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  P R O G E N I T O R

  By

  Antony J Woodward

  Copyright Notice:

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  There is use of Pop Culture references, with no intention of copyright infringement and are merely used as references and do not claim any ownership of copyrighted material.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  © Antony Woodward

  Author's Note:

  While every care has been taken to deliver this product to you in the best possible form - there may still be the odd typo/grammatical error/spelling mistake.

  About the Author:

  Antony J Woodward lives in his hometown of Scunthorpe, with his Pug. A lifelong enthusiast

  for cathartic entertainment, he studied multimedia at college level before finding himself

  in the ever fascinating world of healthcare.

  He’s always excited to hear from you, so drop a message on twitter (@DirtyPrettyThin) or find him on Facebook.

  Other Works by Antony J Woodward:

  The Black Winter

  P A R A D I S E

  The Mendacity Games

  I Am Pug

  P R O G E N Y

  Puss In Boots And The Werewolf Cult

  Puss In Boots and Frankenstein’s Monster

  Rewind

  Available on Amazon’s Kindle Store:

  For Meliah & Jared,

  ADVISORY:

  This book contains themes of sustained horror, violence and gore that some readers may find disturbing…

  PREVIOUSLY:

  In 2025 Liara Nicholson, a famed explorer, finds a bio dome under Mount Kailash. She leads a 13 man crew inside and finds a lost paradise. Not long into the expedition half the crew turn on her and the remaining half disappear. Liara becomes stranded in the bio dome and the remaining members of the crew are picked off by the dangers living in the walled garden. Deep within the bio dome she finds an alien who has been living on Earth for over a millennia. Initially it appears friendly, but it turns on Liara. Demonstrating a complex understanding of human biology, it injects Liara with a mysterious chemical. She is transformed from a partially transitioned trans-woman into a biological female. She is then raped by the alien. She kills the alien in a fight and before she escapes the bio dome. She is the sole survivor of the expedition.

  Six months later Liara, after disappearing off the radar, returns to the public eye. She appears on national television and tells her story. She is then targeted by the Chinese government and saved by the intervention of the English government. They take Liara and her estranged boyfriend Adam into hiding and reveal their awareness of her pregnancy. Liara was impregnated by the alien and had been carrying its progeny. Before Liara is taken to a top secret research facility, the aliens arrive on Earth. They abduct her and irreversibly announce their place in the universe.

  After an indefinite length of time Liara awakes on the aliens’ home planet and joins an exiled community of humans and a similar species of alien. She eventually learns that the blue aliens, dubbed the Fours, abducted her because of her ability to carry their offspring. Their own biological tampering had rendered their species sterile. The white aliens Liara befriends were the same species, dubbed the Twos, but they had been rejected by their evolutionary superior counterparts. The Fours had secretly cloned and genetically modified multiple variations of Liara, trying to perfect her DNA so she could successfully surrogate their progeny. The Liara within the exiled community is revealed to be an eighth generation clone, mixed with a larger amount of Four DNA than previously. During the assault on the Four’s palace, Liara8 finds the real Liara Nicholson suspended in cyrosleep. Before she can exact her revenge on the Queen Four, a new species of aliens arrive and intervene. These new aliens are squid-like in appearance. It is revealed that they are the creators of the Fours and had forbidden the Fours from reproducing. A fight breaks out and Liara8 ultimately eradicates all Four’s from the planet with a biological weapon given to her by the new aliens. Due to the amount of Four DNA in her genetic make-up she succumbs to the weapon herself. The new aliens take her aboard their ship, along with a #9 variant, and begin to rejuvenate Liara8. They, in a display of good will, send the real Liara and remaining survivors of the exiled community home to Earth.

  YEAR UKNOWN:

  CHAPTER ONE:

  The feel of solid glass crushing her cheek rose her from whatever plane of life she was on. She slowly became aware of her self, of her body being laid uncomfortably on something cold. The first thought that formed in her mind was “I’m alive,”.

  Why was that such a revelation? Her mind felt foggy, thick and cloudy just like mist. She felt half-asleep, like she remained with one leg in the land of nod. Only she hadn’t been sleeping, she’d… She didn’t know what it was, only that she had felt cocooned in warmth and cushioned between the planes of waking and dreams. It hadn’t been sleep, it had been something else.

  As her body slowly woke up, she became aware of the cool air around her naked form. She became aware of the little puddle of water at her knees. She opened her green eyes, needing a moment for them to adjust before she could focus. She was somewhere dark, a swathe of blue light pulsed over her sporadically before leaving the room in shadows. She blinked several times. Slowly, she raised herself up. The bones in her arms ached, her muscles felt cold and stiff. She righted herself, realising she was laid upon what appeared to be a glass tube. A cracked and broken tube of glass, much like a cryogenic chamber. There was a tugging at her scalp and she numbly pulled against it. There was a wet tearing sound and something came away from the back of her head. The sound of a wire whipping down to the floor was instantly recognisable. Her long hair had clumped together in one dark damp mess and it clung to her right breast.

  She glanced back, her eyesight somewhat restored. It was indeed what appeared to be a cryogenic chamber, she looked back to the glass she was knelt on. The chamber was vertical standing, so why had the front come off it? Why was it cracked and smashed? Why had it come off at all?

  She hauled herself off the glass and slumped onto a cold metal floor. The open spaces in the grate were uncomfortable to lean on. She took a breath and hauled herself up once more, she managed to get to her knees.

  The sensation of a tired and uncoordinated body felt familiar. It was nothing new. She took another breath and then pushed herself firmly onto her feet. She staggered but she stood tall.

  A pulse of blue light washed over her.

  Where was she? She didn’t recognise the place, not that that was anything new either. She’d seen a lot more strange places than she cared for.

  She coughed suddenly, a violent and explosive cough that forced her to double over. Her chest screamed in sharp agony and it took a lot of her strength to just remain on her feet.

  After a few seconds, the coughing subsided and she could take breath. She tenderly took breaths aware of sharp pain that could stab in her sides at any second. Her throat felt like it had been ravaged by sandpaper. She’d sounded like she’d smoked a hundred cigarettes a day.

  That was new. She didn’t smoke, sure she’d dabbled as a teenager but she’d never took up the habit. Her chest felt tight and it ached a little.

  Another blue wash of light.

  The room appeared to be some sort of laboratory, only it
was filled with machinery and equipment she didn’t recognise. It was alien to her.

  She chuffed at the thought. Wasn’t that just hitting the nail on the head…

  Her life had become irreversibly entangled with aliens.

  So she was in an alien laboratory.

  A sudden thought stealth-bombed in her mind. Instantly her attention dropped to her right arm. It was too dark to see anything.

  Then the blue pulse of light came and she was given the chance to study it. She recognised the collection of lines tattooed on her forearm. She couldn’t read the language but she knew it meant the number 8. For that’s what she was. She was the eighth iteration of the Liara clones.

  She felt reassured by it. How odd, she noted, to be reassured by the mark of what the Fours had done to her. It signified that Liara was indeed who she thought she was. It was only as this idea unfurled in her mind that she realised just how absurd it was. She had doubted she was even herself. But after everything she had been through, nothing was certain. Not even herself. She concluded that her interesting history and then being half-awake had combined to make her overlook these simple facts. Of course she was Liara, or rather the eighth iteration. No other clone would have her personal set of memories. If she was a clone, she wouldn’t even know she was one. No other clone would be so knowledgeable. That affirmation made her feel a little better.

  Liara, the real Liara Nicholson, was somewhere that the clone Liara didn’t know. The last time she’d seen her, she’d been in suspended sleep in a frosted chamber. The allusion to Snow White only appearing in retrospect. The Queen of the Fours, the one who had cloned Liara Nicholson for the sole purpose of carrying her progeny, had been attempting to evacuate with her. She not achieved that goal, Liara had seen to it herself.

  The recollection of the Queen stirred dark emotions in Liara.

  Killing her had been satisfying.

  And to think once upon a time the idea of murder had been abhorrent.

  A brief glimmer of a man’s face flickered in her mind, but was lost as suddenly as it came. Her memories were a little patchy still, some recollections were far stronger than others.

  She could however clearly picture the look on the bitch Queen’s face as she began to dissolve from the inside out. She’d been dismayed that her own creation had undone her. The creation had undone the creator. It was poetic justice.

  Liara was relieved that her memories that she had recovered were still intact, she’d spent the entirety of her stay on the Four’s home planet with amnesia. Amnesia she hadn’t understood until she came to learn she was a clone. The memories of hers that happened prior to awaking on the shore of the cave in the underground city weren’t actually hers. They were the real Liara’s. It must have been the incredible feat of cell-memory that had bestowed them upon Liara. The memories of life before awaking in the cave weren’t ever hers and they never had been, that’s why she’d not remembered them clearly. Of course clone Liara hadn’t known any of this, she wasn’t even meant to. She’d been created and designed in the pursuit of cultivating the perfect surrogate for the Fours. An expendable womb.

  Only this Liara was a failure. The Fours had tried combining more of their DNA in the cloning process and for whatever reason hadn’t succeeded in their goal. The Four DNA in Liara had no outward manifestation; no extra arms, sharp teeth or blue skin. She wasn’t even sure what ratio it was. Ultimately clones number 8 were a failure, perhaps she’d been destined to be euthanized?

  There had been some sort of accident aboard the ship carrying Liara that caused her to be flung free and to wash up ashore the underground city. The only reason she’d been allowed to live was curiosity. The Fours, or rather their researcher “Tak-Tak”, had decided to allow Liara to live to study her. He was a Judas, posing as a friend of the straggling city that housed humans and the outcast Twos when he was definitely aligned with the Fours. This curiosity ended up to be his, and the Four’s, undoing. There was no epic revolution, no tales of grand war, only Liara piercing deep into the rotten heart of the Four’s civilisation and undoing them. Her clones had overthrown the royal palace, an accident she never witnessed. But it was Liara herself who had delivered the killing blow to the Queen. Her fellow clones, her sisters, had started it and she had ended it.

  The Fours had become a dark haunting presence in her life. As she glanced around the dark room she wondered whether this was another Four establishment? Or was this one of the new aliens? The squid-like aliens had arrived on the planet, arriving to try and stop the Fours from succeeding in their plan. Only they was too late, the Queen successfully incubated her child inside a ninth variant Liara clone. Their sterility, that they had brought upon themselves via their genetic modifications, was over. Only this new alien, which revealed itself to be the creator of the Twos, and by extension Fours, killed the child. It had explicitly banned the Fours from reproducing and they’d openly disobeyed it.

  In a strange turn of events it had given Liara a vial of some biological weapon that was designed to wipe out the Fours. It was that very weapon, after a brutal and vicious fight with the Queen, that had been plunged into the Queen’s stomach and killed her. Of course the biological weapon was designed to target Fours and because Liara8 shared their DNA she succumbed to it too. Her last memory had been one of fading away, of the virus taking hold of her system and slowly feeling life ebbing away from her.

  To be alive again… Well, that was unexpected.

  Did this establishment belong to the new alien kind?

  But why? Why had they brought her back from the brink of death?

  A faint hum and then a louder buzz rattled the room. Glass chinked and something heavy crashed to the floor. The lights overhead flickered a little and then came on. The room was filled with clean white light. The room was a little larger than she’d initially thought. It was filled with a few more cryogenic chambers, they lined one wall to her left. The wall opposite was lined with heavy metal desks, a grey metal with black drawers. Futuristic apparatus and paraphernalia littered the tops, as they did the island of desks in the middle. There was no windows to punctuate the off-white walls. There wasn’t a single shred of decoration on any wall. The room was sterile and bland.

  She glanced to the floor, she was stood upon a dark metal grate that she could now see as a drain. It explained why there wasn’t a giant puddle of water on the floor. There was three more drains before her, all of them carefully positioned before the chambers. The other chambers were cracked, only one had any water left. Large chunks of glass glistened on the floor. Someone, or something perhaps, had attempted to smash the chambers open. She glanced around her, a display caught her attention. It looked like a black LCD from Earth. It was displaying a red flashing message that was written in a language that Liara had never seen before. The fact it was flashing in red didn’t bode well, nor did the fact it was plumbed into the chamber she’d been in. Was it displaying an error message? Or was that simply Liara’s imagination?

  She decided that because the language was not one she’d seen before, that it meant she was on the new alien-kind’s territory. She didn’t know how to feel about that… The Fours were a despicable lot and she hated them with a passion, yet these new Aliens were mysterious. Liara had witnessed one of them tear the Queen’s progeny clean in half with its bare hands, which no matter how you looked at it, it was an alarming fact. Yet they had given Liara the means to wipe out the Fours…

  Were they friend or foe? Or was it an enemy of the enemy being only friendly while you have an enemy in common?

  Fear prickled itself across her naked body.

  Like the previous occasions, she was going to have to figure that one out as she went. Right now she needed to figure out where she was.

  She scanned the room once more, she found nothing of use. She headed for the panel that she assumed was the doorway. It slid up as she approached and she stepped into a corridor.

  The corridor spanned both ways for a considerable l
ength. Another door slid open before her. The corridor was made of strange white panels with orange wires running between them. The floor was the same grey sheet metal as the room prior. It was warm underfoot. It appeared there was a junction either side of Liara. She felt like she’d just stepped out into a maze.

  She peeked into the room before her, it was almost identical to the room she’d left. The cryogenic chambers were empty, one had been smashed violently it seemed. Laboratory equipment had been scattered off the central desks, it littered the floor. Liara didn’t know how, she just knew she was looking at an aftermath of something. But what?

  Just what had happened here?

  Where was everybody?

  The silence was claustrophobic and eerie. She glanced down the corridor, deciding to head to her left. The four-way junction led to yet more junctions. The labyrinth revealed itself for what it was. Neat little panels indicated routes yet they was useless without knowing the language. She padded forward, peering into the next room on the right. It was an office, perfectly manicured. A wide slab of glass floated over the desk, little LCD letters blinking in the centre of it. A small pile of books cluttered the desk. Liara wasn’t surprised to see how human-like it was. She’d come to the conclusion that life seemed to riff off the same blueprints and templates in every species of life. Human’s inventions weren’t all that original, it was only our variations upon them that made it human. She took her attention to the room opposite. An identical office.

  This wasn’t a surprise either. All the aliens she’d met seemed to have a taste for repetition and uniformity. Were humans all that different?

  She carried on in the direction she’d been heading. The door on the right opened to reveal what appeared to be a locker room. Long blue metal cabinets lined the walls. An unfamiliar item of clothing hung off an open door. She stepped inside. The open locker yielded nothing but strange cans and cylindrical bottles that she couldn’t identify.