Spy Station

by J. M. R. Gaines

  Suddenly she was jolted by the news – “Do NOT attempt to place the patient into the shuttle compartment.”

  “Why not???” she screamed.

  “Subject is a female Forlani too immature to place in Weh liquid medium. Serious organ damage could result from overexposure. Consider all other options first.”

  Uncertain what to do, Ayan'we clasped Quatilla to her. The Kael female who had accompanied her broke the silence. “Better take her to her mother. She should decide. I will stay here and try to get more information for you.”

  Once again, Ayan'we set off running, she barely knew where. Luckily, there were other guards, Forlani and other races, along the way to point her in the right direction. They seemed to know what had happened. Did Entara know already?

  Entara met them at the portal and grabbed up Quatilla from Ayan'we's arms. “Mother, be careful, she's having seizures. I don't know what to do. Have I done wrong?”

  “No, daughter, calm down. The guards at the killing scene have signaled that the Phiddians who took her were probably killed by massive electric shock and that Quatilla might have been hit, too.”

  “Should I have put her on the shuttle anyway?”

  “No, you did the right thing. The Weh have sent a message that they fear she might be harmed even worse in their liquid medium. The physiologist from Coriolis is just arriving and Rack is bringing him directly to us. The Weh trust him to make a prognosis.”

  A cluster sister brought Ayan'we a bottle of juice, which she took with uncomprehending surprise. Looking up, she perceived that the sisters were regarding her with alarm. She looked at her arms and saw she was drenched in sweat. She must look awful for them to look that concerned. She took a sip of the juice just to get all the eyes off her and tried to slow her breathing back down to normal. Her mind was a mess. She couldn't think what to do, so she asked for a report from the sisters who had been left at the site of the violence. Lila stepped forward and explained she was just back from the place. The told Ayan'we that the perpetrators had been identified as the Gropers Four and that, according to the Robotic Guild staff, they had indeed been instantly killed by a powerful electrical jolt. One of their metal quoits, which was in position to have been held to Quatilla, had apparently conducted part of the shock to her. As to who had stopped the Phiddians, no one knew for sure. There were drops of blood on the scene that the Guild was analyzing for DNA. It did not appear to be Phiddian or Forlani in any case. The Phiddians were denying any responsibility for the Gropers' actions and had started an internal investigation. At least one of the Gropers seemed to have a falsified identity.

  Ayan'we gathered her wits enough to inquire about the guards who had been at the quarters when the abductors struck.

  “They're all under care of the Weh right now.”

  “But why did they shuttle them and not Quatilla?”

  “The Weh say that full-grown Forlani females, even unmated, are perfectly compatible with their liquid environments, but that infants are not. Something about their growth hormones being susceptible to chemical change. That's why it may be dangerous for Quatilla to go there.”

  “Well, how are Kantua and the others doing? Will they survive?”

  “Prognosis looks good, Cluster Leader. Their blood will have to be screened for about 48 station hours. After that they may be able to be returned and awakened in another 6 hours.”

  They were interrupted when a Coriolan in a black medical outfit that covered all but the fur around his snout strode in, followed by Rack and his tech bot assistant, carrying equipment. While they set it up, the Coriolan examined Quatilla with gloved hands. They were astonished when he also licked her face, neck and backside with his tongue.

  The doctor turned to Entara, recognizing her authority, and pronounced, “The little one has suffered a dangerous but non-lethal shock. The seizures she has been experiencing can be brought under control by the injection I shall make now.” He gave an order to the tech bot, who produced a syringe. After observing for several seconds, the doctor scanned Quatilla with a device and seemed satisfied.

  “She may continue to have occasional small seizures, but they are not of immediate concern. By the way, whoever applied that mouthpiece did a perfect job of it. Don't want her to swallow her tongue and block the windpipe.” Ayan'we breathed an imperceptible sigh of relief, then felt guilty over being vain when her sister's existence was still threated.

  “Does that mean she will get better on her own with time?” Ayan'we asked hopefully.

  “No. Decidedly not. You see, she is in a coma-like state, a kind of internal electrical confusion. She will certainly not die right away. The trouble is, we will not be able to wake her up. Unless wakefulness can be restored, her growth will eventually be stunted and her brain may begin to degenerate. It all has to do with the oblate glands located at the bottom of the Forlani brain. Microsurgery will be required on both oblate glands to regularize the neuron discharges there and restore the normal production of cerebral chemicals.”

  “So is that what you will be doing, Doctor?”

  “I regret to say that, like the Weh, I am at a disadvantage for this sort of procedure. Even with boosting, my eyesight is only within 67 percent of the efficiency for this surgery, and my manual dexterity is even lower. You understand that we are working with fractions of millimeters in a living brain. My colleague, Torghh, could probably do this in sleep mode. He's one of the most accomplished neurological surgeons in the sector. Yet he's missing, I understand. No luck locating him thus far?”

  “No luck.” Entara shook her head. “Couldn't I prevail on you to try, Doctor? If I understand correctly, we don't have much time.”

  “No we don't. Listen, if you insist, I will do my very best to operate. But frankly, there is another option that is more favorable.”

  “Is this something new we have not heard about, Doctor?” Rack interjected. “My memory banks don't contain anything on a procedure other than oblate intervention.”

  “It is something new in a way,” said the Doctor. “It's you.”

  “Excuse me?” Rack replied hesitantly.

  “With the backup components Torghh usually travels with, you should have everything you need. I assume you have copies of all his memory banks, as well. Have you never observed one of these procedures?”

  “On the contrary, I have observed all of Torghh's oblate surgeries for the past five tours of duty and annotated most of them. But I myself have never attempted such a complex procedure.”

  “You know what we say, friend Rack. Watch one, do one, teach one. You've watched more than one. Now it's time to do. I will assist, of course. Will your tech be able to fit you will all the necessary components?”

  “I am confident he will. I will start to prepare right now.” Rack and the tech bot headed for the door, then stopped. Rack seemed to reflect. “Yes, it's true. I can do this.”

  Tashto was always uncomfortable when walking through Meeting Room Gamma on Transfer Varess without another member of the Garanian delegation alongside him. This chamber of the satellite was a designated “neutral area” that functioned as a lounge where the delegations of all the species were allowed to interact freely in a casual atmosphere. Despite Tashto’s anxiety, it was usually a languid place where the hostilities were limited between humans and Kael occasionally getting into a shouting match over who would get the last glass of Tauran Ale. Tashto could never understand the obsession that the mammalian species had over that vile draught; to him it tasted so harsh and bitter that he had needed to chase it with a glass of water the few times he had drunk it for the sake of appearances. His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden loud screech to his left; Tashto could not recall hearing such a shrill, discordant sound in his life, and thought that only an alien could produce it. Alarmed, he quickly spun to face in the direction of the sound.

  He saw two of the detestable Song Pai standing close together, arguing with each other. One of them was a typical Song Pai—massive
ly built, with an array of long tentacles, including two bladed ones that it was brandishing as if it was preparing to use them as weapons. The smaller Song Pai was a variety that Tashto had never seen before. It lacked the two bladed tentacles that Song Pai typically used as melee weapons, and was much smaller and more slenderly-built than a typical specimen of its species. The smaller Song Pai was flattened against the floor in a defensive crouch, its body a sickly green shade as its larger foe loomed over it. The larger Song Pai gave a deep, gurgling bellow as it advanced towards its crouching foe.

  Tashto briefly contemplated his response to the bizarre situation. He despised the Song Pai as deeply as any right-thinking Garanian, and found the thought of the disgusting cephalopods slaughtering each other quite amusing. He stifled a chuckle as he further rationalized the situation; as much as he loathed the Song Pai and would relish watching the vermin exterminate their own kind in an orgy of blood, he had to make the Garanian delegation seem as noble as possible in contrast to the barbarism of the Song Pai. And what better way to do so than to intervene on behalf of the weaker creature?

  Tashto quickly moved in front of the aggressor Song Pai, blocking its advance towards its smaller rival. The enraged Song Pai loomed over him, its slashing tentacles raised over its long, octopus-like head. In a final expression of its hatred before closing for the kill, the Song Pai sprayed its filth all over Tashto, fouling its hated foe before moving to strike him down. Tashto drew a stun gun—the only weapon he had brought with him into Meeting Room Gamma—and tensed his muscles, preparing to strike.

  A Rokol charged out of the crowd as fast as its centipede-like legs could carry it, hissing a harsh, grating warning out of its translators. Almost instantly, the aggressive Song Pai backed away, lowering its blade tentacles and quivering with the frustration of unquenched bloodlust. As his adversary rapidly left, Tashto turned in the direction of the smaller Song Pai, eager to claim the creature as a possible ally to prove his magnanimity. Still apprehensive and disturbed at the thought of having to converse with a member of a species that repulsed him by its very existence, Tashto struggled with how to begin the conversation that would prove his understanding to the creature. He casually said, “Those Rokol are certainly faster than they look, aren’t they?”

  “You think so little of them, ignorant Garanian. Do they seem like insects to you? They are my saviors,” the Song Pai signaled on its tablet.

  “My name is Tashto. You would do well to remember it, Song Pai. It was I who saved your life just now.” The tablet apparently had no trouble translating spoken Garanian into something the small Song Pai could understand, but it could only respond in Garanian script on the screen.

  “Did you? It was the Rokol’s warning that caused the Song Pai to withdraw. He would have cut us both in two without a second thought otherwise. And I have a name too. It is Xrilnithan.”

  “Well, Xril,” Tashto said, trying his best to pronounce the difficult Song Pai name, “Why are the Rokol your protectors? Why do your own people wish to murder you?”

  “The Rokol have been allies of the Song Pai for many centuries,” Xril responded. “But they do not approve of all the customs of my people. As you can see, I am not a typical member of my race. Most Song Pai consider me a ‘Lowly One’, a mutant fit only to be killed. The Rokol are far more merciful than most Song Pai, and as a result of their diplomatic relations with my people, some of us ‘Lowly Ones’ have been granted refugee status on the Rokol home world. It is a far better fate than we would receive on Song Pa, where we would be condemned to a lifetime of skulking the deserted caverns of the Western Sea, praying to whatever gods might listen that today won’t be the day a Song Pai raiding party discovers and murders us.”

  The knowledge that the Song Pai would so willingly murder their own kind made Tashto even more repulsed by them than he was in his earlier ignorance. “Clearly, you should be grateful to me, and the rest of the Garanian delegation, for exposing the perfidy of the Song Pai for the entire universe to see,” he said. “We Garanians would never do such a horrible thing!”

  “You still rationalize your kind as the superior race,” signaled Xril. “But are you so much greater? Do you even understand the history of your own species and its interstellar expansion?”

  “I know we are, and always have been, greater than the Song Pai,” Tashto said proudly.

  “I thought your pride came simply from arrogance, but I realize it may stem from ignorance as well. Look at this,” Xril suggested as he clutched a holovid card in one of his tentacles, offering it to Tashto. “It is a virtual reality simulation of the early phase of Garanian interstellar expansion, shortly after the planet was consolidated under the precursor of your present-day Unity government. Here, I have primed it to be intelligible to you,” the cephalopod added, swishing the card briefly with a tentacle.

  Tashto slowly reached out and grasped the tiny, thin card in his hand. The intense pride for his species and disgust with the Song Pai nearly overwhelmed his mind; he began to tense his fingers, preparing to crush the card into plastic shards. But his curiosity about the past, and the history of how the Unity government had been formed, stayed his hand. He wondered, Could this creature’s offering actually help me understand how the Heroic Age of Garan Prime ended, and what was lost?

  He relaxed his tense grip and dropped the holovid card into his pocket. “Thank you, Xril,” he said. “I trust this will be an interesting gift.”

  Tashto gently inserted the thin holovid card into the data slot of his bulky VR headset. He silently thanked the galactic corporations for coming up with a standardized data storage format for virtual reality video; although originally developed for humans, the format had been adapted into numerous headsets with different shapes for the many sapient species that humans had encountered during their galactic expansion. Due to their wariness of the other galactic powers, Garanians had been reluctant to establish ties with Earth’s megacorps to obtain customized headsets of their own, but the techs of Garan Prime had eventually managed to reverse-engineer some relatively simple human headsets they had obtained on the black market. The headset Tashto had been supplied by the Ministry was the techs’ most recent version of the Garanian model, capable of playing even the most recent holovid cards. Tashto could hear the telltale soft whir of the headset’s microprocessors as it booted up and read the card’s memory. He gave a long, soft breath to relax himself as he slipped the headset on…

  As the holovid began playing, Tashto’s eyes were dazzled by the sight of an armada of dozens of Garanian spacecraft. He could recognize their designs from the Ministry’s history classes; they were archaic machines that the Garanians phased out hundreds of years ago, flimsy and clumsy compared to their modern replacements. His field of vision passively drifted through space as they came to an unusual, moss-green hued planet that he did not recognize.

  Suddenly, a deep, loud voice began to narrate the events. “In the early days of the Garanian expansion, Garan Prime was poorly equipped for a systemic empire. Many of the planet’s precious metals had been lost in the Unity Wars as Garanian fought Garanian for control of the planet. The government’s first action upon the declaration of Unity was to assemble the remaining spacecraft into what it called ‘The Ultimate Warfleet’ and sent them to search for and conquer a planet rich in precious metals and other exploitable resources.”

  Tashto remembered this part of the story well. The heroic Ultimate Warfleet, which was the first act of the Ministry of War, was sent to conquer the stars by claiming the planet Vlooghai and subjugating the savage Vloogs. Tashto had heard it repeated so many times in his education and training that he gave a sigh of boredom. He was tempted to take the headset off before the narration continued.

  “Once the Garanians set foot on the world of Vlooghai, they realized that they could not conquer the world with their current forces. The Vloogs, although not a united race, were far too numerous for a simple expeditionary force to defeat. The Garanians were
forced to improvise.”

  The imagery shifted to a small, bucolic village in a valley surrounded by high mountains. The woods around the village were obscured by early morning mists, restricting Tashto’s vision to the village itself. Tashto’s visual field was surrounded by massive, muscular creatures. They were covered in coarse, sparse hair, and had powerful forearms and massive jaws. Despite their imposing physical appearance, Tashto was quick to notice that the only weapons they were holding were primitive flintlock rifles, and he felt no fear of the creatures as a result. Tashto noticed that all the Vloogs were advancing towards the spot the Garanian spacecraft had landed, and he could see shapes slowly moving through the mists.

  Tashto watched as the first Garanian explorer came out of the mists, advancing slowly and calmly. Once he was at point blank range of the Vloogs’ rifles, the Garanian slowly lowered his weapon and bent over, leaving it at the feet of a Vloog with a colorful medallion around his neck. Tashto watched in shock as the Garanian held his right arm out in a gesture of friendship, and the Vloog leader shook it.

  This is not the history the Ministry told us, thought Tashto. We were told the explorers were massacred by the Vloogs! That was the rationale behind our conquest of Vlooghai, that we could not live in peace with the barbarians! What matter of insane propaganda is this?

  The narrator continued. “All over the planet, the governors, chieftains, and kings among the Vloogs were contacted by members of the Garanian force. They were told that a race of horrifying, malevolent aliens, the Song Pai, was coming to conquer their planet, butcher them, and rape their women. Only by allowing the Garanians the right to mine their planet’s natural resources in peace would they be rid of the horrors of the Song Pai.”

  Tashto then saw a massive mining pit gashed into the side of a mountain. As he looked around, he could tell he was located on a huge elevator moving downward. He could see hordes of workers rushing about and operating various drones and robots to assist in the mining process. He noticed that every single worker—from the workers operating power drills to the pit bosses to the techs behind computer screens—was Garanian.