Orion: Star Guardians, Book 1 Read online

  When he pressed the tip against her neck under her ear, she tried to twist away, but his other hand held her head still.

  For the first time, he spoke to her. She had no idea what he was saying or even what language he was using. The words sounded vaguely apologetic.

  The cool metal touched her neck with a hiss, and she flinched as something broke her skin. He lowered the tool and gazed into her eyes. Waiting for something?

  She curled her lip, wanting to spit in his eyes. But her lip was numb and tingly. Her entire body was, she realized. God, was he knocking her out? Why? So he could rape her more easily?

  These thoughts should have terrified her, but a strange numbness was creeping over her, and the ability to feel anything disappeared. A moment later, darkness crept into the edges of her vision. The last thing she saw before she passed out was him staring down into her eyes.

  2

  Juanita woke up with a headache and her mouth drier than the Sonoran desert. Fortunately, when she opened her eyes, the lighting was dim. It wasn’t the darkness of night, as it would have been if she were lying on the trail behind the animal shelter. No, she was inside somewhere now. And it was nowhere that she recognized. She peered up at a grimy ceiling made from what appeared to be bronze panels. They had a scaled texture that reminded her of a snake. Or a dragon.

  She snorted silently at herself.

  She wasn’t living in one of her made-up fantasy worlds. There were no dragons, and no aliens or UFOs. Whoever those freaks who had attacked her had been, they had been human.

  With that thought, she rolled her head from side to side, hoping to get an idea of where she was. A woman she didn’t recognize lay on the ground beside her. Not the ground. A floor. It was made of the same grimy bronze panels. The woman was young with short, wiry black hair. Other women lay on the floor to the other side of her.

  Juanita looked the other way. Another woman, this time, one she recognized, one with blonde hair, pale skin, and tattoos of flowers and the sign of Aquarius on one bare forearm.

  “Angela?” Juanita asked, afraid to speak above a whisper.

  There wasn’t much noise, just the faint thrum of an engine. Were they in a truck, being driven somewhere? If so, the ride was smooth. Only the slightest of reverberations came through the floor.

  Angela did not stir. The other women’s eyes were closed too. Had they all been knocked out with whatever drug had been used on Juanita?

  She risked pushing herself to one elbow. Three more walls were made of bronze, some with thick rivets running up them between metal support beams. The fourth wall was made from what looked like floor-to-ceiling wrought-iron bars with a gate in the middle. The only light came from shell-shaped sconces on the wall behind the bars.

  As the drug wore off and Juanita’s thoughts sharpened, she realized she was in a jail cell of some kind. Being taken somewhere.

  Two men stood in the corridor out there, their backs against the wall with the sconces and several feet between them.

  Juanita recognized one of them right away, the brown-haired man who’d drugged her. He wore something that reminded her of a medieval crossbow on a strap across his torso, but there weren’t any visible bowstrings, and it had a barrel rather than a spot for a quarrel. It wasn’t his only weapon. The hilts of at least half a dozen daggers stuck out from various places on his body. His arms were still bare, his skin a warm olive tone in the yellow light coming from the sconces. Several scars marred the backs of his hands and his knuckles, and another scar had left him a bare spot in his goatee.

  He was looking down at a holographic display coming from a device on his wrist, but she could tell that one of his eyes was puffy from a fight. Juanita remembered the way he’d jumped in to keep her from being mauled. Had that been some act of chivalry? Or was he another thuggish caveman, seeking to claim her for himself? After all, he’d drugged her and presumably carried her to this place. To this jail cell.

  His brown eyes were shifting back and forth, as if he was reading something on that display. A book? A list of tips on how to kidnap women?

  He lifted his gaze, jerking slightly when he saw her looking at him. Juanita wasn’t sure how to read the emotion, but she hoped he felt ashamed for what he’d helped do. He was handsome, so she couldn’t imagine why he’d have to engage in a scheme to kidnap women. Couldn’t he get plenty of feminine attention by legitimate means?

  She remembered the way he’d held her gaze as he drugged her. Had he done anything to her after she’d been knocked out and before she’d been carried here? She shivered at the idea of someone violating her while she slept, but all of her clothes were still on, and she didn’t hurt anywhere, despite having been knocked to the ground.

  She looked at the second guard. This one was even more battered, with fresh bruises rising in purplish-blue lumps from the sides of his face. Blood caked his upper lip, and one of his eyes was swollen shut. His nose was crooked, though it looked like it might have been broken long ago. He had even more scars than the other man, including several that marked his shaven head. He had paler skin that gleamed in the lamplight, and he was bigger than the other man, too, his bald pate nearly brushing the ceiling. He, too, carried a myriad of weapons, some vaguely gun-like, but Juanita couldn’t have given names to anything except the daggers.

  He’d been looking at a voluptuous woman crumpled on her side on the floor on the other side of the bars from him, her deep V-neck shirt revealing ample cleavage. But he must have noticed Juanita move, or maybe he simply felt her looking at him, because he met her gaze. He had dark eyes that sharpened in recognition and then… hunger.

  He smiled widely at her. No, that was a leer.

  Juanita shuddered, knowing instinctively that this was the man who’d grabbed her from behind before. She hadn’t seen his face then, but from the way he looked at her now, she was certain.

  He said something to her in his language, eyes closing to slits as he kept staring at her, then reached down and slowly rubbed his groin.

  Her heart pounded as if she were back in that field again, held helpless by him with his disgusting penis shoved up against her. What was his deal, anyway? She knew she wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t as if she was some beauty queen that men couldn’t keep their hands off. Her knack for burbling geeky things had driven all but fellow geeks away all through school, and even though her acne had cleared up, and laser eye surgery had taken care of the glasses, she still didn’t draw men in droves. Also, she was wearing a blouse and dog-hair-covered hiking pants, nothing that displayed a great deal of flesh.

  The brown-haired man closed his holographic display and spoke sharply. The other looked at him, snapped something back, then squeezed his crotch in a different kind of gesture. Another litany of words came out. The brown-haired man made a show of yawning, leaning back against the wall and flicking a dismissive hand. More words were exchanged—they sounded like taunts—but unfortunately, the men didn’t spring into a battle against each other again.

  Not that Juanita could have taken advantage and escaped if they had. Those bars looked solid, and she assumed the gate was locked.

  “Juanita?” came a whisper from her side.

  Angela. Her green eyes were open and full of alarm. She’d lifted her head enough to see the guards and was staring at the one who was still entertaining himself with his hand.

  Juanita sat up and pointedly put her back to the men. Angela hesitated a second, then did the same.

  “My horoscope said to be careful who I deal with today,” Angela whispered, her eyes still wide. “Trust only the people who have proven their worthiness. Others may have a different agenda, one that doesn’t jive with mine.”

  “You memorized it?”

  “Juanita, what’s their agenda?” Angela gripped Juanita’s arm and jerked her head toward the men.

  “Groping other people and themselves, apparently.”

  Angela did not look amused.

  Movement came from the back wall
. Tala. She rose and picked her way over a couple of sleeping women to join Juanita and Angela. There had to be thirty or forty people in the cell.

  The guards did not say anything at this rearranging. Juanita wondered how many more men were on this… whatever it was. It didn’t look like a truck or a train. Their cell was too wide for that, and the corridor outside seemed to stretch in both directions, leading to other cells maybe, or the rest of the… ship. That was the word Juanita’s mind wanted to use. A sailing ship? Where would a sailing ship have come from in Arizona?

  A spaceship?

  The idea seemed too ludicrous, even to her, a great fan of science fiction. Maybe they were simply in some underground bunker somewhere. Hidden under Mount Elden maybe? And those reverberations could be caused by a generator somewhere providing electricity.

  “Where are we?” someone murmured from the other side of the cell. Several more women stirred, waking up.

  Most looked younger than Juanita’s twenty-four, and several wore NAU sweatshirts or T-shirts. Here and there, someone looked to be in her thirties, like Tala, but the college-age kids were definitely in the majority. And everyone was female.

  Juanita swallowed at the implications of that. She’d heard of tourists being kidnapped while in other countries and sold into slavery, but that couldn’t possibly happen inside the US. Could it?

  Everyone was asking questions, but nobody had answers.

  “Was anyone awake to see what happened?” Tala asked softly, also sitting so that her back was to the men.

  Angela lifted a hand to her neck. “Not me. I remember the door being thrown open while I was preparing the dogs’ dinners, and then someone grabbed me and jammed something against my neck. I was knocked out right away.”

  Tala nodded. “Same here. I was locking up when a big man came out of nowhere and grabbed me from behind. I don’t think it was either of them.” She tilted her head toward the guards.

  No, they had been busy with Juanita….

  “They got me in the field out back,” Juanita said. “Max and Thumper got away.” She couldn’t help but feel she’d failed in her duties as a dog walker because of that.

  “I hope they’re all right,” Angela said. “And the rest of the dogs too. I didn’t see anyone doing anything to them, but after I was drugged, I don’t know what happened.” She lifted her slender shoulders.

  Angela was a wisp of a girl, the same age as Juanita, but that and a love for animals was where their similarities ended. Vegetarian, clothes-making, farm-loving, and astrology-quoting, Angela would certainly have been at home chatting about flower power in the ’60s. She’d grown up on a lavender farm outside of Sedona. Juanita had grown up in Phoenix, helping out in her parents’ Mexican restaurant when her nose hadn’t been buried in a book. She much preferred comic conventions to permaculture get-togethers.

  “They ignored the dogs from what I saw,” Tala said, sighing. “But I didn’t have time to see much.” She glared fearlessly at the guards with the look of someone who wanted answers and was wondering who she had to knock around to get them.

  Juanita didn’t know much of her story, just that she’d been a surgeon before quitting her job and coming up to Flagstaff to volunteer at the animal shelter. She wore nice clothing and drove a BMW, though she’d never done anything to make Juanita think her snobby or entitled. She was on the distant and aloof side. She was Asian, but she didn’t have an accent and said she had grown up in Hawaii. Maybe she was a second-generation American like Juanita.

  “I heard them speaking to each other as I was losing consciousness,” Tala added. “I have no idea what language that is.”

  “Me, either,” Juanita said, “but I only know Spanish and English.”

  “I only know English and Filipino.”

  “I only know English and Pig Latin,” Angela said with a self-deprecating smirk.

  Juanita appreciated that she could find her sense of humor in this place. “You pretty fluent in that second one?”

  “Enough to tell you that’s not what they’re speaking. But I’m pretty sure they’re not aliens.”

  Had Angela been considering that possibility too? Juanita wondered if she’d seen the lights.

  Tala snorted. “I could have told you that.”

  “There are plenty of movies where aliens disguise themselves as humans,” Juanita said, though she didn’t truly imagine they were dealing with some strange creatures that had shape-shifted into human form to kidnap them. Mostly because she couldn’t imagine aliens getting all horny as soon as they shifted. “And in Stargate SG-1, alien symbiotes used humans as hosts and controlled their bodies.”

  “Was that the show where the guys had snakes in their bellies?” Angela asked.

  Juanita was surprised she’d seen it. Maybe they had more in common after all.

  “Those were the symbiotes."

  “Gross.”

  “It kind of was, yeah. Should we ask these guys to lift their shirts, so we can see if they have symbiote pouches?” Juanita asked, though she had no intention of giving either of those two a reason to strip down.

  A clang sounded before Tala or Angela could do more than make expressions of distaste.

  Two men walked in dressed similarly to the others and also wearing huge collections of weapons. They looked over the women, then spoke to the guards.

  Juanita shifted to watch the exchange. One of the newcomers eyed the women with the same kind of interest that Baldie had shown. She had no idea what all this was about—though her guess of being sold into slavery in some obscure third-world country kept coming to mind—but they needed to start contemplating a way to escape. She didn’t care how many weapons those thugs had. They had to sleep sometime.

  One of the men pointed at Tooth Necklace and jerked his thumb toward what had to be a door somewhere down the hall. He stayed where he was, arguing back. Another thumb jerk, then a point to Baldie and the floor, indicating he would stay where he was. Laughter and a dismissive hand wave from the newcomers. Another point at Tooth, then a sterner look, and another gesture toward the door.

  An aggrieved expression flashed in Tooth’s eyes as he glanced at Juanita, but he reluctantly walked out.

  Juanita watched him go with dismay. One of the newcomers walked out after him and another one stayed. He shared smirks with Baldie and nodded in a speculative way toward the women.

  “We may be in trouble,” Juanita murmured.

  3

  Orion of Dethocoles strode to the bridge as quickly as he could without breaking into a run. Truok, the thug following him, would think it odd if he appeared overly eager to see the captain. Nobody was eager to see the captain. Ever. Of course, Orion didn’t care one drachma what the head slaver wanted. He just wanted to return to the brig so he could keep the horny bastards on this ship from ravaging those women.

  Where the hells was his brother, anyway? The slaver ship had cleared the planet’s orbit, and its inhabitants didn’t seem to have any spacecraft that they needed to worry about. Nothing but satellites and a primitive space station orbited the remote blue and green planet. Gaia, if the opportunistic slavers aboard this ship were to be believed. Orion didn’t believe that, not after mankind had spent centuries looking for Gaia, the place that all humans had supposedly come from more than two millennia ago. However, the newly discovered planet, whatever it was, was ridiculously populated, and the captain had just proven its people were easy prey.

  Oh, some of the women had fought valiantly to keep from being captured—the one with the blue-tipped black hair had almost gotten away from them—but the slavers had captured dozens and slipped away without the planet’s military or law enforcers any the wiser. The captain could have stolen hundreds if his ship had the room and supplies to feed that many for the trip through the gates to Zi’i space. Once the word got out among slavers about how easy the pickings were on this planet…

  Orion shook his head and walked onto the bridge, ignoring the slavering growl of t
he svenkar that always lay, sat, or stood at the side of the captain’s chair. Orion had seen him order it to kill a prisoner, and it sickened him. There were svenkars on his brother’s ship, but Star Guardian trainers used them to hunt down criminals, not torment and kill innocent people.

  “Orion,” Cutty, the one-eyed captain said, turning in his seat. He slung a leg up over the arm and smiled lazily, displaying a row of silver and gold teeth.

  Orion had no idea if he’d had his regular ones capped or if someone had knocked the originals out in a fight. In the three weeks Orion had been aboard the ship, he’d never cared enough to ask. Of course, the captain rarely called him up for private chats. Orion would have been more worried about this if he hadn’t been busy worrying about those women. When Captain Cutty had said he was going to capture some humans to sell to the Zi’i, Orion had imagined it being men. The Zi’i were infamous for the deadly games they liked to watch, pitting humans and other alien species against each other in gladiatorial matches. Then they ate the losers. He supposed they might enjoy eating human women as much as they did men. Bastards.

  “I heard you beat the shit out of Bray,” the captain said, draping his arm across the back of his seat.

  He looked completely relaxed, with the four-hundred-pound svenkar munching a bone at his feet, but his eyes were sharp, and he watched Orion intently. Just because of the fight? Or did he suspect the truth?

  His first officer, a cool, calculating man who rarely spoke, also watched the exchange from his station at the helm.

  “So?” Orion asked, figuring he’d only look weak if he made up some lie or excuse. “Don’t tell me he came and whined to you about it.”

  “I asked him why he let some woman pound on him, and he said it was you.” The captain’s single eye narrowed. “Normally, I wouldn’t give two piles of bantok shit if the crew fought, and I let them work problems out for themselves, but you attacked him in the middle of a mission. That’s an idiotic time to be anything but united. There could have been trouble if we’d been caught by what passes for the armed authorities on that planet.”