Enslaved Book III: The Gladiators Read online

  Enslaved III:

  The Gladiators

  By

  Kaitlyn O’Connor

  © copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, July 2010

  Cover Art by Alex DeShanks , July 2010

  ISBN 978-1-60394-446-5

  New Concepts Publishing

  Lake Park, GA 31636

  www.newconceptspublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s

  imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or

  events is merely coincidence.

  Chapter One

  A flicker of both surprise and uneasiness went through Loren Hess when the driver of the black SUV turned into the parking lot of a local nightclub. She glanced at the backs of the heads of the two men in the front, struggling with the impulse to ask why they’d pulled in. Neither of the two hard faced men had been particularly warm or friendly, though, and she quelled the urge rather than risk a snub.

  They made her nervous, anyway, as if she wasn’t already a bundle of nerves!

  The uneasiness went bone deep. They’d kept her so off kilter since she’d been summoned to the administrator’s office that she’d hardly had a moment to sort her thoughts even if she’d had the tranquility to do it.

  She supposed she couldn’t blame it entirely on them. Guilt and the fear of punishment for her snooping had gotten the ball rolling, so to speak. She’d graduated at the top of her class in engineering and had been thrilled, flattered, and unnerved to be recruited by the government right after graduation. She hadn’t even settled from that wild flight of euphoric triumph when she’d found herself in a top secret installation and discovered she’d been hired to reverse engineer alien technology.

  Well! That had totally blown her mind, but she’d settled in after a few weeks and really focused. She’d focused so intently, in point of fact, that it wasn’t until roughly four years later that she began to have a niggling suspicion that something just wasn’t quite right about the picture.

  She supposed she could put it down to youth, enthusiasm, and plain out naiveté if came to that—not that she was excusing herself by any means! Truthfully, she thought she was embarrassed more than anything else that it had taken her long to become suspicious at all. It wounded her sense of self-worth and confidence in her intelligence once it did dawn on her that something strange—stranger than reverse engineering alien technology—was going on, or maybe something not entirely legal.

  The whole cloak and dagger aspect of the operation kept her on edge, though, and her nose firmly to the grindstone. She’d been afraid, at first, even to allow herself to question anything and she certainly hadn’t had the nerve to openly question anything!

  She’d barely seen the light of day since she’d been recruited. It was a rare treat indeed to be allowed to leave the facility and whenever she did, she was monitored at all times to make certain she didn’t divulge any secrets. Phone calls were monitored!

  Not that she got that many or managed to track her parents down to call them and talk very often. It seemed they’d only been waiting to turn her out of the ‘nest’ to resume their field research, which they’d pretty much given up to rear her, taking teaching positions to give her a stable home until she’d gone off to college.

  It wasn’t the tight security that finally made the light come on, though. It was the fact that there seemed to be an endless supply of alien technology that needed to be taken apart and studied plus the fact that she hadn’t seen a single, solitary piece that actually looked like it had been in a crash. No one had actually told her that the devices she was put to work on were from a crash—They didn’t tell her, or anyone else, anything—but the other scientists and engineers on the project seemed to believe that was the origins—a crash.

  Well, when it hit her that she hadn’t seen anything in the entire time she’d been there that looked like it had come from a crash, curiosity about the origins of the electronics had smote her.

  She’d tried to be very casual about it and careful who she talked to, but she’d instantly suspected when she was summoned to the administrator’s office that they’d noticed she was nosey about things that weren’t any of her business. She might not have been except that she hadn’t been in the administrator’s office since she’d arrived over four years earlier, had her canned spiel about security and then been sent along for ‘orientation’, which had also mostly been about security.

  And then there was the fact that she knew she wasn’t supposed to be speculating about anything beyond the materials something was made from, what it did, and how it worked.

  She certainly hadn’t suspected that she’d been summoned to be offered the opportunity to see where the technology came from!

  She hardly remembered anything about the discussion after that.

  In fact, she couldn’t actually recall that she’d volunteered to go and yet here she sat in the back of a black, non-descript government vehicle … in the parking lot of a popular nightspot of all places.

  “This is as far as we go,” the agent in the front seat said coolly, turning around to look at her.

  Loren gaped at him blankly and then looked around. A frown of confusion drew her brows together as the suspicion immediately assailed her that she’d just been fired. “I’m supposed to get out … here?”

  “You’re to walk down that alley there and wait.”

  Loren felt her jaw sag lower as she stared at the dark alley he’d pointed out.

  The suspicion instantly assailed her that she was targeted for termination—and not just from her job. “Uh … that really is a dark alley. You’re sure I’m supposed to wait there?”

  His lips flattened. “You expect them to set down in the middle of the parking lot?” he asked sarcastically.

  Loren felt her face redden, felt stupid. “Oh.” She laughed nervously and reached down to grab the small travel bag that was all they’d allowed her to take. She’d had a hell of time packing enough for an indeterminate stay on an alien world in the one small bag and the end result was that it was like a black hole—incredibly dense and heavy as hell.

  They didn’t offer to help her with her bag so, when she heard the sound of the door locks being deactivated, she grasped the handle of her bag in one hand and the door handle with the other and got out. They drove off while she was still trying to decide if they were sending her into the alley for an execution.

  Fortunately, it occurred to her that they could’ve done that, if that was the plan, at any time along the dark road that led from the secret government facilities. Trying to convince herself that that was completely logical and she didn’t have anything to worry about, she hefted her bag, peered at the darkened alley for a long moment, and finally started toward it, watching nervously for any sign of movement that might indicate it wasn’t as deserted as it looked. Thankfully, it wasn’t as dark as she’d feared. Light spilled in from both ends of the alley and there was enough light to see her way and see anyone if there had been anyone there.

  She stopped about halfway down and looked around uneasily, trying her best to dismiss her fears. She’d been presented with an opportunity few, if any, humans had ever had. She would be examining all sorts of alien technology and learning from it. She should be excited. She should be thrilled to death, not scared to death, but there was no chasing the fear with logic.

  Time did that, leaching it away little by little and allowing other thoughts to flicker through her mind that were disturbing in another way entirely.

  Maybe she was supposed to be picked up by another car and taken to another location for the actual pick up?

/>   That made a lot more sense than the idea of an alien ship swooping from the sky and picking her up behind a nightclub.

  She’d set her bag down because it felt like it was going to pull her shoulder out of socket, but the thought prompted her to pick it up again and start moving along the alley.

  It also occurred to her to wonder if this was some sort of elaborate joke just to make her feel like a complete idiot.

  And that, maybe, she actually had been dismissed and they’d just wanted to dump her far enough from the facilities their secrecy would be protected.

  Why would they do that, though? Shouldn’t they have threatened her about talking if they were going to fire her? Wouldn’t they have at least said she wasn’t to talk about anything she’d seen or worked on?

  But maybe they figured she ought to know nothing had changed in that respect?

  She’d moved perhaps two or three yards further along the alley when she abruptly found herself spotlighted. Her heart skipped a beat, the first thought running through her mind that it was a police helicopter.

  Even as she glanced up, though, she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of a helicopter. In fact, she hadn’t heard any sound at all beyond the dull thud of the music filtering from the nightclub and the traffic on the street in front of it.

  Her heart couldn’t decide whether to leap into her throat or hit her toes when she saw the huge disk above her like a black shadow against the night sky. It didn’t have the chance to do either. She felt a burning tingle begin on her skin and penetrate all the way through her and then she blacked out. When she came to, she was lying on a cold, hard surface that was perfectly smooth, not rough like the pavement of the parking lot, or warmed by the day.

  She felt like she’d been body slammed. She hurt all over—not badly, but she was achy and heavy. It took an effort to push herself up to look around. As she did, a flicker of movement caught her eye and she whipped her head in that direction. She had just enough time to register the mechanical monster coming toward her and to suck in a sharp breath to scream and something hit her that pitched her toward darkness again.

  The second time she regained consciousness she heard the noisy sobs and sniffs of a number of people—women. Confusion flickered through her, but it dredged her upwards from the depths rapidly and she became aware that the hard surface she was lying on was completely different than the one before.

  The room she opened her eyes to was like something from some seamy prison movie. It was dim, but not too dark to see that it was lined with bunks and that there was a woman on almost everyone of the. She lay still for several moments, trying to convince herself that she couldn’t be in a prison, wondering if she’d been given some kind of hallucinogenic drug.

  “Where am I?”

  No one responded. It made the sense that she had to be imagining things or that she was in the grips of some kind of nightmare increase.

  It felt too real to be a nightmare, however, and she finally sat up on the bunk. “What is this place?” she demanded more loudly.

  “We don’t know. Nobody knows,” a dark haired woman on the bunk across from her answered. “We all woke up here just like you did—I’m guessing you saw that scary looking metal monstrosity and he zapped you, too?”

  “But …,” Loren began and then abruptly broke off as sudden doubts swarmed her mind as to the wisdom of offering any sort of information. “I was in the alley behind this club …?”

  “We all were.”

  Loren turned to the blond who’d spoken, blinking at her and trying to assimilate that. “But … nobody was with me.”

  “She didn’t mean we were all standing around just waiting to get scooped up by the fucking aliens, moron!” another woman growled angrily.

  “Who’s the moron?” another woman said loudly. “This isn’t a fucking alien ship! I’m telling you, we’ve been taken by sex slavers!”

  “That had a … a thing like the one that zapped us?”

  “And tell us how we got in a ship, as long as you’re at it! There’s no such thing as little green men that fly around in UFOs!”

  Loren wasn’t about to argue with them on that—actually, any part of it. “You saw an alien?”

  “Nobody saw a damned thing—except the light!” another woman snapped. “I’d left the club and was heading to my car and then this light surrounds me and the next thing I know I’m lying on the floor and then that horrible thing came in and zapped me and I woke up here! It was like that for everybody!”

  A horrible suspicion arose in Loren’s mind. She tried her best to dismiss it, but it wouldn’t be silenced.

  They’d thought of another way to make sure she didn’t tell their dirty little secrets!

  And she’d walked right in to the trap like a complete idiot!

  “What do they want with us?” another woman wailed.

  Loren covered her face with her hands, struggling with fear, anger, and humiliation that she’d walked into their trap like a … child that had no sense of self-preservation. How could she have anticipated that her own government would do something like this to her, though?

  Well, people that worked for the government.

  Someone settled beside her and slipped a comforting arm around her shoulders. “We’re going to be alright.”

  Loren lowered her hands and discovered it was the black woman who’d first spoken to her. “I … don’t think so.”

  The woman’s chin wobbled. “We’re alive, aren’t we? If they’d meant anything … awful, we wouldn’t be alive.”

  “Well! If you don’t think it’s awful to be sold into the sex slavery market …!” one of the other women snapped angrily.

  “I … uh … I actually think it’s aliens,” Loren said uncomfortably.

  “This isn’t a ship,” the black woman said. “We’d feel movement, right? We’d feel the pull of gravity.”

  Loren chewed her lip uncomfortably. “Not if we were in space.”

  “Well! We’d be floating around then!” one of the other women said, her voice quavering on the edge of hysteria.

  “Not if they had artificial gravity on the ship.”

  “We’re trying to figure this out!” the blond said angrily. “Hello? We don’t have things like that!”

  “Aliens might!” the black woman who’d befriended Loren said tightly. “Not that I believe that—the part about us having been picked up by aliens, I mean.”

  Loren was bone deep scared that it was aliens. If it had just been her, she might’ve been able to dismiss that. There might’ve been some possibility of believing she’d been imprisoned on Earth because she knew too much, but she’d spent the last four years of her life studying alien technology. She knew there was such a thing.

  And she knew she’d guessed right the first time, when she’d been summoned to the administrator’s office it was because they knew she’d been snooping and they had every intention of putting a stop to it before she found out more than they wanted to know.

  Such as the fact that they were bartering Earth women for the technology.

  She didn’t want to believe that, but she was almost a hundred percent certain that she really was on an alien ship, imprisoned with a roomful of women. The agents had taken her right to the spot to be picked up. It sure as hell wasn’t a coincidence.

  The terrifying part was that she hadn’t snooped nearly enough—not enough to find out what it was the aliens wanted with Earth women.

  They didn’t have nearly enough time to sit around discussing it and trying to figure it out to Loren’s way of thinking. They’d had just enough time to begin to calm down when an opening appeared in the side of the room where they were held and the metal monstrosity entered. “Please rise and exit the room in an orderly fashion.”

  Loren tried not to think the fact that the damned thing spoke English was yet another indication that the government was cooperating with the aliens in the kidnappings, but she’d begun to realize that they were completely ru
thless.

  Not surprisingly, no one leapt up to do as they were told. Most of the women simply fell into another fit of hysterics. The rest cowered against the walls, terrified.

  The robot—Loren figured that was what it was although it looked more like a square trashcan with octopus arms—zapped two of the women closest, caught each of them by their ankles and dragged them from the room. Almost everyone else bounded forward immediately and followed the machine out of the cell and into a corridor.

  The emotionless monster pointed out the direction they were supposed to go and continued to drag to the two unconscious women. Another one of the things appeared in the corridor behind them and entered the cell, returning a few moments later with two more unconscious women. The stragglers followed the second robot out.

  As terrified as Loren was, she felt downright nauseous when they’d scampered down the corridor ahead of the robots and met up with a line of women—a long line. The black woman exchanged a look with Loren.

  “There must be several hundred women here,” she whispered. “My god! How could they make off with so many women without anybody noticing?”

  Loren was bone deep cold with shock and her jaw was spasming. “They don’t take them from the same place. I heard once that thousands of women go missing every day and many of them are never seen or heard from again.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “Sorry,” Loren said apologetically. “It isn’t something I want to think about either.”

  “I’m Karen, by the way. Karen Smith.”

  “Loren … Hess.”

  “This is a hell of a way to end a night of partying,” the brunette just behind Loren muttered.

  Loren was on the point of telling them that she hadn’t been when it occurred to her that they would demand an explanation. She considered it a moment and finally decided there was really no point in keeping it to herself. “I wasn’t partying. I was taken there specifically to be picked up.”

  “So you know what this is about?” the woman in front of Karen demanded.