Masters of Eden Read online

  “Is there a camera there?” The question came out squeakier than she’d intended it to.

  His lips twisted. “Yeah.”

  “Oh, my…” Eden blushed and hid her face behind her hands. If they’d been watching her… She hoped they hadn’t. They probably didn’t watch the camera continuously. She let her hands drop and peeked over her fingertips. The smirk still hadn’t left the guard’s face. He’d seen something. Maybe he’d seen everything.

  “What do you want?” The question was slightly muffled by coming through her fingers.

  “Need to do your medical assessment,” he said. “You’re not in withdrawal. You should be.”

  “This station isn’t big enough for a dedicated medic,” she said.

  “Right,” he agreed. “I’m the medic.”

  “You can’t be.”

  He cocked his head to the side, dark hair waving with the motion. “Why not?”

  “You’re way too… big.”

  Mixer smiled a broad, pleased smile. “It won’t hurt,” he promised. “Not unless you misbehave. Come on.”

  Eden unfolded her feet and reluctantly put a toe on the floor.

  “Come on,” he said. “You might need a shot to help you process the sedative.”

  “I don’t need a shot.”

  “You scared of a little needle?”

  “No,” Eden lied. She was not fond of needles, not at all. And she didn’t need a shot. “I didn’t get the usual stuff.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I had a friend. Gave me the agents that keep the body in good working order for the duration of the trip, didn’t give me the sedative. That’s why I don’t have the shakes.”

  Thick black brows rose toward the ceiling. “That’s how you got the zapper too, huh?”

  Eden didn’t answer that question. It wasn’t medically relevant. She drew her feet back up, her knees going to her chest to protect her body. This man scared her more than the other one did. He seemed rougher, tougher, maybe not more dangerous, but definitely potentially less controlled.

  “If you weren’t sedated, that means you just spent a month floating in space wide awake.”

  “Yeah,” Eden said. “Sounds about right.”

  “You’re lying.”

  She wasn’t lying, but obviously this guy wasn’t going to believe her.

  “I’m going to have to draw some blood,” he said. “See what you have in your system.”

  “You draw blood, I’ll draw some first,” Eden growled. She really didn’t like needles. She especially didn’t like needles in the hands of behemoths she’d recently electrocuted.

  “You already had your chance, missy,” Mixer said. “Now you got one choice. Are you going to come nicely, or am I going to have to drag you to the medical bay?”

  Eden wasn’t going nicely. She backed herself into the corner of the bed and the wall and looked at him balefully. “I don’t need any medical attention. I feel fine.”

  “Feeling fine doesn’t mean that you are fine, brat.” He leaned over, his shoulders blocking out the light as he reached for her wrist. She squeaked as his large hand closed over her arm, taking up most of her forearm. He was a beast of a man. Eden had no chance of escaping his grasp. That didn’t mean she didn’t try. She kicked and squirmed and wriggled until her shirt rode up and her pants rode down, baring her midriff and butt.

  Naturally, he took the opportunity to swat her on her exposed cheeks. His hand generated almost as much sting as Ghost’s paddle had, owing to the fact that it was almost the size of a dinner plate and it had only the resistance of her panties to work against. The result was quite devastating, a deep, whacking ache that made her whole body squirm with the desire to escape the punishment.

  “Let me go!”

  “Quit wriggling and behave yourself.” The order was growled against her ear as he palmed her bottom, almost covering both cheeks with one of his large mitts. “You’re not going to win like this.”

  The fight went out of her. He was right. She wasn’t going to win by physically scrapping with someone four times her size. Collapsing against the bed, she went limp. Mixer wasted no time grabbing her up and setting her on her feet.

  “Medical bay is this way,” he said, pointing a thick finger down the hall. “Or do you want a good spanking first?”

  She did not want a spanking, nor did she want to go to the medical bay. Mixer wasn’t giving her much of a choice though. Stuck on a space station with nowhere to run, obedience was sometimes going to be a necessary evil.

  “Come on,” he said, swatting her out the door. “Time for a thorough examination.”

  Eden was scowling before they got to the medical bay, a small space that managed to be intimidating in spite of the fact it was barely bigger than her cell. It contained one bed made of thick white foam covered in a plastic rubber composite that made a squeaky noise when he lifted her up and deposited her on it butt first.

  “Lie down,” he said, reaching for a stainless steel tool with flashing lights and a generally malignant appearance.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a device that measures your vital signs. Lie down and lie still.”

  Giving him a dirty look, Eden laid back on the bed. She did not like lying down; it made her feel far too vulnerable. Mixer truly was a beast of a man, so large and broad that she was dwarfed by his scale. His hands were surprisingly gentle as he moved the device from her head to her toes, his fingertips lightly brushing over the tip of her nose, her chin, down between her breasts, over her belly where they briefly skipped up and over the mound of her pussy, following down one leg, then the other until he was done.

  “You seem to be in good shape,” he said, giving her a piercing look. “Which is pretty odd, given how long you were in transit. There should be more muscle wastage, more toxin buildup.”

  “I guess I’m more resilient than most of your prisoners,” she shrugged. “Can I get up now?”

  “No. I’m going to need some blood from you. Your reaction isn’t typical, which means there could be something else going on.”

  Eden sat up abruptly. “All that’s going on is you want to stick me full of needles and do sick experiments on me.”

  Mixer put a hand dead center of her chest and pushed her back down without any effort at all. “Settle down,” he ordered. “You’re not going to be hurt unless you hurt yourself.”

  She pushed back up against his hand, her face contorting with irritation. “Quit pushing me around.”

  He pushed her back down. She pushed back up. She swatted at him. He blocked the attempted blow and lifted a warning brow. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with your reflexes or muscle tone,” he said. “But keep this up and I’ll give that butt of yours a damn good warming.”

  Ignoring his warning, she tried to get up again. She found herself flipped over onto her stomach, her bottom spanked mercilessly hard. Mixer had not been kidding when he made his threat. His hand fell hard and fast on her cheeks, landing both on her bottom itself and between her thighs as she flailed in response. Her flimsy bottoms did not stay on long; she herself managed to accidentally kick them down, leaving her bare bottom to be spanked. Mixer took eager advantage of the situation, whipping her bottom with the palm of his hand until she squealed and begged for clemency.

  “It hurts!”

  “It’s supposed to,” he said grimly. “Are you going to hold still for the rest of this examination?”

  “No!”

  The response earned her a very hard swat that landed hard across her left cheek and wrapped around to the seam of her pussy lips, sending a buzzing jolt of arousal shooting through her body. She was momentarily shocked into stillness, surprised both by what had happened and by her response to it.

  “Ghost!” Mixer looked toward the security camera. “Come help hold this brat, will you?”

  Five minutes later Eden found herself lying obediently on her back, her sore bottom pulsing agai
nst the hard bed. Her pussy was still pulsing with the stray swat, thoroughly distracting her from her rebellion. Ghost was keeping a careful eye on her while Mixer prepared his syringes. Two against one was hardly fair, but nothing in life ever was fair.

  “Put out your arm,” Mixer turned to her, the needle-enhanced syringe looking larger for the plastic cap.

  “No.” She wrapped her arms around her waist and held tight to her body.

  “Make the girl do as she’s told,” Mixer grunted to Ghost.

  “He can’t make me,” she snapped. “He’s not the boss of me.” The words sounded juvenile, but she didn’t have much left. Sitting between two oversized men, her only recourse for rebellion was her tongue—and what little control she had left of her body.

  “This is an essential medical procedure,” Ghost said, his husky voice cajoling. “All it will take is a little needle prick.”

  “You’d know about little pricks,” she said, casting a disparaging glance at his crotch.

  Mixer snorted.

  “This is going to be a lot easier on you if you cooperate,” Ghost continued, unfazed by her rudeness. “Put your arm out and let Mixer take a little blood.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you want to be healthy?”

  “I am healthy.”

  “We could argue all day,” Mixer interjected. He took her by the arm, flipped her over onto her stomach, pulled her pants and panties down, and jabbed a needle into her buttock. All of it was achieved within seconds, force triumphing where diplomacy had failed.

  Eden cursed, her words slurring as the sedative took effect. She felt Ghost laying her out on the bed, his fingers running through her hair soothingly as Mixer wrapped a strap around her arm, sterilized the area around her vein, and took blood. He was surprisingly adept at the fine task. She barely felt a pinch and it was done.

  “You’re going to be hazy for an hour or two,” he informed her when he was done capping the vial of blood. “Rest and relax. This sedative doesn’t mix well with exercise.”

  “Bastard,” she mumbled under her breath.

  “Love you too, sweetheart,” Mixer replied dryly. “Take her back to her cell, Ghost.”

  Chapter Three

  She spent the next three days more or less in her cell. Occasionally she would see either Mixer or Ghost when they brought her a meal, but for the most part she was left alone. Solitude did not concern her. She had traveled for a month in complete solitude and found a peace in her own company.

  What was beginning to wear was the lack of activity. She could walk the perimeter of her cell in four or five paces. She did pushups and crunches and jumping jacks to force her body to work, but in the lowered gravity of the station, she knew it wasn’t going to be enough. She needed to be strong if she was going to make another escape attempt. And she was definitely going to make another escape attempt.

  As if detecting her determined thoughts, Ghost made an appearance.

  “Exercise time,” he said. “You’ve had the mandated three days’ rest and you look like you’re ready to tear this cell apart if we don’t exercise you soon.”

  “I’m ready to tear this station apart if it gets me out of here,” she growled. He was handsome, but he was no friend of hers. He was the personification of all that oppressed her. He was the servant carrying out the corrupt orders of an unjust regime. It was a pity, because the dimples he got when he smiled made butterflies flutter way down low in her naughty places.

  “Let’s see if we can’t redirect some of that energy of yours,” Ghost replied, calmly ignoring her threat. He stepped back, indicating that she should exit the cell. That she did gladly. She had spent far too much time confined of late, too much time counting the minutes of her life away.

  Ghost put his hand around her upper arm and led her to a room where there were three very large octagonal omnidirectional treadmills sitting in a cluster.

  “Put the headset on, get on the tread-pad.”

  Eden was suspicious, but also a little curious and curiosity always won out where she was concerned. She put the headset on and saw nothing but darkness. Ghost’s capable hands guided her up onto a treadmill where she stood in darkness.

  “What’s the poi…”

  The word died on her lips as the headset activated and a great vista opened up before her. She was standing in the middle of a grassy plain that stretched out in all directions. The sky above was blue, wisped with tendrils of pale clouds. The sense of spaciousness was awe-inspiring.

  “Hey.”

  She looked to her right and saw Ghost. He was standing on the plain with her.

  “How…”

  “These machines are all linked,” he explained. “If more than one person hooks into the same simulation, then it is shared.”

  “Wow,” she said, forgetting for a second that he was her sworn enemy. “But you look completely real. How is that possible?”

  “Computers don’t have that much trouble scanning the human face and body anymore.”

  “So you’re not real?”

  She reached out and tried slapping him experimentally. The slap felt surprisingly real; she felt the hard plane of his cheek under her hand, the sting in her own palm as contact was made.

  “How is that possible?” she asked as he glowered at her.

  “The headset sends electrical signals that make the brain interpret real sensations. You’ll really feel everything you do in this simulation.” With that, he reached out and slapped her bottom hard enough to make her squeal. “And you’ll behave yourself too.”

  “Why? It’s not real.”

  “Your brain thinks it is real, which means it is real. I don’t want you picking up bad habits in here and thinking you can get away with it when the simulation ends.”

  “Then get out and leave me alone.”

  “You’re suffering from some disciplinary issues I intend to address in these simulations,” he informed her. “These sessions will have a dual purpose.”

  It was hard to be angry when she could feel the warm sun on her face, the soft breeze coming across the plains, rippling the grass in its wake. The simulation was impressive, incredibly so. She had only seen these sorts of views in picture books of the old Earth; never before had she beheld anything this beautiful with her own eyes. It wasn’t strictly real of course, but like Ghost said, her brain was making it real.

  She sat down and lay back, feeling little blades of grass tickling her skin. Even when she closed her eyes, she could feel the warmth of the sun that was not there.

  “I like this,” she said, letting her palm sweep over the grass. “I like this a lot.”

  For the first time in many, many months, she was beginning to feel a sense of peace and ease not caused by some enforced sedation that left her groggy and out of sorts, but out of the natural workings of her own mind.

  *

  “Where is Eden?” Mixer glanced at the monitor that displayed her cell. She was not in it. Nor was she with Ghost, for Ghost was on the bridge and Eden was not.

  “I put her in the simulator,” Ghost said, sliding into the captain’s chair.

  “Oh, yeah?” Mixer grinned. “How did that go? Did she freak out like your usual noob?”

  “She lay down on the tread-pad and fell asleep,” Ghost chuckled. “She liked it. A lot.”

  “So you just left her there?”

  “She was out like a light,” Ghost said. “I’ll get a notification if she wakes up.”

  “It’s like she’s wired backward,” Mixer mused. “A month stuck in a pod in space without sedation should have made her go mad, but she came out of that thing just as clear and focused as she must have gotten in. And now she’s in a simulator that takes most people hours to so much as stand up in because of sense disorientation and she’s asleep. There’s something not right with that girl.”

  “Maybe she deals with stress well.”

  “It’s more than that,” Mixer said. “She thrives on it. I think she might
even need it.” His expression was somewhere between admiration and concern. “We have a real problem on our hands, don’t we?”

  “I told you that before she got here,” Ghost reminded him. “And yes, we do. As does the colony she’s going to. She’s going to tear that place apart.”

  “Or get torn apart herself. They turn feral out there in deep space. Takes real structure to keep a colony from going wild. Last I heard, Invivo-9 just lost its third governor.”

  Both men fell into an uncomfortable silence. The knowledge of where their ward was going did not sit easy with either of them. It was one thing to handle truly dangerous criminals who deserved deportation. It was something else to deliver relatively innocent women as breeding mates for the existing male population.

  “Maybe they’ll treat her well,” Mixer said doubtfully. “When you’ve only got one woman for every hundred men, you can’t be too rough with them.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Ghost and Mixer turned to see Eden standing nearby. She had her hands on her hips, her chest and chin thrust out with apparent indignation. Ghost checked his monitor. According to it, she was still hooked into the simulation. Weird.

  “How did you get out of the simulator?”

  “I took the helmet off,” she said, frowning at the pair of them. “What is this about one woman for every hundred men?”

  “The colonies have a very low ratio of women to men,” Ghost said. “Especially the one you were sentenced to.”

  Eden frowned for a long moment, then shrugged. “Huh.”

  “Back to the simulator, young lady,” Ghost ordered. “We are not done yet.”

  Eden smirked. “You two are getting slack and it’s only been three days. I doubt I’ll be here by the end of the week.”

  “Oh, yes? Then maybe you need to spend the rest of the week locked down.” Mixer was not impressed by her cheek.

  She scowled at him. “If that’s the only way you think you can win.”

  “This isn’t a game,” Ghost said.

  “It very much is,” she disagreed. “You’re going to try to keep me here long enough to shove me in a tube and send me off to some sex-deprived colony, which I won’t be able to leave because it will be hundreds of years before they have the infrastructure there to allow space travel. I’m going to try to escape this tin box before that happens. It’s a game. And I’m playing for my life.”