Warrior Invasion: A Science Fiction Alien Mail Order Bride Romance (TerraMates Book 10) (7 page)

F
rom the moment
they landed on Oretoz, Katie had problems getting her legs to move. They seemed to have turned to liquid and become useless, along with her stomach. Troxeo had told her to be strong when they went in to see Commander Reck, and she had done her best. Katie could only remain standing because she wasn’t required to speak to him. Either she had done a decent job of being brave, or the older alien had been too busy to notice how badly her knees were shaking.

Any trace of bravery that she did have disappeared as Troxeo took her down to her cell. She had nearly begun to think of him as being on her side as he guarded her against the roaring crowds in the city and supported her outside of Commander Reck’s office. But she realized now that she couldn’t have any allies here. Not Arkhan, not Chixo, and certainly not Troxeo. He had been the one to take her in the first place, after all. She was doomed.

The violent motion of the pod made what was left of her stomach shoot up and out of her mouth during their descent. It was very similar to the elevators she knew back home, only smaller and rounder; she and the aliens had to squeeze tightly together if they all wanted to fit in the same one. Most things on Oretoz so far seemed to be like the pods: similar but not the same. The sky was blue, but it was more of a slate blue than the sky on Earth. It made the colors of the buildings and plants stand out more, like the brilliant hues that stood out just after a thunderstorm had cleared.

She had seen a good sampling of the people as they screamed at her and pounded against the fence, and they seemed to be much like Earthlings in that they had a variety of hair, eye, and skin colors. They were all slightly different shapes. The one thing they had in common that wasn’t similar to the humans she knew was that they all had perfect bodies. Every single one of the people in the crowd, either man or woman, was positively ripped with muscles. Katie doubted they knew anything about fast food, frozen dinners, or curling up on the couch in front of the television.

The pod stopped, and Troxeo guided her off it with a firm grip on her upper arm. She was certain she would have his fingers permanently imprinted on her skin by the time they finished. The new floor was crisp and bright. The floors and walls seemed to be made from something like sealed concrete, hard and glossy, but without any visible seams. The beams that came down from the ceiling were so bright that she couldn’t see any light fixtures.

The two guards waiting for them on the other side of the pod doors joined them as Troxeo guided her across the smooth floor. Katie’s feet were ready to give up and drag behind her as the big man led her to her doom. But she forced herself to continue moving one foot in front of the other. The Oretoz thought she was weak, and she didn’t want to prove them right. Katie felt like she was representing humanity.

When they stopped, the sign in front of her must have said 406 in the native language. She couldn’t read the gibberish printed on it. The sign hung on a rectangular cage in the middle of the room. The bars were white and narrowly spaced. There were even bars across the top even though she knew there would never be any hope of climbing out that way. It reminded Katie of a giant hamster cage, and she was the hamster. Troxeo led her in through the door.

“She has to be stripped, Captain,” one of the guards said. He licked his lips, and Troxeo jumped slightly.

Katie looked up at him, and her gaze locked onto his green eyes. There was something in there, a spark of emotion. She thought it was something more than a soldier doing his job. She had tried several times to write him off as an enemy, but she always changed her mind when she looked at him. Katie knew he was her captor, but she suspected that deep down there was more to him than what he showed on the surface.

Apparently he wasn’t going to let his depths show now. With his mouth set in a grim line, he stuck his fingers into the collar of her bodysuit. They were warm and hard as they touched her collar bone. He yanked down swiftly and split the suit in half, the slippery pieces of blue material falling away from her body. She wrapped her arms around herself, but it was no use. There was no place to hide in the cage, and she couldn’t possibly cover all the parts of her that she didn’t want anyone to see.

“Please,” she whimpered, looking up at her captor with uncertainty. “Please don’t do this to me, Troxeo.”

He said nothing. He dropped the scraps of fabric that remained in his fist and let them fall to the floor. The big man hesitated for a fraction of a second, just long enough to make her wonder what he was going to do next. His gaze lingered over her naked body, and she felt even more exposed than before. His green eyes burned with a fire behind them. She cringed, waiting for him to scoop her up and ravage her.

But he kept himself under control, turning and stepping out through the door of the cage. He never stopped and didn’t look back, marching on until she couldn’t see him anymore.

Katie fell to the floor of the cage in exhaustion. The skin on her back stung from the hard surface. One of the guards shut and locked the door before marching away. Katie looked around, searching for any hope of rescue or escape. But the only things she could see were more cages. They were spread throughout the enormous room, twenty feet away from each other, stretching off into the distance. The cages closest to her were unoccupied, but she could see the shapes of other nude forms further away. Were they from Oretoz or were they other strangers taken from their far-away homes?

Her vision blurred as tears pooled up in her eyes and fell onto her cheeks. She was being held captive on an alien planet, and there was nothing she could do about it.

* * *

S
omeone slid
a meal through a tiny opening in the bars near the floor. Katie’s stomach rumbled, but she considered ignoring the food. Perhaps it would be easier to starve to death and choose her fate herself. But she ate despite her reservations, gambling that she still had a faint hope of escape.

The guards had presented her with a platter that wasn’t nearly as appealing as the food Troxeo had brought her on the ship. The round balls of bread were hard and stale, the fruit had gone mushy, and the slab of meat had an odd sheen to it that made her stomach wretch. She assumed the drink was water, but it tasted bitter and stale.

The guards brought her a bucket shortly after they took away her food tray. She knew its purpose even before the stench of it hit her nostrils. It was embarrassing enough to be naked, but now she had to pee out in the open, in front of everyone? She was spared further embarrassment when the guards left her to her own devices, marching off to bring trays or offer buckets to more distant prisoners.

The door to her cage swung open. She didn’t know how long she had been waiting. There were no windows down here, and she hadn’t had a sense of time since she left Earth. There were no sunrises or sunsets to measure the passing hours, but she felt as though she had been lying on the hard floor for days.

“I suggest you get up,” said a voice above her.

Katie cracked open a dry eyelid to see the stout form of Commander Reck. He loomed over her, fists on his hips and wooly eyebrows pressed together in consternation. She didn’t have the energy to be afraid of him any longer. She pulled herself to a sitting position and gestured at the floor in front of her. “Please, make yourself comfortable. It’s so sweet of you to visit. Would you like something to drink?”

Katie wasted her sarcasm. “I’ll stand,” Reck said as he sneered at her. “I’ve come to ask you a few questions. First of all, what do you know about Earth’s plans for invading other planets?”

She looked up at him with bleary eyes. “I work for a finance company. I used to, at least. If you’d like to ask me about their interest rates on personal loans, I’d be happy to help you learn all about it. But I don’t work for the government or the military. No one has invited me to sit in on any of the EarthGov assemblies, so I don’t know anything about plans for invasion. Maybe we will and maybe we won’t. Either way, I never thought it would affect me until Troxeo took me from my ship.”

Reck stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger and paced around the cage. Fortunately, the smelly bucket had been removed at some point by a guard whose job Katie didn’t envy. “Tell me about your general knowledge, then. What does Earth know about Oretoz?”

Katie sighed. They were only on the second question, and the interrogation was already getting old. “Nothing, as far as I know. I had never heard of the place until Troxeo mentioned it.”

“Really?” he fired back. “You were on your way to Bonaan, so apparently humans have perfected interstellar travel.”

“Discovering Bonaan was an accident. There are plenty of planets with life in the universe. Do you think you’re a special snowflake? No one on Earth knows about you, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t care.”
And nobody knows I’m here
, she thought. Maybe starving to death was a better idea than she realized.

“What about your weapons technology? What arms do you have prepared in the event of intergalactic war?” Commander Reck was standing across the cage from her with his hands behind his back.

“Intergalactic war?” Katie thought she might be able to pinch herself and wake up at a science fiction convention. “I don’t know. I keep telling you, I don’t know anything about this stuff. If you wanted someone who knows things, you should have told Troxeo to grab a military strategist and leave me the hell alone.”

Reck’s brows drew closer together, his dark eyes intense beneath them. “I have ways of making you talk, and they are ways I am not ashamed to use. A few rounds of electricity might spark your memory.”

“Do me a favor and make sure you crank it all the way up to the setting where it fries me, okay?” Katie smirked in spite of herself. She would never have spoken to someone like that before. Apparently being in space had changed her. That or the knowledge that she would die soon no matter what happened here.

“Your insolence and hostility will get you nowhere, Earthling.” He stood over her, looking menacing.

“Yeah, because cooperation has gotten me into the penthouse of the Hilton,” she muttered. “I’m just an average person who gets up and goes to work every morning. I lead a very boring life. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. Do you want me to start making stuff up?”

Reck considered her for a moment before speaking. “We have found that people often know more than they realize. We have mind control specialists that are highly trained in retrieving such information. Unfortunately, it is a risky process for the patient. Sometimes the rest of the mind is left completely useless.” Katie had a horrified look on her face.

“If I allow you to take a tour of this floor, you will have the opportunity to see several victims of this process. They can’t speak or hear at all any longer. They shit where they sleep. They are mere shells of their former selves.” He took a step closer to her. All she could see as she looked up at him was the paunch of his belly and his cruel face. “I hear it’s quite painful.”

Katie wasn’t sure anything compared to the pain of being ripped away from her homeland. But she wasn’t going to tell Reck that.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” the commander continued, “and I expect you to have come up with better answers.” A guard swung open the cage door for him. He moved swiftly through and marched off into the distance.

Katie lay on the floor and closed her eyes, tears dripping silently from her face. For the first time since she had boarded the spaceship to Bonaan, she thought about Ben. It was his cheating ass that had inspired her to leave Earth in the first place. If she ever made it back home, she was going to kick him straight in the balls. Then she thought about her mother, whose face had looked concerned as they said their goodbyes at the spaceport. Katie hoped she would have the chance someday to tell her she was right. Her thoughts strayed to strange flashes of her past and her possible future as she fell asleep.

When she awoke, another familiar face stared down at her from the other side of the bars. It was small and pointy, with pale skin and a mane of spiked hair that stood out around it. Katie was looking from nearly the same vantage point she had seen Chixo before, only at that time no bars had been between them.

The alien woman shook her head. “You and those giant breasts of yours. I still say you ought to let me get them fixed for you.”

“No, thank you.” Katie rolled over and crossed her arms over her ample chest. The floor of her cell was cold as well as hard, and her joints and limbs were stiff from sleeping on it.

“Oh, come on. Don’t be like that. I have something to tell you.”

Katie rolled over to glare at Chixo, but she didn’t remove her arms from her breasts. “What do you want?”

“I have a message for you from Arkhan.” Chixo licked her lips, looking for the right words to say. “He’s trying to get you out of here. He’s on guard duty for this building tomorrow, and he thinks he can pull it off.” Her words were barely above a whisper, but she had every ounce of Katie’s attention.