by Isoellen
Mama pig oinked at him.
She looked like she wanted in that garden. It wouldn't be the first time. The bottom slat on the fence was loose and Papa had repaired it twice already. Mama pig minded her manners, but if something spooked her or made her angry, she knew just which fence slat was loose and where to put pressure on it. Papa meant to fix it, but something more pressing for him to do always came up. Benjere told Papa he'd glue it.
Papa told him that shortcuts fixed nothing.
Benjere didn’t see how that was a shortcut at all, it seemed like the smart thing to do—just squirt glue in there and it would hold good. Papa hadn't fixed it yet, and it gave Benjere an idea. He went over to the fence and pulled the bottom off, dashing quickly around the corner of the barn to see what the pig would do.
Stupid pig didn't do anything.
Picking up some rocks near the wall of the barn. He threw one at Mama pig. "Stupid pig, fat pig, aren't you still hungry? Don't you want some carrots? Don't you want some food? Fresh food is better than that soft we give you, better than leftovers."
The pig snorted louder, pawing the ground of her pen. But she didn't seem inclined to bust through the fence to get to the garden so she could dig it up and hide the evidence of what he had done. He threw another rock and missed and grabbed up three more, positioned closer to his target right in front of the garden. He was close enough to give the pig some wallop now.
The third one hit ole’ fatty Mama pig hard enough to make her squeal, lower her head and break through the fence. She was faster than Benjere ever expected, more furious than hungry. Now she wasn't just a big, Mama pig—suddenly she became an angry monster, tusks caught the red of the moon, and that rule on her chin looked like blood. She ran straight at Benjere, out to gore his belly.
There was yelling, Benjere looked over and saw Papa running towards him. Somehow it all turned against him. It wasn't his fault, but he was going to be blamed for everything. Papa was yelling, trying to stop the pig, who just kept charging.
Teeth clenched, her whole being in denial when Annabell opened her mouth to scream.
The hungries buzzed in a wild frenzy, rushing inside of her, filling her up. That memory had come from them. She did not know how, or why, or the strange magic chemistry of it. But the memory was real. She felt it and lived it.
Filling her up, they poured in with her agony and tasted like cool, perfect water, but she knew it wasn't. There was too much of it, going in, down her throat, in her belly, filling her up.
There was much too much of it.
*
She opened her eyes while floating in the stars. They were strange stars, blue instead of white. Maybe she was underwater and this is what that world looks like. Pinpoints of light above her and all around. Annabelle didn't know where she was or how she had gotten here. It was like no place she'd ever seen. She lay flat and naked on a soft surface. But she wasn't cold. And she couldn't move. She could twitch her fingers, move her hands, and curl her toes, but there was a resistance to sitting up or to moving her arms and legs.
"Hello, Annabelle. I am Eid. It is nice to meet you. Welcome to Home World One," a calm female voice said.
"Anna. My redress Anna."
Annabelle stared at the creature hovering next to her. He was big, at least seven-foot tall, maybe more, with muscles everywhere packed under white skin. Despite the powerful muscles, his body had an appearance of lean strength that made her think of a spear, sharp, and elegant. His skin was white all over. A pure, beautiful white like snow, clean and cold. Even his eyes were white, with thin black rims and solid black pupils. He had a roundish head, ears that pointed at the tip, and two elongated teeth like tusks coming out of his mouth.
Her brother thought Mama pig looked like an Orki. Was this an Orki? He put his hand on her stomach. Not cold, but warm. Infused with heat, his eyes were full of tenderness and anxiety.
"Anna not leave her Doku-ni ni-orki-ror-ess," the Orki said.
"Annabelle Roe, you did almost leave us. The poison was spreading through your body and you would not open your mouth. This is a common occurrence with the consort hungries poison. I am not sure what causes the lockjaw, however. There is not a medical reason for it. Do you remember why you would not open your mouth? I would like that information for the log."
Annabelle wasn't sure she could speak. Confusion swamped her. Where was this woman standing? Able to turn her head from side to side, she could see the Orki, even lift her head. No other people shared the room with them.
"Pardon me, Annabelle. While flushing and rehydration with the antidote is complete, you have been unconscious for several days. Are you thirsty?"
She heard a quiet, snick sound before the big white male leaned down and pulled a hose to where she could see it. "Water, Anna?"
There was no well to provide the water, no lamp to provide the light, nothing she could see that would create blue stationary points of illumination all around. She wasn't in Righteous Way. It looked like a picture in a book or on a screen in the schoolhouse.
Had she been taken to the steel city?
"Anna, drink." The Orki pressed the end of the hose to her lips. Closer to her, she couldn't take her eyes off his. Emotion swirled in the depths of white, tiny dots of color rising to the surface and then slipping away. His brows were heavy, mobile, and expressive. They told her more than the lips between double white tusks. His brows lifted and lowered with his emotion. He was hairless, but it suited his beautiful color.
She gave him a weak smile.
He answered with a rolling purr that went into her head, fizzing through her body, a pervasive soothing warmth. She knew that sound. It spread a lovely intoxicating lassitude through her. She could just curl up into his chest and never leave. Tapping the hose against her lips, she opened her mouth, the first drops of water spelling cold and clean onto her lips. She drank that down; the Orki watching her mouth, his eyes growing heated.
A curious sensation answered the suggestive ideas in the Orki's expression, inspiring an answering warmth in her middle. She knew him. She knew this male on an intimate level. The knowledge of it hovered on her periphery, just out of reach.
"Now that you have had something to drink, I wonder if you would be able to answer a few questions? And I will be able to answer any of your questions."
Annabelle tried an experimental word to see if she could speak. "Yes."
"It is especially important that I ask these questions now, before the memories fade. Please say the first thing that comes into your mind. Do not search for an answer. I would like to know if you remember why you would not open your mouth."
"I didn't want the hive to get inside of me. They were trying to get inside." Saying it made her remember it, the pressure of wet cold all around her, the sense of things pushing in and trying to climb inside her mind and body.
As fear built into a hard ball, a choking threat, the Orki cupped one side of her face and leaned over her, the reassuring rumble increasing. His touch connected her to him, spreading sounds of comfort, chasing away the chilly slime-coated darkness that wanted to drown her.
The female voice said, "Very good. Now, if you don't mind, I would like to ask you what was trying to get inside and what they planned to do when they got there."
Annabelle opened her mouth to answer, then closed it. She didn't know. They were someone vast and big and insect-like. A hive of black beetles. A swarm of springtime hoppers. Insects with hands and pig noses.
"Pig. Mama pig!" A fresh memory bloomed red behind her eyes, crowding in and taking over.
"Could you repeat that, please? My system did not understand." Eid said tonelessly.
"Benjere was teasing Mama pig. He threw rocks at her. He made a mess of the vegetable garden and was trying to cover it up. He broke the fence. He was there, around the corner of the barn, watching. He was still there. He saw me find Papa. He knew what happened and never said anything. He let me be cursed, but he was the curse-I could hear his h
eart, his thoughts, because after he was buried the hive pupae ate his remains. They are everywhere. Everywhere. Dorsus is infested with them."
The memory was so real in her head. Just there, superimposed over her past and too huge to take in.
Not grasping the emotion, Eid ignored it. Instead, the disembodied voice explained, "The adults are called hungries. The Orki term is—" Eid made a noise that sounded like a low baritone sound of disgust. A human man might be able to imitate it, but Annabell didn't have a chance. "The pupa stage is relatively harmless. They are small, with their spiked snout-shaped noses, and six appendages for digging. They cannot mate, only eat and take nourishment back to larvae and soldiers. They require a queen to mature."
"I don't understand. I don't understand. Is that memory real? How can that be real? Where did that come from?"
"I do believe the memory is real. The hungries’ have developed unusual abilities. As the Orki have done, they have adapted to the planet. I have tried for many years to eliminate them, but they are tenacious creatures. Every attempt has failed. This is not a surprise. The Creator aliens did not intend for them to replicate. They dumped the clean-up crews here expecting them to die. Unfortunately, they did not. They are not the only created creature on this planet. Dorsus has some unique properties, indeed."
The Eid woman spoke in clear, concise common words that Annabelle understood. Each word had its own definition. When Eid put them together in such strange ways for an explanation of baffling events, they made no sense at all. She stopped hearing anything after Eid said the memory was real.
"I am not the Woman of Woe, my brother was. He was jealous, petty, and stupid. He's dead. His family is dead. Very bad men came from the steel cities and killed them. Mark is dead. Mama is dead, and Papa died first trying to protect Benjere from the sow he teased, so she would cover up his careless actions," Annabelle said out loud.
She waited for a voice, an inner negativity, to answer her and deny it. All she heard was the loud purr of the white-eyed Orki standing next to her.
Chapter 16
I Can See You Clearly Now
They kept her in the blue room for days. An armband wrapped her left elbow, another band wrapped her ankle, where she received the scratch from the hungries consort. Tubes led into and out of the snug black bands, and there was another, for comfort, between her legs. Annabelle didn't understand any of it or how it worked. The bed itself changed shape and grew arms on command. A monstrous thing, with spider-like interchangeable rods and odd joints acting on Eid's command.
Eid and Doku-ni helped her piece together missing days and hours. As they recounted difficult-to-believe events, the conversations prompted feelings and memories. The Orki was her mate, her One, and she was in Homeland.
Frustrating holes in time existed, however, including some of her time with Doku-ni. Their mating night, as he called it, the night of their bonding when he bit her, had faded to a filmy shadow, one of the first memories to be eaten by the hive.
He recounted it to her, speaking in a mix of Orkish and common. Annabell squirmed with discomfort while listening, her face heating with embarrassed fascination. She couldn't believe she had done half of what he said. Doku-ni told the tale with relish, and she hid behind her hands giggling and whimpering with every word. It was too intimate an event to be spoken out loud.
Climbing into the bed with her, he held her from behind and curled around her body. Voice low and growly, he whispered their story in her ear, his arms crossed over her naked front, his hand lightly clasping her throat in a sensual embrace. She wanted to hear every detail, but the more she heard, the more uncomfortable she became.
Doku-ni rubbed his tusk up the line of her neck. Echoes of emotion and pleasure tickled at her nerve endings as he teased, his voice between a growl and a purr. "Soon, redress. Soon Doku-ni will fill Anna. Take Anna.
"Now," she pleaded, turning her face into his skin.
"Anna heal."
"Annabell, my tests say that your body is not completely healed. You are free of the toxins, but not the damage they caused."
She had forgotten where they were. Eid's intrusion caught her off guard, and she burst out laughing.
The loss of the memory bothered her, for that was the night her child had been created.
Eid told her that all three of Annabell's unborn babies were healthy and doing well. She blurted out, "Three babies? How is that possible?"
"The usual way, I believe. Orki sexual anatomy is unique, and this gives them a greater chance of impregnating—"
"Eid. Stop. Please." The embarrassment and absurdity were unending.
"You do not wish to know how it is possible you could have been impregnated with an Orki brood?" Eid asked in her stiff, formal way.
Peeking at Doku-ni for help, she saw him smirking, entertained, and no help at all.
Neither human or Orki, Eid was a machine, but Annabelle found herself forgetting that despite the inhuman toneless quality of her voice. And this conversation, spoken out loud, outside of the bed, shifted into areas that were better left private as far as she was concerned. "No, I wish to know how it is that I could be pregnant with three babies and how they could survive an infection that almost killed me."
"Orki babies are especially hardy in the womb. They must be. Intercourse with an Orki can be rough. But your body does not conceive Orki children until it is fully ready for a healthy pregnancy. As your children survived the toxins of the hungries, they will also survive any activities you and your mate may indulge in. Other actions like riding on the back of a warg are acceptable as well. I tell you this because it is a question most human women have asked."
Annabell blinked at the statement. She hadn't asked. But now her mind was wandering from the original topic, and Doku-ni's hands were also wandering and teasing, shaping her exposed curves.
"At the point it is no longer possible for you to carry three Orki infants, you shall return here, and I will assist in the delivery." Vulnerable periods of growth occur in several life stages before adulthood, but compared to human offspring, Orki have exceptional protections coded into them. Failures in early experiments led the Creators to strengthen weak areas to ensure the survival of the Orki."
This began a conversation that led Annabell to many shocking answers. Creators? Her father knew many things, but these were the planet’s native Originals. No one, anywhere, knew they were "created." Eid shared a video of Orki Origins and how they came into existence in laboratories using a mix of species and resources, one of which was the sentient warg, or war beasts, of Dorsus.
Annabell gaped, absorbing the history and creation of the Orki. She could believe they were tools of war, but how they became that way astonished her. Closely intertwined, the warg and Orki claimed a relationship as a species based on the manipulations of the Creator Aliens. The Orki were the original Dorsus species because their Creator aliens abandoned them here.
Eid said, "Initially using artificial wombs to birth working specimens, the Creators learned surrogate living wombs had higher rates of success in producing viable subjects that survived into the adult stage. They used warg females to create their army.
"The Orki war machines were birthed from several warg females to bolster their numbers. Some of those females were related. Some were not. They were taken from all over the planet Dorcas so that the gene pool would be varied and not cause defects or deficiencies. The Orki have a telepathic connection to their children established in utero the same way an umbilical cord is connected to support the fetus. Warg reproductive physiology allowed for diverse circumstances. In lean or dangerous times, the warg do not birth young, but the females have the remarkable ability to 'hold' a fertilized egg for years if necessary. This is why you saw Orki and warg birthed together. Artificially implanting the pre-formed war machine embryos stimulated latent pregnancies, and the Orki were born with nest-mates."
Holding Doku-ni's hand, Annabelle listened to Eid's lesson in horror.
&n
bsp; Like the raiders, the strange-looking Creators held no value for any lives but their own, no value for anything at all but knowledge and the power to use it. As if relating the words in a book, Eid said, "The Creator's redesigned life to suit their needs. When they no longer required a project to serve their needs, the project was ended."
*
It was hard to sleep at night. Eid changed the room for Annabell, creating a bed big enough to share with Doku-ni. His presence was everything, but he could not stop the dreams. At first, it was the crying of the hive, calling to her, begging her to come to them. Then it was the memories of the dead given to her as punishment when she wouldn't. Eid created several versions of a sedative, but nothing silenced the nightmares.
The pupae of the hungries were drawn to dead things. Like the Orki, the hungries were not naturally born. Suspicious of every other species around them, the Creators attacked planets and civilizations before they themselves could be attacked. Every aspect of their armies were spliced and diced clones and manufactured creatures.