Sneak Peek - The Last Angel: The Hungry Stars, Chapter 19 (Patreon)

Working on the third and final update for this month, and as voted for it's a new chapter for THS. Some final preparations before planetfall are being made, and a bit of honesty slips through the League's habitual paranoia and secrecy. Hey, you try hiding from the entire galaxy for two millennia and see how open you are. :)

~

She felt the signal from Vegvisir long before Lieutenant te Neu announced it. “Captain Keating is hailing us.”

“Well,” Echo said, putting on her ‘Captain Sudoki’ face. “Let’s see what he wants.”

From the background, Keating was sitting in his personal office. “Captain Sudoki,” he began. “We’ll be ready for planetfall shortly; Parliament and the Synod are just putting the last pieces together before they officially greet you. I just wanted to have a private discussion with you first. There’s something I want to tell you, though I think you probably already know.”

Echo tilted her head slightly, catching her crew’s own surprise in the periphery of her vision. “Yes?”

He paused, trying to gather his thoughts. “More than a thousand years ago, we had a vicious civil war,” he said after a moment. “I won’t bore you with the history of it right now, but it had a substantial effect on our civilization and our culture. That crater two hundred kilometers north-east of New Providence used to be Providence, our original capital city. Either directly or indirectly, almost half our population was killed in the conflict and there was severe radiation damage to the environment. There are still regions on Nibiru itself that remain contaminated by fallout. We had to embrace... extraordinary measures just to survive.”

“Such as?” She knew where he was directing the conversation, but just in case he was referring to something else, she took the opportunity to ask.

Keating didn’t take the bait. Instead, he looked briefly pained. “Captain.”

Echo nodded. If their relationship had been more antagonistic, she might have played with him further, but there was no need to do so here. “Cloning.”

The man ran a hand over his closely-shaven scalp. “Yes. We know that the Confederacy had very strict laws regarding human cloning. At first, we simply followed them but after the war... we had no other choice. We simply didn’t have either the numbers or the undamaged genetic diversity left to maintain our civilization at its current state of development. So we threw away the old customs and accepted a new reality. Today, the majority of our people are either clones or direct descendants of clones.”

“Like you are?”

Obed’s expression froze briefly before he nodded slowly. “Yes. There are nearly forty thousand men with my exact genotype on Nibiru. We’re not gene-bred or engineered, but...” He trailed off, then raised his head. “Does this change anything?”

Echo briefly glanced to her crew. Grace had been the most uneasy about widespread cloning, but she’d also been uneasy about Echo and Red One being AI. The young woman saw the unspoken question on Echo’s face and gave her a steady, slow shake. “No,” she said, directing her attention back to Keating. “No, I don’t believe that it does.”