She sat up and surveyed the room. Smooth metal with two doors on opposite ends. And none of it looked remotely Earth-made.
No fucking way, she marveled. “Are we on a spaceship?” she asked aloud.
“Catches on fast, this one,” a middle-aged man with a sizable paunch said with a chuckle. “Yes, hon, this is a spaceship.”
“Don’t call me hon.”
“Hey, sorry. Don’t bite my head off. What am I supposed to call you?”
“Maureen.”
“Ok, Maureen. I’m Heinz. That’s Teodoro and she’s Yvonne. The others, well, they don’t talk much.”
“They’re aliens. I wouldn’t expect them to speak English,” she snarked at him.
He looked at the others and laughed. “Oh, that’s so cute. You think we’re speaking English? None of us are speaking it. Except you, that is.”
“What are you talking about? I hear you speaking it clear as I am.”
Heinz proceeded to show her the rune behind his ear, just as she had been doing for newcomers ever since. “Translation tech. Something to do with liquid in the skin. Pigment of some kind. The big guy who inked us all could tell you more, but they seem to move him around the ship on a whim.”
Maureen rubbed her temples, the beginning of a headache starting to form. She was on an alien ship, captive along with this lot of strange people. It was about as bad as it could get. Almost, anyway. She had a vivid imagination.
At least the aliens she was being held captive with hadn’t tried to eat her, so there was that, but she soon learned that the ones who actuallyhadtaken her were another story altogether.
It was a gruesome lesson that played out before her eyes as the Raxxians, she found her captors were called, visited their compartment over the following weeks, violently taking her companions for food one by one until she was the only one remaining.
It was horrifying, but there was nothing they could do about it facing the massive aliens. They hadn’t been abducted for science. They were livestock, and nothing more.
Maureen had considered her days numbered, wondering when it would be her turn at the low end of the food chain.
But then something unexpected happened. She was taken from her compartment, but not in the way she had expected.
“You. Come with me,” a Raxxian guard said as he strode through her door.
She had been ready to fight him. At least she would go out with some dignity. But something in the way the Raxxian spoke to her gave her pause. She had always been one to trust her gut, so she took a deep breath and followed him. Raxxians were violent and unpredictable, but if he hadn’t killed her already, then maybe she might live to see another day.
She followed closely, but not too close, taking in everything she could, noting the route they were following as well as how many closed doors they were passing.
The corridor was wide, curved at the top, with overhead illumination built right into the metal, providing steady and even light the length of the walkway. There were seams barely visible in regular intervals, spaced out between the doorways, almost as if separating them like segments of an orange.
But what was behind those doors was anyone’s guess. Perhaps more holding compartments. Perhaps something worse.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked in as neutral a tone as possible, careful not to draw the guard’s ire.
“Livestock from your world is damaged. You need to mend it, if you can.”
“A person? You mean someone is hurt?”
The Raxxian’s massive scaled shoulders gave the faintest of shrugs. He didn’t care if the talking meat lived or died, but he had been tasked with saving this one, so he would do as his commander ordered.
“A breeder,” he said dismissively just as they arrived at a sealed compartment not too far from the one Maureen had been held in. “Save it and you will be rewarded.”
With that, he opened the door to a compartment very similar to the one she had just been taken from, only this one still had several occupants, only one of which was human.
The woman was pregnant all right. A breeder, as he’d called her. But she looked to only be thirty or so weeks along and nowhere near ready to pop. She was unconscious, lying on one of the bunks nestled in the wall, pillows beneath her head and knees. A blanket had been draped over her and a small container of clean water placed at the edge of the bunk should she wake and be thirsty.
“Do what you have been tasked,” the Raxxian said, then turned and walked out, sealing the door behind him.
