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No raskarran has ever done anything terrible to me, but plenty of human fuckers did.
There’s anguish in Maldek’s expression - for me, for the other raskarran - and I take his hand, squeezing it, wishing things weren’t about to get even more terrible.
Inside the cell, my remembered self wraps the shreds of sheet around me. I remember how even that gave me a little of myself back. A tiny piece of dignity to cling on to. How grateful I was to the alien male, even as I eyed him warily still. He moves to the furthest corner away from me, sitting on the floor, cupping his engorged cock with a snarl. My remembered self flinches, shuffles further away. He looks at her from across the room, eyes full of sorrow and pain, and says something. Something I couldn’t understand, but was clearly language. A sign of intelligence.
“Do I remember it well enough for you to translate?” I ask Maldek.
“He said, ‘Do not be afraid, little female.’”
My heart clenches.
Then the humans beside us start to move.
The door yanks open. My remembered self scrambles away from it, now far more afraid of what my own people will do than the alien in the cell with me. The raskarran gets to his feet with a roar and steps over me, ready to defend me, I realise now, watching how he puts himself between me and their weapons. Of course, he’s used to fighting with spears, bows and arrows. He probably doesn’t even know what a gun is.
One of my two fellow soldiers does it. I’m not sure which one. I wasn’t looking. But I remember hearing the click of metal, the hum of a laser rifle being powered up, then the ear-splitting shriek of the blast.
A splatter of warm blood over my skin.
I turn away from the scene, pressing my forehead into Maldek’s shoulder as the raskarran topples backwards, dead before he even hits the ground. A hole burned through his chest where his heart was beating only seconds before.
The rest of it flashes before my closed eyes. The outrage I felt after the fact, when I was clothed again, angry enough not to care that I was going against orders, going against hierarchy. Farrow saying they no longer had need for me, to put me in storage with ‘the rest’. Being dragged kicking and screaming down into the basement and thrown into cryostasis alongside all those other women in pods that I hadn’t even known were down there.
And then, nothing.
When I open my eyes again, we’re no longer in my memories, but inside a little wooden house. We’ve been here before. I recognise it from previous dreams. It’s cute. Basic, but homey, and I wonder if it’s where Maldek lives, if his mind has brought us here, where he feels safe and happy, as a balm to everything we’ve just seen.
I step back from him, see how tight he holds himself, his face contorted with outrage and pain. It would be easy to look at that expression and be afraid, but I’m not. It’s not directed at me, I know that.
Do not be afraid, little female.
I think those words have been spinning around in my subconscious since they were first spoken to me, some part of me understanding, even though my conscious mind couldn’t make any sense of it at the time.
“They killed him without honour,” Maldek says, his voice as guttural and harsh as I have ever heard it. “When he had done nothing wrong, and only sought to protect you. When they had-”
His words cut out with a furious snarl and he turns to me, gripping my face in his hands.
“They sought to force him to mate you, just as you would have been forced to mate a human before. It should not have worked, that male should only have desired his mate, but…”
“The drug, remember?” I say, stroking my fingers over his cheeks in an attempt to calm him. “They must have laced his food with it. Keeping him hungry so he wouldn’t resist the food offered him. They must have mixed the drug in with it.”
“The thing that makes a person desire mating, even when they do not?”
“Exactly. He must have been so confused by what was happening in his body. No wonder he was so angry. But he still got himself under control, gave me something to cover myself. He was kind when he had no cause to be. He didn’t do what they thought he would do, didn’t behave like a savage animal. And they killed him for it.”
“But… why?”
“Because that’s what they do, Maldek. When you’re no longer useful to them, they get rid of you. They don’t care that he had a life, a mate, maybe some children waiting for him to come home. He wouldn’t do what they wanted, so they killed him.”
“I know that much,” Maldek says, his tone dark, bitter. “I meant why did they want him to mate with you? What does that gain them?”
“The same thing it would have gained them if I’d participated in the breeding program back home. A child.”
A half human, half raskarran child. A child like Jassal. Taller, stronger than a human of her age. Probably with claws every bit as sharp and deadly as her father’s. Traits that they couldn’t have bred into a purely human line.
A new breed of soldier. Ones with enough raskarran in them to make them bigger, stronger, deadlier. But enough human in them that they could be controlled.
What I don’t know is what they wanted this new deadlier breed of soldiers for. It can’t have been for anything back home. Military tier had all of that well taken care of. Humanity was under Mercenia’s protection and had been since the last of the Corporation Wars ended.
