Chapter 3
THREE
LYSSA
My head ached, the feeling of wet saliva pooling against where the cold steel met my cheek, the first sensations that came back to me, a stark signal that yet again, I had failed. I sat up with a groan, hearing soft moans from the group around me.
"Who was taken?" someone asked, the rich tones of her voice alerting me that it was Adewesa. She always seemed to recover her composure first, but even her queen-like energy couldn't hide the anxiety in her words, the fear that we all felt when we woke up from being gassed.
The ones who were taken never came back.
I swallowed, moving my tongue as I tried to get my body to rewet my dry mouth, my vision still blurred.
"Sara!" someone else said. There were a lot of women in the room, and though I knew them all by name, I didn't always recognize them by voice if I didn't see who spoke. "Sara's gone!"
Panic rushed through me, immediately replaced by grim satisfaction.
"But she's the only one who could resist the gas," someone said. "We need her!"
"No, we don't need her in here," I said, my eyes finally clearing as I focused in on the frightened faces in the group around me.
Several of the others had gotten to their feet.
"We need her out there. If anyone can find a way, Sara can.
She cuts open brains for a living! If any of us is smart enough to figure out how to get us all out, it is her. "
"We are all capable," Adewesa said in that lilting accent of hers. The translators managed to interpret her language into one I understood, but the sound of the words was heavy with the colors of her own culture. "But you are right. Sara is smart. She-"
A horrible noise echoed from beyond the hulking locked door.
The sound started as a metallic honk, deep and resonant, then climbed into a shrill wail that scraped against the ears.
It made me picture a mechanical goose that had its tail feathers set on fire.
I shook off that absurd mental image as the noise reverberated through the walls, setting every piece of equipment rattling.
The floor jumped beneath my feet.
A split second later, the impact hit.
The entire room shuddered like an earthquake near its center, a wave of vibration rolling through the room.
Bodies hit the floor, knees buckled, hands slapped against metal as people scrambled for purchase while the deck pitched beneath them.
The shaking wasn't a brief jolt. It continued for several long seconds, a deep, bone-rattling vibration that made my teeth chatter together as my knees bruised against the violent floor.
Only Saoirse remained standing.
Her feet spread apart, knees bent slightly as she rode out the movement.
"Damn girl," I said. "Bendy-shit is useful."
She flashed me a grin, the fear in her eyes pulling the expression wide from cheerful to manic in a heartbeat.
"Bendy-balance-shit," she said.
"What was that?" someone shrieked as the floor settled.
"This is a good thing!" I said, strengthening my voice with a tight clench of my diaphragm so it would carry over the frightened conversations bursting out as I rose back up to my feet. "We needed to stay calm, to stay ready. Someone is attacking this place! Enemy of my enemy!"
"We're going to be rescued?" someone else said.
That would be nice, but I didn't fixate on gains because I thought Prince Charming wanted a swole Queen. Relying on someone else to rescue you meant you didn't look for opportunities to do it yourself.
"There is no guarantee of that!" I said. "We need to be ready for whatever might be about to come through that door and not assume they're here to save us. Remember, people, these are carbon-based bipedal aliens, but we can't assume they think the way that we do."
I was just parroting Sara’s words, but there was nothing wrong with that.
In moments of emergency, it was okay to fall back on others' words for guidance.
Plus, I didn't know what the heck I was doing.
I just didn't want any more of the women to collapse into despair and spend their days just lying on the ground.
"I don't agree with that entirely," Adewesa said.
"Our captors are bipedal, all have the same height and build, and appear to be male based on human markers.
Everyone in this room is a woman of reproductive age, so there are some assumptions that we can make about what their intentions are towards us. "
"Sara said they don't do anything to us while we're unconscious, they just pick one of us to take out of the room," Saoirse said. "If they were normal men, you know what would happen. They wouldn't just leave us untouched in here."
"Not all men are like that," Mei said.
"Not all men, but enough men leave the shithead ones alive so they have repeated opportunities to cause harm," I said as I got up and strode over to the wall that held most of the exercise equipment.
"Now, instead of arguing about bear versus alien, or whether or not the aliens that have kept us caged in a room like cattle for weeks are predatory enough to be like human men, or whether or not some human men being good people excuses all the evil ones by association, let's focus on what we can do.
If there is an attack going on, they aren't paying attention to what we're doing.
Who wants to help me try to rip the pull-down bar off the wall again?
If we all try, we might be able to do some damage. "
I set the weight to the lightest, then pulled the bar down. Yanking on it repeatedly had failed to break it free, but maybe if I twisted it a bunch?
"They'll just gas us like they did the last time you did that, give it a rest," someone said, and I looked back over my shoulder but couldn't spot who said that.
"If they're under attack, they're going to be too distracted to gas us for causing property damage. I'm never going to give it a rest!" I snapped. "I'm getting out of here!"
"If this is an attack on our captors, we shouldn't risk being unconscious," Adewesa agreed with the more timid speaker. "Acting passive until the ideal time to strike is a better course of action."
This was the problem with groups. There were too many good points of view, risking inaction while everyone debated what to do next.
"I don't do passive," I said and began to twist the bar.
Sara said from the size of their throats, it was unlikely my plan to try to choke out one of those inhuman fuckwads using my bare arms would work, so the next option was to try to bash some brains in with a metal club. All I had to do was get a hold of one.
"I'll help you," Saoirse said. "Let's fuck some shit up."
I twisted the bar around until it groaned and wouldn't shift any further.
"Okay, now I've got the torsional stress going on, we're going to add some sheer," I said. "Repeated, sharp tugs."
"Like a dog on a rope," Saoirse said as she put her hands next to mine on the other side of the bar, but changed her stance so one of her feet was braced against the weight bench that was bolted to the floor.
"On three," I said. "One, two..."
The door to the room slid open with a sudden hiss.
That door never opened.
Not while we were awake anyway.
Saoirse and I let go of the bar at the same time, startled, and it zipped back up to the wall, twisting around and around as it went, smacking with a loud clang.
"It just opened?" Mei asked, already at the door. She peered out of it. "There's nobody out there!"
"Go go go!" I shouted, my shock wearing off as I bolted straight for the open door. "Everyone out before it closes!"
"What if it's a trap?" someone called out, but it was too late.
I was out into a metal-clad hallway that stretched out in two directions, my bare feet skidding to a halt as I looked up and down in either direction as several other women tumbled out with me, moving as fast as they could to get out of the room.
I held still, listening.
I heard a shout off in the distance, the sound of metal groaning, and other strange noises that sounded like they belonged as single sound samples in a dubstep compilation. There was fighting on the ship, and something had happened that had triggered our door to open.
"It's not a trap," I called back to the few remaining in the room. "Sara must have let us out. Get out of there before you get locked in again!"
I pointed down the hallway.
Now was the time for action. This was the first and only opportunity we had gotten since we woke up in that wretched room. There was no way I was going to let this moment pass me by.
"I'm going that way," I declared. "Away from the sounds of fighting."
I didn't wait to see if other people would go with me.
This was not the time to take a group consensus, pass a talking stick, or mind tone of voice for the sake of other people's feelings.
If anyone wasn't fast enough to follow, we could come back for them after we secured our own rescue.
First off, there were way too many of us, and we'd spent enough time with each other in a confined space to know exactly how irritating we all could be to each other.
Second, if danger was coming at us from the quiet direction, I wanted to make sure I was the one to meet it first.
I would do anything to get us out of this.
Fight or fuck, I would do what it took so others didn’t have to.
"Where are you going?" Saoirse said, her shorter legs moving faster to keep up with my longer strides. "None of us know where we are."
"We're not going to figure that out by standing next to the open door of a cage," I said. "We can all split up or stick together; it doesn't matter. What I'm doing is haulin' ass as fast as I can, and if you want to come with me, you can."
From the sound of bare feet slapping against metal behind me, it seemed like most everyone decided to follow me.
"If we can find any form of console to access their technology, I can see if I can do anything with it," Adewesa said. "If we can't find an exit, we should find a control room."
We rounded a corner, a new feature of the hallway erupting into view.
"I don't think we're finding an exit," I said, my own voice hushed with the sudden shock of the sight.
"Are we in space?" someone asked from behind me. "Is this a spaceship?"
"It could also be a space station," someone else said. "Or a small moon maybe?"
Stars glittered through a curved window in front of us, a backdrop against the horrible sight of a field of asteroids, huge rocks that twisted and tumbled through the vacuum of space, any of them looking like they could collide with the window at any moment and send us hurtling out to join them.
"I'm going with a spaceship. Let's find a control room," I said. "Or somewhere to hide so that if our captors win whatever is going on, they can't find us again."
"Like rats on a ship," Saoirse said. "Squirrled away in the grain stores."
There was only one direction to go other than backward, so we continued down it, hoping that we wouldn't run into any cats.