As soon as they walked me down the moving ramp way, I knew we had landed on Sarceastium. All of the rumors I'd heard about this planet seemed to be confirmed. It was a white and gray landscape of tundra and snow. The Sarceastian city was all glass and steel with nothing green or natural about it. The buildings were stacked very close together and the amount of smog and traffic made LA seem like a country retreat. I got one good look at the snow-swept sea of steel spires and glass domes before they took me deep into the bowels of a warehouse-like building. Once the upper levels were office like rooms and larger meeting rooms. Then, we got to the prison levels. I saw several suspended cells with invisible barriers where unhappy men and other aliens sat and waited out their sentences. Finally, we reached a level that seemed to be at the very bottom of the facility, the basement so to speak. On this floor were several lab-like rooms where I could hear screams of pain. I knew that the most horrible experiments were probably carried out there, and I wanted more than anything else to escape this place and help the people being tortured.

I was placed in a chair next to a control panel. Attached to the chair there were all sorts of instruments of torture, some with blades and drills, and others with heat and laser rays. I struggled, but the soldiers would only strap me more tightly. They turned the chair around and there was Demarin, facing me.

"Oh, my dear, Jessie. What a state you found yourself in. Oh, you are worried about those hi-tech torture devices attached to your chair no doubt. Do not worry. I don't use such unsporting weaponry. I much prefer whips, maces, knives and more primitive ones. I shall only be a minute while I select what is most fitting for today's sport," he said with a wicked laugh.

“You can do what you want with me, but your kind’s days are numbered,” I threatened.

“You’re in no position to make threats, my dear,” Demarin said as he got closer to me. He pushed a button and a heat ray scorched the side of my neck.

"OUCH!" I yelled. The side of my neck had a red burn on it.

“That’s only the beginning,” he said, turning away from her. He went over to a tall closet of sorts and opened the door. Inside the closet there were myriads of weapons, including a whip, a mace, a club, two spears, a series of swords, throwing stars and daggers.

“I’ve always said a coward needs a million weapons,” I chided.

"You will only make me take more pleasure in hurting you, my dear if you keep talking that way," Demarin assured me. He proceeded to pick out a large whip with spikes at the end of it.

Just as he was about to turn around, I saw Yahn come up behind the guard at the door. With a flash, he hit the guard in the back of his head with the back of his laser cannon and grabbed the digital keys to the locks of the torture chair. Demarin turned around quickly and saw that Yahn was about to shoot him. He dove for cover and managed to escape through a door in the back of the chamber. Yahn came over and untied me from the chair.

“Let’s go after Demarin!” I said.

“We really need to focus on getting you safely out of here,” Yahn insisted.

“We have to take him out. Once we do, the Sarceastians will be substantially weakened.”

"All in good time, my dear," Yahn said as he began to take the hooded uniform off of the guard that he had knocked out. Then, he tied up my hands. "Here, put these around your hands," he said.

“Ah, I see where you’re going with this, but will they buy it?” I asked.

"We'll find out." Yahn led me out of the torture area and we wandered back through the floors where the torture had been taking place. We tried our best to ignore the screams we heard. At that moment, we had to get out of the lion's den before the lion came to attack us. I knew that Demarin was going to warn the whole place of our presence there, so we had to hurry out of the area. We passed a couple of guards as we made our way to the upper levels on the moving, suspended walkways that linked the levels together.

“Where are you taking this human?” one of them asked Yahn.

“Demarin has asked that I take the prisoner to his quarters so that he may do with her as he chooses,” Yahn stated.

“Hmm, we haven’t received any word of this,” the guard said. Then, another guard ran up from behind us.

"Sir, we've just received word that the prisoner has been kidnapped by a Karkastian."

“Get them!” the guard yelled and they drew their laser guns. I drew mine first and took out the guard nearest to us. The other guard began to shoot at us and we had to jump from the platform to the lower level to avoid being hit. We exchanged fire and finally one of my shots hit its target and the guard fell over the rail.

“Let’s get to the upper floors and get out of here!” I yelled as we climbed back up to the next level. Prisoners shouted at us as we ran through the prison complex. Laser shots were flying everywhere, barely missing us as we ran through. The whole place had been alerted to our presence, it seemed. We ran down a side hall and hid in a utility closet while the bulk of the guards on that level ran on. We gathered our breath so that we could continue our escape.

We made our way up to a supply and maintenance level. There were vast storerooms of weaponry and machinery. Sleek, new space cruisers were being built for the Sarceastian military and heavily-armored hover copters, the likes of them I had never seen.

"I guess I never realized just how well armed the Sarceastian army was," I remarked. We passed through this level exchanging more gunfire with the soldiers, but again, we managed to get through to the next level. Soon, however, the access doors to the upper levels were being closed. We could hear an alarm sound and an announcement that intruders were in the vicinity. We realized that we were trapped on that floor and the guards were moving in fast.

"Quickly, in the armored assault vehicle there!" Yahn exclaimed. The Sarceastian armored assault vehicles were basically huge hover tanks, armed with missiles and laser fire. We climbed into one of them and began to take out several guards at a time. The rest of them retreated to the exits. I began to drive the vehicle out of the warehouse it was stored in.

“Where are you taking us?” Yahn asked.

"Through the armored door!" I exclaimed and began to make the vehicle operate at full throttle. I activated the large battering ram at the front of the vehicle and first fired several missiles at the door. These all bounced off, but the door was now burned black. I rammed the door with the battering ram and we managed to punch through the door. We got out of the vehicle and continued our escape through the upper floors. Now we were on a floor with what looked to be offices and meeting rooms. In fact, we ran into a room where several well-dressed Sarceastians were in an important meeting. The soldiers were close behind us as we made our way through this floor. We hid out in a place that looked like a bathroom, losing many of the soldiers, but soon they found us hiding there and began to fill the room with laser fire. We barely escaped out of the door.

We were now on the ground floor of the building. Right away, we could feel the colder temperatures coming from outside. We were both nearly out of breath and needed to stop and rest if we could. We found a clothing supply closet with many hooded military uniforms and other supplies. We got far back in the closet and remained completely quiet as a group of Sarceastian soldiers moved through the room, searching it. Finally, they left and we both breathed a sigh of relief.

“We are really close to the outside, I can feel it,” Yahn whispered.

“In that case, we had better stock up on these uniforms. I hear that the landscape is a lot like Yukon, back home. Oh, but you probably wouldn’t know about that,” I said.

“Yes, Yukon is in northern Canada,” Yahn pointed out.

“How did you know that?” I asked him.

“As I’ve said before. We Karkastians would study Earth culture. Mostly as a cautionary tale about how not to give rise to civilization,” he joked.

“Ha ha. Earth is not all bad, Yahn. I’m sure you have seen that by now,” I said, defensively.

“I know, but it has a long way to go,” Yahn concluded.

“Well, I’d like to argue about this with you later, but now I think we need to focus on getting out of here,” I said.

“We can both agree on that. I say we just run for the exit as fast as we can and shoot anything that is in our way,” Yahn suggested.

"I'm with you!" With that, we made our way to the entrance. It was actually quiet because most of the guards had moved on to another area. We looked down the hallway from where we were and saw two soldiers guarding an oval door to the outside. By now, we could hear the howling wintry winds outside the huge facility. We immediately began to fire at the soldiers guarding the door. They fired back at us. One of the guards called for backup and soon we could hear the sound of Sarceastian boots approaching from farther down the hall.

"Ok, follow me. We have to run straight at those guards and take them out before we get hemmed in between them and the soldiers. Come on!" I said. I ran right at the soldiers firing repeatedly as I ran. Yahn was right behind me doing the same thing. Finally, we took out the two guards and used one of their security scanners to open the doors to the outside. The cold winds were worse than I expected. We bundled up tightly and headed out into the frozen lands. Snow was mounted a foot high on every surface we could see. There were mostly steel and glass buildings, all so close that there was barely enough room to walk in between them. Guards that were protecting the outside of the building began to chase us, so we ran into an abandoned building and hid behind a stairwell. We were very cold but warmer than we had been on the outside. We rested there for a minute to plot our next move.

"We can't stay here long. They will search the place soon enough," Yahn pointed out.

"Yeah well, another five minutes out there and I was going to become a snowman," I said.

"What's a snowman?" Yahn inquired.

"Something we used to make out of the snow when we were kids. Never mind, it's not important," I said. I felt very upset.

“Jessie, I know it’s upsetting to be in this situation, but we are together and we are still alive. That is something to be happy about,” Yahn pointed out. I hugged him.

“You are always there to make me feel better, aren’t you?” I said, smiling. “Well, we talked about being in the lion’s den. We are certainly there now. How are we going to get out of here?”