Enslaved III:
The Gladiators
By
Kaitlyn O’Connor
(c) Copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, July 2010
Cover Art by Alex DeShanks , July 2010
Published by New Concepts Publishing
Smashwords Edition
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s
imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or
events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
A flicker of both surprise and uneasiness went through Loren Hess when the driver of the black SUV turned into the parking lot of a local nightclub. She glanced at the backs of the heads of the two men in the front, struggling with the impulse to ask why they’d pulled in. Neither of the two hard faced men had been particularly warm or friendly, though, and she quelled the urge rather than risk a snub.
They made her nervous, anyway, as if she wasn’t already a bundle of nerves!
The uneasiness went bone deep. They’d kept her so off kilter since she’d been summoned to the administrator’s office that she’d hardly had a moment to sort her thoughts even if she’d had the tranquility to do it.
She supposed she couldn’t blame it entirely on them. Guilt and the fear of punishment for her snooping had gotten the ball rolling, so to speak. She’d graduated at the top of her class in engineering and had been thrilled, flattered, and unnerved to be recruited by the government right after graduation. She hadn’t even settled from that wild flight of euphoric triumph when she’d found herself in a top secret installation and discovered she’d been hired to reverse engineer alien technology.
Well! That had totally blown her mind, but she’d settled in after a few weeks and really focused. She’d focused so intently, in point of fact, that it wasn’t until roughly four years later that she began to have a niggling suspicion that something just wasn’t quite right about the picture.
She supposed she could put it down to youth, enthusiasm, and plain out naiveté if came to that—not that she was excusing herself by any means! Truthfully, she thought she was embarrassed more than anything else that it had taken her long to become suspicious at all. It wounded her sense of self-worth and confidence in her intelligence once it did dawn on her that something strange—stranger than reverse engineering alien technology—was going on, or maybe something not entirely legal.
The whole cloak and dagger aspect of the operation kept her on edge, though, and her nose firmly to the grindstone. She’d been afraid, at first, even to allow herself to question anything and she certainly hadn’t had the nerve to openly question anything!
She’d barely seen the light of day since she’d been recruited. It was a rare treat indeed to be allowed to leave the facility and whenever she did, she was monitored at all times to make certain she didn’t divulge any secrets. Phone calls were monitored!
Not that she got that many or managed to track her parents down to call them and talk very often. It seemed they’d only been waiting to turn her out of the ‘nest’ to resume their field research, which they’d pretty much given up to rear her, taking teaching positions to give her a stable home until she’d gone off to college.
It wasn’t the tight security that finally made the light come on, though. It was the fact that there seemed to be an endless supply of alien technology that needed to be taken apart and studied plus the fact that she hadn’t seen a single, solitary piece that actually looked like it had been in a crash. No one had actually told her that the devices she was put to work on were from a crash—They didn’t tell her, or anyone else, anything—but the other scientists and engineers on the project seemed to believe that was the origins—a crash.
Well, when it hit her that she hadn’t seen anything in the entire time she’d been there that looked like it had come from a crash, curiosity about the origins of the electronics had smote her.
She’d tried to be very casual about it and careful who she talked to, but she’d instantly suspected when she was summoned to the administrator’s office that they’d noticed she was nosey about things that weren’t any of her business. She might not have been except that she hadn’t been in the administrator’s office since she’d arrived over four years earlier, had her canned spiel about security and then been sent along for ‘orientation’, which had also mostly been about security.
And then there was the fact that she knew she wasn’t supposed to be speculating about anything beyond the materials something was made from, what it did, and how it worked.
She certainly hadn’t suspected that she’d been summoned to be offered the opportunity to see where the technology came from!
She hardly remembered anything about the discussion after that.
In fact, she couldn’t actually recall that she’d volunteered to go and yet here she sat in the back of a black, non-descript government vehicle … in the parking lot of a popular nightspot of all places.
“This is as far as we go,” the agent in the front seat said coolly, turning around to look at her.
Loren gaped at him blankly and then looked around. A frown of confusion drew her brows together as the suspicion immediately assailed her that she’d just been fired. “I’m supposed to get out … here?”
“You’re to walk down that alley there and wait.”
Loren felt her jaw sag lower as she stared at the dark alley he’d pointed out.
The suspicion instantly assailed her that she was targeted for termination—and not just from her job. “Uh … that really is a dark alley. You’re sure I’m supposed to wait there?”
His lips flattened. “You expect them to set down in the middle of the parking lot?” he asked sarcastically.
Loren felt her face redden, felt stupid. “Oh.” She laughed nervously and reached down to grab the small travel bag that was all they’d allowed her to take. She’d had a hell of time packing enough for an indeterminate stay on an alien world in the one small bag and the end result was that it was like a black hole—incredibly dense and heavy as hell.
They didn’t offer to help her with her bag so, when she heard the sound of the door locks being deactivated, she grasped the handle of her bag in one hand and the door handle with the other and got out. They drove off while she was still trying to decide if they were sending her into the alley for an execution.
Fortunately, it occurred to her that they could’ve done that, if that was the plan, at any time along the dark road that led from the secret government facilities. Trying to convince herself that that was completely logical and she didn’t have anything to worry about, she hefted her bag, peered at the darkened alley for a long moment, and finally started toward it, watching nervously for any sign of movement that might indicate it wasn’t as deserted as it looked. Thankfully, it wasn’t as dark as she’d feared. Light spilled in from both ends of the alley and there was enough light to see her way and see anyone if there had been anyone there.
She stopped about halfway down and looked around uneasily, trying her best to dismiss her fears. She’d been presented with an opportunity few, if any, humans had ever had. She would be examining all sorts of alien technology and learning from it. She should be excited. She should be thrilled to death, not scared to death, but there was no chasing the fear with logic.
Time did that, leaching it away little by little and allowing other thoughts to flicker through her mind that were disturbing in another way entirely.
Maybe she was supposed to be picked up by another car and taken to another location for the actual pick up?
That made a lot more sense than the idea of an alien ship swooping from the sky and picking her up behind a nightclub.
She’d set her bag down because it felt like it was going to pull her shoulder out of socket, but the thought prompted her to pick it up again and start moving along the alley.
It also occurred to her to wonder if this was some sort of elaborate joke just to make her feel like a complete idiot.
And that, maybe, she actually had been dismissed and they’d just wanted to dump her far enough from the facilities their secrecy would be protected.
Why would they do that, though? Shouldn’t they have threatened her about talking if they were going to fire her? Wouldn’t they have at least said she wasn’t to talk about anything she’d seen or worked on?
But maybe they figured she ought to know nothing had changed in that respect?
She’d moved perhaps two or three yards further along the alley when she abruptly found herself spotlighted. Her heart skipped a beat, the first thought running through her mind that it was a police helicopter.
Even as she glanced up, though, she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of a helicopter. In fact, she hadn’t heard any sound at all beyond the dull thud of the music filtering from the nightclub and the traffic on the street in front of it.
Her heart couldn’t decide whether to leap into her throat or hit her toes when she saw the huge disk above her like a black shadow against the night sky. It didn’t have the chance to do either. She felt a burning tingle begin on her skin and penetrate all the way through her and then she blacked out. When she came to, she was lying on a cold, hard surface that was perfectly smooth, not rough like the pavement of the parking lot, or warmed by the day.
She felt like she’d been body slammed. She hurt all over—not badly, but she was achy and heavy. It took an effort to push herself up to look around. As she did, a flicker of movement caught her eye and she whipped her head in that direction. She had just enough time to register the mechanical monster coming toward her and to suck in a sharp breath to scream and something hit her that pitched her toward darkness again.
The second time she regained consciousness she heard the noisy sobs and sniffs of a number of people—women. Confusion flickered through her, but it dredged her upwards from the depths rapidly and she became aware that the hard surface she was lying on was completely different than the one before.
The room she opened her eyes to was like something from some seamy prison movie. It was dim, but not too dark to see that it was lined with bunks and that there was a woman on almost everyone of the. She lay still for several moments, trying to convince herself that she couldn’t be in a prison, wondering if she’d been given some kind of hallucinogenic drug.
“Where am I?”
No one responded. It made the sense that she had to be imagining things or that she was in the grips of some kind of nightmare increase.
It felt too real to be a nightmare, however, and she finally sat up on the bunk. “What is this place?” she demanded more loudly.
“We don’t know. Nobody knows,” a dark haired woman on the bunk across from her answered. “We all woke up here just like you did—I’m guessing you saw that scary looking metal monstrosity and he zapped you, too?”
“But …,” Loren began and then abruptly broke off as sudden doubts swarmed her mind as to the wisdom of offering any sort of information. “I was in the alley behind this club …?”
“We all were.”
Loren turned to the blond who’d spoken, blinking at her and trying to assimilate that. “But … nobody was with me.”
“She didn’t mean we were all standing around just waiting to get scooped up by the fucking aliens, moron!” another woman growled angrily.
“Who’s the moron?” another woman said loudly. “This isn’t a fucking alien ship! I’m telling you, we’ve been taken by sex slavers!”
“That had a … a thing like the one that zapped us?”
“And tell us how we got in a ship, as long as you’re at it! There’s no such thing as little green men that fly around in UFOs!”
Loren wasn’t about to argue with them on that—actually, any part of it. “You saw an alien?”
“Nobody saw a damned thing—except the light!” another woman snapped. “I’d left the club and was heading to my car and then this light surrounds me and the next thing I know I’m lying on the floor and then that horrible thing came in and zapped me and I woke up here! It was like that for everybody!”
A horrible suspicion arose in Loren’s mind. She tried her best to dismiss it, but it wouldn’t be silenced.
They’d thought of another way to make sure she didn’t tell their dirty little secrets!
And she’d walked right in to the trap like a complete idiot!
“What do they want with us?” another woman wailed.
Loren covered her face with her hands, struggling with fear, anger, and humiliation that she’d walked into their trap like a … child that had no sense of self-preservation. How could she have anticipated that her own government would do something like this to her, though?
Well, people that worked for the government.
Someone settled beside her and slipped a comforting arm around her shoulders. “We’re going to be alright.”
Loren lowered her hands and discovered it was the black woman who’d first spoken to her. “I … don’t think so.”
The woman’s chin wobbled. “We’re alive, aren’t we? If they’d meant anything … awful, we wouldn’t be alive.”
“Well! If you don’t think it’s awful to be sold into the sex slavery market …!” one of the other women snapped angrily.
“I … uh … I actually think it’s aliens,” Loren said uncomfortably.
“This isn’t a ship,” the black woman said. “We’d feel movement, right? We’d feel the pull of gravity.”
Loren chewed her lip uncomfortably. “Not if we were in space.”
“Well! We’d be floating around then!” one of the other women said, her voice quavering on the edge of hysteria.
“Not if they had artificial gravity on the ship.”
“We’re trying to figure this out!” the blond said angrily. “Hello? We don’t have things like that!”
“Aliens might!” the black woman who’d befriended Loren said tightly. “Not that I believe that—the part about us having been picked up by aliens, I mean.”
Loren was bone deep scared that it was aliens. If it had just been her, she might’ve been able to dismiss that. There might’ve been some possibility of believing she’d been imprisoned on Earth because she knew too much, but she’d spent the last four years of her life studying alien technology. She knew there was such a thing.
And she knew she’d guessed right the first time, when she’d been summoned to the administrator’s office it was because they knew she’d been snooping and they had every intention of putting a stop to it before she found out more than they wanted to know.
Such as the fact that they were bartering Earth women for the technology.
She didn’t want to believe that, but she was almost a hundred percent certain that she really was on an alien ship, imprisoned with a roomful of women. The agents had taken her right to the spot to be picked up. It sure as hell wasn’t a coincidence.
The terrifying part was that she hadn’t snooped nearly enough—not enough to find out what it was the aliens wanted with Earth women.
They didn’t have nearly enough time to sit around discussing it and trying to figure it out to Loren’s way of thinking. They’d had just enough time to begin to calm down when an opening appeared in the side of the room where they were held and the metal monstrosity entered. “Please rise and exit the room in an orderly fashion.”
Loren tried not to think the fact that the damned thing spoke English was yet another indication that the government was cooperating with the aliens in the kidnappings, but she’d begun to realize that they were completely ruthless.
Not surprisingly, no one leapt up to do as they were told. Most of the women simply fell into another fit of hysterics. The rest cowered against the walls, terrified.
The robot—Loren figured that was what it was although it looked more like a square trashcan with octopus arms—zapped two of the women closest, caught each of them by their ankles and dragged them from the room. Almost everyone else bounded forward immediately and followed the machine out of the cell and into a corridor.
The emotionless monster pointed out the direction they were supposed to go and continued to drag to the two unconscious women. Another one of the things appeared in the corridor behind them and entered the cell, returning a few moments later with two more unconscious women. The stragglers followed the second robot out.
As terrified as Loren was, she felt downright nauseous when they’d scampered down the corridor ahead of the robots and met up with a line of women—a long line. The black woman exchanged a look with Loren.
“There must be several hundred women here,” she whispered. “My god! How could they make off with so many women without anybody noticing?”
Loren was bone deep cold with shock and her jaw was spasming. “They don’t take them from the same place. I heard once that thousands of women go missing every day and many of them are never seen or heard from again.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Sorry,” Loren said apologetically. “It isn’t something I want to think about either.”
“I’m Karen, by the way. Karen Smith.”
“Loren … Hess.”
“This is a hell of a way to end a night of partying,” the brunette just behind Loren muttered.
Loren was on the point of telling them that she hadn’t been when it occurred to her that they would demand an explanation. She considered it a moment and finally decided there was really no point in keeping it to herself. “I wasn’t partying. I was taken there specifically to be picked up.”
“So you know what this is about?” the woman in front of Karen demanded.
“Not … not really,” she said uncomfortably, “but I can guess.”
“We can all guess!” the woman behind her snapped. “We’ve been guessing!”
Loren struggled for a moment with her conscience and her fear that she’d be blamed. “I was an engineer—working for the government. My job was to reverse engineer alien technology for our government.” She paused for several moments. “I began to be suspicious after a while. We thought all of it was from a crash, or maybe several, but every so often we’d get something else and none of it looked like it had been in any sort of crash. So … I started trying to figure out what was going on and ….”
“You ended up here,” Karen said in a shaky voice. “You’re saying this really is aliens and we’re really on an alien ship?”
She hadn’t expected the information to set off a new wave of hysteria, but that was exactly what it did, traveling from her small group all the way down the line of women.
“What do they want with us?” the woman behind her demanded.
“I don’t know. I didn’t really find out anything … until I got here.”
The woman seemed to think she was lying, or holding back. “Tell me, you bitch!” she screamed.
Before she could grab Loren, she was zapped by the robot behind them. She twitched all over and then collapsed. Loren wasn’t even aware that she’d grabbed Karen fearfully until the robot spoke again. “Please move along in a calm, orderly fashion.”
There was nothing calm or orderly about the procession. There wasn’t one woman in the group, including Loren, who wasn’t hysterical or borderline hysterical, but they were trapped in the corridor between the robots and whatever their fate was and there was nowhere to go but forward.
Several women tried to make a break and race down the corridor in the opposite direction, but they didn’t make it far before they were jolted unconscious.
Loren almost envied them. She didn’t really want to find out what awaited them at the other end of the corridor. She saw her fears hadn’t been misplaced when her group finally made it to the door at the end and she discovered they were being processed for shipment. They were all stripped naked, thoroughly examined—more thoroughly than she’d ever been examined before—their bowels and bladder emptied, and then shoved into a pod. She had just enough time to be more thoroughly terrified than she’d ever been in her life when she saw the pod was filling with some sort of fluids and then, mercifully, she lost consciousness. She drifted for what seemed almost like an eternity to her, dreaming at times, vaguely aware of floating at others and then she was as rudely awakened as she’d been knocked out.
The fluids drained away and she struggled to suck a breath of air in, only to have the fluids, which had filled her lungs, begin to evacuate. She was still coughing and gagging and shivering when the pod tilted and dumped her on the hard, metal floor. A robot appeared beside her, jerked her upright by her hair, clamped something tight around her throat and moved on to the next woman.
“Get up and move along!”
Loren jerked at the sound of the voice, the first male voice she’d heard that sounded as if it had been uttered from a human throat. She discovered as soon as she managed to focus her vision, however, that he most certainly wasn’t human even if he wasn’t a machine.
“Move!” he roared when most of the women who’d managed to gain their feet simply stared at him in horror. “The auction is already in progress! If I lose sales because of your laziness, you’ll regret it!”
Loren was still completely and utterly confused about everything except the threat. That was enough to get her on her feet, but she discovered she was chained to a woman both behind and in front of her. When she surged forward, the metal around her neck tightened and nearly sent her into another coughing spasm. It didn’t help that the creature set his damned metal beasts on them to herd from behind when everyone was chained together. Screaming, many of the women tried to run and only succeeded in jerking women around them off their feet. Finally, they managed order of a sort and began moving quickly along the corridor. They met up with another robot after a short run that diverted them down a gangplank.
Loren was in too much terror and distress to think about her nakedness until they began piling down the gangplank, but they were met with a sight that made the women in the lead come to an abrupt halt and everyone behind slammed into them and ended up in a tangle.
The lizard man herding them began shouting and screaming and threatening again and they began struggling to disentangle themselves. They were aided by the robots that moved among them, snatching them up by whatever they snagged—hair, a hand or finger, an arm or a leg or a foot. Loren managed to get on her feet without that ‘help’ and helped Karen up. She had the opportunity while they were waiting for the robots and their captor to restore some semblance of order to gawk at her surroundings.
She might have thought they’d disembarked from one ship and into another that was many times bigger except that she could see that there were other ships docked up and down what looked like a broad street, disgorging trade goods. It almost looked more like a huge mall than anything else, except that, where one would’ve expected to see a ceiling there was a network of metal with some sort of transparent material in between that allowed her to stare at stars she’d never seen. She was still gaping when the women around her began to move again—which was when she discovered she wasn’t the only one gaping.
There were alien beings moving along the ‘street’ and in and out of the ships and buildings along it. She’d either been too stunned to really notice that before or she’d simply assumed they were what she was used to seeing, humans, because most of them appeared to be humanoid even if they didn’t look entirely human or looked about as far from it as they could get and still retain a humanoid shape. There were a few that weren’t even humanoid, but she wasn’t certain whether they were actually intelligent beings or lower animals that were being traded. Almost without exception, however, they all stopped to gape as the women were driven past them as if they’d never seen humans before.
It was the way the aliens were staring at them that finally brought it crashing down upon Loren that she was as naked as the day she was born and most of the aliens seemed to be male. Everyone else seemed to make that connection about the same time Loren did. They crowded into a tight knot that made it that much more difficult to try to walk, trying to cover themselves with their hands. She was almost relieved when they were finally herded into what appeared to be an enormous building near the center of what she realized must be a space station since she hadn’t seen a sign of anything that looked like they might be on a planet, as hard as that was to assimilate. The sense of relief lasted until they’d been driven down the corridor and out the other side and she discovered they were in what looked like a football stadium—except that it was round rather than oblong—and there was no grass on the ‘field’.
Their captor brought them to a halt and told them to be still and then marched away. Struggling to assimilate what was going on, Loren watched him a little dazedly as he crossed the field to the raised platform in the center and spoke with several men-aliens. He looked pleased when he turned toward them again.
“Oh … my …fucking … god!” one of the women near Loren gasped.
“It’s a … it’s a slave auction!”
Loren glanced at Karen in horrified disbelief. She would’ve liked to have disputed her comment as pure conjecture, but their captor returned and released several women from the chain and then hauled them to the platform.
And the bidding began.
Chapter Two
Loren was too shocked to cry. Most of the women were weeping and begging, or cursing and struggling when they were led off to the auction block and screaming hysterically when they were claimed by the highest bidder, but she couldn’t even summon enough emotion to do either. When they came for her, she kept telling herself it just wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. None of it could be. She was going to wake up and discover she was in a mental hospital from a nervous breakdown or that she’d been ‘tripping’ on some hallucinogenic drug.
And yet, the sounds of so many voices and the smells of so many different things were as hard to dismiss as the feel of the field beneath her bare feet and the textural change of the platform as the mounted it. They managed to pierce the cocoon she’d wrapped herself in when her hands were seized and peeled from her protective pose and her arms twisted behind her back to display for the bidders and she happened to catch sight of the huge screens around the arena where the cameras had zoomed in to show her breasts and genitals for everyone to study. If that wasn’t bad enough, chants came from the bidders for a ‘better’ look and they bent her over and pulled the lips of her sex back to satisfy the curiosity of the buyers. Fortunately, that indignity was over before she’d fully grasped what they intended to do.
She began trembling then as quick thaw set in, but the real horror only hit her when the bidding was concluded and the buyer arrived to pay for her and collect her.
She was pretty sure he was the most horrible creature in the entire stadium. He was very little taller than she was, and appeared to be bigger around than he was tall—soft rolls that shimmied with each movement he made—and that was the ‘good’ part. His face more strongly resembled a fish of some kind than anything else that came to mind—from the round, bulbous eyes that didn’t seem to have eyelids to the lipless mouth. He had no hair—nothing like she had, at any rate. Something sprouted from the wrinkly flesh that covered his skull, but it looked more like worms than hair. Each ‘strand’ even seemed to move of its own accord as if they were some kind of parasites attached to him rather than part of him. He had nose holes, but no actual nose and when he grinned and displayed the hideous, discolored teeth in his mouth, she thought for a moment that she might faint.
She prayed for it, actually wilted dizzily toward the floor of the auction block, but he merely coiled a beefy arm around her waist and hauled her away.
The smell!
She’d smelled pigs that smelled better and the noxious fumes emanating from the creature gave rise to nausea. She thought she might have thrown up if she’d had anything at all in her stomach, but it certainly didn’t bring her closer to a swoon. On the contrary, the smell was like having an ammonia capsule broken beneath her nose. It brought her around and far too conscious.
“I can walk,” she said through gritted teeth, desperate to put any amount of distance between herself and the disgusting creature that she could.
“Good. You heavy,” he grunted, dropping her on the ground.
She got to her feet with an effort. “You speak English?” she asked shakily, hope instantly springing to life, though what she hoped for she had no idea.
He trained his bulging eyes on her for a moment and made a sound she finally realized must be laughter. “Speak Unduleze like everyone here. You, too.”
Loren gaped at him, slowly assimilating the ‘broken’ English. It not only dawned on her abruptly that it was completely ridiculous to think he might speak English when they’d been gaped at as if none of the aliens had ever seen a human before, but she realized she wasn’t hearing or speaking English, that there was a faint ‘echo’ of sounds that definitely weren’t English.
“Trader put in brain on trip out. No can sell slave if they not understand how to obey.”
She didn’t know or care how that bastard had made her more saleable! All that mattered was that she could communicate. “There was a mistake,” she said as he grasped her arm and led her across the field.
“No mistake. I pay good credits—too much, but you’ll do.”
Desperation coiled in her belly and her heart thudded dully with a mixture of fear and hopefulness. “I mean, I’m not supposed to be here … at all. See, my government arranged for me to study alien technology so that I could design and build it when I got back to Earth.”
The creature slid a look at her. “They give you to trader?”
Loren blinked at him. “No! They took me to this place and that … that creature kidnapped me!”
“Took to place where trader pick up, you supposed to be here,” the creature said complacently.
Loren’s jaw dropped. Sickness coiled in her belly, however, along with the realization that that was undeniable. What were the chances, after all, that she’d been picked up by that creature instead of the aliens the government had arranged a pickup with? “But I’m not, damn it!”
“Are now. I buy. You mine.”
“But that’s exactly my point!” she said a little more desperately. “I’m not a slave. I’m an engineer! I’m sure we could get this straightened out if you’d just contact the … uh … the American Embassy,” she ended a little weakly when it hit her that she was so far outside the U. S. that even she thought she sounded like a lunatic. She was so busy trying to reason with him that he’d led her into a corridor very like the one they’d entered on their arrival before she even realized he fully intended to take her with him regardless of her attempts to convince him she wasn’t a slave and she wasn’t for sale.
* * * *
Kael had been too angry to watch when he and Dakaar arrived for the slave auction. It was not the first time that Lecur had summoned him to guard him when he went off to purchase new slaves, but he had not grown accustomed to it anymore than he had grown accustomed to being a slave himself. It still made his belly churn with a simmering rage that he could nothing about, and that was almost worse—the knowledge that he was powerless to do anything about his circumstances and unable to do anything about the enslavement of others.
He had never killed an opponent on the gladiatorial field. This was not war where the ultimate sacrifice was demanded and lives taken or yielded if necessary. It was fighting purely for the sake of entertaining the creatures who paid Lecur to be entertained by their blood and he refused to do more than subdue his opponent as he would have in any contest of skills.
There were times, though, when he wanted very badly to choke the life from Lecur and this was one of those times.
He and Dakaar had been left to wait a very long time while newly captured people from many worlds were paraded onto the auction block and sold, however, and he found he could not resist glancing out from the corridor beneath the stands from time to time with impatience to discover if he could how much longer they must wait.
His anger had mounted when a trader had arrived late with even more slaves to offer, but when he had glanced out in annoyance and seen the first of these new offerings, surprise and interest he should not have felt had caught him. He had thought at first that they were children and his fury had threatened to boil over, but when the vids had displayed close images of the creature, he had seen that it was a fully grown woman. More than that, although there seemed very little interest by the buyers in the faces, he had caught a glimpse of the facial features and been stunned to see that these beings were amazing like Hirachi in form, despite their miniature size. He had forgotten his outrage over the sale of flesh then. He had been too busy studying each female that was brought out and noting the things that made them seem Hirachi even while he noticed the things that proved they were still very different.
Beyond the features of the face and body that were so reminiscent of his own people, the two most marked differences were their diminutive size and the many colors of their skin. True, there were subtle differences in their own coloration. Those who spent more time laboring in the sun were darker and those who spent more time laboring in the sea were paler, but those differences were very faint and hardly noticeable. These tiny beings ranged from being so pale as to appear almost completely white to so dark they achieved the opposite end of the scale and were nearly black and there were many colors in between, from pale pink or red to a very pale yellow similar to their own coloring to many shades of brown. It was the same with their hair, which was almost more fascinating, especially when he discovered that they often had one color on their head and an entirely different color on their genitals.
He was hardly aware that they stirred him at first, too focused on studying them hungrily for those things about them that reminded him of the home and life he had once known. One came finally that jolted that arousal to the forefront of his mind, however. He noticed the hair first because it was so different from the others—brown where the light did not shine on it, but a fiery red like a blazing sunset where the light touched it and the small triangle that covered her woman’s mound was almost exactly the same.
It was when the vids displayed a close up view of her form that his cock sprang to attention, however, and that circumstance redirected his mind instantly from mere curious interest in the similarity of the species to his own to hunger for her. The pretty little pointed face he caught a glimpse of sealed his enthrallment. Her eyes were open wide, revealing a color that he had never seen—a pure blue like the sky above his home world.
Want so potent went through him that he lost any ability to think beyond that desperation to possess. He could not pull his gaze away. He could not prevent the flood of thoughts that rushed through his mind as it struggled to conceive a way that he might possess her, completely disregarding the cold, hard fact that he was nothing, now, but a slave and had lost any right to claim a lover, let alone a mate. He felt as he had as a warrior of the Hirachi, as a leader among his people, searching his mind for ways to court the lovely maid and entice her to his pod where he might claim her as his mate and breed his children on her.
Dakaar broke the spell. “She is beautiful,” he murmured hoarsely, clearly so enthralled with her himself that he had no idea he had spoken aloud.
The comment was enough, however, to instantly redirect Kael’s mind to his rival for the attention of the maid that had caught his eyes and focus aggression as potent as his desire for her on the warrior he had considered almost as a brother from childhood.
Dakaar swallowed audibly, still completely unaware of the possessive fury emanating from Kael. “Lecur has bought her,” he said with a strange mixture of excitement and baffled anger.
The statement sent a wave of cold over Kael, however, bringing him back to reality with a sickening jolt.
He could not court her to claim her. He could not entice her with his prowess as a lover. He could not best Dakaar to prove his worth as a warrior and a protector and win her admiration.
She was a slave … and she belonged to Lecur … just he did.
He wanted to rage against the fates that he had lived when the aliens had come and taken him instead killing him. He wanted to grab Lecur and tear him limb from limb.
Instead, he sought to calm the rage that threatened his own existence as much as it did Lecur’s as he watched Lecur bring the tiny creature that had so enthralled him closer and closer. It was some vague notion that he might still achieve his freedom and take the maid that gave him the strength to fight his natural urges. It was pride that made him hide the twin desires for the maid and the desire to kill from his expression to prevent Lecur’s satisfaction in knowing he felt it and could do nothing about it, but it was the little maid herself that chilled those emotions into a frozen wasteland at his core.
She was far smaller even that he had realized, far more beautiful to his eyes … and as far from his reach as if she was still on her own home world. He could not have her. No matter how much it might tear at him to look at her and know he would not touch her, let alone claim her, he could not and it would be far better to kill that want before it consumed him.
Even so, he could not prevent himself from studying her, as hard as he worked to hide the hunger he felt. He could not help but search her pretty little face for some sign that she felt at least a tiny bit of the same interest in him as he had in her. Could she see past their differences as he had? Or would she see only that his skin was yellow and he towered over her and be afraid?
* * * *
A jolt went through Loren when she discovered they’d left the auction area completely, but it wasn’t entirely for that reason. The aliens she saw standing in the corridor, apparently waiting for the creature, shocked her into silence.
They were massive on an entirely different scale than the creature who was deluded enough he thought he’d just bought her. They looked as if they must be every bit of seven feet tall—they were certainly a hell of a lot taller than the average six feet she was accustomed to! And whereas her ‘master’ was more like a ball with two arms and two legs, the pair of yellow skinned aliens looked like weightlifters, massively muscular.
The discovery that they were nearly as naked as she was shattered the comforting cocoon of shock almost as instantaneously as it descended over her. Beyond the leather-looking thing that cupped their genitals and looked like something a male stripper might wear, they were completely exposed—their feet, legs, torso and massive arms ‘blindingly’ bare. In a state of shock that made it almost impossible to assimilate what she was staring at, she gaped without a great deal of comprehension at the massive musculature of the beings, vaguely noting numerous scars at every stage from pale and knotted with age to fresh and angry red against their yellowish skin. They were tattooed, she thought, but the darkened designs on their massive chests didn’t look like anything nature would’ve created.
“Take female and put in harem. I go back and look for another one or two, I tink. You come back din and guard.” He frowned thoughtfully. “No. You send Pin, Uster, Balen, and Mateo. Gods damned pirates try rob me udderwise.”
That comment pierced her shock and Loren turned to stare at the creature in disbelief as he turned and abandoned her. Harem? Her belly knotted with a mixture of fear and revulsion, but she struggled to blank her mind to the implications. He couldn’t possibly think he could ….
A hand settled on her arm that was big enough it engulfed most of her upper arm. She stared at the hand for a long, blank moment, and then looked up at the owner of the hand, discovering with a fresh jolt of surprise that, despite his size and his coloring, he looked human in the face. His features were sharp and his bone structure angular, but it was a surprisingly handsome face for all that.
It took her several moments to realize that he was studying her with an equal intensity.
“Come.”
Loren gulped, struggling to call to mind some kind argument to escape the fate that apparently awaited her. “I’m not supposed to be here,” she said in a squeaky voice.
His gaze flickered over her face. She thought she saw a flicker of pity, but she saw something else, as well—interest, sexual interest and it made her mouth go dry and her knees go weak. “You slave as we are. You no choose. Must,” he said in a deep voice that matched the massive scale of the man and sent a shiver down her spine.
She was too awed and too unnerved to try again. She didn’t try to struggle when he tugged at her arm to get her going. The other one fell into step on her other side and she glanced up at his face finally and discovered that he was looking down at her with interest, as well. Surprise went through her to discover that he was more handsome than the first … actually, handsome in a different way. The first was attractive in a purely male way—his face and features appealing in their strength. The second was still manly, but more ‘pretty’. As absurd as it seemed to think it, even to her, the thought crossed her mind that he was ‘classically’ handsome.
If not for the size of them, and the color of their skin … and the strange little nubs that ran up their arms and the columns of their necks … and the thin, feathery membranes at wrist, elbow and calf that looked like fins—they might almost have passed for humans. They had hair—long and inky black and worn gathered in a tight ‘pony tail’ that fell from the crown of their heads all the way to their shoulder blades—but it looked like her own hair.
Actually, their eyes weren’t like human eyes either except in shape.
“Pretty little ting. Your people all little like you?” the second one asked curiously.
She blinked at him in surprise, finding once again that she had to ‘interpret’, for although the words sounded like English in her ears, his accent was thick and the sentence structure choppy. Her face heated when she realized he’d said she was pretty and then whitened as it dawned on her that he was … flirting. At least, she thought he was, and it was hard to convince herself he wasn’t given the way he was looking at her and the comment together. “I haven’t seen a lot of men as tall as you two,” she said finally, or as massive!
“Look like tiny Hirachi woman … ‘cept dis hair and dis skin.”
Apparently he noticed that she wasn’t especially happy with the comment.
“I like. Is pretty. Different, still pretty.”
He was an attractive male even if he was an alien, but his size unnerved the hell out of her. Not that she thought he was going to get the chance to hump her as he so clearly wanted to when the hideously repulsive creature that had bought her had told them to put her in his harem! And if that had been her only options—him or the fish-man—she would certainly have chosen him! But she didn’t even want to think about what might be lying coiled like a cobra in his loincloth when it seemed likely he was completely proportional!
Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to have occurred to him that her genitals were also proportional to her size!
In all honesty, she thought his size would’ve unnerved her without that possibility thrown into the mix. He looked big enough and strong enough to break something purely by accident and she didn’t want any part of her body broken or mangled!
That being the case, she didn’t reciprocate even though it popped into her mind that it would be polite to tell him that she didn’t find him repulsive either—terrifying, but not repulsive. She smiled at him a little weakly instead of thanking him for the compliment. “You’re … Hirachi?” she asked tentatively. “You aren’t from this world, then?”
“Dis no world. Big habitat in space.”
She’d thought it must be a space station and she was still dismayed. If it had at least been on some planet she might have had the option of escaping and running—and probably dying because she had no clue of how to survive, but it was deeply disturbing to think she didn’t have any options.
“We Hirachi. Captured on Ach, brought here, sold. Master buy to fight. Am Dakaar. Shy one Kael,” he added, pointing to his companion.
Loren transferred her gaze from Dakaar to the ‘shy one’ and discovered that he was giving Dakaar a narrow eyed look. “She is a slave, as we are,” he said tightly. “What are you about? If you want to keep your manhood, you’ll do well to ignore your cock’s interest in the little one. You don’t need it to fight.”
Dakaar flushed. “The poor little thing is scared to death,” he retorted angrily. “Who does it hurt to try to calm her fears?”
“Her!” Kael retorted tightly. “She has every reason to be frightened. You aren’t doing her a good turn to allay those fears when she is destined for the master’s harem.”
Dakaar looked as sick as he felt. “Why would he want her for … that?” he demanded, hesitating over the term since it made him feel sicker to think of that creature pawing her. “ It’s clear she’s far more like us, despite her size, than she is his species.”
“He isn’t interested in breeding,” Kael said sourly, “any more than you are.”
“There’s where you’re wrong,” Dakaar growled. “My time is close and I cannot think of much else!”
Kael studied him thoughtfully for a long moment and finally shifted his gaze to the woman. “Gods!” he muttered. “That wily bastard has bought her to tease us. I thought it strange that he sent us to take her back when he claimed he had need of guards!”
Dismay flickered through Dakaar, and then a wild hope that he didn’t dare dwell upon let alone voice. “He couldn’t know we’re nearing our spawning time, could he?”
Kael snorted derisively. “He is no fool. He would’ve discovered what he could about us when he bought us. You may be sure of that.”
“Mayhap …?”
“Don’t say it! Don’t even think it! She is a pretty little thing, but when have you known Lecur to do anything that was not something for his own comfort or to increase his wealth?”
“What’s going on?” Loren asked uneasily, unable to follow the conversation since they’d switched to another language. She could tell the ‘shy’ one Dakaar had called Kael was angry, however.
“Not mind him,” Dakaar said tightly. “Has only two moods—angry and foul.”
Despite everything, Loren felt amusement flicker through her even though Kael sent Dakaar a look that should have singed his hair.
Actually, she thought, maybe it was because he did. There was something so human-like in the exchange that it comforted her, even though it was unnerving to see an expression of anger on a face attached to a fledgling mountain.
“This … uh … harem,” she said uneasily. “On my world, it’s a place where … uh … sex slaves live. At least, that’s the way my culture looks at it.”
“Is same,” Kael said bluntly.
Loren felt the blood rush from her face. Weakness followed it. Fortunately, Kael had maintained his grip on her. “Oh,” she said faintly, shuddering, trying to block the images that flickered through her mind.
Glancing around for something to distract her from the horrible mental images, she found it very quickly in the stares of the aliens they passed. She only had one hand she could cover herself with, though, and she sidled a little closer to Kael to try to hide from their lascivious gazes. To her surprise, Dakaar responded by moving closer, his expression hard as he warned the bystanders away and tried to shield her from their gazes with his bulk.
She was still almost relieved when they turned into one of the buildings along the thoroughfare. They climbed several flights of stairs. When they reached what she realized must be the top floor, Kael touched buttons on a security pad and a door slid open. Giving her a slight nudge to get her inside, he released her arm. By the time she’d whipped around, the door had closed again, sealing her in.
She sank weakly to the floor where she stood, feeling fear and hopelessness seep into every pore. As unnerving as she’d found both Dakaar and Kael, they’d seemed at least a little sympathetic and protective and she’d hoped ….
She wasn’t certain what she’d hoped. That she might fare better with them?
She didn’t know that and the truth was she couldn’t think of any reason at all to suppose that. The creature that had bought her hadn’t seemed cruel. He’d actually seemed pretty jolly, but then again she had no idea what had put him in such a good mood. It could’ve been plans that she wouldn’t like at all.
The urge to cry assailed her. She struggled with it by force of habit. Her parents hadn’t approved of such an indulgence. If anything happened to make one feel like giving in to their emotions, it was very likely the worst thing to do. Keeping calm allowed some possibility of remedying the situation and giving in to hysterics was no help at all.
She didn’t see how calm reflection was going to help her get out of her current situation, though, and it was pretty damned hard just to keep her mind off of what she very much feared was going to happen once the fish-man returned.
She didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing that she wasn’t a virgin. The fact that she wasn’t certainly hadn’t seemed to discourage anybody from bidding on her! And she also wasn’t sure it was terribly helpful that she knew exactly what she had to face. Maybe she would’ve been more afraid if she was still a virgin and only had an idea, not experience, but she had no idea what that … thing’s penis might be like. She had to assume he had one and was planning on using it, but could she count on it being anything like she was familiar with?
She didn’t think so and the worse of it was, she kept thinking about those things growing out of its head and picturing a penis that was similar.
“Oh god!” she muttered at the thought, surging to her feet and looking around a little wildly for any possibility of escaping. In the back of her mind, she knew it was useless. They were on a space station. She couldn’t run far enough or fast enough to keep from being caught and she suspected runaway slaves would be punished. And she didn’t really want to find out how they were punished. Beyond that, the fish-man had mentioned his fears of pirates, which seemed to suggest this was a very bad ‘neighborhood’. She had a bad feeling that the entire station was a hideout for every sort of lowlife imaginable.
She could be wrong, but it almost seemed that the fact that the place appeared to be primarily populated by males almost insured that likelihood.
A jolt went through her when she searched the perimeter of the large room for any sign of a window she might be climb out of and spotted a creature very like the fish-man lounging sleepily on something like a daybed at the far end of the room. There were several others that differed very little lounging or seated on pillows around her/it?
It spoke to her when she focused on it, but she didn’t understand the language at all. The round face creased in a look of displeasure when she didn’t response.
“Speak Unduleze?”
“I guess so,” Loren said doubtfully.
“What you be? No see ting like you ‘for.”
“Human,” Loren responded uneasily. “From Earth.”
The thing frowned. “No know dat place. Why here?”
There was something about the tone of the question that told Loren it/she wasn’t going to be pleased to discover she was an addition to the harem and the others didn’t look too happy about it either.
Far be it from her to try to steal the fish-man’s attentions! But could she convince them of that? And would it matter even if she did? He was going to do what he wanted to do and since they couldn’t take out their anger on him, she was going to be the target.
“I don’t know,” she said unhappily. “I wasn’t told anything.”
The creature got up and undulated toward her. It almost seemed impossible that it could’ve been bigger around than the fish-man, but it was. She—Loren decided it had to be a female even though she was damned if she could tell that it looked more feminine than the fish-man—looked her over with contempt. “Lecur buy at slave market?”
Loren swallowed a little convulsively, wondering if she was about to have a fight on her hands. “Yes.”
“Din know why here!” the creature spat.
“Actually, I was kind of hoping he had something else in mind. My people would buy me back,” she added on inspiration. Not that she thought the bastards that had put her in this position would, but surely her parents could come up with something! “I was stolen.”
The creature grunted. “I stolen. They stolen. You tink I be here I not stolen?”
Loren smiled with an effort. “Well then! We have something in common, don’t we? Neither of us wants to be here.”
“I here first! Am concubine now!”
“Oh! Well … uh … congratulations?”
“You smartass?”
Loren felt tearful all over again, but she knew it wouldn’t do to appear weak, especially when she was out numbered. The others hadn’t gotten up, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t if there was any sign of trouble. “No. You seemed proud of it.”
“Am!” she snapped angrily. “Lecur very rich! Have many gladiators.”
Loren blinked at her, suddenly recalling the scars all over the two men who’d escorted her and Dakaar’s comment about being bought to fight. That was what he’d meant, she thought, horrified.
Abruptly, she realized that what they faced, regularly, was a good bit worse than having to face the stinky fish-man wallowing on her and poking her. They were scarred all over. They hadn’t gotten those from fist fighting!