The heaviness holding him down disappeared, and he surged to his feet as Nur’s blaster stopped firing.
“I’m out of power!” Nur cried.
Wekniz hefted his extinguishing rifle. “Come on, Nur. We’re going to have to make a run for the woods. Stay close, Falinset!”
As Nur got his rifle ready to fire, Falinset grabbed Wekniz desperately. “We have to find Tasha!”
Wekniz ground his teeth together. “First we have to stay alive to save her. Now come on!”
He and Nur advanced on the front door, spraying retardant as they went to create a concealing fog. The shots from their attackers ceased as they were driven back by the chemical spray. The clan rushed for the sunlit rectangle of the open door.
Falinset drew his knife as he ran to escape the inferno around him. His clan was most assuredly as good as dead. He only hoped one of the soldiers would find the guts to confront him hand-to-hand rather than shooting them from a distance. If he could take at least one of the bastards with him, he’d take that insignificant victory. He’d failed Tasha, but he could leave one less man to hurt her.
Wekniz led their charge. He shouted, “Go for the woods on the west side of the house. Run and don’t stop until I tell you to!” Then he was through the door, Nur half a step behind.
Falinset brought up the rear. He saw his clanmates jerk to either side, as if they’d been grabbed. Nur yelled. Wekniz roared.
Falinset screamed to see them taken. He ran out with his knife flailing, ready to fight and die at their sides.
A scarred hand swept before him, knocking the blade spinning through the air. Falinset felt more hands grabbing him, lifting him off his feet. He was put facedown on the ground and held there, the pressure firm. In his desperation and fear, Falinset thought he’d been handled damned near gently.
From over his head a mocking voice said, “I think that will do, Dramok Falinset.”
* * * *
When Tasha finally stopped coughing, Ket threw her to the ground. He aimed the blaster at her face. “Get up and walk, cunt.”
She blinked streaming eyes. She was on a path in the middle of the woods, perhaps the same forest she and Noelle had fled through when they’d escaped the prison compound.
“Move!” Ket roared and kicked her leg.
Tasha hissed with pain and climbed unsteadily to her feet. Ket gave her a shove, propelling her down the trail in front of him.
She burned with anger, but with the blaster trained on her she had no choice but to be herded along. The fury mixed with terror for Clan Falinset, left behind in the blazing house. Tasha could not hear the bellow of the fire. She couldn’t smell anything burning either. Ket must have moved them for quite some distance before dumping her on her ass.
She glanced back at him, and he grinned. His teeth were blazing white within his smoke-blackened face. “That bitch’s drug wasn’t potent for more than a few minutes. That weak fool Wekniz doesn’t know the first thing about making a real man a prisoner either. All I had to do is wait for the right moment to grab one of you. I hoped for the brat, but her death will make a fine enough distraction while the Basma gets his forces in place.”
He didn’t know Narpok had used his shuttle to get Noelle away. Tasha thought of telling him, just to see the look on his face. But she was still too breathless and weak to make the effort.
That became clear when she stumbled and fell. She laid still and thought about not getting up again.
Ket gave her another rough prod with his heavy boot. “If you’re not up in two seconds, I will kick you to death where you lay.”
She got up, though she knew she was dead anyway … just as Clan Falinset was no doubt dead already. Her heart lurched and tears threatened. Tasha gathered her rage, clutching to her soul like a child with a teddy bear. It gave her the strength to walk, though not fast enough to keep Ket from occasionally slapping the back of her head, shoving her between the shoulders, or kicking her ass and thighs.
The path ended, and Tasha stepped out on the empty landing pad near the Earther abductees’ containment area. She was back at Maf’s camp. Yards away, a few of the women, looking worse than when she’d left, wandered the dirt yard.
A couple of the women saw her and Ket coming and cried out. Several more women appeared at the barrack’s door and then began to surge outside. Tasha saw Sonia and Amy among them. The blonde and brunette stopped in the middle of the yard, their mouths hanging open as they stared at her.
Ket halted at one of the barrier poles, the key to release the field in his hand. He looked around, his brow beetling in surprise. “Where are all the guards?”
He was right, Tasha realized. No sentries patrolled the perimeter, inside or out of the containment. The women within didn’t answer the Nobek’s question. They continued to stare mutely, their eyes riveted on Tasha.
Ket shrugged and flashed a knowing grin. “Huh, I guess they decided to join in the fun of killing my brother and his clan of fools.”
Tasha’s throat closed at his words. She didn’t want to think of Falinset, Nur, and Wekniz dead. It hurt too much.
Ket keyed the containment open and shoved her inside. Tasha lurched forward, falling on her hands and knees. He stepped in too, and locked the field once more.
Tasha crawled away from him, moving towards the other women crowded in a knot near the shelter. Her face heated with shame and she stopped short. She dared not go among them. They had counted on her to bring rescue. She had failed them.
At last, tears streamed from her eyes. She’d lost Clan Falinset. She’d sealed the doom of the other abductees. For all she knew, Narpok and Noelle were back in the Basma’s hands. She’d thought she was strong, that she could win out from sheer fury and determination. Even with Clan Falinset at her back, she’d lost.
Through blurred eyes, she searched for Sonia, the best of the survivors. The gaunt face stared at her, unreadable except for the resignation in her eyes. Tasha begged for her forgiveness. “I’m sorry. The Basma has the whole moon under his control. I couldn’t get away. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Sonia said nothing. She and the rest of the women stood like statues, unmoving. Unfeeling.
Tasha could hear Ket’s smirk in his tone. “Well, my little pussies. It’s been fun fucking you all. Except you, you irritating crotch.” He kicked Tasha again, eliciting a moan. “But it’s time to say goodbye. Look at me, bitch.”
Tasha tried to resist his order. She searched for one last vestige of defiance. It was nowhere to be found.
It was Sonia’s ragged voice that cut through the air. “Get up, woman. Face him on your feet. Don’t let him win.”
Ket laugh. “You stupid piece of shit. I’ve already won.”
Yet Sonia’s words brought Tasha’s lost pride back. She and the other women had suffered so much more than Tasha. If they could die standing tall, so could she. She got her feet under her and rose. She faced Ket.
His blaster pointed inches from her face. Tasha waited to be afraid. She waited for her legs to crumple beneath her, for worthless pleas to burst from her lips. None of that happened. Instead she was calm. She stood up straight on steady legs. She was among women who had faced so much worse than mere death. They’d been hurt in so many ways, but they remained undefeated, their strength intact. That power poured from them, filling her until she was able to look Ket in the eye as he readied to take her life.
He grinned at her. “Goodbye, you worthless whore.” He pulled the trigger.
There was the slide of the mechanism engaging as his finger squeezed. Nothing else. The trigger snapped back into ready mode. Ket’s leer faded and he tried to shoot again. Once more, nothing happened. Tasha stood there, unharmed. Alive.
Her voice sounded distant as she said, “I guess it ran out of power back at the house while I fought off Maf’s stooges. The blaster is empty.”
Ket made a face and threw it in the dirt. He snarled, “Fine. I’ll just snap all your stupid necks like a yard full
of pilchoks.”
Sonia stepped forward. A hectic light blazed forth from her eyes, bringing the almost dead face to life. “Except there’s just one of you and near twenty of us.” She raised a thick branch she held in her hand. It had come from the pile they kept to burn for cooking and heat.
The other women silently went to the pile and grabbed the heaviest branches they could. Ket watched them, first with a blank expression and then with amusement. His laugh bellowed over the silent yard.
“You think you are going to hurt me with your little twigs? Really?”
Tasha took advantage of the distraction to walk towards the women. She too went to the pile and claimed a heavy length of wood. She joined the group of women as they advanced to surround the snickering Ket.
He looked at them, as if enjoying the funniest joke ever. He could not comprehend that the starved and beaten women might believe they had a chance against a battle-trained Nobek. At first, it seemed he was right.
He batted away the first few blows. He egged them on as they took sloppy swipes at him. The ones that landed on his back and shoulders had no effect. The women were starved, beaten, weak. They staggered with every swing. Ket laughed at them.
It was Sonia who landed the first real hit, one right across his throat, powered by true fury. Ket’s eyes went wide, and he gaped breathless, frozen as he wheezed for air.
As Tasha had borrowed courage from them, the rest of the women shared in Sonia’s hate-fueled might. They drew from the grim blonde, made her ferocity their own. Their rage took over, lending their wasted bodies strength. Ket grunted and bent over when a couple of thick limbs caught him in the midsection simultaneously, driving more air out of him. While his head was lowered, someone capitalized with a well-placed blow to the back of his skull. The branches kept raining down, harder and faster. Ket staggered, blood pouring down his face.
Through the hail of limbs, he blinked in shock. He had the look of a man who couldn’t believe what was happening. At last he started trying to fight his way through the throng. His long, muscled arms swung around, knocking a few women aside. They jumped back up and came at him again, not feeling the blows in their growing rage.
Tasha thought it was Amy who struck his ankles with her length of wood, tripping him. He fell to the ground. Then they were on him, the branches rising and falling in a storm of passion. The women screamed like banshees as they unleashed all the horrors they’d endured at Ket’s hands, pounding him so that every time he tried to rise to his knees he was soon face down in the clinging dirt again.
Tasha saw him look up once before the end. His handsome face was unrecognizable with the mixture of black smoke, brown earth, and blood. Despite that, it was easy to see the disbelief, pain, and fear contorting his features. He looked like her neighbor the instant before he died.
The next time Ket went down full-length on the ground, he did not rise again. The branches continued to rise and fall, the thuds of them battering the Nobek’s body a rhythmic beat behind the savage shrieks the women expelled. Even after he lay still and blood pooled all around him, they continued to hammer. It was a long time before the frenzy abated.
And then that part was over. Civilization did not return right away, however. Murder turned to celebration. The Earthers, like drunken maenads, danced around their fallen foe, wild faces alight with long-awaited victory.
Tasha had been pumped full of adrenaline like the rest. However, she pulled out of the rush before any of the other women. The pain of knowing Clan Falinset had faced impossible odds kept her from being fully immersed in the triumph of removing Ket from the list of enemies. As pointless and potentially heartbreaking as it was, she had to return to the house. She had to see for herself the destruction the Basma had wrought on his son’s clan.
Not only that, she and the other women were still in a great deal of danger. She grabbed Sonia, whose worn face was now alight with ferocity.
“Hey! We’re not out of it yet. Wake up. Reality’s here and it’s still ugly as fuck.”
Sonia blinked at her, realization flooding into her blue eyes. The old quiet desperation crept back into the corners of her attitude. “No rest for the weary, right?”
“None at all,” Tasha said grimly. “The Basma has Lobam locked up tight. We need to figure out where you can hide. And I need to see what they did to my friends.”
Lovers, her inner voice amended. In every sense of the word. Tasha would never clan now. No other men existed for her in the way Clan Falinset had.
Sonia absorbed the news with characteristic tired strength. “Fuck. We stay here, we’re dead. We leave, we’re dead. I don’t know the first thing about surviving in the wild. At least here we got a mouthful of slop once a day, water, and firewood.”
“One step at a time,” Tasha encouraged her. “We’ll find a way. Maybe I can salvage something from the house after everyone leaves it. We’ll have to figure out—”
A startled cry rang out from one of the women. Tasha whirled around to see what had everyone yelling and backing towards the shelter. Armed Nobek soldiers emerged from the path, stepping out on the empty landing pad and trotting towards the enclosure, faces bestial, blasters at the ready.
Tasha’s heart sank. This was how it would end then; over a dozen traumatized women mowed down in a hail of blasts as the Basma had the last laugh. He’d spring his surprise attack on Kalquor and then every Earther woman there would be endangered…
Tasha’s thoughts drifted off at the sight of one man rushing to the front of the group, his scarred face immediately recognizable.
“Bifen!” Tasha screamed. She raced towards the containment field at her friend and occasional lover.
The commander grinned at her from the other side of the barrier. “Matara Tasha, it’s good to see you alive and well.” His gaze went from her to the other women, who watched their interaction with a mixture of hope and fear. Bifen’s eyes widened and his rough face registered dismay. The other Nobeks’ expressions mirrored his reaction.
“Mother of All, what realm of horror is this?” Bifen cried. “What … what…?”
He couldn’t seem to finish the thought as he stared at the imprisoned women. More of the men were swearing and shoving at the containment poles as if they could knock the anchored rods down through sheer strength.
“It’s okay! We have a key,” Tasha called. She turned to the remains of Ket. Sonia was already there, sifting through the bloodied pockets of the lumpy mound of flesh. She handled the broken body with no sign of respect, shoving it about and kicking it when it didn’t move to her satisfaction. At last she found the key and held it aloft with triumph.
The women cheered and gathered around her as she shoved it into its slot in the nearest pole. They cheered again as the field shimmered and disappeared once more. Sonia stepped out of the boundary.
“Free!” she screamed to the sky, her voice ragged but exultant. The other women also stepped out of their prison. Within seconds the wild dancing they’d done around Ket’s body had begun again.
The soldiers who had come to rescue them were silent as they watched. Tasha saw few Kalquorian faces absent the show of fangs. They were true Nobeks, men sworn to protect others. That these women had suffered such obvious and horrific abuses within their own territory had turned them feral with rage.
Bifen looked to Tasha. His speech was garbled as he tried to talk around his descended fangs, and he still couldn’t seem to finish his thoughts as he coped with what had happened on Lobam. “When we grabbed that clan … when they said what was here … I never thought…”
Tasha’s heart double beat. “You grabbed a clan? What clan?”
He didn’t need to answer. Falinset’s voice shouted over the crazed shrieks of the women. “Tasha!”
He came running up behind the group of soldiers, Wekniz and Nur on his heels. Tasha shoved through the lines of men to get to them, crying and laughing as she went.
“You’re alive! You’re alive!”
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She jumped into the Dramok’s arms. Not caring about Bifen, not caring about the rescue party who had shown up to save them all, not caring about anything but the fact the three men she loved had survived and were here now, Tasha covered Falinset’s broad, strong face with kisses and tears. Then she reached for a tearful Nur, giving his riveting features the same treatment. At last she went to Wekniz, her brave, scarred protector. Then she started all over again with Falinset, who laughed almost as wildly as the rescued Earther women.
When at last she calmed down enough to note a bunch of medics were swarming around the former prisoners. The mostly Imdiko group were gentle with their charges. As for the women, with the initial high wearing off, the realization that they were truly done with the nightmare began to dawn. Most of them sobbed and crumpled, caught before they could hit the ground by medics who whispered soothingly and wept with them.
Tasha looked to Falinset. “Narpok got through,” she guessed.
Falinset hugged her close. All the clan did, making Tasha sway between them as first one and the another vied for extra contact. “She did, plus the message she sent before coming here alerted everyone to the trouble. Maf’s little army and fleet are fighting the Empire’s forces as we speak.”
Bifen spoke up, having edged close to the group during their reunion. “Not such a little army, Dramok. In fact, I’ve received word to get you all to Kalquor right away. Lobam is a war zone right now.”
As if to emphasize his statement, three military shuttles landed on the pad. The air was crowded with fighters, which hovered protectively over the site.
Bifen yelled to his men. “Evacuate these women and Clan Falinset as fast as possible. Then regroup and make ready for deployment in the battle zone.”
The medics began ushering the women towards the shuttles. The Nobeks surrounded them, keeping watch for attack as they were helped to board the vessels.
Bifen looked over Tasha and Clan Falinset. He offered her a half smile. “Matara Narpok vouched for these three, or we’d be taking them into custody. Global Security will sort them out, but it looks like you’re ready to vouch for them too.”
Alien Hostage Page 36
