Chapter 132: The Elephant in the Room
Midnight looked at me like I was crazy for a moment before turning his attention back to the touchpad and the data on it.
"Jun Li," I called out, looking for a camera somewhere in this room. I huffed when I realized that the Dryadalis were part of the whole AI war thing. It was no wonder they wouldn’t have a camera in a place that they wanted no one to know about.
"Yes?" responded Jun Li. "Why can’t I find you?"
"Super secret lab in one of the lower levels," I said. I walked out of the room and looked up and down the hall to see if there was a lens there.
"Ah, there you are," he grunted. "Stupid law that requires cameras only in public spaces."
"Yeah," I grunted, going back into the medical/experimental room. "I am going to need you to download every last thing from all of these ships. If you can."
"Of course, I can," huffed Jun Li, taking personal insult that I might be skeptical about him downloading all the information off of 22 ships after downloading the entirety of the internet. "Is there anything I am looking for in particular?"
"Any mention of ECD829 and experimentations," I said. "But they might not have saved it in the most obvious of spaces," I continued, trying to think where I would have stored the data if it were me.
"Once you are sure that you have everything, wipe it all clean."
"Understood," said Jun Li, and I turned my attention back to the dead human on the table.
"I don’t suppose you know a quick and easy way to destroy a body, do you?" I asked, turning to Midnight, who was still scrolling through all the information in front of him.
"Toss it out in space or eat it," he said, not really paying attention.
"Neither works," I replied, walking over to the wall of horrors and trying to find the button to open the glass containing the woman’s womb. "I need it destroyed on a cellular level," I continued.
At my comment, his head shot up, and he turned to look at me. He studied my face for a moment before barking out a command to the wolves lingering around the room. They quickly left, leaving only the two of us in the room.
"Can you tell me what you know?" asked Midnight, walking over to come stand in front of me. Realizing our height difference, he tried to kneel so we could look each other in the eyes. I held up my hand to stop his descent. Some things were easier to explain to a muscled chest and eight-pack than into someone’s eyes.
"A while back, the Thuzirusians discovered that the females of my species are universal breeders," I started. It still bugged me that that was all I was reduced to, a breeder. "They went to The Alliance with that information, and then... nothing happened. Fast forward to six years ago, and a female was abducted with an identical genetic code to the Ethawainian Royalty. However, those genes were recessive. The Sisalik set out to find a way to convert the genes from recessive to dominant. And they succeeded."
"Subject 1, I assume?" mused Midnight, this gaze scanning over the organs along the wall.
"Probably. After that success, they went back to abduct other females, probably to see if they could replicate the results," I surmised. It would make the most sense, after all.
"And based on this room, they still haven’t been able to succeed with anyone outside of Subject 1," continued Midnight, looking at the body right behind me.
"Yeah. How does it feel to be forcefully mated to a freak of nature?" I asked, finally getting to the elephant in the room.
"Like I am one of the luckiest males in the universe," answered Midnight, looking down at me with a smile on his face. I snorted at that statement and went back to trying to figure out how to open the display cases.
"Yeah, but you wouldn’t be stuck with me if the Sisalik hadn’t fucked with me," I said with a frown. I swung my fist back and punched the case, not at all surprised when the glass didn’t open. Luckily, I had my gloves on, so it didn’t hurt me.
Midnight pulled me into his arms and away from the cases. Turning me around, he picked me up in his arms so we were eye to eye. "Whether or not the genes are recessive or dominant, they are still you. I would have reacted to you no matter what. And if I didn’t, it would have been the biggest missed opportunity of my life. I like knowing that I was created just for you."
He smirked at me before putting me down again. "You haven’t forced me to do anything I don’t want, so stop being stupid by thinking like that. It doesn’t suit you."
"Did you just call me stupid?" I screeched before I burst out laughing.
"If the blaster fire fits," shrugged the massive male. "Now, tell me what all these things are, and we will figure out a way to get them out and burn them to ash."
I went to the first of two cases that pissed me off the most. "This is a human womb. It is where a fertilized egg implants into the female, and a baby begins to develop."
"A baby?" he asked, the word coming out weirdly from his mouth. It suddenly hit me that they had no translation for the word baby.
"Offspring? Child? Infant? The result of a successful copulation?" I said, throwing out some synonyms that I thought he might understand.
"Cub?" he asked after a moment.
"Sure," I said. "That is where the... cub... remains until it decides to come out ten months later."
He looked at me, stunned for a second, his mouth opening and closing. "That doesn’t look big enough for a cub to grow inside of you."
"It stretches," I answered with a roll of my eyes. "And this is the ovaries and fallopian tubes," I continued, pointing to the second case right beside the first. "This is where a female stores her eggs and how the egg gets to the womb."
He grunted, looking at me side-eyed. "Your species is much more complicated than every other species in the known universe," he growled.
