Annan awoke on a cold, metal floor. His head felt unusually heavy, as if stuffed with stones. His vision was blurry, his mouth dry as sun parched cloth. He blinked the film from his eyes and tried to push himself to his feet. Sharp, grinding pain accompanied his every motion, causing his breath to catch and his face to contort. He paused on all fours then realized his right hand was gripping something. Annan saw what it was…a gun. While he could not recall how it is he came into possession of such a weapon, he knew that the gun had already been discharged. Since there was no powder or shot anywhere within this strange confine he found himself in, the gun was useless to him. He shoved it aside and resumed rising to his feet.
Standing upright on wobbly legs, Annan balanced himself, struggling to regain his orientation along with his memory. When his head was sufficiently cleared, he examined his surroundings, such as they were. A small room, its dimensions slightly higher and wider than he was tall, with gray walls and arm-width bands striating the ceiling that diffused a pallid light.
Annan rubbed his hands along the four walls, feeling for grooves, notches, any break in the continuity of its smooth surface indicative of a door. When his tactile investigation came up fruitless, Annan pounded a fist into a wall, belting out a cry of protest.
Suddenly, an opening developed in the wall behind him. A cool breeze swept across his back from the ever widening aperture. He whirled about, his eyes agape as the wall retracted until it was no more. Annan reached down to grab the gun he had discarded. He decided it may be of use after all as a bludgeon. Whatever or whoever resided beyond this room could not possibly bear him good will.
He prodded himself into motion, putting one tentative foot in front of the other until he stepped out into a narrow passageway. Annan gripped the gun barrel tightly, holding it as a club. He looked both ways down the passage, seeing nothing but gray walls and emptiness for as far as his gaze travelled. Then the wall across from him opened similar to the way his own wall did.
A man, dressed liked Annan, in little more than a dirty loin cloth, stood in a similarly featureless room. Other holes formed along the passage on both sides. Heads peeked out, apprehensive eyes searched and wondered, a murmur of questioning voices broke the spell of silence. Screams of consternation erupted from those unable to cope with the mystery of their circumstances.
Annan wracked his brain, trying to remember something, anything, no matter how trivial that could explain his presence here…wherever he was. He noticed the man across from him was armed with a cutlass. The ones on either side of him clutched an iron bar and a thick piece of wood. As Annan looked down the passageway, some of the men he saw were armed in some manner, others empty handed.
Oddly, Annan did not feel threatened by the armed men. He dared to venture down the passage, meeting the perplexed gazes of these men in passing.
“What is this place?” One asked.
“Where are we?” Asked another.
“Has death claimed us? Are we with the ancestors?”
“How did we get here?”
Some tongues Annan understood, others he didn’t. The persons he understood, spoke in a variety of dialects. Nevertheless, whether he comprehended or not, everyone around him posed the same questions as he.
Questions to which he had no answers. Wherever the answers lay, he was determined to search for them. As he moved through the passage he encountered a number of women, naked, save for the same type of loin garments that covered the men. A few out of the small number of females were also armed with a motley assortment of armaments, from sticks to knives.
Then he stopped short when he saw a white man. Something in the back of Annan’s head whispered a warning. The white man, dressed in a soiled white shirt and dark leg coverings represented a threat.
Annan stared at the white man and the white man stared back at him with a glint of hostility shining from unwavering green eyes. Annan was at a loss to explain his sudden, charged reaction at the sight of the pale skinned man.
He was sure the answer would come to him when his memory was restored…if it was restored. Annan moved cautiously past the white, keeping the gun at his side in a nonthreatening manner. His arm, however, was tensed to swing the weapon should the white so much as blink the wrong way.
There were other whites along the way, mixed in with larger numbers of blacks. The majority of the blacks were men. None wore more than loin garments. Some bore visible injuries from cuts to bruises. Most of the more fully clothed whites also possessed wounds. He saw scarred faces, and bloodied tunics. One white man favored a limp arm.
The array of injuries before him brought to Annan’s attention a thin slash from his left shoulder to the center of his chest. It wasn’t a deep wound. While it stung, its insistent throb in no way distracted him from his relentless stride toward the end of this passageway. He needed to find out where it led.
“Annan?”
Annan turned to see a black man stepping out of a room into the passage. He was tall like Annan but with a heavily muscled wrestler’s build.
That Annan responded to his own name was surely a good sign. He remembered his name. He also remembered that he was a soldier and a commander in the army of the expanding Asante Empire. The rest had to follow sooner or later.
Annan stopped and stared at the man.
“I understand if you don’t remember,” the big man addressed with a disarming smile. “I couldn’t remember anything either when I first woke, but now everything is quickly returning. I am Kofu.”
Annan shook his head slowly. Neither the man’s face nor his name struck a pneumonic chord. Annan quelled a bubbling impatience at his lack of recall. “Hopefully, I’ll remember, soon…Kofu. Perhaps you can help me. Where are we?”
Kofu fell alongside Annan. “I don’t know. One second, we were on the boat, then there was a light…the next thing I know we’re here…”
Annan stopped. “Wait, you say we were on a boat? Where?”
Cries resonated through the passage before Kofu could reply. Both men looked around to see shining box-shaped objects flying toward them. Annan counted over twenty of them. They were grayish smooth sided things, and they glided with an uncanny degree of swiftness and precision.
Kofu muttered an oath, his eyes widening in obvious terror. Annan stepped back, his gaze just as fearfully fixated on the flying objects. In seconds, a stampede of captives pushed past the two men.
Annan grabbed Kofu’s arm. “Come, we had better flow with the crowd before we’re trampled underfoot!”
Kofu pulled his gaze away from the metal demons and followed Annan’s lead.
A captive with a length of chain swung it at a low flying box, missing by a hand span. A sliver of light projected from the box’s center, striking the chain. The makeshift weapon vanished in the captive’s hand.
A white captive aimed a musket at another box. A flash of needle thin light enveloped the firearm and it too disappeared to the man’s horror.
The flying boxes soared above the scrambling captives, targeting any weapons they spotted and causing them to vanish.
A streak of luminescence blinded Annan but for a second. When it subsided, he was empty-handed. He kept running because he had no choice. Everyone else was running. To where? No one knew. The single thought driving this mob was to escape from those boxes.
Annan realized that while the flying boxes were chasing them, they made no attempt to capture or disable anyone.
They’re herding us, Annan thought, struggling to keep pace with the crowd. Suddenly, the van of fleeing captives was at the end of the passageway. The wall opened up before them and the frantic, frightened crowd poured into an enormous room more than sizable enough to accommodate nearly 400 people. The captives spread out along the room’s four walls, attempting to put as much distance between themselves and the boxes as space would allow.
The boxes hovered in a tight cluster just feet beyond the room’s entrance. They advanced no further, they’re only function at this point to keep anyone from leaving.
“What do you think they’re going to do to us?” Kofu asked through labored breathing.
“Perhaps we should ask them,” Annan suggested, surprised at his ability to spout humor in the face of the inexplicable.
Kofu glanced at him, managing a slight grin. “Be my guest.”
A segment of one of the room’s walls faded away to be replaced by a black oval surface coated with many little pinpoints of light.
The crowd grew quiet as they beheld the wall’s change.
Something clicked inside Annan. He knew somehow that the black oval on the wall was not some sort of decoration. “That’s the night sky,” he whispered to Kofu.
Kofu squinted at the oval, his expression agreeing with Annan. “Why are we being shown the night sky?”
A voice broke the tense silent. It was a robust, omniscient voice that invoked another layer of terror in the captives. Half the crowd dropped to their knees, thinking the gods or God was speaking. For many, that voice was an odd blessing, for it could explain why they were here.
Annan was yet to regain his memory, but he knew this little morsel about himself: he was indifferent to anything regarding spiritual matters. As much as the voice unnerved him, somehow he couldn’t bring himself to ascribe to it anything more than a mortal origin.
“Look to the window,” ordered the voice. “You are no longer on your world. You are far, far from the place you called home. There is no going back. Your home is on this ship, which is called a Battle Fortress. I am the master of this Battle Fortress. Therefore I am your master. I represent the Conglomerate, whom you will serve as faithfully as I expect you to serve me.”
“This is the devil’s work!” A huskily built white man, wearing a long black coat over a white shirt with slightly darker pants, stomped toward the middle of the floor. His dark beard was streaked with gray. His eyes flashed rabid defiance. His actions correlated as he boldly advanced on the hovering boxes.
That the white man had clearly lost his wit was not the most astonishing thing to Annan. He could actually understand the prattle issuing from the man’s mouth. Another memory fragment surfaced to remind Annan of the yawning language gap that existed between him and the whites.
“You understand him, too?” Annan put forth to Kofu.
The big man nodded, at a loss. “I never knew their language before. Maybe those…” Kofu directed his eyes toward the flying boxes “…things are using magic to make us understand.”
The white man continued his forward progression, yelling so loudly and with such vociferous energy that spittle spewed from his lips with each invective. “You are all Satan’s dirty, filthy, vermin-riddled, demons! Monsters all! Return us to where you have stolen us or see God’s host descend upon your cursed heads!”
Another white started forward as if to restrain the one with the outburst. But he was pulled back by two of his like complexioned companions.
One of the flying boxes lowered until it hung just a few feet above the bearded man. A blue- white cord of light emitted from the box, striking the agitated man in his chest.
The man collapsed, his body wrapped in a soft blue aura of soothing beauty. Yet, its effect on the white man was hideous. His body twisted and bucked as if something were inside him, tearing to break free. Howls of pain ripped from his throat, deafening at first, soon reduced to an exhausted whimper. The aura vanished. The white man, free of the light’s brief captivity, lay squirming on the floor in a fetal position.
“As servants of the Conglomerate,” the voice continued, seemingly unperturbed by the interruption. “Your every word and action will convey the proper respect toward those who labored to lift you from the grime of your previous existence. Failure to respect us will be met with swift and decisive punishment.”
Every gaze settled on the white man’s slobbering, quivering form. All the captives took the voice’s warning as well as the object lesson to heart. For the blacks who fully regained their memories, and even some of the whites, the bearded man’s torture generated not a shred of sympathy. Most would have gladly done worse if given the opportunity.
Kofu snickered.
“He must be a terrible person,” Annan said, looking at his friend for a clue.
“You’ll know how terrible he is when your memory returns.”
“We must all tread carefully,” Annan warned. “Those flying demons will spill their wrath upon us as quickly as they will those we consider an enemy.”
At that instant, three beings entered the room. Roughly man-shaped, they wore metal armor that covered their bodies from head to toe. Two wore armor of the same gray coloring as the flying boxes. The third one’s armor was milky white.
The trio stepped into the center of the room. The white armored one gestured to the bearded man. The gray armored beings obediently lifted the limp man by his shoulders and feet and carried him toward a wall where they gently placed him on the floor. The captives in the vicinity drew back at the approach of the alien figures.
“These are my associates,” the voice went on. “The one in white will supervise your training. The ones in gray will assist him. You will obey their every instruction or suffer the consequences. The drones will watch you closely. As long as you are compliant the drones will have no reason to punish you.”
Annan studied the flying boxes the voice called drones.
More gray armored beings marched into the room. At least twenty of them.
“You are going to be separated into groups,” the voice announced.
The armored beings plunged into the captives’ ranks, with shouts, gestures and a plenty of rough handling to get everyone moving.
The bearded white man was prodded back to his feet by a Gray Armor. Other than wobbly balance, he appeared recovered enough from his ordeal to move under his own power.
“Training for what?” Kofu wondered, looking back apprehensively at an approaching Gray Armor.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Annan quipped. “I’m the one with no memory.”
White Armor remained in the center of the room watching as the humans were divided into groups and herded out of the space through another passageway.
Vechus removed his white helmet when he entered the Command/Control cube. Thank the Molder his head gear was capable of filtering out the stench of this batch of back world primitives. Of course, he knew it wasn’t for his olfactory comfort that the High Executive decreed that all Contractors wear head-to-toe armor. These primitives--humans--were skittish enough. Seeing Contractors unmasked would have driven the abject creatures to inconsolable fits of terror.
They would most certainly have died of fright if they were to lay eyes on the mass of glistening overlapping tissue that was the High Executive’s visage.
“I don’t know about this,” Vechus stated gruffly.
High Executive Pitott was sitting in his cubicle surrounded by an ever active console. “You are never satisfied, Vechus,” he critiqued, fixated on a monitor that displayed the humans being escorted into decontamination chambers by their armored minders.
“In this case, I’m even less satisfied,” Vechus replied. “These humans haven’t even reached a Phase One stage of industrialization. Even the light colored ones with their ocean plying vessels sorely lack the conceptual basis to comprehend the technology we’ll be introducing them to.”
The High Executive spun about in his swivel chair to face the Head Contractor. “Ah, but both light and dark colored humans understand projectile weapons. How much of a conceptual leap could possibly be required for them to comprehend a gun leagues more advanced, but that can still be aimed and fired like their crude powder shooters? Not much of a leap at all.”
“Operating war machines is considerably beyond their experience,” Vechus griped.
Pitott’s facial coils expanded and retracted in a display of enthusiasm. “A half sentient reptilian, given a small dosage of training could control those machines in its sleep. Surely, you don’t think these humans could accomplish less under your guidance. Besides, I’m not trying to build an elite strike force. All I need is fodder.”
“You’ll get your fodder, High Director. I can guarantee you that.” Vechus put his helmet back on and exited the cube.
