“Glory to the Masculine form! Glory to the grand biceps, the towering trapezius and bulging pectorals. Yea verily do I say, beloved, that a woman who doth lie with a manling who’s chest is smaller than her own is way, way gay. In truth, she lies with no man, but a parasitic dwarf species, known to be under one hundred and fifty five centimeters in height, thin of limb, stunted of root… Sorry, just a quick check in, are we alleging that almost all women everywhere-”

“Yep. Honestly, they should just find another nice lady to shack up with. Not my thing, but better than half steps, you know?”

“Speaking of, all but the top fraction of one percent of the male sex?”

“Are not actually men, but some sort of androgynous symbiotic support system for the species, capable of emitting spermitazoa but not to be confused with actual men.”

“I’m OK with androgyny.”

“You would be, pervert. Now get back to it!”

“The hammer is heavy! Alright, alright.” Mazelton hoisted the bronze hammer, straining to get it above his head in a suitably heroic pose.

“Now, beloved, hear and obey the commandments of the Androform Faith, that one should be bulging of thews, sinews like steel cables and vascularization like unto a snake orgy under your skin. Thy legs should be greater in width than thy womenfolk’s waist, and thy back like a vee shaped cliff under a waterfall. Neglect not even thy calves, for it is by the calf that unmasculine weakness doth creep in. The smaller the calf, my children, the smaller the cock. Now I instruct you, beloved, to open thy copy of the Swoly Bible to Abs, 10:3, and hear the Psalm of the Kitchen.”

“I bet Duane has gorgeous abs. Climb them all day.”

Mazelton swung the hammer down in a vicious arc, shattering three linear meters of the glass dome that had protected the neuroputer.

“You say something?”

“Nope!”

“I fucking thought so. Let’s put our sacral bookmark in here, and focus on the job at hand. Weapons, loot, hidden knowledge. Lucrative new pets. Something to make the last couple of surprisingly trying days worthwhile.”

“Excuse me while I feel no sympathy for your struggles. Or did you get mind choked by a swarm of tortured brains while I wasn’t looking?”

“Well. Not in a long while, and it was strictly recreational. And consensual.”

“What?”

“Mmm?”

“You know what, I’m going to skip right past that. Loot. Let's talk loot. My second favorite bit about prospecting. So. Some interesting things I picked up. First of all, regrettably, no vast secret armory here. This was part R&D base, part manufacturing facility. There is a small arms locker of Bo weapons that might be worth checking out, but knowing the Bo, the weapons have all died at this point.”

“Or are made of bone or some other damn thing.”

“Right. Still worth checking out, though. Ah, I did manage to learn how they bred those glass vial plant things. Not really doable unless the tech base just explodes in the next hundred years, but at least I have it. Next time there is a Pi gathering, we can make sure it’s preserved.”

“Ok, positive, net contributor to this epoch’s tech base but…”

“Not a “right this minute murdering the elderly and children” useful, yeah. Ah, let's see. They weren’t actually lying about the formula for reinvigorating the fungal spores. We would basically have to harvest a whole bunch of the stalks, grind them up, mix them with some nutrient soup, and wait a week or so. On the other hand…”

“How crazy would you have to be to let “super spreader fungal brain eating death weapons” be your go to plan? And rely on the non-existent good will of some brains in a tank in the process?”

“Yeah. Pretty sure they found out the Bo survived from me, and were counting on Ma arrogance and insanity to trigger a follow up apocalypse. They must have thought it was a poetic end.” Lettie said with a bitter smile.

“Proving that, while some of their ancestors might have met the Ma, they really didn’t know the Ma.”

“”We might die, but not in vain.” Wasn't that what you said?”

“Yep. Apocalyptic bioweapons to kill a few hundred threats is just dumb. Now, if there was a way to ensure that the fungus only reproduces once, then dies, THAT would be useful.”

“Hmm. Do I want to adapt a Bo bioweapon with no equipment or understanding of the subject matter? No, no I do not. I choose life.”

“Shame. Anything else?”

“A lot, not much of it useful. How much did you put together?”

Mazelton smiled sadly.

“More than the tribe did, I expect. Uh, what do they call it? Pytor’s dish?”

“Something like that. Yeah. I mean, the skull structure alone should be a clue.”

“Engineer something interesting, make it heritable, chuck a few hundred breeding pairs out into the wild. Come back in a few centuries and see how they are doing.”

“Good news! It works excellently. Bad news! We can’t breed it back into the main line without a ton of work.”

Mazelton shook his head.

“You have to think bigger. I thought the clones were for fighting the Nacon. Sounds like the tribe did too. But that’s wrong.”

“How do you figure?”

“All the Clans are exogamous, right? We bring in fresh blood all the damn time, but reconverge the bloodlines in three generations or so. The “Clan” exists in the form of shared genetics, but more importantly, a shared ideology, culture, all that.”

“Some Clans get a little more extreme on that than others, but for the sake of the discussion, sure.”

“Say what you like about the Ma, we aren’t insular.”

“You… are the most goddamn insular Clan. Your Clan houses are fortresses. You have caustic vats in apartment hallways to clean skull trophies. Everybody thinks you are a clan of evil wizards.”

“Uhuh. And the Pi think anyone who isn’t a Pi is an atavistic throwback with a stunted brain to boot.”

“That's reductive!”

“Sure, sure. Moving right along- new blood. No nasty recessive traits popping up. But we are talking about the Bo here. Recessive is only a thing if they really want it to be.”

“Also reductive, but ok.”

“So, what if this isn’t an army of soldiers, or not just an army of soldiers, but breeders. Send out ten thousand copies of the exact same genetic traits that you want. Sure, they are recessive, but we are on biological time now. Generational time. One generation, two generations, three generations, and now those grandkids or great-grandkids are breeding together. No risk of consanguinity, the Bo have long since bred out anything really nasty. But they are rolling the dice on desirable recessive traits presenting. Some people just have red hair and green eyes, right?”

“Oh that’s nasty. They make a few generations of hybrids with really well developed genomes, packing a few extra modifications and then…”

“Back into the main line they go, and the Bo get another transformational improvement to the Clan.”

“Damn. Makes the idea of meat puppet soldiers seem downright quaint.”

“Little of both, I expect. Not that they got it to work.”

“About that, I have a theory.”

“They secretly did get it to work, but the tribe sabotaged the program?”

“Nah, they would have been looking for that. No, it’s how they were going to do it in the first place. Look at the brains.”

Mazelton shuddered.

“I really rather wouldn’t. I’m not squeamish, but that’s vile.”

Lettie frowned.

“You are right, and I apologize. You wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. Point is that most of the brains, but not all of them, came from the tribe folk. I bet they figured that if they used brains that already knew how to process the extra information from the pheromones, they would have better luck recording skills and memories involving the pheromones. And by extension, implanting those memories.

“Is memory implantation really a thing? What about our little passengers?”

“It’s… sort of debatable. Mostly no, or it's a psychological trick. Make you believe you remember something that didn’t actually happen to you. If some epoch found a way to stamp information onto a blank brain, taking it from fetal to functional in one easy step, well, the information didn’t get passed down.”

“Probably for the best.”

“Definitely. The idea always comes from people who don’t know a damn thing about cognitive development. You are born with a suite of tests that you perform every waking moment, teaching yourself how to understand and interact with the world around you. Every time a baby puts a foot in their mouth, they are learning and testing.”

“Not much space for stamped information.”

“Right.”

“So presumably the Bo know this…”

“The project was a huge waste of time and resources, doomed from the start. Probably someone high up got a wild hair up their ass about the idea, and the rest of the Clan figured the side benefits would be worth it.”

“Hilarious.”

“Kinda.”

They both deliberately didn’t look at the mutilated brains in the tank.

“So what’s your favorite part of prospecting?”

“Discovering hidden knowledge. Most days.”

“Most days.”

They quietly moved through the corridors. The omnipresent organic grime took on new meaning, now. Their footprints erased the accumulated knowledge and culture of a now extinct tribe. It was unlikely that they could ever decode it. So they trod on, tearing up the past as they went. Lettie led Mazelton to the Bo part of the base. Here there were visible signs of violence- doors kicked in, furniture smashed, bones scattered across the floor in heaps. Much less gunk. She got to a sealed section of the wall that looked like people had been hacking at it, without success.

“This was the weapons locker. The key hole is right there.”

Mazelton looked dubiously at the hole, and very gently extended a trickle of heat into it.

“Don’t see that every day. Neat.”

Lettie gestured for him to explain.

“It’s a two part lock. You need the key, but the key powers something else. A scanner of some type, built into the rock face. Presumably, it can detect if you are really the Bo or not. It’s why they couldn’t get in.”

“So… no cache for us?”

“Haha. No. Watch this.”

Mazelton hunted around for a reasonably intact chunk of something heavy. It turned out to be a fairly massive door stopper. He couldn’t read what was written on it, but the bronze and stone crime against aesthetics appeared to be some kind of award. He hefted it awkwardly, bringing it up to his shoulder. He then touched the wall again, confirming with his senses exactly where he wanted to hit, and marked it with a tiny dot of heat. Then he smashed the door stopper into it. It took three tries, and he wrecked the door stopper in the process, but the hidden door popped open.

“How in the hell?”

“Rule 16 of the Book of Ways and Means. “Unless stealth is called for, it’s best to do a lock bypass.” Very true, in my experience.”

“Bypass?”

“Ever had to crack a shackle lock?”

“I guess?”

“Bashed it with a hammer until it popped open, right?”

“Yes. So?”

“You didn’t mess around trying to pick it. You BYPASSED the locking mechanism by smashing the weakest part of the lock- the bit of metal with the notch cut into it.”

“Huh.”

“And… most of this stuff is just black goop. Oh, this looks nice.” Mazelton had found a sack of spiked metal balls the size of a child’s fist.

“Any idea of what they are?”

“Grenades, I think. Shoots out the spikes, delivering poison or plagues.”

“Why not just, yanno, blow them up?”

“You can leave dead soldiers behind, not injured ones. Injured soldiers tie up more resources.”

“Point. Think they still work?”

“After ten millennia? No.”

Mazelton shrugged and took them anyway. Better than nothing. There was also a rather nasty whip designed to deliver a shockingly painful toxin into human flesh, but Mazelton doubted it would measure up to massed rifle fire. He passed on the whip. The only other thing still intact was a bronze canister the size of a funeral urn, tightly sealed. Lettie picked it up and turned it around, alternately frowning and smiling.

“So, you really want to murder the Collective? As opposed to earning enough money to buy an entire mountain or three just for you and Danae?”

“Is that a joke? You can always steal a mountain if you are alive, but you can’t enjoy it if your enemies still live.”

“Yes, silly question, I realized it the second I asked. Know your audience, Lettie. Know your audience.”

“It’s valuable?”

“It’s the last word in pets- your very own bio-horror.”