When I had reawakened from a sleep that I had earlier assumed to be caused by my natural nightly needs, I found myself strapped down in a new, darker environment. The walls were a dull black but two large windows that may have not been symmetrical, still let early afternoon sunlight stream in, letting me observe my squalid surroundings. A doctor stood by the bottom of my feet, looking over a silver covered notebook, ever occasionally glancing up at me, then hastily looking away as if he would have his eyes ripped out for daring to meet my estranged eyes. My clothing had-to my great relief-been changed into a powder blue pair of pants and a long sleeved shirt. Although it wasn't the fashion style I was used to, it suited me much better than the pale strips of clothing I had been given earlier. Heavy bonds crisscrossed over my stomach and arms, which prohibited bodily movement, but allowed me to look around more than when I was in the bright room.
Suddenly, off to my right, a heavy iron door opened, and Lydecker strode in, hands shoved deeply in his pockets. "All right, let's get to-" and as his eyes saw me, lying there on the table, he stopped, choked off by shock. "What the hell happened to her?"
The doctor closed the notebook, letting it click shut with an irritated noise. "Her genetic makeup's bad."
"How in the world does her genetic makeup associate with such abnormal amounts of hair?"
Apparently, Lydecker had just seen me looking the way that I did when I didn't shave. The cat hair, now a reasonable long length of a good inch or so, covered my entire body-everything from eyelids to the tips of my toes-allowing only my eyes to be uncovered with its suffocating power.
"We did some DNA tests on her," the doctor replied, handing the silver notebook to Lydecker. "Looks like she's got an excess of feline DNA in her which contributes to the hair."
Roughly, Lydecker took the portfolio from the man, but didn't look at it. Angrily, he snorted. "What about the other X5s we've bred? None of their offspring had this kind of hair."
"The other X10s, I believe, were all created out of successful-natural-copulation. This one, though," the doctor said with a nod of his head towards me, "she was artificially inseminated and therefore altered before being implanted in 452."
Lydecker chewed on the corner of his lip. "I don't like my soldiers having this kind of hair though. Disgraceful. We'll have to do something about it because, otherwise, she'd have to shave it, and I'm not going to give her a razor."
"She's smart, and will naturally rebel."
"Too smart. Apparently, somebody trained her rather well when she was a child…You know who her parents are-don't you?"
The doctor nodded his shrew little head in affirmation. "Yes. 452 and 599. The X5s, that is."
"Precisely, which is all the more reason that I have to have her work with me."
"Psychoactives?" the doctor asked, arching a thin eyebrow. There were heavy bags under his eyes, indicating that he hadn't had much sleep in the past few days, and his hands quivered as they stroked his mostly bald head.
"Yes," Lydecker replied and turned away from him, coming closer to me. He smelled of Dad; obviously they had been in contact only moments before Lydecker had come to see me.
Dad. Despite the fact I had usually only seen him less than once a month, my separation of one week had been almost unbearable. Briefly, I wondered what had been done with his watch after I was captured. My thoughts were interrupted by the doctor who continued talking with Lydecker as if I wasn't even there.
"I wouldn't recommend it. She's been on a thin diet of simple glucose-barely enough to stay alive-and has been in captivity for approximately 170 hours. Psychoactives will send her body into shock, possibly killing her."
"Apparently," Lydecker responded more vehemently with fire in his eyes, "you didn't hear me earlier: She has the genetic making to be one of the most powerful soldiers. I can't get another one like her if she turns against Manticore again."
"The X7s. You do have X7-599 and X7-452-"
"And they're afflicted with Progeria and are dying rapidly as we speak."
"452 was fine a week ago-"
"Like I said, they're both dying…damn disease sets in and they're gone. I can maybe salvage another couple embryos off of the both of them before they die. All I've got left is X10-416-who I can still use-X5-599 and X5-452 and her," Lydecker said, motioning to me.
"What about her parents? Why not get another child from them instead of risk your chances of killing this one?"
"I've got backup embryos of 452 and 599's in the lab downstairs that'll be transferred to a surrogate mother later on. But I don't have another eighteen years to waste on training new soldiers."
My mind whirled, and, had I contained anything in my stomach, I probably would've thrown it up right then and there. Mom and Dad were being treated like nothing but animals used for breeding stock, and I was being viewed as the perfect soldier for Lydecker's asinine army. And, whatever psychoactives were, they didn't sound good.
The doctor sighed, raising a thick syringe in the air, and tapped it gently on the side before inserting it into my arm, and injecting me with the acid. Liquid fire burned through my flesh with unimaginable pain, causing such agony that my entire body clenched, preventing me from breathing. I groaned in the back of my throat, twisting my wrists to the best of my ability, and shook on the metal table. Finally, a dull sensation spread over me, and my body went lax.
Leaning over me, the doctor adjusted some metal clips to spread my eyelids apart, then fixated the bright laser through my eye so that the torture would be just right. Right. Shit…It was Hell. I wanted so badly so fight back, but the idea of actually moving my being seemed far, far away and out of my clutches. The laser burned, and I tried my best to ignore it as I heard the voice of Lydecker speaking to me.
"Work with me, Alanza, and all of this will be over. I'll give you food. A place to sleep. Warm clothing." His voice was so warm and flowing, that I would have jumped right into his arms and said, "Take me, 'Deck, I'm yours" but words wouldn't come to me. Fortunately, though, he continued talking, "You can save the world. Stop the petty wars that kill innocent people every day. Just help me."
Gently, he lifted away the vocal restraint, and, for the first time that I would have been able to speak, I didn't. Lydecker looked down at me with seemingly sad eyes. "What do you say, Alanza? See your family? See James again?"
But, just as he had finished the word "again", a large globule of my putrid saliva hit him directly in the left eye. Saliva, which I had been slowly saving since the beginning of his manipulation with me, and stunk of morning breath because it had been collected in the very back of my throat from my first minute at Manticore.
Bellowing, Lydecker swung a wide right arm and knocked the laser off my pupil, allowing me to see more freely than before. "I want her gone!" he cried to the alarmed doctor. "I want her shipped out on the next convoy of X10s!"
The doctor looked up, pursing his lips, a quivering pen raised to write down the orders Lydecker had given him. "Where to?"
Breathing in hissed gasps, Lydecker struggled to bring his newfound rage under control. Finally, he rested one hand on his hip and with the other, wiped the spit out of his eye. After all, to lose your temper was to lose control, thus showing your victim that you indeed could be pliable and able to bend for their needs. "Base 23. She'll do good their with the discipline system they've installed."
"All right," the doctor whispered, "I'll be sure to get her out as soon as I can."
Just before Lydecker turned to me, we met furious eyes. "If you think you've beaten me, don't even consider it." And with one mighty swing of his aged arm, the door slammed closed, leaving me, once again more alone then ever, but filled with the awesome sensation that I had infuriated the always cool and confident colonel.
