'Firefly meets Battlestar Galactica'.
A merchant's daughter is captured and sold into slavery.
A genetically modified survivor of an alien attack scours the galaxy for her taken brother before he is 'disassembled'.
An alien scientist u...
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She drifted. Each period of waking brought the inevitable flood of memory, the crazed look in Nero's eyes, and the gaping slash of red across Lulubelle's throat, light seeping from her face before Nero struck Macbeth down. She woke first on her side, still in the clothes Calliope meant to disguise them, her grand escape. Her hands and feet were bound, not with Nero's metal shackles, but Nisseri bioelectric cuffs. Her head pounded, the knot at her temple a throbbing ache, blind spots dancing in her vision in time to her pulse. She was dimly aware of the hum of a transport engine, the knowledge it carried her away from the Chrysostem House brought no comfort. "Perhaps time in the mines will harden you up again."
Her next bout of awareness found her strapped upright, seated across from the startling alien visage of a Barlok. Tension shot through her, adrenaline chasing away the haze in her brain. Barlok mercs? No, this one wore cuffs, strapped in by a harness similar to hers, altered for the alien's numerous appendages. His smaller eyes focused intently on her face while the two larger ones set above them roved all over. The effect was disconcerting.
"Hello, female," he growled in unispeak. His odd shaped mouth should have been incapable of speech. A Barlok, in Nisseri cuffs, headed for Pathosian mines. Macbeth focused on him, allowing her mind to skirt the fresh wave of memory threatening to surface. Push it down, survive. The Barlok's furred body was mostly bare except for a ragged scrap of cloth covering the cross section of his six legs. He made a sound at her obvious perusal.
"Look your fill, female?" His tone was gruff, but patient. "You act like you've never seen one of my kind before."
"Not so close," she rasped. Her voice was hoarse from disuse. She coughed, the bioelectric cuffs tightening against the movement. She forced herself to stop when the harness began to cut off her air.
"Good thing you stopped hacking, or you'd draw our shock happy Keeper over," another low voice reached her ears. Macbeth dragged her eyes from the Barlok, registering her placement in a row of all male prisoners, a mixture of human and Fey. They wore drab garments, their hair shaved close to the skull. Was hers? She reached up, the cuffs giving her just enough range to feel the short layer of fuzz over her scalp. The speaker leered at her, a human with a smattering of Fey ancestry, lending sharp angles to his lean face.
"Nice shiner. What did you do to displease your master?" His lip curled.
Macbeth swallowed, her own scream replaying in her head. The Barlok growled at the man while she cast her gaze away, trying to shove down the bile creeping up her throat. Her fellow prisoners bore a mix of hard expressions and vacant stares, the unbreakable with the broken. Where do I fall now? The Barlok across from her was a lone specimen, but not the only odd alien of the group. An enormous salamander-like creature lay curled at the end of the row, its thick body thoroughly strapped down. Tentacles hung from its scalp like hair, undulating as if underwater. Instead of eyelids, thick white membranes covered its large almond shaped eyes. Its head drooped in a state of rest. Macbeth had seen Barloks from afar in the markets, studied their culture in the distant warmth of her room, so long ago, but she'd never seen or heard of a creature like this one.
