“Christian—”
“No arguments, Araceli,” he said, holding up a hand to silence me even as he cast searching glances between Danovan and myself. There was something in the way he looked at us, something about his semi-absence throughout our reunion, that put me on edge. But I gave a shake of my head to clear the thoughts. If anyone was off, it was me.
I followed Christian out of the airlock, and Danovan followed me. Christian didn’t say anything about Danovan’s constant presence, so I decided not to draw attention to it. But Christian did take my hand as we crossed from the hab to the medic tent, some fifty yards closer to the crash site.
This one was not pressurized the way Christian’s hab was, and I could see how Christian’s shoulders drooped under the added weight of Galatea’s gravity. “I don’t know how you could stand it,” he remarked as we made our way across brown earth, so trampled that the grass had died beneath the feet of the soldiers. “This planet is bloody awful.”
“I don’t know,” I began, ready to defend the site of my great adventure. “It’s rather beautiful, don’t you think?”
“It’s an underdeveloped mound of dirt,” Christian hissed, “best known as the graveyard of the Earth’s grandest ship. I can’t wait to get off this planet. But what I’m wondering is why you don’t feel similarly.” He caught my arm and turned me toward him, and I could see his chest rise and fall in an attempt to catch his breath. The planet was hard work, and Christian Ward wasn’t accustomed to hard work. “You were attacked, by animal and man, in this place. How could you not loathe it, as I do?”
“The people,” I said simply and turned to continue on toward the med tent. Christian heaved a sigh and moved on with me, with Danovan close at our heels.
“The people,” he echoed sourly. Danovan remained ever the silent stoic.
Inside the med tent were a doctor and a team of triage nurses who had been in various states of lethargic lounging when we came in. At the sight of Christian, they all snapped to, and the doctor pranced over to us with a tablet in her hands.
“Dr. Cross,” she said, extending her hand to me. “My name is Melia, and it’s an honor to meet you.” I shook her hand, smiling warmly down at this young doctor who had introduced herself by her first name instead of her proper title. She had beautiful, rich brown eyes beneath an epicanthic fold, and her black hair reached almost to her waist. “Er, Dr. Melia Chen. I’m… sorry, I’m just so glad to see that you’re alive. You’re our first survivor.”
“Just… give her a full body scan,” Christian interjected. “And pay particular attention to the venom burn on her—where is it?”
“Leg,” Danovan offered. “Her left thigh, in fact.”
“Right,” Christian went on, “leg.”
“Of course, Mr. Ward,” Dr. Chen said, stuffing her tablet into the hands of a triage nurse as she showed me to my spot. There was a pod in the center of the space that looked like the bottom half of a pea pod in shining stainless steel.
“Would you gentlemen please step outside?” Dr. Chen asked, ever the professional, as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves.
“We’ll stay,” Christian said, crossing his arms across his chest. I saw Danovan’s features cloud but he offered no argument, so Dr. Chen simply bobbed her head in a nod and got to work.
“Are you wearing any jewelry, Dr. Cross?” she asked, and just as I opened my mouth to speak, Christian chimed in for me.
“No, she isn’t.” I clutched my left hand to my chest and rang my fingers across my knuckles: my ring was gone. I felt myself flush, as I wracked my brain to think of when I had lost it. Had I been wearing it when we left Hiropass? I couldn’t remember. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember.
“Christian,” I whispered, “I’m so sorry—I don’t know what happened to it, it must have—”
“Now is not the time, my dear,” he said quietly, and all I could do was nod.
“Very well,” Dr. Chen went on. “Please just go ahead and undress fully and climb into the pod.”
I did as she bid me, feeling startlingly self-conscious in front of Christian and Danovan, Dr. Chen and her team of triage nurses. But I was a doctor, so I tried to convince myself that there was no need to feel so exposed. I was a human body, and they were going to ascertain the damage that body had taken over the trials of the last few days. I tugged my shirt off over my head and shimmied out of my pants and panties before climbing into the pod. It cradled me gently. It was heated, and I felt warm and safe inside of it.
“Go ahead and lie flat, Dr. Cross,” said Dr. Chen, who retrieved her tablet from the nurse and began to swipe her fingers across the screen.
The halogen lamps in the tent began to dim before an image of my body appeared, a hologram in the air above my actual body. My vitals were projected beneath it, and I could see my heart beating in the image suspended above me. I could see my lungs expanding and contracting as I breathed. I could feel my stomach acid roiling. I could see my blood moving through my veins. And I could see something else, low in my abdomen. I could see something else.
“Dr. Chen—”
“Let’s take a look at that leg first, shall we?” she asked, and I knew she hadn’t noticed the anomaly in the abdomen; I knew she wasn’t immediately looking for an embryo. Why would she? She was concerned about the burns on my leg. Maybe Christian hadn’t noticed yet, either. He wouldn’t know what to look for. Maybe he hadn’t noticed; maybe Danovan hadn’t noticed. But in that moment, I couldn’t bring myself to look at either of them for confirmation.
The image zoomed into the burns on my left leg, and Dr. Chen stepped forward to look as well, using something as old-fashioned as her eyes to ascertain the damage. “The wound has been well cared for,” she said. “Which is excellent. I’m going to apply general purpose medi-gel, which will expedite the cell regeneration process in that region.”
“Dr. Chen,” I said quietly, “I know how medi-gel works.”
“Yes,” she said, shaking her head, flustered, “of course. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. In fact—I know how these scans work. I can read it for myself.” Maybe this way, she wouldn’t note the embryo aloud. Maybe this way, I could keep the secret of my pregnancy to myself, just for a while. Just for a little while. Maybe I could have the opportunity to process it on my own before anyone else had to know.
“Of course,” she said and lowered her tablet, clutching it in front of her and peering at the hologram above me. My vitals looked normal, though my heart rate was elevated for obvious reasons. My blood pressure reflected the strain I was under, but it was nothing with which I would concern myself. My brain activity was normal, vibrant, despite recent head trauma. And everything else looked fine. One of the nurses came forward to administer the medi-gel to my burn, and it felt cool like menthol on my damaged skin. And this was GenOriens tech: it wouldn’t even leave a scar.
“Everything looks good!” I announced, sitting up in the pod. But Dr. Chen wasn’t going to let me off the hook. Poor, well-meaning, stupid girl.
“Oh, but Dr. Cross, didn’t you see?” she asked, freezing the hologram, and using her stupid, latex-covered finger to point to my uterus. “Maybe you weren’t looking for it.”
“Looking for what?” Danovan asked, and I looked over at the men behind me. Danovan’s expression was open and naive and full of hope and promise and intent. Christian’s wasn’t. His expression belied what he knew, and he seemed to know even before I did that I was in a, shall we say, fragile condition.
“Congratulations, Dr. Cross,” Dr. Chen said, clapping her hands together once, and then spreading them apart to enlarge the image of the hologram. “You’re pregnant!”
My mouth went dry and I tried to swallow. “Thank you,” I managed, but my voice was just a squeak.
“And Mr. Ward,” Dr. Chen went on, and my cheeks were on fire with the shame of it. I knew, in my gut, that the baby was not his. I didn’t need the con
firmation he sought to tell him that.
“Do you have a date of fertilization for that embryo, Dr. Chen?” Christian asked, his tone edged to the point of menacing.
“Um, let me see,” Dr. Chen mused, as she swiped through the data scan the machine had given on my body. “Ah, yes. Right here—four days, so brand-new, and…” She trailed off, because even little naive Dr. Chen knew enough to realize that I was still missing, presumed dead, four days ago. And suddenly everyone knew that it wasn’t Christian who should be celebrating, but the only Galatean in the room, in whose arms this hybrid progeny had been conceived a mere four days earlier.
“Isn’t it amazing,” Dr. Chen went on, ignoring the first rule of holes—when you’re in one, stop digging. “The technology? I mean, it used to be that it would take just… weeks to know you were even pregnant, let alone the due date and estimated date of conception. I just think… wow, you know? What a time to be alive.” Dr. Chen glanced nervously between me and Christian, and I tried to smile at her, but I was rooted in place, naked in the med bay. “Why don’t we, um, leave you… so, um, you can have privacy? Yeah? Okay.”
Dr. Chen filed out with her nurses in tow, and I climbed out of the pod to tug my clothes back on. The air was thick, but silent, and I didn’t know what to say to break that silence. So I got dressed before I turned to face these men, crossing my arms beneath my breasts.
“Christian—”
“Just… tell me one thing, Ara,” Christian said, and I could see that he was doing everything in his power to control his considerable rage. That vagueness was gone, replaced with something bright and pulsing. “Did you even want to come back to me?”
“Yes,” I said, “of course I did.” And I saw Danovan’s face drop then, and I realized that there was no version of the whole truth that would hurt no one. “I wanted you to know that I was all right, and I felt that I owed you… an explanation, if nothing else.”
“An explanation?”
“Yes, and I thought you owed me one, too.”
“For what, exactly?” he asked, propping his hands up on his hips. He was very handsome when he was angered: his rage was a sharp point that shot out of the angles of his hip bones and shoulder blades.
“For everything that happened to me,” I went on, feeling bold. “You brought me out here—”
“To work!”
“Yes, but I was aboard the Leviathan for one day before everything went to hell. And I just… you’re so well connected. You have your fingers in every pie—how could you have not known that something was going on? How did you not know about the attack on the GenOriens base on Galatea? How did you not know these things?” In earlier days I would have reached out to touch him. But today, I was afraid he might burn me with the force of his fury.
“Are you accusing me of something, Araceli?” Christian asked, his voice a low growl. “Because if we’re slinging accusations around, then I would like to accuse you of being a lying whore.”
The word landed like a blow to the sternum, and I nearly stumbled back where I stood.
“Don’t you fucking speak to her that way, you spoiled, self-righteous son of a bitch,” Danovan spat, and I blinked owlishly as Christian turned his startled gaze on Danovan.
“Ah,” Christian said at length, “so the bastard hybrid is yours, then.”
Danovan couldn’t help it—he looked over at me, then, and he smiled. He smiled, and I smiled back at him, and I believe it was in that moment that I lost any scrap of trust Christian Ward ever had in me.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Christian mused quietly, though his tone was energized by his anger. “Maybe it would be easier if you just died. You know, if some horrible accident befell you and you never made it to camp, and I had to go onto the newsfeed, the weeping would-be widower. I think that’d be easier to spin. What do you think?”
“Don’t be insane, Ward,” Danovan said, moving to stand bodily between Christian and myself.
“We could just… go away,” I said, knowing that he had that pistol on his person. “You could spin it however you wanted, if you just let us go away.”
Christian chuckled low in his throat, shaking his head as he retrieved the pistol from its thinly veiled hiding place in the back of his waistband. “You stupid girl,” he said. “After everything, you still don’t see the basic fact that this planet isn’t safe for hybrids, or the women carrying them?”
I tried to swallow down the lump in my throat, but it would not be dislodged. So instead, I approached Danovan and put my hand on his arm, an arm he outstretched in the universal signal for stay behind me.
“What do you know about the hybrids?” I asked, perhaps in spite of myself.
“Very little,” Christian said. “Much less than I should. But I do know that they won’t be allowed to live. And yours will be no different.”
“Why?” I demanded. “Why? Why let me do my work if you never wanted it to succeed? Why did you bring me to the Leviathan to begin my human trials? Why, when all the good data showed that my intervention wasn’t even necessary? Why?”
“I don’t ask questions, Araceli,” Christian snapped. “I just do as I’m told. I take over at GenOriens. I green-light your worthless project. I ask you to marry me. I do what I’m told.”
“What…?”
“You were chosen for me, Ara,” Christian went on. “I didn’t choose you for myself.”
“Then why do you care if—”
“Because you’re pregnant now. With… with that alien’s godless offspring. It’s fucking disgusting. You are disgusting.” Though the words stung, the tone was a tense warble. I don’t know how much he believed in what he was saying.
“Hey,” Danovan snapped. “What’d I say about how you speak to her?”
“Don’t talk back to the guy with the gun, tel’Darian, it won’t work out in your favor.”
“So, fine,” I shouted, coming out from behind Danovan. “What do you we do, now? I’m pregnant. I’m leaving you. Are you going to shoot me?” I locked my eyes on Christian, and I could not see him as a stranger. I didn’t believe that he was a heartless puppet who cared nothing for me. I knew what love looked like, and while it was not the great love story of my life, I knew he had felt genuine affection for me. He had shown it to me.
And I had hurt him. I sighed, and reached out a hand, even as I was staring down Christian’s pistol. “Christian,” I gently ventured, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for things to go this way.”
“It’s my fault, really.” A woman’s voice sliced through the tense air like a hot knife through butter. Lucille Ward, fabulous in a black designer sheath dress and a single strand of large freshwater pearls, was a vision in the medical tent entrance. “I should have chosen someone else for my son. But I really thought you had promise, Dr. Cross. Promise.”
I hadn’t heard her walk in, and I had no idea how much she’d heard or what she knew, but there she was, in the flesh, with her coterie of sycophants swarming around her. “So, now that you’ve shown your true colors, we need to figure out what to do with you.”
Chapter 21:
Danovan tel’Darian
I hadn’t seen Lucille Ward come into the room. I couldn’t see anyone or anything, except for Ara. Even as she stood just behind me, I focused on her in my periphery, or felt her as she gripped the sleeve of my shirt. She was my entire universe, burned down to a point; she carried within her the entirety of my future happiness. She was pregnant, and the baby was mine.
A part of me is ashamed of the sizable portion of my mind that put everything else aside in the wake of Dr. Chen’s inadvertent revelation. A baby. A baby. Our baby.
But Lucille had a presence to be reckoned with, and I was flesh and blood, living and breathing, and just as susceptible as the next man to a true stunner. Araceli was beautiful, like a Botticelli cherub with skin like moth wings and hair like copper. But Lucille Ward had something other than beauty, something
perhaps better than beauty. She had gravitas. She had command. She had that certain something that meant it was impossible to deny her once she’d walked into a room.
Her skin was the color of cocoa powder, and her eyes were swirling green emeralds encircled by a halo of thick lashes. Her hair, a cascade of loose black curls, was pinned at her temples but otherwise left to languish like a tumble of water down her spine. It was a youthful choice for someone whose mouth was parenthesized by smile lines, and whose eyes crinkled in the corners from years of smiling. But these were the only giveaways as to her age: she was incredibly well preserved. And why shouldn’t she be? She was among the wealthiest women in the galaxy, and her money could buy her cosmetic time, if it couldn’t buy her the real thing.
“We need to figure out what we’re going to do with you,” she was saying to Ara, who was looking rather startled at the woman’s sudden presence.
“What do you mean, do with me?” Araceli asked, venturing a tentative step toward the woman, who was plucking a pair of elbow-length gloves from her hands and hoisting them into the arms of one of her assistants. She was accompanied by three others, in total: her assistant, a bespectacled mouselike creature with dishwater-blond hair and pasty skin; a tall, hulking man with a shaved head, wearing a suit and sunglasses; and an effeminate gentleman, who was long, and tall, and lanky, in loafers and a sweater vest. They didn’t really seem like they’d be participating in the conversation; they mostly seemed like they were there to bolster their mistress’ presence, and make her seem even more intimidating than she actually was. Or maybe they thought she wasn’t safe with us. Good call: she wasn’t. But it was her son who was weaving the pistol around like a lunatic.
“You’re a great disappointment to me, Araceli,” Lucille went on, eying Ara through that thick forest of black lashes. “I thought you would be a fantastic face for GenOriens, at my son’s side. I thought the two of you looked just so lovely together, so… young and pretty. And as an added bonus, I thought you were smart.”
Alien Survivor: (Stranded on Galatea) An Alien SciFi Romance Page 19