His hands tremble drawing up the syringe, as the old memories swirl in eddies.

Always his father's face resurfaces. Bart Torgal frowns at the image - the face of his entire family. It's a harsh thing to truly know your father's weaknesses, but it's harsher still to know them written so faultlessly into your own DNA. Had all his clone-brothers felt this way?

He counts off the gradations, and the past floods back.

















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"So to your Inheritance my Son! The very legacy you were conceived for!"

A great slow shadow moves through the Yurt compartment over antique Turkeman rugs. High above, the vast structure of a Vesper looms through The Degasi's arching observation cupola. Then finally a sun breaks out behind the structure's flank.

Bart flinches at the glare of the station's clean white finish - alien in contrast to the dark ocean jewel below. If only Alterra's hands were so clean as its products! The company drops a Vesper over every wild planet they claim. If the scans show profit potential they return with their hulking Extractors. Another quarterly net profit - another husk of a planet.

"This 'Inheritance' Father . . . it's aboard the Vesper?" Bart ventures cautiously.

"No boy. But indeed, that was our first clue to its location" His father is well-heeled outcast indeed: Paul Torgal's silk suit styles him as an executive, rather than an ordinary tattooed Mongolian warrior-trader.

"You may have wondered how our small clan competes so well with the Galaxy's greatest trading behemoths? This I will tell you - we see though their eyes and ears my Son." As always, Paul Torgal carefully gauges his son's guarded expressions through his probing trader-implant tech.

"Ah, no thoughts to share on the matter then? Well this Vesper is such an 'eye'. It has scanned this planet these past 20 years. and by deciphering its transmissions, so too have we. But while Alterra awaits it's findings to span the light years, we have listened in real time. But I ask you boy: How so? Are we not equally distant in the Mongolian sector?"

Bart intakes a short breath, "Bugged of course .... but how? Only quantum entanglement transmits data faster than light, and yet no one ... but have we, Father?

"Ha!" Paul Torgal playfully pushes back his son's head, uncommonly animated and familiar now.

"Well well, your cognitive implants may have been worth a king's ransom after all! Yes, our recent successes with the Ancient Codex and have extracted some blueprints. How many centuries have passed ignorantly worshipping it as a religious symbol, a mere cargo cult made of the Architects visit to Old Earth? My God, we spawned from a race of brutish primitives. I was right to have stolen it!"

Bart stiffens slightly, but tries to mask his disgust with a prompt enquiry. 'But this legacy you speak of must be something else. Since you made me only to master exobiology .. the legacy is ... a biological one then. An agricultural bounty?"

Paul studies his son sceptically: "Consider boy, what has always been our Clan's strength? It is our trade in exclusive weaponry between all the competing Nations! We play one against another, this is our own Clans way."

"So ... a bio-weapon then Father?"

"Correct! Our ancestors swept the Terran steppes in the company of a great plague - our enemies falling before even our swords had reached them. In the old tongue that we named it "The Kharaa". Now, long thought extinct, the Vesper has found it thriving in the seas below. And through your skills we may yet see our Clan's glory days return!"

The implications of his father's mad ambition begin to race through Bart's mind. Blackmail, retaliation, a scourge ripping though the Galaxy that only his people have resistance to. The unravelling of the trading accords, the crumbling of Alterra's growing hegemony. And then ... the endless inter-clan warfare between the surviving Khanates.

Then abruptly all his speculation is silenced -
The blinding light. The scream of metal. The fiery descent.

--------------

Only three of them survived. Paul Torgal made certain of that by jettisoning the Degasi's crew module into the path of the quarantine enforcement beam. From the wreckage - just Paul, Father and that new bodyguard Maida.. Ah, Marguerit Maida - wild with resentment over this betrayal of her comrades, and the jettisoning of the honour so prized amongst their race.

--------------

Ten years have passed since then. Father aged quickly, but died stubbornly - deprived of his vital organ upgrades. Raging always, against the dying of the light.

Bart had seen two more ships descend in flames, spewing their radioactive venom into the living waters. Then, incredibly, he witnessed one new craft built atop the Ocean, its fiery ascent and miraculous escape. That was a rocket of Alterra make.

"A bad omen" decreed Maida: "This augurs Alterra's inevitable return. Trespassers and industrial spies can expect no mercy from Company Assassins. That much is known."

My god ... Maida. Could she still be alive? How he yearned for all her stubborn certainties when so much was still left unknown. That last sight of her far above him, locked in a death struggle with the great leviathan. Time she bought for him to escape.

Since then he found his own way as a survivor - delving ever deeper into the planet's life-secrets. How could these creatures here resist the Scourge? What were the ways to fuse a little of their DNA with his own to buy his life a year at time. His love had grown for this world but, for all its strange beauty, to survive longer meant to suffer longer.

--------------

Now. To slip the bright needle beneath the skin and feel cool run of the gene-editors course upwards through his veins. This time will leave so, so little of the Clone-father's DNA.

"Will ... I still be human?" he wonders. But he accepts - for only this final melding with the genes of the strange seal-creature will allow his flight into the freezing South.

Then with the clang of glass upon the tray, Bart exhales. A calm descends upon him, the dread deed now complete, He lays back into the great World's embrace, finally at home with his Inheritance.

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