Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) by David Coy

what the first one would
be.
    “Where
are we?” Bailey asked.
    Mary
wished she’d had a dime for every time she’d heard it. She had the answer to
that one, though, and knew from experience it was better to just show her than
to tell her. Nothing took the place of the show in show and tell .
    “Come
on.”
    She got
up and led Bailey out of the hole and down the tube to another hole some twenty
yards toward the grocery. The opening was higher up on the wall, and she had to
lift herself up a little to get inside. Once in, she held a hand down to
Bailey and hefted her up. She was surprised by the strength she felt in
Bailey’s hands and arms as she clamored in.
    The
chamber was smaller than Mary’s and was nearly round inside, so the floor was
difficult to stand on straight. It was filled with clear light, and Bailey
wasted no time in finding the source of it. She looked down through a thick
irregular plate on the floor, seemingly feet thick, at the floating globe of
Earth. The image was so big, she couldn’t see all of it from her vantage point.
    “Oh my
heavens,” she whispered in awe.
    “Yeah.
Well, that’s where we’re not.”
    “So this
is some kind of space ship or something.”
    That’s
it, Mary thought. Simple.
Yet far from it.
    “How long
has it been here, or how long have you been here?”
    “The
first question is longer than six months, and the second is about six months,
I think. Me and Gilbert, he’s the Bible banger you met earlier, and another guy
named Tom Moon and my friend Fred have been in this tube the longest. Everybody
else is either dead or in another part of the ship doing other duty.”
    “What do
you mean, other duty?” Bailey asked with a sideways look.
    “Skip it.
I’ll tell you later. Too much too soon and you’ll just freak out on me.”
    There,
she’d said it.
    It was
true and she’d told Bailey just what would happen if she knew the ship’s other
horrors. There was a premium on sanity in the ship. If you could keep from
going mad, you stood a much better chance of surviving longer. Gilbert had his
Bible, Tom Moon had his mind of tough, dumb leather, and Mary—well, she had her
own inner fortitude. It did no good to dwell on what happened in the other
parts of the ship. She and others had seen things that just weren’t possible or
imaginable, yet were horribly both. Sink too low, don’t get up when you’re
called and you’d wind up there in those other parts of the ship yourself.
    “I’m
freaked out now,” Bailey said.
    “Nothing
to be ashamed of. We all are.”
    “Who are
they anyway?”
    That was
the one. That was the question that burned deepest. If we had that one, Mary thought, we might have something. We wouldn’t have much, but we’d have
something.
    A name
was more than just a name. If you attached a name to a thing, you knew the
thing. In order for the name to make sense, and to be more than just a sound,
you had to know something about the thing to begin with. They knew practically
nothing about the beings in control and had assigned a purely visual moniker, a
broad, unfortunately meaningless description.
    “We call
them witches.”
    “Witches?
Not Betazoid somethings.”
    “No.
Witches. If you can think of a better name, let us know.”
    “I don’t want
to think about them at all.”
    “Good
policy.”
    Mary
watched the slight smile grow on Bailey’s face as her gaze drifted inexorably
back to the floating globe of Earth. She’d seen that look before. She’d even
possessed it for a moment herself the first time Fred had brought her to this
chamber. Why they were allowed to view their home planet was just another
mystery.
    Then she
watched the smile pale. Mary knew the feeling. It was like being shown a
picture of your all time most favorite place in the world for the last time.
    “Come
on,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
    Tom
Moon’s hole was just up ahead and Mary felt uneasy walking past it. She moved
involuntarily in