A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [15]
For weeks, Nira had shuddered in dank darkness, suffering further as she went through physical withdrawal from the sunlight. Normally, under Ildira’s dazzling sunshine, her photosynthetic skin delivered life energy every minute. Trapped in darkness, however, her metabolism and digestive system had to readjust themselves. Nira had to learn to eat again, to digest normal food. She became extremely ill, weak, but refused to surrender, keeping her heart and her strength.
In the end, the Designate had released Nira from the darkness so he could perform analyses and benchmark measurements on her. His lean and handsome face was similar to Jora’h‘s, but devoid of compassion. His eyes were sparkling and hot, intent on what he might discover about her biology. After studying the test results, he had looked at her first with accusation, then with delight. “You are pregnant! Jora’h’s offspring?”
Rather than throwing her into the breeding barracks or putting her on labor crews like the other human prisoners, the Designate and his medical kithmen had tended her with meticulous devotion, taking regular blood samples, making painful and repetitive scans. Nursing her, studying her, making certain she maintained her health, for their purposes.
Nira, though, kept her strength and sanity for her own reasons.
The labor and birth of her first daughter had progressed normally. Through bleary eyes in the delivery lab, Nira had watched as the Dobro Designate looked wolfishly at the squalling little girl, as if ready to dissect his brother’s child. The baby mixed the bloodlines of a telepathic green priest and the noble Prime Designate. Udru’h had named the girl according to the phonetic traditions of Ildiran kiths, Osira’h, but Nira simply thought of the girl as her Princess, a secret hope from all the storybooks she had read aloud to the curious worldtrees.
As was the custom among the breeding-camp prisoners, the Designate let Nira keep the baby girl for six months, breast-feeding her, nurturing her so that she remained strong. She had grown to love the child, to care for her. Then the Designate had taken the infant girl away. All successful half-breed specimens were separated from their mothers.
But Designate Udru’h had something very important in mind for Osira’h. My Princess.
Afterward, Nira’s real nightmare had begun.
From then on, no matter how much she fought or prayed, the Designate kept her constantly pregnant, experimenting with different fathers. Each defeat drove her down, yet she refused to wither and die. She was like a blade of grass in the forest, bent underfoot and battered by heavy rains only to spring back. In her youth, she had never conceived of such torture, yet she withstood it, learned to send her mind to a kinder place until it was safe to return.
The alien sperm donors did not hate her. They were only following the Designate’s instructions. They were part of an overall plan, to which none of them knew the details. And neither did she.
But unlike Osira’h, her subsequent bastard children had not been conceived out of love. She despised the forced mating sessions, and Nira tried not to grow attached to her half-breed boys and girls. But she had nursed them, held them, studied their features…and her determined attempts at coldness hadn’t worked. She could not reject these innocents simply because their fathers had been ordered to rape her until she conceived again.
Her own children…though she could never keep them. As before, the medical kithmen had snatched the infants away to raise them in the adjacent Ildiran city, under their own testing and training regimen.
Soon, they would consider Nira recovered enough to be reassigned to a work crew, to toughen her. Once her fertility had reached its peak again, the guards would drag her back into the breeding barracks, and the forced-impregnation cycle would begin all over again. Four times already…
Now, as Dobro’s orange sun lowered toward murky clouds on the horizon, she left her fresh, trimmed bushes in the small garden and went to look for