Like Liz, she doubted they could find anything like a legal loophole to use. She wasn’t ready to pat herself on the back just because she’d managed to figure out her donors’ names. She hadn’t been able to get a clue beyond that of what the conversation was about. She didn’t think she was just being conceited about being able to pick up languages pretty easily. The problem was, she hadn’t ever faced a concerted effort to keep her from learning a language. She’d had teachers in school and she’d known or met people afterwards that were willing to help her gain a firmer grasp on the French and Spanish she’d learned. Could she learn without any help at all? She doubted it. She was willing to try. She meant to try, but she didn’t have much faith in herself. She couldn’t blame Liz for not having any.
So that was two very slim possibilities of hope for them.
Simply accepting it as something that couldn’t be changed wasn’t an option. It was a death sentence, would be for most of them—a horrible one. She might not have been pregnant before—actually it was because she hadn’t been able to get pregnant—but she’d done a lot of studying on the subject. Babies were parasites, plain and simple, and they took what they needed regardless of the mother’s needs. That wasn’t necessarily a problem under a doctor’s care because women were able to allow their bodies to rest and recover, but it could be and it certainly would be for them if the draks meant to use them as they’d said. She didn’t see any reason to doubt that. It was hard to accept that they could consider intelligent beings so insignificant as to use them in such a way, but she supposed humans were as bad in their own way—certainly historically speaking.
And it didn’t matter. Looking at it with optimum hope, they could expect to have their health completely ruined with one pregnancy after another. At the opposite end of the spectrum, they could expect to die during a pregnancy or labor from having their bodies so depleted by the infants that they had organ failure. Historically, more women had probably died from childbirth than anything else. Certainly before birth control had been invented it wasn’t at all uncommon. The poor women who’d had the misfortune of being born before modern medicine had often had one baby after another and died before they reached the end of their childbearing years.
As desperately as she’d wanted a baby, she couldn’t think of anything that was much more nightmarish than the prospect of being constantly pregnant.
And that didn’t even take mental health into consideration. The hormonal fluctuations could drive them insane.
No, she couldn’t just lay down and accept!
Someone nudged her, distracting her from her thoughts and she discovered everybody was looking at her expectantly.
“Get up and say something,” Liz prompted.
Simone frowned at her. She was about to refuse when she abruptly changed her mind. She stood up and looked at the women around her. “I felt guilty to realize that I was so focused on my own fears that I hadn’t given a thought to anyone else. I still feel guilty, but I don’t believe its wrong to consider your own survival more important than the survival of a stranger—anyone except, maybe the people you love. It was wrong in the sense that we depend on one another for survival, or should be able to. United we stand, divided we fall!”
Liz stared at her as if she’d lost her mind when she sat back down. “What the hell was that?”
“You told me to say something!” Simone said indignantly.
“That it’s alright to be selfish?”
“Exactly why is it wrong? Because everybody says it is? The only reason people say that is because they know they have a better chance if everybody sticks together!
They’re still being selfish.” She didn’t especially like the condemnation in Liz’s expression. “Why don’t you think about it before you decide I’m being a bitch and completely selfish, huh? I don’t want anything to happen to you. I wouldn’t wish it on you, and I’d certainly try to help if I could. If it came right down to it and one of us had to die, though, would you rather it was me? Or you?”
Liz reddened.
“That’s what I thought!”
She got up again. “Look! All I’m saying is that I’m sorry for them, but it was damned selfish of them to do what they did! They copped out and left us to take the heat!
It could’ve gotten us into a lot more trouble than it did and besides that, we all have a better chance if we try to stick together and help each other. It’s us against them! And there aren’t nearly as much of us as it is!”
“Oh! That was better,” Liz muttered.
Several of the other women turned and glared at her. “That wasn’t nice!” one of the women said.
“Oh yeah? Well I didn’t murder my babies because I was too big of a coward to face adversity! How many babies did they take with them?” Simone growled.
“They aren’t our babies! They’re theirs! And they are aliens!”
“Yours might be, but these are my babies. They might think they’re theirs, but they’re not! They’re mine! I worked my ass off to pay for these babies, and I’m not fucking giving them up! It’s a mothers job to protect her babies! I’m going to protect mine, by whatever means necessary. You wimp out if that’s the best you can do, but I’m an American, by damn, and I intend to act like one! And I’m a woman and by god, that doesn’t make me a weakling! And I’m going to be a mother and that makes me as fucking dangerous to any threat to my babies as a grizzly bear!”
“Exactly what do you think you can do? We’re outnumbered here! And we’re out-muscled! And we’re out-trained!” one of the other women snapped.
“We’re women. I can’t think of anybody that’s more experienced or better at getting what they want by sneak attack! Beyond that, we’re Americans! It’s in our blood. If our ancestors hadn’t learned how to conduct guerrilla warfare from the Indians, we’d still have a Queen instead of a president!”
“Native Americans,” someone nearby corrected her.
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Well my great grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, so mind your own damned business! I’ll call us Indians if I want to!”
“So … what do you have in mind?”
Simone blinked. She’d been so busy running off at the mouth and expressing her opinions she hadn’t realized that she’d caught the attention of all the women and they’d gathered closer. “Uh … You mean a plan?”
“Yeah. What do you think we should do?”
Dismay filled Simone. She was all hot air. She enjoyed expressing her opinion and the more radical it was, the better, because she just liked being able to say what she thought. She realized from the looks on their faces, though, that they were looking for hope. They were hoping for something they could do that wouldn’t leave them feeling so helpless. It occurred to her after some desperate scrambling that there was no way to make a plan until and unless they knew more than they did. Only an idiot tried to make plans without information. “Know the enemy,” she said finally. “We can’t do anything, or make any kind of plan until we know more. We’ll have to focus on discovering any weaknesses before we can use them against them.”
“You will find no weaknesses,” Camryn said directly behind her.
Simone flinched all over, grimacing. When she opened her eyes, she discovered all of the women were gaping at a spot directly behind her with expressions of absolute horror. Goosebumps erupted all over her. “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?” she asked Liz in a low whisper.
Liz swallowed audibly. “The really big really mean one?”
Simone nodded.
“Yeah.”
Simone turned and allowed her gaze to crawl all the way up his length until her neck cramped from tilting her head back. She smiled at him weakly. “What did you say?”
He bent down, grasped her arms and hauled her to her feet. Retaining a grip on one arm, he marched her across the cell toward the door. Simone threw a glance over her shoulder at the other women as he dragged her out the door.
They’d scattered, forming smaller groups.
Camryn didn’t say anything until they’d reached the cabin. Once they had, he pushed her toward a chair and then paced away from her when she wilted into it. She eyed him worriedly, wondering if he was trying to gain control of his temper or just trying to decide how to kill her. It didn’t make her feel any better that when he finally turned to her he stopped a good two yards away and clasped his hands behind his back.
“Is it your intention to try to get these women killed?” he growled finally.
Simone felt her heart surge painfully against her chest wall. She figured it was mostly a rhetorical question, though, and she didn’t bother to answer, mostly because she was trying to remember everything she’d said and figure out how much he’d heard.
She supposed the last of it was damning enough. Fuck! What were they going to do now? How could they sneak attack when she’d opened her big mouth and ruined any chance of it?
His lips tightened. “You had no trouble speaking only a moment ago!”
“I thought it was a rhetorical question,” she muttered, clasping her hands together in her lap. “You know, like when your parents are lecturing you? They don’t really expect an answer. They just want to browbeat you.”
She’d thrown him with that. She could tell by the change in his expression that he was trying to figure out what she was talking about—and, of course, he couldn’t! He wasn’t human and they didn’t have parents! Unfortunately, she couldn’t comfort herself that he didn’t have a very firm grasp on English. He might speak with a thick accent, but he didn’t seem to have any trouble talking or understanding—not the language, anyway.
The customs, some of the concepts—maybe even some of the slang—but she decided she couldn’t pin her hopes on the possibility that he’d failed to understand her.
He leaned toward her. “Have I mistaken your intelligence?”
Simone blinked at him. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
His lips tightened.
“I wasn’t supposed to answer that one?” Simone guessed.
“Woman!” he roared. “Do you grasp that you now belong to the people of Macedon? That your life is entirely in our hands?”
Simone recoiled when he bellowed at her, feeling the color flee from her face, but it wasn’t exactly news to her. She had known that already. There was a vast chasm, she reflected, between knowing and accepting, though. “Yes,” she said in a quavering voice.
“What you have done out there is treason against the people of Macedon!”
Simone chewed her lip. “I think you might have the wrong definition of treason.”
“Shut up, Simone!”
“Yes, but ….”
She began blinking very rapidly when he surged toward her and grasped her arms as if he would yank her from the chair. Instead, he merely gripped them. “I am the only thing that stands between you and death at this moment,” he growled. “Some allowance will be made for your ignorance until you have had time to be taught our ways, but there is a limit to my tolerance. If I catch you trying to incite rebellion in the other women again, I will have no choice but to take steps to put a stop to it. Do you understand me?”
Simone’s chin wobbled with incipient tears—mostly from sheer terror, but resentment found its way past the fear. She swallowed convulsively a couple of times, tempted to inform him that him and his damned people had already passed a death sentence on them. The only difference that she could see was when and how and whether it was their own choice or not. Upon consideration, she thought she’d told them enough.
In any case, there was a lot to be said for putting off even the inevitable when it was a case of die—or die. Most people, even on death row, or with a terminal disease, were willing to endure just about anything to put it off a little while longer and for the chance to escape it altogether and she realized she wasn’t any different.
She didn’t want to die. She wanted to live. She wanted to raise her sons. And that was the crux of it. If they were going to take her babies, what did she really have to live for?
She felt nauseated with the fear of trying to save herself and possibly bringing death that much faster, but she found she just couldn’t give up. “I think I understand you very well,” she said coldly. “We have monsters on my world that don’t look like monsters.”
He looked shocked and then furious. He released her abruptly. “As long as you understand me,” he muttered after a moment. “You belong to Macedon. Any act against Macedon is an act of treason and the penalty is death. You will not be spared only because you carry my heir.”
She was going to have to research their capital punishment, she thought vaguely.
If it was really bad, they might want to figure out a backup plan to avoid it if worse came to worse. The draks certainly weren’t going to be ‘humane’ when they weren’t human!
The question was, how barbaric were their execution practices?
“You will stay here until I am convinced that you will not immediately begin to start trouble again when I send you back to stay with the other breeders.”
* * * *
Camryn was so unsettled when he stalked from the cabin that he felt downright nauseated. He tried to convince himself for a while that it was fury. The woman was adept at arousing that! When he’d found a quiet corner of the recreation room and settled to brood over the confrontation, however, he found his mind going over and over the way she’d looked at him when she’d called him a monster and every time the memory repeated he felt a little more ill.
She hadn’t looked at him like that before. Even when she’d first discovered that he was drak, and not human as she was, she hadn’t looked at him like that! It had scared her and he hadn’t particularly liked that, but it hadn’t been an unexpected reaction. His own reaction when he’d seen his first human had been an unpleasant jolt. It was understandable that hers would be when she was doubly threatened—encountering a different species and being captive of that strange and different being.
That was still a far cry from the admiration he’d seen in her eyes when they had first met face to face, and troubling, but he’d been able to convince himself that she would grow accustomed to the differences as he had.
He scrubbed his hand over his face, trying to wipe away the memory. He couldn’t banish it any more than he could dismiss the sense, almost of fear, that he had crossed a barrier, and it had closed behind him, and he would never be able to breach it again.
She had forced him to it, he thought angrily! He had had no notion that any female creature could be so willful! Their women did not have that trait! They were quiet and gentle creatures! Malleable! She was not a man, gods damn it! He couldn’t challenge her, beat sense in to her, or at least a healthy dose of fear! She was too fragile!
He would almost think her completely witless to keep challenging him when she had to know she had nothing to back up that mouth of hers except that he knew she was as nimble minded as any opponent he’d ever faced on the battlefield!
Was there no way to make her understand that he was restrained by an unwillingness to harm her? That the others would not have that restraint?
He was afraid he could not and he realized abruptly that was a part of the fear churning in his belly. He had glimpsed steel in her eyes—those strangely beautiful eyes that could look at him with such helplessness, that made him feel a desperate need to protect her had hardened like stone when he’d told her she would die if she continued.
She wasn’t fearless—because she wasn’t stupid! She knew what she was doing.
He dug his fingers into his hair, massaging his skull where a headache had begun to pound. He’d begun to suspect that he wasn’t going to be able to inspire enough fear in her to convince her that it was the only way she was going to survive—to bend before they broke her.
And they would, if he failed to control her. The breeders had value to him and the other warriors like him who wanted sons of their own. However,
traditionally, they had no value, and it was the elders who were in power, the same men who’d brought them to this pass, gods damn them!
They were not entirely to blame. He knew that. The traditions went back generations, but they were the only ones living to blame. And beyond that, they had been completely cognizant of the impending disaster—they and their fathers—and they had still been careless and completely irresponsible of their sons’ birthright! Beyond sending out a search for a compatible species, they had not gone one step further even when they had discovered the beings of Earth.
They had had to go before the council and demand that something be done and listened to them argue over the destruction of their race by tainting it with the blood of these alien beings! As if they had not already destroyed all possibility of keeping their lines pure unless they simply accepted extinction!
The elders would leap at the opportunity to dispose of the breeders they’d found!
One breath that the women would be unmanageable, that they would not bow to the traditions of the drak, and they would destroy them! The council had been looking for any excuse to refuse the mission before they had even left.
Mayhap that wasn’t entirely fair, he decided. They were at war with the skeets of L’andal and the flurs of Bandecko over the resources of Kylo. To pull a ship from the front lines, and some of their best warriors, was the next thing to insane. But, as they had argued, could they really afford to lose their best warriors and have no sons to replace them? Who were they fighting for? They had very little to gain from the war themselves and no sons to gain from their efforts.
And they would still have no sons if Simone continued as she had begun!
He sent his brother and his cousin an unwelcome glare when they settled across from him. Neither of them paid it any attention.
He was losing the respect of his peers because he could not control his woman!
His breeder, he reminded himself, so disconcerted that he’d thought of her in terms of a concubine that it decimated his anger.
Alien Penetration Page 9
