Spears of Uu'kata

Chapter 7 - Fighting Females

Charlotte awoke with a miserable groan. Everything hurt. Her head pounded in time with her heartbeat and she felt like she'd been stabbed all over and kicked down a flight of stairs, and if that wasn't enough, her entire body felt so heavy.

She moved to push her blanket aside, but her arms didn't want to work at first. Neither did her legs. Motor function was always a little wonky for a few days after combat in a bio-suite, but this was different. The heaviness was stronger than usual. This felt like real gravity.

It took several tries to get the blanket off enough that she could see her surroundings. She was in a large, dim tent that looked to be made from some kind of hide as far as she could see in the darkness. But other than that she couldn't make out much else.

She turned her head and winced as her skin pulled behind her ear, then she nearly panicked again when she remembered the tub full of octopus creatures. Her hand shot—or flopped—to her throat, then to the spot behind her ear, but before she touched anything, she realized how stiff her hands were and how much they hurt.

Blinking in the gloom, she realized her hands were bandaged, her broken wrist splinted. She understood her wrist, but nothing had been wrong with her hands before. Now, however, they felt swollen and pulsed with a dull ache...

Her hands... her knees, elbows, her spine, shoulders... the implants. Those fuckers had removed all her implants. How did they even know about them?

When the sound of movement brought her head around, she focused on a mound across from her where someone appeared to be sleeping.

Wow, she thought. He didn't even tie me up?

But then she realized the cold, heavy metal around her neck and the chain that led from her throat up to a hook high on the tent pole.

Breathing out slowly, she licked her lips and swallowed as her belly quivered in a fear she hadn't felt in a long, long time.

What are they going to do to me? she wondered. It wasn't like they could get any information out of her. They'd have to speak the same language for that. She supposed one of them could have picked up enough English to communicate from previous prisoners, if they'd ever been able to take one. Which wasn't likely since the human race was really damned good at keeping themselves hidden from the rest of the galaxy. Any old probes that had human language or visage had been recovered. Anything that had seen them had been destroyed. She didn't know why, but Earth's governments had decreed that no sentient life outside of the human race was allowed to see what humans actually looked or sounded like.

In ejecting from her suit on the battlefield, Charlotte had broken so many laws that if she miraculously found her way back to her own people she might be put to death for treason if she wasn't locked up somewhere dark and cramped for the rest of her life.

Charlotte shivered beneath her blanket and what appeared to be some kind of fur. She closed her eyes, pulling her knees up to her chest. She thought of Ben and Vasquez and hoped they were alive. She hoped all of Delta made it out alive but Ben and Vasquez were like brothers to her and her heart hurt thinking of them. She would never see them again. In the gloom, she let herself feel it. Let herself feel it all. The grief of losing her squad. The uncertainty of not knowing if her loved ones lived. The terror of being in that tub of squid creatures. The terror of being at the mercy of an Uu'k'asht. The big brute couldn't have anything good planned for her. Again she took solace in knowing they couldn't communicate. And thank the powers that be for that! Otherwise, she imagined they'd already have broken out the thumb screws.

She heard the tent flap get thrown aside and the tent washed in a bluish light for a moment before it went dark again.

A deep, male voice uttered a word, and a lantern lit, bathing the tent in soft, yellow light.