by Amanda Milo
Unless my theory is correct. My blood crystallizes in my veins as I consider the strength with which I believe that they’ve known all along about my pregnancy: bone deep. The team all seemed very enthusiastic about their job—they freaking love their job—and they’ve haven’t gotten to dig into me in weeks. It’s not a coincidence.
Only a reprieve.
I shudder.
Drogan’s shoulder brushes against mine.
Also not a coincidence.
I meet his eyes, and I’m nearly suffocated with a serious wave of frustration. I like Drogan. It’s painful—like blood flow reawakening tissues nearly destroyed by frostbite.
Whatever they’ve done to me, they put in a switch: when I have to defend myself, or when I have to follow an order, I don’t suffer, wondering if what I had to do was good or bad. It was necessary. Whatever moral agony I would have felt in my old life has been stripped.
Facing Drogan, something is changing; chemical suppression override, or something. Probably due to pregnancy hormones rocking the boat.
I wonder if they factored that into their little experiment.
We’re ushered into a high-tech exam room, decorated in delightfully drab grey but even worse than plain, drab greys are the bright and colorful features; high powered lights, locked cabinets of drugs with noxious yellow warning labels, and shelves of equipment, beakers, vials, instruments.
I hate the instruments.
Drogan gets restrained. I get those sticky nodes affixed to my forehead, under my shirt, and at my wrist. No doubt the team noted every reaction and heartbeat as they made me murder strangers. Now, they’ll get to monitor my every reaction and heartbeat while they make me murder someone I like.
Extra distressing is that I feel distress—if ever there is a time for their forced numbing, I need it now—because without a shadow of a doubt, I know I’ll be literally powerless to stop what happens next. Once they give me the order; I’ll kill. I don’t know what they did to me to install it, but I’m remote control activated: If I hear a specific phrase, it flips a switch in my brain and I destroy my target.
It begins with a calmly uttered, “See the antlers on that stag?” So innocuous, my command to murder. Simple. And I’m helpless to do anything but follow it. They know this well. What they don’t expect is for me to possess any control of who I carry out the kill order on.
I’ve never given them any reason to think I have some control. I don’t have enough to do me any good, but I must have inherited a latent copy of the secret agent gene, because very early on here, it expressed itself by internally cautioning me to bide my time just in case I ever needed to flex my tiny loophole: I do not in fact, have to immediately kill who they sic me on.
This doesn’t sound like a lot of wiggle room—it isn’t. But it’s something, and if I’d revealed this early on, they would have have tightened their control, cut off my tiny ability to rebel, and I’d have nothing now.
That said, I can’t fool myself; Drogan isn’t walking out of here, and neither am I. I haven’t been saving up for a grand escape: we’re in a prison ship in the sky. There is no escape.
This right here is a suicide mission at best, and a total loss of self and self-control once they figure out how to stop-gap me. If we live through this, they’re just going to repeat this entire exercise in order to test that they’ve perfected it. Drogan will face me as his firing squad again, and this will all be for nothing.
They’ll tie up the next poor sucker who swiped late for his shift one too many times, or they’ll bring me a prisoner who they’ve run out of uses for, and they’ll make me kill them too.
To think that I was innocent of any crime when I arrived here, and now, with the things I’ve been programmed to do, I actually deserve to be locked away. After this, they’ll break me of any spare inch of free will I have left. I need to make this good. We’ve got one shot, but we’ve also got a guaranteed bad ending.
My body is vibrating with the need to lunge at the ‘stag’. My breath catches with the sinking realization that I don’t have as much control as I believed I did. I can’t turn from Drogan—I can only resist.
This all changes when one of guards off to the side of me shifts slightly, eyeing me. That small movement is our saving grace; my focus breaks from Drogan, and I launch myself on the guard instead.
Blink; I have his gun. Blink; one bullet between the eyes—he’s dropped. Repeat, repeat, rep—
When it’s Drogan’s raised hands that I see in the sights, I swing past him and onto the next target—a tech that was incredibly fond of the stainless steel torture makers a.k.a the contents of the instrument tray. I can’t say the same. Blink; he’s down—far quicker than he deserves.
The acrid smell of firing propellent is irritating my senses so completely, that it causes me to pause in my killing spree. My focus slips from my mission, to my surroundings, and I’m startled to hear Drogan.
“Do not shoot me,” his tone is authoritative. “The clearing is empty.”
A new command. The bastard knows how to unlock sequences in my brain that I didn’t even know existed—and in the time it takes me to marvel at this, I’ve crossed the floor and am wielding one of these handy scalpels in order to cut through the zip ties that were used to secure him.
“Neutralized,” he breathes, and I relax.
Weird.
He’s referring to the threats in the room. I look around with him.
Everyone but us is dead.
The floor beneath us jars so violently that I pitch forward and narrowly miss crashing through a stand of beakers and bunsen burners. I stick to the wall: not because I’m trying to stay upright and out of the way, but because it’s like I’ve been sucked into the old amusement park ride The Gravitron—I can’t peel myself from the wall of cabinets and racks. A buzzing sound fills my ears as the lights flicker—
WHOOoooSH!
There is a roar so loud, it temporarily drowns out the screams that carry through the door.
What’s happening?
Long, long ago, there was this ship full of people. This ship went down in infamy forever when it crashed into an iceberg, and sentenced most of its passengers to a horrifying, watery grave.
I don’t need to be one of the geniuses on the floor to know that a hit like we just took—or whatever’s just happened—isn’t good.
Sure, we’re not in a ship that floats in the water—we’re flying through the air.
Or, we were.
CHAPTER 4
PRETA
Something is very wrong.
Drogan and I are armed to the teeth—every weapon we could strap on is taking a ride on us as we exit the lab. I almost changed into one of the guard’s uniforms simply for the purpose of having easy access to holsters and loaded pockets, but with the noises and alarms outside this room, I feel too rushed to take the time.
“I take point,” Drogan informs me.
Identified lead soldier, fall into formation!
...That’s not evil-scientist programming. That’s conditioning from a military first-person shooter game I used to play with Charlie.
I laugh a little to myself as I shake my head to regain focus. Drogan is looking at me curiously now, but I’m not going to argue—especially when I see his eyes drop to my stomach. If the man wants to act as our shield… I’m going to let him act as our shield.
I’m disgusted at how content I feel as I fall into step behind him.
We’re a team.
Cold fingers of dread dig into the edges of my nerves as he swipes his badge, and can’t get the door to activate.
“They wasted no time in sweeping you out of the system,” I murmur.
He curses. “I need one of the other guard’s passes.” He gives my appearance a double take. “Your hair’s all fucked up, Sol.”
Unlike Charlie’s, my hair behaves pretty well. (On a normal day—spaceship shake-ups notwithstanding.) She must get the crazy-curliage from her mom. Despite mine b
eing easier to maintain, without access to a mirror, mine feels like it’s all over the place. “No shampoo commercial scouts are going to sign me on,” I say in defeat, but Drogan reaches over and finger-combs it into place for me, and the smile he slants me makes me feel a little better. Still filthy, but better.
A dead guard gets badge-stripped: it works! I nudge Drogan out of the way to tap some fun things into the card reader.
“Do you know what the fuck you’re doing?”
I shoot him a warning look. “You did not just take that tone with me. I’m saving our ass. Shut up so I can hear the instructions my brain weirdly knows.”
His mouth quirks up, but he doesn’t open it again.
He does put his hand on my lower back though. It’s an oddly… affectionate gesture.
“Completed,” I declare, and with a nod, he takes the lead he so gallantly called.
We step out of the room only to enter into madness. Pure madness.
A very-much-alive guard, bristling with aggression to disguise half the panic that’s causing his upper lip and forehead to profusely sweat, points to us and thunders, “Secure your fuck-toy, Drogan!”
Fuck toy? Who all knows about Drogan and me? If everybody knew we were having sex, we could have had that round two, or maybe even three—
Drogan doesn’t miss a beat. He turns smoothly, still blocking the guard’s view of me, giving me time to relocate the gun in my hands into one of my pockets. Jumpsuits are ugly, but I’m giving mine a giant (silent) huzzah for being useful for once. If these were a pair of pants, I’d be worried about them sliding off of me. Guns are heavy.
So are cuffs, which Drogan ‘secures’ me with promptly afterward.
“Ship crashed,” the guard at his back spits.
Drogan and I go still.
“Get her back to her block. The generators are keeping the cell’s weave active, but we’ve already had to shoot a couple to calm down a riot. But we have plans to fix their shit.”
That doesn’t sound good.
A muscle in Drogan’s jaw ticks, and his eyes catch mine.
I can’t give him anything. I can’t reassure him, and he can’t avoid putting me back in.
His eyes are saying it all: we’re so fucked.
***
The guard’s collective, brilliant plan is to send a few unlucky persons—a.k.a cannon fodder—out into the alien landscape we’ve crashed into. That’s right. Alien landscape. Science has never been my thing, but ‘wormhole,’ is the whispered explanation I’m catching from the chatter going on around me. One minute, we were orbiting Earth, and the next…
The crash tore the Alphapod completely off the Concord; who knows where the rest of it ended up. We don’t know if there are survivors. We don’t know how far away the remains of the other pods on the ship might be, nor do we know the state of the supplies in those pods.
We desperately need the supplies.
The food and water were contaminated, or blew up—nobody cares about filling in the details for us prisoners. A few of the guards have taken it upon themselves to emerge as leaders, and they’re marching us, and barking, and the gist of their noise is: don’t panic and shut up.
It’s dark, and creepy, but thanks to the ship, we’ve got some floodlights, which manage to provide exactly enough illumination into the forest to scare the bejeesus out of us.
A tree off to my right is dripping a slightly opaque substance off of its branches like a Saint Bernard slobbers. A naked, wrinkled green beastie with scary, hook-like hands clings to the underside of a branch, gobbling up everything its little mouth can catch, and its stomach is expanding right before our very eyes. It looks like it could almost pop—
It explodes.
We all throw ourselves down to the ground, with various exclamations of horror.
This is not Earth.
“Get your asses up!” comes the thoroughly unfriendly request. “If you want to live, you’d best start walking when we tell you to walk and find out what won’t kill you.”
That’s right: we’re test dummies. The researchers that cared about the welfare of their various pet projects aren’t out here fighting for our safety. In fact, they’re conspicuously nowhere to be seen. I know mine are all a little dead, and maybe the others’ are too—either that, or they moved from Alphapod before we crashed. I don’t know where the rest of the ship is, but we are definitely on our own with the guards, who seem to have a very different take on our usefulness. They aren’t going to risk dying from a poisonous berry, or eating explosive tree slime. Total cowards.
I stare at what looks like one of the beastie’s hook-hands as it twitches in the burned grass a few feet from us.
Alright… I can’t blame them for that last one—I’m staying the hell away from that tree too.
“There is NO way I’m going in that forest!” an inmate shrieks.
I don’t normally agree with the prisoners, but right now, I’m so with her on this. I am not going any deeper into this place.
She’s still screaming. “You can’t make—”
The bullet kills her before the discharge from the handgun even registers as a sound.
I’ve always wanted to see the jungle.
These guys could teach classes on settling disputes; I don’t speak only for myself when I say that watching this has instantly instilled an invigorating air of motivation.
“Look at that,” the guard drawls. “When the others get their bitches here, we’ll have five in each group. Doesn’t that work slick?”
Does he expect us to clap?
“You, the bony whore: get over here.”
Everyone looks at me.
Well.
When I don’t immediately move, he uses the gun to both direct me and remind me that my choices are follow or die. Stiffly, I force myself to approach him. This is how Drogan finds me; being given the choice between eating the berries the guard has shoved at me, or eating a bullet.
The berries are a little bitter.
“What the fuck, man!” Drogan is shouting at this boss-guard. “She’s on a special regimen! She gets the Project-45’s; what the hell are you making her eat?”
The boss-guard dismisses this with simple but factual logic: “This one’s got nothing left to her.” He follows this with a disturbing, distressing, somewhat erroneous plan: “If shit’s poisonous, she’ll be the first to get it through her system and drop, right? We can use her to test out what food is safe to eat tonight.”
My job here is to eat food and live, or eat food and die, and until it hits my stomach and causes one of those two outcomes to either continue or end my reality, my work for the moment is on hold, thus the boss-guard doesn’t protest when Drogan drags me away. Drogan is a man though, and he’s doing that man-thing where he glares down his opponent—even as we’re retreating—and if he doesn’t quit, he’s going to get himself killed.
I hate to do it, but I try to break his side of the staredown. “He was so thoughtful. He even took my cuffs off first, see?” He doesn’t look, but that’s okay, I keep talking. “He didn’t even make me forage for the creepy berries—they were growing right next to where the ship crashed, totally unharmed! I’m so lucky.”
“It’s not fucking funny!” Drogan snaps, but his eyes flicker down to me, worried, and it’s just enough of a concession that the boss-guard can walk away with his ego and pride fully intact.
I’m sorry, Drogan.
Drogan’s glare locks on the man’s back.
“Let it go,” I whisper.
I go unheard. Or at least unheeded.
“Permission to retrieve the inmates’ Project Rations,” he calls out. To me, he mutters under his breath, “Killing all the doctors may have been a bad call.”
“We didn’t kill all the doctors. We didn’t kill all of the scientists either,” I quickly add, figuring what he’ll try to come back with. I experience a rapid series of flashbacks. Slowly, I shake my head. “And no. It was not.”
; He drags an impatient hand over his hair, but his voice sounds a little amused by my antics. As he should. They’re on his behalf, after all. “All of your docs and scientists then—fucking hell woman, you fight with me like we’re friggin’ married.”
“You should be so lucky,” I tease.
When he looks down at me… he… is not teasing anymore. “I should be.”
Wait… “What?”
Drogan’s smile disappears, and his eyes flick over me in an extremely concerned way, not an ‘you’re going to make me fuck you against this ship if you don’t shut up way.’
I was all for this option. Just for the record.
It’s like I can see his stress redouble. I’m guessing it’s become even more noticeable, the effect of my ‘enhanced metabolism.’ It’s been accelerated; like he said, the team had to put me on a special diet and schedule and everything—without their tender loving care and monitoring, I’m already starting to feel like a hummingbird that hasn’t been able to find any flowers. If I don’t get what my body needs and soon, I could waste away from hunger, and it will happen much quicker than to a normal human. The baby situation probably isn’t doing my body any favors in that department either. I look down at myself, and even I can tell I’m already looking rough.
Boss-guard pivots slowly and says, “Lab’s locked. Damndest thing. Nobody can get in. Bet you wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Wisely, Drogan says nothing.
“We’ll get it open. Don’t know when that’ll be, but tell you what. If we can’t get to it in time, maybe we’ll give you the chance to get one last ride out of her.” With that, the ass saunters away.
I tackle Drogan before he can attack the man from behind. “Get it together!” I hiss into his ear.
He roars like an animal.
At me!
He lets me spin him around, and glares down at me while I challenge him. I catch his sleeve, the clingy-affectionate-supplicating move at odds with my sarcastic tone. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Oh, he likes this.