Chapter 3

The large aliens had bound his hands with thick ropes, most likely made from sinew taken from their large animals, Lami thought. Whatever it was made from, it was flexible enough to be tied around his wrists and strong enough to be used even for tying up their large beasts.

Still, he had to actively remind himself to be careful, so he didn’t accidentally break the flimsy ropes. It would not be in his best interest to scare his captors. No, for now, his plan was to gain their trust by showing them he was harmless, in the hope he would be able to determine if they had actually met the lost expedition.

The leader of the band had hoisted him up onto the large creature that was his, placing Lami on his knee like a small boy out on his first horse ride with his father. Had it not been his intention to allow the aliens to take him with them, the whole situation would have been somewhat humiliating, Lami mused. But such feelings were irrelevant—he was a Sunguard Special Agent, and as such, the mission was all that mattered.

They had been riding through the thick snow for a little more than three hours when they finally arrived at the tribal village. Had he been biological, it would have been difficult to keep track of the time on this tidally locked world where the sun neither set nor rose. But he was a biot, capable of tracking the passage of time with the precision of an atomic clock if he wanted to—not that it really mattered how long the journey had taken. The important thing was, he was here now.

The village was located in the shadows of a small ridge, which offered its inhabitants some limited shelter from the ever-present hurricane blowing in from the east, as the atmosphere on the day side boiled and raged, driving the jet streams that encircled the planet.

At first glance, the village seemed larger than it was. It was easy to forget the aliens were so much larger than him—what initially had appeared to be a small town was really not much more than a hamlet. Around it, driven into the permafrost, were sharpened stakes forming a rudimentary palisade. Lami idly wondered what kind of enemies—or predators—the people living here expected to have to defend themselves against. If the beasts they were riding on were any indication, he expected the predators around here to be quite formidable, too.

The entrance through the wall around the village was made from large hides strung over frames made from giant tusks and bones. They weren’t exactly doors—there were no hinges on them, and they were just piled up against the palisade, filling the hole in the wall that served as the doorway and held in place by large rocks. As they approached, the women inside the compound rushed out and lifted the frames away by hand. To Lami, it appeared that the women had spotted the approaching warriors long before they themselves were within visual distance of the compound. When the palisade emerged from out of the snowstorm, the women were already busy unblocking the entrance.

Inside the compound were multiple triangular buildings, each as high as a two-story Terran house. Interspersed with these huts were half-open sheds for butchering, tanning, and storage of giant bales of hay. To the right of the open plaza in front of the entrance, a line of low, square-shaped buildings stood next to a pit or a wide ditch. To the left of the entrance, nestled against the barricade wall, was a long row of stalls, into which the band of warriors rode their beasts. After dismounting, they secured their rides firmly with the thick sinew ropes they were carrying.

The leader of the band slid off his mount, and with one hand, he lifted Lami down to the ground. To the Special Agent, it felt as if he were a kitten, being hoisted around in the mouth of its mother.

Once down on the ground, the band leader poked him with his spear, prodding Lami to walk in front of him until they reached one of the large, triangular huts in the middle of the village. The roof of the triangular building stretched unbroken from nook to ground, and inside, the floor was raised half a meter, creating an A-frame that trapped the air in a bubble below the rough wooden panels that made up its floor, insulating the inside of the hut from the permafrost below. The nook-to-ground roofs probably served a similar purpose, Lami guessed—they would help preserve the heat inside by catching the wind howling along the ground and raising it up above the buildings, keeping the warm air inside from being pushed out of the houses.

Without further ceremony, Lami found himself tied up to a stake at the back of the women’s communal hut. It made him sad to see that here, like on so many other worlds where the men were physically larger than the women, the males had used their size advantage to place themselves at the top of the status pyramid. Lami knew this wasn’t a biological imperative—for both Kelar and Jerrassians, there were no differences in size between the genders—but it was still common enough. On most worlds where intelligence had emerged from species prone to hunt and fight, those races tended to evolve large males to do the physically dangerous work and smaller females to handle all the rest.

It kind of worked up to a point, Lami thought, when innovation and technology made the size discrepancy irrelevant and the larger men remained at the top not because they had to be there for the survival of their tribe anymore, but simply because they could.

As a biot, he understood this intellectually—but he could never share the sentiment. The notion that all people had equal value was literally encoded into his genes, and the very idea that people could be treated differently because of their race, gender, or status was, to him, preposterous and entirely foreign.

Then again, he mused, if the women here were treated as second-class members of the tribe, he was third-class—or perhaps even fourth, if you counted the large animals the men rode on.

For the first three days, he was given neither water to drink nor food to eat. Day and night, he stood tied to the pole, given no respite from the suffering inflicted by his captors. For a biological human, the experience would have been excruciating—not to say lethal. For Lami, it was a learning experience.

The pain he could easily deal with. Rather than turning it off completely, he decided to set his pain management to emulation mode. He now registered the pain as data points, no longer having to be distracted by the feelings. But at the same time, his brain automatically emulated a proper pain response without him having to think about it consciously. To the women sharing the hut with him, his face seemed to wince in pain, his back appeared to contort from having been tied up too long, and his legs shook from exhaustion that wasn’t there. For Lami, this was a subconscious response that he didn’t really notice, leaving his mind free to work on more important problems.

During his time tied to the pole, no one spoke a single word to him—but when the women in the hut talked to each other, Lami listened. His language cortex was pre-made with the thousand most common languages within the Terran Federation, but this data bank wasn’t static. He also had the ability to rapidly decipher and learn new languages. As he watched the women interact with each other, one by one, the pieces of the puzzle he needed to lay fell into place. A word of greeting found its meaning when he heard it being used every time two of the aliens met. A gender pronoun was cracked when he realized the word was only used for the men, and a noun discovered when it turned out to be predominantly used whenever the women were eating.

His grasp of the alien language wasn’t perfect, of course. By now it was clear to him that the very first word he had recognized—Minvali—was the name of the alien people that held him captive. But other words were more difficult to learn. Without anyone talking to him, there were certain types of conversations he never got the chance to hear. And then there would always be words that were too abstract to be deciphered without actually asking someone for their meaning. For example, he had learned that the aliens said ilahu when they talked about him—but did the word refer to him specifically, to his species, or to foreigners in general? There was no way of knowing.

Three days later, the tribal chief—a man called Sote—entered the hut where he was held captive, and without so much as a single word, cut him down from the pole. Falling to the ground in mock exhaustion, Lami held up his bound wrists in an attempt to entice the alien to untie his hands as well, but Sote ignored his silent plea. Instead, the chief shouted ilahu fatame to the women—feed him, or feed the foreigner, Lami thought. Or possibly food for the foreigner—the Minvali language seemed to often use the same word for the noun and the action verb.

Within a minute, his rough translation of the alien language was confirmed when one of the older women living in the hut brought him a bowl of cooked grain and a second, smaller bowl of crystal-clear water.

Eating with his hands bound was not a problem. The Minvali didn’t use utensils, and scooping up the grain was about as messy with a rope tied around his wrists as it would have been if he had been free.

Lami didn’t need the food, of course, but if he was to figure out what had happened to the missing Sunguard expedition, it was important that he continued to build trust with the Minvali. He was certain they had met the Terrans, and one day he hoped they would be willing to tell him what they knew. So the Sunguard officer ate in silence, with the tribal chief watching him, contempt evident on his pale purple face.

Once he had emptied his two bowls, the chief reached for his spear and slapped both of Lami’s shoulders with it. He found the act almost amusing, as if the leader of the tribe were dubbing him a knight in one of the tales from Old Earth. But given the angry look on Sote’s face, Lami was quite sure he was not about to be given a job that noble.

Two minutes later, his suspicions were confirmed when a teenage girl entered the hut, carrying two sets of staves with large buckets tied to their ends. With little consideration for his comfort, she placed yokes on his back, one stave balancing on each shoulder. They were clearly not built for his smaller frame, but Lami guessed this was on purpose—the Minvali wanted to make him suffer, even as they made use of him for manual labor. Still, he accepted the burden without complaints. If carrying water for the tribe brought him closer to his goal, it was surely worth a little discomfort.

He did wonder, however, what he had done to make the aliens hate him that much.

The teenager pushed him to walk, indicating he should leave the building. Pretending to strain under the weight, Lami stumbled forward. Once outside the darkness of the hut, the bright whiteness of the blizzard outside hit his eyes like a wall. The Special Agent quickly adjusted the size of his iris to compensate, while simultaneously dialing up the ISO rating of the photoreceptive cells in his eyes.

Once outside, Lami quickly realized he had been wrong about his new job. Now that he stood in the compact snow covering the ground inside the compound, he realized he had made a mistake in his assumptions. There would, of course, be no reason to carry water to the village. In the subzero temperatures of the frozen tundra, there was no liquid water to be found anywhere. Both men and animals drank by eating—or melting—the ubiquitous snow. In essence, the entire compound was already filled with all the drinking water they would need.

Which meant whatever he was about to be tasked to carry wasn’t water.

With a sigh, Lami realized the intentions of his captors. Even if there was no need to carry water into the village, there was one other type of liquid that needed to be carried out from it, to ensure the pristine snow falling from the sky never got contaminated.

The Sunguard Special Agent’s new job was to empty the latrine.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While Choices of Steel is entirely standalone, I think you’ll particularly enjoy Soldier of Steel, which serves as a prequel to this story, and Conscience of Steel, which is something of a sequel.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

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