Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

Angie

I t seems to me like one moment I’m in my apartment, Rardek standing over me, his proximity sending flutters of heat through my body. Then the next moment, I’m waking up lying in a musty smelling bed. My head pounds, making the thought of opening my eyes singularly unappealing, but I force myself to sit up. Look.

I’m back in the room I was hiding away in before, just as Rardek said. I’ve been dressed in a large, soft nightshirt. A man’s, judging by the size of it. But then I spot a delicate embroidered pattern on the bottom hem. A distinctly feminine touch. I can’t assume that female aliens would have the same tastes and inclinations as human women, but none of Rardek’s clothes had any sort of embellishment. Given the size of Rardek, I can only assume alien women are just as big.

I look around the room. It’s much as it was when I was last up here, except for a tray on the desk. I climb out of the bed, my body stiff and achy, and look at the things on the tray, my eyes landing on a bag made from some animal part. I pick it up, the cool touch of it and the sloshing sound it makes telling me it’s full of liquid. Water, I presume. I wonder what parts of animals are waterproof, deciding promptly not to think about it. My stomach protests enough taking a sip as it is.

The moment the cool water touches my tongue, though, I start to guzzle it, thirst waking in me with an intensity I’ve never felt before. With the thirst comes hunger, and I demolish the strange bar on the tray as fast as I can get it in my mouth, barely registering the salty, meaty taste. Certainly not pausing to wonder exactly what kind of creature the meat came from. The throbbing in my head eases along with the thirst and hunger, and as I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand, I feel almost normal.

“If you need anything else, there’s some human food in the freezers here,” Brooks says from behind me, making me jump. “Coming out of cryo plays havoc with your system if you aren’t used to it, so expect to feel a bit off for a few days. If you’re hurting at all, I’m sure Shemza can give you something.”

“I’m stiff,” I say, because I need to say something, and because it’s true. My legs feel like my muscles have been replaced with metal rods, my back like my spine might snap if I move wrong.

Brooks nods. “Your muscles have been held in place for twenty years. Cryo stops them being damaged, but you still need to get them used to moving again. I’d suggest a gentle walk and some stretches. A hot bath would be good, but the showers downstairs will do. Someone will guard the door for you if you’re worried about being, ah, interrupted.”

Her expression is caught somewhere between cautious and amused. I fight the heat that threatens to rise up my throat, unsure if I’m embarrassed by my actions or if it’s just the reminder of Rardek’s magnificent nakedness that is bringing the colour out.

Lina chooses and she’s never wrong. Well, I’ll definitely award her ten out of ten for physical attraction. I’m not sure what it says about me that I still feel all hot under the collar for him, despite knowing he’s an alien now.

“I’d love a shower,” I say, clearing my throat when my voice comes out a little raspy.

Quite apart from the aches, my hair is straggly this morning from the dousing it got last night and sleeping on it wet. I doubt I’m going to have access to a blow dryer and straighteners out here, but a bit of shampoo and a comb would go a long way to helping me look acceptable. And I would very much like to look acceptable. After all the shattering revelations yesterday and last night, I’d at least like to keep hold of that little piece of myself.

“We can go now, if you like?” Brooks smiles as she inclines her head towards the door.

I follow her down and down again, back to the basement. My eyes are drawn to the pod room at the end of the long corridor, a shiver travelling through me at the sight of it, even though from this distance I can’t see any of the pods, never mind the faces of the women frozen inside them.

“I find it helps not to think about it too much,” Brooks says, noticing the direction of my attention. “Trying to wrap your head around the process, the passage of time - it just hurts your brain.”

Being back in the shower room hurts my brain, too. I’ve had dreams before where you think they’re real when you’re in them, but when you wake up the inconsistencies, the differences between the dream and reality become obvious. Looking round now, I feel like I could have stepped back into the dream. There was really no difference between this place and the dreaming version of it last night.

How does anyone who lives here know when they’re awake and asleep?

I recall the way I could change the location, change my clothes, when I was dreaming. I feel a little ridiculous, but I try to do it now, try to will myself out of the shower room. It doesn’t go anywhere. I’m awake.

Brooks has some fresh clothes for me, and she sets them down on the benches at the edge of the shower area, next to the pile of drying pelts. I strip out of the nightgown and my underwear, head over to the showers and just stand under the spray of hot water until my shoulders start to loosen. I roll my shoulders and neck a few times, stretching my arms up above my head. My back cracks, but nothing jars, no sharp pain interrupts the movements, so I grab a handful of soap from the dispenser and wash my hair, my body, then take another long moment to enjoy the hot water before grabbing a pelt to dry off.

“It won’t take long for the stiffness to go,” Brooks says. “Think of it like recovery after a hard workout. You’ll ache for a couple of days, then it will ease off, and that’s without any raskarran remedies.”

“They have painkillers and heat rub, then?”

“Better,” Brooks says with a grin. “I’ll get you sorted when we head outside.”

“Outside.” The word sends a shudder through me, despite the warm water. “What even is outside?”

“It’s not so dissimilar to back home,” Brooks says. “One sun, blue sky, green trees.”

“Blue sky and trees?”

She laughs at my tone.

“Okay, sure it’s nicer here. Untouched. Mostly. But it’s like the raskarrans aren’t human but they’re familiar enough. It’s the same with the forest.”

“The forest?”

She nods. “It’s a rainforest.” Her expression turns uncertain. “You’re more educated than we were expecting. I assume you know what a rainforest is?”

“Yeah, I know what a rainforest is.”

Hot. Humid. Full of bugs and big cats.

Great.

The clothes Brooks has found for me feel coarse after the raskarran nightgown, but at least they actually fit. They’re ugly, functional. Cargo trousers and a loose white t-shirt. The synthetic material clings to my slightly damp skin.

“Don’t suppose there’s a skin care regimen hiding in one of those lockers?”

I worry for a moment that Brooks won’t pick up on the sarcasm in my tone, that she’ll think I’m being serious. After all my demands and stomping about yesterday, they’ve probably got the impression that I’m extremely high maintenance. Thankfully, she just chuckles.

“I’m afraid we weren’t exactly the crowd for that sort of thing.”

“They don’t teach you to cleanse, tone and moisturise on military tier?”

“Moisturise? You think they wanted any part of us to be soft?”

At first, I think I’ve offended her, but when I glance in her direction, she’s grinning at me.

“And science tier wouldn’t bother with something so inconsequential as looking good,” I say.

She laughs. “Certainly not the ones I encountered on this little trip. The other girls might have something, although probably not here. You might have to wait until we’re back at the village for your skincare.”

“I can wait for skincare. Painkillers, on the other hand…”

Brooks’ smile turns sympathetic. She heads for the door, inclining her head and gesturing for me to follow her. “Let’s go find Shemza now.”

Shemza. The alien they showed me first yesterday. Lorna’s mate. Shortly after meeting him, I flounced out of the room after demanding they speak with their management.

Eugh.

“Look, I’m sorry about how I was yesterday,” I say, jogging after her. “You’ve been nothing but kind to me. You, Lorna and Liv. You didn’t deserve to deal with me at my absolute worst.”

I only hope she believes me about that ‘worst’ part.

The corridor is darker than the shower room, the strip lighting more flickery and dim, but I can see the lack of concern on Brooks’ face as she shrugs, waving away my apology much like Rardek did.

“You woke up on another planet nineteen years in the future. We can’t expect you to have been reasonable about it.”

“There’s ‘reasonable’ and then there’s ‘not a complete asshole’. I could have managed the second.”

“Don’t underestimate how much cryo messes with you. Not just your appetite. Hormones, emotions. Without meaning to sound terrible, you probably weren’t in your right mind yesterday.”

“Well, I’m still sorry. Seems to me I owe you guys my life. Probably will continue to owe you my life until the Mercenia rescue arrives.”

For the first time, Brooks’ expression drops.

“There is a rescue, right?” Fear trickles up and down my spine like an electric current. “What Liv said about not getting back to my life - she just meant the passage of time, right?”

“Angie, Liv and the others crash landed here months ago. Mercenia never came for them. Just like they never came for us twenty years ago. We’re stuck here.”

“Sure, because they lost communications, or there was some kind of issue. They thought there were no survivors.”

Brooks just looks at me with a pained sort of empathy. “Or because Mercenia doesn’t really give a shit about any of us.”

It’s a fair criticism of Mercenia. The systems, the structures - they’re unforgiving. People get chewed up and spat out all the time. But not…

Not me? I almost laugh at myself. I was chewed up and spat out a long time ago. This is just round two.

“Look, I know Mercenia can be shitty. Believe me, I know. But there are lines. And I would have thought ‘abandoning your people on an alien planet’ would be one they wouldn’t cross.”

“And yet, here we are.” She shrugs. “Nineteen years in cryostasis, Angie. I know I said don’t think about it, but think about it for a moment. Nineteen years. How often do you think Mercenia has thought about any of us in that time?”

Never. Never is the answer to that question. Human life is cheap. On an overpopulated planet, who would care about losing twenty or so people when there are billions that could replace us?

Fuck.

“Okay,” I say, mind racing. “So they give zero shits about us as people. But we both know there’s one thing the high ups love more than anything. Money. And we’re sitting on a gold mine here. I’m prepared to bet those cryostasis pods are worth a small fortune, and there are how many sitting in that room? If we can just get in touch with Mercenia, let them know - they’ll fly out here to rescue the equipment and we can all pretend it was really to rescue us and get a ride back home.”

The words come flying out as fast as I can think them. A tickling sense of wrongness settles in the back of my mind, but I ignore it, focusing instead on the practical.

“If there’s power enough to sustain the cryostasis pods, there must be some computers that are still working here, right?”

I begin trying doors. Brooks doesn’t stop me, just watches, following close behind me as I barge into a room full of computers.

“They do work,” she says, as I run over to one and start mashing keys on the keyboard to wake it up.

Sure enough, it takes a moment, but the screen flickers on. There’s a password option, or a ‘log in as guest’. I hit that, wondering how much of the system is locked away if you don’t have a user profile.

“Lorna’s been using them,” Brooks says, pulling up a chair. “She says they’re not connected to any sort of external network. No way to contact Mercenia, I’m afraid.”

The desktop loads in, and I immediately go to the network settings, confirming what she’s saying with a couple of clicks. I deflate, but then I slow down. Think.

The energy requirements alone to send a message across the stars must be enormous. They wouldn’t want everyone on the team sending love notes back to their girlfriends and using up vital resources, putting pressure on the power supply. So, of course, it would be locked down to only a select few users, a select few machines.

I look round the room, spotting a private office sectioned off by a glass wall. Definitely a manager’s office. It’s easy to picture Baxter sitting behind the desk inside it, gazing out at all his subordinates, making sure they’re not twiddling their thumbs for even a second.

If any computer in the room has the kind of connectivity I’m after, that will be the one.

I get up, heading for the room, glad to find the door swings open readily and I don’t have to try taking an office chair to the toughened glass. Brooks follows me once more, her arms folded across her chest.

“Tried this one, too,” she says. “It’s password locked. Can’t get into it.”

A couple of taps on the keyboard confirms this. The Lock Screen loads, the username DFARROW already inputted, the cursor blinking in the empty password box.

“See,” Brooks says, coming round to stand next to me as I sink into the chair. “There’s no way of sending a message home, even if we wanted to.”

I reach for the drawers under the desk, pulling open the top one. It’s full of mess. Screwed up paper, food wrappers, stationery. I jiggle the drawer, feeling for the angle that will let me take the whole thing out. I pull, catching the drawer as it comes loose, then upend the entire thing on the desk. Pencils roll around, dropping off the edges of the desk and onto the floor. Brooks picks one up and sets it back on the desk, her eyes narrowed as she watches me.

And what she said filters through my spinning thoughts.

“‘Even if we wanted to’?”

“Yeah,” Brooks says, her tone and expression defensive. “Why would I want to go back to the people that brought me out here under false pretences then froze me after…”

She trails off, and the look that comes into her eye tells me I really don’t want to know what she’s not saying.

“Why would you want to go back to the people that abducted you, brought you out here and abandoned you?” she says, turning it back on me.

I’m clearly burning through any friendliness that she might have felt towards me, but I can’t worry about that now. I keep sorting through the junk, pushing things aside and spreading it all out until I find what I’m looking for.

A paper diary.

There’s a very specific sort of middle manager who indulges in the exorbitant expense of a paper diary. Baxter was one of them. And Baxter had this terrible habit of writing all his passwords down.

“Why would I want to stay here?” I say to Brooks as I prop the diary up on its spine, let it fall open where it naturally wants to. “Does this village the hunter-gatherer aliens live in have running water? What about indoor plumbing? Air conditioning? What about my skill set, huh? I’m a data analyst-” Not strictly true, but it’s the closest job title to what I actually do for Baxter when I’m supposed to be running errands for him. “-I can’t imagine there’s much call for that out here. Are they going to be glad to have the burden of feeding me, keeping me safe, when I’m utterly useless to their society? All my plants were plastic. I am not built for life in a rainforest.”

The centre edge of the page the diary opens on has been flattened so many times by a sweaty palm, the paper is greyed and dirty. In a column, neatly printed out, is a list of words mixed with numbers and special characters. I put a finger to the first letter of the last iteration, copying the characters into the password box one at a time.

“Lina obviously thinks you are.”

Her words catch me just as I’m about to hit enter, making my heart jolt. I pause, turning to her. I wasn’t going to mention the whole mates thing, but obviously she already knows.

“We’re putting stock in a forest goddess?” I say, arching a brow. “If there’s one thing Mercenia got right, it was banning all religions.”

Brooks shakes her head. “Mercenia banned things it couldn’t control. I don’t know if there was anything to the faiths that humanity had in the past, but I know mates are real. I don’t think you would have mated to Rardek if you weren’t going to find a way to thrive here.”

“He told you.”

“My mate, Maldek, is his brother. They spoke this morning before Rardek left with the other hunters. Rardek asked if I would look after you in his absence. Make sure you were okay.” Her mouth twists. “He told me to tell you ‘flame’.”

My heart tumbles in my chest. I didn’t really doubt that everything that took place in the dreamspace was real, but that’s the final bit of confirmation, wiping away any last tiny threads of doubt.

“A code word,” I say. “So I could confirm the version of him I was talking to in the dream was the same as the real life one.”

“Oh. That’s a good idea.” She laughs. “I didn’t believe it was real either, but then Maldek knew my name in the waking world before I ever had the chance to tell him it outside of dreams. That’s what proved it for me.” Her expression goes soft, her eyes distant, as if she’s remembering those moments with fondness. When she focuses back on me, that softness lingers. “Raskarrans don’t think like humans, Angie. That’s something I had to learn before I could accept my place here. Before I could accept everything Maldek wanted to give me. You’ll go on your own journey with it, but I’m sure you’ll decide eventually that you don’t mind being abandoned here so much. That you don’t want to be rescued either.”

I roll my eyes.

“I’m not going to judge you for finding happiness with your alien,” I say. “Whatever floats your boat. But don’t tell me that I’ll thrive here, that I won’t want to be rescued. Rardek seems like a nice enough guy, but he can’t change me. I am what I am. I’m a city girl. A corporate career path girl. And this-” I gesture at the computer screen. “-this is what I’m good at. This is how I thrive.”

I ignore the rising feeling in my chest that says what I was doing back home was a long way from thriving. It’s beside the point. That was my life, and I knew how to work it. How to carve out little pieces of joy for myself.

I want it back. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

You’ll pay for this, you little bitch. I will make you pay.

I blink away the echo of Baxter’s voice. Hit the enter button.

Watch and wait as the computer chugs.

And a desktop starts to load in.