by Chris Reher
“Nearly a hundred years ago. They probably wiped them out,” Azah mumbled. “Wouldn’t put that past them.”
Laryn was about to ask Azah whom she mean by ‘them’ but Nolan spoke first.
“Cut that big one open, Laryn,” he said. “Let’s see what they look like.”
Laryn held up her scalpel. “With this? Not going to happen.”
“Could bring it over here.”
“No we couldn’t,” Ryle said. “I don’t want this thing on the Nefer. Let’s leave the cutting-up to the Pendra folks.”
Toji raised his hands in some gesture that none of them understood. “Perhaps it’s best if we don’t disturb them. They’ve been resting here for so long. It seems… inappropriate.”
“What?” Azah said. “These creatures probably killed our people. And they’re dead. It’s not like they’ll mind if we took a look.”
“Pendra’s exobiology crew will be here soon enough,” Ryle said. “They’ll be all over these things to slice them up.”
Toji turned to Laryn. “Is that necessary?”
She met his eyes behind the warped surface of his visor and saw something there that seemed almost Human. There was no tell-tale wrinkling around his eyes to hint at his mood, and the horizontal pupils seemed as blind and unemotional as before, but she saw something distraught, almost pleading in his expression. “Discoveries like these are why we’re exploring the Hub,” she said gently. “And not just for our security. It’s why the outbounder fleet exists. Why do you think these… individuals should remain undisturbed?”
“It… it just seems rude.”
“Ryle,” Jex interrupted. “The Iko Kalon wishes to speak.”
“Has he been watching?”
“Yes. In his cabin. He appears agitated.”
“Why didn’t you mention that?”
“It did not seem relevant to your task.”
“The Kalons are part of this mission,” Ryle said with a glance to Azah. “Include their activities in your reports.”
“Understood.”
After a moment a low tone announced the presence of an addition to their open link. They waited for Iko to join the conversation, but the transmission stayed silent, punctuated only by low burrs and hums that seemed more vibration than sound.
“Iko?” Ryle said after a while.
“The Iko Kalon is communicating with the Toji Kalon,” Jex said. “It is beyond the range of your aural capacity.”
Whatever the two Kalons were discussing didn’t seem to suit Toji very well. Laryn studied the tense shift of his hunched body from one foot to the other, and the way his skin tightened around his mouth, like a snarl of someone who had lips to snarl with. His peculiar fingers, tucked into a five-fingered glove, rippled in an agitated rhythm against his leg.
“Jex,” Ryle said, startling her from her scrutiny of the Kalon. He walked back into the lab that once held the Harla’s medical equipment. “Have you identified this stuff yet?”
“Not entirely. The precise technology is unfamiliar and incompatible with our own systems. There is, however, a strong correlation to biomolecular engineering.”
“You mean to help them… err, reproduce or whatever they’re doing in there?”
“No. Their propagation is natural, albeit asexual. May I extrapolate?”
“Please,” Ryle said, watching Azah experiment with the equipment on the bench. She fiddled with some obvious mechanical interfaces but nothing worked to engage a power supply. Giving up, she inspected several racks of hanging bulbs containing a murky liquid.
“Given what we know of this species, from our initial encounter with them, the Br’ll would have to achieve certain adaptations to allow them to survive on the planet below, indeed even on this ship, without protective equipment.”
“Like what?” Laryn said. She stepped aside when Toji entered the lab, apparently done with whatever argument had transpired between him and Iko.
“They respire, but need different gasses to survive,” Jex said. “You will have noticed the density of their pupal carapace. It is designed for a thin atmosphere, like you’re experiencing here on this moon. In the absence of pressure suits, changing their physiology via their existing method of horizontal genetic transfer would be the best way of adapting themselves to these environmental conditions.”
“So they adapted, they evolved, a new generation to survive here,” Laryn said. “That is awesome.”
“Right then, we’ve got work to do,” Ryle said, far less awed by all this. He retrieved the lamp Laryn had placed in the makeshift morgue. “I want to check out the data coming in from the planet. Laryn, can you sort out the samples to make sure we don’t catch anything? I’m itching to go down to the planet.”
“You think that’s wise?” Laryn said. “This is a big discovery. We should report this back to the station.”
“Are you mad?” Azah said at once.
“Wisdom’s never been my strong suit,” Ryle said. “We’re here to find the Harla’s survivors and that’s what we’re going to do. And this isn’t the kind of discovery I’m going to hand over to someone else.”
“You mean the Ministry,” Laryn said.
“I mean Pendra.” He gestured for them to file out of the lab to make their way back to the Nefer. “We’re not dealing with First Contact, Laryn. That makes this my call.”
“The Ministry needs to know about the Br’ll,” she said.
“Obviously. After we’ve had a look around.” He nodded down the black corridor in the direction of the passenger wing of the ship. “Those bodies tell me that the Br’ll aren’t here to make friends. If there are survivors on the planet, they may be in danger. Knowing that is going to make a big difference in how fast we can get help for them.”
Laryn scowled at him, torn between citing regulations, or perhaps even just best practice, and a deep need to see the planet. Immediately. She envied them all for their ability and willingness to put good sense aside for the sake of adventure.
“All right,” she said finally. She turned to Toji. “The Harla passengers have been here since before our relations with the Kalon have improved. Most of them have never seen one of your people. If we go to the surface, I will have to ask you to stay on the Nefer until we have had a chance to talk to the survivors, if there are any.” She looked meaningfully to Ryle. “That is not negotiable.”
Chapter Seven
“All right, Jex, let’s take a look at this.”
Laryn activated the rarely-used equipment in the Nefer’s miniscule lab which also doubled as a medical station. Scanners whined into readiness and two overhead screens blinked on.
After they had removed and decontaminated their EV suits, she had not bothered to retrieve her coveralls but instead pulled a simple, although gloriously amber, shift over her body suit and tied her hair into a loose knot. Ready to immerse herself in her studies, she pulled the padded stool from beneath the console and sat cross-legged to open her sample bags.
The steady hum of the Nefer’s systems supplied soothing white noise and from somewhere music drifted through the ship, barely audible. It was easy to appreciate how comfortable the small ship could feel even on long voyages. The crew worked at their stations, sifting through the sporadic packages of information arriving from the survey drones before taking a few hours of sleep in their cabins.
“You’re not cleared to access this system, Agent Ash,” Jex said.
“Oh. Well, get me cleared.”
Only a few moments passed before the input panel lit up.
“Ryle has asked me to add your profile to the science station. He apologizes for not changing your access earlier. You can proceed.”
“Thanks. Let’s sequence these samples and see if we find anything interesting.”
“What are you looking for, Agent Ash?” Jex inquired.
“You can just call me Laryn,” she said. “Didn’t they tell you that?”
“No.”
“They don’t t
ell you much, do they?” She labeled and transferred the specimen into the scanner and then also offered a drop of her own blood to help with the analysis of the alien retrovirus.
“Whom do you mean?”
She looked up from the microscopic view of the alien cells. “Well, Ryle, for example.”
“We are in constant communication.”
“All the time? Like, right now? He knows I’m speaking to you?”
“Yes. But I’m not transmitting to him now. He would not want to be part of every one of my functions. It would be beyond a tolerable input level for Humans. I shield him from most of that, and sometimes he asks me to disengage.”
“Does that bother you?” she said, momentarily losing interest in the Br’ll pieces. “To be shut out? He seems a little abrupt sometimes, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what that means, Laryn. There is nothing abbreviated in his speech. His communication with the crew appears to suit the dynamics of the group.”
She hesitated a moment, surprised by his deliberate avoidance of her question. The design behind his bland verbal routines seemed far more nuanced than that of most AIs. Generally, they were designed to respond with something dazzling like: “Please rephrase.” She decided on a direct approach. “Are you happy, Jex?”
“That is a very Human state. And very subjective.”
“Hmm, do you like… working with Ryle?”
“Are you asking me if I object to my link to a Human? Or to Ryle?”
Again, an odd extrapolation. “Both, I guess.”
“We are all prisoners,” he replied. “Does he object? I sometimes think so, although he needs me to operate the ship. That is his choice. I have none.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I do not object,” Jex said. “I hope that someday he won’t either.”
“You think he doesn’t like you?” she said, astounded by his statements. The AIs were designed to mimic emotion and even act upon them, as far as their tethers to their Human masters allowed, but it seemed to her that she actually heard regret in his voice. Since she had come aboard the Nefer, he had delivered his part of the conversations with little expression. This, now, seemed like a remarkable bit of programming.
“I think he doesn’t care. He neither likes nor dislikes me. But he likes the ship. That’s enough for me.”
“He grew up on the Nefer, didn’t he? Surely, he cares for you.”
“He did not grow up with me. The Nefer’s original ambient intelligence died when his father did. It was not possible to extend her program until Ryle’s return from Earth. I believe Ryle would have liked to have taken her over. Maybe he misses both of them.”
“Well, I like you,” she said out of some instinctive need to make him feel better, even as she wondered why.
“Thank you, Laryn.”
She shook her head to rid herself of this odd mood and tapped the console. “How are we coming along with the sequencing?”
“The report will be available shortly.”
“So,” she said, peering at the cells magnified on the screen. “How’d you know so much about the Br’ll? That’s quite the file you have on this species, especially since no one else seems to know about them. Do you know where it came from?”
“No. It is part of a compressed inventory. An old file.”
Laryn wondered if perhaps this, the secrets carried in the ship’s archives, might interest her bosses. Could this be stolen classified information? Pendra trade secrets? “Old?” she said. “How old? Who placed it there?”
Jex surprised her by answering, dashing her suspicion that the information was restricted to those with more clearance aboard the Nefer than Pendra’s spy. “It was uploaded to the database by the senior Captain Tanner before I was activated. The date stamp is twenty-nine years ago.”
Laryn looked up when the door to the lab slid open and Ryle entered the small space as if summoned by their conversation about him. “Hey, Laryn, we’ve got a big batch of data from the planet. Want to sit down with us? The others are in the lounge.”
“Of course! I can’t wait to find out what’s going on down there. I’ll be just a few moments.”
Instead of leaving her to her work, he came closer and peered over her shoulder at the sample boxes. “Find anything good?”
She busied herself with the specimen, feeling a little guilty for having discussed him with the AI. Surely, his feelings toward what was essentially the Nefer’s soul now were a private matter. “Jex was about to report,” she said.
The screen before them began to fill with images and other data, delivering information about the samples she had entered. The juvenile Br’ll profile was an inconclusive jumble of alien DNA that the Nefer’s database was unable to interpret. Jex’s explanation that they were little more than a repository of stem cells seemed supported by the report.
Laryn tapped the screen. “Those are the findings on the retrovirus. Looks like Jex was right. There’s no interaction with my blood sample. It might fire up an allergy response but most Humans’ immune system will deal with it fine. The lab will want to take another look at it when we get back to the station.”
Ryle leaned closer to the other screen, nearly touching her shoulder as he bent over her. Laryn felt the warmth of his body and her own surprise at finding that rather pleasant. Normally, she preferred her own space, and plenty of it.
“Tell me I’m not seeing that right,” he said, pointing at a row of cyphers on the screen.
She frowned at the images beneath it. “Jex? Is that right?”
“If you are referring to the Human DNA in the second sample, yes, it is right. I have already confirmed the data.”
Ryle whistled under his breath. “Human. This just got a whole lot more interesting.”
She looked up at him, flabbergasted by this news. “They’re using Human DNA? To… to alter their metamorphs?”
“Let’s get the others into this,” he said and turned to the door. “Jex, ask the Kalons to meet with us in the lounge.”
“I can’t do that, Ryle. They have entered their sleep cycle. Iko explained that they must not be roused from that. To wake suddenly would harm them.”
“What?” Laryn said as she hurried after Ryle. “What kind of sleep is that?”
“It’s not really sleep, but we don’t have a matching biological process on file. They reduce their body functions into what we could describe as a coma. It appears to be mainly a physiological regeneration.”
“Excellent timing,” Ryle said.
Azah and Nolan were waiting in what used to be a small mess hall, quite austere at one point, that had reconfigured itself into a lounge, meeting room, resting place when one’s own cabin wouldn’t do, or a place to play games or argue or do any of the things that made long in-flight hours bearable. The furniture bolted to the deck plates made for a strange assembly of comfortable, if a little shabby, places to rest a body in comfort and companionship. Over time, the crew members that passed through here had found ways to decorate the walls, not always with an eye for style and good taste.
Azah had turfed Nolan from her favorite spot opposite the door where she could prop her boots up on the edge of another bench and still keep her eyes on who came and went. He now slouched by the food dispensers which still offered some of the more interesting items they had stocked before leaving Pendra.
“Let’s have your survey, Jex,” Ryle said as soon as they entered the lounge. He swung a leg over a chair and pulled it up to the projector. The flat surface also served as dining table and he frowned at Nolan when the engineer put his bowl on it.
Azah pushed it out of the way when an image of the planet rose into the air. “This should be good.”
“What’s not so good is what Laryn found in the lab,” Ryle said.
“Oh?” Azah’s eyes turned to Laryn.
“These Br’ll are using Human DNA,” Laryn said. “Building it into those creatures we saw on the Harla.”
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“Huh? What for?” Nolan said.
“It’s what they do.” Laryn waved a hand at the projection of the planet. “My guess is that they did this to acclimatize their species to this place. Since it seems Humans can live down there, using Human DNA would save them a lot of trial and error.”
“You sure about that?” Azah said. “Jex? Is that supported at all?”
“Without knowing more about the Br’ll I can’t say,” Jex said. “But the reasoning seems sound.”
“What do they look like?” Ryle said. “Have you found any down there?”
“Our probes are encountering data errors in some areas. There are transmission problems through the lower troposphere I’ve not been able to correct. It is apparent that the planet has a rich variety of living organism for which we have no data. Any of them could be a Br’ll. I do have visuals in my archive.”
An image of a hunched creature appeared before them so suddenly that even Azah flinched in surprise. “Ugh,” she said.
“That’s a Br’ll?” Nolan said. “Where’s the head on this thing?”
Data scrolled through the air, but all of them stared at the hologram of the alien itself, uninterested in measurements and chemical composition. The creature before them stood on six stout legs, quite short, carrying an elongated torso mottled in dull shades of brown and orange. It looked not much more formed than the larvae they had found in the alien lab, with skin so thick that it at first looked to be a protective suit. The next image showed the larvae, turning as it drew its legs close to its bloated body. An amber-colored carapace formed to turn it into the shapeless lump they had seen on the Harla. After a moment the hologram returned it to its previous display of the Br’ll’s adult stage.
Laryn ran her fingers through the image. “Those bands around the body match where the sections of those cocoons meet.”
“Is that a stinger on its butt?” Nolan said.
“No,” Jex said. “The Br’ll have no significant defensive mechanisms. That’s not its butt.”
Azah chuckled. “Nose?”
“They draw nutrients through that proboscis,” Jex said. “The Br’ll nervous system is extensive but lacking a central brain mass. Their intelligence, according to the exobiology reports, may exceed your own species. Cognitive processes are distributed throughout the main body. As are their sensory receptors.” The image zoomed into a cluster of gleaming apertures along its side, looking very much like pupils despite their elongated shape. Then the creature’s statistics pulsed briefly to draw their attention. “Note the size of this specimen, thought to be average.”
