Title: Domesticus Part II - Selecting
Authors: HopeofDawn, fractalserpent, Femme4jack
Rating: R
Fandom: Movieverse - Dark AU
Characters & Relationships: Mikaela Banes/Raoul, Vortex/Raoul, Robert Epps, Brawl, Swindle
Content: References to rape, anal plug, injection, torture and sexual slavery (not explicit in this version, explicit on Ao3), cussing, human flirtation, groping and massage
Notes: Part 1 of Domesticus was removed from ff dot net by the administrators due to violation of terms of service This part complies with the TOS, but has been edited to do so. To read the chapter in its entirety, or to read part 1, please see the posting on Ao3 - the link is on my profile. Please no comments complaining about removal - ff dot net is completely within their rights to enforce their TOS.
This will be the last chapter of this story I post here as I do not have time to do this sort of editing. If you like the series, please follow it on Ao3 where it doesn't violate the TOS. Comments and kudos may be left there without an account. Thanks!
Homo sapiens domesticus: selecting.
Classification among human stock is typically determined before shipping. The highest grade of humans should be roughly a quarter vorn old, in good general health, and thoroughly trained to service. Presold humans are typically marked with the glyph of their patron Tower; other humans are usually auctioned. [Link to auction dates and times in your sector.]
The vividly lit facility was impossible to miss from where Mikaela hid in the lakeshore brush. The complex was almost garishly bright, radiating a diffuse glow that dimmed the stars above. Once the grid had gone down, only the richest enclaves had lights at night. That hadn't changed much even after the aliens had arrived with their promises of aid and trade; none of the tech seemed to make it to the masses who scraped by outside of those guarded enclaves.
These buildings looked like nothing she'd seen in any city before the collapse, nor in the glimpses of the enclaves after. Their distinctly alien nature was obvious in their dimensions, but even more so in the unexpected angles and curves. It was almost like a honeycomb - what she remembered of a honeycomb, anyway. It'd been a long time since she'd seen one.
But she had seen a honeycomb, once- her gradeschool'd had a window hive, back before the droughts and the oil wars and the genejump. She remembered. Not like all the young kids these days, too little when the pollinators vanished to even recall what bees were like, what honey was like.
There was a rumor that the aliens were promising a self-replicating artificial pollinator to replace the painstaking work of hand pollinating flowers, fruit trees and berry bushes. But then, there were always rumors - promises of new wonders, of solutions without cost. Maybe this time the rumors were true. And maybe people just needed something to believe in.
"Ready, Mik?" Epps whispered.
Mikaela took one more long look at the target. The chances that her dad was inside was slim-to-none, but at least they might finally find out what was going on there. If nothing else, the coldly practical part of her brain reminded her, there'd be all kinds of tech, well-worth appropriating. "Let's take a swim," she said, pulling the hood of her black wetsuit over her close-cropped hair and then the stolen alien-tech over her nose. She swallowed hard against the gag reflex as the thing shifted, adapting itself to the shape of her face and nose, slipping nozzles into her airways and sealing tight. Breathing felt strange with the thing on; it vibrated slightly with each exhalation, a tickling sensation. Alien tech didn't care much about human comfort, but at least the damned things worked.
Beside her, Epps sneezed quietly, shook his head. Mikaela cast him a crooked grin. Together, they slipped into the cold water. They ducked under, took deep breaths - and sank beneath the lapping surface, leaving not a ripple in their wake.
As with most of the aliens' other scattered training facilities, getting in was harder than getting out. Compared to the long, cold swim, accessing the logistics and shipping center of the sprawling complex was childsplay, once wetsuits were hidden and stolen jumpsuits pulled on.
At this hour of the night, the shipping center was deserted. Warehouses were warehouses, no matter what species built them, Mikaela reflected, as she worked silently with Epps. Goods to be taken offplanet by the aliens were stacked in huge crates, all the way to the ceiling - waxes, fabric, wood, and metals. A smaller area contained foodstuffs and other materials for this training center. And another large area, where Mikaela focussed, was filled with huge shipping containers of tech for the enclaves and supplies for the regional training facilities.
A saboteur, once she knew the system, could swap or reprogram tagging labels and destinations, could send tech on long, unguarded trips across the country, while transferring crates full of useless wax and powdery alien paint stuff to the enclaves.
Mikaela knew the system.
She finished attaching the last of her tagging devices to the crates of tech, now relabeled. Within each was a small fortune in weaponry, spare parts, machining tools, solar panels, sensor devices, rainfall generators, and all the other tech that never made it to the people. With a little luck, these crates would be shipped via poorly-guarded overground convoy to the Denver training facility, up winding mountain roads... past a multitude of good ambush points. When the communities caught this tagging device signal, they'd know exactly which convoys to attack.
Epps nodded in satisfaction, cast one last look around the loading area. If the ambush crews managed to capture even half of this, it would be the best take the Resistance had ever managed. And if they didn't... at least the shipping delays would annoy the hell outta the enclaves. "I think that does it," he whispered, turning to head back out to the lakewall.
Mikaela shook her head. "You know I can't go. Not until I find out what happened to him."
The corner of Epps's mouth turned up. "Yeah, figured it was gonna be something like that."
Mikaela stiffened. "Aim to stop me?" she said, weight shifting forward. Epps had seen five years in the Air Force, had four inches on her and outweighed her by eighty pounds. She'd have a hard time taking him, and a harder time doing it quietly.
Epps snorted. "Don't aim to do nothin', except go in with you and make sure you get out. You really think I'd let you do this alone, girl?"
Mikaela's eyes narrowed. "This better not be some sort of misplaced chivalry."
Epps tapped at the jumpsuit she wore, right over the aliens' symbol - a stern mechanical face, with something like tear tracks running from eye to jawline. "Admit it. You like having me around."
"Only for that cute ass of yours." Well, that and the pockets. Epps had an uncanny talent for happening to have just the right thing at just the right time. Mikaela growled in mock warning. "Fine. Just don't get in my way."
Epps held up his hands placatingly. "Whatever you say, Chief. Where you planning to look first?"
Mikaela drew a deep breath. "Remember Mike's theory? That they gotta be drugging the volunteers? I wanna test it, find some of the stuff they feed the recruits, maybe figure out how they're making the food." The food blocks didn't even seem to exist outside these central facilities - the regional ones fed the volunteers well, but it was all earth food. Food block production was a tech the aliens had never shared with even the enclaves, let alone the scattered masses. It could solve the food crisis, for all Mikaela knew. "And... I need to find out where they send people - names, manifests, coordinates, communications, anything." The thought of it made her clench her fists. Nobody knew what happened to any of the volunteers, once the cargo ships took off. No one wrote letters or called home, nobody sent so much as a fucking passenger pigeon back. It was like they were dead, and for all Mikaela or anyone else knew, they actually were.
Her dad hadn't even been a volunteer. He'd been "recruited" as a detailing trainer. The credits had been faithfully deposited in the account held at the commissary just outside one of the enclaves for close to a year, and then abruptly they'd stopped. The regional center to which he'd been drafted claimed to have no record of his ever having been there, and made it very clear that she should quit inquiring if she valued her skin.
Epps nodded, slowly. "I should be able to get closer to the shuttle loading zone than you. Worse comes to worst, I can pull the same trick we did back at Key Largo."
Mikaela smiled crookedly. Peel off the jumpsuit, act like a volunteer, and you could go pretty much anywhere within the gated walls. Try too hard to act like a volunteer or let the human staff get a good look at you, and it was pathetically easy to get yourself thrown out of the training facility. Crazies were always trying to get into these places.
But the only volunteers here were male, and security was tighter. Mikaela would never be able to pass as one of the star-bound.
She glanced at her oddly alien-looking watch, stolen from the same facility where they'd gotten the jumpsuits. "Let's meet back here in twelve hours. If one of us can't make it back then, check in at six hour intervals. But don't stay longer than forty-eight, Epps, even if I don't show."
Epps nodded. "Same goes for you, Chief. Watch your back."
From the inside, the complex was even larger. Human-sized portions had been built into alien-sized rooms and hallways. Unlike at the regional facilities, none of the alien-sized doors opened for her, leaving Mikaela to take long and winding routes through human access corridors. Only one other team of Resistance fighters had ever made it out of this complex with any relevant information, and so she had only the vaguest idea of where she ought to be headed. Some crossroads were marked with bizarre alien words or designs or whatever, all indecipherable.
A chance glimpse of an electrically-powered and self-steered cart, burdened with a block of the foodstuff almost a yard tall and wide, turned Mikaela's attention away from the human zones. She felt like a mouse, scuttling along hallways at least thirty five feet tall, and likely twice that wide. From the scuffs on the flooring, the aliens came this way frequently.
And evidently, they stood around in the corridor as well. Mikaela rounded a sharp corner, and jolted back from the biggest freaking alien she'd ever seen, heart hammering in her throat. A stifled squeak of indrawn air escaped before she could stop it-and that angular, inhuman head turned, snake-quick, red 'eyes' irising down into scarlet pinpricks as they spotted her.
"What the-what have we here?" Chrome-steel fingers caught at her, easily circumventing her reflective flinch, and seized her around the waist, lifting her upwards in a dizzying rush. She clung desperately, trying to stifle her terror; each of those fingers was as thick as her leg, a massive bundle of taut cables and shifting parts, capped in a jaggedly barbed talon nearly as long as her forearm. Those claws, however, were the very least of the alien's weaponry. She spotted the mounts for what looked like cannons, folded back behind those complicated shoulder-parts. More cylinder-shaped mountings that hard earned experience told her were likely hidden artillery were visible along the lower arm-sections as well-and now were pointing directly at her as she dangled from the thing's grip.
The robot was squat, broad and massively built, with a low-slung head set between two loops of heavy, black-steel tank tread. It regarded Mikaela with what looked like bafflement, and as ridiculous as it was to apply human stereotypes to mechanical aliens about a thousand times their size, she couldn't help it- the alien just *looked* like a thug.
Training, she'd been training for this - the volunteers were stupid, were sheep, were docile and simple. Mikaela forced her fists down. "Uh, sorry," she called to the thing, and needed no acting to put the waver in her voice. It was a fucking long way down from here. "I... I got lost."
"Yeah, I can see that," it said, its tone almost... amused. "This ain't a safe sector for curious little monkeys. They might go squish." The alien raised the individual plates of its combat-green armor in a rippling, shrug-like motion, as if flicking something away from it.
Mikaela took a deep breath, hoping the monster didn't have some way of sensing if she was lying. Surely her terror would be considered normal in this circumstance, and not a sign of deception. "Please... I... I have no idea how I got here. They sent me to get a box out of storage and I must have taken a wrong turn. Can you tell me how to get back to food service?"
The alien made a sound a great deal like a snort, and hissed a... word? in its language. Perhaps it was a phrase - something with six rapid clicks, threaded through a popping crackle, with a shrill whine at the end. Mikaela had heard it before, from other aliens. She could have sworn the alien held her a bit away from itself, almost squeamishly, and then it stalked off in the direction from which she had come.
Being carried by something this big was an experience Mikaela hoped never to repeat. The tall walls seemed to rush by, bouncing sickeningly with each jouncing step. The alien wasn't loud, exactly, but each step still hissed with the industrial sound of moving gears and working pistons, and each footfall vibrated through her like thunder as the alien carried her through a dizzying array of giant-sized corridors and doorways. She dug her fingers into the unyielding metal of the monster's hand, trying to slow the hammering of her heart-could it hear that too? Would it even care if it did?
Another turn, and the corridor ended in a human-sized set of double doors, with more of the alien engravings over them. The robot stopped, its movements inhumanly abrupt, and dumped Mikaela ungraciously upon the floor, its hand swooping down with stomach-lurching speed. "Here's where you belong," the thing said. "Here. Stay. Got it?" It pointed a barbed metal finger at her, as if she were a stray dog, and Mikaela had to fight back a hysterical giggle. Instead she nodded dumbly, and the thing seemed satisfied with that. "Good. You get found again where you ain't supposed to be, next time we won't be so nice." The monster straightened. "Get inside," it ordered, pointing at the door.
"Um-yessir," Mikaela said, hoping against hope that's what the aliens wanted to be called, then did what she was told, slipping inside. Against all odds, she'd gotten this far-now she just needed to find out what else the aliens were hiding.
Mikaela kept her head down, and continued to run the quietly humming sweeper over the floor, trying to watch the volunteers out of the corner of her eye. They were boisterous, excited. The spongy-looking cubes they ate set them apart from support staff and training instructors alike, who ate at the other end of the refectory. They joked about how tasteless it was, about how none of them had crapped in over a week, like it was something to be proud of.
It meant they were destined for the stars. Heroes. "Like that Captain fucking Kirk my mom used to write porn about," one of them joked.
If any were afraid or had any qualms about what was coming, they didn't show it.
One of them noticed her, elbowed his companion, then walked straight toward her. "Well hello there, chica," he purred, hips canted forward suggestively. The effects of his last four months of training were particularly obvious up close like this. He'd been depilated, was hairless from the nose down. He'd also been well fed, and had developed a corded musculature, especially across the shoulders and arms. Smoother skin made his cock and his muscles seem to stand out more. Kept nude after the first few weeks, he was a warm caramel all over, without a hint of a tan line. "I got an hour, you got an hour - let me show you how very, very good I've become with massage." He gestured in a way that could have illustrated either kneading or a caress.
Mikaela leaned against the sweeper and gave the volunteer a calculated, slightly bored look. This... could be an opportunity to find out more than they ever had before, since volunteers never seemed to leave the program - not past the first week or two, and rarely enough even then. But how far was she willing to take that, with this full-of-himself starboy? No matter how nice his biceps were, she'd sworn off this type after the whole mess with Trent.
Not to mention that it wasn't like birth control or condoms were easy to come by. She tried to avoid that kind of contact with men altogether. She didn't need a baby to take care of on top of her work in the resistance and just staying fed. Who wanted to bring a child into this kind of world, anyhow?
"I'm not made of metal, in case you hadn't noticed," she said, pointedly looking him up and down. "Your technique might be off."
The volunteer raised his eyebrows, then he was sauntering around her. He put both his hands pointedly on her shoulders, and with practiced motions proceeded to show her exactly how good he was. He leaned in with a sultry whisper, his lips right on her ear, "I'm part of group 114 - shipping out at o'dark hundred. Why don't you let this astronaut give you a taste of heaven, babe. I'm temporarily sterile and a hundred percent disease free. They made sure of that."
"Hmm... maybe. I like to get to know a guy first. I don't even know your name, and it's not like you can buy me a drink here."
"Name's Raoul, chica. How 'bout you sit with me and I'll rub your shoulders all nice like," he purred, moving his full body closer to her back so she could feel his heat through her jumpsuit. "I'll even give you half my cube. It may not taste like much, but it makes you feel real good inside. Then we'll go back to my room and I'll make you feel even better."
Mikaela made a point of pretending to look around for her supervisor, debating. Then she shrugged. "You can rub my back, starboy. I'm not promising anything more than that." She let him grab her hand and pull her back over to the table where a couple of the other volunteers were sitting on benches. He pulled up a second bench and sat behind her, his muscular thighs straddling her lewdly. With one hand, he began kneading her shoulder, while the other reached around her to tear off a hunk of the cube and bring it to her mouth.
It reminded her of a soft version of a rice cake she had tried as a kid, back when stuff like that was still manufactured. But even more tasteless. Spongy though, like the angel food cake she had once made her dad for his birthday. Because she was his little angel, and he didn't need any encouragement in the devil department back then. It sort of melted in her mouth even as she swallowed it.
"So. Temporarily sterile?" Mikaela asked. She braced her elbows on the table as Raoul's fingers found a knot, just under her shoulder blade, and smoothed it away with probing care. He worked away the soreness and started on the tension in her neck, next.
"Hn," Raoul pressed his lips to her ear, like he was telling a secret. "Guess you've been working here, and wouldn't know. Ran us through some kinda ray back at the other facility, before they put men and women together. Just before we got to work on our first mech."
"S'posed to wear off by the time we leave," pointed out one of Raoul's companions.
"You tryin' to harsh my buzz, baboso?" Raoul demanded, turning quickly back to Mikaela. "Ignore that cabron, chica. He is as stupid as the dog. Knows nothing. One of the mechs dropped him on his head. Now, where were we?"
"Mechs?" Mikaela asked with a crooked grin, hard-pressed to keep from groaning. His hands were, Mikaela had to admit, both very strong and very knowledgeable. Soft, too, strangely. Must be all the wax and oils the volunteers worked with.
"Mech. The robots. Like us to call 'em that," Raoul said easily, moving to her shoulders. He'd been right - the food, whatever it was, made her stomach feel comfortably warm. It left the shadow of an aftertaste, as well, something like the way she remembered cinnamon tasting, and made her teeth feel very smooth. The stuff could well be drugged. She took the next chunk from Raoul with her own hand and nibbled it. Under the guise of reaching beside her to rub a thumb along the inside of Raoul's thigh, she palmed the rest into the pocket of her jumpsuit.
Raoul put his nose against the back of her neck and inhaled. Mikaela swallowed hard. "So, why exactly do they make you guys go naked?" she asked quickly. "Seems like with all those points and edges on them, you'd want some protection."
"They're actually pretty careful with us. If you know what you can step on and what you can't, it's pretty safe," shrugged one of Raoul's companions. "Jake here slipped and fell right offa one," added another of the volunteers, making a grasping gesture in the air. "It caught him just like that. Lotta bumps and scrapes, but nothing bad. Don't think clothes woulda helped."
"Ain't much soap and no washing staff in space, chica," purred Raoul, spreading his legs a little more. He nuzzled the short hair on the back of Mikaela's neck, and then kissed the skin below her hairline with warm, soft lips, flicking his tongue out to taste her. "Unless maybe you wanna come with us, yeah?"
Or not. "Kinda doubt I could pass as one of you. The mechs - what's their whole thing with the hair?" After going through the trouble of removing all the rest of the volunteers' hair, why not their eyebrows and what was on top as well?
Raoul shrugged, digging knuckles into the small of her back in a way that made Mikaela want to melt. "Reduces shedding, I think. They don't like it when organic stuff gets into cracks."
"Heard that they made the group before us just totally bald," said one of the other volunteers at the table, waggling his eyebrows. "Eyelashes and all."
That made Raoul laugh, a velvety sound, open and carefree. "How did the mechs tell 'em apart? They have a hard enough time figuring out which of *us* is which." His hands began to wander from Mikaela's back to her chest.
"Easy there, spaceboy," said Mikaela, catching at his wrists, squeezing until he returned them to her back. She softened her tone. "Tell me more about where you're going. Any idea?"
Raoul grinned. "Well, chica, I'll tell you what they told us..."
Mikaela spent the rest of the morning exploring the human sector, searching for alternate routes and little-used passages, sweeper ready in hand in case she should be stopped or questioned. She'd gone on enough ambushes with the Resistance to know when something big was in the works - probably the offworld departure of Raoul and the other volunteers. If she could figure out where they were going, where they were going to gather, perhaps she might have a better chance at getting down that hallway to the place the blocks of food came from. Despite her planning, Mikaela was still caught unprepared when the lights came on in the empty hangar she'd been exploring. She had time only to duck back into the shadows behind a sinister-looking metal wire enclosure - apparently with no door - when the volunteers began filing in.
Laughing, they broke into groups of twenty, filing onto five raised platforms near the center of the room. Murmuring among each other, interested and alert, the volunteers peered around, waiting until everyone had taken their places.
And then Epps walked past her.
He'd stripped off his stolen jumpsuit, and was shaven close enough in anticipation of this mission to pass casual inspection. He smiled, chatted pleasantly with the volunteers near him, doing as they did. He was good at acting like he knew what he was doing.
Fuck. What *was* he doing? This section of volunteers was due to leave - not till this evening, but... fuck. There were risks, and then there were *risks*, and this one fell on the far side of that line.
Mikaela leaned out as far as she dared, trying to catch Epps's eye. If he got off the platform now, he might be able to make it to her shadowed corner. The other recruits might see, but... something felt very, very wrong to her.
Then, just as Epps's gaze met hers... clear walls of energy rose up around each little platform of volunteers. Around ten feet wide, long, and tall, the enclosures were quite crowded. The volunteers seemed not to mind. Inside the cage, Epps put his hand to the energy wall. It crackled a little, but did not let him through.
And then the mech-sized door irised open, and two of the aliens walked in. A hush fell over the volunteers.
Both aliens had made themselves look more human, less monstrous, than the green thug-alien from before. The yellow and purple one was smaller and more compact - though Mikaela never thought she'd be calling a twenty-foot-tall robot 'small'. It carried deep-treaded wheels on its shoulders, and the spread doors on its back looked like something torn from a jeep or small military vehicle. It had taken a lot of trouble with the segments of its face, to judge by the range of its expressions as it 'conversed' with the other one. Something about the alien seemed... slimy to Mikaela, seemed fickle and too smooth, like a politician's grin.
The other one was nearly as tall as the thug-alien, but far more slender in its build. It wore the folded rotor blades of a helicopter down its back in a rattling bundle. Minor portions of its frame were painted the same bright purple and fluorescent yellow as the smaller alien, but most of its surface was a dull, flat gray that seemed somehow sinister. Gunmetal gray, maybe.
The rotor-alien seemed bored, uninterested in any of the proceedings. It hung back while the purple-colored alien paced around the cluster of energy-walled platforms and the crowded, expectant volunteers within, inspecting them. When the purple alien emitted squealing chatter for several seconds, the gray alien lifted its rotor blades briefly in something like a shrug in response, a gesture which seemed to anger the purple one, leading to still more electronic chitter-yowling.
Finally, with another insolent shrug, the rotor-alien walked forward and reached into the first of the boxes of volunteers. Those energy walls, ten feet tall, were laughably short compared to the alien, hardly coming to its waist. The humans within were knee-high. The volunteers, by now quite accustomed to handling, seemed unworried - one even stepped forward with a cocky swagger. 'Look at me. I'm not scared of any fucking giant aliens.'
Raoul, Mikaela realized. The one from the mess hall, who had shared his... food block.
The gray alien caught him around the middle, lifted him up to the height of its crimson-glowing eyes - what Mikaela presumed were its eyes, anyway, for they were as mechanical as the rest of the thing. Raoul wriggled a little, but smiled openly with that cocky grin, worked one hand free to wave a little at the alien. The thing's eyes irised down to pinpoints, and it spat a modem-line of code at the other one. Then it turned to an alien-sized table at the far end of the room, where the purple alien joined it.
The table was too tall to see what was going on. Most of the volunteers, Mikaela figured, wouldn't be able to see, either - the setup made the hair at the back of her neck stand on end. Spider-senses tingling, Mikaela looked around, spotted one of the many ladders evidently installed for human convenience. Climbing it would take her out of the deepest part of the shadows, but...
Her dad might have been where these volunteers were now. Fuck. She had to know.
Leaving her sweeper behind, Mikaela climbed.
She'd just reached a metal catwalk that spanned one side of the warehouse when a sharp, metallic crackle rippled through the hangar space, followed by Raoul's shocked cry.
The sharpness of the sound nearly unbalanced her, silenced the rest of the huge room. As anticipated, she had an unobstructed view from this angle.
[section removed to comply with ff dot net terms of service. For full chapter, see posting on Ao3. Link is found on the top of my profile]
Raoul clutched at his abdomen when the alien released him, and those terrible sharp claws seized his ankle, instead. The monster handled him like a piece of meat, dragging him closer and onto his side, and then its whole hand closed over his lower leg, like it wanted to pick him up by that limb. Instead, Raoul cried out again, flinching and kicking. The alien released him a moment later, and Raoul jerked his arms and legs in, trying to curl into a tight ball - but not before Mikaela spotted a small mark, one of the aliens' words scrawled in stark black on the caramel skin of his ankle. A tattoo? Jesus, how had the thing - and just with its hand!
The purple and yellow alien nodded, squealed something that sounded like a box of parts tumbling off a high shelf. The rotor-alien gave Raoul no time to recover - simply scooped him up and deposited him in the smaller of two big steel shipping crates. The two aliens exchanged a few more yowling words... and then each of them walked back to the cages of other humans, reached in, and selected a new subject.
And the process began all over again, this time in stereo.
Not all of the volunteers were tattooed, or forced to come into the tube. But all of them were electrically stimulated once, spilling over the steel of their captor's hand. All of them were injected. And all of them were impaled with a plug. Around a quarter were treated like Raoul, first milked into that sucking tube, and then injected and plugged, and finally tattooed. They all were placed into the separate, smaller box.
Only two of the men, the lucky ones, went into the wire cage on the floor - not a shipping crate at all, just an open-topped and doorless pen made of razorwire. They alone were not injected, were not raped.
Oh God. Epps was down there. Mikaela clenched her fists, nails going white.
The purple alien plucked Epps out of the force-shielded pen a few minutes later. Mikaela gasped, going limp with relief when Epps was placed in the razorwire pen fairly quickly into his testing, saving him from whatever fate awaited the others. She tuned out the rest of the screams, the sobbing pleas and wild cries that were some mixture of agony and horrible pleasure, focussing instead on the layout of the room, possible escape routes. She had to get Epps out of there. She had laser wire cutters among her tools. Moving carefully, quietly, she headed back towards the ladder.
Suddenly her attention came crashing back to the sinister looking gray mech. It turned and made more of the hissing, buzzing noises at another mech who had just walked in - the greenish one that had intercepted Mikaela in her search for the foodblock device. It should have seemed smaller from her perch on the walkway - it didn't. The perspective just made more of its weapons visible. The thing was a walking tank, unbelievably massive. From this angle, the crests on its shoulders looked like they did double duty as rocket launchers, each loaded with a missile as big as her leg. She hadn't seen the monster's extra blades when it had grabbed her that first time - not just the claws on its fingers, which were already evil-looking enough, but a set of blades attached to one of its arm weapons, each of the curved silver sabers taller than her whole body. The thug-alien said something in reply, full of clicks and lower-resonance buzzes. Then it lifted its arm, as if to point at the razor-wire pen of humans, though its fingers were clenched in a fist. One of the strange-looking guns on its arm hissed, metal pieces spinning, the long tube emitting a cold green glow.
"Hey you!" Mikaela screamed at the top of her lungs, before sanity could overtake her desperation. "Green and ugly! What the hell you think you're doing?!"
All three mechs, and every other human in sight, turned and looked straight up at her.
Well, fuck.