Pledge of Honor

Pledge of Honor, Lori L. Anderson, Xlibris Corp, 2003

Jamie McGivens and Tony Stone are among a group of humans who have been kidnapped and taken to the planet Elos, by a humanoid race called the Berloff. The men are to be slaves, and the women are to be used for breeding. Jamie becomes the property of Locom, the leader of the Berloff.

Keenu is the grown son of the leader of a race of native Elosians, who have suffered constant Berloff slave raids. His quest is to find Dolan, his grandfather, who left their home village many years before. Using Dolan's wisdom (and experience living on Earth), the plan is to get themselves arrested by the Berloff (the easy part), and somehow free all the slaves from the "inside" (the hard part), to stop the whole slave system, permanently.

The breakout happens, and the four flee into the jungle. While in Locom's possession, Jamie was forced to let Locom have his way with her, and she is having a hard time dealing with it. Back on Earth, she was the sole caregiver for her sick mother, and the last thing she remembers before her abduction was finding her boyfriend in bed with another woman. So Jamie is not appreciative when told that Keenu had to establish a mental Link with her (sort of a permanent Vulcan Mind Meld), that is not easily broken, when she is injured in the breakout.

Tony falls prey to one of the many deadly creatures of Elos, and Jamie almost joins him. She is brought to Keenu's home village to recover. Dolan was thrown out of the village years before, under very unpleasant circumstances, and little has changed. Damar, the Elosian ruler, and Dolan's son (and Keenu's father) does not want Dolan there, and the fact that he has brought an. . . alien with him makes it that much worse. After she recovers, Dolan brings Jamie back to an Earth that holds nothing for her. Her mother died a couple of days previously, the police want to know where she has been for the last month, and her ex-boyfriend really wants to get back together with her, to the point of being obnoxious. Jamie also discovers that she has some pretty strong feelings for Keenu.

This works best as a story about the human spirit and about bonds between very different people, that happens to take place mostly on an alien planet. The reader could do a lot worse than to read this novel; it is very much worth the time.