Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE

Angie

A lmost as soon as the desktop appears, a blizzard of pop-ups hits. Urgent updates, reset required, antiviral software hasn’t been run in six thousand days. They appear so fast, it’s impossible to click them away before the next one covers it up.

“Uh, what is all of that?” Brooks says, grabbing another chair from the corner of the room and pulling it up beside me.

“A computer that hasn’t been turned on for twenty years,” I say, waiting a moment for the last of the messages to appear before I start clicking them away one by one. “Looking at some of these, he must have been tapped into the whole base from this machine.”

I point out one of the messages - ‘Low level warning: Tank B’, whatever that means. There are others in the same vein. Power fluctuation alerts, machinery needing servicing alerts, monitoring alerts from the cryostasis pods. One is a warning to say a pod has malfunctioned. I hover over it, not immediately clicking it away.

“That will be me,” Brooks says. “I wasn’t exactly woken up in the correct way.”

“So one of those machines isn’t housing a corpse, then?”

“I hope not.”

I wonder how much worse it was to be woken the incorrect way, given how fucking horrible my wake up was. But I recall what she said about her body getting used to the wake up over time and hope it wasn’t too horrendous for her. No one deserves that.

The desktop that starts emerging underneath is no better. A sea of icons clutters up the entire screen, documents and spreadsheets, note files and images saved indiscriminately, without any sort of folder hierarchy or structure. Part of me huffs in disgust at the disorganisation, but I don’t need the files. I need the network settings.

I open them up. Unlike the other computer, this one doesn’t just have an internal network. There’s an external one sitting there next to it. Hand trembling a little, I go to move the mouse to click on it, but Brooks’ hand comes down over the top of mine, stopping me.

“Angie, it’s been nearly twenty years. Even if somehow the network is still working, having had no maintenance, no use for that long, no one is going to be watching for messages from this place back home. It’s a dead base. A dead project. Mercenia will have moved on by now.”

“Probably,” I say, trying to move my hand, anyway. But her grip is too tight, too strong. “But like I said, I don’t belong here. I have to try. Maybe it comes to nothing. But at least I’ll know I’ve tried everything.”

Her grip doesn’t budge.

“Angie, you can’t, I’m sorry.”

“Why?” My voice is going high, tight again. I’m never going to beat her in a battle of strength. If she decides to stop me, there are so many ways she can do it.

“Because we don’t want Mercenia coming back here.” The voice comes from the doorway. We both look up, see Liv standing there. The furrow between her brows is deep, high colour dotting her cheeks, her lips pressed into a thin line. She looks at me, eyes hard. “We don’t want them coming back here ever.”

I stop trying to push the mouse, and Brooks’ grip loosens. I let go of it, sitting back in my chair, and she releases me. Folding my arms across my chest, I stare at Liv over the top of the computer so she knows I’m not intimidated by her little show of anger.

“I get that you’re happy here,” I say. “Good for you. But I won’t be. If there’s a shot at getting rescued, I have to take it.”

Liv’s scowl deepens. “You know you won’t be happy here? You haven’t even been outside. You haven’t seen anything of what this place has to offer beyond this basement.”

“A rainforest, right? Hunter-gatherer tribes. I’m just not built for that kind of life.”

“You think any of us thought we were? With the exception of Brooks, none of us had been in an environment like this one. You know what happened? We adapted.”

“That’s great for you. Well done. But why should I have to do that if I can go home? Home.”

I fill the word with all the longing I feel, even as part of me wonders exactly what I’m longing for. The long thankless hours of doing Baxter’s job for him? That job won’t have sat empty, waiting for my return, and whatever else I’m slotted in to won’t be any better. My physical home. The apartment that Rardek called ‘very white’ like the money I spent on interior design and expensive furniture was a joke? Could I make a space like that for myself again without those words, spoken in his low, rumbling voice, mocking me from across the stars?

“Letting go of everything you knew isn’t going to be easy, we know that,” Brooks says, her tone vastly more sympathetic than Liv’s.

“It’s not just me, either,” I say, looking between the two of them. “You’ve got a load of other women back there in those cryostasis pods. Why is what you want more important than what all of us want, huh?”

“You’re assuming they won’t want to stay,” Liv bites.

“You’re assuming they will!”

“You aren’t summoning Mercenia back here.”

She doesn’t say ‘over my dead body’, but it’s very much clear in her tone.

A cold sort of rage pours into me.

“What happened to ‘you have a choice’? Or is this just another thing I actually have no choice in that you neglected to mention?”

Some of the fight goes out of her at that, and she gestures to Brooks. Brooks gets up out of her chair, but hovers next to us like she’s Liv’s bodyguard. I guess the old military tier habits die hard. Or maybe she’s just waiting to dive for the mouse again. I keep my arms folded, so she knows I’m not going to touch anything I’ve been told not to.

They can’t watch me twenty-four seven. I’ll just come back later.

“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you about the dreamspace,” Liv says. “We should have. It wasn’t fair that you had to face all that without being forewarned.”

She still has a hard sort of look in her eye, but there’s nothing about her tone that makes it sound like she’s forcing an apology she doesn’t want to give. She doesn’t like me, but she knows she fucked up.

Except she didn’t. Not really. If she can acknowledge that she should have tried to tell me, I can acknowledge that I definitely wouldn’t have listened.

“I don’t think there was any way you could have made me hear what you had to say about it yesterday.”

Liv nods, her countenance softening some at my admission. “Probably not. You already had enough going on without dream mates to add to the picture.”

There’s a regretful note to her voice, as if she wishes it could have been some other way. The tight coil of rage loosens in my chest.

“I already apologised to Brooks for my behaviour yesterday, but I need to apologise to you and Lorna as well.”

Something flickers in her eyes, but after a moment, she nods.

“It’s fine,” she says. “Forgive me for my oversight, and I’ll forgive you for your outbursts. We can have a do over.”

There’s a hint of a smile curling up the corners of her lips, and she holds out a hand towards me, a single brow arching as if in challenge. I dip my head in acknowledgement, then take her hand. Shake it.

“Liv,” she says. “Chieftess of the tribe and known to be a little sharp-edged a lot of the time.”

“Angie. Data analyst and possessed of an attitude problem before I ever came here.”

That makes her laugh and her expression softens more, my outrage also fast unravelling.

“I don’t know how much you took in of what we were telling you yesterday,” she says. “But I said we could go through everything going on here step by step, and that offer still stands. I don’t have time to do it right now. We’ve got friends arriving from the village today with supplies to help us wake up all the other frozen girls, and I want to get on to that as soon as possible. But I can explain to you why we don’t want Mercenia back here.”

“I can’t promise it will change my mind about wanting to contact them.”

Liv nods. “That’s fair. But I hope when you see what’s at stake, you’ll see things a little more from my point of view.”

She leans back in her chair, pushing her hair out of her face with a hand. Her features are puffy, her body swelling up from the heat and her advancing pregnancy, but it’s obvious that she’s beautiful. The sort of striking beauty that was never well favoured on my white collar tier. They preferred their women docile. It’s far too obvious that Liv has the same tendency to bite as I do.

Back home, we’d have been rivals, vying for the same scraps the career path sometimes threw at us. But there’s no corporate job here, no better role I might move into if I kiss enough of the right asses. Maybe, if we can avoid arguing with each other, we might be something like friends.

It surprises me how much I like the thought of that.

“I told you that Mercenia was trying to run a breeding program here. Trying to create half human, half raskarran super soldiers.”

And I had dismissed it outright as impossible.

“That’s really what they were doing?” Some of my disbelief must creep into my tone, because Brooks is firmer than she has been with me when she answers.

“I know that’s what they were doing,” she says. “Because they tried to breed me.”

She tells me the story, brief and blunt and horrifying.

“That’s…” There are no words to soften what she just said, so I don’t even try. “So you’re afraid they’re going to restart the program again if we call them back out here? Use all of us as their test subjects?”

I’d honestly kind of forgotten about the breeding program being the reason I was brought out here, too caught up in the knowledge that it was all lies and it never should have happened to me, anyway.

Except it isn’t lies. And twenty years down the line, is Mercenia going to care that it shouldn’t have happened to me? I’ve been gone all that time, considered dead. Would they resurrect me? Or just re-enrol me…

One of those is a lot easier than the other, and Mercenia is all about the easy path.

Fuck.

“Mercenia would definitely restart the program,” Liv says. “Starting with taking the kids we already have.”

I shake my head. “Liv, you’ve been here about six months, and you look about six months along. You must have got pregnant before you arrived here. Just before. Lorna, too.”

“I wasn’t pregnant when I got here.”

“Most women don’t realise until they’re five or six weeks along. I can see how the timing might look like it lines up, but you were probably just too early into it to notice any of the signs.”

Liv shakes her head at me. “I wasn’t pregnant before I got here. I wasn’t with anyone before, for starters. I was getting a whole lot of nothing back home. This is Gregar’s baby.”

I don’t quite catch the sound of disbelief before it escapes my mouth. Liv doesn’t look pissed at me though, more amused.

“Brooks,” she says, “would you fetch Sally for me, please?”

“Sure,” Brooks says, leaving the room.

My eyes cut to the mouse now she’s no longer here to stop me grabbing for it. Liv notices me looking and arches her brows at me, as if to say, ‘what are you going to do, then?’ I sit back in my chair, keeping my hands in my lap. Quite apart from the dawning realisation that contacting Mercenia might not be the best plan, I’m not about to get into a physical altercation with a pregnant lady.

“Look,” I say. “I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of what was going on here, but clearly the experiment wasn’t viable.”

“What makes you say that?” Liv says.

“Uh, the fact that this place has been abandoned. If they were running a breeding program and they made it work, I’d be forty something with fifteen half raskarran kids by now. They left, ergo, they didn’t make it work. So why would you, twenty years later, no science tier team working with you, be able to make it work when they couldn’t?”

“The dreamspace,” Liv answers, as if it’s a blindingly obvious answer, and she can’t understand why I can’t see it.

“The dreamspace?”

“Raskarrans don’t have casual relationships the way humans do, and their fertility cycle works differently, too. They have mates. They meet in the dreamspace. They only sleep with their mates and only their mates cause their mating node to activate, allowing for impregnation.”

I blink. “Rardek didn’t mention any of that.”

Liv snorts. “Rardek is one of the more… worldly, let’s say, of the raskarrans. Most of them would have happily told you everything without realising they were freaking you out. Rardek is clever enough to know that overloading you wasn’t the best approach.”

My head spins with so many thoughts about that. I squash them all down, push them aside to examine later. What Rardek has and hasn’t said to me is irrelevant to the point I’m trying to make.

“So they have a moral structure within their society,” I say. “They only sleep with their mates, so mating nodes, whatever they are, only ever have the opportunity to work with their mates. Going into the dreamspace - I’m not going to pretend to know how that works - but it’s obviously some sort of physiological process. Male sees female, male likes female, male triggers dreamspace connection. That makes them mates, which means they then have the opportunity for mating nodes to work and therefore get to make babies.”

“The raskarrans believe Lina places them in dreams. They don’t choose it.”

I huff. “Religion is what we use to explain things that can’t be explained with science yet. These guys are hunter gatherers. They aren’t going to be scientifically advanced enough to know how their own biology works.”

“Or there really is a forest goddess.”

She says it so lightly, as if daring me to disagree with her again. It’s clearly what she believes, and I don’t want to ruin what little progress I’ve made towards friendliness with her by shitting on her beliefs.

“We’re getting off track here. My point is, you can’t be pregnant by your alien friend. Dreamspaces and mating nodes and other stuff don’t counteract the Biological Species Concept.”

“The what now?”

I pause, wondering how best to pitch my explanation.

“What’s your level of understanding when it comes to biology?”

“Assume zero.”

Okay then.

“Scientists define creatures as distinct species based on a number of factors,” I say, speaking slowly and giving her plenty of chance to stop and question me. “But in the main, a species is the largest group of organisms where any two of its members can mate and have fertile offspring. Babies. Babies that will grow up and be able to have their own babies. So dogs, right? You’ve got rottweilers and you have chihuahuas.” I gesture their disparate sizes with my hands. “About as different in size and appearance as two dogs can get. But they’re still the same species because they are capable of producing viable, fertile offspring. They carry their pregnancies to term, birth living babies that are healthy and can one day have babies of their own.”

“Okay,” Liv says, nodding along.

“Leopards and cheetahs, though. Both big cats. You’d think perhaps they’re the same species. They look very similar, live in the same areas. Yet they can’t have children. A male leopard and female cheetah can do the deed, but it will never result in a pregnancy. So they’re two different species. That’s the Biological Species Concept.”

I check to see she’s still following. When I see no signs of confusion, I continue.

“Like with everything in science, it’s a spectrum, and there are exceptions. Some distinct species get a little further than the leopard and the cheetah. They might have a pregnancy, but the foetus isn’t healthy, and it dies before it can be born. And some different species can be successfully hybridised, but the resulting offspring are sterile. Horses and donkeys, for example. Two distinct species, but you crossbreed them, you get mules. Lions and tigers. Ligers. Ligers aren’t always sterile, but they have a lot of other health problems.”

“You’re trying to say my baby will have health problems?” Liv’s tone is sharp, but not as bad as it has been. As if she doesn’t really believe what I’m saying.

“No, I’m not saying that. The thing is - horses and donkeys, lions and tigers - the reason these different species can be hybridised is that they are very similar. Descended from the same ancestors, most likely. Raskarrans and humans are from two entirely different planets. There’s no common ancestry there. We might superficially look alike. We can eat the same food, breathe the same air. But genetically speaking, the likelihood of the raskarrans being at all similar to humans is infinitesimal.”

Liv doesn’t look confused, but she doesn’t look moved by what I’m saying.

“I can’t say for certain what Mercenia was doing here,” I continue. “But to allow raskarrans and humans to procreate - I can only think it would have involved genetic engineering. Splicing DNA and changing the genetic makeup of their test subjects until they were no longer exactly human, no longer exactly raskarran, but something in between the two. I don’t know if that level of genetic interference is even possible. The fact that Mercenia abandoned this place suggests it isn’t.”

Liv’s expression doesn’t shift. “So you’re saying this pregnancy being because of Gregar is extremely unlikely?”

She still doesn’t sound angry, which surprises me.

“I’m saying it’s impossible.”

“Impossible?” A new voice speaks, making me look up.

To see an unfamiliar blonde woman in the office doorway.

Holding what looks very much like a half human, half raskarran baby in her arms.