I woke to the sound of the cell door sliding open and light flooding into the dark room. The presence of an Okva guard in the doorway meant we had already arrived. Normally, dropping out of a jump would have been sufficient to wake me, but capital ships have better dampeners and I had been exhausted when I finally laid down, so I mercifully slept through the entire trip.
I stood as quickly as I could, trying to rouse myself and return to full awareness. The slaver wailed something at me, no doubt a warning about what would happen if I didn’t start moving. I was tempted to reply with some choice comments of my own, but there was no point. Wouldn’t have understood a word I was saying anyway.
I stepped out into the narrow hallway between the makeshift cells and found that my companions were likewise being marshaled along towards their next confinement. There were no others; we had apparently been their entire haul. Rada looked especially tense, while Nesti just looked tired and irritated, like a kid being woken up from a nap. And Vos’go… I never could tell with Sarvallans, honestly. Each shove or prod seemed to jar him more than the rest of us, but at least he wasn’t panicking.
We advanced in a line like that until we exited the corvette, with little of note along the way. It was a floating junk pile, and the Okva had scratched up all of the interiors with their claw markings. An art collector on Massia had once told me in detail about how each of those scratch lines was part of a long cultural story, but it all looked like random scrapes to me. And he had tried to stiff me on that contract anyway, so why believe him?
We moved into the small cargo bay, which was mostly empty, save for the containers of fuel cells that had originally been aboard our freighter. That smell of ozone that floated to me as we walked past felt like a blessing, despite my distaste for it, because it momentarily masked the stench of the Okva. More red light seeped in through the cracks as the loading doors stretched open, revealing, at last, the world we would have to contend with.
I remember that scenery clearly to this day because I tried so hard to memorize it in the moment, to capture all the details that might be necessary to survive. The world was rocky, rust-colored, and pockmarked with impacts craters; there was one a few hundred meters from where we had landed that yawned deep enough that I couldn’t see into it. The sky was filled with swirling clouds of varying colors, although they all looked to be some shade of red from the sunlight. It was hot, oppressively hot, like walking through a wall of dense air, and the low oxygen level made it even harder to breathe. It took concentration to not slip into hyperventilation.
The pirates’ base was relatively small, maybe a dozen structures, most of them prefab barracks or warehouses. There were a couple of permanent buildings also, small ones, made from some kind of concrete that I couldn’t make out. They had hangars as well, three of them, none of them large enough to fit anything bigger than a couple of mid-size gunboats, or a half-dozen fighters. There was another large, uncovered landing pad, big enough for a corvette or perhaps a small frigate, but it was empty.
Our procession continued down the ramp towards the base itself. Other Okva cartel members were moving up to meet us, trading shrill notes with our escort group as they passed. Greetings, probably, but it could have been jeers at us as well. There were Kval with them as well, mostly unarmed, but sneering at us nonetheless. They were likely the ones in charge. The Okva, I’m told, never really evolved the intellect for space travel, and it was only their luck in cohabiting with the Kval that they managed to reach the stars at all. It stood to reason that they likewise weren’t much inclined to the actual business of running a slave ring, and relied on their enterprising neighbors to handle that element.
The four of us were separated and led to different buildings. I tried to steal a glance back as they led me forward, hoping to figure out which structure each was being taken to, but could only get a general sense of it. The one I was taken to was basically a warehouse, like Vel had predicted, with nearly a hundred divided cells and a single corridor running between them. None were much larger than a storage closet, and most would turn out to be empty. They each had only a single rectangular opening to see through, but it was enough.
I was surprised by the number of them, at first, because it seemed to outscale the operation. Then it occurred to me that they probably kept their captives for longer than we had estimated, and moved more of them at a time. Given the relative emptiness of the cells, there was a good chance Kai was still at the base, as they gradually captured enough to make a worthwhile trip. But it could also mean they had very recently taken the ones they had to the Cluster, which would mean we were too late.
They pushed me past the cells nearest to the entrance, all of which were already filled. The prisoners were mostly human, but varied greatly besides that. A young girl in one cell, no older than fourteen, looked up at me hopefully as I passed, her eyes growing with despair when she could see that I was also a captive. In another, there was an older man who didn’t bother raising his head at all. It turned my stomach; slavery is a cowardly and dishonorable business. But there was little I could do for them, and I had to focus on the task at hand. Unfortunately for me, Kai was not among them.
The Okva pushed me into the first cage we came upon that was empty, shoved the heavy door closed behind me, and left. My new home was smaller than the one on their ship, and at lot more spartan; there was no bed, nor anything resembling one, just a cold, empty, and very dirty square room. I had been in plenty of rough situations in my life, and this wasn’t even my first time being locked away, but this was worse than all of them. I wasn’t willing to sit on the floor, so I leaned against one of the walls. I closed my eyes for a few moments, but that just made me more aware of the intense smell of human waste.
I spent the next several hours trying to gather whatever information I could from my confined location. There wasn’t anything in the cell itself that would be of any use, but there were always things worth noticing. The door itself had a combination electronic-mechanical lock; all of them could be opened remotely, but if the power went out, the doors wouldn’t open automatically. I could probably get it open using the small explosive Vos’go had given me, but only if I placed it correctly, and the door was too heavy to break down or blast through.
With extremely limited sight through the rectangular opening, I had no option except to listen. After those first few hours had passed, I established two important details. The first was that, while the relative volume was fairly low, the others in that holding area were talking. What they were saying wasn’t useful, half of them were just saying pointless prayers, but it meant that when it came time to communicate with the others, my voice wouldn’t stand out.
The second was that there were no patrols within the holding area itself. This surprised me at first, but made sense as I thought it over. We were unarmed and in cells, and even if we somehow got out, there was nowhere for us to run to. As long as they guarded their hangars closely, escape was a non-factor, so why bother? It was a bit of good news, since less patrols meant less potential problems, but it also meant it would be harder to pick them apart if we needed to go that route.
I waited a long stretch into the day before I decided it was time to activate the comms. I had been concerned at first that trying to use it might give us away, but that was replaced by my need to concentrate while I evaluated the surroundings. I didn’t feel I’d get much done with that if all three of them were talking in my ear. But as much as I preferred solitude, I wasn’t going to get out of there without their help. I took the piece out of my ear, found the very thin, nearly invisible bit of plastic inserted into it, yanked it out, then put the device back in place.
There was intense ambient noise, and it sounded like it was coming from two sources at the same time, which made it immediately irritating to listen to. I reached up instinctively to take it out of my ear, but resisted that urge. Against the background, there was unmistakable aggressive whispering.
“Get yourself killed is all that will happen!” Vos’go spat, more emphatic than I expected he could be.
“Well, I ain’t gonna just sit around here and wait!” Nesti barked loudly, abandoning his whisper entirely.
“Stop shouting! What’s wrong with you?” I interrupted, hoping to stop the bickering.
“Cor, good. Please tell giant not to run off on his own.” Vos’go said to me, like a kid trying to get their parent to pick a side in a fight.
“Would you just tell me what’s going on?”
“Rada’s comms went dead,” Nesti cut in. “There was a lot of noise and some yelling and then it went quiet. We need to figure out where they took her while we still have a chance.”
I leaned my head back against the hard wall and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the noise.
“He’s right, Vos’go, we need her. And if they figure out that she’s up to something, sooner or later they’ll break her, and then they’ll have the rest of us.” Nesti started to get a dig in at the increasingly indignant Sarvallan, but I cut him off. “But we have to have a plan first. Break out now and you’ll be dead before you can find her. At the least, we’ve got to wait until night.”
“We don’t even know when that’s gonna be. I mean, this planet could be tidal locked, then what?”
“Isn’t.” Vos’go said. “Can see the light moving in this cell. Will have night soon enough.”
I could hear Nesti take a deep breath, re-orienting himself around the new information. It was clear that his time arguing with Vos’go had left him deeply frustrated.
“So then what’s your plan? Since you don’t like mine.”
I didn’t have one, of course, there wasn’t enough to go on. “Well, first off, did either of you find him yet?”
“No. Rada was looking for him when her comms went out. She said they threw her in a bigger holding area, so there were others in there also.”
I couldn’t figure out why they would use a larger holding area while all these cells were empty, but it didn’t seem like there was anything I could do with that info at the time.
We went back and forth on a plan, poring over the details and bits of minutiae that we had collected. It seemed that the four of us had been placed in warehouses that were, more-or-less, on the four geometric corners of the facility. This didn’t make much practical sense, since you’d just want your captives to be easy to load and unload nearest to the landing pads. But the Okva were highly superstitious, and such symbolic arrangement is apparently common for them.
The result for us was that it placed buildings between each of us and our nearest comrade. Between Vos’go and I were the hangar bays, which was bad news. They had too much open space to easily cross undetected, even at night, and they were also the most likely to be heavily guarded. That meant it was best saved for last, after we had armed ourselves, and ideally found Rada and Kai.
Instead, Nesti and I would break out simultaneously and meet up behind the large building between us. Its purpose was unclear, but there was at least a chance of it being an armory or whatever place they had taken Rada. If they had taken her at all, that is. We all had to acknowledge the possibility that she was already dead, and we agreed that if we found Kai and had a safe escape possible, we had to take it. I’d expect them to do the same had it been me. That was just the way things were.
Vos’go would make his own way across towards the holding area Rada had been in originally. I was surprised he volunteered this, as my suggestion was just that he stayed put until we could get to him. But he insisted. The Sarvallan had more guts than I had given him credit for.
We didn’t plan beyond that, the situation was just too volatile to know what would come. We would have to improvise as things came along. Risky as it was, that was our only real chance of success. It was how most jobs went for me, because plans quickly fell apart when you were after a target, especially once they figured out they were a target. We were getting closer to the part of the job that I excelled at.
For the time though, there was just tension, the impatience before everything began in earnest. Once the plan was settled on, we all fell quiet, left to our respective thoughts, waiting in our cages for the coming night.