Page 6 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded

“From Doctor Green, at the military base. He spoke to your psychologist, who confirmed that you’re still drinking heavily.”

Aiden had been busy, hadn’t he? Yes, I was still having weekly sessions with a military-appointed psychologist. Not that they did much good. They never had. “So the Doc is just handing out medication to anyone? Why would he give this toyou?” I was fairly sure it was against regulations to give prescription medication to anyone other than the patient. Then again, I had allowed Aiden to have access to my service record, so maybe that created some kind of loophole?

A faint smirk crossed Aiden’s face. “Well, first of all, these are entirely useless to anyone who isn’t an alcoholic. The withdrawal symptoms are caused by hyperactivity in the nervous system, as a result of removing the sedative effect of the alcohol. If I took one of those, the only thing that would happen is I’d feel a bit sleepy. And secondly, Doctor Green is going to be calling you tomorrow to confirm that you got them. And just in case you’re thinking about causing trouble on that front, if you don’t decide to get clean willingly, you’re going to rehab. That means an automatic discharge from the military and the removal of any accolades from your service record. Including that Green Star you got for saving the lives of three of your crewmates. Is that what you want? Because if you want to make life difficult, then I’m more than willing to meet you halfway.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Dax

Iwas a terrible dimari. I knew that, objectively, and I’d gathered plenty of evidence over the past year to back up the idea. I couldn’t follow rules. I couldn’t keep my opinions to myself. My master hated me. What more did I need to know?

And now, I was sitting in a café, across from a dimari who was everything that I was not, knowing with absolute certainty that my master was going to dismiss me from my job and send me back to Eumad, informing my trainers that I was every bit as useless as I knew myself to be.

Kade scanned the label on the corner of the table with his comm, then chose an order and sent it off to the kitchen. Meanwhile, I hadn’t even thought to bring my comm with me. My master had given me one, a few days after we’d arrived at his home, but he so rarely asked anything of me that I’d long ago given up wearing it. Kade’s was strapped to his wrist, the device shiny and clean, and the holographic screen it projected was crisp and clear. The device I’d been given was battered and worn, and the screen flickered when I tried to use it.

“I’ve ordered you some moloto juice and a Big Breakfast,” Kade informed me. “It must be a while since you’ve had a decent meal.”

I felt my scales ripple at the pointed reprimand. A good dimari would have pleased their master. A pleased master provided adequate food for their dimari. And therefore, if I was underweight, it was because I was a bad dimari.

There was no point in trying to justify anything I’d done over the past year to the man sitting across from me. He was the epitome of everything a dimari was supposed to be. Kade was strong. He was confident. His master was proud of him. That much was clear from the way he was given tasks and then left to complete them as he saw fit, without any further supervision. My master, on the other hand, didn’t even trust me to open the door to his house and greet a stranger.

“You’ve been here a year, haven’t you?” Kade asked, and I shrank down in my chair.

“Yes,” I said. A year of trying, and I hadn’t been able to please my master one tiny bit.

Kade sighed. The scales across his neck shimmered with faint ripples of colour, green and violet glowing briefly atop the brown he wore so casually. It was a typical sign of agitation in a Vangravian.

Was that what my master was so displeased with? I wondered, as I watched the display of colour. It hadn’t occurred to me to try and match my master’s colouring, my own scales naturally a light turquoise-blue, but perhaps he would have been happier with me if I’d tried to colour myself closer to his dusky brown skin. I’d never been particularly good at altering my colours, but I could at least have tried.

“I need to explain a few things to you,” Kade said. “Some of them are going to be difficult to understand. But the important thing to remember is that my master and I are both here to helpyou. We care a great deal about your wellbeing and we want you to succeed.”

My gut lurched, and for a moment, I found it difficult to breathe. “I see,” I said, feeling the crushing weight of dejection bearing down on me. “I’m such a terrible dimari that my master had to find another dimari to teach me how to do my job?” It was worse than I’d thought. I knew I was failing miserably at serving my master. But up until now, he’d mostly seemed disinterested in me, rather than angry or annoyed. But to decide to have me retrained, I must be truly awful.

“No, no, that’s not it at all,” Kade said, with what I felt was an excessive degree of earnestness. “It’s an entirely different problem. But the good news is that it’s a problem we can solve. Actually, there are two problems, but let’s deal with one at a time.”

I shrugged helplessly, feeling like each of my limbs weighed a tonne. My master hated me. What difference did it make to know the exact reasons why?

But Kade forged ahead, undeterred by my lack of enthusiasm. “You and I were raised on the same planet and we went through a large part of the same training. So it would be equally true for both of us that we were taught a great deal about a number of different species and what they expected of a dimari; the Basuba, the Fortusians, the Polvron. Each species has their own culture and their own expectations, and what is considered polite for one culture would be considered strange, or even rude, for a different culture. Do you agree?”

“Yes,” I said morosely. I knew myself well enough to know that the cultural specifications of my master were only a small part of the problem.

“So the first problem – which is a problem for every single dimari that ends up on Rendol 4,” Kade said, “is that we were never taught anything about Alliance culture. There arevery few Alliance members who ever buy a dimari, so the Eumadians don’t generally teach us about their culture. It’s just not economically viable. And the people here who buy dimari generally don’t know a great deal about how we’re trained or what we’re taught to do. They buy us for a specific purpose, but they don’t think much beyond that one role. I’m a combat specialist,” he went on, and I was intrigued now. Kade had had difficulties when he’d arrived? I wanted to know more. “My master is in the military, and he needed someone to protect him on his more dangerous missions. Which I can do. But he didn’t think much about how he and I were supposed to interact during all the time we’re not on missions. We had a great many misunderstandings before we learned what to expect of each other.”

That made me feel just a fraction better. If this strong, confident, knowledgeable dimari had been caught off guard, then perhaps it wasn’t such a huge crime that I’d found myself out of my depth with my own master.

“That lack of knowledge creates a huge problem,” Kade continued. “Your master holds certain standards as self-evident, which are completely foreign to us, while we try to conform to standards which are viewed with confusion, or even disdain, among the Alliance species.

“But there is some good news in all of this,” he went on, while I had to make a concerted effort to stop myself from hyperventilating. I’d spent twenty years training to please my master, and I’d learned all the wrong things?

“The simple solution is for you to learn more about Alliance culture,” Kade said, as if he was suggesting nothing more complicated than buying a different brand of soap. “Do you have a comm? I can send you a list of documents that you might find helpful.”

I sagged in my seat, one more failure rising up to bite me. “I left it at my master’s house,” I muttered, staring at the table.

He shrugged. “Okay. I’ll send it to you when we get back. It’s nothing terribly difficult. It’s mostly things like how they like to be addressed, how they want you to behave around strangers, that sort of thing. They have a few social rituals that are a little different from what we’re taught to expect.”

That sounded simple enough. But I doubted that a few social customs could explain away my master’s utter disgust with me. “What’s the second problem?” I asked, hoping that it was something other than my own abysmal behaviour.

Kade tapped at his comm, bringing up a document that I recognised immediately. It was the operations manual I’d been sent here with, containing my contract of sale and a detailed description of my training. “When your master bought you-” Kade began to say, but I interrupted him.