Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Bedu
Corti Directorate doctrine was that Corti were supposed to remain entirely dispassionate. Corti reality, however, was in Bedu’s opinion proof that the doctrine was hideously flawed. Corti indulged in any number of emotions, and by far the least palatable of them was humble pie.
“I see,” he agreed, and returned Vakno’s tablet. He didn’t apologize, however. Understanding the source of her apathy was not enough to excuse the lack of cooperation and communication that had so maddened him.
Vakno had not taken the destruction of her equipment well, and was dealing with it in the most vicious way possible: She was being icily, perfectly polite. “Somebody fed Perfection to the Hunters, Shipmaster Bedu. I came with you out of the belief that you might have a lead on who, what, or why.”
“I do.” Bedu assured her.
“You have shown me collagen in non-human bones, biological markers which just prove some facts we already knew about the universal traits of living organism, and a half-formed hypothesis about a nebulous relationship between technology and ennui,” she retorted. “Interesting finds, yes, but they bring us no closer to that goal.”
“They do.” Bedu insisted. He span around the ship’s lab, accumulating the props he needed to present his case.
“Think about it,” he insisted, gathering his evidence. “What good reason is there for intelligence to come at the expense of physical prowess? How does that help us? Why is it in our interests to be physically weak?” He called up some images he’d managed to keep of the armored humans who had abducted him. “Humans are living proof that the brain/brawn dichotomy is an illusion.”
“So why is the Directorate focusing on one facet at the expense of the other?”
“Exactly. Now…watch this.”
He called up footage from when the Negotiable Curiosity had arrived in the Cimbrean system. Vakno’s expression as she watched the Humans line up against the wall to have their brains scanned was, of course, impassive but he detected a slight shift in her weight distribution.
“The Humans don’t even bother to hide it anymore,” he said. “Cranial implants are listed on their infosphere as an item of concern, and every single being passing through their borders is scanned coming in and out. I certainly was.”
“Human motives can be difficult to unravel sometimes,” Vakno pointed out. “Many of the items on their contraband list are there because of the unique chemical effects they have on their nervous systems, for instance.”
“Which is an entirely rational reason to prevent their entry. Would you actively import a crippling poison?”
“I am saying that it’s possible their reasons for banning implants are unique to them.”
“True,” agreed Badu, “I must concede that point. Except…we designed those implants, and we know they are safe. They must think otherwise, and that means they have a reason. They are strange but they are not illogical.”
“Aren’t they?” Vakno asked. “…a historical example. Their most popular intoxicant is ethanol. It is consumed recreationally in enormous quantities across many of their cultures, and yet has been the target of repeated bans. Often, these bans have been ethical in nature rather than well-founded or rational, and succeeded only in creating a thriving black-market and powerful, wealthy criminals. ”
“Ethics is always grounded in a rationality, Vakno. This is one of the first precepts of the Prime Science.”
“Another such corollary precept is that a being can focus on physical development or mental development, but cannot possibly devote enough time and energy to properly develop both.” She nodded at Bedu’s footage. “Clearly, that precept is incorrect. One wonders how many others are similarly flawed.”
Bedu blinked at her. Vakno had just uttered the closest thing that Corti had to heresy. Fortunately for her, he agreed completely. “I believe you are correct, Vakno. And that means we must begin again from the Prime Precept. That a being is if it is, and that each individual being is the only one capable of realizing this. From this, one develops logic, explores qualia, defines the senses. Logic is rooted in the physical and extends from there, not the other way around. And that, perhaps, gives them an advantage. Who else is so resolutely physical?”
Vakno nodded, following his logic. “Extending outward from that, we must ask why they care so much. Look at their behavior. Much of it is odd, but I suppose that completely irrational beings could not make a force like the ‘HEAT’.”
“How irrational could they routinely be?” Bedu asked.
“More irrational than us.” Vakno sniffed. “And it seems we have our own areas of irrationality. Are we drifting off-topic?”
“No, I do not think so. I think it is necessary to establish that our frame of reference itself must be questioned. Perhaps…even in the Prime Science, no reference frame is preferred.”
“Such must be true for logic and reason, therefore. A paradox. If we have made this deduction reasonably, then even the conclusion that we cannot rely upon it, cannot be relied upon.”
“And by a long path of deduction which I will omit for clarity, we must consider their rationality and their reasoning on their terms, not ours. Which brings us back to the question: why?”
“Presumably…they have information we lack.”
“Yes. I have only an…I hesitate to even say this, but an ‘intuition’ about what that might be.”
“And so you are jointly fascinated by a researcher who uploaded a simulation of her consciousness to a digital substrate, and also in the decline and extinction of an elder species.” Vakno glanced at the looping footage of the humans being scanned again. “Can you articulate how those are connected, and how they relate to neural implants?”
“…I think the connection is the neural implants. And the infuriating, vexing part…is I do not know why I believe this. Only that I…perceive a grave risk.”
“This grave risk. A…person? An entity?”
“That is…not impossible. The total complexity of a set of networked implants certainly exceeds the Mog-Gul threshold. But then, if we were to posit that was the connection…”
Bedu watched Vakno’s face closely. He knew that she was close, so very close to the conclusion that had sent Bedu running to a surgeon who could remove his implant suite. The question was whether she had the creativity to see what he had seen, or whether generations of Corti selective breeding too badly deprived her of the ability to make those kinds of intuitive leaps.
He hoped that his last bit of evidence would be there to solidify her resolve, not to forge it.
Scant hours after his surgery, he’d been arguing desperately with poor Hkzzvk, trying to persuade his Vzk’tk engineer to shed his own enhancements when Hkzzvk had gone still and quiet for a moment. The look of frustration and hatred that had then swelled over his colleague’s face had taken Bedu’s breath away.
Fortunately, in the end, the scuffle was decided by the fact that Bedu had known where Mwrmwrwk kept her pulse pistol. He’d “buried” poor Hkzzvk by firing him respectfully into a star….after removing his implants, which had provided the final compelling proof he hadn’t needed. He was still glad to have studied them—they had totally vindicated him—but he hoped that Vakno would become convinced even before seeing the evidence they contained.
It just felt more…solid, that way.
Vakno scowled thoughtfully. “…An entity or organization would have a motive of some kind.”
“Indeed.”
“Hmmm…What kind of motive might be served by the periodic decline and fall of technologically advanced civilizations?” She asked. The question was obviously not for Bedu to answer as she turned her back on him to pace the room. “The loss of their knowledge…thereby placing an upper ceiling on scientific advancement? Confining galactic civilization to within desired parameters. To what end? Ego? No, not compatible with anonymity or the Lemnian Psychological Definitions. Ego demands acknowledgement…Necessity?”
She paused and tapped thoughtfully on the countertop. “…Necessity. Postulate: sapient life forms are a resource. Run time on the implants within sapient lifeforms are therefore also a resource. Technological paradigm shifts would endanger that resource. Periodic genocide equals stability. Absurd! But…no. Rule One, there are no preconceptions: Assume nothing and test everything. Bedu!”
She turned around sharply. “You said that there are still signs of power in the city?”
Bedu nodded, viciously stamping down his own delighted impulse to smile triumphantly. “Yes. The recon drones haven’t been able to trace them yet.”
“Then we are investigating personally.”
Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Professor Daniel Hurt
“So…what’s the plan, exactly?”
Byron’s meeting room was the opposite of his office. Far from being a study in understatement, the meeting room was sumptuous and sleek, lacquered in the kind of minimalist grandeur that only the very wealthy could afford.
A lot of psychology had gone into its construction, too. From the shield-shaped table which allowed Byron to sit unopposed at the head, to the cunning use of subtle angled mirrors that didn’t reflect the interior of the room but which did shepherd in and amplify the natural daylight, this was a throne room for corporate power.
And—a nice touch—the walls were decorated with the eleven ships of the BGEV program. Dan had privately boggled at how much wealth those ships represented, and the staggering waste of how many of them had failed. The table itself was a memorial to the lost crews, whose names were engraved in its steel spine. Maybe those crews just hadn’t had whatever quality it was that Buehler, Chang and Etsicitty brought out in one another.
The Misfit crew had turned out to be even more of a force of nature in person than they had been on TV, but the surprise from Dan’s perspective was that they didn’t seem to be aware of it. They all three had the poise and stillness worn only by truly competent people, married to sincere humility. It shone through even though the three of them were plainly exhausted, emotional and nervous.
“The plan?” Dan offered them a self-effacing smile. “The plan is that we do a lot of planning. We have an entire species to save, not just from whatever’s stalking it, but also from ourselves. That’s not something we can rush into. We have to do this right, or not at all.”
This was not, apparently, what the trio had wanted to hear. After the gut-punch of having their home torched by protesters, the three of them were in a low mood compounded by hours of draining travel. Although they were smart enough not to have been expecting one, they’d obviously been dreaming of having a solution delivered on a plate.
Kevin Jenkins seemed to know exactly how to pick them up, though. “The good news is, we definitely have the resources and willpower on board to save them,” he said. All three of the Misfits immediately heaved a synchronized sigh of relief and smiled at each other.
“You promise?” Xiù asked.
“I’ve been talking to Allied Extrasolar Command, Moses had a friendly chat with the President…RIght now, we’re tracking through a defense contract kinda thing. AEC wants scout ships and a lot of them, an’ it turns out the Misfit hull is perfect for the job, with a few upgrades. Ericson damn near jizzed in his pants.”
“Are AEC on board with saving the People?” Julian asked.
“The People are potential strategic allies in the long run, and…you gotta understand military types. They think of themselves as protectors. Sheepdogs. And these are some vulnerable-ass sheep with some evil-ass wolves circling them, right? Those big-damn-hero instincts swing into place and…”
“Surely they’ll look after humanity first?” Dan asked. Kevin shrugged.
“If it ever comes down to choosin’ between them or us, yeah,” he agreed. “Ain’t no point in savin’ somebody who can’t defend themselves when their protectors are gone. But so long as it doesn’t come to that, AEC are in the fight.”
“And the President?” Dan asked. “What’s in it for him?”
“Popular support for extraterrestrial defence spending for a change, I reckon. Plus a spot in the history books, which is what Moses wants.”
Dan inclined his head, sensing there was more that Kevin wasn’t saying. “That’s all?”
“Hey, I don’t know the inside of Sartori’s head,” Kevin shrugged the question off, neatly deflecting it.
Allison sat forward. “So what’s the plan?” she insisted.
Dan nodded, realizing they’d digressed enough. “Okay…At this point, the evisceration of their culture is basically inevitable. You already taught them too much. Even teaching them English and how it works was destructive—” he raised a hand as Allison sat straighter in her seat. “—necessary,” he soothed, “but destructive. So a huge part of this is going to be documenting their culture before it self-destructs.”
“We already recorded their language,” Xiù pointed out.
“Good start. And you have plenty of video footage, but there are other things. Things they need to record in their own words, like what ’magic’ means and how they define the difference between Giving and Taking. Their coming-of-age ceremony and its symbolism. What, exactly, a Given Man is and what he does…and so on. God-only-knows how many questions we don’t know we need to ask, yet.”
“There’s a lot that the Singer won’t want to share,” Julian fretted.
“For good reason,” Dan nodded. “Honestly, I think the first step here is to ask every anthropologist who’ll answer a phone to give us their two cents.”
“I think the first step,” Kevin suggested, “is for y’all to go over what we already know.”
“….Right. Good call. In fact, we start from the top: First contact. Where’s the helmet cam footage?”
“Uh…” Allison picked up her tablet and began searching. “Here…No, here.”
Kevin stood up. “I’ll run snacks,” he said.
“Aren’t you an executive?” Dan asked.
“Yyyup. But I still make the best coffee in Omaha. And the best paninis. Trust me.”
Dan barely noticed. He’d pulled the helmet cam footage from Allison’s tablet and was reviewing it with a fascinated expression while his fingers danced on the keyboard, noting his thoughts as they arrived.
They had a lot of work to do.
Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
Passenger mesoliner, Flight Level 2000 over Montana, Earth.
Lucy Campbell
“Fucking. Crazy. I can see the curvature of the Earth from up here!”
“Yeah, you were still in the escape pod when Airbus rolled these bad boys out,” Lucy smiled. Lewis had his face pressed to the porthole like a child and was gazing awestruck out at the blue-blackness around and above them.
Mesoliners smashed all the altitude and speed records for a civilian passenger vehicle. Thanks to the same Electro-Static Flight Surface technology and kinetic engines that went into Firebirds, Weaver dropships and the Byron Group’s exploration ships, they could fly so high and so fast that even the old Concord supersonic liner would have been left coughing on their dust.
Two hundred thousand feet. Sixty kilometers, straight up. High enough that the atmosphere outside was in that tenuous limbo between not being there, and yet being there enough to vaporize hurtling space rocks and hold up a high-speed passenger plane. High enough to really see the Earth’s shape, and to look up and get slapped in the face with a sense just how tiny humans really were.
Lucy had spent her first trip in a mesoliner with her face pressed to the window too.
The planes had plenty of creature comforts on top of the high-tech high-altitude flight. Free onboard wifi for a start, which gave Lucy the chance to check her messages.
She managed to trade messages with her mom, fire off an email to her sister, order a beer and catch up with her best friend from school before Lewis finally tore himself away from the view.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Lucy agreed.
“Well, yeah. I was thinkin’ about the NavScope problem.”
Lucy sipped her beer, and activated their seats’ privacy fields. First class really was the only way to fly.
She didn’t know much about the coltainer’s NavScope system—she knew it was part of navigation and guidance, but her domain as a metallurgist and materials scientist didn’t overlap much with the business of getting the probe to actually fly around. “Problem?”
“Yyyup. Problem one: Billions of stars out there. Not all of them even have any planets. Most of the ones with planets don’t have the right kind of planet. So we need the probe to track ‘em down.”
“Meaning nitrogen-oxygen and liquid water. I know that part,” Lucy nodded.
“Yeah, but that gets you nowhere if you find a place that’s, like, two hundred degrees average temperature or whatever. We’ve been running the numbers, and Lee reckons that for every planet that the current system thinks is a match? Out of every seven, one might be a temperate.”
“Those aren’t terrible odds…” Lucy pointed out.
“Nuh, but they could be better too. It’s gonna mean a lot more waiting before each new find comes online and we can start sending people out that way. So we’ve been tryin’a work on a way to narrow it down. See if we can spot other clues.”
“Better telescopes?” Lucy suggested.
“Maybe more of ‘em. I guess we could have the probe build telescope satellites everywhere they go, build up a network…” Lewis sighed. “I mean, Allison, Julian and Xiù, they had the same problem. Eighteen month mission, and they only found two viable planets.”
“Maybe if you put your heads together you can solve it.”
“Maybe…” Lewis looked out the window again. “Right now, I just… Shit. I mean, I thought they were dead, you know? And then instead they’re like these huge celebrities. And they’re together…”
Lucy took his hand. “Does that bother you?”
“Just kinda…a prediction that came true,” Lewis chuckled, then leaned over and kissed her. “I’m happy for ‘em. Happy for me, too. Shit worked out, you know?”
“Something’s bothering you,” Lucy pointed out.
“…I’m just shit scared of seeing them again. Like, I’m really looking forward to it, but I’m terrified too.”
Lucy nodded and relaxed, happy that it was nothing important. “That sounds normal,” she declared.
“…Glad you’re here though, Luce. Thanks for keepin’ me in the real world.”
She laughed. “I love you too.”
“…Think they’ll be happy to see me?”
“Lewis.” It was her turn to lean over and kiss him. “I’m sure of it.”
There was a pulse in their privacy field, signaling a request to drop it. Lucy hit the button to find a stewardess smiling at her.
“Sorry miss, but the captain’s called positions for landing approach. Could you turn off your devices and return your seats to the upright position please?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks!”
They did as asked and Lucy let Lewis get back to staring out the window, reflecting as she did so that he had literally lived in space for the last several years but was still acting like a giddy child when confronted with the reality of mesoliners.
She couldn’t blame him.
Date Point: 12y10m2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Nofl
If ’community service’ was supposed to be some kind of punishment, the humans had picked entirely the wrong approach. They had him donating his time to sort and catalog bacterial samples collected by research teams from the borders of the Terran Microbial Action Zone—Cimbrean’s infamous ’skidmark.’
This was clearly intended to be drudge work, but to any Corti biologist with a functioning sense of excitement—and Nofl’s was scandalously overactive—the opportunity to study class twelve microbes in any capacity was a privilege. Especially ones that were native to a human’s personal biome. Humans were less a species than a sprawling sapient ecosystem.
He’d already spotted two ways in which the taxonomic classification system the deathworlders favored was inadequate for categorizing microbes, and had neatly partitioned off part of his attention to write a paper on the proposed upgrade while another partition handled the business of cataloging and filing, and a third mused on the role that matrix metalloproteinase-9 played in malignant invasion and whether there was a way to use it as a marker to target an artificially induced anoikis, preferably without leading on to arthritic or cardiovascular pathologies.
A fourth partition was idly looking forward to his tofu and pesto sandwich.
It came as something of an irritation, therefore, when his peaceful contemplations were interrupted by the inconvenient way the samples ran out.
He trudged out of the lab complex and picked his way carefully down a sidewalk full of deathworlders en route back to his own facility in the Alien Quarter. The Humans of Folctha were well acclimatized to the presence of other, more fragile species in their city and gave him a wide berth that had nothing to do with respect or discomfort and everything to do with the fact that all of them were strong and massive enough to potentially cause harm just by bumping into him.
Which made it all the more obvious when a human wanted to interact. Gabriel Arés, in this case. He waved Nofl down from across the street and came trundling along in that careful, deliberate way he did when he didn’t want to look as if he was, in fact, crippled. It seemed an instinct the Deathworlders had; they always did their best to project health and danger.
The fact was, he was much less crippled nowadays thanks to the course of Cruezzir-Derivative that he’d taken for his brain injury. While it had done absolutely nothing to repair the ancient damage to his femoral nerve—that, sadly, was several years too old to be repaired by any Cruezzir-based therapy—the atrophied muscles in his leg had been stimulated into regenerating themselves somewhat, restoring strength and stability to a badly weakened limb.
He still walked with the aid of a stick, but that stick now looked dignified rather than necessary. All in all, it was a significant improvement.
“Chief!” Nofl put on his most disarmingly charming facade. “How lovely to see you! Is this business, or pleasure?”
“You know me, Nofl,” Arés said, though Nofl had learned how to detect a subtle joke of some kind hiding behind his otherwise neutral expression. “All business. You staying out of trouble?”
“Oh, chief,” Nofl tutted, and slowed his pace so that the limping deathworlder could join him. “Do you have any idea how much less fun I’d be having if I did anything to land myself in your oh-so-hospitable cells?”
“Glad to see the deterrent works,” Arés snorted.
“What can I do for you, hun?”
Arés shook his head. “Something I want to discuss with you in private. Your lab?”
“Ah. The nerve damage. You want to do something about it, hmm?”
Arés nodded subtly. “I think I have to face the evidence that you seem to be mostly trustworthy when it comes to medicines.”
“Seem? Oh dear, I really need to work harder on my image.” Nofl looked up at the shuffling Human’s face and was pleased to see a smile fighting the corners of his mouth. “Sweetie, I am a steel banner, and yet I still became the darling of the Directorate’s regenerative medicine faculty. It’s hardly my fault that a human managed to tear my career apart without meaning to. Your species has a knack for destroying things.”
“Steel banner?” Arés asked.
“Every Corti is assigned their banner at… well, you would call it birth. ’Decanted’ might be the more appropriate phrase,” Nofl tasted the word. There was something civilized about that particular English word that he quite liked. It was less perfunctory than the Cortan equivalent. “A quick genetic sequencing, some aptitude and early-development tests and there you have it: your caste. Steel is the lowest caste, forbidden from breeding.”
“Hmm.”
“Oh, I know that hmm,” Nofl raised his head to project as much wounded dignity as he could. “That’s your ’I don’t like that’ hmm. Penny for your thoughts, darling?”
“We, uh…well, we have some bad history with stuff like that. Kinda makes me uncomfortable, in fact. Same with the Gaoians and their whole Clan arrangement.”
Nofl shrugged. “You’re…what was it, Latino? Hispanic? I don’t know the difference. The point is, you carry genetic traits your ancestors deemed desirable. Yes?”
“That’s different.”
“Only in that the selection is not deliberately controlled, dear.”
“Whatever.”
Nofl sighed. Arés could demolish a whole line of conversation with three syllables, and in this case a huge reinforced iron gate had come crashing down in front of what had promised to be an entertaining debate.
“Oh, have it your way,” he said. “The point is that I made it to the very top of my field despite an enormous personal handicap. I know what I’m doing when it comes to medicine. I’m especially an expert on the way our cutting-edge medicines interact with human physiology.”
Gabe rubbed his jaw, and spoke without looking down at him. “My own son is a thundering example.”
“Oh yes. Watching their progress has been a delight!” Nofl fished in the satchel on his hip for his ID as they crossed Quarterside Park and approached the checkpoint. “And a tiny bit terrifying.”
Gabriel snorted. “A tiny bit?” he asked, then waved to the checkpoint security, who had stood up straighter as their chief and commander approached. “Zachary! I heard your son won that Taekwondo medal?”
The CCS officer grinned as he scanned their IDs. “He sure did! He says he’s gonna try for Folctha’s Olympic team in four years.”
“Now that’d be a heck of a thing…”
“Sure would…you’re clear, chief. Four hours from…mark.”
”Gracias.”
“Now the Olympics, there is an interesting thing,” Nofl mused as they passed through the biofilter tunnel. “Mock warfare to save your sons, hmm?”
“Must you analyze everything like that?”
“I must!”
“So nothing can ever be just for fun to you?”
Nofl gave him a blank look. “Of course it’s for fun. But fun comes from instinctive places. Have you ever noticed how human children will scramble back up the slide rather than use the ladder? If you asked them, they would say it was more fun. But why is it fun, hmm?”
“You tell me.”
“Your species lives and breathes challenge and conflict, dear. You get your most satisfying fun from doing difficult things. Climbing back up the slide is more challenging than using the ladder, and so it’s more fun.
“You’ve practically bred it into yourselves and have been doing that since before your own history. Before you were even properly sapient, most probably. Maybe before you even had a central nervous system. And nowhere is that instinct more potent—” Conveniently, a knot of Gaoian cubs chose that moment to tumble past, chasing and pouncing after a giggling, slightly older human child. “—than when you fight. You have sports and the only other species who have the same concept are the Gaoians.”
“What the hell even motivates you, then?” Arés asked, apparently intrigued for once. “I can barely get my head around my own son and now…Christ, you’re alien! Uh…” He seemed suddenly embarrassed, “Sorry, that’s rude. I think.”
Nofl flapped a hand impatiently. ’Rude’ was such an…irrelevant concept. It just got in the way. “Darling, nonsense! I am alien. As are you! Isn’t that the point of this colony in the first place? Admirable project, I say. Maybe a bit misguided…”
“But what motivates you, Nofl?” Arés asked. “There has to be something stopping you from just…I’unno. Running a low-voltage current through your own brain’s pleasure centers. I know the Corti have the tech to do something like that.”
Nofl did something he rarely did and engaged a mental mode that the Directorate would actually have approved of. “Do not misunderstand us, Gabriel Arés. Mine are a fiercely competitive people. We do enjoy striving for perfection. We are simply not so…” he paused and selected a word. “…Aggressive.”
“Aggressive.”
“Yes! Goodness, your minion’s child just won an award for beating one of his fellows senseless, did he not?”
“Well, not senseless—” Arés tried to begin, but Nofl waved the objection off as an irrelevance.
“Crushing, lethal force that would cripple any other species was doubtless involved, and now I am entirely certain that those children are the best of friends. Again, look at your sports. Do you know the history of your Olympics? Fascinating thing, really. They were originally meant to avoid war amongst the Greek tribes, not that it stopped anyone. Same for the modern era: the Pentathlon cannot be properly considered anything but military exercises! It even involves weapons!”
“Well, okay, sure, the discus and the javelin I guess…”
“All of them. Every single last sport is somehow like that. Find one that isn’t, I challenge you.”
“Uh…Rhythmic gymnastics?”
“Team competition, body control, demonstration of poise, strength, and endurance.”
“…White-water rafting?”
“Bravery, strength, toughness, and tactical maneuvering.”
“Table ten….no. Okay. Point made.”
“Small projectiles and reflexes!” Nofl said, not letting him back away from the challenge. “Then there’s the popular sports. Football, any form of it. This new Gravball your son helped invent!” He swiped his hand through the biometric scanner that served as the lock on his front door. “Now…”
He trotted smartly up the stairs to his lab, activating all the equipment he’d brought with him from Origin with an unnecessary wave of his hand. His implants took care of the actual commands. Arés took them more slowly and carefully, gripping the handrail as though it was the difference between life and death.
“In any case, if I may be so bold as to ask you to strip down and lie on the table face-down?”
“Woah, woah! No.”
Nofl rolled his eyes and planted his hands on where his hips were, not that Corti anatomy made them at all prominent. “…Darling! You taunt me with this challenge and then take it away? How cruel!”
“I came here to discuss something important Nofl,” Arés told him. “My damn leg can wait.”
“…Oh?”
“You’re coming up on the end of your community service. A couple more months and the time you owe to the SOR is going to come into play. That means you could be working with my son. Directly. Exactly what you would be doing and who you would be working with, how sensitive your work would be…that’s all still being decided.”
Nofl gave him the shrewdest look he could manage, and blinked both layers of his eyelids. “My implants are the problem, aren’t they?”
“Good, you’re not as dumb as you look,” Arés smiled disarmingly.
“That is asking rather a lot. What would I get in return?”
Gabriel eased himself down into sitting on the examination couch, and rested his hands lightly on his cane.
“You will never find a better example of Deathworlder biology than the HEAT,” he said. “Not on Cimbrean, not on Earth, not anywhere. You want to resurrect your work in real, cutting-edge regenerative medicine? In real Cruezzir, not the watered-down shit? That’s what’s on our side of the table.”
For the first time in his life, Nofl found himself at a loss for what to say.
Arés leaned forward, making the couch creak. “Understand me,” he said in a low, even and reasonable voice that was nevertheless laden with intimidation. “The HEAT alone is a valuable enough asset that we will never risk them until we know we can trust you, Nofl. But fuck all of that: We are talking about my son, and you will never go within a mile of him if there’s an ounce of technology inside that skull of yours. Comprende?”
Nofl rocked back on his feet and thought to himself. He’d had no inkling he might be given access to the HEAT. To get even the most mundane kinds of samples from any of them–!
Arés sat back again. “That’s our price. We can find something else for you to do if it’s too high, but the terms are not negotiable. Don’t you dare even try.”
“Gabriel Arés,” Nofl told him formally after a moment of racing thought, “You personally are a man I wouldn’t cross anyway. The fact that you are the father of ‘Warhorse’ hardly makes it worse. I will not play games with you, but…all of my implants, right now?”
“Yes,” Arés nodded emphatically. “Right now. We have a trusted surgeon just down the way. You get those implants out…and you can fix me up as soon as you’re able. I won’t object. I’ll even put a good word in for you. If not…well, like I said. I’m sure we’ll find something productive and…safe for you to do.”
He stood up with a grunt. “….What do you say?”