Ice Planet Barbarians: The Complete Series: A SciFi Alien Serial Romance (2 page)

Everyone’s terrified of them, too.

I figure this out when I wake up the next morning—though I suppose it could be the afternoon—and see everyone else is awake. The last of the dopey meds seem to have worn off, and I stifle a yawn, blinking. I want to be silent, because silent is good. It takes me a moment to realize everyone’s moving to the far side of the cage, huddling away from the bars. The hairs on the back of my neck rise, and I follow the others, heading to the back. I want to ask what’s going on, but the moment I open my mouth, Liz shakes her head silently, her gaze fixed on something over my shoulder.

I turn and flinch at the sight of a basketball-headed alien peering through the bars at me. I flinch again when he gives me a leering grin, and I scoot closer to the others.

“No screaming,” someone murmurs as a warning.

God, this is freaking me out. I nod. No way am I making a sound.

The ball heads remain in our room all day. It’s like they’re waiting for something. I’m afraid to wonder what it is. We huddle in the corner of the cage, on edge, and another unconscious girl is brought into the room after a few hours. No one even tries to escape when they open the door. We just sit and watch as they shove the newest girl inside and close the door again.

I can guess why no one wants to attempt a break out. Where would we go? And the consequences of disobedience must be bad, because everyone in the cage is utterly frightened by the basketball heads.

Someone grabs the new girl by the arm and tries to pull her into our huddled pile. She’s about my age and has pretty red hair. I notice the ball heads keep coming back to the cage and commenting on her in their weird garbled language, making hand gestures from time to time. Then they laugh, a high-pitched, eerie sound that grates on my frayed nerves.

It’s almost like they’re taking bets on the new girl.

A few hours later, she wakes up. I’m hunkered down next to Liz, and I startle out of my stupor when she inhales sharply.

The girl sobs aloud, her eyes going wide.

“Don’t scream,” I hear a low voice hiss. I can’t make out who’s said it, but I know we’re all thinking it.

The redhead isn’t listening, though. She takes one look around her, panics, and begins to scream. Her shrill cry echoes in the hold. She won’t stop, even though others are waving their hands and touching her, trying to calm her down. She’s hysterical, her cries getting louder and more panicked the more awake she gets. She flails and thrashes against our warning touches.

Something beeps overhead.

The others in the cage go utterly still.

Weird bird-like chirps fill the air from the intercom.

One of the ball heads touches a panel that lights up, and he gargles a response. The crowd of girls seems to shrink back as the other ball head approaches the cage and opens the door.

It’s freedom, but no one’s reaching.

The redhead is snagged. She’s a fighter, I’ll give her that. She thrashes and flails as they touch her, screaming obscenities in French and shrieking for help. Everyone else sits quietly, watching.

I can’t stand this. I try to get up, to go help her. Liz grabs my leg. “Don’t,” she hisses. “Don’t call attention to yourself, Georgie. Trust me.”

Even though it goes against everything inside me to do nothing, I’m terrified too. It’s too easy to sit down and huddle with the mass of girls again. To sit and wait and see what happens when someone disobeys the unspoken gag order. And I hate myself for it.

A moment later, the redhead’s dragged to what I thought was an examining table. I watch in horror as one of the ball heads slaps some sort of mask over her mouth. When she goes silent, I realize it’s a muzzle of some kind. My own mouth thins, my teeth clamping together. I feel sick as her hands are stretched over her head and bound at the far end of the table with a cord that snakes around her wrists. Her hips and legs hang over the edge and I start imagining the worst.

She continues to kick and flail as one of the aliens grabs her skirt and rips it from her body.

“Don’t look,” Liz whispers to me.

I look, though. Someone has to look. Someone has to see.

Sick at heart, I watch as the redhead bucks and tries to free herself. I watch as the first alien undoes the front of his uniform with a touch at the collar. I watch as his friend makes laughing comments as he mounts the gagged woman.

I watch, dry-eyed and full of hate as they laugh and get on top of her over and over again. It seems to go on forever. At some point she stops fighting and goes limp, and I hope she’s passed out. I hope she doesn’t remember any of this.

Liz squeezes my hand. “Kira says they have standing orders that they’re allowed to ‘discipline’ any misbehaving captives.”

I nod and finally look away as the aliens talk in their weird language and switch places once more. I’m guessing she’s good and “disciplined”’ by now. I want to scream, but loud noises aren’t allowed. I dig my nails into my palms and gaze down the row of pale faces in the pen with me, trying to figure out which one is Kira. A girl at the end with silky, flat brown hair is weeping with her hands pressed to her ears. It’s as if she can’t stand to hear what’s going on, but the redhead is silent. There’s only alien chatter.

That must be Kira. She’s the only one who can understand them, thanks to the device implanted in her ear. I scan the others. They’re in shock, eyes averted. One girl wears a look of horrified grief, and I wonder if she was a screamer, too. I decide I don’t want to know. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to drown out the world. Trying to exist in a quiet bubble where none of this is real. Where if I pinch my arm hard enough, everything will go away and I’ll wake up.

But when I close my eyes, I see the redhead’s face as she’s raped. I see the ball head’s face as he jokes and yammers away in his alien language as he rapes the girl. As if it’s no big deal, just another day at the office, typical water-cooler shit.

Liz is right. We’re nothing but cattle to these things. They’re going to sell us to someone else to rape, to eat, or both. Or something else more horrible that I can’t even imagine.

I’m not going to take my fate sitting down, though. I cross my arms tightly over my pajamas, draw my legs up, and study my surroundings. I look at each nook and cranny of the strange walls, trying to determine if there’s anything I can grab that can be used as a weapon.

Because I’m going to kill those pebbly, gross bastards if they ever try to touch me.

 • • • 

No one else comes on board the ship for the next week, so I’m starting to suspect we’re “full.” Which is good, considering that our tiny hold gets more and more crowded-feeling with every hour. Now with Dominique—the brutalized redhead—squeezed in with us, we feel like sardines.

Not that anyone is jumping up to complain.

Liz and I talk quietly during the night, when the guards leave us alone. We must be heading out to space now. Our ears have been popping repeatedly during the last few days, and we suspect we’ve begun traveling at a high speed.

And we don’t know what to do about it.

“We start with killing the guards,” I tell Liz and Kira for the second time tonight. “The little green men seem to have the basketball heads doing all the grunt work. I think if we get rid of the orange ones, maybe we can bully our way into demanding a return to Earth.”

“Tiny flaw in this plan, Georgie,” says Liz, ever the practical one. She gestures at the bars of the cage. “We’re on this side, and they’re on the other side. With guns.”

“We need to do something to prompt them to open the door.” Kira’s quiet voice cuts through the darkness. “I would say we could wait for another captive to show up, but . . .”

“Yeah,” I say thoughtfully, my gaze sliding over to where Dominique huddles in a corner, alone. She’s been a straight-up mess ever since they’d returned her to the cage. She’s quiet now, of course. She spends her waking hours with her fist stuffed against her mouth and biting down on it, tears streaming down her face. And she resists all attempts to befriend her or calm her down. It’s going to take time and patience, and because we’re all crammed into something the size of a closet, patience is running short at the moment.

I look back over at Kira and Liz’s grim faces, thinking hard. “What if we all pretend to be sick the next time they come to feed us?”

“That won’t be too hard,” Liz says. “Those seaweed bars are fucking nasty.”

But Kira shakes her head. “And what if they decide that since we’re all sick, they’ll just dump everyone into space? We’re extras, remember? As long as they have their quota in those pods, we’re expendable.” She gestures at the lockers on the opposite side of the room.

I can’t forget them. I don’t know if I’m jealous that they’re completely unaware of our situation or even more horrified at what they’re going to go through when they wake up. But she’s right. The pod people being safe and secure makes us superfluous, and I’m not willing to add “sabotage the pods” to the escape plan. Nor am I willing to leave them behind. We’ll simply have to factor them in. “Well then,” I say. “What if we scream?”

Kira swallows audibly. “That terrifies me.” She peers over my shoulder at Dominique and shudders.

“I don’t like it either,” I tell her. “But what are our options? One misbehaving person ensures that everyone else stays safe, right? So we get their attention, get them to open the doors . . .”

“And?” Liz prompts. “What? Get raped?”

“No.” I don’t even want to think about that. “We need a distraction of some kind. We can rush them when they open the doors. There are more of us than them.”

“But they have guns,” Kira points out.

“But if we all rush them—”

“Then the ones in front get shot,” Liz says. “I don’t want to be here, but I don’t want to die. And I don’t know that the others do, either. They’re not really fighters. None of us are.”

“But what choice do we have?” I protest. “We can be good little slaves and still get raped and still get sold off for God knows what. At least if we fight back, we have a chance.”

“No, you’re right.” Liz draws her knees up close to her chest, thinking. “So we make a distraction, have them open the doors, rush them, take the guns, and take control. We just need to make sure Kira’s protected through all of this.”

“Me?” Kira looks surprised. “Why?”

“Because you’re the one with the translator,” Liz says grimly. “We’re not going to be able to convince them to turn around and go back to Earth if you get shot and we can’t talk to them.”

She has a point. “I’ll be the distraction. It’s my plan.”

“You sure?”

God, no, I’m not sure. Every part of my body vibrates with terror at the thought of those pebbly-skinned creatures touching me. But what choice do I have? Sit back and do nothing? Roll over and let these creatures decide my fate? Screw that. “I’ll do it.”

As if agreeing with me, the ship lurches and dips, sending us all sprawling.

Not a single person screams, of course. We know better.

• • •  

For the second time that day, the ship lurches. Turbulence is a little ridiculous, considering that we’re in space. Isn’t it supposed to be a smooth ride? My stomach lurches along with it, but I ignore it.

It’s almost time for our plan.

I stare at the guard pacing outside of our cell. It’s what we consider “bedtime,” in which we’ve received the last seaweed bar of the day and the guards are getting bored with harassing us. Normally after the last feeding, they change our waste bucket and then head out.

But tonight, things are off. Even though our waste bucket is nearly full, the ball head isn’t coming to get it. Chirping sounds keep coming over the intercom, and the guard in the room is more and more agitated as the minutes tick past.

And the whole time, the ship keeps lurching.

“What’s going on?” I whisper to Kira as we watch the single guard pace back and forth, distracted. “Where’s the other basketball head?”

“I don’t know,” she admits, her hand pressing to her ear and the silvery device curled there. “Some of the words don’t translate over. Or they do, but I don’t know what they mean.” She shakes her head. “I think there’s something going on with the engine, though. They keep talking about detaching the cargo and offloading to a safe location.”

The pit of my stomach curdles. “Um, we’re the cargo.”

She grimaces. “I know. Apparently they’re going to miss a ship date if they do, though, so they’re trying to work around it.”

“Lucky us,” I murmur, glancing at the one guard. Only one. Normally there are two. My body tenses with realization. If we take down the one guard . . . there will only be one to deal with later. Our odds are much better if we divide and conquer.

And if we have his gun.

“I think we should move ahead with our plan,” I say in a low voice as the guard begins to pace again.

“I don’t know,” Kira says, chewing on her lip. But Liz nods at me.

“We’re going for it,” I whisper to the others in the cage. The girls look uncomfortable, but they move aside to give me room. If I’m willing to be the sacrificial lamb, they’re willing to let me sacrifice myself.

So I steel my courage, head to the cage bars, and stick my face between the slats of the prison. “Hey.”

The guard doesn’t turn. He keeps pacing, his gaze flicking at the ceiling as if expecting more of those weird chirping orders to come down.

I try again. “Hey. Over here.” When he doesn’t pay attention to me, I admit I’m surprised. Normally they take any excuse to punish us. I’ve seen another girl raped over the last week because she’d cried out in a nightmare. So I try a new tactic to get his attention.

I hock a big wad of spit at him.

It lands on the back of his big bald head, and he stops in his pacing. His weird little fish-eyes get round as he turns to glare at me, then stalks across the storage bay toward our cage.

“Good job, Georgie,” Liz breathes.

I suck in a deep breath and nod. I don’t feel so good about it, but hey. I retreat to the back of the cage like we’ve planned—so he’ll have to come in after me—and when the other girls close ranks around me, I haul the shit bucket up into my arms.