The guards’ hands were rough, four-fingered claws that dug into the meat of my arms. They dragged me through corridors that smelled of ozone and recycled air, the metallic deck cold and unforgiving under my bare feet. I didn’t fight. Not anymore. I’d spent the last of my energy when they’d overrun our position, when I’d watched the last of my unit fall. Now, there was nothing left but the hollow ache of defeat and a soldier’s grim acceptance of what came next.
Interrogation. Execution. In that order, if I was lucky.
They shoved me through a final doorway, and the change in atmosphere was immediate. The air grew colder, sharper, thick with the scent of antiseptic. The light was a brilliant, sterile white that bounced off every surface, making me squint. This wasn't a brig or an execution chamber. It was a medical bay.
My stomach clenched. Medical meant something worse than a quick death. It meant experimentation. It meant being taken apart piece by piece to see what made a human tick.
And then I saw him.
He stood in the far corner of the room, a monolith of grey, scarred flesh and black armor. He was Krotharr. Even without the insignia, you could tell. The sheer scale of him was an act of violence. He had to be over seven feet tall, with shoulders so broad they seemed to strain the limits of his armor plating. His head was bare, his face a landscape of old wounds and rigid discipline. His eyes, dark and unblinking, were fixed on me from the moment I entered the room. He wasn't a guard. He was the one in charge. The warlord. Vraxxus. I knew the name from panicked transmissions before our comms went dead.
The guards forced me toward a table in the center of the room. It wasn’t a bed; it was an altar of polished, dark metal, with thick restraints dangling from its sides. A cold, deep dread began to crawl up my spine. I started to struggle then, a primal instinct overriding my soldier’s discipline. I kicked back, twisted, tried to wrench my arms free.
“Get the fuck off me,” I snarled, the words feeling rusty in my throat.
It was useless. They were too strong. They slammed me onto the table, the impact jarring my teeth. The cold of the metal seeped through my thin prisoner’s jumpsuit, a chilling violation all on its own. One guard held me down while the other began cutting the jumpsuit from my body with a blade of focused light that hummed ominously. The flimsy fabric fell away in strips, leaving me naked under the merciless white lights.
My breath hitched. I squeezed my eyes shut, humiliation a hot, searing wave. I was a combat medic. I’d seen naked, broken bodies a thousand times. But being the body on the table, exposed and helpless—that was a different kind of wound.
The guards snapped the restraints into place. Thick cuffs locked around my wrists, my ankles, and a broader strap across my torso, pinning me completely. My heart hammered against my ribs, a trapped bird beating its wings against a cage.
From across the room, Vraxxus watched. No expression. No movement. Just a cold, analytical gaze that stripped me down more completely than the guards had. It wasn't sexual. It was worse. It was the look of a biologist studying a new specimen.
As the guards stepped back and left the room, their heavy footfalls echoing, I caught my own reflection on the polished chrome of a nearby instrument panel. The woman staring back was a stranger. Her face was smudged with dirt and streaked with dried sweat. A thin, white scar bisected her left eyebrow, a souvenir from a shrapnel wound on Triton. Her eyes, though, her eyes were mine. They burned with a useless, furious hate. My body was wiry, all lean muscle and sinew from years in the resistance, but against the slab of metal, I looked small. Frail. Prey.
Silent, multi-limbed droids descended from the ceiling on articulated arms. They were all chrome and lenses, their movements smooth and utterly silent. They surrounded the table, their purpose terrifyingly clear.
The first one extended a thin, metallic needle. I flinched as it pricked my arm, drawing a vial of my blood. I didn't have time to process it before another droid was coating my stomach with a clear, frigid gel. A wave of nausea rolled through me. I knew what this was. I had used similar tech in the field. An ultrasound scanner. But why?
The scanner head, a cool, smooth disc, pressed against my skin. It slid over my abdomen, and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out at the cold, invasive pressure. I twisted my head to the side, away from the sight of the machines violating my body, and my eyes landed on him again.
Vraxxus hadn't moved. His gaze was now fixed on the space above me.
I followed his line of sight. My breath caught in my throat.
Projected in the air above my body was a glowing, three-dimensional hologram. It was me. My insides. My organs, rendered in stark, clinical detail. The droids were focused on one area. My reproductive system. My ovaries, my fallopian tubes, my uterus. My womb. It pulsed in the air, a ghostly, intimate map of my most private self, on display for the monster in the corner.
The medic in me tried to take over, to detach, to analyze the data scrolling in an alien script beside the hologram. Uterine wall thickness, optimal. Follicular count, high. Ovarian reserves, excellent. But the woman in me was screaming. This was a violation deeper than any cut, any bruise. He was looking inside of me, cataloging me, judging my worth based on the function of my flesh.
Another droid moved between my legs. I tensed, my whole body going rigid. Its chrome arm extended, and a long, thin probe emerged from its tip. It was coated in the same cold gel.
"No," I whispered, the sound swallowed by the vast, silent room. "No, please."
My defiance finally broke, cracking under the weight of this clinical, systematic rape. A tear escaped, hot and shameful, and traced a path through the grime on my temple. I bucked against the restraints, a pointless, frantic struggle. The strap across my chest cut into my skin, but I barely felt it.
The probe pushed against me. I squeezed my legs together, a futile act of defense. The droid was implacable. It nudged, insisted, and then slid inside my vagina.
A raw, guttural sob ripped from my throat. It wasn’t pain. It was… a trespass. A cold, mechanical object was inside me, mapping my interior walls, measuring the depth of my cervix. The hologram above me shifted, new data flooding the display. It was the ultimate humiliation. To be taken apart not by passion or rage, but by cold, indifferent machinery, all while the man who ordered it watched me break.
I stared at the ceiling, my vision blurring, trying to go somewhere else in my mind. Back to the barracks, sharing a nutrient paste bar with my squad. Back to my childhood, running through the hydroponic fields on Europa. Anywhere but here. But his presence was too powerful. I could feel his eyes on me, a physical weight. I forced myself to look at him one last time, wanting him to see the hate in my eyes, wanting him to know that even though he was doing this to me, he would never, ever break my spirit.
The probe retracted. The droids began to pull back, their articulated arms folding back into the ceiling. The hologram flickered and died.
Silence.
It was heavier, more absolute than any sound. It pressed in on me, filled my lungs. The droids were gone. It was just me, naked and restrained, and him, a shadow of death in the corner.
Then, a single, synthesized word broke the silence. It came from a speaker on the wall, the droid’s final analysis delivered in a flat, toneless voice.
"Compatible."
The word hung in the air, electric and final.
Everything changed in that instant. I saw it in the way Vraxxus moved. He pushed himself off the wall, and for the first time, he took a step toward me. His heavy boots made a soft, menacing sound on the deck. The air shifted, displaced by his sheer mass.
His eyes were different now. The cold, analytical detachment was gone. It was replaced by something else. Something raw and possessive. He was no longer a biologist studying a specimen. He was a conqueror who had just found the spoils of his war.
He walked to the side of the table and stopped, looming over me. I could smell him—the clean scent of the ship’s air mixed with something else, something musky and alien and distinctly male. He was close enough that I could see the intricate web of scars on his jaw, the hard line of his mouth.
He looked down at my body. His gaze traveled from my face, down my neck, over my breasts, my stomach. He lingered on my flat abdomen, where the gel was still cold on my skin. He was looking at the place the machines had just mapped. He was looking at my womb.
I held my breath, waiting for the order, for the knife, for the final, brutal end.
But he said nothing. He simply stood there, looking at me, his shadow falling over my body like a shroud. The silence stretched, thin and tight, vibrating with a terrifying, unspoken purpose.
It wasn’t a death sentence.
It was a life sentence. And it was going to be so much worse.
