"As heavily armored infantry, the Orki were the first and last destructive wave sent into every battle. They were built, born to survive anything you can imagine, and more. They were also designed to avoid situations where they might cause undue destruction. The creators used pain to train them. They could not be killed, but they had twice the nerve receptors that the weak, sensitive creators lived with. The opposite of pain is pleasure." Eid showed a diagram of a naked Orki. "But the creators only gave them pain. They were tools. Machines. Cognizant, intelligent, physically sensitive machines."
Eid spoke in the common language without emotional emphasis. Cold. But what Corrin saw on the screen was not. It was a world she had chosen to avoid, a world her parents and grandparents had walked away from. Manufactured. Cruel. Overwhelming and soulless. Beings from beyond Dorcus had made the Orki, potters shaping clay. They treated them with callous regard, purposely causing them extra pain. Behind her, holding her, the thing that those beings had created, purred, comforting her as she listened to the incredible, impossible story of his existence.
Eid continued. "Certain things must happen when tampering with the codex of life. The creators could not make fearless, powerful soldiers without giving them hormone surges to fuel their aggression. They could not create hormones without creating reproductive systems. They tried. But those experiments were failures. The creators made the Orki male but did not want them to have the ability to reproduce on their own. They were a fearsome, powerful force of unstoppable, aggressive soldiers."
Urku-ri said something.
Eid answered. "You have seen how the Orki were born from the wargs, and that wargs were born with them. The creators released warg kits back on Dorcus, seeing potential for their later use, knowing that within the warg kit was everything they needed to create more Orki. The map for one life form hidden in the other. Thinking them simple-minded animals, the creators did not closely monitor their existence. They kept the Orki for warring. One thousand and two were born. Eight hundred and seventy survived to adulthood. Seven hundred and fifty-three survived to full training. Those that died, died of natural causes; faults in the code. This is common with the first experiments. They considered the living Orki a success to the program."
"The creators did not understand the connection with the wargs. Urku-ri wishes you to know that this connection is in the mind and heart, as his connection with you will one day grow to be. While the creators trained the Orki to be their machines, the wargs, planet systems away, were connected to them, and told them of freedom, of mates, of companionship, and autonomy," Eid said. "As intelligent as their counterpart, but with instincts unique to their kind, the wargs can smell Orki compatibility with humans. I have studied the amazing phenomena extensively. I believe there is a scent match on the DNA level that the wargs are aware of."
Urku-ri, standing behind her, hand on her neck, purring, leaned over and buried his face in her hair. "Corrin is mate. Is redress."
"Corrin is the wife of the second Ri. You have been drinking the fermented milk of his nestmate, Searnon, born from the same warg mother, Sian. The milk, accompanied by natural elements on Dorcus, minerals in the soil, natural chemicals in the water, have made minute changes to your biology so that you are fully compatible with the Orki and can conceive children. These changes affect your reproductive cycles and will have minor positive effects on your health."
The screen, which had been showing images of wargs and Orki, now showed a human woman, following along with Eid's dialogue. "You may conceive up to three sons in a single pregnancy. Searnon will have a unique telepathic link to them as all wargs do with the Orki and therefore know when it is time to birth them before they are too big. I will assist in a safe medical procedure to accomplish this. Orki are strong, even as infants. They will not be fully developed for months after birth; this is often distressing to human mothers. Searnon has told Urku-ri that you will be ready at your next cycle to conceive. But she did not believe you were ready to hear this truth."
"Searnon, say Corrin stubborn for stubborn sake. Urku-ri say Corrin isso-humonn-ror'si-ess."
He'd been changing her. Drugging her.
He wasn't born, he was made to destroy things.
He wasn't a simple, barbaric, stone-age beast, he was from an advanced civilization.
She could give birth to multiple children.
And that sneaking, conniving, manipulative, war beast thought she was stubborn.
*
Urku-ri turned her, pulled her into his hot, naked chest and surrounded her with his smell. She thought he might be trembling. The room and the floor moved, creating a chair. Taking her with him, he sat. Pulling her down onto his lap, he moved his mouth along her neck to the bite mark he had made in her skin. Urku-ri had warned Corrin that she may not like the truth. She wondered which part he thought she wouldn't like. The part where he was not a born, humanoid, sentient being, but stitched together from different materials from across space? The part where he drugged her, changed her body, gave her no choice in becoming a compatible partner for him?
That part. That part stung.
Corrin knew she could sit here, pinned to him, wrapped up with him, and be furious, disgusted, outraged over that part. She knew that's what she should do. She should blame encountering him on the curse and failure of her life. The seventh daughter of the seventh daughter, born in blood, forced into mating this animalistic, machine thing, because that was just another bad thing in a long list of bad things in her dull little life.
But Urku-ri did not feel like a curse. Being with him, a compatible partner for him, felt like a miracle—not a curse.
Her arms went around his neck and she snuggled close. Safe. Warm. Wanted. Oh, moons above. Cursed moons. She would lose this for the sake of her outrage and a life of bad luck. She would lose the moments of silly teasing and the strength that pulled her out of a grave where hungries waited to devour her. She would lose hours of pleasured joy and lose the only person who had everseenher. Tears started at the thought of that.
She would have to walk away, the way her father had walked away.
From the ladder, Urku-ri walked her down the tunnels where she heard voices again. The Orki language and the common language both, words she understood, along with foreign noise of the warg nest mates. The least shocking of everything Eid had related was the heart and mind connection the Orki shared with the war beasts. The familial link of sharing a womb. Corrin didn't completely understand how, but it made sense that the two species, as close as siblings, communicated beyond sound waves, in a way Corrin couldn't hear.
Eid's story of the Orki felt like one of Nanny's tales of long ago and far away. Incredible, impossible, history unfolded like a gift in front of Corrin on that screen, with more to come. She got the sense that Eid knew many things and was ready to answer every question Corrin had about any subject. This was not surprising. It was female, after all. Every female Corrin had ever met was ten times more talkative than the males.
Holding hands, staying close, Urku-ri led her through the tunnels into a large room. Designed much like the tree camp, two tiers, with a central fire pit. The circle glowed unearthly white, with a fire that did not flicker or rise above a perfect dome, mechanical and not natural. Instead of cubbies in the walls, there were tunnels branching out and away. Some, but not all the tunnel entrances had lit torches next to them. Since the humans needed the extra light, Corrin wondered if the unlit exits were banned to her.
She'd think about that later.
There was a lot to think about later. She and Urku-ri had sat in that chair in the starlit room, not talking, just breathing each other in. He tipped her chin so he could look into her eyes, so that she could see his, and she felt his heart making words her ears didn't hear. When her stomach rumbled with hunger, he stood her up and held her close. The chair transformed into the floor, and the floor where they stood became a platform that lowered them back down the tunnel they had climbed up from. Corrin didn't wonder at the difference. If she thought about how they magically levitated up a tunnel into Eid's presence, she would have lost her mind.
Corrin had the sense they were deep inside a mountain. At least, she thought it was a made structure that looked like a mountain. Eid had said it came from an aircraft. She had witnessed how it shaped chairs and video equipment out of nothing. With everything so smooth and evenly constructed here, it was possible that the entire place existed outside of the realm of nature.
Just like Urku-ri.
Gathered around the large space of the central circle were
