GblaRCS Chpt 23

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 23 -==
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"Those old rumours about Amaris having a secret underwater battlemech factory somewhere on Kwangjong-ni gave me the idea that maybe the old Star League facility on Frobisher might be eventually expanded to make things other than people with gills."General Jenna Romanov - 2837CE
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===Meeting the new transfer student===
Joseph-Louis Lagrange Memorial High School – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2832
"Perhaps our new student would like to introduce herself to the class." the teacher suggested having directed her to a position next to his desk in front of everyone.
Philomena could have really done without this but her adoptive parents were not the sort that were going to allow her not to attend school, even if Niops Social Services would have, which they would not.
"Hi, I'm Philomena." she introduced herself to the teenagers who were all staring at her with a mix of various expressions on their faces ranging from intrigue to something verging on disgust in a couple of cases. "I'm from Frobisher" she added redundantly given that the local press had been discussing the other Terran Hegemony research colony way out in the periphery ever since the story broke. "Yes, my people were genetically engineered to make us amphibious. Yes, I have gills. No, I'm not more fish than I am human or anything close to it. Yes, my eyes are pretty big, but no I don't see in widescreen or panorama. No, my legs don't turn into a tail when I'm in the water, I don't know why that needs saying but for some reason it does, and finally, yes, I have partially webbed hands and feet to help with swimming" she concluded, holding her hands up fingers spread to demonstrate. "Any questions?"
"Are you wearing that scarf indoors to hide your gills?" a girl with ginger hair asked, sounding more genuinely curious than she did mocking.
"No, I'm wearing it because it's freezing cold here and I'm still trying to warm up from being outside more than a few minutes" Philomena replied honestly. "I'm not trying to hide my bald head with the woolly hat either" she added just in case that was going to be the next question. Because she was a minor the newspapers had not published her photograph, but that seemed a little redundant given that anonymity wasn't really an option. She was the only member of Homo Sapiens Amphibia on the planet, and for that matter the only one of her kind on any planet other than Frobisher, and if she wore sunglasses to hide her very distinctive eyes that would only attract more attention out in public because blindingly bright the local star was not.
If she hadn't already been overwhelmed by most everything else she encountered on Niops VII the fact it was actually safe to look directly at the sun here would have made more of an impact on Philomena than it did. In reality, she was still too busy adjusting to other things to pay it much mind. Visiting the planetarium a couple of days back had been particularly mind-blowing, not so much the holographic presentation but the realization that there were enough seats in there to hold the entire population of Frobisher twice over.
Her father's somewhat insensitive 'Dad Joke' about her gawking 'wide-eyed' at everything like a kid from a hick town had not been appreciated. Albeit mostly because she was already concerned that she was staring at everything in the 'big city' like some slack-jawed yokel from ****** Nowhere while everyone else was staring at her. 
Hoping her time as an unwilling celebrity would be short-lived Philomena had been reassured somewhat that yesterday, and for the first time since they arrived, her family, had not been the front-page story in the morning newspaper. Instead the headlines had been lauding that the recharge station at the Niops zenith point had charged its first JumpShip, and this was apparently considered some cause for celebration. Still under construction, and only partially operational, the station had yet to even be officially named, but it was by far the largest structure built in space by the Niops Association and judging by the headlines they all seemed pretty damn proud of the thing. 
"Ah yes, the climate where you're from, that's something we might wish to talk about for today's lesson which will be a departure from the original lesson plan" the teacher said. "Please take a seat there Philomena" he directed her to an empty desk.
"We're not going to talk about me the whole hour are we?" Philomena responded in dismay.
"Oh, dear me no" the teacher replied, "that's mostly a matter of biology, we're studying astronomy and astrophysics this morning, although we will be talking about your home as the system de jour" he told her as she sat down. "Any more questions for Philomena before we begin?" he asked, best to just get it all over with he decided pragmatically.
"What's your star-sign? Pisces?" a boy joked to some laughter.
The teacher glared at the boy. "I will tolerate many things in this class, David. Even a certain amount of frivolity, but references to astrology is not one of them" the usually laid-back and relaxed teacher uncharacteristically snapped. If the Niops Association ever came to dominate the galaxy it would be very bad news for anyone that subscribed to that particular nonsense, astrologers were held somewhat lower in public esteem there than people that claimed to be able to divine the future by studying goat entrails."
"It wasn't like the constellations were even in the same place in the Terran sky that they were when the Ancient Babylonians first invented the ridiculous pseudoscience, the teacher thought angrily to himself. If the charlatans were remotely rigorous in their approach they would have added a thirteenth starsign, Ophiuchus, to the zodiac over a thousand years ago."
"Sorry, Sir." David replied sheepishly, it was always a bad idea to hit the teacher's berserk button.
"Any serious questions?" the teacher asked, expression indicating that they had better be serious questions from now on.
"How long are you going to be on Niops before you go home?" a girl asked. "I'm asking because I'm on the swim team and we're competing against Bernard Lovell High next month. Any chance you'd be interested in being a ringer?" she asked hopefully.
"Jennifer, that would be deeply unethical." the teacher chided.
"It's the only sport we don't always beat them at. We already won our case that genetic engineering shouldn't disqualify any of us from inter-school athletic competition" the girl argued. "Lovell is just bitter that all the Ironborn attend Lagrange."
Philomena blinked. "Wait, are you the 'super-soldier' kids I've heard about?" she asked looking around to see if she could notice anything different about them.
"Only some of us, there's a few more in another class, but we prefer being called 'First Generation Ironborn', not 'super soldier kids' if you please." Jennifer McEvedy replied. "I guess they stuck you in with us because people in this school are used to having gene-spliced freaks around" she suggested wryly.
"Guess so." Philomena agreed, wondering if her parents knew.
"Just be grateful that Niops isn't exactly a hotbed of religious fundamentalists that'll call you an ungodly abomination to your face" McEvedy told her. "I'll bet that would happen a lot more elsewhere."
"Some might call you a science-devil in Chinese though." a boy spoke up. "Happens to me all the time."
The teacher frowned. "Frederick, I hope you tell your parents when that happens so they can remonstrate with the person concerned" he checked.
"They know. It's mainly my stepmom's mom that does it" Frederick Hallis replied, shrugging. It wasn't like she liked his father either, albeit for very different reasons.
"Oh" the teacher responded awkwardly. Well, what did General Hallis expect if he married into a Capellan family, he thought to himself dismissively, deciding to move on swiftly. The teacher pressed a few buttons on his noteputer and a color projection of what Philomena recognized as her home system appeared on the wall behind the teacher's desk.
"This is the Frobisher which can be found approximately ten jumps, or three hundred light years, Rimward of Niops" the teacher began. "It's slightly atypical in that the star Frobisher is not a main sequence star, it's a type K5IV, an orange subgiant, with a luminosity you would normally expect of a hotter G type star like Terra but while maintaining the spectral class of your more regular K type" he said. "Since the system's habitable planet is also only second out from its sun the planet Frobisher is also considerably warmer than the standard baseline for habitability, Terra III, with an average equatorial temperature of 37 degrees Celsius."
"Damn, that's even hotter than Alphard" one of the boys exclaimed.
"Indeed Henry, and unlike Alphard the surface of which is only fifty-five percent covered by ocean, the same cannot be said of Frobisher" he noted, looking to the girl for comment.
"We're ninety-five percent ocean, everything else is islands and none of them are very big" Philomena told them.
"Extreme humidity for most of the year and so-called 'wet bulb' temperatures are far from unusual on the surface making it feel up to twenty degrees hotter than it really is" the teacher told them. "Would you care to explain to the class what that means given your first-hand experience Philomena?" he asked the girl. "It's not something that's exactly an issue here on Niops VII" he said, smiling.
"You can't cool down by sweating." Philomena told them. "We don't just spend a lot more time in the water than we do up on the islands because we can breathe down there, we do it because you can easily die of heat exhaustion up on the surface."
"We'll discuss thermoregulation more in biology class, but I suspect you can all see why Philomena finds our own climate rather chilly" the teacher said, smiling.
"I'd never seen snow in real life before I came here" Philomena remarked. "When does summer begin anyway?" she asked.
"This is summer." Jennifer told her apologetically. "We're near the equator, and there's not that much axial tilt anyway, so it doesn't get that much colder though."
"You don't swim in the sea here do you?" Philomena asked, grimacing. Back home the sea was always warm, at least it was unless you dived really, really deep, but they had actual icebergs here. She had seen the polar icecaps from space and they were huge.
"Sometimes, but not for competitions." Jennifer told her, rightly assuming that if it meant diving into the frigid waters of Niops VII there was no way that Philomena would want to join the swim team whether she was certain to win the event or not.
"Getting back to Frobisher II," the teacher cut them off. "the gravity there is slightly higher than our own, not that it matters if you're floating of course, and they have a moon called…" he looked to Philomena again.
"Ayde" Philomena told the class. "A.Y.D.E" she spelled it out for them because it was pronounced exactly the same way as aide, and actually meant the same thing. Not that she was sure why anyone had considered that particular moon more helpful than any other.
"As you already know, except you perhaps Philomena, Alphard is itself a subgiant star, which is why Alphard IV is actually hotter than Terra III, despite both stars being otherwise similar type G yellow stars" the teacher noted. "Specifically G3 in the case of Alphard and G2 in the case of Terra."
The teacher then got very technical about subgiant stars for the next fifteen minutes, then about the goldilocks zones around different stars and Philomena started to wonder if the teenagers on this planet were geniuses because they all seemed to know a ridiculous amount about such things judging by their questions and comments. Unable to follow it all very well she ended up zoning out for much of the rest of the lesson and was relieved when the Math and English classes with different teachers later on were more her speed. Math class even seemed to use the same textbooks as school back home, which probably shouldn't have come as a surprise given that the Terran Hegemony probably printed billions of them and shipped them out to every system it controlled.
The last class of the day was biology with the same science teacher as before, and it was at this point Philomena realized that the kids weren't scientific geniuses. They must just have a cultural bias towards teaching their children astronomy and astrophysics here, she concluded, because she was well ahead of them in her grasp on the topics being covered in the biology lesson.
Then it occurred to Philomena that the reason she seemed to know so much more about the biological sciences already than they did was likely because Frobisher had its own cultural biases in that direction.
She was still thinking about that when it came time to head home, wondering how science was taught on 'normal' worlds for a while before she realized that in much of the galaxy these days it might not even be taught that much at all.
The apartment the government had assigned her family was far enough away from Lagrange High that she needed to take the school bus home, not that she was particularly unhappy not to have to walk given how damn cold it was. The same youngsters who had stared at her on the bus on the way to school in the morning did so again on the way back, although a couple of kids from her class did talk to her now at least, including the girl with all the ginger hair who she had since found out was called Alice. Alice wasn't one of the 'Ironborn' kids herself, but she was dating one, and Philomena figured that meant she was a little more relaxed about genetically engineered humans than some other people might be.
The Ironborn kids all went to some kind of weird army cadet meeting after school a few days a week apparently, so none of them were on the bus that afternoon. Alice claimed that the week before her boyfriend had been playing with live shoulder-launched inferno missiles, but Philomena sincerely doubted that was true. Who on Terra would let sixteen-year-olds do something like that?
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===Home with Dad===
Not having her own key yet Philomena had to knock on the apartment door to be let in when she got home and her father did so. "Mom's still at some meeting." Ian Johanson told his adopted daughter.
"When isn't she, either here or back home?" Philomena replied rhetorically, hanging up her coat on the rack near the door as her father closed it again. At least it was toasty warm inside the apartment, in a place that had cheap fusion power generation and bountiful geothermal energy nobody worried about turning up the thermostat, electricity was practically too cheap to be worth metering.
"How was your first day at school?" Ian asked.
"Pretty good, only got asked if it was true that I could entice sailors to crash onto rocks by singing twice." Philomena replied sardonically.
Ian Johanson laughed. "Nobody that has ever heard you sing would ever accuse you of being a Siren." he replied. "Odysseus wouldn't have been begging his crew to untie him from the mast, he would have been begging them to fill his ears with beeswax too."
"Gee, thanks, Dad."
"Just calling it as I see it, Honey." Ian replied as the girl now took off her hat too as she warmed up. "You have many fine talents, being able to hold a tune is not one of them."
If that was merely a subjective opinion, and not an objective fact, Philomena might have argued with him but melodious her singing voice was not. Part of that was down to the gills and how they connected up to her regular respiratory system, it messed with hitting the high notes somehow, but most of it was down to her being tone deaf. "How was the biology department at the university?" she asked, changing the subject.
"Friendly people, some of the lab equipment was a little quaint compared to what we have back home, and their library resources leave a lot to be desired, but I think I'll be happy enough working there for a while." Ian replied. "Oh, and I got you a pet while I was there." the genetic engineer added, smiling.
"A pet?" Philomena queried, wondering if it was some kind of genetically-engineered cat or something.
"They had quite a few of them at the lab, they breed pretty fast so when I asked if I could borrow a tank and take one home they were okay with it." Johanson told her. "It's in here" he continued, heading off towards the living room with Philomena following.
When she got there Philomena took stock of the large fish tank now resting on the dining table and its inhabitant. "That is one ugly fish." she opined, looking at it.
"Ah, but what it lacks in good looks it makes up for in character" her father declared. "This one is used to be handled" he said, reaching into the tank and gently taking hold of it, the fish not trying to evade but placidly seeming to accept being picked up.
To Philomena's surprise her father lifted the fish out of the water and placed it on the table beside the tank. Rather than immediately seeming to panic and thrash about like a normal fish would as it began to drown in air the creature remained placid and just seemed to look around.
"It's amphibious" Philomena realized.
"Species name Amphibius Alphardis, usually called the Alphard Mudskipper." Ian Johanson told her. "Not quite fully grown, it'll reach just over twenty centimetres when it is" he continued, reaching for a small plastic container, taking the lid off and pouring some food on the table near the fish.
The mudskipper immediately spotted the food and the reason why its fins were so misshapen compared to an ordinary fish became obvious as it employed them like legs to make its way across the table towards the food which it started to devour.
"Back home on Alphard they eat algae, but they find the algae from the sea here too salty so they prefer cabbage of all things" Johanson told her as the mudskipper devoured the green plants.
"Not a saltwater fish then?" Philomena assumed.
"Native to a freshwater inland sea called Lerna on the Hydrae continent." her father replied. "They climb out of the water to feed on the mudflats by the water, and to avoid predators if necessary. They're a true amphibian, just as happy breathing air as they are water, although they don't spend too much time out of the water in daytime. Poor little things get sunburn."
"You'd better put that back in the water before it wanders off" Philomena advised as the mudskipper finished off what it was eating and started looking around. "Pet fish shouldn't need a leash."
Ian Johanson gently picked the mudskipper back up and placed it back in its tank. "It's adorable, isn't it?" he asked as it started swimming. "We should get it some aquatic plants for its tank. Ones that it won't eat but aren't toxic either."
Philomena looked at the fish askance. "You only think its adorable because its amphibious" she decided, wondering if some of her DNA would have come from this thing if it had been native to Frobisher instead of Alphard.
"Nonsense. You're amphibious and I don't think you're adorable." Johanson replied, trying and failing to look serious about it.
"Hey!"
"I mean you used to be fairly adorable when you were small, but the taller you got the less adorable you became" Johanson told her, tongue-in-cheek. "Whatever traces of adorableness you still had vanished right about the time you turned thirteen and started talking back and swimming off in a huff when you were angry with us."
"Okay so you think its adorable because it's amphibious and small" Philomena slightly adjusted her position.
"You don't think it's neat that we're looking at a species that is probably in the process of doing what our ancestors on Terra did nearly four hundred million years ago, crawl out of the oceans and start to colonies the land?" Johanson asked.
Philomena thought about that. "As a member of a human sub-species heading in the opposite direction I can't help but think that one of us has it badly wrong." she eventually replied.
"I guess we'll just have to rely on natural selection to sort out who has it right then. Loser goes extinct" the geneticist replied in jest. "While we're on the subject of extinction, or rather the need to avoid it, the head of the biology department came to me with a warning that keeping all our eggs in one basket on Frobisher might be unwise given that your sub-species is only one global cataclysm away from going the way of the Trilobite."
"The seas here are too cold for us." Philomena replied quickly.
"Nonsense, you are all perfectly capable of surviving in the waters here." Johanson replied.
"I don't mean it would kill us, I mean nobody with any sense would want to live in these waters." Philomena explained. "They have icebergs, actual icebergs here." she exclaimed, shivering just from thinking about it.
"The department head was actually thinking about Niops VI which is a few degrees warmer, at least on the side that always faces the sun, although the strength of the ocean currents generated by the temperature differential between the two hemispheres could cause problems of their own." Johanson noted. "I actually suggested a small colony on Alphard within the Lerna Sea, that should be comfortably warm enough for you."
Philomena frowned. "Freshwater though?"
"Think of it as an opportunity to test if we were successful in making you a euryhaline species." the genetist joked.
"I already know I can breathe fresh water, I used to do it in the bath remember, it's just that we've always lived in the ocean."
"Only because Frobisher has barely any rivers and is entirely lacking in lakes." Johanson replied. "I remember the time you forgot to rinse away all the residue left behind by your mother's scented soaps first before putting your head under and opening your gills in the bath."
Philomena nearly gagged with the memory. "They itched for a week after that and everything, and I mean everything, smelled like lavender for days." she recalled with an involuntary shudder. "That scent still makes me gag now."
"Maybe that's my fault for not considering that eventuality when I helped engineer your grandparents" the genetic engineer remarked. "The need for lavender-proof gills just wasn't on my sonar I suppose" he admitted, smiling. "Any cute boys at school? You know mother will ask about that." 
"None with a fish fetish as far as I could tell." Philomena replied sarcastically, ignoring her father's look of disapproval in response to that. "I don't think bald, built-in flippers and huge eyes is considered all that attractive here."
Ian Johanson nodded. "Having once been a teenage boy myself, admittedly many, many decades ago, I can offer some advice there." he said.
"Yeah?"
"Wear a low-cut top and they won't be looking at anything higher than your neck." Johanson suggested, holding back laughter.
"DAD!" Philomena exclaimed, her cheeks going bright red with embarrassment.
"All I'm saying is that if you want them to think something other than 'fish' then drawing attention to your mammalian features is a sure-fire way to do it." Johanson told her. "Scientifically speaking."
"I can't believe you sometimes." Philomena told him, shaking her head in disbelief.
"If your Mom hadn't given much the same advice to your biological mother when she was working as my lab assistant, and trying to get your biological father to notice her, you wouldn't even exist." Johanson told the girl. "The bikini had a lot more impact than the lab-coat ever did."
"GAH!" she gagged 
"You know we didn't just take you in when they died in that accident because we loved you and your parents, we did it because we were both partially responsible for your existence, me with the gene-splicing, Eleanor with the matchmaking." 
"Okay, that's enough. I don't want to think about this anymore" Philomena told him seriously. "What are we having for dinner?" she asked.
"Your Mom is picking up take-out on the way home." Ian Johanson told her.
"Those noodles again?" Philomena asked hopefully. The weather might be awful but the food here was great, much more variety than on Frobisher.
"Either that or fried chicken."
"Also sounds pretty good." Philomena replied, frankly anything that wasn't the usual fish and edible seaweed from back home was fine by her. She didn't like people staring at her here but the food on Niops was fantastic, almost as good as the movies and gameshows they had on television.
"What did they feed you at school?"
"Some kind of salad with ham in it. At least I think it was ham, it was okay though" Philomena told him. "They seemed surprised I didn't have any special dietary requirements."
Ian Johanson rolled his eyes. "I take it as a personal insult that we would have engineered you to be restricted in what you can eat." he said. "The whole idea was to make you more adaptable not less."
"That's what I told them." Philomena replied. "I'm not sure if they believed me when I said I could eat stuff with so much ammonia or other chemicals in it that it would make them ill" she said. "Not that I like the taste or smell of ammonia."
"We'll we didn't want to mess with your tastebuds, we might have accidentally stopped you appreciating a good steak, not that you ever had one before we got here" Johanson replied, reaching for the television remote. "I wanted to catch the news in case they mention us again."
"Maybe you need to splice together some amphibious cows so we can have steak and burgers back home?" Philomena suggested, grinning as he switched on the viewscreen which was already tuned to the news channel.
"… continues to top the rankings in the Gunslinger Program. When asked for comment by our correspondent reporting on the competition, mechwarrior Wilhelm Sampson, better known by his nom de guerre of 'Billy the Kid', attributed his outstanding victories in both the Heavy and Medium weight classes to taking recreational drugs, drinking to excess, and dropping out of school" the male news presenter said with a disapproving expression, an image of the mechwarrior in question appearing in one corner of the screen.
"Hey, I've seen that guy, Sampson I mean," Philomena realised. "A couple of the girls at school have his picture in their lockers."
"In response SLDF High Command have issued a press statement saying that mechwarrior Sampson was only joking and that he will be reprimanded for doing so in a manner that could have led impressionable youth astray" the newscaster reported.
Ian Johanson chuckled. "So, the most skilled mechwarrior on the planet is a young, good-looking guy with a rebellious streak." he observed. "Really makes you wonder what the teenage girls might see in him." he said sardonically before grinning.
"It's a mystery." Philomena replied deadpan.
//"In other news, record grain harvests on Alphard this year are expected to lower the price of staple foods significantly over the next few months"\\ the newscaster announced. //"The Office of the High Associator has claimed that this is another example of how investing taxpayer's money in other systems pays dividends to our citizens in the medium-to-long term, noting that the grain yields per acre that have been achieved his year were only possible thanks to irrigation projects funded by the Niops Association. Those of us who have come to enjoy a large glass or two of imported Alphard Ale at the bar of an evening have extra reason to celebrate, as increased production of wheat and maize on Alphard means that more Fonio, the type of millet used in its production, is available for the brewing industry rather than being made into porridge or bread"\\ he said happily.
"I've tried that beer, it's not bad" Johanson remarked. "Better than what we could make on Frobisher anyway."
//"Germanium production on Alphard also continues to increase month-by-month, although the government refutes as 'scurrilous' the rumors that this is because guards at the Crux Penal Colony have been issued electric cattle-prods from Francas to motivate the prisoners into working harder in the mines" the newscaster said. //"Increased automation and heavy-duty mining equipment imported from the Free Worlds League are stated to be the sole reason for the increase in the output of germanium ore, and the government has offered to allow both the press and independent observers access to the facility to investigate for themselves if the allegations of mistreatment of the inmates have any merit."\\
"Penal Colony?" Philomena queried.
"Someone mentioned it in the university when we were talking about Alphard earlier, it's on a different continent than the inland sea where the mudskippers live." Johanson replied. "Captured pirates and slavers put to work swinging pickaxes so I heard."
Philomena thought about that. "Pirates and slavers? Well ****** those guys then." she decided eventually.
"Language!" Ian Johanson rebuked her sharply.
"Sorry." Philomena apologised.
//"… in other mining news, recruitment on Comstock for people to work in the new coltan mine on the Hydrae continent continues, although take-up has been reportedly worse than expected due to both lower unemployment and an improving standard of living on Comstock itself as it recovers from its decades-long economic and societal malaise" the television newscaster said. "The fifty percent government-owned Hydrae Mining Corporation that was established last year has warned shareholders that it may need to increase wages in order to meet recruitment targets and that this will negatively impact expected dividends for the next few years. Deemed a strategically vital resource, the extraction and processing of coltan ore has been deemed a high priority by the government's Strategic Planning Committee since the ore contain large amounts of tantalum, necessary for our expanding electronics industry, and niobium, itself used in both the production of specialised steels and superalloys. Any viewers interested in knowing more should make sure to tune into our special report on mineral extraction in the protectorates, and its implications for the future of the Niops Association scheduled for Tuesday evening."\\
"Sounds riveting. I'd make sure to watch it, but I'm washing my hair that evening." Philomena said wryly. "Can we switch to the gameshow channel instead?" she requested. "The show where you have to answer questions while they throw beanbags at you is on soon" she told him. That was hilarious, especially the bonus round where the mechanical flinger was sped up.
"Not yet" Johanson replied, he wasn't a fan of the gameshow channel which was a weird mix of education, comedy sadism and complete idiocy.
//"And finally, before we switch over to our other studio where our regular panel of experts will be discussing the latest news from the Inner Sphere and the ongoing war there, High Associator Giles Olson answered questions today regarding how the Associator will approach the Frobisher controversy."\\
"You know, all things considered, I'd prefer my very existence not to be controversial." Philomena remarked drily.
//"Unwilling to comment on government policy that is yet to be decided the High Associator did however offer his personal thoughts, saying that if he had been in charge on Terra back when the Frobisher project was begun he would have vetoed the whole thing due to the ethical issues involved in human experimentation."\\
"Not great." Johanson replied, frowning.
//"However, he then went on to add that since the human sub-species known as Homo Sapiens Amphibia had, in fact, been created well over a hundred years ago, then he believed it would be morally wrong to let an entire race become extinct when the Niops Association could help prevent that. This he said was particularly the case as the people of Frobisher were Terran Hegemony citizens who had the same legal rights and protections as any other citizens and the government therefore had a duty of care towards them."\\
Philomena rolled her eyes. "Hey, we might be freaks, but at least they accept we're people."
"I have a dream that one day my creations will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the sequencing of their DNA but by the content of their character." Ian Johanson declared in a haughty tone of voice, his expression indicating he was being rather less than serious however.
"You know if you keep referring to yourself as 'the creator' then one day God might get pissed and decide to teach you a lesson about hubris and humility, Dad." Philomena warned.
"Total amateur, he didn't even make his own creations flood-proof like I did. What kind of half-assed species needs an ark to survive a global deluge anyway?" Johanson joked.
Philomena looked at him. "You know your sense of humour is more blasphemous and contrary to the will of the almighty than anything you've ever done in a lab" she told him. "It's a good thing that the only people that might face getting burned at the stake here are the ones that claim to have invented perpetual motion." 
"A little harsh, but objectively what more suitable punishment could there be for anyone that doubts the inviolable truth of thermodynamics?" Ian Johanson wanted to know, sounding so sincere about it Philomena didn't know if he was kidding or not.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : The Rim Worlds Republic under Amaris actually did have a secret underwater battlmech factory on Kwangjong-ni although the SLDF never found it (Defiance Industries did eventually) so military gear being produced in secret underwater bases is very much a thing in Battletech.In canon Frobisher only had a population of only 4500 by the year 3095, despite the colony being four centuries old by that point. Even though it likely had a declining population over the years there were never very many people living their (gentically engineered or otherwise) so to Philomena born there the capital city of Niops VII is going to seem like a huge metropolis (there are more teenagers attending Joseph-Louis Lagrange Memorial High School alone than there are children in total on Frobisher). Niops VII is also going to seem very, very cold to her.I somehow suspect that astrology is unlikely to be thought of too highly in a society founded by astronomers and astrophysicists.Jennifer McEvedy is a great believer in the notion that winning is what really counts and that playing fair is for suckers. As such she looks at Philomena and doesn't think 'big-eyed freak' but rather 'easy win for us in the swimming competition'. Where she gets that attitude from is of course a mystery.Mechwarrior Wilhelm Sampson, AKA 'Billy the Kid' (last seen fighting the Blood Rain in Part XIV) has become a minor celebrity, thanks to performing so well in the Gunslinger Program. His scores are much higher than his promotion prospects.If Homo Sapiens Amphibia were not engineered to be a euryhaline species (able to cope with waters of differing salinity) then the scientists on Frobisher really messed up their design requirements for an adaptable human sub-species. Having a colony of Frobisher originated people living in the freshwater Lerna Sea along with the Alphard Mudskipper amused me as an idea. According to Handbook: Major Periphery States mudskippers are eaten on Alphard as a delicacy, though an acquired taste apparently, but Frobishers keeping them as pets instead has appeal. Handbook: Major Periphery States also notes that large amounts of Tantalum and Niobium are produced from Coltan ore on Alphard (both very useful materials).
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Chapter 23