Six months! I can’t leave my research for six months, Kal thought as the small Were in his tidy uniform inclined his head, his expression still holding that wary expectation.
“There can be no question,” Ulbrine was saying. “No mistakes. The balance between the four major Inderland species has been maintained for over eight hundred years, and if the effects of this new virus are more detrimental than Trisk promises, there will be problems.”
Realization snapped through him, washing Kal with an icy breath despite the heat. The enclave could send anyone to double-check Trisk’s work. They were sending him so they could quietly mothball his current research with bacteria. They’d given up on it in the face of Trisk’s more promising, quickly evolving theory. Trisk’s results were attractively fast, but that’s where the danger lay. His theories were slower, yes, but safer. Why couldn’t they see that?
A feeling of alarmed urgency broke over him, but Kal kept his breathing even. His theory that bacteria could safely insert genetic code into mature cells would have as much chance of being developed now as a man had of walking on the moon.
Rick cleared his throat, drawing his attention. The living vampire beamed at him, his hand rising in a gesture of Well? as Max lit another cigarette, clearly not caring. Colonel Wolfe’s eyes narrowed in threat. And still, Kal couldn’t move, the heat of the day making it hard to breathe. If he left for six months, they’d close his project. He’d never find another lab willing to pick it back up. Trisk’s code-carrying virus would become a potential threat in their very children’s cells until something went wrong, and something always went wrong.
“Dr. Kalamack, a word?” Ulbrine said as he rose, chair scraping the worn wood.
I should have worked harder. Kal sat for three heartbeats as his failure trickled through him. With very little grace, he stood, pushing his chair back with a loud noise to follow Ulbrine to the railing, where the crashing waves might cloud their words. The wind was fresher, tugging at his short hair as the dampness wound its way past his shirt and coated him in a sticky, salty film.
“Trisk’s research is dangerous,” Kal said bitterly, not caring if the three men at the table now discussing the agony of jet lag could hear. “You expect me to leave my lab to become a field manager? For a witch? To help her?”
Ulbrine’s expression creased as he took Kal’s shoulder and turned him to the ocean. “This isn’t about Trisk, it’s about Dr. Plank’s tactical virus. We must be sure it will function as designed before other labs take it up as their template. Our numbers are too low to risk outside strife impacting us, and if it should go wrong, we won’t survive another species-specific war.”
They want to close my work down, he thought, seething. Trisk would laugh her ass off.
Ulbrine’s expression darkened, clearly thinking jealousy, not the loss of his own work, was making Kal reluctant, and he felt his face burn. When NASA had withdrawn their offer, he’d been forced to accept his second choice. It was still in Florida, but he felt like damaged goods. And it was Trisk’s fault. No wonder he hadn’t made any progress. Even his colleagues doubted him.
“I’m giving you this opportunity as a favor to your father,” Ulbrine said, and Kal’s focus cleared.
“Don’t do my father any favors,” he said coldly, turning to take his leave. But he stopped short when Ulbrine grasped his elbow, the tingle of ley line energy warning him to stay.
“Then consider it a last-ditch effort to save your family name,” Ulbrine said, his eyes inches from Kal’s. “You’re the very last one in a very long line, Trent. Your parents were lucky to bring you to full term, and they spent their entire fortune keeping you alive.”
He let go, and Kal caught his balance. He remembered the bitter medicines, the painful experimental treatments. It had been akin to torture, and he had lost most of his childhood, but his parents had tried to make it up to him in other ways. Part of why he worked so hard was so that no other child would ever have to go through what he had.
Apparently satisfied Kal was listening, Ulbrine turned to the ocean to prevent anyone from reading his lips. “There are two ways elven lines maintain power,” he lectured. “Through money, which your parents utterly spent to keep you alive, or by having many children. You haven’t had much luck there, either. If you do nothing, your name will die with you.”
“I haven’t—” Kal started, feeling his masculinity threatened.
“Stop.” Ulbrine turned from the two women walking the beach to look him up and down. “Our race is dying, but some families, once the most powerful, are dying faster than others. Yours is on a knife’s edge. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Kal thought about the women he had had relations with over the years. None of them had gotten pregnant. Not even for a month or two.
“Which brings me to the second reason I want you there,” Ulbrine said softly. “If Trisk successfully used a donor virus to introduce new code into an established individual such that it breeds true, I want to know. People are not tomatoes, but technique is technique, and if it can be applied to repair our genome, she has to be moved into a real lab.”
A job at NASA, perhaps? he thought bitterly. Trisk’s ideas were dangerous, not only because they were inherently flawed, but also because they would suck the funding from his own research, research that wasn’t based on hasty assumptions. Somehow he kept it from his face. Trying to explain it to Ulbrine would only reinforce the old man’s idea that he was being jealously stubborn, not stubbornly pragmatic.