Enslaved Book III: The Gladiators

by Kaitlyn O'Connor

  As for having his choice among the maidens—he supposed he had—later, after he had become a warrior of note and pod leader—not when they were younglings, certainly! He supposed Dakaar’s memory was faulty when it came to those times that Dakaar had claimed a maiden he had had his eye on!

  He had been no more inclined to change lovers in those days after he had matured than they had. It was true that when the sex cooled and the arguments heated he still tended to consider his welcome worn out and left, but he had spent far more time with no lover at all of late years than either Dakaar or Balen—because he had come to realize that there were none that suited him—none that he would consider sharing a pod with for any great length of time.

  There were troubles enough for him to deal with. He wanted peace when he retired to his pod and he had not found one willing to allow him any peace.

  He did not particularly blame the women. From the time the sheloni had begun to raid their world for slaves, their lives had changed forever. If there had been more children and a chance to nurture them, the women would have been happier, but the threat of a raid hung over them at all times. Most, like him, had decided to ignore their mating instincts and did not spawn, for they knew the chances were great that they would be snatched or their child would and either way the odds were not in their favor that they would be able to nurture their child to adulthood.

  Mostly, the sheloni took the adults and left the young to die, however, and he was not willing to risk that anymore than he wanted to see a child of his taken into slavery.

  He shuttled those thoughts aside and tried to focus once more on the plan of escape, but he discovered that he could not put Lau-ren from his mind. Mayhap he had been right along. There was no future for any of them—not now—but he discovered that he could not completely dismiss the hope that Lau-ren had brought him that there was. He did not want to look back. Nothing but misery and sorrow lay there. The future held some promise … if Dakaar was right and Lau-ren was only angry about something and Balen was wrong and she could and did see that they were worthy of fathering children on her.

  And if they could find a place where they could live free and nurture their young.

  Chapter Nine

  Loren didn’t feel one whit better when she woke up. In point of fact, she couldn’t remember any time when she’d felt worse except rare occasions when she’d been half dead with a cold or the flu. She felt like pure hell. Her head was splitting. Her eyes felt gritty and her eyelids were so swollen they almost felt like they were abrading her eyes every time she blinked. She didn’t feel much better when she’d showered, but the heat on her face from the water had eased some of the pain behind her eyes and she was clear headed enough to realize she’d screwed up royally the night before when she’d decided to pitch a bitch.

  Struggling with the urge to flop on the bed and pitch another one, she stared at the pile of ‘gifts’ at the bars and finally trudged over to retrieve them. Her chin wobbled threateningly when she’d picked them up and recalled the look on their faces when she’d hurled their gifts at them. Sucking in a sustaining breath, she retreated to the bed and sat down, wondering what had possessed her to throw such a fit.

  She was pretty sure she’d never behaved quite that badly before in her entire life. Her parents would’ve been shocked, horrified, and deeply distressed by such a display of ungovernable temper.

  She remembered abruptly that she’d thought they were cold and unfeeling when she’d been in her teens—actually ever since then. It dawned on her, though, why they’d tried so hard to train her to exert control over her emotions when they threatened to take control of her.

  Because she did and said things that were really, really stupid when she let her emotions control her instead of the other way around! She had a bad feeling that they were right and IQ points started dropping dramatically the moment she gave in to urges instead of using her brain.

  She closed her eyes, seeking calm, breathing slow, deep breaths and letting them out just as slowly. The urge to cry retreated.

  Since all it took was thinking about the argument and the way they’d looked at her to make her feel like crying all over again, she focused on trying to convince herself it really didn’t matter and she really didn’t care. Their accusations had been unjust and unwarranted! She’d had every right to be angry when they seemed to be accusing her of ‘entrapping’ them by getting her pregnant, she thought indignantly!

  The thought brought her mind instantly to that very subject and she glanced at the wall where she’d been scratching marks to try to keep track of her imprisonment. She had no idea why she’d done it—it was depressing—but she’d felt a need to know.

  It also brought to mind the ‘nightmare’ she’d had and she lifted a hand to her collar. Her chest felt like it would cave in when she felt the slight twist in it that told her the incident hadn’t been the nightmare she’d tried to convince herself it was. Kael had honored his ‘promise’. Glancing immediately toward the door, she moved close enough to examine it for any sign of what they’d done. Relieved when she didn’t see anything to incriminate them and possibly get them killed, she returned to the bed and sank weakly on it, struggling with guilt and fear as she accepted that her temper tantrum had put them in danger—because they were determined to protect her no matter how stupid she behaved!

  It didn’t bear thinking on what might have happened to them if they’d been caught at it!

  She couldn’t even gather up any indignation over the fact that one of them had nearly smothered her. Undoubtedly, they’d been unnerved by the necessity. None of them had ever been careless with her and she didn’t think it was deliberate.

  Although, she supposed, if she’d been in their place and had to risk getting caught to do ‘the right thing’ she might’ve felt like strangling the idiot that had forced her to risk her neck.

  She pushed the unnerving incident from her mind after a few moments and glanced at the wall again. When it finally occurred to her that her ‘I don’t want to know’ attitude wasn’t going to change the facts, she moved to the wall and counted the scratches, and then recounted them.

  A wave of shock went through her despite the fact that she’d almost managed to convince herself that she was scaring herself for nothing. It was weird that she almost felt like she’d been imprisoned a hundred years and it was still a hell of a shock to see it had been thirty two days.

  By the time she’d counted the scratches several more times, she was beginning to feel panic clawing at the back of her mind. Searching for a ray of hope, she collected her ‘privacy’ blanket and went to the toilet to examine herself. No blood. No period. She considered it for a moment and finally ran a finger up her passage and pulled it out to examine it. Nothing.

  Ok, don’t panic, she told herself! Thirty two days … really that was only a few days off. She was probably just stressed out and she’d start the next day or the next. The trip on the ship had probably completely fucked her cycle up and her body just hadn’t kick-started everything up again … yet. She was sure it would. This sort of thing just took time.

  Apparently a lot of time. She’d damned near rubbed her pussy raw trying to find some sign of menstrual blood after a few days of searching frantically for it. Slowly but insidiously, her search for some excuse to explain that horrific circumstance other than the obvious one petered out.

  She was pregnant.

  She felt like squalling her eyes out—not because she was, but because she knew the guys were going to be even more pissed off with her.

  Not that they weren’t already. They hadn’t been near her since she’d gone psycho on them.

  She resented their defection part of the time and told herself she didn’t care part of the time, but most of the time, she was just totally depressed about it.

  One little tiny psycho event and they acted like she was a leper!

  Well, she decided, she wasn’t going to try to coax them back!

  Mostly b
ecause they didn’t give her the damned chance.

  The spineless bastards!

  If she hadn’t been so focused on her fears about being pregnant and her misery about being abandoned she might have noticed she was in trouble before it was really dire. As it happened, though, when she heard the door being unlocked, her mind had leapt instantly to the guys and her heart had leapt with so much completely irrational hope that she’d simply stared blankly at Lecur when he pushed the door open.

  She hadn’t even fully assimilated her danger when the gladiators began to pour in behind Lecur until she was surrounded and felt their hands all over her. She screamed then, in pure terror, launching a futile counterattack made more ineffectual by the fact that she was already surrounded and had lost the battle before she started.

  The only effect clawing and slapping at them had was to encourage two of them to hold her down for the third man and there was no attempt to be the least bit gentle. She felt like they were going to dislocate every joint in her body. “Kael!” she screamed desperately when they finally managed to pin her completely and the man looming over her began struggling to get his loincloth off.

  Lecur snickered, the first she realized he’d stayed to watch. “Kael in lockup wid Dakaar and Balen. No good call for dem.”

  * * * *

  Kael knew that they had run out of time the moment Lecur closed their cell door and locked it. It was not the locking of the door in itself. He had heard other doors clang shut and the scrape of a key being turned and knew that, for some reason, Lecur had decided to lock down the gladiator quarters.

  His first thought was that Lecur had realized that they had destroyed the collars of more than half of the slaves and he sent Dakaar and Balen a look that cautioned them to wait until they knew for certain what the situation was.

  It was not until he saw the smug on Lecur’s face that he began to have an inkling of what he was really up.

  And the discovery that not all of the gladiators had been confined.

  He still could not fully accept that Lecur had made good on his threat, however, until Lau-ren began to scream and he saw gladiators racing down the corridor toward her cell.

  Her first shrill scream was all it took to break his determination to hold and wait for the best time to implement their plan. Breaking out of his cell was not any part of the plan, but the scream that shot adrenaline pumping through his blood and sent a cold wave over his flesh wiped the plan from his mind instantly.

  Surging to his feet, he sucked in a lungful of air and uttered a roar to release the most powerful sound waves that he was capable of. Dakaar and Balen had leapt up, as well, and blasted the door as he had. The bars vibrated. The walls holding the door began to crumble and abruptly the entire door, broken at its weakest point, shot out of the wall and slammed into the wall on the other side of the corridor. Kael, Dakaar, and Balen surged toward the opening they had made and out before the bars could fall. A veritable wall of gladiators, they discovered, were clogging the corridor between them and Lau-ren’s cell.

  The red haze of battle instantly closed over Kael’s mind. Uttering a bellow of rage, he seized the nearest, lifted him over his head and threw him. Without waiting to see where he landed, he seized the next, plowing a path right down the middle of the men that stood between him and the one he meant to tear limb from limb.

  His battle cries echoed throughout the basement, uttered by nearly a dozen throats as the Hirachi burst from their cells and clashed with the other gladiators. The walls, the ceiling, and the floor shook from the bellows and from the bodies slamming into them. Dust rained from the ceiling and the walls as the cheap plaster shattered and crumbled. The men who could, scattered. Those who were trapped, fought and died where they stood.

  Kael was climbing over bodies by the time he reached the open door of Lau-ren’s cell. He did not see Lau-ren, but he saw the three men pinning her down. The bellow uttered then carried the burn of microwaves. They screamed and fell away from her as their flesh began to burn, rolling around on the floor. He lifted the first he came to and hurled him toward the far wall, narrowly missing Lecur, who was plastered against it in terror, his bulbous eyes nearly bulging from their sockets.

  Kael hesitated for the first time, torn between the need to see about Lau-ren and the desire to pound his fists into Lecur until there was nothing left but bloody pulp. Discovering Dakaar and Balen had surged into the room behind him, he turned away from Lecur and went to Lau-ren. She seemed dazed, but when she saw him, she burst into tears and reached for him. When he’d gathered her close against his chest and risen, he turned to survey the threat and discovered there was no opposition to his escape. Dakaar was pounding on Lecur and Balen had seized one of the men who’d attacked Lau-ren and was slamming him against the wall, over and over, even though Kael could see the man was either unconscious or dead.

  “Weapons!” he bellowed.

  A huge piece of the ceiling dropped and slammed against the floor at his yell, drawing his attention, finally, to the building around them. “Out! Now! The building is collapsing!” Without waiting to see if they’d heard the shouted warning, he leapt toward the door of Lau-ren’s cell and moved as fast as he could toward the exit. The corridor was so littered with bodies of dead and injured and unconscious that he could barely find a solid place to plant his feet and he finally merely bounded from body to body until he landed on the floor beyond them.

  Gladiators were fleeing up the stairs when he reached them, among them the other Hirachi. He joined them, pushing his way through the throng until he reached the upper floor and then racing down the corridor.

  There was a crowd gathered outside Lecur’s house and more men piling out of the nearest buildings armed with laser pistols and rifles. Assessing the threat, Kael shifted Lau-ren across one shoulder and bellowed for a weapon. Dakaar and Balen, he discovered, were close behind him. Dakaar tossed him his kinsu. Carrying their gladiatorial shields, Dakaar and Balen, armed with their weapons of choice, the bolo and the plue, raced to catch up. “Guard Lau-ren! We’ll take point.”

  Ordinarily, the shields would’ve been completely ineffectual against the lasers, but the men carrying them had been forced to use the inhibitors to prevent damage to the outer walls of the space station. Some of the blasts still managed to pierce the shields, but far more struck them and deflected and there were no inhibitors on the lung power of the Hirachi. The moment they realized they were completely outnumbered, they began whittling down the opposition by sonic blasts that shattered windows and walls and lifted men clean off their feet and pitched them away as if they were nothing more than paper dolls.

  The gladiators who’d escaped had formed a wedge they were driving steadily along the thoroughfare toward the ships at dock. They’d had to fight every step of the way, however, and Kael had begun to think they would be overwhelmed by sheer numbers when an alarm went up. One man screamed and then another until there were dozens shouting the warning. “The dome’s collapsing!”

  Men broke off fighting and whirled to run. The gladiators cut them down and raced over them, unimpeded finally, but with the certain knowledge that they were going to be trapped in the collapsing space station if they didn’t get into one of the crafts quickly.

  Kael discarded any notion of choosing among them, racing toward the closest. Even as his foot settled on the gangplank of the first he came to, however, he spied the trader two vessels over fighting his way up his own gangplank. “That one!” he bellowed, leaping off the gangplank and battling his way through the mindless mob racing to get to safety.

  The trader had made it inside and was already trying to retract the gangplank when they reached it. It moved sluggishly, weighed down by those still standing on it. Gathering himself, Kael leapt up onto the gangplank and raced toward the door that was closing, shoving his sword into the swiftly closing aperture. Dakaar and Balen arrived as he was struggling to get leverage to pry the door open again. Grasping the edge, they began prying at the d
oor, straining every muscle in their efforts to pull it wider.

  The trader began screaming obscenities at them in a half a dozen tongues. “You’ll break it and breach the hull, you stupid bastards!”

  “Open it!” Kael bellowed.

  Unfortunately, he was still caught in the grips of battle fever. The sonar blast he projected picked the trader up and sent him flying across the bay and slammed him into the wall. He slid down it and lay unmoving on the floor.

  “Fuck!” Kael bellowed.

  “Let me down!” Loren screamed. “I can get in and open it.”

  Kael hesitated as it flickered through his mind that she might well seize the opportunity to rid herself of them permanently, but he only hesitated a moment. Grasping her waist, he hauled her from his shoulder and settled her on her feet. She sent him a look he could not quite interpret as she wedged herself into the narrow opening and then she disappeared. “Give me a second!”

  “We only have one!” Dakaar bellowed. “The top of the station is cracking!”

  Realizing Dakaar had spoken in their own tongue, Kael was about to repeat his warning in Unduleze when the door began to open wider. He charged inside the moment it was wide enough. Dakaar and Balen leapt in behind him and the remainder of the Hirachi poured in behind them, carrying Ka-ren and Shara. Kael hesitated when he saw three of the other gladiators struggling up the plank and then held the door for them.

  “I close!” he told Lau-ren. “Go! Make de machine go!”

  Nodding jerkily, she glanced around the bay. “Oh god! I don’t even know where the damned control room is!”

  Spying the trader, she raced to him and dropped to her knees. “The control room! Where is it!”

  He opened his eyes and stared at her blankly.

  She grabbed the front of his suit and jerked him upright. “Tell me, you stupid bastard or we’re all dead!” she screamed at him.

  His head wobbled. Blood gurgled in his throat when he tried to speak and he began coughing, spattering her with tiny droplets of blood. He lifted his arm and pointed, however. “Lift there. Top level.”