Ch. 3

…Their eyes widened as they saw what appeared to be a combination between a human and a rat emerge from the doorway. About five and a half feet tall, relatively skinny, with short fur covering most of the creature's body, and fingers that were tipped with claws. While his body structure was more man in appearance, his face was almost all rat. His small, almost nonexistent ears, coupled with a large jaw and nose that extended from his face in a way that made him look exactly like a rat.

Showing small, razor sharp teeth, the creature uttered what Chloe thought might be its language.

"Ithir filsith Ish-nith!" said the ugly creature as if it was trying to give an order.

"Sith Ish-nith sidar," came a voice from the creature's belt, "Translation from Ish-nith to standard Human English complete. Please proceed to speak."

"You will follow me!" demanded the rat/man in a voice that had a slightly mechanical overtone. Chloe immediately thought of the universal translator from old Star Trek episodes.

"You will remain silent at all times. Anything you say will be heard by the device on my belt and translated into my language as mine is being translated into yours, and then you will be punished accordingly. You will only speak when spoken to directly. You will answer immediately, truthfully, and with the proper respect or you will be punished. Do you understand?"

"Who are you and what are we doing here? Why are you holding us prisoner?" demanded Chloe.

The rat/man sighed and gave them a pitying look. "It looks like I've got a couple of slow ones here. Very well, perhaps a demonstration will help you to learn a bit faster." With that he reached down and pressed a button on his belt.

Chloe screamed and fell to the ground as what felt like a huge jolt of electricity coursed through her body.

"Chloe!" shouted Lana as she watched her best friend writhe on the ground.

The rat/man slowly shook his head and then pressed another button on his belt located beside the first. Immediately, Lana joined Chloe on the floor.

"I hope that you have learned a lesson just now," the rat/man shouted over the sounds of agony that surrounded him. Continuing to shake his head, he pushed first one, and then the other button on his belt. Relief from the pain immediately flowed through Chloe, and then through Lana, but both were still shaking from the immense pain that had almost pushed their bodies to the breaking point. It took a while before they could hear what the rat/man was saying.

"I hope that you both have learned a lesson. Any form of disobedience will be punished immediately and severely. I will say this only once, so pay attention. You have been taken from your home planet by the Ish-nith Conglomerate, a space faring race that controls much of the trade in vices throughout this galaxy. You have been taken to serve as prizes for the victor in our gladiatorial games. You will serve as the slave of whoever happens to win you. It is my job to give you a crash course in how to be a slave and survive long enough to be of some use. If you do as I say, and life will be much easier for you. Continue to resist, and your punishments will worsen. Continue your resistance past a certain point, and you will be killed as an example to others. To help you along your path to submission, I have ordered a window to be formed for a moment so that you can see exactly where you are."

With that, a section of the wall behind Chloe and Lana became transparent. Looking outside, Chloe saw a sight that would be forever burned into her mind. She was looking down on Earth from orbit. Chloe heard a gasp come from Lana as she too realized what this meant. There was no way to get home. Not right now, and probably not in the future. They were stuck here and they needed to do whatever it took to survive.

"Oh, and just in case you think someone will come for you, the authorities on your planet will simply assume that you were killed in the meteor shower. There will be no rescue, and escape is impossible. There is no way for you to return, so the faster you learn to obey, the longer you will live and the easier your life will be. Now do you understand?"

Looking at each other, they simultaneously decided to go along with him, at least for now.

"Yes." They both said reluctantly.

"Very good. Perhaps you aren't so slow after all. Your second lesson is this; always walk exactly three feet behind your owner unless otherwise told or unless you are performing your duties. You will practice this by following me off of this shuttle and to your new quarters, after a stop at the training grounds of course. There we will continue your training."

Ch.4

Clark flew. Not in an airplane or a helicopter. He had no wires or guides holding him up. He didn't even have a jet pack. He was flying under his own steam, using sheer willpower in conjunction with his unique physiology to propel himself at fantastic speeds through the air. The boy who had once been afraid of heights has become a man who loves them. If he wasn't so worried about his friends he would have tried to perform a few aerobatic tricks to test the limits of what he could do. However, after everything he had heard from Jor-el, he was more than just concerned about their wellbeing. He was afraid. Afraid for them and their wellbeing and afraid of how they would react when they found out everything about him. And it was inevitable now. There was no way they wouldn't find out. But above all of that, he was afraid that he would fail them, that he wouldn't be able to pull off the scheme, the performance that Jor-el had concocted.

It was a daring plan. A frontal assault on the ship would not work. Not that he couldn't beat its defenses, he could. The problem was more complicated that that. The Ish-nith had a policy of killing any slaves or hostages if a rescue was attempted. While he could destroy the ship if he wanted to, gaining entrance without causing enough damage to possibly kill Chloe or Lana would simply take too long. By the time he disabled the defenses, gained entrance, and then found them, it would almost certainly be too late. They would be dead by the time he arrived. So, Jor-el suggested a more subtle and devious approach to rescuing them.

"Kal-el," Jor-el said telepathically, interrupting Clark's thoughts, "You are now directly under the ship. Fly straight up. Once you exit the Earth's atmosphere you should be able to detect the ship's presence. Its cloak is imperfect, as it is very costly for them to run it at full strength. While it is set high enough to ensure that it cannot be detected by Earth, if you get close enough to it you should be able to detect it with your enhanced senses."

"Are you positive that I can travel through space safely?" Clark asked, still a little apprehensive about that part of the rescue.

"The nothingness of space will not harm you, and you can hold your breath long enough to get on board the ship." Jor-el said reassuringly.

"I see it!" Clark said a few minutes later. The ship was huge. Clark could barely guess its size. It had to be at least ten miles long and wide, and at least four miles high. It was shaped like a very thick disk and had a clear dome on the top of the ship, which was facing towards the sun so that sunlight would illuminate whatever was under the dome.

"My son, you should see an opening in the side of the ship. Small ships should be going in and out of that opening. Fly under one of the approaching ships. It will mask your approach from their sensors. Once the ship lands, head for the Gaming Office. You know what to do from then on."

Seir Ralid was bored. No, not just bored, he was bored out of his tiny, tiny mind. He was so bored his whiskers hurt. It was his job to insure that all of the applicants for the Games met a certain criteria. The problem with this was you needed applicants to test; otherwise you twiddled your thumbs and did nothing, in short making this job very boring if business was slow. Not that it wasn't important, because it was. If a contestant wasn't up to a certain standard the fight would be to lopsided and it would be over very quickly. That would bore the audience, and that was very bad. The better rating each fight got, the more the advertisers back home would pay to advertise on their network. A bad fight literally meant millions of credits right out the space dock. Not to mention the potential loss of advertisers. The Galactivision advertisers were a fickle lot and had to be humored and pampered. So, here he was, behind a desk, waiting for another applicant to try to qualify.

Seir was prepared to continue his sulking when he saw the door to his facility open and in walk a tall humanoid, dressed in an almost skin tight outfit. The outfit was all white, except for a symbol on the chest which was black. Seir immediately arrived at the impression that this person could handle himself well in combat, but it was better to be safe than sorry, and he had been wrong before. He had learned the hard way that appearances were deceiving.

"Hello, and welcome to the Gladiatorial Gaming Office, I am Seir, your Tester. To insure that you can fight well enough to survive for a few minutes, we have a battery of tests that you must pass, but first you must fill out these forms and answer a few questions while you do so." He said, motioning the humanoid towards the chair on the other side of his desk.

"First question, what race are you?"

"Kryptonian."

Seir's eyes popped open. He was no longer bored. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he was so excited. The Kryptonians NEVER participated in the games. In fact, they never participated in anything with the other races. He couldn't remember the last time he, or anyone else for that mater, had seen a Kryptonian. Not that that was surprising. The Kryptonians were a highly advanced race, but they were also very xenophobic. They disliked outside influences so much that they didn't even keep embassies on other planets. It wasn't unusual to go ten or twenty years without anyone seeing one, but everyone paid attention when you did get a message from them. The last race stupid enough to attack them, the Icthrop, were punished by the Kryptonians severely. Not that they ever claimed to have done it, but everyone knew that they had. The Icthrop sent almost every ship they had toward Krypton, none of which were ever heard form again. Two weeks later their home planet was destroyed. After that, no one even tried to violate Kryptonian space. This was monumental. Even if he wasn't a good fighter, he would probably be allowed to fight; simply because of the attention having a Kryptonian fight at all would be huge. But that wasn't his decision. Reaching under his desk, Seir pressed a button that would summon The Owner. He would handle this. All Seir had to do was keep the Kryptonian occupied until he got here.

The Owner, known at birth as Sidir Tisl, was at what very moment in his office with Sirit (their equivalent of coffee) dripping from his triple chins onto his extremely large shirt that barely covered his copious form. An alarm had just sounded, and while it wasn't a 'we're under attack' kind of an alarm, it was enough to startle him into spilling Sirit all over himself.

"Servant! servant! Get in here and get me a new shirt! Move it! I have a code three alarm to tend to." He said as he took off his shirt and used the dry part to wipe off his shin and jowls. Normally, it would be unthinkable for him to do so himself, but with a code three alarm he decided that quickness and efficiency took precedence over comfort and custom.

"This had better be important," he growled as his servant arrived with a new shirt. The servant should be moving faster, much faster. After all, it was a code three alarm.

With that thought, Sidir cuffed the slave girl hard across the mouth, causing her to fall to the floor in a heap.

"Get up and move faster! I have to leave now!" said Sidir as he considered adding a kick in the ribs for good measure. He decided against it because it would simply take too much time for the slave to get up if he did so. He blatantly ignored the lavender blood that trickled down the girls pink skin from where one of his claws had caught on her skin. After all, she was just a slave, and therefore had no rights to any feelings of her own or to kindness from him, her owner.

Following the slave girl as she picked herself up and opened the door to his office, he waited until she summoned his personal lift to give her the command, "Remind me to punish you more when this is over with. You should have moved much faster."

Knowing that if she did not she would be punished even worse if he ever remembered on his own; she nodded and climbed on board the lift and punched in the destination. Knowing that her owner would be impatient to leave the lift she moved toward the door as the lift decelerated. After opening the door, she waited until he left the lift to follow him, always exactly three feet behind him as was proper for a slave. She could hear her trainers words even now, "You will always walk exactly … "

TBC.