Indentured Bride by Yamila Abraham Page B

the robot said.
    “I want…love.”  She began to fade midway through the sentence.  Silence followed long enough for her to drift back toward the deeper waters of her delirium. 
    “Oh, I see.”  The robot’s voice had an echo.  “Yes.  Very good.  I will make arrangements for you to become a war concubine.”
    War…concu…?
    There was an inkling of a strong reaction, but in her delirium she thought she’d be punished if she objected out loud.  Ten years of tr’sark zaps, sleep deprivation, and browbeating had caused a defensive wall to build inside her.  It remained steadfast, even when her mind was filled with fog.  Unconsciousness was tugging at her brain, making things go murky every other second.  She finally relinquished herself to its pull.
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    When she next woke everything was sharp in her mind. 
    She sat up in the hospital bed and pieced everything together.  Apparently the Hax-Rah had signed a treaty that prevented them from torturing their slaves.  A treaty with the Alliance…that’s what he’d said.  This had to be the same Alliance that had promised to send them help ten years ago.  Why didn’t they just liberate them?
    She placed her forehead in her hand and put that thought aside.  The fog in her mind had cleared, but she had a throbbing headache.  The robot had something else that was like an itch deep inside her brain. 
    She stiffened.  
    War concubine.  
    That’s what the robot had said right?  Or had she just dreamed it? 
    No.  She was talking about Troy and he’d misunderstood.  He thought he was giving her what she wanted.
    Her brow pinched as she tried to think things through.  Normally getting out of the slave compound would be something to celebrate.  She’d been turned into a machine by cruel masters wielding those insidious tr’sarks.  Even when she was able to avoid punishment, they worked her seventeen hours a day and gave her and all the other slaves a single meal of powdery mush and then a single opportunity to take water at the communal fountain.  She could never slake her thirst fully because the crime of needing to leave her station for the bathroom was a tr’sark burn on the bottom of her foot. 
    Thinking of it all now, with her mind well rested for the first times in years, made her shudder.  Nothing could be worse than the hell she’d endured for the last ten years, right?
    Except rape.  Rape would be worse.
    Oh, God.
    Later in the day, after she’d eaten rehydrated vegetables and managed to get up and walk around, a robot and a wizened Hax-Rah man entered the room.  He had cruel pale yellow eyes surrounded by deep wrinkles.  His coloration was the usual reddish-purple, but with some yellowing on his forehead, likely from age.  He was still gigantic, standing well over six feet with shoulders as wide as car tires. 
    The alien man stood over her bed a moment staring at her.  The robot flanked the opposite side of her bed.
    “You volunteered to be a war concubine, correct?”
    Tabitha’s throat grew tight.  I was delirious.  I don’t even know what that is.  I never volunteered for anything.
    No.  Slaves who sniveled were always tortured the worst. 
    Still…
    “No, serat.”
    “Serat is the female term!”  He barked the admonishment while sending out a dot of spittle.  “You will call me, hith .”
    “No, hith.”  All her masters had been women thus far.  She presumed that was because the men were out conquering worlds for their empire.
    “What do you mean, no?  Diplomo said you should be granted the opportunity to switch from slave to indentured servant.  That’s a war concubine.  It’s the only indenturement offered to your people in the treaty.”
    Tabitha blinked at him.  Indentured servant, if he was using the archaic term correctly, was something she’d studied in a history class long ago.  It had insidious connotations in her own country’s history.  This was