Breeder: The Tradrych Strain, #1

By Marissa Farrar

Prisoner on an alien planet, I have only one role - to birth their spawn.

Sent in a worldwide asteroid strike, the alien race, the Trads, sneaked onto Earth to steal women away to repopulate their own planet.

I, Tara Chase, am one of those women.

I believed my lover to be a gorgeous human man, only to be shown the most terrible of truths...

He's anything but.

Now I'm on his planet of Tradrych, and after a three month stint in cryostasis, I've woken to find myself a prisoner on the verge of birthing his child.

And I'm not the only one.

I share the facility with numerous other women, all close to giving birth. The aliens who tend to us look like handsome demons, with scales, horns and even a tail. There are multiple Trads to every human woman, and I know once this baby is out of me, I'll be handed back to them to impregnate again. I see the way the Trad males working at the facility look at me—with hunger in their flame-filled eyes.

When the time comes for us women to give birth to the aliens inside us, we're taken away and never seen again.

My time is close now, but I won't give up without a fight.

This is a dark sci-fi romance and is reverse harem. It is also part of the Planet Athion multi-author reverse harem sci-fi world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warwick House Press
• Release date: Sep 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223386759

Book preview

Chapter One

T ara?

A hissed voice, full of urgency, roused me from sleep.

The skin on my stomach—now as thin and tightly stretched as the membrane on a drum—bulged outward as the creature woke, too, and moved inside me.

Only a few months had passed since I’d been abducted from Earth, but I struggled to imagine how this thing would remain encased within my womb for much longer. Other women who I now lived with in the birthing ring had already gone into labor and been taken away. They’d not returned, and I feared for their lives. Could they have died during the birth, or had the women served their purpose and had been killed? Or was it possible something even worse had happened to them?

My belly was swollen beneath the skimpy, silky dress we were all made to wear. My breasts were almost as large, and barely recognizable as my own. I’d never been lacking in that department, but now my body no longer belonged to me, in all senses of the word. I’d been taken by a man I’d believed to be human but turned out to be part of an alien race from Tradrych. My body belonged to him now, but not only him. It also belonged to the child—or creature, I wasn’t sure how to think about it yet—who grew inside me. But even more than that, I belonged to planet Tradrych. I was a servant to their population. A slave.

Just like all the other human women I was chained up with, I only existed now to repopulate Tradrych.

I’d seen the creatures that had taken us in their natural form, and now I couldn’t stop imagining what the thing growing inside me looked like. I felt nothing maternal toward the fetus—quite the opposite. Rumors were that the creatures we gave birth to weren’t even half human. The Trads’ reproductive system worked differently to our own, and while they needed our wombs to incubate the spawn they’d planted inside us, the child itself wasn’t genetically linked to the female. Did the creature inside me take after its father? Was its body covered in red and orange scales, or did they develop after birth?

Tara, the voice repeated. I think it’s happening.

I sat up straight, the strange kind of metal around my wrists clinking, and turned toward the young woman beside me. Her name was Zoe, and she was twenty-two years old. Just like me, her stomach was rounded beneath the slip of her dress. Her skin was pale, her blue eyes wide, the shadows beneath making them appear as skeletal hollows in her face.

What? I whispered back, glancing around nervously to make sure none of the Trads—the alien race that had kidnapped us from Earth—were close by.

We weren’t allowed to talk to each other and risked being punished if we did, but that didn’t stop us. Having the other women around was the only thing that kept us sane. We needed that small amount of contact. Because we were carrying the aliens’ spawn, they didn’t physically harm us as punishment. Instead, they took us to be locked in individual cells, away from each other, in the dark. Somehow, they knew that was a worse punishment.

Zoe’s features were pinched in pain, her eyes wild with fear. The baby. I think it’s coming. I’ve been getting pains for the last few hours. I hoped it might be something else and I was just overreacting, but it’s getting worse.

I tried to reassure her. You’ll be all right, Zoe. This is good. It means you won’t be carrying one of them anymore.

But what happens to us next? Where do they take us?

Maybe they take us home again, I said, not truly believing it but wanting to make her feel better.

I don’t think they do, she said, bursting into tears. I don’t think we’ll ever get to go home.

I yanked on my bindings again, wishing I could be free of them so I could go to her and comfort her. The strange, liquid metal circled my wrist perfectly, and I knew there was no possibility of taking them off. The metal kept us restricted to the area of each of our individual pods, which were essentially like our bedrooms now.

Each pod gave us somewhere to sit and sleep in the form of a raised platform, the size and shape of a single bed, with a thin mattress on top. What might be considered a headboard rose right to the ceiling, and we were able to circumnavigate the headboard to the bathroom facilities behind—which was essentially no more than a hole in the floor to relieve ourselves. Once a day, the liquid metal bonds released us from the pods, and we were marched by Tradrych guards to an outside bathing area, where we were all forced to remove the tiny slip of a dress we’d been given, and were then hosed down. Though the experience was unpleasant, it was the one chance we got to breathe fresh air, feel the Tradrych sun on our skin, and look up at the sky. Meals were brought to us on trays in our pods—meats we didn’t recognize, vegetables that held only vague resemblances to those found on Earth, liquids with flavorings we couldn’t pinpoint. Everything was strange and terrifying—even our own bodies.

Though we weren’t supposed to talk, we still whispered things we’d heard to each other, passing rumors and secrets from one woman to the next. Apparently, there were facilities just like this one all across the planet. I’d counted thirty-eight women currently held in our one, but our number changed almost daily. New girls were brought in, screaming and crying, having just been taken from one of the transporter ships.

That part had been the worst. We’d woken into a nightmare. The Trads must have used some kind of cryostasis to put us to sleep during the flight from Earth, so we didn’t notice either the passing of time or the way our bellies swelled with the growth of the fetus our captives had placed inside us. One moment, we’d been taken, and the next we woke on a different planet, with our stomachs looking as though we were eight months pregnant, even though they’d been completely flat when we’d been taken.

Some of the girls lost their minds, and it was horrifying to watch. It was the movement of the creature inside us that made many lose their grip on reality. Feeling something alien twist and squirm, knowing it was joined to you and living off your nutrients—not just living, but thriving—it was too much for some to take.

I climbed off the raised surface of my bed and edged over to Zoe, reaching one arm toward her, the liquid metal morphing with my movements. I knew the give was only so much, however. In the week or so since I’d been here, I’d tried everything to get free of the bindings, but nothing had worked. Once it reached a certain length, or if I moved too quickly, the material went solid and wouldn’t stretch any farther. Only when I relaxed the tension on it again did it go back to that liquid metal form.

Zoe did the same, her fingers stretching toward me. With both of us reaching as far as we could, we managed to grip the tips of each other’s hands, and I squeezed her fingers in support. She gave me a grateful, teary smile, but then another contraction caught her, and she yanked her hand away and wrapped herself into a ball.

What’s happening? another voice whispered from the other side of me.

The woman in the bed to my left was Dawn, and she was a couple of years older than my twenty-seven years. She’d already had children on Earth—a little girl, who was five, and a boy who was two—and I often woke to her crying out their names and berating herself for what she’d done. But we couldn’t be blamed or blame ourselves for what had happened. The Trads had some way of making themselves irresistible to us.

Of course, I knew now that the man I’d believed I was getting involved with back on Earth didn’t look like a human male at all.

Zoe’s going into labor, I told her.

Dawn winced. Oh no. Poor Zoe.

She’s young and strong, I said, hoping Zoe was only hearing the positives. She’ll be fine.

Dawn smiled at me, though it was restrained, and nodded. All of our times would come soon, and with each woman who entered labor and was taken from this facility and never seen again, our time got closer.

Other women were waking now, disturbed by the noise. Everyone here was heavily pregnant, which told me something—that so far, the only women who’d ended up pregnant had been impregnated on Earth. None of the women who’d already given birth had been brought back here again, pregnant or otherwise, so maybe they were taken somewhere else to recover, perhaps were taking care of the newborns. Would the Trads try to immediately impregnate the women again? Perhaps they’d tried, but it hadn’t worked.

I had a million questions but no answers.

Movement came from the entrance as Trads entered the room, barreling through. I caught sight of Rhett—the one who’d impregnated me—and my breath caught, my face heating. I quickly turned my face away.

This one’s ready, Rhetarz, one of the Trads said, using Rhett’s true name here on Tradrych.

I can see that, Zymunt. Get her out of here.

There was no emotion in Rhett’s eyes as he cast a glance toward me. The intense, sexy, fun man I’d met back at the Las Vegas Observatory no longer existed—not that he had ever really existed at all. Though I could still recognize him as the same male—the structure of his face was overall similar, his nose, mouth, and eyes all the same as they’d been when he’d been in a human guise—there were big differences now. Twin horns protruded from the top of his head, and a long, thick tail swished out from his tailbone. Large parts of his skin were covered in red and orange scales.

At least they hadn’t touched us again in a sexual way. It was a small thing to be thankful for right now, but it was something. I no longer got that overwhelming desire when I was around Rhett—or Rhetarz, as I now knew him—though I didn’t know if that was because he was in Trad form, or if it was because I was already pregnant, or if it was simply because he was able to turn off whatever had made him so attractive to me in the first place. The idea of having to be with one of these creatures while they were in their true form horrified me. It was one thing having willing sex with a gorgeous man when you thought that was all they were, but it was a whole other situation being taken by something you knew to be a monster.

Accompanying the two males was the only female Trad I’d seen so far. We called her the matron, though that obviously wasn’t her name.

What are you waiting for, Kaja, Rhetarz snapped at the matron. Get the girl moving.

The female Trad was almost as big as the males, and looked older, too. She scowled at Rhetarz. When the contraction is over, we will move her. Do you want to cause harm to the baby?

He returned the scowl. Of course not.

Do things my way then. You know nothing of the birthing process.

It’s not as though you birthed any yourself, Kaja, he threw back.

Her tail whipped out and caught him around the cheek. Don’t backchat me, boy, she snarled.

Rhett held his cheek but kept his mouth shut.

I was secretly pleased. I had no love for Kaja—the woman had proven herself to be as cruel and heartless as the males during the mere week or so that I’d been here—but I was happy to see someone hurt Rhett.

Beside me, Zoe cried out in fear and yanked on her bonds. No, no. Please!

She was begging, but she wasn’t begging for her life. She was begging for the life inside her to simply no longer exist. She didn’t want to go through the trauma of what lay ahead.

The other women in the room were all awake now. Some were crying at