Their Human Vessel Read online

  “Stage one identification complete,” a synthesized voice droned. “Please provide fingerprint identification.”

  A panel slid back, revealing a glossy blue surface with outline of a right hand. Corrie pressed her hand to the scanner, taking care to line up her fingertips just right.

  She had also retrieved Burgess’s fingerprints from the training documents he had given her during her initiation session. Next had come the most unpleasant part of the process. The biometric duplicator had used a laser to literally etch Burgess’s fingerprint whorls onto Corrie’s own fingers. It was highly illegal, but that wouldn’t matter once the story was published and she was riding high. When things got rough, as they undoubtedly would, the Solar Sentinel would take on all of the legal burden while Corrie would be free to bask in the limelight.

  Provided, of course, that the fingerprint transferal process had actually worked.

  A blue line of light slid down the scanner, and the machine beeped.

  “Thank you. Stage two complete. Please read the following numeric code aloud to finish your verification.”

  They were using a three-factor ID process. Fortunately, Corrie had prepared for this contingency as well. While Burgess had been leading her around the facility earlier, she had been recording his voice with her phone. The sound had been somewhat dampened by her pocket, but she had managed to collect a sufficient speech sample which she had loaded into the vocoder device on her throat, which allowed her to speak with a perfect imitation of Burgess’s thick drawl.

  She read out the randomly generated string of numbers and letters that appeared on the small screen beside the scanner.

  Corrie felt her pulse quicken. Sweat was beading along her brow and neck. If someone came along and busted her now, her cover would be blown. Why the hell was this machine taking so long?

  As the moment stretched out in oppressive silence, Corrie’s stomach clenched with nervousness.

  At last, the mechanical voice spoke again.

  “Thank you, Mr. Burgess. Access granted. Please proceed.”

  There was a mechanical hiss as the locking mechanism released and the heavy steel door slid open.

  It had worked. Corrie let out the breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  She stepped inside the small chamber beyond. As soon as she was through, the door closed behind her with a startling quickness. For a hellish moment, Corrie’s nerves came back in full force as the thought occurred to her that it had been a trap. A moment later, however, another door in front of her opened onto a massive space.

  Corrie’s heart skipped.

  This was it. Whatever the secret behind Juvanis was, she was certain it was there in that sprawling room that lay before her. It just had to be.

  Lit by conical, caged lights suspended from the high ceiling, the spacious area had the feel of a massive warehouse. The air was redolent with a peculiar yet oddly familiar smell—something like sea salt and a touch of chlorine. The whole place was pervaded with a nearly sub-audible vibration of machines going about their business.

  Then there were the cylinders.

  On the floor, lined up in a vast array, stood row upon seemingly endless row of huge, vertical cylinders, and these seemed to be the source of the incessant vibration. On the side of each cylinder, about seven feet up, there was circular, glass porthole. Below that were gauges and digital readouts. Even farther down, at the level of the smooth cement floor, a narrow clear tube emerged from the base of each cylinder.

  What the hell was this place?

  Corrie shook herself out of her daze, remembering that if she got caught sneaking around this off-limits part of the facility, it would mean game-over for her story.

  She took a deep inhale of the strangely perfumed air and scanned the sprawling, warehouse-like space again.

  Despite the vast number of thrumming machines filling this place, there were very few actual human workers. Corrie noticed a single technician in a white lab coat in the distance. The man had not spotted her yet. He was too busy making his way down one of the aisles as he checked the electronic readouts of the machines.

  Before the technician had a chance to notice her, Corrie ducked down one of the rows to get a closer look at the cylinders. Once she was reasonably sure she was safe, she took a moment to catch her breath.

  She picked a cylinder at random, the one that happened to be nearest, and stepped closer.

  First she checked the screens and dials set into the side of the cylinder. Most of the information was totally indecipherable to her, but one screen was instantly recognizable, and it caused her breath to catch in her throat.

  It was a heart-rate monitor. The green blip pattern tracing over the screen was unmistakable.

  Ever so slowly, Corrie found her eyes drifting upward to that round glass porthole. What she saw there made her heart start to gallop.

  Slowly and repeatedly, the glass fogged with the steady cadence of living breath.

  Someone was inside that thing.

  “No way,” Corrie murmured to herself.

  Corrie’s mind was a whirlwind of disjointed thoughts and emotions, and at the forefront was an electric thrill of excitement that prickled her skin with goosebumps and raised the small hairs on the nape of her neck. It was the old familiar sensation that she had not experienced in far too long. The rush of knowing that she had gotten her hands on a major story.

  She was going to pull back the curtain on a scandal so big that its reverberations would be felt across the entire galaxy.

  This would be the story that would put her back in her rightful place at the very pinnacle of her field. Hell, this would be even bigger than her sex-trafficking exposé.

  But that excitement was quickly soured by a pulse of nausea.

  There was a human being in there.

  And it wasn’t just one human being. There were hundreds of them in this facility. Thousands perhaps. All around her stood never-ending rows of other identical cylinders, and this was only one of several hundred such facilities scattered across the surface of the planet.

  What the hell was wrong with her? People were suffering here, human captives, and all she could think about were the accolades she would receive for her journalistic prowess.

  Corrie felt an overwhelming wave of shame about her selfish impulse.

  Still, she needed to figure out what the hell was going on in this terrible place, one way or another. Why the hell was the Galen Group keeping human beings stashed away in tin cans like this? How did it tie into Juvanis? Were they using these poor people as guinea pigs for experiments or something? That had to be it.

  Corrie was startled out of this jumble of thoughts by a sudden gurgling sound down near her feet. It reminded her of the sound of those unpleasant suction tubes that dentists use when they vacuum the spit out of your mouth.

  She looked down at the clear tube emerging from the base of the cylinder. Flowing through the tube was a large quantity of pale, pearly fluid, similar to the stuff contained in Juvanis gel caps. Her eyes followed the tube, which snaked along the floor until it joined with others to form an even larger tube about the size of a garden hose, which in turn joined with yet others until it formed a large clear pipe.

  And every part of this network was flowing with that off-white, viscous fluid.

  “No way,” Corrie whispered again.

  Her eyes returned to that porthole on the cylinder. The dark interior of the glass fogged with the pulse of another breath. And another.

  She had to see. She had to look inside.

  First she tried standing on tip-toe, but the small window was too high up. But a little height difference wasn’t going to stop the most intrepid investigative journalist in the galaxy.

  Placing her foot carefully onto one of the monitors and gripping a metal conduit running down the side of the cylinder, Corrie managed to drag herself up until her face was lined up with the circle of glass.

  It took her brain a few second
s to catch up with what her eyes were seeing.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  There on the other side of the glass was a man. His eyes were shut, but Corrie could make out the agitated movement of the eyeballs beneath the closed lids, signalling REM sleep. The man was dreaming.

  Only this was no ordinary man. He was a giant. His head was enormous, and his bone structure had a terrifyingly beautiful quality to it, sculptural and feral at the same time. Below, she could just see the thick slabs on muscles forming his shoulders and the top of his chest.

  But the strangest part was his skin.

  It was blue. Dark blue, verging on black. The color of dark slate.

  At first she thought it was some trick of the light, but soon she realized it was not. His skin was dark blue. Not bluish, but literally blue.

  This was no man at all.

  This was an alien.

  “Hey, you there!”

  The voice echoing from the end of the row made Corrie’s heart leap into her throat. It was one of the white-coated technicians, perhaps the one she had seen before, and he was racing down the aisle toward her with an infuriated scowl on his face.

  “Get down from there!” the man shouted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You can’t be in here!”

  Startled, Corrie started to lose her footing.

  “Careful you fool!” The technician was sprinting toward her now, his shoes clapping on the hard floor. “Watch out you idiot, don’t—“

  Corrie’s foot slipped, and she felt a lever move under her heel. There was a sudden rush of air, and the entire front of the cylinder swung open, sending Corrie tumbling to the floor where she landed hard on her butt.

  “Oh Jesus!” the technician cried. “Oh Jesus, what have you done?”

  The man was wide-eyed with terror. His soles squeaked on the smooth concrete as he skidded to a stop, wheeled around, and starting sprinting away in the opposite direction.

  Corrie looked up at the open cylinder.

  A cloud of white steam exuded from the open chamber, and after a moment, when the fog cleared, Corrie saw the sleeping alien creature in full. Moving of their own accord, her eyes slowly took the specimen in.

  What she hadn’t been able to see before, due to the angle of the glass porthole, was that the alien had a pair of ridged horns sprouting from his forehead.

  God, he looked just like a sleeping demon standing over her.

  Corrie’s gaze traveled down the broad expanse of the creature’s thick, striated chest muscles, down the chiseled symmetry of its abdomen, and down the deeply carved V that terminated between its legs.

  But the creature was not nude as expected—not completely anyway.

  Its phallus was encased in a clear tube. The device resembled a teat cup from the milking machines used on dairy farms, only this tube wasn’t milking a cow’s teat.

  It was milking a massive alien cock.

  As Corrie watched, the creature’s large, smooth testicles tightened against its body, the encased cock bucked, and a pulse of pale fluid spurted into the device only to be slurped away by the narrower plastic tube which was the same one she had noticed emerging from the bottom of the cylinder before.

  Corrie gasped aloud as the pieces started falling into place in her mind.

  Juvanis, the most popular and profitable drug in the known universe, was made from alien semen.

  Above her, the dark blue alien’s nostrils flared wide as he inhaled deeply. He snuffled the air like a hound catching a scent. When Corrie realized what the creature was smelling, her blood ran cold.

  He was smelling her.

  Those dark blue eyelids cracked open, revealing a slit of glowing green. Gradually those eyes opened wider. There were no pupils. No irises. Just solid, terrifying orbs of pale green light.

  Corrie recognized those eyes immediately. She didn’t know how it was possible, but there was no mistaking it.

  They were the glowing green eyes from her dreams.

  The alien’s lip peeled back in a snarl, flashing snow-white fangs.

  Another, even more startling realization clenched Corrie’s gut. According to the official story, the worker that she had replaced had been mauled by an animal.

  Now Corrie knew beyond a doubt what animal had done it.

  The man must have been attacked when one of these aliens escaped its cylinder.

  And the same thing was about to happen to her.

  Corrie tried to scramble to her feet, her breath coming in ragged gasps and her heart hammering in her chest. But it was useless. The alien creature exploded out of the cylinder with lightning speed, pouncing on her and pinning her helpless body to the floor beneath its impossibly strong muscles. Her arms ached within the beast’s crushing grip.

  Corrie knew she was going to die.

  “Oh God, please...” she whimpered.

  Tears streaked down her temples. She started to hiccup and felt like she was about two seconds away from wetting herself.

  But the creature didn’t attack. It didn’t rend her to pieces with its vice-like hands and razor sharp fangs.

  Instead, the alien buried its face against her neck and inhaled deeply. Those hard, deadly horns brushed Corrie’s face. The beast reared back with a roar that echoed through the sprawling chamber, the blood-curdling sound bouncing between the rows of cylinders.

  “Please,” Corrie begged.

  She dared not fight back. She dared not even struggle. That would only serve to piss the creature off even more. Her only hope now was that someone would save her. The technician who had fled would surely alert security.

  But if they didn’t get here soon, there wouldn’t be anything left of her to save.

  The alien dipped its head and looked between its legs where the suction device was still encasing its erection. With a grunt of annoyance, it reached down and tore the tube away, casting it aside and exposing its hard, pulsating member ribbed with strange, inhuman ridges and thick, winding veins. A residue of sticky fluid spilled onto the front of Corrie’s pants.

  “Veellazz...”

  The alien’s voice seemed to rumble straight into Corrie’s center, and for a moment she stopped squirming, transfixed by the strange, vibrational sensation. Her eyes locked with the glowing orbs staring down at her with terrifying intensity. The creature kneed her thighs open and settled himself between her legs, pressing his long, textured erection against Corrie’s spread crotch. She could feel the intense heat of his member through her pants, and the steady throb of its pulse.

  The creature rocked its hips, humping Corrie’s crotch.

  “Veellaaazz,” the beast hissed again. Its hot breath stirred Corrie’s short hair.

  “No,” she whimpered. “Please, I—“

  What happened next took a matter of seconds. It was only later, after the moment had passed, that Corrie was able to process it all.

  First, there was a deafening blast from the end of the aisle. Instantaneously, one of the beast’s horns exploded into shards, leaving only a broken stump.

  Another blast immediately followed, and something impacted at the alien creature’s side, tearing the flesh down to the muscle and bone and sending a spray of magenta blood over the floor.

  The alien let out another curdling bellow, a sound born more of rage than of pain. The weight pressing down on Corrie’s body disappeared as the creature leapt away, not fleeing from its attackers but rushing toward them. It raced down the aisle in the direction of the blast, which had come from a cadre of armed guards.

  As the creature charged them, the guards opened fire again, a deafening salvo of shots followed immediately after by a series of screams—human screams.

  The creature tore through the group of men with ease and disappeared around the corner with frightening agility. There was a crash, more screams, and then...nothing.

  In the ensuing calm following the brief whirlwind of chaos and violence, Corrie suddenly became intensely aware of the quieter sounds aro
und her. The ragged in-and-out of her shallow breathing. The low, nearly subaudible hum of the machines. The incessant slurping of the plastic tubes carrying away the never-ending supply of alien seed from the innumerable cylinders and the other sleeping aliens contained within.

  She just lay their panting and dazed. Her crotch was still warm from where the creature had pressed its naked and aroused member against her.

  To her dismay, Corrie realized she was wet. Not from the fluid the alien had spilled on her clothes. Sure, there was that too. But she was also wet down below, inside her panties. Beneath the uncomfortable girdle strapping down her breasts, her nipples ached with pebbled hardness.

  “Oh God,” she groaned.

  There was a clamor of boots drumming against the hard concrete floor as the remaining guards rushed toward her. In the background, at least two of the men lay sprawled on the floor in a slowly widening pool of blood.

  Corrie’s eyes went to the approaching guards weapons.

  Shotguns.

  Corrie had done a bit of shooting in her day. Mostly clay pigeons. She knew that at the distance from which the guards had fired, it would have been almost impossible to control the spread of their shot. They had missed hitting her out of sheer dumb luck.

  These guys hadn’t come here to save her.

  The guard at the front of the pack came to a stop and pumped his shotgun, sending a red plastic casing clattering to the floor. He swung the weapon up, and Corrie found herself staring straight down the 12-gauge barrel. It was a circle of darkness as black as the void of space.

  “Don’t fucking move,” the guard snarled.

  CHAPTER 5

  The grotto was not completely dark. It was softly illuminated by the bioluminescent fungi clinging to the cool, slick stone walls. It was a strange and beautiful assortment of scalloped mushrooms, fan-like structures, and larger, branching corals, all of them emitting a gentle, multicolored glow.

  It was just enough light for Vorne to go about his work.

  The stone walls of the dim grotto echoed with the rhythm of the sharpening. The fine-grained whetstone slid against the steel blade with a metallic whisper as Vorne honed his weapon to a razor-sharp edge. After a while, the scraping almost seemed like a chanting voice—a cold, malevolent incantation. The only other noise was the sound of dripping water reverberating deep within the warren of caverns below.