by L A Warren
What the hell are you talking about? Chandra scratched out a hasty question.
Elise was telling me something on the way over here. How much do you know that we don’t know? The suspicion, and worse, the pain of Alice’s words hurt.
Sorry, I didn’t want to make you upset. Elise scraped up a pile of lettuce and shoved it in her mouth. One of the WOR-guards passed their table, paused, and eyed the full plates. They jumped and began eating. Four women staring at full plates of food would draw unwanted attention.
Spill it. Aomi glanced at Alice and then leveled the look at Elise. It was time to explain, and, with the code, everyone within earshot would hear as well. Perhaps it was time to share the news.
First off, we're property. In their minds we’re not people, just little pets to train. Don’t ever forget that. They don’t see you the way you see them. The only difference between you and me right now is that the emperor laid claim to me from the very beginning. I belong to him. I have done from the start. Who you eventually belong to has yet to be decided. High Tender vlor’Martun is in charge of determining that. When he finally does, you’ll be registered to your vlor’ master on his inventory! The fact Alice has a vlor’lordling asking her to call him by given name means he’s pretty certain she’ll be his.
Elise scraped absently at the lettuce on her plate. The other girls stared sullenly at their food. No one was really hungry anymore. She continued trying to explain something she barely understood.
Just remember, everything the Vendel do is tied to biology and biotech. The Vector and the Activator were biological constructs. Like little machines sent into our bodies with one purpose in mind: to create WOR. They’re picking out vlor’lords for each of you. Once they do, there’s this Blood Rite. You exchange blood and your genes somehow get integrated into his DNA. I’m assuming by some sort of mechanism like the Activator, but I don’t really know. I can’t find anything in the am-net. WOR training is highly protected information, but I’m working on that.
Alice tapped out. Why would…what would be the purpose of the Blood Rite? I don’t see how you can swap DNA?
Elise paused and considered. There’s a lot about the Vendel and their technology we don’t understand. But they engineered the Vector, not only to pick us out of the herd, but to make sure only those people with some of the WOR-genes survived. Earth has become a WOR breeding ground.
How do you know all this? Chandra flicked her curls in frustration. She stabbed a piece of meat with vengeance and shoved it in her mouth. Baby blue eyes flicked up and down the table. They weren’t the only ones listening in to the covert conversation.
Gregor. He’s thrilled that they harvested so many of us. In particular, so many of the Fifth Rank. So, the Blood Rite pairs you with a vlor’lord. But after we’re trained there’s another ritual. The Binding Ritual. I’m guessing—because it’s the only thing the emperor hasn’t forced on me—that it involves sex and the exchange of other bodily fluids. Whichever vlor’lord you get paired with remember you belong to him. All of you, body and mind. Each of those things are his to do with as he pleases.
The three women sat up in alarm. Elise had gotten their attention. Women on both sides of the table stiffened. One of the girls cried out.
Alice slammed her cup on the table. “No shit!”
Aomi’s eyes widened and Chandra cringed. They weren’t allowed to speak during meals. Alice remembered a moment too late. Two WOR-guards descended on their table, she barely had time to tap out, Damn WOR-gors.
The two men glared at the women and yanked Alice up from her seat. She didn’t resist and allowed them to take her to the far wall. Two other WOR-guards pulled the woman who’d cried out from the table and dragged her off whimpering to the far wall. The lash of the whipstick echoed in the room as each woman met the strike of the whipstick ten times.
Alice didn’t make a sound. When they were done, she came back to the table and picked up her plate. Tears streamed down her face and she sniffled. A WOR-guard correction always ended a meal.
Whatever you’re planning, hurry it up! Alice tapped in their secondary, and very private, code. Alice drew down her brows in a frown and headed out the door. Ten bright red welts marked her delicate white skin.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Gambit Day 140
Later that night, Elise bunched up the covers of her bed. The lights had dimmed several hours ago. The sounds of those around her had faded into the gentle slumber of sleep. She desperately desired sleep, but would get none tonight. The desperation in Alice’s coded words pulled at her and persuaded her to pursue another night of exploration, despite her fatigue. Elise had spent the last two nights exploring her escape route. She was exhausted and had planned to sleep tonight, but plans changed.
A WOR-guard passed her bed and continued down the rows of little round cells that posed as beds. She waited for the WOR-guard to pass again before making her move. With a wish for invisibility, she slipped into the showers. She carried a palm-pad. With a cautious glance around the locker room, he headed to the stack of gray and white workout clothes.
She moved to the access hatch and lined up her electronic construct, Bobo, to the door sensor. The panel slid silently aside and she crept into the hatch. A long tunnel extended into the wall for twenty feet before coming to a ‘T’ intersection. She crawled to the intersection, removed her clothes, and dressed in a gray and white workout uniform.
Last night she’d found an exit hatch along the outer edges of one of the ship’s ports. The Confinement Deck straddled the 25th level of the Gambit, conveniently placed with easy access to the central pod-car track.
She wracked her brain trying to figure out how to escape. Unfortunately, Gregor’s words haunted her every effort. Where was she going to go in a ship traveling through WOR-space that they couldn’t find her?
It was a problem, but she challenged every assumption concerning the Vendel. Gregor also said over twenty First Rank WOR operated the WOR-drive, taking five ships, which made up the fleet through WOR-space. Was it an assumption or reality that there was no travel between the five ships while in WOR-space? The Vendel had beaming technology. Did they teleport between ships? Or was there a way to travel between…to travel within WOR-space? Where was the Vendel fleet going and how long would it take to get there?
All these questions needed to be answered before she could figure out a plan. Time was running out. The Blood Rite would be here in less than a cycle. That left less than ten days. Training through Bar, Rod, and Wheel took time. How much she hadn’t a clue. The Bonding Ritual loomed in front of them all. If her suspicions were correct, any escape would be impossible afterwards.
The clock ticked and Elise had no idea how much time was left.
She tucked her clothes into a small crack in the ceiling. The exit hatch was easy to locate and she made it out without difficulty. She found her way to the central park and loped into a jog.
Several crewmen passed, all dressed in the casual gray and white exercise outfits. She gave them cursory nods and pressed on. The intended target for this excursion was a particular flight deck and a distinctly unusual woman. She ran until she came to a pod hub. A quick ride around the Gambit’s torus brought her to Sector F.
An antiseptic space, Sector F was full of utilitarian lines, dry air, and a pervasive metallic taste. A swarm of bio-pods lined the ceilings, coming and going as they scrubbed the air and cleaned the ship. Through her research, she determined Sector F was the manufacturing and trade hub on the Gambit. The refineries, machine shops, and processing plants dumped vast quantities of pollutants into the air, which the bio-pods cleaned. The ceilings were nearly black with the moving carpet of the little devices.
Elise wandered to the personnel quarters. She read the signs and entered the single women’s rooms. Nearly everyone should be at work. It was convenient that the sleep cycles of the Confinement Deck and the ship proper were opposite one another. If this had been their night, all of these r
ooms would be occupied with people bedding down to sleep. As it was, the hallways were desolate.
She tracked down the wash facilities and snuck inside. A quick look around and she found a pair of blue overalls that fit. They appeared to be relatively nondescript, but she was wary. The Vendel social structure was still very mysterious.
A quick examination in the mirror and she thought she looked similar to any of the other women. Gregor had been upfront about that as well. While there were definitely well-defined male and female roles in this society, women were well-represented in the workforce.
That discovery led her to scan personnel logs. Women were engaged in virtually every profession among the Vendel, but there were a few exceptions. There were no female WOR-guards. The Tender Conclave remained an exclusive realm of the privileged male half of the population. Otherwise, women appeared to fill nearly every niche onboard, working in concert with their male counterparts.
If she ignored the fact that women had no say in the political system, property ownership, or basic rights, it seemed almost civilized.
It was in the personnel logs where she found mention of the female pilot.
The flight deck she had chosen was small, but packed full of civilian trade vessels. Once she’d stumbled across the Gambit’s ship inventory log, she was surprised at the number of privately owned citizen vessels berthed inside. The Gambit may be the imperial flagship, but it appeared to be a mini-world as well.
Berth 28F39.1 was her intended target. The pilot of Copingham’s Riot was female.
Elise wandered the flight deck, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. Her eyes and ears were open and took in everything, using her eidetic memory to file away every detail.
A squat bullet-shaped ship with asymmetric bulges protruding from its hull sat two rows down. Copingham’s Riot had been scrawled across its bow in a feminine hand. All the ships looked similar and varied merely by differences in length, girth, or the number of odd projections coming off the hull.
“Hey, chickadee,” a deep rumbling voice said, “care to hand up that k-site and the wrench next to it.”
Elise stopped, and her breath caught in her throat. Looking left and right failed to identify the owner of the voice. She took another step.
“Ah, come on, sweetie. You’re not gonna make me come down there and fetch it myself, are ya?”
Elise looked up and into one of the ugliest faces she’d ever seen. A cauliflower nose and puffy, beet-red cheeks highlighted a face too broad and too scarred to have ever been called handsome. The face topped a thick-set man with a barrel chest. His eyes twinkled and laugh lines crinkled as he looked down at her from the top of his ship.
She jerked her chin at the blue letters on the hull. “Spider Devil…what an unusual name.”
“Not if you’re from Colnag. Those little buggers infest everything with the coming of the tides. Have you ever been to Colnag before?”
“No, sir,” she replied.
“Well, these red arachnids live in the oceans. But every five years, when the planet is under the greatest influence of its three moons, the high tides come and bring with them a flood of the red spiders. It’s their mating season and they scurry up out of the tidemark and head into the hills. A living, crawling mass of the little critters swarm over everything. Disgusting,” he said with a deep baritone voice.
“And you named your ship after them?”
“You bet. When the red tide comes, everyone gets out of the way of the red devils. Get it?”
“Yeah.” She couldn't help but smile.
He wiped his hands on his overalls. The stains on the front of his blue coveralls were thick. He arched a brow and looked at her quizzically. “So, can you hand me my tools.”
“Sorry.”
A black case, filled with odd looking devices in neat and orderly trays, sat on the ground near the base of the front support rod. She had no idea what a k-site or arc wrench were.
“What do you need?”
“The k-site and the arc wrench.”
She dragged the box of tools out from under the nose of the ship and looked up at him doubtfully. She shrugged. “I don’t know what those are.”
“You’re kidding, right?” His eyes narrowed suspiciously.
Oh shit! Elise swallowed hard. This wasn’t good. Her mind worked furiously.
The man walked to the nose of the ship and stood looking down with his hands crossed over his barrel chest. He kicked his boot and a metal ladder unrolled, clattering to dangle near the floor. “Look sweetie, grab that box, bring it up here, and let’s have ourselves a little talk.”
She glanced around, deciding on an escape route. How fast could she run versus how fast could he yell? The answer to that was plainly clear. Her hands balled into fists and she shook her head at her stupidity. Why hadn’t she just stayed on the Confinement Deck?
"Listen, chickadee,” he knelt down on one knee and extended his hand for the box. "I don’t know what you’re running from, but the Constables are due momentarily. If you continue to look so out of place then they’re going to pick you up and take you back to your sponsor. Come up here and come inside. I won’t bite, and at least we can let them finish their sweep, then you can go back the way you came.” He extended his hand and beckoned with his fingers.
Elise stood still. “Why do you think that? I was just walking along minding my own business.”
“Right,” he said with a crooked smile. He jerked his chin at two men dressed in dark jumpsuits walking toward them. “Tell that to the Constables.”
Elise considered. This man could turn her in just as easily as any other. The consequences wouldn’t be any worse. More importantly, she had to figure out what gave her away. It was his smile that finally persuaded her to trust him. Anyone with a smile that wide, and a face that ugly, had to have a warm heart to go along with it.
He reached out and took the box as she stretched up on tip-toe handing it to him. Placing her foot on the first rung of the ladder, she climbed on board. He gestured to a small hatch in the fuselage and she ducked inside as the Constables came by the front of the ship.
“Good day, gentlemen,” the man said.
“Good day, Dove. Are you gonna get that dust bucket running by the time we reach Malbra?” The older of the two constables spoke. He was a tall, thin man in the prime of his life. Salt and pepper hair, cropped in the common Vendel style, made him look distinguished.
“Shoot yes,” Dove said.
“How much business are you losing right now with it grounded?” The second voice belonged to the younger of the two guards. She could barely make out his clean-shaven, good looks from the edge of the airlock door.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll make due. That’s what the Conclave is all about.” Dove scratched his crotch and wiped his hands on dirty trousers.
“Hey, I hear Jeena’s been taking up all your slack!” The younger man smirked.
“You bet! Damn smart lass, even better pilot. And I’m glad it’s her and not one of these other fellows. Makes them think twice having a woman submit double earnings to the Conclave. Maybe they’ll start pulling their fair share of the load.”
“I hear she turned down Pendelton’s matrimonial offer,” the first Constable said. Wiry tendons stood out from his arms as he flexed them.
“Did she?” Dove said. “She should’ve tossed him out the airlock for asking. Hell, I bet Jeena would’ve cut off his balls and tossed them into orbit, if she could have gotten away with it.”
The younger man slapped his hand to his thigh and laughed. “Shoot Dove, she may not have cut them off, but she sent him to the infirmary. Kicked him in the groin. She waited for him to stand up straight. When he got his breath, she apologized and kicked him again.”
Dove planted his hands on his hips, elbows wide. “Well, I guess he deserved it. Ha! A man asking a woman to the matrimonial bed.” He shook with disbelief. “Guess he got tired of snarking. Did she really send him to the doc?�
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“You need to get out more Dove. It’s the talk of the deck.”
“Yeah, well,” he gestured to his ship, “got to get the old boy flying again. Haven’t really been out at the pubs for all the gossip.”
The older man eyed Dove with interest. “Why haven’t you made a play for Jeena? I’ve always thought you were kind of sweet on her. You’d make a great pair. It’s not right for a woman to be alone. You’d be a right smart sponsor for her, too. Give her status.”
Dove sighed. “No way in hell am I asking like that fool Pendelton.” He shook his head, “A man asking a woman to wed is absurd.” He waved at the men and they ambled off.
Elise ducked her head back from the doorway as Dove came in. He rubbed his shaved head and the stubble turned a darker shade of black. He smiled and gestured down the hall.
“Sorry, not a lot of space in here. Gotta save it for cargo.” Dove directed her into a tiny cabin with a table, two benches, and a dirty countertop. “Thirsty?” He went over to the sink and a hiss of air and foam magically stripped the grease and grime from his hands.
“No, sir,” she said.
“You’re a really formal one, aren’t ya’?” Dove stuck out a hand. “Gabe Doveland Maddus, call me Dove, everyone else does.”
She looked at his hand and reached out tentatively to take it. “Elise.” His grip was surprisingly gentle.
“Well, it’s right nice to meet you Miss Elise.” He leaned back, crossed his arms, and puffed out his cheeks. “So, what’s a girl like you doing on the deck, dressed in mechanic’s blues, with no snarking idea what a k-site is?”
“What is it?” she asked with a sheepish grin.
“Nothing.” He pointed a fat finger at her. “But you didn’t know that and that’s when I knew.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Did I stick out that badly?” If she was such an easy mark, she’d never make any headway with her scheme. The Vendel citizens would pluck her out of a crowd with ease. This whole thing was hopeless.
