Anoush and I spent six months in the sample side of the High Security Lab, with our minders more congenial but also more cautious than Boy and Hooters had been. It was a pain in the heinie, but we kept telling ourselves that half a year out of a 500-year-plus life expectancy was tolerable. I would have been suspicious of us too, given the novelty of what had happened.
As the news from the various human settlements collected, it turned out Anoush and I were not an isolated case. About two hundred people were taken during those First Human Sweeps. Of them, Anoush and I were the only ones to return. We were incredibly lucky.
The social scientists think that more were killed than gave in, but maybe that’s just their residual good opinion of our species. There’s no clear evidence. But when the Second Human Sweeps began in 2865, what success they had was widely attributed to “tamed” humans collaborating. The Sweeps’ primary targets were humans on or near an HX but there were also some HX-sponsored raids on planetary settlements.
After a few decades, it became obvious that the tamed humans were raising kids, grandkids, etc., to continue in the family business. The scientists call those “domestic” humans—unless they escape and become “feral” humans. Ferals are very different from us “wild” humans … but Anoush and I aren’t in those stories.
Our story is that having retrieved a big HX battery set us each up for life. While being comrades in arms, bed partners, and fellow prisoners we’d gotten to know each other well and like each other a lot. We decided to raise a big family together, fifteen kids so far, with the youngest still a toddler.
Back on the HX ships, from being a pure if periodically annoying blessing to their raiding partners we wilds became a blessing and a curse. All the raiders adapted by becoming secretive about our presence; no one mentioned humans when they could be heard or tapped, except as a highly effective decoy technique. But the tamed humans and domestics were pretty good at helping protect the HX from raids, and soon everyone was reminiscing about how good the loot stream used to be while cursing how badly it had shrunk. Some human raiders and a lot of alien raider races went out of the business.
23 years ago, in 3134, the Sweeps near us tapered off. Apparently the HX inhabitants decided that their human population was big enough and had become self-sustaining.
Nobody is at all sure that this is a happy ending.