Incursio Epilogue

 Ned stepped through one last warp gate to see the Apex standing in front of a cliff, looking over his shoulder to see him. Apparently, the Apex was looking out at the view in front of him before Ned showed up.
 "Ah, Ned, good to see you again," the Apex said in his mechanical voice. "I saw how Operation: Five Thousand Fists went. Quite amazing, if I do say so myself."
 "You seem to see a lot of what I do for a guy that tries to stay under the radar," Ned replied, approaching the alien.
 "And you seem to hide a lot of things for a man who doesn't stay under the radar," the Apex retorted. "But thank you for at least referring to me as a 'guy' instead of a 'thing.'"
 By now, Ned was standing next to the Apex, in front of the cliff. "Oh, believe me, I still see you as a 'thing,'" he said with a scoff, looking at the landscape in front of him. This alien world appeared to have very tall trees, though most of the ones in sight appeared dead, there was barely any other vegetation, and ruins of a fallen civilization littered the area. "What is this place?"
 "This is my homeworld," the Apex answered. "Or, what is left of it, at least. The beings that created my kind did so basically because they knew this was about to happen."
 "Right, they knew that they had made a world that they were unable to adapt to, so they created the Carno-Teksa out of their DNA in order for their bloodlines to continue to survive at the price of mobility. They were a very proud race, after all, as you have told me," Ned said.
 "Correct. But did I ever tell you that I never saw my own world myself?" the Apex said.
 Surprised, Ned flinched at that. "You didn't?"
 The Apex shook his metal head. "I am a second-generation Carno-Teksa, created after our kind left this planet. Honestly, I knew it would look bleak, but I didn't think it was this bad. But there's a lesson to be learned when you look at my race and the ruins of this world. Pride destroyed this planet and my kind. All because I was the only one willing to swallow that pride, as you humans would say, I am the only one left, the only living creature that carries my predecessors' genes."
 Ned half-heartedly raised his eyebrows. "Wow, that almost sounded tragic," he said, growing tired of this and wanting to discuss more important matters. "So where is Zed?"
 "You humans and your arbitrary emotions," the Apex replied. "He left to do a bit of exploring. He'll be back soon. After all, the only creatures indigenous to this planet that could possibly do him any harm are all extinct."
 Ned sniffed the dusty air, which had a hint of death in it, as he knew all too well. "If all predatory animals are extinct here, then wasn't there some kind of contamination in the air that killed them? What's stopping it from killing Zed and me?"
 "It's been over a thousand years since my predecessors contaminated this world, both in your years and mine. Nature does reestablish itself, you know," the Apex reminded him. "Speaking of which, you do know that your countervirus will die out sometime, and the gene it creates to cause immunity is recessive, right?"
 "Yes, I know," Ned replied with a raised voice. "That way, I won't be disrupting time. The countervirus will wipe itself out in a few years at the most and the trait should disappear from human genetics a number of decades after Jaysun's time, making the world ripe for the other zombie plague. I've been meaning to ask about this, too: I found some evidence that you convened with that loris, Bovril, while we were gone. What were you doing there?"
 "I was watching Operation: Five Thousand Fists. While I was doing that, I found that little animal, and it spoke to me, saying 'Alien.' I was curious, so I tried to have a conversation with it, to no avail."
 "Apparently you told it that silence is golden and that I sometimes refer to you as 'space head.'"
 "Yes, when I was trying to confer with Bovril, my attempts escalated to mentioning those. Don't worry, the only person who saw me was a drunken Leviathan crewmember."
 The sound of jogging footsteps a few meters away from them stopped their conversation. Once both of them looked in their direction, they both saw the only person who could possibly be making the noises: Zed.
 "You're back," Zed said, the only way he knew how to greet Ned.
 "Yeah, thanks, Sherlock," Ned responded. "I'm back for the last time, I'm afraid."
 "What do you mean?" the Apex said.
 Ned now turned to the alien in a mechanical shell. "You know exactly what I mean," he replied. "You were trying to put things in perspective for me, and you did: I'm too reckless. All because of that, I unleashed a vile plague on the world that nearly wiped out my entire race. Therefore, once I'm done here, I'm going to destroy all the warp gate devices so that I can't screw up the world anymore."
 "I think you may have misunderstood what I was trying to tell you: rationality and irrationality are equally important to your race," the Apex corrected. "Irrationality and recklessness caused the zombie plague, yes, but they both had a role in ending it as well. Haven't you noticed it?"
 Ned then turned his eyes upward, pondering. Indeed, for one thing, his rationality told him to hide under that semi from Pariah, and the opposite of that allowed him and his team to kill it. Similar circumstances also caused the deaths of Leduc, Spartacus, and John Henderson.
 Just when Ned was in the middle of this moment of speculation, the Apex kept talking. "Don't destroy the warp machines simply because you made a careless mistake with them. Learn from that mistake, and do better things with warp gates to make up for it. Destroying them in order to prevent further mistakes is just being too rational, which has no place in humanity. It did in the Carno-Teksa, but thanks to that, I'm the only one left."
 Ned's eyes slightly widened, suddenly having an epiphany. For such a vigilant man, it was amazing he missed this fairly obvious thing. The Apex was trying to teach him how not to be reckless and how to better tell the difference between being cautious and being cowardly. It probably just didn't work at first because the Apex was more accustomed to using such methods on other Carno-Teksa instead of humans, whose minds worked differently.
 "Wow… okay, I think I get it now," he said. "All right, thanks. I changed my mind- I'm not going to destroy the warp machines; I'll simply be more careful with them."
 "There you go," the Apex replied. "You really have gotten it now."
 "Right then, so," Ned said, "it was good talking to you both, especially since I just decided that this won't be the last time we see each other. Zed, till next we meet, you take care of yourself."
 "I intend to," Zed said.
 "And Apex," Ned continued, "remember, I still don't trust you, and I have multiple defensive strategies for if you decide to attack my planet again. The one I have for the least visible threat is an order to send several fleets of B-52s to scorch the very earth you stand on. If I am so much as told by a crystal-meth head whose mother did that very drug while she was pregnant with him that a Carno-Teksa crashed a wild bachelor party that was already getting out of hand, I will rain down an ungodly firestorm right on your metal space head, and it will be biblical. You understand?"
 The Apex just released mechanical laughing noises. "I can't blame you for not trusting me, but don't you think that's a little much?"
 "I have a tendency to take risks, but never when it comes to someone who's tried to kill me in the past," Ned replied. "As an old Earth saying goes, 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.'"
 "But I am not your enemy anymore," the Apex said with a scoff.
 Ned turned and started to walk back to the warp gate. "Says you." He didn't even wait for either Zed or the Apex to respond to that, instead simply walking through the portal where Emma was waiting and pushing the "close" button.
 "So?" Emma asked. "Have you fixed everything yet?"
 "Well, actually, I believe I had a change of mind about destroying these things," Ned replied, "and no, I just thought of something else."
 At this point, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his iPod. "It's strange," he continued. "Deryn said that I gave this to her the first time I was in their world. But I know for a fact that I didn't do that. Since I've always hated long goodbyes, I just ran for the Firebird and left."
 Emma shrugged in response. "What if you go and give it to her now?" she suggested.
 "That is a possibility, but...," Ned started to say, staring down at his device. "I bought this with a sizable portion of my personal budget, and I modified its battery to hold Narkkoh with my bare hands. Why would I just give it away?"
 Emma stayed silent, unable to come up with a solution herself. This indeed was a mind-boggling conundrum.
 But then all of a sudden, Ned thought back to the extra needle-tracker he had in a tiny baggy in his pocket, which he had in case he dropped the first one. "Wait a minute," he said, pulling the bag out and removing the tracking device from it. He then pried the back off of his iPod and wedged the needle in next to the battery before replacing the cap. "I think I just figured it out."
 "You remodified your iPod into a tracking device so you can easily find Deryn and Alek again, while also making sure the device makes sense and doesn't draw too much attention," Emma replied, thinking like her boyfriend was. "Is that it?"
 "Yes, precisely," Ned said with a smile. "They travel a lot, too, since they spend nearly all their time on a floating whale, so it only makes sense. And you know what, maybe I can make that summer home after all."
 "Just as long as I'm invited," Emma said, smiling back.
 Ned just confirmed this with a laugh and a quick kiss before putting the wrist-sized warp machine on his wrist. "I'll be back in a minute," he said, leaving to get the Firebird ready.