Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
“This is ridiculous!” Shurla muttered to Penny but there was real fear in her eyes as she spoke. “Where do you think they’re taking us?”
“I d-don’t kn-know,” Penny wasn’t sure if her teeth were chattering from the chill of being soaked to the bone or from fright—she only knew she was in trouble here, and she couldn’t think of a single way to get out of it.
Twenty-One
The cart hummed smoothly along, past the shower buildings and through another hundred yards of jungle before coming to a big stone arch which seemed to mark the entrance of the Compound. There was another, smaller statue standing beside the entryway and again Penny thought the man depicted looked somehow familiar.
Then they went through the archway and entered the Compound.
The first thing Penny thought was that it looked like an idyllic little village—almost too idyllic, in fact. It was too neat, too clean, too manicured. To her eyes it looked artificially cheerful, like Main Street in Disney World.
A vast swath of jungle had been cleared to make way for rows of snug white cottages trimmed in deep blue. There were pristine white paths leading to each door and not a speck of trash or litter to be seen anywhere.
Past the cottages, there was a kind of marketplace, with buyers and sellers manning rustic wooden stalls, all perfectly painted and trimmed with bright, crisp banners declaring things like, Bread Sold Here and, Fresh Produce Every Day.
Again Penny got the feeling of artificial perfection. The marketplace looked like it was just for show, even though people were actually buying and selling there. It reminded her of those frontier museums you went to sometimes where the General Store looked just like it had back in the old days, but when you went inside, all the items they used to sell were behind a big wall of Plexiglas.
Further on, past the marketplace, was a public park filled with lush trees, some bearing large pink flowers and others with clusters of pear-shaped fruit in blue, purple, and green. The trees and grass were trimmed to obsessive perfection without a single leaf or blade of grass out of place and the crushed white gravel pathways curved perfectly through the neatly landscaped area.
There was even a kind of arena which seemed to be an outdoor public meeting place, Penny saw, though it was deserted at the moment. It looked like someplace you might go to see Shakespeare in the Park or Theater in the Round, with tiered bleacher-like seats all carved from dark gray stone.
Despite the obsessive perfection of the place, there were lots of people in the Compound—humanoids of all different races all apparently living and working in harmony together. The crowd here was every bit as diverse as the marketplace in Hell’s Gate Station—except for the fact that everyone was dressed the same.
They all had on short, toga-like garments which ended at mid-thigh and made them look like extras in an old gladiator movie, Penny thought. The men wore dark crimson red and the women wore a soft, periwinkle blue and all of them wore sandals which laced around their ankles. It was like a little Roman villa but with aliens. Weird.
But even weirder than their clothes, were the people themselves—or rather, their expressions. Every single face that Penny studied was smiling and content. Nobody was frowning or looking angry or upset about anything at all. And when they saw the new captives in the cart, many of them waved.
“Welcome!” one man called. “Welcome to the Compound!”
The woman beside him took up the call and soon all of them were waving and smiling at the dripping, shivering women in the hover cart.
Of course they couldn’t wave back, because their hands were still cuffed behind their backs, so Penny and Shurla and the rest of the captives just stared. Again, Penny was reminded of someplace artificially friendly, like Disney World where all the cast members had to wave and smile and act like they were ecstatic to be there.
The happiest place on Earth, she thought to herself as the cart floated smoothly along. Or in this case, the happiest place on Yown Alpha, she supposed.
After studying the people who lived in the idyllic little village, her eyes were drawn once more to the architecture. Far to one side of the Compound, was a building unlike the cozy cottages—it was high-tech, made of gleaming metal and glass and it appeared to be several stories tall. This was the Breeding and Conception Center, as Penny would soon come to know, and she would dread having her “exam” every morning. But for now, she just looked around, trying to take it all in.
The only building bigger than the glass and metal structure was a huge mansion at the far end. It was built on a hill—possibly an artificial one, since the rest of the surrounding land was flat as a pancake, Penny thought.