Invasion

The weird thing, the worrying thing, was how little that thought bothered her. When she’d thought about it, the rare occasions before her capture that she had thought about it, she hadn’t expected to survive more than a week of captivity. As a sterile female, she had thought that it was likely – and would have happened in the Unification Wars – that she would have been treated as a honorary male and simply executed, along with the remainder of any male prisoners. It was true that in some cases, male prisoners would be enslaved, but they tended not to last very long if cut off from the possibility of reproduction. They could – and sometimes had – go for years without having children, if producing children was actually possible, but if they were prevented from meeting and courting females, despair overcame them and they just drifted away.

A female, on the other hand, would be treated differently. As a possible source of new children, any normal female would be accepted into the enemy clan…and treated as a mixture of junior wife and prisoner. She would become one of the enemy clan, expected to forget her old clan and become one of them, in heart and soul. Accepted into the comforting warmth and safety of a clan, treated with respect by the other females, thoughts of escape and the old clan quickly vanished, becoming nothing more than memories. Femala had read somewhere, when she had been studying biology in the hopes that she could escape the fate she had been condemned to, that their own biochemistry played a role in their submission and subversion. They literally brainwashed themselves into becoming one of the enemy.

The research hadn’t interested her as much as machines and the way they went together, but she remembered enough of it to understand the reason why. Human females, it seemed, couldn’t pick and choose their mates. Any human male strong enough could force himself upon them and into them, forcing the poor woman to bear his child, regardless of her opinion. It had happened, several times, in the occupied zone and the High Priest had been contemplating ordering a death sentence for the human male responsible, once he had been able to wrap his head around the concept. The idea was literally alien to the Takaina; Femala, like all females, couldn’t have sex unless she wanted to have sex, which was part of the reason why her biochemistry would push her into the enemy clan. Any male who tried to force himself on her would be unable to force his way into her…and even if he did, he couldn’t get her pregnant. When her condition was discovered, as it would have been pretty quickly, she would have been classed as useless and, if she was lucky, killed.

But she was becoming more…human.

The humans hadn’t treated her badly and hadn’t cared that she was sterile, although there was no logical reason for them to care, unless they wanted to breed more Takaina. Instead, they’d treated her well and given her plenty of books to read, although no access to their computers. She couldn’t blame them for that, even though it was much harder to use a computer for hacking and sabotage than most people believed, but…they had so many! Perhaps there were so many computers on their world that hacking was commonplace, while on the Guiding Star there were only a few hundred who really knew how computers worked and how to use them for their own purposes. It was an odd way of doing things, but studying the human race through the eyes of an engineer made her wonder just what the final outcome of it all would be.

And the warriors!

She’d expected – as had they – that they would simply be killed. Instead, they had been brought into the human clan, as she was coming to think of it. It was an odd clan, but one she was starting to associate herself with, and so was Fallon. The female researcher into humanity was rapidly becoming one of her own test subjects, something that was even moderating her attitude to Femala. She’d scorned the sterile female on the shuttle, but now they were almost friends, although there would always be that barrier between them. Fallon had the attention of all of the warriors, and probably always would, unless more females arrived and joined the clan…and she studied humans. She believed that the humans meant what they said when they’d offered to treat them well, and, in many ways, she had almost gone completely over to them. She couldn’t fight her own biology, while Femala, who had been brought up in a society where she was worthless, was on the verge of joining her. She almost welcomed the sight of new and different humans…