Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

Angie

“ Y ou can’t be fucking serious,” I say, when I finally stop laughing enough to speak.

The dark-haired woman’s expression doesn’t shift.

“Deadly,” she says, folding her arms across the top of her rounded stomach. My eyes linger on it for a moment, my brain snagging on that detail. Something about it bothers me, but there’s too much else spinning through my mind to focus on why.

“An alien planet?” I nearly start laughing again. “We don’t have the capability. We can barely replicate the moon landings, interstellar travel…”

“Can be done,” Brooks interrupts. “I know. I was on the ship that brought you here. Nineteen years ago.”

I arch a brow at her. “You can’t be a day over twenty-five.”

She turns, pointing to another pod, this one upright, but open. Empty.

“That one was mine. I was part of the team that came out here, but once I’d outlived my usefulness, they froze me. Left me behind with the rest of you.”

I take a breath, trying to arrange the facts they’re telling me into a kind of order.

“So, you and I both ended up frozen out here twenty years ago. Then we were left behind, forgotten about for those twenty years, until these guys came and found us and woke us up?”

Brooks gives a little shrug of her shoulder. “Essentially.”

“Essentially?”

Nothing in her manner suggests she’s talking down to me, but the glossing over of the full truth - even when it absolutely isn’t the fucking truth - gets my hackles rising.

Don’t worry your pretty little head about it .

Baxter’s voice in my ears, clear as if he was in the room right now.

“How about you tell me everything?”

I don’t quite keep the sharpness out of my tone, and I don’t quite feel bad about it, either.

Brooks looks to the dark-haired woman again.

“My name is Liv,” she says. “I’m in charge here.”

There’s something about how she says ‘in charge’ - like she doesn’t think it’s quite the right descriptor. Not as good an actress as Brooks, this one.

Still, when she talks, her voice is low, full of authority.

“There’s not much more we can tell you, I’m afraid. We don’t know exactly what was going on. That’s part of the problem. All we know about what Mercenia was doing here is what Brooks has told us. She’s military tier, not a scientist, so we know the general information, not details.”

“Which is?” I say, losing patience with the obfuscation. I know Novak’s scenarios are often short on specifics, but this one is particularly vague.

The same hesitation as before the alien planet announcement. Even the facilitators think this experiment is pushing the limits of plausibility too far.

“It was a breeding program.”

My eyes skate back to her own pregnant bump, and I think she notices, her hand coming to cradle it protectively. At least that explains why she’s being used for this scenario. Normally, Mercenia is really funny about letting pregnant women from tiers like science tier do anything besides convalesce. The next generation of little scientists is far more important than whatever contributions they can make to their projects. That’s why seeing her and the blonde so obviously pregnant felt off. They should be hidden away somewhere, focusing on nothing but getting the best nutrition and following the correct exercise program to promote healthy pregnancy and birth.

But selling a breeding program scenario - it was never going to be as convincing without a few baby bumps.

“If you have questions, I’ll do my best to answer them,” Liv says. “But, like I said, there’s not a lot we know about what was going on here.”

Questions. I have a ton of them. But probably not the kind she’s imagining. Like always with these weird experiments, I wonder what they’re trying to prove. Sometimes I can almost see the point of it. Telling a group of people that they can’t go outside because of radiation forces them to work together in close proximity to survive. There are useful applications for the learning that might come out of observing how they behave. Interstellar travel would be one of them. A crew operating in an enclosed environment like a spaceship would encounter similar obstacles and problems.

But a breeding program? Presumably with the local alien species, because otherwise why the conceit about cryostasis and alien planets. What are they looking to learn from that?

Memories of Screening rise in my mind, all the more potent and visceral thanks to the dream. They had their categories and criteria. The boxes they wanted to slot us into. Perhaps that checklist was informed by experiments like this.

The women who were prepared to breed with aliens exhibited the following personality characteristics. If your subject displays any of these, proceed with caution.

Or maybe they want the women that are prepared to lie back and send their brains somewhere else while they’re ‘bred’.

Either way, it will be wrong somehow. That’s the truth of being a woman under Mercenia’s rule. Nothing we do is right.

“A breeding program,” I repeat. “With the little green men that live here?”

Something like a genuine smirk comes on to Liv’s face, her eyes flashing with amusement. It stops her from looking awkward and uncomfortable - makes her look more real.

“Not so little,” she says. “But yes, that’s what they wanted.”

“Why?” I ask, because I’m curious what reason they’re going to give.

“Super soldiers,” Brooks says. “Mercenia has been trying to create them for years. They pushed selective human breeding to the limits. Why not throw some new genetic material into the mix?”

Because it wouldn’t work.

“So, I was frozen, brought out here to an alien planet, where I was going to be subjected to a breeding program with the aliens that live here.” Saying it again and again doesn’t make it sound any less ludicrous. “But that all happened twenty years ago, and now?”

The time jump I don’t get. What’s the purpose of it? Why nineteen years? Wouldn’t it take hundreds to get to the nearest planet outside of our solar system? Apart from distancing me from my ‘old’ life, why bother with the whole charade?

“Now we crash landed here about six months ago, then stumbled across this old military base and found you,” Liv says.

“And six months ago, immediately resumed the breeding program?”

Another amused smirk. “Except it’s not a breeding program any more. Mercenia isn’t here pulling the strings. It’s just us girls trying to live our lives. We were lucky enough to be rescued by a local tribe after we crashed. And then some of us were lucky enough to find companionship, love.”

“With the aliens?” I manage to resist rolling my eyes. “Because the alien women aren’t good enough for them?”

Darkness flickers in Liv’s expression for a moment. “There are no alien women.”

Of course there aren’t.

“Where did they all go?”

Liv’s mouth presses into a thin line and she looks at Brooks and the blonde briefly before focusing back on me.

“Look, Angie, there are layers upon layers of things going on here. We could sit down and go through it all step by step. But I don’t think you’re asking these questions in good faith.”

Busted.

“It’s professional curiosity, honestly,” I say. “I work for the people who provide funding for this kind of experiment. I was just trying to figure out what your brief might be, what hypothesis you’re trying to test. It’s been fascinating, but I need you to call your superiors now and have me removed from your cohort of test subjects. Clearly, I am not supposed to be here.”

“None of us are supposed to be here,” Liv says. “We-”

I cut her off with a frustrated huff. “I would have thought someone from science tier would be quicker on the uptake. You won’t convince me, so stop trying and start getting me out of here.”

“We’re not from science tier, Angie,” the blonde says.

My patience - worn thin before I ever met these three - snaps.

“You aren’t going to get away with this, you know? I’m not some bottom tier gutter trash you can abduct without consequences. I have a family. I have a job, responsibilities. People who will know that I’m missing and ask questions.”

Even as I say it, Baxter flashes before my eyes again - disheveled and furious, promising to make me pay. If anyone had questions, they’d ask him. And he would probably just smile winningly and tell them I’ve been transferred to a different office. No one would doubt him.

And my family - I stopped mattering to them when I failed my Screening.

The fear that’s been bubbling under the surface threatens to envelop me, closing off my airways like a fist around my throat.

“Maybe they did ask questions,” Liv says. “But you have to understand, Angie, any questions would have been asked nineteen years ago. Your job and responsibilities are gone. Your family… I don’t know what Mercenia told them. Probably that you died. They have a habit of saying that to get angry families off their backs.”

Any pretense at empathy is gone now, her patience already worn through by my lack of compliance. There’s a new sharp edge to her tone that only aggravates me even more.

“No, I don’t have to understand that,” I snap. “I haven’t been frozen for nineteen years. We don’t have that capability.”

“In the general workforce, no,” Brooks says, her voice still gentle, kind. “But military tier has had access to cryogenics for years.”

That’s actually a convincing lie. Military tier has their own research and development departments, fed by science tier. Top secret, need to know stuff. Even with my job, I still wouldn’t qualify as ‘need to know’. The fear gets a little louder, a little stronger.

“I’m not playing this game anymore,” I say, trying to sound firm and unshakeable, landing somewhere in the vicinity.

Impatience flashes in Liv’s eyes, but she takes a breath before turning to the blonde.

“Lorna.”

“Sure,” the blonde replies, walking off between the pods and out of sight.

Silence falls for a moment, and I wonder what Lorna has been sent to do. I get my answer when I hear heavy footsteps approaching.

I’m about to have my first ‘alien’ encounter.

Lorna reappears first, her arm extended behind her where she’s gripping a big hand. A big, green hand. I follow that hand back up, my eyes moving along a toned arm to a brown, handmade vest top stretched across a broad chest. When Liv said ‘not so little’, she wasn’t kidding. The guy has to be over six and a half feet tall. Lorna looks tiny next to him. I glance at Brooks. She’s obviously not the only military tier recruit they have for this little experiment.

I look back at the ‘alien’. The room is dark, the lighting overhead dim. There are no windows anywhere that I can see, so no natural light. It’s helping to sell the illusion. In the shadows cast by the soft glow from my pod, it’s hard to see anything properly. I look up and up to his face, meet with big brown eyes. His features are a little broader, a little flatter than typical, but they aren’t so far from human that they couldn’t be engineered with the right prosthetics and makeup. The poor lighting hides any rough edges, blending the fake with the real so effectively, I can’t see any flaws to point out.

“Angie, this is Shemza,” Lorna says, patting his chest. There’s a proprietary air to the way she touches him, and I gather I’m supposed to believe this is her baby daddy. “Shemza, this is Angie.”

He nods his head in greeting, and my attention snags on the long hair that he’s tied back from his face. Must be a wig, because most people can’t grow their hair that long, and there’s no way he wasn’t sporting a military tier buzz cut like Brooks’ before he was picked for this job.

“Hello,” he says, his voice low, slightly growling, but still somehow soft. And he must have had some damn good vocal coaching, because his accent twists the word out of shape, like it’s not his first language. Excellent attention to detail.

“They’re called raskarrans,” Liv says. “They’re hunter-gatherers, nowhere near humanity’s technological level. But they’re kind and respectful. They took us in without hesitation and have looked after us as we’ve found our feet and our place within the tribe. They’ll do the same for you and all the other girls here.”

“And all I have to do to earn that is have sex with them?” I say, relocating some of my disdain.

Liv scowls, but catches herself, smoothing her expression out. Her tone when she speaks is one of strained patience, as though she’s trying to be kind but can’t quite find it in herself. “This isn’t Mercenia’s world here. Whatever ideas you have about how things work are going to be way off. You’ll earn your keep, sure, but how you decide to do that is up to you. Everyone has found a way to be valuable to the tribe, and sex has nothing to do with it.”

She takes a breath and continues, softer now. Earnest. “Your life is yours to make what you will of it here, Angie. Whatever constraints, whatever rules Mercenia placed on you, they’re gone. They don’t apply. No one, within reason, is going to tell you what you can and can’t do. Who you are, who you want to be, is your choice.”

It’s like she knows exactly what to say to get under my skin.

She probably does know. Probably studied some profile of me given to her by whoever Baxter paid to get rid of me. Lies, obviously, but close enough to the truth that she can use it to get to me.

Who you are, who you want to be, is your choice.

Tantalising.

A shame it’s bullshit.

“Well,” I say, climbing out of the pod. Brooks rushes to close the gap between us, arms spread, ready to catch me. I stumble, my legs feeling inordinately weak underneath me - the paralytic they gave me still not quite worn off, I guess - but steady myself, spreading my arms to help me balance. As I stand there like a starfish, I realise I’m wearing panties and a vest. It takes the wind out of my indignation, but I do my best to summon it again.

“Well,” I say again, “it’s been entertaining. I’ll give you that. But it’s time you stop trying to convince me of the impossible and send me home.”

I straighten my shoulders and back. It takes a moment for full command of my body to come back to me, but it’s not like when I first woke up. My limbs and torso are all there, waiting to listen to me. They just need a little push to get them all aligned and working together. Once I’m standing with some poise and sure I’m not going to just topple over on my first step, I look back to Liv.

“I expect you to have consulted your management by the next time I see you and to have a plan for my safe return to my life.”

I nearly add a ‘thank you’ at the end, years of being the one who always had to be subservient and polite hard to overcome. But just like I dropped that persona with Baxter in the end, I keep it away now. Then, with as much power as I can muster, I turn and head for where I assume the exit must be.

At first, the other pods block my view of pretty much everything else, but as I step out from between them, I see the door at the other side of the room, leading on to a long corridor. Everything is grey concrete, dim strip lighting, no decoration or personality. A military base, Liv said. Mercenia has thousands of them all over the world, many no longer in use since the Corporation Wars ended. An abandoned military base makes for the perfect location for an experiment like this. Doctor Novak is very fond of them.

I’m heading for the door when movement catches my eye. Stupidly, I turn to look toward it. See three more hulking figures standing in the shadows. One of them is enormous, the biggest guy I’ve ever seen, and the other two aren’t far behind him. Fear flares along my spine again, my heart tripping over itself as it races to beat faster, harder. My next breaths are snatched into tight lungs, and I try to keep my head high, walk swiftly past them, but they’ve noticed me now, and the one closest to me steps into my path, blocking my way to the door.

Much like with Shemza, the lighting is too dim for me to get a proper look at him. To identify where the edges of the prosthetics are, how makeup has been used to smooth out the transitions between his human features and the alien ones they’ve built on top of them. Unlike with Shemza, there’s something a little more rough-edged, a little more wild about this guy.

It’s not that his eyes are yellow - that’s easily explainable with contact lenses. It’s that there’s something about the spirit, the person behind those eyes. Something in the way he looks at me.

It all feels a little…

Alien.

The fear escalates. Shifts into terror.

“Get out of my way.”

I try to be firm, try to snarl or hiss or simply demand. But my voice betrays me, cracking and wobbling around the syllables, spelling my terror out for anyone to hear.

“Let her go, Rardek,” Liv calls from behind me.

The guy in front of me looks in her direction, then nods. Steps aside.

I hurry past him, head out of the room with my heart in my throat. It takes every bit of control I have not to run. Not to scream.