By the time they are grown, they are walking libraries of every danger their world has ever thrown at them.
We thought they were fragile, doctor, small and soft and short-lived.
We had it exactly backward.
Their world tried to kill them every single day for millions of years, and they are what survived.
Yes, said Sepha.
I have been thinking the same thing.
The council is going to have to reassess everything, said Cael.
Every medical assumption we have made about them, every safety rule, every risk table.
Some members will not like it.
She almost smiled.
I find that I am looking forward to it.
The reassessment, when it came, spread across the galaxy faster than anyone had expected.
Cael’s report to the Medical Council was published in full.
Within a month, it had been read on every major world in the Conquered.
Within two months, the human medical texts that had sat untranslated in the archives for four years were the most requested documents in the Conquered’s libraries.
Liran universities began offering courses in human immunology.
Adravic Medical School invited human doctors to lecture, and the lecture halls were so full that students sat in the aisles.
A Human Pediatric Guide for Parents, translated into 19 languages, became an unexpected bestseller on worlds where nobody had children who caught colds.
And on Meridian Exchange, Sepha Ilanth began working with a team of human and Liran researchers on the first true anti-venom program for the Skithra.
The humans who volunteered were carefully screened, carefully monitored, and given tiny, safe, controlled exposures under full medical supervision, the same way human doctors had made anti-venoms on earth for more than a century.
Their bodies did what human bodies did.
They learned.
Within a year, the first stocks of Skithra anti-venom had been sent to every research station and trading post within 10 jumps of the creature’s home world.
It saved its first life three months after that on a survey ship in the deep frontier.
Sepha received a message from the ship’s doctor, a Dravik she had never met, which said only, it worked.
Thank you.
Please thank the humans.
She forwarded it to Hamish.
He sent back a single line.
No worries, doc.
Told you it was a good story for the pub.
But that was later.
First, there was the dinner.
It had been Hamish’s idea, of course.
He had raised it on the morning examiner Cael left the station, sitting up in his bed with his arm healing nicely and a plate of commissary pancakes in his lap.
