Anywhere
Tamar March
Federated Commonwealth
12 March, 3050

        Fiona awoke to the door opening and light flooding into the room. “I see you are still asleep, surat.” She heard a few footsteps, then a powerful grip on her shoulder, pulling her out of bed. “We do not have time to waste. Grab your boots and come with me.”

Fiona hadn’t taken off her jumpsuit from the day before, only her socks and boots, which she grabbed but did not have time to put on before scurrying after Mechwarrior Abigail out the door and down the hallway. They stopped at another door, which led to a communal bathroom. Abigail led her around the corner of a wall to a row of stalls that each housed a shower head, but no door or curtain. Without so much as a word, the Clan Mechwarrior grabbed the boots from Fiona’s grasp and shoved her into one of the stalls, which was already running, spraying luke warm water  all over her. “You have three minutes. Hurry, surat.”

She quickly stripped off her jumpsuit, doing her best to wash in the allotted time. When she heard Abigail call out to her, she stuck her head out, to which Abigail responded by grabbing her by the hair and pulling her out of the stall. By now, several people had filed into the room and were themselves slipping into various shower stalls. The clanner tossed a towel at Fiona, and when she had mostly dried herself, tossed her a fresh jumpsuit, along with clean socks and her boots.

Fiona hurriedly dressed, and when she was almost done, Abigail called for her to follow. She quickly tied her boots and followed the woman out into the hall, and out past the guards. They quickly crossed a tarmac and walked up the open ramp of a massive Overlord DropShip. The ship was not laid out in the traditional manner that Fiona was used to for an Overlord class ship. As they stepped into a lift and the door shut, Fiona dared a question.

“So all this, this is the return of Kerensky? Why not just, you know, return and announce yourselves?”

Abigail scowled. “At least you read the material I provided. And yes, we are the return of Kerensky. As for why we are returning as we are, is there any other choice? The decadent and wasteful leaders of all the failed Inner Sphere houses will never relinquish their grip over their holdings, and it is doubtful that they will willingly embrace the wisdom of the Star League. They have had 300 years to do so. Why would they do it now? No, we have no other choice but to enforce the Star League once again. Once you see the efficiency of the Clan way of life, you will understand that it is for the better.”

She changed the subject. “What are we going to be doing today? I’m—That is, I am not sure that I can survive another day like yesterday.”

The clanner scoffed. “You will have to survive far worse, I assure you. But today will be slightly different. We are going to the medbay to get you checked out and then get a regimen of supplements to help you develop faster.”

“Develop? I’m already a fully grown adult.”

“Contractions again, freebirth. And I know that, but if you are to be a warrior, we must teach you to fight, and I cannot teach you to fight if you break like a weakling at the slightest contact. So we will help you along.”

At that, they arrived at the medbay, and a female doctor was already waiting for them at an exam table. She poked and prodded her, used various scanners, drew blood, checked her vitals, and entered a seemingly endless amount of data into a noteputer. When she was finished, she disappeared for a few minutes.

“There’s a lot I still don’t---do not, understand about your culture, your goals, all of it. I have a million questions.”

Abigail stood with her hands on her hips. “We will focus on things that are less cardiovascular today, strength and agility. You will have plenty of time to ask questions. I will try to answer them to the best of my abilities. Even when you wash out of this foolish quest to be made into a warrior, you will still serve the clan in some capacity, so you will need to know these things.”

Just then, the doctor returned. “Overall you are young and in good health, but you lack the strength and other physical hallmarks of a warrior. You will need significant nutritional guidance. I am also going to give you regular injections of nutrients and vitamins to help the process along. In addition, I will be giving you injections of a performance enhancing cocktail regularly. It will help you build muscle and endurance. It is a mixture of various chemicals, drugs, and hormones. You will doubtless feel many side effects, but they will pass, and unless they are debilitating, you should push through them with your training.”

She furrowed her brow. “What kind of side effects?”

The doctor shrugged casually. “They will vary from person to person. You may feel waves of euphoria, surges of energy, spikes in emotion and aggressiveness, hot flashes, altered sleep patterns or dreaming, various pains or swelling, the list is virtually endless, but minor. But the end result is that you will build muscle at an accelerated rate in concert with your physical training regimen.”

She sighed. “Great, so on top of all this insanity, I’m going to be PMS’ing as well. Thanks, Doc.

The doctor raised an eyebrow in irritation. “If that is how you choose to classify it, but that is hardly accurate. In fact, the high doses of hormones will suppress menstrual function.”

Fiona shook her head. “I guess humor isn’t one of the things you guys breed for.”

With that, her exam was done, and she and Abigail returned to training. As promised, most of the day’s activity focused on strength training and agility. The day passed mostly without event, Fiona doing her best to avoid contractions, which always brought a glare from the clanner, and Abigail doing her best to explain the foreign ways of the Clans to Fiona.

The training proceeded that way for nearly two weeks, days alternating between intensive cardiovascular training and strength training. The daily schedule was always the same, though the individual activities were varied. As promised, her days consisted of a roller coaster of emotions, waves of euphoria, bouts of anger, and much to her annoyance, a massive increase in sex drive, which, with no outlet, further fueled her anger and frustration.

At the end of the day, very near to the end of the second week, she collapsed in her bunk as always, exhausted from the day’s training. The lights in the room were still on, and only some of her roomates had put their heads down for sleep. 

She was about to close her eyes when Westbrook spoke up. “Getting kind of cozy with the clanners, aren’t you? That Clan bitch drags you out every morning, but I never see you on any of the work details. What do they have you doing?”

She did not look at him at first. “They just put me through training, exercises, that sort of shit, every day.”

“Training for what? The Olympics?” He chuckled.

“I have no idea. I just do what I’m told so I don’t get the shit knocked out of me.” She replied.

“They want you to be one of them, that’s what I’d wager. Raising you to be a quisling.”

The voice of the man from the bunk above her broke into the conversation. Over the course of the last two weeks, she had learned his name was Freidrich. “Lay off, Westbrook. We’re all in this shithole together.”

Westbrook laughed. “If you say so. But remember, these Jade Chickens are going to need people to do their dirty work for them. Seems like an offworlder, and a Davion at that, is a pretty good place to start.”

Fiona didn’t bother engaging the man verbally, or warning him, she simply leaped up from the bed and ran over to a completely off guard Westbrook and began pummeling him. He offered minimal resistance at first, but after a short time even that subsided under her angry blows and screams.

Shortly before the guards arrived, Freidrich pulled her off of the unconscious Westbrook, and she turned her anger towards him. Though much larger than her, he did not fight back particularly well, whether from a lack of training or a desire to not hurt her severely, she never knew. She pounded him furiously, and he responded mainly by defending himself and staving off her blows until several guards burst through the door and dragged her off of him, out the door and into another room, where they proceeded to restrain her.