“It's no joke, I'm afraid. I've scanned you multiple times just to be sure, since I knew Tarion would order me to do so anyway once he found out. Dashel's impregnated you. With twins.” He tilted his head, peering at me. “Frankly, I'm surprised that you didn't already know. Drakon females tend to become aware of their own pregnancies within a matter of days, so I assumed you would too. But perhaps that trait is unique to our species. I wouldn't know...I'm a combat medic, not a damn obstetrician.”
This is some kind of crazy dream, I thought. It has to be.
“This is impossible,” I said softly. “He's a dragon, for God's sake. He's cold-blooded. I'm warm-blooded. There's no way we could procreate together. Biologically, it makes no sense.”
“Oh! I see. Well, in that case, I suppose you're not pregnant after all, so there's nothing to worry about,” he retorted briskly. “I mean, I must bow to your superior expertise in these matters, since you obviously earned an advanced medical degree while working in the mines and I only have a paltry, oh, forty years of experience as a healer to rely on.”
“I'm...pregnant. With dragons.” The words seemed like they were coming from someone else's mouth, even as I said them.
“Yes. You're pregnant. With dragons. Two of them. Unless one devours the other in utero, that is.”
I fought a wave of nausea. “They do that?!”
Stal chuckled. “Now that was a joke. If one were going to eat the other, it would have happened already.”
“So...but...wait, your species is reptilian,” I protested. “Don't reptiles lay eggs? I mean...am I going to lay eggs?”
“Human physiology may not be my specialty,” he said, “but even I know that human females have 'eggs' as well, after a fashion. You're born with about a million of them, and you ovulate roughly three or four hundred during your lifetime. So no, you won't be squatting over a nest of twigs and pine needles to lay your eggs. They'll allow the offspring to develop within your body in the usual way, and then you'll give birth. For God's sake, didn't they teach you these sorts of things in school? Just what do humans teach their young, anyway? No, wait...don't answer, I'm sure it will only depress me.”
I wasn't waking up from this. This was no dream. This was my life. I was pregnant. With twins. Dragons. If I'd known this was a possibility, I would have—well, no, looking back, there was nothing much I could have done to avoid it. What was I supposed to do while I was trying to seduce my way out of my cell? Insist that Dashel stop midway and procure whatever dragons use for condoms?
“Won't giving birth to a pair of dragons kill me?” I asked, terrified. The thought of them tearing their way out of me made my blood freeze.
“These births are, shall we say, frowned upon in Hielsrane society, but they're not unheard of,” he reassured me. “As long as you have access to a proper medical facility, everything should be fine. Now, I'm going to switch on the calcium matrix. Perhaps you might distract yourself from the pain by deciding whether you'd like me to inform Dashel of this state of affairs, or if you'd prefer to break the news to him yourself.”
The feeling of my fractured bones rotating and knitting themselves together was agonizing. I welcomed it. At least it provided a brief distraction from what I'd just been told.
Pregnant with alien twins.
Jesus, what had my life turned into?
22
Dashel
Outside the window of my cabin, the Gyygnar had separated into two independently-controlled sections – each one with a command deck and three nacelles – and their crews were engaged in training maneuvers. It was an impressive ship, capable of waging war on two different fronts at once. But I wasn't paying any attention to that.
Instead, I stared at the empty green bottle for a few moments, then turned it upside down over my glass and shook it, pounding on the base just to be sure there weren't a few more drops hiding in there. I bitterly wished I'd brought a second bottle on this mission. Maybe even a whole case of them. The news Natalie had given me was still clanging and echoing in my head, and I'd have given anything in that moment to drown it out.
I'd impregnated her. With twins, even.
Okay, maybe I could forgive myself for not wearing a neut-ring around the base of my cock the first time we'd had sex. After all, I'd gone into that cell to interrogate her, not to make love to her.
But the second time, in my cabin? The third time, down on the planet's surface?
And by the time we'd visited the underground grotto, well...the damage had surely been done by then, hadn't it?
So now what?
I tried to look on the bright side. We were lovers, weren't we? We'd made plans for the future together, hadn't we? Why shouldn't we have offspring as well? Yes, these things generally went much better when they'd been planned out in advance – even between two Drakon– but that didn't mean the outcome couldn't still be a positive one. We could love these hatchlings, teach them, support them, watch them grow into proud warriors of the Hielsrane empire...
If they inherit even one-tenth of their mother's strength, determination, beauty, and resourcefulness, I thought wryly, they'll probably end up running the empire, and looking damn good while they do it.
Still, I was well aware of the problems that would be inherent in a situation like this one – especially as my door chimed, letting me know that two of those problems were standing right outside my cabin.
“Come in,” I said wearily, “and let's get this over with.”
The
