Page 11 of The Alien's Stolen Rebel

I groaned, trying to tell my horny self to shut up and relax. The little voice blew me a raspberry but fell silent and I lay back, doing my best to keep thoughts of Kreel out of my mind. It wasn’t easy. The quick rush to medbay in his arms wasn’t a clear memory, but it left an impression.

“Enough. Let’s fucking get on with it.” I looked up at the hologram, trying to figure out what the red marks meant. Nothing good, and worse, the machine wasn’t doing anything to heal me. “Autodoc, activate.”

Nothing happened. “Autodoc, I need medical assistance.”

Still nothing. I looked around for a button, instructions, anything. Again, nothing, though the room’s baroque finery might have hidden an entire control panel. Fucking Vehn, they worked so hard to make their technology look effortless that they hid important functions.

I ruled out calling for help as soon as the idea occurred to me. First, nothing that happened here could be worse than being recaptured by Frax. Distracting the pilot was aterribleidea. Second, I wasn’t about to let Kreel have the satisfaction of telling me he told me so.

“Autodoc, if you don’t heal me now, so help me, I will use your circuit boards to patch holes in the hull. Understand me? Get to fucking work.”

I’m not sure what prompted that outburst. Maybe simple frustration, maybe an intuitive leap. It didn’t matter. With a musical hum, the machine came to life. Delicate forcefields took hold of me, pulling me down into the soft mattress.

An emperor wouldn’t ask nicely, I guessed. An emperor commands, and an emperor’s computer expects to be commanded, not asked. Was it as simple as that?

The forcefields pushed me down and held me still, and soothing music played. Maybe it had calming subsonics, or maybe the music was that good, but I relaxed instantly.

The ship shook violently, which I only noticed with a mild interest. Okay, this was more than just the music. I drifted in a cloud of euphoria, and nothing could shift me. Sensuous voices whispered in my ears, speaking a language I didn’t know. It didn’t matter, the words didn’t matter, the sounds were enough to keep me chilled and relaxed as forcefields plucked the shrapnel from my wounds.

They sounded like a mix of men and women, speaking in soft tones that felt like a gentle caress of my mind. Was this what the Vehn emperors liked to listen to while they were beingoperated on?I giggled at the thought and my eyes drifted closed.

It wasn’t like sleep,more like drifting into a dream without the transition. My eyes drifted shut, then open, and I lay in a garden.

Not any kind of garden I’d ever been in. I spent a few months on Earth, and even there, any kind of ornamental garden would be the domain of the oligarchs. Among the people I grew up with, the lucky ones might have a vegetable garden.

On Mars, of course, gardens weren’t a thing at all. The carefully tended hydroponics provided food and oxygen, and they were beautiful enough in their way, but they weren’tgardens.

I sat up on a blanket of grass waving in a thin breeze, shaded by a tree with white-gold bark and leaves that looked like green-tinted glass. Paths stretched away, beside flowerbeds and groves of strange trees. It was all put together in patterns that drew the eye subtly, guiding me to look at beautiful feature after beautiful feature.

The view was amazing, but there was something I disliked about it. The sheer perfection was too overwhelming to be truly enjoyable. There was something off about the whole thing. Even the scent, flowery and wonderful as it was, seemed flat and strange.

“Highness,” a voice spoke close to my ear, making me jump with an undignified squeak. “Welcome. How may we serve?”

Catching my breath, I turned on the speaker, my heart pounding as though I’d run a marathon.

“Don’t fucking sneak up on me like that. You could have given me a heart attack!”

The Vehn blinked. “As you say, Highness. I will announce my approach in the future. However, I must stress that I cannot give you a heart attack. It is impossible.”

I looked him over. Tall, handsome in a completely sterile way, the feathers on his head a light gray, and his simple robes bright red. His only decoration was a group of five patches down the left side of his chest, the symbols on them meaningless to me.

But they highlighted one thing—aside from them,the man looked perfectly symmetrical. Unnaturally so. And that, along with his strange speech patterns, gave me the clues I needed.

“You’re a simulation, aren’t you?” I looked the stranger in the eyes. “This whole place is.”

A slight smile touched his lips, and he nodded so deep it was almost a bow. “Yes, Highness.”

“And you’re an avatar of theStarshadow?”

“Only of the medical systems, Highness. I would not ordinarily bother you, but I have never treated a human before and have some questions.”

I looked around the garden again, appreciating the artistry of the virtual space. The sky above us showed unfamiliar constellations and three moons. On one, cities showed as clusters of lights linked by the glowing chains of highways.

This place was far away, if it ever really existed. Far beyond where humans had traveled, far enough that no one knew much about us. It made sense that the medical system would be unsure how to treat us.

It raised a bunch more questions, too. “Why do you keep calling me Highness?”

“Apologies if that is not the correct honorific,” he said. “The Royal Database appears to have only received intermittent updates in the last decade. However, it lists you as Princess Rachel Day of Mars, daughter of Heston Day, first king of Mars.”

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