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the rest of her?” Urad was looking worried.
    “Oh. She is living with her mate on Salass. They might be taking part in the Resicor situation, but I don’t know. When she finished her tour to link my world to the others, she had to surrender those links, so Resicor removed the layer of connections and took a copy of Skiria at the same time.”
    The orb darted into the mechanism of the tube while they were talking, and when she finished, the orb hovered and expanded into a display of a sleeping man, twitching violently before he punched his way through the top of the container.
    That is when the display ended.
    Noma looked around and found the main console. “Let’s see what the internal scans saw.”
    Using the tech skills that she had been taught during keeper training, she brought the system online and viewed the internal monitors.
    “Noma, where are we, exactly?”
    “Urad, we are in the middle of a spacecraft. It is designed to ship powers like cattle for service to the Vorwings. An alien race who believes in their superiority over others and their extensive lifespans make many worlds worship them as gods.”
    “Like ours.”
    “Like yours. Don’t get me wrong, they do have frightening and impressive power, but they are like spoiled children. They want what they want and nothing else will do. Their hunger to get their bloodlines expanded is ongoing. It is a good thing that they don’t breed easily.” Noma blinked when she rattled off Resicor’s opinion of the Vorwings.
    It seemed that Resicor might not be physically with her, but there was knowledge left behind.
    “They are breeding with us?” He looked horrified.
    “Well, I doubt they are doing it with the men. The men would be used as guards, trained to be Raiders or manipulated into being part of invading armies. Can you imagine an entire army of powers coming against you?”
    He shuddered. “I can see why they would want us. Why not come in and take us in one sweep?”
    She smiled. “On my world, the talents are appearing more frequently, but I am guessing that here, it is less than one percent of the population. That is a lot of sifting for them, and as you know, if a talent really doesn’t want to be found, they can be hidden for quite a while. They are functionally immortal; they have all the time in the world.”
     

Chapter Seven
     
     
    The monitors were all movement activated. Noma and Urad watched the display of a sobbing young boy being hauled into the chamber by bots and sedated.
    The teen was undressed and wired into the first tube, the stasis chamber being activated and the bots returning to their charging stations.
    A blast of fire began the next clip and a reference to sedating gas came up on the bottom of the screen.
    “Damn. They gas them.”
    “Why don’t we smell it above the pit?”
    “The gas is heavier than air. They pump it in and suck it out to store it for another use.”
    The woman carried in was an adult, and she was unconscious in the arms of the bots.
    They watched a few powers dropped in pairs, many singly and all of them ended up in the tubes.
    The final couple were adults and fighting the sedative gas. They were wired and placed in the tubes just as the others had been. The recording ended and then snapped back on as the pair moved restlessly in their tubes and both punched their ways through the clear plexi cover.
    Moving as one, they destroyed the bots, ripping them into pieces. They carefully looked into the tubes and selected someone that they must have recognized. They opened the tube and unhooked the man as carefully as they could. He blinked his eyes and smiled, staggering as they helped him stand.
    With the man with them, they moved swiftly from tube to tube, opening each one and unhooking the inhabitant while the man pressed his hand to their forehead and chest.
    Urad smiled, “They knew which one was a healer.”
    “He was the second to the last one in before them.”
    When all thirty-eight powers were