We’d been unable to peer inside it, but the gravitational force of it was strong enough to rival that of a large star or a giant planet. Unlike them, however, its gravity behaved differently, too.
“How did you get this close to it?” I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the hypnotic lights. “How come the gravity doesn’t pull us in right now?”
“Because we’re already inside it, human,” he said before exiting the room. “You’re looking out of the Dark Anomaly, into the open space beyond.”
I KEPT STARING AT THE lights long after he had left. After a while, the awareness of this room had completely disappeared. All that remained was the feeling of floating in space, surrounded by the undulating colors and light.
“Don’t stare at the lights for too long. They can drive you mad.”
I understood what he meant. The sense of reality was no longer there, but I didn’t miss it. The brutal aliens, their captain, this insane grotesque world—all seemed to be just remnants of a bad dream. A nightmare I hoped to wake up from soon.
The sound of the doors opening yanked me back into reality again.
“Dinner,” the captain’s voice sounded behind me, and I slowly turned around.
Carrying a tray in one hand, he rolled a small table in with the other. A group of his thugs lingered outside the door, peeking in over his shoulders. Their smirking faces proved even more sobering.
This was real. I still didn’t understand why or how, but this world truly existed.
The wall between the room and the corridor was of the same solid pewter-colored metal as the doors. Both provided a stable point of reference that helped me finally ground myself. Facing the wall, I felt the floor under my feet once again.
The captain deposited the tray on the table. When he turned around to get more things from his crew, his tail came into view.
He had a tail!
Covered in long, silver-white fur, it swayed delicately, the black tip reaching the tops of his tall boots.
Next, he brought in a roll of blankets and a metal box.
“Sleeping pallet.” He tossed the bed roll at my feet. “May I suggest you place it in the part of the room farthest from the door. We’ll search for a real bed for you later.”
“Listen...” I scrambled to collect my thoughts. My new reality seemed surreal, no matter how hard I tried to orientate myself.
He pressed an open metal box into my hands. “Here are some toiletries. Everyone is allowed a five-minute shower a day. And no, the minutes do not roll over into the next day. Use them or lose them.”
I mechanically clutched the box to my chest.
“What is this place?” I asked, one of the gazillion questions that crowded my brain.
“Dark Anomaly.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I thought we’ve already covered that.”
“Can you...fly your ship in and out of it?”
The Anomaly did not absorb celestial bodies. However, it had sucked in any probe or unmanned research vessel we had ever sent near it. Past a certain point, which was slightly different for each object, all transmissions stopped. And we had been unable to retrieve any of the probes or vessels.
“Dark Anomaly sucks things in. No one gets out.” He said it slowly, as if depositing every word into my brain then waiting for me to absorb it.
“Have you tried to steer the ship—”
He tilted his head. “Which one of the millions of wrecked ships would you suggest I steer?”
Despite the thick sarcasm in his tone, I replied as calmly as I could manage, “Whichever is in the best shape. My spacesuit actually could—”
“No, it couldn’t,” he cut me off. “The solid part in the center of the Dark Anomaly, where we are, is made entirely of crushed spaceships. For ages, this thing has been sucking them in, smashing them into each other, then squishing them together, into a disk. We are on the very edge of it here, where the newly arrived vessels still have room between the walls. Using the energy we get from the lights of the Anomaly, we have made this sector of the disk habitable. This is home. Yours too, now. The only one you’ll ever have. The sooner you accept it, the higher your chances of survival will be.”
“How about contacting the ships passing by, outside of its gravitational field? My station is—”
“The Dark Anomaly absorbs any kind of communication waves. Reaching the outside world is impossible.”
I blinked at him, lost for words for a moment.
Vrateus might fully believe what he was saying, but I couldn’t blindly accept any of this as facts without testing them first. There had to be a way out of here. He just hadn’t found it yet.
He obviously mistook my silence for acceptance.
“Well, let’s see...” He slid an assessing gaze down my body. It wasn’t immediately clear what exactly he was assessing. “I’ll organize a search for clothes for you tomorrow. There are not enough hours left for that today.”
I inspected him, too. Although a bit too harsh and sharp to be beautiful, his features could still be considered handsome.
Only now had I noticed the slight slump in his wide shoulders and signs of exhaustion on his face.
“I don’t need clothes,” I protested. My bodysuit was self-cleaning and required minimal maintenance. Besides, I wasn’t planning to stay here for long. “My team will be searching for me.”
“The only way anyone can find you is if they crash here, too. We’ll deal with that when or if it happens,” he dismissed.
Our protocol required for a search party to be sent to look for a missing person. However, I doubted my team leader would send anyone inside the Anomaly. Even if they discovered exactly how I had disappeared, the risk of losing another person without knowing what to expect inside this abnormality would be too great.
With or without the rescue party, however, I was determined to find my way out of here.
“Vrateus, I’ll be leaving here, one way or another—”
“No, you won’t.” He wouldn’t listen, brushing his hand over his face in a gesture that betrayed how tired he was.
Maybe right now wasn’t the best time to argue or even try to reason.
He raked his fingers, tipped with black claws through the fur on his head. It seemed thick and soft, bringing the fur of an arctic fox to mind. It ran in a wide stripe up his nape and along the middle of his head, ending in a thick wave hanging over his forehead. The visual softness of it clashed with his chiseled jaw and sharp cheekbones. And with his hard attitude, too...
“Eat.” He pointed at the bowl on the tray, piled high with things not all of which I would consider food. “Then rest. You’ll need your strength for tomorrow night.”
Alarm shot through me at that reminder.
“You weren’t serious about that, were you? You don’t really want me to...um, do what you told them I’d do?”
His words had made no sense. No one would expect a person to do anything of that sort. Would they?
He glanced at me, confused.
“I promised my crew some entertainment. That’s the reason you’re still alive,” he said it as if he had done me a huge favor by bargaining with my body without my permission.
“You must know it’s illegal to force me.” I shook my head in disbelief. “You didn’t discuss anything with me. All I wanted was some assistance—”
“What you want is irrelevant.” He jerked his head to the side, impatiently. “There are over seven hundred males in here. They all want a piece of you, some literally. The trick was to convince them to want less of you. And I have accomplished that.”
Lifting an eyebrow, he leveled a stare at me, obviously annoyed at my ungratefulness and lack of appreciation for what he’d done “for me.”
Was this man for real?
“You’ve promised them what wasn’t yours to give!” I snapped, losing my patience and frustrated by his inability to see things for what they were. “How are you planning to deliver it? Surely, you don’t think I will act out your perve
rted fantasies?”
His jaw flexed. He folded his arms across his chest, his tail lashing against his boots.
“What choice do you have?”
“The choice not to do it.” I widened my stance.
“And who would protect you from the wrath of their disappointment? Do you know what hundreds of sex-starved males can do to one female?” He flinched.
I grimaced, too, trying not to imagine what he had implied.
Was he trying to scare me? Why?
Several interplanetary laws guaranteed my freedom and wellbeing anywhere in the Federation's territory. I could recite them all by heart.
“Why are you threatening me?” I asked.
“It’s not a threat. Just the simple truth.”
My mind flashed back to the scene in the corridor. Vrateus had shot one of his people in front of everyone, with no repercussions. Obviously, he didn’t respect interplanetary laws.
Did he want me to beg for his personal protection, then?
“I suspect next you’ll say you’ll save me from the big, bad guys out there, but there’s a price? Is that it?”
He frowned.
“I’ve already done all I can to save you. The rest is up to you.”
With another irritated flip of his tail, he left.
Chapter 4
VRATEUS
There was still so much to do before he could call it a night.
Each newly arrived ship had to be stripped for every piece of equipment that could be reasonably used as a weapon. It had to be done tonight, no matter how tired he was.
As he worked on cataloguing the items and sorting them into boxes, his thoughts kept coming back to the woman who had arrived on this ship.
What an infuriating, ungrateful female she’d turned out to be.
He had left her alone, in the relative safety of the observation capsule of the ship that had crashed on the Dark Anomaly about a decade ago. The decade as calculated here, according to the arbitrary clock he had established and maintained.
He had long suspected that time on the Anomaly did not flow quite the same as it did outside of it. It appeared to run much slower here.
Whenever a new ship crashed, Vrateus would analyze the data, weapons, and equipment it had. He would estimate the amount of time that had passed in the world outside against the age of the data and technology that he’d recovered from the previously crashed ship.
For every year on the Dark Anomaly, about three hundred years passed on a regular, inhabitable planet like Nofoi, the home of his family. Which meant he had been missing from that world for over six thousand years, now.
Not that it mattered, anyway. No one was there to actually miss him. Everyone who’d ever known his family must be long dead by now. And no one outside of the Dark Anomaly would ever see him again. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, none of the people inside the Anomaly existed.
This was a world on its own.
Suppressing a yawn, he pinched the inside of his wrist, forcing himself to stay awake and alert as he inspected the rest of the human’s ship.
Crux and Nocc stood nearby.
“To keep watch,” Vrateus had told Crux.
In truth, he wanted to have the errock close by to keep an eye on him. By having Crux close, Vrateus ensured he wasn’t out there stirring trouble among the rest of the crew.
Crux was ambitious, unpredictable, cruel, and dangerous. He was also the leader of the errocks on the Dark Anomaly, the largest and physically strongest species.
Vrateus had relied on their brawn to keep his crew members in order, especially during the first years of his rise to power. Strong, huge, and ruthless, errocks proved useful at enforcing his rules and establishing his authority over the rest.
Leading this community of shipwrecks wasn’t easy. Being the only one of his species left on the Anomaly, Vrateus needed the assistance of others. Not that he ever could trust anyone here completely.
He blinked, trying to chase away the sleep that had been clouding his brain with increasing persistence.
With a glance at the watch on his belt, he realized he had been awake for over twenty hours now. Dealing with the aftermath of the crash of the human’s little spaceship had taken all his evening and most of his night.
“We’re done here for today,” he called over to Crux, entering the last piece of equipment into the catalogue on his tablet.
The human wasn’t lying when she said her mission was peaceful. Judging by its equipment, the ship had a scientific purpose, not a military one. Although unfamiliar with most of it, he realized that the things he had catalogued must be tools, not weapons. However, if they could effectively kill, he qualified them as weapons.
The rest could wait until tomorrow, he decided, sweeping his gaze over the warped walls of the damaged spaceship. In a few centuries, Anomaly time, all of this would move closer to its center. As the disk rotated, the ships crushed and compressed until there was no more space left between the walls. The pressure grew even stronger in the very middle of the disk, fusing all materials in a homogenous matter that bulged up into a sphere at the center.
In a few centuries time, he would be gone one way or another, and none of this would matter.
Until then...
“Come,” he ordered Crux and Nocc.
Each of them lifted a box with the catalogued equipment, taking it down the hall to his room. It was identical to the one he had assigned to the female, located just a short distance down the corridor from hers.
Passing by her door, he realized he wasn’t done for the night.
At the entrance to his room, he let Crux and Nocc go, then hauled the boxes with tools inside on his own.
He had chosen to live in this room for the same reason he had put the female in hers. The errocks had an extreme fear of large open spaces. They would never enter a room made entirely out of clear material, and it was therefore the only place in the Dark Anomaly where he could get some sleep.
The sleep would have to wait tonight, though. After quickly shoving the boxes into the secret storage room he had opened from his bathroom into the wreck of the spaceship one layer below, Vrateus left for the library.
He had promised his crew that the human woman would moan in pleasure. Judging by her words and the glares she had given him, she was not inclined to cooperate in delivering on that promise. Her resistance would end up costing her her life. And the death would not be one he’d wish on his worst enemy.
To keep her alive, he needed her to prove her value to his crew. She had to convince them all that they would get more entertainment from her being alive than from killing her.
He was not against helping her with that, but he needed to educate himself first.
The library was a large room he had expanded into the mass of compressed wreckage, off the main corridor. Here, shelves with opal tablet inserts lined the walls, organized by subject then by the themul alphabet of his species.
Heaving a sigh, he contemplated what exactly he needed. Although, he had never heard of humans before, there might be some information on them in the data he had added to his collection in recent years.
The female spoke of the Federation. If humans now were a part of it, there could be mentions of them in the information he’d retrieved from the recently crashed, unmanned ships.
Pulling out the few inserts off the shelves, he grabbed some on mating rituals of themul and other humanoid species that might be biologically similar to the woman in his care.
Back in his room, he kicked off his boots, got out of his clothes then unclipped, unholstered, and unstrapped the weapons from his body. Running his hands through the thick fur on his head he arched his back, stretching the muscles and letting the tension of the day finally drain a little.
His gaze drifted to the small figure of the human in the capsule beside his. He had dimmed the glass of his room from the outside. However, he had kept her glass completely transparent to keep an eye on her.
> As a result, he remained invisible to her, but he could see her clearly.
With her arms wrapped around her, she was sitting on her knees on the floor at the farthest end of her capsule. Her forehead pressed to the glass, she stared straight into the raging storm of light.
He had spent many nights doing the same, wishing he could reach out beyond the lights and into the world.
No one escaped the Dark Anomaly, though. The human was trapped here for life—just like the rest of them were. All she could do was try to survive.
He turned away. Grabbing his tablet frame, he slid the first opal insert in. The surface of the insert came to life, turning into a glowing screen in his hands. Stretching in his narrow, metal bed, he started reading.
As he had feared, there wasn’t much information on humans. When the ship before hers had crashed, they had just been discovered, but hadn’t been contacted by the interplanetary Federation yet.
The notes on her species were scarce and dry—the expected lifespan, the natural habitat, the general characteristics. Only a few facts on reproduction.
Apparently, some humans mated for life, but some didn’t. Breeding was spontaneous, largely unregulated by their governments. Thankfully, like most species he knew, humans appeared to enjoy having sex as recreation, not solely for reproduction.
He found a diagram of male and female bodies and examined it, then compared it to the similar diagrams of other species.
His main goal was to figure out what to do to make the female moan tomorrow night and every night thereafter, but he got sidetracked, watching the mating videos of themul and other species.
Vrateus viewed his own arousal as just another function of his body that needed to be addressed from time to time.
When he was hungry, he ate. When his bladder got full, he used the bathroom. When his cock got hard and achy, he stroked it until the climax brought him release.
Gravity (Dark Anomaly Book 1) Page 3
