Page 25 of Seven Oars
They were dragged through the dark, away from the perceived but oh-so-precious safety of their“back” room.
The squeeze compressed them hard.
More pressure. Almost unbearable tightness.
Pain.
A clang echoed from somewhere deep, followed by a prolonged hiss of an airlock hatch.
A door to what hell?
Lights flashed, stabbing into Rosamma’s eyes.
She landed hard on her side.
Gravity.
They were someplace else now, another ship. It smelled of machine oil and a stuffy locker room.
A great machine rumbled in the bowels of this new ship. It pulsed as if alive with grating whirrs and deep, throaty knocks. The vibrations transferred through the floor, into her skin, her bones, until her body thrummed with it.
The net loosened, leaving Rosamma writhing on the floor.
Her wavering vision registered dark figures moving around.
Tremors racked her body. She was cold. Beside her, Anske whimpered in pain.Mara lay motionless.
Phex! Where was he?
Frantically scanning the tangle of bodies with her blurry eyes, Rosamma spotted his arm, bent and still, fingers lax.
“What have we here?” said a gravelly voice, speaking smooth but strangely accented Universal.“Would you look at that.”
A new sound entered the space, a soft whirring underscored by a slight squeak of fat wheels. A bizarre contraption rolled up from the darkness. Its sight sparked a tiny hope inside Rosamma that maybe, after all, it was all just a bad dream.
“No immediate danger, Striker,” the contraption enunciated in a melodious female voice. It spoke a textbook-perfect Universal.“Higher reasoning present. Non-venomous. Weapons not detected.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Rosamma glimpsed the frightened, pinched faces of her companions. Their attention was fixed on the thing, with Daphne staring intently at the small purple light blinking in the middle of the robot’s“belly.”
“Hello, alien life forms,” said the same gravelly voice, so deep it resonated in Rosamma’s chest like the ship’s engines.
The pirate stepped forward from the hazy beyond and halted when the toes of his scuffed boots touched the net. Slowly, he lowered himself onto his haunches.
Others behind him sniggered in a coarse and obnoxious manner.
He flung the net off sharply, scaring the women into gasps and cries for mercy.
Pulse hammering in her temples, Rosamma looked the pirate in the face.
Scars and grime. Sharp planes. Ugly.
His oversized black eyes glinted malevolently under the ship’s dim, flickering lights.
Her mental wheels snagged at his image.
His eyes were large, almond-shaped, and fully black above an aquiline nose with three slatted nostrils on each side.
Phex’s eyes.
