Eventually she dozed off, dreaming of walking hand in hand with Gabe beside a beautiful lake, surrounded by wild flowers.
She woke from the happy dream with a start, as Ashla’s scornful voice hailed her from the corridor. “Time to rise and serve the greater purpose, my rebellious Second Daughter. You can sleep for eternity soon enough.”
Taking a deep breath to gather herself for whatever ordeal lay ahead, Keshara rose from the bed and faced the barrier. Slibb and Ashla waited there, while Branggin leaned against the wall close by, stunner at the ready in his hand. An anti grav litter floated by his side
“Stand on the muster line,” Slibb said. “I’m going to give you a fast acting inject and then we’ll be taking you to the annex.”
Preparing herself to make a desperate last ditch stand, Keshara moved to the line obediently but as soon as Ashla and Slibb were close enough, she launched herself at the tech, claws out and fangs deployed. If I can grab him, he’ll make a valuable hostage. Farahnnim needs him.
Swearing, Ashla intercepted her, tackling her from the side with a force that took them both to the floor. Screaming defiance, amped up on adrenaline, Keshara kicked and punched, landing a few telling blows, and sank her fangs deep into Ashla’s shoulder.
“Stun her!” Slibb was yelling to Branggin but the expected pulse of paralyzing power didn’t strike. Determined to fight on until she was stunned or worse, Keshara grappled for a better hold on Ashla and tried to slash the older woman’s throat. She could tell Ashla was holding back, since the desire was to take Keshara alive, to serve the Khagrish purpose in the extraction pods. Under no such compunction herself, Keshara managed to flip Ashla onto her back and was going for the kill when she felt a stabbing pain in her shoulder. Snarling at the distraction, she instinctively snapped her fangs at Slibb and caught a portion of his uniform in her teeth as he screeched in alarm and fell backward, scrabbling to escape to a safe distance.
Keshara’s vision blurred and she couldn’t maintain her hold on Ashla. She slipped to the side away from the First Daughter and sprawled on the floor, unable to move.
“Fucking bitch nearly tore my leg off,” Slibb said as he gathered himself and got to his feet. He glared at the security officer. “Why didn’t you stun her?”
Branggin sounded amused. “Didn’t want to hit Ashla.” He waved the stunner at the First Daughter. “I thought she was going to kill you, old girl. You’re getting slow.”
Keshara was helpless to defend herself from the kick in the ribs, Ashla delivered a second later. “If I wasn’t under the Director’s orders to keep her alive there’d have been no fight at all. I’d have torn her throat out in the first minute.” The First Daughter leaned over and stared into Keshara’s eyes. Ashla’s glowed with her fury and her face was twisted into an angry grimace. “I won’t miss you once you’re safely in the annex.”
If she’d had any control over her own body, Keshara would have spit in Ashla’s face and clawed her heart out as her rage-driven battle instincts were pushing her to do but whatever Slibb had injected into her had stolen her free will.
“Rise,” he said now.
In disbelief, she found herself standing up as if she was a puppet or a robo. Increasingly frantic in the trap of her mind, Keshara tried to fight, to rebel as she was walked into the hall under Slibb’s gleeful orders and made to lie on the anti grav litter.
“Guess you won’t need my help any longer.” Branggin sounded relieved. “I’m going to have breakfast since I missed it.” He sauntered off.
Keshara felt the litter moving and watched the ceiling panels passing by above her head. Ashla kept pace with the conveyance, a figure of menace towering over her. All too quickly they entered a corridor where Keshara’d never been allowed before and she found herself in completely new territory. Her litter was directed into a room where the ambient temperature was noticeably lower than normal.
“You can go now,” Slibb said to Ashla as he busied himself with tasks out of Keshara’s limited line of sight. “I know you like to escort the women in here but you’ve got no role thereafter. It’s my job to prepare them and place them in the pod. You’re going to be in the way.”
Keshara flinched in surprise as the First Daughter leaned over the litter. “Just so you know, I took your man into my bed last night. Think about what we did together while you dream the last few months of your life away in your pod.” She patted Keshara’s shoulder and guffawed as she strode away.
Gabe would not betray me. The reassuring knowledge was immediate and unquestioning. But she could well believe Ashla might have assaulted her mate, using the Khagrish drugs and techniques to render a subject helpless. Such an ordeal would have been traumatic for anyone, but especially for her proud soldier.
“Rise from the litter and undress,” Slibb said as he set the platform to sink to the floor so she could obey the order.
In the thrall of whatever substance he’d injected, Keshara had no choice in the matter. The pods were in her direct line of sight and the view was horrifying—her sisters lying quietly, pale and drawn, like so many lifeless dolls. Bitter acid rose in her throat and she was afraid she’d vomit. The tech had her walk to where he stood and climb into an empty pod. Keshara was grateful he didn’t touch her, nor ogle her nakedness. Slibb was businesslike as he draped a sheet over her body from the neck down.
Keshara wanted to scream and flee the trap she’d placed herself in on command but it was as if she was a mind floating totally disassociated from her body. She had no control of her limbs. As Slibb lowered the clear lid on the pod she had a flash of total blind insanity, because he was essentially locking her into her coffin. Misty tendrils of a foul smelling orange fog drifted along her sides and up over her body. She tried to hold her breath but to no avail.
Slibb was watching her through the pod cover. “Breathe deep,” he said in a voice loud enough to penetrate the transparent barrier. “It’ll make things easier for you, knock you right out. You’ll won’t feel a thing when the Director extracts what she needs. Or so I’m told.”
Unable even to shake her head from side to side, Keshara closed her eyes and exhaled. The next breath she took would be her last, at least as a sentient being, so she filled her mind with a mental picture of Gabe and their time together.
“Hey.” Slibb rapped hard on the pod cover, startling her into re-opening her eyes. The tech was directly above her, staring into her eyes. “What Ashla said—it wasn’t like she implied. The soldier talked her out of what she had in mind. She never touched him or at least not the way she’d planned. I thought you should know.”
Lungs screaming for air, Keshara inhaled the noxious orange vapor and knew no more.
CHAPTER EIGHT
True to his word, Slibb returned to collect Gabe hours later, accompanied by Branggin, both men carrying weapons. Gabe eyed the antigrav litter floating at their side with annoyance. He was tired of being paralyzed or drugged into immobility.
“Stand on the muster line,” Branggin said, gesturing with his pulse rifle.
Deciding it wouldn’t do him much good to refuse, and he wanted to be out of the cell anyway, Gabe stepped onto the thick black line on the floor and stood at parade rest. Slibb pointed a neurocontroller at him and Gabe collapsed, convulsing on the floor, biting his lip until he drew blood, because he refused to give the bastards the satisfaction of hearing him yell in agony. The pain raked his innards, worse than before, maybe because his nervous system had been affected by the drugs the day before and the stun blasts prior to that.
When the pain emanating through his body from the bracelet on his wrist faded, he heard the force barrier go down, and the two Khagrish entered the cell. Reluctant to go for his hidden knife because his muscle control was shot, and he might drop it, he could offer only token resistance as his captors locked force binders on his wrists and ankles and heaved him into the waiting litter.
The Khagrish moved rapidly out of the cell block and made their way to th
At first, the place looked like any other Khagrish lab he’d ever been in, full of equipment, several examining tables, shelves and cupboards full of records, drugs, chemicals and other assorted scientific paraphernalia. But, as his litter was maneuvered through the crowded space, he saw a pillar-like installation reminiscent of the one in the pod room, and he wondered if this was the machine that converted the extract from the Badari into the infamous elixir.
A little further into the room sat a huge, clear container, in the center of which a small vial floated on an antigrav cushion. The vial appeared to be empty, although the sides and bottom were coated with streaks of a glowing, purple and blue crystalline residue. There was a label in Khagrish, but Gabe couldn’t read their written language. Beyond this elaborate storage set up was more equipment and then another door.
Farahnnim was seated on a stool in front of a desk off to the side, head in her hands. As the two men muscled Gabe onto a table and strapped him down, she raised her head, blinking as if disoriented then slid from the stool to approach them.
“I’m going to need to run physical endurance tests today too,” she said, steps wavering as if she’d been indulging in serious feelgoods. “Did you bring the comprehensive data analysis on the daughters’ fertility profiles, Slibb?”
The tech froze, like a small prey animal caught in the open in front of a much bigger predator. “No, doctor. I haven’t even run the final collation. There was no order in my work queue—”
Tearing at her crest of hair with both hands, Farahnnim let out a screech of rage. “I need to know all his parameters before I design the corresponding breeding program for the Daughters. After all these years you should be able to anticipate these tasks, surely. Go take care of my request and don’t come into my lab again until you have the data smoothed and re-indexed.”
Stammering apologies, Slibb couldn’t escape the room fast enough.
“What have you done with Keshara?” Gabe asked in the silence following the tech’s departure, anger lending force to his question. He hated being at the mercy of this insane woman and loathed the cruelty of everything Farahnnim stood for.
“No need to concern yourself.” Calm again, tantrum over for now, the Director glanced at the machine he suspected of making the elixir. “She’s installed in a pod, ready to contribute to the needs of science. You won’t be seeing her again.”
His blood ran cold, and he reminded himself the women in the pods were alive, at least for now. He could still get Keshara out. He took a deep breath to stop his unusually chaotic mental processes. His mate needed him to be at his best right now. Both of their lives depended on his coming up with a plan and executing it to perfection.
Or they were both going to die at the whim of the Khagrish.
“When you need to have him off the table, com me and I’ll come assist,” Blanggin said. He kissed Farahnnim and left the lab, saying as he sauntered to the door, “Don’t take any chances with him, and don’t trust anything he says.”
“We’ll have to wait for Slibb to hook up the nutrient feed. He should have done the task before he left.” Farahnnim plunked herself onto the stool.
“Because ordinary lab work is beneath you?” Gabe said.
“Exactly,” she said with no irony in her voice. “I earned my rank. I did my time assisting others,” she said as if Gabe deserved to hear her justify herself. “Came to this planet all starry eyed, eager to do original research, participate in the discoveries. Found out there was almost no opportunity for me to succeed unless I was willing to be subservient to the males in charge. Well, I fooled all of them, didn’t I? Running my own lab, doing ground breaking science, and I outlived them by hundreds of years. Fools.” She pulled out a slender black feelgood stick, lit the end and sat puffing, pulling whatever drug it delivered into her lungs. “The Badari are virtually immortal, you know. Designed to be that way, if you think about it. But the idiots in charge were terrified of the unintended side effect of the customers’ request, buried the data, killed each cohort off at a specific age.”
Gabe thought about it as she’d suggested and decided she was probably right. Badari were immune to nearly everything and healed at amazing speeds. He was curious despite his own predicament. “What generation were your colleagues up to in the labs when you arrived?”
“Three.” She puffed some more and exhaled smoke in a series of perfect circles, smiling at her own cleverness. “The program didn’t run smoothly at first. Several iterations failed miserably before it was possible to form subjects with any reliability. Wasted a lot of years, ruined quite a few careers. The customer came close to losing patience before Generation One was formed and survived, but the Chimmer and their masters operate on a long time frame so they allowed a certain margin of error. The researchers must be up to generation eight or nine out there now.”
He couldn’t see any reason to confirm her guess.
“Waste of time to start with children.” She waved the black stick, sending smoke curling in her vicinity as if she was casting a spell. “But the customer insisted. Once I had my own lab here, I went straight to mature specimens.”
“The First Daughters, like Ashla?”
She nodded, dropping the much shortened, charred stick to the floor and smashing it with the toe of one boot. She drew a fresh one from the pocket and lit up. “I had a few misfires but then yes. Eventually, all the generation one women had to go into the pods, to create elixir for us. I had a sentimental attachment to Ashla so I kept her aside. She’s my pet, you might say. Besides, she’s been unexpectedly useful at controlling the newer subjects. They respond well to one of their own giving orders.”
Nauseous, Gabe doggedly continued his questioning. “How did you manage to create females? All I was ever told once I got on this planet was there were no Badari women.”
“Exactly.” Farahnnim pointed her feelgood at him and the acrid smoke made him cough. “I finally bent my pride enough to find a mentor to toady to, worked my way up in his project until I was indispensable. He took me with him to retrieve the mattrichiexe for forming Generation Four. And while I was there, at the secret facility, snooping in all the storage spaces frankly,” she laughed at her own cleverness centuries ago, “I uncovered a container off to the side, in the back of a cabinet, marked ‘Not Appropriate for Program.’” She gestured at the display cabinet further down the wall. “Who could resist, eh?”
Gabe’s head was spinning, from the second hand smoke and from the information she was giving him.
Thoroughly spun up on the story she was telling, she needed no further prompting from him to continue. “I grabbed the bottle, hid it in my personal items. Did a few tests when I got back to the main lab. Everyone had their own side projects running, we all hoped to create a breakthrough of our own so no one was suspicious of my extra lab time. Some idiot in the first phase of the program collected or created by accident mattrichiexe only capable of generating females. And the customer didn’t want females.” She laughed and went to stand in front of the cabinet, resting one hand on the glass. “Their loss.”
“But this facility where we are now—how did you take it over?”
Farahnnim shrugged. “When the planet was set up to support a wide variety of customer-sponsored projects, facilities were built in many places. Turned out we didn’t need all of them so a majority were put in inactive status. My lover was in charge of the database, and he deleted all mention of this place. We recruited a few loyal techs and guards who were friends of his and—”
The portal opened. “What are you telling him, darling?” Branggin walked hastily to the table, glancing at Gabe suspiciously. “Slibb isn’t back yet?”
“I assume the sad excuse for a senior lab tech is off doing data crunching as I ordered and taking forever with it,” she said. “Probably stopped to imbibe or inhale his favorite drugs of choice and thinks I won’t notice. I was bringing my subject here up to date on the program, so he can better appreciate his own place in it.”
“Is there anything we can be doing to make progress in Slibb’s absence?” Branggin asked.
Gabe wondered why the captain was in such a rush.
“The human needs nutrients if you want to hook up a feed.” She waved vaguely in Gabe’s direction. “I’m going to my office to transcribe notes. Call me when we’re ready to proceed.”
Farahnnim wandered off, pausing at various tables on her way to the door, riffling through papers and stirring mixtures at random, as one or another caught her eye.
“Not my job,” Branggin said, gazing after the scientist and shaking his head. “Guess you’ll have to wait.” He strode away.
Seems they’d be lost without Slibb. This entire operation struck Gabe as teetering on the brink of disaster. The remaining Khagrish were all kidding themselves, immortal or not. And Keshara and her friends were in danger of dying to keep this horrific existence going a little longer for the Khagrish. Gabe tested the restraints again, but there was no give to any of them. He had hopes of being free to move about to some extent later during the physical endurance tests. He’d seen a treadmill-like device over in the far corner.
Another small quake rolled through the ground underneath the lab and the table to which he was bound rocked precariously. Gabe tensed, fearing it was going to topple with him helpless to protect himself. He watched the instruments hung from the ceiling above him sway and heard breaking glass in the recesses of the room. A giant crack formed in the side of the cabinet holding the remnants of the mysterious substance Farahnnim used to create Badari. He was amazed the entire thing didn’t shatter. Serious wave harmonics going on with today’s quakes.
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