“Let’s hope so. I don’t remember anything after that cable thing of theirs grabbed my ankle. All my nerves lit up like fireworks and I couldn’t think beyond it.”
“That’s what I remember. I should have anticipated that they’d have personal versions of the snake thing that tried to grab Fiori.”
“None of us thought of it, Danny. It’s technology we’ve never seen before.” His tone was chiding.
My thoughts were coming together with more clarity now. I was clearly recovering. I didn’t rush to speak.
Dalton said, after a while, “The snake things they wear…they’re designed to subdue others. Then there are these shells, just waiting for occupants—look at all the empties over there. I think part of their culture is built around this.”
“This?”
“Restraining others. Capturing them…and not killing them.”
“Slaves,” I whispered, the sourness back in my mouth.
“Yeah,” Dalton said heavily. “That’s what the speaking dude said. ‘Humans, ours’.”
“Their possessions, by right.” I grimaced. “That explains why they snatched the crew of the Ige Ibas instead of just killing them outright. And it’s probably what happened to the other ships that Lyth tracked. The people Juliyana is looking for.”
“But they’re not here,” Dalton pointed out. “And if this is the first time the blue sods have come across humans, how come they have human-style shells just ready to drop us into?”
“Maybe they’ve been…I don’t know…harvesting humans for a while? It’s been twenty-five years since the Shutdown and even when the Empire was still operating, news from way out here on the fringes was pretty slow getting back to the population centers. And if these fuckers were scraping ships of every last human on them, then no word was sent about them at all. Look at the trouble Lyth had even finding a hint of their activities out here.”
“So what now?” Dalton said. “I can’t budge this bar across my chest. It’s in exactly the wrong position to get my hands on it, too.”
The placement of the bar showed more intimate knowledge of human anatomy. I tucked that fact away for consideration, later. “Let’s wait awhile,” I said. “If you’ve been awake for a while and I just came around, then it’s possible that if the others are here with us, they’ll come around soon, too.”
We waited in the dark. I tried shifting around in the shell, but it was so close fitting there was no room to do much but wriggle. I couldn’t twist, the bar stopped me. I couldn’t raise my arms, or reach out with my hands, for the same reason.
And I didn’t feel much like moving, anyway, because the damned headache didn’t seem to want to leave. My entire head throbbed and fizzed. If it was a migraine, it was a new species. I’d never felt anything like it.
“Do you have a headache?” I asked Dalton.
“A bugger of one, yeah. Feels like something tried to strip all the synapses out of my skull with a laser edge.”
It was an apt description.
A while later, I heard a soft moan. Feminine.
“Fiori?” I called. “Juliyana?”
A cough and sonorous breathing. “Calpurnia,” she croaked. “What am I in?”
We told her what we knew and by the time we were finished, we heard the sound of others stirring. Moans and groans and soft curses as they figured out their situation.
“Keep your voices down,” I warned everyone. “It doesn’t feel like this ship is in motion. We might be able to find a way off it and back to the Lythion.”
“If we can get out of these damned cage things,” Kristiana muttered.
“If I can reach my neck, I can activate a beacon,” Lyth said. “Lyssa will be able to trace it.”
“Not that it will do much but tell her where we are, and I think she has probably figured that out,” I said. “She can’t attack this ship, even if she knows where it is.”
“My head feels like it will explode if I move too much,” Marlow complained.
“It would have been nice of them to include bio-plumbing in these things while they were designing them,” Dalton added.
“And food outlets,” Yoan said. “I’m starving.”
“You’re always starving,” Sauli pointed out. “What’s our next step, Colonel?”
“Simple,” I replied. “We get out of here, back to the Lythion and back to civilization, where we raise the biggest, loudest noise possible and make sure everyone knows about these assholes.”
“Getting out of here might be a problem,” Jai said, his tone urbane. He didn’t sound the slightest bit stressed.
“I think I might be able to,” Calpurnia said. Her voice was rough, as if she was exerting herself.
Well, if anyone could break out of the damn things, she might.
“Try real hard,” Dalton urged her.
“Maybe the lack of plumbing and food isn’t a design flaw,” Fiori said, her tone thoughtful, while Calpurnia made low, hard sounds of strain, then paused to pant a bit, before trying again.
“I can’t see how they could choose to exclude food and plumbing,” Jai said, his tone just as thought-filled. “They’ve obviously gone to a lot of trouble to develop tech that can overcome us, and a way to transport us. Their business wouldn’t sustain itself if we were dead on arrival.”
Lyth said, “We don’t know how efficient their faster-than-light system is. Maybe it only takes a few minutes for them to reach destinations that take us hours and days.”
“Or maybe it does take days, but they figure we wouldn’t need either food or plumbing,” Fiori said, her tone firm.
“What are you thinking?” I asked her curiously.
“I think these are some sort of cryogenic capsules.”
Everyone but Calpurnia was silent while we absorbed that and turned it over in our minds.
“The problem with prisoners,” Jai said, “is that they persist in trying to escape. And they need food, water and shelter. If these beings have learned how to circumvent the problems of cryogenics, then it would provide them with a solution to all those problems.”
“There’s no light in here, either,” Dalton said.
“Exactly,” Jai replied.
“What does that mean, no light?” Yoan asked.
“No light means no monitoring,” Sauli said. “They don’t feel they
