Romancing the Raptor

Sergeant Thompson's head appeared against the cloudless blue sky. The color of his face bordered on crimson and nostrils were flaring with something more than exertion.

"Get off of her, you bastard," he blared as he grabbed Number Three by the neck. His biceps tightened and bulged as he heaved the now-limp prisoner to the ground beside Chastity.

Thompson dropped down, straddling Number Three's chest and started pummeling his face with calloused fists.

"It's okay." Chastity surged to Thompson's side. "He's down. He's not getting back up." She touched his shoulder and brought his attention to her.

The beating stopped. Thompson held his arm back, coiled to throw another punch. He looked at Chastity, gusts of air surging in and out of his open mouth.

Chastity could see the slow burn behind the blue of his eyes. The heat of it was something she knew all too well. It was fueled by primal needs—fight or fuck, and the urge to fight in Thompson was fading.

With a speed that was at odds with his size, Thompson had his arms around Chastity. His eyes took in the soft features of her face. He brushed his thumb along her cheek. The gentle touch from calloused fingers sent an electric shiver down Chastity's spine.

Chastity leaned into him, her soft curves pressing into his hard edges. She gave him a soft kiss on the corner of his mouth. His skin was salty and earthy.

Thompson tilted his head a little to the left and met her lips with his. He parted his lips and kissed back. His lips were dry and chapped, but Chastity didn't care. She didn't want anything but the touch of those lips against hers right now.

She broke the kiss with a light nibble to his lower lip.

"You taste like cherries," Thompson said.

Shit, Chastity thought, realizing what was happening. She moved back enough to put a gap between them.

She looked at the prisoner on the ground beside them. "He's going to need CPR or a ventilator," she said. She didn't want to scoot away from Thompson, but she did, just by inches.

Thompson leaned closer and pressed his lips against Chastity's—harder this time.

"You've got to get away from me," Chastity said, breaking her lips away. "The pheromones... too strong in the sweat... they're getting into your system through..."

Thompson pulled back. He seemed to understand that something was wrong.

"Sergeant Thompson, I need you to trust me. I'm an expert at this. I know what this messed up body of mine can do," Chastity said, keeping her voice level. "I'm going to move back. Just take some breaths. Deep and regular—that's right, just keep that up. Just keep breathing"

Chastity moved downwind of Sergeant Thompson and waited. Sanchez and Jones were racing toward them.

***

Chastity watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Number Three's chest. The team didn't have a medic, but it did have a set of treatment pods in the rectangular metal shed that passed for the camp's medical bay. Its automated system administered an antivenin and was maintaining him on life support until his diaphragm recovered enough to take over the push and pull of air.

Something wasn't right.

Something wasn't right about this mission

Something definitely wasn't right about these prisoners.

Even with the deep plum bruises and lumpy swelling that spoiled the symmetry of his cheeks and brow, his face and body weren't that of a hardened criminal. He had the look of an accountant who lived an easy life and the pectorals of someone who would be lucky to manage a half of a pushup.

He was white collar all the way, the kind you would see corralled in a country club with a curfew and high fence.

Why would someone like him be in a super-max facility? Why would any of them? In a fair fight—hell, probably even an unfair one—Chastity was sure she could take this one and any of the ones she'd seen in the holding pen.

And near the top of the "not right" list was: how did he know how to deactivate the body armor?

Something definitely wasn't right.

Chastity walked to the first pod. It was occupied by one of one of Thompson's team. She tapped a panel at the seam of the transparent lid. His name—Daniels—lit up on the transparent lid. His vital signs slid in a neat row beneath. She hadn't met him. He was one of the first ambushed by the raptors before she had made it through the wormhole.

Chastity tapped another button on the panel and the lights inside the pod brightened, giving Chastity a clear view of the damage. His chest was torn, a yawning gash running from the left collarbone down to the pelvis. There was very little blood. Colonies of nanites formed a mercurial froth that rippled in the wound bed. There was more vigorous activity along the ribcage, where they were fusing into rigid scaffolds to replace the segments of seven ribs that had been shattered.

"Pod, do you have an audio interface?" Chastity asked. She expected it did. Automated equipment this advanced usually had an AI core to control its functions.

"This unit has an active audio interface." The voice came from a speaker at the top of the pod. It didn't have the depth that Alex did. She expected that personality subroutines weren't standard issue in the off-the-line units.

"Is he going to live?" Chastity asked. Aside from the obvious torso wound, Daniels was pale—very pale—and the vital signs running across the display seemed lower than should be.

"There is a 0.86 probability that he will survive the next forty-eight hours. The probability will increase to 0.98 if he is transferred to a tertiary care center with a trauma unit."

"What about the person in the second pod?"

"Information on that patient is classified."

"Is he going to live?" Chastity asked, hoping that she could find a loophole in the AI's programming that would lead to a clue.

"Information on that patient is classified."

"Do you keep an event log on the pods?"

"Event logs are created and maintained."

"Show me the events for Daniels."

A stream of text flowed across the display. Admission time... Initial assessment and probability of survival... Nanite repair... Nanite repair... Disposition of personal effects...

"Wait, stop there. List the personal effects."

"Combat fatigues, damaged. Blaster, intact, ninety-seven percent charge. Comm-cuff, intact. Photograph—"

"Where are they?"

A drawer at the base of the pod opened and bumped Chastity in the shin.

Chastity pulled out the comm-cuff. She swiped her index finger along the screen, icons moved under the glass in response, all fairly standard military applications. She found the one that she wanted and tapped. A map appeared with the search drone on the screen. A red crosshair marked her location. Green crosshairs close by marked the location of Thompson and the rest of his team. A lone blue dot stood out in the forest to the south.

Something about this mission wasn't right. She didn't know if she could trust the sergeant or his men.

But she did know who might have the answers, and all she had to do to find him was follow the little blue dot.

"Hold on, Tom, I'm coming."

***

The hardest part about sneaking out of the base camp was getting the all terrain vehicle past the robots patrolling the perimeter. It was easy to convince Sergeant Thompson that she needed to recuperate after the day they'd had. It helped that he was uneasy about how easily he had started to lose control. Olfactory nerve block or not, he was more than willing to let her hole up in a corner of the camp until the booster wore completely off and her smell dropped back to normal.

She didn't tell him that they already had. For what she had planned, he really shouldn't know that.

When the patrol robot with the Gatling gun roved past, Chastity popped the ATV into neutral and broke for the gate. It wasn't that far. When the team had gotten back, they put two of the prisoners in the pen with the rest and Number Three, who she learned Thompson had nicknamed 'Leaky', into the medical bay.

Once Chastity was outside the gate, she coasted down the incline just off of the main path and into to the cover of the tree line. The undergrowth was thick and she wasn't sure that she could push it much farther. She looked back at the camp. She didn't hear any boots stomping against the dirt. Nobody was screaming her name. No one had noticed.

Chastity turned the key and the engine rumbled to life.

The motor wasn't that loud.

Go steady and don't rev the gas too hard and she could probably make it.

She tapped the screen on her borrowed comm-cuff. The map lit up green against a black background. She tapped the compass icon in the right corner and the map rotated. The red crosshair that marked her position changed to an arrow that indicated the direction she was facing.

She grabbed the handlebars, put some pressure on the accelerator, and moved toward the blue dot.

***

The search for the blue dot took longer than Chastity had expected. Dense undergrowth and a menacing looking triangle that had appeared on the map had forced changes in the route. The fact that the triangle had mirrored her movements wasn't comforting.

Stalky triangles in a place like this couldn't be good. But at least there was only one.

Chastity had taken a blaster and rail gun out of the pod drawer too. She wasn't going out without more firepower than she had come in with. Her handgun just wasn't going to cut it.

She was getting closer. On the comm-cuff map, her arrow symbol was almost on top of the blue dot. According to the topography, Tom would be about one hundred feet west of the jagged bend of the embankment that she was on.

The land had gotten too rugged, and the trees too congested to maneuver the ATV, so he hopped off and started the climb down the bank, careful to make sure each footstep landed on solid earth. She couldn't afford to tumble down and break a leg.

The suspicious triangle wasn't on the map, but who knew what else could be hiding in the underbrush.

Was there a minimum size creature that the drones could scan? She didn't know and she didn't want to find out.

When she was halfway down the bank, Chastity leapt and splashed down into the stream. The water was as clear as a cut diamond, its clarity only muddled with murky clouds where her shoes disturbed the sediment.

She walked along the streambed to avoid the underbrush. Thrashing through the leaves would probably be akin to ringing a dinner bell and having the town crier yell fresh meat.

Walking in the water would help mask her trail too. Some of the things here had good noses.

Chastity thought about the raptor that had attacked. That had barely twelve hours ago. With the daylight and drone data streaming to her borrowed comm-cuff, though, she felt a little more secure.

She remained still, listening to the forest around her. There was a soft rustling high above as wind stroked the leaves of the forest canopy. Thin deposits of shale clacked and slid down the embankment as some mouse-sized thing scampered up into the vegetation.

She didn't hear the froggy chirrups that she associated with the raptor that had attacked earlier, so she continued down the bend of the stream. The watery corridor was claustrophobic. Both banks of the stream were congested with sprouting leaves and mossy branches. Everything was a perfect hiding place—if predatory mouths were there, she would be blind to them until a millisecond before rows of pointy teeth crushed her skull and slurped out gooey scoops of brain matter.

In the middle of the bazillion shades of green, one other color pooled at her boots, pleading for attention.

An eddy of washed-out crimson circled between the smooth pebbles and the surface of the water. Chastity bent and swirled the water with her fingertips. The sanguine ribbon wilted away to nothingness.

Blood.

Flashes of possibilities flashed through Chastity's mind. Every mental image seemed disjointed, like something in her brain integral in processing the probabilities had slipped out of track. Raptor attack. Tom's chest slashed like Daniels in the medical pod. Big monsters tearing the throats out of little monsters.

Chastity broke into an upstream run, following the thin red strands that hung beneath the water's surface. "Hold on, Tom," Chastity screamed, "I'm coming!" She pulled the blaster from its holster and fired in a high arc. Tom wasn't tall, so Chastity was sure that she wouldn't hit him. Hitting something wasn't the goal anyway—scaring it away was.

Chastity heard a shriek that definitely—or almost definitely—came from human vocal cords. She cut blind into the thicket to the right and bungled over a knot of scrawny arms and legs hunkered down on the ground. As she tumbled over, she saw the flash of a white jumpsuit and a balding head pressed to the ground with hands clasped tight around for protection.

Chastity's head hit the ground and her brain rattled in her skull. A circle of darkness raced in from the periphery of her vision as brain and body began to shut down.

***

The world flickered in rapid succession between bright and dark as if an overused and nearly dead florescent light had replaced the sun. Chastity had trouble keeping her eyes open at first. Everything was doubled; her eyes didn't want to function as a united pair. The flashing light and one eye looking up while the other looked down led to a lurch in her stomach. The ready-to-eat meal that she'd had after getting back from the morning's prisoner roundup spewed out. Yellow-white goo from what the ingredient list purported to be eggs trickled down her cheek.

A set of grey eyes, inflated by thick black-rimmed lenses, looked down at her with a mix of curiosity and disgust.

"Oh oh oh, keep your eyes shut please, and roll onto your left side—you almost got that on me and I don't have a change of clothes."

Chastity did just the opposite at the sound of the strange man's voice. A second wave of imitation egg chunks flowed.

"You're just no good with instructions. I can't work like this. I just can't do this if you can't follow instructions."

There was an annoyed click of the tongue and a rustle in the composting forest floor as the man rose and walked away from her.

Annoyed. That was something that didn't fit with what her life had become. For the past year the only thing that annoyed men was her general unwillingness to play hide the giblet with them. Vomit, bad hair days, the phase of her menstrual cycle—those were never turnoffs. The succubus syndrome trumped them all, and this guy was annoyed with her for splashing a little vomit, when any other would be trying to find a way to use it for lube?

"Sorry," Chastity said, putting a figurative thumbtack in the mini-mystery, "and wait! I came to rescue you... Well, you weren't the person I was hoping to find, but you prisoners are the reason I'm here."

The sounds of walking paused then came closer.

"Explain," the voice was more distant than before, he had most likely judged the range of any projectile body fluids and was standing just out of range.

"The team has patrol drones searching for life signs. They picked up a group and you. I thought that you were someone else—"

"No, not that part. You said prisoners are the reason you are here. Explain that."

Chastity chanced opening one eye. The man's face came into focus. He looked to be anywhere in his fifties or early sixties. His unkempt red hair was thinning above the temples and had passed the halfway mark to turning grey. His eyes were magnified to an uncomfortably large size by the thick lenses of his glasses.

"My name is Chastity. I've got this thing with my pheromones. McMurtey—the head of the Agency—wanted me to come as bait, to make it easier to recapture you all."

"Bring the bears to the honeypot," he said. "Interesting tactic, but surely they knew that sending someone infected with the VN1R1 retrovirus wouldn't work on all of us... But, given the time constraints imposed by the disintegrating wormhole, I suppose it was a do what you must situation."

VN1R1 retrovirus. Disintegrating wormhole. This guy seemed to know a lot.

"You can tell that I'm infected? Why aren't the pheromones affecting you? Olfactory nerve block? Gay?" Chastity's mind was overclocking, trying to fit this new piece of knowledge into what she understood of her situation.

"Hmm, with the exception of one fumbled teenage experiment in the locker room, I would not consider myself gay, and I why in the world would I subject myself to an olfactory nerve block?"

"Why aren't you affected then?"

"It's a simple enough answer, girl. I created the retrovirus. Why would I make myself susceptible to it?"

***

The words were perfectly clear to Chastity's ears, but cloudy and confusing in her mind as she tried to process them.

"You? You're responsible for the fucking succubus syndrome? YOU FUCKING DID THIS TO ME?" Chastity felt the bile churn in her stomach again, but the source of it was based in resentment and anger over what her life had become after the infection.

"Please don't call it that," he sneered. "I planned on writing a letter of protest to the uninspired news station that contrived that catchphrase. It sounds vulgar, don't you think?" He looked at Chastity, as if expecting confirmation. "And, it creates a type of demonic association. Completely false, it is. I created the virus with transphylogenetic reverse transcriptase encoders, not some satanic succubus drivel."

Chastity looked firm into those cold oversized eyes. There was no suggestion of shame in them over what he had done. Would even occur to him to feel remorse for what he had done?

Before Chastity's rational mind could register it, she lunged and punched him. Her knuckles smashed into his face. He had turned her life into a man-hating shitfest, and he deserved every punch he got.

He fell and landed on his back. Chastity dove on top of him, straddled his chest and pinned his arms to the ground with her knees.

She punched again, hard into his nose. The cartilage buckled under the impact of her knuckles, but she wasn't sure if it broke so she punched again.

"Dear lord, what is wrong with you?" he shrieked at her.

"What's wrong with me? You're damned retrovirus is what's wrong with me! It's twisted my insides into something I hate. I'm one skin-suit from being a shut-in or shipped away. I barely leave the house and when I do I have to inject myself with an inhibitor that makes men only want to dry hump me instead of rape me." She hit him again, this time with a smack instead of a punch. "You ruined my life. Don't you care?"

The answer came so quick it had to be true. "It never occurred to me to consider your thoughts in the matter."

Chastity pulled back to swing another punch, but let her arm fall limp. It finally made sense. He was a damned mad scientist. That was the special population of the prison. Every one of them was a damned mad scientist.

She had agreed to risk her life to save the man who had made her what she was.

"If you will just stop for a second," he said. "I'm sure that we can come to some sort of arrangement in which you stop hitting me and help me. In return I can help you."

"Help you?" Chastity said, almost spitting in his face. "I'm still not sure that I'm not going to kill you before the team figures out that I've found you."

"Killing me would preclude my helping you. You really should consider—"

"We're one-hundred and twenty-something million years in the past. You're unarmed. You're a fucking psychopath, by the way. What the hell do you think you can do to help me?"