Alpha Centauri Amazons - Chapter 3
By Jan Vincent (2002)
Dwelling of the guilty party: jan123@hotmail.com As always, comments are welcome!
THREE
"Is this the room?"
"Yes," Linda said as her eyes adapted to the dim light coming from a large cylindrical container lying at the center of the room. The container was made of a glass-like translucent material, unlike the solid, steely "caskets" where Hades had imprisoned them and kept them unaware of the slaughter of the human race. Before Lisa was able to see the contents of the cylinder, Linda guessed the surprised look on the blonde woman's face.
"There's someone inside."
"Yes, I know. Mandy thinks that's the real Hades."
Lisa's brows rose slightly; her stare studied the human-like lying body. Linda accompanied Lisa's gaze on the foreign figure -- a gangly midget with shut eyelids, furrowed gray skin, voluminous skull bones, a lip-less cleft for a mouth, and two nostrils covered by a thin transparent membrane atop an otherwise nonexistent nose. His plainness was palliated by luscious strands of strawberry blond hair which hid most of his ample forehead and emaciated shoulders.
"He's weird."
"We don't know if that's a 'he'," Lisa said, still staring at the gray figure. "For all we know, he can be a 'she'."
"You think he... she is alive?"
"I know as much as you. Maybe he is Hades. Probably Mandy's been right all along... Maybe we've been lied to from day one. Hades' story stinks." Lisa looked around but failed to see where the other women were. "Where are they?" she asked, facing Linda.
"The room next door." Instead of walking to the only entrance of the room, Linda ambled to the wall and went through it effortlessly. Their new ability of passing through walls was slowly sinking in; still, Lisa remained where she was until the initial shock dwindled away and she regained her breath.
"Ah, there you are," said Mandy, as she saw Lisa coming through the skin-like wall. "Perhaps you can explain all this to me."
Lisa studied the heavy book Mandy was holding open. She peeked at its cover and read, 'Human Gametogenesis and Fertilization'.
"Where did you get this?"
"Just look around." Mandy made a circular motion with her head, indicating that the darkened room where they were was filled with similar scientific literature. "This guy Hades was really into studying our weaknesses. Books about virology, biology, anatomy, you name it."
"And according to you, human fertilization is also one of our weaknesses?"
Mandy saw a shadow of mischievousness appearing on Lisa's full lips. She chuckled. "Well, when you really want to fuck someone, more often than not, you can't think. All that matters is to get him... or her... in the sack, and fuck them their brains out."
Her? Lisa appraised Mandy carefully, wondering whether the Australian reporter was playing a veiled word game with her.
"Well, in our case, fucking another girl wouldn't make us any good. As far as I know human fertilization can only be accomplished between a man and a woman."
"Not according to these notes," said Sandra, joining Lisa and Mandy, showing them an old notebook written half in English, half in an undecipherable alphabet. "This guy was studying a way of a girl impregnating another girl. Look. Look at these drawings. And here... These needles... and here..."
With utter skepticism Lisa skimmed through the notes Sandra had found. At first she thought the erratic scribble filling pages and pages of yellowed paper was just another product of Hades' insanity. However, a few passages made her heart jump. A chill ran through her spine when she realized that notebook contained a detailed description of a biochemical and medical procedure called 'Female-Female Fertilization' or 'FFF'. And it was certainly no coincidence that her PhD was about the study of the signal transduction pathways involved in the fertilization of the human oocyte. Hades had it all planned. But why? Another chill sped down her spine. Nothing seemed to make sense...
Grimly Lisa raised her eyes and faced Mandy. "Well, it seemed that your theory about Hades wanting us to be his lovers is not correct at all. I don't know what he wants to do with us, but apparently this sick bastard wants us to get each other pregnant."
"What?" Mandy said, grinning. "Without fucking? No fun and then 'bam', you're pregnant?"
"I think fucking to have kids is probably a thing of the past," Lisa stated thoughtfully, ignoring Mandy's repartee. "Now, it seems, that every girl's dream has come true. You can fuck your brains out, as you say, until you drop dead without any fear of getting pregnant. You will only get knocked up if you really want to."
"But how?" Sandra asked, with bafflement in her vivid green eyes.
"Like you said, it involves needles... This sick bastard planned everything very well... He knew that when women live among other women their menstrual cycles become synchronized. This means our fertility peaks will coincide in a matter of months. Apparently he developed a 'smart' needle that will automatically search for mature oocytes when they are released from the ovary into the uterus. Inside this needle the oocytes will be modified with enzymes that will dissolve their outer layers and promote cell fusion. It will also stimulate..."
"Wait a minute," Mandy said, frowning and shaking her head. "Not so fast. Oocyte? What's that?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot you're not a biologist. Oocyte is the correct term for an 'unfertilized egg'."
"Okay, so basically what you're saying is that this guy REALLY developed a method of 'in vitro' fertilization for women only, the very dream of feminists and dykes alike. You must be JOKING!"
"I am not," Lisa affirmed. "He apparently resolved the problem of the incompatibility between the fusion of two female haploid genomes. Previous experiments trying to fuse two oocytes have failed miserably. This kind of research is nothing new in my field."
"What? You mean you were doing this 'unnatural things', too?"
The three women turned to Linda, who had remained silent and forgotten at a dark corner of the room until then.
"No, I was not doing that, but I read a few articles describing similar experiments. The goal was never to develop such a procedure. The goal was to study what was the molecular basis for human fertilization, so that we could provide new ways to cure infertility among couples. That's a big difference."
"But why would he want to do that?" asked Sandra. "I mean... If he was a woman, I could understand that. But a man... researching that... and make himself dispensable, that makes no sense."
"I don't know. Maybe his daughter was a lesbian and he wanted to help her. Maybe he just liked lesbians... Maybe he's just a misogynist with a very twisted sense of humor, who devised a diabolic plan to punish humankind by sparing two hundred attractive young women from doomsday and turning them into lesbians... Stranger things have happened."
The governing triumvirate decided to withhold the new facts from the rest of the women on the ship. What Hades had done to them and the rest of the humankind was already sinister enough. To reveal how twisted Hades really was would only cause more unrest among them. Linda Wells was a headstrong teenager, but apparently she was willing to keep quiet about that disturbing insight into the future Hades and his alien 'forefathers' had reserved for them.
"The ship's moving!" someone screamed. "The ship's moving!"
Lisa awoke and yawned. Slowly her eyes focused on the glowing skin-like gray wall. It seemed as though they lived in the bowels of a living entity and they were parasites, living off what 'she' chose to give them. Those little machines that dispensed all kinds of food and drink... in the cafeteria... at the pressing of a button. It was all very disturbing.
There was a commotion in the hall. People were running and yelling, as if panic had broken out. Lisa sat up on her bed, the drowsiness refusing to leave her body, despite the signals of danger coming from the other side of the door. She stumbled out of the room and found a deserted hall. She trudged to where the unusual din came from: the second level meeting room. Around thirty women in their pajamas, sweat-wear, or T-shirts were huddled together near the sizable porthole of the room where she had been chosen as one of the triumviri. Some of the younger ones fought for their turn at the porthole, but fearful curiosity was stronger than good manners.
"What's this? What happened?"
The women turned around and saw a half asleep Lisa Wells in her Smiley T-shirt and panties.
"The ship has left Earth's orbit," said a woman with a pony tail of long pitch black hair. She had the build and the bone structure of a ballerina, and the maturity of waiting for her chance of seeing what was going on outside that porthole instead of pushing and shoving her way through.
"Let me see that." Lisa yawned as the women let her pass and peek through the porthole. In spite of her apparent neutrality, Lisa felt dizzy with the news. If true that meant the abduction was going to be consummated and there was probably no turning back. With reluctance Lisa had to conclude the pitch black-haired woman with a German accent was right. Planet Earth was now a small blue dot on the starry landscape -- it would soon disappear from view as the ship accelerated away from the Sun.
"We're fucked. We're FUCKED!"
Lisa searched for the person who had voiced out loud exactly how she felt. And, of all people, it was Sandy Bates, the model waif teenager who had exchanged a few punches with the dreadlock-loving Nordic beauty Kirsten Johanssen in that infamous cafeteria brawl.
"Ah, there you are. We've been looking for you all over the ship."
"I know," Sandy huffed with a pouting grimace. "But who cares? We're fucked and nothing you're gonna say will matter anyway."
"Yes, you're right. We're fucked. This guy has not blinked once before he slaughtered humankind. I don't know what he wants to do with us, but it is not going to be pretty, I presume."
"Well, I don't think they were going to kills us," said the woman with the German accent, her big blue eyes and her pale skin being attractively set off by the dark color of her hair.
"Why do you say that?" Lisa asked.
"They want us alive, but I don't know for what purpose. I don't know why they chose to spare women only, but probably this is a kind of experiment they are conducting."
"And we're the guinea pigs, right?"
"Yes, that's right," said the woman, who, despite herself and the seriousness of the matter, laughed at Lisa's characterization of the ship's shanghaied crew. "By the way, I am Paula. Paula Schaefer. I'm from Koeln, Germany."
Lisa smiled. "And you're a dancer, right?"
"Yes, I am," Paula said, surprise and amusement widening her attentive eyes. "How did you know? Well, I am not a really a professional dancer, but I do dance in my spare time."
"So, what do you do for a living?" Lisa wanted to know. The obvious intelligence of her interlocutor impelled her to know more about the German woman.
"I work at the Max Planck Institute in Koeln. I work with plants. Arabidopsis... I am an investigator."
"It seems as though we're colleagues. I'm Lisa Wells. Used to work in Harvard... I was doing my PhD, when all this happened."
They shook hands, Paula observing Lisa with interest, which made the American woman experience some awkwardness. The loose fitting T-shirt she was wearing, with a huge yellow Smiley on it, became suddenly too flimsy to preclude Paula's probing stare, which lingered on Lisa's breasts and the junction of her legs a fraction of a second too long to avoid suspicion. An alarm bell rang in the back of Lisa's mind when she felt her own arousal building between her legs, caused by a subtle close inspection from an interesting female. Queer was that, Lisa decided, oblivious to the pun.
"Sorry, I gotta go," she announced. "I must find Sandra and ask her whether she knows where we're headed."
"We're headed for Alpha Centauri," Sandra stated, as the greenish holographic projection in front of her eyes became brighter. She had lost a few days trying to figure out how to break in the ship's computer, an unusual machine with no obvious keyboard. Like an organic being, it had to be mentally coaxed into doing what she wanted. It was amazing she could communicate with a machine telepathically.
"Alpha Centauri, what's that?"
Sandra cast a fleeting glance over her shoulder to meet the skeptic scowl of the Australian redhead, then she willed the projection of the Alpha Centauri stellar system on the holographic screen. Three bright spots materialized before their eyes. "Alpha Centauri is the group of stars closest to the Sun. This yellow star is Alpha Centauri A, which looks a lot like our Sun... This is Alpha Centauri B, which is a little smaller and a little redder than Alpha Centauri A. A and B revolve around each other every eighty years and form what is called a binary system. Then there is Proxima Centauri, a tiny red star, the third star of this stellar system, and the closest to the Solar System. When I was with NASA I learned that if there were any group of stars where life could have evolved that would be Alpha Centauri."
"You were with NASA?" Lisa asked, unable to hide her surprise.
"Yes, I was. But not for long."
"Why?" Mandy asked, sitting down and tearing her eyes off the 3D screen displaying the triple star system to study the green-eyed Canadian blonde, her hair twisted into a dozen of braids that fell down her back.
"I was not fit enough to be an astronaut, I was told."
"Not fit enough? Ha! If only they could see you now."
Sandra laughed quietly at Mandy's remark, zooming in the image of Alpha Centauri A, so similar to the Sun, although slightly brighter and larger than the solar star. "Actually, there were a few personal problems involved... but that's nothing I want to talk about... now."
"When do you think we'll arrive there?" Lisa asked.
Sandra sighed and said, "I don't know. Apparently this computer does not understand my concept of time and speed. Talking to this computer is like talking to a nervous stallion. Sometimes he does what he's told, sometimes he just neighs as if I hadn't said a thing."
Hades is probably censoring what we are allowed to know," Lisa concluded with a musing expression. She sighed as well, leaving the bridge. She thought of the second level and willed herself to be taken down there by the magenta sparkles. With resolve she walked down the hall of her quarters, already picturing how she would summon up Hades and interrogate him about his plans. Before she was able to penetrate the door of her room, she heard some giggling followed by some moaning. Lisa began the diapedesis-like process, when the giggling turned into embarrassed laughter and the moaning turned into slurping sounds.
Curious she walked to the source of the noises, a room three doors down her own. It was Karin van der Veld's room, a Dutch girl from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, an athletic blonde who used to play field hockey. Lisa heard some kissing sounds coming through the other side of the membrane, followed by some excited moaning. It was obvious a couple was making out in there. And that was funny. Karin didn't strike her as someone who would lust after another girl... But then again, the situation they were in was far from normal.
Suddenly Lisa felt a tap on her shoulder and involuntarily she let out a squeak of surprise.
"Mandy!" she exclaimed, turning to the grinning redhead. "Don't you ever do that."
"Do what? I just wanted to ask you why you were here. This is not your room."
"I know."
"Then?" Mandy's grin became wider, her hands on the hips, waiting for an answer.
"I got myself lost."
"You did, didn't you?" Lisa blushed. The Aussie young woman didn't seem impressed by her obvious lie.
"Yes, I did."
"All right, I believe you... Although I could've sworn you were eavesdropping on the love birds."
"Love birds?"
"Yeah, everybody knows that Karin van der Veld and Kirsten Johanssen hit it off with each other from day one. It's seems the Dutch and the Danish have a lot in common."
"Karin and Kirsten?!"
Mandy laughed, thoroughly amused by her friend's surprise. She recoiled a bit when two faces emerged on the room's door and the two lovers set foot on the hall. A moment of embarrassment came over Lisa and Karin, whereas Mandy and Kirsten exchanged self-assured smiles with each other.
"By the way," began Kirsten, "I'm not Danish. I'm Norwegian. There's a big difference."
"I'll bet."
The Norwegian woman chortled, then took Karin's hand. The two blondes left hand in hand, two elegant female figures wearing jeans and cream turtlenecks.
"Hmm, there goes a beautiful pair. I wouldn't mind some smooching right now."
Lisa was able to discern some lust in Mandy's eyes, as the Aussie observed the female couple ambling away, giggling and holding each other's waists.
"Well, not with me," Lisa said, assaulted by a vague feeling of disgust. "It's seems that Hades' plan is working."
"You mean... to turn us into lesbians, so that we can impregnate each other and start a new civilization based on girl power. Is that it?"
"You don't have to be so sarcastic with me," said Lisa, making a half turn.
Mandy followed her very annoyed companion closely behind. "Well, Miss Spice Girl, that's your theory, innit?"
Lisa stopped and faced her hounding persecutor. "Yes. Or does Miss Nicole Kidman have a better theory?"
Mandy pulled up a big smile. Twirling some locks of reddish hair, and with mock innocence, she blinked her eyes and asked, "Do you really think I look like her?"
"Ohhh!" Lisa growled, her hands curled into claws. "You're impossible, Mandy. You..." She closed her eyes and hurled herself into the door of her room. She settled herself on the bed, praying for Mandy to leave.
"May I come in?"
"No. Just go. And leave me alone."
"Okay, Captain. If you say so."
Lisa sighed as she heard Mandy step away. She pulled her hair up and then let it fall over her shoulders. The courage to invoke Hades faltered. She felt too emotionally drained. Her fears were ominously becoming reality. First, Kirsten and Karin, two beautiful women, who no way in hell would be a lesbian couple if there were any men left... and... Mandy... and her out-of-place lust...
Hades had to be behind all this. He had to be.