Beauty and the Fleet (Intergalactic Fairy Tales Book 2) (7 page)

Then, as if the universe could hear her thoughts, the waiting was over. A series of dull thuds hit all around the cargo bay. Hands opened his watch even though the last supply drop couldn't have been more than an hour before.

"It's too early," he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

Torch stumbled into their sleeping area, followed by a trail of smoke. His hand clamped his shirt up over his mouth and nose. "Gas," he said, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell on the floor.

Beatrix's first instinct was to head for their flight suits. They were piled in a corner, not far away from where she and Hands sat. Before she could do little more than pull her shirt up over her nose, she was enveloped in smoke. She expected it to stink and make her choke. Instead she drifted off into unconsciousness to a smell like citrus.

CHAPTER TWELVE

"I knew we should have kept our helmets on," grumbled Pickle, somewhere near.

While the gas hadn't smelled terrible, it didn't leave her mind easily. The smell of citrus still filled her senses and wrapped her thoughts in a thick layer of cotton. The world tilted to and fro in her blurry vision. If she squinted in just the right way she could make out ants crawling about on the ground below. Then a foggy haze drifted before her eyes and she dozed for a time.

When she came to again, her mind was more clear and she recognized the ants as people. The tilting world was a result of the small aircraft they were on banking during turns. Her mind still mustn't have been completely clear, because she could have sworn the buildings they were flying over were in a riot of color. Pinks and greens sat beside reds and blues. Every color of the rainbow could be seen without turning her head. Not one speck of dreadful grey anywhere unless she turned her eyes from the window to the small passenger compartment she shared with Torch, Gadget, Pickle, Hands, and three menacing Colarian guards. Then grey was all she saw.

Her hands and feet were firmly chained, so she decided to take advantage of her delusional state and stared out the window. They flew across what looked like farm land. Not much different from where she had grown up if she was honest with herself. Fields in various shades of green gave way to golden brown pastures dotted with livestock that, while foreign to her, still seemed familiar in their docile manner. Interestingly, the few Colarians she saw weren't the huge beasts she was used to. They varied as much in size and shape as any Nedran.

Beatrix realized that she was picking out a lot of detail, so they must be approaching their destination and dropping lower to the ground. Her mind didn't feel altered any more by the gas, but the large building they circled was a shade of light blue that shimmered to a pearly white in small splotches, giving it the appearance of being part of the sky with an occasional cloud. It was the most beautiful house—no, mansion—that Beatrix had ever seen. Too bad it wasn't real. She was certain that soon she would blink and it would change into an artless grey block and they would haul her to a cell inside, never to be seen again.

Their forward motion stopped just behind the building, where they slowly lowered to the ground. The others stirred awake when the aircraft touched down with a slight thump. Each of them turned immediately toward the nearest window. Their faces lit up with surprise. "It's so beautiful," murmured Hands.

The guards raised their weapons, obviously ready to gun them all down if they so much as sneezed. Beatrix studied them closely, ignoring the menacing barrels of their guns. She'd only ever seen one Colarian up close and personal. Then her judgment had been so impaired by panic that when she saw them in a textbook later, she assumed the book was wrong. In her mind's eye Colarians were beastly beyond comparison, with barely any Nedran features to separate them from the huge cats that stalked the jungles and filled the roles of villains in children's stories. In truth, they looked much more like very tall and strong Nedrans than anything else. The coloration of the hair that covered their bodies varied greatly, from tawny to dark red, to brown, and black. The three that held them were all the same shade of light brown, though their similarities mostly ended there.

The hair, or fur, on the one that was closest to her was thick and woolly looking. It made him look rather ridiculous; nothing like the Colarian who had killed her father. Scholars seemed to choose whether to call it hair or fur seemingly at random. After reading countless essays and papers, and then learning more about their authors, she found the choice was usually made on personal bias. If the author thought of the Colarians more as beasts, they called it fur. If they thought of them as men, they called it hair. So, Beatrix made up her mind to call it fur. That meant the longer hair on the head was called a mane.

The fur on the other two was sleek and laid flat against their body, looking like skin at a distance. One had long sharp features on its face and light blue eyes with a vertical pupil. The second sleek Colarian was orange and white in a blotchy pattern. The woolly one's face was round with a blunt nose and green eyes. His thin lips were curled up in a nasty sneer, just daring them to step out of line.

The one other thing that tied them together in appearance was the same on all Colarians. Above their eyes were two hairless black strips of flesh that ran up their foreheads, through their manes, and down the back of their necks. They were their symbionts. It was one of those strips of flesh that Beatrix had cut away when the Colarian had attacked her home. She knew from her studies that the symbiont covered most of their back beneath their identical grey uniforms. They burrowed into the Colarians' bodies at different points, connecting to each of the major systems. Together they functioned almost as a singular organism. In early experiments, scientists had attempted to separate them when they captured a Colarian alive, in order to better understand their relationship. Neither the host, nor the symbiont, ever survived the procedure. The practice was quickly outlawed and the intricacies of the symbiont relationship remained a mystery.

The woolly Colarian grunted and gestured with his gun for them to move toward the rear of the aircraft. It was then that Beatrix noticed that Woolly only had one strip of black flesh above his eyes. She wondered if there was another woman out there who had cut it off like she'd done to the beast who killed her father. The back wall tilted down to the ground, forming a ramp so they could disembark. Torch stepped up beside Beatrix and whispered, "Don't try anything stupid." He tilted his head toward the large complement of guards standing on either side of the ramp, each holding weapons trained on them.

"Me?" Beatrix asked, quirking an eyebrow. "Never."

"Sting..."

"I'm not that stupid, Cap. When I make a break for it, I'll make sure I can get away, or do a hell of a lot of damage. Or both."

A grunt and a nudge from the barrel of a gun silenced them. Even without a threat from the guards, Beatrix was struck dumb. The effect of the mansion was mind-boggling. She was certain now that it was real. They were walking alongside it and still it felt like she could fall right into it and touch only air. Even after all of her pilot training, it made her dizzy to look to the side and see the open sky. Only the occasional window and corner broke the illusion. It wasn't until she saw a bird flit across its surface and then caught sight of it on her other side that she realized the image was a reflection of the actual sky around the building.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" purred a baritone voice from just behind her left shoulder.

Beatrix jumped, her heart leaping into her throat. She knew a Colarian was behind her, but nothing had prepared her to hear one speak, let alone to hear it speak lightly accented Nedran. It was like walking through a forest and hearing a tree speak to you in your own language. Even when put in a room together, Colarian prisoners never spoke a word to one another, though it was obvious they could communicate in some way.

Finally, she chanced a glance over her shoulder, certain what she would find. Sure enough, it was the beast who had killed her father. His fur was sleek and black, and the place where his symbiont should be attached, above his left eye, was just a light puckered scar. Beatrix shuddered and pulled the chains that held her hands taut. She turned her head back to the path in front of her. Her back stiffened and a low growl erupted involuntarily from her throat. There was an answering growl and then sudden silence. When she turned back, determined to strangle him or die trying, he was nowhere to be found. Woolly stepped up and nudged her with his gun, an attempt to spur her back into motion.

Woolly had badly misjudged the situation.

With her intended target gone, Beatrix lashed out at the next best thing. She knocked Woolly's gun aside, jumped up and wrapped her shackles around the back of his neck, planted her feet in his midsection and heaved backward and down with all of her strength. When he bent forward and her back hit the ground, she used his momentum and her leverage to toss him over her and into the wall of the mansion. His back collided with the fake blue sky and sent a ripple across its surface. He dropped to the ground. His head absorbed the impact of his landing. Before she could attack him again, the other guards had surrounded her. The click of guns being cocked almost drowned out Torch's strangled, "What the hell is wrong with you, Sting?"

Beatrix ignored him, her rage still boiling in her veins. Woolly pulled himself to his feet, looking no worse for the abuse she'd just given him. As a matter of fact, he was smiling, and not in the vindictive way of someone who was about to try to kill you. He reached up and rubbed the spot where the remaining symbiont tentacle connected to his head, and smiled even wider. He then turned his back and led them into the house. The other guards fell into line beside their prisoners without any spoken command. Beatrix pondered Woolly's weird reaction and realized her rage had subsided. That was good. Fighting more at this point would just get her killed.

"I don't know why they didn't kill us all," whispered Torch from behind her. "But if you try something like that again, I'll take you out myself."

Beatrix gave him a curt nod, not trusting herself to speak. They were ushered inside the building through a grand entrance twice as tall as Beatrix. The beauty of the place was mostly lost on her now that the beast had soured her thoughts. Still, some part of her observed the rich colors of the tapestries and the beautiful pink striations in the marble below their feet. This place was nothing like the cold stone structures she had imagined the Colarians living in. Any noble in Nedra would be proud to live in a dwelling as fine as this.

They only saw a tiny portion of the house before they were ushered through a narrow door and down a dimly lit concrete stairway. The air was cool and smelled of dust. At the bottom of the stairs the walls were lined with small cubby holes, most of them containing a bottle. A wine cellar. In the back of the cellar was a heavy metal door in Colarian grey.

Beatrix knew that beyond that door there would be nothing of beauty and even less of hope.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Beatrix awoke the next morning in her cell. The others were trying to cheer one another up as best they could from their own cells. Beatrix remained silent beyond letting them know she wasn't hurt. They all knew her well enough to leave her alone when she didn't want to talk, and she was thankful for that. She needed time to take stock of her situation.

The beast who had murdered her father really was there, and he'd
talked
to her. There was no more denying that he'd been the one that dropped
A Dark Beauty
into her cage on the ship. She'd taken comfort in it, and now it was gone. He was toying with her and that pissed her off like nothing else could. She had to get out of her cell, if only so she could find a way to kill him. As she went through scenario after scenario in her head about how she would snuff out his life, she began to shake. She'd killed over two hundred Colarians, but it was this one who haunted her nightmares. He'd taken on a role that was bigger than life. He was like one of those monsters in old movies that stomped through cities, kicking cars like toys, and crushing buildings beneath his feet. How was she supposed to deal with something like that?

She resolutely pushed the thoughts of killing the beast aside. That was the ultimate goal, and there were lots of steps to complete before then. She couldn't do anything while she was trapped in a cell. She had to focus on finding a way out first.

She was alone in a grey cube with cement on three sides and bars on the fourth. Her companions were in cells like hers, one right next to the other, with just enough wall between them so they couldn't touch if they reached out through the bars. Hands was next to her, then Gadget, Torch, and Pickle on the other end.

Each cell had a single caged light on the ceiling, a toilet, a sink, a ledge jutting from one wall with a mattress, and a couple of dust bunnies for company. As was expected, all of it was in Colarian grey. It was a recipe for madness. Seeing color and beauty for a few short minutes and then being plunged back into the abyss of grey, even for one night, was hard to take.

If any of them were going to see the outside again, she had to figure out what the Colarians wanted them for.

Beatrix didn't have enough critical information to pose a threat to Nedra as a whole. Not even Torch had enough information worth being tortured for. Since the Colarians had shown no interest in negotiation before, they probably weren't being held as hostages. That left only a couple of other uses and none of them were pleasant. The first that sprang to Beatrix's mind was scientific experimentation. When she thought of the early tests performed on Colarians that were taken captive, she shuddered.

She saw no one except for the Colarian guards that resumed the every four hour supply drops. One of them was Woolly from their trip in on the aircraft. She preferred his open animosity to the bored indifference of the other guards. Something about their blank looks prevented her from giving them any sort of nickname like Woolly.