Ice Planet Barbarians: The Complete Series: A SciFi Alien Serial Romance (3 page)

The idea we’ve come up with is that I’ll throw the crap on him to further distract him, and then the others will use that time to jump him. We’ll overwhelm him and take him down, then strip him of his gun. Not that we know how to shoot an alien weapon, but one step at a time. As long as he doesn’t have it, that’s half the battle.

Of course, hefting the shit bucket into my arms shows just how heavy it is and just how weak and lethargic I am from the shitty rations they’re giving us. I stagger under the weight of it, wincing when some slops over the edge and onto my arm. Fuck it.

He growls out something that sounds like a cuss-word in alien-ese and unlocks the cage.

Unlike
how we’ve planned, the other girls fall back, cringing, leaving me there with the waste bucket and a stupid expression on my face as he slams toward me.

I throw it at him just as he grabs for me, but it’s too heavy and ends up slopping on both of us. He grabs my arm, and I shriek in surprise as his fingers dig into the meat of my bicep. Not only is his pebbly skin ugly, it’s rough and tears at my skin like it’s sandpaper.

He spits an epithet at me and drags me forward.

“No,” Liz says, grabbing my other arm even as I twist in his grasp. Where was our big fucking attack plan? Why are the others all huddling like scared rabbits? I look to Kira, my other co-conspirator, but she has her head tilted, a funny expression on her face as she stares at the ceiling. Faint birdlike chirping comes from above.

“Detachment commencing?” Kira asks, a confused look on her face.

The entire floor shifts to the side, and we go flying.

I slam across the room, my body soaring through the air. I land hard against the stasis lockers, and all the air leaves my lungs.

The entire world tilts, topsy-turvy, and the hold is filled with screaming women. Splashes of something wet hit my arms, and the waste bucket flies past overhead. Then everything hangs in the air. The lights go out, leaving us in the darkness.

A red light flickers on. Oh, that’s not good. Red lights are always emergency lights, aren’t they?

I stare into the now-red room, watching as globules of waste soar past. In the background, someone tumbles in the air. We’ve lost gravity.

What the hell?

I try to focus my eyes as something dances past my head. Black, oblong, with a thick barrel.

The gun.

Holy cow. I push off of one of the lockers and swim through the air for it, just as gravity kicks in again. I slam to the ground on top of the gun.

A few feet away, the guard slams down as well. All the while, that weird, birdlike chirping keeps going over the intercoms.

I grab the gun and look for a trigger as the guard groans and shakes his head, trying to gather his thoughts. There’s no trigger. Well, fuck it. It’ll work just as well as a bludgeon. Grabbing it by the thick, heavy base, I raise it over my head and bring it down on the guard’s head.

CRACK.

The guard flails.

I don’t stop. I hit him again and again.
Crack. Crack.
Over and over, I slam the butt of the rifle into his head. He doesn’t move, but I don’t stop. I’m terrified he’ll somehow have a granite skull and will roll over and overpower me. So I just keep hitting him.

Hands grab mine. “Georgie. Hey, Georgie, stop. I think he’s dead.” Liz’s voice cuts through the haze in my brain. “You can stop now.”

I slow, staring blankly at her then down at the guard. Or what’s left of the guard. His face is nothing but a pile of meat atop his neck.

I stare. Then I throw up.

“You did it,” Liz says, rubbing my back. “Holy shit. You did it, Georgie! You’re a fucking Billy Badass!”

I don’t feel so badass. I feel sick. I’ve just killed a man. Kinda a man. Sorta. Definitely a rapist.

Still a living creature.

Was.
Was
a living creature.

My stomach roils uncomfortably again, and I go to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, then stop. It smells like sewage. Ugh. I’m covered, too, and the cabin is splattered. “What the heck happened?”

“I don’t know,” Liz says, helping me to my feet.

I ache all over, my ribs feeling bruised from where I landed on the gun. I hold onto it, though. I don’t care if it’s covered in poop and brains and everything else, it’s mine now.

A metallic sounding chirp blares over the loudspeaker, just as my ears pop hard. Liz clutches her ears at the same time as I do, and we look at each other in surprise.

Kira comes running out of the cage. “Ladies! We’ve got bigger problems. The message overhead is now saying ‘Prepare for re-entry.’ I think that means we’re crashing!”

Fuck.

We pitch again, and I tumble through the air, banging into the lockers. Something smacks my head, and everything goes black

• • • 

“Hey.” A familiar voice sounds in my ear. “Hey, wake up. Are you okay, Georgie?”

I slowly come to and groan at the fierce stab of pain shooting through my forehead. Then, a moment later, the pain isn’t just in my head. Every part of my body aches, my wrist most of all. It throbs with an uncomfortable fire that seems to radiate all the way up to my elbow. I squint up at Liz as she hovered over me. “Ow.”

She grins back, displaying a fat lip and a growing bruise on one cheek. “You’re alive. That’s always a plus.” She sits back on her haunches and offers me a hand. “Can you sit up?”

With her help, I get to a seated position, wincing. Sitting up just makes everything hurt even more. “What happened?”

“We crashed,” she says. “Most of us got knocked out from being bounced around. There are a few broken bones, a few bloody noses, and two who didn’t make it.”

I stare at her in shock then scan the cabin. “Two people . . . died? Who?”

“In addition to the guard you took down, Krissy and Peg. Looks like broken necks.” She nods over at the far side of the room. “Poor kids.”

I swallow the knot of grief in my throat. I didn’t know them well, but I knew their terror and fear. I’m just glad I’m alive. I hug Liz, and she hugs me back, and for a moment, we’re just relieved to be breathing and mostly whole. Over her shoulder, I squint, noticing that the entire cargo bay seems to be slanted at an angle. The metallic floor is covered with debris, tilted, and icy cold. I get to my feet with her help, wobbling, and gaze around in shock.

Several of the girls cling together in a corner—Megan is hugging Dominique and trying to calm her, the latter choking back braying sobs. Other girls are still sprawled on the ground, unconscious, and I see two bodies piled in the corner next to the dead guard. Krissy’s dark hair tumbles over her face, obscuring her features. It’s for the best. I look away. Over off to the side, Kira’s trying to help another girl straighten an obviously broken leg. Kira’s own face is bruised and blood’s running down from her ear implant.

Everyone looks beaten up, bruised, and damaged. I gaze down at my own legs, but they seem to be okay. My wrist, however, is swollen and getting a little purplish, and my ribs feel like they’re on fire. “I think I broke this,” I say, holding my bad arm out. I gingerly rotate my wrist and nearly pass out at the shockwave of pain it sends through my body.

“Guess you won’t be clubbing any more aliens then,” Liz says cheerfully. “If it’s not broke, it’s sprained pretty bad. You should see my toes on my left foot. They look pretty awful, too. Like they tried to make a strategic retreat into my foot and failed.”

I glance over at her skeptically. “Then why are you in such a good mood?”

“Because we’re free,” she says enthusiastically. “We are fucking free, and we’ve landed somewhere. I already count those as better odds than what we had before.”

“How do you know we landed?”

Liz hobbles to my side, favoring her leg. “Because the floor’s tilted and cold, and because of that.” She points at something behind me.

I turn and look. Overhead, it seems as if one of the compartments has peeled partially away, leaving a long, narrow scrape in the hull of our storage bay. Through the scrape, weak light filters in and what looks like snowflakes drizzle down. I gasp and push forward, trying to see. “Is that snow?”

“It is,” Liz says happily. “And since we’re all not asphyxiating from breathing methane or something, there’s also oxygen coming in.”

Hope thuds in my heart, and I stare up at the ceiling. I turn back to Liz, full of excitement. “Do you think we landed back on Earth somehow?”

“I don’t think so,” Kira says, her soft voice interrupting my thoughts. I glance over at her and wince. She looks pretty rough, the entire left side of her thin face purple and bloody. One of her eyes has a broken blood vessel, the red stark against her pale skin. And she is limping, too, her knee swollen.

“How do you know we’re not on Earth?” I ask. I refuse to give up hope just yet. “How many places can have snow and oxygen? We just might be, I don’t know, in Canada or something.”

“Except I heard through this thing,” she says, pointing at the bloodied earpiece still attached to her head, “that they were dumping us at a ‘safe location’ for a return pick-up at a later date.”

Liz crosses her arms, frowning. “Return pick-up? So they dropped us so we can sit pretty, and they’re going to pick us up again in a day or two? Fuck that.”

“I don’t know when,” Kira says, her face solemn. “But when they mentioned this place, it definitely wasn’t Earth they were referring to. They kept talking about a particle cloud, but the only particle cloud I remember from science class was on the edge of our solar system: the Oort Cloud. And if we’re getting that much light,” she says, pointing at the scrape in the hull, “We’re not anywhere close to Pluto. I don’t think we’re on Earth at all. I don’t think we’re in our solar system, either.”

“Gotcha,” Liz agrees. She sounds glum.

I’m still skeptical. Glancing up at the snow falling into the crack, it’s hard not to get excited. We had to be home, didn’t we? It’s winter out there. They could have dropped us in Antarctica. Right now I’d take Antarctica over a random planet. “I don’t want to stick around until they come back.”

“Me either.” Kira sighs and winces, rubbing her shoulder. “But everyone’s hurt. I don’t know how fast we can move, or if it’s even safe to move. For all we know, we could be floating on a sea of ice filled with man-eating ice-sharks.”

“Good God, you’re Suzy Fucking Sunshine, aren’t you?” Liz says, staring at Kira.

“Sorry.” Kira grimaces, pressing a palm to her forehead. “It’s been a hell of a day, and I feel like it’s just going to get worse.”

She looks so morose that I want to hug her. I refuse to be down about this. One guard is dead, we have his gun, and for now we’re away from our captors. “It’ll be fine,” I tell them brightly. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Can we figure out food?” Megan calls from the corner of the slanted storage bay. “We’re pretty hungry.”

“Food is a good start,” I agree, nodding at Liz. “Let’s see what we have if we’re supposed to ride this out and wait for the little green men to return.”

An hour later, though, things are looking grim. We’ve found enough bars for a week, and we have enough water for approximately as long. Beyond that, though, there is nothing.

In addition, other than what belonged to the guard we’d killed—well,
I’d
killed—there were no weapons and no additional clothes. We went through everything, pounding on walls and trying to find hidden compartments in the shuttle bay, but we didn’t find much. The only discovery was some sort of thick plastic-like sheet material, but it wasn’t warm or flexible enough to be used for much of anything.

“Pretty sure Robinson Crusoe wasn’t nearly as fucked as we are,” Liz jokes.

I haven’t read
Robinson Crusoe
, but I agree. It’s clear we’re not equipped for survival. We’re not equipped for anything, and it’s getting colder in the hold by the minute, thanks to the snow and cold air that steadily trickles in from the gap in the hull.

“I mean, I don’t understand,” Liz says, handing out a few seaweed bars. “If they want us to sit and wait, don’t you think they should have left us with more supplies?”

“You forget that we’re the extras,” I point out, waving away my bar. Someone else could eat it. My stomach was upset enough as it is. “As long as they’re intact, that’s all that matters, right? And they’re not eating.” I thumb a gesture at the lockers still lining the wall. “They’re still in perfect condition.”

Naturally.

“Should we wake them up now?” The thought of a handful of women floating in stasis a few feet away with no comprehension of what was going on is rather unnerving to me. If I’d crash landed, wouldn’t I want to know?

“God no,” Liz says. “How do we even know that they’re aware of where we are? For all they know, they’re still tucked into bed and little green men don’t exist. How would you like to wake up to find all this and oh, by the way, we’re stranded and don’t have much to eat?”

“Good point.” I gaze around the empty room, tapping my bare foot and thinking.

“So what do we do?” Kira asks, sliding in next to the other girls huddling together for body warmth. She looks exhausted.

Liz glances at me, waiting.

Am I the leader now? Crap. But . . . someone’s got to do it, and I’m tired of no one having ideas. I consider our options for a long moment. “Well, if we’re on a planet with oxygen, I’m guessing there are other things living here. I don’t know a lot about science, but if Earth can support all kinds of life, doesn’t it stand to reason that this planet could, too? We could be really close to a city for all we know.”

“A city full of aliens,” someone mutters.

“True,” I agree. “But we can’t stay here and starve to death. Or freeze. The sun’s shining right now, but we don’t know how long we have until night—”

“Or how long night will last,” Kira adds.

“Maybe you quit helping out,” Liz tells her. “I’m just saying.”

“I think we need to scout around at least,” I suggest. “Find out our bearings, look for food and water, and report back.”

“But most of us are injured,” sniffs one girl. Tiffany. She looks like she is fresh off the farm and utterly terrified. Some of us have taken our captivity with grim determination, and some have completely fallen apart. Tiffany’s in the latter category.