The Bondage Laboratory Ch 05

Reagan looked up suddenly from her breakfast as she heard the unmistakable crackle of gunfire from somewhere nearby. The morning chatter of the common room fell abruptly silent, the other girls all staring towards the door at the far end of the cell block as more shots rang out from the hallway outside followed by shouting and a scream that set her teeth on edge.

"What the fuck was that?" Zara hissed beside her.

She shook her head, rising slowly to her feet and stepping out from behind the table they had been eating at. "I don't know," she replied.

The others followed her as she edged forward slowly and gathered about the common room doors, staring down their row of cells to the large metal doors at the far end of the hall. The battle seemed to be taking place right outside the cell block and she could hear some of the girls whispering urgently to each other, some suggesting that it was perhaps a rescue team coming to save them, when something large and heavy struck the metal doors with enough force to put a dent in them and with a scream that turned Reagan's blood to ice. The girls jumped, several of them gasping or screaming in surprise. Someone grabbed her wrist tightly and she looked round to see Milly beside her, her eyes wide but her jaw set defiantly.

Several more shots rang out against the doors before everything fell deathly silent. No one spoke for several moments before everyone started speaking at once. The girls were shouting over each other, asking Reagan what she thought the noises had been as if she might have seen something they hadn't. In the end she was almost grateful when the sonic sirens mounted on the walls of the cellblock activated, the frantic questioning grinding to a halt as the girls rushed to cover their ears against the terrible, wailing drone.

"Ladies." The Doctor was doing his best to sound calm but there was an unmistakable note of urgency in his tone that Reagan hadn't heard before. "Please return to your cells immediately."

If the Doctor had hoped to calm his prisoners down he had failed dismally. The voices of her cellmates only grew louder as panic began to take hold. Reagan was buffeted by questions that she had no answer to, Alyss looked to be on the verge of tears again and to make matters worse, the gunfire had started again.

"Enough!" she yelled, her frustration eventually getting the better of her. "I don't know anything more than the rest of you. Let's just do as the Doctor says and wait this out." She looked at the other girls in turn, fixing each of them with what she hoped amounted to a reassuring stare as she said firmly, "We will be fine."

She didn't wait for anyone to argue with her as she turned and made her way back to the relative comfort of her cell. She paused at the end of the corridor to glance at the battered door and the tiny slither off light that was now visible between the two buckled halves. She considered attempting to steal a look through the narrow crack but ultimately thought better of it. Something in the back of her mind was telling her to move, that her cell was the safest place to be right now. As soon as she crossed the threshold of her cell, the energy field in the doorway crackled to life behind her, bathing her in its soft blue glow. She pursed her lips, her mind racing with questions as she settled herself on the edge of her bed and waited, all too aware of the sounds of gunfire that were still present in the distance.

The minutes stretched to hours with no word from anyone outside the cell block. A selection of films were made available to them on their video screens and food was provided through the usual chutes in the back of their cells in an obvious attempt to distract them all from what was happening outside the cells but nothing could quite drown out the continued shooting nor the chilling screams that echoed down the nearby corridors. Occasionally the fighting would draw closer and on one occasion something began to ram the doors again which caused another round of panic to set in as the great steel slabs buckled further. She was thankful to be separated from the others, with only Milly to talk to in her cell across the hall. They shared a few ideas over what might be happening but largely tried to ignore it, both knowing that they were powerless to do anything about it.

The arrival of evening was marked by the lights in the cell block being cycled down to simulate night. Reagan tried to get some sleep but found it virtually impossible with the fighting still audible within the facility and even when she did manage to close her eyes, her dreams were haunted by strange and terrifying creatures with horned heads, knife-like teeth and chilling screams.

By morning the fighting seemed to have stopped or at least moved to a part of the facility far enough away from the cells that the girls could no longer hear it. Breakfast was delivered to their cells and after another hour of waiting the doors to the cell block finally opened as far as the buckled panels would permit them to. Reagan hurried to watch as the Doctor strode into the block, his expression grim. He was accompanied by twenty or so nurses and several battle droids, all of whom were armed with plasma rifles and who quickly took up positions around the door, looking back into the facility.

"I apologise for the wait," the Doctor said. "However, it is imperative that we move you all to a safer location. The nurses will come and prepare you for transport. Please do not resist."

"What's going on?" Reagan demanded. "We heard fighting!"

One of the nurses reached for the stun baton that hung from her waist but the Doctor held up his hand, gesturing for the others to continue before walking over to Reagan's cell.

"I owe you an apology," he said softly. "It seems that the nurse you attacked the other night was... Not herself."

"She attacked us," Reagan said coldly.

The Doctor nodded apologetically. "I know," he replied. "I will explain everything but we are running out of time. For now you will have to trust me."

She snorted. "As if I would trust you!"

He frowned, her words clearly having cut him deeper than she had intended. "Do not resist," he said sadly as he shut down the forcefield to her cell. "It will all make sense soon."

The Doctor stepped aside to allow two of the nurses into the cell. She scowled at the women, clenching her fists at her sides as they advanced towards her. What if the other girls had been right? What if someone was battling to try and rescue them at that very moment. As one of the nurses reached for her, she lashed out instinctively, catching the woman a glancing blow that caused her stumble against the wall of her cell. The other nurse through her arms around Reagan, her PVC dress creaking as she pinned her arms to her side even as Reagan bucked and kicked her legs. The other nurse recovered from the blow that she had dealt her and was at her side in a moment, plunging a needle into her arm and injecting her with a vibrant blue liquid. Reagan's eyes went wide as the second nurse released her, her body already beginning to shut down as the drug spread rapidly through her system. She slumped against the bed, her vision blurring as her heavy eyelids slid slowly shut.

****

The low humming of florescent bulbs was the first thing Reagan heard as she stirred from her drug induced state of unconsciousness. She was sat on a hard chair, slumped face down on a cold metal table in a small white room. There was a door in the wall opposite her as well a large mirror that ran the length of the wall to her right hand side. Though the style of the room was similar in principal to what other sections of the facility that she had seen, this particular room seemed somehow different, the white walls less bright, the furniture hard and cold and the lighting dull.

She sat up slowly, pushing strands of her black hair from her face and wiping drool from the corner of her lip. She was still naked and she shivered against the chill of the room, wrapping her arms around herself as her lilac skin rose like goose flesh in the cold.

The door to the room opened before she could consider further where she was and the Doctor stepped inside. He clutched a computer and a stack of files under one arm that he set carefully on the table before settling himself in the seat opposite her with a groan of a man who had grown suddenly tired.

"How are you feeling?" he asked gently.

She scowled at him, adjusting her arms to cover her purple nipples that had grown hard in the cold.

He rubbed his face, clearly frustrated by her silence. "The others are all fine," he informed her. "What happens next is up to you."

"Let me guess," she growled, "you are going to drug me again, steal my memories and dump me back in my cell?"

"You can leave," he said. "That has always been an option."

She pursed her lips, meeting his steady gaze with an icy coldness of her own. "That is not an answer," she bit back.

"You are right," he said. "And I promised you answers." He pulled the computer from beneath the stack of papers and turned it on. It was an old model, practically an antique what with its integrated keyboard and flip screen monitor. She watched him as he input commands into the computer, noticing for the first time the small silver band on the ring finger of his left hand. The idea that he was married sent a strange feeling through her body, though she could not place quite what it was that she felt.

He turned the computer around, showing her the monitor and a frozen image of a distant city on a faraway planet in flames, it's people fleeing from some invisible threat.

"Where is this?" she whispered, for the sleek architecture of the burning buildings seemed strangely familiar.

"Hydeera," he said softly. "You went there on holiday once with your parents, so you told me."

She swallowed, tears forming inexplicably in the corners of her eyes. "What is happening?"

His lips tightened to a thin line as he moved his fingers over the keyboard and the image began to play. She watched the camera pan frantically over the burning city, watched walkways full of people collapse and buildings explode as the fire tore through their fragile metal frames. There was no sound, but she could hear the screams nonetheless and as she looked more closely, she could see the monsters responsible for the destruction. They were lithe and powerful, female in the shape of their hips and chests but also beyond the notion of femininity. Long horns curled from their pallid foreheads and behind their pointed ears, forked tongues lashed at the air and spiked tails swayed in their wake. Scales covered their bodies and their eyes were black pits from which no light could be seen. The camera panned, panic seizing the operator as they did what they should have already been doing and began to run, only for one of the creatures to come loping out of an adjacent alleyway and fall upon them. The camera clattered to the floor, the image distorting as a crack appeared over the lens. Reagan recoiled as she saw a body, or at least the remains of one, flop to the floor to the right of the screen before the hideous creature fell upon it and the screen became too coated in gore to see anything else.

"What is that thing?" she breathed as the Doctor closed the screen.

He met her gaze, and she was suddenly aware of the dark circles under his eyes. "Hell is real, Reagan," he said. "Those things, those daemons, are what we all have created."

She balked at him, shaking her head in disbelief. "I don't..."

"Three years ago the Galactic Alliance recorded a rift in the fabric of space," he said, sliding one of the files over to her and flipping it open. "A research vessel was dispatched to determine the cause of the rift but whatever probes or vessels that were sent into the rift were all lost, except for one."

She flicked through the file at his prompting, pausing at the images of a great tear of fiery, blue and pink energy in the blackness of space, a photo of the research vessel and its thirty man crew beneath it and later of a probe droid, it's silvered surface scorched and blackened and rent open by strange marks.

"The probe contained data unlike anything the Alliance scientists had ever seen before. To all eyes it seemed as though there was another universe behind the walls of our reality, that the rift was in actual fact a keyhole to that unimaginable place. They weren't to know that the probe had brought back more than data, however, that the universe that it alluded to was a harsh and violent place that would make even the most inhospitable regions of our own reality look like a paradise."

He passed her another file, opening on a page that contained a panicked transcript. "It became clear that something had entered our universe through the rift and that the probe had inadvertently brought it back to the research vessel. The ship's female crew members all fell ill one after the other and soon began to transform."

She turned the page and gasped at the grainy black and white images of more creatures, some still wearing tattered white and green Alliance uniforms, hurtling through the ship.

"The vessel crashed on a nearby planet, spilling its diseased payload onto that world from where it spread across the galaxy. These monsters, these daemons, are smart and powerful. They adapted quickly with each planet they consumed, each system they infected. Where they began as little more than monsters, they now command fleets of their own and have brought the Alliance to its knees."

Reagan stared at the Doctor, her heart pounding as she recalled the terrible screams that she had heard earlier that day. "What does this have to do with me though?" she hissed.

His dark expression faltered, his lip twitching in a smile as he handed her the next file, open to a page headed by a picture of herself in a grey lab coat with three green stripes running vertically from her right shoulder.

"Doctor Reagan Brightstar," he said, a note of pride in his voice. "The Alliance's foremost geneticist. Whilst the fleet bought time you were the one leading the efforts to find a cure. You were the one who worked out that the daemons release a type of pheromone that causes the DNA of other species to mutate. I was on your team. We had almost cracked the code when..."

"One of the subjects got loose," she finished, the dream she had witnessed in the suite only a few nights ago suddenly coming back to her. "I remember... They were killing them all... Will..." The name hit her like a punch to the gut, the face of her brother vanishing behind the bulkhead door as he pushed her through the small opening before turning to make a stand against the creatures.

The Doctor hung his head, his eyes glassy with unshed tears. "You remember your brother?" he asked before nodding softly. "Good. Your brother was a great man and a good friend to me. Not a day goes past where I do not think how much I miss him."

Tears tracked down her cheeks as she stared into the Doctor's familiar face, the fog that had dominated her mind for so many days starting to clear. The simple silver ring caught the light as he wrung his hands together, the small symbol inscribed upon the band read 'forever' in the Elven tongue.

"Who are you?" she breathed.

He looked at her with such longing that she thought he might collapse. The tears in his eyes broke free, rolling down his cheeks into the stubble of his beard.

"Tell me," she insisted, touching her own index finger on her left hand, subconsciously aware that something was missing.

"I can't," he said. "I want to, but I can't." He took the final file from the desk and opened it for her. The page displayed the results of a number of blood samples. She saw her name as well as Milly's and all the other girls' names that they had been imprisoned alongside. She picked up the file, flicking through the pages as her brain made sense of what she was reading, her understanding of the science unhindered by the drugs that had stripped her memories.

"We are infected?" she breathed.

He nodded grimly. "You have been ever since the day your brother died."

****

Reagan woke to the pounding of her own head and the low hum of a nearby engine. She tried to stretch but something was holding her in place. Lights shone overhead, dim yet bright enough to make her squint in her lucid state. She blinked the sleep out of her eyes and looked around slowly as the fog that clouded her mind began to part. She was encased in a kind of upright glass cylinder. She wore a leather straight jacket that pulled her arms across her chest beneath her bare boobs and was fastened tightly behind her back. Straps bound her legs together around her ankles and above and below her knees whilst more straps pinned her to the lightly cushioned surface that she lay against. A collar was cool against her neck and a ball gag was large in her mouth, straps securing it beneath her chin and behind her head.

She looked beyond the small glass cylinder to the room that she was in. There were three other containers, two on each side of the room and each containing another of the girls from the prison, bound and gagged as she was. She was glad to see Milly opposite her, her blue hair pulled into a high ponytail as Reagan's had been. Zara was in the tube beside her, her arms crossed beneath her small tits, her short hair tousled around her face. She couldn't see who was in the tube beside her own. A large table lay in the centre of the room and there were numerous devices set about the edges of the room that both terrified her and stirred something within her. It was almost as if they were in a miniature version of the Doctor's lab.

The door to the room opened and the Doctor stepped inside. He was cleaning his glasses on a scrap of cloth and had shed his suit jacket and tie. No nurses accompanied him as the door slid shut behind him, Reagan catching sight of a narrow corridor leading into what seemed to be a cockpit beyond.

"You're all awake," he said, his cheerful tone returned. "Good."

Reagan tried to remember what had happened. The facility had been attacked. They had been taken from their cells... Something about Hell being real and daemons flooding through a rift in space.

"The prison has been compromised," the Doctor said bluntly. "Fortunately we had made preparations for this inevitability. You may be a little less comfortable from now on, but at least we can continue our work."

"The others are all fine," the Doctor continued. "Unfortunately they elected to leave the process, however, which makes the four of you even more valuable than you were before."

Reagan closed her eyes, the realisation that she had chosen once again to be here a familiar revelation.

"The nurses will no longer be assisting me," he went on. "But this ship has been specifically designed for our work. Computer, please prepare our guests for the warp-jump."

Reagan looked up as panels in the top and bottom of her tube opened. Her eyes widened as two pairs of robotic arms snaked out of the opening towards her. She recoiled but the straps that held her down meant she had no way of avoiding the arms as they slid a blindfold over her eyes and slithered up her legs. Something cold and slick with lube was pressed between the lips of her pussy and into her ass and she shuddered as the vibrator and butt plug slid inside her. Her breathing quickened, her toes curling and her fists clenched in the sleeves of the tight fitting jacket. She couldn't see anything and the only thing she could here was the distant hum of the ships engines as they began to power up.

The vibrator clicked on, the butt plug beginning to buzz inside of her ass a moment later. She gasped, her mouth filling with saliva as her eyes rolled up into her head. She could not see,