The Spawning Read Online Free Page A

ceiling itself just seemed to glow with a strange greenish-yellow light that Miranda found uncomfortable, that seemed to prevent her eyes from focusing properly.
    There was nothing else to see beyond the robot Miranda was acutely conscious of behind her, but she wasn’t anxious to study it after she’d seen what it was capable of.
    No one on Earth had anything like it.
    She knew that.
    She was as certain as she could be that she would’ve heard something about such a technological breakthrough as a robot fully capable and armed as a guard, a robot that at least appeared capable of assessing the situation on its own and reacting.
    It was still impossible to accept the completely unacceptable explanation Deborah had supplied her with.
    She wasn’t certain if that was because it just wasn’t logical or because she just didn’t want to.
    She’d shuffled forward several yards before she heard a faint groan behind her that alerted her to the fact that the woman who’d been knocked out was coming around.
    She flicked a glance over her shoulder as she heard the gasp that followed.
    THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 14
    “Your cooperation will be appreciated,” the robot said. “Get up and stand in line with the others.”
    The woman whimpered, hysteria edging her voice.
    “I’d do as it says,” Miranda murmured warningly as she met the woman’s gaze.
    For several moments she wondered if the woman was even rational enough to
    grasp the warning, but she clamped her lips together and, when the robot released her, she scrambled to her feet and bolted into Miranda, nearly shoving her into the woman in front of her.
    “What are they doing? Where are they taking us?” the woman babbled, digging
    her fingernails into Miranda’s arms.
    “I don’t know. None of us know,” Miranda responded, trying to disentangle
    herself from the woman, then added in an attempt to soothe her, “They want us alive. We wouldn’t be alive now if they didn’t have some use for us. Try to stay calm.”
    The woman nodded jerkily, but her eyes were still wide with terror. “You think?”
    she whispered hoarsely, an unmistakable note of pleading in her eyes.
    Miranda didn’t have a clue and what was worse, the woman’s hysteria was
    beginning to infect her and every other woman within hearing. “Some of the women have already been here a couple of days,” she pointed out, as much to reassure herself as everyone else.
    It did seem to reassure them—even reassured her—and she didn’t have a fucking clue of whether she was right or not.
    It seemed logical, though, she told herself. They’d been kidnapped. They,
    whoever, or whatever ‘they’ were, wanted something.
    She discovered when she’d shuffled forward several more yards that there was a door beyond the bend. Every twenty minutes or so, by her best guess, it opened silently, the robot standing at the front of the line shoved a half dozen women through, and then the door closed again.
    Miranda’s stomach knotted with fear.
    As hard as she tried to convince herself that there had to be another explanation for the situation, the presence of the robots—and no humans besides the captives, the strange lights, the unfamiliar materials that surrounded them—everything seemed to point to the unlikelihood that anything human, from Earth, could be behind their captivity.
    She tried to direct her mind away from her churning bowels and the aching
    bladder she hadn’t noticed before, wondering how many hours had passed since she’d been kidnapped. The full bladder indicated at least three or four, but then she’d had one and a half mixed drinks before she’d left the club.
    She’d visited the lady’s room before she’d left, though.
    Her hearing seemed to have returned to normal. That usually took several hours.
    She’d been knocked out, though, twice—and she’d slept at least a few hours. The sluggishness she felt seemed to be the aftereffects of not enough sleep, but could have