***Tirnanog, The Old Camp***

***Magnus***

There were a lot of things to talk about. From the Old Camp’s immediate problems like the coming night to more distant issues.

With their comparably low numbers, Conla and her people had trouble protecting all the newly arrived exiles.

It wasn’t like my people hadn’t brought weapons to protect themselves, but guns helped only to a certain point without the right mutations to back up the firepower. You couldn’t shoot what you didn’t see coming and couldn’t hit what was faster than you could adjust your aim. Not to mention, certain denizens of the night would take a few bullets just as easily as they impaled themselves on a spear just to get to the fleshy human.

So our first countermeasure was for Astra and me to be drafted as an emergency response team. Having two additional juggernauts assist in repelling monsters would be a great help. Especially since the forest’s creatures seemed to think of the newly repopulated Old Camp as an inviting buffet.

A second issue was the scarce supply of frequently used ‘mutation materials’ like starfish, upon which I pointedly ignored Conla’s and Astra’s glares. It wasn’t like I could have done anything about having poisoned the lake at this point. The poison itself had already decayed, but the marine life was slow to repopulate the biome. Besides, it was a good tactical decision at the moment.

The problem would be solved soon enough once Aerie’s relief forces arrived with additional supplies.

More interesting was the news of Earth being only semi-involved in this conflict. There was no question they would become trouble for us sooner or later, but if my people were to be believed, then Thich couldn’t count on getting more support.

This didn’t mean the old weapon and supply stashes which had already been revealed to our enemies weren’t still a massive problem for us.

Sadly, nobody could tell us exactly what type of weapons and how many of them the Thich had retrieved from those sites. If Gunnar was to be believed, then the rogue scientist named Everhart had revealed roughly fifty locations filled to the brim with old and new war material in addition to activating the sleeper force which tried to assassinate me. Coincidentally, this was supposedly the very same man who held my departing speech when I was exiled.

The more Gunnar revealed about the whole mess, the more I wondered what had gone wrong to get a man like Everhart into a position with so much potential for power abuse. Then again, Tirnanog wasn’t exactly on Earth’s list of priorities. The whole mess had only blown up in Everhart’s face because I meddled with the supercomputers at Mount Aerie and Hochberg, shutting out the scientists and getting other departments like IT involved.

Who knew how far things would have gone if Gunnar hadn’t used the opportunity to kick a warning up the chain of command? And in the end, complete loss of communication wasn’t something the professor could sweep under the rug without getting the higher-ups involved.

I guessed the good news about all of this was that the Thich were unlikely to receive additional manpower from Earth.

Jakob Lang, the leader of my resistance cell back on Earth, revealed an impressive list of supplies and devices the organisation brought with them. Among these was all the necessary equipment for a gene laboratory. So in my imagination, I already saw Gurney salivating and indecently touching the boxes with chemicals and gene sequencers while whispering sweet nothings to them.

Anyway!

One of the organisation’s main concerns was what would happen after their clean breakaway from Earth. All of us were dependent on our nanotech for the foreseeable future. It was a vital part of survival in this world, so gaining complete control of the UI was important.

What Chloe and the others were afraid of was some kind of hidden ‘kill switch’ that Earth could activate if they thought they lost control of the situation.

I didn’t want to dismiss the possibility of such a function completely, but I had my doubts about the nanotech being capable of just flipping a switch and having all of clan Aerie drop dead.

First, I was sure Earth would have had no scruple using this feature during the Clan War if they could. The fact they hadn’t done so was a strong argument against the possibility.

Secondly, I happened to have met the father of this miracle technology and learned some of the history behind its inception.

This was a part of history which had been completely unknown to me until it was revealed by Mary and Gurney. Even if he had lost in the end, I found it highly unlikely that someone like Gurney would have used the nanotech on himself if he even remotely believed it could be used against him. Given the UI’s web functionality, it would have been all too easy for Earth to break their promise once he handed over the secret.

Thirdly, Gurney hadn't invented the nanotechnology with the intention to use it for genetic mass experimentation on people. Deploying it on Tirnanog was an abuse Earth's leadership had come up with.

This didn’t completely exclude the possibility of Earth coming up with something new. To put it bluntly, it had been a few years since those events, but there was the little fact that Earth’s scientists had not managed to significantly change the original function of Gurney’s blueprints. All they achieved were minor alterations.

Even I could see that Everhart was only a buffoon who barely understood the tool he was messing with. Like a kid mashing together different play doughs to see what the result would be.

I wasn’t a bioengineer, but in my mind, this meant Gurney’s nanotech was based on some fundamental principle which was hard to mess with. And I happened to know a perfectly reasonable explanation for how a single human happened to invent a miracle technology which still went over his peers' heads decades later.

The next time I went to sleep, Gaia would have to answer a few pointed questions.

My thoughts drifted to the rough world map of Tirnanog that Chloe had shown me.

Like Earth, Tirnanog was mostly covered by water, but it was counting eight continents. Altogether, it had significantly more landmass than Earth.

The clans were living on the northernmost part of a roughly Australia-sized continent whose northern mountain range directly transitioned into the ice-covered north pole.

The largest continent was on the planet’s equator, with the others more or less evenly distributed over the planet. One was admittedly not so much a real continent, but an extensive archipelago of islands spanning the world's southern latitudes. Supposedly, each of Earth’s Gateway facilities was aimed at another one of these continents.

My interest in the other colonies aside, what astounded me was the convenience of it all. Without any self-adulation, thanks to Gaia’s teachings Astra and I had probably turned into the foremost experts for wormhole theory among all of humanity. With emphasis on the word ‘theory’, because I wouldn’t be able to whip up a miniature wormhole like Gilbert Kline’s wormgate if my life depended on it.

What I could do, however, was to assess the likelihood of a planet having enough jaunt points for a wormhole to target the right coordinates. Of course, it was possible to create a jaunt point artificially like Astra and I were doing. But if not in use, it would slowly degrade and disappear again.

Given a planet’s gravity well and electromagnetic field, each world needed to have at least one natural jaunt point at each of its electromagnetic poles. Two altogether. If I put my sub-personalities to the task and was very creative, I could imagine it was possible to come up with scenarios to raise the number of natural jaunt points on a planet to four, maybe five, taking moons with an electromagnetic field and a very electromagnetically active star into account.

However, those additional jaunt points were very unlikely to be anywhere close to an ideal position like the one allowing the Tibet Gateway to drop people directly into Starfish Lake or the pool at the Old Camp.

In other words, a planet having as many convenient natural jaunt points for Tibet, Europe, North- and South America, Africa, and Australia, each running their own Gateway Station dropping exiles on another continent… This was outright impossible!

It meant Tirnanog had at least eight natural jaunt points! And given the fact that a wormhole bridging light-years needed a damn powerful jaunt point to be stable enough for use like it was only possible from a planet’s gravity well and magnetic field, this meant what?

I frowned and thought about Tirnanog’s sun, which was admittedly a white dwarf which probably had a damn powerful magnetic field. But there was only one moon, limiting the possibilities for complexity within the system.

The only solution I could come up with was that all of the jaunt points which allowed Earth to drop their exiles so conveniently on different continents were artificial. It was the only scenario that made sense.

But the technology necessary to create those jaunt points was magnitudes beyond the little street lights Astra and I were setting up. The only way I could see to make this possible was the ability to shape the entire planet’s magnetic field to one’s desire.

Two delicate fingers pinching my cheek brought me back from my musings.

“Hey! Stop zoning out. We just got word that there is work to do. Something huge rampaged through the organisation’s sensor array monitoring the outer perimeter and Conla wants us to get rid of it sooner rather than later.”

“Right.” I picked up my weapons and followed Astra out of the bunker, still deep in thought. Sadly, I couldn’t do much more than to stash away this train of thought for later.

We flash-stepped to our destination but still arrived a little bit late to the party.

Three of Conla’s warriors were already playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a firehorn when we reached a line of improvised barricades where the former wooden palisade had been. Some of the organisation’s men were shooting the creature with rifles, but the reptile’s scaly hide withstood the projectiles, allowing it to ignore the pesky insect bites.

Mind you, the firehorn wasn’t impervious to the guns, but it took two or three bullets to shatter a scale and for consecutive shots to get through. The triceratops-like predator was already bleeding from a handful of wounds, but so far none had deterred the creature.

When we arrived on the scene, the monster stopped suddenly and raised its nostrils, sniffing the air.

Then it turned in our direction, its eyes locking onto me like a bloodhound having found its mark.

“Shit!” I said a moment before the creature charged.

“I think I remember a certain event involving you and a firehorn,” Astra commented. “But I didn’t expect it to remember your scent among the dozens of exiles. Looks like their infamy for remembering the scent of their foes forever isn’t just an old woman’s tale.”

“Do you think it’s the same one?” I asked. “Why would it remember my scent? I didn’t do anything to it while it ate most of my fellow exiles!”

“Well, your scent was within the vicinity of a certain egg-thief,” Astra reasoned.

The firehorn opened its maw, revealing several rows of shark-like teeth and a deep-red glow coming from deep within its throat.

I flash-stepped, dodging the burning glob of napalm-like fire which shot out and impacted at the position where Astra and I had been just a moment ago. And when it hit, it burst apart, splashing all over the barricades like a liquid.

The creature didn’t stop its charge as it readjusted in my direction, readying another burning projectile.

I sighed and pulled a javelin from my back, wondering what would happen if the fireball was hit while it was still within the creature’s maw.