Alien Penetration

by Kaitlyn O’Connor

  Why would they do that?”

  She couldn’t possibly expect them to know!

  “Obviously because they needed breeders!” Liz snapped. “I’m guessing they wore out the old ones!”

  The second woman started blubbering. “I just wanted a baby! Why is this happening?”

  Simone felt her own throat close, felt tears stinging her eyes and nose. She’d gotten in to this just because she wanted a baby? “You mean … they did it at the clinic?”

  Liz glanced at her. “You were going to fertility clinic?”

  “I was.”

  “Me, too.”

  They fell silent for several moments. “Well, didn’t we make it fucking convenient for them?” Liz snapped. “Walked right in like fucking sheep, gave them all of our personal information, and paid the bastards to run tests so they knew us right down to our DNA!”

  Simone sniffed, frowning. “I can see that, but … none of us would’ve been at a fertility clinic if we’d been able to have a baby without help. Why would they want us?”

  “Because that’s the way they do it there!” Liz snapped. “They don’t like to take chances that they might not get what they want—boys.”

  Simone stared at her blankly. “They only want boys?”

  “Sons.”

  Simone’s jaw slid to half-mast. “Well! That’s just plain stupid! No wonder they have to hunt breeders if the morons don’t have girls!”

  “I wouldn’t advise pointing that out to them,” Liz said. “These guys are serious

  chauvinistic pigs!”

  “Oh god! Don’t tell me you’re a feminist! No wonder you were at the clinic!”

  Liz trained a deadly eye on the woman. “If you want to keep your teeth, you might want to think about shutting the fuck up! I’m really not in the mood to listen to any prosing at the moment about a woman’s place! Not when I’ve been listening to it out of them for two fucking days!”

  “That’s what they were doing?” Simone asked.

  “They called it ‘indoctrinating’ me into the laws and customs of the ‘people’ of Macedon, which by that, they mean the men, and by indoctrinating they mean brainwashing.”

  “Conspiracy ….”

  “I’m going to belt you in the mouth, bitch!” Liz growled.

  “It’s not worth it!” Simone said hurriedly. “They’ll take you again!”

  Liz studied her a moment and finally bounded off of the bunk and stalked off.

  Simone watched her pace along the aisle next to the wall for several moments and finally got up to approach her when she thought she’d had time to get her temper under control.

  Simone fell into step beside her and paced with her until she’d walked off some of her own nervousness. Liz looked at her when she finally took a seat on the floor with her back against the wall, paced two more laps and then settled beside her. “I take it you don’t have a problem with feminists?”

  Simone shrugged. “I believe our government has an obligation to treat every citizen equal, regardless of race, religion, sex—height, weight, etc., etc. I believe they have an obligation to enact laws enforcing equal rights.”

  Liz nodded. “It totally pisses me off when other women gang up on me just because I think I deserve to treated without prejudice!”

  “So, you aren’t actually a feminist either?”

  “No. I’m not actually ‘in’ to following anybody. I like to make my own decisions.”

  “This is so weird,” Simone said after a time. “I can’t seem to wrap my mind around it.” She shivered, rubbing her arms.

  “I’d like to think I’d lost my mind,” Liz said almost conversationally.

  “What else did they tell you?”

  “Oh, don’t worry! The dick-wad will be back to give everybody the low down!

  But, yeah, I think I got pretty much their entire fucking history. I’m sure you won’t be amazed to learn that men in their society run everything and always have.”

  “No!” Simone said with feigned shock.

  “Sounds familiar, huh?” Liz asked, smiling wanly. “Macedon, FYI, isn’t their ‘Father’ world. Apparently, that caught the broad side of a planet killer meteor a while back.”

  Simone frowned thoughtfully. “And it killed more women than men?”

  Liz’s lips thinned. “Oh, no! They did that to themselves. Before the great cataclysm, their world was like ours—so overpopulated they were well on their way to destroying it themselves. They passed a law that nobody could have more than one child and, naturally enough they decided, since men were running things, if they could only have one, then it had to be a son!”

  “You know … I think I heard they were doing that in India and Japan,” Simone said.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it. I’m certainly not suggesting we’re better than they are. We just fucked up our world a different way.”

  “So, this has been going on for a while and nobody noticed they were getting thin of women?” Simone guessed.

  “Well—they didn’t know what marriage was, so I’m guessing they weren’t too worried about it when they should have been. They always just ‘begat’ on whatever female was handy. Anyway, I guess the ‘great disaster’, sometimes referred to as ‘the great extinction’, sort of preoccupied them for a while. They already had space technology. They’d already begun colonizing different worlds, and they managed to pick up some survivors from the ‘Father world’.

  “But from what I understood, the draks have had a long, long history of warring with the other races from their world and they didn’t stop just because they lost the home planet. In fact, it sounds like it escalated the problem. They didn’t just become determined to make sure their own race made it. They seem pretty determined to make sure the others didn’t.”

  “Well, that doesn’t make any damned sense! If they’ve been warring all this time, they must have lost a lot of men.”

  “I’m sure—which probably aggravated the situation, making them more

  determined to produce more males for warring since they consider women less than dirt beneath their feet and useless for pretty much anything besides breeding.”

  “Screwing?” Simone said a little doubtfully.

  Liz shrugged. “I guess they don’t enjoy that as much as they enjoy killing each other. Different strokes for different folks, you know.”

  Simone settled back to mull that information over. As disturbing as the idea was of having been stolen as sex slaves, it was almost more disturbing to realize they weren’t anything but cattle, as Liz had put it. No, it was more disturbing! They might have had some chance of at least some sort of favorable treatment if they were ‘sort of’ important.

  She didn’t think they were nearly as important as breeders—not if they meant to just breed them over and over and discard them when they became useless for that.

  “They told you they’d implanted five?”

  Liz looked like she might throw up for several moments. “No. That fucking coward of a doctor did—at my insistence, mind you! This was my second attempt. They implanted three the first time and I lost them all. It took me a while to save up the money for another attempt. I thought if I got more that I’d at least end up with one, but I won’t have any.”

  Empathy made Simone’s chest tighten uncomfortably. “You will. They’ll just be half drak.”

  Liz sniffed, chewing her lips for a moment. “You really don’t get it, do you?

  They really, really mean we’re just breeders. We get to help feed them, but we might not even actually get to do that ourselves considering how many they planted in each of us.

  They might just milk us and give it to the babies. Why do you think I said we were cows? The thing is, they aren’t ours. They belong to the men and they decide whether they think we’re worthy of feeding their sons. Even if they allowed us to help take care of them, and that’s an ‘if’, they’re breeding warriors for their damned wars! They aren’t going to allow us the chance to make th
em ‘soft’. The boys begin their training when their father decides—usually around six but sometimes younger.

  “We aren’t even drak women so the chances are we won’t get to see them at all.

  The chances are they’ll be put in nurseries and tended by drak women—what few they have.”

  “Well! If they have women, why the hell don’t they use their own!” Simone exclaimed furiously.

  “They did. They only have a few that are still young enough to breed. You don’t honestly think they would’ve bestowed their golden seed on us if they’d had other options? They didn’t even start looking for alternatives until it finally filtered through their thick skulls that they were running low on women!”

  Simone felt so battered by what she’d learned that she couldn’t even find relief in tears. After sitting with Liz a while, she finally got up and returned to her bunk. Her ‘neighbors’ looked at her a little warily, but apparently decided not to push her buttons.

  She was still staring at nothing in particular, thinking of nothing in particular, when Akule entered their prison and mounted the platform again. She didn’t even notice him until he started speaking. She didn’t listen either. She’d gotten the gist of it from Liz. It was accepting that she was having trouble with.

  She caught some of it in spite of her efforts to close her mind to it. He literally laid out the laws and explained the drak class system so that they would understand how they were to behave and what they were allowed to do—which was pretty much nothing beyond breathing and breeding. It didn’t come as any great surprise to learn that the warrior caste was at the top of the totem pole. What did surprise her was that it was a pyramid, although she supposed it shouldn’t have. Breeders didn’t have class status.

  Surprise! Surprise! Even the damned servant class—workers—were more important than they were.

  The babies belonged to classes! As breeders, they were, sort of, lumped into the class that spawned the babies they were carrying. She wasn’t certain what that meant beyond the housing. Apparently, they liked to keep their breeders close to hand so they could keep an eye on them, but they would be bumped to the next level—down—once they’d produced for the warrior class, and apparently all of them had been impregnated with the golden seed of the warriors!

  Almost the scariest thing about the entire business was that their society was a fucking pyramid. The warriors were at the top, but not nearly as numerous as the next class down or the next.

  She was pushing thirty! Hadn’t they done any fucking research?

  Either they hadn’t or they just didn’t care. None of the women they’d snatched were exactly prime because they’d selected most, if not all, of them from fertility clinics, which was the last hope of most of the women, who’d already tried everything else.

  By the time Akule had finished his voice had been drowned by the wailing and furious screams of the women. Actually, she wasn’t certain whether he’d finished or given up trying to be heard over the din, which had grown progressively louder the longer he talked.

  No one, she thought wryly, was accepting their fate stoically!

  The men, guards, she supposed, appeared, but apparently they couldn’t decide which woman or women to grab. The women who’d been screaming abuse promptly fell silent at their appearance, studying their hands as if they were ‘good little girls’ or looking around as if to say it wasn’t them and they had no clue who it was. Finally, Akule and the guards departed. It took a while for anyone to notice, however.

  The women had gathered in knots to rant or commiserate, according to their personality. Simone was on the point of seeking Liz out when there was an announcement that the women were to file to the bathing chamber.

  Simone didn’t know about the rest of them, but Nazi death camp instantly leapt into her mind. She didn’t move.

  No one else did either.

  The power of the suspicious mind!

  Apparently it took the draks, being unaccustomed to women having minds of their own, a little while to decide what to do about the rebellion. The women waited uneasily for retaliation. The moment a door opened at one end of their prison and a small army of drak warriors entered, the women began screaming and running around mindlessly.

  Simone was certain they were warriors as opposed to the guards they’d seen before, which must have been more like cops.

  She recognized the hard faced one in the front. A cold shiver raked down her spine when his gaze hit her like a laser.

  “Simone!” he growled, lifting a hand and pointing toward the other end of the cell.

  Simone blinked at him. She didn’t move, however, until he took a threatening step toward her. When he did, she bounded out of her bunk and backed away.

  “Now!” he growled.

  She stared at him for a moment, but she realized fairly quickly that she didn’t really want to find out what he might do if she refused. She lifted her chin at him.

  Assuming a ‘Joan of Arc’ pose, she turned and stalked toward the other end of the room.

  That sustained her until a wide opening appeared at the other end. Her knees turned to water then and threatened to buckle. Showers, she told herself. They’d said bathe. She hadn’t been screaming. Obviously, they were being monitored and the draks would know she hadn’t created a disturbance. There wasn’t any reason to hurt her. They wouldn’t without a reason, she told herself.

  She discovered the other women had buckled under the pressure of male dominance, too. It shouldn’t have given her any comfort at all when she knew they were as helpless as she was, but the herd mentality ruled. As soon as she was comfortably surrounded by the other cows she became brave enough to continue.

  To her vast relief, she discovered it was a bathing chamber—communal! A flicker of outrage went through her. This was almost worse than the damned toilet situation! At least there was a little privacy, a single wall that surrounded a half a dozen toilets that had been in almost constant use with so many women cramped together but something! Here, there was nothing but an open room with showerheads projecting from the wall—and not nearly enough of them. They had to strip—not that any of them had a damned thing on but the fucking gowns they’d been wearing when they were taken—and stand under the showerheads in groups of three or four at the time, sharing the soap and the water. And some of the women still had to wait.

  Simone was the first one in which, unfortunately, translated to also being the first one out. The warriors had apparently decided not to simply assume they’d do as they were told. The entire brigade was camped in the fucking door, watching. She stared back at them, shivering, her legs crossed, one hand over her thatch, the other across her breasts. The jerk that had bellowed at her lifted a hand and crooked his fingers at her in a ‘come here’ gesture.

  She eyed him distrustfully. When he tensed as if he would come after her, though, she surged forward. He handed her a cloth that was about the size of a fucking band-aid and about as thick as toilet paper—she supposed to dry off with. She retreated into a corner to dry off in the little privacy it afforded. He followed her, standing over her until she’d dried the best she could and then handed her something that seemed to be made of the same material. She unfolded it and stared at it in confusion, unable to decide which was the back and which the front. It looked like a sack with arm and neck holes.

  Sighing, she pulled it over her head. The armholes, she discovered to her dismay, were big enough her boobs could’ve fallen out of them. She folded her arms across her chest. “Satisfied?” she asked, staring stonily at the floor.

  He stepped back. Taking it as a dismissal, she whirled away from him and stalked back into the other room. Unfortunately, she couldn’t figure out which bunk was hers. She hadn’t bothered to count the rows. All of the beds were usually occupied since there wasn’t any place to sit besides the bunks or the floor.

  She hadn’t exactly hit it off with her nearest neighbors, either.

  She decided to retreat to sit
on the floor and wait until everybody came back and she could identify her spot. The tent-like gown she’d been given made her feel as if she’d been given a tent and made to stand inside of it naked. The only thing she could think to say for it was that it at least wasn’t a wrap around.

  Drawing her knees up under it, she wrapped her arms around them and settled her cheek on her knees, trying not to think. She’d begun to understand the lure of drugs although she’d always despised people that did them—except for nicotine, caffeine and alcohol.

  Actually, she felt a healthy contempt for anybody that overdid alcohol, too, but she could certainly see the lure of not facing reality at the moment! Oh for the chance to drown her sorrows by drinking herself into a stupor—or popping a few ‘don’t give a damn’ pills! Even a cigarette to soothe her jangling nerves would’ve been welcome.

  Well, she decided, she couldn’t borrow courage. She was going to have to find it within her if she could. They were all going to have to.

  She discovered the following morning that not everyone agreed with that assessment. One of the women managed to hang herself. Another one had sawed her wrists open by rubbing them on the metal edges of the cots.

  To say that the draks were pissed off that two of the women had figured out a way to escape them was an understatement!

  Chapter Five

  Unable to sleep, Simone was half awake when the women started screaming, alert enough that adrenaline instantly shot through her and brought her upright on the bunk and then surging off of it. She was still disoriented enough from sleep to be confused, regardless, and merely whipped around in a circle in search of the threat.

  Akule and two of the peace keepers had appeared almost before Simone herself had reacted, although it wasn’t until later that the significance of that hit her, but then she’d suspected all along that they were being monitored.

  Not closely enough, apparently.

  Akule and the guards apparently hadn’t expected anything like they discovered.

  All three men abruptly halted in their tracks in shock for a handful of seconds and then one of the men spoke into his communicator. By the time the warriors arrived, most of the women were out of their beds and huddling together in frightened knots.