Gareth awoke to light leaking past the curtains in the front of the flat. He was alone on the sofa, which helped. He had no idea how he would have dealt with the beautiful Nari woman waking up in his arms.
But she had wakened first and managed to slip out with rousing him. He heard her now, making tea in the kitchen, on the other side of the central wall, metal spoon clinking on a porcelain mug.
Gareth threw back the blanket and stood, taking the time to fold the thing back into a sofa and fold the blanket up.
“Gareth?” she called quietly.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t meant to wake you.”
“You didn’t, I don’t think,” Gareth recalled. “This is my normal time to wake up.”
“Tea’s almost done,” she appeared around the edge of the wall. “Or you can take a quick shower in the sonic fresher first.”
Gareth nodded and headed to the bathroom.
That had been the single coolest thing he had found about the Accord of Souls. Instead of walking naked into hot water, he could step into a small booth without taking off his clothes, just stand there for sixty seconds while the device bombarded him with some sort of sonics and radiation, then stay there while another machine vacuumed him in a way that left both him and his clothes completely clean. He hadn’t even had to do laundry once since he got here.
Taking that technology home to Earth might put a lot of people out of work, but it would save so much time that everyone should come out way ahead.
The only thing that had been a problem was that he didn’t have a razor. Morty had brought one before, made for a Vanir male, but they’d forgotten to stop at an all-night grocery where they could get a new one. Fortunately, his stubble was blond, so it wouldn’t show up for a few days. He felt bad being out of uniform.
Except he was already out of uniform. It had been packed early, and hidden. He was undercover. Should he grow a beard?
He’d never gone more than three days without shaving, since he started.
What kind of Undercover Agent could he be, with hair already a week past the point he should have gone to the barber, and a beard?
Gareth hadn’t come to any conclusion by the time he rejoined the woman scientist, but his brain was percolating like a proper coffee pot.
She must have been up for a while, because she had already gotten cleaned up and changed from her pajamas into an outfit similar to yesterdays: harem-like pants in baby blue with a lavender tunic over that, wrapped by a cute belt in black leather with all sorts of decorative, silver bangles.
She handed him a mug of steaming tea and smiled.
“How are you feeling this morning?” she asked.
“Refreshed,” he discovered as he said the word.
Really spot-on. Like he had just slept twenty-four hours after eating the best ribeye possible.
“Good,” she said. “Come with me.”
He followed her into the bathroom. She pressed a hidden catch and the back of the linen closet opened into a hidden room beyond. They went through, and Gareth found himself back in the room with the dentist chair, but the walls were more of a brown color.
Beyond it, the same kind of control room as at her lab.
Back where her bedroom would have been, in the other apartment, a working space like what he was really expecting. Just a single workbench with the black top, scarred and stained and melted in a few places.
A computer on a desk in the corner.
Restaurant-sized refrigerators took up the whole back, three of them.
She moved around the workbench and gestured him to stand across from her.
“You here,” she ordered mildly. “I need to take some blood, and then test how it will react. Take off your outer shirt, please.”
She was more relaxed today. That much was obvious. Maybe it was escaping, and being saved, and escaping again. Plus a good night’s sleep, even if she had to have a human to do it.
The plaid shirt in the colors of Sky Patrol came off, leaving him with only the tucked-in white t-shirt. Talyarkinash pulled some strange medical device out of a drawer and held it out. With her other hand, she grabbed his wrist and turned his arm over.
She touched the inside of his forearm briefly. It was more like a puppy’s lick than anything, and then she pulled it back.
Gareth looked down and realized that it had left a tiny, red spot. Had she just drawn blood? That painlessly? That quickly?
There was another invention to take home, if he ever could.
The machine beeped after a few seconds. Talyarkinash hmmm-ed a bit and read some readout.
Rather than speak, she put it down on the counter and began to pull vials out of the farthest-right refrigerator. From underneath Talyarkinash pulled out a small crucible and a pair of eyedroppers.
It all looked incredibly sciency.
First, she poured some of a vial into the crucible. Then she added exactly three drops from the second bottle. The second eyedropper went into the side of the first device, and came out filled with a bright red fluid.
Blood? Wow.
“Ready?” she asked, looked up at him with an unexpected smile.
Gareth smiled back and nodded.
Talyarkinash dropped a single drop of Gareth’s blood into the crucible, and stirred it with a glass rod that had appeared from somewhere when he wasn’t looking.
At first, it started to steam a little.
And then a lot.
Before Gareth knew what was happening, the sides of the crucible cracked and the mixture inside poured out and started to melt the surface of the counter.
When Talyarkinash managed to splash it with some fresh water from the sink, it had eaten a disk about an eighth of an inch into the surface, which looked like a plastic of some sort.
“Fardel,” she whispered under her breath.
Gareth felt like he should blush at this point, to listen to a lady curse in public.
“Everything okay?” he ventured, unsure of his footing.
She looked up and there was almost no color in her eyes, just slitted-open irises like it was all black to bottom of her soul.
She sucked a loud breath in and blew it out.
“Had that been my blood, Gareth, or Morty’s, or anybody else’s, there would have been the slightest puff of steam,” she explained. “Just enough to see, but you might miss it if you blinked. Normally, the second experiment is to do the same thing in a genetic spectrometer to see where we might manage adjustments, if someone had any space left.”
“Okay?”
“I didn’t do this with Maximus,” she continued. “We were just upgrading him slightly by causing him to resize into a Vanir, so it was a simple enough cut and slice job.”
“Cut and slice?” Gareth felt his hair want to stand on end.
“I program a virus like a phage, Gareth,” she looked up in deadly seriousness, even if the meaning of some of the words eluded him. “Once we inject it, it infects every one of your cells and reprograms them to make you someone else. In the case of Maximus, he went to sleep for a few hours, and then ate like a horse for a week as his body suddenly grew a foot and he put on almost a hundred pounds of mass. After that, I never saw him again, but Morty and Xiomber said they did something similar to raise his IQ to genius levels.”
“But we aren’t stopping there,” Gareth observed.
“We’re not,” Talyarkinash agreed nervously. “Especially with all the changes I needed to program. This goes well beyond just making you Vanir-sized, since I need to program the changes with a morphic level clear out at the limits of anything anybody has ever done.”
Gareth reached out and took her hand before she could pull it back.
“This is necessary,” he said. “I understand that you might kill me accidentally in the process. It might be the single dumbest idea I have ever had, but it was the only context I could find for myself to encompass what I needed to stop Marc from taking over the entire galaxy.”
“Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“No,” he said. “I’m sure it is probably suicidal. But I don’t know any other way to handle it. And the clock is running.”