“Don’t do my father any favors,” he said coldly, turning to take his leave. But he stopped short when Ulbrine grasped his elbow, the tingle of ley line energy warning him to stay.
“Then consider it a last-ditch effort to save your family name,” Ulbrine said, his eyes inches from Kal’s. “You’re the very last one in a very long line, Trent. Your parents were lucky to bring you to full term, and they spent their entire fortune keeping you alive.”
He let go, and Kal caught his balance. He remembered the bitter medicines, the painful experimental treatments. It had been akin to torture, and he had lost most of his childhood, but his parents had tried to make it up to him in other ways. Part of why he worked so hard was so that no other child would ever have to go through what he had.
Apparently satisfied Kal was listening, Ulbrine turned to the ocean to prevent anyone from reading his lips. “There are two ways elven lines maintain power,” he lectured. “Through money, which your parents utterly spent to keep you alive, or by having many children. You haven’t had much luck there, either. If you do nothing, your name will die with you.”
“I haven’t—” Kal started, feeling his masculinity threatened.
“Stop.” Ulbrine turned from the two women walking the beach to look him up and down. “Our race is dying, but some families, once the most powerful, are dying faster than others. Yours is on a knife’s edge. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Kal thought about the women he had had relations with over the years. None of them had gotten pregnant. Not even for a month or two.
“Which brings me to the second reason I want you there,” Ulbrine said softly. “If Trisk successfully used a donor virus to introduce new code into an established individual such that it breeds true, I want to know. People are not tomatoes, but technique is technique, and if it can be applied to repair our genome, she has to be moved into a real lab.”
A job at NASA, perhaps? he thought bitterly. Trisk’s ideas were dangerous, not only because they were inherently flawed, but also because they would suck the funding from his own research, research that wasn’t based on hasty assumptions. Somehow he kept it from his face. Trying to explain it to Ulbrine would only reinforce the old man’s idea that he was being jealously stubborn, not stubbornly pragmatic.
“She’s done more in that wretched human lab than ten men with access to all our elven advances.” Ulbrine hesitated. “This opportunity is a gift, Kal.” Hunched with his elbows on the wooden railing, the older man eyed Kal, the dappled shade of the palm making his eyes look black. “If you find errors in the immunity of the tactical virus, it will be your task to fix them.”
“You want me to fix her work?” Kal asked in disbelief, but in his very question he saw the beginnings of an idea.
“What I want is for you to give us control of something worth having,” Ulbrine said. “It will take stealth and cleverness and test your ability to manipulate to the utmost. These are the traits that define the best of us, Kal, and your father was the epitome of the warrior poet steadfastly doing what needed to be done to keep our people alive. Even the most ugly of deeds.” He hesitated, focus going back to the water. “Perhaps I made a mistake. Sometimes it skips a generation.”
But Kal hardly heard, his mind racing forward, seeing this for the golden chance that Ulbrine never dreamed it was. He could do what the enclave wanted and bring it to their attention that Trisk’s donor virus was not the savior to their species it looked to be, prove that other avenues of research shouldn’t be shut down in the name of fast results. He could stomach Trisk thinking he was a field manager if it might bring the perils of her flawed research to light.
Pulse quickening, Kal gripped the worn railing. “I’ll do this,” he said. “But if I have to make repairs to her work, I want my name on it, not hers.” If it bore his name, he could keep her techniques and utilize them on his own organism. And with that, NASA would again be in his reach, his family name restored.
“That sounds fair, Ulbrine,” a light but resonant voice rumbled, and Kal spun, shocked to realize Colonel Wolfe had come up silently behind them both. Rick and Max remained at the table, the older man slumped in what Kal now recognized as jet lag.
“I knew he’d do it,” Rick said, jostling Max’s elbow. “Didn’t I say he’d do it?”
Max waved a listless hand, the cigarette dropping ash into his coffee.
“I need a few days to wrap up my life here,” Kal said softly. He had no emotional ties, and he’d accumulated only a few belongings in three years. It would be easier to leave everything behind. Except for his orchid collection, of course, carefully developed and tended like the obsessive-compulsive hobby it was.