He thought he had a good deal of self-control, but giving him Bri when his body had already been raging for mating--with any available female that was even close to satisfactory--had been like waving water under the nose of someone perishing for it.
Mating with their own women should have appeased the urges. It hadn’t, though, because their women had aborted their young. They knew it, and it had stirred the instincts again to fever pitch--because they
had
to produce once they were in cycle. And having already caved in to the need once, none of them, even him, had been able to overcome or ignore the urge. Discipline, willpower, and the logical thinking mind had gotten him through the previous cycles, but it had been hellish. He prided himself on the fact that he had had enough strength of will to do what had to be done without having to be physically restrained as some had. But he had been miserable long after the urges had passed, unappeased by casual intercourse with the women, and each successive cycle had taken its toll, weakened his resolve a little more.
He wondered if he was only making excuses for himself, trying to justify his weakness. He didn’t know. The plain truth was he was still in cycle and less than his usual rational self.
Rage surged inside of him all over again at the thought. He had feared that it would be a bad thing to get a child on Bri as dainty as she was, and he still hadn’t been able to resist.
And then they had taken it.
In one sense he was relieved. He didn’t want to chance that she could not birth his child without help--and the gods knew the Sheloni were butchers. They were far more interested in the offspring than the mother. They would not care if she lived or died so long as they managed to remove the child from her body.
Irrational or not, he had still been fiercely glad when he thought that he had gotten his child on her and half mad when he discovered they’d aborted it.
And then they had given her to Dansk.
By their customs, she was
his
for the mating cycle! She might not have chosen him, but she had accepted him! And she had lost his child! He had the right to a second chance at breeding her with his seed!
He shook the thought off. It had been beyond insane to attack Dansk. Quite aside from the fact that he knew Dansk was in cycle, too, and driven just as he was, he had so lost his reason when he had seen the two of them together that he had breeched the Sheloni security,
shown
them how completely inadequate it was. And they had been at great pains to convince the Sheloni that they were completely at their mercy!
The only saving grace of the entire fiasco was that the Sheloni had apparently decided that both of them were mad and that explained why the collars had failed to bring them down. Apparently their chemical levels had still been spiked when they’d been examined. The Sheloni had kept them isolated until the levels had returned, more or less, to normal and returned them to general population--with their collar settings a good bit higher than before, but they hadn’t changed the settings of the others’ collars.
Actually, there were two positive things that had come out of the incident.
He realized that the Sheloni had never actually dealt with Hirachi in mating cycle--meaning those they’d captured before had resisted the seventh year call of the wild--and therefore the Sheloni did not know that when their hormones spiked, so too did their strength.
And he had prevented Dansk from breeding on his woman--for the time being.
He was going to have to confront Dansk. He didn’t know how they were going to resolve the issue without alerting the Sheloni, but they would have to. He could see Bri was inclined to accept Dansk. He didn’t like it, but he knew she had the right to choose another male, any male, any time it pleased her, and he could live with that. She had already accepted him for this cycle, however. If she bore a child, it would be his. Dansk could father the child of the next cycle if that was what Bri wanted. He would try not to interfere. The urge to reproduce was rarely as strong after a male had managed a successful mating anyway. He should be able to control the urge to dispose of rivals.
As he at last reached the point where the land dropped away and dove into the chasm beyond the shelf that lined the beach, a sense of peace washed over him as it always did when he returned to the sea. This time, though, the joy of feeling the sea engulf him was fleeting. Even as he followed the others deeper and deeper into the peaceful silence and darkness of the ocean deaths, fresh anxieties arose to plague him.
He still could not completely accept that the Earth women were not able to live in the sea. He had wanted to dismiss it as beyond believable, but when he had prodded her Bri had left him in no doubt. She could
not
live in the sea, couldn’t even swim! How could the Earth people look so similar and be so different?
And what would than mean to their offspring?
He shook that thought off. As maddening as his urges were at the moment, the child was not the problem--they would be long gone before the children were born--and he couldn’t afford to allow himself no room to think beyond that.
Bri was the problem.
All
the Earth human females were a problem.
They
could escape, but the sea was their best hope if not their only hope. It had not occurred to him when he’d begun to formulate the plan that they would not be able to escape
with
the women that way.
They had bred their children on these women. They could not leave them, even if they wanted to--and no one wanted to.
Chapter Twenty
“It’s like … sushi,” Caroline muttered in surprise.
Bri glanced at the woman she’d been working beside for hours. They’d seemed to hit if off instantly, but she rather thought that was just because of who Caroline was. Caroline from South Carolina was friendly, cheerful, and uncomplicated. She was pretty, but she had the look of someone who’d been more than a little plump and had suddenly, drastically plummeted in weight--probably because of the tasteless Sheloni diet--which made it all the more surprising that she managed to remain cheerful.
“You like sushi?”
“God no! Uh, I’ve never actually tried any. It’s gross even to think of eating anything raw. At least we don’t have to cook, though. I hate cooking. I suck big time at cooking.”
Bri glanced at her in surprise.
Caroline chuckled, but this time it was a little forced. “I know what you’re thinking. How did I get fat if I don’t even cook? Right?”
“Actually, I was thinking you would’ve made the perfect customer--if I still had my business. In my old life, I used to prepare home cooking for women who didn’t have time to do it from scratch themselves, or didn’t know how to cook, or just didn’t want to. Everything was carefully prepared--meat, veggies, and seasoning--and ready to go into the oven or the frying pan.”
“That must have been interesting.”
Bri laughed. “You’re just too sweet to say boring, but I didn’t mind it. I started it to help support myself and my mother. It was something I could do and still stay home to take care of her, and it was actually a pretty successful business. Just before I was taken I’d landed a chain supermarket deal to sell in their delis.”
“Wow! You might have been rich! That sucks a big hairy one.”
Bri laughed even though it occurred to her that in her ‘old life’ she would have been shocked, probably disgusted by the comment. Maybe she would even have turned her nose up at Caroline for her ‘gutter talk’.
Now it was just so nice to hear someone chattering back at her in her own language she didn’t much care how they expressed themselves. Sometimes she didn’t even feel like the same person at all. It was almost like remembering a past life where she’d been someone else.
“So…,” Caroline said, changing the subject. “You think maybe these Hirachi people are like … Asians from another world?”
Bri stared at her blankly.
“I mean … sushi, and Hirachi sounds a little Asian, doesn’t it? And they have dark hair and the Asians are supposed to be the ‘yellow race’, though I never really figured that one out because they’re not. Well, maybe a little yellow toned--guess we’re not exactly white, either. Himini calls us pink.”
Suppressing the urge to laugh, Bri considered it. “You’re talking about the alien seeding theory sci-fi buffs like?”
“Yeah. Except I never heard anything about it being Asians, but there seems to be a lot of similarities to me, so it’s possible. Don’t you think?”
“You’re just saying that because you like Himini,” Lisa, one of the women from Florida, said teasingly.
Blushing, Caroline glanced at the woman on her other side suspiciously and finally smiled. “So? I do like him. What’s wrong with that? He’s really sweet to me.”
“He ain’t human,” Becky ‘the fucking cunt’ said. “Asian!” She snorted. “It’s like … fucking a dolphin.”
Caroline reddened with anger.
Bri felt her own anger surge to the forefront. “I’ve never tried that,” Bri responded agreeably. “But I’ll take your word for it. I did hear somewhere that they’ve got really big cocks. What was it like for you?”
Caroline let out a snorting laugh. Several of the women gaped at her and then began to snicker.
Becky, she saw when she met the woman’s eye, was glaring at her, her face red with both anger and embarrassment.
Bri gave her a saccharin smile.
Becky’s hand tightened on the knife she was using to skin the fish.
“You don’t want to do that,” Bri said coldly. “If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out. Caroline likes Himini. I like … Kole and Dansk. And I love Cory. And we don’t like people talking nasty about them.”
After glancing around the group of women and discovering their expressions were anything but encouraging, Becky focused on her task.
The job they’d been given was revolting. Food preparation might have been something they were all familiar with, but not
this
kind! Slabs of protein wrapped in plastic was something Bri could handle.
This
was disgusting. The Hirachi had begun bringing up both the coral looking stuff and … things that only vaguely resembled any kind of fish any of them were familiar with. It was easiest just to call them fish because they came out of the water, though.
Thankfully, Bri had landed near the middle of the assembly line the robots had formed because the women at the beginning had to behead and gut the smelly things. Most of them, she was sure, had never done anything like that. There’d been a lot of screaming and cursing going on at first when they’d had to struggle with the wiggling, flopping, and occasional attempts to bite, but that had been hours ago.
She glanced over to where some of the other women were struggling to figure out how to erect the shelters. They were supposed to be watching Cory, but aside from forming a barrier all the way around him, none of them were paying him much attention. Still, he seemed content enough to watch them--fascinated, in fact. Every once in a while, he’d make a sound--his version of exercising his voice--and one of the women would glance at him. He always smiled sweetly at anyone that paid him any attention, but he rarely got a smile in return.
Poor baby!
Trying not to be angry about the snubs, Bri rolled her aching shoulders and flicked a few glances around the compound. The Sheloni had disappeared some time ago after moving around the wall to stare down at the harvesting bins that were slowly being filled. None of them had ventured any closer, and she wondered if that meant anything. It seemed possible that whatever the stuff was it had properties that didn’t set well with them. That would be yet another reason the Sheloni couldn’t handle harvesting it themselves.
She wasn’t certain why she’d gotten that impression. It might have been no more than laziness about climbing down the walls to look it over--or wariness about venturing into the slave den--but it seemed to her than she noted both excitement over the harvest and uneasiness in them.
That ruled out the possibility that it was something they ate, she decided, which also ruled out the possibility of poisoning it.
But if it was poison to them in its natural state …?
The walls looked like stone. She hadn’t gotten close enough to examine them very well, and she wasn’t certain that would’ve made a lot of difference, but despite the fact that they looked to be as smooth as glass, she didn’t think they were made of any kind of metal.
She wondered why. Too expensive to haul metal across the galaxy? That seemed plausible, and yet it was almost strange to think of the Sheloni using natural materials. There hadn’t been any on the ship that she had noticed. In fact everything, including the ship itself, seemed to be made out of the same stuff--a sort of plastic/metal material.
The walls were thick. She’d noticed when she came through the gate that the walls were at least five feet thick, bottom to top, too narrow, though, she thought to be hollow--as in rooms or cells--but awfully thick just to be a retaining wall for prisoners. She doubted much shy of a truck load of dynamite would blast through them.
The gates had been made out of the same material as the ship and about eight inches thick. If she was a betting person, she would’ve bet they were equal in strength to the stone walls, but it still seemed the only way out. No way could a climber, even an experienced one, go over the slick walls with no hand or foot holds, nothing even for traction.
She had to wonder if the place was like Fort Knox just to keep them in, or if there was something on the other side the Sheloni was worried about keeping out. That was a creepy thought, but she couldn’t recall seeing anything at all that would support that theory. True, she’d been in pain, struggling with Cory, and upset over the deaths of Consuelo and the others, but as thick as the jungle was with plant life, there should have been furtive scurrying of creatures somewhere along the way. She should have seen some sort of flying things, tracks, or maybe broken down vegetation from something passing.
It was certainly not a dead world by any means. She’d seen a few fairly horrible looking insects--not many thankfully, but a few--beetle looking things and crawly things with way too many legs. The woman who’d described the place as looking prehistoric was right. There was something about this world that seemed fresh and just born, even though, if she remembered her science correctly, the sun was probably an old one.