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On the interstellar craft, I strap into a different seat. Outside, the starscape is impossibly deep and dark, pinpricks of light glittering from so far away it feels impossible. I’ve seen stars from the ground before - in those dark, hostile places the insurgents call their home. But they didn’t look like this. Didn’t look so vast.
And somewhere out there, a whole new world.
Resources, expansion.
Another traitorous thought.
How much can the human race possibly need?
Then the countdown begins, the engines fire.
And I’m launched into the stars.
CHAPTERSIXTEEN
Maldek
Iam not convinced that my Brooks is even aware of my presence as we go through her memories, though I keep my tail wrapped around her leg, my fingers touching her waist, her shoulder at all times. The things she shows me are confusing, disorienting, and I understand very little of what I see.
Except the sneering way that she is spoken to by her elders, the looks that other males give her - half derision, half desire, as if they are disgusted at themselves for wanting her, not because she does not want their attentions, but because she does not look how they think a desirable female should.
I have thought many times that there must be a lot of fools among humans, and I find no evidence in my Brooks’ memories to contradict these thoughts.
But it is the elder female, the one called Brannigan, who breaks my heartspace. When she looks at my Brooks and says that she might have been her mother, and there is longing and hurt and many long seasons of holding those things back in her gaze.
I do not understand much, but I understand from this that not only would my Brooks have been forced to bear a child by a male she did not know or like, that she did not want to have - she would also have that child removed from her care before she had a chance to get to know it, to raise it. The cruelty of all this steals my breath.
I wish I could wrap her in my arms and draw her away from all this, but there are things my Brooks needs to remember. I will not disturb her as she does, no matter how much my heartspace desires to protect hers.
So I watch as her strange flying hut takes her through the stars, forced to close my eyes against it for a time, my stomach roiling in protest against what I am seeing. I watch as she comes to my world in an egg similar to the one that brought my sisters to this place. Only it does not crash, but sets down gently in the space around the Mercenia hut. The Mercenia hut many years ago, the space around it not reclaimed by nature. The ground is smooth and flat, and the trees kept at bay. Everything is brighter, lighter, cleaner, and my Brooks sweats in her heavy clothes as she helps her tribe to unload big crates from the egg into the hut. Crates containing their supplies - foods and clothes and other things I cannot identify.
Her tribe must have come before her, though, for the Mercenia hut was already standing, already supplied withmachinesand furniture. The way was prepared for them, my Brooks and those with her stepping in to populate the hut as Jestaw and his brothers did at Darran’s empty village. It is a disquieting thought that Mercenia’s presence in Lina’s forests might go back even further.
The memories roll from one into another, none of them long or particularly interesting. A lot of my Brooks standing on guard outside the hut, patrolling a short distance away. I can see that she is dedicated to her duty, takes it seriously, even though it is clear the other warriors accompanying her do not. They talk of the ‘natives’ and I understand them to mean raskarrans. They do not have kind things to say, talking much of exterminating us if we interfere with Mercenia’s project.
“Do we even know what the project is?” my Brooks asks.
“Resources and expansion,” the others repeat, and it is clear they don’t care to know any more than that.
“You aren’t curious what, exactly, though? Like do they plan to start a colony here or what?”
One of the males grins. “Maybe that cute little scientist would tell me everything if I bent her over her desk just right.”
The others laugh, but not my Brooks. She schools her face blank, but I know her well enough to see the disgust in her eyes.
“Assholes,” she says, and suddenly she’s back beside me, in the dreamspace and not in the memory completely.
They keep moving around, not freezing as the memories so often do when they are broken. I do not need to hear their conversation to know they are being unpleasant.
“I remember all this now,” she says. “The mission. Protect the research team. After the excitement of the travel and arriving on this world, it was the most boring mission I’d ever done. Standing guard against nothing, patrolling with these clowns. I shouldn’t have been questioning orders, but I was starting to wonder what the point of it all was. Boredom drove my curiosity, and I started poking my nose places I shouldn’t have.”
“You discovered Mercenia’s purpose here?”
“Yeah,” she says, expression grim. She turns to me, an aching in her expression that has nothing to do with need. “I’m so sorry for what I’m about to show you. If it gets to be too much, we can stop. Just tell me and we’ll stop.”
My heartspace constricts. I have been so worried about the harm this remembering might do to her - that she thinks what I am about to witness will harm me more so only raises my fears for her wellbeing.
Around us, the light fades. It is deep night, and we are outside the Mercenia hut, my Brooks on guard once more. Brightness shines out of several points on the outside of the building, like candles, only far more intense, illuminating the clear ground around the hut, but not much breaking into the trees. More unnerving human cleverness, but I wonder why they would want to fight back the night, when darkness provides cover and security for defenders as much as it does for those who might attack.
