“Let’s just say we are anatomically compatible and they don’t care if you say no,” he said, his chin wobbling and face averted.
I closed my eyes. Damn, Beth and I had both guessed right, it sounded like.
“So, they made you their plaything?” Gary asked him.
“Yes. Don’t make them mad. If the shock sticks don’t work, they get to, um, train us, in other ways.” His voice broke. Carol reached for his arm, and he shook her off. “Don’t. It happened and probably will again. But I’m stronger than they think. I might have to take it, but they will never have me.”
We all nodded.
“They sent me back to you guys as they deemed me obedient enough now, and so I could talk to you, tell you what’s what. Apparently, the machine they used on me eats a lot of power, so they don’t like using it more than once per load. Our new masters will be responsible for giving you guys translators or teaching you their language.”
“And who are our new masters going to be?” one of the new girls, Anne, demanded.
“Near as I could figure out, they are dropping the ones in the coffins off someplace as they’ve already been paid for. The rest of us are headed for some auction or other.”
The ship began to vibrate, and clicks, chitters, and chirps came over the sound system.
“That says for all to prepare for lightspeed. I suggest finding something heavy to hold onto.”
No sooner had he spoken than the ship gave a large shudder and lurched. It did nothing for our stomachs. I heard a few others join me in retching at the awful sensation of our stomachs falling. I thought I’d felt deep despair before. It turned out there was further yet to fall as we left our home solar system and with it, the faintest of hopes that somehow we’d find a way back. No Space Force astronauts in a modified shuttle would be shooting holes in the ship, busting their way in, to action movie their way through the aliens, and rescue us.
It sounded stupid in my head, but as we flew away, I realized that somewhere, deep down, I’d secretly hoped for exactly that. From the sounds of the sobs around me, I hadn’t been the only one entertaining such a crazy fantasy, either. Once the bumpiness stopped, I moved to sit against the wall, reaching for Sam’s hand. She looked at me gratefully, eyes shimmering, then reached for Bill, one of the new guys. He came and sat down, taking her hand, and in turn, offering his to Patrick. As we traveled out into the deep black unknown, we all sat in solidarity, holding hands. We couldn’t do much, but this we could do. We could provide the comfort of simply being there for each other.
3
ROBBIE
“Well, according to my watch, we’ve been traveling for three days.”
The pronouncement had us nodding, for no other reason than to acknowledge what Sam had said. She might occasionally forget to wind it up, but she remembered more often than not. Having some sort of way to be able to sense the passage of time was a godsend. It let us know we’d survived one more day.
Fred cocked his head, a look of concentration on his face as the loudspeaker came on again. I envied him his ability to understand what the fuckers were saying, but not how he came to be the one elected for the translation beam. It had really messed with his vision, his eyes now having a sort of haze to them, and his depth perception was off.
“I think the engines have slowed down almost to a stop,” Carol said.
Fred nodded. “That jibes with what they’re saying. They are talking about docking with another ship and offloading cargo.”
The door opened, and four guards came in, along with two unarmed crew. They attached four disks onto the coffin on the bottom of each stack of three. As the last disk went on, a light flickered and a low hum sounded as the stacked units began to rise. We watched as the two crew members guided the levitating units carrying the blissfully unconscious people out the door. The two guards smirked at us, shaking the shock sticks and baring their teeth menacingly as they backed out through the door. Once they were gone, I said, “I hate that there was nothing I could do to stop them from taking them.”
“There really wasn’t,” Fred said, laying a hand on my arm.
“Not even if we all rushed them,” Beth added.
“Yeah, they’d have just sent more guards,” one of the girls who’d finally decided to start talking to the rest of us, Mary, said.
“There’s four more, and they probably could pipe some of that gas in here that they used to knock us out to begin with,” Fred continued.
It made sense, but I still hated it. We didn’t need to understand the next announcement to know we were moving on now, delivery completed, as the engines got louder and that horrible lurch happened again.
Sam glanced down at her watch. “That took about half an hour.”
“Probably took a few minutes to connect the two ships,” Gary mused.
“Yeah,” I said.”But you know what? I’ve been thinking, and every one of us that’s male is gay or bi, while the women are straight. How the hell did they know that about us?”
Fred glanced away. “I was still recovering in bed after, um, spending some, ah, time with the captain of the ship when he spoke to someone on a video screen,” he sighed deeply. “The guy was human, and I’m sorry to say that they’re fed that information, in exchange for technology. Those sudden big breakthroughs we’ve had over the last few years? All reverse engineered in exchange for data about people. I was real upset about it, and the captain laughed at me, said that our governments happily placed trackers on our vehicles and stalked our social media, et cetera, to help facilitate our removal.”
Silence reigned for several moments as we all digested the betrayal.
