Page 75 of Challenged

“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 itwasn’t something you brought here by accident. You fucking designed it.”

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

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