Chapter Fourteen: Unfinished Business
Natasha more than lived up to her promise. It felt like days had passed before she did more than just stay in bed with each of her boys in turn.
None of them wanted to let her out of their sight for very long, and even when she went to relieve herself they were waiting for her, needing to reassure themselves that she was safe.
She supposed that made sense. It had been a rough time for them while she was gone, that much was easy to see. And she liked that they wanted her close. She liked that Temos would put his arm around her and that Az wanted to talk to her while he flew and that Alaran was content to sit in silence with her, as long as she was there.
But soon enough they decided that it was time to move on. There was still more space to explore and still one more thing they needed to do before they could call this part of the journey finished, for good.
Az was the one who brought it up, and he did so gently. "I know you do not enjoy it when we kill people," he began, which was a horrible way to start a sentence in her opinion. "But I promised myself that once we found you, we would go back and do something about the slaves in the Cluster. Something to help them."
"Yes," Natasha said immediately. "It sounded horrible, and those poor people get tortured and hurt all the way to the Cluster. Or at least, that's what they wanted to do to us."
Sometimes she still had nightmares about it. Sometimes it was her killing the Lormanax over and over again, and sometimes he was killing her. Sometimes he was killing Az, Alaran, or Temos, and those were maybe the worst.
She didn't even want to think about what those poor people had been through on the ships that brought them in, and what they were going through now.
"Perhaps it is past time that we show this corner of the galaxy what the Dammen Ka think of slavery," Alaran said thoughtfully.
Natasha grinned and couldn't help leaning over to kiss him.
"Hey," Az teased. "It was my idea. Where is my kiss?"
She rolled her eyes, but kissed each of them in turn. "So what do we do?" she asked.
The plan was simple, and highly contested. The dragon three would deal with the slavers and those in charge, and Natasha would try and get the slaves to revolt. It was her idea, and she was proud of it, even while the other three tried to tell her it was too dangerous.
"I'm not staying on the ship," she said firmly. "The last time I stayed on the ship, I got kidnapped." No one could argue with that. "Listen, when I first got Nahira, Loro, and Soro Vel out of their bindings, all they could talk about was how no one escapes from these people and how no one was going to find us. But I convinced them to move and then Loro came up with the idea to find the shuttle. All it takes it someone willing to get through to these people. I know I can do it."
Of the four of them, she was the one with the best chance, she thought, and the dragon three were best being used where their strength lay. Namely with their strength.
At the last minute, they relented, with the caveat that she take Alaran with her for protection.
"The prisoners will hardly be unguarded," Az pointed out, and that was a good argument.
When they reached the Cluster, Natasha had never been gladder that they had escaped before they got there. It was a joyless place, and the sadness in it seemed to be thick in the air. Natasha stood at the window and watched as they approached, some of her confidence waning.
"I know," Alaran said as he came up behind her. "It is a horrible place."
"How can people just let somewhere like this exist?" she wanted to know. "How can they just...ignore it?"
"Because it benefits them to," Az said. "The resources here can be mined cheaply so they're sold cheaply, and everyone likes that, no matter how they might feel about the labor involved."
"That's horrible." There were things like that on Earth, of course, so she couldn't judge it as just something that happened out here, but it still turned her stomach to think about it.
"And that is why were are going to free them all," Temos said. Of all of them, he was in the best mood, probably because they were about to go cause some chaos, which was his favorite thing.
"Everyone be careful," Az said. "This won't mean anything if one of us falls during this." He looked at her meaningfully.
"I'm always careful," Natasha quipped back. "And I've got my dagger, so. I'm basically unstoppable."
They all grinned at that, which helped, and then they moved.
The compound on the first planet was laid out in a grid pattern, which made things much easier to navigate, especially once Alaran had incapacitated the guard with the map on his comm.
They were lucky in that they had landed during one of the periods of downtime, and the prisoners were in their 'rooms', which seemed to be nothing more than concrete walls and a pallet on the floor, packed cubicle style into one of the long buildings.
The conditions were horrible, and the smell was even worse.
Nat and Alaran walked until they found a cluster of prisoners in their rooms. All of them were just lying on the pallets, staring blankly at the ceiling. It was almost like they had been brainwashed, and Natasha tried to make it seem like she wasn’t nervous.
She looked over her shoulder at Alaran who was looking back at her with an expression that said 'this was your idea', so that was no help at all.
Finally Natasha just cleared her throat and stepped forward.
Most of the gathered prisoners looked up at her, and the dullness in their eyes made her heart ache for them.
"Hello," she said, speaking softly. "Um. My name is Natasha, and I'm here to get you out."
She wasn't sure what she had expected them to say in response to that, but they were all silent, and most of them went back to staring blankly.
Okay. She needed to remember that these were people who had been tortured and hurt and broken into subservience. They would need a little more than a sweeping declaration.
"I know you're used to this life now," she said. "I know you think this is all there is. But I'm here with members of the Dammen Ka, and we're going to get you out."
That sparked something in one of them, at least, and he looked at her. He was dark skinned and bald, and his eyes were bright pink and pupiless.
"The...Dammen Ka," he said, his voice raspy. "You know the Dammen Ka."
Natasha nodded and gestured Alaran forward. "See? This is one my companions."
The man looked Alaran over and something glimmered in his eyes. "My...my partner," he murmured. "She was saved by one of the dragon warriors when she was a child. It was her favorite story."
Alaran smiled and inclined his head. "We try to help where we can."
"I have not thought about that story in ages."
"Will you tell it to us?" Natasha urged. "I'd love to hear it."
The man blinked, and some of the fog faded from his gaze. "She was just a small thing, barely knee height to the warrior, and she was drowning in the river because her friend dared her to jump in. A warrior with skin so blue and scales and markings just like those," he nodded to Alaran "jumped into the river to save her. When she was not breathing, he pushed the water from inside her, and he saved her life and then took her and her friend home."
By the time he was finished talking, he seemed more coherent. He was sitting up, and looking around him. "My partner. I have not seen her in so long."
"We will get you home," Alaran said, promise in his tone.
As if him coming out of his fog was triggering a chain reaction, the others started speaking up. They mentioned their partners and mates, their children, their friends. People they hadn't seen since they were taken.
"How long have we been here?" one woman asked, and she looked distressingly young.
"I don't know," Natasha admitted. "But this is your last day. Come with us."
The group got up and followed them as they walked to another part of the building. Seeing their fellows up and alert stirred something in the others, and each time they found a cluster of prisoners it was that much easier to stir them from their fog and get them moving.
As they walked, Alaran found anything that could be used as a weapon and started handing them out. Since it was a mining colony, there were a lot of things. Pickaxes with razor sharp blades on one end, made of the strongest materials imaginable. Blasters that were designed to clear out falls of rock. Shovels and sledge hammers and knives and lasers.
The fact that the people in charge left all of this within the reach of their captives spoke to how little they thought of them and how secure they felt in their supremacy.
Time to shake that up.
By the time they were leaving the area where the prisoners lived when they weren't working, they had amassed a small army, and the longer they went out of their fogs, the angrier they got.
These were people who had been taken from their homes, snatched from their loved ones, and treated like garbage while being made to work long, hot hours for no pay off. Now that they were back to themselves, they wanted vengeance.
That had been Natasha's caveat for this whole thing. She, and the Dammen Ka would free the prisoners and keep the guards from harassing them, but they weren't going to kill anyone. If there were deaths, let the prisoners take matters into their own hands because the right to vengeance was theirs.
Judging by the fact that they met with very little resistance as they freed people, Temos and Az must have been doing a good job on their end.
If they could take down the leadership here, on the main planet, then the rest of the operation would fall. With it in shambles, people wouldn't be able to look the other way anymore, and they wouldn't be getting their minerals for so cheap.
"We're heading for the ships!" Natasha called out. "We're getting you out of here."
A cry of elation went up from the group, and she could only imagine how happy they were to be going home finally.
Every time they met a guard, someone from the group leapt forward to take them out. By the time they met up with Temos and Az, anyone who was left to oppose them was being chased away by their angry former prisoners.
"Well," Az said as they stood back and watched the chaos unfold around them. "Now you can say you've led a successful revolt of a prisoner work camp. On another planet. Not many humans can boast about that, can they?"
Natasha shook her head, grinning at the mess. Like so many things on this trip through space, this was a first time experience, and it, like everything else she'd gained since coming out here, was glorious.