Fifty-Four

Reza immediately sensed that something was wrong; the aura of his surroundings had changed, darkened, as soon as he set foot inside the Golden Pearl and the airlock had cycled closed behind him.

Nicole, Tony, and Enya had already dashed for the cockpit, a muffled scuffle announcing that the Golden Pearl had just had a change in flight crew. Reza felt the Pearl lurch as she separated from the dying Warspite. In seconds, the sleek ship was accelerating toward the Empress moon as Reza had instructed, dodging through the web of energy fire and torpedoes from the massive battle raging around them.

“What is it, Father?” Shera-Khan asked in a whisper as Reza drew his sword. His own hand reached instinctively for one of the remaining shrekkas. He did not have his father’s special senses, but he could sense the change in him, even without hearing his Bloodsong, as he could sense that hot had turned to cold.

“I know not, my son,” he replied quietly as he set down the black case on a nearby table to leave his hands free for fighting. “Something is amiss; beware.”

Together, the two warriors warily advanced down the chandelier-bedecked hallway that led toward the library.

***

The first thing Jodi became aware of was an unfamiliar taste in her mouth. There was blood, to be sure. But there was also something different, something she had never tasted before, but from descriptions she had heard from other women, she had no doubt as to what it was. Semen.

Forcing back the nausea that rose in her throat, she feebly spat the sticky substance from her mouth, along with some blood and the debris from a broken tooth. The effort resulted in a red-hot lance of pain from her stomach and ribs, and it was all she could do to keep from moaning aloud. The mixture of blood, semen, and enamel bubbled from between her lips to ooze down the side of her face in a warm, coppery stream.

With what seemed a titanic effort, she managed to pry one eye open, the other resisting her will with the force of the swelling that had deformed the right side of her face. Beyond the panorama of the carpet, stained with her own blood, she saw the blurred image of a combat boot, then its mate as it slowly swam into focus. For now, the vision of the two boots on the bloody rug was the extent of her world.

“Shouldn’t Cerda have checked in with us?” a voice from somewhere above asked in a high, nasal voice. “Maybe we should go check on the president, or something.”

“Shut up,” said another, deeper voice, one familiar with being in charge of any situation. “If you want to brown nose, just butt snorkel with Cerda and keep away from Borge. Treak,” he called to a third, “go forward and see what the hell’s going on. Find out what we’re supposed to do with this trash.” A boot prodded Jodi’s buttocks, but she only felt a vague pressure, nothing more. She was numb below the waist, and a tentative command to curl one of her toes disappeared into darkness, unheeded. Her lower body was paralyzed.

“Sure, sarge,” someone answered casually, and she heard heavy soles clump toward an exit, a door slid open–

–and then all hell broke loose.

“Look out!” someone cried as a lion’s roar ripped through the room, followed by her captors screaming and shouting. A few shots thundered out, and Jodi could see a rush of booted feet running toward the door.

And there was another sound, one she recognized instantly as the lethal whisper of a shrekka whirling through the air. One man’s scream was cut off in mid-sentence, and Jodi heard two distinct thumps as his severed head and then his body hit the deck. She also heard the distinct rhythm of a blade scything through the air, armor, and flesh with equal ease.

The Kreelans have boarded, she thought, her hopes for rescue dying, replaced now by the hope that her torment would soon be ended.

Suddenly, the sounds of fighting were gone, and the only sign visible to Jodi that a battle had raged was the curling smoke that stung her single good eye.

A sandaled foot stepped into her view, and she closed her swelling eye, waiting for the final blow to come. If nothing else, she thought, the Kreelans had never sought to make humans suffer, as other humans did. Whatever their motives for war, it was to fight and die. To kill the enemy or be killed oneself. The desire for torture and suffering that Man inflicted upon others of his own kind was absent in the hearts and minds of the Kreelans. Death would come quickly, now, painlessly.

“Jodi?” she heard a hoarse whisper from lips she had once kissed.

“Reza?” she said, not willing to believe that her luck, perhaps, was finally turning, and for the better. “Is it you?” She tried to lift her head enough to see his face. The pain that was her reward left a moaning cry in her throat and a savage, flaming agony shooting up and down her spine.

She felt his hands tenderly grip her shoulders, but for a long time she could say nothing, a scream of raw pain issuing from her throat like a wall of water exploding from a breached dam as he tried to turn her over. After a time, it subsided into a dull throb that pulsed with every beat of her heart, and her mind was finally able to command her tongue to form words that Reza might hear, might understand.

“I… I think my back’s broken, Reza,” she whimpered. She hated the way she sounded, helpless, terrified, but she could not deny, even to herself, that it was true. “Thorella…” She cringed at the sound of the man’s name, even from her own lips, “Thorella beat me… he…” She could not say what else he had done to her.

“Hush,” Reza said, biting back the wave of black rage that rose in his soul. “Be still. I will–”

“Father,” Shera-Khan called from the next room, his voice conveying concern, apprehension, but no fear; there was no threat to him in there. “There is another like her in here.”

“What…” Jodi rasped, “what did he say?”

“Nothing,” Reza lied. “Be still.”

Uncoiling like a snake about to strike, Reza covered the distance to where his son stood in three paces.

“Eustus,” he whispered, his heart catching in his throat. His friend hung in the air, suspended from the heavy chandelier above. His tormentors had tied his elbows together behind his back with a thin metal cable, pulled so tight that it had cut into the flesh of his arms, and then hoisted him from the ground. Then they had beaten him with what could only be a Kreelan grakh’ta, the whip with seven barbed tails like the one that had once scourged Esah-Zhurah’s back.

Handing his sword to his son, he said, “Cut him down.” Then he held onto Eustus’s motionless body while Shera-Khan sliced the cruel metal wire that bound his father’s friend. Ever so gently, Reza carried him into the other room, laying him next to Jodi so he could tend to them both. With a claw of his right hand, he severed the wire that bound Eustus’s elbows, letting his shoulders and back spring back into something like their normal position.

Eustus let out a groan.

“Reza,” Jodi asked, “what’s going on? What is it?” Lying as she was, she could not see any of the three other living people in the room, only two of the mangled bodies of the ISS men who had raped her. Somehow, it was not as comforting a sight as she had at first thought it would be.

“It is Eustus,” he told her as he pointed out to Shera-Khan a medikit that hung on one of the bulkheads. The boy immediately scrambled to retrieve it.

“How… how is he?”

“Alive,” Reza said softly, fighting to keep his hands from trembling with the anger coursing through his veins. Thoughts of dark vengeance intermingled with compassion for his injured and beaten friends, friends who had become his family in this strange world that called itself humanity.

Taking the medikit from Shera-Khan, he told the boy in the New Tongue, “Go to the flight deck and get help. Tell them that Jodi and Eustus are aboard, and are hurt badly.”

Shera-Khan nodded in acknowledgment, then bolted for the flight deck at a dead run.

In the meantime, Reza tore open the medikit and began to do what little he could until the others could help him get their friends into the ship’s sickbay.