Star Force: Quenar (SF88) (Star Force Origin Series) by Aer-ki Jyr Page B

it under our control.”
    “A preserve,” Riley amended with a smile as he looked
at Paul, “and we can see if we can get her speed up a bit.”
    Pryon looked confused. “Why would we want to increase
her capabilities?”
    “Walking the dog,” Davis said with a satisfied nod. “I
like it.”
    “Explain please,” Yetti asked, also confused.
    “Something before your time,” Davis said as he stood
up and began pacing around the perimeter of the ‘windows’ as he thought. “Dogs
used to be kept as pets, and the pet owners often did nothing with them.
Treated them like furniture that just sat around and looked good, maybe did a
few tricks. They died rather fast from the stagnation, not to mention developed
many disorders prior to that. It was found that what they called ‘exercise’ was
beneficial to both the longevity and temperament of the dogs, so their owners
would take them out into public areas to walk them, partly as a status symbol
but also to maintain their pets in what they thought was the responsible
manner.”
    “What exactly is a pet?” Pryon asked.
    “A term from the dark ages,” Davis said with mild
disgust. “It can mean one’s property, a keepsake, a pampered individual, or a
piece of living art. It comes from a time when Humans looked into the eyes of
another and deemed them not to be people, and from that a lot of bad things
came. Pets weren’t immune to that, but they tended to fair better than those
labeled ‘cattle.’ Eating pets was taboo, but aside from some that were well
cared for, most pets were left to stagnate and suffer in ways their owners did
not understand.”
    “I’m glad I missed that,” the Duke said, catching onto
the point. “You want to train the Uriti?”
    Davis looked to Riley. “What are you estimates on
reworking the transmitter?”
    “No clue. The power levels are high enough, I think,
but our syntax is wrong or we just smell bad. I don’t know. We could stumble
onto the right settings tomorrow or a thousand years from now.”
    “Which means we need to pursue simultaneous courses of
interaction,” Davis wisely said as the possibilities unfolded in his mind like
pages of a book being speed read. “If the Uriti will respond to orders, we can
train it even if it doesn’t understand why. And the more orders we get it to
successfully follow, the greater the influence we will have over it. Perhaps
more than even the Chixzon did. And while the Uriti seems to be immune to
stagnation as far as death is concerned, my gut says that it is not immune to
all of its effects?” he asked, looking to the trailblazers.
    “My credits say the same,” Paul agreed, with Jason
nodding in sync.
    “We might get it liking us despite the genetic
controls,” Riley added, “just by getting it into better shape.”
    “Them,” Yetti amended,
drawing glances from them all. “If we’re going to solidify our position here we
need to bring in more Uriti, perhaps not immediately, but there is one nearby
that we have leverage to get released. Others are well guarded, but some races
might not be protecting them to gain leverage, but rather to keep their own
people safe. If we could prove that we could remove the threat safely and take
it far away from their civilization, some of them might give them up freely.
Hell, they might even pay us to take them off their hands.”
    Davis, on sudden impulse, stopped his pacing of the
perimeter and headed for a work station, pulling up a map of the system and
zooming out until 10 or so systems were visible. He then pulled it out again,
seeing what was there within the nearest 100, then pulled back again to the
nearest 1000 before spotting the first inhabited system…a Star Force colony
that was relocating the Hedrock race to their
homeworld, but doing so as a ward of the empire rather than an independent
civilization, per their request.
    Davis remained silent as he worked, pulling up stellar
data for the stars around the Alamo System and