A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [125]
Now Ildiran guards and laborers, each wearing their respective kith uniforms, drove carts to accompany the human crew out to the excavation sites. These kiths had been bred to do work, and it did not occur to them that the breeder captives might not wish to spend their days being productive to help the Dobro Designate.
Wistfully, Nira said quietly to no one in particular, “Some of the most acrobatic young people on Theroc are trained as treedancers. They leap from the branches and pirouette in the air, bouncing from one bough to another.” She smiled as she remembered the performances, the breathtaking vaults and fingertip pivots. “The trees help them with their agility; no one ever falls.”
Beside her, a middle-aged woman continued chopping at the dirt and prying embedded rocks loose, unimpressed. Nira sighed, but continued talking. Around her, though the captives seemed to pay no attention, she knew they were listening. What else did they have to occupy their minds?
The supervisors directed the human workers into deep arroyos where weather had exposed ancient strata and valuable pearly fossils. Nira used a hand tool to chip away the powdery sandstone. This arroyo was an ancient graveyard of twisted shellfish, beautiful mollusks, and calcified anemone-things. Fossilized opalbones and iridescent skeletons were polished and cut into highly prized ornaments, the primary product of Dobro…other than misbred genetic horrors.
Nira chipped at the rock and finally removed a perfect corkscrew shell that retained the feathery tentacles of the creature that had once lived within. With sore fingers, she used an abrasive brush to clean the fossil. It was beautiful, sparkling in the sunlight. This mysterious creature had been trapped until the forces of nature preserved it, turned the thing to stone.
But Nira had freed it now, after millions of years. She placed the prize in the nearest bin and wondered if she and the other human breeders would ever be broken free, like this treasure.
When Nira’s work crew returned to camp, they were rinsed off under a needle-sharp high-pressure spray of cold water. Nira stepped away, dripping and naked—unable to avoid the probing eyes of the medical kithmen, who tested each fertile woman every three days.
The luxury of modesty had been forgotten over the course of generations in captivity. The breeder humans displayed a variety of features, dark or milky or freckled skins, but the green priest from Theroc always attracted their attention. Nira felt no shame for her body, only resignation about what the captors would do to her next.
On strict orders from the Dobro Designate, Nira was to remain pregnant as often as possible for the continued experiments. None of the other human captives had proved so “interesting.” Now medical kithmen took her by the arm, and Nira’s heart pounded in her chest. She staggered after them into the camp’s medical facilities.
The first several times, years ago, Nira had struggled and kicked and fought, resisting what they intended to do to her. She had thrown herself at the doctors, trying to strangle them or use her nails to claw out their eyes. But it had served no purpose. The guards easily wrestled her away, and the medical kithmen strapped her down and performed their tests anyway; as punishment, they had locked her in the darkness for a week. Later, when she had comforted herself by tending plants and shrubs around the camp barracks, they found they could hurt her by uprooting her prizes and leaving them trampled in the dirt.
She had decided to find other ways to fight back.
Now, inside the harshly lit medical facility, the Ildiran doctors drew her blood, took scrapings of her tissues, probed inside to verify the condition of her uterus. They spoke to each other but never to Nira, other than to issue gruff instructions. By now, she knew what to do, regardless of how much she hated it.