The Spawning (36 page)

Vaguely disappointed, Miranda considered what she’d said and finally shrugged.

“I guess we get to experiment, but there’s always meat that goes to waste. Assuming, of course, that the Hirachi come back and bring us more meat,” she added, feeling her spirits plummet again.

Mary Jane looked the hut over. “I think we need something a lot smaller than this even to try it. Like I said, he had to keep the fire going overnight. He’d get it started on Christmas Eve, sometime in the afternoon and keep it going until just before we had Christmas dinner. It would take a lot of fire to heat this place up enough. He used an old refrigerator.”

They discovered they’d worried needlessly. The Hirachi men returned as had

been their habit before the removal to the underwater village. They looked uncertain of their welcome and many of them downright angry.

They had every reason to be. They’d been publicly humiliated.

She regretted not beating the shit out of Carol and her cohorts herself.

That group was sulking and barely spared a glance at the men. The other women, thankfully, stopped what they were doing and followed the men, offering to help. They were dismissed, which didn’t surprise Miranda, but since Gerek was among the men, she made a point of going to him and demanding a kiss. He looked surprised and doubtful but he readily obliged. The kiss was purely carnal—not the affectionate peck she’d intended, but she responded with the heat that welled readily within her. She smiled up at him a little dopily when he set on her feet once more. “Well … hello to you, too,” she THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 161

said teasingly. “I won’t ask if you missed me.”

He chuckled, she thought more from her tone than because he entirely

understood. “My little man did,” he murmured, shifting a pointed look downward.

“Maybe I should’ve kissed your little man, then, if he’s the only one that missed me!” Miranda said a little tartly.

Grinning, he caught her wrist when she turned away, dragging her back for

another kiss. “This man missed you, too,” he said huskily when he pulled away. “But the little man won’t mind if you kiss him.”

Miranda sent him a look of promise. “I’ll think about it,” she murmured

teasingly, feeling very pleased with herself when she turned and headed back to what she’d been doing.

Either the other women had decided to take their cues from her or they’d been as anxious as she was to make certain the men knew they were welcome for more than the food they’d risked their necks to get. Even Carol and her bunch had decided to unbend enough to greet their men, although, Miranda thought sourly, she doubted their motives had anything to do with making the men feel better. More likely, they’d either been afraid they might have defectors, or they’d just decided to ‘show everybody’ that their men found their behavior acceptable—probably both.

She didn’t care either as long as they patched things up.

She noticed the men watched them working on taking the hut apart curiously, but, like they generally did, once they had the fire going and the meat cooking, they took to the sea again, reappearing now and then to turn the meat on the spit and study the work in progress.

Miranda had decided they could use part of the old hut to build a smoke house

and part to build a ‘bath house’ near the water’s edge. She didn’t actually think there was any way to get water piped inside to make even a crude shower, but they needed toilets.

It had been miserable enough to have to use what was available before, but after a month in relative civilization nobody wanted to do without something that at least approximated a bathroom.

The bamboo they’d used for construction had dried out and most of the pulpy

center fell out when they took hut apart. Deciding they’d work for pipes, some of the women settled with the straight pieces that had been used to form the ends of the hut and began stabbing at what was left with thinner pieces of bamboo to finish the job of hollowing them out. While they were occupied with pipe making, the other women began dragging materials toward the beach and began assembling their ‘bath house’ just above the high tide line.

Miranda hoped they could put something together that would carry the waste far enough out that the current would handle the rest of the problem. They managed to get the smoke house erected and their new bath house mostly put together before the men returned near dusk to eat with them.

As tired as she was, Miranda felt something hard and fearful inside of her break free the moment she recognized Khan, Teron, and Adar among the men. She hadn’t wanted to admit, even to herself, that she believed they’d simply dumped her, but she’d been afraid they had. She was so giddy with relief she had to work hard to tamp her enthusiasm and try to hide the fact that she’d doubted them, but she had a feeling she wasn’t entirely successful.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 162

Disappointment filled her when the men
all
got up to leave. She’d hoped that Khan would stay the night with her, at least. Instead, all four of them kissed her silly and then left her feeling thrown away—ripe for sex and no one to party with!

Trying to dismiss it, she headed for the carcass and worked at carving off some turkey sized chunks of meat to put in the smoke house.

They discovered when they got up the following morning that the men had come

back and completed their bathhouse—totally completed it. Four ‘shower’ spouts had been added to one long wall and were connected to a barrel-like container they’d put up on ‘legs’ so that gravity would feed the water once the barrel was filled. There was also a row of ‘toilets’, a bench with cutouts and trap to collect waste and funnel it away with the ‘pipes’ they’d made.

Everyone was so delighted they were practically dancing with excitement.

Except Carol and the obnoxious bunch, naturally, who sneered at it, complained about the fact that the water had to be lugged up to fill the barrel before the showers would work, but deigned to make use of it.

“They’d complain if they were hanged with a new rope,” Mary Jane said irritably.

Miranda and Deborah stared at her a moment and started laughing at her

graveyard humor.

When the first women got sick, everyone was convinced they had food poisoning.

They decided they hadn’t cured the meat long enough, or maybe hadn’t built the fire hot enough, and produced smoked,
dried
meat the next time around, and the first to puke were still exhibiting nausea and occasional vomiting. When it finally occurred to them that none of the food poison-like symptoms had been accompanied by diarrhea it also dawned on them that some of them, at least, were pregnant. By the end of the month, they decided they could make that unanimous. It was a relief on several levels. On others, not so much.

Miranda couldn’t decide whether she was more thrilled or scared to death at the prospect of having a baby—her first—without a hospital and lots of drugs close at hand.

She was pretty sure the others shared her sentiments—except for those who hadn’t wanted to be pregnant at all. They were just plain scared shitless and didn’t even have anything to be happy about to counter it.

Beyond that, nobody knew who the father of their baby actually was since it

seemed very unlikely that they’d all been at peak fertility when the designated impregnator had done his job. And they had the added worry of a showdown some eight months down the road when the babies arrived and might or might not look like the Hirachi who thought he’d fathered it.

“I wonder if we should mention, now, that we don’t have cycles like the Hirachi women apparently do,” Deborah said uneasily.

“I don’t think they’ll be very happy if we mention it now when we didn’t before,”

Miranda said.

“Yes, but I think Tin’s going to be really angry if I have a baby and it looks like–

Cel or Dirk,” Beth said unhappily.

“Puhlease!” Carol put in. “They all look alike and babies all look alike. You don’t honestly think they’ll be able to tell the difference?”

Everyone but Joy turned to glare at her angrily and even Joy didn’t look terribly pleased with her. “They don’t
all
look alike!” Deborah snapped. “They don’t look THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 163

any
thing alike! If you ever paid any attention to anybody but yourself you would’ve noticed that.”

Carol glared at her but finally shrugged. “I was just trying to make her feel better,” she said coolly.

“Right,” Mary Jane retorted dryly.

Miranda massaged her temples. “I suppose we can all act like wonder brain over there and pretend we’re completely stunned when the babies get here,” she murmured with a touch of humor she didn’t particularly feel.

“I heard that!” Carol snapped.

“Good!” Miranda snarled at her. “At least now I know you aren’t deaf
and

stupid! I’ll remember that the next time you decide to play deaf!”

“Oh this is going to be fun!” Deborah said dryly. “Twenty pregnant women all

stuffed in these four little pods together! We’ll be lucky if we all make it to term alive.”

“You know,” Beth said thoughtfully, “I read once that anytime women were stuck together really close, their cycles began to shift toward the alpha female until they were all on the exact same cycle.”

Everybody stared at her with a mixture of hope and doubt. “You’re sure that’s what the article said?” Mary Jane asked.

“Actually,” Deborah put in, “I’ve heard that, too. Maybe we were all cycling

together?”

Miranda frowned. “You think we were together long enough for that to happen?”

she asked doubtfully.

Deborah shrugged. “God only knows
how
long we were together on that damned ship.”

“Yes, but … would it work, though, since we were all ‘asleep’, in hibernation or something like that?”

“Maybe the trader gave us some kind of drugs? He said he’d taken our birth

control to make sure we were ready to breed. He knew about the Hirachi and seemed to know about us, too.”

“Maybe. I think I’m going to vote we all just keep our mouths shut and worry

about the issue if it comes up … and not before that. We’ve got enough to worry about now,” Miranda pointed out.

She should’ve known, Carol being the troublemaker she was, that she’d take the first fucking opportunity to make the announcement just to make trouble for everybody else!

* * * *

Miranda had a split second to feel surprise and delight when Khan suggested she walk with him to her habitat. A flicker of uneasiness washed both away when she discovered that Teron, Gerek, and Adar apparently meant to join them, though.

Somehow, she couldn’t quite convince herself that they had something kinky and exciting in mind.

She was even more unnerved when she discovered that Teron intended to

examine her. Aside from feeling some vague discomfort at being exposed to all of them at one time, though, she didn’t think much about it. Teron hadn’t examined her since he had just before they’d all been brought back to the compound. She thought she was probably around three months along in her pregnancy and she figured he probably
should
THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 164

check her.

She was actually a little pleased about it, even though she still had a lot of reservations about the
labor
she was facing at the end. She’d gotten just far enough along that she had to leave her pants undone at the waist, and she’d developed just a little bit of a pooch—so that it had finally begun to seem real to her.

She was a little embarrassed and uncomfortable when he slipped two fingers

inside of her but since he then pressed down on her abdomen she decided he was just trying to get an idea of how much her womb had grown. The discomfort vanished. She studied his face anxiously, trying to decide if he thought it felt right or not.

She couldn’t read his expression, unfortunately.

When he settled back and pulled her gown down, she waited expectantly a

moment, but when he didn’t offer anything, she asked, “It’s alright?”

“I can not find any reason to feel concern at this time.”

Relieved, she looked at the others.

There was something about their expressions that set off warning bells.

“Taj has told us that his woman informed him that the child she carries might not be his,” Teron said.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 165

Chapter Twenty

Miranda stared at Teron, searching her mind a little frantically to try to identify who Taj was. She came up empty. She had a hard time even remembering all of the women’s names. The faces were all very familiar by now, but the names—there were just too many to remember them all.

It didn’t matter. She knew what he was asking.

She still felt a cowardly urge to try to elude being pinned down about it. “Who’s Taj’s woman?”

“The one called Carol.”

Anger surged through her. She should’ve known right off, or at least suspected that it had to be Carol or one of
those
women, the obnoxious half dozen. She struggled with her temper a moment. “Oh? What do you think?” she managed finally.

Teron’s face hardened. “I think I … we would like to know about your natural

cycles.”

Miranda immediately felt defensive. “It’s not my fault that you just
assumed
we were on the same sort of cycle as the Hirachi women!”

“But you knew we did,” Khan put in tightly. “And you didn’t say anything.”

Miranda felt her face redden guiltily. She was still more than a little resentful, though. “You made it pretty damned clear that you didn’t want to breed with any of us any damned way because you thought we were inferior! You didn’t think it would work.

We
didn’t think it would work! And when it came right down to it, you were too busy to ask and I was to busy to think about it!

“
I
thought you’d just decided to screw! I didn’t know it was the spawning! We don’t do that. There was no reason for it to even occur to me.”