Chapter 1 #2
Looking at them now, even the shackles that had held me were old rust colored plastic-type material. They’d taken me, thrown me into a flimsy cell, trussed me up with less than secure bindings, and then hadn’t bothered to check on me since.
Wonderful.
I’d been taken by amateurs.
I was never going to live this down as long as I lived, and that was looking to be a long time thanks to the nanobots.
Living forever with embarrassment was another mark on the cons side of being abducted by aliens.
Who the hell wanted to live forever? If Anu was anything to go by, immortality made people nuttier not wiser.
I shuddered to think of a thousand year old Patty, armed with more combat skills and knowledge than she knew what to do with.
The woman was going to take over the universe when she got bored enough and her and Jack were going to drag my ass into it.
I banged my head softly against the bars a few times in pity for my future self before trying to see if maybe my strength was on par with Jack’s and I could just pull the bars loose and escape, but a few hard tugs proved that my newly acquired genetics didn’t include hulk strength.
I glanced up at the janky ceiling only a few inches over my five foot eight frame and reached up a hand to run my fingers across the surface.
Rough, cold metal that was slightly damp and none too sturdy.
I pressed, and the metal popped inward slightly like I was pressing on the side of an old tin barn.
While the flimsiness of my cell worked in my favor, a little shiver cascaded over me at the thought of that same quality of craftsmanship making up the whole ship and not just this one room.
“Please, Lord, don’t let me die because some junkyard trash gets pulled apart by an asteroid field or some shit,” I whispered to the dark as I ran my nail…
no, my claw, because I absolutely had claws now, across the ceiling.
The dull scraping sound was covered by the whir of shoddy engines and the death keen of a bad air system.
I didn’t think anyone would hear me escape over the noise of their trash ship.
I also seriously doubted they’d have a surveillance system.
Why none of the aliens I had encountered that had decided to be bad guys had cameras to monitor their prisoners was baffling to me.
Was it extreme arrogance? Did they think humans were just that weak and we had zero chance of escape so they didn't bother? Surely they trafficked other aliens and quite literally none of the many species I’d encountered had been fluffy bunnies.
Most had nightmare visages and killing claws, so you’d think that there would be top notch security measures.
But the Vrax had been woefully lacking in that department and now these trash people were much of the same.
Still, it didn’t hurt to double check. I crouched down, pressing my face to the bars to look up and around at the room, checking all the corners of the ceiling in the small space.
No obvious cameras. No orbs or blinking lights.
Though, Anu had no such things either. Her ships, and Ohem’s monstrosity of a war machine, didn’t have any obvious cameras.
I still wasn’t entirely sure how it worked, but it seems as if the nanotech that was used in the construction material for these advanced ships also functioned as eyes and ears.
The AI was literally in the goddamn walls.
Not as creepy as whatever the hell Anu did, she’d told me once that she could see through people’s eyes, hear through their ears.
Anyone that held even a remnant of nanotech inside their bodies was at risk of her invasion, as she could hack into the systems with ease.
She was damn near omnipresent because of this and it creeped me the fuck out.
I didn’t think my abductors had anything like that. Not even close, if the thin ceiling my fingers could just graze was any indication. It felt like it was made of old tin. The kind of tin that graced many a dilapidated barn back in my hometown.
Good for barns, bad for spaceships.
The worry of the vacuum creeped forward from the back of my mind.
I shoved it down as I rose onto my toes to press along the ceiling.
There was a hollowness there, a space above the metal like this was a drop ceiling.
Plenum space I could possibly exploit. Not in the way old movies depicted, as an air vent one could crawl through, but maybe enough space I could use to pass over the bars of my cage.
I dragged a single claw across the ceiling, pressing hard, managing to score it but not break through. At that moment, I wished I was a werewolf psychopath Amazonian woman, then the damn metal would be like tissue paper and I could river dance over the torn up corpses of my enemies on my way home.
But no, I was me. Stronger, faster and meaner, yes, but still not a total freak of nature.
Though what Anu hadn’t been able to give me in genetics, she did give me in handy subdermal armor.
Calling it forth felt very much like the sensation of goosebumps spreading over freshly shaven legs, prickly and unpleasant along my arm below the elbow, but the liquid gold covered my hands and claws to solidify into a hard gauntlet.
I pressed my fingers together to make a knife hand, gold claws catching the dirty light, and stabbed upwards with as much strength as I could muster.
My hand punched through the ceiling with a whomping bang.
I grinned and made a fist before pulling my hand free.
Forming another gauntlet on my left hand to match the right, I gripped the rough hole I’d made with both, and pulled the metal apart with a grunt.
The ceiling folded outward, and I kept pulling, rolling the metal until I had a decent escape hatch.
It was dark beyond the ceiling, and not knowing how much space I would have to maneuver, I used caution when I took hold of the edges to hop up to test to see if I hit anything.
I cleared over my shoulders before my head brushed against what I guessed was the structural ceiling.
Using my armor-covered hands like grappling claws to pull myself upwards proved more difficult than I’d thought it would be, even with a running jump and I made a mental note to do more upper body workouts when this was all done with.
I kept my upper body low, heaving myself until my chest was pressed hard against the metal of the drop ceiling and then wriggled myself the rest of the way onto my belly.
Army crawling across the ceiling stirred up a cloud of dust that clogged my nose and started a sneezing attack that stopped me dead for a good thirty seconds.
There was a narrow slanted vent about a foot in front of me that I crawled to hoping for some relief from the dust, but no air circulated.
It did give me a lovely view of the door folding in on itself like a lift door opening.
The grinding screech of metal on metal an unholy warning system, and in stepped two guards.
“—he said we couldn’t touch her. You’re going to get us ki—where did she go?
” The speaker was head and shoulders taller than the other guard, with deep navy skin speckled with darker flecks on his bald head, neck, and arms. He was muscled like a brute, his chest and arms were thick and straining the tan shirt he was wearing.
His face was harsh with heavy protruding brows and sunken sockets for too small yellow eyes.
His buddy was slender to the point of creepy, with deep ruby skin and eyes so large they took up nearly all of his face.
All the red creep’s limbs were too long and it made my skin crawl.
Panic infused Blue’s voice as he frantically crossed to my cell and jerked on the door. “It’s still locked. Oh, Mother, she's gone. We are dead.” His voice was higher than I was expecting, and it trembled.
Red smacked Blue’s muscled shoulder and pointed one long finger to the hole in the ceiling and said with a condescending rasp, “She went up, you moron. She’s probably still up there. Go get the scanner and the stun guns and we’ll get her back.”
The blue brute scrambled out of the room like his ass was on fire which left me with a glaring Red.
“I know you’re up there, human. I can smell you. You smell sweet like meat, female, come down and I’ll only take a small bite.” His narrow head tilted as his large eyes blinked separately. “Or I’ll come up there and get you and eat you whole. It’s your choice.”
Right.
Fat chance of that.
I looked around the space, spotting rows of wires to my right against the outer wall of the ship.
They were thick and important looking. I shuffled over to reach my golden clawed hand over, hesitating a moment to say a quick prayer to the chaos gods of the universe that these weren’t oxygen wires or anything life support related before I gripped one and jerked.
It came off the wall with a shower of scattering support brackets.
“What are you doing up there, female?” Red’s voice slithered up to me.
I cursed under my breath and slashed at the wire, slicing through the thick casing and revealing a colorful array of smaller wires inside. I slashed again with my claws. A shock of electricity zapped my hand and I hissed but kept going when the lights flickered.
A grin stretched my lips. I looked over at the grate a few feet to my left, my swollen eye popping open at long last. “Can you see in the dark, Red?”
There was a beat of silence before his raspy voice answered me. “What?”
A final tear and the lights cut out, washing us in darkness.
Shouts rang out in the distance echoing with Red’s curses below me.
My eyes adjusted just as the emergency lighting flickered on, though it was such a low orange it might as well have been black.
I rapid crawled back to the grate, jerked it up and out, and dropped down beside Red.
He cursed again, jerking away from me, his wide eyes even wider in the dark as he strained to see me in the gloom.
I swept my foot out, bringing my heel down on Red’s Iliotibial band, assuming it would hurt just as badly as it did on a human.
He dropped with a shout of pain, his leg all but useless, and I jumped to pin him to the floor, rolling him to his stomach and bringing his slender arm behind his back.
I had never been more thankful for all the grueling training Aga, Rema, and Jack had put me through on the Solus.
Hand to hand combat with aliens was nothing like humans.
His joints were more liquid, so I had to pin his arm much higher than I normally would, but it must have hurt like a bitch because he cried out and then cursed a blue streak when my knee in his back kept him from struggling too much.
“Get off! Get off of me!”
I leaned over his shoulder to hiss into his flat ear, “Why am I here? Who are you? Who sent you?”
When he only grunted in response, I picked his upper body off the floor and slammed him back down against it, his red skull bouncing off the metal floor with a thump.
“Ah! I don’t know why he wanted you. Who knows why he does anything,” he huffed at me.
I pressed his arm higher making him hiss in pain. “Who is ‘he’?”
“Ow! Stars! Rathal, the Lord of Erral. He has been watching the war between the Unity and General A’tens and told us to go and fetch him something interesting. A human. That’s all I know.”
Man, why couldn’t aliens be fucking normal?
Just one damn normal interaction is all I asked for, and instead I get creepy wannabe feudal lords kidnapping humans because they were “interesting”.
What was so interesting about us anyways?
As far as anatomy went, humans were boring as hell compared to most of the aliens I’d run into.
I figured we were like the goldfish of the galaxy. Common and abundant.
But the Vrax had a whole business of taking human women off Earth to sell into sexual slavery in some space version of a black market.
Their last known shipment had ended with the Vrax dead and eaten courtesy of a pissed off Jack, a crashed ship, eighteen dead human women, and five escaped prisoners.
One of which was a general in the Unity, who’d taken it personally, and the other was a Rijiteran killing machine that held a nasty grudge.
We would eventually get around to hunting down every single flesh trader in the galaxy and exterminating them with extreme prejudice.
Now these morons had just added themselves to the list of things to kill.
I dug my knee harder into his back. “Where am I?”
He wriggled under me. “Hoirt galaxy, quadrant four seven three.” Twisting his head back unnaturally to look at me, he sneered. “You’re already here, female. Good luck.”
“Thanks, Red. I appreciate your cooperation.”
He must have heard the finality in my voice because his red face paled.
My teeth flashing was the last thing he saw before his head snapped backwards.
Death comes quick in the dark.