V dispatched two before they could even draw their blasters and Drace killed two as well. Penelope seemed reluctant to fire, which was understandable to V. She was still shaken by the actions she’d taken against Skrug and wasn’t, by nature, a violent person.
When the short battle was over, they stood on the landing pad—which was really just an extra-large clearing in the jungle—and V offered Drace a warrior’s clasp.
“I thank you for your help, Brother,” he said to the other male seriously.
“I owe you my life,” Drace replied. “If ever I can repay the debt, let me know.”
“Thank you for the offer,” V told him. “But now it’s time we part ways. Penelope and I will take one ship and you take the other. That way the NeverBreeders have no way to come after us and no way to go kidnap anyone else for their cult.”
“Agreed.” Drace nodded again, the sunlight catching the concentric rings of gold, brown, and copper in his eyes. They matched the highlights in his black hair. “This has been an interesting side adventure, but I need to get back to my ship.”
“Same,” V agreed, nodding. “Maybe we’ll meet again if the Goddess wills it.”
“If she wills it,” Drace agreed and then they each took separate ships with Penelope following V as they boarded the NeverBreeder crafts.
Eighty-Four
The minute they finally got aboard one of the NeverBreeder spaceships, Penny felt ready to collapse. But first she wanted a long drink of water and a shower to wash the jungle grime off herself.
“You go ahead, sweetheart,” V’rex said distractedly. He was busy in the pilot’s chair, apparently getting the hang of the new controls. “This is nothing like any ship I’ve ever seen—fucking NeverBreeders,” Penny heard him mutter to himself. “Now where in the Seven Hells did they put the Nav-com? Oh right—here it is, where nobody in their right mind would think to put it…”
Deciding to leave him to it, Penny left the blaster she’d been holding on the passenger’s side seat and walked through to the back of the ship, looking for the aforementioned drink and shower.
The NeverBreeders’ ship was extremely utilitarian with absolutely no extra frills. Clearly they only used it to grab unsuspecting “breeders” and bring them back to Yown Alpha. But they did have a rudimentary kitchen area which had a sink with a single faucet and a press button to make the water come out.
Penny washed her hands and face and drank thirstily from her cupped palms. As soon as her thirst was taken care of, her stomach growled—it had been almost a whole day since her last meal.
There was a small cupboard which held a few supplies. Penny saw a few jerky-like strips of dried meat which she avoided with a shudder. But there were also some compressed plant bars stacked there. They tasted sweet and bland and faintly grassy—like someone had mixed carrots, beets, and grass clippings and then dried them out and compressed them into hard little rectangles about the size of a granola bar.
They weren’t the best thing Penny had ever tasted, but she was so hungry she ate two of them before she made herself stop. There were still plenty left for V’rex—if he wanted to eat the plant bars, that was. Right now, Penny decided she wanted a shower more than anything else.
She went further back to explore the rest of the ship and hopefully find a bathroom—now that she had taken care of her thirst and hunger, she really had to pee. Although, to be perfectly honest, she wasn’t sure the NeverBreeders needed a bathroom. They were perfectly smooth between their legs—at least from the few glimpses she had caught. How did they eliminate wastes?
The very back of the ship was obviously a holding area for prisoners. It looked like it could hold ten or twelve comfortably—or two or three if one of them was as big as the two-headed Trollox that had died. Ugh!
Penny was just despairing of finding anyplace to relieve herself when she at last spied a tiny, recessed door that she’d missed on her way to look at the holding area. When she let herself in, she saw a strange kind of toilet that appeared to be nothing but a long tube coming out of the floor, attached to an oval head. There was also a round metal shower stall in one corner but Penny barely paid attention to it because by now she really had to go.
But how?
She plucked the hose-like device carefully from the hook it was hanging from and looked uncertainly at the oval attachment. Was it some kind of suction device? It looked a little bit like a vacuum cleaner attachment.
Experimentally, she pressed the blue button on the wall beside the hook and sure enough, a long slit opened in the oval head and it began to suck. So it was like the toilets in the bathrooms at Hell’s Gate Station, Penny thought.
But she didn’t see any of the sanitary arrangements that were on the other suction toilets. Did the NeverBreeders press this oval thing between their crotches or wherever their waste came out? Did they clean it between times? What if they didn’t? She didn’t see any cleaning materials. The awful thing was probably crawling with germs. Ugh! And she had touched it!
Suddenly Penny had the urge to wash her hands—her whole body, in fact. She eyed the tall metal shower cylinder in the corner and wondered if there was hot water available.
“Maybe I’ll just pee in the shower,” she muttered to herself, turning to place the hose and its attachment gingerly back on its hook on the wall. “Who knows how the NeverBreeders use that thing anyway?”
“We press it to our cloaca and allow it to suck the wastes from
