discourage her weaknesses. The goal was to prepare her for the Hunger-driven men of Hezara. Part of her was curious—what exactly they would demand from her? There was another part of her that she kept hidden, one that harbored the niggling doubts that haunted her dreams and required hours of meditation to tame.
The secretive training was devoted to the art of sexual pleasure, and in particular style practiced by the men of Hezara. Most of it was conducted through the use of virtual reality environments. She learned their language and rituals including the bizarre concept of nestors who shared everything without jealousy. The virtual world felt real enough, but it wasn’t really; she knew that reality would offer different sensations and emotions. Her mother, who’d disappeared out of her life with another man when she was small, contacted her once to claim Shayla was the victim of brainwashing. Shayla never heard a peep from her after that and wondered if she’d been arrested for subverting the law that strictly prohibited criticizing Hezara.
Fortunately, although criticism was forbidden, curiosity was allowed.
“They’ll spank you,” said her favorite tutor. Alfraya had warned her during one of her early sessions on sexual behavior, and not long after she joined the academy at eighteen. “Expect to be spanked regularly for the slightest error. They are exacting men who firmly believe in correction.”
“On my bottom?” Shayla asked.
“Yes. Of course since you are naked all the time, it will be bare bottomed.”
Shayla’s jaw dropped. “Won’t it hurt?”
Alfraya lifted Shayla’s chin and patted her hand in an almost reassuring manner. “Naturally. It’s supposed to hurt, but they won’t harm you. Remember, Gifts are returned to Earth once they are retired by Hezara and the knowledge they bring back is crucial to the next generation of Gifts. So, don’t fret, spanking will cause you discomfort but no lasting impediments. They will also punish you in other ways that you may find challenging but not impossible to bear.”
“Challenging.” Shayla swallowed hard. “Do you know exactly what they might do?”
“Oh, dear girl. Of course. I am after all a returned Gift.” She said this with a gleeful smile as if the accolade was a medal around her neck.
Shayla discovered many of her tutors had once been gifted. Not all women returned when they retired, some chose to live out their lives on distant planets, where they were treated kindly, but generally ignored as unwanted reminders of Hezara’s dependence on the females of other species. The tutors were surprisingly coy about their specific treatment, citing their need to honor privacy agreements with Hezara. However, Alfraya was quite open about her life there.
“Spanked. Anal sex. Insertion of stimulating devices. Orgasm denial. These are many ways you might be tamed. My advice, young Shayla, do not disobey these men. And if you do, accept their punishment with dignity. They will respect you for that. Be demure and submissive in all things. Never question their authority.”
There was so much to take in about these strange aliens. Some days Shayla felt completely overwhelmed with her responsibilities, other times, thrilled at the idea of adventure, even if she’d had little involvement in its planning. She’d no clue when drafted into the academy that Hezara were archaic in their attitudes to women and dependent on base desires, and yet also advanced beyond Earth’s imagination when it came to technology and military accomplishments. Whenever she purred with excitement at the thought of traveling to the other side of the galaxy, Alfraya brought her crashing back down with some nuanced piece of information. There were things Shayla had come to accept as okay, perhaps pleasant if done well, but denial and spankings were not on her wish list. She needed to know more; she could be terribly nosey when she put her mind to it.
“They won’t harm me?” she asked.
“They seem incapable of harm when it comes to human women. You see, my dear, you are too precious to them. Without you, they must force the Hunger from their bodies with sexdroids and those robots are not satisfying these men. Their functionality is limited, and not all men have access to them, and only a handful are granted Gifts. You will be treated well, but also controlled in every possible way to keep you safe and secure in their habitats and jealously guarded. Very possessive, these Hezara men. One might say it is a weakness.” Alfraya lowered her voice. “Don’t ignore their weaknesses. There are some who wish to know more about them.”
“Who wants to know?” Shayla asked.
Alfraya pressed her finger to Shayla’s lips. “Somebody will contact you.”
In the weeks before her departure, covert operators whispered to her during secret meetings; they wanted her to find out about the queens.
“It’s their biggest problem,” one creepy man with a lopsided face told her. “Hezara rely on a relatively small number of females to reproduce and the shrinkage of their genetic pool is forcing them into this Hunger. We, the Earth’s Resistance, believe that if we can threaten their incubators, then they will give us greater freedom.”
“Freedom from what?” she asked. Such insurrection was dangerous, but she’d agreed to meet them because Alfraya had insisted and she trusted her friend.
“This oppression, the claim that gifting of our women will protect us.”
“But, don’t they protect us from the Violence?” Shayla wrung her hands into a knot. Something about her mother’s warning and her father’s own opinions had given Shayla the confidence to break with protocols and meet the Rogues, as they were called by the Earth’s Supreme Authority. She’d not anticipated how many people were out there willing to risk their lives to speak to her.
“The Violence,” said the lopsided man, who had come with a companion who scowled throughout and kept glancing over his shoulder—they’d met in the middle of the night in an abandoned basketball court. “What Violence? We have only their word that the galaxy is a dangerous place. They need us more than we need them. Gifts! What happens is a mockery of that word.”
She mentioned her eminent father, but the Rogues disagreed with what he preached.
“Your father is wrong. There will never be integration and we will slowly be subjugated until all our women are theirs. To protect ourselves, we must understand more about their nests and incubators, the queens. These aliens aren’t going to love you, treat you with respect. They see you for one purpose only. Fucking. They’re addicted to fucking.”
That last word had made her uncomfortable. It was strictly forbidden in the academy to talk about ‘fucking’ and any other vulgar term for copulation. As far as Shayla had been taught, pleasuring was an art and required specialist physical stamina and mindfulness. Hence her daily requirement to meditate.
She said her goodbyes—to her fellow trainees, who looked on with both envy and delight at her achievement, the dedicated team who’d tutored her at the academy, and Earth, the planet she’d called home since birth. As for her mother, Shayla had long ago accepted that relationship was a distant memory. Her birth father, a pioneering advocate of interspecies relationships, had maintained a cursory interest in her life, and only during her last days on Earth had he approached her to give advice. Like her mother, he’d not been happy that she’d been selected, but what could he do when nobody was allowed to criticize the system. He hoped for a different future, where choice played a greater role.
Her father believed the Hezarans should consider breeding with humans and ultimately create equality between two species. He even spoke of the potential for life partners, which was something the men of Hezara claimed they never needed.
“The Hunger,” he told her during their brief farewell meeting, “is symptomatic of a greater need that goes beyond sexual appetites. You, Shayla, and all the other women we’ve sent in the past, are slowly awakening them to other desires, and possibly other solutions. This is your true mission. Conquer their hearts and we will achieve integration.”
So what was her true mission? Was it to rescue aliens from the agony of the Hunger? Just that—to find love with Hezarans and convince them to be equals, as her father wished? Or was it to uncover the secrets of their nests and queens, and spy?