Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 22

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Angie

I wake up abruptly, the red lights at the top of the radio tower still flashing before my eyes.

It has power. The radio tower is working. So why not the network?

I can’t think at first why this unsettles me so much, but then the conversation with Deborah comes back to me.

Dawes. They were waking up Dawes. Dawes would know about Farrow’s computer. I’d be prepared to bet on it. Would she know enough about the network to get it running again? To send an SOS home to Mercenia?

I bolt out of bed, not bothering to change out of my nightgown, or even put on my shoes before running down the stairs as fast as my feet will safely take me. I have no idea what time it is, but there doesn’t seem to be much activity. The lights in the basement corridor only flick on when I start sprinting down it. I hope it’s early. I hope Dawes is somewhere sleeping.

But as I barge into Farrow’s office, a blonde head looks up over the top of the monitor, brow furrowing. Steely blue eyes peer at me from beneath them. The furrow in her brow only deepens as she takes me in.

“Get off the computer,” I say.

She sits back in the chair, folding her arms across her chest.

“And who are you, exactly? One of the crash survivors, or one of the specimens?”

If I wasn’t already convinced this must be Katherine Dawes, the haughty, superior tone would have done it. Fucking science tier. So busy playing god, they forget they’re only human like the rest of us.

“I’m Angie,” I say. “Specimen.”

I swallow down the bile that rises in my throat at the word.

“Well, Angie, I’m busy.”

She dismisses me with a flick of her eyes, then looks down at the machine again, typing into it.

“Sorry, sweetie,” I say, making my voice every bit as thickly patronising as Baxter and his ilk used to speak to me. “But you’re going to have to move. I’ve got things to do.”

“What could a bottom tier girl possibly have to do on a computer she doesn’t know how to switch on, never mind use?”

I hate that I once sounded like that to Liv.

“Why does some science tier bitch think she stands a chance of stopping this bottom tier girl from taking whatever the fuck she wants?” I say, trying to look menacing.

Having spoken to Liv and the others, I don’t think bottom tier girls are any better at fighting than any other tier. But they do have a reputation, and that’s all Dawes will know. Sure enough, her hands pause on the keyboard as I move round.

“Get the fuck out of my chair,” I tell her.

She does.

I sit down, my heart almost stopping when I see she’s almost all the way through troubleshooting the network connection. Just as I’m about to click to cancel it, a warning message pops up.

No connectivity. Satellites out of range. Estimated time until next in range: 36 days.

Relief lifts my chest, a full breath of air entering my lungs for the first time since I saw that the radio tower was still working.

“Hoping to send a message home?” I say.

She jumps. Clearly assumed I couldn’t read. “It’s not working.”

“I know. Figured that out already. Just didn’t think to troubleshoot it at the time. Your satellites are out of range for another month. Unfortunately for you, I’m going to personally see to it that this place is burned to the fucking ground long before then.”

I’m expecting devastation, but she’s too science tier for that. Just scoffs and looks at me accusingly.

“You’re not bottom tier.”

“Did they tell you that’s what all the ‘specimens’ were? Did it make you feel better about what you were planning to do to them?”

She doesn’t answer, but I can see her eyeing me. I glare at her, let all my most feral rage into the expression.

“I could still take you.”

I don’t think she doubts me, but Deborah chooses that moment to come bursting through the door, as out of breath as I was a few moments ago. Her eyes land on Dawes and she pales, but she turns back to me.

“Angie, the radio tower.”

“Had power, I saw. Don’t worry, messages still can’t be sent right now.”

Her whole body sags with relief, but even limp like that, she’s still all height and muscle and power. Dawes watches her warily. I see the moment Deborah notices she’s there, her body going stiff, her expression tightening. I’m not sure how much the paleness of her skin is leftover panic, how much is in response to Dawes’ presence, but I say the first thing that comes into my head to get Dawes’ attention on me. To give Deborah a moment to breathe and gather herself.

“When did they freeze you, Dawes?”

Dawes’ expression is all twisted as she turns back to me.

“I don’t see why what happened to me is of any interest to you.”

Her tone is sharp enough to cut. A little too sharp. I stand up, put my hands on my hips as I face her.

“I’m interested because I have a theory about why the team here left. I was feeling pretty confident in it before today, but something knocked that confidence. I really need to know that I’m right, and you could maybe help me with that. But the thing is, now I’m just more interested in why you’re being so defensive about answering what I thought was a simple, innocuous question.”

“I don’t know when they froze me. According to the others, it was nineteen years ago, but how am I supposed to know if that’s true?”

“How much time has elapsed since doesn’t affect what month of what year you were frozen, so how about you stop avoiding the question and answer me?”

She looks at me, looks to the door. Deborah is still standing in it, but she’s risen to her full height, now, her military bearing back in force. I see Dawes’ throat bob as she gulps.

“July,” she says. “They froze me in July.”

I give her my best smile. “No they fucking didn’t.”

“You asked me a question, I’ve answered it, I-”

“Nothing was happening here in July. If you were really frozen then, you’d have just said it straight away. No reason to hide it. You didn’t want to answer, ergo, there’s something you don’t want us to know. So how about we try a different question - did they freeze you before or after they put the base into lockdown?”

It’s dark in the office and the computer monitor bleeds most of the colour out of everything. But I see the way her skin pales. The unease that has been sitting in the back of my chest since I woke up spikes, even as I feel a predatory rush, knowing I’m slowly backing her into a corner.

“You know about the lockdown. After then. Right at the very end. Why would they freeze you then? Right at the very end. Deborah’s guess was that you’d outlived your usefulness. But I’m not so sure. No one was useful by the time the doors to the base closed to shut out the infection ripping through the raskarrans. There’s only two reasons really that they’d freeze you at that point. Because you pissed someone off, or to shut you up. Which was it, Katherine?”

My head is racing, thoughts whirring with all the information I’ve read on Farrow’s computer, every discussion I’ve had with Liv, Deborah, Rardek.

Which would be simplest? Rardek’s question buzzes at the forefront of it all.

“Here’s the thing,” I say, taking a step closer to her. She steps back automatically, bumping into the wall behind her. I like what this says about my chances of getting answers out of her. “The sickness. I thought initially it must have originated within the raskarrans, that you guys saw it sweeping through their population and were afraid that you might catch it. An unknown disease with such a high fatality rate - must have been terrifying. Enough to make you all run away back home.

“But then I started thinking about that mortality rate. Ridiculously high, and the disease behaves in a way that no disease the raskarrans have ever encountered before does. That stinks of the disease coming from here, doesn’t it? The common cold kills all the aliens.”

“We had protocols,” Dawes says stiffly. “Isolation periods.”

“Yeah, I figured you’d probably accounted for the risk when this mission was planned. But here’s the thing. You weren’t in charge, were you? Farrow was. Farrow, whose computer is a fucking mess and who writes down all his passwords in his paper diary. Farrow, who decided it was a good idea to up the ante in your experiment by throwing Deborah in with a drugged up raskarran to see what would happen.”

Dawes pales further, barely any colour left in her cheeks as she turns to Deborah.

“That was nothing to do with me, I swear.”

“That’s what I said earlier, isn’t it, Deb?”

“Yeah,” Deborah says, her voice hard. Cold.

“I said it wasn’t good science. That science tier would have nothing to do with it. That it reeked of a greedy, impatient manager who thinks he knows better than his staff.”

Dawes visibly relaxes. “That’s exactly who Farrow was. Brooks, you didn’t have much to do with him until that day, but you must have been aware of him. His arrogance, his incompetence. The way he was constantly questioning my judgement. Like he was the one with a PhD in genetics.”

“The only PhD he had was in ass kissing, right?” I say, trying to add a little fuel to the fire I’ve managed to light in her.

Dawes scoffs. “He wasn’t even all that good at that. Why do you think he was chosen for a mission on a different planet? No one wanted him around. They stuck him here out of the way with a promise that he would make the big time when he got back. A promise they were never going to keep. We all knew it. Only Farrow was stupid enough not to see it.”

“Arrogant, incompetent, ambitious. It’s a dangerous combination. So what protocols did he ignore that allowed a virus or bacteria from within this compound to escape into the raskarran population?”

Even as I say it, the unease surges in my chest. It had been two years, almost. Way longer than the incubation period for any disease I’m aware of. Even if they’d been slack with their isolation protocols coming out here, they should have all been clean.

“He threw out every protocol there was,” Dawes snaps. “I told him. I told all of them. There were too many variables. Too much risk. But did Farrow listen to me? Of course not.”

She looks at me as if expecting to see her fury mirrored in my response, but my brain is just reeling.

Too many variables.

Too much risk.

Suddenly it’s like there are fireworks going off in my head, each explosion something surfacing out of everything I’ve seen and heard over the last two days.

A PhD in genetics.

Nuclear level PPE.

Impossible half-raskarran, half-human children.

“Genetic engineering,” I say, cursing myself for being so fucking stupid. “The delivery mechanism for new DNA isn’t a pill. You use a virus. All this time I’ve been thinking you must have done something to us to make the breeding possible because you just didn’t have access to the raskarrans. But you didn’t have to have access to all of them. Just a few. You didn’t do anything to us, you did it to them. The sickness wasn’t a naturally occurring disease that you ran away from. And it wasn’t something you brought here by accident. You fucking designed it.”

“What?” Deborah’s voice, full of horror.

Dawes’ mouth opens and closes like a fish.

“That’s what the protective gear is for, isn’t it? To handle the virus once you engineered it. To handle the raskarrans you infected with it.”

“I didn’t want to release it,” Dawes stammers, no sharpness or strength left in her voice now. “I wanted to test it first. We didn’t even know if it would work. I wanted to be sure.”

“You would still have killed whoever you infected with it.”

“Better that a handful die while we refined the design than…”

“Than a massacre?” I finish for her.

“I was going to tell them what he did,” Dawes all but yells. “It was going to be in my report that he pushed the button. He ruined years of careful preparation and planning. Billions in funding. But Farrow couldn’t have that, could he? And he had all your cronies on his side.” She directs this at Deborah, her tone accusing. “Promised them cushy positions, massive bonuses, promotions. All manner of things that he could never have delivered on. But they wouldn’t hear anyone say a bad word about Farrow, and with them on his side, the rest of us couldn’t do much of anything. But I was going to try. Farrow found out somehow. Must have been reading our emails. He found out what I was going to do, and that’s why he froze me. So I couldn’t tell the truth about what he did. So he could tell whatever little story he wanted to and, if he needed someone to blame, he could blame me.”

“Blame you for what?” Liv says from somewhere behind Deborah.

All three of us turn to her, and our faces must be a picture. Deborah looks like she’s about to burst into tears, Dawes’ face bright, angry red. And my own… I don’t even know what I must look like.

Liv’s own expression is cold, hard. So is her voice when she says again, “Blame you for what?”

The news spreads round the camp like a virus. One by one I watch the raskarran faces crumple, shock, horror and grief all too easy to read on their not quite human faces. The ones with mates seek comfort in their linashas. I see Lorna consoling a desolate-looking Shemza, while Liv practically drags Gregar out into the forest where he bellows out his incoherent rage. I’d be worried about her safety, except I know he would never do anything to hurt her.

None of this helps the girls who were woken up yesterday. They stare at all the raskarrans, watching them break down, and huddle close to each other, terrified. I watch Anghar try his best to smile at them reassuringly, but he doesn’t last five seconds before he has to turn away, walk off into the trees to be by himself for a while.

“What’s going on?” one of them asks.

I turn round to see it’s Summer, the suspicious one Deborah and I woke up yesterday. She’s looking at me. I’m the only one left in the area who isn’t dealing with a raskarran.

“It’s too complicated to explain right now,” I say, because I just do not have the emotional energy. “They’ve had some really bad news. Nothing that changes anything for you. You’re safe, I promise.”

“What authority do you have to promise that?”

I can’t blame her for asking. It’s exactly the sort of thing I might have asked if I was in her shoes right now.

“Do I look afraid?” I say. “Do I look like I’m worried about if I’m going to get fed?”

“You look sad.” Bree. Ironically, she’s actually stopped crying.

“I am sad,” I say. “Sad for them.”

Sad for the great emptiness the raskarrans must each hold in their chests - partway filled by their linashas and children, if they’re lucky enough to have them. But never completely filled. How could you replace what they lost? And hard as it was to deal with that loss, knowing that it was just nature’s cruel randomness behind it, it must be so, so much worse knowing that it wasn’t chance. It was a reckless act of violence against them. Reckless and devastating.

Then there’s the knowing that it changed them. That they survived but are no longer what they were when they were born. It changed their DNA enough to make them compatible with humans.

“Is that why the females were affected worse?” Grace asks me a while later, when the news has settled on everyone, the emotions around the base quieting some. “Because it was harder to make a female able to carry a baby than it was to make a male able to make one?”

“Has to be,” I say. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

And the old and young surviving. Because of the lower levels of sex hormones in their bodies? Dawes might know for sure, but I’m not about to go looking for her. Sensibly, she’s made herself scarce.

“What are we going to do about Dawes?” Sam asks, as if she picked up on my thoughts somehow.

“Leave her here to rot?” Deborah says.

“Tempting,” Liv replies. “But no. We do that, we’re no better than Mercenia.”

“On this one occasion, do we mind stooping to their level?” There’s a quiet sort of rage in Grace’s voice.

“We’re going to destroy this place when we go,” I say. “It’s the only way to be sure that no one can ever send a message to Mercenia. Leaving her here would be leaving her to die.”

“So?” Molly, the youngest of the crash survivors, says. “She murdered all the raskarrans. She deserves it.”

I sigh, hating that I have to be the one to stick up for Dawes.

“She didn’t do it. She made the virus. That was always the plan. But she didn’t release it into the wild. Farrow did, and he’s long gone. I’m not saying she’s good - she’s cold and calculating. That’s how science tier people are raised to be. But they’re also raised to be careful and thorough. She didn’t release the virus into the general population because that just wasn’t good science.”

“She would have done eventually, though?” Grace says.

“Sure, once she’d worked her way through a few captive raskarrans testing it. Like I said, she’s not the good guy in all this. She’s just not the worst.”

“The decision is mine,” Liv says, her tone firm, final. “And I’m not getting her blood on my hands.”

Those with appetite eat their evening meal. I pick at mine. Manage a few mouthfuls.

“Am I making the right decision about Dawes?” Liv says, appearing beside me.

“You’re asking me? The person with an outrageous anger problem?”

Liv huffs, the sound almost a laugh. “I’m asking you, the person who understands best everything that happened here.”

I shake my head. “I already stuck up for her in front of the others. I think you know what my answer is.”

“I’d like to hear it said,” Liv says. “For my sanity.”

I look her dead in the eye. “I think you’re making the right decision. Even if it really fucking sucks.”

She half laughs, then the sob overtakes it, the tears she’s been holding in all day finally falling.

“It really does fucking suck,” she says.

My eyes burn. I blink.

Then a voice calls from the forest behind me. The first cheerful voice I’ve heard all day.

“Nhi Angie!”

I turn. Watch Rardek’s smiling face fall as he sees the tears running down my cheeks.