Moro's Price Page 4

  Kott’s other hand hooked through the loop of the Diamond’s collar. Neural implants and mental conditioning took over as the Diamond felt the gentle pressure around his throat, the drag on the back of his neck. Lust fogged his eyesight. He wobbled fetchingly on his spiked boots. Even their added height only brought his eyes up to Kott’s nose, and the Diamond was not a small man.

  “Ah, but we all know what our songbird really wants,” called Kott. “A chance to sing!”

  To the crowd’s next roar, Kott popped the candy in his own mouth. His free hand swept down to the Diamond’s hips, found the thin drawstring of the modest black silk shorts, and broke it with a sudden twist. The fabric fluttered down, shredding to ribbons when it reached knife-spiked boots. Kott’s fingers fondled the uncut tip of the Diamond’s hardening cock.

  Kott brought his hand up to his own mouth, removing the candy. He painted his lips, then the Diamond’s, with the sticky sweetness.

  The bondslave tasted his own salt mixed with artificial mango and opened his mouth for Kott’s possessive, grinding kiss. His arm was numb from Kott’s grip. The bondmaster’s free hand dragged down across the Diamond’s face, further smearing the cosmetics. Kott clutched the Diamond’s hair, undoing the club the medics had bound it into before the unscheduled matches.

  Don’t fight, don’t talk, don’t think, warned the part of the slave’s mind that was still Moro. I’ll gain nothing but a public beating by resisting. Just let it happen.

  The Diamond heard the golden chains rattle above him as the ornate scrollwork cage lifted higher. Of course, the arena patrons would want a better view. A familiar clank warned the Diamond when a central pillar dropped and locked into a spot on the floor. Somewhere far outside the chamber, a starship’s engines complained about liftoff, their deep rumble caressing the Diamond’s bones.

  He brought his hands toward the front of Kott’s pants. The bondmaster pushed them away. “Turn around and hold the pillar,” Kott ordered. For the first time in years the Diamond could not read his master’s expression.

  He pivoted slowly for the crowd, bending forward at the waist and slapping his hands in place on the golden pillar. Two crossbars unfolded from recessed tracks. He shifted his hands to them, grateful for the support. A medic tightened a black silk scarf around the Diamond’s wrists, binding him to the pillar.

  Kott dug his fingers into the Diamond’s cleft. “You’re still slick. Good. By now you know I can make you want this even without the collar, right?”

  “Y-y-yes, S-Sero K-Kott.”

  Kott kicked the Diamond’s booted feet apart. Cloth rustled, Kott’s pants shifting down around his ankles. Squatting again, he pulled the Diamond’s hips back. A spotlight stabbed from above, splashing their shadows across the floor. Brilliant rainbow reflections splashed over the distorted black shapes. Since the afternoon, Kott had added a jeweled cage over his cockhead.

  The Diamond had seen it used to punish other slaves. He went limp as Kott breached him, pushing pain back into the same mental prison where his fury seethed.

  Forced to hold him upright, Kott cursed, reached higher, and slapped his face.

  The Diamond felt it nearly as a caress. Sometimes, at the right times, agony centered him and transmuted into a kind of pleasure. He’d been able to do it since childhood, but it wasn’t something a wise man shared with his gran, his girlfriend, or his boyfriend. Not when he was already considered a freak. But to reach that plateau, he had to let go of fear and anger, let go of his mind, and step back from his body. Someday, he thought, he’d go far enough away that he’d never come back.

  “You can’t!” screamed those lost, beloved voices in his memory. “They want you to go away. Fight, Moro! Stay!”

  He vaguely heard the arena crowd growl its disapproval. A limp toy wasn’t as fun as a thrashing, screaming victim.

  The audio amplified a feedback loop of someone’s moans. The sound faded into static hiss. Vision narrowed to a distorted tunnel and then went black. In the blackness nothing touched him, not even the voices of his dead.

  He could stay here forever.

  One impossibly distant white light kindled in the darkness, another old friend he’d seen on some of these dives into the abyss. It never came closer. Sometimes it vanished, as if disappointed in him…

  Blink. The light left him. The Diamond braced his mind for a maelstrom of color, sound, and pain collapsing to a burst of false pleasure, too quickly over to be any real orgasm.

  Gasping, hips shaking, the slave tried to regain his calm.

  “Wake up, my lovely. I need you here for this.” Kott grunted, lifting up, digging deeper with each thrust, forcing the Diamond onto his toes. “I need you listening. Are you with me?”

  “Y-y-yes, S-Sero Kott!” The Diamond’s breath was harsh and fast. His feet and arms ached. He desperately wanted Kott to pull back on his collar again, to once more explode shame and need into mindless release, but Kott only laughed.

  “Beg me to end this.”

  “P-please, Sero K-Kott,” the Diamond panted.

  “Ah, then I’ll end it. We had a good run these eight years,” Kott growled into the Diamond’s ear. “Were it up to me, I’d sign off your contract tomorrow. You’d be free, rich, and forever mine.”

  Nearly out of his mind with new frustration, the Diamond couldn’t make sense of his master’s regretful tone. “Sero K-Kott? M-Michol?”

  “Mara damn me, I want you.” Kott pushed his bondslave’s thighs farther apart and hauled them up around his own grinding hips. The Diamond’s bound hands clenched white on the golden crossbars. “Turns out I’ve only rented your charms,” whispered Kott. “Someone else owns you, mind and body. With a price so high you’ll never pay it off.”

  Impaled, lifted off his feet, feeling a new orgasm approach with the inevitability of a solar flare, the Diamond slowly comprehended. “M-Michol, n-n-no!”

  Very clearly, so the audio could pick it up, Kott said, “Your first master wants you back.”

  The Diamond remembered his first master. A year of hellish pleasure and methodical humiliation, so horrible—so spectacular—that Kott had seemed kindly by comparison.

  The warped part of him wanted it again.

  The Diamond screamed, spending himself in powerful, creamy-white bursts raining over flowers, jewels, glitter, candy, hard-credits, and a bloody steel floor. The Diamond couldn’t hide the anguish and shame twisting his face. Kott plundered him for a few more thrusts. The Diamond felt hot liquid fill his channel. His muscles rippled helplessly against Kott’s pulsing cock and its jeweled crown. Kott bit him gently on the left shoulder, almost mouthing a kiss. The bondmaster pulled back on the collar loop with his teeth.

  A different kind of pleasure wrapped white-hot arms around the Diamond and took him away from the world again.

  The Diamond revived as Kott pulled out of him and set him back on his feet. He leaned forward against the golden pillar and closed his eyes, trying to keep the tears in.

  Kott patted him on the ass. “Gentlefolk, say farewell to the Diamond, who will be leaving the arena circuit for a well-deserved retirement. We will not see his like again!”

  Only Kott’s grip on him kept upright as the flashbacks hit with brutal clarity.

  Eight

  NINE YEARS BEFORE, in a courtroom on Ventana, a man called Lyton Sardis stood behind the furious, terrified eighteen-year-old boy the Diamond had once been. Sardis kept a companionable hand on the boy’s left shoulder. He pointed an energy pistol into the boy’s right side, in plain view of everyone who would not look directly at Sardis.

  Young and naive, the boy had been more frightened of the gun than the elegantly dressed man holding it. The two of them watched silently while weary, stunned freeborn and bonders straggled out of the courtroom.

  Ventana Holding had fallen to a corporate takeover. Young Jost Ventana was dead by his own hand, said the reporters. Any freeborn person who wouldn’t sell their land at a ruinously low value was to
be thrown off it. Every generous bond contract once negotiated by Jost’s ancestors was now owned by the multiworld terraforming conglomerate Rio Sardis and its director. “Re-allocation of resources” was lawyer speak for scattering the defiant bondslaves of Ventana across the star systems of the League.

  “They called you a silver-tongued young activist,” Lyton had said mockingly behind him. “The bonderboy who tried to better himself. The whistle-blower. How many of them love you now? They should have sold everything to me when they had the chance.”

  The Diamond couldn’t remember what he’d answered, only Lyton’s next words: “You are very beautiful, Moro. I see why Jost treasured you. The law says you turned eighteen yesterday. And now I own you. Did you know there are at least twenty kinds of virginity? If you prove worthy of me this afternoon, we’ll start stripping them from you, one by one.”

  THE DIAMOND BLINKED away memory and brought himself back to the suddenly harsher present.

  One medic undid the black scarf binding his wrists to the pillar. Another worked his sore, unresisting arms into the sleeves of a short, black silk robe. Someone unlocked the boots from his feet. A daring hand brushed across the back of his collar. The Diamond shivered but for once felt no vast, swooning pleasure. The pillar was cool against his forehead. He heard Kott say something. The meaning didn’t register.

  The bondmaster dragged the Diamond around to face him. “You in there, boy?” A medic murmured something about shock.

  The Diamond didn’t respond.

  Someone asked if they should clean him. The Diamond was filthy with smeared cosmetics, tangled hair, his skin sticky with blood and candy. He reeked with an evening’s worth of adrenaline-rank sweat. Kott’s prodigious lather oozed down his bare legs.

  Kott said, “No. Sardis might enjoy washing him.”

  Another memory: a honeymoon resort on an expensive moon called Dala. There had been vivid green ferns and red ginger flowers edged black lava-rock steps beyond the stream bank. Warm water thundered down a cliff. Restraints held Moro faceup in a sling, moving in and out of the torrent as Lyton fucked him. Lyton breathed easily through synthetic gills. Moro, his own breathing gear left just out of reach on the bank, gasped and struggled not to drown. His climax had been shattering. The second time Lyton put him in the sling, Moro had simply opened his mouth and breathed in as much of the water as he could. Waking up in a private hospital had been no reprieve, either.

  Now, in the Cedar-Saba arena, the Diamond shook his head, remembering the first of many suicide attempts. The rich Apex-worlders loved their mind-scan tech and unimaginably good medical care. For slaves, those miracles meant there was almost no final escape.

  Two of the arena medics had brought a floating gurney. Kott waved them away. “Sero Kott, he’s damaged!” protested one man.

  “I’ll bring him down to the stable in a little while,” the bondmaster growled. “Go!”

  Kott refastened his pants, then leaned close, and ruffled the Diamond’s hair.

  “W-why?” the Diamond whispered. Only his thoughts screamed: Why did you keep me? Why did you hurt me this evening? Why are you letting Sardis take me?

  “Oh, my beauty, I had no choice in the end,” Kott said, stroking his hair. “Sardis bought my bond when I was eighteen too. I’ve been slave-breaking men and women for him for fifty years. He was specific when he sent you to me eight years ago. He wanted you trained, shamed, and used. But not broken. He wants to finish that himself.”

  The Diamond shuddered, resting his head on Kott’s chest.

  “I must call Sardis in a few minutes,” Kott said. “I’ll find out when he wants to collect you. He won’t wait long. As randy as he is over you, we’ll probably have less than twenty minutes before he arrives. Are you listening?”

  The Diamond nodded.

  “Go to the rooftop garden. If anyone asks, say I want to have your mouth again. The garden’s a pretty place, but don’t stray near the balcony. They don’t spend good money on public safety in south Saba. No catch-beams or nets for drunk fools.”

  The Diamond looked up, startled by the fierce emotion he read in his master’s voice.

  “I have a better master now, someone cold and cunning, a million times smarter than Sardis. Sardis doesn’t own me anymore. I don’t think he should have you, too.”

  “T-take m-me?”

  Kott gave him a pained look. “My new master has other plans for you. Now go,” Kott ordered, pushing him away.

  ON THE STEEL floor, some of the blood smears were already separating into red clots and clear plasma. Other splashes remained whole but were turning a darker red. A servant mopped up one mess with a white rag and looked puzzled when the smear went utterly black and simply vanished off the cloth.

  The Diamond shuddered at the sight. Once outside him, sooner or later, his shed blood disappeared on its own. Kott had waved it off as just another freak aspect of his prize slave. Lyton had used that as an excuse for more torture.

  Not many people were left inside the echoing arena, and they had jobs more important than watching him. No one challenged the Diamond as he stepped, wincing, off the cage platform. He saw the garden access door standing open, a tall rectangle of black, glittering night. As he reached the aisle leading to the access, sudden movement alongside made him jump and shift to an attack position.

  A life-size holographic poster on one wall showed the Diamond himself, striking the same gladiator’s pose in a more glamorous moment. Sunlight kindled cobalt reflections off the wavy black hair coiling over his shoulders to his narrow waist. His exposed, pale skin shone like pearl against the spiked black steel collar, boots, gloves, and bracers. A sky-blue scarf draped from left hip to right thigh, barely covering his genitals. Dramatic makeup accented his strong, pointed chin and high cheekbones. Heavy kohl on his eyelids made his large black irises seem enormous.

  The man in the holo lacked a courtesan’s sulky, inviting pout. Kott had never beaten him into learning it, and now the Diamond knew why. The painted man in the holo tried for expressionless reserve, but fear and fury showed in his wide, dark eyes and the hard set of his mouth.

  A virgin’s face, still. No wonder the audiences gave their money night after night, watching the Diamond scowl in challenge, waiting for him to surrender in helpless lust.

  He’d learned to fight mostly to deny them as well as his attackers.

  As he watched, the holo changed to a brutally clear shot of him climaxing to Kott’s wonderful news. Lust was there, certainly, but spiked with terror and despair.

  The face Lyton Sardis wanted to see.

  Nine

  SEVERAL FLOORS DOWN from the arena, jostling, arguing customers surrounded the gaudy Golden Cage kiosk. Those unable to score tickets for the now legendary match itself consoled themselves with souvenir programs. Over the ticket counters large holos showed the famed Diamond in different poses and outfits. Since this was a public area, these were censored. The moving images in the holo programs weren’t, judging by the raised voices of their buyers.

  Under the cover of the commotion across the casino floor, a male medic ducked into an empty communication alcove. A few moments later a taller, gray-masked, and cloaked figure followed him. Several more such figures stood between the kiosk and alcove. No one paid them much attention. Many arena patrons didn’t want their identities known. Some used force to ensure their anonymity.

  The medic bowed to the cloaked man.

  The stranger held out his gray-gloved hands, and a small fortune in hard-credit chips, drawn off one of the League’s most prestigious banks. “Do you have it?” asked a deep male voice, his Terran Standard slightly accented. For a moment his eyes glowed a cold purple behind a smoky plastic mask.

  “Yes, Sero.” The medic nodded, taking the credits. He removed a dark plastic package from inside his medical bag. Frost traced filigree patterns across its surface. “In the stasis bag you provided. The Diamond’s blood and semen. Might be trace DNA from Malkovski or Kott.�
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  Twice a year for four years they’d had the same exchange. It didn’t matter what League world Kott chose for his stable’s next half-year or yearlong run. It could happen during any of the Diamond’s matches. The medic would notice the gray figures among the audience. The other patrons never reacted to them.

  His mysterious employers had paid for the medic’s new face and voice. They’d shown him how to bring the boy back from the edge of death, again and again. There was no love or kindness in the lessons, only brutal practicality. Their coin was poor Diamond’s blood and seed, always harvested under the most extreme stress.

  Now the shrouded figure held the new package flat on his upturned palms as if looking within it. “Such dross can be filtered. You have done well. How does the young one fare after this ordeal?”

  “Not good, Sero,” said the medic. “In some ways, worse than after Vance nearly killed him. Poor lad.”

  The figure offered another batch of credits. “You pity him now?”

  The medic stood his ground. “I’m from Ventana,” he said proudly. “He’s one of ours.”

  “You did not believe so when we began this arrangement.”

  “At first, I thought he sold us out to Sardis and murdered my kin. And others. To find proof, I changed identities and infiltrated Kott’s stable. I was going to kill the boy.”

  “We know. We would have terminated you before a real attempt. You refrained.”

  The medic didn’t allow himself to tense. He knew these were murderers, and worse.

  “I’ve seen more of Sardis’s handiwork since. If Moro truly did any of those things, it was Lyton Sardis using him. Moro won’t go back. I saw death on his face tonight. I’m sorry, Sero, but I think you are too late to rescue him. I couldn’t get him away from Kott. And Kott said…Kott said Moro was going back to his first master. Sardis?”

  “If he has broken under such little strain, he was not worth rescuing.”