Dr. Ghix jolted and snatched up his tablet, and moved closer to Ohem. “Of course! It is a genuine pleasure to meet you, Jack. I would never dishonor myself by sharing any information without your permission.” He bowed, his front leg folding and the others splaying out so his head almost touched the floor. He popped back up and gave me a solemn look. “Please explain the symptoms, and we can take some samples of your blood and tissue to see what’s going on inside your body.” He looked at Sam and the girls and his smile widened. “Look around! Nothing can hurt you in this lab, so touch and test to your heart’s desire,” he said cheerfully.
It was the right thing to say.
Sam squealed and immediately went to a microscope at one of the desks. Patty and Callie gravitated towards the firing range. None of the weapons better be out or they’d be screwing around with them. I didn’t have any ear protection and didn’t feel like being deafened by the sound of gunfire in close quarters.
I turned when Dr. Ghix held out his hand to me. “Please, if you would let me take some blood for analysis,” he said, and I extended my arm towards him, pulling up my sleeve. He waved a rod-shaped scanner over my forearm in a slow back-and-forth motion and hummed when the scanner pinged and sat it down on the desk next to us. He picked up a white disk that looked like a hockey puck and pressed it to my forearm. I jumped when it pinched me and glared at the doctor. He smiled at me in apology and lifted the puck when it pinged at him.
“Sorry, I should have warned you about the sting.” He placed the puck inside a slot in what looked like a white computer tower and then turned back to me. “Now, what are your symptoms?” He asked.
I remembered the nano super pill on the shark ship and made a face. “I puked my guts up when they tried to give me the pill of nanos on the Vrax ship. I was out for days recovering and I was weak when I woke up. Shaky, headache, cramps. Now the translator is itching,” I said, pointing at my ear.
Ghix nodded and typed on his tablet. He placed it on the table next to the tower and picked up another puck. He met my eyes. “This is going to sting again. I’m taking tissue samples. It will take skin, muscle, and a piece of your nerve.” I nodded for him to do it, and he placed the puck against my forearm. It pinched worse than the other and I barely managed not to jerk my arm away from it. The puck pinged, and the doctor placed it into the tower like the last one.
“What was the test earlier?” I asked to break up the silence we’d fallen into while waiting for the tower to do something with the pucks.
Dr. Ghix looked at me in confusion, so I pointed at the firing range on the other side of the room where Callie and Patty were poking around. He looked back and his face brightened in understanding. “Ah yes, I was testing a new cannon. We have plasma cannons for close proximity contact with overwhelming enemy forces. The blow back burns many of our troop support. I was trying to find a new delivery method to minimize the risks.”
I smiled at him. “We call that danger close back where I’m from.”
He returned my smile. “That's an excellent name for it! Yes. Danger close. I like that.” And picked up his tablet to make a note.
I chuckled at him. “You’ll have to ask Callie about all the other military jargon we have on Earth. You’d probably like a lot of it,” I said, and pointed Callie out to the doctor and he made more notes on his tablet.
“Was your test successful?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No. There was still significant plasma fall out risk. Had I not been behind a shield, I would have been badly burned. It’s less of a problem for the armored soldier as plasma burn through is low risk, but if there is unarmored support or civilians then they would be harmed or killed by the cannon. Close proximity cannons or CPCs are used fairly often during wartime, especially during this last war we took part in on the planet Xemia. It spilled over into their cities and the CPC was used against their forces inside buildings. Civilians died.”
He gestured to Ohem, who stood at my side. “General At’ens tasked me with finding a solution.”
I looked over at my mate, who met my gaze. “Civilian deaths are unacceptable to me. No matter the enemy. We aim to make our weapons target only enemy combatants and avoid the unarmed.”
Knowing what I did about his ancestors’ actions towards my people and his opinion about those actions, it didn’t come as a surprise that he hated unnecessary death. He’d grown up learning about the atrocities committed by his own family. It was a wonder he hadn’t become a doctor or something instead of a soldier.
The computer tower pinged at us and Dr. Ghix looked down at his tablet in his hand. He stared at his tablet in confusion, tapping and swiping at it for several minutes. His brows lowered more and more as he read the results of my test. A hollow boom broke the tension that had been building while Ohem and I waited for the doctor to tell us what the hell was wrong with me.
I turned towards the noise and found Patty holding a gun in hand and looking back at us sheepishly. She was behind a shimmering blue barrier that separated the shooting range from the rest of the room, and it must have come down when she’d picked up the weapon as an automated protective measure. It hadn’t been there before.
Callie started shooting another gun at the mannequin that rose from the floor at the end of the range, there was almost no sound other than hollow popping. Sam didn’t even look up from whatever she was researching at her desk. Our little genius was no doubt in her version of heaven with all that information available to her. I grinned at Patty, gave her a thumbs up and she went back to blowing pieces off her alien shaped target.
“You already have nanos in your system,” Dr. Ghix said, and I turned away from the girls to give him my full attention. He was still looking at his tablet and tapping away at it. He looked up, his face was excited. “They are far more advanced than ours. I am going to have to run more tests to understand the extent of their capabilities, but I can tell you right now that these are absolutely revolutionary! It would take us years to reverse engineer them. It’s no wonder they rejected our inferior technology.”
He was almost manic as he shifted over to a desk and waved his hand in the air. A hologram screen appeared from the desk. Ohem and I moved to look at the data stream. I couldn’t make any sense of what I was looking at, but Ohem had gone stiff with shock.
He touched the screen and moved data around. “Rijitera nanotechnology. It’s no wonder you heal so fast,” he whispered, more to himself than to me. He scrolled through the screen some more and muttered to himself. He looked at the doctor. “She has the old tech inside her.”
I looked between them in confusion. “What does that mean?”
Ohem turned to fully face me and grabbed my hands. “You have the old Rijiteran systems inside you. Their nanos used to power everything of theirs. It was all biometrically locked to their species. They needed specialized nanos to power their weapons and armor. It gave them advanced reflexes and healing far beyond the capabilities of their already considerable natural baseline. It would seem yours are dormant. They work to adapt your body to environmental changes and heal damages, but all other functions are shut down.”
I shook my head. “How’d I get them? I’d remember the pain from the injections if I’d gotten them when I was younger. I didn’t even get my vaccines like normal Earth kids. I got no shots or pills growing up,”
Ohem chuffed. “You got them in utero, most likely. As did the rest of your kind. We do the same. Once a mother has nanos, her children will not have to get them later in life as they pass from mother to child during pregnancy. I imagine your people have had them for thousands of years from your ancestors before you. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that sooner.” He shook his head in self depreciation. “It was an obvious answer to your rejections. You had me too occupied with mating to think clearly,” he said, laughing.
I grinned and winked at him. “I’ll never apologize for that.”
I looked at the doctor who was watching us with a soft smile. “Can we activate the dormant parts? Maybe they will work as a translator too?”
He looked thoughtful at my question. “We don’t even have the beginnings of a program advanced enough to give commands to the nanos,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m afraid all I can do is speculate at this point. You would need to get your hands on a Rijiteran computer system to activate the more complicated settings these nanos no doubt have.”
