My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire by Colin Alexander Page A

suicide.
    Wouldn’t it have been easier to put a camera in the cabin? Yes, if the proper equipment had been available. The ship hadn’t been designed with internal security in mind. While the materials necessary to create such a system could, no doubt, be found on the ship, it would have required some ingenuity to put it together. Carvalho’s freebooters, educated or not, were using equipment they could manipulate but didn’t really understand. It’s not such a strange situation. After all, I didn’t need a certification in gynecology in order to have sex. It was much the same with the ship. They could fly it, fight it and repair parts of it, but jury-rigging a surveillance camera, which required creative thought, they wouldn’t even consider. It was simpler to find a way to work without one, which accounted for the strict instructions about keeping my hands off.
    Given the lack of furniture in the cabin, the only place for the Little Mistress to sit was on the bed. She was there when I came in, although it would have been easy to mistake her for another piece of furniture. She sat utterly motionless, and no part of her was visible, thanks to a gray cloak that shrouded her from neck to ankle and had a deep hood that completely hid her face. All I could see, other than the cloak, was a pair of black half-boots, the type that was worn with a shipsuit. She didn’t acknowledge my entrance in any way.
    I felt awkward at being ignored. How do you introduce yourself to your kidnap victim when she doesn’t greet you?
    “Hi,” I said, “I’ve got your dinner.”
    For all the response I got, I might as well have stood there, as silent as she. Had I waited for her to say something, I would probably still be standing there. I was there to bring her dinner, so that’s what I did. I walked the tray over to the table, put it down and pushed the table in front of her. Even up close, the folds of the hood were too deep to see her face. Having left the tray, I retreated to the door and waited. And waited.
    Finally, I said, “Look, you know that I have to see that you eat it,” while wondering
how
I was going to do that.
    To my immense relief, there was a fractional nod and she began to comply. By virtue of picking up the utensil and the cover, her hands became visible. Their normalness was a bit of a surprise, since that all-encompassing cloak had built up fantasies in my mind about what type of being might be underneath it. The hands, however, were Srihani. They were small, which matched my estimate of the figure under the cloak, and covered with pale, white skin. One of them brought the food from the bowl up into the recesses of the hood. When the bowl was empty, the hands disappeared again. The meal finished, I was free to take the tray back and have my own dinner.
    At first, her silence didn’t bother me. In fact, I preferred it that way. I was ambivalent about holding a hostage; no matter what the empire was really like, it wasn’t her fault. By not talking to me, I figured she wasn’t going to make me feel any more guilty than I already did. I was glad for that because icing Kolgorinn had gained me a measure of acceptance from the crew, which I appreciated. Although I hadn’t fought alongside them yet, the standard by which they measured everyone, they did admit me to the social life of the ship. The humor could be a little rough, but I began to feel a part of the team.
    Except, that is, for the time I spent watching the Little Mistress eat. It got old fast, standing there with nothing to do while she ate and not reaching the mess until almost everyone else was done. Guilty feelings or not, I began to wish she would say something.
    The silence led me to invent conversations we could have. That was bad for me, because somewhere in each conversation would be the accusing question, “Why are you doing this to me?” No answer sounded good, even in the privacy of my head. Before too long, I really did want to talk with