by Ryan Kirk
That night there was a feast unlike any Tev had experienced before. Fish, caught from the streams below, made up the bulk of the meal. He had eaten fish before, but never of this size. The meat was tender and flavorful and entirely unlike anything he'd ever tasted. It was accompanied by a selection of fruits and plants, some of which were familiar and many that weren’t. Tev tried everything, finding most of it to his liking.
After the feast was over, the crowd quieted down as a large bowl passed around the circle. Each person took a sip and Tev watched as their demeanor changed. Hunters who had been alert a moment before became glassy-eyed and lost in a world Tev could not see. Tev had heard of this practice before, but had never seen it in person.
He leaned over to the hunter next to him and asked what the liquid was. The hunter replied, “It is a holy gift, given to us by our ancestors. It is made with the crushed leaves of a plant that grows nearby, but a single sip will open your eyes to experiences you can’t imagine. It is said that it will show you what you need to know."
Tev considered passing on the substance. He was a hunter tasked with pursuing a strange creature, and he needed his wits about him. But they were safe in the caves and he was a guest here. And he was curious, more than anything else. When the bowl came to him, he sipped without hesitation.
It took a moment for the liquid to kick in, but once it did, Tev’s world shattered. Images and sensations burned across his mind faster than he could focus. He was no longer in the cave with other hunters, but was everywhere at once. He flew over mountains and trees and rivers and vast bodies of water. Everyone seemed small and their problems meaningless. And then everything went dark, a darkness unlike anything Tev had ever experienced, complete blackness.
A deep chill settled into his bones, a cold he thought he might die from. Then a single pinprick of light flashed across the sky. Small as it was, it was hot, setting his insides on fire. And then there was a rock, but it wasn't a rock. Tev didn’t have the language to describe it, but he knew it had been made, like a boat sailing between the pinpricks of light. And somehow, it mattered, mattered more than anything Tev had ever done in his entire life.
Other images flashed through his mind, there and gone before he was even aware of their presence, but there was one image that stuck with him. A rock hurtling through the darkness, smooth and shiny. He opened his eyes, surprised to find he was no longer in the cave. He looked around and felt the wind whipping around him. Although it was dark, he knew he was in a very high place. Perhaps the highest place.
He spun around, suddenly certain he wasn't alone, and he wasn't. There was a woman there with him. At first he thought it was Neera, strong and confident. But as the figure became more solid, he realized it wasn't her. Deep in his gut, he knew he was standing with Lys, the goddess of the hunt.
She looked at him with sad eyes, eyes that had seen pain others had never experienced. She looked right at him, looked right through him, and spoke. He thought perhaps she was speaking to him, but he couldn't be sure. Her voice went through him as though he was just one of many people she spoke to.
"You have a very long way to go."
Tev looked around. He wasn't sure about anything, but he couldn’t see anyone else and he felt compelled to respond. "I've already traveled a long way. Farther than I ever have before."
Lys shook her head. "You have barely even taken the first step," she said. "You cannot even conceive of how much farther you must go. You must chase your prey as far as your life can take you."
Then Tev was alone, standing on a high place in the dark. He shivered and opened his eyes and he was back in the cave, surrounded by the hunters he would travel with when the sun rose. He looked around and saw that the fire had gone out, untended by the glassy-eyed individuals scattered throughout the cave.
Moving silently, Tev built the fire back up to keep them warm through the long night. He laid back down, his dream running through his mind, the image of a rock in the blackness consuming his thoughts.
Even though Kindra’s world was spiraling out of control, it had least had the decency to do it in slow motion. She was running towards the airlock where Kenan would re-enter, but she felt as though the air itself was dense, like she was running through a gaseous soup rather than the ultra-purified air of their dropship.
In the corner of her eye, Kenan’s helmet cam allowed her to see what Kenan could see. From her observations, Kenan was the calmest of them all. Derreck was silent on the comms. He had given the order to return and there was little left for him to do but ponder his next decision. Kindra watched as Kenan’s targeting reticule regularly scanned his path to make sure he was clear of threats.
She had never seen him in combat before. Besides Derreck, none of them had. But the bravado and machismo were gone. This was the real Kenan, focused and deadly. She pulled up his vitals. His hormones were all over the place. That was no surprise. Fleet had never seen any point in shutting down the hardwired fight-or-flight response. But his respiration was slow and steady.
Kindra reached the airlock minutes before Kenan did. Years of training took over, and her conscious mind slid away, replaced by the comforting checklists of routine. She could feel her own heart pounding in her chest, and she wasn’t even in any danger.
Her checks were complete by the time Kenan returned. She could see him through the airlock window, assessing the surrounding territory one more time. But he hadn’t been followed. He stepped backwards into the airlock, never turning his back to the wilderness beyond. He didn’t lower his arm until the hatch was fully closed.
The airlock ran through the decontamination procedures. Kindra didn’t see any reason they needed to rush, so she allowed the full cycle to run. She expected Kenan to complain, but he said nothing, waiting patiently for the cycle to complete. When it did, the airlock opened with a soft hiss and he stepped back into the dropship.
He didn’t even give Kindra a chance to help him with his helmet. He pulled it off immediately, and Kindra was taken aback. Kenan was smiling. Not the half-smile he so often left plastered on his face, but a genuine smile. His eyes were bright, and he was grinning like he was a kid who had just gotten a gift he’d always wanted.
He didn’t wait for Kindra. He stepped backwards into the exosuit storage container and waited as the container disassembled his suit around his body. The smile never left his face, and Kindra couldn’t even begin to guess what was running through his mind.
She ran a quick diagnostic on his exosuit, but everything was in perfect condition. She wasn’t surprised. The suit was designed to withstand impacts from advanced weaponry. There was almost no chance it would be harmed by mere arrows and spears.
Once the exosuit was off, she forced Kenan into a cursory examination, but she knew there was little point. There was no way he could have gotten even a scratch, and he hadn’t. She took a quick blood sample to run some tests, but that was standard procedure after an exosuit mission on a new planet.
Derreck’s voice spoke softly in her ear. “Kindra, I need to know what that was out there. It happened out of range of the ship sensors, so you’ll have to rely on Kenan’s exosuit data. Can you have a report for me in an hour?”
Kindra thought about what she had seen. “Can you give me two?”
Derreck didn’t hesitate. “Sure. My quarters in two hours. There will be a team briefing in three.”
“Yes, sir.”
The line went dead, and Kindra walked quickly back to Biology, leaving Kenan to his post-mission checks. She needed to find out who they had just fired on.
As Derreck had promised, three hours later the five of them were sitting down around the dinner table which doubled as their conference table. Kindra looked around the room to try to gauge the reactions of her fellow crew. Derreck’s reaction she knew well enough. They had spent the last hour together going over Kindra’s findings, as unbelievable as they were. He was angry at Kenan, but more disappointed by the way Kenan had handled himself. Ther
e was a backstory to Kenan’s reaction, but she didn’t know what it was and Derreck hadn’t said anything.
Kenan was as cool as ever, and Kindra passed over him, trying to keep him as far out of her mind as possible. She was beyond furious at him. Pulling the trigger might have been the most disastrous event in all of human history. Humanity had been waiting hundreds of years to find another species, and the minute they did, they fired 137 high-velocity shells at them. Kenan didn’t care. The smirk had returned to his face, and Kindra would have given a month’s worth of hazard pay to kick it right off his face.
Eleta was the one who seemed most disturbed. Somewhere in her logical mind, the pieces weren’t adding up, and she seemed deeply upset by what had just happened. Kindra had her work to distract her, but Eleta didn’t. The ship and exosuit were in perfect working condition, so her life was largely routine at this point.
Alston was, well, Alston. He was as fascinated by the local geology as Kindra was by the life on the planet, and the fact that one of their crew had been fired upon didn’t seem to register much in his mind. She suspected his biggest concern was what type of stone the arrowhead was made of.
Derreck called them to order and began the debriefing. He ran over the incident in moderate detail. Everyone chipped in their own piece, and Derreck detailed it all so they were on the same page. When he finished he glanced over at Kindra. “Kindra has some. . . interesting data on the incident. Kindra?”
Kindra nodded and pulled up some of the best holograms she’d been able to piece together. As a matter of course, Kenan’s suit collected a wide array of data, and with a little manipulation, Kindra had produced a blurry image combining visual and infrared data streams.
There was a sharp intake of breath around the table. Only she and Derreck had seen this image before.
“As you can see, we’ve made first contact. As you can also see, even from a cursory glance, whatever we encountered looks awfully human.”
She let everyone scan the image more closely before continuing, highlighting areas of the image as she spoke.
“Kenan’s sensors are geared towards combat, and given the circumstances, we weren’t able to get nearly as much information as I’d like, but from what I’ve been able to observe, the similarities between ourselves and this species go beyond remarkable. It’s almost creepy, as unscientific as that term is. Kenan encountered a bipedal creature with a gait and stature similar to that of a human. I estimate this creature stands at about two meters tall and weighs approximately eighty kilos. Its temperature is almost thirty-seven degrees. It seems to have a human head as well: two eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, all on the head up here. It fired a bow and arrow much as a human would, if we were living thousands of years ago.”
Kindra stopped and played the combined image as it shot the arrow at Kenan. She couldn’t help but see the creature as human.
“I could bore you with speculation, but those are the facts.”
Alston looked up from the hologram. “Forgive me for asking what seems an obvious question, but have you considered the possibility all this is meaningless? It seems to me we’ve just found some sort of crazy colony. Kindra, every stat you just mentioned falls squarely under the category of a healthy human. If it walks like a human, is the same size as a human, and shoots a bow and arrow like a human, why isn’t it a human?”
Derreck interrupted Kindra before she could begin.
“The thought occurred to us, too. It’s too much to be a coincidence, unless Kindra unearths some data that proves the theory wrong. I wondered if perhaps Fleet had some ulterior motive, and I went digging in the archives. To make a long story short, there’s no way they are human.”
Alston shook his head. “Forgive me, Captain, but this history seems significant to me. I think I, for one, would like to hear the long story.”
Derreck looked around and saw that Alston wasn’t alone. “Very well. My first check was public archives. There was no surprise there, this planet has never been visited.” Derreck paused. He looked around the room and spoke to the ship’s AI. “Vigilance, pause recording. Captain’s override.”
Kindra’s eyebrows went up at that. She glanced around and saw she wasn’t the only one.
“What most people don’t know is that there’s another set of archives, not publicly available. The similarities Kindra picked up on were too much for me to dismiss, and even though I’m pretty high up in Fleet, they don’t tell me everything. I don’t want to say too much, because as you can probably guess, this is all highly classified. But Fleet does maintain a small subset of deep-expedition ships that can get involved in some highly unusual activities. I wondered if perhaps we had stumbled upon that. Perhaps one part of Fleet didn’t know what another part was doing.”
“But the search came up empty. Even according to the classified archives, this planet has never been visited before, and those archives go all the way back to the first colonies. Plus, all of us here know just how far from explored space we are. We’re not as far as some of those deep expeditions, but we’re well beyond the boundaries of current Fleet space. Why would anyone else be out here?”
Derreck shifted his voice back to the ship’s AI. “Vigilance, resume recording.”
“So, again, we come to the fact that as much as these creatures may seem human, they aren’t human. They can’t be.”
Alston wasn’t so easily deterred. “What about concurrent evolution?”
This time it was Kindra who shook her head. “It’s not impossible, of course. You can’t prove something can’t happen. But come on, Alston, you know as well as I do that the odds of something like that happening are beyond astronomical. There’s no way that’s the answer.”
Alston shrugged but didn’t say anything else.
Derreck gave everyone more time to ask questions, but everyone seemed preoccupied with their own thoughts.
“We now find ourselves in a difficult situation. We’re all up to date with the information, so now the only question is what we do next. We weren’t given very much guidance, but I think we’re in over our heads. Our pick-up isn’t for another twenty-two days, but our mission is officially over. I think we can all agree we have made first contact, and our only responsibility at this point is to communicate that fact to Fleet so they can decide on the next steps.”
Kindra launched out of her seat. “Derreck, we can’t just leave!”
He viewed her outburst calmly, as though he’d expected it. He probably had. “And why should we stay? There’s no evidence to support this, but something is happening here. We’ve lost two probes and made contact with a species who considers us a danger.”
“Derreck, everything you’ve said is exactly why we need to stay here!”
Kenan laughed out loud at that, silenced only by Derreck’s vicious stare. It gave Kindra a chance to collect her thoughts.
“Derreck, we’re already here, and there’s still so much to learn. None of you are biologists, but you’ve got to know just how unusual and special this planet is. Why not stay and gather more information? All of it will be useful for Fleet. We’re explorers. This is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing.”
Derreck shook his head. “We can do research from orbit as well. That’s not a compelling reason to stay here.”
“Scans of the planet from orbit aren’t nearly as useful as the research we can do down here. Besides, we all know the only thing Fleet is going to do is send another crew just like us here, if they can even pony up the resources for another mission. We are the only answer to finding out what’s happening here.”
Derreck nodded, acknowledging the truth of Kindra’s point.
Eleta spoke up for the first time. “But we’re in danger here. They shot at Kenan, and he shot at them. What if they come back with more weapons?”
Kenan rebutted that himself. “Eleta, we’ve got nothing to worry about. I could stand there and get shot at all day and it wouldn’t bother me none. I may have overreacted a bit this l
ast time, but I was taken by surprise. I could finish taking samples while they shot at me until their arms fell off.”
Kindra saw Derreck’s frown at Kenan’s words. It was clear he didn’t want any more contact with the creatures of the planet. She jumped in before Kenan could say any more. “There’s no reason to think they’ll return. Despite the inappropriateness of Kenan’s reaction, you can be sure he terrified them all. They have no idea what our weaponry is like. And, if they do come back, we can just retreat and leave the planet. Simple as that.”
Kindra looked around and saw everyone thinking about the choice. She couldn’t believe they weren’t as certain as she was. It had taken Fleet months to put together the resources for this trip. Despite their best intentions, it might be years before Fleet could afford to return, and Kindra couldn’t live with that. There was too much work here to be done, too many questions to answer. And they were here, on a planet with intelligent life! How could anyone think about leaving?
“Come on. This is the biggest scientific discovery, perhaps of all time, and you want to leave? Think of everything we can learn. This is exactly why we signed on. We can’t be deterred by the setbacks we’ve experienced. All of us are here because exploring the galaxy is in our blood. Let’s make the discoveries that will change the course of human history.”
She saw her words were having the desired effect. She knew her audience. Each of them had joined Fleet for different reasons, but there was a connecting thread that ran through all their lives. All of them considered themselves explorers. They loved to be on the edge of space, going places no one had gone before.
Kindra studied Derreck. Ultimately, he was the only one she needed to convince. He liked to pretend the ship was a democracy, and he considered everyone’s opinions; but at the same time, he was the captain of the ship, responsible not just for their lives, but for all the decisions that were made. She had to imagine he would already be in the hottest of water for Kenan’s firing on a new species. They’d catch the paused recording, too. Hell, there was every chance he would lose his position and get court-martialed as a result of all this.
