by Chris Reher
“Not with anything we have here. We’ll figure something out when we get it to Targon.”
She ran her hands over the meteorite, feeling its wounds and scars. There was something comforting in that, like stroking a pet. She thought about her encounter with Jovan just now. Why did she turn into a simpering idiot when he was around? She was, even by Delphian standards, an expert researcher and xenobiologist with a long list of accomplishments and accreditations. She had worked for her place on Anders’ team – even his love for her family would not favor her for this if she hadn’t earned it. And yet, when Jovan came near her, she turned back into the blue-braided little fool who once imagined him as the handsome prince of her dreams. Had she still not gotten over that stupid infatuation?
She sighed and shook her head, resolving to guard her thoughts more carefully. To have him continue to think of her as the tedious brat foisted upon him by his oath to her clan was unbearable. At least, she thought, she could try to grow a damn spine and act like an adult around him.
“It’s so alone,” she said quietly.
“Cyann?” The technician’s voice floated through the speaker built into her suit.
“Huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” She frowned, bewildered. Why had she said that? She watched her gloved hands sweep over the surface of the stone. But it wasn’t a stone. It was organic, it was carbon and ice and water and any number of strange combinations of matter that had allowed it to reach this place. To find her.
The voice.
It was here. She felt it reaching for her, drawn to her from somewhere at some vast distance or, as the Shantirs and the doctors believed, from somewhere inside her own head. Each time she felt it had been a time of some emotional turmoil, good or bad. Breaking her leg when she was eight. Her first trip away from Delphi. Visiting the science center on Feyd with her father. Finally leaving her school to study with the Shantirs who did not scorn her for being part Human. Watching Jovan’s ship leave the first time. Watching it leave the second time.
And then, over these past few years, it had found her more frequently. It had been her secret. She was not mad, of that she was certain. Given the absence of any serious sign of dementia, thought the scientist inside her, there was no need to alarm those who cared about her or to invite more derision from those who saw her as an unlikely freak of nature. But she had found Tava who promised to help her reach farther than the other Shantirs would. And he had. Again and again, she had heard that voice, each time a little more clearly.
She touched the small control panel at her shoulder to turn off the sound system in her suit. “I hear you,” she whispered.
There was no reply. Just a presence. Something was waiting. Something terribly sad. Terribly alone. She looked at the meteorite. The voice had not come from there. It was still distant, still barely there. But it knew where she was and it expected something.
She stretched her arms out over the meteorite and stepped closer as if to embrace it. Pressing her body against it, she rested her cheek on its surface, hampered by the awkward headgear of her suit. She did not hear the tech as he surely wondered what she was doing. This was a comfortable moment and she felt like, finally, she might sleep, on her feet and stretched out on this battered piece of space debris. It felt almost like she could sink into it, like a pillow.
She realized that she was, indeed, sinking into it. The surface of the meteorite gave way under the pressure of her body as if her warmth melted it. She lifted her head to see an indent where her helmet had lain. It deepened and expanded as she watched, fascinated.
The dull thud of someone banging on the observation windows roused her. The tech was waving his arms, shouting something she barely understood. She touched her control panel to re-activate the sound system.
“—the hell out of there!”
“Don’t shout,” she said and pulled back from the meteorite. “It’s all right.” She put her hand on its surface, which immediately shrank away from it, like ice melting under a flame. Some of the material flowed to the floor to form an irregular and expanding puddle. The light around her shifted when the technician escalated the hazard indicator.
“Don’t you take your suit off!”
“Why would I do that?” she said. “Calm down.”
“What did you do, other than make out with it?”
Two others had entered the observation ring. Seeing the new state of the meteorite, both headed for the airlock leading into the dome.
“I did nothing. I just touched it. Am I still tight?”
He checked the integrity of her suit. “You’re good.”
The door behind him opened again and this time Jovan rushed into the room, followed by a somewhat sleepy-looking Anders. The older man blinked in disbelief when he grasped the situation. “What have we got?” He scrubbed the short stubble on his head as he scrutinized the monitors. “Vapor samples, quick. Have we got sound recording?”
Jovan went to the window. “Cyann, are you all right?”
“Come in here,” she said. She moved her fingers through the dissolving outer layer of the rock, fascinated by its texture. Neither dust nor sand, it seemed as though it was simply falling apart, losing cohesion and turning into something else.
The other technicians entered the lab, thickly suited and armed with their scanners. Unlike Cyann, they did not seem especially eager to touch the meteorite. One of them began to collect samples of the material that had fallen to the floor.
She watched her hand move deeper into the top of the rock. The clear visor of her headgear fogged and she took a moment to calm herself. The softening material easily gave way to her careful probing.
“Cyann, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Anders said.
“I know,” she replied. “But I have to.”
“Jovan,” he called when the Shantir stepped into the ring. “Stop her. This is reckless.”
Jovan leaned over the meteorite. “What is it?” he said, also deaf to Anders’ plea.
“You feel it, too?”
“Yes.” He looked up at the others outside the dome. “There is something in there. And I don’t mean microbe.”
“Feels warmer in there, but not by much,” she said. “I wish I could take my gloves off.” She tilted her head, concentrating on what little physical sensation her gloves afforded. But it was the touch inside her mind that guided her while assuring her that she, somehow, was doing the right thing. “Join me.”
He placed his hand on her shoulder, lending her the power of his finely trained mind to enhance her perceptions. She gasped when her fingers connected with something. “I found it,” she said excitedly.
“Found what,” Anders wanted to know, now as enraptured as everyone else by the discovery.
“It’s moving!” Cyann stroked a finger over the soft contours of what she had found. “It’s alive. It’s hurting. Too much gravity. Can we dial that down?”
Anders waved at someone to find the engineer to adjust the gravity fields that had been spun up to make up for Sola’s weak pull. “It’s communicating?”
“Yes! This is amazing.” Cyann closed her eyes. “It’s peculiar. Not really using language but I can feel some imagery, if that makes any sense.”
Jovan reached past her to gently move more of the increasingly soft material out of the way. Deeper below the disintegrating crust a lighter, nearly translucent layer shifted easily. They both saw something dark beneath that. He leaned back to allow the overhead cameras to record what they had found.
“I think this material is some sort of nutrient matrix,” Cyann said and gestured for one of the techs to take a sample from the interior. “The feeling I get is that our visitor just woke up. It’s what started the decomposition of the hull. Amazing technology. If you want to call it that.”
“I can see it moving,” Anders marveled. “Cyann, I really have to insist that you step away. Anything that big might have teeth.”
She grinned. “It also has a brain big enough to know that we mean no harm. There is nothing hostile here. It’s a little frightened but I’m not really getting much panic.”
Jovan nodded. “I’m getting that, too. Impatience. And curiosity.” He smiled. “From both of you.”
“Hah! Like you’re not ready to explode if we don’t get a look at it soon.” She gripped his arm with her free hand when they felt a gradual shift of the vessel’s gravity.
“How is it breathing?” Anders asked.
“It’s not. It’s absorbing what it needs from the medium it’s in. But it doesn’t want to stay in there. We’ll need to find a way to replicate this if we want to keep it alive.”
“Well, let’s not get our hopes up,” Anders cautioned. “We don’t even know what it is.”
“I wonder if we can freeze it.”
Jovan sighed. “Can you two stop being scientists for a moment? It’s not dead yet. And it’s sentient. Let’s not start dissecting it just yet.”
Cyann winked at Anders. “All right, all right. Just don’t get too attached to it. The odds aren’t—” She jerked her hand back when the creature inside made a violent movement. They all saw the side of the melting block bulge outward. Both Cyann and Jovan stepped away. She noted that one of the technicians in the dome with them moved to a compartment near the airlock and retrieved a stunner.
The shell of this alien visitor finally gave way and a tear appeared from where Cyann’s hand had broken through and then ripped downward. Something pale and shiny slid from the gap. Long limbs unfolded slowly, trembling as they moved. It gathered itself and rose, first on four limbs, and then it stood.
“Gods,” Cyann whispered. “It’s a Prime species.”
The others all gaped in astonishment, letting the cameras, scanners and monitors do their work while they simply stared speechlessly at something that none of them, not the Delphians, nor the Humans, not the two Centauri guards summoned by the new caution level, had ever seen before.
It was only the size of a child, with thin, flattened limbs, colorless skin so translucent that the denser organs and insubstantial bones beneath it were eerily visible as dark shadows. The head was round and very flat, with small, widely-spaced eyes more round than elongated and entirely taken up by mirror-like irises. A slotted aperture in the place of a nose sat above a small triangular mouth with a peaked upper lip. Most definitely a Prime, one of the species scattered on distant worlds that had, for some reason, evolved in much the same way.
Most remarkably, the waxy skin exhibited a wonderful bioluminescence that changed colors so rapidly that it seemed to be some sort of signal. The edges of its round head, the long fingers at the ends of both hands and feet, and even the surface of its thin chest flickered in rapid waves of green and orange and yellow.
“It’s holding something.” Jovan said.
Indeed, the little creature’s fist was closed tightly around what appeared to be a wet rag. It was gray and looked to be falling apart, like so much damp paper.
Cyann moved closer to the visitor and crouched to appear less threatening. Cautiously, she extended her hand, keeping it low and open to point at the object. The visitor looked down at it and then lifted its own hand in response. Barely daring to breathe, Cyann touched the scrap of material and smiled when she was able to gently pull it from the pale fingers. She gave it to Jovan, far more interested in the mirror eyes that had not left her own. She touched the alien’s hand, careful not to trap it in her own.
Jovan tugged on the rag until it was more or less flattened out. A technician opened a transparent envelope and he slipped the artifact into it. “Looks like writing,” the woman said. “Symbols. Look, those two are the same.”
“Get that deconned,” Anders said. “Scan it into the system to see if we can decipher it here. Send a copy to Targon.”
Jovan held the technician back to peer more closely at the writing. “Send it also to Delphi.”
“You don’t think we can decipher this up here? We’ve got some pretty smart machines.”
“And we have some pretty smart coders and linguists on Delphi,” Jovan said. He nodded to the tech and then turned his attention back to Cyann. “Are you getting anything from it?”
She nodded. “It’s dying.” The alien had wrapped those long fingers around her hand. Like its arms and legs, the digits had no joints as if, instead of bones, her body was simply supported by cartilage. “It... She knows she’s dying. She knew she would before she even got here.”
“What can we do?” Anders whispered.
Jovan lowered himself beside Cyann and put a hand on her shoulder in silent support. “Leave them,” he said. “Just let them be.”
Cyann wished that the protective suit she wore was made of something soft and comforting. The urge to embrace this individual, to comfort her, was so overwhelming that she had to fight against her instincts to tear out of the stiff fabric. “Someone pass through a towel or a blanket or something.” She bit her lip when tears obscured her vision. “Oh, Jovie, she’s so alone.”
“Her respiration is not able to deal with any of the gas mixes we can come up with,” he said to the others, his own voice unsteady. “She’s barely breathing. We won’t have time to figure out a stasis that’ll keep her alive.”
“Shh,” Cyann said softly. Her gloved fingers stroked the visitor’s arm. “She’s aware. She’s all right with it. She was sent here. She’s so tired. Others are following.”
“To Delphi?” Anders asked.
“To this sector. Trans-Targon, I guess. Just generally this way.”
“More of these meteorites? These pods?”
“Yes. But much bigger. Asteroids. Many of them traveling together.”
“Why?”
Cyann closed her eyes. “We will die. We. I don’t know if she means them or us. Just ‘we’. She’s not using words. Jovan?”
“That’s all I’m getting, too.”
The stranger’s coloring still shifted through its spectrum, but paler and not as rapidly. A nearby hissing sound announced the arrival of another technician and then someone handed Cyann a soft piece of cloth. She realized that it was someone’s shirt. She draped it gently around the creature who allowed her to draw her close and finally take her into her arms. She was almost weightless in this gravity but Cyann felt the relief when she no longer had to stand on her own.
“She’s very tired now.”
“How are you doing?” Jovan said.
“I know what she knows. It isn’t much.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Cyann shifted into a different khamal. I’ll cry later, she sent to Jovan. “She’s one of several individuals sent out in advance of a larger group,” she said aloud. “She doesn’t know what happened to the others. They’re coming this way, partially through sub-space.”
“Using our own jumpsites,” Anders said.
Jovan shook his head. “Not just the open sites. They’re using keyholes, too. Any breach in space.”
“You mean to say that this little... person, without any technology, is able to open a keyhole, span sub-space without navigational aid or controls, and actually emerge again where intended?”
“Astrophysics is going to wet their pants,” Nigel murmured.
“Yes,” Cyann said. “But she was pushed here. She’s not the navigator. Just some sort of advance warning.”
“That a pathogen-infested asteroid field is on its way here.”
“Yes.”
Jovan looked up. “See if you can reach the observatory on Delphi. We’ll need the elder Asher and Leisakh. Send them what we know.” He glanced at Cyann. “And wake up base command.”
“Do you know how far away they are?” Anders asked. “Where? When they might get here?”
Cyann looked into the dark mirror spheres of the visitor’s eyes. “There is a... a stone on the bottom of the pod. It’ll have recorded the trajectory.”
The alien’s featureless chest fl
uttered rapidly and then they heard a string of language, emitted in a high-pitched gurgle. The words she spoke were not formed by her motionless face but seemed to originate in her throat. The rapid cadence flattened until it seemed that she had to push the words out with whatever breath remained.
Cyann watched helplessly as the flashes of color at the edges of the being’s face faded and disappeared. The stranger raised her thin arm to place her flat and unlined hand against Cyann’s faceplate. None of the Delphian aversion to displaying emotion among strangers kept a sob from escaping her lips when the little creature slipped from her mind and then lay limp in her arms.
* * *
“Cyann, they’re all here now.”
She looked up from her cultures when Anders’ voice broke the silence of the Scout’s laboratory. He did not have to consult the ship’s system to find her here after checking her empty cabin. Few places were as comforting to her as the well-ordered isolation of her workspace and here her troubled mind always found peace.
Their visitor’s passing twenty hours ago had unleashed a torrent of activity, both here on Delphi as well as at Air Command headquarters on Targon. Data transferred, experts summoned, samples analyzed, endless calculations made to dissect every scrap of information they had obtained from the asteroid and its mysterious visitor. Both Jovan and Cyann had spent hours conveying the mental impressions and imagery they had received from the little being before they escaped for a few hours’ rest.
She smiled at Anders. “I can’t wait to hear what they’ve come up with.” She glanced at the reflective surface of a cooler to check her lab smock for stains and then quickly tucked a wayward strand of hair into the loose knot at her nape. “Any news about our friend?”
“Nothing. There is no sentient anywhere in the database even remotely similar. She must have traveled a long way.”
“And yet her DNA says otherwise.”
He nodded. Once again, they had been stumped to find that a previously unknown species not only appeared physically similar but also shared a great deal of their genetic makeup.
Since the Centauri and their Human companions had brought interstellar travel to this sector over three hundred years ago, they had found many wondrous species, sentient or not, living in both beautiful and hostile environments. But again and again they encountered what came to be known as Prime species: highly evolved bipeds, physically alike and mentally similar in their thought processes, intellect and emotional range. These tended to be the dominant species of their respective planets – the Commonwealth Union of Planets was a partnership of these races and only a few chose to ignore the invitation to join.
