“It could destroy everything we’ve built here.”

“What?”

“This arrival is too dangerous to be made public knowledge. By association, the Triad has decided that you are too dangerous as well. I intervened, out of respect for your father, to spare your life.”

Flynn opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

“You see the gravity of this now? The Triad was prepared to erase you, completely, without archival—”

Flynn could care less about the Hall of Minds. But the thought that the Triad considered killing him—the current, flesh-and-blood person—just to avoid some sort of “disruption,” that was worse than appalling. But, thanks to his boss, Flynn had stayed alive, under house arrest in the barracks by the fallen seed.

“Why are you here?” Flynn asked.

“I wanted you to know that this will be over soon.” He looked into Flynn’s face. “When things return to normal, I want your promise not to make any waves. Don’t make me regret helping you.”

“I—”

“Please, Flynn. Your father was my friend.”

Do you even have friends? Flynn thought.

He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded.

Sheldon let go of Flynn’s shoulder and said, “Thank you.” As he got up to leave he glanced at the comm screen and said, “White has mate in three moves.”

Flynn heard Tetsami whisper inside his skull, What are they going to do?

Date: 2526.5.30 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

The next day, they had an answer.

Flynn and Tetsami watched as three tracked vehicles rolled across the clearing in the direction of the seed. The vehicles were ocher metal, squat, and carried large cylindrical power plants on their backs.

“What the hell are those?” Flynn muttered.

“Mining equipment,” Tetsami said, an invisible presence next to him. “We had dozens of the things when we founded this misbegotten planet.”

“Mining equipment? What for?”

“Those things have the highest energy gamma lasers on this rock, unless someone’s gone and started building hovertanks I don’t know about.”

“Oh.” Flynn paused. He finally said, “Fuck.”

The closed-minded bastards of the Triad were going to destroy the seed. Forget that it was the space-borne equivalent of their sacred Hall of Minds, it was disruptive.

Worse, Flynn knew that the debate that probably had raged in the Triad and the upper echelons of the Salmagundi leadership in the last month—and, good lord, how those old farts loved a debate—wouldn’t even have touched on the moral question of incinerating a million minds or the progeny of an unimaginably advanced civilization. What would have taken a month of debate would have been the logistics of how to incinerate the damn thing.

“We should do something,” Flynn said.

“Do you mean that?”

“What are you asking, Gram?”

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