Alien Slave (14 page)

He nodded enthusiastically. “It fly
okay. Trouble with land but it come down one way or
other.”

He laughed, squeezing her thigh. Dani
swallowed and made a weak attempt to share his humor. The
breathless chuffing noises she made sounded suspiciously like
sobs.

You have got to be kidding. You’re not
actually getting on that, are you?

Gelan’s clan would show up at any
second to reclaim her and probably publicly punish her for running
out on the contract. Thinking about that, about being beaten by the
massive Kalquorians in full view of hundreds of cheering spectators
suddenly made dying in a crash not such a terrible alternative
after all.

She’d have to trust in Reggie’s
piloting skills; there was no turning back now.

Chapter 8

Dani boarded Reggie’s ship once all his
cargo had been loaded. She stared around the dim interior, barely
able to make out more than shapes of the bins. Wires and loose
conduits hung haphazardly from the ceiling. The console in front of
the pilot’s seat contained a plethora of lights. Some burned
steadily, some blinked off and on. The vid showing his flight plan
washed in and out.

She seriously reconsidered her escape.
Maybe the Kalquorians would let her off with a warning if she
surrendered to them and begged forgiveness?

Reggie shut the hatch behind her and
motioned her to the co-pilot’s seat. “Sit, Dani. Take off
now.”

She paused, her hand on the back of the
seat. “How old is this ship?”

Reggie hopped in his chair, and a cloud
of dust puffed up from it. “Old, old. Bought cheap.”

Her nose wrinkling in anticipation of
another dust cloud, Dani sat gingerly on the musty-smelling seat.
Reggie set to work punching buttons, sliding levers, and issuing
commands in his indecipherable language. The engine started with a
terrible ratcheting sound, and alarms shrieked. Dani shrieked a
little with them. Reggie smashed the panel with two fists, and the
claxons died off.

The Earther rose a little from her
seat. “Um, maybe it needs more work.”

Reggie nodded, his face grim with
concentration. “Maybe. See soon.”

The ship lurched upward with a screech
then continued to rise slowly with a series of ominous creaks. Dani
grabbed the restraining straps on her seat only to find they
wouldn’t connect. The ship lurched again, and she frantically tied
the straps in a knot over her waist.

God, I really screwed up this
time.

Another alarm blared. Reggie,
unconcerned, hit the panel to shut it off once more. He nodded at
Dani. “You see? Ep, ep, we good.”

Dani gripped the armrests in
white-knuckled fists as the ship shuddered its way into space.
“Yeah. Real epping good.”

Too close to Kalquor or not, she was
definitely getting off this scrap heap on Joshada.

* * * *

Gelan pointedly ignored the noise a
very unhappy Krijero made as the Imdiko packed their belongings
away in the clan’s shuttle. The Imdiko was clumsy as a rule, but he
was making extra noise so his irritation with the situation would
be well known. Gelan concentrated on his pre-flight checklist and
let Krijero have his tantrum. Perhaps he concentrated too hard
because he jumped in surprise when Wynhod joined him in the small
cockpit.

“
That was fast,” he said to
his Nobek when he recovered from his shock.

Wynhod gave him a feral grin,
apparently enjoying catching the Dramok off guard. “Not too many
Earther females are on Dantovon. People take notice.”

“
So you found out where she
went?”

Wynhod nodded. “The Isetacian she left
with is well known.”

Krijero stuck his head into the
cockpit. He frowned at the back of the Nobek’s head as Wynhod
entered their flight plan into the computer. “Well known for what
reasons?”

“
He’s one of the few around
here that deals fair. That stands out in this port.”

Gelan relaxed a little. “Then at least
she’s not in bad hands.”

Wynhod’s fingers flew over the command
controls. The shuttle was only two years old and had all the latest
programs. The clan often argued over who would pilot their trips.
“I’m inputting his flight plan. He left for Joshada an hour
ago.”

“
Are we locked down,
Krijero?”

The tense Imdiko nodded. “Everything’s
stored.”

“
Flight plan’s ready. We can
take off as soon as you want,” Wynhod said. His face erupted in a
fierce grin. “This vacation is turning out to be more fun than I
anticipated.”

Gelan laughed in shared delight. He
only wished Krijero could appreciate the added entertainment. The
rush of anticipation at the coming pursuit excited him. He hoped
Dani was more resourceful than she looked, that she would give them
a good hunt.

He licked his lips and shook his braids
back. “Let’s track down an Earther.”

* * * *

After a couple of hours of uneventful
flight, Dani had started to relax. Later, she would superstitiously
think that was what set off the chain of events that
followed.

Reggie trilled his sweet tunes, and she
let herself be lulled. When two of his hands moved over, tracing
slow circles up her thighs, she sighed. Her legs fell apart. She
drifted as he crawled over, crouching above, singing his song. He
slid her skirt up, pushed her panties aside to expose her. Dani sat
unmoving as he touched, stroked, entered.

A small price to pay for freedom, she
thought.

Multiple alarms went off at once,
shocking Dani into wakefulness. The ship shook all over like a
frenzied horse trying to buck off a rider. Reggie sprang back to
his seat. All his pounding on the wildly blinking console couldn’t
shut the claxons off this time. As dispassionate as a weatherman
commenting on the possibility of rain during the weekend, the
Isetacian muttered, “Aug, aug, no good.”

Dani sat up straight, her fingers
digging into the seat’s armrests. She was too frightened to
straighten her clothing. “What do you mean ‘no good’? What’s
happening?”

Six sets of fingers flew over the
console as the whole ship shuddered again. “On fire. Parts blow
off. Must land.”

Dani’s stomach threatened to jump out
of her mouth. “On fire? Parts have blown off? Oh God, oh God, we’re
going to die.”

Reggie’s voice remained bland. “Maybe.
Hold on. We land on moon LXS-42. Control by Earth during war. Maybe
help still there.”

The ship’s dampers screamed as it
entered the moon’s atmosphere, the craft shaking and shuddering.
Unsecured containers behind Dani bounced and flew about the
compartment, one narrowly missing her head on its way to smashing
the controls. Remembering safety instructions from shuttle flights
before, Dani bent over, sticking her head between her knees and
covering her head with her arms. She thought she might have been
shrieking, but in the chaos she wasn’t sure.

The few dim lights they had went out,
and an instant later a boom deafened Dani. The floor beneath her
feet rose sharply, and then the world became a cacophony of thunder
and earthquake. She felt bruising impacts all over her body as
debris pelted down.

Then all went quiet and dark and Dani
knew no more.

Chapter 9

Dani woke to a red-tinged clutter of
small storage containers. She blinked her eyes slowly, trying to
remember where she was. Bit by bit, it came back to her.

The Kalquorians. Escaping Dantovon in
Reggie’s battered shuttle. Crashing.

The control panel before her, wires
springing here and there like tufts of sparsely growing hair, had
gone dark. The pulsing red light came from one panel on the
ceiling. Tumbled cargo containers piled up around her seat,
obscuring her vision of Reggie.

Dani evaluated herself. Her back and
shoulders ached. She was sure she had been bruised by the flying
cargo, and her head pounded. She carefully rubbed the back of her
scalp and discovered a lump where something had bounced off her
skull. She’d been knocked out, but her vision didn’t blur. Other
than the thudding headache, she seemed fine.

“
Reggie?” she croaked. When
she got no answer, she shoved at the storage containers to see if
her pilot remained in his seat. Maybe he’d gone for
help.

But Reggie still sat in his seat, the
upper part of his body crumpled on top of the control panel. Half
his eyes, or at least half of the eyes she could see, were closed.
The other half stared at nothing, glazed in death.

“
Oh Reggie, I’m so sorry.”
And she was. The Isetacian had been a good guy. Tears rose in
Dani’s eyes, and she wiped them away.

After a moment of sorrow, she took
stock of her situation, ignoring the nibble of panic. They’d
crashed. She’d survived. Reggie had said he was setting down on
some moon, something like LSF-52. The Earther military had kept a
base here during the war, and so help might be
available.

“
Okay. Let’s see what we’ve
got here,” Dani said to herself out loud.

She shoved containers aside, keeping
them from falling on Reggie’s poor broken body. He couldn’t feel
pain anymore, but for some reason she couldn’t bear to treat him
like he hadn’t mattered. She even felt a pang of guilt like this
had been her fault, though it had been his half-hearted maintenance
that had sent the ship down to its death spiral. He would have
crashed whether she’d come with him or not.

Still, conscience nagged at Dani. She’d
been present, the ship had gone down, and Reggie was dead. She
couldn’t quite shake the feeling she’d brought bad luck on board
with her.

She managed to clear a spot so she
could stand up, once she’d untied the knotted restraining straps.
No doubt they’d saved her life by keeping her from bouncing around
the ship like the cargo. The top of her head brushed the ceiling,
and she remembered the sensation of the floor rising up beneath her
feet before she’d lost consciousness. They’d landed hard, all
right. It was a wonder the whole damned shuttle hadn’t
disintegrated.

It seemed most of the unsecured cargo
had slid into the cockpit. Once Dani cleared a path she moved into
the small storage area, also lit by pulsing red light. A large part
of it had open space in the back now that the cargo was forward.
Unfortunately, the hatch to escape the downed transport was at the
end near the cockpit. It took her several minutes to clear the area
of containers.

Breathing hard from effort, Dani pushed
the switch that should have opened the hatch. It emitted a weak
beep and slid back only three inches.

“
Damn it,” she swore. Her
arms trembled from the workout she’d had just getting to this
point, but she would have no choice but to shove the reluctant
hatch open.

First she pressed her face to the tiny
slit, trying to see what was outside. Nothing but blackness greeted
her eyes. She couldn’t see a thing.

She could hear, smell and feel, though.
An eye-watering layer of buzzing like that of a million insects
carpeted the world beyond the shuttle. Over that, bestial far-off
screams rose that made Dani’s hair stand on end. Images of
fantastical beasts ran before her mind’s eye, monsters possessing
sharp fangs and claws. She knew the screams probably came from
prey, not predators, and that freaked her out even more.

The scents weren’t much better. The air
that wafted in smelled dank and fetid, similar to the jungle stench
that drifted into Ler, but more rotted. The added tang of saltiness
made Dani think of soup left out on the kitchen counter to mold for
a month.

Ler had been on the brink of autumn,
with cool breezes to refresh. Here, it was warm and humid, the
odors of rotting vegetation made worse by the muggy air. LFN-22, or
whatever the darn moon’s designation was, didn’t feel welcoming in
the least.

The only comfort came from the
star-strewn sky overhead. The tiny points of light didn’t show Dani
her surroundings though. She worried the moon might not rotate,
that she’d crashed on a permanent dark side.

That would suck big time.

But she smelled vegetation. Things
didn’t grow without a light source, right? So daylight was bound to
come. She hoped. Dani crossed her fingers like a child wishing for
a pony.

She retreated into the ship and tried
to close the hatch once more. It didn’t budge no matter her
efforts, and she was forced to concede defeat.

“
I sure hope nothing
dangerous can get in,” she muttered. Three inches of space. Did
this moon have venomous things like snakes? Spiders? After a
moment’s consideration, Dani shoved containers back in front of the
hatch, closing off the opening against small but lethal
predators.

Once that was done, she stood before
the blocked hatch, her head down, shoulders sagging. “Damn, I
really did it this time. This is the biggest cluster fuck I’ve ever
pulled.”

At least when Earth fell apart, there’d
been resources to loot for a little while. She’d known most of the
dangers surrounding her on her home planet. She knew nothing about
this environment, none of its hazards.