(Page 1 of 2) One Master or Another by Tristis WardSUMMARY: Entry for the July Flash Fic contest "Freedom"Five days after being rescued out of the hold of an asteroid mining ship, Wodam Lof sat on the floor of his cell and contemplated freedom. Having been born spacer, he was used to quarters as small as the cage he now occupied. He was even used to bars due to his recent stint through slavery, where he had, by times, been caged with so many others that there was barely room to breathe until the bodies of the weak got removed.
It all began in the dark. His ship was a family trader, registered "Olaner." He was one of the few hire-ons, and determined to impress the Captain for reasons mostly related to the man's very fine pilot daughter, Rulan. The Olaner's regular route from Allgate Stat to Lan Stat made for a profitable living. There was a lot of trade competition between those two major stations, but the Captain knew some shortcuts.
They were speeding along one of these "dark corridors" outside the Empire-buoyed lanes when the lights went out, complimented by instant silence from engines, air circulation and stunned crew. They were completely dead, dark, de-grav'd and cooling in a projected arc toward a gravity well that was off regular maps. Wodam thought he had only the choices of suffocating or freezing to look forward to. Hours later, when banging announced a boarding by a band of brutal aliens, he found another.
By then, he and the rest of Olaner's crew were far too weak to fight against the invaders. Rulan was with him when the crew was herded into grimy cages in the hold of the alien's ship. She cried on his shoulder while the bodies of the dead were stacked in the cage beside them. Her mother was in the other cage, her distinctively greyed hair clearly visible between pant legs and anonymous arms.
It's a dim, but precious memory for Wodam: holding Rulan those first few hours before things got so much worse. It constituted the sum total of their relationship, and the most peace he achieved through the whole bitter agony of captivity. Olaner's crew was not alone in that cage, and they were not the last shoved in. Before the end of the slaver's arc, they shared air with a menagerie of Empire colonial crews. Putrid food was thrown in. Water came in a shower from overhead pipes. There was no such thing as facilities, and death passed through the cage in waves.
Wodam's first ever planetfall was to a sorting centre where Rulan was yanked screaming out of his arms into an absence he hoped later was death and not the series of horrors he faced. He was shoved into yet another cage in yet another ship's hold. This time, a black liquid was sprayed from overhead pipes at regular intervals. Food was also provided, but in one meaty lump he had to learn to fight for a portion of.
He was pulled from the cage with five others for a final transfer to a ship that operated like an asteroid skimmer, except they used living crews to hollow out the rock. He was added to that sorry company. No explanation was provided beyond shocks from the guard's clubs when the ship banged onto its first rock and the hold's flex-lock barely sealed itself around exposed stone and ice.
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(4 ratings)