Barbarian Prince (6 page)

She’d felt like she was taking her life into her hands with every bite she took and she and Monica had decided that the safest way to handle the food issue was to only take one bite and wait to see if they survived it. (The assumption being that one bite wouldn’t be enough to kill even if the substance happened to be highly toxic to humans—which was a risky assumption at that considering their were toxins on Earth that required far less than a bite to kill.)

Unfortunately, the damn warrior woman came back to collect the offerings before they’d had the chance to eat more and the next food brought hadn’t been the same.

Sooo… three days in captivity and only a bite of food here and there.

Her appetite should have dwindled, given those circumstances alone. With extreme emotional distress added to that, her nerves should have been too tattered to allow for any kind of appetite.

And yet here she was on an antiquated spaceship that didn’t look like it had been space worthy for a hundred years that was probably going to spring an air leak, implode, explode or crash whenever they got where they were going, and all she could think about was food!

Well, and sex!

Not that she wanted sex!

Especially with a savage that was twice her size!

But she figured that must be what she’d been captured for. All of the savages had chased down women and brought them back onboard the ship—she’d heard the screaming and cursing when the men had brought them in. What else could they have in mind?

Unless they preferred women for sacrifices?

She couldn’t think about either possibility without feeling a panic attack coming on.

But there was no escaping whatever fate they had in mind.

She needed to get a grip!

There were two choices of a place to sit—the bed—which she wasn’t going anywhere near!—and the uncomfortable seat she’d used at takeoff. She settled in the chair, closed her eyes, and tried to force herself to relax by focusing on slowing her breathing and calming her thoughts until her pulse was less frantic and erratic.

She wasn’t going to get rescued. She thought she might have, eventually, if she had just been captured by local barbarians, but these weren’t local. Wherever they taking her, she didn’t think the people of the colony would be able to find her.

Granted, Monica might have been right in her assessment of the situation and rescue wouldn’t have been something she could count on where she’d been, but it had at least been a possibility! Now it definitely wasn’t because the colonists would have no way of figuring out where she was given that the range of their tracking implants had been calibrated to an area within twenty miles of the colony itself.

So she was on her own and she was going to have to keep her wits if she was going to survive!

That bracing thought required unfastening the harness and a making another trip to the facilities—which she’d, thankfully, found on her own through a narrow door that didn’t look big enough for the barbarian to fit through.

So maybe he hadn’t shown it to her because he didn’t know it was there? Because it was dusty and musty enough that it didn’t look like it had seen much use in years.

Actually, the entire ship smelled of fuel—frightening!—and dust—
not
comforting at all!

What did that tell her?

Not a hell of a lot when she couldn’t seem to gather her wits to analyze the situation.

Frowning, she struggled with the puzzle pieces she had. It would’ve been easier, she thought, if she’d had more than a couple, but she had what she had.

The aliens looked like the aliens on the colony world—well, some of them. As it was on Earth, there seemed to be several different races with different hair, eye, and skin colors. But these were recognizable, in her book, as being from the same origins and they didn’t appear to have evolved in a way that suggested there’d been a significant separation over time that would have necessitated diverging physical traits.

And yet, they were clearly separated! The ship was proof positive that they didn’t even share the same world—she didn’t think. Otherwise, why would they be in space?

It seemed inescapable that these barbarians were from the sister world simply because it was closest and she couldn’t imagine the ramshackle thing she was in making it any further! She was surprised it had made the first leg of the trip intact!

That sister world was horribly inhospitable, though! That was why they’d settled where they had. The other world had been just a little further out, but that was enough to make it bitterly cold in the winter and not terribly warm in the summer. Those inhospitable temperatures would translate to more fuel burned during the long, bitterly cold winter to just keep the colonists relatively comfortable and a short growing season that, when the colonists were entirely unfamiliar with the techniques needed to grow plants in this particular soil, could mean starvation and a complete failure of the colony.

New Earth—or K’naiper as the natives referred to it—was the best choice for a successful colony, the safest.

They’d thought.

They hadn’t actually expected the natives to be hostile, though. She supposed that was because they had a skewed perception of their self-worth. They’d thought the natives might be afraid of them—at first—but could be won over with minimal effort—gifts of trinkets and so forth. And the natives would be so grateful to have god-like beings living among them they would probably be more of a nuisance (worshipful) than any kind of threat!

Boy had they been wrong!

She shook that thought and dragged her mind back to picking at the puzzle.

The truth was, they’d been puzzled about the solar system they’d targeted for their colony before they left Earth. The ‘sister’ worlds orbiting in the system’s Goldilocks zone seemed to be in stable orbits, but they were far closer than any others they’d found—almost close enough that one could’ve been a satellite of the other at some point.

Or it was possible that the two sisters had originally been a single, much larger planet that had been split apart by a major collision with a planet-killer asteroid.

Was that where the technology had come from? Was that even possible?

There was no doubt that the circumstances were dyslexic! The technology looked ancient, but it was definitely from a very advanced civilization—it wasn’t entry level space travel. As antiquated and rundown as it seemed now, this ship was clearly capable of interplanetary use and had been used for that purpose in the past.

Neither the natives of New Earth or the men aboard the ship, supposedly from the sister world, displayed customs or accomplishments that suggested it was a civilization in ruins, regressing. So maybe they’d hit bottom, or close, and were on the rebound?

Or maybe the ship didn’t represent accomplishments of this race at all but were gifts or maybe remainders of a different civilization all together? Or maybe stolen goods? These men were clearly raiders—much like the Vikings of history on Earth.

Could they have simply stolen it?

She thought they could have. She could see the possibility of an alien race setting down to explore or establish a colony and getting overrun by the giants.

Who then forced the pilot/original owners/designers to teach them how to use it?

She didn’t think that was beyond their capabilities either. They seemed pretty … persuasive!

But had it happened that way?

She needed way more data to determine that, she decided.

Unfortunately, she realized that that unknown factor wasn’t just a matter of assuaging her scientific curiosity. It could make a world of difference to her.

For if they were an advanced civilization on the rebound, then they would surely not be as savage as they seemed? Surely they would be open to reason?

She considered that for a few moments and revised it to
maybe
they would be open to reason.

She thought that might depend on how well their campaign for survival was going.

His captive was not native to their world, Drak concluded. He was as certain of that after only a few minutes in her company as he had ever been of anything.

She spoke the language, the most commonly used language among the people of the sister worlds, but she didn’t speak it as a native would. The way she enunciated the words was entirely foreign and he’d also noticed that she seemed to mentally interpret the things he said before she responded.

Of course, he supposed that could be explained away by caution, but the amusement she hadn’t managed to hide was hardly the act of a female of caution!

Nor did she strike him as being slow-witted.

No, as bizarre and unbelievable as it seemed on the surface, he had to conclude that she absolutely wasn’t a product of either of their worlds, which meant that, regardless of the similarity to their people, she was of a different species altogether.

And the other female that had been with her was conclusive proof to his mind!

But where had they come from?

And what did that mean in regards to his hope/determination to mate with her?

He had no real interest in producing more offspring. He had his heir and two other sons to secure his line.

And he still felt an odd little jab of disappointment at the thought that he might not be able to successfully join his line to hers.

He dismissed it. He was far more interested in the ‘practice’ than the accomplishment!

That thought brought him to an unsettling conclusion!

She’d looked very much like a Flaxen woman, despite her size, but could he count on her being the same where it counted? He hadn’t actually examined
that
part!

He was tempted to check that out immediately, but a very little thought made him reconsider. He was
not
going to be pleased, at all, if he discovered she was not made to suit him sexually and that wasn’t something he had any desire to share with the crew!

And he wasn’t sure he could contain his disappointment!

It would be better, he decided, to wait for more privacy, particularly since he found the flight unsettling to begin with and might have difficulty focusing!

In any case, he decided dismissively, she had a mouth. If all else failed, there was that!

Not that he was going to be happy about that necessity, but his raid would not be in vain! He would not return from the death defying trek empty-handed.

Having settled that much in his mind, his thoughts returned to the puzzle of her origins and her potential as an asset.

The precise ‘where’, he realized, was not something he was likely to figure out with nothing to go on, but the ‘how’ of it was like a slap in the face or a douse of icy water—a stunning revelation that was made more shocking by the time it had taken him to arrive at it!

Her people
must
be builders of ships like his—capable of crossing the black sea of space!

Except theirs would not be technology rescued from rusting heaps of a bygone time! Theirs would—had to be—better, stronger, capable of more speed and distance!

He was discomfited by the fact that he had been so focused on his physical attraction to her that he had previously overlooked the importance of her as an asset.

But that hardly mattered when no one could be aware of it beyond him and he had realized it quickly enough to consider how best to handle his prize from what might possibly turn out to be
the
most important raid of his entire reign as Prince!

The landing was far more horrific than the take off! Even without the porthole, she knew the moment they hit the atmosphere. The ship was buffeted by scary winds as soon as it dropped low enough and this was no gentler near the ground!

She thought they’d crashed when they landed with a scream of metal against metal and rock and a jolt hard enough to make her bite her tongue.

The barbarian Prince’s swift entrance seemed to support her worst fears and Noelle immediately threw off her safety harness with shaking hands and charged toward the door on rubbery legs.

He caught her and held her. “You cannot escape now!” he growled.

Noelle gaped at him. “We could if you’d move your ass!” she snapped. “It hasn’t exploded yet!”

It was his turn to gape at her in disbelief. He looked torn between outrage and amusement.

Thankfully, the amusement seemed to win out.

“
We have not crashed, you impudent little
guztier
! We have landed on my world!”

Noelle wasn’t certain she believed him. There seemed to be an awful lot of screaming, cursing, and scrambling on the part of the other passengers to get out of the death trap—get off the ship.

“
Ok! Fine! You win! Can we discuss this a hundred yards or so from the ship?”

He shook his head, but he released her. Noelle took the opportunity to follow the last of the other passengers as fast as she could. She would’ve outstripped them except that they were blocking her path and wouldn’t let her get around them!

And the moment she reached the exit a gale force blast of frigid air slammed into her.

Of course even getting to the door had felt like crawling through a wind tunnel, but she’d had a lot of very large people in front of her to break the force of the wind. With everyone else now galloping down the gangplank toward a herd of ….
Monsters
milling about in a pen … she had an unrestricted view and the wind had no impediments to scouring the skin off her face, neck, and arms.

A heavy fur was tossed over her, momentarily blocking her view, and she nearly slipped and rolled down the gangplank. Fortunately, the same thoughtful person who’d dropped the blinding blanket over her, grabbed her as she pitched forward. This time, instead of tossing her across one shoulder, the barbarian Prince rolled her up in the fur and tucked her under one arm as if he was carrying a roll of carpet.

She had mixed feelings about the situation. The fur instantly blocked the bulk of the icy wind tearing at her, protecting her both from the cold and the sense of being sandblasted. It smelled a lot like the animal it had come off of, however.

Not that she knew what sort of animal had given its all to keep her temporarily warm! But it certainly had a gamey smell to it that tainted the air and made it hard to get plain fresh air.

And being wrapped in it—or possibly because of the arm cinched around her middle—she had to struggle to breathe.

The first she knew that she was going to get up close and personal with the giant monster-beasts was when she was lifted up and then plunked down on something that was warm beneath her ass—and moving. Fortunately, since the fur she was wrapped in produced a straight-jacket effect, the Prince never completely released her as he joined her on the back of the beast.

She relaxed fractionally when she felt the bracket his arms and chest formed around her, losing her fear that she was going to hit the hard ground any moment. The skin began to loosen almost immediately when she’d settled and Noelle wiggled until she could free her arms and hands and push the piece over her head and face far enough back to get a look at her surroundings.

Most of the females appeared to be rolled in a similar hide—and hogtied and strapped across the rumps of the beasts!

Noelle’s shock at that discovery gave way to a sense of gratitude.

Unable to stand much total freedom from the fur, she coiled it tightly around herself again and covered her head and face, leaving only a sliver of an opening to view her surroundings. Through that small crack, she turned to look at the Prince. “Why … uh?”

Amusement, she thought, glittered in his eyes, narrowed against the gusting wind. He shrugged. “They fought.”

Well, that was stupid! She didn’t voice the thought, though, particularly when she didn’t honestly know if it was a stupid move or not. It did seem to her that they would have been better off to make a pretense of cooperation to lull their captors into letting their guard down, but one never knew how such a thing would turn out.

With modern era crime on Earth, it usually turned out that the longer one was able to stay alive the better chance one had of staying that way—it increased the chances of escape or rescue—but it didn’t always end well. At least as often as not, it seemed to her, if a fierce effort to escape the captor immediately was unsuccessful and the perpetrator managed to carry their victims off to a quiet place, murder, not release came after the perp had satisfied whatever desires had prompted him to commit the crime in the first place.

She supposed, though, that her current circumstances couldn’t be compared too closely to that sort of situation, and not merely because she wasn’t dealing with humans—because she didn’t think they were that different from humans when all was said and done. These people were aliens and that meant an unknown mindset, culture, and belief system, but she thought there would very likely be certain constants, that they could be counted on to feel, and exhibit, many of the same traits/emotions believed to be purely human.

Because they had discovered that the traits were purely animal—not human—and that many so called ‘lower’ animals on Earth also exhibited greed, desire, generosity,
etc.

Given that, she didn’t think it was too much of a stretch to expect similar behavior, regardless of the vast differences between them.

However, this primitive society didn’t seem to have laws prohibiting this kind of behavior, and that was the main motivation for criminals to kill—the possibility of getting caught and punished. By killing their victims, they had this twisted type of logic that made it seem they were less likely to get caught and convicted—no witness, no conviction. And sometimes they were right. More often, they were dead wrong and ended up paying a life for a life.

The important thing to her health, though, was that
these
people weren’t concerned about retaliation and therefore had no motive to dispose of their captives.

That being the case, she thought it might not be pleasant to be a captive of these people and probably wouldn’t be, but she didn’t think they would try to kill her and short of that, she was determined to endure until she could find a way out!

Of course, she couldn’t rule out the possibility of sacrifice, but it seemed a long way to go to get sacrifices!

Which still didn’t rule it out, but given what she knew of the situation, it seemed more likely that the men had captured women for the usual purpose.

Well, one of them. They didn’t seem like the type to particularly care whether they had a woman around to keep house!

“
You like that these barbarian neetars have taken you?”

Noelle felt the Prince stiffen at the comment or she wouldn’t have realized the observation was directed at her. Slowly, she twisted her head until she could see the speaker who, unlike the majority of the women, was settled before the warrior on the beast next to theirs as the Prince was holding her.

The expression on the female’s face was contemptuous so it didn’t take a lot of brain power to grasp that, whatever a
neetar
was, likening the barbarians to it was intended as an insult. What she couldn’t decide was why the bitch had decided to insult
her
! She didn’t recognize the female so she was reasonably certain she hadn’t done or said anything directly to make an enemy out of her.

She debated, briefly, whether to simply ignore her provocative statement or not—maybe pretend she didn’t understand their damned language like they’d been pretending! But it was just too provoking to ignore considering what she’d endured at the hands of the alien females. “I can’t say I’m thrilled. On the other hand, I didn’t appreciate being taken prisoner by the barbarians in
your
village either.”

Actually, although the long term situation was yet to be revealed, she rather thought she had been treated better by this group of barbarians.

And there was no doubt in her mind that she liked the way
he
looked at her far better than she’d liked the way that she-male from the village had. She couldn’t have said why she felt that way—or wouldn’t acknowledge it, at any rate. But she knew that it wasn’t just because she wasn’t sure of whether the other was male or female!

She rather thought it might be because the Prince was a damn fine specimen of male pulchritude, but she didn’t want to examine
that
any further. She thought it was sufficient to acknowledge that she preferred to be admired by males that she could and did admire. Lust in the eyes of a person that did not appeal was just plain scary!

The woman gaped at her. “You are as stupid as these barbarian
neetars
! We freed you!”

It was Noelle’s turn to gape, to feel a rush of outrage. “Freed? You call locking me and my friend in a cage
freeing
us?”

The female flicked a look at the man holding her, seemed to debate with herself and then continued. “You are brainwashed,” she muttered. “We were only holding you and the other until you had time to realize you were not with the males of your free will. It seems they have made you believe that you must stay, that you belong to them, but you do not need to on
K’naiper
. You have free will. You need not belong to any male!”

Noelle blinked at the female, digesting the statements slowly—trying to free her mind of her own personal prejudices so that she could see what the alien woman believed she was seeing. It wasn’t entirely impossible to do, but she had her own preconceived notions to deal with. “You don’t know us! And you couldn’t be more wrong about the situation! Not only were we there because we wanted to be there, we were there because we worked damned hard to be chosen to come! I guess you were judging us by your own circumstances—a common mistake, believe me! But our circumstances are nothing at all like yours!”

Drak terminated the conversation by urging the beast to move faster and they left the other female and her captor behind—left everyone else behind.

Noelle was relieved. If they hadn’t had their captors as an audience, she would gladly have pursued the conversation to discover what she could about the people while she had the opportunity. But she hadn’t been comfortable discussing the ‘barbarians’ as if they were deaf when she already knew they spoke the same language!

She didn’t try to strike up a conversation with her captor despite the fact that she seemed to recall something in the manual about hostage situations suggesting that it could be very important to establish oneself as an individual and not allow the captor to distance themselves. She didn’t think yelling at him would promote peace or help her case. And the gallop of the beast jarred every bone in her body and rattled her voice box until she could barely force sounds, other than grunts, out of it. The wind was a horror, as well, snatching her words away as if they were bits of debris and tossing them into the sky. She was surprised the warrior woman had heard her well enough to understand.

But then again, maybe she hadn’t? Maybe her mind had filled in ‘blanks’ she hadn’t actually heard, and vice versa?

She was pretty sure she hadn’t misunderstood the woman, but that wasn’t an absolute. She’d reacted to the tone and the woman’s expression, she was certain. It was possible that she and the woman had simply screamed at one another and imagined there was more to the conversation that there had been.

Unwilling to allow her mind to wander to frightening possibilities of what she was about to have to face, she focused on observing.

There was more to see than a layman might have thought. Granted, the blustery wind made it pretty difficult to see a lot, but she could see New Earth in the sky. Low on the horizon now and swathed in the snow and ice churned up by the wind, it was still visible and recognizable. She’d gotten a similar view when they were approaching their new home and she recognized it.