Page 50 of Galaxy Games Four-Book Box Set (Galaxy Games)

50

What’s Going On?

P resent Day

Somewhere in space on the aging cruise ship, the Crown Nebula

Sadie

″Attention, females. It’s almost time for what we’ve all been waiting for,” the assistant to the assistant producer perkily announces to a collective grumble.

I’m crammed into this small room with 49 females of other species, trying to listen to the assistant. She might have important information and I want to hear it. I really want to win this thing.

″I’ve got this bag of makeup.” She lifts a sack the size of my friend Corda’s makeup bag back home. Certainly this isn’t enough cosmetics to prettify fifty women? Especially since they come in such a wide variety of colors.

″I know it’s a stretch to try to look good. For some more than others.” She gives heavy side-eye to the gray female who has five rows of shark-like teeth in a mouth that stretches from ear to ear. I’ll admit. It hurts to look at her.

″Get yourselves as pretty as you can, we’ve got…” She consults her wrist-comm, “twenty minutes.”

She tosses the bag on the floor and exits, leaving fifty females to fight over the makeup as if it were the last markdown dress at a Bloomingdale’s sale.

I decide not to enter the fray. I don’t have a chance of wrestling anything out of these women’s hands, anyway.

I edge toward one of the four small mirrors they’ve supplied and catch a glimpse of myself in the bottom corner of one. Shrugging, I decide I’ll have to go without makeup. Not that it would matter. Even with professional makeup, I’d still look ridiculous in this dress they’ve supplied me with.

It’s actually pretty, in a prom dress kind of way. It’s all shimmery cobalt blue with a slash up the leg and a bare shoulder. On a six-and-a-half-foot woman, it would probably look stunning. Sadly, I’m five feet tall.

The shoulder gaps so badly it exposes my right breast, so I tie a makeshift knot near my shoulder that makes me look a bit like Quasimodo. The skirt is so long I have to lift it in order not to trip when I walk. It’s not sexy in the least. I look more like a little girl playing dress-up.

As I watch the feeding frenzy over the makeup, I think about my strategy, although they haven’t really told us enough specifics about The Game for me to have figured out how to beat it.

All I know is that I was abducted thirty-two days ago. Well, I wonder if I was in stasis for a while, so I’m not sure how long I’ve been gone from Earth. But I know for certain I’ve been awake for thirty-two days because I’ve kept track.

There were four Earth girls with me when I woke up in a pod on a slaver ship. Thank goodness I had some company, because I think if I’d awakened with the bunch of alien females in this room, I would have been even more terrified than I was, and that’s saying something.

Our captors held us in cells for days and we got to know each other. We were supportive as we helped each other come to the stark realization that this wasn’t a bad dream. We began to accept that we really had been abducted and transported to the other side of the universe.

Four days later, they forced us into a slave auction. I was terrified. We all were. They hauled us up on stage in front of a hundred different species of males. Evidently, Earth women are quite the commodity out in space. For one thing and one thing only—as sex slaves.

They tried to sell the four of us as one lot, but when no one bid, they sold us all separately. Well, not all of us. No one bid on me.

The slavers who’d abducted me—ugly, squat, tusky creatures whose language consisted of nothing but grunts—struck me a few times with a shock stick, then loaded me back in their vessel. I guess they weren’t happy that no one took me off their hands, so they didn’t feed me until we reached our next port of call.

A few days later, I was entered into another failed auction. By then I’d been none-too-gently equipped with a subdural translator—ouch—and understood the bidders’ objections of “too little” and, endearingly, “my cock would never fit.”

After that, my owners must have quit trying to get top dollar for me. They threw me in with a bunch of other women who I assume were also hard to sell and transported us to this “cruise ship.”

I was on a cruise ship with my parents for my college graduation. I know one thing, this vessel resembles that in no way whatsoever. At least the part of it I’ve seen. All fifty of us have been jammed together in a cabin the size of my parents’ living room back in Ohio.

The women who have a friend of their own species stay in cliquish groups. I can’t blame them. If there were another human here, I imagine we’d be besties. The others tend to keep to themselves, so it’s been a lonely few weeks.

The ugly tusk guys are long gone. I’m now owned by TGN, The Galaxy Network. Here’s the exciting part. We’ve been selected to participate in the galaxy-wide premiere of a new game show. I’ve never really yearned for fame, so that’s not the great news. The best part is that at the end of the game, we all get a small parcel of land and a stipend!

I’ll be honest, I still don’t want to be in space. I’d much rather be back home on Earth performing every night for the Eleura Cirque on the silks. I dangled from the rafters doing acrobatics while I traveled the country. Not a bad gig to begin my career.

Having recently become a realist, I accept that life is gone forever. Being in this game show is the best outcome I could hope for.

I mean, really, the choice was to be a bargain-basement sex slave or have my own land. That’s great news, right? I guess it’s the outer space equivalent of the forty acres and a mule they used to give homesteaders back in the 1800s.

So, I’m looking at this as a glass-half-full kind of thing.

I get another chance to peek into the mirror and see that at least my long brown hair is pulled into a neat ponytail. I don’t have any mascara to highlight my green eyes, but I can’t see why I’d need to look pretty to do well at this game. And, bonus! They finally let us take showers. That was a miracle in and of itself. It was smelling pretty ripe in our cabin.

″It’s showtime!” the assistant to the assistant announces when she returns. “Be on your best behavior. You want to win the game, don’t you?”

1213

″The cameras will start rolling in five minutes,” the assistant producer announces. His gaze scans over the inhabitants in this ballroom as if we were animals slated for slaughter. His four arms hug his chest, blatantly announcing his distaste for his job. Or perhaps it’s his distaste for us.

I imagine striding across the room, lifting him by the neck, and squeezing the life out of him. Then I envision six other ways I could kill him within a minute. Of course, I don’t do that. The three stone-faced guards holding laser rifles deter me from that. Entertaining myself with images of killing people will be the only thing that gets me through the night without actually harming anyone.

The atmosphere in the big ballroom shifts when the double doors open and females pour in. Since I’ve counted fifty males in the two days I’ve been smashed into a small cabin with them, I assume there are fifty females entering the space.

We still haven’t been told our purpose, so I have no idea what I’m looking for. I understand we’re here to play a game. Assuming the stakes are high and I need to win, I pay attention to everything down to the smallest detail.

There’s confusion and surprise on many of the females’ faces, so I imagine they know no more than we do about the nature of this venture.

They’re in finery, although their clothes aren’t exactly fine. Some of them are wearing gowns that fit well, others weren’t so lucky. Clothing must have been thrown into their enclosure in the same manner it was thrown into ours.

Normally, I would have forced everyone out of the way and claimed what I wanted, but all our clothes looked the same—black leather kilts and the cheapest black sandals that could be bought wholesale.

A beautiful Halckon female enters the room, surrounded by armed guards. Her minion walks in front of her with a mirror held at face height as the red-skinned Halckon pulls back her lips, and uses her long, blue fingernail in a precision maneuver to flick something from between her teeth.

Looking out at the crowd, it’s as if she was unaware there were one hundred living beings in the room until this moment. Her lovely face shifts into a sneer as she informs us, “You have been lucky enough to be picked to play this game. Winners will receive a parcel of land, a stipend of credits, and their freedom. You will follow all instructions or we will remove you from the game.”

Her face hardens. “I’m certain none of you want that.”

″Three, two, one,” one of the techs announces. With that, the lights brighten, instrumental music fills the hall, and the Halckon female suddenly wears a charming smile.

″Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Galaxy Network production of The Game, Down to Two . I’m Jahzara Zedd, and I’m so pleased you’ve joined us for our inaugural episode. As you can see…” She pauses for the cameras to pan the room. “We have some excited participants just waiting to play for your amusement. Let me explain the game, shall I?”