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Queen of the Monsters (Story)
🕑 Added 2021-02-16 01:40:52 +0000 UTCHi! This is the start of what might (hopefully) be a longer series, where I take a not!Kerrigan character through a cool adventure where she learns to master her incredible growing mutation powers and, well, fucks a lot of intelligent monsters. Will she embrace her power or fail and become a helpless submissive breeder? Find out!
As for content, it starts in a prison with so if you're not into gaslighting or forceble confinement, heads up. There's also going to be a LOT of monsterfucking in these stories, so, yeah, if you don't like people getting railed by intelligent creatures of varying description, look away!
Everyone else, please enjoy!
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On worlds innumerable, they moved. Without fear, without fatigue, without heed, they raced forward. Each had a different form, sometimes with vast variation, representing the malleability in the genetic web that connected them all. A dog-sized quadruped with segmented jaw parts and a ravenous appetite marched in the shadow of a colossus of tusks and fangs whose charge could split a tank apart. Huge, bat-like lizards that glided on grey membranous wings shared the skies with colossal, eldritch squid creatures that reached high into the heavens, their tentacles stabbing the ground with each lumbering step.
The parade of abominations bared down on their target. But what that target was seemed subject to change. One moment it was a research facility buried deep in the rocks of a frozen planet, glacial ice cracking under their combined weight. The next it was a defensive installation in the soaking heat of a jungle, trees falling like dominoes as the horde barrelled forward. It was a bunker. It was a city. It was a tower in the desert.
Finally, it was a single human figure. Her long, glorious magenta hair swirling around her head. Her hands were claws, elegant and long and razor sharp, stretched out before her in exultation. She wore no clothes, her naked body a mix of chitinous armour and human flesh, with shimmering scales for shoulders like iridescent pauldrons. Her body was caught between a model of perfectly alien beauty and a weapon of the deadliest form. She lifted off the surface of a pool of water, propelled by unseen forces to ascend as an acrobat in flight. All eyes turned to her. The beasts swarmed, but not in attack. They circled, their many eyes gazing reverently at the floating form of...of…
***
She awoke every morning to that same dream. The forms changed, as did the locations, but everything else...the swarm of creatures, the alien woman, it was all she saw when she fell asleep. It could be a memory. It could be some abstracted fantasy. All she knew is that it was important enough for her mind to fixate on, even in her current state.
The lights flicked on. Daytime, more or less. With her mind still foggy, she reacted on instinct and rolled to her feet. She had thirty seconds to shift off the uncomfortable slab to her feet, where the platform that served as her cot would recede into the featureless grey wall, rendering it identical to the other three sides of her cubicle prison. No visible mechanism, no discernable seam, it was like the bed had never been there.
Immediately afterwards, they would arrive. Two men in spotless white coats and serious expressions would enter through a door that appeared from a part of the wall without a visible seam. They would sit down at chairs and a table that pushed up from the floor, open a briefcase filled with various inscrutable devices, and begin their interrogation. She could sit down at a chair provided, or pace, or sag against the wall and weep. In a hundred frustrating ways, they would ask the same question.
“Who are you?”
And she would respond in just as many varieties.
“I don’t know.”
This would go on for hours. When they left, the door would disappear again, leaving her in her prison cell for another day. The one concession to the idea that she was a living thing and not an item in a box was the air vent in the ceiling, five metres up. It pumped in diffused white light and conditioned air, but the lack of circulation still made it feel hot and stuffy, especially with two other bodies inside.
The two men wore identical outfits but couldn’t be more different in appearance. One was lanky, with carefully combed dark brown hair and angular features. The other was stocky, balding, and peered down at her through wide rimmed glasses like she was a petri dish. Both smelled like two different brands of equally cheap cologne. They didn’t identify themselves, so she’d taken to calling them Tall and Small in her head.
Tall paced, something he had a habit of doing, clenching and unclenching his fist like he was walking off being scolded. Small leaned over the table, splayed fingers holding his weight.
“That’s not a satisfactory answer. The tests don’t show that anything has happened to your brain. Your neurochemical readings are all normal, your full spectrum biotics are merely a touch over borderline. You are the same person as you were before the procedure...mostly. So it stands to reason that you are lying to us.”
“We’re just trying to help you,” Small chimed in. He had a strange accent that she couldn’t place. Not that she could place either of her accents. Or her own. “Can you describe your home? Your family?”
“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” she replied, trying to control a swell of anger, “I’m telling you the truth. I can’t remember my name, where I come from, where any of this is.”
Small jotted down something on a flat device in his palm. “What’s the first thing you remember?”
They’d asked that before, too. She repeated off the answer. “I remember flashes. Some kind of corridor. A needle. And something thrashing around in a tube. Before that, nothing. After that, I’m in here.” She held out her hands to indicate the room. “What about you? Do you know my name?”
The men were taken aback. It was the first time in a long while that she’d asked a question. “We...that is to say we can’t give you that information,” Small began before being interrupted by Tall.
“If you cooperate, this will go much faster. Now, think about it. Reach out with...whatever. Look in your mind and find that part of you that tells you who you are and listen to it.”
She shook her head, but humoured him. Closing her eyes, she searched herself for the answers she sought. They’d told her to do this before, but this time felt different. The noise of the fan fell away, as did the scratch of Small’s stylus on his tablet. The room opened up, and in her mind’s eye she saw an infinite multitude of pinprick lights in all directions...
**MORRIGAN**
The word came out of the blue, crashing into her mind like a railgun round. She screamed, clutching her head. The pair of men crowded around her, pantomiming concern.
“Are you alright?” one of them asked, she couldn’t tell which.
“I...just a headache,” she said, for the moment unwilling to tell her captives anything they didn’t already know. They didn’t believe her. Tall pulled out a hand-held device from the briefcase, casting a blue light over her head. He stared at the other side’s screen with a furrowed brow.
“Her peptides levels spiked...but they’re drifting back to baseline now. Might be a residual effect of the suppressants. Up the dose?” Tall proposed, like she wasn’t even there.
“Not yet. Keep her monitored. We’re going to need clear readings if the antipathic is losing effectiveness.” They stood, gathered their things, and left the room. The seats and table all slid back into the ground. The coast clear, she looked around for the source of the voice that had spoken to her. But of course, there was nobody else in the room.
“Great,” she muttered under her breath, “Now I’m hearing voices too.” Not a great indicator of mental health, but if the readings that the two men were taking were any indication, it wasn’t a figment of her imagination completely. And the name sounded familiar. Whether it was some malfunctioning piece of her psyche or not, it glided in like a puzzle piece slotting perfectly into where it belonged.
Morrigan.
Her name was Morrigan.
***
Aside from her conversations with her two interrogators, her days were monochrome. Three times a day, a tiny portion of the door would open and a meal of rectangular gelatinous material would be dropped into her cell for her reluctant consumption. They looked awful and tasted worse. Part of her knew this treatment was unacceptable, but she couldn’t remember the world outside of it. She spent hours pacing the cell, racking her brain for more details. She could catch fragments, wisps of other places, other people, other moments in time. And just when she’d reach for them, they’d slide through her fingers. Like snatching at smoke.
For roughly one third of the day, the light above her would turn off and she’d try to sleep. She would try to dream of her past, and inevitably return to that woman in the circle, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of disparate creatures.
**QUEEN**
The word exploded in her mind, jolting her awake and making her flop to the floor. She clutched her skull. Pain, deep and pounding, suffused her skull. Wrapped in the agony was a message beyond speech, beyond the crudities of verbal communication. She could feel the words, like they were hanging in the air in front of her and she could touch them with her hand. It hurt to think, to do anything but wait for it to subside.
**HEAR?**
The second word stabbed through her mind again. Her mind reeled at the sheer discomfort of hearing what sounded like another person’s thoughts. The words were intelligible but they were cacophonous, shrill. Like a bandsaw on violin strings, it was not the way her brain was meant to be used. She pushed herself off the ground, trying to get a hold of what exactly was happening. In her efforts, she realized the last word had been an interrogative.
“Yes, yes I hear you, whatever you are,” she said aloud, not knowing how else to proceed.
**QUEEN NEEDED. HIVE DISCORDANT. NEED INSTRUCTION. NEED DIRECTION**
She shook her head. Then, feeling foolish, replied. “I don’t know what any of that means. I’m no queen. Who are you? Why are you able to talk like this?”
A long pause. When the voice returned, it was slower, more methodical in its speech. It hurt less too. Either her mind was getting used to it, or the voice was dialing back its efforts.
**QUEEN DAMAGED. UNFORTUNATE DEVELOPMENT. APOLOGIES. HEARD YOUR SONG, HEARD YOUR...MELODY. IS QUEEN IN PERIL?**
Morrigan thought a while about how to answer that. She hadn’t been hurt, per se. But she was being kept against her will. Her attempts to escape were thwarted by the enormous men in black and white armour who stood sentry outside her cell.
“Again, not a queen. And I’m not in immediate danger, but I am being held captive. Can you help me?”
The door exploded open. A half dozen men, including Small and Tall, rushed in with a wide array of gadgets. Startled, she still threw a wild haymaker and utterly decked the taller of the familiar pair. He fell like a ton of bricks. Two burly guards in that inscrutable white armour grabbed her by the wrist, cutting short her rebellion, though she still tried to fight with some furious kicks. Another person in a labcoat, one she’d never seen before, gently tapped the side of a syringe filled with green fluid. Morrigan screamed
“We don’t have long!” Small shouted, motioning to Morrigan’s arm, “Tranq her while her peptide levels are above 50. We can isolate the link!”
“Or cut her open,” Tall said through a clenched jaw, “Might be easier than doing this dance.”
“Kill the subject? When we’re this close?!”
“She was talking to them, Morris. How long do you think we have until she figures out she can…” He trailed off, realizing she was still awake. “Jesus Christ, do I have to do everything myself?!” Tall yanked the syringe free, tapped her restrained arm, and slid the needle inside. The iron grip of the guards kept her from moving around too much, and soon she felt the medicine’s effects.
“You...were...watching muh…” she managed before her jaw stopped responding to commands. She felt so tired, more tired than she’d ever been. She sagged against the guards, and they laid her back on her bed. There was no telling what they would do to her afterwards, or if she’d even wake up at all. The last thing she noticed before drifting off was the sight of Tall slipping on a blue surgical glove.
***
She returned to the clearing, the place where the gorgeous woman floated in the centre of the crystal clear pool of water, surrounded by the masses of alien forms. But there was nobody there. Nobody besides her, at least. The idea that this was a dream floated by her conscious thoughts. She’d never lucid dreamed before. Maybe it had something to do with the sedatives they had her under.
“Queen.”
A familiar voice. Her head whipped around to see one of the strange creatures from her dream. Best described as a featherless bird of prey, it stood on two digitigrade legs, each foot wielding claws that looked sharp enough to dig into the toughest hides. Two hands with similar sharp claws took the place of wings, their tri-digit grip reminiscent of an eagle’s talon. Its shoulders were hunched, elongated snout/beak bristling with countless pointed teeth. Definitely a carnivore. She tilted her head to the side, looking for who had spoken.
“Hello? Is this your animal?”
“I am owned by no one,” the bird thing said.
Morrigan topped backward. “W-what the fuck?”
“Yes,” it said, jaw visibly straining to get its mouth around a human language, “I am the fuck. Karak. Karak of Deluge. I sang to you, but you were not used to music. But here, in this dreaming, you can understand?”
It took a moment to get her head around the idea of the creature before her not only intelligent but had been the one speaking to her. She recognised its strange cadence from the voice in her head when she was awake. It being non-humanoid was a twist she hadn’t expected, but she supposed there were plenty of non-humanoid intelligences in the galaxy. Weren’t there? The amnesiac state had left her with a general feeling for some facts and ideas but no concrete assertions.
“I can, yes. Sorry for my reaction, I’m just...something’s happened to my memory. The people who hold me captive might have something to do with it. I can’t remember anything.”
Karak nodded. “I see. Explanation for discord, for your voice being out of tune. Strange. At first I thought ‘not Queen’, but it’s clear, Queen.” It motioned with its grasper toward her, like the answer was self-evident.
“I’m still pretty sure you have me mixed up with-” she began, then caught sight of a glint of reflection. The pool of water at her feet. She looked down...and screamed.
She had become the woman in her dream. The same flowing purple hair, the same armoured skin. The savage claws, the same glowing green eyes. Naked but far from helpless, she held up one of her fearsome clawed hands to her eye. They were not just fearsome in appearance, they were weapons. Nobody would ever contain her in this form. She was free.
“What...who am I?” she asked.
“You are Morrigan. You are Queen.”
She shook her head, turning from the reflection to face the creature. “But beside that. Where did I come from? Did I have a home somewhere? A job? Friends? Family?”
Karak tilted its head. “Do not understand. Deluge beyond human friendship. Beyond human family.” It reached out with one if its clawed hands, causing her to recoil. “Indeed, worse than I feared. Damage to Queen severe. I will render assistance.”
Before she could ask what that meant, it had pounced on her. She screamed, though her movements were slowed, uncoordinated. Her unconscious state was affecting her even here in this dreamworld.
“G-get off of me!” she said in as commanding a tone as she could, “Unhand me, Karak! Your queen demands it.”
“Queen damaged. Cannot command, not yet. Will fix.” Its powerful graspers pinned her arms to her sides, while its tremendous bulk kept the rest of her body from wriggling around. It used its legs to push her knees apart, and then Morrigan saw it. From a sheath, it emerged with a lurid wet noise. Thick, almost the size of her arm. It glistened with some kind of clear fluid.
“What the...is that a...get offa me or I’ll start swinging!”
It growled, the noise reverberating deep within its thorax, the vibrations rolling through its limbs til she could feel it in hers. It was so heavy. Masculine in a way that was simultaneously completely alien yet entirely recognisable. The creature pinning her had an urge that was coming to the fore, something she knew all too well from her own species.
“Queen...very attractive...you will make a good broodmother.”
She turned red. “W-what?! But I doooooh!” Her words turned to a moan as it pressed its slickened cock against her own naked body. More fluid pulsed from its flared head, coating her torso in its sticky warmth.
“Ejaculate programmed to excite broodmothers, ready them for copulation. This work a projection of our minds, but as of now, I am the stronger of us. I write the rules of this. And therefore, you are aroused.”
She felt the spark. Her breath caught, and everywhere the creature’s precum spilled, a warm glow followed, building up to a heat in her lower body. She hadn’t felt anything like it before. In the past, her sexual encounters had been amicable and enjoyable for the most part, but they’d been completely unnecessary to her overall wellbeing. The compulsion building up inside her now was a Need. A primal, atavistic desire as strong as her need to breathe or drink or eat. In moments, the moisture spread between her legs, but that wasn’t the alien’s doing.
She exhaled, at once rebelling against the foreign compulsion and reveling in its intoxicating promise of pleasures to come. A need to be taken overriding her previous worries, and for the moment, this monstrous creature looked like the most desirable partner in the world. It was strong. Powerful. Intelligent. The perfect source of genetic material.
It thrust its flared tip inside her. Her body yielded despite its size, her slickened slit providing ample lubrication and making it impossible to deny how much she was anticipating this. She widened her stance as far as her legs could move, opening up her body to be claimed by her alien lover.
“This is...this is just some trick…” she said, her breath hot and heavy.
“Feel free to tell yourself that,” it said, pulling back for a moment, “Repeat in your own mind that this is not your doing. That you are blameless. It must have been me that turned you into the perfect receptacle for my essence. If you say it enough times, maybe you can make yourself believe it.” He cut off any reply with another deep thrust forward, making her squeal and her useless little legs quiver from the impact.
“Hey!” Morrigan cried, “I thought I was your Queen!”
Karak was unmoved. “Queen varied role in Deluge. Observe.”
Two figures approached from either side of the crystal pool. Morrigan turned her head to see the first was an obscene parody of femininity. She appeared as the archetypical fertility statue found in paleolithic caves. Her breasts were beyond human norms, beyond even exaggerated porn star modifications, and her belly was absurdly gravid. Iridescent milk flowed freely from her nipples down along her pale green skin. A horse sized creature with the body of a snake approached from behind, and the woman bent over, presenting herself like the lowest barnyard sow. When the broodmother lit up with ecstasy as she was penetrated by the snake monster, Morrigan realized in horror that she was staring at her own face.
“Weak Queen,” Karak explained, “Useful for breeding, pleasure of hive. Very important place, but ultimately subservient to hive.”
Morrigan yanked her head to the side to avoid seeing any more. What she saw next was almost as disturbing. This figure was her as well, but...so much more. The woman was at least twelve feet tall and partially resembled the original woman from her dream, with the glorious magenta hair. Her body, though, was entirely composed of that chitinous armour save for her face, which held a mouth brimming with razor sharp teeth identical to the ones Karak had. She looked down upon Morrigan with a distant contempt, flapping a pair of huge wings that emerged from her back like some twisted Gigerian angel. Even after all that, her eyes fell to the strangest sight of all: a cock placed between her legs. Easily a foot long, it stood rock hard and drooled a thick glowing substance that, in her lust addled state, Morrigan couldn’t help but lick her lips over.
“Strong Queen. Force of control, order, leads the hive. Strongest Queen of all leads entire Deluge, but rare. Last one thousands of years ago. Time will tell what Queen you will be. Both have their place.”
The two Queens, the two fates, disappeared into a haze, and Morrigan’s attention returned to the enormous cock inside her. The pace had slowed during the demonstration, but now returned to a steady, merciless rhythm. Each push netted another quick gasp or moan, feelings of submissive passivity washing over her in waves that made the tension in her lower half build towards its inevitable climax. It would be so easy to just give up here. To be that submissive, eager broodmother. She let her heart flutter with the idea.
Then, with a strength she didn’t know she had, she flipped Karak onto its back while keeping him plugged inside her. Now pinning him, she traced her finger along its long body and smiled the smile of a predator.
“Let’s find out what kind of Queen I can be,” she said. Karak didn’t resist this treatment, merely appearing intrigued by the development. Getting a feel for just how much dick the creature had shoved inside her, Morrigan lifted up and nearly off of its girth. Then, with a sly grin, stuffed herself with it like it was just another sex toy in her collection.
The beast hissed. Apparently whatever she was doing felt as good for it as it did for her. With a good judge of just how much length she had to play with, she got to riding, pressing her hands into its chest to steady herself. Lurid noises filled the air, wet slapping mingled with its growls and hissing, topped by her unhindered moaning. She was almost proud of the noises she was making, claiming pleasure from its terrifying entity.
She ground herself closer and closer to climax. She knew what would happen if she stayed on top of Karak. But it felt too good to stop. She craved, yearned for, needed its cock plunged deep in her pussy. It completed her. It sated her urges for not just sex, but a new need. The power of control was intoxicating. To tame this monster that was moments before pinning her to the earth. Using it. Her breeding slave. Her subject.
With a final bottoming out, she came. Her muscles clenched and she cried out to the ethereal heavens above in her mindscape. Her pussy squeezed down upon the monstrous cock, practically begging for it to follow suit. Karak, in the end, could do nothing but obey. She could feel it pulse within her as the beastial entity howled with her. Thick spurts of hot cum glazed her insides, filling her up further than humanly possible. With its flared end keeping her plugged up, the cum had nowhere to go but up and outward, bloating up her body to obscene proportions. The same size as her ‘weak queen’ doppelganger, she realized with shock. But it still felt so good. Her stomach pushed out, belly stretching out with faux pregnancy at the sheer volume that Karak could provide.
“There,” it purred, “Receive my gift. A mere fraction of your body’s potential restored.”
She could see the fluid it injected inside her begin to glow, even through her skin. Tingling filled her entire form, and she relaxed as a wave of changes washed over her vulnerable form...
***
Her eyes snapped open. The first thing she noticed was that the light in the vent above her was still off. She’d awoken in the “night” once more. But far from deathly silence, the walls were rumbling, a reverberation from an impact of something either very close by or something very, very large.
Her entire body ached. Like she’d used every muscle at once in some brutal calisthenics course. Her legs seized, and she fell back on the bed to massage them. As she kneaded her muscles, her fingers found purchase on much more muscle underneath the skin than she remembered. She had the calves of a long distance runner. Looking around the rest of her body, similar muscle groups had blossomed. How had that happened?
The dream. The gift that the creature had given her...could this be a part of it? Had the changes Karak mentioned have been actual, real modifications?
Was she really not crazy?
The door opened once more. Instead of the white diffused light through the portal, she saw flashing red strobing. Tall entered first, looking worse than she’d ever seen him. His normally orderly hair was mussed, like he’d just woken up. His trademark white coat was rumpled and stained with flecks of a luminescent blue fluid. He was followed by a pair of men in the stark black and white guard armour. One of them might have been the one who had prevented her previous escape attempts, but it was impossible to see anything besides their piercing stares through the full body protection.
“This is the one,” Tall said, pointing a crooked finger at Morrigan before jerking his head back to look over his shoulder, “Gas the rest but you two need to make sure she’s dead.”
“I’m sorry?!” Morrigan asked, her adrenaline spiking.
“These weapons can’t deliver lethal jolts,” one of the guards said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Get creative. You’re both big boys, I assume you can kill one unarmed woman without resorting to firearms. Just do it quick, I don’t know how long we have.”
His sentence was punctuated by a bloodcurdling howl. The guards spun around, reflexively looking for the source. In that fraction of a second’s worth of distraction, Morrigan saw a chance to survive. Weeks of built up resentment unleashed, and she grabbed one of the taser sticks by the pommel, put another hand on a guard’s elbow, and thrust it to the side with all her might. The arc connected with the guard on the left, causing him to yelp and spasm. By the time the first guard had tossed her to the side, the second had flopped to the ground.
“You little…” he cursed, taking a swing with his baton. She blocked it with her forearm, waiting for the spike of pain or the sound of a cracking bone. Neither came. Instead, her arm remained where it was. All that muscle on the guard should have been enough to knock her to the ground. But it hadn’t. She looked at her limb in wonder, eyes widening when she saw the patch of skin around the impact point had turned to the same chitinous armour of the woman from her dream.
“It was real!” she stated, almost as confused as the guards.
Tall stared, a look of fear in his eyes that he tried desperately to hide behind bravado. “That’s...that’s not supposed to happen! The process is only neurochemical!”
The guard looked to the man, then back to Morrigan. His confusion didn’t last long, replaced with the muscle memory of training. He stabbed out with the taser end of the stick, little lightning bolts crackling from the prongs. She dodged, sliding out of the way of his strike with a serpentine grace she’d never experienced or demonstrated before. So she was fast as well as tough…
More wild swings, each dodged with minimal effort. A final swipe saw the man overextend his elbow. She slammed her hands into either side of his arm and twisted. A sick pop told her it was dislocated. The baton fell from his fingers, allowing her to swoop downward, grab hold before it touched the ground, and bring it back on an overhead stabbing arc down onto the injured guard. He seized and flopped like a sack of spuds.
A part of her felt bad for the violence. Remorse, even. But these men would have killed her given the chance. This was just survival.
Tall ran for the door. She stepped into his path. The man stutter stepped back, looked to yank his fist back, then used it to reach into his breast pocket and retrieve a mini-syringe. A lethal dose of something, no doubt. Morrigan caught his hand with her empty one and squeezed. The glass broke in his fingers.
“F-fuck!” he screamed, using his other hand to try and pry his right loose. She didn’t budge until she was sure he got the message. She let him go, and he clutched his bleeding palm. “You’ll never get off the base. The guards on all the other levels have lethal munitions and are locking down this base as we speak. I don’t care what that alien shit did to you, you won’t block a laser carbine.”
Part of her, a dark and savage part, wanted to hurt him more. To extract all the information she wanted from his pathetic body then leave what’s left in a pile. But...he was right. There had to be more guards on their way, and if she wanted out, she’d have to get moving. Before taking off, however, she did yank Tall’s badge card from his coat.
“You wanted to know my name?” she asked rhetorically, stepping out of the cell, “It’s Morrigan. Better hope we never meet again. Because if we do, I’m carving it into your body so you’ll never forget.” And with a press of a button on the panel, the door slammed itself shut, deadbolts clacking into place and the seam disappearing into the wall.
She breathed in the air in the corridor. Despite it being in the same facility, likely under the exact same conditions, it smelled...fresh.
She loped down the corridor, stun stick held in her right hand. Sacrifice stealth for speed, she could hear every step she made. Not the heavy footfalls of boots but the meaty slap of her bare feet on cold metal. That, and the paper thin gown she wore, would announce to anyone she ran into that she was a prisoner. She needed a new outfit.
“At least for variety’s sake,” she mumbled, suddenly aware that she’d been wearing the same clothes for as long as she had memories.
Tall seemed to know way more about her life than he wanted to let on. Maybe she could track down a database on her way out. It was a long shot, but the more information she had on what they did to her, the better chance she had of having it reversed. That was, of course, if she could make it out of here alive.
“HELP! They’re gonna kill us!” a cracking voice called from around the corner. She snapped out of her reverie, Tall’s words coming back to her. The other test subjects were to be gassed…
She sprinted, rounding the corner so fast that her momentum carried her into the far wall. Her feet came out on instinct, and for the briefest of moments she was truly running on the wall. The brief gravity defying maneuver was enough to draw the attention of a trio of guards standing outside an open door. Two of them, in black/white guard armour, looked familiar. The third, in a red labcoat, did not.
The pistol he pulled from a belt holster was unfamiliar too.
Morrigan dived for her life into the alcove around a door just in time. Bullets thwipped past, impacting the walls with heavy clangs, joined by the tinkling of spent brass. Firearm then. Some people still carried those as backup weapons or in places where more advanced weaponry wouldn’t be as effective or could damage important equipment. That explanation came from nowhere and left her mind just as quickly. No time to ask why, focus on the problem at hand.
She hit the green ‘Open’ button on the control pad for the door she was sheltering against. No dice. Thinking quickly, she pressed the badge to a black square next to the door controls. It dinged, and she was able to command it to open. Inside was…
“Fucking broombots?!” she said, staring at the pair of squat cylinder drones plugged into charging stations on opposite sides of a very cramped room. Scattered above them on shelves was various other cleaning equipment, some in mechanically accessible dispensers and other stuff that needed human hands to operate. Great, she was going to die in a janitor’s closet.
“Come out of there with your hands up!” an authoritative voice called out. That sounded like a bad idea, given that the one with the gun had just shot first and didn’t appear to be in the mood for asking questions. But what could she possibly do against a firearm?
She set the taser stick down and looked at the bots. They were waist high little trash cans on a pair of wheels. She hefted one up, and was surprised when it lifted easily. It looked a lot heavier than that. Must be empty on the inside, she reasoned. At least she had something to block a bullet.
The moment she saw the muzzle of a gun drift into sight, Morrigan charged. The man in the red coat got two more shots off that pumped into the body of the poor, inactive robot before she shoved it with both hands directly at him. It impacted his unprotected chest with a thud, knocking the wind out of him in a violent gasp for air. Morrigan rushed the rest of the way, pulled the gun from his weakened grasp, and pistol whipped him down. He sagged, still trying to breathe.
“Don’t quit your dayjob, bud,” she said to the gasping man. She turned to the other two guards, the pistol in her off-hand coming on line with the nearest. Her arm didn’t shake a millimeter. “You guys! Quit your dayjobs immediately. Scatter.”
They exchanged a glance. Once shrugged, then they both took off down the hall. She wondered why the hell she feared these clowns in the first place.
While she stripped the red labcoat and, more importantly, the sporty shoes from the disarmed gunman, heads poked out from the open door down the hall that the guards had been busy with. She kept an eye on it, but didn’t move to investigate until her feet were covered. By the time she’d donned the coat, a steady trickle of people were stepping out from the room.
All of them wore the same outfit that she’d had on for however long they had imprisoned her. But aside from that, there were no similarities. All heights, weights, ethnicities, gender expressions, some had tattoos, some had prosthetics, some had scars, others had the plugs for a neural rig on the side of their heads. It was a veritable smorgasbord of humanity, perhaps even purposefully so.
The first one to step closer than the edge of the door frame was a tall woman with wide red eyes and gorgeous curled black hair. She held her hands out at her side, palms out, and stepped closer.
“Are you one of their subjects too?” she asked.
Morrigan nodded. “I just got out. Something’s got the guards spooked, and I felt something shake through the walls.”
The woman pointed back at the small crowd at the door. “Well, first off, thank you. The guy you just took out was taking us all somewhere at gunpoint. Whatever's going on, this little operation they were running seems to be wrapping up, and we’re all loose ends that need tying. Nice work on disarming him by the way. Never known someone your size could toss a Broombot like a shotput.”
She smiled. “Brings me to four, actually. You know that tall fucker with the jawline and the bad attitude?” She waited for an acknowledgement before continuing. “I think I broke his hand.”
The other woman barked a laugh. “Good for you. Patterson’s a real Grade A prick. The name’s Sybil. You?”
“Morrigan,” she said, a firm confidence to the words. It felt good to introduce herself.
“Well, Morrigan, you can clearly handle yourself, and if you’re in the same shit as we are, why don’t you come with us?”
“You got a plan?” Morrigan asked a little too loudly.
“Well, we got half of one. Most of us didn’t remember getting put here, but Caleb was only pretending to be under anaesthetic when they took him from the docking bay to this level. With his help, we might be able to make it to where they keep their shuttles. After that,” she shrugged, “It’s anyone’s guess. But it beats staying here long enough to find out what in God’s Cosmos is making this base shake. Unfortunately, none of us have any space flight experience, though Magda flew sea skippers on Lemuria. Can you fly a shuttle?”
Morrigan shook her head, then the weight of the woman’s words made her eyes bulge. “Wait, you remember your past?”
“Of...course we do? The experiment did some weird shit but we’re still 'us' at the end of the day.” The woman’s expression went from appreciative to concerned. “Do you not? What did they do to you?”
The same couple flashes when she tried to remember her past. The squirming thing. Being held down. “I don’t know. I can’t remember a thing. I get fragments. Like a projector set to strobe or something...and dreams. Real weird dreams about being at the centre of an alien swarm. Does that...mean anything to you?”
Sybil shook her head. “No fucking clue, sorry. But that might explain why we never saw you. Our captors might have kept you locked up because whatever they were doing to us affected you differently. Maybe they were afraid it would spread to us...or maybe they were looking for a way to make it spread to us.”
Morrigan thought back to the encounter with the creature in her dreams. “Do you have any idea why we're even here in the first place?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but her words were drowned out by another thunder crack that shook the station. This time followed by a blaze of fully automatic gunfire coming from somewhere down the hallway behind Morrigan.
“Alright, as much as I love comparing notes, we’re gonna die if we keep gabbing here. Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
Comments
This was really fun! If we get to vote mine is for the strong queen.
Littlegreenartichoke
I must know what happens next. This was really interesting! 😊
