Page 52 of Challenged

“You found this information quickly,” I say. “So why did you fall asleep at themachine? You were looking for answers to your questions?”

“I know I should have gone looking for Liv.” The defensiveness is back, as is her scowl.

I shrug. “Liv will be as pleased to hear your news in the morning as she would have been to hear it this afternoon.”

“I probably still should have told her, rather than wasting all evening looking for answers to questions that only bother me.”

There is a furrow in her brow as she speaks. Her headspace spins, I think, just as mine has been doing.

“Would you speak to me of these questions and the answers you seek?”

The furrow deepens. “You want me to bore you to death with science stuff you don’t understand?”

“I know there is probably little I can do to aid you in your search for answers, but I have always found that talking through a thing out loud can help straighten your headspace.”

My Angie blows out a sigh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you’re stupid.”

I grin at her. “You did not. You just know as well as I do that human things are beyond my understanding. Just as you would not know the best ways to hunt an ensouka.”

“No, I definitely do not.” Concern fills her features. “Is that something I’m going to have to learn to do?”

“Only if you desire it.” I put some tease into my next words. “You are mated to a very skilled hunter. He will always provide for you if hunting is not a thing you wish to do.”

She huffs, but I think there is some amusement in it, her lips twitching at the very edges. Looking down at the table, she traces her fingers over the surface. Everywhere she touches, she leaves a trail behind her, as if she has painted on the table with light. At first, her movements are random, but then she presses her palmflat to the surface, swiping it across the light trails she has made, wiping them away. The next marks she makes are deliberate, and though I cannot interpret what it says, I have watched the females in their lessons often enough to know that it iswriting.She stares at thiswritingfor a long time.

Then, as if the stopper has been pulled out of her, the words come flooding out.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Angie

Once I start, it’s difficult to stop.

“It just doesn’t make any sense. Mercenia came here to start a breeding program, and it would seem they weren’t successful because they didn’t come back. But they have to have been successful, because Sally and the others have or are having children. But if whatever Mercenia did worked, how is it that Sally and the others are affected by it?”

The words I wrote on the table shine up at me.

Genetic Engineering.

It’s the only possible answer, but it invites a new question - how?

“I would understand if I got pregnant, or Brooks. They could have done anything to us while we were frozen. But Sally crash landed here. I could believe that Liv’s crash was deliberate - a group of bottom tier women dumped on an alien planet to see what happened. But Sally told me the circumstances of herarrival here. It sounds like it was actually a crash landing. Even Mercenia doesn’t go as far as killing people to make a scenario realistic.”

Dr Novak might have faked a few deaths for his experiments, but they were always undertaken in places that Mercenia had complete control of. Teams of people and lots of tech were used to make any ‘deaths’ look authentic. In an alien wilderness, attacked by the wildlife - there’s just no way a production team could have made that happen.

“But even if they did crash Sally here deliberately, she still didn’t have any sort of treatment before she left. Neither did Liv, or any of the others. It’s not like Mercenia could have slipped them a few pills and not told them what they were, either. Making a human compatible with a raskarran - it must take some pretty intense genetic engineering. You guys never met any humans before them, right? So you can’t have been treated. It has to be them. But even if, somehow, the treatment was completely painless and didn’t have any side effects, they would have needed careful monitoring, lots of check ups. Tests to make sure it actually worked. None of them experienced anything like that. So they can’t have been treated. Yet there are three healthy half-human, half-raskarran kids already born. More on the way.”

I push a hand through my hair.

“And if Mercenia didn’t genetically engineer any of the girls to breed with aliens, I guess I’m supposed to believe it’s just a coincidence that two different ships crashed here. And maybe it could be, you know? Ten years is a long time. If you think of the path from home to this Alpha Colony like a road - the volume of traffic on it, the average condition of the vehicles, the skill of the drivers, the amount of time - maybe it’s about right that there have been two crashes. Maybe there have been even more thatwe don’t know about. It just doesn’t sit right with me. None of this does. It just…”

“It does not make any sense,” Rardek says, nodding.

I shrug. “So I tried looking on Farrow’s computer. There’s so much stuff on there, I thought for sure I’d be able to find something that gave me some clues as to how all of this is possible. A report from the science tier teams - they had to be reporting to him.”

“And did you find anything?”

I scoff. “All sorts. Menus for the canteen, risk assessments, inventory lists. Just nothing that’s any fucking use.”

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