Awakened by the Giant: Brides of the Kindred Read online

  “Wrap up my study?” Calden wanted to pull his hair out by the roots. “It’s not about the study, you stupid AI son of a bitch!” he cried. “I love her! I love her and you’ve killed her!”

  He wanted to roar with rage—wanted to rant and rave and punch the AI’s central processor until FATHER was no more than a twisted pile of junk.

  But he didn’t have time for any of that. He had to get Madeline out of here now. Where he would take her and how he would save her, he had no idea. There was supposedly no way to remove a still-active self-termination unit. The device would act like a miniature bomb and blow off her head if he tried to take it out without deactivation. He would probably be taking her out into space to die in his arms, the way the littlest brantha—the one Madeline had dubbed “Snuffy” had died in his arms the last time.

  But I can’t just sit here and do nothing! Just wait for the end, he thought wildly. I have to try, damn it! I’ll get clear of the station and put out another call to the Mother Ship—maybe they’ll hear me this time. Kindred technology might be able to deactivate the device—it’s my only hope!

  A small chance—probably less than one in a trillion considering the vast reaches of space that separated him from his Kindred brothers. But he had to take it—he had to try.

  He jumped up suddenly, knocking over the too small stool.

  “Calden,” FATHER said calmly. “Where are you going? This interview is not yet at an end.”

  “I’m leaving here,” Calden growled, wishing he had the blaster he kept locked in a drawer of his desk so he could shoot the maddening AI’s interface unit. “I’m leaving and I’m taking Madeline with me. There must be something I can do—some way I can save her!”

  “You cannot—” FATHER began but Calden was already gone, rushing out of the scanning booth and down the curving metal corridor, looking for Madeline.

  * * * * *

  “I’m a clone,” Maddy said again and this time the words stuck. They were true—they were real. As real as the real Madeline who was lying in the top drawer of Calden’s handy-dandy portable lab morgue.The real Madeline staring up at her with lifeless green eyes that looked like cloudy glass marbles some careless child had rolled in the dust.

  But what had happened to her? How had she died?

  The drawer slid smoothly now, rolling on its tracks when she tugged on it, revealing more of her lifeless body to Maddy’s disbelieving eyes.

  She was wearing—correction, her original, real body was wearing—the light blue jumpsuit with the US flag sewn over the pocket and her last name, Harris, stitched in gold thread. But below the waist, the suit was strangely flattened—as though a giant foot had stomped down on her, neatly smashing her flat from her hips all the way down to her feet. The light blue jumpsuit was maroonish-purple there—the dark, ominous color of a fresh bruise.

  A blinding pain suddenly knifed through Maddy’s guts. She gasped and put an arm to her waist, nearly falling off the step-stool. In one agonizing flash, everything came back to her…

  She had caught Pierce with Ana—the head biologist—a woman she’d thought was her friend. Ana, always inviting her to share a cup of tea and a chat…Ana, drawing her out, inviting her to talk about Pierce, about the troubles with her marriage and all the while she’d been doing nothing but trying to find Maddy’s weaknesses…trying to find a way to get Pierce for herself.

  They hadn’t even hid it very well, Maddy remembered now. They’d been kissing in a public corridor—not that there was much privacy aboard the Kennedy but still, they could have at least tried to hide it. She remembered now, rounding a corner and being shocked—the sight of Pierce kissing the other woman like a sharp slap in the face.

  “She doesn’t understand you,” Ana had been whispering between kisses. “Not like I do, Pierce. She’ll never love you like I do. Once we find a planet, we need to be together permanently. We’ll have to populate a whole new world and you’re the one I want as the father of my babies—only you.”

  Maddy had made some low, incredulous noise in the back of her throat at that point and the two of them had whirled around and seen her standing there, wide-eyed and disbelieving. All she could think of, Maddy remembered now, was how hard she’d been working to make things work with Pierce. Hell, she’d left a thriving animal practice and her entire family to come on this mission with him! True, the Earth had been under threat of invasion but she still would have stayed with the people she loved if she hadn’t been trying so damn hard to make things work with Pierce.

  The ungrateful, cheating bastard.

  “Maddy!” Pierce’s eyes had gone wide and she could already see him formulating some kind of excuse. “Maddy, please. It’s not—”

  “Not what it looks like?” Maddy asked, feeling sick to her stomach. “How could you, Pierce? I left my family for you! All those months of marriage counseling, all the things we tried—”

  “Maybe it’s time to stop trying and just admit that you’ve lost—that the two of you don’t belong together anymore.” Ana’s face had the smug look of a cat with canary feathers sticking out of its mouth. “Maybe it’s time to let Pierce follow his heart—to me.”

  The heart in question had felt sore and bruised—as though Maddy had rounded the corner and Pierce had kicked her in the chest or maybe stuck a knife in her. It hurt so much that for a minute she was sure she would be sick.

  “You can have him,” she told Ana shortly. “I never want to speak to either of you again.”

  Then she turned and fled—ran to the back of the ship where she knew she could be alone. She had to go back there to check on the seed vault and embryo storage every twelve hours anyway. Back there among the huge terraformers on their giant tires, fixed to the Kennedy’s inner walls with their clanking chains.

  Maddy had run blindly among them, feeling sick, feeling sorry for what her life had become. Wishing she was back on Earth with her sisters and mother and her dogs, which she’d had to leave behind. Wishing she was dead…

  And then Captain Judith’s strong voice came over the intercom, advising everyone to strap in.

  “We have a Scourge vessel after us,” she’d said. “They’re gaining fast. But there is a small spatial anomaly ahead—I believe it’s a wormhole. We’re going into it—the only other option is capture or death.”

  “Oh my God,” Maddy had whispered to herself. She’d started to go to the front part of the ship, looking for a place to strap down but just then she’d felt a jarring moment of disorientation that made her too dizzy to do anything but crouch where she was, feeling sick. Then the ship had lurched—and then lurched again, bouncing violently in space as though a huge hand had grabbed it and shaken it.

  It was then that she had heard the screaming sound of tearing metal, the clank of chains, and had looked up to see the nearest huge terraformer bearing down on her. She had tried to scramble out of the way but it was coming so fast and…

  “And I didn’t make it. I died,” Maddy whispered, looking down at her body once more. “I died before the Kennedy was even torn in two by the asteroid. I wasn’t the only survivor—I died.”

  But why had Calden let her believe otherwise? Why hadn’t he just told her the truth? And why had he cloned her in the first place?

  A new, awful thought came into her mind as she remembered him telling her that he had cloned some specimens over and over, until he felt that he’d gotten everything he needed from them.

  How many times has he cloned you, Maddy? whispered a dark little voice in her head. How many times has Calden done this little act—pretending to be a virgin—a scientist only interested in research who has no idea what to do with a woman. How much “data” has he collected from you over the days or months or years he’s been cloning you?

  Then the little voice whispered an even worse thought: And how does he dispose of the Madeline clones once he’s done with them? Are you going to die? Going to drop dead like all the cloned animals in his lab? Will there be any warnin