✅ Project SETI 2: The Daxut Plan

Part XIV: Worth

When Gabriel woke up, he was alone in the treatment room where he'd been resuscitated. Everything that occurred before he lost consciousness returned to him at once in an overwhelming wave, and he looked down at himself and realized what happened right away. He'd been violently apprehended—but for some reason, they saw fit to spare him.

He saw his helmet sitting on a counter nearby and attempted to check the holster on his hip, but the restraints automatically tightened when he tried to move. He sighed sharply upon realizing he had been disarmed and immediately tried to think of a way to get out of his current predicament. He looked down again and thought that if he could fish his legs out of the suit without causing the seemingly intelligent restraints to tighten again, he might be able to break the arm restraints by thrashing around hard enough...

His thoughts were interrupted by the door swiftly opening and closing. He recognized the blue-crowned alien that glided across the room as Jarah, the Daxut that had been 'looking after' Nova. His face tightened with disgust as she grew near.

"Hello, Gabriel." Jarah greeted him cheerfully in her incredibly sedating way. "I am so relieved to see you are okay."

Even though she meant to sound friendly, her tone came across as sinister to him. He gritted and bared his teeth. "Whatever you're about to try, Jarah, it's not going to work."

"Oh, don't be like that," she said as she sat down on the stool beside the bed. He tried to lean away from her, but his bindings kept him locked in place. "You'll hear what I have to say, won't you?"

Gabriel grunted and squeezed his eyes closed, as if that would stop him from hearing her voice. As she did with Nova before, the tranquilizing effect of her speech became so potent that he could have sworn he didn't even hear her speaking English. And yet, a moment later, the meaning of what she said came to him, and he could only answer in the affirmative. He begrudgingly offered a nod.

"You are indispensable to Project SETI. And I must thank you for all the very successful work you've done there... and of course, for introducing us to your very fertile friend," she hummed sardonically. She knew that he'd seen far too much of their activities aboard the Temetor One and reasoned that there was little point in trying to keep up appearances with him.

"What are you really going to do with him?" Gabriel demanded. He realized quickly that she was mocking him with the fact that he was directly responsible for the circumstance Nova currently found himself in, but he tried to put it out of his mind. He did genuinely want to know what they had planned for him and hoped that she would reveal something that might help him find him.

"As you are no doubt aware... we have created the technology for cloning human beings. The only major problem we were unable to fix, is that cloned humans have a very short lifespan—not so short that it's not worth it, but enough that it makes the whole blood necessary to create them a very precious resource... and, well. To have the 'original model', so to speak, is just economic—Nova doesn't need a constant supply of blood like the clones do. And in our fertility pods, he could do seventeen birth cycles per solar year, for total of nearly four hundr—"

Gabriel spat at her, and the disgusting combination of saliva and throat gunk landed right on her beak. She shrieked in surprise and looked down at him with a pointed but amused expression as she wiped it off and cleaned her hand against the back of her apron.

"Nova is worth more than the amount of fucking babies he can give you," he hissed.

"You are correct," Jarah bantered. She seemed to delight in his anger, which was on clear display not only on his face and in his voice, but in his elevated heart rate as well. "We can also use his blood for more clones, and his fat tissue for food."