Tsor-Vaal curled his lip and snarled, “Maybe it is time, after all…we should settle this with long swords.”
The bridge crew glanced at him in unison. His blow came with the speed of a striking cobra. He drove his fist into Votan-Vaal’s belly and sent him crashing across the bridge. The bridge crew were on their feet. He sprang forward to follow up the attack, but Votan-Vaal’s hand flashed and his EM plasma sidearm was pointed at Tsor-Vaal’s chest. He scowled at the crew and said, “Arrest him. Throw him in the cell. I will deal with him later. And get me Skral on the communication screen.”
Katie watched in horror as Tsor-Vaal was dragged from the bridge. He looked at her and she heard his voice in her mind. “I will come for you. I will save you!”
Then she turned as the communication screen came to life, and all the blood drained from her face.
The great saurian head looked at her, the vertical slits of it pupils dilated and the tongue flicked from it’s mouth. The whistling voice said, “Is that a human?”
Votan-Vaal said, “Indeed it is. Young. Not more than twenty two summers. She has bonded with my Commander…”
The ophidian eyes swiveled. “Really, Captain? That is a shame…”
“I know humans are a great delicacy among the Naga - priceless, as I understand it…”
Katie gave a small cry and Skral’s eyes shifted to look at her. He emitted a gentle, whistling noise like a blackbird on a summer’s evening. His tongue darted from his mouth. Votan-Vaal knew he had him. He said, “You allow us to go freely on our way, no questions asked, and the human is all yours to enjoy.”
“Done…”
Votan-Vaal laughed, “Tell me, how will you cook it?”
“I won’t, Captain. Raw and living is the only way to eat them…”
Six
Her wrists were bound behind her back and she was dragged from the bridge, kicking and screaming. In his cell, Tsor-Vaal lived through every moment of her torment with her, until, realizing that her only chance of survival lay in his own escape, he shut her out of his consciousness and concentrated his mind
She was marched by two Valhaan guards, down winding corridors to the vast, steel loading bay at the rear of the ship. There, they stood waiting. A red light flashed intermittently over the giant airlock and a voice repeated with monotonous regularity that a Naga transit pod was approaching.
Eventually the flashing light turned from red to green and the disembodied voice announced that the transit pod had docked and the airlock would open in thirty seconds. Her guards glanced at each other, then the one on her left looked into her eyes and placed a thought in her mind. “You have the blood. Be brave, Katie Human. Die well.”
She stared at him in horror. She said aloud, “Gee, thanks a lot, pal!”
The great steel doors clanged and echoed and rolled back. A ship that reminded her vaguely of a NASA space shuttle, only ugly in military green, was revealed on a rotating platform. A hatch opened in the side and two humanoids stepped out. Katie went cold, like a million frozen ants were burrowing through her skin. They were the most horrific things she had ever seen. They were snakes on legs.
They were easily eight foot in height, with large, ophidian heads. Their legs were like bird’s legs, with the knee bent backwards under powerful thighs, and large talons at the end. Their skin was scaly, mainly green, but with occasional brown and red patterns that seemed to change with the light. They wore no clothes, but a belt hung across from shoulder to hip held what seemed to be a sidearm. Their walk was lumbering, but their other movements were fluid and managed to be both graceful and sickening at the same time.
They crowded in on her, pushing the Valhaan guards aside, leaning down to sniff her and flick their long, tubular tongues over her skin. They grunted and emitted strange, melodious whistling sounds. Then their hands closed on her arms with terrifying strength and they dragged her towards the shuttle. She stared over her shoulder at the Valhaan guards. She screamed to them in her mind to help her. They watched. She could sense their distress. The last thoughts she heard from them were, “Be brave, Katie Human. Die well…”
She was hurled into the shuttle and strapped to a seat. The airlock closed behind them and the great, steel exterior doors rolled back, gaping out onto the frozen, empty blackness of space. There was a vast roar of engines, a surge of power and they plunged out, into the void.
The next hours were the darkest and most desperate of her short life. They did not fly to the flagship, but headed out instead, into deep space. She attempted to mind-speak with Tsor-Vaal, but there was no response, nor could she feel him. She had no idea what speeds they were attaining in the small shuttle craft, but she was aware that thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of miles of empty space were passing every hour, taking her further from her home in California, further from the Valhaan ship – and further from Tsor-Vaal.
She wept bitterly, as she had never wept in her life, but she wept in silence because even as the grief welled in her breast, a fierce, savage rage also burned in her, and she swore to herself that she would sooner burn for an eternity in hell than give these freaks the satisfaction of even glimpsing her grief.
Her captors did not speak or move. They remained perfectly immobile, and Katie came to wonder if they were in some kind of trance or sleep. She herself dozed fitfully, waking with sudden starts of terror as the insane reality of her situation rushed in on her from her dreams.
She was awoken from one such sleep by the crackle of a radio, and the cooing and whistling of her captors. She opened her eyes and was astonished to see, through the windshield of the shuttle, the vast form of Saturn looming ahead. But they did not head for Saturn, instead they veered and began to close on one of his moons. Dimly, in her memory, she recalled that NASA believed there might be organic life on Enceladus, a frozen moon that held warm water under an icy shell.
Suddenly they were plunging, hurtling at terrifying speed towards the surface of the frozen moon. Within seconds the windshield was filled with the white, scarred and cracked surface. Katie screamed and covered her face with her arms. There was a strange whoomph! Sound and then total silence. She heard some cooing and trilling and peered over her arms.
The first thing that struck her was the eerie light. It was a dirty, green luminescence, as though somebody were shining a flashlight through an overgrown pond. They were moving through water. Dense strands of algae drifted past, draped themselves across the craft and were swept away. Small creatures jerked into view, thrashed and twisted and were gone. She stared aghast and wondered where the light could be coming from. The sun was little more than a large star at this distance, and the moon itself was encased in dense ice, so no sunlight could penetrate to this depth.
And then she saw them: vast beds of algae, with strands three or four miles long, glowing with their own, bioelectric charge. A device, perhaps, to lure life forms, trap them and eat them – part of natures eternal, ruthless cycle of life and death. For around the great forests of seaweed, weaving in and out of the giant tendrils, were massive swarms of what she could only describe to herself as fish, though they were like no fish she had ever seen. They glowed with every color of the rainbow and more besides, and they were of every organic shape imaginable.
They penetrated deeper into the pea soup of life and soon rock formations became visible, as they neared the ocean bed. A mountain range loomed over to their right and she saw, perched like a bubble on the green and black rocks, a great dome made of some transparent material. And within the dome she could see a small city.
Again the radio crackled, and again one of the Naga pilots exchanged weird, cooing messages. Now she could see that from the sides of the dome, a long tube protruded, perhaps a mile in length, and it was into this tube that they now headed. Powerful lights illuminated the passage as they traveled along it. At the end they came to a set of massive, steel doors. A further set of door closed behind them and slowly the water was drained from the lock. With a great
clang, the craft settled on the concrete floor and the gates before them rolled back.
Within a few moments the hatch opened and the pilots were joined by another two Naga who, to Katie’s eyes, looked exactly like the pilots. They hissed and cooed at her, ran their tubular tongues over her and sang trilling songs to each other. Then they grabbed her and dragged her from the craft. One of the newcomers produced a large, black leather neckband with a heavy chain attached and buckled it around her neck. They then dragged her away, out of the docking bay toward an open-topped truck that seemed to hover on some kid of magnetic field.
The creatures walked fast with their great, lumbering gait and Katie had to run to keep up, but even as she ran they yanked on the chain, making her stumble and fall to her knees. They would then trill and sing, and she wondered, in her growing rage and hatred, whether this was their version of laughter.
They arrived at the truck and one of the Naga picked her up and threw her in the back. They took off and she lay back, trembling, struggling in her mind to hold on to logic and reason. She felt herself slipping into a paralysis of despair. But she knew she could not allow herself to do that. The words of the Valhaan guard came back to her, Be brave, Die well… If nothing else, if she had nothing else to hold onto, at least she would hold on to that. She would die well, and dying well meant dying in the process of trying to escape.
They moved through streets with massive stone building towering above them. Great, lumbering saurians, some ten foot tall, swarmed the streets, spilling among huge, steel vehicles, in and out of the edifices, some climbing up the faces of the building to enter and exit through window-like holes in the walls. Above her, the sky was the transparent ceiling of the dome, with its filthy, murky green glow, holding the city in a perpetual, pea-soup twilight.
They came, bye and bye, to a great piazza. At the centre of the esplanade was a pyramid resembling more the Mayan, staggered structures than the Egyptian ones. They entered by way of an opening at ground level and came at last to a halt outside an iron gate. Here she was handed over, with more cooing and hissing, to a brace of Naga guards who led her down stone steps to a small, dingy cell. There she was thrown in and the iron grate slammed closed and locked behind her.
She spent half an hour sobbing, sometimes wailing, and calling on whatever gods there were out there to tell her why; why they were doing this to her. What had she done to deserve it? Eventually the fit passed and she lay in silence, looking through the iron bars at the stone passage outside. And that was when she made her decision, her commitment.
She was going to die, as the Valhaan guard had said. She was going to die that very day. But she was going to die escaping, and she would take as many Naga with her as she could before she went down.
Seven
There was only one guard. He wandered by every fifteen minutes or so. Each time he did he would pause and look in at her, whistling his strange blackbird tune and flicking his tongue at her. The third time he paused a little longer, holding onto the bars and sniffing at her. A sudden violent rage welled up inside her and without thinking she lashed out at him with her mind, visualizing herself smashing his head in with the samurai sword she kept hanging on the wall in her apartment.
To her astonishment the Naga guard screeched and took a step back. He stood staring at her and moved away. Her mind reeled. Inspiration flooded in. She closed her eyes, focused on the guard and ordered him, “Come back!”
She heard his steps falter. Then the great, lumbering footfalls and he was there again, staring at her.
She held his eye. “Open the door.” She visualized him turning the key in the lock and swinging open the door. She placed that short, mental movie in his mind. Without hesitation he unlocked the door and stepped in. He was now standing over her where she sat on the floor, trilling and whistling, and flicking his obscene tongue. Like the pilots and the guards who had collected her from the shuttle, he too wore a sash-like belt with some kind of weapon suspended. She focused her mind and ordered him, “Show me…”
He blinked his ophidian eyes and seemed to sway. She visualized him directing the weapon at the cell door. She stood as he unfastened it. It was like an ultra-modern automatic. He flipped a switch, directed it at the cell door and pulled the trigger. The air seemed to shimmer and the lock shattered.
The shot seemed to shake him out of his trance state, because he hissed like a snake and spun to face her. But it was too little too late. She grabbed the barrel of the blaster, levered it down and round with her right hand and pressed the trigger with her left. His chest exploded and what was left of him was hurled against the cell wall, leaving the weapon in her hands. She surveyed the mess on the wall and looked down at the corpse on the floor. She gave a lopsided smile, “Love what you’ve done with the place.”
Then she was out in the corridor. Her mind was spinning. Her plan was simple and had a 0.01% chance of success: find a pilot and make him take her back to either the Valhaan ship or Earth. As far as she could see she had two immediate problems. First, they all looked the same so how the hell would she know if one was a pilot? Two, get to a ship without being blasted into the next universe.
As silently as she was able she ran to the end of the corridor, where the stone steps climbed to the street level above. She peered up, but saw nothing. Then, not knowing exactly why, she probed with her mind, palpating the area above as though her consciousness were an invisible hand. She found the other guard there. She moved swiftly and quietly up the steps to the door. It was not locked. She turned the handle and stepped through. The guard was there, staring at her.
It was impossible to tell from his face what was going on in his mind. It was utterly expressionless. But she raised the weapon and pointed it at him, and with her mind planted the idea that he unhook his own blaster and drop it to the floor. This he did. So far so good, she thought. Now she needed transport back to the docking bay, and from there a pilot and a ship. She could feel her mind growing tired, but forced herself to focus. The effort was draining her. She created the image of one of their hover-trucks in her mind and placed it in his. He let out a long, trilling whistle and thrashed his tail. She focused harder, saw him driving, back towards the docking bay. He lumbered along the passage, out towards the piazza.
As they came to the exit she saw he was heading for a kind of parking lot where half a dozen of their hover-vehicles sat connected by cables to some kind of power supply. Four of them were open topped, but two had covered cabs. The Naga stopped and stared at her. She pointed at one of the covered vehicles and prodded him with the blaster. He understood and clambered in. She got in beside him. She braced herself against the wall and focused on his mind.
“Drive to the docking bay…”
She conjured up the image of the docking bay where she had arrived and transmitted it to him. He trilled a sad song and they took off. She kept the blaster trained on him. Her mind felt like a wet rag.
They moved through the swarming masses of grotesque reptiles, under the ugly, green light of the ocean above. She thought she recognized the route, but it was hard to tell for sure. She probed his mind to see if she could detect any falsehood or lies, but again, it was hard to tell, because his language, his thinking, his perception of reality itself was so alien to hers. And then suddenly she knew where they were. She recognized the road and the entrance to the docking bay.
All the while until then she had been focusing on one, single issue. How to get there, and how to make sure the prison guard was not taking her to some other place. But now she was here, she had no idea what to do next.
The guard pulled into a lot just outside the building. She could see a crowd of Naga by the entrance. They were all wearing side arms so she figured they were soldiers of some kind. The guard was staring at her. She locked onto his eyes and reached deep inside herself for reserves of strength. She conveyed to him the image of himself taking her, like she was a prisoner, through the crowd and into the docking bay, marching her t
oward a ship and dragging her onboard.
All the while, beneath the surface level of her thoughts, she was wondering what the hell she would do then. But she knew there was only one answer to that. She would cross that bridge when she came to it. The Naga opened the door and climbed out. She felt her hands close on the weapon. He lumbered round the vehicle and pulled open the door, then yanked her out. She slipped the weapon and her sweatshirt. Gripping her arm like a vice he dragged her with him toward the entrance to the building. A thousand thoughts sped through her mind. Had Tsor-Vaal conveyed to her some amazing power during their bonding? Did the Naga have minds that were so simple and primitive they were easy to manipulate? Both? Or was she actually being dragged to another prison cell?
They pushed through the crowd and moved into the hangar-like building. The Naga guard stopped and scanned the area. He spied a ship over to the left and started dragging her toward it. A thud of excitement kicked in her chest. She could barely believe she was pulling this off. It just wasn’t possible for it to be that simple. Something was going to go wrong. It had to.
She realized too late what she was doing, just as his steps faltered and he turned to look at her, as if he was seeing her for the first time. Her flood of unguarded disbelief had washed right into his mind and he had woken out of the trance she had induced in him. He blinked and his vertical pupils narrowed to slits. He took a step back, away from her, reaching for a blaster that wasn’t there. She knew she had just a couple of seconds. He was still struggling with his own mind, trying to make sense of how and why he was here.
She pulled the gun and blew his head off. The blast echoed around the huge, cavernous hall. All around her Naga turned to stare. There must have been a hundred of them. God alone knew how many had weapons. She raised the blaster and let off a volley of shots at random, wherever she saw a crowd or a cluster. Then she turned and ran, dodging and weaving, heading for the ship.
Sold To The Dragon Princes: The Novel Page 52