you try to go beyond the boundaries of our gate, it will put you down like a rabid Chinthian canine.”
V opened his mouth to say he’d be damned if he would father a child and leave it here for this bastard to fuck around with and that he didn’t give a flying fuck for any of the assembled females…
And then the orange mutant doctor moved down the line, revealing her. The little female with the long, chestnut brown hair and big brown eyes he’d been watching back at the bar what seemed like a million cycles ago. The one with the luscious ass.
But it wasn’t her ass V was looking at this time—it was her eyes. Unlike the glassy stare of the other females, her big brown eyes were wide and frightened.
She didn’t look brainwashed like the rest—she looked scared to death, though she was obviously trying to conceal it.
Poor little female!
V felt his heart squeeze when he looked at the fear in those big, brown eyes. She looked like a small helpless animal, caught in a trap.
“Well?” the “Glorious Leader” asked, a self-satisfied smile curving his lips. “You see one you like, don’t you? One you’d like to breed?”
I see a female caught in the same trap I am, V thought, glaring down at the other male. And I’m going to get both of us out or die trying!
Nineteen
The daily inspections were the worst.
Every day Penny and the other women who had been captured around the same time by the orange Oompa-Loompas were herded into an exam room in the Breeding and Conception Center and forced to strip. Then they had to undergo a complete physical, including a bizarre gynecological exam which involved having a lighted wand shoved inside them, which was supposed to check for “womb health and fertility” according to the Oompa-Loompa scientist who performed the check.
Penny hated that part—it made her feel so helpless, so violated. Thank goodness the orange scientists who called themselves “NeverBreeders” didn’t try to touch her in a sexual way—the exam was done with a pure, clinical detachment every time.
But that didn’t matter—it was still an invasion of her privacy, a violation of her body that made her feel sick and scared and helpless every time it happened.
It also reminded her of every cheesy abduction story she’d ever heard—I was captured by aliens and probed! Except this was no pulp science fiction novel—this was her life and it was really happening to her.
It happened every morning and every day here was the same—they were all beginning to blur together. As she stared straight ahead, trying not to think of the coming exam, Penny tried to remember how long she had been here, tried to think back to the beginning, when she had first been brought into the Compound…
She had woken from her drugged slumber just in time to see a huge white marble statue of a man looming over her head like a vengeful god.
“Wha…What’s that?” she managed to get out, her tongue still numb from the aftereffects of the drugs the Oompa-Loompas had given her.
“Hell if I know, but he’s one ugly son of a bitch, whoever he is,” Shurla had murmured beside her.
Penny had been glad to see her new friend was awake and alert. She and Shurla and about six other alien women were crammed into a hover cart which was moving smoothly through what appeared to be a tropical jungle. Huge, fan-like leaves in shades of emerald and turquoise lined the road and the distant chattering and calls of wild animals could be heard as well. The air smelled green, if that made any sense, Penny thought to herself. Green and growing.
“Like a tropical paradise,” she muttered to herself.
Clearly they weren’t on Hell’s Gate Spaceport or on Yown Beta. So where else could they be? Then Penny remembered her last conversation with Rive and Y’lla.
“Yown Alpha,” she murmured. “This must be Yown Alpha!”
“Could be,” Shurla murmured beside her. “In which case we’re in a lot of trouble—there’s nobody here. At least, there’s not supposed to be on account of all the poisonous plants, you know?”
“That’s what I heard too,” Penny murmured back. “Do you remember coming here at all? Did they bring us in a ship?”
“Sorry.” Shurla shook her head. “Don’t remember a damn thing about how we got here, hon. I woke up myself a minute before you did. I just hope—”
“Silence!” shouted one of the orange Oompa-Loompas in his high, androgynous voice. “We have come to