* * *
“Sir, something seems to be attaching to the hull.” The boy at the console was only two years into his service training, and his voice held the clipped nervousness of it. Hair did not venture to his jaw just yet, though it curved around it in a short brown waterfall.
“Well Ensign, this looks like a good day to send out the droids to harvest or remove it. What is the location?” The Captain sat in his chair at the bridge, setting his m’larh mug down carefully in the holding cell. The lid closed on the steaming thick aromatic mauve liquid without prompting. He shifted, his backside beginning to fill the seat more than he would have liked. His feet no longer reached the floor. He had lost height, though he’d never been as tall as the Ancestors were when designing the ships. The voluminous purple and gold robes tangled around his legs.
“That is the problem, Sir. The readings indicate that the object is wrapping our vessel, but none of the cameras show anything other than shifting lights. There’s nothing to harvest or remove that I know how to deal with.” The lad in green looked up at the man beside him for confirmation.
The man training his replacement nodded his graying egg-shaped head. “The boy is right, Sir. This isn’t anything that I have ever seen myself.” He brought up a visual onscreen, knowing his Captain’s next order from long experience.
Blue and purple lights shot with silver and gold swathed them, shifting and whirling gently, though from time to time the movements lashed. His eye began to pick out what looked like coils and scales. Absently he ran his fingers over the material of his robes, stitched and woven to mimic such beauty as well as fabric ever could.
“What is it, Sir?” The Ensign whispered.
“We may have picked up an energy thread on our last jump.” He replied. “But I don’t think so. We’ll give it another tetsch if there are no damage readings. If it is a thread then it should dissipate soon. How are the solar panels holding?”
A woman at the power consol piped up, her voice so high as to verge on the edge of hearing. Her normally greenish skin had paled to lime-cream. “Power readings are high, Sir. It’s like we’re in the middle of a cluster. Excess power is being diverted to charge the storage crystals, which will speed along the order for hydroponics’ summer cycle.”
Everyone on the bridge stilled when they felt soft brushes pass through and around them, as if someone trailed real fur over them. It wasn’t dead like what was so carefully preserved in the museum deck, but vibrant and soft, much different than the synthetics that were used to trim beds and robes with. A cool mind joined them in their bodies, sifting through memories... memories they didn’t even know they had. Images of what they thought their race looked liked were dredged up.
Several of them tried to cover themselves. No one escaped, though some did enjoy the probing more than others. The captain found his heart rate slowing as the invader latched more firmly onto his mind. Tingles ran through his body as a light presence filled him and explored his body, as if it examined every molecule. While it held him he hazily thought that he could see the spaces between atoms somehow, and a deep sadness filled him without apparent cause.
The presence pulled back, revolted at something it found in his mind. Then it pressed in again, much less gently than before. Around him his crew members cried out in panic. Some dropped to the floor or flailed in jerky motions as if fighting something from within their own body. He felt fear for everyone under his protection. Was this one of the body snatchers from Sector Gamma-Gamma-Omega 313? He didn’t have the whole colony, but who knew what would happen to their race with the loss of even one of the transport refuge ships?
Its grip gentled. The image of a face composed of the lights outside and combining reptilian and equine features coalesced in his mind. Through it he could see the star field. A great mane waved in a breeze that he knew could not exist. Whirling faceted eyes of starlight regarded him guardedly. How this thing outside could survive, when it should surely have exploded due to lack of pressure, he had no idea. Then again, all that the screen showed was light.
Was this then some energy being?
Something pushed him back further within his mental space and he felt it take over, settling over him like a cloak and peering through his eyes, moving his body. It melded into him more perfectly with every twitch and breath, and he found himself studying each crewmate in turn. None of them appeared the way that he had seen them before. Whatever this being was, she – it was definitely female – had known what their race once looked like. The shadows of the past overlaid them all through his shared eyes, revealing that they now had eyes too large in bulbous heads. Wasted bodies far shorter than what ‘should have been’ from their ancestral stock lurked in voluminous robes that hid from their view what the effects of generations of exclusive space travel had wreaked. Even skin tones had been affected along with color perceptions. How many generations back had ‘skin tone’ become shades of blue, green, grey, or purple, and not the browns and whites they expected and had been seeing? What genetic mutation had enabled that?
There was a snort and shake in his mind. Had the invader heard his thoughts?
A World of Worlds Page 61