Author's Note: So now you get to see where some of Dave's xenophobia comes from. Thinking about it from the point of view of the larger world shown here, it makes sense that so many people would be xenophobic. We're talking about humanity's first great big push out into the larger universe, with localized economies and worlds you can't get to very easily. Along with the first time humanity settles on alien worlds. This is all new to the human race, and some people will naturally find it scary.

Of course, with no centralized military and difficulty policing distant regions of space, you'll get stuff like this happening.

Enjoy.

The area was smallish, dimly lit but still humming with electricity. The area had clearly been assembled into something resembling a living quarters, with a makeshift bed and toilet to one side, a food replicator against the far wall.

And a very large amount of machinery crowding every available corner.

"Visitors!" came a croaky-sounding voice, from the far end. Dave sensed movement behind the machinery, but his eyes were still adjusting to the change in ambient lighting. "Oh, how long I've waited for this day."

Seo squinted, as she entered.

Stepped inside, just enough that the light from the outer world wasn't gleaming in her eyes, and she could adjust to the dimness of her new surroundings. Her eyes skimming over the machinery, taking it all in.

Then her eyes widened, her breath caught in her throat.

"Close the door!" she shouted, turning around and racing back to shove at the door, as the hum of the machinery intensified around them. "Faraday—!"

There was a clap of sound.

And Seo screamed.

Collapsing to the floor.

But she'd closed the door in time.

Dave had his last gun out in seconds, leveling it at the strange man he'd come to rescue. "What did you do?" he demanded. "Tell me. Or you die."

The man emerged.

He was ragged. An older man, with salt-and-pepper hair and a long, scraggly beard. His eyes peering at Seo's fallen form, a small smile sprouting on his lips.

"It couldn't be," he said. "Could it? Is it possible?"

Seo groaned, clutching her head.

"Professor Gordon Trinch," she hissed.

The man laughed, delighted. "It is you! Oh, this is an added bonus," he said, rushing forwards. "Thirty years, and you don't look a day older. What species are you, child?"

Dave fired a warning shot.

And Professor Trinch stopped in his tracks. Raised his hands.

"I'll ask you again," said Dave. "What did you do to her?"

"Apparently, not nearly enough," Professor Trinch answered. "That pulse should have killed her completely. But she appears to still be alive. Must need to recalibrate."

Dave turned the gun and shot at the heart of the machine.

It sparked, and the humming died down.

"Well, there was no need for that, young man," Professor Trinch said. "I'll only repair it, again. I did build the thing, you know."

"And even if you repair it, you'll kill no one," Seo breathed. Trying to get back to her feet, but still dizzy with pain. "I… closed the door. Resealed the faraday cage. The pulse can't get out."

But Professor Trinch had now turned his eyes to Dave. "And you," he said. "You look familiar, too. Like a scientist I knew once. A David… Walter…"

Dave felt his heart stop.

"Korjensky, that was it," said Trinch. "David Walter the second. A brilliant physicist. We worked together, briefly." His eyes gleamed. "So you must be… the third! His little junior. I heard your whole family had moved off-world."

Even Seo looked up at the name.

Staring at Dave as if it meant something to her.

"I don't care if you knew my family," Dave replied, his voice icy and quiet. "They're nothing to me. You're nothing to me. I could kill you in a second, and never think twice after I'm done."

"What? Because I almost killed sweety over there?" Professor Trinch shook his head. "She isn't even fully human, David. An alien. They're all the same."

Dave didn't answer.

"That's your justification for wanting us all dead?" Seo demanded. "Or is it more? Is this personal?"

The Professor turned on her. "You destroyed my life's work!" he spat. "You and that wretched aunt of yours. I could have reunited Earth as a military empire, given us the power to wipe out our enemies with no effort at all! But then I was overthrown and discredited, turned into a laughing stock… by a child! Some meddling teenage busy-body who wasn't even human!"

Seo tried to stand, but her legs gave out. "So it is personal. You didn't build this for the Autons. You built this to kill me."

"Look at what Earth Empire has become," Professor Trinch sneered. "Chevauchéers trying to coerce the natives to acquiesce to being part of our empire! Our military using weapons and uniforms so old they look like something out of a carnival! Our population — a cesspool of alien impurity."

Seo gave a shaky laugh.

"Families like yours make me sick," Professor Trinch said, pointing at Seo. "A human sleeping with an alien?! What about the sanctity of marriage? What about their corrupted children, with their altered moral values — mutts and half-breeds trying to push moral depravity onto vulnerable human children!"

"Oh, sorry; you upset that you were outsmarted by a girl?" Seo said, with a fake pout. "An alien half-breed?"

Professor Trinch looked like he was about to throttle her with his bare hands. But Dave took another warning shot, and the Professor backed off.

"What is your problem, boy?!" the Professor snapped. "You know what I'm talking about. How the aliens corrupt. You were one of the ones taken by the Pachorans, weren't you? They murdered your parents while you watched."

Dave remembered it.

Could still see it vividly, burned into his mind.

The night it happened. The night his world ended.

"You're pure-blood, David Korjensky," said Professor Trinch. "Pure human. That's why you survived! You are everything we could be — everything we should be — if aliens hadn't contaminated our gene-pool. A highly evolved human being."

Dave didn't say anything.

"It's why you survived when the others didn't!" Professor Trinch continued. "Why you and only five others weren't murdered. You were normal; everyone else was flawed. Contaminated by aliens! The corruption turned them into inhuman monsters, destroying everything you'd worked for."

"And your machine is supposed to fix that?" Seo gritted, finally managing to stagger to her feet. "Find any bit of alien contamination and sear it out of people's skulls?"

Dave faltered with the gun.

"Imagine if I'd gotten out of here sooner," Professor Trinch told Dave, moving steadily closer to him. "All your friends. All the Pachoran Slave Cluster, made better, again! Just one flip of a switch, and everyone's purified from alien influence. All at once."

Dave really did hesitate, now.

Thinking about all those people he'd considered friends, everyone who'd turned on him…

Could this have saved them?

"By seeking out any living alien consciousness," Seo said, "and burning it to cinders. What would have happened to me if it had been calibrated correctly? Melted-brains-soup?"

"Shut up, half-breed," Professor Trinch said. "You don't matter." He turned back to Dave. "He matters. Purity. Humanity."

"And a little bit of telepathy," Seo added. "Just a smidge that's been around since the little David Walter from my time, the five-year-old playing with legos and plastic model space ships in Chelsea, 2009. I've seen glimpses of it." She went over to Dave. Put a gentle hand on his arm. "You knew the Korjensky family well, didn't you? Well enough to know what Dave went through on his home planet. To know how his mind works. Well enough to lure him here in a trap so you could correctly calibrate your machine — because his mind works exactly the same way as that machine does. That's how it finds mental consciousnesses — because Dave senses mental consciousnesses."

Professor Trinch, in a moment of rage, threw himself at Dave to try to grab the gun and shoot Seo on the spot, and it was only because Dave had been so thoroughly rattled before that Trinch nearly managed to succeed.

The gun shot, wildly, into the air, as they wrestled for it.

Then Seo cried out, wincing as she clutched her shoulder, and it proved the distraction Dave needed to regain the upper hand. He yanked the gun away from Trinch, then rolled to his feet, kicking the other man down onto his knees.

Dave held the gun barrel directly at Trinch's head.

He could feel his finger tight around the trigger. And he was only just barely holding it together enough to not pull it right now.

Without looking back, his eyes still hard and cold on Trinch, he asked Seo, "Are you all right?"

"Bullet grazed my arm," Seo said. "I'll recover."

"Shoot her between the eyes, boy," Trinch snapped at him. "She's the real enemy. Aliens like her destroy humans! Massacre…!"

"You brought the Nestene Consciousness here," Dave said. "Didn't you?"

The words lingered in the air.

A silence falling around them.

"This was a populated world, once," Dave continued. "The Autons showed up out of the blue. Massacred everyone. I read the brief." His eyes narrowed. "But the Autons kept you alive longer than all the others. Because you brought them here. Helped their invasion to succeed."

"I needed to test out my machine," Professor Trinch pleaded, trying to get up. "They had a consciousness. I had a consciousness destroyer! I just needed—"

Dave kicked him back down. "To recreate the universe in my image?"

"Your mother had the same dream," Professor Trinch said. "We knew each other long before she married your father. She gave me the scans of your brain! Gave me everything I needed to eliminate the aliens among us, destroy the—"

"Shut up!" Dave shouted. His whole body was trembling, now. All except the gun leveled at Trinch's head. "I don't care about my family. My heritage. Anything that happened before I was born!" He pointed at Seo. "She's part-human. Your machine was supposed to kill her. Do you really think I'm stupid enough to not know what that means?"

"I'm purifying humanity," said Professor Trinch.

"You're killing everyone," Dave growled. "Anyone not a hundred percent human. And this was your test run. You sold out the humans, you sold out the aliens. Of course you're somehow entwined with my life — you're just as much a traitor as everyone I've ever known."

"Think about what that harpy's done to you, boy," Professor Trinch urged. "A pretty alien face, and suddenly, you're compromising your very humanity for—"

"The sooner you shut up," Dave interrupted, "the less chance of me failing my mission by killing you, here and now." He leveled cold eyes at Professor Trinch. "Now get up. You're coming back to Earth Central with me."

"You're kidding!" shouted Seo, grabbing Dave by the arm. "Look at him. He's a maniac."

Dave sighed. "A maniac and a traitor. But who isn't, these days?" He shrugged. "Turn him over to Earth Central. Or put a bullet in his brain. It makes no difference to me."

"If you put him in a position of authority, on Earth," Seo warned, "even just symbolic authority, then millions — billions! — of innocents are going to be massacred!"

"That's not my problem," said Dave. "It's Earth's problem. They're the ones who get to decide what to do with him."

Seo stepped back. Her eyes leveled at Dave. "I trusted you," she said, in a very low voice, "to make the right decision, David Walter Korjensky III. Trusted you with my life, and the lives of billions of people." Her eyes narrowed. "And you don't dare betray that trust."

Dave's mouth formed a thin line.

He didn't answer.

"Leave him here, to spend the rest of his days raging impotently in his little self-made prison," Seo commanded. "Let the Nestene Consciousness escape this world. Or so help me, I'll find you across every point in time and space and make sure you never perform another heartless act again. Do you understand?!"

"Yes," Dave said.

He hadn't even thought about his agreement.

But he knew, the moment he said it, that he meant it.

"You can't escape here if you wanted to," Professor Trinch said, with a gruff laugh. "She shut the door! The automatic locking mechanisms will have kicked in. We're stuck together, all three of us, for the rest of our lives." With a menacing look at Seo. "Which, in some cases, will be extremely short."

Dave looked as if he was about to say to hell with the mission, and shoot the man anyways.

Then he looked at Seo.

And lowered the gun.

"There are others coming," Seo told Professor Trinch. "They'll let us out."

Dave shook his head. "Why wait for them? I told you before — I don't trust anyone." He nodded at Trinch. "And I definitely wasn't about to trust our lives to him." He checked his watch. "I thought it might be a trap. So I made sure, if the door wound up locked or closed, it'd open again at exactly the right time."

The hands on the clock moved.

"Now," said Dave.

A heavy clunk resounded through the door, and Professor Trinch leapt for his machine. But Dave was ready for this. He leveled a shot at the retreating Professor, a howl of pain indicating that he'd hit his mark. Then, one arm around Seo, he ushered the two of them out of the metal dome.

"You didn't have to shoot—!" Seo shouted.

"Oh, make up your mind," Dave muttered. "You want me to save everyone or not? He was about to kill them all!"

"I needed to make him think he still had the upper hand!" Seo hissed. She raced over to the force-field equipment, frantically trying to wire something up. "There were three barriers on that prison. Now there's just one. You think he won't get out?"

"So you're saying I should have killed him stone dead," Dave said.

"No, I'm saying you should have made him think he'd won!" Seo snapped. "I told him the others were coming to open the door on purpose! So we'd have time to deal with him." She broke a wire with her teeth, then wound it around a cable. "Now he'll be desperate. You didn't hit anything vital in that machine, and it's been calibrating to you the whole time we've been in there. He'll know we're up to something, out here, to stop him! He'll make sure—"

The metallic door to Trinch's prison didn't stay closed.

As a shockwave blew it off its hinges.

Seo grunted, tumbling to her knees, as she struggled to make the last connection. And the force-field seared into place.

Dave ran over to her. Helping her to her feet.

The energy pulse from the weapon still played along the outer-shell of the barrier.

"That won't last long," Seo said, her voice sounding weak. "It's a lash-up job, and he's giving his machine full power. He's been waiting for this moment a very long time."

"Then I'm getting you back to your ship," Dave decided. "I'll survive the blast from that machine. You'll die."

"No," Seo said, wrestling herself out of Dave's grip. She was still breathing heavily, her legs wobbly and her eyes looking sunken. "We have to stop this. If that blast gets out of the force field, it won't just encompass this planet. It'll encompass the quarantine zone, too. That's staffed by thousands of patrollers! Both alien and human. We can't let them die."

Dave looked back at the metal prison. "Should have killed him when I had the chance."

"Oh, and is that how your brain is wired?" Seo retorted. "Kill everything… that… isn't…?"

Seo trailed off.

Her brow furrowed in thought.

Then she laughed. Her face breaking out into a wide beam, her eyes shining.

"How your brain is wired!" Seo cried, grabbing him up by the shoulders. "And how that machine is wired. Oh, that's brilliant. That's perfect!"

Dave blinked. "I don't—"

"Ready to believe in miracles, again?" Seo asked, grabbing him up by the hand. "Because I'm about to perform one. And we're off to face the Nestene Consciousness!"