Page 1 of Golden Darkness

Chapter One

Janessa sat in the corner of the cell that none of the other humans could enter. She watched the door to their container open, and everyone tensed. They weren’t supposed to stop for another two weeks.

She swallowed as the creatures came in, and they examined the males in the container. They had scanners and were looking for something.

Sixteen other humans were in the cargo container with her, and they were all scanned one by one until one of the creatures swept past her hiding position and made some excited sounds.

Janessa understood cackling when she heard it.

Four of the creatures walked to her cell, and the power system went down. She tasted fear as they jabbed her with a stun rod, and the world went white.

She heard screaming when she woke, and it was her own voice. Masculine shrieks were distant but unmistakably human. She was floating in a tank, a breathing mask over her face and electrodes on her skin. Alien hands pulled her from the tank and strapped her to a med bed.

“Ah, you have become conscious. Interesting.” A female in a lab coat was looking over at a scanner. “Your output is very close to what he requires to wake. If we simply work on increasing your frequency spectrum, we may have a result.”

The language was a lot of clicking and humming, but Janessa understood. She croaked, “How are you going to do that?”

The woman with six eyes, mandibles, and a psychotic gleam in her gaze said, “With pain, of course. It isn’t as nourishing for him, but it is controllable. We need him awake, not alert.”

Janessa tried to move but was belted to the bed in six places.

Her head hurt, but the electrodes on her scalp were visible in the reflection of the machines.

“You will be impressed to note that your level has increased from a one to a four. One more, and we have actually shaped Hmrain-compatible energy out of an unsuitable female. It seems where the mind leads, the body follows. When he is done with you, I am going to enjoy doing the autopsy to see the effect the changes have created.”

“What are you doing to me?”

A blast of agony made her scream. The electrodes on her head were not the only ones.

When she dropped back to the surgical bed, she was panting and sweating. Her sex throbbed, and she hated that side effect.

There was no more conversation. There was pain and a strange arousal, and then there was darkness.

Janessa was exhausted. She felt that the pain had been going on for days, but she wasn’t connected to life support, so she didn’t know how long she would last.

They gave her pain again, and she screamed weakly, thrashing in the fluid left on the bed under her. An instant later, there was a furious roar from deep in the ship.

The researcher chuckled. “Excellent. He’s awake. We need him to access some secure points of the ship. Now we will feed you to him, and then we can negotiate for his cooperation.”

“How?”

“We will promise to reshape some of the other humans in the vessel. They don’t change as readily as you did, but they are close and certainly in his consumption profile.”

She was too tired to shiver.

Thudding emanated from deep in the ship, and two light torture sessions had him howling in fury. Whatever was down there was big and very angry.

Janessa came down from the pain and hoped that Iris was having a better time than she was. To think she had fought to survive for two years and didn’t even make it onto an alien world. She was pulled out of the tank and dropped onto a med bed, gasping and covered with things that made her skin burn. They dried her off and pulled off the mask and the electrodes. All of them.

A floating gurney was put next to the medical bed. She was moved onto a wrap and covered, and then the gurney was moving.

Where was the monologuing? Aren’t villains always supposed to explain the details of their devious plans?

Her brain was flitting from one thought to the next as they went deep into the ship where the thudding and growling were coming from.

She wanted to fight. She wanted to beat her way out of the ship, but the fact that a relatively quick death in space was more appealing than taking her chances meant that she was truly around the bend. She was a survivor. She fought to live. Right now, she had nothing left.

Janessa rattled and rocked for fifteen minutes before the gurney was shoved into a long, straight line. She heard the hum of an energy field turning off and then on again as she continued to glide along.

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