Welcome to the Journal of Now and Forever. This Journal is a collection of my Star Control and Star Control 2 fiction. Note: Some of this material is, by necessity, extrapolation from the slim information provided by canon sources.

New fiction is posted first at My Livejournal before it appears here. This story is in response to 15 Minute Ficlets' Challenge #82.

Jack rested his chin in his hands and exhaled noisily.

"Don't you have any remorse over what you did?" Kurt snapped at the female Androsynth sitting at the end of the table. She was slender and long-faced, with long brown hair that kept falling over the left side of her face. She shook her head and shrugged.

Dina didn't know what to make of this one. Her chosen name was Lynn, and in theory all female Androsynth should know each other, since there were so few of them, but in practice Dina was fairly sure she'd never encountered Lynn before. She would have remembered the eyes.

"Lynn," Ruth said, "you've created a potentially very dangerous organism here, and it could have killed people when you released it."

"But it didn't," Lynn said. She had a soft, surprisingly high voice; she almost sounded like a child. "I knew it wouldn't. I designed it that way. I tested and re-tested it. It wouldn't kill us." She shrugged again. "And now we're protected."

"We are," Ruth countered, "but the Earthlings aren't. And we'll need some of them alive to further our research."

Dina thought she saw a shadow pass over Lynn's face, and the hair fell forward again. Was that a scar on the left side? Or just a trick of the shadow? Either way, Lynn didn't respond.

"We'll need your notes," Dina said. "And if you created this organism – does it have a name? – since you created it," she continued, as Lynn shook her head, "that implies you did it to protect us from something, and that implies there's a worse organism in existence. Where is it?"

"It's several," Lynn said in that odd voice. "Several bugs. The vaccine was a superbug to make the most efficient delivery. I couldn't count on making several waves of illness. But there's... several." She almost smiled. "So that when we attacked Earth, we could scour it clean. Not every human would die, but it would be a great setback. And we'd be safe. We could take over and show them what it felt like." She seemed to come back to herself for a moment, then said, as though an afterthought, "It was Consul-approved."

The silence in the room was deafening. None of the Consuls or Advisors dared to look at one another. Dina stared at Lynn. A secret biowarfare project? Here? That was the sort of black-ops thing Earthlings did. Not us. But why not us?

"Who approved it?" Jack asked, looking over the top of his glasses at Lynn.

She gave a half-shrug – Dina started to find the gesture irritating – and said, in a bored tone that implied it didn't matter, "Tomo. The dead guy."

~ ~ ~

It was a week before Lynn met the one who'd given her the approval to proceed with this project, long ago.

"Nice job throwing it on Tomo," he said. "So much time has passed that it might never get figured out. Plus it's hard for a dead man to defend himself."

"Yes," Lynn agreed. She'd finally been allowed back to her job; so far there was no public mention of her 'misdeed,' although the Consuls and Advisors had questioned her extensively. This was supposed to be one of those sessions, in fact. She guessed he had a way of getting around any surveillance; it didn't matter to her. "Could be hard for a living one to defend himself, though."

"Indeed," the other replied. "So what's the price to buy more silence?"

"I don't want to reproduce."

He looked at her, coldly, hard, but it was the truth, and at last he just studied her. "If that's what you really want," he said, as if not quite believing it.

"I'm sure. Take me off the egg list and your secret's safe with me."

He shook his head. "All right, then. I'll talk to you again soon, when I've managed it."

He didn't tell her, of course, that she'd already been removed from the list. There was no way the Androsynth could let someone like her pass on a genetic code. She was obviously not quite all there, and it could easily be due to being one of the oldest Androsynth series, before all the bugs were straightened out of the cloning process.

Still, he'd have to find some way of taking care of her now, without being too obvious. She might renege, after all. Murder might be too hard to cover up, but perhaps some kind of accident could be arranged, or an 'interview' with an angry Ur-Quan. At least for now, his secret was safe, and he had time to plan.

Comments? Email me: laridian at aol dot com