"I know what we're not going to talk about," Gabrielle stated flatly.
"Oh?" Harris' skepticism had not yet completely disappeared.
"We're not going to talk about God, or sleeping, or how they go to the bathroom, or anything else that might trigger some kind of cultural problem."
"Yes, Gabe, I agree. We need to avoid those topics. But, Admiral, if we just stand across from them and try to communicate, I think it will be worthwhile. They're smart. They're literate. They’ll get it."
"I have to remind you all that our return date is coming up," Terri Michael pointed out. "And I fully plan to meet that deadline. If you're going to the surface to have this, this, conversation, it needs to be soon."
"Yes, Captain."
Harris looked over at Cordero. "When would you go?"
"They come out after midday to fish. I'd think we should be there then."
"They're probably armed. How many Marines would you want to take?"
Carol looked at Gabe and Greg and answered for them. "None, sir."
Harris turned to her. "None? You want to go down there and get shot?"
"Greg has a good idea about that, sir. We'll put a message on the side of the shuttle."
"A message?"
"Yes, sir."
"What message could you possibly put on a shuttle?"
Cordero answered. "One word, sir. Friend."
Harris looked over at Michael. "Are they all as crazy as I think?"
"Maybe, sir. But we were once young, too, and maybe slightly foolhardy —"
"You were never 'foolhardy,' Commander." He looked around the table once more. "OK, fine. Go."
They were out of the Intel workroom as if there had been an explosive decompression.
Columbia
GL 876
Wednesday, October 18, 2078, 0900 UTC
The samples from the wreck came in properly double-bagged and marked with their source. Susan Scranton and ship's doctor Gerry Knight examined them and agreed that this was probably some kind of forelimb. The limb and the blood were far too hard to process as they were, so she placed them in the sample freezer, which was much warmer than where they had been. Once they came up to normal freezer temperatures, they'd be workable.
The next morning, in full isolation gear, they carefully cut samples from the amputated end of the limb and sectioned them for staining and microscopic examination. Additional samples were taken for DNA analysis, which would take another full day. Once the samples were out of the alcohol-mediated stain and safely under microscope slide coverslips, they could ditch the isolation suits and begin looking at what they had found.
The digitally-enhanced microscope had a high-def video port along with traditional eyepieces, so Gerry could see on the large wall monitor the same field Susan was examining.
Since they arrived at the wreck, Susan had lost some of the edge on whatever chip was on her shoulder. She was now polite to most everyone, and almost cordial to Knight, whom she apparently viewed as some kind of colleague. Or, at least, an intellectual equal. As the sample came into focus, she stared at it for a full minute.
"Gerry, are you seeing this?" she asked quietly.
"Yes, I am. Looks like muscle tissue to me, nothing remarkable."
She looked up from the eyepiece. "But, Gerry, that's the most remarkable thing about it."
"Not following, Susan."
"This is alien tissue, Gerry. Alien. It doesn't even look like Inori tissue."
"OK, so no surprise that these are different aliens than the Inori, right?"
Susan looked again through the eyepiece. "I'm not sure they're really alien at all."
"What?"
"Mitochondria, Gerry. They have mitochondria."
Gerry walked to the monitor and looked at it for a long moment. "Well, I'll be damned."
"Should we tell the Captain?"
"Yes. Smith will want to know right away. Powell, too."
Susan got up from the microscope and called Dan Smith. In a few minutes, he, Alona Melville, and David Powell were in the sick bay, staring at the image on the wall monitor.
"Mitochondria?" David asked, his voice full of the confusion he felt.
"Very good, Powell. Very good."
"But that would mean, would it not, Doctor, that this species is —"
"Terran. Yes, Powell, it would. As best we know, anyway, only organisms from Earth have mitochondria. Inori don't, and neither do the microbes on Enceladus."
"DNA?" Dan Smith asked.
"Tomorrow. If indeed this is a Terran species, it should give us a hint as to the origin."
"But, how on Earth..." Alona said, unable to finish the thought.
"Not on Earth, I think," Dan answered. He stood looking at the cell images, considering what he should do next. "OK, we'll wait for the DNA tomorrow. Meantime, we keep looking for more evidence on the wreck."
"And?" Susan asked.
"Once we see the DNA results, we can decide next steps. If, Doctor Scranton, you feel your mission goals here have been met, I need to know that."
"Meantime, we keep looking?" Alona asked.
"Yeah, we keep at it."
They stood there for what felt like a long time, Dan and Alona leaving after a while to discuss their options privately. David remained for several minutes, eventually heading back to the Intel workroom and his biology texts. He could not be the experts that Scranton and Knight were, but he needed to try to understand how this could possibly be true.
"Who are these aliens?" he wondered to himself aloud. "If they're not really aliens?"
With the immediate biological goals met, Dan ordered additional search teams to enter the BGH and explore that space. They found that the aft portion of the ship was indeed six enormous tanks, all shattered by Sigma's attack. Near the top of the ship, they discovered a passage which the crew must have used to get to the far aft end. It was ripped open from the bottom, and the damage was such that they could not get very far in either direction. There was just too much sharp and shattered metal for them to pass safely. If they wanted to get to the Drive apparatus, they'd have to find another way in.
The next morning, Susan Scranton called David and the rest of the officers to the sick bay.
"I have the DNA results. They're Terran."
Dan just looked at her. "You're sure the enemy is from Earth?"
"I am. There's really no question about it."
"Can you identify the species?" Alona asked.
"They're not a known species, obviously not human or any hominid that we know about. There are some markers that look close to, well, birds."
"Birds?" Dan asked, surprised.
There was a long silence as they considered what this news meant.
David looked at her. "Don't we think of birds as the last living dinosaurs?"
"Yes, that's been proven pretty conclusively."
David held her eye. "What about you, Doctor Scranton. What do you think? You're the exobiologist in the room."
"I think this is about the last thing I expected. I thought I might be able to find some markers similar to others, if we could find a body then maybe tell something about their home environment."
"But?"
"But, I never, ever, thought we'd find out the enemy was a species that originally developed on Earth."
"You're sure?" Dan asked again.
"Sorry, Captain, but yes, I'm sure. There are far too many commonalities with other organisms for it to be otherwise."
David had a different thought. "Could they and we share some kind of common ancestor? Could this possibly be telling us something new about where life on Earth came from?"
"Not in my opinion. Life on Earth arose on Earth, period. There is no serious evidence to indicate otherwise, Martian theories notwithstanding."
"You said they're related to birds."
"Yes, Lieutenant Powell, there's little doubt about that. Yesterday, Doctor Knight and I did a close examination of the skin." She put an
enlarged picture on the screen. "This is from a macro lens, the kind of thing we use to look at ticks, bed bugs, that kind of thing."
"That looks like a feather," Alona said.
"Indeed, Lieutenant Melville, that's exactly what it is." She switched to a larger scale image. "They're actually kind of a pretty, dark purple, all from very fine feathers that almost look like fur."
"Incredible," Dan said to himself.
David's mind was racing, looking for the next question. "I seem to recall that you can tell how long populations have been apart by looking at the number of DNA differences between them."
"Yes, that's true."
"Do you have enough information here to determine that?"
"Not in any way I'd be willing to stand behind."
Dan, who had been looking down but listening intently, looked up. "Explain, please."
Susan took a deep breath, then sat on the stool next to the microscope. "Let's assume I am correct. If so, whatever this species is split off from all other Earth organisms a very long time ago. It would be as if I was suddenly presented with fresh T-Rex DNA. The DNA separation in both time and speciation is just too great for me to measure."
"Could someone else?"
Scranton thought about that for a few seconds. "Perhaps. It would be a long and tedious research project, but given enough expertise, I think an educated guess could be made."
"Come on, Doctor," Alona Melville pushed, "tell us what you think. Are we talking thousands of years? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?"
Susan looked over at Gerry McKnight, then back to Alona. "We were discussing that this morning before I called you down here. It's nothing more than a hunch, really, but I would say multiple millions of years."
"Wow," Alona whispered.
"Are you saying, Doctor Scranton, are you really saying," David struggled to gather his question, "that there was a technologically advanced society, one with an FTL drive, on Earth millions of years ago?"
Scranton was taken aback by the question. "Yes, I guess I am. I had not quite thought of it in just that way, but yes, that's what the evidence I see here tells me."
"Well, wait," Katch said. "We know the enemy is from Earth, but the tech could have come to them from somewhere else."
"What are you saying, Katch?" Dan's incredulity was clear.
"The crew is Terran, sir. I accept Doctor Scranton's expertise on that. But they could have been abducted, or bred, or taken somehow to where they are now."
"So, now, you think it's possible that some other aliens picked up some handy dinos while vacationing on our little third rock a couple million years back and bred them into what they are now?"
"It sounded less ridiculous in my head."
"It's not that crazy, Katch," Alona said, her hands emphasizing her point. "We now know of three other intelligent species, all not that far from home, none of which we knew anything about just twenty years ago. There must be many, many more out here."
"Could be, I guess," Dan said quietly.
"This changes everything," Alona said.
"With respect, XO, this changes nothing," David said, anger in his voice.
"But when people hear that they are from Earth, won't they want to help them somehow? Understand them?"
David was unmoved. "We've been killing other Earthly species — including uncounted members of our own — for generations. I think they'll get over it."
Dan looked first at David, then Alona. "It will be a shock to everyone, that far I agree with Alona. But David is right, the war goes on regardless."
"One more thing," Doctor Scranton said, regaining their attention.
"Yes, Doctor?"
"I x-rayed the claw this morning."
"Yes?" Dan asked.
"Well, calling it a claw doesn't do it justice. It's far more complex and well-articulated than any current Terran bird. It's a fully functional hand, regardless of what it looks like."
"Interesting."
Another long moment of silence hung in the air.
Finally, David turned to Dan. "So, what now, sir?"
"Damned if I know, David. What would you do?"
"It would still be good to find a complete body for Doctor Scranton to dissect."
"True," Alona agreed. "Gross, but true."
"And, we could try to get to some of the other levels in the front of the wreck."
"OK."
"There are controls and dials, sir, but other than that so far there are no manuals, no books, no writing. We need to look harder for that kind of stuff."
"That is strange."
"Really, Captain," Katch added, "this information does not provide any kind of tactical advantage to us. It's interesting —"
"And weird," Alona interrupted.
"—but not terribly useful in a fight."
"So, what are you getting at, Katch?"
"There's no hurry to get this news back to the Fleet. I agree with David. We might do better to exploit the wreck itself for whatever intelligence value it has, instead of spending so much time trying to understand who was riding in it."
Dan nodded. "OK, that's how we'll play it. We keep exploring both up front and in the aft section, in order to understand the technology. If we hit on more remains, fine, Doctor Scranton can see what she can learn." He looked around the room. "Agreed?" He received a quiet chorus of "yes, sir" in response.
He looked at Susan Scranton. "Doctor?"
"Yes, Captain, I agree. I have what I came here for. More would be better, to be sure, but I've met my primary mission goals. We know what we're up against."
"OK, good. Let's get back at it."
The group flowed quickly out of the sickbay, scattering to their various areas of expertise. Susan Scranton found herself strangely intrigued, not so much with the aliens, but rather the crew around her. They were surprisingly smart and insightful, and they were far more flexible in their thinking than she expected. Her mission had just become Priority Two, but she agreed with that assessment and looked forward to whatever she might still learn.
As for the enemy, she wondered what their prehistoric reptile lineage meant in terms of behaviors and tendencies. Are they fully sapient, like humans and Inori? Or, are they intrinsically more primitive, less able to understand the evil they do? Would a reptile like this even understand something as being evil? Yes, she decided, they would. They've built a complex society with advanced technology. That society would require some level of societal moral compass, some kind of behavioral norms, to support it. They have to be sapient, she thought, but not necessarily in a way that we can accept.
She allowed herself a few moments to think of her father. He would be proud of her work, she thought. He was large, strong, sometimes a little too loud, but he lavishly loved his only child. His loss left her alone in a world now colder and emptier than it should have been. Once the tears had stopped flowing after his death on Inor, she had set herself the goal to destroy those who had taken him from her. Her pain quickly transmuted into a singular hatred that was intense beyond words. It spilled over into her relations with others, turning her into a tough, sometimes rude, overbearing presence that only furthered her isolation. She didn't care about that. She just wanted them all dead.
David found himself in the wardroom after dinner, thinking about everything that had happened over the last two days. He picked up the worn notebook that was his inner channel to Carol and began to write.
C —
OK, you won't believe this. The alien enemy isn't really alien. They're an Earth species. Yes, really. No kidding. Doctor Hardass dropped that nuke on us this morning. I don't know how I feel about it — betrayed, maybe? Like they're turncoats somehow.
I'll be going back over tomorrow to see what else we can find. I like being in the EVA suit — it's just me and the team, and maybe someone at the Comms station. Sometimes I turn off my mike and just talk to you while I'm working. Sounds a little crazy, yeah, but it makes me feel like we're together.
—D
Big Blue
Seeker Beach
Wednesday, October 18, 2078, 1000 UTC
Carol Hansen set the shuttle down on the Seekers' beach, just before the time they usually appeared. She and Jack Ballard unstrapped themselves and went back into the cabin to help Gabrielle, Greg Cordero, and Wayne Barnes unload Greg's materials. They had painted Greg's first message, 'FRIEND,' in Seekerish on the side of the shuttle. Harris had again argued that they take a detachment of Marines with them for protection, but Gabrielle and Greg argued just as forcefully that the Seeker culture was not by nature aggressive. If they displayed too much force, Greg pointed out, it would contradict the simple message they were trying to express. They compromised that Carol, Jack, and Wayne would carry sidearms. None of them thought a .45 would be much use in a firefight, but it got Harris to back off, so they agreed. They wore small body-cams on their uniforms which would be sent live to Antares through the shuttle, and they all had a small earpiece to allow Harris and Michael to talk to them if necessary.
Doctor Soto had done enough research and cultures by now that the SLUGs and isolation suits could be left behind. They'd have to go through an anti-microbial shower when they returned, but beyond that Soto no longer thought the planet was out to kill them. That was a major breakthrough for everyone.
Greg set up his table about ten meters away from where the forest met the beach. He wanted to be close, but still give the Seekers room to observe him from a distance. He placed his stack of prepared words and phrases on the table. Greg set a stack of blank paper to one side with a black marker. Hopefully, the Seeker, or Seekers, would be willing to write their responses. His tablet now contained all the words they had translated, and if the Seekers wrote something, he could scan it and read the translation.
"OK, what now?" Carol asked, sounding a little nervous.
"We wait, Carol, we just wait. We know they're in there, and I believe they know we're here."
Not a hundred meters from where Greg Cordero stood, inside the cave the adult males were hastily putting away their fishing gear and bringing out what few weapons they had left. The scramble in the main part of the cave as the warriors gathered frightened little Ullnii Dagt, and she grasped Eaagher Fita's soft hand tightly.
Silver Search Page 22