The man saluted and stepped back.
Irritation flickered through Taurin, but he let it go when he saw the women had not seemed to notice.
“Status report!” Muck barked over the com unit, resurrecting Taurin’s annoyance and enhancing it.
“The men have found nothing of significant value. This appears to be a colonist ship. All that was found in the hold was household goods.”
“Without men?” Muck said in patent disbelief.
Inwardly, Taurin shrugged. “Perhaps they are going to meet men who went before them to establish a village?”
“And perhaps they have hidden their valuables? We will see once we have the ship in the bay—if we have to take it apart piece by piece.”
Anger flickered through Taurin. He did not have to look far to know why.
As eager as his people were for war, they did not make war on women and children. These women were virtually helpless and they had nothing of any significant value that Muck might gain by taking what they had. The bastard should let them go. He knew it would be less than useless to suggest it, however. “The ship may be the only thing of any value. It would be a … shame to destroy it if that is the case.”
“The females have value,” Muck retorted at once. “Females always have some value.”
Unconsciously, Taurin glanced at the woman at that—the woman he still wanted so badly—despite every effort to deny his needs—it was like acid in his veins.
He did not bother to ask what Muck meant by the statement. He would not answer and he would consider it a breach of discipline.
Not that Taurin gave a fuck if the bastard punished him again, but he did not want to inadvertently contribute to harm that might come to the women if Muck realized he was interested.
He glanced around at his men then and realized that all of them were staring vacuously at the pods—or more specifically, the females inside them.
When Muck broke communications, he turned his com off and signaled to the others to turn theirs off.
“The ship and all of its cargo belongs to the Delizo Empire,” he reminded them. “No good will come to any of us or to the women if you make it obvious that you find them … a distraction. We are here to kill and loot for them and that alone keeps our home world safe.”
In silence, they turned their backs to the pods.
Jurik glanced at the woman, stared at her hungrily for a long moment, and then resolutely looked away.
Almost in sync they turned their coms back on and stood at attention as the ship they were in was swallowed by the delizo craft with no more than a whisper of sound before it settled to the hanger deck.
When they felt the jolt of the tractor release, the one nearest the airlock moved to it and studied it for a moment before he used the control panel to open it.
Muck was waiting impatiently to enter.
He strode inside as soon as the door opened and looked everything over possessively as he passed until he reached the corridor of pods. There he slowed and examined the occupant of each thoroughly. Eventually, he reached the room where the women who’d been awakened were being held.
At the first sight of him, the women began screaming and clawing at one another mindlessly as if they were trying to climb each other.
Muck grimaced at the racket. “Silence!” he bellowed.
That only seemed to inspire them to more panic.
Taurin surged toward the women, grabbing the leader. “Tell them to be quiet!” he growled, giving her a slight shake to get her attention.
She merely gaped at him for several moments, but she seemed to grasp, at least in part, what was going on. She turned to them. “Be quiet! You’ll get us killed!”
The women subsided at once … to a degree. They seemed to have some difficulty getting their emotions completely under control, but they ceased screaming and clawing at one another in mindless terror and simply clutched one another.
“You know their language?” Muck demanded suspiciously.
“Negative,” Taurin responded.
Muck’s eyes narrowed. “And yet they look suspiciously like the madrone.”
Taurin’s lips tightened. “They are not from our world.”
“I know that …!” Muck snapped, and then broke off abruptly.
As if he had almost said something and thought better of it.
Taurin felt him belly tighten. Nausea washed through him.
He knew then why Muck was so certain they were not from his world. With an effort, he focused his gaze above the bastard’s head lest he give himself away and struggled with the great roaring in his ears, the shock of acknowledging what he had long suspected but refused to accept. “The translator has begun to decode their language—a few words only at this point.”
Muck studied him for a long moment. “Why did you not report that they had much the look of the madrone?”
Taurin frowned. “I did not?”
It was a dangerous slip and he realized it immediately. “We were still searching for men at that point. I suppose it did not occur to me that it was of any importance or interest to you.”
“But you did notice?”
Taurin did not hesitate. “Some, yes.”
“In what way different?”
“Puny,” he said promptly. “Our women … are tall and strong.”
“But … otherwise?”
Taurin’s lips tightened. “I would not know. I did not examine them and, in any case, my memory of my people has … dimmed.”
To Taurin’s relief, he seemed to dismiss his suspicions. “Send someone to find a place to store them and then remove them from the ship.”
Taurin blinked at him. “You want us to leave them in the pods and remove them?” he asked blankly, wondering if they would survive if the pods were not connected to … whatever they were connected to.
Irritation flickered across Muck’s features. “Did I say that?” he bellowed. “Take them out and then find a place. Or rather, find a place and then take them out. And unload the ship in the bay so that I can see what we have.”
Taurin was so surprised by Muck’s outburst and then his confusion of orders that the bastard had disappeared before it occurred to him why he was apparently in a state of disorder.
He desired the women, Taurin realized, both enraged and revolted by the thought of the bastard touching any of them.
He exchanged a long look with Jurik, who was never far from him—unless he had sent him off on some task. He could see Jurik felt much as he did, or perhaps more profoundly. “Go and summon the others to help with off-loading the … cargo.”
A muscle worked in Jurik’s jaw, as if he was grinding his teeth, but he merely executed the madrone salute and left.
When he had left, Taurin turned to study the woman and finally summoned her with a gesture. She looked reluctant to approach him, but she got up and moved closer.
“I am Taurin.” He touched his chest. “My name is Taurin.” He touched her chest. “Name?”
She jolted all over at his touch, turned a pasty gray and then red as fire.
He supposed, wryly, that she was too weak with fright to run or she would have. He tried again. “Taurin.”
She chewed her lip, studying the gesture. “Taurin.”
He nodded and touched her lightly on the collar bone. “Name?”
She licked her lips. “Nicole.”
“Ni—cole?”
“Yes,” she responded after a moment. “Nicole.”
He grasped her upper arm then and led her into the pod room. There he gestured to the control panel. “Open this.”
She didn’t need to understand his language to understand what he wanted. Reluctance flickered through her, but she knew it was pointless to even attempt to fight the tide. The women in stasis weren’t likely to be any better off if they were awakened, but they could be a lot worse off if the aliens decided to just break the pods open.
She nodded. “Ok.” She keyed the code in to open the
pod, watching until the woman opened her eyes. She knew her vision would be blurred upon first awakening, and wanted to stay long enough to reassure her, but he—Taurin—grasped her arm again and led her to the next. By the time they reached the third, the woman in the first pod had been dragged out, screaming and fighting.
Niki stopped and turned to her. “Stop it … before you get us all killed!” she snapped at the woman.
The woman—a virtual stranger to Nikki—turned and stared at her. “But …!”
“Hysterics won’t help any of us—even if we all feel hysterical.”
The woman nodded jerkily and allowed the warrior to lead her away.
Nikki was sorry she could do nothing for anyone—not even give them any comfort to help ease them into the horror they were waking up to. But she had no power here, no comfort even for herself. The alien—Taurin—seemed to have grasped that she was the head of the group. Not that she actually was. She was just the ship’s commander and her powers and leadership didn’t extend beyond the running of the ship.
But she was designated leader until they reached the colony.
Which they would never reach now.
By the time they got to the end of the first row, Nikki was having trouble keeping up.
Ordinarily, she would have mostly rested for the first few days after being brought out of stasis. Everyone was too weak to be a hundred percent right off, but she also wondered if the artificial gravity on the alien ship that she discovered had swallowed their ship was more than Earth’s.
Of course, she didn’t know their ship had been pulled into a hanger until she saw that the airlock was open and she could see the hanger.
And she had no idea if the hanger was on a planet or part of an alien ship.
But she had more food for thought than she felt competent to digest just then.
And she felt heavier and heavier as they moved to the other side and began to work their way back on the second half of the pods.
She did wonder, though, why he insisted upon dragging her from one to another. It would have been easy enough, she thought, to memorize the code she entered after the first dozen or so and he wouldn’t allow her to linger to reassure the occupant.
She managed to make it almost halfway back before the darkness that had been gathering around her abruptly swallowed her up.
A sudden tug was all the warning Taurin had that something had happened. Thinking, at first, that she had jerked away from him, anger flickered through him, but he saw at once when he whipped a look at her that she had lost consciousness. He managed to catch her, scooping her into his arms, but she was so deathly white and so limp he was jolted with the fear that she had died.
Dropping to his knees, he laid her carefully on the deck and checked for a pulse—her wrist, her throat and finally placed his ear against her chest before he heard the faint sound he had hoped to find. Leaning back with a sense of relief, he discovered that Jurik had returned.
“What is wrong with her?” he asked, his tone so cold and even that Taurin knew immediately that Jurik was as unnerved about it as he was.
“I do not know.” He frowned, glancing around at the pods. “She was too weak for the task.”
Jurik followed his gaze and looked, as well. “Too weak to walk such a short distance?” he asked, clearly appalled.
Taurin shrugged. “I can think of no other explanation. They are all weak. Mayhap it is the pods that cause this?”
“Why would they get into them if they … depleted their strength?”
“I know no more about these things than you do,” Taurin said dryly. “Or about them. Muck pointed out that they looked like our people, but they are not our people. I think we cannot understand them since they are not.”
The woman—Ni-cole—came around while they were talking and immediately tried to get up. Taurin settled his hand on her belly. “Stay. Ni-cole. Be still.”
He glanced at Jurik. “Stay with her. Make her stay here and rest while I release the others.”
Jurik nodded, catching her shoulders and pushing her back to the deck when she tried to get up the moment Taurin moved away. “Rest.”
“I’m ok.”
Surprise flickered through Jurik when he heard and understood the word ‘ok’. He shook his head. “No ok. Stay put.”
Nicole subsided, rubbing her throbbing head, wondering if she’d bumped it when she blacked out. She lay with her eyes closed for a few moments, but finally realized she was drifting toward sleep and opened them.
The alien man was staring at her, but his expression was—well his face was devoid of any expression at all. “I’m Nicole,” she said uncomfortably after a prolonged staring match.
“Jurik.”
It wasn’t much in the way of communicating, but at least it was something—something familiar enough to make her feel a little less tense and frightened.
Because she was deep down scared—had been since she’d awakened—and it wasn’t at a much lower level than it had been from the beginning.
But she found herself studying his face, from beneath her lashes, since he was so close and looking at her.
And she realized Annette had been right—as much as she hated to admit it. They were exceptionally handsome—to the human female eye. And their extraordinary physique added to the handsome face definitely put them into the gorgeous category.
It was a shame, really, to waste all of that beauty on monsters.
Because they were.
And dangerous.
Because they looked so human it was far too easy to look at them as human and have expectations of understanding them.
She had no idea why this one was staring at her.
Was he expecting her to croak any minute?
Was he thinking ‘dinner’?
Which wasn’t as farfetched as it seemed since it was doubtful they were having the same problem ‘identifying’ as the Earth women were and, even if they were, Earth had had its share of cannibals.
She didn’t make the mistake as she had with Taurin that it had anything to do with desire.
And then he did something that totally disarmed her, he skated a finger lightly along her cheek in a touch that she could only think of as a caress.
She opened her eyes and stared at him then.
He met her gaze for a long moment and then looked away.
She followed his line of sight and saw that Taurin was returning. He crouched down, studying her for several moments, and then he scooped her off the floor, adjusted her so that she was cradled against his chest, and carried her out of the ship.
The wailing women choked back their frightened sobs when he appeared on the gangplank carrying her. He halted when he reached them and set her carefully on her feet.
Almost as if he was concerned he might harm her.
She doubted that was for her sake, though.
The horrible thing that had come in to the room where they were being held was clearly the big boss, otherwise she didn’t think he would’ve been stupid enough to bellow at Taurin—who was at least half a head taller and looked like he had enough muscle in his little finger to break the freaky thing in half.
She’d done her best to shuttle that unforgettable memory as far back into the dark recesses of her mind as she could get it, but it wasn’t something she could avoid, unfortunately.
The object of her worst nightmares appeared again as the warriors rounded them up and began to herd them away.
She refused to look at the thing—fearful of catching its/his attention, but when she couldn’t stand the suspense any longer and flicked a quick look in his direction, she saw that he was either staring at her or someone damned close to her. She shuffled forward a half step to put another woman between her and the nightmare.
A shudder went through her.
Reptilian. Clearly reptilian.
It was hard to grasp a species of reptilian beings that were intelligent enough to reach such an advanced stage in science and tec
hnology, but she didn’t think the other species on the ship, the warriors, had developed what they had seen—a ship that looked like it must be as big as a stadium.
And she’d discovered it was a ship.
As soon as Taurin had carried her out, she’d seen the windows that looked out into space all along one wall.
So, unless it was a hanger on a mountain it wasn’t on any planet.
To say nothing of the fact that their ship was now parked in the alien hanger and it hadn’t been designed for flight within a planet’s atmosphere. It had been built in space and launched from space.
And then there was the matter of air turbulence within a planet’s gravitational pull.
So—definitely nowhere to run or hide.
Because they had been taken by aliens and they weren’t after the technology when they had better. And they weren’t after ransom when they had no idea where the U.S.S. Intrepid had come from.
And, try though she might, she simply could not come up with anything else they might have in mind for her and the other women that didn’t involve sex.
Well, except for being dinner and that was actually a hell of a lot worse, she thought, than the sex—depending, of course, upon whom they were supposed to lay down and spread their legs for.
She didn’t know if she could bear being touched by the reptilian aliens if her life depended upon it.
And the worst of it was, she was sure it did.
Chapter Four
The place where they were taken was … pretty awful. It looked like it must be a cargo area and it was cold. None of them were wearing anything but undergarments or Ts and panties like she was since nobody went into the sleeping pod fully clothed.
They’d had clothing on the ship, but even as they had been rounded up and herded away from it, she’d seen the giants busily unloading everything.
Maybe, she thought hopefully, they would give them their clothing at least? Or something to wear.
Frightened and cold, they gathered into a tight knot, trying to share warmth and comfort when none of them had any to spare.
There wasn’t even anything to sit on but the icy floor.
Buckets were provided for … necessary functions.
Alien Warriors: Invasion Page 3
