"I recruited a batch of crew, is what. It says up there they'll be delivered within the day," said Zhao Chen.
"Crew? What crew?"
"Slave crew. Didn't you say those were the cheapest?"
"How much did it cost? Didn't you say you'd spent every last academy credit?"
"Wasn't pricey at all. 3,000 star coins, is all."
"If I remember right — the living-expense money in your account comes to only 3,000-odd star coins."
"That's right."
"………"
Black lines were already crawling across Zhao Wan'er's face. How had she never noticed, in all this time, just how hopelessly unreliable this brother of hers was?
"Here, take a look — this is the roster." Zhao Chen even brought up for Zhao Wan'er the roster of the slaves he'd bought, pictures and all.
The moment Zhao Wan'er saw the pictures, matters went from bad to worse.
Because they were, one and all, beast-folk — and what was more… every last one of them was a female beast-folk.
Zhao Wan'er glared at this brother of hers, her face gone dark. "Zhao Chen!"
……
In the end, Zhao Wan'er finished dressing Zhao Chen down and turned on her heel, storming off in high dudgeon.
The way she saw it, her brother had lost his wits and was set fast in his folly.
She would have to make ready for the worst — which was to say, to clean up the mess Zhao Chen left behind him.
As for Zhao Chen, once Zhao Wan'er had gone, he first washed and cleaned himself up, had a good long sleep, and changed into a fresh set of clothes.
By that time, the "slave crew" Zhao Chen had ordered had arrived as well.
"Good day to you — would you be Mr. Zhao Chen? These are the hundred slaves you ordered. If you'd be so good as to show me your ID card." A man wearing a professional smile appeared at the door of Zhao Chen's work bay.
Behind the man stood a row of mechanical carts, each draped in black cloth — 10 of them, every one three meters tall, four or five long, two wide.
Apart from those, not another soul was to be seen.
Zhao Chen produced his ID card and asked, puzzled, "So where are the people I ordered?"
"In here, of course." The man lifted the black cloth from one of the carts, laying bare the iron cages within.
The cages were roughly meter-high cubes, and inside each sat a beast-folk, arms wrapped about drawn-up knees, clothing in tatters, electronic shackles at neck and feet — every one of them gaunt, and frightened…
"This is the software that controls the electronic collars round their necks. The collars have both a shock function and a self-detonation function. Unless you enter the code to release them, any tampering from outside will set off the self-detonation," the man explained.
"I understand. And are these cages given to me as well?" Zhao Chen pointed at the apparatus.
"Of course." The man smiled.
These beast-folk had been dead weight on their hands a good long while; now that someone was at last willing to take them off their hands, what were a few mechanical carts and cages?
"Then I'll wheel them in myself." Zhao Chen pushed the dozen-odd mechanical carts into the work bay on his own.
He drew off all the black cloths.
And the beast-folk stood fully revealed before Zhao Chen's eyes.
They were of many kinds. Some were furred head to foot like true beasts; others were closer to human, but carried the ears or the tail of a beast. Of them, the three beast-strains most represented were dog, pig, and sheep.
And one among them drew the eye above all the rest.
That was a white-furred beast-folk woman, her eyes a pale blue, her gaze charged with menace and rage and a bitter refusal to yield; upon her head was a pair of broken white ears.
At the small of her back, too, there was a stub of broken white tail.
Her face and body, moreover, carried no few ugly scars; were it not for those scars, even as a beast-folk she'd have measured up well enough against the human standard of beauty.
This beast-folk woman Zhao Chen knew very "well" — for the single greatest reason he'd chosen this particular batch of beast-folk in the first place was this woman.
"Hello, General Charlotte."
The white-furred beast-girl looked up in some surprise that the man before her had, of all things, spoken her name aloud — and, most of all, that title.
"General Charlotte, born in the Black Fang Star Region of the Warhammer Interstellar Commonwealth, of the line of the White Tiger tribe. Out of anger at the way the local lord's regime ground down the beast-folk tribes across the star region, you rose up in revolt and raised an interstellar resistance army. Over three years, you fought no fewer than 50 interstellar engagements, great and small. You once commanded a 300-ship resistance fleet in a fierce battle against a 500-ship lord's fleet — and in the end won a bitter victory, destroying even one of the enemy's T3 starships. But at the last, three months ago, a traitor's betrayal laid your operation bare, and you were ambushed by an enemy fleet many times your number; your interstellar fleet was destroyed to the last hull, and afterward your whereabouts were unknown. I never dreamed you'd have fallen to slavery — and been trafficked, of all places, to the Starlight Empire." Zhao Chen recounted, point for point, the deeds of this beast-folk general before him.
Hearing the man lay out all this past, Charlotte's expression turned somewhat vacant.
Zhao Chen opened Charlotte's cage and sat down on the floor before her.
"So — care to have a talk with me?"
Charlotte gave a self-mocking little laugh. "Talk? I'm nothing now but a prisoner beneath your heel. What's there to talk about?"
"Your freedom, for one thing. And the freedom of those beast-folk soldiers who've fallen to the same lot as you."
Zhao Chen's words caught Charlotte's attention, and she fixed him with a wary stare. "What do you mean by that?"
Zhao Chen said with a smile, "I'll put it plainly. I have a starship, but I have no crew. So it's my hope that you and your people might serve as that crew."
"Heh, heh, heh… so it's free labor you're after, that's all. You bought us slaves for exactly this, didn't you?" Charlotte sneered.
"No, no, no. What I want is a crew — not slaves. Interstellar warriors willing to fight for me with all their hearts!" Zhao Chen corrected her.
"Beast-folk will never fight for another's sake." A pride all their own flashed in Charlotte's eyes.
"Even if you won't think of yourself, you ought at least to give some thought to those beast-folk warriors who once fought shoulder to shoulder at your side. As far as I know, your defeat saw close to 30,000 beast-folk sold as slaves into our Starlight Empire. I've bought only 100 of them. The rest, at this moment, hang between life and death. Don't you want to save them?" Zhao Chen fixed his eyes on Charlotte.
A wavering came into Charlotte's expression.
Zhao Chen knew he'd already won most of the way.
He rose to his feet. "Fight for me, and here is my promise: as far as my means allow, I will buy back every one of the beast-folk warriors once under your command, now scattered across the Starlight Empire. And once you have led them in fighting and laboring for me for the span of three years — when those three years are up, you and they will be free! So how about it? Will you fight for me? Or, to put it another way — will you fight for your freedom?"
Zhao Chen held out his hand to Charlotte within the cage.
Charlotte's expression was a tangled one, a whole shifting play of feeling in her eyes.
At the last, she reached out her own hand all the same, and clasped it with Zhao Chen's.
But she said, stubborn to the end, "This is for my people!"