Dream Unchained (19 page)

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Authors: Kate Douglas

BOOK: Dream Unchained
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He no longer felt like throwing up, but neither did he want to think of what he was drawing deep into his lungs. It wasn't easy to breathe—the air was thin, as if he were high in the mountains, but it lacked that pure mountain air scent.
Duran paused in front of a large set of double doors. These were definitely some sort of metal, similar to titanium, if Finn's guess was right. They looked like doors to an elevator you might find in any high-tech office building. He ran his fingers along both sides and then got down on his knees to check along the floor line. There! He couldn't actually see the panel, but he could feel the seam where two pieces of metal were perfectly joined.
Now, if he could just get it open. Finn used the razor-sharp blade of his knife to run along the edge. He applied just a bit of pressure, and the blade slipped into the invisible seam. It took just a bit of prying. The cover popped off.
Duran gasped but Finn caught the metal plate before it hit the ground. He heard Duran's sigh of relief, but he knelt there a moment, holding on to the plate, much too aware of his thundering heart and trembling hands.
Then he heard a rumble, above and beyond the pounding of his heart or the normal sounds of the ship. A sound vibrating through the walls, coming closer.
Coming from the elevator.
“Shit. Someone's coming.”
Duran grabbed Finn's arm and dragged him to his feet. Clutching the small access panel to his chest, Finn raced after the Nyrian, back to their hiding spot down the hall and around the corner.
Rodie glanced up, wide-eyed, as he and Duran slid to a stop and pressed back against the wall, both of them gasping for air in the putrid atmosphere. “What's wrong?”
It took Finn a while to catch his breath. “Someone's coming down the elevator. I got the panel open, but haven't had a chance to look inside.” He held up the metal cover.
“Won't they notice it's missing?” Rodie hung on to Morgan's hand, but she wasn't freaking out. That was a good thing.
“I don't know.” Finn held a finger to his lips. He'd heard the solid thud as the elevator stopped. Now a soft swish as doors opened. Voices? Must be the Gar talking, but they sounded almost like birds chirping. Actually, he thought of ravens with the combination of high tones, some lower sounds, even the loud clicking he'd heard the big birds make. The voices disappeared in the distance, which meant they'd probably joined the other guards.
He hoped it was just a shift change, that they were relieving the guards on duty now and those guards would leave. The idea of even more Gar to deal with made him very nervous.
10
R
odie hated this, being stuck in a long, fairly well-lit corridor without any kind of cover, waiting in plain sight of anyone who might come by, knowing they still had the hardest part of the mission ahead of them. It didn't help, breathing air that stank to high heaven. What the hell was that smell? She raised her head like a dog sniffing the breeze. The ship reeked of carrion, that sickly sweet yet acrid stench of death and rotting meat.
She couldn't get past the thought this was like being trapped in a box with roadkill.
Think about something else. Anything else.
She curled her fingers against the slick wall, and her nails caught on something that felt like an indentation of some sort. Slowly turning, Rodie ran her fingers over the area that was just a little bit lower than a door handle would be.
There wasn't really anything to grab hold of, but she tried pushing along one edge. A curved ring popped out of the wall. Tugging slightly, she gasped when the entire section of wall slid to one side.
“Oh, shit.” The stench just about knocked her over.
“What the hell is that?” Morgan was looking over her shoulder, but the room was icy cold and very dark, and from their spot here in the doorway, there was nothing to see.
“No idea.” Rodie swept her hand over the wall inside the door, looking for a light switch. Nothing but smooth, cold wall.
Morgan stepped back. He whispered something to Duran and then she caught the slight whisper of Duran's reply. Morgan draped an arm over her shoulder. “He says the light will go on automatically once you step over the threshold.”
“Okay.” Rodie pressed the on button for the little video camera she'd strung around her neck, covered her nose and mouth with the sleeve of her jacket to cut the worst of the stench, and stepped into the room with the digital camera recording.
The lights went on, and thank goodness Morgan's hand covered her mouth, though it was barely in time to catch her scream. She could hardly hear him whispering rapidly to the others over the roaring in her ears, and the gorge rose in her throat until she was swallowing repeatedly to keep from puking all over the floor.
Slowly she peeled his fingers away from her mouth. She turned and looked at him, and she knew her eyes were probably bugging out of her face, but she wasn't going to scream. She absolutely was not going to make a sound.
Morgan stared back at her with the same shocked expression that she felt. They nodded to one another, and she finally forced herself to turn around, to see exactly what she'd discovered.
The room was massive. Absolutely huge, and filled with bodies hanging for as far as the eye could see. Row upon row of gutted bodies of alien beings, hanging from overhead hooks like slabs of meat in a butcher's locker. Not Gar and obviously not Nyrians, these were still humanoid enough that she knew they had to have been sentient beings from some civilized world.
“Holy fucking shit.”
Rodie looked over her shoulder at Finn and Duran standing directly behind Morgan. Finn was staring at the bodies with an expression of absolute horror on his face. Duran just looked . . . bored? As if this wasn't anything awful or even interesting?
“It's a fucking meat locker,” Morgan said. “Duran? Who were these people? There are . . . good lord, there must be thousands of bodies in here.”
“I have no idea.” Duran shrugged as he looked down the long rows. “This is one of their storage facilities. There are many of them about the ship, usually segregated by species according to quality. This locker is a long way from the kitchens, so I imagine this species isn't top quality. You know. Not as good to eat.”
Rodie's shocked gasp seemed to surprise Duran. He frowned and actually focused on her expression. Didn't he get it? Didn't he understand just how disgusting this was? How wrong?
Duran nodded, and she realized he'd been reading her thoughts. “It is wrong by human standards, but I believe I've told you, the Gar are carnivores. This is their food. Sentience in another species doesn't preclude the Gar from eating them. When a species is consumable, they are slaughtered like your cattle and removed from the planet for storage aboard the ship before the other resources are mined.”
“But these were people. Not human, but still sentient people. They had families. Oh, God. Some of them look like children.” Rodie had gotten past the nausea and her initial shock enough to remember her camera. She held it out from her chest but left the cord around her neck, filming as she walked over to the closest row of bodies. “Look. This one is still wearing clothing.” She focused the camera on tattered pants covered in thick maroon stains. Blood? She didn't know. Didn't really want to know, though this one, like all the others, had been eviscerated and the internal organs removed.
Speaking to the camera, she described what she was filming. “The creature is bipedal, about five feet tall with four toes on each foot and three fingers on each hand plus what appears to be an opposing thumb. It's hard to tell because the hands are clenched, but there are metal rings on some of the fingers. Jewelry of some kind. From the musculature, I'm guessing this one's male.”
She kept up her running commentary as she filmed the entire body before moving on to the next, a child this time by its smaller size and softer facial features. Her hands shook so much, she hoped it didn't screw up the images she was trying to capture. The one beside it had two sets of breasts. Female, though like all the others, the chest had been split open, the body eviscerated, which somehow made the sagging breasts—two on either side of the open chest cavity—a horrible parody of the female body.
She wondered if this one had been the child's mother. Had she been forced to see her baby slaughtered? The female's facial features were frozen in a rictus of agony. Rodie stared at the face, wondering if this one—if any of them—had been killed before the Gar gutted her. Some of the bodies were nude. She filmed them from all sides and angles, in case scientists might be interested in the differences between the men and women.
She couldn't get the image of the breasts out of her mind, of the child hanging beside the female. The gorge was rising in her throat again and she had to stop and close her eyes. Look away from so much carnage.
“Over here, Rodie.”
She glanced up as Finn gestured to a row of different-looking creatures. Some had four and others had six legs, but these bodies had all been skinned. There were tufts of dark fur near oddly shaped hooves, but they looked more like animals, not sentient beings. They hung in long rows that disappeared into shadows.
“This is what they had planned for Earth.” Morgan didn't strike Rodie as a man easily shaken by much of anything, but he looked as pale as she felt and his voice cracked on the words. Rage? He didn't look afraid. No, he looked totally pissed off.
He glanced at her camera. “Are you getting all of this?”
“I am. As much as I can. It's just a cheap little camera, but it's good for about two hours. I hope Dink can use it for his newscast.”
“It's better than nothing. I'm glad you thought to bring it.” He brushed a hand over her hair. “You were right when you said you had different skills we would need. You think of stuff ahead of time.”
“It's a girl thing,” she said, though her smile was forced. “We're smaller. We have to be smarter and faster. And better prepared.”
Morgan nodded and glanced at the door. Duran had slipped back outside. “The world needs to know what the Gar are capable of. Dink said there's a lot of sympathy for the poor aliens coming to Earth. Damned fools. C'mon. We need to get out of here before someone comes by.”
“Good idea.” Finn stared at the body closest to him, what looked like a young male. “I don't want to end up on the menu.”
Rodie felt absolutely numb. This was so much worse than anything she'd expected to see on this mission. These weren't just slabs of meat hanging in a freezer. They were the bodies of people—many of them children—obviously sentient beings who had lived on another planet somewhere.
A planet that had been their home.
Possibly a world like Earth, with forests and mountains, with a sun overhead and atmosphere they could breathe. Now they were nothing more than slabs of meat for a stronger race.
She turned away, flipped the camera off, slipped the cord over her neck, and stuck the camera in her pack. She was not going to cry. Not now. She'd do that later, when they were home safe and she had the time to mourn a people gone forever.
Home safe.
Morgan was wrong. She hadn't really thought this through, hadn't considered the danger. Now it felt all too real, what they were doing. What they were hoping to prevent.
Morgan and Finn followed her out of the freezer.
Morgan carefully shut the door behind them, but it didn't make the stench go away. Or the horror.
 
Finn leaned against the wall, fighting a combination of nausea and blinding rage. He would never forget what he'd just seen. Never forget all those individuals hanging in long rows, each face totally unique. Not human. Not even close to human, but they were obviously people.
Any guilt he'd felt about destroying the Gar ship and all the people aboard was gone. They were murderers. He had faces of their victims now. Males, females, and from the size of many of the bodies hanging in the freezer, children. Many, many children.
The women had four breasts, which meant they probably had larger families. That would account for all the children. God but he didn't want to be sick. Not here. Not now.
His heart pounded against his chest and he felt the anger flowing off Morgan and Rodie. All of them in this together. The sense from Duran was not so strong, but he'd lived with this for thousands of years. Did one become numb to so much death?
He must have. All of the Nyrians must have, or they wouldn't have survived this long. Of course, they fed off energy, not meat. They wouldn't have been involved in the actual preparation of bodies. He tried to imagine what it was like for the Gar who killed the various inhabitants of different planets. Did they see other species as equals? Probably not. They only saw the Nyrians as a source of energy, not as a sentient race.
He leaned his head against the wall and concentrated on calming down. On controlling the rush of adrenaline that had his muscles twitching and the blood rushing through his veins. He needed to find his center and hold on to it or he'd not be steady enough to work on the elevator controls.
Then he needed to finish this mission. Find the soulstones and blow this goddamned ship to smithereens.
He felt as if they'd been holding their position here for forever. A lifetime had passed since he'd walked into that damned meat locker. Something inherently central to who and what he was had been forever changed. Could anyone see something that horrible and not change?
Then Finn heard that odd clattering sound again, heard the door to the elevator open, then close, and the deep hum as the machinery kicked on. He pushed himself away from the wall.
Duran caught his arm. “Wait. Let me see what's happening in the engine room. The walls are blocked so we can't communicate through them.” He disassembled for no more than a few seconds of swirling energy and sparkling lights before reappearing. “Bolt says they're just waiting for our word. They intend to power the ship until the last minute to give us more time to escape. As soon as we've got the guards near the vault under control, they'll shut down and meet us to collect their soulstones. Then we're all going to disassemble and get off of here as quickly as we can. They figure fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before the systems begin to destabilize.”
Morgan grunted. “It can't be soon enough for me.”
“Me, either.” Rodie still looked slightly nauseous, and her skin was way too pale, but she didn't appear to be at all afraid. If anything, Finn thought she sounded even more determined.
“I definitely agree. Okay, I'm ready to take another shot at the elevator controls.” Finn glanced at Duran for confirmation.
He nodded. “I think we should all go this time. We'll be that much closer to the guards, but still out of sight of their post. Remember, they're fresh. They'll be more alert.”
“Great,” Rodie muttered. “Just what we need.”
Morgan leaned close and kissed her. “You can handle 'em,” he said. “Hey, Duran? Do the Gar have sexual fantasies?”
Duran gave him a disgusted look. “Nothing we get a charge from, that's for sure. Humans are the best we've ever found.”
“As it should be.” Morgan glanced at Finn.
We need to get her thinking of something else.
I agree.
Finn nodded. He followed Duran around the corner and along the broad hallway with Rodie and Morgan close behind. Morgan's voice in his mind had been clear as glass. Their ability to communicate telepathically was growing stronger.

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