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"Just a few moon rotations ago," Priough confirmed.
"Of course you have mentioned your discovery to the Emperor," I mocked, keeping my eyes on the parade of beings, not one appeared to look like the other.
"Since the Cryons are not part of the empire, yet, nocc, we haven't," Priough answered defiantly. "This is our discovery and according to galactic union law, the spoils belong to us."
"You don't want to provoke the emperor's ire," I warned. "You know his stance on the treatment of intelligent species."
"Their intelligence is yet to be determined," Priough replied smugly, exploiting a loophole.
"Let's get this over with," I snarled and shouldered Priough out of the way. I knew how to get to Crough's throne room; I didn't need a guide for that.
But before I left the hangar, I threw one more speculative glance toward the wretches the Cryons unloaded. It didn't appear as if the Cryons had been selective about gender or age, making me believe Priough's statement that these creatures had just been discovered and were in need of examination.
The prisoners' bound arms indicated they were fighters who hadn't gone willingly with their captors. I grinned, I hoped they had given them hell.
I had no ideahow much time had passed in the cell. I slept, I woke, and yes, I made my way to the trough to drink some water, but never got hungry enough to try the slop. My stomach growled, but I hadn't reached that point, yet.
At least in here talking was allowed, however, our hands remained bound behind our backs. Not that talking did us any good, because none of us knew where we were, where the aliens were taking us or what would happen once we got there. We didn't even knowwhy we were here and not dead.
Small arguments broke out, born from desperation, confusion, and fear. One was about how much time had gone by, with some claiming hours and others days.
Every so often guards would come to clean up the cells. Since there were no toilets here, we were forced to relieve ourselves on the floor. This was made even more challenging due to our hands being bound behind our backs.
It wasn't a task one could accomplish on their own, we had to ask our cell neighbors to loosen our belts, pants, and so on, before we could take care of our most basic needs. Then we had to ask for assistance again to get our clothes back in order. It was embarrassing and humiliating, but we managed.
After some time, the aliens returned, opened the cell doors, and forced my group out.
On our way out I noticed that all the cells we passed were empty, except for a few drones which were hard at work cleaning them up, readying them for the next wave of occupants. The thought of what had happened to the former occupants and wondering where we were going now made me shudder.
We entered a large hall, reminding me of the inside of a hangar, before we were led down a ramp, into a truly cavernous space.
A glance back over my shoulder made me realize we were leaving a spaceship the size of a cruise ship and my knees faltered at the thought that we might have been taken to an alien planet.
More of the same spaceships were parked up and down the enormous hall we had entered. Most of which were being unloaded like ours, with pitiful-looking humans being prodded forward.
There were thousands of us. The massive scale of which the aliens were capturing us robbed me momentarily of my breath. Would there be any humans left on Earth to one day write about this in our history books?
The thought that nobody would ever mourn me, even know that I had lived, hit me hard. All these people here, me, we would just be numbers, casualties of an invasion that happened at some point in our history. How often had that happened before in Earth's history? For some reason I thought of all the nameless people during an invasion of Rome thousands of years ago. I read about it, had been fascinated by it, but had never given a single thought to the many nameless, faceless residents of Rome at the time. Not until now, where I was becoming another nameless, faceless victim of something not of my making.
I turned to look at the faces of my fellow prisoners, tried to commit them to memory, because somebody should,right? And I wondered how many times people had done so during one war or another, just to be forgotten, just to become a number.
I thought about all the human beings over the course of history who had been captured by enemies and taken from their homelands to another country, relived their hopelessness and destitution, and nearly faltered, because now I was one of them.
Our group stopped and my thoughts were jarred back to the present. Oddly removed, I watched as the children were divided off from our group and I lost sight of the boy who had been next to me for so long. Minutes later, we were divided again, this time into males and females. I swallowed my misgivings, until an alien that seemed taller than the others appeared, wearing the same silvery uniform. He moved up and down our line, sorting us by age groups. That's when new fears sprouted up inside me.
Besides being aliens, our captors bore a certain resemblance to us humans. They were taller than us, leaner without much muscle mass to speak off, with longer arms and legs, and hairless bodies, as far as I could tell.
Their skin color was grayish, darker than the silvery uniforms they wore. They had triangular-shaped heads with large, black eyes reminding me of those of deep-sea sharks—and yes, very much like the usual alien caricature you saw plastered everywhere on Earth.
Initially they seemed genderless to me, but this new alien sported a distinct bulge between his legs, which only added to the new fear growing inside me.
A group of about a hundred women and I stood to the left after the tall alien made his selections, with me somewhere in the middle. Slowly he began to move up and down our line, staring from one woman to the other. He stopped a few down and intently stared at the woman before him. His long arm moved forward and he cupped her breast.
With a scream of outrage in a language I thought might be Slavic, the woman kicked out at him.
Another alien leveled his gun-like weapon at her and fired. A green-blue light blasted out, bringing the woman instantly to the ground.
A gasp went through our lines and when the tall alien made a point of inspecting the breasts of the woman who stood next to the one on the ground now, she didn't move. She flinched away, but didn't voice her outrage or try to fight him.
