Women of Steel 3: Frozen Daiquiri
Camille Anthony
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Copyright ©2005 Camille Anthony
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ISBN (10): 1-59596-148-8
ISBN (13): 978-1-59596-148-8
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Chapter One
Awakened to Captivity
“How… long…”
Damn, is that my voice?
She cleared her throat and tried again. “Hel-lo?”
Why are scratchy, hoarse sounds the only ones I can make?
“She’s awake! Quick, go fetch Mason! Tell her the general spoke. Hurry up!”
A gentle hand slipped under her neck, lifted her head. Blessedly cool, wet water dribbled down her parched throat. The delicious liquid spread out in every direction; dampening her organs and revitalizing her mouth and tongue. Suddenly, she was ravenous for more.
Snatching the cup from the hovering presence, she lifted it to her mouth in a death grip, greedily guzzling the precious fluid. She swallowed as fast as she could, before the people surrounding her managed to pry the cup out of her resisting fingers.
What were they doing? Why were they being so cruel? Can’t they see I’m dying of thirst?
“More!” Damn it, there she was, croaking again!
“Easy, General… you don’t want to drink too fast. Your stomach can’t handle it. You’ll just throw it back up and that would be worse than not drinking at all.”
She wanted to argue with the calm voice of reason, but already she could feel the water settling in a cold, heavy puddle at the bottom of her gut. When she tightened her stomach muscles, the liquid sloshed and rolled, making a gurgling sound she could hear through the wall of her skin.
Sweat broke out on her forehead. Queasiness roiled in her belly, and she tried not to swallow as her mouth filled with saliva. She knew the signs… fought them. Her stomach muscles tightened in protest. A moan squeezed through her folded lips.
“Uh, oh, I think she’s about to…”
With a low groan, she flung herself over the side of the bed, gagging. All the water she’d ingested spewed out, mixed with bile. Thank the Weaver of the Matrix, there was nothing else in her stomach to bring up.
“… hurl!”
Wearily, she lay back, panting and feeling sick to her stomach. She hated puking with a passion. On top of that, she still craved water like a kraken craved blood, but she dared not try putting something else down her queasy belly now. It would only come right back up.
“General, I want you to take a small sip of water.”
She turned her head away from the cup that presented itself at her lips, refusing the possibility of a second round of nausea.
She heard a smothered laugh. Her head snapped around. Teeth bared, she glared into the faces of the three women surrounding her. Not one of them betrayed by expression or glance which one of them had been insane enough to mock her pain.
“I don’t want you to swallow it, sir. I can imagine how upset your tummy must be feeling about now. Just swish it around in your mouth and then spit it out in this bowl.”
She stared at the speaker. Paula Mason, a corporal in the Planetary Repulsion Force. A crony of her mother’s, Paula was a woman she trusted. The tall older woman was thin as a rail and black as midnight. Close-cropped nappy curls rioted over her head, the fluffy gray mass resembling pristine bolls of cotton. Her spare frame didn’t have an ounce of fat on it, but her breasts still rode high and pert, as firm as those of a nineteen-year-old. She, like all the women she’d seen, was naked.
Nodding to indicate her reluctant agreement, Daiq accepted the water, swished and spat on command. Her mouth did feel better for it. She worked her jaw a bit, loosening it in preparation of doing some major talking.
“I’m weak as a kitten. I know I was injured, but not that badly. Have I been sick?”
Mason nodded. “We all have been. There’s a nasty alien bug in the water. Two of us died before the Scarth came in and inoculated us. After that, none became as ill as you. You’ve been on the verge of death several times. Even with the vaccine, your weakened system almost lost the war.”
“How long have I been out of it?” she asked, again.
Mason sighed. “You were injured during the last minutes of the engagement. The Scarth carried you on board and dumped you among my group. We calculate we’ve been prisoners for more than a year. You were in their infirmary for most of that time. They just gave you back what seems a few weeks ago. It’s hard to keep track of time when the world you’re on doesn’t have twenty-four hour days.”
“Our watches?”
That gray head shook no. “Something about these caverns… Our batteries went haywire shortly after we arrived. Besides, the Scarth gathered up all our technological gadgets. We’ve been counting sunrises -- the ones we could see -- and sunsets. There’ve been entirely too many to keep track of. It didn’t help that the Scarth kept us in total darkness for the first segment of time after our arrival. We had no way of knowing how much time had elapsed.”
“The other officers… where are they?”
“I’m afraid you’re looking at the only remaining one, sir.” Mason sighed. “I don’t know about the other enclaves, but we had over three hundred prisoners in this camp at the beginning. The Scarth have systematically removed groups of women until we are down to slightly over two hundred.”
Daiq frowned. “What are they doing with them? What do the women say when they return?”
“Not one has ever returned. We have no way of knowing if they are dead or serving in another capacity. I suspect they are being used as lab rats. The Scarth have to be trying to find out as much about us as the folks back home are striving to discover about them.”
Chewing on her bottom lip, Daiq considered the implications. “They’re not dead. It’s a psychological tactic -- leaves us guessing and demoralized. But I’m betting your hunch about them being guinea pigs is on the money. When did the first snatch take place?”
“Right after everyone fell sick from the water.”
“And before the inoculations?”
“Yes. How could you know that?”
Daiq snorted. “They discovered we’re not the same, despite nominal outward appearances. That bug in the water harming us like that probably threw them for a loop. They had to scramble to avert disaster.” She lowered her eyebrows. “Never think for a moment that we are here by accident. They need us for something. It’s our job to find out what that something is.”
Sitting up, she threw off the covers and gingerly came to her feet. She swayed a bit before finding her balance. Once secure, she tottered over to the makeshift mirror -- a slab of wall evened and glossed by some force of nature shaping and molding its surface until it was a smooth, reflective surface. She peered at the wa
vering outline of her form, marveling at the changes a year had made.
Always tall and spare, Daiq now appeared gaunt and emaciated. She’d never had abundant curves. Now, her breasts and hips seemed to have melted away. Her black hair was longer than she liked to wear it, the unruly curls frothing below her shoulders. She’d take care of that ASAP. Only her cool gray gaze remained familiar. Too big for her starved face, her mirrored eyes stared back with an aloof expression that had earned her the nickname Frozen Daiquiri.
Her people thought she didn’t know what they called her behind her back. On the contrary… she not only knew of the title, she actively endorsed it. Emotion had no place in war. She’d found it had no place at all in her life.
Daiq had been raised in a household that lived by strict Amazon rules. Her adult beliefs were shaped by her childhood memories. In Thalassic’s home, all the males were treated kindly, but definitely kept in their secondary place. Men were for pleasuring and, when the time was right, the fathering of daughters. They were too gentle for the brutal business of war.
Daiq’s followers thought her cold because she never took a lover. Lovers were for peacetime and leisure, not to be indulged in during conflict. She knew better than to mix business with pleasure…
Dissatisfied with what she’d seen, Daiq turned away and retreated back to bed. She looked as bad as she felt. There was no way anyone with sense would follow her lead while she appeared half dead, with one foot on a slimy banana peel. With a dejected sigh, Daiq crawled up on the soft material that made up her makeshift mattress and collapsed. She was still too weak. The first thing she had to do was regain her strength.
“I’m going to take a nap. I want you to gather everyone whose rank is higher than an ensign. Don’t let me sleep past two hours. When I wake up, we’ll have a planning meeting.”
The three women saluted.
“I’ll see it done, General,” Mason promised. Her black face shone with militaristic zeal. “May I say how glad I am to have you on the mend and in command, again? We need better leadership than I’ve been providing.”
One of the fem protested Paula’s humble disclaimer. “That’s not correct, sir! Corporal Mason has been wonderful!”
“Glad to hear it.” Daiq waved a weary hand. “I would have been disappointed if I’d heard anything to the contrary. Dismissed.”
Chapter Two
Three Earth Years Later
As darkness fell, what meager warmth the cave walls had absorbed from the small white sun leached rapidly away. Consequently, the increasing chill quickly rendered their prison dangerously uncomfortable.
Their captors had taken them out today, to clean the caverns of their filth. She knew the real reason was to plant new visual and listening devices, which she and her soldiers would again destroy as soon as they found the new locations.
Daiq Harmon was tired… bone tired of subterfuge, tired of being on duty twenty-four/seven -- or whatever the time frame on this world was…
She rubbed her chilled arms, watching her people forming several small groups, huddling together to seek what warmth and comfort they could find in the close press of naked bodies.
Once, they had been a group of officers and soldiers -- both men and women -- several companies serving together in the war against an alien enemy. Then the unthinkable had happened. Earth lost the first skirmish of the war. To her knowledge, three companies were taken captive.
Every male had been dispatched with cold-blooded efficiency upon detainment. Only females had been herded aboard space craft and shuffled off to an unknown destination.
After she’d recovered from her wounds and subsequent illness and found herself on what she believed to be one of the Scarth home worlds, Daiq -- the ranking command officer -- had paired the women off two-by-two, for safety. They’d started out with over three hundred prisoners. Her company was now down to seventy-six, not counting herself.
The remaining small group had evolved into one big family, becoming the closest of friends. Some within the group had found committed lovers. Only General Daiquiri Harmon remained spiritually and sexually solitary.
She could not pair with one of the women for fear of the others claiming unfair favoritism and none of the other squad leaders had survived the latest skirmish. She missed Paula Mason’s bolstering presence. The older woman had been taken after the last uprising. Now, there was no one to share the load of responsibility. Fate, or the Goddess, or whatever the Higher Power was manifesting Itself as today, had decreed she stand alone.
As the commanding officer of all the imprisoned soldiers, it was up to her to maintain morale and ethical prisoner interactions. She did it in the only way she knew how -- the way her mother had taught her -- by personal example. She hoped she did it right…
“General Harmon, are you certain it will be tonight?”
The question, asked by her second-in-command in a trembling voice, hung heavy in the air. Every woman anxiously awaited the answer.
Daiquiri Harmon’s troops turned to her, their upturned faces fearful, seeking reassurance. She lowered her head, unwilling for them to see her lack of hope.
With a heart-sick sigh, she wished the situation would just go away, but she knew better.
There was no one else to take the burden of leading these women. From somewhere -- she had no idea from where -- she gathered her resolve and dredged up words of comfort; something… anything to help them face the coming ordeal.
She sighed and straightened her shoulders, angry and impatient with herself. This wasn’t the time to wallow in self-pity. All-in-all, she was relatively lucky. Since being captured and incarcerated by the enemy, a lot of her soldiers -- those women who had already been separated out and sent to the upper chambers -- had probably experienced more horror than they could cope with.
With that reminder uppermost in her mind, she spoke gently. “They will more than likely come tonight. It’s been thirty sunrises since they last took prisoners out of the caverns. If they stay on the schedule we’ve noted, they should come tonight or tomorrow.” She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter when they come, though. We’ll be ready for the bastards. Whatever happens, we will face it together, as soldiers and strong women. We’ll make them pay in blood and pain for every one of us they manage to snatch.”
Someone moaned, began rocking herself, chin tucked tight against her chest. Her partner wrapped her arms around the shaking woman, giving silent encouragement.
Daiq tightened her lips. Raising her knees to her chest, she looped her arms about her lower legs and rested her head in her lap. She focused on her plans, trying to block out the sounds of misery and fear rising about her. Inside, where no one could see, she mourned for the women under her command. But she didn’t cry. What would be the use? Tears hadn’t stopped the atrocities visited on the chosen women, those taken from the others over the years. Tears wouldn’t stop the Scarth from whatever they planned for tonight.
Spending one fortifying moment in prayer to the Weaver of the Matrix of Life, Daiquiri unfolded her long limbs and came to her feet in a smooth, effortless move as graceful as one a prima ballerina might make. She dusted the fine grit of the cave floor off her hands and fisted them at her hips.
“All right, gentlefem soldiers, listen up!”
Silence rippled out from her, the quiet spreading from rung to rung of seated females.
“We’re spending way too much time today cowering in fear, and not enough training and preparing for a fight. We’re still at war! Don’t think for a moment my mother, General Thalassic, isn’t waging an all-out campaign against these invaders on the home-front. Are we going to let her down?”
The roar of denial echoed off the cavern walls.
“Training is fine, but what can we do without any means of hurting these monsters, General?”
“We have no weapons! We’re helpless!”
“No, we’re not!” Daiq snarled, confronting the timid women. “We have brains! We have grit and
determination! We have the will to survive. And we have the peace in knowing that if we go down fighting, we still win because we’ve taken the enemies’ prizes from them.”
Her mouth firm, she faced her troops. “So we train. We keep in tip-top condition. We stay ready to fight. On your feet, soldiers… give me three laps! As you run, keep an eye out for the locations of the digi-eyes and ears. Search and destroy.”
As the last woman jogged by, Daiq fell into place behind her, whispering encouragement and offering unobtrusive assistance. Tara had been injured during the battle on Earth, taking a laser blast to the back of her left calf, which caused her ongoing pain and some instability while running.
Running along the cavern walls beside her soldiers, Daiquiri paced herself so she didn’t overrun the weaker ones or discourage the ones falling behind the others. As she ran, she questioned her insistence in putting her people through their training routine. What was the use of exercising other than keeping her women warm? The Scarth certainly were never going to allow them the chance at weapons and without them, there was no way to overpower their captors.
Watching her breath fog on the cold air, Daiquiri admitted that warmth was one important factor to her strategy. Her small company faced the very real possibility of freezing to death during the long, cold nights. Without clothing, they struggled to stay warm. Exercise was a great blood heater.
She made them run two more laps, watching all the time for those unable to perform at peak fighting ability. Relief washed through her as she noted only Tara was having difficulties, and she was compensating nicely for the weak leg.
Clapping her hands together, Daiq called, “Hand-to-hand, folks -- and not with your living-partner!” She ignored the groans and mutterings.
“Your partner knows your strategies, can sense your weaknesses, but beyond that, you will have a tendency to pull your punches, lighten your blows. I don’t want you engaging your lover. I want you practicing to engage your enemy.”
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