Genesis (28 page)

It wasn’t until then that Bri discovered that there was undoubtedly at least one other level of habitats because there were far more people, both Hirachi and Earth people, than had been housed on the level she’d grown so familiar with.

Did that mean that their guesstimate of the enemy had been totally off the mark, too?

She feared it probably did, but then she realized that the more times the number was multiplied, the greater the odds in their favor … possibly.

Briefly, as they all converged in the docking bay, she encountered Consuelo, the first time since they’d fallen out. After looking at her uncomfortably several times, Consuelo finally broke the cold silence between them. “I’m sorry for what I said to you, Bri. It was just that … it frightened me … the fight … the bots coming out. I was afraid they would turn and begin to shoot all of us.”

It was an apology, she supposed. It didn’t make Bri feel any better, but she swallowed the dregs of her own anger and nodded. “It scared the hell out of me, too--not that I realized what was happening with the bots.”

Consuelo’s face crumpled. “I’m disgraced!” she gasped. “Everyone will say I am a whore when I go home. My mother will disown me. My brothers … I don’t know what I will do!”

She’d suspected as much, and a jolt still went through Bri at the distressed confession. What could she say? Don’t worry, you’ll never go home again so you
can’t
be in disgrace? It wasn’t something that would comfort
her
. Before she could think of anything at all to say, though, they were separated as the lines began to move forward again.

The ride down to the surface of the planet was absolutely the most terrifying thing Bri had ever had to endure in her life. Like cattle, they were packed into the transport until they could do nothing but stand shoulder to shoulder and back to breast--and the much shorter Earth women could hardly even breathe. Cory began to wail long before the thing took off, and there was nothing about the ride to reassure him at all. He alternated between screaming and crying almost non-stop.

Bri struggled to protect him from the powerful battering they took the best she could as the ship entered the atmosphere, but if not for the fact that they’d been packed too tightly to actually fall down she thought all of them would’ve. When the ship impacted with the ground, however, she discovered they
could
fall. The jar of the impact made her knees give way, everyone’s. They crumpled into a screaming, clawing, tangled mass as the transport slammed into the ground.

The trip down didn’t take nearly as long as she’d thought it must--not surprising since it was practically a freefall. The time element of the round trip seemed to be mostly taken up with disentangling the cargo once they arrived. Battering and bruising was the least of the injuries. Cory’s forehead had slammed into her face at one point, busting her lip and lifting a hen egg on his forehead. She was pretty sure she’d gotten several broken toes from being stepped on. Her ribs ached because someone’s elbow had caught her, and she was afraid that one or more ribs were cracked.

Some of the women had to be carried out, however. Some to be treated, and a half dozen to be disposed of because by the time the Hirachi managed to get off of them, they’d been crushed to death.

Needless to say, the Hirachi fared better. Some were limping as they moved off the transport, but she didn’t see any of them in the growing pile of bodies being tossed to one side of the off ramp the Sheloni used to unload them.

She didn’t want to look, but she couldn’t seem to keep her eyes from straying to the horror of piled human bodies. Angie, the software specialist she’d placed the most hope on, was in the ‘discard’ pile, and recognition of the woman’s face not only sent a jolt of shock through her but crushed the hope she’d clung to like a lifeline since she’d been forced to accept the fact that she was never going to be free of the Sheloni unless she freed herself.

She looked away at once, fighting the sting of tears of hopelessness, struggling even harder for breath with the choke of tears added to the pain in her ribs. It was the realization that she had to know the worst that directed her gaze toward the human refuse pile again, the realization that she had to know how many of the women they’d pinned their hopes on that had died.

Pain like a knife blade stabbed through her chest when she saw Consuelo and Manuel among the dead. Bile rose in throat. Between battling the urge to throw up, the tears that blinded her, and the painful tightness of her chest, Bri gave up on trying to see what she hadn’t wanted to see to start with.

She hadn’t had the chance to patch things up with Consuelo. It had seemed that Consuelo was trying. She’d finally put aside her anger and resentment and offered a truce, but the friendliness they’d had before was gone, and now there would be no chance to try to regain what they’d lost.

Anger finally sparked to life, quelling the urge to cry or be sick. If the bastards had spared any thought at all to the welfare of their slaves they would have had enough sense to at least separate the females from the males and give the women a little better odds of surviving! Consuelo had been too little to protect herself in that mass of giants, let alone poor little Manuel!

She fought down the anger when it had suppressed the sense of hopelessness and grief. She was still alive and Cory was still alive, and he depended upon her to save him. She wasn’t going to let him down! She had to be strong, physically and mentally. She couldn’t allow herself to wallow in useless emotions.

A bot waited at the end of the ramp, threading lengths of chain into the ankle restraints everyone wore, allowing only enough room between them to take a step, which forced them to march in sync. The world, what she could see of it, as everyone was allowed to spread out a little and she could see more than broad backs, sent her spiraling off into a profound shock of the senses. Feeling as if she’d been caught up in a dream/nightmare, she gaped at her surroundings, unable to really assimilate what her eyes recorded around her.

It was more than her banged up ribs, she realized finally, that made it so hard to breathe. The world--or at least the part where they’d set down--was like a primal, equatorial jungle--hot, unbelievably humid. The ground beneath her feet was as hard and unyielding as rock. Patches of red and yellow and black soil alternated with crushed vegetation. Sprouting from the ground to either side of the line of bodies were plants so bizarre it was almost impossible to think of them as plants--except that they were predominantly green like plants.

Their movements were halting and awkward. Chained together, they followed a narrow trail like ants threading their way through tall grass. Behind and before her were Hirachi men tall enough to see over a good bit of the plants, she was sure, and plants crowding close on either side. She caught a glimpse of a red sun, huge in the sky--which was pinkish and studded with what appeared to be a mixture of storm laden clouds, smoke, and dust.

Mars’ sky had a pinkish look to it because of all the Martian dust in the air. Was that why the sky looked more pink than anything else? Or was it the color of this world’s sun? Or maybe a combination of many factors? It wasn’t lack of oxygen. She was sure she would’ve felt the effects of that very quickly. In any case, she was familiar enough with high humidity.

No blue skies. No golden sun. She couldn’t even pretend the plants looked familiar or were just exotic--like the unfamiliar plants of a tropical region.

Homesickness assailed her.

She hadn’t realized that somewhere in the back of her mind she’d nursed the hope/belief that the world would look like home, that she’d be able to draw comfort from that and try to pretend she
was
home. She’d tried to convince herself she had no real expectations, but she’d figured since they were all oxygen breathing beings that the planet must be similar to Earth. To have to provide breathing equipment and/or protective suits for so many would surely defeat the purpose of stealing biological entities for labor rather than using robots.

One of the Hirachi muttered a comment to another. She didn’t catch all of it, but she caught enough to realize that he was remarking on how similar the world was to
their
home world.

Bully for them, she thought angrily!

She had suspected the habitat had been designed for them--red sun, warm, and humid, and she still felt persecuted, an irrational sense of injustice that the world was like theirs rather than Earth, even though, reluctantly, she had to admit that it was at least similar to what she was used to in temperature.

Except it was far worse than anything she’d ever experienced before, despite the fact that she’d grown up in a semi-tropical, very humid area.

She realized it must be nearly unbearable for the women who were from cooler climates. As hard a time as she was having, it was going to be harder on them, and she wondered how many more would die before they could adjust.

She’d walked until it had begun to be a race to see which part of her body was going to give out first--her arms and back from carrying Cory, or her lungs from struggling with the thick air, or her legs. Pain dogged her from the first because of her injured toes and ribs, but it became more and more unbearable as time went on. She shifted the baby from one hip to the other and back again, but when the Hirachi male behind her offered to take the baby, she shook her head, clutching him tighter.

She was ready to drop where she stood when they came at last to a knoll overlooking a vast, yellow sea. Walls rose up at the edge of the jungle almost like a part of it. Like embracing arms, the walls wrapped around a wide, virtually bare area of land and sea--more sea than land from what she could see from where she stood.

The ground was bare of anything. There were no habitats, no limits that she could see at all beyond the walls.

Disbelief, and then fear settled in her belly in a knot.

They were turning all of them in together!

She saw the same dawning of fear in all the other women’s eyes as they reached the bot that was removing the tethers from their ankle restraints at the yawing gate in the side of the wall. The women who’d already been freed moved into a growing cluster just inside the compound. The Hirachi men seemed content to ignore them in favor of investigating their surroundings.

It lessened her anxiety, but not as much as she would’ve liked.

“God! What are we going to do now?” a woman near Bri asked in a suffocated voice as Bri instinctively moved toward ‘her own kind’.

Bri glanced around until she’d identified the woman who’d spoken. She didn’t recognize the woman, but she didn’t know if that was only because she hadn’t seen her up close before, or if she was from one of the other areas of the alien ship.

It was really a rhetorical question, she supposed, and, weighed down with pain, grief, and depression, she was tempted to simply ignore it. She realized, though, that everyone, including her, needed something to bolster their spirits. “We assess the situation and formulate a plan,” she responded finally, infusing as much confidence into the statement as she could muster.

She didn’t feel any. She felt as hopeless and scared as the rest of the women looked.

The comment evoked a cacophony of responses from the other women, mostly questions she didn’t have an answer for. And most of the questions only added to her own fear and depression. The defeatism in everything they said, their postures, and their faces sparked a thread of irritation in her, though. She stepped away from them and turned to face them, waiting until they’d gotten quieter. “Did anybody
not
see the women who died on the trip down and were tossed aside like yesterday’s garbage?”

The question silenced the few who’d continued to exchange worried, unanswerable questions.

“We’re slaves. I’ve got no more idea what the Sheloni are expecting of us than you do, but I do know I’m not going to simply accept this fate. Maybe we’d be better off under their thumb, but I don’t think so.”

“They want us alive. They’ll take care of us, feed us,” someone deep in the group pointed out. “It isn’t like we wouldn’t be working to live if we were still on Earth.”

Damn the woman for unerringly pinpointing the root of all their fears. “I can’t argue with that,” Bri responded. “I can’t even argue with the fact that we’ve always had someone to tell us what to do--bosses, maybe husbands, or boyfriends, or fathers, or mothers. We’ve had ‘big brother’ watching over us, too, our governments, police, military. This is different, though. We can’t quit. We can’t move out. We have no protection or recourse if they decide we’ve done something wrong. There’s no one to stop them from punishing us anyway they feel like punishing us, whether we’re guilty or not, whether the punishment fits the crime or not. There’s no one to stop them if they decide to kill any one of us because they’ve decided they have no use for us.

“The trip from Earth was enough to convince me that the Sheloni are by far the worst thing we could face. If the rest of you aren’t convinced yet … let me know when you change your mind.”

“You’re talking … you aren’t seriously considering living out there? My god! Did you see this place? It’s … like prehistoric! I half expected to run into a dinosaur! There’s no place to escape
to
! The wildest woods at home are like a walk in the park compared to this place--and at home there’d be civilization somewhere. There would be hope of reaching it. Here, there’s nothing.”

As bad as Bri hated to admit it, the woman had a point. In all the time she’d considered how impossible and dangerous it would be to try to take over the ship, she hadn’t imagined they’d be dumped on anything like this. How could she? When she thought of woods, she thought of the woods she passed by on the highway. “Well! Far be it from me to suggest you give up the luxurious accommodations here!” she responded angrily, gesturing around at the empty pen where they all stood looking around hopefully as if their miserable habitats were going to suddenly appear. “I’m going to look around and find a comfy spot for me and Cory.”