THE BOOK:
Inside an intergalactic spacecraft, crew and passengers are traveling through space in a state of hibernation. All except the two stowaways who are hiding in the cargo hold. Their profession is one of the oldest in the world. They are pirates.
The stowaways have not chosen this ship by chance. Among the valuable merchandise it carries are the finalists of the Miss Galaxy Competition. The pirates have very precise plans for them ...
They take over the ship and reroute it to Barbaria, a small planet where they are planning to trade with their valuable booty of human flesh. Barbaria is a cruel, heartless world without law or order, a feudal society with ancient customs giving the Lord the right to spend the first night with new brides, sexual slavery as an accepted practice, and the Law of Talion - "an eye for eye, a tooth for a tooth".
This is the Medieval galaxy to which the characters of this inhumane story are travelling...
Gabriella Cianni is the author of the world famous "Slave in the Castle" and the incomparable "War Booty", both of which appear in this collection.
FROM THE BOOK...
The Beginning
It's five thousand years since humanity reached the stars and brought with it the evil that exists in the nature of the species.
Man has explored, colonised and exploited thousands of planets in the Galaxy and Barbaria was one of them even though it was by accident.
A millennium before the awful events that this chronicle relates, the space ship DISASTER exploded near the uninhabited planet. Good fortune allowed some of the crew to survive and reach the surface of the planet.
The survivors became authentic outer space Robinson Crusoes with only the clothes they stood up in. Without computers, ready made utensils or information cubes their descendants soon forgot the prodigies of technology. In reality they had never known about them.
With the passage of the centuries, the little human enclave grew until it covered most of a continent and had developed an oligarchic society with a feudal structure.
The wide diversity of the ecosystem, deserts to the north and jungle to the south, encouraged the formation of cities to the north and smaller communities to the south.
For whatever cause, nobody ever knew, they split apart soon after arriving. The blacks stayed in the desert, forming cities and seeking their fortunes in commerce. The whites went south and started to live like peasants...
Barbaria, twenty years before the arrival of Andros V
The Galaxy is shining in the omnipresent sky full of stars and nebulae.
It's night and the world is submerged in darkness.
A hurricane wind lifts the sands of the desert and hurls them against the walls of Sodom.
Nothing has changed in the last millennium.
From the Castle, eternal on its seat at the top of the hill, the city seems to be asleep.
Inside the walls, the glimmer of the fires evokes shadows of the past and ghosts from distant universes.
Outside, beyond the wall, there is nothing, only darkness and legend... And the looted remains of WARRIOR II, the Federation ship that came to bring order to Barbaria.
The tortuous open streets between the miserable houses are deserted. The Castle, at the top of the mount, is deserted too.
The wind whistles past the poorly adjusted hinges on the wooden doors. It's summer, but tonight it's cold and the wind cuts through the skin.
Where are the inhabitants of the city?
Suddenly, mixed cries of rage and triumph echo in the night. The mob is at large.
Outside the walls, where there is a meteorite crated that is believed to be the mouth of hell, Aguirre the Assassin is haranguing his subjects.
The ignorant and superstitious inhabitants of Sodom, cowed by the dictator's powerful temple guards, are clamouring against the "Invaders".
'DEATH...!! DEATH...!! DEATH...!!!'
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