Free Honour by Viola Grace

Chapter One
     
     
    Honour Coyle hid behind a hill and tried to imagine them not spotting her through their myriad scanning devices.
    The entire research base had been emptied, and she was the only one left at large. She heard the search ships getting close to her hiding place when she heard the offer.
    “Terran, Honour Coyle. If you surrender yourself, the entire base will be released. If you agree to promise to remain where we put you, they will go free and remain so. Break your word and they will die.”
    Honour wasn’t sure she was hearing what she thought she was. She looked up, and the skimmer was staring her in the face. “What do you mean?”
    “There has been a request for a Terran, and we will gain much by delivering one whole and there of their own free will. No other species will do.”
    Honour blinked and narrowed her eyes. “Why not?”
    Men were rushing in to grab her arms. They hauled her carefully to her feet. The leader of the attackers leaned in and grinned, “Because he has all the races that he wants in his harem. A Terran was all that he was missing to complete his collection.”
    As they started to haul her off, she closed her eyes.
    “Damn it.”
    This was not how she had planned to end her vacation.
    They put her in a cushioned tube and knocked her out. It must have been the easiest way to deal with her. As darkness swelled around her, she knew that when she woke, she wanted some answers.
     
    Nausea was the only thing that sprang to mind when they released her from the tube. The gas that they had used didn’t mesh with her biology.
    A hand produced a cup of water. “Drink.”
    She grabbed the cup with shaking hands and tried to get the liquid down. It reversed direction as if her stomach had bounced it. Honour hung over the side of the tube and lost the only thing she had consumed since she had been at the base.
    Hands lifted her from the tube, and she was put on a floating gurney. She looked up at her captors, and four very heavily armed men in some kind of royal livery had replaced the grubby Raiders.
    They didn’t speak; they simply pushed her gurney along through some very thick gates and down a hall. Honour wasn’t up to much analysis; her body was twisted with cramps.
    The guards brought the gurney into a room with the unmistakable tang of a medical facility.
    A voice spoke to her in soft tones. “They tried to give you water?”
    She turned and looked at the man who wore the standard medical tunic over his trousers and a mask over his features.
    “How did you guess?” She clenched again as another cramp twisted her.
    “Your species specs indicated that they should keep you awake instead of gassing you. When they arrived, they notified us of the manner in which you had been transported. It detracted markedly from their payment.”
    “They were paid to attack the research station?”
    His dark brows knit together. “No, they were paid to bring a Terran here. What is this about an attack?”
    She gave him the story in bursts while he hooked up IVs to her body, and two of the guards lift her onto an exam bed.
    Honour had spent her vacation at the Eericourt Research Station. She had been interning and learning about Nyal protocols for processing horticultural samples. The alarm sounded and the inhabitants of the station had scattered, including Honour. She had been instructed to keep running, and she had until the messages had begun to come out over the loud speaker.
    “So, you traded your freedom for theirs?”
    “I exchanged my freedom for their lives. They had better still be alive or I am going to make my time here of very short duration.” Her cramps had eased, so she carefully crossed her arms.
    Her work suit was still torn and filthy, her skin was smudged, but the man attending her ignored that and concentrated on her colouration. When she reached what he considered to be a healthy colour, he began to take samples.
    “Why am I here?”
    He flicked an amused look at her