CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE #2
“I’d like to know what you think that means,” I said to him gently.
“The raw facts are that we shot down a Eumadian ship, found the crate of you and the other dimari inside, and assigned you to masters here who hadn’t specifically chosen you.
But I want to know what you think that means.
What does it mean about your master? What does it say about you? ”
James was glaring at me, and I could understand why.
Rather than trying to soothe the wound Sora was feeling, it must have sounded to him like I was ripping it further open.
But that was one of the ironies about dimari.
They were too smart to be placated with shallow reassurances and more layers of lies.
Once they knew the truth, the only way out was to acknowledge the real situation – but at the same time, we needed to twist it in a way that reaffirmed their place in the world.
I’d stumbled into a similar situation when I’d been forced to tell Kade the truth, roughly two years ago.
I’d solved the problem by pinning him to the bed, sticking my dick in him and demanding to know whether he thought he knew better than his master.
That certainly wasn’t a strategy I was going to recommend to James, but nonetheless, there were a couple of sound principles behind the idea.
“My master does not want me,” Sora replied, his voice a mere whisper.
“Now, I know for a fact that that’s not true,” I said.
“You see, slavery in the Alliance is illegal, but despite that, there’s still a steady trickle of dimari arriving here, due to various accidents with Eumadian cargo ships.
We have about a hundred dimari living very happily on Rendol 4, all of whom arrived here largely by accident.
“So we know that new arrivals are going to keep coming, and we know that we need to find you suitable homes. The reason slavery is illegal here is that we’re very concerned about slaves being mistreated.
The dimari are all trained to serve your masters to the very best of your abilities, but there are some people – some potential masters – who would still take pleasure in beating you, in over-working you, in denying you food or shelter for no better reason than pure spite.
There are some very evil people in the galaxy, and our laws are designed to prevent them from being able to harm any dimari.
“But at the same time, there are some very kind and very diligent people here, who would benefit greatly from the skills the dimari learn. You’re a pilot, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Sora said. I was determined to keep nudging him to participate in the conversation, even if it was only one or two word answers, to make sure he couldn’t just tune out and ignore me.
“And I happen to know that dimari pilots are some of the best in the galaxy. You just took one of our ships on a test run, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you ever flown an Alliance ship before?”
“No, sir.”
“And do you think you did it well?”
I didn’t expect Sora to answer. Dimari were generally very bad at assessing their own skill levels. They depended on their masters to tell them whether they’d done well or not.
“How did Sora do?” I asked James, when Sora didn’t reply. Just in case James hadn’t picked up on the subtext of where I was going with this, I gave him a very obvious expression of ‘enthusiasm, please!’ Given that Sora was still staring at the table, he wouldn’t notice the obvious lead.
“Exceptionally well,” James said, picking up the baton right away. “It only took about half an hour of going over the differences with the ship, and then Sora was flying like he’d been born in the pilot’s seat.”
It was subtle, but I caught a faint hint of a smile flutter across Sora’s face, along with a ripple of colour over the scales on his neck. He liked the praise, even if he couldn’t quite believe it was genuine.
“And do you think he’s going to be able to do successful runs to the fringe colonies?”
“Yes, absolutely,” James said. I was hoping for a little more extrapolation from him, but given that I’d had no time to brief him, he was doing reasonably well.
“So the next thing you need to know,” I said to Sora, “is that because we know a few dimari are going to be arriving every month, we have a screening program to find suitable masters for them. We assess what sort of skills the potential master has a use for, and we do background checks to make sure they’re going to treat the dimari well.
James, here, went through the screening process a full six months ago.
Six months before you got here, he had already put up his hand to say he would like a dimari, if a suitable one happened to come along.
“And then you arrived, with your pilot training, and we all said holy heck, this would be a perfect dimari for James to adopt. James has already proven that he’s got the kindness and empathy to treat you with respect, and you had the ideal set of skills to help him with his career.
He primarily runs diplomatic missions to fringe colonies – as I’m sure he’s explained to you – and having another reliable pilot to go with him means he can focus on the diplomatic side of the missions without always having to worry about piloting the ship.
So what that means is that James very much did choose you, it’s just that he chose you out of the dozen or so dimari who arrived in the past six months, rather than out of the Eumadians’ entire catalogue. ”
Sora lifted his head, looking suspiciously at James, then at me. “Baz called me a stray,” he said, scowling at me, his tone dejected.
“No, he didn’t,” James tried to contradict him.
“No, he said that the dimari who come here are all strays,” Sora corrected himself. “So the implication was that I’m one as well.”
I sighed, feeling the muscles in my neck start to tense up.
“Perhaps you should tell me exactly what Baz said,” I said to Sora.
“And at the same time, remember what I just said about there being evil people in the world. Some people just like to make other people miserable, for the fun of it.” After this conversation was over, I was going to be having a very frank conversation with Henderson about the behaviour of the other pilots operating from this base.