The trader and his minion
continued shoving me forward down the conduit. I was getting fed up with
being pushed around but I knew that this was not the time to try and
protest. The head trader was at least eight feet tall and probably at
least four hundred pounds. Combine his stature with the weapons around
his belt and the sharpness of his fangs and I was certainly at a slight
disadvantage. I knew in order to escape I'd have to find or create a moment but this was not it, not yet.
"Stalling is making me angered. Show me chip now or die to death."
As
if their foul breathe and pushing wasn't bad enough, their blatant
butchering of the English language was grating on my nerves.
I
scanned the area ahead of me, continuing to count the steps we took in
my head. It was four hundred feet between emergency beacons and I was
nearly at the next one. Through the darkness, dragging my feet, I came
up on the next beacon. I pretending to trip again, and as I fell to the
ground I initiated the next one.
"What
you do? What that light?" I heard over my shoulder as a mammoth foot
came crashing down on my back. The weight of the blow knocked the air
out of my lungs. I regained my senses and turned over; "It's a marker I
placed to show me the way to the chip I hid." It was a blatant bluff,
but it was all I could come up with at the minute. The head trader
leaned down over me, his vile breathe making me nauseous. He seethed
over me for several moments before he acquiesced.
"You get up now and find chip, or you find your head under foot next time."
I
got to my feet and continued to stumble forward. All I could do was
pray that somewhere, someone was monitoring the feed from the emergency
beacons and was alerted to the distress signal, because I was certainly
in plenty of distress.
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