Disclaimer: The TV show Dark Angel, all of the characters that appeared on it (Max, Zack, Jondy, etc.), and everything else that has to do with the show belong to their respective owners, not to me. No money is being made off of this fic. I only own the original characters (Elle/X5-164, etc.).
Notes: Spoiler-ish stuff for "Designate This."
Chapter 51: Becky (X6-405)
I couldn't help feeling triumphant as I marched out of the room once my debriefing had finished. My first solo assignment was not only in the books, but it was a complete success. I'd been one of the first X6s to be assigned to a mission by his or herself, definitely the first female X6 to go, and I think mine was the longest so far, even counting when I had to travel back here to Seattle every couple of weeks to check in. My brothers, especially Kevin, are just going to say that it's my urge to overachieve rearing its ugly head again. Well, they will if they're here. I wonder if they're around or if they've been sent out on missions since the last time that I'd had to check in. I suppose I'll find out soon enough. Suddenly, I had to quickly step aside when an X3 nearly ran into me. The woman stopped and glared at me.
"Excuse me, do you mind not being in everybody's way?" she snapped. "Go march your little ass someplace else."
"No," I said coolly. I looked her in the eye and the X3 shrank back a little. Once us X6s take and pass our solo tests, we would be considered to be ranked even with the X3s and X4s, and since I was at the top of my unit and squad and I knew that this woman was neither, I outranked her and we both were aware of that fact. I wonder what could make her forget, and explain her bitchy attitude. "I was not in your way. You were not paying attention and almost walked right into me. I will not report you for your conduct towards a superior officer, but I will if you act this way towards me again. Understand?"
"Affirmative, ma'am. It will not happen again." She gave me a quick salute before marching off, obviously still agitated.
I continued on my own way, frowning to myself. This was not good. My eyes darted around, taking in the other transgenics that passed through the hallways. Most of the older ones were tense in one degree or another, but not in the typical way a Manticore soldier usually is. Damn, it's too bad that my family's apparently out on a training exercise out in the North woods and won't be back until just after lights out, which is about twenty minutes from now, but I can wait. I've always been patient.
"405!"
Maybe that won't be necessary. I picked up my pace until I met up with Tinga a little further down the hall. "656. Is there something that you require?"
"Yes, 405, there is." Tinga looked around and leaned forward and lowered her voice until only the two of us could hear it. "Something major's happened. We're meeting in the library at midnight so we can fill you and the other young ones in on what's going on. Can you do me a favor and let them know about the meeting?"
"Sure, Tinga, of course I will," I assured her.
"Thanks, Becky. You're the best," Tinga said. When somebody came close to us, she nodded and I saluted Tinga and continued towards my block. I went inside my cell, unpacked my things, and lay down on my bed, still fully dressed. A couple of minutes after the lights had gone out, I could hear my family approaching the block, so I got out of my bunk, left my cell, and stood outside my door to wait for them.
"Becky?" Jeff asked. "What's going on?"
"I ran into Tinga after I was done with my debriefing. We're meeting the X5s in the library at midnight," I replied. "It's urgent."
"Got it," Jeff said. He and the others went into their cells and I went back into mine. Ten minutes later, we all met up in the hallway and quietly made our way to the library. Tinga, Zack, and the rest of their present brothers and sisters were already there and Alec, Biggs, and Sasha arrived moments later. None of them looked happy. In fact, they ran the range from terrified to flat-out pissed. Zack, who was on the angry end of the scale, stood up and paced.
"There was an assembly this morning for the X3s, X4s, and X5s before Becky got back from Russia and the rest of you from your training mission," he began. "Renfro told us that there were problems with what was supposed to be the X10s. All the latest tests showed that there were problems with the base X10 DNA that were apparently irreparable for the foreseeable future and since the committee wants new soldiers, they're going to get them like normal people get children." Zack's hands clenched into fists at his side and I could feel the anger in me start to surge. I had a feeling where this was leading. "There's going to be a breeding program for the older transgenics starting tomorrow."
Unbelievable. Those sick, twisted motherfuckers. A breeding program? Who the hell do they think they are? Who do they think we are? We sure as hell aren't mindless animals, as much as we pretend to be sometimes to shut them up. We—oh crap, the X6s aren't going to have to participate in this, are they? Are we?
Suzanne read my mind. "It's only going to be the older transgenics, right? Not the X6s?"
"No," Tinga assured her. "At least for now, the X6s aren't going to participate in the breeding program." That's a relief.
"Are they mixing it up or is it X3s to X3s, X4s to X4s, and X5s to X5s?" Matt asked.
"They're not going to try for hybrid X-series kids," Elle said. "The lowdown is that we're going to be assigned a breeding partner at some point along the line and the guy is supposed to report to the girl's cell every night until the girl gets knocked up. Renfro will ask us every day if we got it on the night before and us women get pregnancy tests every week. The women all had a class tonight about pregnancy and what we should expect to happen over the nine months."
"Nine months?" Maggie repeated. "Transgenic pregnancies last for nine months? How do they know that?"
"Good ol' trial and error," Parker spoke up, sounding disgusted. I don't blame him. "They might have bailed on the idea of having a breeding program with ordinary soldiers years ago, but that didn't mean that they still weren't curious about what would happen when female transgenics were pregnant. They conducted this program at the Syracuse facility two years before all three of the facilities were integrated, which is why none of us heard about it before I found it in our copy of the database recently. They got sperm samples from a few of the X3, X4, and X5 men and artificially inseminated some of the women in the corresponding generations. All resulted in successful pregnancies, and each of those lasted nine months, give or take a normal human variation of a couple of days or weeks. Every one of those children were born as healthy as an X-series usually gets and half of the births were multiples, all fraternal and mostly twins, but one of the multiple births was triplets. Gotta love that feline DNA in us and the X4s and that canine in the X3s, huh? The X4 kids were born with barcodes, but they faded away within months and neither the X3 nor the X5 children had them at all. Manticore had to give them 'codes after they were born, and re-insert the barcodes for the little X4s."
"What happened to the children?" Layla asked tentatively.
"Oh, it was great," Parker said sarcastically. "They grouped all fifteen of those kids into their own special unit. Baby training was going well, despite the disparate ability levels, until they hit eleven months old. To be honest, the initial incident wasn't Manticore's fault. Well, at least as far as I know it wasn't. One of the nurses who was watching the kids went mental. When Manticore did an investigation after the mess, it revealed that she'd been having some pretty messy problems with her husband and her in-laws at the time. She was threatening to leave her spouse and he threatened right back that he was going to take the children away from her if she did and his parents were backing him up. Anyway, the Psycho Nurse grabbed a gun from a guard and just starts shooting the poor, innocent children. She killed eight and wounded another five by the time she was finally subdued. Three more of the babies died from their wounds within the week." Parker sighed and shook his head. "Of course, the nurse was executed for her break with reality. Unfortunately, she wasn't the only one. Since there were only four of the babies left alive when the dust eventually settled, it was decided that the program was no longer viable and…" Parker couldn't finish the sentence. "Jesus, not even a year old."
Nobody could say anything for several moments. How could anybody? We just got thrown further proof of just how low Manticore could get. Murdering innocent toddlers just because… I blinked and tried to keep my face as neutral as possible. It was almost like what had happened to Jeff, Wes, Ralph, Christian, and Layla. If they hadn't been adolescents and had so much invested into their training when their original family had been wiped out, they could have easily been taken out by Manticore. Jeff… I took a deep breath. Calm down, Becky. Focus on the situation at hand.
"When does this begin?" I asked, mentally breathing a sigh of relief at the relatively calm tone of my voice.
"Tomorrow night," Zane answered, giving me a look. He wasn't fooled by my demeanor. Damn, the X5s could always read me. Maybe I am a little too much like Zack sometimes. "The lists of the first couples will be up first thing tomorrow morning."
"Oh, great," Kenny muttered. "Wonderful. This is going to be a fucking blast. Having to have sex with a random woman while some guy is getting to fuck your girlfriend. This is perfect."
"Kenny, calm down," Zack ordered. "First of all, we don't know if you're going to be among the people that are going to be cycled into the program tomorrow. Second, we don't know how the pairings are going to be selected. There's a chance that you could end up being paired with Sasha."
Parker raised his hand, an evil grin on his face. I held my breath. That look usually meant bad news. "Au contraire, brother dear. Your resident evil computer genius has already hacked into the mainframe and gotten all of those goodies. I can tell you right now that the pair selections are going to be made randomly, which happens to work very well for our purposes. What are said purposes? Why, changing around certain pairings so that we get spared the kind of hell that Kenny just described. The pairings for week one have already been set and as of thirty minutes ago, they have been re-set." He nodded towards Tinga and Biggs, who were sitting together. "You guys are going to be in that group."
"Anybody else among us going to be participating in the first wave as well?" Syl questioned.
"Yeah, Sasha and Kenny are set to go sometime this week as well," Parker replied. "To answer the question that you were going to ask eventually, Zack, they're going to pair you and Max when she eventually returns from her mission. I didn't have to change that at all."
"Parker, you're the man," Kenny said gratefully. "We…" His expression went from happy to somewhere between dejected and furious. "We're still going to have to give up our child when the pregnancy is over. All of us will have to."
"Like hell I'm going to give up my child," Sasha snapped. "Does Manticore really think that they'll be able to take our babies away? Fuck, no. That's not going to happen." The other women nodded in agreement. "I won't do it."
"You shouldn't have to," Zack agreed. His eyes narrowed and I held my breath.
"Zack?" Krit asked quietly.
"Tinga, Sasha, Biggs, and Kenny are supposed to participate in the program this week," Zack said. "That gives us nine months to figure out what to do. We're on the clock, everybody." He took a deep breath. "I'll see all of you in the morning." With that, the others made their way out of the library. Zack remained sitting in his chair and I got up and sat down in a chair next to him.
"Zack?"
"I've thought a lot of things about Manticore, Becky," he told me. "First, I didn't know anything else. Then, I figured out what the deal really was but I still went along with it because I knew what would happen if I didn't. Now…if there was one thing that I always wondered, it was what it would have taken to really push me over the edge and want to get away from this place. I mean, part of me has always wanted to run. You know that. Plus, I bet that I'm not the only one of us who's wondered what the breaking point would be, either." Zack sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "This might be it. I just…I can't imagine having a child and giving it up to these sadists. I can't see myself giving my potential children away at all, much less to Manticore."
I nodded. "Zack, if getting out of here turns out to be the only option that your sisters have, then that's what it's going to take. The good news is that we've got at least a couple of months before we absolutely have to have a plan set in stone. We're going to need that time. I've got to figure on Manticore upping the security just incase a three, four, or five woman has a panic attack and decides to take their child or children and run. They've been having the X7s run a lot more seek-and-destroy exercises lately. I wouldn't want to be on the bad side of one of those guys on a good day, much less in the coming weeks and months."
"You're right," Zack conceded. "They'll take us down without a second thought." He managed a smile. "It's a good thing that you're here to help me come up with a plan, though, isn't it?"
"Of course," I said immediately. I returned the smile. "Absolutely."
TBC