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Liv’s quiet for a moment, but when she talks her voice is level, no anger in it.
“I sometimes think that’s why Mercenia keeps us in tiers. So we never see beyond our own problems.” Her dark eyes cut to me, assessing me. After a moment, she nods, apparently satisfied with whatever she’s seen. “You were lashing out. Wedidn’t deserve it, but you didn’t deserve what happened to you either, so let’s just move on and put it behind us.”
I’m not sure I deserve that level of grace either, but I’ll take it. Gladly.
“Thank you.”
Then, to my surprise, she grins.
“You really want to thank me?” she says. “I think maybe there is something you can do with that skill set of yours.”
Back in the manager’s office, I re-enter the password and load up the machine again. With all the pop-ups dealt with, it goes significantly quicker.
“What do you want to know?” I ask, picking up the paper diary and turning through it until I find an unused notes page. There are all sorts of pens in the pile of mess from the upturned draw, but I rifle through until I find a pencil.
Liv takes a deep breath. “How difficult do you think it would be to figure out when the Mercenia team abandoned this place?”
“Uh, down to an exact date? Probably tricky. But a ballpark one?”
I set down my pencil and open the diary at the front. Like most diaries, there are pages of nonsense at the beginning. I skip past them to the year at a glance page, but it isn’t filled in.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I figure if I understand when and why they left, I might feel more certain they aren’t ever going to come back.”
I can understand why that idea would play on her mind.
“I last remember it being February, the year before this diary covers,” I say. “But it presumably would have taken Mercenia some time to go from kidnapping me to loading me up on aspaceship. Then Brooks remembers being here for a period of time, right?”
“About six months, she thinks,” Liv says. “Time was a little difficult to keep track of when she was here, but she left around April, thinks it was probably October time when she was frozen. Again, the year before that diary covers.”
“So they were here at least another couple of months for D Farrow to have moved into this diary.”
I hit the first day by day pages. Fortunately, these are filled in - meeting reminders, to-do lists and notes all written out across the pages in scrappy handwriting.
“Busy in January,” I say.
I skip forward to the next month, and then the next, on and on until I reach September. At the beginning of the month, there’s still plenty in the diary, but when I turn over to October, the pages are blank.
“There we go then,” I say, flicking back from October, looking for the last entry in the diary. “They came here nineteen years ago, and were gone less than two years later. That’s… not a lot of time for a research project of this scale.”
The funding, the work it would have taken to get this place set up - transporting the materials, the equipment across the stars. Building the base, setting it up inside. Then the food, the supplies, the power network, never mind the cryostasis pods and the training for the people coming here, their salaries, hazard pay, etc. etc. It doesn’t make any sense that it would be abandoned so soon.
“Something must have gone wrong,” I say.
“What makes you say that?” Liv’s voice is sharp.
“All the funding they must have poured into this place to get it set up - it doesn’t seem right that the team would only be out here for eighteen or so months.”
“You said the experiment wasn’t viable.”
“I said that when I thought you were pregnant by someone you met before you arrived here. You’re having hybrid children.” There’s still so much I don’t understand about how exactly that’s possible, but I ignore that for now. “The experiment worked. So why did they suddenly leave?” I turn to her. “Seventeen years is a long time to be gone, though. A lifetime in scientific research. The chances that they’ve forgotten about this place and the breeding program they were trying to start here are excellent.”
I’m expecting her to look reassured, but her expression only darkens.
“What?” I say, my heart rate climbing.
Liv’s eyes cut to the door, then back to me. “Raskarrans don’t count their days the way we do, but Sally has been here long enough to know that a raskarran ‘year’ is near as makes no difference the same as a year back home. Seventeen years ago, a plague swept through the raskarran populace, killing almost all of them.”
