Blue Light of Home (4 page)

He never said anything mean or disparaging about humans. He never gave her patronizing looks or treated her too terrifically inferior, except for the whole you’re-here-to-serve-me attitude he kept so firmly in place around her. He didn’t push her around when she blundered into his path, and didn’t complain even when she had to be shown how to work the shower three times.

He just ignored her.

Skye had brought two day-planners to use as a calendar, and so she knew that it was Day 18 when she first toyed idly with the thought of flushing herself out the airlock. Oh, she’d never really do it, she knew that. She wasn’t even all that miserable, just bored. She had her puzzle books for entertainment (sixty-three of them), although they weren’t going to last even half a year at the rate she was going through them, and she had one M&M every night to remind herself that food had flavor and crunch somewhere in the universe. Sometimes she sang to herself a little when she was in the exercise room, just to remember the lyrics of her favorite songs, her not-so-favorites, even the ones she hated. Anything to hear a voice.

She slept a lot more than she used to (with her head directly underneath the piercing blue light so she couldn’t fail to wake up the instant it lit), and sometimes she cried for no reason, but it wasn’t that bad. Certainly, it could have been a lot worse.

If only he would talk to her.

She was sound asleep on Day 21 when the light came on, rousing her from a tiresomely-recurrent dream of being stuck in an invisible sound-proofed box on a busy street corner. She got up yawning, checked the time, and was surprised.

Once in a while, he sent for her at the start of his day, and always at the end, but this was smack-dab in the middle of his down-time.

Still. It didn’t pay to keep the man waiting. She only needed to learn that lesson once.

Skye slipped into her slinky nightie and padded down the hall to his room, doing her best to shake the sleep from her head. The door opened on blackness.

She stood there, puzzled, listening to his heavy, sleeping breaths until her eyes had adjusted to the Earthlight enough to see him. He lay sprawled belly-down almost sideways over the bed, the thin blanket covering only part of one leg, still naked. She’d never seen his ass before. He had kind of a wide, thin tail or an armored plate or something over most of it; no wonder he’d needed to have spankings explained to him. She was faintly jealous.

Should she leave? Clearly, he’d rolled over and hit the panel on the wall by accident…but if he woke up at his usual time and saw it was on and she wasn’t there, he’d only spank her again. Should she wake him up? She kind of got the feeling that was a spanking offense too. Try to creep over and turn the light off herself? That just
had
to be one.

While she stood there in her agony of indecision, Vala snorted and then shifted in his sleep. He rolled onto his back, began to rub lazily at his throat, and then sat bolt upright in bed with one hand drawn up and hooked into claws. He looked at her there in the doorway, then looked at the panel by his bed. He started to lower his hand, then changed his mind and used it instead to wipe unnecessarily at his snout. Muttering something sleep-thick in his own language, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and beckoned to her.

“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” she said, coming toward him. “You look exhausted.”

He froze in the act of scratching his chest and gaped at her. Gaped. Like she’d just called him a garbage-eating monkey-banger or something. Then he shut his beak with a snap and sat up a lot straighter, hitting the light-panel with his fist.

He looked a lot angrier in the light.

“Sorry,” she said, wondering what on Earth she was apologizing for. “I’m just saying it’s obvious you didn’t mean to call me. It was an accident. We don’t have to do this if you’re too tired—”

“On your knees, woman, and serve me!” he shouted.

She flinched back and stared at him. He’d never shouted at her before. Apart from that first spanking, he’d never even raised his voice. Even the third time he’d had to walk her through the extremely basic controls for the shower, he’d always been very quiet, very calm, very patient. Now, as she watched, she could see brilliant green markings throbbing to life along the sides of his snout, throat, and shoulders—a visible sign of some very palpable anger.

She knew what she was supposed to do, but could not make her feet take one step towards that furious alien. When he sprang up, she actually jumped back, then tried to bolt and run.

Run where, for God’s sake? The entire deck wasn’t much bigger than her apartment back home. Unless she really meant to flush herself out the airlock, and she didn’t even know how to open that hatchway.

She screamed when he caught her, babbling mindless incoherent things about Please and Don’t and Sorry. He ignored them, hauled her back into his room and against the side table (which she had come to think of as the “sex table”) and just started whaling on her.

His hand was like iron, flattening her ass at each stroke and banging her into the table with unreal force. She’d forgotten how much this hurt, forgotten how strong he was, and most importantly, forgot that he expected her to stand still and take it.

She went wild, kicking and pummeling back at him as she slapped her hands around in a protective cover, already howling at the shock of it. The pain would sink in later. For now, all that mattered was escape.

And escape was out of the question. He tolerated only a few seconds of her struggles and then she was doubled up like a penknife, her cheek pressed flat against the tabletop, while he methodically caught up both her wrists and trapped them together at the small of her back. Then he lit into her again, each crack of his hand as loud as a firecracker in her ears, splitting the air, exploding in it, and drumming the most unbelievable hurt into her body until it seemed every nerve ending had fired up in sympathy and she couldn’t even blink her
eyes
without waking up new flares of Hell in her bottom.

‘
Stop
!’ she told herself. ‘Stop struggling!’ But she couldn’t—Who had that kind of control?—she just kept hopping and bucking and wailing as his hand rained down, until she was exhausted. Breathlessness, not remorse, stole the wind from her panicked cries; burned-out adrenaline took the kick out of her legs. Her struggles waned in fits and starts until she could only lay like an old doll over his table, trying to muster up the strength to fight back.

“Never!” he bellowed, punctuating every word with one more terrible CRACK! “Run! From! Me! Again!”

She tried again to apologize, gulped air, and shook her head instead.

He stopped, but she could see his shadow on the wall, his hand still high, wanting to fall. She didn’t move, not even a twitch, and never mind how badly she needed to squirm and rub at herself. At last he released her and stood back. Those green markings were still blazoned over his skin, actually throbbing with his pulse in crazy harmony with her blistered bottom. He glared at her, plainly seething, and finally snarled, “I’ll call you at whatever hour I wish. You are here to answer my desires. No more insults!”

All of Skye’s fractured breath left her as a baffled, “Wha—?” which he terminated by pointing a claw at her.

“No more! You are here to serve me! Serve!”

She obeyed, confusion succeeding where spankings alone had not, and for the first time in seven long, difficult years, tears flooded her eyes and fell. She knelt down to coax his member out (and it took a lot of coaxing), aware only of his hoarse, furious breath, and the way his hands kept flexing from fists into hooks and back again at his sides. She had no idea what she’d said to provoke him, and couldn’t even ask. She only huddled at his thigh, feeling dirty and used, until he brusquely ordered her up.

She turned toward the table fast, but he saw her face. She assumed the position and waited, evening out her breath, trembling.

It was a long wait.

He muttered again. She heard him pace curtly back and forth behind her for a few brief seconds. When he touched her, it wasn’t an angry grip. When he took her, it wasn’t hard and hurtful. She cried a little more, relieved, but tried to be quiet about it.

It took him longer to than usual to finish and she could tell he was trying to hurry by the end, hissing under his breath and maybe swearing (the words had a brittle, ugly sound to them). When it was finally over, she didn’t wait for him to open the door, but yanked her panties up and fled into the darkened hall back to her own room, where she threw herself on the bed and sobbed into the forgiving muffle of her pillow.

She thought crying would make her feel better, that it would magically gather up all the hurt and pour it out of her with the tears, but it didn’t. If anything, she felt worse, as though she’d betrayed herself, betrayed maybe even her parents by making it possible to compare her misery tonight with her grief at their passing. She felt weak and pathetic and shameful, which only made her cry harder, and soon she didn’t even care about the fiery sting still throbbing through her bottom. Her mind spun with uncertainty and accusations and humiliation: ‘I could lose the house without crying, but I couldn’t get through this,’ she kept thinking, or, ‘I could drop out of school and be a janitor, but I couldn’t get through this,’ but mostly it was, ‘What did I
say
? Why was he yelling at me? What did I
say
?’

The confusion never ebbed, but her tears eventually did, and once they had, she could hear him in the hall, pacing in front of her door. He was there almost an hour, and then he hissed again and stalked into the exercise room.

Skye fell asleep lying on her stomach with one hand twisted back and lightly cupping one burning cheek, listening to the sound of him running on the incline. Running, hissing, and swearing.

* * *

He made it easy to avoid him. She stayed in her room until hunger drove her out, and the hunger had to be extremely compelling before she made herself drink the tasteless slime the ship provided her. When she did emerge, he ignored her, but she noticed as she waited for her tureen to fill that those green markings faded into life as he stared stonily at his computers, proof not only that he was aware of her, but also that he was still angry with her. She kept her distance, didn’t speak, and returned to her room as soon as she could.

But there, reason insisted on making itself known. She could hide from him all day, sure she could, but this ship was just not that big. She was going to have to deal with him eventually, and if his routine stayed true to form, that stupid blue light would be going on tonight, whether she was ready to face him or not. She had to find some way of dealing with him.

But he wouldn’t talk to her.

She let logic browbeat excuses for a few hours, but as Earth rose luminous in her window, she gave up. She couldn’t hide from him for two years, and she sure couldn’t walk out on him and go home. She’d wasted enough time sitting in here and feeling sorry for herself. She had to try and talk to him.

Vala had unfolded the narrow table from the wall so that he could sit and drink his dinner. He didn’t look happy to see her return to the bridge so soon, but he didn’t say anything, just curled around his tureen a little more aggressively and glared at the opposite wall.

She started to pull up a chair and join up, but a dull throb from her bottom stopped her. Too early for that. She stood instead, fingers grappling at each other as she watched the green markings grow more and more strident over his skin.

“I honestly don’t know what I did to make you so angry,” she said finally. “The least you could do is tell me, so I don’t do it again.”

Silence.

“You had some lofty things to say about how to make discipline effective. How effective is it to just randomly start shouting and beating on someone?”

He threw her a scathing glare and then continued to stare down the wall.

Skye stood there, feeling her own temper start to rise, as useless as that was to her in this situation. “Look at this!” she snapped suddenly, and spun around to yank down her pants and her panties. She’d gotten an eyeful herself in the shiny surface of the shower stall earlier and her poor bottom was just as red as a couple of cherries. “You don’t do that to someone without telling them why!”

He ignored her, drank some slime.

Skye covered herself in an angry yank. “You’re supposed to be the superior race, huh? Is this how your whole Empire is going to handle their first misunderstanding? Just beat the crap out of some—”

Vala slammed down the tureen hard enough to spill even its thick contents. “I do not tolerate personal insults and I absolutely will not tolerate insults to the Empire!”

“
What
insults?” she exclaimed, throwing out her arms. “You were the one who made the mistake! I was just trying to show a little goddamn sensitivity and let you get some sleep!”

He leapt up, broad streaks of green blazing all the way down his sides to his hips. “
How dare you
!” he bellowed.

“How dare I
what
?” she shouted back, losing the battle to tears yet again. Twice in two days. She wanted to throw up. “Dammit, why did you even ask for a human if you were going to act like this? All you use me for is sex, and for all you’re getting out of me, you might as well be doing that yourself too!”

He gaped at her yet again, absolutely thunderstruck for all of five full seconds. Then, the eruption. He slammed his fist down on the table hard enough to snap it right off the wall, sending his supper and his soup tureen crashing to the floor as he roared at her: “I am first-born of the House of Korokth, counted
twelvth
of the Kor’Mor caste! I served my Emperor fourteen years with distinction and took ten—
ten
!—enemy commanders during the War of Barakit! Emperor Vokalek
himself
has given me three of the eighteen medals I’ve earned in my career! I am Kor’Vala D’Telenor! I do not cook my own
meat
, I do not scrub my own
floors
, and
I do not stimulate myself for pleasure
! My people don’t even have a word for that!”