“They’ve got a whole ceremony to take the balls out of the guards when they age out or want children, and then give them to a new recruit.” Linao was right beside Ethan now, standing next to the box. “The normal population keep tight control of the tech, I guess so the super soldiers don’t get the idea in their heads to take over.”
“Well, maybe that’s the issue. I was involved in cataloguing the inventory from the ancestral ship on Garmen, but I onlyfound out about the box since your report. There’s no indication they were used at all, although they could have been, and then all returned to the box because they were defective, for all I know.” Ritter walked over to join her. “Did anyone else experiment with them before me, do you know?”
“The ancestral ship these are from was how the Core Companies found Garmen to begin with,” Linao said. “The signal from the mothership was picked up by one of the asteroid miners and it led them to where it was located on the planet. The scientists were sent out to inventory and move the tech as quickly as possible away from the signal, in case a Verdant String ship picked it up. I don’t think anyone did anything with the box until I got back from the monster planet.”
“Was the Garmen ship broken up, or intact?” Ritter asked. He sounded enthralled.
Ethan couldn’t help but feel the same. That’s how the Cores had found Garmen? A signal had led them to it, and they’d never disclosed their find?
Of course not, he realized. The Verdant String would never have allowed them to claim Garmen as the first breakaway planet, unaffiliated to the VSC, if they’d known.
Now that the VSC had clawed Garmen back about a year ago, they would be surveying the whole planet. Would they find the ship?
He guessed they would, sooner or later. It had to be big.
“I didn’t see the Garmen mothership myself, but apparently it didn’t crash. It’s fully intact,” Linao said. “The people onboard obviously meant to land on Garmen, and they set up a small settlement around the ship initially.”
“So what happened to them?” Ritter asked. “Garmen was uninhabited when the Cores found it.”
“They died, and not long after they arrived, by the looks of things. So far, there’s no indication of how or why. A disease,maybe. One thing is for sure, if they used the nanotech they’d been given, it didn’t help them survive.”
“Well, there’s place for ten in here, and there’s a full set accounted for,” Ritter agreed. “So either they didn’t need it, or it didn’t work. Or someone was nervous about using it.”
“Hmm,” Linao agreed. “No one on the reclamation crew knew what the box was, and it didn’t look particularly interesting, so it was set aside in preference for some of the more obviously useful tech, until we got back from Fjern and worked out what it was.”
“Fjern?” Ritter asked.
“That’s what the locals call the monster planet,” Linao said. “And they have a lot more than a set of ten there. Maybe because Garmen is so close to the actual Verdant String, the Garmen group only got a single set.” She paused. “So what’s the plan now? Another dose for our two subjects?”
“Why not?” Ritter said. “If the balls have degraded over time, there’s no harm done, and maybe one or two will have some capability left.”
“You can definitely take them back out when you see a result?” Linao asked.
“Yes, the extraction machine was inside the box with the balls,” Ritter said. “You said in your report they use the same thing on the monster planet?”
“They call it a gyrna-na.” Linao made a sound of interest and Ethan guessed Ritter was opening the box. “I only heard about it, I never saw one.”
“It draws the nanotech back out, no problem. It’s pretty easy to operate,” Ritter said. “We can experiment as we like, and then the top bosses can decide who gets the ones that work.”
He stepped closer to Ethan, and he felt the smooth ball land in the hollow of his throat again. Heard Ritter walk to Velda and do the same.
“You’re probably hungry,” Ritter said after he put the box away and took their blindfolds off. He tested their vitals, marked them down on his handheld screen.
Linao was leaning against a wall, arms crossed, watching them with lazy interest.
“You probably don’t need the blindfolds,” she said to Ritter.
“I can’t have anyone talking—” He cut himself off. Shrugged. “I guess you’re right.”
She gave them both a bright smile and walked out, calling the guards to come in to take them to the mess.
She was a piece of work, that one.
She knew they’d understand what she meant. That it didn’t matter what they saw, what they heard, because they’d been marked for death.
The hover strike hadn’t succeeded, but when they stopped being useful to Ritter, they would be ended another way.
That won’t happen.
