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THE SPAWNING
By
Kaitlyn O’Connor
© copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, July 2008
Cover art by Eliza Black, © copyright July 2008
ISBN 978-1-60394-144-0
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
Vibrations from the bass were already working their way up through the pavement, penetrating the soles of Detective Miranda ‘Randy’ Hart’s impractical but sexy high-heel sandals and rattling into her system before she had covered three quarters of the distance between her car and the popular nightspot that was her target for the night. Her heart thrummed in time to the beat, or at least it seemed to, pumping the blood more rapidly through her, producing a heightened awareness of everything around her, a level of excitement that seemed almost equal parts nerves and anticipation. Flicking a practiced ‘casual’ glance at the smattering of other cars parked in the back of the rear parking lot, at the deep shadows created by the lone security light near the building, she wondered a little wryly if the music itself had set off the adrenaline rush or if it was ‘the hunt’.
And, if it was ‘the hunt’, was it her feminine side anticipating the possibility of finding that perfect man? Or the detective in her hoping to catch a predator?
Ordinarily, there wouldn’t have been any question in her mind. The detective side of herself saw far more action than her feminine side, had risen to dominance long since, suppressing the softer side that she’d been forced to realize was a weakness she couldn’t afford if she wanted to stay alive and relatively sane. It helped that her personal life had only been a series of disappointments that had gradually worn down her optimism to the point that she no longer had any real expectation that there was a ‘perfect man’ out there for her.
There was still the sporadic twinge of interest when she saw a man that appealed to her on at least a physical level. Occasionally, she even gave in to the emotional and physical need to find release in a warm, male body, but without expectations, without the starry-eyed little girl dreams she’d indulged at one time that it was, or could be, more than what it appeared—a raw, animalistic coupling to assuage physical needs. About the most that could be expected of that sort of liaison was a few days, weeks, or months of pleasure and aggravation that slowly degenerated until it was more a trial than pleasure of any kind.
The search for a life partner with cool logic produced even worse results because then there wasn’t even passion to hold it together.
There was still hope, though, she realized. Deep down she’d never really given up entirely on the dream that one day, when she least expected it, she was going to walk smack into the one man that did it all for her. The white knight that thrilled her to her core with no more than a look, drove her wild in bed, intrigued her with his intelligence and complex personality. And, at the same time, gave her a sense of unshakable security because integrity was so deeply ingrained in him that trust was a matter of course.
She didn’t really believe that, but she still hoped, and it was that tiny hope that accounted for a little of the excitement thrumming through her because she felt so feminine tonight. She’d indulged herself in an orgy of primping she rarely took the time for. She’d donned a slinky black dress, sexy high-heals, just enough make-up to highlight her best features.
Even the pistol tucked in a thigh holster didn’t diminish the glorious sense of femininity she felt as she strolled across the parking lot toward ‘single territory’ where she knew there was at least some possibility that man that was just the right ‘fit’ might be waiting to be found.
She shook the thoughts off as she reached the corner of the building, struggling to suppress the inappropriate sense that she was just a woman seeking a mate. The night was all business and she’d do well to remember that if she wanted to wake up tomorrow with a whole hide.
Her backup was sitting in an unmarked car three rows over. He eyed her assessingly for so long that amusement flickered through her. She was going to rag him tomorrow about not recognizing her—because she could see he didn’t, could pinpoint the exact moment when it dawned on him.
Mildly annoyed that he hadn’t immediately recognized her as the same woman he worked with every day, she lifted a hand as if to smooth her hair and shot him a bird. He was glaring at her when she glanced in his direction again.
Prick, she thought, feeling slightly mollified.
Ignoring him, she scanned the main parking lot. The pickings were slim tonight, she thought, feeling vaguely deflated. Of course it was still early, but it wasn’t ‘prime night’ either and wasn’t likely to get terribly busy even if the club was one of the most popular in the city.
All business again, she focused on her purpose, grappling with the fresh spurt of adrenaline that flooded her bloodstream as she spied the entrance.
Without a doubt, there was no greater ‘rush’ than knowing she was closing in on quarry—a combination of sheer terror and fierce satisfaction that always arose regardless of the potential for danger. Truthfully, though, she had no sense that she was closing in on her quarry, felt none of the ‘vibes’ she’d learned to expect that told her she was close.
The painful fact was, she was pretty damned sure she wasn’t any closer to figuring out what was going on than she had been when she’d been given her current assignment. If there was any sense of urgency whatsoever to account for the surge of her heart rate it was the fact that time was against her, and she hadn’t managed to come up with a damned thing, not one lead beyond the club itself, and even that was a long shot.
More than a dozen women—that they knew of—had disappeared in the past two days and nobody had a clue of why, of whether the same perp or group of perps were responsible, or what, exactly, they meant to do with the young women.
They had their suspicions and it was possible they were right on target, but it had been her experience that the most obvious possibility turned out to be a dead end as often as it was on target and, what was worse, tended to act as blinders if one wasn’t damned careful.
In this case, it was nothing short of a miracle that they’d tumbled to it as quickly as they had. Ordinarily, they probably wouldn’t have even picked up on the case so quickly. People went missing all the time and, in general, when it was an adult, it turned out that they weren’t actually missing at all. They’d just decided on impulse to take off with someone—friends or a new acquaintance—and reappeared a few days or a week later. It was so commonplace, in fact, that they wouldn’t even entertain the possibility that a person actually might be missing until they’d been a no show for at least three days.
The police chief’s daughter had been one of the first to disappear, though. Nobody had quite dared to suggest that, maybe, she’d found a man that appealed to her when she was out ‘clubbing’ and had just decided to take a few days to get to know him a little better. They’d gotten right on it—and discovered in the course of their search that a bare minimum of six other young women had also turned up missing the same night from various nightspots around the city—Carol, Captain Sloan’s daughter, and two of her friends, Lynn Patterson and Joy Freemont had all disappeared together. The captain had found Carol’s abandoned car behind the club she’d told him she intended to visit that evening.
Almost a half dozen others were ‘maybes’—women who’d pulled a similar stunt before and hadn’t been reported as MIA, yet, because they were still expected to turn up alive and well and tired from their little weekend adventure.
Despite the doubts that had plagued them about the chief’s daughter, that many women going missing all on the same night just didn’t sit right. Especially when not only had not a single one turned up by evening of the following day or even called to touch base with anybody that knew them but nearly a dozen more had vanished the following night.
No bodies had turned up.
Nobody had actually expected that they would—certainly not if the cases were connected and, oddly enough, they seemed to be. Serial killers, thankfully, didn’t seem to be ‘in’ to wholesale slaughter.
It had to be a white slavery ring. Even Miranda was inclined to accept that a ring must be working the area, despite her tendency to discount the most obvious. Nothing else would explain such a massive disappearance of young—mostly blond—white females.
No doubt, at least some of the cases weren’t connected at all, but just as surely the majority were.
Although she doubted he would agree, they were damned lucky that the chief’s daughter had been among the first. Otherwise it could have been weeks, possibly months, before they’d become aware that someone was stalking and taking young women from the city and, by that time, the perps would almost certainly have moved on.
Because the one thing all, or at least most, of them seemed to have in common was that they were all single women living alone and, in far too many of the cases, they hadn’t had anyone to report them missing. Every one of the women that had vanished had been out clubbing.
Reaching the door to the club at last, Miranda pulled it open and stepped inside. Instantly, a wall of music crashed over her, the assault so loud it set her eardrums to rattling. She glanced around the small vestibule, noting the woman behind the counter and the two bouncers that stood like matching bookends on either side of the ‘gateway’ to adult land.
Leaning close enough to the bullet proof cage the woman stood behind to hear the woman’s demand for the cover charge fee, Miranda pulled a bill from her purse and passed it through the small slot provided. Wondering if the woman had any idea how ineffectual her ‘safety cage’ was, she moved away from the window as soon as she’d collected her change and stuffed the bills back into her evening purse. One of the bouncers held out his left hand in silent demand, a stamp poised in the other.
Miranda flicked an assessing glance over both men as she extended her right hand and waited to be stamped and tagged with the neon wristbands the club used to differentiate legal from illegal drinkers. Unable to detect even a spark of interest in either man’s eyes, she glanced at her wrist as the one tagging her finished, abruptly feeling a strange sense of uneasiness sweep over her.
She wasn’t a habitual clubber. She was single and she had been the rounds a few times, but it was hard to get away from the fact that the club scene seemed to be more of a route for hook ups than anything else.
Not that she was against an occasional hook up. Sometimes it seemed the best way to juggle a demanding career and the need for companionship when it couldn’t be ignored anymore, but she rarely even had time to indulge those needs.
Oddly enough, though, she felt a sudden threat in being tagged, despite her familiarity with the practice.
She wasn’t certain why, but she pondered it as she passed between the bouncers and paused just inside the club proper to allow her eyes to adjust to the cave-like interior.
With little surprise, but a good deal of disappointment since she knew she was early and it wasn’t a ‘peak’ singles night, she saw at a glance that the club was a long way from packed.
There were still an impressive number of barflies hunched around the long bar and scattered throughout the dim interior.
Wryly, she wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing. It would certainly make it easier to attract the kind of attention she was looking to draw, but it seemed a little less likely that her quarry would be working the bar when the pickings were not only slimmer, but the chances of attracting attention to themselves was higher.
They were brazen bastards, though, she reminded herself. Even the thugs that ran the white slavery rings were generally a good bit less blatant about shopping than the perps she was looking for—which was the one thing that bothered her the most about just accepting the most likely scenario in this case.
Moving to the bar after a moment, she ordered herself a mixed drink, glancing around to study the patrons while she waited to be served. She noticed a few interested glances cast in her direction, but nothing particularly pointed. Most of the men were either perched at the bar, nursing their drinks, or gathered around the pool tables in the backroom.
When she’d collected her drink, she debated briefly whether to climb onto a stool and give her feet a short break from the sexy shoes that were already killing her or to troll and finally decided to troll. She hadn’t gotten nearly as much interest as she’d hoped.
Of course, from what she could see, the only females in the place getting any attention were the ones wearing the wristbands that clearly marked them as legal to screw but illegal for drinking—eighteen to twenty.
How convenient that the management had found a way to mark the young does for the bucks!
Ignoring the pinch of her shoes, she strolled around the club, pausing now and then to study the dancers on the floor. She wandered toward the backroom to watch the pool players awhile, and then back to the main club. Four hours later, the club had filled, her feet were killing her, and she still hadn’t been approached.
Jeeze! What did a woman have to do to get a little attention these days?
Strip naked and wave their tits?
Roll back the clock, evidently.
Either she looked like a cop or nobody twenty one or over was getting any action.
She was putting her money on age discrimination. Even the men that were clearly thirty and up had no eyes for anything but the tender young things.
Disgusted, she decided to call the night a bust and headed for the exit, wondering uneasily if the kidnappers had already collected all the women they needed or wanted and had moved on.
There were a few loiters outside the club when she exited. A patrol car was parked just outside to pick up the drunks. She didn’t recognize either officer and, in any case, she was undercover. With barely a glance in their direction, she struck off across the parking lot, headed toward her own vehicle, which she’d parked in the rear—not because the lot was overflowing when she’d arrived but because all the abandoned vehicles they’d found that belonged to missing women had been parked in isolated areas.
She tensed as she rounded the side of the building and moved beyond the view of the patrolmen and the few patrons that had been in the lot. Chances were, this was where she was going to run into trouble if trouble had spotted her—and marked her.
The thought shifted her mind to the neon wristband she was still wearing, and she abruptly realized why that circumstance had bothered her even though she knew it was standard practice at clubs.
She’d been tagged. Anyone that spotted her would know that she’d just come from a club, was probably at least a little tipsy if not downright drunk, and that she was most likely single since she was a female and far fewer women who had attachments showed up in the singles clubs than men.
The thought had barely completed the circuit in her brain when she abruptly found herself spotlighted.
She jolted to a halt, blinded, startled. For just a split second her mind leapt to the conclusion that she’d been marked by a police chopper. Even as it clicked in her mind, though, that she didn’t hear the very distinctive sound of a helicopter—in fact didn’t hear anything—her mind leapt in another direction entirely, to the realization that she’d been tagged, hunted, and bagged. Her mind had just shifted to the gun she had strapped to her thigh when she blacked out.
Adrenaline spiked in her system as she jolted toward consciousness and her mind—temporarily suspended—completed the instinctive move she’d attempted before blacking out. She groped for her weapon as her eyes flew open. In one corner of her mind, she knew it was the wrong move. She needed to assess her situation before she acted, and yet her mind was completely disordered by the transition from consciousness to blackout and abrupt awareness again.
She reacted instantly and instinctively to the certainty of threat.
And she was still too sluggish to move with any swiftness or surety of coordination, shoving awkwardly upright, grabbing for the butt of her pistol, and whipping her head around to target the threat almost at the same time. A wave of dizziness washed over her as she scanned the small, shadowy room. She blinked, trying to clear her mind of confusion and focus her eyes.
She’d nursed one drink throughout most of the night, had drunk no more than half of the second. Her reflexes shouldn’t have been affected to such a degree as to make her head swim with so little motion, and yet it did.
She nearly dropped her pistol as she dragged it out of the holster and staggered to her feet, wavering as she gaped at her surroundings, or more precisely the thing she saw coming toward her. Her mind refused to supply her with an identification of the thing—mechanical, metallic, threatening in its very strangeness.
Jerking her pistol up, she fired at it. The bullet made a dull clanging sound as it impacted with the thing, the sound registering as not quite that of metal against metal, though she thought that was what it should’ve sounded like.
Robot—her mind registered that. She just couldn’t grasp why or how it was even possible that she’d found herself faced off with a robot—the most bizarre looking thing imaginable at that—not humanoid in appearance or even anything that fit the catalogue of Hollywood representatives stashed in her mind.
The robot stopped. A hissing noise slipped past the dull roar in her ears from hours of being pelted by music loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss.
She’d barely had time to assess the fact that she’d been transported from the parking lot to where ever this place was too quickly for her hearing to recover when she felt darkness fall over her again. The last sound she heard before complete nothingness engulfed her, and that with a vast sense of despair, was the sound of her pistol hitting the floor at her feet.
A buzz of voices was the first thing Miranda heard as she drifted toward consciousness again. This time the transition was slower. She lay with her eyes closed for some time, a faint frown between her brows from the pain she’d become aware of and the struggle to figure out where she was and what she was doing there.
She was laying on something hard, and she was cold.
The ‘hard’ she could understand since the last thing she remembered was heading toward her car in the parking lot. The chill confused her.
It was a muggy summer’s night. Why would she be chilled?
Air conditioned room?
And who the hell were the people she could hear murmuring around her?
Not people, she corrected after a moment—women. All of the voices she heard were women’s voices.
Opening her eyes, she stared blankly at the smooth surface above her head.
“She’s come around,” somebody said close by, drawing Miranda’s attention.
She couldn’t seem to focus her eyes at first but gradually the dark blob she was peering at through the strange glow of light resolved itself into individual shapes and she realized she was staring at a fairly large group of women, most of whom were staring back at her.
Her confusion deepened rather than lifting. “Where am I?” she croaked as her gaze finally met that of a woman who looked to be around her age, in her late twenties.
Something flickered across the woman’s face—stark terror. Her voice was shaky with it when she spoke, although it was obvious she was struggling to preserve at least a surface calm—whether for Miranda’s benefit or her own Miranda couldn’t tell. “We don’t know … exactly.”
Miranda frowned at her as the woman’s eyes slid away. She was lying. It was one of the first things they taught at the academy—people who lied generally shifted their gaze away from their interrogators—the left indicated probing memories, the right indicated fabrication.
Miranda felt for her gun.
“It’s gone.”
She glanced at the other woman who’d spoken.
“Whatever you’re looking for, they took it.”
Pushing herself upright, Miranda ignored the group of women, glancing around the room. It was a cell. Her mind registered that right away.
What it wasn’t was a jail cell, which ruled out the possibility that she’d found herself thrown in with a group of hookers even if it wasn’t for the fact that they certainly weren’t dressed as hookers.
They were all wearing identical shifts that were almost hospital-like, but the only hospital-like environment that she knew of that would include locking up the patients was a lunatic asylum.
She shied away from that assessment. They looked frightened—every face pale and tense—but there was nothing but fear in their eyes, not insanity.
“How did I get here?” she asked finally.
“One of the robots brought you.”
Miranda’s head snapped toward the speaker, but she couldn’t tell which of the women had spoken.
Not that it mattered. The moment the woman had said it memories had flooded her mind. A bizarre sense of unreality settled over her. She remembered the robot. She’d known that was what it was even though it had thoroughly rattled her that the thing had seemed so … purposeful—so real, not toy-like, not like some remote controlled bucket of wires and bolts that moved with the awkwardness of a person trying to manipulate a ‘body’ not their own. “What the fuck is going on here?” she demanded, feeling a surge of anger and fear.
The women all looked at each other and, almost as if some silent communication had passed between them, they began to disperse. Moving back to the bunks that lined the walls of the cell, they settled on the lowest bunks in little frightened knots.
“We were hoping you could tell us.”
Glancing toward the speaker, Miranda discovered it was the same woman who’d first addressed her. The woman smiled shakily. “I’m Deborah Moss.”
Miranda stared at her, feeling a flicker of recognition for the first time. Coldness swept over her when she finally realized why both the name and the face seemed familiar.
She was one of the women who’d gone missing.
Scanning the faces of the other women, she also recognized the captain’s daughter, Carol Sloan, her two friends, Lynn Patterson and Joy Freemont, Mary Jane Carter, Stacy Smith, and Jan Hutton. All in all, she counted nineteen women—twenty including herself, though she didn’t recognize any of the others—because they hadn’t made it to the ‘list’.
Aside from looking scared half to death, she didn’t see any obvious signs of mistreatment—which was at least some relief. White slavers generally beat the hell of the women they took right off to show them who was boss.
After studying the women, Miranda finally swung her feet over the side of the bunk where she sat and examined herself. They were right, she saw without much surprise but with a good deal of dismay. Everything she’d had was gone—her weapon, her identification, her clothing, the fucking high heels from hell. A vague sense of nausea washed over her.
The wonder of it all was that she was still alive. They had to know—whoever had taken her—that she was a cop.
Why was she still alive?
She was still reluctant to give up her own identity, but what was the point in trying to maintain secrecy? “Detective Miranda Hart,” she responded finally.
The admission caused a brief flurry of excitement before it dawned on all of the women that their ‘rescuer’ was locked in the cell with them.
“You would’ve had backup, though, right?” one of the young women said hopefully.
Captain Sloan’s daughter, Carol, Miranda realized. “Right,” she muttered instead of pointing out that her backup obviously hadn’t managed to catch up to her or the perps or she wouldn’t be where ever it was that she was now. She didn’t particularly want to dwell on that unnerving circumstance herself.
“You were looking for us?” another woman asked.
Miranda nodded, standing up and moving around the room to examine it. There weren’t any bars—no door that she could see. How the hell had they brought her in?
“The robot dragged you in through the door,” one of the women answered her thoughts, pointing to a blank wall.
Miranda moved toward it, examining it closely, and finally turned to search the room for the woman who’d spoken.
“She isn’t crazy—not unless we all are. It brought us all in the same way.”
Miranda glanced at Deborah again when she spoke. She’d been among the first to go missing. “What do you remember?”
Deborah shrugged. “Probably not much more than you do. I’d been out clubbing. The place was packed, and I’d had to park at the far back of the lot. I decided to leave around midnight—even though everything was still hopping. I never made it to the car, though. I’d just realized that I was completely alone when I was caught in this blinding beam of light. The next thing I knew, I was here. Everybody else’s experience was pretty much the same.”
Miranda glanced around at the other women for confirmation, but she didn’t really need it. Not only had they already come up with that scenario regarding the missing women—at least the part where they’d been snatched on the way to their cars—but it was pretty much like her own experience. “Any idea where ‘here’ is? Any theories?”
The women all exchanged uncomfortable glances.
“Yes,” Carol Sloan responded. “But you’re going to think we’re all crazy.”
“Try me,” Miranda said grimly.
Carol gnawed her lower lip. “We’re pretty sure we’ve been ‘taken’.”
Oddly enough, Miranda didn’t feel any urge to laugh. She did feel perfectly blank for several moments before she managed to come up with a definition that seemed to fit the connotations. “’Taken’ as in ‘the rapture’?” she asked cautiously.
“Taken as in aliens,” Deborah said flatly.
Chapter Two
Trying to ignore the sick feeling in her stomach that had nothing to do with a suspicion that they were all crazy and everything to do with the fact that the answer seemed a lot more believable than it ought to, Miranda studied every frightened face that met her gaze until she’d made the rounds. Finally, she looked at Deborah again. “What makes you believe this has anything to do with extra-terrestrials?”
Deborah’s face crumpled. “The beam of light? The robot? The transport room we all woke up in when we first got here? The door none of us can see until that damned robot shows up with somebody else!” she finished, gesturing to the blank wall Miranda had examined.
“You think we were beamed aboard an alien vessel?” Miranda asked slowly, trying to wrap her mind around it. At the same time, a dozen questions and doubts rose and tumbled around in her mind. There was no sense of movement … at all. She didn’t feel pressure like she always had when she’d been in an airplane or even when she went up in a particularly tall building. She felt gravity pulling at her, not a sense of weightlessness, and it felt ‘normal’, not artificial in any way, not less than or more than she was used to feeling.
Deborah let out a huff of irritation. “Why don’t you think about it a while and let us know what you come up with?” she snapped angrily.
The problem was she couldn’t think. Her head felt as numb as the rest of her body.
Well, not numb in the sense that she was unaware of the chill. Her feet felt like blocks of ice from the little walking she’d done, and her entire body ached as if she was coming down with the flu. But numb as in clueless, confused, and unable to process the little bit of information that seemed to be getting through to her brain. After merely staring at the frightened, angry woman for a moment, she nodded, looked around until she identified the cot she’d woken on and headed toward it.
It was actually more like the floor than a cot. The moment she sat down, she realized there wasn’t even a thin mat covering the hard platform let alone a mattress of any description. The ‘blanket’ she pulled up to cover herself with wasn’t a blanket either. It felt more like plastic sheeting or Mylar.
She lay staring up at the platform above her for a while, trying to sort her jumbled impressions, memories, and the comments the women had made and finally surprised herself by falling asleep.
She was awakened by a stir in the room that she identified as a wave of hysteria even as her eyes snapped open.
The robot she’d shot the day before, or one just like it, was standing in the center of the room. “Move to door to be processed,” the robot intoned in a strangely mechanical voice, sounding like the pieced together recordings of a human voice arranged and rearranged to say different things.
Startled gasps went up from some of the women, frightened little squeals from others, but beyond that, their only response was to scramble as far from the robot as they could get and cower in terror. The robot swiveled toward the knot of women at one end of the cell. A beam of light about the circumference of a pencil shot from its boxy head, hitting one of the unfortunate women in the forefront. She jolted all over in spasms as if she’d been hit with a taser, her eyes rolling back in her head. When the beam ceased, she dropped to the floor, still convulsing.
Screaming, the other women in the room leapt up and stampeded toward the opening that had appeared in the wall. Miranda bailed out of her own bunk. Still punch drunk from being awakened so abruptly, she stared blankly at the woman on the floor as the robot moved awkwardly toward her prone form on its three mechanical legs. A pneumatic arm extended toward her, the manacle like hand clamping around her ankle. Miranda stared in horror at the thing as it turned, dragging the unconscious woman behind it.
It halted when it spied her. “Move to door to be processed.”
Swallowing convulsively, Miranda headed toward the opening. She discovered when she’d emerged from the cell that she was in a long, curving corridor that seemed to go on forever.
It was clogged with women, far more women than those who’d shared her cell with her. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest, but she couldn’t seem to assimilate what her eyes were telling her.
She counted fifty women before the curve in the corridor cut off her view. Wondering whether there were even more around the bend, or if there was some blockage ahead that had resulted in the ‘jam’, Miranda glanced uneasily behind her as the robot dragged the unconscious woman from the cell and stopped behind her, cutting off any hope of retreat.
Not that it had occurred to her until that moment to consider it.
Struggling against the fear that was trying to edge past the shock that had cocooned her, Miranda surveyed her surroundings. Except for the floor, which was flat and as smooth and seamless as glass, the entire corridor had the curvature of a tube. There didn’t seem to be an obvious source of light. The ceiling itself just seemed to glow with a strange greenish-yellow light that Miranda found uncomfortable, that seemed to prevent her eyes from focusing properly.
There was nothing else to see beyond the robot Miranda was acutely conscious of behind her, but she wasn’t anxious to study it after she’d seen what it was capable of.
No one on Earth had anything like it.
She knew that.
She was as certain as she could be that she would’ve heard something about such a technological breakthrough as a robot fully capable and armed as a guard, a robot that at least appeared capable of assessing the situation on its own and reacting.
It was still impossible to accept the completely unacceptable explanation Deborah had supplied her with.
She wasn’t certain if that was because it just wasn’t logical or because she just didn’t want to.
She’d shuffled forward several yards before she heard a faint groan behind her that alerted her to the fact that the woman who’d been knocked out was coming around. She flicked a glance over her shoulder as she heard the gasp that followed.
“Your cooperation will be appreciated,” the robot said. “Get up and stand in line with the others.”
The woman whimpered, hysteria edging her voice.
“I’d do as it says,” Miranda murmured warningly as she met the woman’s gaze.
For several moments she wondered if the woman was even rational enough to grasp the warning, but she clamped her lips together and, when the robot released her, she scrambled to her feet and bolted into Miranda, nearly shoving her into the woman in front of her.
“What are they doing? Where are they taking us?” the woman babbled, digging her fingernails into Miranda’s arms.
“I don’t know. None of us know,” Miranda responded, trying to disentangle herself from the woman, then added in an attempt to soothe her, “They want us alive. We wouldn’t be alive now if they didn’t have some use for us. Try to stay calm.”
The woman nodded jerkily, but her eyes were still wide with terror. “You think?” she whispered hoarsely, an unmistakable note of pleading in her eyes.
Miranda didn’t have a clue and what was worse, the woman’s hysteria was beginning to infect her and every other woman within hearing. “Some of the women have already been here a couple of days,” she pointed out, as much to reassure herself as everyone else.
It did seem to reassure them—even reassured her—and she didn’t have a fucking clue of whether she was right or not.
It seemed logical, though, she told herself. They’d been kidnapped. They, whoever, or whatever ‘they’ were, wanted something.
She discovered when she’d shuffled forward several more yards that there was a door beyond the bend. Every twenty minutes or so, by her best guess, it opened silently, the robot standing at the front of the line shoved a half dozen women through, and then the door closed again.
Miranda’s stomach knotted with fear.
As hard as she tried to convince herself that there had to be another explanation for the situation, the presence of the robots—and no humans besides the captives, the strange lights, the unfamiliar materials that surrounded them—everything seemed to point to the unlikelihood that anything human, from Earth, could be behind their captivity.
She tried to direct her mind away from her churning bowels and the aching bladder she hadn’t noticed before, wondering how many hours had passed since she’d been kidnapped. The full bladder indicated at least three or four, but then she’d had one and a half mixed drinks before she’d left the club.
She’d visited the lady’s room before she’d left, though.
Her hearing seemed to have returned to normal. That usually took several hours.
She’d been knocked out, though, twice—and she’d slept at least a few hours. The sluggishness she felt seemed to be the aftereffects of not enough sleep, but could have been the result of the alcohol in her system and/or whatever they’d knocked her out with.
She managed to occupy herself with trying to calculate the time until she reached the doors that had caused the slow build of hysteria inside of her until it was all she could do to refrain from screaming and trying to claw her way over the robot behind her. She almost felt let down when the doors slid open and she discovered she’d been shoved inside what looked almost like a community bath.
It would’ve looked more like one and banished much of her terror if she hadn’t discovered a spider-like robot on the other side. “Empty bowels and bladders and then proceed to the decontamination showers,” the thing intoned in the same eerily mechanical voice as the other robot, lifting two arms/legs and pointing to either side of the room.
As jolting as that order was, it was nothing compared to the discovery that more robots were waiting to ‘assist’ in the evacuation. Miranda discovered she was terrified enough by that time that her bowels had turned to water. She didn’t need a fucking enema, but she got one anyway.
Weak and thoroughly rung out from the experience, her legs felt like jelly as she was herded with the others to the decontamination showers, sprayed down with something foamy from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet, and then hosed off.
Her eyes and nose were still stinging when she was blasted with air that drove the excess fluids from her skin but still left her damp and shivering as she was shoved through another door that appeared just beyond the decontamination area. The woman at the very front of the line balked when she saw what was beyond the door.
A robot clamped a manacle-like hand on her wrist and snatched her through, dragging her toward one of the waiting gurneys. Knowing it was useless, they all fought.
And it was useless.
What followed was an examination that was more nightmarish than anything Miranda had ever experienced and painful enough she wondered if it was actually intended as torture. She was stabbed with needles, every orifice thoroughly examined, including her sex. She was clamped to the table so that she couldn’t actually see what was going on ‘below’, but her legs had been clamped into something frighteningly similar to the support stirrups of a gynecologist’s table and when her womb spasmed painfully she knew they’d removed her IUD.
She didn’t know why, but the pain in her belly on top of the pain still radiating through her from her bowels was too pervasive to allow for much thought. She was just relieved when the poking and painful prodding finally stopped and the clamps opened.
A robot grasped her wrist, half lifting, half dragging her from the table.
“Diseased.”
The pronouncement pierced her shock sufficiently to capture her attention. Miranda glanced around in time to see a robot dragging one of the women out a different door than she and the other women were being herded toward. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest, although she wasn’t actually aware of what had caused her fear to spike, whether it was some vague awareness of the woman’s fate or just fear of what her own was to be.
It seemed frighteningly significant, though, that the woman had been pronounced ‘diseased’ and promptly separated from the rest of the herd.
She felt like a herd animal—an animal being led to the slaughter.
She tried her best to close her mind to that terrifying thought.
Each door had seemed to lead them all deeper into nightmare, though, and Miranda discovered the third door was no different. She saw as she was dragged through it that she’d stepped into a cavernous warehouse-like room filled with strange lozenges that seemed to be on some sort of rotating shelves. She struggled mindlessly against the grip on her wrist, fought for all she was worth as the robot, with the single-mindedness and complete lack of emotion of a machine, dragged her to one of the lozenges, shoved her inside, and closed the lid.
She began battering against it the moment she was released, screaming, cursing—making so much noise she didn’t hear the hiss of the gases entering the chamber, had no awareness that she was being knocked out until the cloudiness enveloped her mind and she lost tone in every muscle. Terror filled her briefly as she felt the liquid filling the coffin she’d been shoved into and then even that floated away.
* * * *
Miranda woke to the horror of drowning. She flailed mindlessly, trying to drag air into her nose, opening her mouth, even though she could feel the icy jell that seemed to envelope her, knew even through the madness of fear there was no air to breathe. Abruptly, her chest heaved. She gagged, coughing up the thick jell that had surrounded her only seconds before.
Something hard clamped around her wrists and lifted her, making it feel as if every joint in her body separated as she was hoisted clear of the pod. She was still too mindless and too beleaguered with the effort to expel the jell in her lungs, however, to have more than a fleeting awareness of being lifted and then lowered again. Her feet touched something solid, but although she tried to brace her knees instinctively, she sprawled on the hard floor as soon as she was released, coughing, gagging, and sputtering until she finally managed to heave in a lungful of air.
Something clamped around one of her wrists again, lifting her. Blinking, trying to focus her eyes, Miranda struggled to get her feet under her when she felt the pressure on her shoulder joint increasing to the point of agonizing pain.
“Move forward.”
She’d barely managed to lock her shaky knees to keep from collapsing again when she heard the order. Shivering from the cold, her entire body feeling as heavy as if she’d just climbed from a pool after hours of swimming, thoroughly disoriented, Miranda nevertheless responded to the command, taking one trembling step forward with a tremendous effort. She couldn’t see, couldn’t fully open her eyes for the gluttonous mess that kept trying to slide into her eyes with every blink. Lifting a hand with an effort, she tried to wipe her eyes but discovered there was as much of the jelly like substance on her fingers as there was on her face.
Squinting, she finally managed to fix her gaze on the naked back of the woman in front of her and staggered in a drunken path behind her, halting when the woman stopped, shuffling forward again when the woman moved.
She was barely aware of passing from the room she was in into another room until she was blasted with water that was nearly as icy as the sticky jell that coated her skin. The temperature took her breath. The water, pelting her from every direction, managed to make it up her nostrils and into her throat, strangling her.
The robots herding them, drove them all into a clumsy run once they’d emerged from the ‘shower’ and been briefly blasted with air nearly as frigid as the water. Still weak, half blind, thoroughly bewildered, and coughing and choking from the water and the remnants of the jell their lungs continued to expel, the group slipped, skidded, and collided with each other, the walls, and the floor until they ran out of anywhere to run to. Huddling in a terrified, shivering mass, most of the women were either wailing loudly or weeping quietly when the doors shut behind them, sealing them into a profound darkness that might have been a tomb for all any of them knew.
The wails became screams as the ‘room’ they were in abruptly fell. It was the first Miranda had felt any sense of motion since she’d awoken to the nightmare, but she was one of the few who didn’t scream—mostly because she was just too terrified even to find her voice. The screaming was deafening, reached a fever pitch and rolled around them in waves as they continued to fall endlessly.
The most prolific screamers among them were hoarse long before the ‘room’ they were in began to bounce, shake, and jolt as if some giant held them and meant to shake them to death. They tumbled about the room, colliding painfully with each other and the walls, ceiling, and floor, over and over until gravity plastered them to the floor.
Or rather the ceiling.
They made that discovery when the ‘can’ holding them abruptly decelerated and they all landed on the floor in a crumpled tangle of bodies, groaning in pain—those still conscious enough to manage at least that much.
Miranda was too stunned even to attempt movement at first, too wary that she might discover they actually hadn’t stopped falling to consider trying to disentangle herself and get up. Instinctively, though, her mind performed an internal inventory for damage assessment even while it struggled for orientation that would tell her which end was up.
She hurt in too many places to catalogue and at that she still thought she might be better off than many of the others. She was conscious. She was pretty sure many of the others weren’t, might not even still be alive.
It occurred to her after a time that they couldn’t have fallen regardless of what it had seemed like. The fall hadn’t just seemed endless. It had lasted a very, very long time and, that being the case, they would all certainly be dead if whatever it was they were in actually had fallen.
The door where they’d entered opened. Blinding light and a warm gust of air spilled inside.
Miranda blinked at the sudden assault, her eyes watering.
“Please stand and exit in an orderly manner.”
Rage abruptly surged through Miranda at the calm, indifferent command after what they’d just endured. If there’d been any way in hell she could’ve managed it, she thought she would’ve pounded that hunk of fucking metal and wires into a pulp. It took her several minutes even to extricate herself from the women around her and find a spot on the floor to place her feet that wasn’t already occupied with some part of someone’s body. Groaning, one by one the women around her also began trying to right themselves.
“Please exit in an orderly manner or I will begin firing randomly in twenty seconds, nineteen, eighteen ….”
Screaming hoarsely, three women stumbled toward the door in a blind panic and wedged themselves into the opening. Right behind them, frightened near witless herself, Miranda gave the nearest one a shove that broke the clog. She nearly rolled down the gangplank as she stumbled out behind the woman, still unable to see very clearly and caught completely off guard by the discovery that the floor beyond the ‘room’ was no longer a level corridor, but a sharp incline.
A chorus of weak, hoarse cries followed as the remainder of the women scrambled to obey before the robot started firing on them. Several women were knocked down in the stampede to comply and either stepped on or tripped over by the women shoving behind them. In the melee, it was many minutes after she’d reached the ground before Miranda collected herself enough to look around and when she had she couldn’t assimilate what her senses were feeding her about her surroundings.
The heat was the first thing that really penetrated her mind but even that was slow in coming because the chill from the jell and the hosing had penetrated bone deep and it took her mind minutes to register something it would’ve recorded instantly under most circumstances. It took longer to recognize that the difficulty she was having breathing was from the humidity—not from the painful bruising of her ribs or the residual aftereffects of having her lungs filled with fluids … or jell, whatever it was that she’d been packed in for the trip.
She wasn’t on Earth.
Her mind told her that even while it scrambled madly to try to identify her surroundings with information stored in her brain that was totally useless to her now. A jungle surrounded them, but it was no Earth jungle. Beyond the familiarity of colors—shades of green, gray, and brown like she’d never seen, but still colors she knew—there was nothing that even vaguely resembled any plant—flower, shrub, tree, or grass she’d ever seen in pictures or otherwise.
As soon as she’d noted the alien landscape, she lifted her head to scan the sky, staring at the enormous orange ball and the murky, sulfurish-yellow sky until she was jostled by one of the other women. She glanced around at her traveling companions, then, wondering if she wore the same completely bewildered expressions they did, wondering if her eyes looked as vacant.
One of the three legged bots she’d encountered in the bath/horror room, she saw, was affixing manacles around the right ankles of the women while another busily threaded a chain through the eye of each. She watched them dully for several moments before she lifted her head to look around again.
A jolt went through her, penetrating the fog of her chaotic mind when she realized that one of the ‘robots’ she’d dismissed wasn’t a robot at all. It was … a being, a very alien being, in a spacesuit. She stared at it, trying to wrap her mind around the newest assault to her senses, wondering if her mind had simply shattered at some point.
After a few moments, she realized it—the thing in the suit which, although humanoid, reminded her most strongly of a lizard—was assessing the condition of the women and counting heads. When that dawned on her, she looked around to assess them herself.
Bruised, battered … and naked, dazed, but with the beginnings of fear in their eyes, she discovered they were all looking around hopelessly just as she was.
She had no idea whether the group included everyone that had been driven into the ‘cell’ or not. She didn’t notice anyone that hadn’t been in the cell with her at first, but there had certainly been more women than the original group she’d been confined with when they’d been ‘packed’. Turning slightly at that thought, she looked back up the ramp.
The ship that had transported them to the surface of the world was a clunky, battered-looking thing that looked as if it had seen a great deal of use—maybe more than it should’ve seen.
It was a ship, though, clearly a space going vessel.
She was almost surprised that she didn’t feel any surprise.
Maybe her mind had broken? She felt oddly detached—in mind, at least. Her body was throbbing from so many assaults that it seemed one mass of pain, not excruciating pain, but certainly at a miserable level. She supposed by that that she’d arrived miraculously unhurt—nothing broken or damaged beyond repair.
She moved forward when she was ordered to and allowed the machines to clamp a manacle around her right ankle as it had the others. When they’d been chained together, the alien fell in behind one of the robots, which appeared, from Miranda’s perspective nearly at the end of the line of women, to be flattening the jungle growth and creating a path for them all to follow.
When she reached the edge of the clearing where the ship had landed it seemed that supposition had been borne up. The freshly crushed vegetation was still sticky under her bare feet. It was prickly, as well, uncomfortable and in some places downright painful to trod on. She tried to watch for sharp splinters after the first one she stepped on.
The wondrous sense of detachment that had gripped her began to dissipate as they were engulfed in the alien jungle. She thought, if it had been a jungle on Earth that it would’ve given her the creeps. The strangeness of the trees and plants and the possibility of equally alien creatures slithering through the bizarre foliage—and the possibility of something big enough and ferocious enough to eat them—only made it more unnerving. She felt her skin prickle despite the heat and the humidity, glancing fearfully to either side of the narrow trail for any sign of threat.
They’d been trudging for at least thirty minutes when Miranda spotted a wall rising above the jungle. Her heart thudded dully in her chest with uneasiness as the realization slowly sank into her that they’d come at last to the destination the aliens had had in mind from the time she’d been taken.
Now, for better or worse, she’d have the answers she’d set out to discover the night she’d gone to the club to try to find out what had happened to the women who’d gone missing.
Much good it would do her or any of them!
There were gates in the wall—gates that stood open, banishing the thought that had popped into her mind that it was some sort of prison, or at least a fortress. The lizard-man stopped at the gate, apparently counting heads as the robots continued to herd them forward until they’d all passed through the opening in the wall.
Limited in her movements by the tether on her ankle, Miranda stopped when everyone else did, lifting her head to stare assessingly at her surroundings. There wasn’t much to see. The place seemed deserted and there wasn’t anything dotting the broad courtyard where they’d halted beyond three containers that reminded her of the large, open trash bins she’d seen at construction sites. Two of them appeared to be full almost to overflowing with something, but she certainly couldn’t identify it.
Lizard-man followed them into the compound, looked around, and finally pointed to the wall they’d passed through. Miranda turned to look. Seeing that the wall had cast deep shade over a wedge of the bare dirt, she headed toward it with a sense of relief.
It was short lived. The fucking chains on their ankles made sitting in any real comfort nearly impossible and damned awkward to achieve. Finally, though, they all managed to sit, their backs against the cool, if uncomfortably rough, stone wall. The coarse soil wasn’t particularly comfortable against bare buttocks, if it came to that, but all in all, it was the closest to comfort any of them had had since they’d been snatched from the storage pods they’d been transported in.
Weak and shaky, Miranda drew her knees up and propped her cheek on them. The temptation to close her eyes and yield to the weakness and just sleep was aborted when she discovered that the courtyard gave way to a vast expanse of water. It was hard to say what sort of water—possibly man-made—or at least artificial. The walls of the fortress, she saw, extended well out into the water, encompassing perhaps three times the area of the courtyard itself—which became beach-like in her mind. The water was relatively still, though, probably due to the walls.
She was still scanning the water, trying to ignore her parched throat when she saw something bob up in the water. Her eyes instantly focused on it and then she saw several other ‘things’—heads, she realized after a moment. As she stared, dumbstruck, she saw necks, chests, torsos and then legs as the man-like creatures seemed to walk, not swim, out of the sea.
A ripple of uneasiness stirred through her and the other women around her, but she was too completely focused on the beings to notice the reactions of the others to any great degree.
The first thing that struck her was the color of their skin—golden, but more yellowish than brown—which was sharply contrasted by the black hair slicked back from their faces and gathered at their crowns to form a long ‘pony tail’. The chests and shoulders were broad, everything, she saw as they emerged, bulked with muscles as if a herd of body builders were marching unhurriedly from the sea. It wasn’t until they’d emerged enough that she could see that, unlike their upper bodies which were obviously bare, their lower bodies were encased in britches of some kind that she returned her attention to their faces and discovered they’d been spotted.
The creatures halted on the edge of the beach, tension in every line of their massive bodies. After several unnerving moments, the majority seemed to dismiss them, heading toward the containers she’d noticed before. One of them separated from the others, though, striding directly toward them.
* * * *
Khan noticed the machines first. Every fiber of his being tensed at the sight of them, the sense of threat that washed through him surpassed only by the rage that followed. It occurred to him after a moment that the machines were nothing like the things belonging to their hated enemies, the Sheloni. That didn’t necessarily mean they were less of a threat, and it was certainly no less of an offense that they’d encroached on territory the Hirachi considered their own.
It might or might not mean, however, that they could be more easily destroyed.
Having noted every detail that he could from where he stood, he dismissed them for the moment and turned his attention to searching for the beings they belonged to.
His gaze slid over the cringing, pale skinned beings along the wall and settled finally on the one clad in an environmental suit similar to those worn by the Sheloni. He wasn’t nearly tall enough to be one, however. If he had been, he would certainly not be standing nonchalantly by what was obviously his captives. He would know that it was more than his life was worth to appear in a Hirachi stronghold so poorly defended.
The presence of the captives pegged him as being of their ilk, regardless, strengthening his distrust and dislike, though doubt had begun to percolate through him that threat was intended, whether he felt it or not. Everything about the creature’s posture suggested he expected to be welcomed.
He was propped negligently against the stone wall behind him and the machines seemed to be focused entirely on watching the captives, not ranged around him for his protection or situated in a formation of defense.
Signaling the others to continue with their work, he strode toward the intruders to discover their business.
* * * *
Focused on the one striding toward them the moment he separated from the others and moved purposefully toward them, Miranda’s heart clenched in her chest, squeezing the air from her lungs as he approached closely enough for her to fully appreciate his size.
They were giants, she thought, feeling a jolt of shock roll over her—not just massively built, but tall—six and a half feet, bare minimum. The one approaching them had been taller than the others standing near him, which had caught her attention even before he started toward her group, but she could see he was easily six eight or ten, which meant the others had to be at least six and half at the shortest.
She might not have noticed with the distance that still separated them, because he wasn’t disproportionate as so many of the very tall men she’d seen were. He didn’t have the stretched out looking torso that made him appear as if his body had out grown his arms and legs, or the stork-like legs and gangly arms and ‘normal’ sized torso that gave some very tall people the appearance of a water-bug. His arms, legs, and torso seemed, in fact, perfectly balanced and proportioned.
It was the size of his parts that brought home the fact, without anything to measure him against, that he hailed from a tribe of giants.
Dragging her attention from the powerful legs, arms, and chest, she focused on his face, trying to discern his features, which, at a distance at least, had seemed as human-like as his form, fully expecting as he drew nearer to discover they weren’t at all human-like.
She discovered she was wrong. His nose, eyes, and lips, at least from what she could see, were formed like human features, not distorted in any peculiar way. He looked as completely human, in that regard, at least, as any man she might have met on the streets of the city. The face itself was a collection of sharp angles and planes—his cheekbones high and distinctive, his forehead a broad, flat slope to his hairline, his chin boxy rather than rounded and almost belligerent in the jut of it, his jaw line as squared as his chin.
His ears, she discovered with a jolt of surprise, were pointed.
Her overall impression, despite his strange skin tones, despite her absolute certainty that he was as alien as the creature that had kidnapped them, was that he was a remarkably attractive being. His powerful, beautifully male body certainly didn’t detract from that impression, but neither did the face that went with the body.
* * * *
Khan wasn’t certain what made him alter his direction. Truthfully, he wasn’t even aware that he had, at first. As he drew nearer to the group ranged along the far wall of the compound, however, began to discern the manner of beings they were, his entire focus shifted from confronting the alien to inspecting the ‘cargo’ he’d brought with him.
It wasn’t just the jolting discovery that it was females—strangely colored miniature females—though that certainly caught his attention the very instant his gaze flickered over them and was snagged by the glimpse of clearly feminine genitalia. An odd sense almost of awe swept over him the closer he came to them and the more certain he was that he wasn’t merely imagining that the tiny, almost ethereal creatures were almost Hirachi-like in face and form. If he hadn’t been so stunned, he thought later, it would’ve been obvious to all, especially the gods damned trader, that he was beyond intrigued by them. Enthralled might have come closer to the mark, though he wasn’t certain that was strong enough.
The glimpses of full, rounded, pink tipped breasts disabused him of the brief suspicion, and anxiety, that they were children, not adults, though—as tiny as they were.
Tiny women—not young children, he realized with a relief that was almost dizzying.
Ignoring the lizard-man completely, he strode directly toward them. Jolting to a halt when he was close enough to thoroughly appraise them, he scanned each woman slowly, struggling with the fascination that grew more pronounced in him the longer he studied them. Huddled as they were, he could tell at a glance that not one would stand more than breast high to him, and yet they weren’t misshapen or disproportioned. They were, in point of fact, very pleasingly proportioned for females of any race, tiny, but beautifully made. Even their faces were pretty, as pale as they were, as obviously frightened as the poor little mites were.
It was as well, he thought wryly when he saw the alarm in their eyes, that he hadn’t gone any closer, though he couldn’t claim any forethought in it. He’d stopped to struggle with the urge to grab the nearest and thoroughly examine the miniature body parts to see if they were as flawless, and still fully functional, as they looked.
He couldn’t decide whether or not he liked their coloring, though. The pinkish white skin seemed almost as strange to his eyes as the pale hair—and their pale eyes. That was startling. For several moments he wondered if they were blind, but he noticed almost immediately that they could see him quite clearly.
Obviously a little too clearly to suit them, he thought wryly, wondering briefly if they were as disconcerted about his size and his skin tones as he was theirs. Somehow, he doubted they were as captivated as he was—something about the way they trembled alerted him to that, he thought with a touch of sarcasm to cover his sense of disappointment and irritation.
And he was captivated, however disconcerted he also was.
Dragging his attention from the two he’d focused on when he finally noticed their reaction wasn’t quite the delight he’d felt, he scanned the others.
One near the end closest to the gate caught his eye as he did so—almost literally knocked the breath from him. Her skin was much like all the others, but her hair—it glowed like fire in the sun’s rays. As fascinating as he’d found the hair of the others—warm, golden shades near the color of Hirachi skin—warm like flickering fire, hers was the deeper shade of the hottest flames of a fire.
He felt oddly lightheaded as he studied her, as stunned as if he’d caught a jolt of the electrical charge from a thunderbolt—not quite comatose, but not far from it, he realized when he’d finally managed to gather some of his wits.
He was almost as amazed that no one seemed to notice he’d been struck witless as he was to realize he had been—that it had taken no more than the connection of his gaze to her to completely short-circuit his brain.
He could no more have prevented himself from moving closer to her to study her than he could’ve ceased to breathe. He wasn’t even aware he had until he found himself crouched in front of her, studying her almost face to face, so close her scent tantalized him, not just her appearance, so close he could see flecks of gold in eyes the color of summer grasses, so close he could see that the texture of her skin looked as smooth and soft as the petal of a flower.
The urge to touch her moved through him with a nearly irresistible force. He tensed every muscle to fight the impulse, but the effort left him feeling drained, dizzy, left his mouth and throat feeling parched with the dryness of desperate thirst.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. As certain as he’d been when he approached her that he’d find she wasn’t nearly as wondrous as she’d seemed from afar, he saw that she was even more perfect than he’d imagined. Want settled in his belly like fire, the desire, the absolute desperation to possess her.
It shocked him.
It shook him to his core when he recognized it for what it was.
He’d never felt such a fierce need to possess any thing, let alone a thinking being. They were not to be possessed, could not be owned. They belonged only to themselves and only shared whatever part of themselves they were willing to share.
He was repelled that the thought had even occurred to him, but he couldn’t shake it, regardless. It didn’t go away because he knew it was wrong. It didn’t even diminish.
* * * *
Regardless of her ability to appreciate the surprising, but interesting, even attractive, aspects of the alien approaching them, it threw Miranda into complete disorder when, instead of heading directly to their captor, he veered toward them. Thankfully, he stopped to the study the women at the far end from where she sat, but his interest, in any of them, was still unnerving.
She wasn’t the only one unsettled. The ripples of uneasiness from the women nearer to him seemed almost to telegraph through the chain that bound them together. She felt their urge to take flight as surely as she felt her own natural instincts toward fight or flight, confronted as they had been with a being so completely alien, and so totally threatening in size alone.
It didn’t stop there, however. As handsome a creature as he was, there was that about him that screamed barbarian. The breeches and boots that covered his lower body seemed intricate enough in design and craftsmanship to suggest some familiarity with civilization, but the long flowing hair, the extensive tattooing across his bulging upper chest muscles, and the rings that pierced his male nipples, to say nothing of his imposing ‘presence’ and hard, unsmiling, almost fierce features, suggested more than a passing familiarity with purely physical contests of strength and aggression.
After studying the women closest to him with a thoroughness that made even her uncomfortable, despite the fact that it wasn’t her that held his attention, he lifted his head, scanning the rest of the women with far less intensity, almost what amounted to disinterest considering the focus he’d directed at the women at the end. The modicum of relief she’d felt that he seemed more interested in the blonds vanished when his gaze reached her and stopped, zeroing in on her with the piercing, unwavering intensity of a laser sight—or a predator.
That latter impression intensified when he straightened abruptly, his entire body tensed with alertness, and then began to move toward her without so much as a flicker of interest in any of the women between them.
Briefly, the hope arose that it wasn’t her that had caught his attention, that she was mistaken and he was actually looking beyond her at Carol, or maybe at Deborah, who sat on her other side. He wasn’t. He didn’t pause until he was directly in front of her. When he sank to his knees, she found herself nearly face to face with him, discovered he was so close she could feel the warmth of his body, hear a faint waffling of his breath as if he was struggling to control his breathing.
Instinctively, if not consciously, she recognized it for what it was—desire. Despite her uneasiness, her body responded, warming to that barely discernable sign of sexual interest more strongly even than it reacted to the darkening of his golden eyes as his pupils expanded until there was no more than a thin ring of gold around the darkness.
Her heart, which had seemed to freeze in her chest as he stopped in front of her, jerked to life, ran away, pounding hard enough it put her lungs in greater distress. She found herself panting slightly for breath, her mouth and throat as dry as dust and still so frozen at the look in his eyes that it wasn’t until he finally released his hold on her by shifting his gaze that she could move her own.
As aware as she was that he was examining her with a thoroughness that couldn’t possibly miss any flaws, her own focus was on him.
He wasn’t just human-like in a vague sort of way, she realized with a strange sense of unreality, of being outside herself and oddly detached. His individual features were pleasingly shaped and proportioned and formed a whole that was inescapably handsome—remarkably appealing—breathtakingly attractive.
She was completely certain she’d never seen a human male any more, or even as handsome, or as thoroughly devastating to her senses.
Reluctant, vaguely disbelieving of her senses or at least her perception of them, she studied his features again, the slash of straight, black brows above his deep set eyes, the exotic shape and tilt of his eyes, the long, straight bridge of his nose that ended in compact but slightly flared nostrils, the strong cheek bones beneath his eyes, the narrow lips that formed his hard mouth. She couldn’t find fault, though, either with their initial appeal to her or her perceptions.
The ears were intriguing, though she couldn’t see them that well when he was looking directly at her—as well proportioned as everything else about him, set close to his head—but pointed, elf-like, though there damned sure wasn’t anything else about him that was the least bit elf-like.
His shoulders stuck out on either side of his head at hard right angles, straight and strong, without a hint of a weak slope. His chest was downright massive, impossibly broad, the muscles as well formed and defined as a body builder who focused diet and exercise to achieve anything approaching what she knew, absolutely, was natural to him. His arms were no less endowed. She thought the bulging muscle of his upper arm was probably as big in circumference as her thigh—and her thighs weren’t skinny by any means.
She’d allowed her fascination in him to lead her gaze downward, along the rippling muscles of his belly to the disconcertingly impressive bulge of his sex before she caught herself and looked away.
He didn’t seem to have any such reservations, she discovered. He examined everything exposed—which was most of her despite her efforts to cover herself with her arms, hands, and legs—with the same piercing intensity as he had her face.
Wryly, she thought she should appreciate the fact that he at least seemed as fascinated with her face as he was her body.
A frown twitched his dark brows together when his gaze settled at last on her ankle, though. Reaching toward her, he curled his hand around the chain that bound her, tightening it until she saw his knuckles whiten with the pressure.
For a moment, pure rage contorted his features, but fear had barely hit her when he erased the expression. Lifting his head, he studied her a moment longer and then glanced down the line of women until his searching gaze found the lizard-man. Straightening to his full height, he approached the lizard-man.
She saw when he stopped before the other alien that she hadn’t been far off in her guess about his height. The lizard-man was around six feet tall and the other alien topped him by half a head.
“What manner of beings are these?” he asked the lizard-man, gesturing toward them with his hand.
Total shock rippled through Miranda when she realized she could understand him. She felt the same shock vibrate through the other women, saw it in their faces when they met her gaze.
The lizard-man almost seemed to smile. “Earth females.”
Another jolt of surprise went through Miranda—not because she’d understood him. The robots had obviously been programmed with their language, which certainly suggested the aliens who’d programmed them knew it. It wasn’t even because he sounded like the robots—as if he was using some mechanical device to translate.
It was the fact that he knew exactly what they were. How could he know they called their world Earth when he hadn’t, as far she knew, questioned a single one of them? The robots hadn’t.
The language, she supposed, he might have collected and translated through broadcasts, but the chances seemed remote that he would’ve learned in that way that their world was called Earth.
“Why are they chained?”
There was menace in the question, and it was obvious the lizard-man detected it at once. He shrugged in an uncannily human gesture. “They are slaves—purchased for trade,” he added hastily. “I couldn’t allow them to wander off into the jungle and get eaten.”
A furious denial instantly sprang to Miranda’s lips, but never emerged.
“Purchased? Or stolen? They didn’t come with you willingly or there’d be no need for chains,” the alien growled.
The lizard-man’s eyes narrowed. “I’m an honest trader,” he said somewhat defensively. “I traded for them. Their government was happy to take the technology I offered in return for them. If you will look, you will see they are all healthy, breedable females. They were tagged for me for pick up. I was told exactly where to find them and when to look, otherwise I couldn’t have collected such an exquisite selection so quickly or so easily.” He shoved his hand into one of the pockets of his space suit and produced a handful of colorful strips that Miranda instantly recognized as the wristbands the clubs commonly used.
She stared at them in dawning horror as what he’d claimed slowly sank into her mind and completely obliterated the urge she’d felt to furiously deny his lies. A wave of nausea washed over her, but she wasn’t certain if it was rage that inspired it or recognition of a completely unacceptable truth.
The black haired alien turned to survey them, his expression eloquent of distaste. “Their own people sold them?”
“I have a bill of sale if you would like to see it—though, of course it’s in their language. The Vernamin will vouch for me. It was they who suggested the Hirachi might be interested in acquiring females. I was told to speak with Khan, the leader. May I assume that you are he?”
He stiffened and turned to look at the trader. “We trade with the Vernamin. It does not follow that we either trust them or consider them friends. You would’ve been better informed of our needs if you had approached us first.”
Turning from the trader, he strode down the line of women again. Reaching Miranda, he bent down, caught her upper arms, and hauled her to her feet before she could even assimilate what he had in mind. He stared down at her, his expression grim, though something flickered in his eyes that seemed to belie the contempt in his hard expression. “They are … pigmies! This one is not much more than waist high to me and some are even smaller!” He curled his fingers around her upper arm, spanning it and then some. “Weak—strange to my eyes. I am certain they are beautiful to their own kind—but not as beautiful as our own women! Not strong, capable of bearing strong warriors. Mayhap not even breedable for the Hirachi at all!”
The trader looked disconcerted and then angry. “I was told you would find them appealing.”
“They lied to you!” Khan growled.
“They are compatible for breeding,” the trader insisted. “Many have already bred with Hirachi males and produced good stock! They appealed to other Hirachi males … and I have seen to it that they can speak the Hirachi tongue and understand.”
Khan’s gaze flew to the woman’s face—the woman that made him lightheaded just looking at her, that he’d chosen to use as an example purely for the fact that it would give him the opportunity to touch her as he’d so desperately wanted to—that he’d just thoroughly insulted. Never, that he could recall, had he so effectively made such a complete ass of himself. He felt his face heat with acute discomfort as he studied her expression and found confirmation of the trader’s claim that he wasn’t particularly fucking delighted with at the moment. Briefly, he scanned his memory to discover just how damning his remarks had been, but he didn’t get far before he realized he didn’t particularly want to remember what he’d said when he’d thought there was no way any of the women would understand him.
Dragging his gaze from the woman, he focused on the trader again with an effort. “The spawning is not a time when a Hirachi male thinks with his brain,” he growled uncomfortably. “If creatures such as these were all that were available ….”
“Not such as these … just like these. It took a great deal of time and effort to track them to the source. They were thoroughly examined and tested to assure quality and also that they were exactly the same as the others genetically so there could be no doubt that they were compatible for breeding.”
“Why did you not track our own females?” Khan demanded testily, reluctantly releasing his grip on the woman’s arm and striding away from her when pulling her closer held a lot more appeal and he began to realize that temptation might get the best of him.
Something flickered in the lizard-man’s eyes as Khan joined him once more, but he merely shrugged. “I tried. The Sheloni would not barter for the location of the world they stole the Hirachi from.”
Unable to resist, Khan turned to study the women assessingly, his gaze moving with a will of its own to the red headed one he coveted so much he could taste it in every pore, so much he was having a hell of a gods damned time trying to maintain even a semblance of only mild interest. “To whom do you mean to trade them if we have no interest?”
The trader studied them through narrowed eyes that made him wonder just how successful he’d been in hiding his absolute fascination. When he spoke, though, Khan felt himself relax fractionally—briefly.
“They do appear a weak lot. I’m not certain they would be of much use to anyone for labor. I suppose I would have to see if any of the other tribes of Hirachi on this world were interested and, if they are not, then I will have to settle them in a brothel somewhere. They have a certain appeal, you will admit, despite their strangeness. I would not mind fucking one myself—though, of course, they are completely unsuitable for breeding for my people.”
Khan’s expression tightened. “Is this all that you have?”
“There were a few that were diseased and had to be disposed of. Which part do you find least appealing? The size or the color? I believe they come in other colors. I only selected these because their own people assured me the light ones were most desirable. They may have steered me wrong. I had not considered that. They seemed honest enough and eager to trade. I should have considered that they might want to unload the most abundant, or least desirable. I’m certain that I can find at least a few that are sturdier, perhaps a bit taller, although these seem to be average for their species. Would you prefer I collect another selection and return with them?”
Miranda couldn’t quite interpret the look Khan bent upon the trader, but it seemed to make the trader uneasy.
“What would you require in trade?”
The trader turned to study the bins. “One load of jasumi for the lot of them?”
Khan’s face tightened. “Those are promised already to the Vernamin—three bins—and we have not even reached full quota yet.”
The lizard-man licked his lips. “A half a load then … since I can see these are not just what you want. I will bring a better selection when I come again and more, and then, perhaps, we can discuss a full load?”
Khans hands clenched and unclenched as if he was contemplating wrapping them around the trader’s neck. He leaned closer. “It is the custom among the Hirachi that the females chose the males,” he said in a low growl through clenched teeth. “The only thing more repellent to the Hirachi than an unwilling female is slavery, trader.”
The trader looked uneasy, but he managed an off-handed shrug. “Next time I will be certain to bring volunteers,” he said with an oily smile. “And be assured that I will see to it that they are far more desirable.”
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