Mate-Prize Read online

Is having so much freedom really worth it… if you end up all alone?

  Chapter 3

  Rachel

  I must have stayed up on the roof of the trailer for at least another hour. Maybe two. I do some of my best thinking on roofs. Hell, I do some of my only thinking on roofs.

  I was just about to call it a night when Andy, Jason and Jon stumbled out the back door of Happy Hours, making as straight a line as they could manage back to the trailer we all shared.

  “You guys finally had enough?” I called out.

  They laughed. Which I thought was kind of weird. It hadn’t really been a joke.

  “Hey,” I called again, just wanting a little human interaction. “Who’s driving tomorrow? I’m not going to get stuck behind the wheel again if you bozos can’t wake up, am I?”

  They were less than ten feet away. But they didn’t respond. Didn’t even look up at me. They were all mumbling at once, drunk as shit and all thinking the other two were listening to them. Oblivious.

  “Hey!” I shouted, my feelings getting a little bruised. I was the face of the band, after all. When I spoke, I expected to at least be acknowledged.

  But it was like I wasn’t even there.

  It took Andy three tries to turn the doorknob on the trailer door.

  Getting a little pissed, I swung my feet over so that they were hanging down in front of the door, blocking it. When Andy tried to open the door, I dug my heels in and flexed my leg muscles, pushing the door shut.

  “What the hell?” asked Andy.

  “You got to get in the gym, bro!” said Jason.

  Andy pulled again. Again I kept the door closed with my legs.

  “What the fuck is happening?” he wondered aloud.

  “I am, you dipshits!” I shouted.

  “I don't know… that’s kind of weird,” said Andy. He pulled harder. I didn’t try to keep the door shut that time, knowing how strong he is and not wanting to get pulled off the trailer roof.

  “What the fuck is up with you three?” I all shouted, nearly at the top of my lungs. “I know you can fucking hear me!”

  No reaction. From any of them.

  “We need to get someone to look at this door,” said Andy as he disappeared into the trailer. Jason and Jon, agreeing, followed him.

  That was my first hint that something wasn’t right.

  I sat there on the trailer for a few minutes. Dumbstruck.

  Was my own band giving me the silent treatment? Would those idiots stoop to something so juvenile?

  No. Things were going great between us. In fact, our chemistry as a band had never been better.

  Suddenly, I got the irrational fear that nobody would hear me ever again. It wasn’t like just a feeling though, you know? It was like… a premonition.

  I didn’t like it.

  I dug my phone out of my jeans. Dialed Ellie. Her phone rang only once before she picked up.

  “What now, Rachel?” she asked. “You doing a whole other show you want me to come out to tonight? I’d love to, but a girl has to sleep, you know?”

  “I…” I said, but trailed off. “I just wanted to ask you… I don’t know, have you heard from mom lately?” It was lame. But for some reason, I just wanted someone to hear my voice.

  “Um, hello?” Ellie asked.

  “Wait… you can hear me, right?” I asked. “Please tell me you can hear-”

  “Oh, great, nice butt-dial Rache,” said Ellie. The call disconnected. She’d hung up.

  What… the… fuck.

  “My apologies, Rachel Faraway,” said a voice from behind me. “But nobody you know will hear from you ever again.”

  Chapter 4

  Rachel

  I nearly jumped out of my skin. My head whipped around, peering over my shoulder.

  There was nobody there.

  I stood up and looked around. There was no mistake - I’d just heard the sound of a strangely soothing, robotic voice.

  Just then, exactly what that voice had said finally registered. I began growing afraid.

  The air in front of me shimmered.

  And there it was. A smooth, metallic orb, with several lenses and lights on the outside of it, just hovering in the air over the roof of the trailer.

  “I am a collection drone,” said the orb. “I am here to escort you to your new life.”

  I was too shocked to move. Too shocked to speak.

  “Have no fear,” said the hovering, blinking ball. “I am equipped with technology that is far beyond anything possessed by terrestrial humans. You will not be harmed.”

  I didn’t think. I ran. I didn’t know what the fuck that thing was. But nothing it had said to me sounded good.

  At least… I tried to run. Believe it or not, I actually tried to jump right off the roof of the trailer, unwilling to take the time to climb down safely. Only when I was in mid-air, ten feet above the solid asphalt of the back lot, did it occur to me that I may have made a miscalculation.

  This landing was going to hurt.

  But… it didn’t hurt.

  Because I didn’t fall. In fact, I didn’t go anywhere. I just hung there, frozen in midair, my legs and arms wobbling back and forth, instinctively trying to balance me without having anything to balance me against.

  “I will not permit you to escape,” said the soothing, metallic voice from behind me, “or to hurt yourself in any way. Do not resist me. There is no point in doing so. Do not worry. You will be safe with me, and you will be safe where we are going.”

  Where… we were going?

  What the Hell did that mean? Where the fuck were we going?

  “Where the fuck are we going?” I demanded. I’d tried to sound tough. But the question came out as a kind of shrill whimper. I act tough whenever I can, but I’m no fighter.

  “We will soon board a collection ship,” said the orb, “which will take us back to the warship Bane, just outside your solar system. It is there that you will be awarded to your new mates.”

  I’d thought my head couldn’t spin any faster. I was wrong.

  I struggled to process all of the impossible things happening to me. Not only was I speaking with a small, floating metal ball, not only was I floating in midair, but I was being… collected? As in, abducted? I was about to leave the freaking solar system?

  “No,” I said. Just that. I still wasn’t thinking straight. I still wasn’t capable of it. But I knew enough to understand that I definitely did not want to be abducted by aliens.

  “I’m afraid the decision has been made,” said the orb, “and that decision is irreversible. This will no doubt be a challenging experience for you. But I am confident that you will adjust, in time. One of our selection criteria is the ability to adapt to a wide range of experiences - a trait which our data indicates you possess in abundance. Please be patient. And do behave yourself. Mate-prizes are not permitted to disobey orders in any way.”

  Holy. Shit.

  Did that thing just say… mate? As in, I’m going to be someone’s mate? Like, for mating?

  I’d thought I couldn’t get any more scared. I was wrong.

  A fear deeper than any I’d ever known seeped into my chest. Into my bones.

  I had to escape.

  I started thrashing.

  “Help! Heeelp!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. It felt weak, humiliating, to call for help like that. I’d never been in a situation that I couldn’t handle on my own. But I was no dummy. This was most definitely a situation that I couldn’t handle on my own.

  “I placed a sonic dampening field around us some time ago,” said the orb. “No sound you make can penetrate it.”

  My thrashing seemed to have some effect. Instead of floating in midair, I was now bobbing up and down in midair - still ten feet over the asphalt. I thrashed harder. I was scared of falling ten feet onto the hard, rough ground. But I was fucking terrified of that fucking orb.

  Of being ripped away from my life forever.

  “Cease resisting,” sai
d the orb, its voice shifting from soothing to stern. “I will not hurt you, but I am equipped with several functions that will allow me to cause you some discomfort. Be still, or I will activate them.”

  Through my abject terror, I managed to laugh a little at that. This thing was trying to fucking abduct me straight off the planet, and it thought that ‘some discomfort’ would be enough to make me cooperate?

  “Fuck you!” I shouted. Mostly to try to summon a little courage.

  It worked. A little.

  The bottoms of my feet exploded.

  At least, that’s what it felt like. I gasped and froze from the pain. The sensation lasted less than half a second, but just that was enough to freeze my entire nervous system with the shock of it. As I stopped thrashing, I stopped bobbing up and down, returning to a stable hover.

  “I do not want to have to do that again,” said the orb, its voice extra soothing.

  To be honest, the shock was worse than the pain. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it hadn’t been that! I thought about trying to thrash again - it had almost felt like I was about to break free of whatever it was that was holding me in the air.

  The thought of more ‘some discomfort’ made me pause.

  Goddammit, I thought, there’s got to be something I can do! Some way I can get free!

  There wasn’t. At least, nothing that I could see. I was totally helpless. I was in this orb’s power. At its mercy. It was a foreign, alien feeling. I didn’t like it one bit.

  “I… I don’t suppose… we could… talk?” I asked. I was desperate. “I don’t know… negotiate?”

  “I am afraid you have nothing that I want. Nothing except yourself, that is. And I already possess you. In any case, neither you nor I are permitted to negotiate anything. I am here to do a job: capture you. You are here to be captured by me. There really isn’t anything to talk about.”

  I realized that I was gasping for breath. Not because I was out of breath, but because I was struggling so hard to process what was happening.

  “Let me go!” I screamed. I knew it wouldn’t. I just couldn’t hold it in any longer.

  “Now now,” said the orb, “your experience will improve in time. Intense feelings of fear is a very common reaction in freshly captured mate-prizes. Trust me, I have captured many hundreds of woman from this planet alone. In time, you will come to accept your new life, just as you should.”

  Waves of shock rolled through my body, rattling my very bones. I didn’t want to leave Earth. I didn’t want to lose the life I’d built for myself. I didn’t want to lose what little family I had.

  And I absolutely did not want to become someone’s fucking ‘mate-prize,’ whatever the hell that was! I didn’t know exactly what it meant. But I decided that there was no scenario in which it turned out to be something I wanted.

  I wasn’t a prize. And I sure as Hell wasn’t anyone’s fucking ‘mate!’ I was my own woman. I went where I wanted, when I wanted, and did what I wanted when I got there. That was who I’d always been!

  Suddenly, directly above me by about fifty feet, a thin rectangle of yellow light appeared. As I watched, suddenly transfixed, still scared silly, dreading whatever was to come, the rectangle grew wider, and wider, until it was a sizeable square of light.

  “Excellent,” said the orb. “The collection ship has arrived. We can now depart.”

  With that, the orb and I began floating slowly higher.

  Chapter 5

  Travan

  My name is Travan.

  I have fought in countless battles, and have led my men to victory with distinction. It is through my many successes in battle that I finally earned the right to bear sons of my own.

  I, and my men, had finally earned the right to claim our mate-prize.

  I was born on the intergalactic battleship known throughout the Galaxy as Bane, one of the largest, meanest and most battle-proven warships in space. Like the rest of my four-man squad, I have known no other life but war.

  It is a life that I relish.

  The Milky Way is home to over 75 different branches of humanity, each with their own planets and political interests. My squad and I belong to a clan named Triumphant. We are one of the most powerful tribes, and the most feared. We do not retreat. We conquer. We do not show mercy. We demand obedience. Ours is a proud clan.

  And I am proud to serve it, as are my men.

  I have never known a time when my clan was not at war with one rival clan or another. There are clans which seek peace. Ours is not one of them. In my heart, I know that one day clan Triumphant will conquer this galaxy.

  And I will be one of the soldiers who make it happen.

  Intergalactic civilization, to which all clans and branches of humanity belong, is countless millennia old. Some say we all came from the same planet. Others say we evolved in parallel on different worlds.

  To be honest, I don’t really care.

  I concern myself with the present, and the future. What difference does it make to me if all clans share common ancestors? The paths of the clans diverged long ago. Long enough ago that each clan has evolved independently of the others, such that the humans of one clan are unique to all other humans in the galaxy. There is a clan of humans that have developed webbed feet and gills, the better to live underwater. There is a clan of humans that have evolved long, curved, wickedly sharp horns on their heads, to be used as weapons in battle. My clan has evolved into one of the largest subspecies of humans in known space. The average member of my clan is seven feet nine inches tall, with the musculature to match.

  For thousands of generations, we of clan Triumphant have been selectively breeding ourselves, turning our descendants - myself and my men included - into unstoppable weapons.

  Another important feature of clan Triumphant... is that we are a clan exclusively of men.

  The decision to erase the capability to bear female children from our DNA was made long before my time. Some leader long ago decided that bearing nothing but sons would give us a decisive advantage in our unceasing struggle against other clans. I don’t know exactly how effective that decision was. And I don’t care. What matters to my men and I is that, in order to procreate, we need to capture a woman, from outside our clan, with which to breed.

  It’s why my clan seeded the planet known to its inhabitants as Earth with non-Triumphant human life so many thousands of years ago.

  Earth sits squarely in my clan’s sphere of influence. We own the planet, and we own everything and everyone on it. We have heard Earth’s primitive messages, which they fling up into the void using radios and other laughably primitive technologies, hoping in vain to contact alien life. Sometimes I wonder what it must be like, to think that your planet holds the only life in the universe. Regardless, my clan chooses not to contact Earth, and to block any attempts at communication with Earth, for one very simple reason: their ignorance of wider galactic civilization makes it much easier to harvest women from the planet. Capturing unsuspecting women, who are totally ignorant of the fact that they might be targeted as breeding partners, is far easier than it would be if those same women spent their lives hiding and running.

  That is all Earth is to my clan. A sexual convenience. A human ranch, from which we can select and capture the females with the highest potential for bearing strong sons, who will grow up to fight for the glory of the Triumphant.

  That is why the warship Bane was orbiting the Earth’s sun, just out of range of any of the primitive technology they have which might detect us. We were there to harvest women.

  To capture them.

  To own them.

  We have learned to be careful in the harvesting of women. If we take too many at any one time, the local population may figure out that someone is taking them. To avoid this, we harvest women slowly, at a rate that will not arouse suspicion. As a result, there are never enough women to pair with all of the men in clan Triumphant. In fact, in my clan there are roughly ten men for every one woman. That i
s why breeding is not a right our clan.

  It is a privilege, won through valor on the field of battle. A privilege my men and I had earned, and were eager to claim.

  “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long, long time,” said Jensi, as he smoothed his slicked-back hair even straighter atop his olive-skinned scalp, looking at himself in the full-length mirror in our shared bunk. Jensi was my second in command. He’s a good soldier. All my men are.

  “You and me both, brother,” said Daxen, the squad’s technology expert. There’s not a piece of technology in the galaxy he can’t take apart and put back together again, only better. But that doesn’t make him any less dangerous with a gun or a sword. The men of clan Triumphant are nothing if not deadly. Daxen, tall and almost lanky despite his heavy muscles, was already in his dress uniform, a close-fitting outfit consisting white trousers, a white full-sleeve coat with gold buttons, a polished white belt, and a ceremonial saber. At nearly eight feet tall, Daxen was the tallest man in the squad.

  “My cock is getting hard just thinking about it,” said Ellon, who was just getting into his dress trousers in preparation for the mate-prize awarding ceremony, which was due to take place in a matter of hours. Ellon was one of the heaviest men I’d ever served with, nearly as wide as he was tall. And he was quite tall. His bald head bore more than one battle scar.

  I grinned, as did the rest of my squad. Ellon spoke for all of us.

  Every man in clan Triumphant begins their military career as a lowly enlisted soldier - far too low of rank to ever get anywhere near a woman. But in just a few short years, I’d risen to Squad Leader, and had led my men into decisive action in multiple battles. None of us had ever been with a woman before. Prior to our last battle, we hadn’t earned the right.

  But that had changed. Now, we had earned a single woman to share among us, a woman to satisfy the carnal desires that had gone unfulfilled for so long. A woman to bear our offspring.

  In one corner of the room, a holo-display winked to life. We had an automated message. Lounging in my chair, I made a simple hand gesture. The voice of an automated collector orb filled our bunk.