Текст книги "The Alien’s Bond"

Автор книги: Kira Quinn

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Copyright © 2023 by Kira Quinn

All rights reserved.

Print Edition ISBN 978-1-945996-99-3

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover by MiblArt

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

38. Bonus Content

About the Author

Books By Kira Quinn

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CHAPTER ONE

“Come on, Dar, stay a little longer! Pleeeeeease!” Tamara whined. “It’s not that late.”

Darla looked around her friend’s apartment and gauged the level of festivities still underway. Tammy was right, it wasn’t really all that late, at least not by her standards, but things were nevertheless winding down. On top of that, all the available men had already been reeled in by Tammy’s more forward friends.

By forward, she meant slutty.

Damn. Some nights I wish I could just pick up strange like that, consequences be damned, Darla quietly lamented.

She longed to live it up and throw caution to the wind, but she was always the responsible one. The one you came to if you needed a ride home, or when you needed someone to watch your back on a night out while you overdid it to an extent that would have made Caligula blush.

Nope, Darla simply wasn’t that person. She’d fantasized about it plenty of times, sure, but putting those imagined debaucherous actions into practice? It just never happened. Still, maybe tonight would be the night she stepped out of her comfort bubble. Maybe tonight she’d take a strange man home and do unspeakable things with him.

She gave the dwindling crowd one last glance, clocking those who had paired up and were well on their way to doing what she so desperately wished was in the cards for her. Around and around she looked, but the only remotely interesting man left unspoken for was Earl, and there was simply no way in hell she would stoop that low. Even if she had gotten shit-blind drunk, there was no chance.

The only reason he kept popping up at Tammy’s parties was because he was her old friend from back in the day. The guy who was always around, and who over the years had bedded, or attempted to bed, just about every one of her friends. At least, those who would lower their standards enough to give him a shot.

The worst part of it? Darla had heard through the grapevine that despite his braggadocio and big dick energy, Earl wasn’t terribly well endowed. That was something that could be worked around with a little imagination and a lot of enthusiasm, but Earl failed to make up for his shortcomings, refusing to go down on a woman, saying it was gross, while simultaneously insisting she suck on his tiny dick.

Why anyone would sink that low was beyond her.

Desperation, she thought. Desperation and lack of self-respect. And I lack one and have plenty of the other. She turned to her friend. “Listen, Tammy, you know I’d love to stay, but I’ve got work tomorrow and can’t stay out too crazy late.”

“Just a little bit longer. C’mon, you know you want to.”

“Tammy—”

“Just one more drink, then I’ll let you go.”

“I’m driving.”

“So call a rideshare.”

“And then I’ll be without my car in the morning. When I have to go to work. Jeez, Tam, you really suck at this convincing thing.” Darla shook her head with a chuckle as she dug out her keys. “I’m going home. You have fun, okay?”

Tamara leaned in and wrapped her up in a sloppy hug, the smell of fruity alcohol wafting off of her like a reveler at last call in a WeHo tiki bar. “I love you, you know?”

“I know.”

“And you’re, like, my bestest friend.”

“Yeah, you’ve said,” Darla replied, then headed for the door. “Thanks for the party, Tam. It was nice getting out.”

“You need to come over more often.”

“I know, and I promise, I will. Now, drink some water, then go have yourself some fun. And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Tammy let out a snorting laugh. “Shit, no way! That won’t leave me anything fun.”

“Ha-ha. Love you too. Call me when you finally get up and let me know you’re alive, okay? Just leave a message if I can’t answer.”

“Yuppers. Will do, Captain,” Tamara managed without slurring, flashing a little salute then closing the door.

Darla took her time walking down the steps to the street. She’d only had a couple of drinks in the hours she’d been at the gathering, and they had been mild ones at that. Still, she was the responsible one, and she wanted to assess herself free of the distractions of the party. She took a deep breath, then another.

“Yep. Sober,” she noted. “Jesus, is this what my social life has devolved into?”

The walk to her car was relatively short, and in just a couple of minutes she sat in the driver’s seat and swapped out her heels for a pair of comfy athletic shoes. Aah, better. She then buckled up and started the engine. A yawn escaped her lips, and she had a decent drive ahead of her.

Coffee. I need some freaking coffee.

Darla rolled the windows down, cranked up the radio, and pulled out onto the road. It was late enough that any respectable coffee joint would be long closed, but this wasn’t about a steamy cup of the nectar of the gods. This was survival coffee. It didn’t have to be good, as long as it would get the job done.

Like Dylan, she mused with a chuckle. I wonder where he is these days.

The fleeting thought left her as soon as she hit the road. Ten minutes later she pulled into the twenty-four-hour mini-mart attached to a run-down gas station. Bypassing the pumps, she nosed her car into a space right outside the doors and made her way into the cool greenish fluorescent lighting.

“Coffee?” she queried the scruffy man behind the plexiglass barrier at the register.

He nodded his head in the direction of the hot dog machine, full of wieners that had clearly been there most of the day, if not longer. Beside it sat a pair of coffee pots. One sported the orange top of the dreaded decaf. As Darla was fond of saying, the eleventh commandment should have been, “Thou shalt not partake of decaf.”

Luckily, fortune smiled upon her. The pot of the good stuff beside it was full of a wicked smelling brew.

“Buy you a cup?” a raspy voice asked from over her right shoulder.

She glanced at its owner. Average height, lean, but with that wiry kind of muscle from years of hard use. He had to be in his late forties, judging by the silver sprinkled through his hair and stubble, offsetting the dark brown nicely. His eyes were a bright blue, sparkling with mischief, a nice contrast to his dark locks. Despite herself, Darla found herself replying.

“I’m good, thanks,” she said, immediately reaching up and mentally smacking her own forehead in her mind. And this is why I’m still single.

He didn’t falter, his smile setting in place with a wry little gleam of mischief in his eye. “Okay, okay. But if you don’t mind a little company, maybe I could join you for a cup. If you’re up for a little talk, or something.”

The way he said something both creeped her out and excited her at the same time. It had been so long since she’d had a mindless fling, and what a story this one could be. Picking up a handsome stranger on the road home?

Wait a minute, Dar. That’s how you wind up on This Weeks Missing Persons Report, and that’s not the kind of story you want to be in.

“Thanks for the offer, but no thanks,” she said, declining but still more than a little conflicted.

He flashed a warm smile and chuckled. The rusty timbre of his laugh gave her a little tingle in her belly. He just oozed testosterone.

“Well, if you change your mind, I’m filling up over at pump number three,” he said, giving her a little nod and heading out to his car.

Truck, actually, she noted, and a big one at that, all flared fenders and gleaming chrome. It suited him. An overt statement of masculine confidence in steel and rubber.

Darla paid for her coffee and walked back to her car, contemplating the handsome stranger whose gaze she could feel admiring her ass without even needing to look. At least in this instance the attention wasn’t totally unwanted. The gas station was well lit, and the man doing the looking wasn’t some drooling meathead cat-calling with his buddies.

She turned and gave him one last look before sliding back into her car. It would be so easy to take him home. To let him do all sorts of wonderfully naughty things to her. But then cruel reality raised her ugly head. She had work in the morning, and if she was to take him home, there would be a very real chance she’d spend the next day suffering for it.

With her luck, it wouldn’t even be worth it.

She gave the stranger a little nod, then fired up her engine and pulled out into the night.

It was still going to be nearly a half-hour drive home, and on dark roads to boot. Darla sipped her cup of bitter brew and sighed.

There’s just a serious lackof good men in this town, she mused. Hell, it’s hard to even find one who’s good enough for something less than serious.

Her gaze shifted to the car stereo, her hands fumbling with her phone, which was stubbornly not connecting to the car’s speaker system.

“Come on, you son of a bitch, I need music,” she grumbled.

Making the drive with coffee helped, but tunes would make it much better. Finally, the devices linked up and music began thumping from her speakers.

“That’s more like it.”

Darla reached down and grabbed her coffee, but as she was raising it to her lips, her stereo blasted out loud static and a bright light filled her vehicle with blinding illumination. She swerved. Or at least she started to, but in an instant Darla’s world went black.

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CHAPTER TWO

Darla’s head was slowly pounding, a steady thump thump in time with her pulse filling her ears. Everything was dark, though she tried her best to orient herself to her situation.

Did I crash my car? she wondered. If I fell asleep at the wheel, I’ll never hear the end of it.

Memories of hot coffee and a scruffy, sexy stranger at the gas station flickered through her mind, but the taste of her coffee was nowhere to be found. In fact, her lips were feeling a bit dry and chapped. And that taste in her mouth? Definitely not the nectar of the gods.

“I need a toothbrush,” she muttered, trying to force her eyes open. They stubbornly refused, glued shut by a thin crust of nasty gunk. “What the hell?” she grumbled, rubbing at her lashes with the back of her knuckles, slowly loosening them up until blurry traces of light made an appearance on her retinas.

She felt at her waist, reaching for her seatbelt. If she crashed, she’d need to get out of the car and see just how bad it was. Shit. My insurance is going to go up, she realized.

To her surprise, there was no trace of her driver-side restraint to be found. She fumbled around and realized this wasn’t her car at all. Had someone pulled her from the wreckage? Was this an ambulance?

She listened to the quiet muttering of voices. Male and female, and quite a few of them from the sound of it. Was this a rescue squad? What happened to her?

Oh no. Am I in a hospital? How badly am I hurt?

Darla began feeling around her with a more frantic air. This wasn’t a hospital bed. It felt like some sort of cot, but the telltale railing wasn’t there. Also, she didn’t have any IV lines running into her arms, and there were no beeping monitors and electrodes wired to her chest, keeping tabs on her heart.

She shifted to her side and pushed herself up, banging her already pounding head on the cold metal above her with a soft gong.

“Ouch! Motherfucker!”

“Hey, the new one’s up,” a less than thrilled woman’s voice commented from not far away.

The sound of others murmuring and coming closer filled Darla’s ears. With an unpleasant wet smack she forced her eyelids to part, blinking away the blurry bits and rubbing her eyes. What she saw was not remotely what she’d anticipated.

“What in the actual hell?” she gasped.

This wasn’t a hospital. Not by a long shot. And she wasn’t on a gurney. No, Darla was tucked into some sort of bunk set into an indentation in the wall. And about that wall, it was metal, like everything in the large, round chamber. Not steel, or any other metal she had seen before. This was a blue metal that seemed to give off a faint light. The ceiling was a lighter toned section, illuminated but without visible light fixtures, radiating a cool glow to every part of the compartment.

Not every corner, though, for this room was completely round, and as she forced herself to sit up and swing her legs out of the bunk, Darla noted there were at least two dozen identical bunks all evenly spaced, rising two high. It was almost like the catacombs beneath some ancient cities, only instead of the dead, these little nooks housed the living.

Darla needed a better look at this place. She twisted and glanced down at the floor. At least she was on one of the lower bunks. With the way her legs and head felt, she really didn’t want to have to climb down from any height.

Thank God for small victories, she morbidly chuckled to herself.

Darla carefully slid off her bunk and onto her feet, grateful whoever had brought her to this place had left her shoes on.

“You’ll want to go slow for a few minutes,” an extremely fit brunette with bleached blonde tips said, walking closer. “It’ll take a little before it wears off.”

“Before what wears off?” Darla said, stubbornly attempting to walk.

She found herself rudely introduced to the floor a moment later.

The woman chuckled and squatted down to meet her gaze. “Yeah, like I said, you’ll want to go slow. I’m Maureen,” she offered, reaching out a hand.

Darla accepted, gripping firmly as her new friend helped her to her feet. She wobbled a little but stayed up.

“I’m okay. Just gimme a minute.”

“Take all the time you want. Not like we’re going anywhere.”

Darla focused like she learned in that yoga class she took last summer. Breathe in, breathe out. Center yourself and connect with your body. She was already starting to feel more like herself. She moved her head slowly, avoiding sudden movements that might upset her equilibrium, and surveyed the faces staring at her.

At least a dozen women of various ethnicities and diverse attire, as well as a handful of stout men. A few other people remained tucked in the shadows of their bunks, but she estimated there to be nearly twenty people in the room, all in. But the question was, who were they? And how the hell did she get here?

She turned back to Maureen. The woman had the look of an aerobics instructor. Lean and muscled, contrasting with her own softer physique. Not that Darla wasn’t in decent shape, but the kind of shape that still allowed for pizza and ice cream once in a while.

“Better?” Maureen asked.

“Yeah. I remember driving. I had just picked up some coffee from the gas station. There was this cute guy there, but I blew him off and was heading home. And then—I don’t remember.”

“That’s how it is.”

“What is?” Darla asked, alarm flaring in her chest. “Wait a minute. You said it took a minute to wear off. Oh, no. Did that bastard roofie me? But there’s no way he could have spiked my coffee—”

“It’s not roofies.”

“Then what? And where are we? What is this place?”

“Well, you may want to sit back down for that part.”

Darla did not like the sound of that. Not one bit.

“Maureen, what’s going on?”

“Look around us. Not exactly like anything you’ve seen on Earth before, is it?”

“You talk as if we were on another planet or something.”

“Or something, yeah.”

Darla’s eyes widened. The impossible illumination of the metal, the strange design of the chamber. And her winding up here with no memory of how she’d gotten here. It was insane, but it was all starting to add up. Add up to an impossible answer.

“I was abducted?” she gasped.

“Now she gets it,” a deeply tanned man with broad shoulders and several days scruff on his square jaw growled.

“Be nice, Victor.”

“I am being nice, Maureen,” he snarked, turning his attention back to the newcomer. “You were abducted. She was abducted. I was abducted. Just about all of us were snatched up in one way or another, get it?”

“Okay, you made your point. There’s no need to be a dick about it.”

“Baby, if you think I’m an asshole, you’ve got another thing coming.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He flashed a look at Maureen. “You wanna tell her about the Raxxians?”

Several of the other captives seemed to shift uncomfortably at the mention of the word. It was unsettling to say the least.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s a Raxxian?”

Maureen shook her head.

“Fine,” Victor scoffed. “I’ll do it. You see, hon, the Raxxians are the scaly green bastards who took us.”

“Don’t call me hon.”

“Whatever you say, babe,” he replied with an annoying wink. “Let me tell you, you’re going to want to watch yourself around them. Don’t get their attention. They’re big sons of bitches too. Taller than any man, and meaner to boot.”

“Worse than you?”

“Ha, you’ve got some fire in you,” he said with an amused chuckle. “Okay, play it your way. We’ll see how long that lasts once you meet our hosts.”

With that, Victor strode off and took a seat against the wall.

Darla was keeping up with the flood of impossible information as best she could. The automatic flare of anger at being spoken to like that had kicked her defenses into overdrive, but as the adrenaline slowed to a trickle and her mind accepted the reality of her situation, she found herself falling into a state of despair. But despair mixed with a sliver of hope.

It was one of her traits her sister had always said she envied. How she could find something positive in just about any situation. But even for Darla, this one was going to take an effort.

“Okay, so this is real. I’ve been kidnapped by aliens.”

“We like to say abducted,” Maureen noted. “Kidnapping makes it sound like they want a ransom, and that’s not what the Raxxians are about.”

Darla nodded, numb from the rude awakening. “Fine. Abducted. We’ve been abducted by aliens and taken to their planet. Has anyone seen the outside?”

A murmur rippled through the others.

Maureen put a hand on her shoulder and looked at her with a sympathetic gaze. “Oh, honey, don’t you feel that? The little vibration in the floor?”

Darla was wearing shoes, and not her going out heels, but a pair of comfy trainers. “What vibration?” she asked, bending down and putting her hand on the smooth metal.

There it was. Faint but consistent. A low thrum that couldn’t be heard but was most certainly felt. She felt a new surge of adrenaline flood her system.

Maureen saw her look of stunned realization and nodded. “That’s right. We’re on their ship, and no one knows where they’re taking us.”

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CHAPTER THREE

Darla had to give herself a little credit. She may have nearly passed out from the shock, but at least she hadn’t thrown up, though she’d felt her stomach do more than one flip-flop when the reality of her situation sank in. Her ass had become well acquainted with the floor in a hurry, though, as she slumped down in a heap.

I’m in a goddamn alien spaceship. And I may never see home again.

It was a lot to take in even in the best of circumstances. And these? These were far from the best. In fact, it downright sucked.

What was truly crazy was that her unbelievable situation was almost expected in a strange way. Darla’s mother had long claimed to have been abducted by aliens in her teens, taken and experimented on before being returned to Earth.

Her mom had said the aliens had been intrigued with her human reproductive system, injecting her with strange fluids and probing her at length for days or weeks, she wasn’t really sure. She said that she had felt her body changing from what they did to her, though she couldn’t put a finger on how.

Eventually, the aliens grew weary of their experiments and decided to be rid of her, and that was the end of it. By the time she was returned home—with a story no one believed—she had felt certain she would be unable to have children. But then, just a few years later, and quite unexpectedly, along came Darla.

And now here she was, in space, just like her mom.

“How long?” Darla managed to ask.

Maureen lowered herself down next to her. “You? You’ve been here for about eighteen hours or so. It’s hard to tell for sure, but that’s about how long whatever they do to us seems to last on average. It’s a guesstimate, of course. No one wears a watch these days, so we can’t say for sure. And on top of that, the lights are almost always on.”

“Then how do you sleep?”

Maureen shrugged. “We sleep when we’re tired. Hugo says it’s called a multi-phasic sleep schedule. Apparently, it’s common in Spain. Siestas and all of that, you don’t just sleep for one long time at night. Took some getting used to at first, but I guess it’s all about adaptation at this point.”

“But how do you track time? Days, weeks?”

“We don’t, really. All of us who had phones still on us, well, their batteries died a while ago. No signal, you know? If we’d been smart, we’d have switched one off to save some juice, but we’re in space, so it really doesn’t matter anymore. Not to mention, the roaming charges would be brutal.”

Darla took in the new information, along with several deep, calming breaths. Freaking out wasn’t going to make the situation any better. And if she wanted to survive this mess she needed all the intel she could get.

She looked around, taking in their surroundings with a more detail-oriented eye. Her initial impression had been correct. There were no rivets holding panels in place. In fact, aside from the two doors mounted on opposite walls from each other, there were almost no seams visible in the entire compartment.

Almost.

There were a few faint lines she could make out, but to what end? It wasn’t like she was going to pull a magic crowbar out of her ass and make a break for it. No, this was an academic exercise. Something to keep her mind from cracking.

“So,” she said, looking over the rather spartan interior of the craft, “this is a spaceship. Not exactly what I thought it would be like.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. Maybe walls of flickering lights. Or a window showing the galaxy.”

“Fat chance, that. We’re lucky for the few amenities we have. Speaking of which, are you hungry? Once the grogginess wears off, people are usually pretty famished.”

Darla hadn’t thought about it, but now that Maureen mentioned it, she actually was hungry. Very hungry, in fact.

“Yeah, I could definitely eat.”

Maureen pushed herself up to her feet and offered Darla a hand. “Come on, let’s get some chow.”

The two of them crossed the chamber to a wall with a small textural anomaly on its surface.

“Here, this is how we get food balls,” Maureen said, pressing her hand against the rough spot.

A small hole in the ceiling opened up, though Darla hadn’t noticed any seams there, and a baseball sized orb of some green organic-looking material dropped into her waiting palm. She tossed it to Darla and repeated the process, getting a ball for herself as well.

Darla sniffed it. Pungent, with a hint of something that might be some sort of spice.

“Don’t try to figure out what it is,” Maureen advised. “Trust me, no one’s got an idea, and we probably don’t want to know. The only thing I am sure of is it’s gluten free.”

“How can you tell?”

“Ashanti over there is celiac. One bite of wheat products and she’ll be doubled over for hours.”

“A canary in your culinary coal mine, then?”

Maureen chuckled and bit off a piece. “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, be glad today is green. The orange ones are a bit hard to get down.”

Darla was normally a somewhat picky eater, though not to the point of being a pain in the ass, but after whatever they’d done to her body when they took her, even that one whiff of the odd alien food ball had made her mouth water. She took a bite, ripping into the compressed food orb with a gusto that surprised her. She powered the whole thing down in under two minutes.

“More?”

Maureen chuckled. “Trust me, you’ll want to space them out. Food’s always available, but you need a lot of water to wash these things down, otherwise you’ll be all kinds of plugged up.”

“Ah, thanks for the tip.”

“Gotta look out for the new girl. And speaking of which, let me show you how to get water. It’s weird at first, but you’ll get used to it.”

Maureen led the way to another section of the wall. This one had a damp spot on the ground where it seemed a micro mesh allowed water to escape. Darla was not impressed.

“What are we supposed to do? Lap it up like dogs? Not exactly a high-tech alien wonder.”

“Just watch.”

Maureen stepped forward onto the mesh area, stopping just shy of the damp portion. She turned her head upward and waited. “Any second now.”

As if on cue, a trickle of water began flowing from the ceiling. She moved underneath it and filled her mouth, then stepped back to swallow.

“See? Easy. It’s pressure sensitive. All you have to do is stand there and it’ll turn on.”

Darla stepped forward tentatively. A moment later the water began trickling once more. She wasn’t as practiced as her new friend at catching the stream from above and wound up soaking her face, but Darla didn’t care. The water tasted amazing, and a side benefit of her messy drink was the added plus of washing the last bit of crud from her eyes.

“Better?”

“Definitely better. Thanks. But why do they do it like this? It’s such a weird system.”

“Beats me. Who knows why the Raxxians do anything? But at least we’ve got food and water, so I’m not going to look that gift horse in the mouth.”

Darla figured that was probably a wise outlook, given their situation. The two of them stepped away from the watering system so another captive could get a drink. She was jumpy and rail-thin. By the look of her, she wasn’t eating the alien food, and Darla wondered how long she could survive like that.

“Hey, Maureen?”

“Yeah?”

“Exactly how long have you been in here?”

“Me? Hmm, let’s see. I’d say a bit over a week. Like I said before, though, I can’t be totally sure of time in this place.”

“A week, huh? What about the others?”

“The longest is her over there,” she said, pointing to an Asian woman with a thick, long braid. “That’s Mei. She doesn’t talk much. From what I heard, things got kind of ugly when her group was brought aboard. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them, but she’s the only one left.”

Darla felt a pang of sympathy briefly outweigh her own self-pity, at least for a moment. Then the reality of the shitty situation crashed back around her.

“So, if they just brought me on board, how are you so sure we’re not still on Earth? Maybe—”

“Trust me, I know. We all felt it. The ship’s vibrations changed. Right after the Raxxians dumped you in here, come to think of it.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean—”

“And then we had a second of weightlessness when we popped out of the atmosphere before whatever they use to create artificial gravity kicked in,” Maureen cut her off.

“Ah,” Darla stammered. “Well, uh, yeah. I guess that kinda settles it, then.”

“Yup.”

Darla mulled over the details for a minute, coming to terms with the harsh reality of her situation. She was a captive on an alien spaceship, and she didn’t have the slightest idea what would become of her.

A cramp hit her as the alien food and water processed through her system. It seemed that while it was edible, it would take her stomach some getting used to.

“Where’s the bathroom?” she asked, her hand resting on her lower belly.

Maureen’s smile faltered.

“Follow me.”

She led the way to a seamless section of wall and pointed to a pair of slightly indented ovals barely visible on the floor. They were separated by about two feet, the metal between them faintly lined in an iris pattern.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Darla asked.

“Step on them.”

“Step on them?”

“You heard me.”

She had no reason to doubt her, so Darla took a step forward, placing one foot on each indentation. Immediately the iris in the floor cycled open beneath her, the faint stink of sewage wafting up despite the ship’s disposal system.

“Hang on. A shit hole? Seriously? A literal shit hole?” Darla stepped back and the iris snapped shut. “Uh-uh. No way. I need privacy. And toilet paper.”

“There’s a bidet sort of feature on it. Not sure how it works, it just seems to know when you’re done and gives you a spritz.”

“Fuck this. I don’t know about you, but this isn’t acceptable.”

“You don’t have a choice. And keep your voice down.”

“I will not keep my voice down. This is bullshit! They can’t treat us like this!”

“Will you shut her up?” a tall blond man in a stained tank top shouted. “You know what they’ll do.”

“Olaf’s right,” a woman with platinum blonde hair whispered from the bunk she’d slid into. “You have to stay quiet.”

“What’s with you people? They obviously need us alive, right? So why—”

“Just shut up!” the man growled. “Don’t make them—”

The door at the far side of the room slid open with a whoosh. Two massive, green, scaled creatures strode in, their stubby tails waving behind them through the holes in their uniforms. They were huge. Muscular. And worst of all, their reptilian faces sported row after row of sharp teeth.

The nearest of them grabbed the man roughly by the arm.

“No! It wasn’t me! Please! I swear, it was her!”

The alien ignored his pleas and dragged him from the chamber like a parent would haul a struggling toddler. The door slammed shut behind them, leaving the room in silence. Maureen turned to Darla with a disapproving glare. “Those were the Raxxians. And they do not tolerate acting up.”

“I-I didn’t know,” Darla stammered.

Maureen’s expression softened, if only slightly. “Well, now you do. Don’t let it happen again, for all our sake.”