Enslaved Book III: The Gladiators

by Kaitlyn O'Connor

He shrugged. “Make hot, make fire.”

  Dakaar struck his chest with his fist. “Make like punch.”

  “Kill tings,” Balen said.

  Loren gaped at him, struggling not to look as horrified as she felt, but then she’d heard dolphins could produce sound waves powerful enough to kill small fish. They used it to catch food.

  That was probably what he’d meant, she told herself.

  Dakaar and Kael both glared at him.

  “It’s ok,” she said dismissively, turning her attention at last to studying the works of the collar. To her relief, she discovered it was actually a pretty simple device. There was a tiny circuit chip in it that controlled everything—including the charge. “I think this is the explosive charge.” She pointed to it with her pinky, taking care not to touch it and then looked up at them. “How accurately can you direct the sound waves?”

  Again Kael shrugged. “Close, very much—far away, not so much.”

  Loren nodded. “The machine that Lecur has directs a beam—like the sound you can make—probably all over this area. Actually, it’s probably all over the building, like a shield. Once the circuit is completed by fastening the collar, it can’t be broken as long as the ‘shield’ is up without setting off the explosive charge. I think, if you could destroy this chip, that it would break the circuit without blowing up. I don’t know of any way to test it, though, except to activate it.” Frustration filled her. “If I had tools, I could remove the charge and test it. Otherwise, I can’t tell for sure one way or the other.”

  Kael frowned. “Is enough charge blow head off?”

  Loren stared at it skeptically. “Explosives aren’t my field, but I’m going to guess, based on what you’ve heard and the fact that it’s there at all, that it would majorly fuck you up if it went off, even if it didn’t kill you. I don’t think it would be there if it wouldn’t.”

  Kael nodded, frowning thoughtfully. “Explode under water?”

  She considered it. “I don’t honestly know. I don’t see why it wouldn’t, though. The cover obviously fits tightly enough to keep water out.”

  “Make less noise, though, yes?”

  Loren blinked at him. “No! I know what you’re thinking, but it’s too dangerous, Kael! When it blows up, it’ll blow this metal up and shrapnel will fly in every direction!”

  Kael snatched it from her. “Try not blow up.”

  “Oh god! Don’t put it there!” she gasped when he shoved it into his loincloth again.

  She saw his eyes were gleaming with amusement when she looked up at him. “No blow off nice ting.” He shrugged and nudged his head at his companions. “Dakaar and Balen still hab one. Me I hab tongue.” He waved it at her.

  She couldn’t help but smile. “That isn’t funny! I like that nice thing!”

  He grinned at her. “I like, too. ‘Specially like put in Lau-ren’s tup.”

  Loren wanted him to put it in her tup, too! Her smile faded. “Just be careful.”

  She watched them leave in dismay, wondering if she should’ve tried to talk him out of trying anything at all, wishing she hadn’t been so caught up in the possibility that he had a ‘built in’ tool to disable the damned things that she’d actually considered what it meant if he tried it and it didn’t work.

  She was too on edge to sleep, fearing any moment that an explosion would rip through the basement. Finally exhaustion got the better of her, though, and she dropped off. The anxiety returned the moment she woke up, but she knew she was just going to have to contain herself to discover if they’d successfully tried it or decided it was too dangerous to attempt.

  She looked at them expectantly when they arrived at her cell door the following night. They grinned at her. Loren flew to the door in excitement. “It worked?” she asked in an excited whisper.

  “Yes. Work. No blow anyting off.”

  “Thank god! I couldn’t sleep last night for worrying about it.” She paused to calm her racing heart. “We’re going to have to try one that’s already been activated to be sure.”

  “Am sure,” Kael responded. “Break Dakaar’s and Balen’s. Dakaar break mine.”

  Loren gaped at him in horror. “Oh my god! You didn’t!”

  The three men exchanged a look of surprise. “Did,” Dakaar assured her. “Still have head.”

  “I would have had nightmares if I’d known you were going to do that!” Loren said crossly.

  Kael’s brows. “Good ting no know, yes?”

  She glared at him. “No it isn’t!” she hissed at him. “If it hadn’t worked, you’d be dead!”

  He caught her and dragged her against the bars, bending down to try to nuzzle her through the bars. “Shimone be sad?”

  She popped his shoulder angrily. “Of course I’d be sad,” she said tightly and then abruptly felt close to tears. “I don’t want anything to happen to you!”

  Amusement flickered in his eyes, but he sobered quickly. “No want anyting happen to mine shimone, either,” he said. “Need do dis ting. No udder way.”

  He was right and she knew it. Despite everything that had happened to her, though, she wasn’t accustomed to life or death situations. It was hard to accept that they had to risk death just have a chance at life—because this certainly wasn’t life. She nodded, straining to reach him to soothe the sting from her slap with a kiss. He looked bemused, but didn’t ask her how she thought a kiss would take the sting away.

  “What next?” she asked him.

  “More kisses first,” he murmured.

  As much as she enjoyed kissing them, it was a huge disappointment that that was all she could get. She was tempted to suggest oral sex, but she wasn’t certain she could bring them all off without making it look suspicious that they lingered so long and they couldn’t afford to arouse any kind of suspicions.

  She moved back to Kael when she’d made the rounds, looking up at him expectantly. He shook his head at her. “Next part harder. Take time.”

  Which they were running out of if they were going to escape before Lecur turned the other gladiators loose on her and the other two women. Sighing when she realized she was just going to have to give him time to work out a plan, she let it go.

  There was one thing about their wild orgy that had been bothering her, though. She hadn’t broached it before because of the trust issue that had arisen from the incident and also because she hadn’t wanted to risk insulting them or making them feel bad. She had been left with doubts that disturbed her, though, and it wasn’t something she wanted to find out later. “There was something I wanted to ask. After the … uh … games last time. Dakaar suggested …. Well, he said it was the spawning, that the fever was gone. What is the spawning exactly?”

  The three men glanced at one another questioningly. “Make baby,” Kael responded finally, studying her a little warily.

  Loren blinked at him. “You think you made a baby?”

  Balen answered. “We know it no you time. You no be ‘fraid if had fever, too.”

  She stared at him blankly for a moment before that sank in. “You’re saying you and your women go into this … spawning fever at the same time?”

  That time they stared at her blankly. They exchanged puzzled and vaguely uneasy looks.

  “How often does this happen?” she asked worriedly.

  They frowned. “Three … four years,” Balen said.

  That was the part that was really worrying her. She’d known they must be talking about their mating cycle and she had to say the ‘fever’ was pretty damned unnerving, but she wasn’t especially happy about the implications that sex wasn’t going to be in the picture except then. And it didn’t actually make sense that they’d want to be her lover if that was the cycle, unless they had a completely different meaning for the word. “But … you have lovers … uh … sex between spawning?”

  “Yes. No babies den.”

  Indignation welled in her as she digested that. “Let me get this straight—you’re saying you can have sex any ti
me and not get pregnant—your women—except during the spawning? Oh! That is just so unfair! Why couldn’t we have evolved like that?”

  All three of them turned so pale it startled her.

  “How often you spawn?” Kael asked a little hoarsely.

  Loren considered correcting him and telling him they didn’t ‘spawn’ or at least didn’t call it that, but dismissed it. It was what they were familiar with. She sighed. “Pretty much any time we don’t use birth control and have sex unless we’re lucky.”

  They’d begun to look a little sick by the time she finished.

  “Truth?” Dakaar asked, disbelief evident in his voice.

  Loren lifted her brows. “Why would I lie?” she asked a little indignantly.

  Kael touched her cheek, bringing her attention back to him. “How often, shimone?”

  “Every twenty eight days … almost like clockwork.” She frowned, feeling a strange little quiver race through her. “Now that you mention it my period’s late.”

  “What dis birth control?” Kael asked hoarsely. “You use?”

  That time Loren felt distinctly uneasy. She studied his expression. Admit she hadn’t been on birth control since she’d been taken? Or tell them she was absolutely certain that she wouldn’t get pregnant having sex with them because they were aliens?

  Maybe it would be better to just lie and say she was on birth control, she thought unhappily? It was bound to insult them and maybe hurt their feelings if she told him the latter and they looked like they just might be pissed off if she told them the former.

  She smiled at Kael a little weakly. “We have to use it to keep from having babies except when we want to have them. Of course I have birth control pills! No responsible adult would consider having sex without the pill!”

  He didn’t look convinced. None of them did and they didn’t look happy. Not but what she could see their point. It wasn’t as if she wanted to get pregnant when she was treated like a caged animal! She hadn’t actually given any thought to when, or even if, she would have a family, but having sex didn’t put her the mood to brood!

  She was counting on the fact that they were different preventing conception, because she didn’t have any damned thing else to rely on and she didn’t have any options, either!

  Kael cupped her face and forced her to look at him. “Dis important, shimone. Say truth! You in fertile time? Or no?”

  “You mean now?” she hedged.

  His lips tightened. “When we fuck, gods damn it!”

  She glared at him, hurt that he’d referred to it as fucking, although she supposed it was absurd to think it was anything else. “I don’t know, damn it! It’s not like I could’ve fought you off—any of you—anyway!”

  He stared at her for a long moment and finally turned and left. Dakaar and Balen looked as upset about the information as Kael had, for that matter.

  Loren stared at their retreating backs unhappily, wondering why their reaction to the possibility that she might have conceived made her so unhappy.

  Chapter Eight

  Dakaar was angry. A good deal of it was fear because Lau-ren had been evasive about whether or not she might be breeding and worry that she was and would be even more vulnerable because of it, but there was also a sense of betrayal that he could not shake—or precisely pinpoint for that matter. As they reached their cell again, he pinned Balen with an accusing look. “You said there was no danger that we might spawn on her!” he growled.

  Balen’s lips tightened. “I told you what she said to me, gods damn it! Do you think I would not have been worried if I had thought otherwise?”

  “It would not have made any difference one way or another,” Kael said pointedly. “I do not recall much of anything from the spawning, but there could not have been much to deter us or we would not have caught her. I do recall that I did mate her.”

  Dakaar glared at him. “I also recall that part! She did not try to fight, gods damn it. I know it would have been ineffectual if she had, and mayhap I would not have been able to stop myself anyway, but I also know that I would recall if she had tried to prevent it!”

  Kael studied him angrily. The truth was that that was bothering him, as well. “She ran.”

  “They always run!” Dakaar snapped. “How else can they weed out the less desirable to them? It is one thing to accept a lover that you know lacks those qualities most desirable in offspring and another entirely to allow them to breed!”

  “What are you saying then?” Kael demanded angrily. “That it is her fault if she is breeding? We can clear our conscience that she may be in even more danger than we believed because of something that we did? That we have not endangered a child because of our actions?”

  “She did not believe that it would be an issue because she does see past the differences between us,” Balen said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “We are the undesirable lovers to her … except that she was not concerned that we might catch her because it is more than that. She does not think that we are capable of breeding on her. I should have known then that that was what she meant—mayhap I did and I did not want to believe it—because I wanted her and I wanted to believe that she felt the same and not that she was only willing because she thought she must barter for protection.”

  Dakaar exchanged a glance with Kael. He could see in his eyes that Kael knew that that was the truth just as he did and he finally realized why he had felt the sense of betrayal. It was because, even now, Lau-ren was only certain that they had not bred on her because she looked upon them only as creatures from another world, perhaps even inferior creatures. She did not see any of the ways that they were the same, only the differences.

  “We do not know that ourselves,” Kael said finally, “but we must assume that one of us has bred on her and plan accordingly. I do not like that we have no more to offer a mate than we did before—beyond the possibility of freedom—but it is not within our power to change that. We can nothing but our best to protect her and the child she might be carrying, take her from this place where neither she nor the child will have any chance at all of surviving, and hope that we can find a place where there will be a future for her and the child—if she is carrying one.

  “I will not say that it does not matter to me that she does not feel as I had hoped and begun to believe. It does. But it does not change the way I feel about her and it also does not mean that it is not possible that she could feel for me as I would like, only that I have not won her heart as I had hoped and that I must try harder to win her. Mayhap her instincts are better than ours and she is right and if that is the case, then it is the way that it was meant to be. It grieves me to think so. I would like to think there might be a chance to have a child with her to bond us more closely, or mayhap to bond us at all if nothing else would, but it is still better to have something than to have nothing. She is a willing lover whatever her motives.”

  Dakaar swallowed a little convulsively. “I agree to an extent. I do not think that I ever had a choice in the way that I feel about her. From the moment I saw her …. But as you say, what is meant to be is. What if her instincts are wrong, though? What if we have bred upon her? If she does not accept us, will she also refuse to accept our child? Will she only look upon it as some alien thing that she must tolerate? Or mayhap will not tolerate?”

  Kael stared at him a little sickly and finally scrubbed his hands over his face dispiritedly. “We cannot do anything about that and I cannot think about that now … and there is no point in worrying about a future until and unless we can provide one. First, we must think of a way to take her from this place and do our utmost to carry it out. Then will be the time to worry about other things, not now.

  “We do not have time to worry about such distractions. I am as certain as I can be that Lecur never makes idle threats—and his decision was intended as one, not a promise. He will give her to the others to punish us and her and he does not care what happens to her. In fact, I would not put it past him to urge t
hem to do their worst or to give her first to those he knows will be cruel and rough with her. He is furious with her and the other women because he miscalculated and it cost him, and he did not expect that.

  “It is … regrettable that we were in no state, and not prepared, to make use of the situation. There was enough mayhem that we might have won our freedom then—if not for the collars. Unfortunately, Lecur is wary now and I am not certain that we could instigate another riot like that and make use of it.

  “I am thinking that it is still our best hope of achieving what we must, though.”

  Dakaar frowned. “I see your point. I do not see that we could do it, though, without including all of the gladiators in the plot and there are too many I do not trust—and they will not be willing to try it if we do not destroy their collars.”

  “That is the part that I have not worked out,” Kael admitted. “I think there is also the risk that if we deactivate the collars Lecur’s machine might detect that, but I do not see an alternative. It is too risky to try to do it all at once. If we are in a great rush, we cannot be as careful and could end up killing those we meant to free.” He shook his head. “Those we do not trust will trust us no better. They might not allow us to try and might not trust that it was done even so and it is critical that we create a diversion. Our chances of success will be far lower if there is not enough of a stir to distract them from what we are doing.

  “If Lau-ren were more confident that she could control their machines, I would not worry so much, but we will need to buy her the time to figure it out … and we cannot even determine how much time that will take.”

  “Mayhap it would be better,” Balen said thoughtfully, “to simply wait until it is dark and slip away? I had not realized it before, but Lau-ren is blind in the dark and it is possible that the others are also, or at least cannot see as well as we can.”

  Kael stared at him in surprise for a moment and then turned that news over in his mind. Finally, he shook his head. “We cannot know that that is the case. We do not even know if the entire space station is dark at the same time or if it is only Lecur who turns all of the lights out because he is a cheap bastard or because it is what he is accustomed to.”