“Why’s that?” Ziana asked. “Are we special because we’re humans?”
He laughed at that, his body jiggling from his mirth. “Oh, no one cares about that, I can assure you. But you two are lacking the runes.”
“What runes? You mean the tattoos all of you have? We already heard about those. Some sort of cultural thing. That’s why everyone has them.”
“Oh, they’re far more than that. The Dotharian Conglomerate requiresby lawthat anyone within its realms has them. And you two most certainly do not.”
“But we’re not from here,” Maria objected. “We were abducted against our will.”
“That would be the definition of abduction,” he noted with an amused chuckle. “But it doesn’t matterwhyyou don’t have the runes. It only matters that they are lacking. And let me tell you, you do not want the Dotharians to find you without runes. It’s one of the things they takeveryseriously.”
Ziana shook her head. “So, what are we supposed to do? It’s not onlynotour fault we don’t have them, but we’ve also been locked in here for I don’t even know how many weeks, so there’s no way we could have dealt with that even if we’d known it was an issue.”
“Don’t worry about that. One of two things will happen when we finally reach wherever it is they’re planning on offloading us, and that will be that.”
“Why does the way you said that worry me?”
A little grin creased his lips. “Because you’re a perceptive one,” he replied. “Look, it’s going to happen one way or another. There’s no way anyone will not notice you lack the runes, and that will affect your value. So, you’ll either be given the runes by whichever Skrizzit they have on-hand, or you’ll be deemed not worth the expenditure.”
“And if that happens?”
“You’ll be handed over to the Dotharians for violation of the law. Probably executed, though maybe, just maybe, they’ll be lenient and only sentenced to life in a penal colony since you were taken by Raxxians.No onelikes Raxxians, even the Dotharians.”
“But they allow them to operate under their noses.”
“Because the Raxxians are a powerful and violent race. They don’t tempt outright confrontation, only snatching up people from the fringes for the most part. That and war prisoners. But they manage to not cross the line with the Dotharians, and the Dotharians, in turn, do not seek to pursue any conflict with them unless there is absolutely no option. They have been known to take down a few ships here and there if there is a particularly egregious violation, but they always do it in as diplomatic a way as possible.”
“How do you destroy an entire ship diplomatically?” Maria interjected.
“By giving them an out. Letting them say it was a rogue captain who was operating on their own and without permission. Sure, it’s a messy system, but it’s better to allow a few minor transgressions to be dealt with like that than to devolve into a full-fledged interstellar war, wouldn’t you agree?”
They both had to admit that actually made sense. It still sucked, this whole ridiculous situation, but at least some of the alien logic wasn’t so, for lack of a better word,alien.
Ziana shook her head. “So, we just wait and see what they do to us? Is that about it?”
“I’m afraid so. But hey, at least whatever happens to you two, it’ll be quick.”
Neither woman was terribly appreciative of his good humor, but then, in the long time they’d been confined as prisoners in this transport container, they’d come to expect the worst while not even hoping for the best. After their experience with the Raxxians, it had become second nature realizing that having hope was not a wise move.
At the end of the day, life was pretty shit, and neither woman could believe how they had gotten into this mess in the first place.
CHAPTER TWO
Ziana and Maria had compared notes on their abductions, as well as the living conditions aboard the Raxxian ship at length. They were stuck in a slow-moving transit container, after all. Time was one thing they had an overabundance of, and conversation with someone from home was as good a way to pass the time as any.
They discussed all manner of things in their weeks together. Weeks that stretched into months, so far as they could tell, given the lack of a proper timekeeping method beyond the irregular arrival of food through the delivery slots. They talked about their lives, their homes, pretty much anything and everything, and, in time, even things they usually kept to themselves. It wasn’t as if they had any secrets worth keeping, after all. Not now. Not on this planet far from Earth.
Of course, they also dove into their individual experiences with the whole Raxxian abduction thing. It had been fairly similar for both of them. Each had been snatched up at night, and each of them was out on their own when it had happened. It seemed to be a common theme with the green-scaled bastards who took them. They were aggressive and violent, but they alsopreferred to operate in ways where they had the clear advantage, targeting individuals rather than groups, and typically at night. As a result, their victims never knew what hit them and there was no one around to help.
Each had woken up aboard the Raxxian ship, surrounded by aliens and, in Maria’s case, a few other humans as well. All of them had the same tale. One minute they were going about their lives, the next they were waking up much later, confined to a single compartment aboard the Raxxian livestock ship.
Livestock.
Cattle.
Food.
That’s all they were to them. There would be no experimentation, no anal probes. The Raxxians didn’t care about any of that. These were pieces of meat, nothing more, destined to be someone’s meal, and food didn’t warrant the effort. The one exception to that was the need for them to be able to follow directions when herded from one compartment to another.
