1
“Back to work!” the gray-blue-skinned guard shouted. “No slacking off!”
Shalia shifted her gaze, setting her focus on the plant in front of her. She and the other captives had a job to do, and even the most stubborn of them had learned quite early on just how unpleasant their Dohrag captors could make things for them if they wanted. And with these brutish aliens, the crack of a whip would be the least of their concerns.
The violet and yellow plant was covered in small thorns, the prickling ends drawing blood repeatedly throughout the day. The other workers were spread out in the fields, men and women separated not only by gender but also by seniority. As the newest arrivals, Shalia and her fellow captives were bunched together in a small work group while they awaited what one of the guards called processing.
She didn’t know what that meant. They were already working, after all, but after being kept as livestock aboard a Raxxian ship as an eventual food source for her abductors, she figured just about anything would be a considerable improvement from that. She would find out soon enough.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, she’d thought, whenthe Raxxian ship fell under attack, resulting in her and her fellow livestock prisoners winding up crash-landed on the surface of this utterly alien world. And it wasn’t just the planet. Garalla, Fetza, and Nivonk, while females like her, and thus part of her work group, were also aliens. Aliens who had wound up in the same crashed section of the Raxxian ship as Shalia.
Fortunately, the translation runes they had all had tattooed behind their ears during their time with the Raxxians were of decent quality, and as a result, they had little trouble understanding one another. The others had been snatched up from their own worlds, the same as Shalia, taken by their lizard-like abductors for food. How many races were held aboard that ship and in what number was a mystery, but it seemed possible a good many had been spread out across the craft’s many holding compartments.
“Dohrags,” Fetza had said when the flat-faced brutes came across their little group of survivors shortly after their crash landing. “Don’t look them in the eye. And don’t say anything.”
She was a sturdy woman with broad shoulders and thick muscles under her pale violet skin. Fetza’s hair was a light pink, her eyes a deeper shade of the same color, and her hands each sported six fingers instead of five. Four long digits and two thumbs, one on each side of her palm. A trait that turned out to be quite useful when the Dohrags set them to work in the fields.
Harvesting produce. That was their new task. Shalia knew it was far better than being some lizard thing’s food, clearly, but it was also almost anti-climactic after the whole abduction-by-aliens thing. No probes, no exotic adventures, just hard work in the fields. If not for the unusual flora, it could almost be home. Almost.
The newcomer women were given bunks in a freestanding barracks structure, then sent to work at once. The learning curve was fast and steep. Do as you were told, keep your mouth shut, and you would avoid a beating. Violence was something the all-male guard unit seemed to be itching for. And judging by the waythey looked at the women under their oversight, perhaps something else as well.
“So, we just work in the fields?” Shalia asked quietly when they walked back to their quarters on the third day of captivity. “That’s it?”
“Pretty much,” Garalla replied, a sad look clear on her deep-yellow face, though with the slender dangling tentacles hanging from her head it was often kind of hard to say what her mood was for sure, no matter how used to her odd morphology Shalia had become.
Manual labor it would be, apparently, and so they did every day, waking early and heading out, spread among the different crops, always separated from the other workers as they set to their daily task.
The cultivation techniques were actually pretty impressive, Shalia had mused when not commiserating about being a captive, and the landscape around them was quite beautiful despite their situation. The trees bordering the fields were vibrant hues of green, burgundy, and yellow, all surrounded by open skies and the occasional mountain jutting up through the clouds off in the distance.
At least they could appreciate the nature of the place as they worked. When they’d crashed, it had been more of a rush to survive type of situation. Steve, the lone male among them, had taken off to look for food. That had been just before they were discovered and taken. Of course, it was the lone man among their little group of survivors who had avoided capture, but truth be told, it was probably for the best. He would have likely been killed for sport, given what the others said about their captors. But still, it was a source of annoyance.
“Fucking Steve,” Shalia grumbled when they were marched into the Dohrag camp, the other captives agreeing quietly. But that was pretty much the extent of it. What was done was done, and now that they had settled into this new situation, he was all but forgotten.
Shalia learned early on that the Dohrags were a pretty much universally despised race. Brutish and violent, they adhered to the Dotharian Conglomerate rules for the systems in which they operated, but only barely, testing their limitations whenever they felt the group overseeing so much of the galaxy wasn’t looking their way.
Even wearing their customary armor, Shalia could tell the gray-blue men were stocky and muscular, but with almost skeletal noses, wide-set eyes, and broad, flat foreheads. The soldiers were certainly not pleasing to look at, even by alien standards, from what the other women had said. Combined with their overall abusive attitudes, it made for a most unpleasant living arrangement.
The captives simply kept their heads down and worked hard. It was all they could do, until a few days into their captivity, they finally learned what “processing” actually meant.
“The commander will be coming down from orbit this afternoon,” the camp’s ranking officer, a particularly angry-looking general, informed them as they walked out to their daily work. “All newcomers who do not yet bear the mark will gather at their barracks when instructed.”
Shalia waited for more information, but none was forthcoming. And given the nature of their captors, she didn’t think raising her hand to ask a question would be terribly well received.
“It’s what they do once they’ve gathered enough fresh meat,” a green-skinned woman by the name of Flinx, who’d been there a little longer than them, said. “The commander doesn’t come down often. Only when there’s a large enough group of new prisoners.”
“Come down?”
“They have a station in orbit.”
“Why come down at all?” Shalia wondered.
The woman shrugged. “Inspection of the goods, I’d assume. That, and they mark us all with their brand.”
“Branding? Oh, hell no. I’m not being branded!”
“It’s not like that. It’s a tattoo process, no heated metal involved.”
“Then why call it branding?”
