Kaitlyn O'Connor (3 page)

The lizard man herding them began shouting and screaming and threatening again and they began struggling to disentangle themselves. They were aided by the robots that moved among them, snatching them up by whatever they snagged—hair, a hand or finger, an arm or a leg or a foot. Loren managed to get on her feet without that „help
‟
and helped Karen up. She had the opportunity while they were waiting for the robots and their captor to restore some semblance of order to gawk at her surroundings.

She might have thought they
‟
d disembarked from one ship and into another that was many times bigger except that she could see that there were other ships docked up and down what looked like a broad street, disgorging trade goods. It almost looked more like a huge mall than 10

anything else, except that, where one would
‟
ve expected to see a ceiling there was a network of metal with some sort of transparent material in between that allowed her to stare at stars she
‟
d never seen. She was still gaping when the women around her began to move again—which was when she discovered she wasn
‟
t the only one gaping.

There were alien beings moving along the „street
‟
and in and out of the ships and buildings along it. She
‟
d either been too stunned to really notice that before or she
‟
d simply assumed they were what she was used to seeing, humans, because most of them appeared to be humanoid even if they didn
‟
t look entirely human or looked about as far from it as they could get and still retain a humanoid shape. There were a few that weren
‟
t even humanoid, but she wasn
‟
t certain whether they were actually intelligent beings or lower animals that were being traded. Almost without exception, however, they all stopped to gape as the women were driven past them as if they
‟
d never seen humans before.

It was the way the aliens were staring at them that finally brought it crashing down upon Loren that she was as naked as the day she was born and
most
of the aliens seemed to be male.

Everyone else seemed to make that connection about the same time Loren did. They crowded into a tight knot that made it that much more difficult to try to walk, trying to cover themselves with their hands. She was almost relieved when they were finally herded into what appeared to be an enormous building near the center of what she realized must be a space station since she hadn
‟
t seen a sign of anything that looked like they might be on a planet, as hard as
that
was to assimilate. The sense of relief lasted until they
‟
d been driven down the corridor and out the other side and she discovered they were in what looked like a football stadium—except that it was round rather than oblong—and there was no grass on the „field
‟
.

Their captor brought them to a halt and told them to be still and then marched away.

Struggling to assimilate what was going on, Loren watched him a little dazedly as he crossed the field to the raised platform in the center and spoke with several men-aliens. He looked pleased when he turned toward them again.

“Oh…my…fucking…god!” one of the women near Loren gasped.

“It
‟
s a…it
‟
s a slave auction!”

Loren glanced at Karen in horrified disbelief. She would
‟
ve liked to have disputed her comment as pure conjecture, but their captor returned and released several women from the chain and then hauled them to the platform.

And the bidding began.

11

Loren was too shocked to cry. Most of the women were weeping and begging, or cursing and struggling when they were led off to the auction block and screaming hysterically when they were claimed by the highest bidder, but she couldn
‟
t even summon enough emotion to do either.

When they came for her, she kept telling herself it just wasn
‟
t real. It couldn
‟
t be real. None of it could be. She was going to wake up and discover she was in a mental hospital from a nervous breakdown or that she
‟
d been „tripping
‟
on some hallucinogenic drug.

And yet, the sounds of so many voices and the smells of so many different things were as hard to dismiss as the feel of the field beneath her bare feet and the textural change of the platform as the mounted it. They managed to pierce the cocoon she
‟
d wrapped herself in when her hands were seized and peeled from her protective pose and her arms twisted behind her back to display for the bidders and she happened to catch sight of the huge screens around the arena where the cameras had zoomed in to show her breasts and genitals for everyone to study. If that wasn
‟
t bad enough, chants came from the bidders for a „better
‟
look and they bent her over and pulled the lips of her sex back to satisfy the curiosity of the buyers. Fortunately, that indignity was over before she
‟
d fully grasped what they intended to do.

She began trembling then as quick thaw set in, but the real horror only hit her when the bidding was concluded and the buyer arrived to pay for her and collect her.

She was pretty sure he was the most horrible creature in the entire stadium. He was very little taller than she was, and appeared to be bigger around than he was tall—soft rolls that shimmied with each movement he made—and that was the „good
‟
part. His face more strongly resembled a fish of some kind than anything else that came to mind—from the round, bulbous eyes that didn
‟
t seem to have eyelids to the lipless mouth. He had no hair—nothing like she had, at any rate.
Something
sprouted from the wrinkly flesh that covered his skull, but it looked more like worms than hair. Each „strand
‟
even seemed to move of its own accord as if they were some kind of parasites attached to him rather than part of him. He had nose holes, but no actual nose and when he grinned and displayed the hideous, discolored teeth in his mouth, she thought for a moment that she might faint.

She prayed for it, actually wilted dizzily toward the floor of the auction block, but he merely coiled a beefy arm around her waist and hauled her away.

The smell!

She
‟
d smelled pigs that smelled better and the noxious fumes emanating from the creature gave rise to nausea. She thought she might have thrown up if she
‟
d had anything at all in her stomach, but it certainly didn
‟
t bring her closer to a swoon. On the contrary, the smell was like having an ammonia capsule broken beneath her nose. It brought her around and far too conscious.

“I can walk,” she said through gritted teeth, desperate to put any amount of distance between herself and the disgusting creature that she could.

12

“Good. You heavy,” he grunted, dropping her on the ground.

She got to her feet with an effort. “You speak English?” she asked shakily, hope instantly springing to life, though what she hoped for she had no idea.

He trained his bulging eyes on her for a moment and made a sound she finally realized must be laughter. “Speak Unduleze like everyone here. You, too.”

Loren gaped at him, slowly assimilating the „broken
‟
English. It not only dawned on her abruptly that it was completely ridiculous to think he
might
speak English when they
‟
d been gaped at as if none of the aliens had ever seen a human before, but she realized she wasn
‟
t hearing or speaking English, that there was a faint „echo
‟
of sounds that definitely weren
‟
t English.

“Trader put in brain on trip out. No can sell slave if they not understand how to obey.”

She didn
‟
t know or care how that
bastard
had made her more saleable! All that mattered was that she could communicate. “There was a mistake,” she said as he grasped her arm and led her across the field.

“No mistake. I pay good credits—too much, but you
‟
ll do.”

Desperation coiled in her belly and her heart thudded dully with a mixture of fear and hopefulness. “I mean, I
‟
m not supposed to be here…at all. See, my government arranged for me to study alien technology so that I could design and build it when I got back to Earth.”

The creature slid a look at her. “They give you to trader?”

Loren blinked at him. “No! They took me to this place and that…that creature kidnapped me!”

“Took to place where trader pick up, you supposed to be here,” the creature said complacently.

Loren
‟
s jaw dropped. Sickness coiled in her belly, however, along with the realization that that was undeniable. What were the chances, after all, that she
‟
d been picked up by that creature instead of the aliens the government had arranged a pickup with? “But I
‟
m not, damn it!”

“Are now. I buy. You mine.”

“But that
‟
s exactly my point!” she said a little more desperately. “I
‟
m not a slave. I
‟
m an engineer! I
‟
m sure we could get this straightened out if you
‟
d just contact the…uh…the American Embassy,” she ended a little weakly when it hit her that she was so far outside the U.

S. that even
she
thought she sounded like a lunatic. She was so busy trying to reason with him that he
‟
d led her into a corridor very like the one they
‟
d entered on their arrival before she even realized he fully intended to take her with him regardless of her attempts to convince him she wasn
‟
t a slave and she wasn
‟
t for sale.

* * * *

Kael had been too angry to watch when he and Dakaar arrived for the slave auction. It was not the first time that Lecur had summoned him to guard him when he went off to purchase new slaves, but he had not grown accustomed to it anymore than he had grown accustomed to being a slave himself. It still made his belly churn with a simmering rage that he could nothing about, and that was almost worse—the knowledge that he was powerless to do anything about his circumstances and unable to do anything about the enslavement of others.

13

He had never killed an opponent on the gladiatorial field. This was not war where the ultimate sacrifice was demanded and lives taken or yielded if necessary. It was fighting purely for the sake of entertaining the creatures who paid Lecur to be entertained by their blood and he refused to do more than subdue his opponent as he would have in any contest of skills.

There were times, though, when he wanted very badly to choke the life from Lecur and this was one of those times.

He and Dakaar had been left to wait a very long time while newly captured people from many worlds were paraded onto the auction block and sold, however, and he found he could not resist glancing out from the corridor beneath the stands from time to time with impatience to discover if he could how much longer they must wait.

His anger had mounted when a trader had arrived late with even more slaves to offer, but when he had glanced out in annoyance and seen the first of these new offerings, surprise and interest he should not have felt had caught him. He had thought at first that they were children and his fury had threatened to boil over, but when the vids had displayed close images of the creature, he had seen that it was a fully grown woman. More than that, although there seemed very little interest by the buyers in the faces, he had caught a glimpse of the facial features and been stunned to see that these beings were amazing like Hirachi in form, despite their miniature size. He had forgotten his outrage over the sale of flesh then. He had been too busy studying each female that was brought out and noting the things that made them seem Hirachi even while he noticed the things that proved they were still very different.

Beyond the features of the face and body that were so reminiscent of his own people, the two most marked differences were their diminutive size and the many colors of their skin. True, there were subtle differences in their own coloration. Those who spent more time laboring in the sun were darker and those who spent more time laboring in the sea were paler, but those differences were very faint and hardly noticeable. These tiny beings ranged from being so pale as to appear almost completely white to so dark they achieved the opposite end of the scale and were nearly black and there were many colors in between, from pale pink or red to a very pale yellow similar to their own coloring to many shades of brown. It was the same with their hair, which was almost more fascinating, especially when he discovered that they often had one color on their head and an entirely different color on their genitals.

He was hardly aware that they stirred him at first, too focused on studying them hungrily for those things about them that reminded him of the home and life he had once known. One came finally that jolted that arousal to the forefront of his mind, however. He noticed the hair first because it was so different from the others—brown where the light did not shine on it, but a fiery red like a blazing sunset where the light touched it and the small triangle that covered her woman
‟
s mound was almost exactly the same.

It was when the vids displayed a close up view of her form that his cock sprang to attention, however, and that circumstance redirected his mind instantly from mere curious interest in the similarity of the species to his own to hunger for her. The pretty little pointed face he caught a glimpse of sealed his enthrallment. Her eyes were open wide, revealing a color that he had never seen—a pure blue like the sky above his home world.

Want so potent went through him that he lost any ability to think beyond that desperation to possess. He could not pull his gaze away. He could not prevent the flood of thoughts that rushed through his mind as it struggled to conceive a way that he might possess her, completely disregarding the cold, hard fact that he was nothing, now, but a slave and had lost any right to 14

claim a lover, let alone a mate. He felt as he had as a warrior of the Hirachi, as a leader among his people, searching his mind for ways to court the lovely maid and entice her to his pod where he might claim her as his mate and breed his children on her.

Dakaar broke the spell. “She is beautiful,” he murmured hoarsely, clearly so enthralled with her himself that he had no idea he had spoken aloud.

The comment was enough, however, to instantly redirect Kael
‟
s mind to his rival for the attention of the maid that had caught his eyes and focus aggression as potent as his desire for her on the warrior he had considered almost as a brother from childhood.

Dakaar swallowed audibly, still completely unaware of the possessive fury emanating from Kael. “Lecur has bought her,” he said with a strange mixture of excitement and baffled anger.

The statement sent a wave of cold over Kael, however, bringing him back to reality with a sickening jolt.

He could not court her to claim her. He could not entice her with his prowess as a lover. He could not best Dakaar to prove his worth as a warrior and a protector and win her admiration.

She was a slave…and she belonged to Lecur…just he did.

He wanted to rage against the fates that he had lived when the aliens had come and taken him instead killing him. He wanted to grab Lecur and tear him limb from limb.

Instead, he sought to calm the rage that threatened his own existence as much as it did Lecur
‟
s as he watched Lecur bring the tiny creature that had so enthralled him closer and closer.

It was some vague notion that he might still achieve his freedom and take the maid that gave him the strength to fight his natural urges. It was pride that made him hide the twin desires for the maid and the desire to kill from his expression to prevent Lecur
‟
s satisfaction in knowing he felt it and could do nothing about it, but it was the little maid herself that chilled those emotions into a frozen wasteland at his core.

She was far smaller even that he had realized, far more beautiful to his eyes…and as far from his reach as if she was still on her own home world. He could not have her. No matter how much it might tear at him to look at her and know he would not touch her, let alone claim her, he could not and it would be far better to kill that want before it consumed him.

Even so, he could not prevent himself from studying her, as hard as he worked to hide the hunger he felt. He could not help but search her pretty little face for some sign that she felt at least a tiny bit of the same interest in him as he had in her. Could she see past their differences as he had? Or would she see only that his skin was yellow and he towered over her and be afraid?