“No!” Skrew said, waving all four of his arms. “No need to save. No can save. Female is ugly. Old and ugly. Has big thing on face. Mouth is tiny, disgusting tiny. Flesh is pink. Skin is smooth. Eyes are big and bright.” He shuddered and gagged.
I brushed the sniveling vrak aside and crept toward the sound.
“Uh, Skrew wait here, yes? Keep watch.”
Sure, whatever.
The scrap metal hut was larger than most of the others and had more trash piled on top as well. I began to suspect that the larger the pile of trash, the more wealthy the inhabitant. If his slave counted for any significant amount of wealth, he was about to go bankrupt. He’d be lucky if I didn’t pull his head off and shove it right up his… whatever the vrak had for assholes. I wasn’t sure if the Lakunae had given me enough strength for such a maneuver, but I was willing to give it a shot.
I didn’t see any vrak around, so I moved right up to the wall facing the jungle and put my ear against the corrugated metal. Inside, I heard the deep, growling voice of a vrak and some very human whimpering. There were little holes in the metal wall, so I moved from one to another, searching for one that would give me a decent view of the interior.
I saw her. She was covered head to toe in old rags someone had hastily sewn together into a poor imitation of clothing. She held a hand toward something to my left inside the room, something I couldn’t see. There was only one thing it could be.
When the tip of a short whip passed in front of my vision, I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists. I estimated the location of the whip-wielding slave-owner based on the length of the whip, how it swung, the average height of the other vrak I’d observed. I took a half-step to the left and drew my clenched fist back. Now was the time to gather some hard data on the limits of my strength. It might hurt, but it would be incredibly satisfying if it worked.
I grunted as I punched clean through the wall and grabbed a fistful of vrak-junk. I hadn’t been sure that was where they kept their bits, but the high-pitched squeal told me that what I had in my hand was 100% pure vrak tenderloin. Oh, and would it be tender.
I pulled hard, and the whole sheet of iron came loose with a single haul backward. I’d wanted to pull the slave owner through the wall, but this was good enough. I still held him by his junk, so I dropped him and pulled the iron wall off my arm.
I hadn’t made a lot of noise, and the vrak slaver sounded like he was trying to breath through a straw. I took one look at him and considered sparing his life for half a second before I approached him.
“Human fool will die,” he managed to say as he clutched his mangled junk.
“Not by your hands,” I said as I lifted a foot above his head. “Or your whip.”
I slammed my foot down, and the slaver wasn’t fast enough to avoid my boot. His skull popped against the ground as his limbs made a final twitch.
“Take my hand,” I said, taking a step toward the woman inside the hut.
Her face was hidden in shadow despite the small fire burning in the middle of the hut under a cooking pot. She took my offered hand, tried to stand, and gasped in pain. I offered her my other hand, but before she could take it, another alien called from the adjoining hut.
“Slave, stop making noise! I am needing to sleep!”
I scooped her up and tossed her over my shoulder as carefully as I could. She gasped but didn’t fight back. She felt light, thin, and frail.
I ran toward the jungle, abandoning stealth, hoping speed would get us out of trouble. Skrew was beside a tree, motioning to me in some kind of weird sign-language I couldn’t understand.
“What?” I asked once I’d reached him.
“Guards! They are coming. Mean Cobble is Chief of Guards. And Jacob splattered his brains. Guards are coming!” Then he looked up at the woman I held over my shoulder, gagged, and scampered deeper into the woods.
I followed the sprinting vrak, trusting him to lead us somewhere safe or somewhere defensible at least.
We ran headlong into the dark and cut through a stream a few times in hopes that the guards lose our tracks. Vines, brambles, and more than one sky-spider attempted to accost us along the way. I could have gone on for another hour, maybe two, but Skrew reached a point where he could barely walk.
We paused in an oblong clearing about seven yards wide. The ground was soft, but rocks poked through here and there. The tree branches were low enough to climb, but I wouldn’t be climbing any that night. I’d be fighting, and I’d win, or I’d die. Either way, I would not release the woman back into slavery. It wasn’t clear if she was Martian, Terran, or something else entirely. But she was close enough to my own species that I didn’t care. I didn’t know how many years she had left, but I’d make sure she got to count all of them as a free person.
I lifted her from my shoulder and placed her as gently as possible into the highest branch I could reach. She wrapped one arm around the trunk of the tree and curled her legs around the branch she was sitting on.
“Stay there,” I whispered. “No matter what happens, stay there and stay quiet. Do you understand?”
She nodded as her wide eyes stared at me from under her hood.
I turned around, looking for Skrew, and caught sight of him scaling another tree. He was clumsy, but so long as he didn’t fall and break his
