Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 12: The New Boss (Patreon)

I stayed silent, lazily sorting through my options. Do praxi even read school forums?

Maybe. Or maybe he just remembered me from those events three years ago. After all, it had cost them treasures, freedom, and lives.

"How do you know me?" I asked directly.

The head prax snorted sarcastically, baring his sharp teeth.

"You mean it was too small an event for you to remember?" he asked cheekily. "I don't think it seemed that insignificant to you when you were running for your life out of our trap."

Something told me I didn't much fancy working under this boss. So I decided to show right away that we weren't going to get along.

"I was there," I nodded, switching to the same sarcastic, cheeky tone. "It wasn't much fun. Probably about as much fun as when you lot got smashed under the volcano, or on the planetary base. Or maybe when we captured your ships?"

The praxi clenched their jaws, hid their teeth, and pursed their lips.

"Do you have some personal grudge against me, or is it just general hatred?" I asked.

"You're part of the reason I'm stuck in this hole," he snapped. "As far as I'm concerned, that's fairly personal."

"So that's the reason?" I asked. "Not the fact that your Alliance was carrying out genocide against natives for resources and profit?"

"Oh!" he said, clapping theatrically. "Noble humans and their morals! They'd never stoop to robbing and killing others just to survive, would they, lads?" he asked his mates, looking for support.

His mates nodded in unison.

"Noble humans would never have stripped other people's ships clean, taken thousands prisoner, or started calling us 'hired workers' because it sounds nicer than 'trophies'!" his anger grew more direct, more honest, and started pouring out faster. "Don't lecture me about morals, lad You killed us for your own survival, exactly the same way we killed the kalamari for ours. The only difference is who lost."

"The difference," I raised my voice, "is that we didn't run a genocide against a civilian population for profit."

"The difference is you wiped out thousands of kalamari indiscriminately, while we let you live."

"You did that out of good old-fashioned calculation, not kindness!" the praxi barked.

Well, I had nothing to argue with there.

"Fair enough," I said. "If we were acting on conscience, we should've carved you up the same way you carved up the kalamari. Unfairness is a bitch!"

There, he had nothing left to argue with.

"Curse me all you like," I said, shrugging. "The time for fighting's over. You should've fought on the planet three years ago."

"Against the Fives you threw at us?" he replied. "I'm not an idiot. They don't take idiots into portal technicians."

Logical, and honest, cold-blooded technician's arithmetic: no point fighting a stronger opponent, and he'd understood that perfectly well even back then.

So what the hell had he made this whole scene for?

An awkward silence fell. The other two praxi went back to their steaks, as if they'd decided the interesting part of the conversation was over and nothing further was worth pulling away from lunch for.

"Right then," the boss said, with a malice still in his voice, "throw me your diploma."

I opened my interface and sent over the certification file for Shako Nokh. The name displayed in full, without the usual Earth-style abbreviation of one's given name, but the interfaces were fully compatible.

Made sense, seeing as praxi interface tech had improved ours in the first place.

Shako accepted the file and glanced at the data that popped up in front of his eyes.

"Fine," he said. "Consider the interview passed. Show up tomorrow at eight."

"That's it?" I couldn't quite hide my mild surprise.

"Were you expecting something more?" Shako snorted. "A test? An exam? I haven't got time for that. Be on time, or I'll write you up."

"Don't expect you can push me around," I warned him.

"Don't get cheeky with the boss, sonny," he replied with a grin.

Bloody hell!

Looked like I had quite the job ahead of me.

I left without saying goodbye. Anger boiled inside me, and beneath it, a sense of trouble was brewing.

Poor, sodding, offended praxi! Forced to work!

Oh dear, oh dear, what awful people we are.

Slavers!

Well… honestly, we did have that sin on our conscience. We'd only just freed the thinhorns.

But the thinhorns, unlike Shako, had never been guilty of anything. They'd been grown in test tubes, literally.

On the outside, they'd looked enough like demons to soothe someone's ego and demonstrate humanity's superiority over the horned bastards.

Ha! I'd never thought about it before, but there'd been a more pragmatic side to it too.

Human cultivators had learnt to exist alongside half-demons, and somewhere deep down, on a subconscious level, that was supposed to strip away every block and fear Earth had built up against the invincible threat that had hung over it, ravaging it, for millennia.

The whole thing came down to the bloody horns. Even if theirs had been thinner, thanks to the mix of demon and human DNA, the thinhorns had let people get used to the mere presence of horns. Now they wouldn't come as a shock in battle.

Humanity had used the thinhorns for its own survival. They hadn't chosen to be born that way. They hadn't carried out genocide, they'd barely even held a weapon except for training.

The thinhorns had been born into the world already doomed to service, with a mangled hormonal balance and no ability to reproduce. With a fate someone else had decided for them before they were even born.

The praxi were an entirely different story.

Shako, whatever the technician act he put on, had still been part of a raid that wiped out a hundred and forty thousand sentient lives for profit.

This technician had serviced the portal rings, kept the systems running, provided the logistics of genocide, even if he'd never once raised a weapon against the victims himself, even if he'd had nothing to do with developing or maintaining the fungal zombies that had done all the dirty work.

He, and people like him, deserved a far harsher punishment than working as a technician on a safe base.

The difference between him and the thinhorns wasn't cosmetic in the slightest. The difference was one of substance, not form.

You could argue about the weakest of the praxi left aboard the ships, but not about this bastard. And once it was all over, I'd really rather the praxi weren't integrated into our society the way the thinhorns had been.

Novak had promised to give them new ships and let them go…

Wouldn't that make humanity guilty of future genocides?

I doubted scum like this one could be reformed.

Leaving the division's grounds with quick, angry strides, I called Novak.

"Right on time," he said.

"Why didn't you warn me about the praxi?" I asked without preamble. "One of them is my new boss now, and my first conversation with him went completely wrong."

"Slipped my mind," Novak replied evenly, without a trace of guilt in his voice. "That topic died down ages ago. And his qualifications outrank anyone else we've got. I've been busy with damage control after your little fireworks display with the aura."

"How bad is it?"

"Aoran's with Bergquist right now," Novak said. "That's the worst case. He's in a pod."

The name meant nothing to me, but it was probably the one they'd carried out on a stretcher from the neighbouring chamber.

"His chances of recovery are good," Novak went on. "Aoran's handling it personally."

"Good PR for federal medicine?"

"Not without that, no," Novak agreed. "The main thing is it takes the load off you. Afterwards, just apologise and hand him a little box of gifts. It won't even cost you anything. I've already put the box together."

"Two more are just in the medbay," Novak continued, as if reading off a list. "Lighter effects, don't need a pod."

"Two more?"

"One got off lightest, barely affected at all. The other's case resolves with a week of good recovery tea."

"Still, all of them lost resources and time. If you don't want more enemies, settle this."

"How?"

"I'm not going to hold your hand through every conversation. Sending you the list. Sort it out."

A message popped up in my interface a second later, four names.

T. Hamilton — minimal harm

F. Moreau — near-minimal

A. C. Nwosu — migraines (in the medbay)

N. R. Choudhury — mild core destabilisation (in the medbay)

So I needed to meet all four, apologise, and press some sort of bribe into their hands so they'd forget about their troubles, and ideally, tell everyone what a great guy I was into the bargain.

There was a problem with the apologising part.

I remembered how old Chen had apologised over his grandson…

Bloody hell, I hadn't thought about that little shit in ages, and now some sort of conscience had woken up in me, as if I owed him something.

Not the point.

The main thing was that a junior couldn't refuse an apology from a senior. And I don't mean age, I mean cultivation.

I suspected the whole five of them would turn out to be older than me, I'd bloomed early, which only added to the tension. And the result of an apology could either ease that tension or make it worse, which I really didn't want.

The injured parties, in private conversations, might say I hadn't apologised enough and had generally acted like a complete arsehole. So the apology needed to be valuable, public, and hit exactly the right mark.

Mind you, the injured parties might refuse to meet publicly. Except for the ones currently in the medbay.

And even with a public apology, they might say it had all been for show.

Either way, they wouldn't be able to ignore a valuable gift.

I decided to focus on the two in the medbay. I still needed to work out the cause of the migraines, but for the core destabilisation, Bao had a tea that could help with that.

Not a cheap tea.

Still, I could trade it for Old Well, which might, in theory, help with the migraines.

So I got in touch with Bao and traded ten portions of Old Well for the same amount of Stone Root, then headed for the medbay.

On the way, it occurred to me to contact Zola and have her gather information on all four injuries, along with the wards where the two patients in the medbay were being kept.

Zola was outraged, brought up doctor-patient confidentiality, and flatly refused.

The list of injuries landed in my inbox right when I was already trying to figure out which doctor to bribe with what to get the whole info.

I'd guessed right about the core destabilisation. The migraine, though, turned out to actually be a thunderclap headache caused by a minor subarachnoid haemorrhage, and it was easily treatable with our medicine. No point wasting any extra resources on it, but out of politeness, I threw in 10 portions of Old Well anyway.

I'd planned to visit Choudhury first, but Nwosu was right on the way, so I stopped in on him.

I only had a name, so I had to check all four patients in the ward through my interface. They tensed up when I appeared, and probably did the same thing I did, because three sets of eyes locked onto Nwosu, a cadet with a solid build, coal-dark skin, and short, curly black hair.

So I'd have an audience. Wonderful!

"Hey!" I waved to him, walking closer and pulling a box of tea out of my spatial pocket. "A little apology."

"Thanks," he said cautiously, getting up from his bed.

"Lie down, lie down."

"I'm not banned from getting up," he said, eyeing the box with curiosity.

I pulled a chair over, sat down myself, and gestured for Nwosu to sit too.

"Old Well, basically Pure Thoughts plus, for the third-to-fourth stage. Red quality, from the Federation," I rattled off, another one of my well-practised speeches, noting his first flicker of pleasant surprise. "I never meant to cause you any harm. Honestly, I didn't even know it was possible. But I'm not shrugging off responsibility. This is the small apology," I nodded at the box in his hands. "But I'd like to close this whole thing out properly. So, what phase of your breakthrough were you at, what resources did you spend?" I asked him. "I'll try to compensate as much as I can," I smiled, mentally crossing every finger and toe I had. "Just, please, don't let it include a crystal!"