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Ajura shook her head. "No! Ancesters help us! Mother's ship is sacred! What... what am I going to do now?"

"How about you let me off this damn hook, get me something to dress and help me off this ship?" I suggested.

The door hissed open.

"You will remain where you are, Mister Rios." The voice was almost a whisper, old, hoarse and filled with six kinds of malice. I slowly turned my head. It took me several moments to comprehend what I was looking at. The being in front of me, flanked by two massive redheads, was garbed in the same kind of robe Ajura wore but it hung off her frail, almost skeletal body like sheets off a hanger. Her skin, if you could call it that under patches of metal, was paper-white and carved with a network of lines and veins which lent her the look of a porcelain doll someone had repeatedly smashed with an ink-drenched hammer. A quartet of transparent tubes had been surgically implanted into her neck. One pair seemed to be an extension of her circulatory system, pumping blood into the frail vessel before me, the others probably were part of a breathing assist. One of the guards carried a small wheeled box which hissed and gurgled in time to her breaths.

Wispy strands of hair hung unkempt in the being's face but even they couldn't hide the eyes. They were ancient, that much was clear from even a single, errant glance. In contrast to the rest of the almost undead body, they seemed untouched by age and enfeeblement, harboring a vast intelligence more alien than anything I had ever encountered before.

"Ajura. I have need of you," Mother -- who else could this... thing be? - rasped.

The psionic bent her head. "As you wish." She went to a knee in front of the haggard, skeletal being and looked up at her. Mother raised a shaking hand, barely able to lift the branch-like appendage, and splayed it over the beautiful face of Ajura. A moment later, Mother crumpled into the arms of the second guard.

Ajura raised her head. "Don't be alarmed, human. My larynx is not used to long speeches any more so I am borrowing hers for a bit." She walked, rather unsteadily, as if she wasn't used to a fresh, young body, to the tool cabinet and withdrew a fresh syringe and a glass with a clear liquid from it.

"What do you want from me? How about you respect my rights as a citizen of the Galactic Community and-"

"You have corrupted one of my children, almost to the point of no return. It will take centuries of re-indoctrination to bring Jenala to a point where she will be compliant again." Ajura/Mother shook her head. "It is only fair to derive some compensation from you then, don't you think?"

"Compensation? Corruption? What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Jenala's mission was simple. Fetch me gene samples of every Precursor species. And what happens? Now she babbles about leaving the fleet and returning with you?"

"What's so bad about that? She seemed genuinely happy when traveling the stars."

"Her mere existence outside the fleet is a risk I am not willing to take, Mister Rios. I have spent every minute of the past twenty-five thousand years protecting my children. I will kill anyone who even might pose the remote risk of putting my life's work in jeopardy."

"You- what?"

"I see your male brain struggles to comprehend what a Mother has to do. Fine. I will explain in simple terms." Ajura/Mother gestured and a stool moved closer. She sat down. "What has Jenala told you about us?"

"Barely anything. She tried to keep me at arm's length when it came to her origins so I could leave more easily."

"Oh, that romantic fool." Ajura/Mother chuckled. "No matter how little she would have told you, you are not leaving the fleet, Mister Rios."

"Why?"

Ajura/Mother ignored the question. Her eyes took on a far-away look. "We are yekare vana, Mister Rios. We are the Children of the Ancients. The beings you know as the 'Precursors' made us. We were their greatest achievement, the perfect, purest breeding stock of intelligent life."

"What good is a species of only women?" I asked her, trying to throw any kind of spanner into her monologue. There had to be a way out of this!

A horrible little smile played around Ajura/Mother's lips. "Back when we were still in our creator's favor, there were males and females. Even when the Great Calamity threatened to kill us all, there were men and women. I was married once, Mister Rios. My husband died protecting us from the Dark Tide. He fought valiantly to buy the colonists more time as the horrors from space descended upon our home world. But I am getting ahead of myself."

She adjusted Ajura's robes which had opened during her striding about. The petite scientist didn't wear a battle shell underneath.

"Avert your eyes, you lecher," Ajura/Mother snarled. "I will not allow you to even think about sticking your slimy appendage into one of my beautiful children!"

"Make me," I said, gnashing my teeth. A moment later, arcs of energy lanced through my wrists and into my body. A hoarse scream echoed through the room and it took me a moment to notice it was my voice. As suddenly as the pain had come, it stopped.

"So far, I have been a generous host," Ajura/Mother hissed. "Don't tempt me."

"Fine, get your supervillain monologue over with already," I panted. My ears were still ringing and every hair on my body seemed to spark. "Dying is preferable to you waffling about for hours."

"Oh, you won't die. At least not until your usefulness has run out." She turned to face her guards and snapped an order in her native tongue. The redheads slowly placed both the limp, skeletal body of Mother and her breathing apparatus onto the floor before closing the door behind themselves.

It didn't make me feel safer, not one bit. Not with some kind of shock emitter tied to my wrists and a complete lunatic hogging the trigger.

"We thought we were the Chosen of the Ancestors, blessed with a form they could never achieve. On their first try, they managed perfection. Two legs, two arms, a head filled with a thriving brain. Our genesis should have been the end but, oh no, the Ancients were not even close to finished. They took whole clans of our people and abducted them, only to conduct horrible experiments on them. It took only a few decades until we realized we were nothing but test subjects for them, self-replicating and possibly infinite in numbers, so there was always someone to cut or splice into or subject to horrible environments. But we lacked the technology to counter the Ancients. We were doomed to witness the slaughter of countless of our loved ones. Over time, the Ancients managed to form new species, based off our glorious seed."

"Wait, hold up, hold up."

Ajura/Mother shot me a dangerous glare. "What?"

"Are you trying to tell me you are..."

"Yes. From our DNA, every subsequent Precursor species was created. You are all lesser, inferior versions of our once glorious people. Gravon, Zuthrian, Nor, humans and all the other failed experiments the Ancestors seeded throughout the galaxy. You are all lesser, distorted mirror versions of us!"

"Shouldn't you then try and help us instead of treating us the same way your oh-so-wonderful Ancients did?"

Ajura/Mother spat on the floor. "Fuck those backstabbing blobs of featureless biomass," she cursed. "When it was obvious we were no longer needed, they passed off our entire species to the Gray. From one set of maniacs to another. If the Ancients only had the guts to exterminate us themselves! But no, they bartered us away for some unknown favor. And so the end began."

"You seem to be pretty well off for an exterminated species."

"Shut up or the last shock will feel like a triple blowjob, you idiot."

"Okay, nevermind."

"Before the Betrayal, we had been unified in our attempts to protect ourselves from the predations of the Ancestors. But once news spread we were to be given away as slaves to the Gray, one of our leaders and her followers decided that drastic measures had to be taken. She took her fleet and left for the edge of the galaxy, vowing to return once she found a weapon mighty enough to deal with the Gray and the Ancestors both. And to all our horror, she found something in the void beyond the stars. Something even older than the Ancestors, beings longing to merge with mutable biomass to enhance their own capabilities. They found millions of willing hosts and a mere century after she left, the Lost Princess returned -- as the heart of the Dark Tide, swallowing everything in her path."

Despite my predicament, I was fascinated. This was either the delusional rambling of a madwoman or one of the most horrifying stories I've ever heard.

"Where is this ...Dark Tide now?"

"It is slowly gathering strength at the edge of the galaxy, swallowing stars and assimilating every single cell of biomatter it can find. We barely managed to escape them when they returned to claim their former brothers and sisters."

"The Great Calamity?"

"Yes. Even though our long-range scouts were aware of the threat coming closer, we thought we had much more time. So we prepared and began to build ships to evacuate our populace. But to our dismay, the Tide evolved and our calculations were proven false. Much quicker than anticipated they appeared and attacked."

I kept quiet. My gut told me this was no mere fever dream, no ancient psychopath trying to rationalize her tyrannical rule over her fleet. She firmly, utterly believed what she was talking about.

"When all was said and done, we had barely enough ships for half of our people. How could we decide who would be doomed to remain behind? How could there ever be a sensible solution to our dilemma?"

"No clue. Roll the dice?"

"No. It was decided that every female would receive a spot on the ships while the last ship, this one, would be turned into a repository for our species' legacy. We asked every male to donate their seed so we could repopulate once the danger had passed. There was no other way!" I saw blood trickle from between Ajura/Mother's fingers. She had rammed her fingernails into her own palms. "While the colony ships launched, our men stayed behind to delay the Dark Tide for as long as possible. Without their sacrifice, we would never have escaped our home cluster."

"And you've been running for twenty-five millennia? There had to be the occasional planet worthy of settling by now."

"Don't you understand? The Dark Tide is still out there! Growing. Moving. Expanding. No matter where we settled, they would eventually catch up with us. And who knows if we'd be able to escape once more?"

"Did you at least have the forethought to warn the other nations about this?

"Our existence must remain a secret!" Mother/Ajura hissed. "I have lost six-hundred fifty-two Scouts in the past two hundred years alone. The galaxy is not ready for us. Just look at your own kind. Despite being offered a place at the galactic table, humanity still squabbles over any little advantage an individual nation might have over the other. Unless your world manages unity, you will always be the red-headed stepchild of the Galactic Community. You are indeed the most corrupted of the so-called Precursor species. Nor are spineless pacifists but at least their psionics are noteworthy. Zuthrians are capable fighters, overcoming the odds at every turn, but just look at the Gravon to see where your species is headed. Gifted with god-like strength and endurance, being able to withstand traumas which would kill members of every other species, they are eternally embroiled in civil wars because no one ever manages to unify them for long. And you... you humans don't even have any special powers!"

"Well, what's the point of us then?" I asked, a bit of my former defiance returning. I mean, come on... humans had their faults, but were we really that bad?

Ajura/Mother laughed. "You, my naked, helpless human, are nothing more than a forgotten control group. It's a wonder you haven't managed to extinct yourself already, because there have been six or seven other planets settled with your kind and every single one, according to the data left over from the time of the Ancients, died off within a number of centuries."

"Maybe you're wrong," I snarled. "Maybe our ingenuity, our adaptability makes us special after all."

"I don't see much of that in you, to be frank. You haven't even found a way to deal with your nanite poisoning." Ajura/Mother prepared the syringe. "Let Mother help you, little Salvador." She walked around me and kissed my left butt cheek. Then there was the sensation of a long needle being jabbed into my skin. Cool liquid entered my system. And suddenly everything went to shit. My heart rate shot up through the roof. My lungs burned and no matter how hard I gasped, I could simply not get enough air. There was a horrible rush in my ears and colorful specks flickered in front of my eyes.

Ajura/Mother had the courtesy to force a tongue protector between my chattering teeth.

"I know you're dying to know what is happening to you, so I'll enlighten you. You have been injected with one of my crowning achievements -- an immunity booster which will purge your system of any foreign material, be it implants, nanites, cybernetics or the like. It will be a painful eternity for you but, seriously, you should be thankful I wasted a whole ampule on you. We can't have a walking bomb stored on this ship, now can we?"

My spine arched of its own accord as my body tried to move in all directions at once, tried to get away from the excruciating agony which seemed to begin in my chest and radiated into my toes and fingers. Ajura slumped onto the couch and Mother forced herself onto hands and knees. "Enjoy, human. Because this will be the last kindness I'll do for you."

My brain finally had enough and shut off. The pain was just. Too. Fucking. Much.

* * * *

I came to and immediately wished I could return to Unconscious-Land. Every muscle, every bone hurt. Compared to the agony I was in, a botched repulsor-belt lesson in the military as preparations for the unit's Hoverball season was a gentle kiss. I had spent three weeks in hospital, swimming in a healing tank while nanites stitched my shattered shin bones back together.

My arms were above my head again, which probably only added a few screaming voices to the chorus of pain screeching in my brain. I stood on a narrow walkway, with a glowing vessel beneath. The light was painfully bright and of a particular blue hue which hurt my eyes. I raised my head, only to lock gazes with Mother. Flanked by her soldier girls, she had brought a cane to lean on.

"What are you looking at?" I mumbled. My tongue was an unresponsive, raw lump between my teeth. "Why are you keeping me alive?"

"After I spent a whole bottle of immunity booster on you? You, my dear Salvador, will be another source of fresh gene material."

"Why me? Don't you have a whole ship full of cum?"

Mother sighed disapprovingly. "Twenty-five thousand years place a certain strain on things."

"So your stored cum has dried up then?"

"Watch your tone," she hissed. "I don't need you whole to be of use to me." Softer, she added: "Technical difficulties. Damage to the stasis cores. Two mutinies. Attempted mutinies. All of it has left us with barely enough seed to create a viable, self-sustaining populace. I have spent centuries figuring out which bloodlines to mix, where to inject improvements and how to make sure my children will flourish should we settle down but these setbacks have almost ruined everything! Your species may be a watered-down version of ours, but you are close enough to inject a few valuable fresh strands of DNA into our gene pool. As such, I will try something new with you. Instead of simply freezing your seed, I will keep your whole seed-producing apparatus. So I won't run out of samples to mix and tinker with. I might even let you have some pussy if you behave. I wonder what would happen if I let you impregnate Ajura. Her gene-strands are very complex, involving not only ours, but a slew of Gray DNA as well. How else could we raise our psionic potential past the barriers the Ancients had cursed us with? Her children desperately need an influx of strengthening genes and you, my dear Salvador, might be the perfect fit."

"Is this the part where I'm allowed to say 'you'll never get away with it?'"

"No, human. This is the part where I win." She barely moved her hand. The board under my feet was pushed back by an invisible force. A rebreather mask came out of nowhere and latched onto my face while I feebly kicked and writhed, expecting my body weight to tear out my shoulder joints. But something held me aloft until the mask was in place. Only then did I fall, ramrod straight, into the vessel below me. The liquid was sickeningly briny and warm and the moment my head went under, a heavy thud announced a lid which had slammed onto the vessel.

Don't struggle.

The voice in my head was huge and ancient. Mother.

The air supply should last until stasis has fully kicked in. It would be a pity to lose you right about now. I'll make sure Jenala's pod will be within eyesight.

Claustrophobia welled up from my burning, aching chest. But I couldn't move. My panicking brain was trapped in a motionless body which was trapped in some alien pod with some alien piss in it. And then even my brain slowed down until there was only one thought left.

Is this the end?

* * * *

As it turned out, it wasn't. Some time later, I came to again. I smelled of the ghastly fluid I had been marinated in and someone had wrapped me up with towels like an especially scruffy mummy to the point I could hardly move.

Hardly meant at least my head. I turned my face to the side just in the nick of time as I lost most of my stomach's contents. Going by the stench, it wasn't anything important. It dribbled through the floor's grating. I heard water run nearby. Maybe underneath?

Someone held a bowl under my nose. It smelled warm and pleasant and I carefully lapped at its lukewarm contents. The familiar aroma of Zuthras and Sand Dragon tickled my tongue. I lapped a bit more energetically until I felt confident moving my arm wouldn't send me back to NapVille. Why was I eating insta-broth, Dragon flavor?

"Where..." I rasped. My tongue had felt like someone else's before but now that someone else had an alien's tongue in their mouth. I feebly moved my fingers. Some layers of towels came away and I breathed a bit easier.

"I think you're not quite ready for a spoon yet," someone said nearby. I forced my eyes to look upwards. Broga knelt next to me, her powerful physique blotting out at least two light bulbs overhead. She held the bowl with soup. I saw another mummy-like shape nearby, being tended to by another Soldier-girl. "Do you think I can sit you up without you choking on your barf?" Broga asked.

"Can't be worse'n'dat," I muttered. The Soldier placed the bowl out of harm's way and moved me into a sitting position, carefully and much more gently than expected. With a much better field of view, at least compared to before, I recognized the other parcel person. Jenala. And Xajani was treating her to a bowl of soup as well. She looked at least twice as bad as I felt. Not only did she suffer from post-stasis blues but someone had obviously taken great pains to beat her to an inch of her life. There were bruises everywhere.

"She will be fine." A new voice piped up. I slowly moved my head to come face to face with Ajura. She raised her hands in a warding gesture.

"It's me, really. No other voices in my head. No more. Never ever." She made a disgusted face. Now, with the knowledge Mother had imparted, the likeness was striking. The features were far less pronounced as on, say Ylzics, but the similarity was shockingly obvious now that my brain slowly uncramped.