Primal Estate: The Candidate Species (50 page)
Read Primal Estate: The Candidate Species Online
Authors: Samuel Franklin
“If you’re against him, then why are you surveying villages for harvest?” Rick asked.
“Why are you trying to kill me and supporting agendas that serve his project?” Ryvil countered. “We are all occasionally forced into service that we do not support. It is our burden. We must bear it only so long as we have to.”
“What should I tell Synster about whether or not I shot you?”
“I would certainly like him to think I am dead, especially now that we are all stranded on this planet, but he knows that the ship’s signal would have prompted me to activate my shield. He would know that your attempt would fail. You must say that you were able to transport home moments before you were caught. You must be angry with him for not warning you.”
Rick’s mind was spinning. I must be the luckiest man alive, he thought. All he wanted to do was go home and be with his family, raise Carson, marry Nwella, have babies in the house, and forget about Marcus in the back yard. There were probably a million questions he had for Syrjon and Ryvil, none of which he could think of and none of which they were likely to answer.
“If we’re allies, then why did you try to kill me and instead hurt Carson?”
“Rick, you really need to give me more credit. If I’d wanted to kill you, do you really think I would have failed? The answer to your question is in the results of the action that I took. That is all I will say,” responded Ryvil.
Rick had his instructions, and he was alive. For now, that was enough. As he pressed the controls that would take him home, Syrjon and Ryvil were walking away from him, starting up the vast mountainside that had loomed behind them. They assured him they had the means by which to continue their project.
Three days later, Carson, Nwella, Utu, and Shainan were all back from their trip, settling down and getting some much needed rest. Apparently, they’d enjoyed quite an adventure. When Carson and the others poured themselves out of the Charger when they first got home, nobody wanted to talk. They all looked exhausted and dirty.
Rick asked, “What happened? You guys look like you’ve been through the mill.” They had brown stains on their clothing that looked like dried blood.
Carson pulled a blood stained samurai sword out of the car and assured him, “We’re okay, Dad. Nobody really wants to talk right now. Some stuff happened, but we’re good now. We didn’t leave any evidence…to speak of, and Utu made sure we weren’t followed.”
Nwella, Shainan, and Utu all nodded agreement, as Utu tucked another sword into his belt and shuffled toward the front door. Carson paused as he followed the others, as if in deep thought.
Rick was about to stop him and demand answers, but he was interrupted by Carson’s statement. “You might want to check the trunk, I think you’ll like what you see…some of it, anyways. We’re developing quite a little arsenal.”
Rick walked to the trunk and popped it open. There were two plastic garbage bags tucked as far back into the rear as they would go. Rick grabbed the nearest one and pulled it open…the remains of the leg of some kind of hooved animal. Utu. That makes sense, Rick thought, remembering the two deer carcasses he found a week ago hanging in the trees out back.
He grabbed the next bag and pulled it open. Four Provenger gauntlets. Rick quickly checked for bolts. None. He was about to yell to Nwella, who had just entered the house, to ask if it was safe to have them. Then he realized that if they weren’t, she probably would have done something about it.
Rick didn’t ask for details for a number of days. He had been through a mission where he’d returned covered with blood, and he understood. Everyone seemed to just want to sleep for the next twenty-four hours. By the way they looked, Rick suspected they’d been on the go for much of their trip. They’d obviously had a run-in with the Provenger and must have killed them. Provenger don’t just leave those gauntlets lying around. And after what he’d been through, he just didn’t care. As long as everyone was home safe, that was all that mattered. Carson would tell him when he was ready.
The next evening, Rick wanted to get things back to normal. Utu and Shainan were in their room either making love, taking one of their dream trips down memory lane, or talking about their developing baby. Carson was healthy, thanks to the Recombinant, getting caught up on some homework, and getting over the thought of a local man being buried in the back yard.
Rick and Nwella were expecting Synster to arrive and he didn’t make them wait long. It was an unusually mild evening, so Rick and Nwella were on the patio sitting by the fire wrapped in bison hides. Barnes and Nobelle were inside. He appeared in a startling manner, directly in front of them. Synster tried to ignore Nwella. She was banished, after all. He had read the report, and had only narrowly decided to let Rick live.
They spoke about his recent mission. “I tried to get to you regarding the complications with your last assignment, but I couldn’t get away. It was a shame the assignment was a failure. I wanted that done. It may be impossible now that he’s gone. He cannot be found,” Synster said, divulging the fact that Ryvil had absconded.
Synster believed that neither Rick nor Nwella knew anything of the Provenger Nation Ship being compromised. He believed that perhaps Ryvil had gone mad and committed sabotage. Perhaps Ryvil expected the new ship to arrive at any time and would benefit from the delays caused by the disabled ship. Synster was still working on a theory, but resources for an investigation were stretched thin. He would be lucky to be able to operate at a minimal level while stuck on Earth.
“We will, nevertheless, continue with the Project. Rick, I will be contacting you regarding the progress of our initiatives and your government’s policy changes.”
To Rick and Nwella’s great surprise, he turned to Nwella and said to her with all sincerity. “I am grieved that we should come to this. Take care of yourself. Don’t eat any of the candidate species. It would be poison to your system. Wheat is in everything on Earth.” And with that, he was gone.
Nwella turned her head toward Rick and gave him a dumb stare. After what she had been through the last three days, she had begged for death with that poison in her system. She would never be the same. Her body had taken the brunt of the toxins so that her baby would survive. She felt she had been weakened to almost human strength.
Rick thought about what Synster said. The candidate species. “Hmm, that’s funny. On this last assignment, I saw Syrjon, and he referred to me as their ‘candidate species’. I remember. He said, ‘Rick Thompson, our candidate species’, just like that.”
“You must be mistaken, Rick,” Nwella said. “The candidate species is the one we genetically alter for our purposes. For this project it was wheat.”
“No, I’m pretty sure that’s what he said.”
“Rick, you must be confused. Let’s talk about our baby. Do you have any names in mind?”
“Well, there’s a lot to consider. There’s the boy/girl issue. Then there’s the human/alien thing.” Rick gave her a wink. “How about Ryan if it’s a boy and Gwen if it’s a girl?”
As the fire burned low, Rick and Nwella spoke of simple things that people in a stable world with common interests might concern themselves. Rick felt he deserved a break. The world was, for now, safe from the harvest. They had time to think, to plan, and to hope. Meanwhile, the universe around them swirled with complexities that neither of them could, or desired, to understand.
End of book one: The Candidate Species
Appendix
A
Recipes
…an obligatory addition for diet books and serious novels
Shainan’s red meat cooked in ash
- Build big fire
- Let fire burn down to coals
- Put meat in fire
- Wait until village dogs lose interest and walk away
- Flip meat and leave for same amount of time
- Remove meat, brush off large coals and season with salt, if you have it.
Utu’s whole fish cooked in ash
- Build big fire
- Let fire burn down to coals
- Put gutted fish in fire
- Wait until village dogs lose interest and walk away
- Roll fish over and leave for same amount of time
- Remove fish, brush off large coals and season with salt, if you have it.
Appendix
B
Nwella’s Provenger Nation Ship diagram
30 second attack plan
Appendix C
Planning Committee
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TRANSCRIBED RECORD
Planning Committee
Candidate Species: Yngorn
As you've already been informed in your brief, our objective of populating this planet through the advancement of their agricultural technology has been fully vetted by the Algorithm. A delicate balance must be struck between the subject species’ population growth and their technological impairment. The goal is to provide us with a maximum population increase over time without their posing a technological threat upon our return. As has been well-established, any intelligent organism, provided with the efficiencies of agriculture, will have the time and the incentive to develop and accumulate technology. A hunting/gathering society, on the other hand, has the time but not necessarily the incentive or means to do the same.
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We are therefore compelled to include various progressive deleterious effects to our agricultural product introduction. These qualities are designed to obstruct health and productivity in their post-harvest years.
Our goal is that they be reasonably healthy and of proper carcass mass index during harvest age, without being advanced enough to defend themselves against us. Our return to this planet is scheduled for nine years, eight months, our time. Allowing for Accelerated Gravitational Time Dilation, we will return in approximately twelve thousand, eight hundred and ninety-three years planet time. We have the charter to proceed as necessary to generate a viable product. We must be aggressive. Let’s just say, any enemies we make now, won't be around to trouble us later.
Prior experience has shown that it is imprudent to rely on a single mechanism to achieve our ends, and we are best rewarded by implementing multiple strategies. We are fortunate in regard to this planet, as we have a grass that grows throughout a great variety of regions that is highly receptive to genetic modification. We can amend its qualities to suit our needs. This enables us to implement not a single, but a multi-pronged approach with this one species to achieve our goals. There is other vegetation that offers potential, and it will be made available for agricultural development. But it is only this one grass that produces a grain, largely poisonous and unpalatable to the human population, which we will modify to enhance its beneficial properties for the purposes of achieving production goals.
PAUSE
