"So bearing in mind I spent half a semester on metal head bio and it was more about the cellular level, and the people who really work with these rankings are the ones who go out and shoot them, probably the ones that are smarter and less likely to just fall over dead for no reason and have armor that can stand up to more blaster rounds."

And here they are.

"Some of them fall over for no reason?"

"It's sort of like aging, but if you want to do math to it you want to pretend they have a half-life instead of - I don't know if your species even ages, though."

"We do not. How interesting. Are they radioactive?"

"Literally the entire planet is radioactive, you can even find out how old some things are by checking the isotopes of carbon in them. But metal heads aren't much more radioactive than the average crocadog."

"Crocadog. Gosh. I wonder why the half-life model then."

"I know a textbook that explains that - Metal Head Microanatomy by Doctor Lany, uh, but the preface is by someone else I forgot - actually, do you want a dozen titles and I can answer questions when you're done?"

"Dozen titles sounds good. And your food order."

"Oh. Yeah. Hey, Torn!"

The man, who is still resting on one of the beds, looks up. "Hm?"

"I thought if the strategic situation is about to change and we've got Cam to conjure things we could be giving out more free food, am I right?"

"Yeah. To start with, as many five-pound bags of cornberry flour as will fit under the table and two dozen cans of chipped yakow - make them look like the Laughing Lurker brand, if you can."

"Can do." Bags under table, chipped yakow. He makes a nibble of chipped yakow to taste.

It's dried meat, offensively salty and otherwise unseasoned.

Torn looks over the foods. For the first time since Cam's been here, he smiles.

Rit recommends an introductory biology textbook, an introductory eco studies textbook, a history textbook, a biography of Baron Praxis, What Makes A Zoomer Zoom, Computers Made Simple, A Brief History of Eco Studies, and a bunch of fiction she thinks will give cultural context.

"Thanks!" He sticks them all into his computer on a little stick and starts in with the history textbook.

The book explains that, while the Precursors were very important and existed in the past, they are the subject of an entirely different field of study and will not be covered here, and skips forward to the earliest currently readable narrative records and their archaeological context.

This continent was the second one settled by humans and the first one settled by most types of lurkers (the reader is assumed to know what a lurker is). Historically it wasn't the seat of the most important civilizations, as judged by people at the time. But the descendants of other civilizations are few and scattered and assimilated, and there's only so much room in one book, so the local civilizations get nearly all the focus. The book covers their migration to the continent, their initially peaceful relations with the more intelligent lurkers (there's substantial evidence of trade, and there are burials of lurker skeletons in human graveyards, buried with similar sorts of burial goods). The humans on the continent eventually unified politically, partly by making use of salvaged Precursor warp gates to keep travel times low.

The centuries that followed are sometimes known as the golden age of sagecraft. The sages were people who studied and worked with eco, and usually studied other things, and were recognized by other sages as learned and worth listening to. They were described at the time as usually having powers like levitation or the ability to communicate with plants.

Then at one point an unpopular law was followed by arson and acts of sabotage, many of which specifically took advantage of the warp network; the book claims that the resulting crackdown on dissidents wasn't strong enough, since the violence got worse. Eventually, for only partly related reasons, the country split down the middle, northwest and southeast, with lurkers controlling the territory in between. The fact that the split was along geographic lines was partly a coincidence but it made it much more appealing to just shut down the warp network. Written records from the west in the following centuries report fewer and eventually no sages, fewer scientific discoveries, increasing border raids from lurkers, and two famines. At least there are substantial records from the west, though. The east - might not have kept good records, or their records might have been destroyed. As best modern historians can tell, there was at least one all-out war with the lurkers, maybe more; the country fractured further, but it's not clear how much; there was a volcanic eruption in the middle of their territory; and this would have been when the lurker sharks migrated to the area en masse and would have taken a bite out of their fishing industry. One of the very few stories from this time and place is that of the Last Sage, also called the Dark Sage, Gol Acheron; the books assumes the reader has heard that one before. It does say there probably was a historical Gol Acheron; it's wildly unlikely that the legendary hero defeated him and opened a door in his citadel that let the metal heads out, because the metal heads arrived far to the south, near what is now Haven City, and the only plausible locations for his citadel are nowhere near there.

When the metal heads attacked, the east was devastated, but still had the knowledge and technical ability to put together primitive force fields. The west was hit later, but more thoroughly destroyed. Its survivors fled east. It isn't clear whether Mar came from the east or the west (the reader is assumed to have heard of Mar before), or even if he came from another continent; he appeared when he was needed, built Haven City, unified the southeast, drove the metal heads out of a substantial area, and made Haven City the capital of a smallish but prosperous country. Under his rule, science began advancing again, the population started growing again, and mankind even made peace with the lurkers. After his death, the war carried on at a stalemate for a while. The humans spread and prospered, but so did the metal heads.

Then there are centuries of names of rulers of Haven City, and the dates of their reigns, and the dates of the destruction of dozens of other important settlements; the last time a city fell was less than twenty years ago. As of the writing of the book, Haven and Kras were presumed to be the only two human settlements remaining anywhere on the planet. The book ends with Baron Praxis, who (contrary to popular belief) is related to the House of Mar, rescuing the city from the weakness and laziness of its prior ruler and preparing to reverse the era of decline.

Cam's questions are:

- what's a lurker
- what's Gol Acheron's supposed deal
- what's Mar's deal

"Lurkers are a whole group of related animal species - except lurker sharks, they're not real lurkers - they're pretty varied but they all have these weirdass jaws, it'll make sense once you've seen one. A few species talk - not random words, they know what they're saying, they mostly know what you're saying - and they even make tools that are almost as complicated as what people make. We have a couple that are citizens, they're not that much less civilized than, well." She smiles bitterly.

"Gol Acheron is supposedly the sage who first decided to start studying dark eco and supposedly might have turned evil and supposedly might have wanted to destroy the world and supposedly might have been friends with some lurkers and supposedly might have been killed by a legendary hero who might or might not have been Mar or Mar's father or Mar's lover or Mar's pet crocadog, I know five different versions of this bedtime story and I don't believe any of them but sages were real and someone started trying to study dark eco and turning evil is the kind of thing that could happen if you did that without taking any safety precautions and the world wasn't destroyed, thanks to Mar.

"Right, Mar is - I mean, he's in the book, there are lots more books about him. He's a hero, he's the next best thing to a Precursor, whatever. I don't know, I don't care much, I barely even celebrate the Feast of Mar."

Cam makes a lurker model to investigate its jaw. "What's a good Mar book?"

It has a pronounced underbite and four protrusions from the lower lip.

"Dunno," Rit says, "it's not my field."

"Early Governance of Haven City: a New Perspective by Samos," says Torn.

Cam adds that to his reading list. "Did you find anywhere else to put food or anything while I was reading?"

"I texted the Shadow about it. He's interested in seeing if you can 'heal the ecology'," he says with barely detectable sarcasm, "so we can farm more in the long term. We could use more potable water for the stockpile, too. We need things for the war, but it's hard to say what we'd still need if the metal heads were on another planet. Other than that, what kind of assurances do you need to do recon for us?"

"You don't have the species I'm used to so my ecology healing would be inexpert at best but if you tell me in what containers you want your water that I can do. Recon like...?"

"Plastic jugs or glass bottles, doesn't matter. We need to know if the baron is planning anything in the next few weeks. I want everything he's written and every room he's visited and every person he's talked to in the last week. I want to know about every weapon he has. I want to know the location of Mar's Tomb. I want to know where an orphan we're taking care of came from. And while we're at it, I want to scout sites for the new city."

Plastic water jugs. "I would need more reason to be confident the baron's bad news before spying on him. Tomb and orphan origins and a scale model of the continent I can do though, where do you want that last one and what time should I be looking for orphan contexts in? I'll also need their name."

"Scale model of the entire continent should wait till I've cleared the food out of here, unless you can put it up on a wall. The kid can't tell us his name, is there a way around that?"

"I could put it on the wall if you like, though I'll need to plasticize the water features and stuff so they don't slosh out. Do you have a name you're calling him?"

"...'The kid.' And - I guess not much is secret from you - the Heir of Mar."