The alien price for saving the station had been a heavy one. After that leviathan destroyed the alien vessels that were attacking, it assumed a high orbit over the colony, and waited. Thirteen local days later, the aliens patient watch ended with the arrival of more ships. Massive bulk landers descended on the planet below, and the colonists found out the price of their salvation.
Of the nine million colonists, eight and a half million were loaded onto the transports and taken back into space. Resistance was met with instant lethality, and the colony was turned into a ghost town over the course of a week. Factories and labs were abandoned, and the basic infrastructure started to break down without the people needed to maintain them. The supply ship that arrived after the aliens took their price found a colony in shambles, and evacuated the remaining thirty thousand souls off world.
My life found its direction in the aftermath of that grim harvest. The Hycanthians, the aliens that performed that harvest were a part of a vast interstellar community of nations. Hycanthian scientists very quickly figured out how to build us out of our constituent parts using their genetic technologies. Cheaper to build than robots, we were accepted into the service of many different species at the lowest rung of their social structures. For a while we were new and exotic, and that meant that we were meat to consumed.
They were hungry for us, using us up and discarding us like cattle or sheep back home. The ones that weren't trying to eat us were trying to fuck us. Of the initial grouping of eight and a half million, ninety percent were dead within that first year of our bondage. Most were eaten as an exotic delicacy by the lords and ladies of interstellar empires. We were the hot ticket item, and i heard stories of our children sold as pets to the children of the fabulously wealthy.
Fortunately, in a twisted way of looking at things, our fad faded, and soon we were just another primitive bipedal race that didn't understand how technology worked. We became the lowest level of labor used by most of the more advanced races. Hard labor, mining, and agriculture became our stock in trade, we weren't advanced enough yet to understand alien construction technology.
Five natural born generations of our people were born, lived, and died under the cruel watch of alien overseers. We dug across a million mines, and fed trillions upon trillions of other more advanced sentient creatures. One of the workers at a mining colony showed a remarkable bit of craftiness, and his overseer saw the potential and put him to work repairing mining equipment and overseeing other humans.
Five more generations of our kind labored under the watchful eyes of our own people. We were a wonderfully exploitable resource. We kept ourselves in line, could fix our own equipment, and if given parameters to operate under, we could effectively keep ourselves motivated to complete a task. Thy Hycanthians made vast fortunes on the backs of human labor pods, and we were integrating slowly into the landscape of the interstellar collective we had been forced into.
Then something unexpected occurred that changed the way we were seen forever. The Gulark insurrection attacked the Hycanthians. The rest of the aliens stayed out of the fighting, but the Hycanthians panicked. They armed us, and sent us into the field against the Gularks. We died in the millions, but the Hycanthians could always build more. Using brain recordings and advances in cybernetic technology, they built a better human being, one that emerged from the genevats ready to take up arms and destroy their enemies.
At a cost of 12 billion human lives, the Hycanthians destoyed the Gulark insurrection and added their planets to the Hycanthas regime. The secret about humans was out though. Intelligent enough to follow orders in combat but expendable enough to throw into the jaws of certain death, we became a commodity again. Hycanthian technology is capable of building many different kinds of human soldiers, from common infantry all the way up to something like me.
I remember the first time my purchaser came to the Hycanthian Ark. Common infantry could be grown in less than a month, but something as complicated and advanced as i was took longer, almost five years and a fabulous cost in money. My purchaser was a Brellian. He was a large creature, covered in very soft, very fine fur. Three eyes rounded its conical head, giving it the ability to see almost all the way around its head. He nodded at the Hycanthian who was responsible for my construction.
Despite his apparent approval, my appearance was deemed less than ideal, and i was modified. My canine teeth were elongated and sharpened, and my skin texture was modified to a more pleasant texture. Other humans i would later encounter had extremely smooth, soft skin. Mine was much rougher and thicker, and had an abrasive feeling. They also modified my skin color, giving me a dark blue coloration, with lighter highlights radiating away from my core.
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