Chapter 5
“What the fuck are you doing?” the female Overseer shrieked in broken French, bracing her hands against the cockpit’s roof, her hair floating upward from the freefall.
A hundred and two souls trapped in a plummet, the vessel Georges attempted to fly, lurching, shuddering, nose tilting toward the ocean in a sudden downdraft. The horizon failed, blinding sun pitched, the ship’s tail thrown high.
Red lights strobed. Alarms screaming even louder than the terrified women in the hull.
White-knuckling the ship’s yoke, adrenaline burned through the Beta’s veins. His mouth tasted of glue, the exact flavor of the acrid sealant used to seal solar plates. A terrible, horrible, ugly taste.
Worst of all, years on Beta suppressants, he’d never had to feel anything close to terror.
Now, every tremor, the unbearable, bone-deep vibration of dread, helplessness as he pulled on a yoke…
visceral… fighting to redirect a vessel pushed past its flight tolerances and not break it apart in the sky.
He’d tried to explain to the Alpha, Maryanne, why it was unwise to fly so fast. Why the females in the hold were too many. Packed too tight. The weight distribution incorrect.
And though it seemed she understood all he said in his soft-spoken explanation, her clipped, broken response made it clear her ability to speak his language was deeply lacking.
And when he told her it wasn’t possible, she snarled at him.
She wasn’t asking.
This was an order.
He now reported to her.
A woman practically vibrating with a need to get out of Greth Dome as quickly as possible. Ordering him to board the old ship and demanding he take off before he’d had time to orient himself with the controls.
Females jammed into the cargo hold like sardines. No sitting room. No safety restraints. No toilet. Complaining while even more bodies were shoved in as the cargo doors started to close.
From waking to take off, all in a window of twenty minutes.
And a rude awakening it had been. Georges tossing in the sweaty, broken-sleep withdrawal had blessed him with. Followers urgently telling him that he had to move now. No need to dress. No food, no water, no chance to do more than throw on his glasses and follow in his pajamas.
They had given him good boots.
And then he’d been introduced to his new Overseer, Maryanne Cauley. A tall, striking woman who’d eyed him like she knew what he’d done. Like she could see right through his nervous fidgeting with his frames.
She had been curt, yet touched him a great deal. Literally handling him onto the ship as she spoke in piecemeal French orders he half understood—fly the plane as fast as possible to Bernard Dome. There would be no return flight. No extra fuel.
To fail would be to die.
But if he might impress her with the skill she had heard so much about, Maryanne tempted him with the one thing he wanted most. The opportunity to protect Brenya.
Who would be violated and possibly murdered if Georges failed.
He did not know the details or why he’d been summoned. But… that word. That one ugly word. Maryanne had pronounced it flawlessly. His guilt all over his face.
Violer.
Rape.
Because she knew what he’d done to another blonde female. How he had not been able to stop himself. How the shame was eating him up from the inside.
He’d only even flown a ship once before… a different, much smaller vessel than this. He was no expert, might intuit the controls, but did not understand the ship’s nuances or fail-safes. And when he’d tried to take the time to learn, Maryanne had barked at him to take off.
He’d obeyed, strapped into the captain’s chair, and maneuvered the ship out of the Dome well enough that she had been overly confident in his abilities to pilot such a massive cargo vessel.
The vessel plummeting toward the sea as every gauge before him jittered, needles dancing. Metal groaning, the cockpit rattling like it might pop apart and suck them into the atmosphere.
A ship that might be centuries old, maybe even older than the Domes… and packed to the gills with more sweet-smelling pretty blondes.
Who were screaming…
His hands began to shake, the shrieks of another woman’s frantic begging invading his ears, his thoughts, his body.
He got hard.
Felt hiccupping sobs. Tears running down his face.
That one, the one he’d raped, she had not spoken much French either, but Spanish. High and breaking. The words similar enough to equate to meaning, different enough to be alien and awful.
She’d begged him to help her, and he’d fucked her, forced her legs apart, and was inside her before he understood what he was doing.
He was a monster.
His grip faltered as the wailing in the hull blurred into his worst memory. That smell—female, sweet. Heat crept up his neck. Shame. Cock throbbing, leaking, pointing at the sky in his loose pajama bottoms as the nose of the plane pointed toward the sea.
His stomach clenched, he climaxed, shivered in revulsion as he felt female sexual fluids on his skin that were not there… as if that crying, begging woman was with him and he was inside her again. Drowning him in soft, squeezing heat, scratching at his back in desperation.
How hard she had cried.
“I’m trying!” Said just as he had spoken it all those weeks ago. He had tried to get off of her. He had tried to get out of that room. But instead, he had raped her. Over and over and over.
For days…
The cockpit tilted to the left, alarms howling, the Overseer, the angry woman, slapping his face, shaking him, fitting a breathing apparatus over his mouth.
Clean air forced its way into his chest. A deep, sucking breath that reoriented his twitching brain.
And the pocket of air that tossed the ship around vanished on that inhale, the jerk upward almost as violent as the freefall. Georges panting, sucking down sterile air, sip after sip, until he realized he wasn’t flying the ship.
She was.
And the Alpha female reeked of fear, her own mouth covered with a breathing apparatus as she dared glance away from the windscreen to ask, “Comme ca? I hold it like this?”
The yoke?
Gods, his penis hurt. Testicles swelling, a cry of agony caught in the breathing apparatus.
“I don’t know how to fly an aircraft!” she yelled. Yet the Alpha female was trying, though sending the ship in too sharp an ascent. “Georges! Snap out. Maintenant! Wake up!”
He could not feel his hands. Glasses long since having fallen from his face. Cockpit a blur, he swallowed air, heard the damning screams from the cargo hold, and ever so slowly began to realize where he was.
He couldn’t fly. Not yet. Still, he reached out with numb fingers and adjusted Maryanne’s grip on the yoke. Guided her to steady the ship, rocking in his seat.
The whole thing came and went in a blink of time… yet it had felt like an eternity. The hell he had earned.
Maryanne had brown eyes. Doe eyes. Eyes that knew his every secret. Yet now, his Overseer, the Alpha who spoke terrible French, looked at him like she… felt concern.
Even her broken French was soft, even in its judgment.
“Bo?te, Georges. You make a box, oui? Everything in your head, put it inside. Shove it down, lock it tight, so far you cannot touch it anymore. You forget it exists. Comprends? There is no temps for anything else. No room for… feelings. Not now. Seulement maintenant. Do you hear me?” Stumbling over her words, as if she too had her own shame, she added with an uncomfortable, harried, “Unit 512XT, do you understand me?”
And that did it. That simple recognition, that reminder, of who he had always been. The job he had to do. “I’m not your tech. I’m Unit 17C’s tech. Brenya’s tech. And I am going back home to save her.”
“Oui, that’s right,” the woman agreed, a stiff nod of her chin. The narrowing of her eyes as she watched the horizon. “She needs you. She needs you to keep it together. To help her. Comprends?”
It wasn’t instant, how his brain slowly turned back on. But the shakes stopped, his breath deepened, and he was able to reach for the fluttering yoke before him and relieve the frightened woman of a job she had no training in. “I apologize. I did not account for potential vertical wind shear.”
He leveled out the ship, assuring a safe and steady ascent to make up for lost altitude, and did exactly what Maryanne had ordered—he shoved his feelings deep, deep down. “We should reach our destination in two hours.”
“No. You make it one hour.” There was determination in this woman, a desperation Georges could not account for.
“Push ship harder. Must go faster. We need Bernard Dome maintenant. You can do.” She swallowed, eyes flashing guilt before she forced it down.
“There are drugs… if you need. In the black bag. Just enough to get you through. I need you… operational.”
“Pharmaceuticals?” Georges would never touch them, not that he wasn’t salivating at the thought. He didn’t deserve oblivion. He deserved to feel every last trace of guilt. “Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind, ma’am.”
Again, he pushed the ship too hard, the next thirty minutes leaving the cockpit rattling through turbulence while Maryanne outlined the next stages of the plan, her fluency improving marginally with practice.
Confidence, she pulled it around her like a blanket, apparently shoving her own feelings into a box, until she was cocky, flippant… desperate.
The second downdraft they hit sent them plummeting again, and together they corrected the ship, the female even making a joke as if she were now used to the violence of the wind. “Fun, eh?”
She adapted. She lied.
She pretended her box of feelings didn’t have any cracks.
It did. The breathing apparatus might have filtered out the scent of her fear, but he saw the sweat at her temples. The whites of her eyes.
And then her loud sigh of relief as the glittering shine of Bernard Dome came into view.
The final minutes of approach, her exhilaration failed, and her hands began to shake, until it was she who reached for a drug, digging through one of the black bags until her hand found a premeasured syringe of something blue that she jammed right into the meat of her leg.
Her spine straightened, her pupils dilating, as she reached for another, and then she stuck a needle into the meat of his thigh, shooting chemicals into him before he might refuse.
The effect was instant.
These were not Beta rations, but a stimulant that drove away fear, pain, and heightened his concentration.
And he wondered why she had not given it to him sooner.
“Do not remove your breathing apparatus, even after we land.” All this was spoken as she signaled the landing pad, ordering them to open the Dome so a gift of one hundred Omegas might be delivered to Central as promised.
That time, her French was flawless, as if she had practiced the words in her mind, over and over, until polished and commanding.
And the glittering fortress of his home opened to him.
The landing, unlike the flight, was smooth, his drug-heightened awareness making piloting the old ship suddenly easy—the women cheering from the cargo hold, some sobbing in relief.
He’d done it.
Smiling behind his mask, he turned to his Overseer as she triggered the cargo bay hatch, sirens wailing as the massive seal split apart.
Metal groaned, alarms blared, and when the ramp slammed down onto the tarmac, the ship shuddered under the stampede of women rushing into open air, shaking it in a way no turbulence ever had.
Screams of delight cut short by screams of another sort. Panicked confusion, a cacophony of quickly spoken Spanish. Ship’s cameras showing the brutality of hundreds of Alpha males shoving each other in their desperation to swarm the crowd of desperate, terrified women.
Maryanne turned off the monitor that had captured Georges’s horror, pulling on his arm, barking orders to grab the bags and follow her out of a side hatch before Alpha security might stop their escape.
“Do not look back! No matter what you hear or see happening to the Omegas, you cannot stop. Brenya needs you! The real mission starts now.”
A fresh wave of overlapping female screams, these even more hideous than the shrill cries of terror that had come when the ship plummeted toward the sea. These were…. They were….
“What’s an Omega?”
Shoving a heavy bag into his arms, she ordered him to follow as she kicked open the emergency exit. “Oh, sweetheart, not now. Move!”