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CHAPTER 1: SERENITY
Serenity Mendez gasped awake in the darkness. Her hair was damp with perspiration, her skin stippled with sweat.
She’d been having the dream again.
The nightmare.
It was the same one she had every night.
As the screams and visions of violence faded from her mind, Serenity steadied her nerves and got her bearings. She was in the sleeping tent. It was an oblong structure made of heavy animal hides draped around two central wooden poles. From the outside, it reminded Serenity of a primitive circus tent, though it was not nearly that big. However, itwasbig enough to comfortably fit about two dozen female refugees, herself included.
Now Serenity sat in the darkness, listening to the susurrus of the other women snoring softly. After the nightmare, it was a comforting reminder that she was not alone.
The air inside the tent was warm with the collective body heat of the women and freighted with a somewhat musky scent of B.O. that made Serenity wrinkle her nose. Not that she could complain, of course; she was adding her own fair share of bodily stench to the mix along with everyone else. Perhaps even more than her fair share, considering how much she was sweating.
Despite the odor, Serenity took several slow, deep breaths to steady her buzzing nerves. Once her heart rate had dropped back to a reasonable rhythm, she lay down in her primitive bedding of animal furs and tried to go back to sleep.
It was useless, of course.
It was always useless.
No matter what, the sights and sounds and smells of the nightmare kept intruding into her mind. The harder Serenity tried to ignore the visions, the more insistently they forced themselves upon her consciousness.
But what made the nightmare all the more horrible was the fact that it was real. It was not some imaginary fabrication of her subconscious mind. It was a memory. It had really happened.
The slaughterhouse.
Just thinking of that word and everything it entailed brought a taste of bile to Serenity’s mouth.
Her story was roughly the same as all the other women here. Back on Earth, she had been unjustly sentenced as a criminal. Due to the overcrowding of Earth’s prison system as well as the extreme overpopulation of the planet in general, prisoners like Serenity were sent off-world.
She had been sold.
To aliens.
The nith were hideous creatures with gator-like heads, coal-black scales, and dark soulless eyes.
At the time, Serenity had assumed she was being sold into slavery. But as she quickly discovered, the situation was far more grim than that. Upon arrival on the nith homeworld, Serenity and the rest of the human prisoners had been led into a place that was worse than any hell she had ever imagined.
Inside a large, windowless room, sodium lights had cast a sickly orange glow over the throng of naked humans pressed shoulder to shoulder like cattle. The air had been humid and thick with the rusty smell of blood and the foul stench of gore. But the worst part of all had been the sounds—the mingled shrieking of human voices and mechanical saw blades going about their grisly business.
They weren’t going to be slaves. They were going to be food. The place was a human slaughterhouse.
By the time Serenity and her fellow prisoners had realized that fact, it was already too late. They were trapped. Behind them, nith guards armed with high-voltage cattle prods had urged the humans toward their doom.
That was the awful memory Serenity relived every night when she slept. There was only one difference between Serenity’s dream and the reality of what had happened.
The ending.
The dream always ended in a red mist of pain and screaming as Serenity was forced forward into the killing blades.
In reality, however, she had been saved. Another group of aliens, the ukkur, had attacked and raided the slaughterhouse at the last minute. The ukkur were enemies of the nith. The brutal warriors had killed the gator-like aliens, freed the humans, and taken them all back to their primitive encampment as refugees.
That’s where Serenity was now.
She reckoned she’d been here for approximately six Earth months, though it was hard to say for sure. This was an alien world, and the days and lunar cycles were not identical to Earth’s.
In the time since their rescue, the others had gotten over their trauma, as was evidenced by the peaceful snoring of the other women inside the tent. Now, as Serenity listened to that sound, she felt a scorch of resentment rising up in her chest.
