Xenotech General Mayhem: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 4)

by Dave Schroeder

  I was even less interested in talking to my bio-father than I was in coping with a hundred EUA Macerator units charging through the dining room’s front door. Unfortunately, no Macerators appeared to distract me further. Just as well. They’re pushovers.

  Martin had taken over for Poly in guarding the fake waiter. He’d cuffed the man to a chair and called the Atlanta police to take him into custody. I noticed Martin had cuffed his right hand so he could suck on the burns on his left. I wondered if I’d show that much compassion to someone who’d tried to kill me and my friends and was pleased to realize I probably would.

  I stepped over to Martin and spoke softly.

  “Will you be handling the interrogation?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said my friend. “This one is personal.”

  “You might want to hold off for a day,” I said. “I’ll ask the folks from Hu Zahn Fierst Corporation in Provo to fly out with a stock of their telepathic nanoparticles. Poly and I can meet them on Tuesday. I feel bad for blowing them off last week.”

  “I can do that,” said Martin, “and I’ll make sure Homeplanet Security doesn’t hear about it.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I felt like I needed either a six-pack of Diet Starbuzz or a twelve-hour nap.

  My phone chimed. I looked at its screen and saw it not only had a confirmation from Hu, Zahn, and Fierst—it had handled their travel arrangements and booked them rooms downtown in the SLN Tower’s five-star hotel. I didn’t know what I’d do without my phone.

  Pierre’s efficient staff was already cleaning up the spilled wine and broken crockery. The little Pyr was wringing his tentacles and lamenting what this latest round of damage would do to his insurance rates when Queen Sherrhi, Roger Joe-Bob Bacon, Cornell, and Bavarian all offered to help cover the cost. They could pay for the repairs out of petty cash.

  Poly had come back to stand near me and was talking to Hildy. I distracted her with a kiss on the cheek and told her I was heading for the Stone Mountain Room.

  “Do you want me to come along?” Poly asked.

  “No,” I replied, “but I expect I’ll need a hug or three when I’m done.”

  “I’ll warm up my arms to get ready,” she said, moving her shoulders in circles.

  “Love you,” I said.

  “Love you, too,” said Poly.

  Nothing like the threat of imminent death to make you think about family.

  Chit picked that moment to flit down to my shoulder.

  “Go on, bucko,” said Chit. “Stop stallin’—it’s time to git.”

  I got.

  Chapter 50

  “Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles...”

  — Homer, The Iliad

  The Stone Mountain Room was off the main large-species dining room. About the size of a basketball court, it would count as an intimate space for Tōdons and Dauushans. Teleport Inns around the galaxy named their private dining areas after local landmarks and Stone Mountain was one of the biggest things in the Atlanta area, so the room’s name made sense in context.

  Pierre and his team had shown their usual care, efficiency and customer service by setting up a small, human-sized square table and stocking it well. There were several bottles of water, wine, and Diet Starbuzz in one corner, along with a small bucket of ice and associated goblets and tumblers. There was even a parfait glass with strawberry-galberry trifle and a long spoon there to tempt me.

  My mom and Chilly were sitting at the table with mostly full glasses of red wine in front of them. They’d been talking, but stopped and turned my way when I entered. Given the size of the room, it was a hike to get to the table. I felt their eyes were on me every step of the way and my stomach was tossing like a small boat on a restless, wine-dark sea. I took a seat across from my mother and got right to the point.

  “When were you going to tell me?” I asked, the way a French prosecutor might say, “J’accuse!”

  “Today,” said my mom.

  That slowed me down. I’d been expecting apologies, or an answer like, “Never.”

  “Go ahead,” I said to my mom. “Is Chilly really my biological father?”

  “Chilly?” my mom asked.

  “That’s what he told me to call him.”

  “Okay,” she replied. “Then yes—just look in a mirror for confirmation.”

  I reluctantly looked at Chilly’s real face for the first time. He wasn’t wearing his programmable mask this time and did look rather familiar. I compared his face to my memory of the one I saw in the mirror when I shaved every morning. We clearly shared a lot of genetic material. He looked back at me, his face warm, open, and welcoming. I turned away.

  “What is his name?” I asked my mom. “I expect it’s not Chilly.”

  “No,” said my mom. “Chilly is the reception you’re giving me and your bio-father.”

  Mom always knew how to make me smile. This time was no exception. The corners of my mouth turned up involuntarily and I almost laughed. Goodness knows I needed to release some tension.

  “No fair,” I said, giving her a mock glare.

  “My name is Achilles,” said the man. “Achilles Theranos. I need your help.”

  That wasn’t fair, either. My brain was hard-wired to help people who needed my assistance.

  “You’re not my father,” I said, fighting back against my desire to learn more. “My father is Thomas Jefferson Buckston. You’re just a sperm donor.”

  Chilly’s face fell and my mother gave me a stern look and a word of warning.

  “Jack!”

  She said my name with the tone she’d used after one of my engineering experiments had resulted in property damage. It made me feel about nine.

  “I’m sorry, mom,” I said, “but this is a lot to process. I haven’t even told T.J. about Max yet.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Jack,” she said. “I have and he’s thrilled.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I’d wanted to be the one to tell him.

  It felt like my skull only had room for two gigs and somebody was trying to cram it full of forty gigs of information. My brain was spinning faster than a thirty-millisecond pulsar. I took a deep breath and did a mental reset. Unreasoning hostility wouldn’t necessarily get me anywhere. I put a calm I wasn’t feeling into my voice.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Theranos,” I said. “That was out of line. All in all, I’m pleased to have the random assortment of genes I’ve inherited from you. They’ve served me well.”

  Theranos nodded—not giving me anything to trigger more anger.

  What could this total stranger I shared DNA with need from me? A kidney? Doubtful. Galactic medical technology had that covered. I tried to retain my zen-like attitude but couldn’t manage it and shifted back to prosecutorial mode.

  “I have three questions,” I said. “Why did you leave? Why did you come back? And what’s your problem?”

  Theranos started to speak but my mom held up her hand.

  “Wait,” she said. “There are some things I have to say first.”

  I sat back in my chair, crossed my arms over my chest, and tried to center myself into active listening mode. It wasn’t easy.

  “I know now that Achilles wasn’t supposed to fall in love with me,” said my mom. “It broke all the rules. Understanding that after the fact makes it somehow even more romantic. Achilles and I were literally star-crossed lovers. I thought he was just an exchange student from New Zealand or something.”

  “Or something,” said Achilles.

  My mom kept going. “We fell for each other in a big way and got married after a whirlwind courtship.”

  She looked at Achilles with what I interpreted to be a wistful smile.

  “You got started shortly thereafter,” she said, “Then Achilles just disappeared, without leaving a note or text message or anything. I hadn’t even told him I was pregnant.”

  Mom’s wistful smile got tighter.

  “I was worried that he’d been killed o
r kidnapped or I don’t know what. It made me a wreck for months.”

  She reached out and patted Achilles arm. I shook my head.

  “Now I know why he left, Jack, and it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t want to go, but received emergency recall orders and had to leave immediately. I didn’t know any of that until yesterday. He wasn’t allowed to tell me before he left.”

  I looked at my mom, then looked at Achilles, then turned back to my mom. She may have forgiven him, but I wasn’t ready to.

  Emergency recall orders from where? New Zealand?

  “Got it,” I said, my anger flaring. “Abandoned his family. Didn’t mean to. You didn’t have a husband. I didn’t have a dad, but there were extenuating circumstances. As far as you’re concerned, all is forgiven. Next?”

  “Don’t take that tone with me—I’m still your mother.”

  “I know, Mom,” I said. “But can you blame me for my reaction?”

  She didn’t seem particularly maternal when she glared at me.

  “Just be civil,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sorry. I’ll dial it back.”

  I recrossed my arms in the other direction. Hate led to the dark side, so I tried not to feed it, but it kept begging for scraps from the table. I put it on a leash so only a little seeped through and focused on calming my mind.

  “What’s the story?” I said. “Do you want to tell it or should he?”

  “It’s probably better coming from me,” said Achilles. “Let me tell it to you straight—I’m an alien.”

  I looked closely at my bio-father. He seemed every bit as human as I was.

  “What does that make me?” I asked. “Mr. Spock, with a human mother and an alien father?”

  “You told me he had a flare for the dramatic,” said Achilles.

  “He got that from reading too much Shakespeare as a child,” said my mom.

  “Not just Shakespeare,” I said, thinking of all the adventure stories I’d read.

  “I’m an alien, Jack, in that I’m from another planet—but I’m human, too. You’re not half Vulcan.”

  I looked a bit disappointed and made both of them smile by saying, “Fascinating.”

  A little more tension evaporated. Then I thought through the timing of Achilles’ presence here on Earth before I was born.

  “Hey,” I said, “You were on Earth before First Contact Day. I thought Terra was off-limits.”

  “It was,” said Achilles. “My presence wasn’t sanctioned.”

  “My father was an illegal alien?”

  Now all three of us were smiling. I quickly shifted my face back to Vulcan imperturbability.

  “I didn’t know there were humans anywhere else in the galaxy,” I said. “Where are you from?”

  “My planet is called Akrotiri,” said Achilles.

  “Akrotiri? Like the ruined village on Santorini?” I asked.

  “Correct,” said Achilles. “Exactly like that. A G’nandrian trader was making an illegal water stop on Terra about thirty-six hundred years ago when his instruments told him the Thera volcano was about to explode. Against all GaFTA regulations he loaded the citizens of Akrotiri into the hold of his freighter and took them with him when he left, saving all their lives.”

  “Nice guy,” I said. “Sometimes you have to break the rules to do the right thing.”

  My attempts at nurturing serenity were starting to work—and Achilles’ story was interesting. I wondered if the trader’s water stop was to pick up aquatic life forms with promising pharmaceutical possibilities.

  I poured some Diet Starbuzz into a glass and sipped.

  “Remember,” said Achilles. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I agreed. “What’s a G’nandrian, by the way? I don’t recognize the species.”

  “That’s because there aren’t any G’nandrians left anymore,” said Achilles. “The reason is sadly ironic—but I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  I spooned up a bite of strawberry-galberry trifle and waited for Achilles to continue.

  “The trader realized he could get in a lot of trouble back home with the GaFTA authorities if he showed up on a GaFTA planet with a cargo of pre-congruency sentients,” said Achilles. “Being a good hearted being, he dropped the Akrotiri citizens off on an uninhabited Earth-like world several thousand light-years from here. The humans named their new planet after their original village. The trader figured he’d done a good deed and there’d be no way to pin anything on him. It didn’t hurt that Akrotiri’s system was hidden deep inside a dense nebula and hard to find.”

  “A sentient after my own heart,” I said.

  “Then he got bad news—the G’nandrians’ sun had just gone nova, slagging their planet and destroying all life in their system.”

  “Ouch,” I said. “I see the irony.”

  My mom patted my hand and encouraged me to have more trifle while I listened.

  “Wouldn’t a space-faring species be dispersed across enough systems to come back from such a disaster?” I asked.

  “You’d think,” said Achilles, “but the G’nandrians had rigid roles for each gender. Males were the traders—they went out into the galaxy. Females stayed home and ran the governments, factories, farms, and families.”

  My mom was shaking her head slowly.

  “Those poor people. Those poor, poor people,” she said.

  I agreed.

  “All the G’nandrian females were gone,” said Achilles, “and the remaining males—mostly other traders—hadn’t figured out how to create new females using genetic engineering. There were religious taboos in their culture that discouraged that line of research.”

  I thought about similar problems we’d had here on Earth and found I was getting deeper into his story, my anger replaced with interest. I waved with my spoon, encouraging Achilles to keep talking.

  “The trader who rescued the Akrotiri folks—my ancestors—quietly got the word out and hundreds more G’nandrian traders were able to join him on our hidden planet. The lonely males adopted the humans as their children and successors, teaching them how to use and expand on congruent technology. They also made it very clear that we would not be welcome in the Galactic Free Trade Association of the time because we didn’t invent congruent technology—it was handed to us.”

  My mom took up the tale while Achilles had a few sips of wine.

  “Eventually the G’nandrian traders all died,” she said, “leaving the people of Akrotiri with an empty, resource-rich planet and humans’ built-in compulsion to be fruitful and multiply, along with all the technology of an advanced galactic civilization.” She hurried her words along to get them out in one breath.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Doing that violated GaFTA’s Prime Directive.”

  “Exactly,” said Achilles. “The trade sanctions for doing something like that are draconian, including complete quarantines.”

  “From what my Murm friend Chit says, the Prime Directive is more often treated like the First Suggestion.”

  “True,” said Achilles. “Let me just say that some species are more equal than others when it comes to stretching the law.”

  “A universal truth,” I said. “But you’re talking about stuff that happened thirty-six hundred years ago. You’re an established congruency-using civilization. Why wouldn’t they just think you figured things out on your own? And since you’re hiding from the rest of the galaxy now, how much worse could it be to get stuck with a quarantine?”

  “It isn’t that simple,” said Achilles. “There’s more to the story.”

  “Humans don’t do simple,” I noted. “Go ahead, drop the other shoe.”

  “Akrotiri’s culture inherited the desire to trade and explore from both our human and G’nandrian sides,” said Achilles. “My original ancestors did a lot of trading around the Mediterranean. For the past three thousand years we’ve been surreptitiously visiting planets with pre-congruency civilizations and rescuing m
embers of other species slated to die in natural disasters.”

  “I can understand why, given your own history,” I said. “So you relocated the survivors elsewhere on their planet. What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong is that we didn’t move the rescued sentients elsewhere on their original planets,” said Achilles. “We followed the original G’nandrian trader’s example, brought them back to Akrotiri, and taught them how to use congruent technology. That means Akrotiri isn’t guilty of just one violation of GaFTA’s Prime Directive—there’ve been twenty-seven of them.”

  “Less than one a century,” I said. “That’s not too bad.”

  “Tell it to the Galactic Free Trade Association Council,” said Achilles. “They’d lock up our system and throw away the key.”

  “Are we talking about the same Galactic Free Trade Association?” I said. “In my experience, they’d be more interested in trade than quarantine.”

  “How long as Earth been in GaFTA?” asked my mom.

  “You know the answer to that,” I said. “Just over fifteen years.”

  “How long has Akrotiri been observing GaFTA in operation?” she went on.

  “Ummm… Over three thousand years?”

  “Uh huh,” said my mom. “We’ve been a bit naive and shielded from GaFTA’s worst politics.”

  I thought about the recent Pâkk-Orishen War and the Pâkk-Tigrammath War thousands of years ago. There was a lot I didn’t know. Come to think of it, I’d never heard of the Galactic Free Trade Association Council.

  “Okay,” I said. “Point taken.”

  “The member species of the Galactic Free Trade Association would have been willing to look the other way if a planet full of humans appeared using congruent technology they didn’t invent,” said Achilles. “We’ve got entertaining legislatures, too. But they can’t easily condone us abducting small populations of twenty-seven other species and giving them congruent technology in violation of their number one rule. It’s too much.”

  “I’m beginning to see the scope of the problem,” I said.

  This wouldn’t be easy.

  “What’s your current planetary population?” I asked.