Tamed by the Alien Overlords Page 2

  But, even for all that, they were slaves.

  All women who tested positive for being able to conceive Domann children were made into mates for the Domann. And they had absolutely no choice in the matter.

  Nor did they have any choice in which Domann they would belong to - the Domann military awarded them to high-ranking officers and administrators.

  Nor did they have any choice in how many Domann they would mate with. Women that could bear Domann children were rare enough that Domann law stipulated that each of them must have at least three permanent Domann owners. And those three owners ruled their woman’s life. They fucked her when they wanted. How they wanted. Even shared her with other Domann, as they wanted.

  All the luxury and power in the galaxy couldn’t change the fact that those women were baby-slaves, doomed to pump out alien spawn for the rest of their days.

  The Domann had made it a planet-wide law that every woman be tested for mating compatibility on her eighteenth birthday. But many women disobeyed, going underground, living off the grid to escape the fate of becoming a Domann mate.

  Women like me.

  The Domann thought that displays like the one I was watching would convince us not to run. To come to them voluntarily.

  They couldn’t be more wrong.

  I stood up. Turned around. Stalked from the room. I didn’t need to keep watching to know what was going to happen.

  Those Domann would fuck their mate in front of the whole planet. Would reduce her to a writhing, quivering, begging ball of hormones and orgasms on the end of their fat alien dicks. Such things actually appealed to a lot of women, and a lot of men too. Reports were conflicting, but our best guess was that something like half of humanity was completely content with their subjugation to the Domann. Perfectly happy to let the alien scum steal and violate whichever women they wanted. Domann rule wasn’t bad for them personally, so why bother to fight it? The Domann were smart, after all. If humanity satisfied their demands for raw materials - women included - they were content to leave human society more or less to its own devices. To many people on the planet, everyday life probably wasn’t much different than it had been before the Domann had taken over. So a lot of people were just fine with the arrangement.

  Not me. And not the brave fighters of the resistance.

  We would fight to our dying breaths against the Domann. We would show them that we weren’t their pet species. That our women weren’t their fuck toys. Their baby-factories. Someday we would kick them the hell off our world.

  And if their species died out because of it, even better.

  Chapter 2

  Liza

  Very gently, almost lovingly, I squeezed the trigger.

  The pistol in my hand went off, its incredibly heavy caliber punching my hand backward. As I’d been trained, I let my arm swing back at the elbow while keeping my shoulder rigid and leaning into the force of the shot. It helped with the ungodly recoil of the anti-Domann weapon. Still, it was like firing a cannon.

  Anything that was actually manageable to fire would be absolutely useless against Domann combat armor and shields.

  “Damn nice shot!” said Garth from over my shoulder. He’s a skinny guy, pretty much the opposite of Damien, lighter than me even, with a thick brown beard that makes him look a lot older than his twenty-five years.

  “Took that fucker’s head clean off,” said Kara admiringly. Her hair was up in the same messy bun I was wearing, the one that took the least amount of time to keep the maximum amount of hair out of the way. She was dressed like me too, dark leather pants and work shirt and thick combat boots. She looked good, even covered in dirt and sweat from the hot, dirty shooting range. She often got compliments. Even more than me - a fact that I often pretended not to notice.

  I peered down the fifty-feet or so of the dirt-floored gun range, through the thick but already thinning cloud of smoke my pistol has issued. Kara was right - the target I’d been aiming at, hanging from a thin metal bar just in front of the packed-dirt backstop, had a fist-sized hole in it, right between the eyes.

  “We assuming that one had his helmet off?” I asked sardonically. Even when you hit a damn Domann soldier with enough fire to temporarily overwhelm its ballistic shield, their armor is nearly impenetrable. Still, hitting one in the head like that would have at least given the fucker a nasty headache. Maybe even knocked him out cold.

  Lots of recruits think that it takes muscle to fire one of the ultra-heavy caliber rifles or pistols. That only the biggest men would be eligible to train with them, or carry them on missions. But really, it mainly takes skill. You’ve got to know how to move your body, to give just enough to absorb the crazy recoil without landing on your ass. That’s the reason women like Kara and me were permitted to use the heavy guns - the ammunition for which was unbelievably expensive. Me and her had earned the right to carry the big guns into battle with training and skill, despite our average-to-skinny frames.

  Don’t get me wrong, we were soldiers. We can do a hell of a lot more pushups than you can - or at least we’ll make you work to out-push us. But we don’t juice, or take anything else to develop our muscles beyond a moderate cross-training regimen. The Domann are too smart for us to be too muscular. The bastards have monitoring drones that, I shit you not, monitor every individual person. Like, on the planet. One drone can work fast enough to monitor the body weight, musculature and dozens of other bio-signals of more than a million people a day - you see the little dragonfly-looking things zipping around from time to time when you go outside. What that means is that it’s ideal for resistance soldiers to be in great shape, but not so much that we’d be flagged as persons of interest by the drones. I’d even been told by resistance intelligence officers to gain weight on occasion. It always felt weird to force myself to eat. Felt like I was wasting all the effort I’d put into toning my flat stomach, my lean legs, my subtly muscular back, my gently curving hips. But, orders are orders. At the very least, a little extra padding on my rear and chest made it easy to get male attention, when I wanted it.

  I holstered my weapon. Tucked a loose strand of sandy-blond hair back behind one ear. Shook my right hand, which was still numb from the shot, flexing my fingers back and forth, trying to get the feeling to come back into it. Garth, Damien, Kara and I had been shooting for about twenty minutes, alongside a handful of other soldiers, and the range already had that heavy, pleasant stench of sweat mixed with spent gunpowder. Admittedly, it’s an acquired taste. You live underground half your life like I had, and you learn to appreciate some pretty strange things.

  By the way, I meant underground in the literal sense too. I and my comrades lived in the headquarters of our cell of the Atlanta Resistance, which was comprised of a sprawling network of underground tunnels and rooms stretching between the basements of a few dozen buildings south of the city. Musty, dusty, crowded, poorly-ventilated, cluttered, dirty, filled with hard men and women training to fight and studying the latest Domann intelligence.

  Home.

  “My turn,” said Damien, unholstering a pistol that was even more powerful than mine. Even after we demonstrate the skill required to use the big guns, resistance command still assigns us calibers based on strength tests.

  At the other end of the low-ceilinged room, a simple machine swapped out my target for a fresh one.

  “Best you can do is tie,” Garth observed.

  “And you can’t keep up with Liza Strong forever,” said Kara. “She’s the best pistol in Atlanta.”

  “Twenty credits and tonight’s dinner says she misses before I do,” said Damien, cocking his head in what he must have imagined was a confident gesture. Of course, it came off plain cocky, like always.

  “You’re on!” said Kara, Garth and I simultaneously.

  Just then, the lights in the shooting range went out.

  Just like they were programmed to do. Conditions in the range change from time to time, at random, simulating different real-world conditions tha
t would interfere with marksmanship.

  “No stalling!” I said. “You have to take your shot before-”

  A massive bang cut me off as Damien fired.

  After a moment, a spotlight at the end of the range illuminated Damien’s target - revealing a perfect hit through the center of the target’s head.

  I gave him a low, impressed whistle. He’d earned it.

  “I can taste that stale, pre-packed, freeze-dried, tasteless chicken now!” said Damien. Being an underground organization, we didn’t always have the luxury of eating well. Or even poorly.

  “Let me fix that for you,” I said, shouldering past him good-naturedly and stepping back to the firing line.

  “Just try not to think about that moment when you open your wallet to pay for my meal,” said Damien.

  “Tell me again what you’re having,” I said as I loaded another hefty cartridge into my pistol.

  “I was thinking of the fried-”

  This time it was my pistol’s report cutting Damien short. After a second, the spotlight came back on.

  “Beautiful,” said Kara admiringly.

  And it was. My own shot mirrored Damien’s - dead center on the paper target’s head.

  “Lucky,” said Damien.

  “If that’s true,” said Garth, “Liza must be the luckiest person ever born.”

  “Does it make me the most skilled person ever born?” asked Damien.

  “It definitely makes you the biggest ass ever born,” I replied.

  That got a few laughs.

  “A sharp eye, and a sharper tongue,” said Damien. “I’m going to have to teach-”

  “Atten-TION!” bellowed the range Sergeant, a split second after every light in the firing range snapped back on. “Fall IN!”

  In seconds, all of the dozen or so of us who had been shooting had assembled in a straight line, our backs to the target area.

  And it was immediately clear why we’d been called to a formal order.

  General Ian Adama himself had just strode onto the range. General Adama was an internationally respected figure within the loose network of resistance groups that spanned the entire globe, as well as the ranking officer in the entire city of Atlanta. He also had more confirmed Domann kills than anyone else in North America.

  Since I know you’re wondering… two. Arguably the very best soldier in America had managed to kill exactly two of the alien bastards.

  Still, it was a hell of a higher body count that I had. Most soldiers who survived their first year without being captured ended up killing plenty of drones. I had scrapped thirty-seven combat drones myself.

  But the actual Domann were just in a whole other league.

  “At ease,” Adama said, wearing a ghost of a smile. He was a tall man. Mid-forties. Mostly-grey-but-still-flecks-of-black hair. Thick mustache. Spotless, well-pressed tan officer’s uniform. He had this straight-backed way of carrying himself that just made you want to stand up straighter yourself. And a way of talking, a deep baritone filled with experience, intelligence, passion, gravitas and good-old-fashioned brass balls, that made you want to listen very closely to everything he had to say.

  “Glad to see you all honing your bastard-killing skills,” he said, to the sound of a few snickers and an ‘amen.’

  “When are you going to let us run another mission?” I asked. It had been awhile since I’d been above ground. And even longer since I’d been in a firefight. Lately I’d been feeling that familiar itch. The one I always got if I went too long without taking a shot at a Domann target.

  “Well… about that,” said Adama carefully. “There’s something you ought to be aware of, in fact. We’ve been keeping this under wraps for awhile, but I trust everyone in this room enough to let you in on something. We’re scaling back operations,” he said, his voice low and serious. “Way back.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  Not one bit.

  The Domann occupation had defined every waking moment of my entire life. My childhood had been spent under the specter of one day being tested as a potential mate - and possibly being taken by the Domann as a baby-slave. My adolescence had been sacrificed to training and study. Both in the arts of war, and the methods of science. My parents had both been scientists, before the invasion. My mother a computing engineer and advanced technologist, my father an environmental scientists. He’d gone missing shortly after the invasion - a fact that served as my primary motivation to get as close to the front lines as possible. My adulthood - an admittedly short amount of time - had been spent on more training, and in combat.

  In short, I’d been born and bred to fight the alien menace.

  And I did not like hearing that I would be getting fewer chances to do that.

  Not one little bit.

  I was about to say as much out loud.

  But Adama held up a hand.

  “Now I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking that you’ve all been born and bred to fight the alien menace, or something equally romantic.” You can see why Adama was so well respected. “But I’ll let you all in on a little secret.”

  A secret?

  What secret?

  Everybody in line unconsciously leaned in towards Adama, just a bit.

  Adama, his smile widening, becoming somewhat savage, lowered his voice. Milking the drama of the moment.

  “We’ve been developing… a new weapon,” he said. “And it’s almost finished.”

  He paused.

  We waited for more, eager as hungry puppies.

  “This new weapon,” he said, “is going to change everything. It’s going to give us... leverage. It’s going to force the alien scum squatting on our planet to pay attention. It’s going to change the course of this war.”

  I was growing excited.

  We all were.

  There was just this… I don’t know, like a feeling, in the room. Like we were all getting a shared adrenaline high. And could you blame us? Here we were wondering if we would ever even get the chance to kill even one of the Domann, and Adama was promising us a way to win the entire fucking war.

  I fucking loved it.

  “What is it?” Kara breathed.

  Adama straightened up, adopting a serious face once again.

  “I’m afraid that’s all I’m at liberty to say at the moment,” he said. “In fact, I probably shouldn’t even have told you that much. But I figured I owed you all an explanation as to why we won't be sending you out any time soon. There’s just too much at stake right now… and when our plans come to fruition - when, mind you, not if - this war is going to be dramatically different. So different, that it’s just not worth risking any of you finely-honed weapons on the missions we’re currently capable of executing.”

  That was Adama for you. He had this way of making you feel special, just for being exactly who you are. It made people love him. Hell, it made me love him. Not like a lover. But the way a soldier should love their commanding officer. I had already decided that I would risk dying in battle if Adama ordered me to. And every time I heard him speak, he reminded me that that decision was a good one.

  “As you were!” Adama said, then turned smartly on his heel and strode off range.

  We all returned to target practice.

  But my mind was no longer in it.

  I lost the competition to Damien. In my defense, I had bigger things on my mind. Things like the total destruction of the Alien invaders. As such, I begged off dinner, promising to buy him two meals some other time to make up for it.

  My friends, not my only ones, but some of my closest in the South Atlanta Resistance headquarters, lingered at the shooting range as I left. My mind whirling, at the prospect of some new human super weapon.

  I actually was hungry. But instead of heading to the mess hall, I did what I always do when my mind is whirling.

  I went to talk to my mom.

  Chapter 3

  Liza

  As one of the most accompl
ished, studied and driven technologists in the Atlanta Resistance, my mom - Samantha Strong - enjoyed a private lab, and a damn well-equipped one at that. Studying Domann technology in the hopes of replicating it, or at least figuring out how to raise humanities' level of technological prowess, was considered a top priority by both resistance leaders and Earth’s conventional governments alike.

  And my mom had become one of the world’s foremost experts on Domann technology.

  The lab was dark - per usual - when I walked in. Not pitch black. Just gloomy. It was one of the things mom did when she was trying to concentrate. She said the fewer things she could see, the easier it was to concentrate. I thought it was weird. And I wasn’t the only one. But, people as smart as my mom tend to be on the eccentric side.

  It was a small space, comprised of a few heavy metal work tables ringed by shelf upon shelf stacked with every sort of technological component you could think of. In the center of it all sat mom, staring so intently at a chassis harvested from some Domann drone that she didn’t even hear me come in. Her petite frame was perched on a tall stool, her back hunched intently down at the object of her study in that way I kept telling her was bad for her back. Her hair was cropped short, but had grown long enough to become really messy, a condition she would only rectify once it started interfering with her ability to see her work. She was wearing the white lab coat she prized as a symbol of her profession as a researcher.

  “Knock knock,” I said softly, trying not to startle her.

  And failing miserably. Mom’s head jerked up so hard she nearly fell off her stool.