ramp descended from the terrace to the highest of the street levels. The women were taken down and assembled on a moving platform which carried them along a silver rail through the heart of the city. Vehicle and foot traffic was heavy, but again the group attracted little attention. Few of the many passers-by gave even a second glance to the two adolescents shepherding fourteen nude, bound women.

Alysha saw very few slaves, which seemed puzzling since they comprised something like a quarter of the population. But as she observed the flows and rhythms of the city, she concluded that it was not, at least on the surface, the hive of industry of her first impression. Most of the pedestrians were strolling or loitering – families, couples arm in arm, children at play, elderly folk basking in the warmth of the synthetic sun. In a nearby park of manicured lawns and sculpted shrubs, a concert was underway ,with music and dancing and other frivolities. Far from the dour, militaristic society Alysha had expected to find, away from small pockets of activity like the dock, this was a culture of leisure. And that explained the apparent absence of slaves. They were the muscles and sinews and lifeblood of the city, toiling unseen indoors and underneath while the free citizens enjoyed the fruits of those labours.

When they reached the slave market, things moved quickly, so much so that Alysha was left dazed. She had expected to be put on display and be sold at auction, but it was nothing like that. The authorities had a full two weeks to prepare a catalogue, take bids, finalize deals and complete formalities like certificates of ownership. Although they were split up, the women were kept in a large holding pen to await the arrival of their new owners, and Alysha was able to witness the fate of most. Jemma Stannec, Panyra Vadeine, and two of the women passengers were taken away in a van, and Alysha guessed that Panyra had been right all along about her destination. Fariza and her mother were, mercifully, kept together, bought by an affluent-looking young couple. Luzi Charnas was purchased by a disreputable looking pair of men in spacer jumpsuits. The remaining three passengers and the last of the civilian crewmembers were led off by a woman who wore the badge of a Vestrian corporation and were no doubt heading for one of the subterranean factories. Alysha did not discover what happened to the girl Elsbeth or to Cailín Sherval, because at that moment she felt a hand on her shoulder.

She turned around, to be confronted by a small, striking woman and a girl of about fifteen, who looked to be her daughter. Both were both naked. They never spoke, and they kept Alysha’s arms shackled behind her as they took her through the bustle of the marketplace and outside into the street. There they waited, until they were met by a boy not much older than the two previous escorts and wearing the same junior cadet’s uniform. He bore a striking resemblance to the girl, and Alysha realized immediately that they were twins. Both mother and daughter lowered their eyes and clasped their hands behind their backs in a gesture of obeisance to their son, brother and master.

With the boy in the lead, the three slaves – for Alysha now was a slave, she had to get used to that – walked for about twenty minutes through the city. People had begun to stare, and it took Alysha a while to comprehend. It was so absurd that she’d forgotten this that she almost laughed. She was the only naked female anywhere to be seen with pubic hair – the sign of a newly minted slave. Perhaps the news of the latest triumph of the Bellatrix made people curious. Maybe Alysha Sarton, who had dreamt as a child of achieving renown as a great space pilot, had indeed found a sort of fame.

4. The House of Cassaverna

Lorens Cassaverna was a man awaiting his due, an unappreciated go-getter whose aspirations to high rank had been thwarted by the jealousy and prejudice of incompetent superiors (especially the women, ungrateful harridans). In the snobbish hierarchy of spacer society, elite background counted for more than talent, and he was despised because his mother was a slave; but she was well-bred and fetched a high price when he sold her to finance his first business venture. When that failed, through no fault of his own, he had used his not inconsiderable charm to marry the daughter of a former ships’ captain turned entrepreneur.

When he’d heard that the Bellatrix was returning with a load of fresh prisoners, he could not ignore such an opportunity. After all, that ship had been his father-in-law’s last command, and Lorens Cassaverna put great value on such links with his hard-won heritage. Bidding had been fierce, and he’ been obliged to sell two of his slaves to raise the credit. He was disappointed that his new acquisition was a lowly ensign; but on the other hand, being young, it could be trained to bring in a good return on the investment.

He had sent his stepson to complete the transaction. Devan was a fine young man, worthy of carrying on the good name of the House of Cassaverna. His natural father had been an officer aboard the Amazon (sister ship of the Bellatrix) when it achieved a splendid sacrifice against hopeless odds in the Battle of Europa. Lorens attended the auction of the crewmembers’ property, and out of respect for the fallen he bought the slave Maya. This proved a fortuitous purchase, since the woman came with an impeccable pedigree. She was a fifth-generation slave, a descendant of one of the originals from the Ceres affair. Unusually, she had twin children, a boy and a girl. The lad showed promise, and having no sons of his own, Lorens arranged an adoption. The girl also had potential. If properly brought up, she would earn a handsome profit when she came of age.

Yet in some ways, Devan was a strange boy. He remained unaccountably distant from his new father, and maintained unhealthy and illogical feelings of attachment to his mother and sister. It was an understandable if regrettable weakness that he felt affection towards the woman who had carried him to birth; but his fondness for the female with whom he had shared the womb made no sense. While still inside their mother, their destinies had already been decided – one free, the other a slave. Such were the immutable laws of nature and of men, and if Devan was to take full advantage of his good prospects and bring glory to the name of Cassaverna, he must learn to put aside juvenile sentiments.

Some owners might disagree. They granted their female property the unearned luxury of time to themselves, allowed them to wear clothing in the privacy of their master’s home, even permitted them a few possessions to call their own. It was this sort of lax discipline and frivolous indulgence which had made spacer society soft and had undermined traditional morals and values. More and more young people, brought up in privilege, were avoiding military careers. That was especially galling to Lorens Cassaverna, who had been denied the opportunity to serve (because he owed a duty to his investors, and a spacer did not shirk his responsibilities merely for the sake of personal glory). But the slaves were worse. They embodied all the worst attributes of their sex – they were by nature lazy and vain and treacherous – without the virtues of modesty and humility. They needed to be kept under strict control.

That was why, when he sent the boy to fetch the new slave, Lorens insisted that Maya and the girl accompany him. Lacking the innate sense of duty that made free men free, slaves had to be constantly reminded of what they were and what they were not, and an excursion to the market was always a salutary lesson – it could at any time be a one-way trip.

So Lorens Cassaverna considered himself firm but just in dealing with his slaves, and he could sympathize with the boy Devan, who was still young. But he also had his own daughter to consider. Lori was sixteen years of age, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who had inherited her mother’s high spirits and her father’s strength of character. After he had been compelled to divorce his wife, he devoted every minute of his life away from his business to ensure her proper upbringing. But recently he had fallen on hard times, even been forced to sell off some of his slaves. He understood that life was not always fair to risk-takers like himself, but in his preoccupation with his commercial affairs he neglected his daughter (he was man enough to admit that). And she had developed a close bond with Devan.

There was nothing untoward in such a relationship. In spacer society, after a century of conflict, adoptions were commonplace, and there was no law or principle against step-brothers and sisters marrying, since they were not biologically related. But Lorens had higher aspirations for his own flesh and blood. If she could not be his heir, then she must marry into her own class. Lorens Cassaverna could never permit her to be the wife of the son of a slave. Tolerance can only be stretched so far.

When Devan had returned with the new acquisition, Lorens was not disappointed but not particularly impressed. She was smaller than the average Federation officer and not especially voluptuous, but the belly was flat, the buttocks were ample for their purpose, and the breasts could be enhanced. She was attractive but not beautiful.

Her aptitude and attitude left much to be desired. She had to be ordered to kneel, and when asked “What were you called?” she looked up at him with quizzical eyes before quickly lowering her gaze to its proper place at his feet.

It had taken her a second or two to get his meaning. “Alysha... Alysha Sarton, sir...”

There was another pause before she corrected herself: “Master.”

Lorens shook his head. Dull, insolent and lacking initiative. If this creature was typical of what the Fleet was recruiting these days, it explained why only the spacers, and not the decadent planet-huggers, enslaved their female captives. Any spacer woman would willingly, joyfully die before enduring such dishonour and bringing disgrace upon her family.

He sent her off to her quarters with Maya, after Devan had released her from the shackles. As he watched them leave, he scratched his head and sipped his drink. He started to think. Perhaps he had been hasty in purchasing this slave. There was nothing wrong with her, at least nothing that some hard discipline could not put right; but what sort of influence would she have on Maya and the girl Devi?

Lorens was no fool. He was sure that Maya only played the dutiful, obedient slave. She was deceitful and untrustworthy, typical of slaves and of her sex in general. She took advantage of his generosity and his genuine feelings for her son. But Lorens had his own plans. He would not be outfoxed by a scheming female. On the day he made Devan his heir, Maya, and her impudent daughter as well, would be dispatched to the market. The lad would no doubt be upset at first, but he would quickly adapt. Lorens had taught his stepson the quality of self-sacrifice.

For he, himself, had made many sacrifices in the course of his eminent career. He had given up the chance for glory and high office in the spacer fleet for the sake of his business commitments. He had consented to his wife leaving him and shouldered the responsibilities of fatherhood when he denied her custody of their daughter. Even his adoption of Devan had been difficult, for it disqualified his natural child from her inheritance.

Lori appreciated the sacrifices and compromises he’d had to make; she was always reassuring him of that; and he knew that when the time came she would abandon her foolish infatuation with Devan and marry a man of her own class and father’s choosing. But Maya was different. And so was this new slave, whom he’d named Lys. She had been in the household for almost twelve months now, and was still as sullen and stubborn as she had been on that very first day. Perhaps that was characteristic of Federation space women, lacking in proper deference and incapable of unquestioning obedience. He’d never owned one before, and now he could see why the Federation had become corrupted. And the ingratitude! The female resented sharing his bed. Yet were it not for his benevolence, she might have been sold to a brothel, and ended up serving strangers with her body instead of her master.

When one slave in a household starts to believe it has more privileges than its master, the delusion becomes infectious. So perhaps it was time to get rid of the troublesome Lys.

5. Underworld

The slave Lys, formerly Alysha Sarton, Fleet Ensign of the United World Federation, rose every morning at exactly 0500 hours.

Everything ran like clockwork in the basalt-encased environs of Vesta’s main city. Time of day was an artificial and arbitrary construct. Because the asteroid rotates in five hours and orbits the Sun in 1325 Earth days, a Vestrian year has nearly six thousand local (or solar) days. So the Vestrians, as in the other spacer colonies, used the Earth calendar, not out of any sentimental attachment to the “old world” but simply for convenience. It meant only a minor adjustment for someone like Lys, brought up on a planet with a day longer than its year. However, anyone who had not been raised in a synthetic environment would be surprised to see the city light up at the same time all year round, and be disconcerted that it rained for precisely one hour at precisely 0600 every third day at precisely the same rate. For on Vesta weather was neither random nor capricious. The punctual downpour washed away accumulated dust and grime and provided relief from the monotony of an absolutely predictable climate.

The slaves shared a small cubicle at the rear of the Cassaverna mansion. It was large enough for just a bunk, which was adequate since slaves had no personal possessions to take up room, certainly no closet space. It must have been uncomfortable when four or five women slept there, but now there were just Lys, Maya and Devi. On most nights, the master summoned Maya or Lys to his own bed, so for the two left there was room to stretch out.

There was no particular reason to be getting up so early, because the males did not rise until much later, particularly on rain mornings. But the master was strict about discipline and imposed a rigorous and inflexible regime to keep his slaves in their place. Lori was expected to be up at that time as well, to supervise. She might be free, but she was a girl, and the master believed that females should not be pampered, lest they develop irresponsible tendencies.

Lys had stopped questioning – only ever in her mind, of course – her owner’s ways. It had been more than a year since her capture and enslavement. As there was not even a remote possibility of achieving freedom or of exercising her own will, there was no point in struggling against her fate. And there were worse masters to serve. She rarely spoke to slaves other than Maya and Devi, since that was forbidden, but she saw the looks on some of the faces, and the marks on their bodies. Whereas Lorens Cassaverna was not cruel. He lacked the imagination to be anything more than callous. He had never found cause to use the punishment device that was still implanted in the back of Lys’s neck. He merely grumbled, as he relaxed on his balcony, drink in hand – there was almost always drink in hand – about how lazy slaves were these days. At the lavish parties he threw to ingratiate himself with his clients and creditors, he complained about how servile slaves were these days; and as he sent Lys or Maya to the bedroom with one of his guests, he disapproved of how wanton and shameless slaves had become these days.


To be continued...

Preview: Chapter 10. The Battle of the Palladium

Preview: Chapter 10. The Battle of the Palladium

The arrival of Lys and her entourage revived the sagging morale of the slave underground. The women had always expected they would have to fight for their freedom. Most expected to die. But now, for the first time, they expected to win.

Yet ahead lay several months of planning, many frustrations, mistakes, betrayals and losses. Word spread slowly among the slaves, but spread it did. They’d had a hundred years to perfect their clandestine networks. The spacer intelligence agency dispensed propaganda and misinformation to counter the sedition. In response to increased repression, hundreds of slaves volunteered to arrange for their own arrest and interrogation, to mislead the authorities about their plans and their associates and the whereabouts of Lys. So when it finally came, the revolt took everyone by surprise, except its meticulous planners.

The opening moves were scheduled to occur at precisely the same time. To this day, it remains unclear how the astonishing coordination was achieved. Out of habit, the women have kept their secrets. In what has come to be known as the “night of the razors” – though only a fraction of the victims actually had their throats cut – thousands of masters were murdered in their beds by their slaves. In their bloodlust, many slaves exterminated entire spacer households; and in reprisal thousand of slaves were killed. But even as the citizens awoke to news of the carnage, reports were coming in of a far graver setback. During the night, a force of two or three hundred slaves, led by Lys herself, had launched an assault on the central transmission station for the punishment implants. Designed for the purpose of instantly disabling every slave in the city in the event of a crisis, the system by necessity included an emergency shut-off that could be used to neutralize the devices. The vanguard of the attackers had only seconds to reach their objective before the implants activated, and in that time more than half their number were put out of action or cut down; but the rest, with the momentum of sheer willpower and hatred, made it inside the station; and once they had lost possession of the transmitter, the spacers had lost control of their slaves.

The government did not lose its nerve. Rather than attempt an immediate, poorly organized counter-attack, the Tyrannos ordered all citizens to withdraw to the security of the Palladium, the vast, elevated, heavily guarded compound built in the early days of slavery, the last time that the threat of rebellion had been taken seriously. Barricades were set in place, and weapons were distributed to all able-bodied adults. Most citizens, of course, did not make it into the Palladium. With the streets now teeming with jubilant, angry slaves, they deemed it safer to remain locked in their homes. Some householders, deranged by fear, summarily executed their slaves, which merely added to the ferocity of the mob outside.

At around high noon, Lys ordered the advance on the Palladium to commence. The spacer commander charged with its defence was no fool, but he underestimated his opponents and made a serious mistake in putting just ten thousand men on the barricades, with a few thousand in reserve. Against them, a quarter of a million women and girls – half the slaves in the city – were massed. Lys sent the younger ones to the rear, but she made the hard-headed decision to throw into the first wave the old women and those slaves who lacked the education or skills that would be vital in building a new society and defending it against those determined to destroy it. Not one balked, and in places women argued and fought with each other for the honour of advancing in that first wave. A hundred years of pent-up rage was about to be unleashed.

The attack began not with shouts and battle cries but with a slow moan, rising in volume and pitch until a quarter-million voices echoed in crescendo through the enormous cavern. The first wave surged forward, staggered under a withering hail of gun blasts. In the opening minute of the battle, thousands of women fell. Without hesitation, the next line went forward. With nothing to lose, the slaves had nothing to fear. Yet it was naked flesh and bare hands against fire and missiles. They fought with the most makeshift of weapons, and those with no weapons at all fought with teeth and claws. They scrambled over the bodies of the dead and the dying.

Lys was seen to be everywhere during the desperate struggle before the barricades. She pushed her way to the front of the lines, rallying and steadying her troops, encouraging those who wavered, deploying them at points where the defences appeared weakest, exposing herself to constant danger. Wounded three times, she was physically restrained and finally dragged out of harm’s way by her subordinates. She protested that her life was of no more importance than any other’s, that she was not the revolution. They did not listen. Many women died throwing themselves in front of their commander, shielding her with their bodies.

The corpses piled up. The streets radiating from the Palladium literally ran red with blood. The air was filled with the stench of burning flesh and the cries of wounded and dying women. Each wave hurled against the barricades was cut down with a fearsome slaughter. And each wave lapped closer to the lines. The bodies stacked up ten, twenty deep, and yet they kept coming. They just kept coming. The spacers had been reassured that the slave rabble would falter at the first volley, and would disperse on the second. But they had not stopped. And it began to dawn on the alarmed defenders that they were not going to stop. Nothing was going to stop them.

The panic began as isolated murmurs of unease, that the attacks would just keep coming. Superbly skilled in the arts and science of interplanetary warfare, the spacers had no experience or training in hand-to-hand combat. Their weapons were old and unreliable. Many had answered the call to duty and left their families behind in the city, at the mercy of the rampaging slaves. Others feared that if they fell on the barricades, their loved ones in the Palladium would be defenceless.

The infection rapidly spread. While most men held their ground, a few timid individuals, and others sickened by the butchery, abandoned their positions, opening up small gaps in the lines. Exploiting these, or simply taking refuge against the storm of fire, hundreds and then thousands of women poured into the breaks, widening and deepening the breaches. Within just a few minutes, the defenders found themselves being outflanked in two dozen places as the multitude surged past and around and behind them.

Before most of the spacers even knew it, the tide of battle had turned. The anguished screams of the dying were now drowned out by blood-curdling screams of fury and vengeance. Suddenly, discipline dissolved, the line wavered, and it was every man trying to extricate himself from the enveloping chaos. They knew that any still on the barricades when the lines collapsed was a dead man. The spacers were, in general, brave. Each man who chose to stand and fight took out ten, in some cases twenty of the slaves. And they were hacked to death by a hundred more.

Finally, the pressure became too great. The remaining defenders broke and ran. Those who could not outrun their frenzied pursuers were brought down and torn to pieces. And as the first tsunami swept over the barricades, a second rebounded off it and back across the city, overwhelming everything in its path. The destruction and looting and killing continued for hours. To slow down the rampant slaves, the Tyrannos ordered the artificial sun to be dimmed, but that just made it harder for the citizens trapped outside the Palladium to defend their homes. And anyway, to light their way, the slaves set fire to anything that would burn. The rain was turned on to douse the flames, and the giant air filters ran at full capacity to clear the atmosphere of choking smoke and poisonous fumes. The Tyrannos of Pallas, most feared warlord in the Solar System, was reduced to cowering in his citadel, fighting fires and freshening the air.

It was eventually simple exhaustion which ended the first and last battle of the great slave revolt. The carnage had been appalling. Forty thousand women lost their lives in the assault on the barricades. Fifty thousand more were maimed, and many of these would soon die of their wounds. Freedom had been won at a terrible cost, but it had been won. The spacers had also suffered. It is estimated that five thousand men died in the night of the razors, another five thousand on the barricades, and more in the house-to-house fighting. The survivors were hiding throughout the city or entrenched inside the Palladium. Yet the spacers’ position should have been unassailable. The slaves outnumbered them by just two to one, and they had on their side overwhelming firepower. But the impact of the revolt, after a century of complacency, was devastating; and the spacers now discovered what the slaves had known for a hundred years, that once demoralization sets in, it quickly turns to paralyzing despair.

Lys was still having her wounds tended, receiving reports of casualties and continuing action in various parts of the city, making plans for the next phase of the campaign. And then a remarkable thing happened. A message came down from the Palladium. The Tyrannos had called for a truce. He summoned Lys to negotiate. He proposed an alliance.

Lys immediately guessed the reason for this change of heart. Already, the other spacer colonies would be gathering their forces for an expedition against Pallas. The incipient slave rebellion had to be quashed before the contagion spread; and as a bonus, the arrogant Palladians could be put in their proper place. Old scores would be settled. The Tyrannos and his advisers remembered the lesson about overweening pride their predecessors had taught to the people of Ceres.

Although some of her lieutenants warned of a trap, to avoid needless further bloodshed, Lys had no real option but to answer the summons. She went alone, and was escorted to the senate house along an avenue lined with tens of thousands of angry, frightened citizens. She chose to go naked, as the slave she still was, and she did proper obeisance, prostrating herself at the feet of the Tyrannos. Then she stood up, raised her head, looked him in the eye and spoke two words. “Freedom, now.”

The Tyrannos offered Lys and her closest supporters immediate freedom, and an amnesty for all other slaves.

She said nothing.

He promised a gradual, phased-in emancipation, with all females not born into slavery to be liberated forthwith.

She said nothing.

He patiently explained that it was a complex situation, and that quick solutions would lead to confusion and disorder.

She turned and began walking towards the exit. He yelled after her. She kept walking.

The Tyrannos shouted: “Arrest her!”

And another remarkable thing happened. No one moved.

The spacers were, above all else, men of honour. Their word was a sacred bond. For a man like the Tyrannos, a pledge to a slave meant nothing, but to the rest, a guarantee of safe passage carried more weight than a fleet of battle-cruisers.

As she reached the threshold, Lys heard the voice of the Tyrannos, reduced to a thin whisper.

“Under the legislative, executive and judicial powers invested in my person and my office, as Tyrannos of Pallas, supreme leader, commander and protector of the Palladian people, I hereby decree that all females enslaved under our laws are hereby free, and that the institution of slavery as established in our constitution is hereby abolished.”

Alysha Sarton stopped, smiled and turned around.

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