Chapter 7
The door clanged shut, and the din of the gathering hall died away. Natalie kicked and scratched and screamed. “Put me down! Let me go!”
The big stranger set her on her feet and stepped back. Once free, Natalie calmed down and regarded him. He didn’t look so imposing up close, but his mask still gave him a mysterious air. His green eyes caught her and held her with their enthralling intensity.
A brisk breeze touched Natalie’s skin, and she shivered. She was outside, naked again, and the people in the foyer gave her curious glances. She would have straightened herself out if she’d been wearing anything. Instead, she squared her shoulders and faced the stranger.
He closed his eyes and bowed his head. “You are free to go if you wish.”
Natalie looked around. “Thank you for....I mean, I’ll just go back to....” She glanced toward the hall.
“You cannot go back in there,” he told her.
“Why not?” she asked. “I have to find my.....I mean, I have to get back to the men who brought me here.”
He shook his head. “You cannot go back to them. Anyone left alive in that room will be taken into custody. The recovered slaves will be taken to a rehabilitation center on this planet’s moon.”
“Taken into custody?” Natalie repeated. “You mean they’ll be arrested.”
“That is what I mean,” he replied. “These gatherings are highly illegal, and most of the slaves are contraband species, like yourself. They will be rehabilitated and returned to their home worlds.”
Natalie brightened up. “So I’ll be sent back to Earth? Oh, thank God!”
“Not you,” he replied. “You can go to the rehabilitation center, but you won’t go back to Earth. Do you want to go to the rehabilitation center?”
Natalie’s face fell. “I don’t think I want to go there, but why can’t I go back to Earth.”
He inclined his head to one side. “I think you’d better come with me. You can’t go back to the men who brought you here, and you can’t stay on this planet. Come with me to my ship. You can recover there and decide what you want to do.”
Natalie looked around again. The guests pointed at her and whispered to each other. For the first time, Natalie cowered in shame at her own naked body. She had to get out of there, if for no other reason than to hide herself from them. Still, she didn’t want to go to any rehabilitation center. That was the last place in the world she wanted to go. “All right.”
He eyed her. “You can trust me. You’re safe from those men now.”
Natalie snorted. “Yeah, right.”
He didn’t blink. “Will you let me take you back to my ship? I believe you’ll be better off there than at the rehabilitation center.”
Natalie sighed, and her shoulders slumped. He didn’t pick her up again. She couldn’t have tolerated it if he did. He turned to one side, and she walked at his side back to the room where her regeneration bed still waited for her. She cast a wistful glance at it. If only she could get into it now and forget about all this. Where were Fo and Te and Ee? What would become of her, now that they were gone? Would she ever trust anyone else again?
The stranger noticed her looking at the bed. “Come with me. All will become clear to you soon.”
He took a small round pad out of his pocket. Before Natalie could utter a word, he touched the screen and a deafening explosion battered her ears. She tried to cover her ears to protect herself from the noise, but even before she could raise her arms, the room vanished and she found herself on a wire platform in a vaulted cargo bay. Some kind of vehicle she’d never seen before sat on the floor far below her, and indistinct figures walked around engaged in various tasks.
Natalie studied the bay. “Is this your ship?”
“This is it.” He turned away and started walking along a suspended catwalk. Natalie had no choice but to follow.
At the end of the catwalk, he opened a door and ushered her into a warm, carpeted corridor lined with glass windows. He conducted her into the first room they came to and opened a panel in the wall. He flicked through a bunch of garments on hangers and murmured to himself. “Let’s see. These will all be too big for you. Here. This will do. Put this on.”
He handed her an emerald green jumpsuit. Natalie held it up to herself. It covered her arms and legs and clasped around the neck. “What about underwear?”
He narrowed his eyes. “What is that? I don’t know that word.”
Natalie dropped her eyes. “Never mind.”
She slipped into the jumpsuit and fastened the clasps. The stranger led the way back down the hall. On the way, Natalie stole fleeting glances through the windows and could hardly believe what she saw. In one, women sat on the floor surrounded by children and toys. In another, three young men sat in a semi-circle around an old man with a long white beard. He waved his hands while they listened to him with rapt attention.
Farther down the hall, one window showed a view of an exercise studio. A group of men and women practiced some kind of hand to hand combat. All these people represented different alien species. Natalie recognized most of the species from her experiences at the gatherings to which Fo and his men took her to perform.
At last, the big stranger ushered her through a door into a room without windows. A collection of desks surrounded a big swivel chair in the middle of the room, and panels of lights and computer displays and dials covered the walls. Massive alien males of a species Natalie didn’t recognize sat at the desks, and another male sat in the chair in the middle. Gold and silver and colored decorations covered the chest of his uniform. He turned to face Natalie when she entered.
He nodded first to the masked stranger and rose from his seat. “You are welcome here, Earthling female. I am Commander Axilon, and this is the Star Destroyer Mixtidelin. This is my command bridge, as you can see.”
“You must be Surveyors,” Natalie remarked. “I’ve heard about you.”
“Surveyors,” the Commander replied, “is a derogatory term the pirates and traders use for the Galactic Police Force. We hunt them to stop them trading in helpless people they kidnap from their home worlds. We did not know they trafficked in your species, but your species carries the heaviest penalty of all creatures.”
“Three other Earthling females were taken along with me,” Natalie told him. “Have you found any of them? I really wish I could find out what happened to them.”
“As I said,” he replied, “we didn’t even know about you, and we have no information about any other Earthlings among the pirates. Now that we know they are out there somewhere, we can keep searching until we find them. In the meantime, you are welcome here. You may find this ship more comfortable than the one you left behind.”
Natalie looked around. “Thank you for taking me in, but I wasn’t uncomfortable on the ship I left behind. I was never uncomfortable, but now I’m hungry. I haven’t been back in the regeneration bed in hours. I should get back there soon.”
“You won’t go back to the regeneration bed,” the Commander told her. “They are highly illegal. If you are hungry, we can arrange food and drink for you. You’ll be given quarters where you can recover from your ordeal. If you require medical attention, our staff will attend to your needs.”
“I’m telling you it wasn’t an ordeal,” she countered. “It was actually pleasant and enjoyable. I’m not so sure about this place. I mainly came to find out how I can get back to Earth. Your man there....” She pointed to the masked stranger.
“His name is Kyan,” the commander told her.
Natalie shrugged. “He said the other slaves would be returned to their home worlds, so why can’t I?”
“As I told you,” the Commander replied, “the regeneration beds are highly illegal. You’ve been altered genetically. You couldn’t return to your home planet without your people detecting the change. According to your genetic make-up and how many times you have been altered, I estimate you have been gone from your planet for six revolutions of your Earth moon.”
Natalie gasped. “Six months! How could I be gone so long?”
“The regeneration bed altered you at a cellular level every time you used it,” he went on. “In many ways, you are no longer fully human.”
Natalie cradled her swimming head with her hand. “I can’t stay here. I have to get back to my family and my friends and my home.”
He furrowed his eyebrows. “You will receive compensation from the Galactic Fund to compensate you for your ordeal, so you will never have to worry about your future. But you can never go back to Earth. You can go anywhere in the galaxy, but not there.”
Natalie staggered back down the hall behind Kyan’s towering frame. She barely saw anything on the way back. Only one thought kept beating against her brain. She could never go home again. She would never be human again. What was the point of trying to find her friends? She was too altered, in every possible way to have anything to do with them.
She didn’t pay attention to where he led her, so before she knew it, he stopped in a plush room with a neat table and chairs in the middle and soft couches and chairs around the perimeter. Through another open door she spied a bed—a regular sleeping bed, not a regeneration bed—laid out with duvets and pillows. What would it be like to stretch out on a real bed and sleep, just sleep, without the interference of the stimulating regeneration energy? She might actually start to feel human again.
She dragged herself out of her trance and heard Kyan explaining something to her. “And this is the food dispenser. You just stand in front of it and say what you want, and it dispenses what you ask for. You might need to program it to produce the kind of food you’re used to, but we can help you do that later. You can go anywhere you want on the ship to learn your way around, but I see by the ship’s roster that you’re scheduled for a complete medical examination at the next day watch. I’m sure the Commander wants to make sure the pirates didn’t damage you in any way.”
“They didn’t,” she told him.
He shrugged. “You got lucky. Most of the slaves we recover from the pirates are in bad shape. Some never recover at all and have to spend their lives in special rehabilitation facilities.”
“Fo would never do anything like that to me,” Natalie told him. “He always treated me well, and he made sure I recovered in the regeneration bed from everything that happened to me.”
Kyan shook his head. “It’s the regeneration bed that ruins them. More than one of your species has been destroyed in the regeneration bed. They don’t alter the way the pirates want them to, and the bed winds up killing them or destroying them. You could be one in a thousand to respond to the alterations the way you did.”
Natalie shook her head. “I can’t believe this.”
“Believe it,” he replied. “I’ve seen it myself in the time I’ve been working on the Force.”
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.
He gazed up at the ceiling. “About eight years. You are the first slave we’ve recovered who said the experience was pleasant and enjoyable.”
Natalie sank down into a chair, and he left her sitting there.