Chapter 11
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Dawn was livid. She considered yanking the robot’s tail but remembered that she hadn’t installed pain receptors there.
“What choice did I have?” Ladee replied calmly. “You let him back in here.”
Dawn shook her head. “I don’t know how that happened.”
“Neither do I,” he replied, “but I’m going to find out.”
She stopped, crossing her arms over her chest and watching as the robot returned to his workbench. “You have a plan.”
“Not as such. But I have a theory that I’d like to confirm before we get rid of you-know-who.”
“Tell me,” she said, kneeling beside him at his station. He was staring intently at the slide under the microscope.
He raised his furry head and gave her a probing look. “I’m not sure if I should. You’ve been distracted by him ever since he appeared, even going so far as to unlock the door for him after he’d transferred the credits. He may have infected you somehow to make you susceptible to his suggestions. Perhaps when you were doing… whatever you were doing on Venus?”
Dawn sputtered. “You’re saying I’m compromised? That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.” The fox’s expression was serious, but she could detect a hint of teasing. Not for the first time, she wished she hadn’t programmed him to develop the ability to taunt her.
“What’s your theory, Ladee?”
The fox sighed and rolled back from the bench, gesturing toward the microscope. “See for yourself.”
Dawn bent low to the eyepiece of the small microscope. Skin cells appeared, enhanced by the scope. They were a deep pink color, filled with smaller cells that ranged in color from dark purple to light blue. It took a moment, but she soon noted an irregularity.
“The melanocytes,” she murmured. “They have complex nuclei. You can barely tell them apart from the Langerhans cells.” It was a small difference, but one she’d never seen before.
“What do you think?” she asked, pulling away. “Genetic mutation?”
The fox let out a breath. “Perhaps. It’s hard to know for certain without the full analysis.”
Dawn’s eyes skittered over to the DNA unit. “We’ll know by tomorrow morning.”
She rose, stretching her arms over her head. It was barely afternoon, and she’d slept in this morning following her night of debauchery, but she was already tired. Fighting a war of wills with the pushy asshole who was now the sole investor in her research had drained her of energy, energy she needed to work.
Wandering over to the sheet-draped stasis unit, Dawn collected her thoughts as if they were stray points of data that weren’t lining up in the even curves she desired. “Five million credits are enough to get the project moving,” she murmured, unconsciously running her hands over the sheet and the prize hidden beneath it. “It may not be enough for an extensive post-experiment analysis stage, but it should be just enough to get me started.”
Ladee rolled over, his expression neutral. “You’re really considering going in there, are you?”
She nodded in response. “There’s no other way to determine exactly what we’ve got our hands on.” Her examination of the artifact so far had discovered no means of accessing the subject. Her analysis of the protective crystal had provided no hints as to how she could break inside.
The crystal was composed of no known substance, its molecular structure denser than any other she’d seen. She wondered why it didn’t crush the winsome creature that resided inside it.
Dawn assumed the creature was female, and its anatomy was similar to a human’s, but there were a few differences that pointed to non-Territhian ancestry. Her skin tone, for instance, was a very faint purple in color that reminded Dawn of lilacs. Her hair was slightly darker, a lavender complement, long and straight and covering her otherwise naked body like a soft blanket.
She had two arms, two legs, and ten fingers and toes, but she also had rows of dark spots along her neck in a pattern of lines, four on top, five in the middle, and four below, on either side of her throat. Comparable spots decorated the space between her eyebrows. There, they formed a delicate circle, five on the outside and three inside in a triangle that pointed upwards. Dawn wasn’t sure if the spots had any purpose besides decoration. She couldn’t even tell if they were biological or ornamental. The spots were just one of the many mysteries she hoped to solve, once she could get past the crystal barrier.
Was the lifeform alive or dead? Dawn was betting on the former. Although her instruments hadn’t been able to penetrate the crystal to get any readings from the body inside it, she had detected the faintest resonance within the crystal itself. A resonance that was slightly irregular, a stronger beat followed by two weaker ones in a non-stop repeating pattern.
Dawn thought it was a heartbeat.
Where in the universe did the creature in crystal come from? Although there were scores of lifeforms in her databases, she had yet to discover a race with the same coloring and spots. That didn’t necessarily mean there was no race of aliens somewhere in the seven known galaxies or beyond that this fey-like female could have come from. It just meant her race had yet to be discovered. Or perhaps it was long forgotten.
The fact that her ancestry was unknown was even more intriguing. Who knew what secrets she could hold? Once the crystal was opened, would the creature awake like a sleeping princess and reveal her wisdom? Dawn doubted opening the crystal would be enough to bring the woman out of stasis. She had prepared for this eventuality, however, and had a plan to make contact with her subject to slowly bring her out of her slumber.
