Four pairs of intense stares are on me. The hope is bright in their onyx eyes. Guys who never smile are grinning like it’s their rekking job. Something fills my chest.
Hope.
“And if they’re a match?” Galen asks lowly, his voice slightly muffled behind his protective mask.
“If they’re a match, we breed.”
Nine morts stand all too close to Avrell as he works quickly to study the biological data. It’s been six solars since Theron and Sayer brought home the cryotubes and we’ve all been on edge with the need to know if breeding will work. Galen’s seedling mission is a thing of the past. Nobody wants to leave the lab, much less the facility, to trek through The Graveyard hunting for good soil to plant.
“There are only five of them,” mutters Hadrian, the youngest mort at only seventeen revolutions old. “Who will get one?”
I drag my gaze from the unconscious alien who remains in a deep sleep to the only mortling in our faction. Memories of when his mother died, the last of our females, is a dark solar I try desperately not to remember. Vetta was like a mother to all of us. And because she was still fertile, we had plans to keep our existence going via her womb. That all faded away the solar she caught The Rades and died shivering while she clawed at her own flesh, lost to the madness of the disease.
The child in her womb, one that belonged to her deceased mate Puno, passed along with her. It was a devastating moment. I took Hadrian under my protection and have looked after him as a son ever since.
“Yeah, Commander, who will get one?” Draven, our faction’s lieutenant engineer, challenges from the doorway of the lab. I know he won’t step inside. He suffers mentally and always feels trapped. It all stems, according to Avrell and his studies, from when Draven caught a mild case of The Rades. He was in a sleeplike state for almost an entire revolution—hundreds and hundreds of solars. His skin seeped with a puss-like substance from sores that had formed all over his body. If it hadn’t been for Avrell caring for him at every moment of every solar, he would have met death along with Vetta and her unborn mortling. When he came to, his eyes were crazed and he babbled on for many solar cycles about “the captors.” They’d chained him up and tortured him.
All in his mind, of course.
They still haunt him with every breath he takes.
It’s been many revolutions, and he’s never lost the unhinged glimmer in his coal-black eyes.
I straighten my spine and walk over to the alien. Avrell has taken to calling her Specimen Az-1. Her chest, beneath the thin sheet covering, rises and falls with each breath she takes. We’re all wearing our zu-gear until we can ascertain if she’s carrying anything harmful.
“Any updates?” I ask, my eyes glued to her unusual, dirty-looking face. She has skin the color of a sabrevipe’s belly. If she weren’t potentially dangerous to touch, I’d love to remove my glove and see what the texture of her flesh feels like.
He looks up from the micro-viewer on the table near the alien, and a small smile, revealing his semi-filed-down fangs, has hope once again dancing inside my chest. “I think it’s good news, Commander.”
Everyone in the room seems to be holding their breath. The tension is thick enough to cut with a magknife.
“Proceed,” I urge, tamping down my eagerness.
“Have a look.” He gestures to the micro-viewer.
I walk over to the machine and peer into the viewer. Inside are colorful cells but they mean nothing to me.
“See the cerulean cells?” he asks.
“There are many,” I agree.
“Now find the opaque ones. You may have to squint to see those.”
I blink as I attempt to focus. “I see them. The cerulean ones are being eaten by them.”
“Not eaten,” Avrell says, a smile in his voice. “Fertilized.”
I jerk away and glare at him. “What does it mean?”
“Exactly what you think. Not only is our genetics compatible, but we can breed the aliens. That right there,” he gestures to the micro-viewer, “is the hope for our survival.”
“What will you do with them?” There were at least four fertilized cell units under the viewer.
“I could destroy them or I could implant them.”
I look around to the other eight pair of eyes watching my exchange with Avrell. Ten morts. Five aliens. It’s unfair to choose between who gets an alien to mate with and who doesn’t. As much as I’d love to wake and mate with them properly, it’s too risky. If the aliens were to fall ill and pass on like Vetta, all of this would be for nothing.
My ears flatten against my nog as I crack all twenty-eight of the sub-bones in my neck. All my subordinates slightly bow their nogs in submission. They know my word is binding. Even if they’ll hate what I’m about to say.