Build another one? Was Steve insane? The first had been an almost irredeemable failure, why would anyone in their right mind want to create another one?
Of course, I had come to him with almost exactly that proposal in mind, so I suppose I wasn't one to talk. Still, my purpose was to create the Resonator as it was meant to be, not the hacked up bastardized version we ended up with. It was that version that the tribunal, lunatics that they were, would want. It seemed somewhat ironic to me that the very people that had condemned mine for war crimes wanted something with which to commit one of their own.
Yeah, our failed experiment failed that badly. I confess to nothing, however, so if you were expecting to get some incriminating evidence out of this journal, you're going to have to keep looking.
Steve did have a point about the insanity of starting up Archetype again. The dream had brought it to the forefront of my mind, but the desire to tinker with and improve upon what we had done had been there for decades. Like I said, it's like a puzzle I just can't put down. I tended to forget that it was a very dangerous puzzle, though. The Ulix had trusted us with it, and boy had they misplaced that bit of trust.
Still, I had another reason to find the others now. That Dr. Fallon had turned himself in didn't come as an especially great surprise to me, I actually thought it would have happened much sooner. He was a man of conscience, and when he saw what his work had done, it broke his heart. The important part now was to find the others. Fallon, great guy that he was, was likely to try to take all the blame for the project, but chances were good that the tribunal would eventually ferret out the rest of us and condemn us to some prison planet - and that only if we were lucky. Salient Steve had recommended I find Sann first, but I had no idea where the recitent engineer would be keeping himself. I had a vague idea, however, where Jenn might be. At least, I knew where to start.
First, though, I had a bounty to collect. Traveling with an empty cargo hold would be a lot easier both in a practical and psychological sense if I had a bit of money to fall back on.
--
"Mister Ledford, quite frankly we're amazed."
I was in one of the more comfortable chairs I'd had the chance to enjoy in some time. The offices of Zahann Industries were climate controlled specifically to the client's needs. Naturally this required someone with a tolerance for said client's atmosphere, and in this case it turns out they actually had someone from Exile on hand.
"Never in my lifetime, nor the lifetime of any species currently employed by Zahann, have we actually seen someone come in with this light on their translator."
Said translator was still in the hands of Zahann engineers, who had likely finished making sure I hadn't taken it apart to somehow force the light to come on and were now just wasting time. It wasn't needed because I understood the particular dialect this fellow was speaking. I had to put up with his horrible accent, though.
"What's even more amazing is that records indicate you were in Ulix space at the time?"
This was said with an air of suspicion. Clearly I couldn't have been in Ulix space, so some tampering had to have been done. I had actually cracked the case of the translator box on occasion, but only to add the various naming features and other little quirks of the sort that I eventually add to all my machinery. They'd likely see this and assume I'd messed with its locator somehow to say that I was somewhere I wasn't. The controller which dictated whether or not a new language had been found, however, I hadn't touched. Besides, I knew it would have recorded everything that Oorn had said, so I wasn't particularly worried. I made up some story about not wanting to reveal my true whereabouts at the time of the encounter, as it would raise a lot of questions I didn't want asked. It was mostly true, after all.
"Ah, well, someone in your trade," this said rather disdainfully "obviously has a great many undertakings he would prefer not be made public. You may rely on us to be discreet."
Sure I could. A company whose big seller was a device which lets people communicate with other people and thus increase the amount of chatter in the universe was suddenly going to shut up on my behalf.
"Mister Ledford, let me assure you, translation is not our only business. We make a wide variety of products, many of which I am sure you have made use of yourself, even if you were not aware of it. We are very familiar with more... subtle technology."
I didn't reply to that - either he was offering to sell me black-market items, in which case I had plenty and didn't especially need more, or he was trying to bait me in an effort to get me arrested.
A buzz sounded at his desk. Annoyed, he pressed his fingertip to the intercom key. A message, conducted via his skin, was relayed to an earpiece he appeared to wear at all times. His face lost quite a bit of its skepticism.
"Well, Mister Ledford."
Dammit, I'm a Captain.
"Captain Ledford, of course. I'm happy to inform you that our engineers and linguists agree your unit is mostly intact and the sound samples are genuine. You've done us quite a service. Provide your banking information of choice, and we will be happy to credit you your bounty."
My translator?
"It will be returned to you once our engineers have copied the sound samples over. In the meanwhile, we are providing you with our top of the line, free of charge."
At this, an orderly of some sort emerged in the room, carrying the newest box on the market. I didn't know much about it, as it had only been released as of two days ago. What I did know what that it was way out of my price range. They could keep the old one, this one would be more entertaining to slice.
"Thank you for your kind donation, Captain Ledford. We hope to do business with you again."
<!--We have, at our disposal, more detailed records than even Zahann. They date back farther than anyone on this team's species, and in this case the language Ledford discovered was not, in fact, a new language. We compared it to the one farthest back in the archives, the first language entered by those who had constructed these records, and found it a perfect match.
What Ledford had rediscovered was the native Ulix tongue.
-->