by T. J. Quinn
“Are you sure you want to do that? She has been pounding the door to her quarters ever since I left her there,” Egil explained.
Asgar scowled but nodded. “I might be able to calm her down.”
“Good luck with that.”
Asgar walked to the area they had prepared for their guests, and soon he was hearing her poundings. He opened the door, and she fell against him, ready to pound once more.
“Let me out of here…” she cried out, struggling to free herself.
Asgar carried her easily inside the room and closed the door. “Please, calm down.”
“You left her there… he’s going to kill her… you bastard…” she yelled at him as she punched his chest.
“I brought her with me,” he finally managed to say, though he had to repeat it a few times until she finally understood what he was saying.
Her hands stood still over his chest. “What did you say?” she asked in a low tone.
“I brought your friend with me,” he repeated again.
For a moment, she didn’t say a word, she just stayed there, with her hands on his chest, and her eyes fixed on his chest. And all of a sudden, she had buried her face in his chest and started crying out loud.
Asgar simply held her in his arms and allowed her to unburden herself. She clearly had been through a lot.
In a day, they would arrive at Zuvrak, and the time for explanations would finally arrive.
Excerpts from Brynjar, Drogon King
Eleanor watched as the guards took the other women out of the dungeon, in silence. Sasha had put up some resistance, but she was quickly subdued by the collar attached to all of our necks.
She still had trouble believing all of the things happening weren’t part of a nightmare that was actually real. Aliens were supposed to be fiction, right? They weren’t supposed to. Exist and not only that, to come into your house and abduct you, to sell you at a slave auction.
She crawled back to her bunker, pulling herself up and laying there, staring at the ceiling. Today, the rest of the women who had been captured by the aliens were going to be sold to the highest bidder, including her best friend, Sasha.
Eleanor wasn’t included in the group, because, as the slave master insisted in reminding her, she was damaged goods. She couldn’t walk.
When she was sixteen, she had been in a car accident with her parents. Her father had been driving that night, and she was in the back seat of the car, taking a nap. They were coming back from their annual trip to the lakes, where they usually spent the summers, when a drunken truck driver, left his lane and rammed head-on into her parents' car. Her parents and the other driver died instantly, and Eleanor was severely injured.
After the accident, she was confined to a wheelchair. The damage to her spine had been too great, and it became too painful for her to stand, what to say to move her legs. She didn’t lose sensibility in her legs, but sometimes, the pain was so excruciating, she wished she had.
Sasha had been there for her. They had been friends since kinder garden, and after the accident, she became the sister she had never had. After they had graduated from high school, they went to college together, and they had been together ever since.
Eleanor sometimes thought she was becoming a burden on her friend’s life and she hated the feeling, but every time she had suggested moving alone, Sasha had rejected the idea roundly.
“Don’t think you’re the only needy part in this relationship, Eleanor. I wouldn’t know what to do without you in my life,” she used to say, every time the subject came up.
“I wouldn’t be out of your life, just out of your apartment,” Eleanor insisted, to no avail.
But now things had changed dramatically.
A couple of huge alien lizards had appeared on their apartment, to abduct her. The plan was to kidnap Sasha while Eleanor was out, at the gym where she had therapy, three times a week, but that day, the therapist didn’t show up, and she returned home earlier, just when Sasha was losing the battle with the lizard men.
Sasha had tried to warn her, to make her escape, but instead of doing that, Eleanor had approached Sasha’s room, just to get herself in trouble, as well.
The abductors drugged Sasha and knocked out Eleanor, taking them both to their spaceship.
From the beginning, it was evident they hadn’t planned on bringing Eleanor along. She was damaged goods, and they had little to do with her.
She was kept alive because the captain had decided he would find a buyer for her, that he wouldn’t waste time and food they had spent on her.
The whole idea crept her to the bones, but she was a fighter, and she had no death wishes. As long as she lived, there was hope, and she clung to that hope with all her strength.
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Excerpt from Alien Aliances
Chapter One
Meg Casey was running along the shoulder of Sackett Road near where she lived in her modest ranch style home between two hay fields with a woodlot out back. Running was her favorite way to unwind from her hectic job as a nurse practitioner at the local Family Health Clinic. It was exactly a mile from her house to the crossing of Pine Road with only one other house on that stretch of road. She ran the same route about three times a week on the evenings she got off work early. The exercise was good for her, and the endorphins gave her a natural uplift.
She alternated between jogging at a leisurely pace with wind sprints, her long blond ponytail bobbing up and down as she ran. She was fairly tall at 5’8” with long, shapely legs, wider at the hips than she would like with a rounded and toned butt. Her C cup breasts were stabilized by snug sports bra to keep them from bouncing too much as she ran. Her stark blue eyes were protected from the bright evening sun by UV blocking sunglasses.
She was almost to Pine Road when an ordinary SUV slowed and stopped beside her. The man inside looked older, partially bald, and basically harmless, so she stopped.
“Can you tell me which way to the main highway? I have gotten myself turned around, and this GPS is no help,” he said.
“Keep going in this direction. It’s about a mile down this road,” she said and pointed. When she looked back at him, he was pointing a small device that looked like a car remote at her and pressed the button. Meg jerked as though she’d been struck and crumpled to the ground. The man jumped out and opened the back door of his vehicle, picked Meg up from the side of the road, and tossed her in the back seat as though she weighed no more than a small child. He slammed the door, jumped back into the driver’s seat and sped away.
That was the last thing she remembered until she woke up lying on a cot hanging from a wall in a nondescript white room with four other women lying on cots like hers wearing only her bra and panties. There was a fresh tattoo on the inside of her wrist that resembled Cuneiform which she had only seen in pictures back in school.
In the center of the room was a pedestal table with benches on each side, all anchored to the floor. There was a small bathroom with a shower and sink that opened off the corner of the room with what looked like a sliding door on the fourth wall opposite the wall with the bathroom opening. The sliding door that Meg assumed was the exit was closed with no apparent way to open it.
“Does anyone know where we are?” Meg asked the other women in general.
” We’ve been kidnapped by alien slavers,” said the woman with dark, short hair in the bunk like hers on the other wall.
Meg laughed out loud. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I wish I was,” the other woman said. “There are about a dozen of us that I know of. I’ve been aboard for about a week. They picked me up when I was walking my dog before work. I woke up as they were shuttling a few of us up to their mother ship.”
“You’re serious,” Meg gasped.
“I wish I weren't,” she sighed. “They are taking us to som
e planet for a slave auction. All the women I’ve seen are young and fairly attractive. I heard we would probably be sold as pleasure companions.”
“You mean sex slaves.” Meg shuddered.
“Yeah.” The other woman sounded as hopeless as Meg felt.
Even if they were on Earth, escaping human traffickers would be no small feat, but escaping them in space was nearly impossible. Even if they would get out of this cell and find the shuttle that brought them here, she doubted any of them could fly it or would know where to go if they could. They couldn’t even hope for rescue. No one who would miss them would have a clue where to find them.
“How did you find out their intentions?” Meg asked.
“The one that comes with the droid cart that brings us food told us. He said they have been taking humans from earth for many years because it’s very profitable.”
“I’m sure it is,” Meg said. “I’m Meg Casey, what’s your name?”
“Kayla Elliott. Above you are Jane Edwards, and Liz Carson is above me,” said Kayla. “From what I’ve seen, there’s no way out of this before we land---and even then.”
Meg was about to ask what the aliens were like when the door across the room slid open with a soft whoosh. An automated cart rolled in followed by a hairless bipedal alien with purple wrinkled skin that sort of reminded her of a cartoon character. He was tall and slender with a humanoid face that had large dark round eyes, a flat nose with two nostrils and a wide mouth with thin lips.
Meg rolled out of the bunk and strode across the room toward the alien. “Who are you people and what right do you have to steal us from our homes? We are human beings, not cattle.” She shouted at him forgetting she was barefoot wearing only her underwear.
“Because we can,” the alien answered in fluent English. “We are Tenzari. We take what we can. Once we take you from Earth, you belong to us. Your world is not a member of the Alliance of Worlds. They have no recourse.”
“That is unacceptable!” Meg took another step forward, and the alien raised a wand and pointed it in her direction.
“Step back or feel the pain stick,” he warned, brandishing a black stick with two prongs on the end.
Meg saw that another alien had stopped in the open doorway. She backed away toward her bunk. This was not the time to make a move. She had no fighting skills. Dodging blows from combative patients in her early nursing career didn’t count. She backed away and sat on her bunk while the alien placed food trays on the table, one for each of them. She didn’t move toward the table until he left.
“Now do you believe me?” Kayla murmured.
“Either, we are on an alien spacecraft, we’re trapped in a movie set,” Meg quipped. “But they have weapons, and we don’t. Is the food fit to eat?”
“So far, it has been. It’s Earth food. I guess they want to keep us healthy,” Jane said, “I’m hungry, let’s eat.” She jumped down from the upper bunk and padded over also in bare feet.
There were four identical frozen dinners, packaged fruit cups and hot drinks that smelled like tea. Meg ate with the others. It was not the greatest, but it had been a day since she’d eaten. The simple food was at least filling.
“Come on, Liz, you need to eat,” coaxed Kayla.
“I’m not hungry,” she sniffed, weeping softly. “If I can’t go home, I would rather be dead. I want Paul and our baby. I love them so much. I don’t want to live the rest of my life without them. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone?”
“None of this is right or fair,” said Jane. “Slavery is just obscene.”
While eating, Meg tried not to think about what her life would be if she were actually sold into slavery to be some alien’s whore, or would she be relegated to a brothel and forced to screw any being that would pay. She shuddered as she wondered if the Tenzari might decide to sample the merchandise. That just creeped her out.
What bothered her more than her own possible fate was that her family and friends wouldn’t know what happened to her. They would think she had been murdered and dumped somewhere. Her ex-husband wouldn’t care. He’d already found someone else before their split, the bastard. But her patients would be left high and dry. Everything she had worked for would be gone---she would be gone.
“I can’t believe that slavery can be legal in a civilization with this level of technology,” said Meg.
“It probably isn’t,” said Kayla. “He said Earth had no recourse because they are not part of the Alliance. These aliens are probably not either.”
“Yes, it sounded like they think they will get away with it because Earth can’t complain to whatever Alliance might stop them,” Meg added. “It doesn’t sound very hopeful for us to get out of this.”
“I know. It’s not like we can call 911,” Jane said. “Whatever or whoever this Alliance is, we have no way to contact them to see if they would even help us.”
So, we’re basically screwed. Meg thought. She fell silent and concentrated on eating.
“I wish they’d at least left me my cell phone. Even if I couldn’t call anyone it had games and stuff and a few books to read,” said Jane.
“I didn’t have mine with me when the old guy snatched me right off the road near my house,” Meg said. “I wonder what they did with my $200 running shoes.”
Kayla laughed, “It’s not like you will need them. There’s nowhere to run on this ship---not like we can escape and run away in space.”
“Even if we can escape from them wherever they’re taking us, how could we get back to Earth?” Jane added.
Screwed.
Between meals and sleeping, the days seemed endless. There was little to do in the small cell but talk or exercise in place. They didn’t even have a deck of cards between them. Liz cried a lot about the husband, and the four-month-old baby boy left behind. She missed her baby and her husband. She just wanted to go home. To make matters worse, she was still lactating from breastfeeding and her breasts hurt and leaked. She spent a lot of time in the bathroom expressing the excess milk and crying more.
It was hard for the other women to be encouraging to her because their situation looked so hopeless. But Meg kept telling herself that somehow, she was going to get out of this. Maybe she couldn’t escape from the ship but if she watched and waited an opportunity would arise.
Two
Captain Dargan Marrek paced the bridge of the United Alliance Interceptor, Raptor One. At forty-one he was young to be an Alliance Enforcer frigate captain. Raptor One was the largest of the Interceptor line with cabin space for a crew of three hundred fifty, though they only carried a crew of three hundred ten. Marrek had worked his way up through the ranks. He’d proved himself by his courage in battle and leadership abilities worthy to command the first of the Raptor series.
His crew found him a fair and considerate leader who occasionally would socialize with them to gain a better understanding of their strengths and mindset. Marrek took pride in knowing them all by name as well.
Captain Marrek paused from time to time to stare at the forward scanner screen showing the trajectory of the Tenzari clipper they’d been trailing for days. “How soon to intercept?” he demanded from his helmsman.
“About six hours, sir,” she responded. “We’ll catch them well before they get to the Tenzari system.”
“Can you bump up our velocity so we can get there a little faster? Tenzari is out of our jurisdiction. We don’t want to start a war. We just want to get those Earthers back. If we get there soon enough, we can at least shut down one slave ship.”
“I can probably shave off another hour without straining our star drive,” she replied.
“Do it! We must show them severe consequences for abducting people from Alliance sectors. If we take enough of their ships, maybe they’ll decide it’s not worth the risk.” Marrek said.
Momentarily, Commander Pannot Rareton strode on to the bridge and came to a stop in front of Captain Marrek. “Reporting for duty, sir. You’re relieved,” Rareton sn
apped his heels together and bowed his head briefly in salute.
“Thank you, Commander. Com me when we are in range of the Tenzari clipper.
“Will do.”
Marrek gave him a brief nod and left the bridge heading toward his quarters for a few hours’ sleep. Marrek was Narovian, a member of a feline humanoid race that was once preyed upon by Tenzari slavers before they became space faring. Hatred of slavers was part of the Narovian culture. Stealing a person’s freedom was in the akin to murder in their eyes. As slaves, they no longer had any control over their own destiny. Many were ripped away from their families. It was a cruel business.
Dargan Marrek looked much like Earth humans but with blue hair and amber, cat-like eyes he was a few inches over six feet with a powerful brawny build. Though he was reluctant to leave the bridge, he knew he needed a few hours of sleep so he would be rested for the seizure and boarding of the Tenzari vessel. Not that he couldn’t trust Rareton to handle it, Marrek just wanted to be there for the culmination of the chase.
Captain Marrek didn't wait to be called to the bridge as Raptor One closed on the Tenzari clipper. He had his computer wake him five hours later. He showered and dressed and was on the bridge ten minutes later as they were making their final approach on the clipper. Marrek stood at ease behind Rareton who was sitting in the Captain's chair.
“Gunner, arm weapons,” Rareton ordered in a calm voice. “Target weapons and main star drive. Our priority is to rescue the abductees. We don't want to blow them out of the sky.”
“Com, see if you can get me a face on that clipper.”
Minutes later, a grumpy looking Tenzari, in plain clothes appeared on the forward com screen.
“This is Commander Rareton of the United Alliance of Planets Interceptor Raptor One. Cut your engines and prepare for docking.” Rareton demanded. “We have a search warrant.”