Like everywhere else in the mine headquarters—other than the kitchen—it was cold and damp, and she shivered as she crawled under the thin blanket without bothering to remove her dress. The shapeless garment had been in the room when she arrived, and Ukhaan hadn’t objected when she nervously started wearing it. Unfortunately, it only helped a little to stave off the cold. She’d tried sleeping in the warmth of the kitchen, but Ukhaan caught her and it had taken two weeks for the bruises to fade.
How had she ended up here, she wondered, as she did every night. How had Joan Hunter, an ordinary housewife from Topeka, Kansas, ended up as a slave to an alien mine owner?
The morning she was taken, she had been out for a reluctant jog. Her divorce was finally official, and she was determined to move on with her life, starting with an attempt to get back in shape. As she had puffed her way through the park, she caught a whiff of a horrible smell, then something sharp pricked her neck and the world went dark.
When she woke, she was naked and confined in a small cage, one of a long line of cages curving away in either direction. The cages were filled with assorted creatures, none of which she had ever seen before, in a mind-bending array of colors and scales, of claws and fangs. Her mind had been unable to process what she was seeing, and she spent the first period of her captivity huddled in the corner of her cage, trying to convince herself that it was just a horrible dream.
But then a guard showed up—a guard with blue skin and red eyes and a cruel sneer—and it became all too clear that this was her new reality. He had filled the two bowls attached to her cage with water and some type of pellets and told her to be quiet. She had obeyed. A lifetime of living with a domineering husband had taught her that it was better not to argue. And as long as she gave the appearance of obedience, she could sometimes find a way to accomplish what she wanted.
However, an alien spaceship and a guard with a shock stick were not in the same category as an arrogant but oblivious husband. Ex-husband, she reminded herself with a sigh of relief.
The next few days passed in a monotonous blur. She drank the water, forced down a handful of the tasteless pellets, and reluctantly made use of the channel of liquid flowing beneath the back of the cage that served as the only sanitary facility. A guard came by periodically to fill up her bowls. One of them usually ignored her. The other tried to provoke her with increasingly obscene or terrifying comments, but she stared at the floor and refused to answer him. It pissed him off just as much as it had pissed off Kevin. But unlike her ex-husband, while she suspected the guard wouldn’t hesitate to retaliate, her lack of response apparently wasn’t sufficient justification, and he would snarl and walk away.
She spent a lot of time thinking about what was going to happen next. It seemed fairly obvious that she was going somewhere to be sold. But where and for what purpose? Of course, the possibility that she would be sold for sex occurred to her, but she was just an ordinary person on the wrong side of thirty, not some sexy young girl like the one who had finally lured Kevin into agreeing to the divorce. If they were going to come all the way to Earth to kidnap sex slaves, she would have assumed they’d snatch someone like Mindy rather than her.
She was sitting on the floor of her cage, trying to decide if she could use the pellets the same way she would use bread and make stuffing out of them, when both her guards came rushing by.
“I don’t like this,” one complained.
“Shut up, Muu. It’s perfectly legal to sell slaves for a work contract.”
“Legal slaves,” Muu said, glancing at her.
“What? You want to change the way we do business just because the new Emperor is besotted by a former slave? The new laws won’t last.” He nudged his companion. “These humans are going to make us a ton of credits. We should never have sold that first one so cheaply. Think how much profit we lost just because Captain Fabii thought he saw an Imperial Patrol ship.”
“Better not let him hear you say that, Asgii. You’re lucky he didn’t dock your share for damaging the other one.”
Asgii shrugged. “It was worth it.” He cast a dissatisfied glance in her direction. “This one never gave me a fucking excuse.”
They both stopped to look at her. She dropped her eyes, her face as impassive as she could make it.
“Maybe it’s not too late. Any hole is better than none, eh?” Asgii dropped his hand to his groin and began stroking a rapidly growing cock.
Muu shoved him. “Forget it. We have to get all of them unloaded. There isn’t time.”
“Doesn’t take me long.”
“No wonder you have to fuck a slave.”
Asgii snarled and shoved Muu back. Joan watched from under her lashes, hoping they would come to blows, but Muu threw up his hands and backed away.
“Forget it. Look, let’s just get the cargo unloaded. How about on our next trip, we pick up
