Exile
An Empires story by Dave Bryant
Characters created by Dave Bryant
Background created by Chris Grant and used with permission
This work is copyright 1998 and is not in the public domain
A new culture has formed in the Centrality, one that owes allegiance to no single world. It is made up of the people who serve the Alliance directly, who must deal with aliens, and with others of their own kind from different places, on an everyday basis. Many are disaffected or disillusioned with their homes for whatever reason. In this sort of environment, only an easygoing, cosmopolitan approach will preserve sanity and peace—both in the individual and in the group.—Commander Crystaal Noir, “The Synthetic Culture”,
Proceedings of the Central Alliance Military Forces,
Firstmonth 227 issue
17 Altermonth 185 Centrality Standard Calendar
“Mmmm.”
Aran tilted his head back as Jess licked at his neck. “There now,” the older boy said softly. “Feel any better?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” came the slow reply. Even so, the younger A’kii seemed jittery, his eyes still on the door to the small bunkroom, his four feet shifting.
Jess looked impatient. “C’mon, they won’t be back for hours.” He stroked the heavy coat of fur on his companion’s hind-body soothingly. “. . . And I want you now.”
Aran looked over his shoulder at the other for a long, uncertain moment before nodding and bracing his canine paws on the carpeted floor. His hands went out to grip the edge of the bedside table in front of him.
Jess made an approving sound, and Aran waited patiently as he stepped forward, reared slightly, and gently began to settle his centauroid body onto Aran’s. Jess’ arms encircled his forechest.
It was only a few minutes later, both of them deeply involved in the coupling, yips and other small noises filling the room, when the door crashed open, bouncing back from the wall stop. The boys’ heads snapped around, their hearts hammering.
“. . . always so cute and eager to please—” Two A’kii women, little older than girls, stood framed by the doorway. Tika’s voice trailed off as she noticed the room’s occupants. Michila’s jaw dropped in shock as she stared past the younger girl’s shoulder.
Jess slid off Aran’s back, his sudden withdrawal painful in Aran’s hindquarters, and broke past the still-frozen squad-sisters. They half-turned to pursue for a moment before changing their minds to concentrate on the target they knew.
Aran cowered against the far wall as the larger females crowded through the door, his pleading whimpers lost in their rising growls. The frightened boy frantically searched Tika’s face for the gentleness she’d shown in the months since he’d been assigned to the squad. There was no trace of it now, just hateful eyes that didn’t see him, that saw only what he’d done.
He flinched when her hand snaked toward his face, but the pain he expected didn’t come. She held his muzzle shut and hissed, “You stupid little faggot! How could you do—that—that—” The fist released him, only to smash across his muzzle. Aran reeled back against the wall, his nose and lips bloodied, and staggered as another blow slammed down on his shoulder.
Michila hooked an unsteady foreleg out from under him, sprawling him on his side. The girl half-mounted her victim, pinning him with her weight, and hooked an arm around his throat, choking him and forcing his injured muzzle up. “Bad enough yer cheatin’ on us at all, and it’s gotta be another guy!” She braced her forelegs against the base of his forechest and raked with her hindclaws, tearing long, shallow gashes down his flank. His own neatly pedicured claws scrabbled uselessly against the wall.
Aran yelped in panic, his eyes filled with tears as much from the sudden hatred as from the pain. Somehow he noticed that Tika was crying too, but it didn’t stop her blows on his forequarters as they pounded the air from his lungs. A dark fog narrowed his vision as he fought for breath.
Suddenly Michila’s weight left him, and he writhed weakly, trying instinctively to protect his vitals, trying desperately not to vomit. He barely saw Tika standing over him, shaking with rage, ears down and lips drawn back in a snarl. Her fists knotted and opened and her eyes seemed glazed above tear-stained cheeks, as if she were unsure what to do next.
Michila had already made up her mind. She stormed across the room to yank a drawer completely out of the bedside table, then dumped it across the nearby bed and threw the drawer aside, her eyes fastening on a spool of picture-hanging wire. She picked it up, hands trembling, and looped one end around the knuckles of one hand. The wire hummed just audibly in the now-quiet room as she snapped it taut between her hands.
“We’ll kill you,” she promised, her voice a growl. “We’ll start with your balls, you little freak, and work our way up. Even if the traditions didn’t say so, we’d kill ya.” The wire lashed at his face, leaving another bloody streak in his fur. “For what you did to the squad, t’me and Tika and our sisters.”
“I don’t think so,” a new voice interjected. All three looked at the still-open door, Aran squinting through a haze of pain.
“Kwachef! What do you mean?” Michila looked outraged, ready to challenge her squad leader’s breach of tradition.
“I mean that you will stop beating Aran. Right now.” The kwachef was calm and appeared sure of herself. The assailants hesitated as tradition warred with obedience for a moment; Aran lay gasping, unable to do much more.
In the silent pause, the senior squad-sister strode forward, lowered her forebody, and picked Aran up by the neck and one forearm. She hauled his unresisting body through the small suite of rooms that belonged to her months-old squad and stopped at the front door that led out onto the clanhouse courtyard.
The two other girls had followed, still seething, but not daring to disobey their kwachef. “Open the door,” that worthy commanded. As Tika stepped forward, she turned to Aran and continued in a lower, but no less intense, voice. “Dammit, I want to kill your ass too. But these’re new times, and the Centrality’s watching, and I’ll be damned if I let my girls be a bad example for the outworlders—let alone any other squads.” She surged through the now-open door, getting up a head of steam, then swung him out and away before letting go. “Don’t ever come back, you little tradition-flouter.” Among the A’kii, that epithet cut worse than any obscenity.
Aran’s battered body flailed and tumbled into the plush-moss lawn. He lay for a moment, lungs heaving, crying silently with pain and humiliation. What finally forced him to stand was the sound of dozens of paws thudding in a lope toward him. He looked back, just once, and scratched off into an unsteady run at the sight of a small lynch mob of females, led by Michila, headed straight for him.
Once he caught his wind, he moved a little better, but only the fact that he was just one individual weaving through the maze of the clanhouse grounds kept him ahead of his pursuers. After what seemed like hours, he burst out of a side gate and onto a township street, skidding to a stop. A wheeled covered platform—typical A’kii motor transport—swerved, nearly spilling its load of centaur-canids and baggage.
Aran paid the vehicle little mind, once he was sure it wouldn’t hit him. He looked around wildly, then his eyes fastened on something visible above the nearby roofs. A fresh jolt of adrenalin accompanied the first feeling of hope he’d had since being discovered. A Centrality flag! The medical mission! He wheeled and dashed off, less than a second ahead of the enraged mob.
A hue and cry went up, and Aran’s heart leaped in his hindbody. Some of the passersby simply gaped, while others joined the chase. None, though, attempted to interfere. Their quarry sobbed in terror and frustration as he wove between the blocky clanhouses of the town, racing down the broad boulevards.
At one intersection, he barrelled out just as an imported gravsled floated majestically across his path. Without breaking stride, he ducked his forebody out flat and galloped under the massive machine. The clearance was nonexistent, and he accumulated a few more bruises along his back.
The growing posse behind him broke like a wave against the sled, milling and shouting as they regained their bearings. Aran didn’t stop; it was probably his only chance to disappear out of their line of sight. He rounded a last corner and spotted the encampment of the visiting Centrality Army Medical Corps company ahead. Hope turned to anxiety as he realized that the whole camp was surrounded by a temporary smart-fence. He sprinted on, looking for an opening in the barrier.
He’d reached the second side of the roughly square camp when his twitching, pointed ears told him that the furies had picked up his trail once more. He sped on, oblivious to the khaki-clad figures inside the fence who turned to view the spectacle. There had to be a gate!
There was. A vehicle drop-gate had lowered to allow an armored grav transport to glide out onto the road ahead of him. As the vehicle commander and the gate guards gaped, Aran gathered himself for the leap of his life, scant meters ahead of grasping arms. He sailed across the opening, over the still-active gate mesh lying on the ground, and tumbled across the dusty, trampled ground of the Centrality extraterritoriality zone. He’d hit hard in the nearly one-and-a-half-gravity of A’kii’rii’s surface, and lay for long moments feeling only the agony of his abused, overextended body, and seeing nothing at all.
His dully aching body swathed in bandages, Aran lay on a double-size cot in a tiny tent ward. He’d apparently caused quite a stir in the week he’d been in the camp, between the story he’d finally managed to stumble through, the almost literally howling mob outside the fence, and the outworlder officers’ reports to their superiors. The medical personnel had treated the boy kindly, a new and wonderful experience for him, but he’d been able to gather no more than a few details from them, leaving him in continual apprehension.
Nervous speculation was interrupted by the entry of a large, barrel-chested two-legged alien, his shovel-like jaw lined with what looked like cilia. His voice was surprisingly gentle as he rumbled, “Good day. I am Captain Sholoviera. You are . . . Aran. Correct?”
Aran replied, “Uh-huh. Wh-what’s gonna happen now?”
“Good question. Local clan is demanding your return. Do you want to go back?”
“N-no! They’d kill me!”
“Ah. They try not to say that, but they do not hide it well. Why do they wish this on you?”
Aran stared at the interlocking rubberized mats that formed the tent’s floor. “I . . . was caught with another boy. . . .”
The captain rubbed the top of his head, giving off a slight scraping sound. “For this they kill you?”
Fear and hurt and confusion churned in Aran’s stomach, and he looked up into the other’s eyes. “Well, yeah—that’s the tradition.”
Sholoviera hunkered down beside the bed. This put his eyes on a level with Aran’s as he said slowly, “Suppose you explain tradition.”
Aran hesitated. Explain things that had been a part of his life since he was born? The big alien waited patiently as the boy painfully groped for words.
“Th-the clan mothers put me in a brand-new squad just a few months ago. We, um, males, we’re s’posed to, to serve our squads, and to m-make pups with the squad-sisters. But I like boys better, an’ that’s bad, ’cause it’s not the way things’re s’posed to be.”
“Squad of eight A’kii women gets one man?”
“Uh, yeah, of course.” Aran looked confused.
Sholoviera looked for a moment as if he were about to continue, but paused and said, “Go on.”
“So when J-Jess ’n’ I got caught, they were gonna kill me, but the kwachef—the squad leader—threw me out instead. The others were gonna kill me anyway, and I had to get away.”
“You could not just leave the squad, or the clan?”
“It’s our place, the clan is everything! I, I’ve defiled myself, the laws say . . .” Aran trailed off into a whimper.
“A’kii law does not apply here. This is Centrality dirt. So. But regulations say nobody can stay after recovery, unless they are army personnel.”
That was the final straw, and Aran burst into tears and canine whines of distress. The captain leaned forward, putting a giant hand on the youth’s shoulder. “You are safe for now, boy. Still a week, maybe two—”
Aran scrubbed at his eyes. “B-but I’ll still haveta go back, ’cause I’m not in the . . .” A sudden inspiration struck. “I wanna join up. I want to be in the Army.”
Sholoviera straightened up again. “Sure? Hard work, tough on a boy like you.”
The A’kii was plainly frightened, but he sat up and said, “It . . . it’s better’n being killed.”
The sauroid head nodded. “Okay. I’ll get paperwork. You rest.”
The youngster lay back in relief, not registering until much later how the officer’s cilia twitched with satisfaction as he turned to leave. Aran’s mind was on something else.
He wondered if Jess had managed to get away in all the ruckus. Ω
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