by Lula Monk
Dredge thought it best not to correct her about the composition of the pod at this moment. Later.
“I am sorry if I have shown you anything distressing,” he said.
She sank back against the floor of the pod and put her head in her hands.
With a heavy heart, Dredge began the long trek back to their room in the Breeding Sector.
As they passed the pavilion, Samantha stood.
“Is there already another auction?” she asked.
Dredge’s spine went rigid. He’d not meant to pass so closely to the auction block for fear this would happen. He hadn’t memorized the auction schedule, but the thickening crowds had signaled that one was most likely approaching. A grievous error.
“I want to watch,” said Samantha, her voice hollow but determined.
“That is not wise.”
She pressed her face against the portal once more. “I need to see, Dredge.”
His mind whirled with various thoughts, the primary one of which being that he had already overindulged her. This outing had not gone as he had hoped, and he was not eager to give another opportunity for unintentional strife to develop.
“I do not like crowds,” he said. “I would rather return to our room.”
“I . . . I need to see someone who looks like me,” she whispered.
Dredge’s gut clinched. He knew that sensation well, the feeling of supreme isolation and loneliness. It infuriated him, the way his Earthling was able to manipulate his emotions. For that reason alone, he almost refused her request. But when he looked into her large liquid eyes once more, he heard himself saying, “All right.”
Curses! He’d not meant to speak the words but now that they out in the open, he was beholden to them.
An unfortunate turn indeed.
He led the pod to the back of the crowd just as a new human stepped onto the auction block.
Samantha sucked in a sharp breath. “I know her,” she said.
“Inconceivable. The statistical likelihood of you knowing an Earth woman lightyears away is negligible. There is no likelihood.”
“Shove your math up your ass, Dredge. I’ve seen her before. I know it.”
Dredge frowned at the idiom, not wanting anything inserted into his anal cavity. “I do not see that as being possible, Samantha. I believe you are seeing what you want to see.”
Her face changed, a new light shining from behind her eyes, as if she’d just made some realization. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. I’m probably just . . . shell shocked or whatever the kidnapped-by-aliens-and-sold-as-a-sex-slave equivalent would be.”
Dredge began to depart, the pod following him.
“Wait!” Samantha cried out, her face pushing through the portal.
The woman on the auction block looked back to their section of the crowd. Recognition and disbelief bloomed across her face, spreading like some virulent disease. Then, foolishly, hope.
“Samantha!” the woman shouted, her hand waving. She went to leap from the stage, and a Ceph pressed a stun gun to her neck. The woman dropped to the floor.
There were a few outraged cries from the crowd, probably from the aliens who had already bid on the woman.
“Fret not,” the auctioneer crooned reassuringly, "the human woman is not harmed. Their species' neurological system is powered by small charges of electricity. A minor stun is nothing more than a temporary inconvenience. She is not damaged.”
Some of the creatures in the crowd turned to glare and glower at Dredge. No, at Samantha in her pod.
“Take me home, Dredge,” she whispered, her eyes unblinking. Tears leaked from them in a steady rhythm, not inhibited by her unmoving eyelids.
Dredge sealed the pod and did as his Earth woman commanded.
Chapter 9
Samantha
Dredge didn’t understand. That much was obvious from the way he sat in the chair by the table, staring at her.
Samantha could not make her tears stop flowing. She’d wanted so much for their trip through the Hub to yield some reward, some clue for helping her plan an escape. All it had done was break her spirit.
She could not remember the name of the woman on the auction block; only her face had been recognizable. She was sure she had gone to college with the woman, maybe done a group project in one of her non-degree classes. It’s not like they had been friends or anything.
But she had remembered Samantha.
Through the fear and confusion and exhaustion she was bound to have been experiencing, the woman saw Samantha’s face squeezing through the pod portal and knew her. Called out to her by name.
That is what had frightened Samantha the most. Not the aliens leering at her, nor the auctioneer with his many eyes and twice again as many mouths, all sneering and speaking in unison.
No, what had frightened Samantha the most was that that woman on the stage was probably at this moment being stripped and forcibly impregnated as she herself sat on the floor of Dredge’s sterile room. She was confident that was the woman’s fate, for there were no creatures in the crowd that even remotely resembled a human or even a Glim like Dredge.
Her thoughts were no longer on escape. What was the point, when anyone she knew could be taken from Earth and brought to this place to have God knows what done to them?
She’d not even considered the possibility until she saw the woman on stage.
Before, when Samantha herself had arrived the previous day with Debra and the rest, she’d been only concerned with how odd her own abduction had been. Even though she was with a group of other females, all of them standing on the auction block and waiting to go to the highest bidder, Samantha had felt alone in her suffering, as though it were unique to her in some way.
But now that sensation had changed, eclipse by the stark reality that what had happened to her could happen to anyone. Would happen, to lots of other women.
No, her mind and soul no longer longed for escape. What she wanted now was freedom, and not just for herself but for the many other women who were on this space station.
She wanted to bring Galactic Continuity to its knees.
“Are you recovered?” asked Dredge, seeing that Samantha was no longer crying.
She continued to stare down at her hands, a fledgling plan hatching in her mind.
“Samantha?”
“No,” she said, looking up at him with haunted eyes. “I’m not okay.”
Dredge sighed. “There is nothing you could have done, Samantha.” He paused for a moment, as if contemplating. “If I could have purchased her for you, I would have.”
“I don’t want to own her, Dredge.” Samantha stared at him through narrow eyes. “Don’t you get that? We are people. We aren’t meant to be owned.”
Dredge nodded. “I agree. All sentient lifeforms deserve freedom and autonomy.”
Samantha stared at him blankly. “And yet you came here to the Hub, determined to buy a breeder and pump you little Glimlings into her.”
“Would you please stop referring to the act of mating with me in such crass terms?”
She rolled her eyes., desiring to gauge out his. “Sorry if my words offend you.”
“You do not sound genuinely apologetic.”
“Good. I’m not.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Samantha began chewing on her nails once more.
“I want you to know that I do not enjoy this,” said Dredge.
“Oh. That’s good to know.”
“More sarcasm?”
“Yes.”
The alien sighed. “This is not how I imagined having offspring, Samantha.”
“Yeah, well me either, buddy.”
“Please stop being so verbally combative. I am trying to . . . to share my emotions with you.”
“Fuck your emotions.”
“That is not possible.”
More silence.
“Before the disease came to Brillar, I–”
“I don’t care.”
D
redge sighed, his patience obviously wearing thin.
“Before the disease came to Brillar, I’d had my own dreams, Samantha. My own desires and hopes. My own plan for my life. But when the disease began to wipe out the Glims, extinguishing their lights one by one . . . When their fragmented parts began to line the streets, I knew there was something I had to do. Do you know what that something was, Samantha?”
“Travel across the universe and rape a human.”
“Have I even attempted to force myself on you?” he asked, his tone hurt.
Her shoulders slumped. She was ashamed that she had said the words at all. “No.”
Dredge nodded in acknowledgement. “The thing that I gave up, Samantha, was my own desires. Before the disease, I had been . . . saving myself, as it were. Biding my time until I met the Glim female with whom I would want to merge my light. To fuse my soul with hers and live as one creature until the end of our light.”
“Is this a long, drawn out speech just to tell me you’re, what? A virgin?”
“There is no equivocal term in my vocabulary. If you mean that I have not previously mated, you are correct.”
Samantha scoffed.
“But that is not the purpose of my story. My purpose, Samantha, the lesson I wish for you to learn, is that there are times when our own needs must be subjugated for the good of others. Sometimes, others’ needs are more important than our own.”
Samantha laughed, but it was not a humorous sound. “Great. I should happily let go of my old life and lay down to give you Glimlings, right? Because the survival of your species is more important than one insignificant human’s life?”
“That is accurate.”
Samantha’s heart hammered in her chest, threatening to burst forth from her rib cage. She felt like she could run a mile. A hundred miles. Adrenalin coursed through her veins, making perspiration bead along the base of her neck, dampening her hair.
She wanted to fight.
She took in big, bracing gulps of air. She had to be calm. Now was a time for careful planning, right? Not emotional reaction.
“Dredge,” she said carefully, measuring out the word. “You know this is all wrong, right? I mean, you said it yourself. All creatures deserve freedom.”
“All sentient creatures deserve freedom,” he corrected.
Samantha’s teeth set on edge. “Right,” she said. “All sentient creatures.”
“That is correct.”
“So how can you be doing this? How can you be participating in something so . . . evil?”
“I have explained this to you many times now, Samantha. Ensuring the survival of my species is not evil.”
“Yeah, that sounds noble enough, Dredge. But when you have to force another creature to help you do it? That’s just wrong.”
“The Intergalactic Council would agree with you,” Dredge said rubbing his eyes.
She was wearing him down, that much was apparent. Good. The sicker of her he was, the less he would pester her about mating. His words struck her suddenly like a jolt from a stun gun.
“The what?” she asked.
Dredge sat up straight in his chair, as though electrified. He met her eyes and then gave a resigned sigh. “The Intergalactic Council,” he said, his shoulders slumping once more.
“What is that?”
“It is a Council established many eons ago, with the intent of maintaining order and peace in the universe.”
Samantha’s gnawed at her fingernail, thinking. When Dredge didn’t offer any more information, she asked, “What did you mean when you said the Intergalactic Council would agree with me, about the freedom thing?”
Dredge stood and began to pace. He looked outside of the transparent wall, and Samantha did as well. The ‘starfield,’ as he called it, looked different now. There were obvious planets in the distance, now visible as if they’d grown larger.
Samantha sucked in a breath. No, planets didn’t grow larger, but she’d bet space stations moved.
Her heart dropped into her stomach. She wondered if they were moving closer to or father away from Earth. Probably the latter.
At last, Dredge spoke, though it was obvious he did not want to. “The Intergalactic Council has decrees. 'Laws,' your species would call them. Such things are written and then agreed to by some planets within the jurisdiction of the Intergalactic Council. The ones that have mastered space travel, at least.”
“Why just some?” Samantha asked.
Dredge met her eyes in the reflection of the window and smiled. “The universe is a large place, Samantha. Some would say infinite. There is no way to know where all life forms exist.”
Samantha nodded, waiting for him to continue.
“Those planets that do not agree to directives as set forth by the Council forfeit representation on the Council itself, thereby eliminating their position in trade and other intergalactic endeavors.”
“What are these rules . . . err ‘directives’?”
“They are numerous. Too many to list.”
“But what the Hub is doing, buying and selling humans? That breaks one of the decrees, correct?”
Dredge sucked in a sharp breath then exhaled it slowly. “Yes.”
“So, what you are doing to me then is illegal, huh?”
“We have no concept of legality, but it is breaking the Council’s directives, yes.”
Samantha chewed on her lip, thoughtfully. “What does the Council do if someone breaks one of the rules?”
Dredge turned to her, his eyes boring into hers. “You have no way to contact the Council, Samantha. Any efforts of yours on that front will be futile.”
Her eyes widened, and once more she wondered if he could read minds. “It was just a question, Dredge.”
“Obliteration is the punishment for breaching a Council directive.”
And there it was. Her key. The end goal for Samantha’s plan, the one that had not even fully formed in her mind yet.
She didn’t know how she would do it, or how long it would take, but she would bring Galactic Continuity to the attention of the Intergalactic Council.
There was no need for escape if the system which restricted your freedom was gone.
Chapter 10
Dredge
He turned back to the transparent wall, assessing the view without. He had said too much to the Earth woman, had revealed too many things. He watched her reflection in the window, watched the way she pensively chewed on her lower lip, lost in thought. He tried to calm the beating of his heart.
Even if the Earth woman had grand plans to bring him to ruin – plans he would ensure did not come to fruition, at any cost – there was no way she could execute them. She could not even escape this room. There would be no way for her to bring Dredge to justice for his crimes.
This entire affair had become a mess. He knew the excursion had been a bad choice. And he knew that speaking his next words would be an even poorer one.
“Are you ready to breed now?”
Samantha did not answer.
Dredge left the view and went to sit on the floor by her side, as he had done before when they had shared their first and only intimate moment. Not the kiss. When Samantha had placed her hand on his, comforting him.
The Earth woman moved away from him, increasing the distance between them.
“Have I done something to offend you?”
“Can you just . . . not mention breeding for a while? I’m a little shaken up from today. Sleeping with you now . . . it sounds much less appealing that it did before. No offense.”
“None taken,” said Dredge, though that was not true. Knowing Samantha found the idea of mating with him unappealing made Dredge feel . . . what? Shame? Disappointment?
Rejection, he realized. It was not a pleasant sensation to experience.
“How long is a ‘while?’” he asked. “We do not have such a concept on Brillar.”
“A few days.”
Dredge said nothing. Assuming she meant Ear
th days, he did the calculations in his mind, converting universal time units into Earth days and then Earth hours.
“I just need some space,” Samantha said.
He stood and went to the other side of the room. “Is this enough space?”
She looked up at him and gave a small smile.
“Yes, Dredge. That is far enough.”
Chapter 11
Samantha
It had been four days since she’d asked Dredge for space, judging by the digital watch he had gone out and gotten for her. She marveled that such a thing was available, for Dredge had told her that no one on the Hub kept track of time in what he called “Earth units.”
Samantha ran her finger around the edge of the watch face, trying not to imagine what kind of woman slept in a watch. Surely that is how such a thing had come to be at a place like this. Some woman had been abducted wearing it, and then . . .
Samantha did not dwell on what must have happened to have left the watch without its owner.
Dredge stayed true to his word, giving her both time and space. In addition to the watch, he’d also gone out and gotten her books to read. When he had returned with a small bundle of regular looking hardbacks, she’d been surprised. What she wasn’t surprised about was the fact that each of the books he brought back – all five of them – were about the planet Brillar.
Fair enough. At least he wasn’t begging her to breed.
The first book was large and ultimately very dull, being a comprehensive history of the planet itself, from formation to the present day.
The second and third books were more entertaining. Both were actual novels about Glims, of course. And they were . . . romances? She laughed to herself when she realized the genre halfway through the first chapter of the first book. She wondered if this was a ploy on Dredge’s part, some hope that seeing Glims in love and lust would appeal to her in some way. Perhaps even make her comfortable with the idea of falling in love with him or at least being willing to breed with him.
Fat chance.
By the time she reached the end of the third book, the second of the romance novels, she felt enlightened. Bad pun, but it was true.