"Freaking untie my hand." Reneesh yelled at his guard. "What will you do if I don't?" He asked back. "What say you untie my hand and I will not beat the living shit out of you?" Reneesh yelled back. The guard unlinked his hand to the pole and dragged Reneesh across the floor and started kicking him in the stomach with his boots. "STOP IT!" I yelled. The man stopped kicking Reneesh and comes to me and puts his face right in front of mine. "Tell your beloved crew mate to shut his mouth. I swear I will kill him next time." He warned and with this he dragged Reneesh back to his place hitting him for the last time. "Just don't bloody open your mouth, Reneesh." I told him. "Just don't."  I snapped. He glared at me and then looked down to the ground. "What will you do to us?" I asked Bolius, mainly because he was so keen on making us suffer. "Where are you taking us?" I asked, when there was no reply to my previous question. "Just where you wanted to go." He said, his sinister smile coming right back onto his face. "Your beloved planet. For which you've been fighting for." He continued. "What's on that planet?" I asked back, hoping to get some information out of him. "Everything." He replied. "You'll get to know everything very soon. Till then, just close your mouth, else I'll put a bullet into it." he said, indicating that this discussion was over. I looked out of the window just as we were passing by some space rocks, just like the Oort cloud of our solar system. I looked over to Souvik who was in a lot of pain. His guard was snoozing in his seat and Souvik was on his knees, blood oozing out from his fresh wounds. He looks at me, his eyes filled with pain. I look down to the ground, not able to find the strength to look at him in the eye. I just looked out the window as our ship approached the planet we were supposed to originally go to. Curiosity took over my brain. Questions started flooding my thoughts. What is down there? As Leo said, there were many things about this place we didn't understand. There was something weird about this planet. Very weird. I was damn tired and slowly drifted away to sleep.

"Wakey Wakey!" Bolius said, his ugly face just centimetres away from mine.  "We're just outside the planet's atmosphere. We're landing on it in a few minutes and you need to strap in. C'mon. Get on your feet." He continued. All my crew were strapped in hard into the seats. The captain, I suppose, comes over the announcement system. "All crew, prepare for drop." "Drop?" I asked, clearly surprised. "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN BY DROP?" Anna yelled. I figured why that came in. She was afraid of heights. Memories of our first day, during our launch, came into my head. "We're going to drop onto the surface. Saves fuel and time. No wonder you have to strap in so tight. We don't want idiots floating around on the ship." He said, his stupid grin returning to his face. "Prepare for the drop in 3..2..1.." The captain announced. "Oh man, this ain't gonna be good!" Leo yelled as we dropped. Let me tell you, dropping isn't pretty.

We were just outside the atmosphere when the drop started and we were now hurtling towards the surface at speeds I just can't imagine. The content in my stomach was coming right back up. I regretted having that stew yesterday. Anna was screaming all the way down to the surface. The planes walls were heating up from the friction between the ship and the air. The view below was blocked by the clouds. Real white clouds. Probably full of water vapour, which was a rare sight back on Earth. Suddenly, the ship dropped out from the clouds and the view took my breath away. There were birds flying around. And everything looked... Clean. None of the dirt we had back at home. No dust. Just how Earth was before it was destroyed by our actions. "Does this thing slow down anytime soon?" I yelled at Bolius over the sound us falling. "Wait and watch." He replied.

We were just a couple of thousand feet away from the ground, yet the ship showed no signs of slowing down. Suddenly, the thrusters kicked in and the ships' rate of descent plummeted. In a few seconds, we were hovering over the ground. We then jerked forward and started moving at a very high speed. Nothing back on Earth moved at such speeds. I looked outside the window admiring the beauty of this new strange world. This was the first time I was going to set my foot in a planet other than Earth. The ship banked right and we were making our way towards some sort of heavily militarized base in the distance. In a couple of minutes, we were on our final approach and we finally landed with a thud.

I looked out of the window to find heavily armed men approaching the ship. "Stay calm and they will not hurt you." Bolius warned. The doors opened and Schrotanic scurried down the steps and stood outside. Trust me, it was one hell of a welcome party. "Welcome to our base. Follow me." He said, motioning us towards the door. The base was huge. It was surrounded on all the four sides by high walls. "Escaping this place is close to impossible." Schrotanic started. "It has only one entry and one exit. Nothing gets in by mistake. And nothing ever stumbles out.  "Is this planet your home?" I asked, remembering the information Leo gave us. I was trying to cross-check whether the information we had received from Dace's system was genuine or fake information placed to trick us. "This isn't our home. This is what you people call the Forward Operating Base. This base is very important in our war." He replied and stopped abruptly. "What war?" I asked. "I just said more than you need to know. You can jolly well screw your mouth shut now." he said. It was clear that that piece of information was a slip of the tongue.

"This is where you'll be imprisoned till we set things up to break you. Physically and mentally." Schrotanic said, pointing at a building with just one door and no windows. "You make it sound so simple." Leo said, looking disgusted. "You do know you're destroying an entire species, right?" Leo continued. I admired Leo's guts. At the same time, his guts brought him nothing but pain from his guard. "Leo, please don't talk. Please." I said to him. Leo, Reneesh and Anna were the three people I cared about. I could trust them, no matter what happened. "Oh no, Leo!" Schrotanic interrupted. "We have no plans on destroying your whole species. We have a plan which would make you think dying would have been a better option." He continued. "Oh please. Cut that crap." Reneesh said. "Throw their butts in there according to the rooms they've been allotted." Schrotanic ordered to the guards. "Have fun in there. You're our key to a better future." He said, leaving me to my own thoughts. That guy must be crazy, to say that humanity would instead wish to die rather than to face what was to come and at the same time say that we were the key to a better future. Bolius, along with his guards, dragged us inside and took us to our rooms, which was a room, of course, with nothing except for a small partition, probably the washroom. The rest was white. And when I say white, I mean white walls, white floor, white ceiling. There wasn't a bed. There wasn't a chair. Nothing. Just dazzling white everywhere. I did not know what all this white was supposed to achieve, but I sure was not enjoying this. "Enjoy your stay here." Bolius said, smiling his sinister smile again. I was getting sick of that and was fighting the urge to smack him right in his perfect teeth. I got put into a room with Leo. Reneesh with Souvik. Konrad and Anna in two separate rooms. I actually felt bad for the both of them. Being in this situation is stressful enough and being alone only makes it worse. We were given some clothes and they shut the door. The door went straight into the wall and a moment after the wall showed no signs that it had a door in it. Things pretty much sucked right now.

***