surrounds you has dulled your nerve endings while your hide heals.”
Gel tank. That explained the muffled quality of Z’shezhira’s voice. He suddenly became aware of a strange, crowded sensation in his skull’s maxillary region. A breathing tube, no doubt, probably attached to an amphibious microphone.
“From what am I healing?” he asked.
“Severe radiation burns, sustained during the mishap on Sazssgrerrn.”
“Mishap?” Why couldn’t he remember what had happened?
“I am told it was an extremely large solar-mass ejection, First Myrmidon. It occurs when the balance of forces within a star’s photosphere becomes—”
“Such things are known to me, Z’shezhira.” Gog’resssh had never had any patience for tech-caste lecturing. “What, precisely, was the outcome of this ‘mishap’?”
Silence followed, irritating Gog’resssh further.
“I regret to inform you,” Z’shezhira said at length, “that Warrior-Caste Hatchery Crèche P152 was destroyed.”
“My soldiers?”
“We extracted nineteen warrior-caste survivors and twenty-two from the technological and artisan subcastes. All survivors immediately underwent treatment. Several have since died. The prognosis appears good for the rest, if guarded. Still, the neurological damage was ext—”
This was too much to get his mind around. “What of the eggs?” he said, interrupting.
“Gone.”
“All of them?”
“I fear so. Sazssgrerrn itself is now uninhabitable.”
My mission was to defend those eggs. And if Dr. Rreszsesrr—the ancient scientist who had probably been reduced to a clawful of ashes by the Sazssgrerrn “mishap”—was to be believed, those eggs had represented the entirety of his own caste’s hopes for the future. Not to mention the future of the Gorn Hegemony itself. The black pit of despair into which Gog’resssh had narrowly avoided plummeting moments earlier suddenly returned with a vengeance.
This time he tumbled headlong into it.
Intermittent voices reached across the sedative-saturated void in which Gog’resssh floated. Tech-casters speaking in their uniquely opaque argot.
He heard something about severe radiation exposure. And burns. And “radiogenic damage” to someone’s genes. Were they discussing his officers and troops? Or were they talking solely about Gog’resssh himself? He decided it probably didn’t much matter.
Then he heard one of the male doctors say “study them all, then euthanize them all” before going on to explain to somebody—Z’shezhira, perhaps?—that genetically-damaged Gorn soldiers could never be permitted to pollute what remained of the warrior caste’s gene pool.
“After all,” the voice continued, “we cannot compromise the Gorn Hegemony’s health and safety.”
Consciousness returned more easily the next time, and the time after that. Gog’resssh was pleased to be out of the tank, though he could have done without the pain that the cessation of neutral buoyancy had brought him as he began getting used to Gorn-standard shipboard gravity. His recovery continued apace over the next several diurnal cycles, despite the awful knowledge that had settled upon him like a heavy shelf of granite sitting on his chest.
My caste’s next generation has been burned to a cinder, along with any prospect of replacing it. And these tech-casters will probably put us all down without a thought once they’ve extracted whatever useful data our suffering may generate.
Though Gog’resssh studiously avoided giving voice to those thoughts—particularly when paying a supervised visit to Second Myrmidon Zegrroz’rh or any of the seventeen other officers and men who had survived the Sazssgrerrn “mishap”—he knew he could never be rid of his self-immolating misgivings.
Not until he found a way out of here, preferably for both himself and his troops, and began trying to secure a new crècheworld for his caste.
It wasn’t until his sixth diurnal cycle aboard the S’alath, during one of Z’shezhira’s infirmary visits, that Gog’resssh dared hope that his dream might be realized.
“You say the search for a new warrior hatchery planet is among this vessel’s mission objectives?” he said after Z’shezhira had mentioned the topic in passing while moving a scanner over the steadily healing scales of his back and shoulders.
“It’s one of several,” she said, her vertical pupils riveted to the readout on her medical scanner. “But it has been a high priority for this vessel for many Gornar suncircuits. Since the events at Sazssgrerrn, the political, technological, and labor castes now regard it as a matter of the highest priority.”
Of course they do, Gog’resssh thought bitterly. Now that it is too late to save any part of the Sazssgrerrn Crèche. Now that it is too late to cleanse me of my shame, my failure.
“Does this mean that you have identified some candidate replacements for Sazssgrerrn?” he asked.
Her scaled, heavy brow ridges crumpled into a thoughtful posture. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
Gog’resssh bared his teeth to convey his impatience with that answer. “I do not understand.”
“It is difficult to explain.”
“You tech-casters