"Now," she pleaded, turning her face into his skin.
"Anna heal."
"Annabell, my tests say that your body is not completely healed. You are free of the toxins, but not the damage they caused."
She had forgotten where they were. Eid's intrusion caught her off guard, and she burst out laughing.
The loss of the memory bothered her, for that was the night her child had been created.
Eid told her that all three of Annabell's unborn babies were healthy and doing well. She blurted out, "Three babies? How is that possible?"
"The usual way, I believe. Orki sexual anatomy is unique, and this gives them a greater chance of impregnating—"
"Eid. Stop. Please." The embarrassment and absurdity were unending.
"You do not wish to know how it is possible you could have been impregnated with an Orki brood?" Eid asked in her stiff, formal way.
Peeking at Doku-ni for help, she saw him smirking, entertained, and no help at all.
Neither human or Orki, Eid was a machine, but Annabelle found herself forgetting that despite the inhuman toneless quality of her voice. And this conversation, spoken out loud, outside of the bed, shifted into areas that were better left private as far as she was concerned. "No, I wish to know how it is that I could be pregnant with three babies and how they could survive an infection that almost killed me."
"Orki babies are especially hardy in the womb. They must be. Intercourse with an Orki can be rough. But your body does not conceive Orki children until it is fully ready for a healthy pregnancy. As your children survived the toxins of the hungries,they will also survive any activities you and your mate may indulge in. Other actions like riding on the back of a warg are acceptable as well.I tell you this because it is aquestion most human women have asked."
Annabell blinked at the statement. She hadn't asked. But now her mind was wandering from the original topic, and Doku-ni's hands were also wandering and teasing, shaping her exposed curves.
"At the point it is no longer possible for you to carry three Orki infants, you shall return here, and I will assist in the delivery." Vulnerable periods of growth occur in several life stages before adulthood, but compared to human offspring, Orki have exceptional protections coded into them. Failures in early experiments led the Creators to strengthen weak areas to ensure the survival of the Orki."
This began a conversation that led Annabell to many shocking answers. Creators? Her father knew many things, but these were the planet’s native Originals. No one, anywhere, knew they were "created." Eid shared a video of Orki Origins and how they came into existence in laboratories using a mix of species and resources, one of which was the sentient warg, or war beasts, of Dorsus.
Annabell gaped, absorbing the history and creation of the Orki. She could believe they were tools of war, but how they became that way astonished her. Closely intertwined, the warg and Orki claimed a relationship as a species based on the manipulations of the Creator Aliens. The Orki were the original Dorsus species because their Creator aliens abandoned them here.
Eid said, "Initially using artificial wombs to birth working specimens, the Creators learned surrogate living wombs had higher rates of success in producing viable subjects that survived into the adult stage. They used warg females to create their army.
"The Orki war machines were birthed from several warg females to bolster their numbers. Some of those females were related. Some were not. They were taken from all over the planet Dorcas so that the gene pool would be varied and not cause defects or deficiencies. The Orki have a telepathic connection to their children established in utero the same way an umbilical cord is connected to support the fetus. Warg reproductive physiology allowed for diverse circumstances. In lean or dangerous times, the warg do not birth young, but the females have the remarkable ability to 'hold' a fertilized egg for years if necessary. This is why you saw Orki and warg birthed together. Artificially implanting the pre-formed war machine embryos stimulated latent pregnancies, and the Orki were born with nest-mates."
Holding Doku-ni's hand, Annabelle listened to Eid's lesson in horror.
Like the raiders, the strange-looking Creators held no value for any lives but their own, no value for anything at all but knowledge and the power to use it. As if relating the words in a book, Eid said, "The Creator's redesigned life to suit their needs. When they no longer required a project to serve their needs, the project was ended."
*
It was hard to sleep at night. Eid changed the room for Annabell, creating a bed big enough to share with Doku-ni. His presence was everything, but he could not stop the dreams. At first, it was the crying of the hive, calling to her, begging her to come to them. Then it was the memories of the dead given to her as punishment when she wouldn't. Eid created several versions of a sedative, but nothing silenced the nightmares.
The pupae of the hungries were drawn to dead things. Like the Orki, the hungries were not naturally born. Suspicious of every other species around them, the Creators attacked planets and civilizations before they themselves could be attacked. Every aspect of their armies were spliced and diced clones and manufactured creatures.
The hungries acted as their clean-up crew. Treating their creations like inanimate objects, the Creators rarely treated any of them like individuals. Giving the carrion-eating beings one connected mind made them easier to control. Like the Orki, they were never meant to be able to reproduce.
But they did reproduce. They used a queen, she has consorts, she lays eggs. It disgusted Annabelle to even think it. To say the words out loud was to admit the stomach-turning pictures in her head she could not escape.
Every day in the blue room Eid explained more. "The hungries ability to reproduce is the result of an element on this planet. I have been studying it in hopes of understanding more. I have not yet been able to isolate it, but it is the same kind of element that helps you reproduce. Every human born here is affected by the planet's influences on her reproductive system—even the women in the steel cities. Living away from industry, pollution, and city infrastructure such as roads and building foundations increases the potential of a female to be a progenitor. Many Dorsus species self-create serums to speed and adjust the process. It is a very unique and beautiful phenomenon."
Annabelle was not sure if she agreed with Eid's conclusions. The complicated science used vocabulary and concepts far beyond her humble life education. Every statement the computer AI made sparked more questions.
The creatures were drawn and stimulated by death. But a battle had taken place, and there were many dead in Righteous Way and other towns where the raiders had scouted. Without modern means to incinerate the bodies, as done in the steel cities, the corpses drew the hungry pupae. Lodged in those corpses were the imprint of their memories, which somehow the pupae absorbed.
Connected as a hive mind, everything the pupae knew, the hunters also knew, and everything the hunters knew the queen knew as well. And because Annabell had resisted opening her mouth, they could not flush the transformation toxins immediately following the ambush; it took only one cut.
“A queen has her consorts. What I think happened is that with the death of their queen, activated by the heat of the two new Orki redress mates, and the presence of two other females, I think the hunters transformed themselves into consorts. The one who managed to cut you would have been your first consort. It was a small cut on your ankle. Just above the line of your boot. Your tightly laced boots hid the swelling that continued after Doku-ni applied Agent-five."
