Valentine by Demelza Carlton

Author:Demelza Carlton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lost Plot Press
Published: 2021-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

At first, she'd meant to only prepare enough eggs for one incubator, but then she'd started preparing the embryos for implantation in the eggs, and somehow she'd forgotten she was dealing with moa and not emus, and she was staring at a double batch of embryos, about to start on a third. Anna even had the next vial in her hand, and she couldn't remember taking the rack out of stasis. She squinted at the label, brushing condensation off it so she could read it clearly. Aquila? No, it should say Pachyornis! Quickly, she checked a couple of other vials in the same rack – all Aquila – before putting the rack back into stasis. There was a place for eagles in the Altan system, but it wasn't her moa biome. Not yet.

What if she'd...

Anna fished out one of the empty vials from the racks she'd already implanted. No, that said Pachyornis, like it was supposed to. Thank the stars she'd stopped when she did.

She carefully loaded the eggs into the incubators, the programmed in the new protocol. This time it would be different – surely some of the embryos would survive, unlike all the embryos she'd lost on Titan. She couldn't wait to see what a baby moa looked like.

Once she'd sealed both incubators, she picked up her tablet to make a note of the settings, as well as the date and time. She'd need to monitor these more carefully than the emus, so that if something went wrong, she'd know precisely where, in order to improve on the process next time.

The door to the lab whooshed open. "You're in early," Vega said, still buttoning her lab coat over her green coverall. "Or are you working late?"

Anna glanced at the menu bar on her tablet, which told her it was 7:32 already. She'd worked all night? She hadn't pulled an all nighter since the week she'd received the news about the Magellan's demise. Maybe a couple weeks after that, too – she had to admit those first few weeks had become a blur in her mind. Much like last night.

The tablet in her hands pinged, as if in rebuke, and she almost dropped it in surprise. No, it wasn't suddenly sentient. It was just pinging to alert her to an incoming message. A text message, thank the stars, from Dr Calmana. Brief but to the point:

Your husband is suffering from amnesia. Unsure yet whether this is temporary or how much of it is permanent. Would like to meet at the hospital so we can discuss possible paths forward for his treatment.

A small, cowardly part of Anna didn't want to meet the doctor at all, but she knew she couldn't avoid the woman forever. Couldn't avoid the man who had been her husband, either. The sooner she faced up to this, the sooner she could move on with her life. If that was even possible...

"Can you keep an eye on these? Hourly observations. I need to go up to the hops.

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