Tales from the Inbox: Nojus's Near Miss

2946-10-23 - Tales from the Inbox: Brand's Badlands

Nojus would have paused at the ridgeline to catch his breath and admire the view, but under the watchful eyes of his camera-drones, he thought better of it. Beneath his feet, the dark basalt hills sloped down to meet the golden sands of the desert beyond. The unnamed world was arid to the extreme, but not quite as hot as he had been hoping when he had seen pictures of the place; in fact, the temperature since he’d landed had never exceeded thirty Celsius. Not even a reasonable amount of exaggerated exertion had drawn enough sweat from his brow to compensate for the unexpectedly mild temperature; there was no concealing from the watchful eyes of the drones that his hike from the landing site had been only slightly more strenuous than a tourist’s hike through the Bradagan Foothills on Planet at Centauri.

The view that Nojus wasn’t able to stop to appreciate was spectacular from horizon to horizon, but not because of the brilliant golden luster of the local desert sand, or the stark contrast it made with the deep, chocolate-brown volcanic rock that made up most of the hills. It wasn’t worth admiring because of the brilliant scarlet pinpricks of bulbous local flora which populated the margins where the hills vanished into the sand, or the pair of moons visible in the hazy slate sky. The detail that tempted the veteran explorer to stop and stare was the very detail that, when he’d seen it in still images, had convinced him to come to an unnamed, unknown world, where no dangerous life had ever been encountered.

The titanic skull half-submerged in the brilliant sand was easily ninety meters long and thirty high. Where the dry air and unobstructed daylight would have bleached Earthly bones white, the skeletal deposits of local fauna oxidized in air, forming a deep blue patina. It was, Nojus thought, a most perfect emblem for the desolate world: a darkly lustrous sapphire set on the edge of a vast golden wasteland.

Without delay, Nojus configured his Reed-Soares Portable Survival Utility into a hiking pole and started the descent toward the long-dead titan’s remains. The Naval Survey Auxiliary pilot who’d given him coordinates and still images of the world had been disappointingly certain that the towering remains dotting the desert were those of an extinct species, perhaps the giant cousins of a scaled, amphibious apex predator living in the world’s few scattered oases and wetlands, itself already a beast of unusual size and ferocity. While he intended to take his camera-drones into the marshy habitats of such monsters before he left the planet, Nojus had decided to follow up on a very different detail of the Survey pilot’s account first.

Picking his way down the rocky hillside, surrounded by his modest flotilla of automatons, Nojus saw little wildlife. A sort of scuttling, chitinous creature lived in abundance among the rocks, but their skittish nature defied his best attempts to sneak up on them with his drones. A fast-moving flier, the same slate color as the sky, darted down in pursuit of the skittering things, but its speed was such that Nojus doubted that his drones were getting a good recording of its hunt. He fervently hoped that the pilot’s story was true; otherwise, one of his three days on the wild planet’s surface would be wasted.

As the rock below his feet gave way to the bright sand, Nojus began to see more wildlife. A small herd of bumbling, portly grazers meandered among the scarlet succulents at the desert’s edge, carefully nibbling the soft, blood-red flesh between scabrous upwellings of acrid-smelling, toxic sap. Both the herbivores and the slinking, feline shape which shadowed them paid the explorer and his drones no mind, but they did provide Nojus with some footage and an excuse to emphasize how a human would be killed by the toxins the desert herbivores ingested in a single bite. Most of the plant life on such an arid world was forced to guard its hard-earned biomass carefully, just as Earthly cacti shielded their soft flesh with a hedge of spines.

Passing beyond the stand of crimson growths and into the open sand, Nojus headed directly for the huge skull. The darkness inside its cavernous eye sockets loomed menacingly, and though he had no feeling of apprehension, Nojus knew that his audience, seeing his destination, would be more invested if he did. As he approached, he wove a few subtle hints of unease into his demeanor, for their benefit.

When at last he stood in the long shadow of the great fossilized skull, Nojus sent his drones up for wide-angle shots while he reconfigured his survival multitool into a spearlike weapon. Having no means to direct their movements personally, he had to trust in algorithmic photography to adequately capture the scene, as usual. For once, he doubted that even the best automation software would be up to the task.

When the drones returned, Nojus counted them, and noticed that one was missing. For the first time since he had set off from his landing site, he smiled. It was evidence that the Survey pilot had been telling the truth. The leviathans of the planet’s ancient past were dead, but their weathered bones had come to shelter those horrors that yet lived.

“I wonder who lives here.” Nojus muttered for the benefit of the cameras, feigning ignorance. What he’d been told about the creeping ambushers who hid from daylight was precious little, but if even half of it was accurate, his audience was in for a treat.

For those of you who follow both this text feed and Mr. Brand's vidcast episodes, you will probably recognize today's account as being the prelude to his most recent installation. You will probably also know that Mr. Brand barely survived his first day on this recently-surveyed Frontier world; he fared badly in an encounter with with some sort of furred, serpent-like predator, and nearly became extinct along with the titanic creatures that once roamed that world.

Obviously, Mr. Brand survived, or we wouldn't have his account or the video episode he published. Badly injured, it took him almost two whole days to drag himself back to his landing craft, and though he is recovering well from his injuries, it is my understanding that this is the closest that he has come to losing his life since his infamous 2939 run-in with a hive of blade scarabs on Barsamia.

Mr. Brand tried to persuade me to also run a Tales from the Inbox episode describing his agonizing return trip, but I will spare this audience the excruciatingly detailed account of how Nojus covered twenty-four kilometers of alien badlands after being partially disemboweled by a predator that fortunately disliked the taste of his foreign biology. It is sufficient to say that he is in good spirits about the incident, and plans to return to work as soon as his medical team allows.

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Tales from the Inbox: Libbie's Gallery

2946-10-16 - Tales from the Inbox: Libbie's Gallery

Not every member of this audience is an interstellar professional.

This seemingly obvious fact often slips my mind, as the goal of Cosmic Background from the beginning has always been to provide variety entertainment for spacers, largely about spacers. However, it is quite true that there are a number of faithful viewers and readers of our content for whom the events described are impossibly distant from their everyday life, farther from their world than even fiction could be.

It is from this side of the audience that Libbie A. brings the story which encouraged her to sell her storefront art gallery in the growing market of Maribel and move back to the Core Worlds. Evidently, after encountering an eccentric denizen of that world and a macabre painting, she decided the Frontier was not sufficiently tamed for her liking.

I find it likely that this story is the result of a psychological warfare campaign by one of Libbie's business competitors, but she is convinced that the man she met was being honest with her. I have seen stills of the painting in question, and can find no records of creatures such as the one depicted on the canvas - I have placed the image Libbie provided on our datasphere hub, and have done my best to do it justice in simple text here, knowing that many of our readers can't access the Centauri datasphere or any of our major mirror hubs.

 "Odd.”

The word, spoken quietly, caused Libbie to jump in surprise. She had been reading an explorer’s unexpectedly gripping account of his escape from a burrowing predator on one of the many worlds of the Frontier, and hadn’t seen the customer enter her shabby little store-front.

Hurriedly stowing her slate reader, Libbie sat up and spied the old man standing in front of one of the larger pieces in the dusty old gallery. Like most of her other wares, the painting was done in the old style, with oil paints not too different from those used to paint the long-crumbled masterpieces of the Earthbound Age of Lights. The only thing different about the modern compositions was the pigments fixed to the canvas – the synthetic colors would not fade with age, not even after the canvas itself crumbled to dust.

As if noticing Libbie for the first time, the old man waved her closer. She marked him as unlikely to buy the piece; his clothing was even shabbier than the little store-front she passed off as a local artists’ gallery, and his white hair was wildly unkempt, sticking out from under the brim of a quaint sun-hat. He was, she suspected, one of Maribel’s old hands; a man who’d seen the colony in its hardscrabble youth as a young man. Most of the old hands, holding agricultural lands around the world’s original colonial settlement, had been hit hard by the relocation of the main spaceport halfway around the world to a more favorable location. Their holdings were still vast by most standards, but they were, other than the value gained from working the land, all but worthless.

“Can I help you, sir?” Libbie asked, sidling around the counter to approach the customer. She realized as she did that the man was examining her least favorite piece in the gallery, and suppressed a shudder. Penniless old hand or not, she hoped he would buy the painting, if only to ensure she never had to look at it again.

“Possibly not.” He looked up for the first time, his piercing crystal-blue eyes seeming at odds with his threadbare appearance. “What can you tell me about this painting?”

The gallery attendant shrugged. “Not much beyond what the placard says, I’m afraid. I’ve sold a few other paintings by the same artist, but this is probably his most… striking.” Libbie doubted her half-hearted sales pitch was having any effect; the old man could almost certainly tell she didn’t like the painting. It wasn’t that it was of poor quality – it was truthfully among the best paintings she’d ever hung in her gallery – it was that the horror depicted emerging from the rust-hued fog in the middle of the piece. Its slavering, toothy maw, three dead, hollow eye sockets set in a skull-like head, and bestial claws seemed all the more chilling on a very human-like frame, restrained by great chains. Libbie had dealt in macabre and even sadistic paintings before without letting any of them get to her, but this one piece had managed to break her usually professional treatment of the art she sold. 

“I would have liked to see the others by this artist.” The old man muttered. “They sold, you say?”

“Yes.” Libbie rallied. “There are images on our datasphere hub, if you are curious.”

“No, that’s all right.” The old man shrugged. “What can you tell me about where he lives?”

“The artist?” Libbie shook her head. “Not much, sorry.” The signature on the paintings was for one “Ciril O”, but the reclusive Ciril never came to Libbie’s gallery directly. He shipped the pieces directly, and received his sale proceeds by the quaint method of sending credit chits to an anonymous mail stop in one of Maribel’s more inhospitable regions. “He likes his anonymity; if I had to guess, he’s only a part-time artistic genius.” Genius he was, Libbie knew; but she also suspected he was a sinister one.

“Of course.” The old man agreed distantly. “But I didn’t mean the painter.” 

“Who then, sir?”

“The subject, who else?” The old man replied, as if this was obvious. "If he's back, it would do to steer clear of the place."

Libbie was silent for several seconds, processing this. The old man, seeming to understand her shock, offered a faint smile. “Nothing? Perhaps that’s for the best, miss.” He sighed, then turned and headed for the door. “Good day.”

 

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Tales from the Inbox: Mandy's Bangle

2946-10-09 - Tales from the Inbox: Mandy's Bangle

Mandy stared uncomprehending at the display for several seconds. The sleek, flattened-teardrop outline of the tiny derelict she had stumbled on had been naggingly familiar from the moment it had appeared on the readout, but now that her suspicion had been confirmed by the Survey Auxiliary’s high-quality recognition algorithm, she found it oddly impossible to process the fact that she was a few dozen kilometers away from Survey’s holy grail: an abandoned Angel starship.

The Angel ship was no bigger than her own Sirius M67 survey ship, and as cold and dead as the interplanetary void in which she had found it drifting, but Mandy still felt terribly alone and unprepared. She’d graduated from the Academy fifth from the bottom of her class, and as a result had been put on the roster of the Naval Survey Auxiliary’s valuable but unglamorous internal survey arm, which sent its pilots into uninhabited systems within the traditional boundaries of Confederated Worlds territory rather than sending out crews to push out the farthest extent of the Frontier.

Until the smooth, metallic object had shown up on her Sirius’s sensor plot, the system Mandy had been surveying had been only an unremarkable binary with no name and only a chart index number, first explored sometime in the twenty-fifth century. Her week-long drift through the system had been only another step in a dull routine of filling in the gaps in four hundred year old data, each flight a means of working her way up to the Survey Auxiliary’s frontier exploration effort. The moment the text “ORIGIN: ANGELS” had appeared on the display, all of that had changed. The unremarkable binary’s chart number, she knew, might be memorized by students of future generations as the place humanity’s steady technological progress took a sudden leap not seen since first contact with the nomadic Reachers kicked off the Second Space Age. In the derelict, she saw her own rather unremarkable surname being spoken in the same category as Columbus, Armstrong, Edwards, Blazek, or Himura.

The ship’s autopilot, ever cautious when dealing with unknown derelicts, crept closer far too slowly for Mandy’s liking, but she didn’t trust her own manual control with a discovery of such enormity. The derelict was in unknown condition, and might in theory crumble if subjected to even the faintest gust of thruster propellant. Somehow she doubted it would; if stories from the War were to be believed, Angel ships of war no bigger than the one she was now approaching were fairly evenly matched in one-on-one combat with the six-hundred-meter-long Rattanai star cruisers of the Earth occupation fleet.

With visions of immortality dancing in her head, Mandy double checked the status indicators of the ship’s recording devices. She didn’t want to miss anything; the techs back at Saunders’ Hoard could wring all the useful data out of everything she brought back. Every detail of the slow, gradual tumbling motion with which the Angel derelict slowly orbited the distant binary stars was of potential value in learning how it had come to be where it was, and when. Mandy wondered idly if it had been there all along, a lost member of the silent swarm which had saved humanity in its interstellar infancy, or if it had arrived since the star system had been first explored. Perhaps it was merely a hollowed-out shell left as a marker by the inscrutiable, secretive Angels, or perhaps it was proof of the old legend that the Angels buried their dead the old Norse way, by packing them into the ships of war that had served them so well in life, and setting them adrift on the currents of the stellar sea.

Mandy was still imagining the sorts of stories her find might reveal when an alarm squealed somewhere inside her cockpit. Startled, she hunted for its origin, and a dagger of icy dread pierced her guts when she found warning lights on the powerplant status board. Before she could do anything to divine the meaning of the half-dozen warning lights, a jolt rippled through the tiny ship. The cockpit lights dimmed, and the familiar vibration of the gravitic drive faded into eerie silence as most of the cockpit sensor readouts shut down. All the warning indicators winked out save one – the ship’s reactor had, in her moment of supreme triumph, shut itself down to prevent a somewhat more inconvenient explosion.

Mandy cursed her luck, manually issuing a gentle burst of thruster power to push her ship’s now unpowered trajectory safely away from the valuable derelict. Though very new and modern, the M67 was still not reliable enough for Frontier service. Reactor panics like the one Mandy had just experienced, along with a host of other teething problems, were why the model was being issued only for internal survey flights, though it was a decade newer than anything else the Auxiliary had in its inventory. If she couldn’t get the reactor back online herself, another Survey ship would come along to investigate her failure to return. While there was more than enough reserve power and provisions for her to survive until rescued by another Auxiliary pilot, her dreams of becoming a legend were already being torn away from her. Another flight would mean someone else to share the glory with – someone just as likely to want to claim all the credit.

Just as Mandy turned her attention to attempting to coax her ship’s temperamental reactor back to life, another alarm sounded – this time, she recognized the insistent shriek of the collision alarm. The autopilot didn’t wait for instructions, quickly shoving the ship sideways violently enough that its pilot felt the maneuver even through the compensators. Though the readout had gone dark moments before, Mandy remembered from the plot that there was nothing out there to collide with – nothing, that is, except for the derelict. Chill dread returned as Mandy, all but blind with the active sensors too energy-intensive to operate on auxiliary power, brought one of the ship’s visual-light telescopes to bear on the orbital track of the Angel relic. It was just as she feared – the enigmatic vessel was not where it had been when her systems had gone dark. Without active sensors, she had no way of knowing if she had simply miscalculated its relative position, or if the dead ship had suddenly come to life.

Though she had no way of knowing what was happening outside her hull, Mandy wheeled the telescope around on its bearings, looking for any sign of the derelict’s sleek profile against the distant stars. All at once, it seemed that the stern, alien eyes of a lone Angel, its mysterious vigil disturbed, were upon her, piercing the hull of the Sirius as if they were a thin shell of brittle glass rather than sturdy titanium alloy. The odd, reclusive sapients had, for their own reasons, interceded to save humanity from extinction twice in its history as a spacefaring species, but she knew that was no guarantee of safety in such an encounter. The Angels were suspicious creatures, their impossible technologies always kept out of human hands, by lethal force if necessary.

Though she saw nothing against the starfield, Mandy found the controls for the broadcast radio and turned its power up as far as the auxiliaries could support. “Is someone out there? This is Naval Survey Auxiliary Flight 406-T-77. I’ve encountered a minor reactor malfunction, and any assistance would be appreciated.” The words seemed lost in the void, even within the confines of the cockpit.

There was, of course, no reply but the gentle background hiss of the binary system’s tangled magnetic field. Mandy shook her head, trying not to focus on visions of silent Angelic wrath fixed on her intrusion, and set about issuing reactor restart instructions.

To her relief, the temperamental Sirius power plant staggered to life on the second attempt. Immediately, Mandy swept local space for any sign of the derelict Angel ship, and was less than surprised when she failed to find it, either at its predicted location, or anywhere else. What did surprise her was that there was something out there – a highly reflective object no more than ten centimeters across. The ship’s computer helpfully modeled its trajectory and demonstrated that this small anomaly, not the missing derelict, had caused the collision alarm and emergency maneuver.

Gingerly, Mandy brought the ship around to scoop up the tiny object which had caused her so much terror. Once it was safely aboard and hoisted into the analysis tank, Mandy put the ship back on its original course and went down to have a look at it. She found herself looking at a polished plate of bronze-colored metal, triangular with two of its corners curled inwards. On the outer surface, a handsome pattern of etching crisscrossed the smooth finish. It looked, she decided, like a piece of simple jewelery; holes on the two curved corners might once have been the places where a clasp fitted to attach the item to a human-sized wrist or forearm.

Using the grippers in the analysis tank, Mandy turned the object over to examine the inside surface, and found a different pattern of etching there. Small blocks of complex etching marched in ordered rows, almost like letters, though she saw no place the pattern used a repeated shape. Mandy found it hard to focus on the etching; the nearly writing-like quality made her imagine letters and words appearing out of the background, but each time, they vanished as soon as she thought they appeared. It was, she decided, nothing that would be drifting in space by accident. The object was undoubtedly related to the Angel derelict; perhaps a piece that had fallen off and been forgotten when it had departed.

As she considered the possible meaning of the object, Mandy’s eyes drifted across the writing-like pattern once more, and she recoiled from the analysis tank in alarm, falling heavily against the opposite bulkhead. For a moment, another odd set of letters had seemed to rise from the complex pattern, bolder and clearer than all the suggestions her imagination had already supplied.

“Mandy, you’re losing it.” She muttered, standing once more and returning to the tank, sure that what she had seen would be only a figment of her overly active imagination. Picking up the metal object with the tank’s grippers once more, Mandy turned it over and once again looked upon the etching on the inside surface.

Despite all her expectations, the words that had so unnerved her were still there. Mandy stared uncomprehending at the thing in the analysis tank, torn between wonder and sheer panic. Etched into the ordered patterns on its inside face, very near the center and impossible to mistake, was her own name.

I'm genuinely shocked this story cleared Naval Intelligence, but it did.

Mandy G. sends us the account of the most eventful flight of her brief career in the Naval Survey Auxiliary. In her account, she claims to have stumbled on an apparently derelict Angel starship. The Auxiliary has never confirmed this incident, but their representative here on Planet refused to categorically deny her account. The usually very open service denied having any data recordings to back up the story, so I can't say I believe it all happened exactly as Mandy claims, but the physical proof of the story - the "bangle" she returned with - is a well documented fact.

According to Mandy, the physical proof she brought back was subjected to a number of analyses at the research station on Saunders’ Hoard, and the technicians there determined the item to have been manufactured by a human mass fabricator of a type mainly used in the early 2700s. How such an item came to have Mandy's name etched on it, none of them could understand, but they let her keep it all the same, finding no evidence it was of Angel origin. Mandy transferred from the Auxiliary to the true Navy shortly after this allegedly happened in early 2944; evidently she has been serving as a launch pilot on a Navy tender for almost a year, and she claims that she keeps the "bangle" on her person every time she straps into a cockpit.

I am interested in the teething problems Mandy reports with the Sirius M67 type - this ship class is sometimes considered the closest competitor to several of our loyal sponsor's offerings, since it is purportedly going to be available to the general public sometime early next year, at a similar price point to analogous Kosseler products. The Sirius model was built to the Survey Auxiliary's specifications, and supposedly in second-line Survey service they've worked most of the kinks out of the type, but I can't find any proof they've been cleared for Frontier service yet, even eighteen months after Mandy's reported bad experience. Is Sirius going to start selling these ships to the public before they're even ready for the purpose for which they were originally designed?

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Tales from the Inbox: Rattanai Rematch

2946-09-24 - Tales from the Inbox: Rattanai Rematch

In the final episode of Jaska N.'s account, we find him joining forces with another prisoner of the raiders who took him captive after destroying his colony compound home. If you missed the previous parts of Jaska's account, you can read them in Tales from the Inbox: Rattanai Raiders, Tales from the Inbox: Rattanai Captivity, and Tales from the Inbox: Rattanai Reprisal.

In his message to me, Jaska admitted not knowing much about the creature he describes having freed from captivity, though his speculation is that it was not a sapient creature at all, but instead an advanced hive-networked swarm masquerading as a single entity. He offered no speculation as to its origins beyond this; it seemed that he was making good on his promise to it, to go his own way and leave it to its own business. He doesn't explicitly say that the creature departed his company after they were set free, but it is heavily implied in the way he described his ordeal that this is what happened.

Having heard other stories about symbiotic sapients (many of them retold so many times as to be devoid of any useful information to research the matter), I do not wish to discount the possibility that he is right, but details he offers suggest that the creature or machine isn't - or at least isn't entirely - synthetic.. Jaska offers no details beyond that the creature was able to help him subdue several Rattanai brigands, at which point the ship's master called for parley and offered to deposit him, Karley, and the mysterious creature on a nearby sparsely populated colony world unharmed.

Despite their fanaticsim, it is unsurprising that this raider band were amenable to a peaceful settlement; faced with a force of unknown capability, they decided to cut their losses and negotiate. This is in keeping with the behavior of some Rattanai commanders during the days of the empire, and it proves that though these towering xenosapients are very different from humans and Atro'me psychologically, they are not beyond all reason. To me, this has always made the imagery of the Terran-Rattanai War more terrifying: it forces one to come to terms with the real possibility that a grand empire of generally rational beings can seek to exterminate or subjugate humanity for what is, for them, rational reasons.

Jaska put his hand against the armored door gingerly, wondering if, locked behind it, was  something that might contribute to his and Karley’s escape, if he could get it open.

The raiders had configured their ship in a manner that made no particular sense to him; though parts of the interior made it obvious that the ship was originally built by a human yard, its Rattanai owners had reconfigured it in a manner that seemed, at least to a retired spacer like Jaska, to be rather arbitrary.

The first two spaces he’d thought likely to be some sort of armory had turned out to be an empty storage compartment and an oddly-fitted plumbing head; the third had been guarded too attentively to slip inside. After watching this fourth doorway for several minutes, hidden in a grate-covered maintenance shaft, he’d risked creeping out and up to it, only to find that its control panel was apparently nonfunctional, its small holo-display projecting a universally recognizable “system fault” symbol, as well as a string of Rattanai language-glyphs which Jaska couldn’t read. Most likely, that meant that whatever was on the other side was of no concern to the fanatical Rattanai crew.

Jaska was about to leave the armored door and whatever mystery compartment lay beyond when the control panel chirped. Returning his attention to its display, he noticed that the Rattanai glyphs displayed below the fault symbol had been replaced by a trio of Terran Anglo-standard letters, “WHO.” 

With a shock, he realized that it was an interrogative. “Me?” Jaska whispered, before he realized what he was doing.

The letters vanished for a moment, then “YES” replaced them. Jaska took a step back, and considered running away; the ship was after all hostile territory. Most likely, the letters were the result of a Rattanai computer technician elsewhere on the ship trying to distract him until armed raiders arrived to return him to his cell.

Still, Jaska knew he needed a lucky break. The narrow maintenance crawlspace behind him beckoned invitingly, but he judged himself able to dive into it at the first hint of Rattanai approaching. “You first.” Jaska replied quietly, craning his head to look and listen for any sign of danger.

The letters “CAP” appeared, then vanished to be replaced by “TVE”. It was clear that the meaning was “captive.” That wasn’t an answer to his question, but it did explain why the limit of their ability to manipulate the display was three characters; perhaps exposed wiring allowed a clever technician captive only limited control over the display.

“I was too, but I got out.” Jaska whispered. “Does this door open from the outside? It gave me a fault when I tried.”

There was no reply for several seconds. “YES” appeared, followed by “WAI.”

Before waiting for whatever would follow, Jaska slapped the control panel’s largest button, which was clearly meant to open the door. As the grinding sound of heavy lock mechanisms indicated success, the displayed letters changed to “TYO,” “UMU,” and finally “STK” before the armored portal slid uneasily downward to reveal a dark compartment not unlike the one he and Karley had been imprisoned in, if slightly bigger. “I must what?” Jaska asked into the darkness, seeing motion in the far corner, where the light did not penetrate.

What uncoiled from the darkness and stepped forward was not human. Though it took roughly the shape of a human, it moved oddly, more flexible than a human in some ways, and more constrained in others. Its long, slim limbs were hugged by form-fitting armor plates like metallic dragon-scales, and its face was a blank, glassy mask. From around this mask, a mane of white, hairlike filaments cascaded in all directions. If it was biologically similar to a human under its armored hide, Jaska decided it was probably the female of its species, based on its slim, somewhat wasp-waisted profile. A long, segmented tail danced in the air around the figure, and Jaska didn’t fail to notice the barbed stinger at its tip.

As if to remind Jaska of his purpose in opening the door, three blocky letters appeared in the creature’s blank mask-like face. Just as Jaska recognized “LET,” the creature replaced them with “SGO.” The meaning of these six letters was quite clear.

“Right.” Quickly, he led the odd figure to the open grate of the maintenance crawlspace, ushered her inside, then followed. After moving a safe distance away from the opening, he reached out to pull the stranger to a halt. “Wait.”

When he touched the smooth scales of her arm, they seemed to shift under his hand, as if it was metallic scales, only loosely connected to each other, all the way through. Surprised, he withdrew his hand, and when he looked up, the letters “WHY” glowed softly against the dim silhouette in front of him.

“Because we’re never going to get off this ship unless we work together.” He told her, still cringing at the feeling of the brief contact even though it hadn’t done him any harm.

There was a pause. “DOY,” “OUK,” and finally “NOW” appeared, each at a delay of several seconds.

Not waiting for the rest of the message, Jaska decided to answer. “I have no idea what the hell you are, and I don’t care. When we get out of this, you go your way, Karley and I will go ours, and that will be that. We just need some way to fight the Rattanai.”

There was another pause, and the alien put out a hand, pointing at Jaska. “WHO” appeared on her face.

“I’m Jaska.” He replied. “I was captured with Karley, a neighbor of mine, but we got out of our cell. What can I call you?”

“INA” were the only three letters delivered in reply. “Ina”, Jaska decided, was as good a name as he was likely to get. 

As he considered this, she reached out and grasped his wrist, holding his hand up in the darkness. The scale-like structures seemed to grind against each other, and the impression that the alien was entirely made of layers of interlocking plates was reinforced. As he wondered what the gesture meant and tried to fight another wave of revulsion, Jaska noticed new letters: “BEC,” then “ALM”

“Be calm?” Jaska echoed, wondering whether it would be impolite to pry his hand free. Ina’s grip was gentle, but the movement of her scales was highly unpleasant against his wrist. “Why? What makes-”

With a sudden motion, the alien pounced on him, and they both toppled to the floor. Ina seemed to lose her form and become an amorphous flow of metallic components, pinning Jaska to the floor. He struggled, and would have cried out, except that the plate of the creature's face pressed itself against his in a macabre mockery of intimacy, covering his mouth and nose, and stifling his breath. He tried to gasp for breath, tried to free his limbs to claw at the object which seemed to fold around his face and head, but found himself entirely restrained. As spots danced in the darkness in front of his occluded eyes, Jaska hoped that, at least, Ina would kill some of the Rattanai after she was finished with him.

Just as his consciousness was beginning to fade, his straining lungs filled themselves with dry shipboard air. The weight holding him down had vanished. “The hell-” Jaska said, then stopped – his voice echoed back into his ears, as if he was wearing a bubble helmet. Reaching up to touch his face, Jaska found his fingers clinking against a smooth, featureless surface; evidently, he was wearing a helmet, or something very like it. The presence of interlocking armored gloves over his hands – and apparently the rest of his body – also became evident.

“I said to be calm.” A smooth feminine voice with an unplaceable accent dripped into Jaska’s ears like warm honey. “It is so difficult to explain symbiosis from outside.”

“Ina?” Jaska sat up unsteadily, uncomfortable with the fact that he was now completely encased in the form of a machine – or a creature - which fitted him like a second skin, below even his tattered clothing.

“Correct.”

“Symbiosis?” Jaska prompted, exploring his person blindly with metal-scaled hands, surprised at how much tactile sensation carried through Ina’s covering.

“Alone, I am weak." Ina replied. “Weak enough to be easily imprisoned. As one, however, we are strong. Strong enough, perhaps, to fight these brigands.” As she spoke, the scale-plates on Jaska’s arms shifted subtly as Ina showed him how she could amplify his bodily strength; experimentally, he made a fist and punched the floor, and was surprised to leave a sizable dent in the shape of his armored knuckles. Ina, he realized, was making him as strong as a decent human-built suit of combat armor would, but it wasn’t clear how.   

The opaque faceplate in front of Jaska cleared. The dim crawlspace now looked as well-lit as the corridors. “This... symbiosis, is it reversible?”

Ina laughed. It wasn’t a human laugh; it had a buzzing multiplicity that coursed up and down his body, as if each scale were laughing individually. It was simultaneously a terrifying and pleasurable feeling. “If you wish.” She replied. “Let’s go find your friend.”

At that instant, the ship shuddered, and Jaska found himself drifting off the deck plates he was sitting on. “That would be her now.”

“Your friend is resourceful.”

Jaska smiled into the faceplate, knowing that Ina couldn’t possibly know about how Karley had contributed to his presence in the first place. “Apparently she is. Let’s go see how agile these lunks are in zero-gee, Ina.”

“With pleasure, Jaska.” The odd being’s voice purred as Jaska maneuvered weightlessly toward the nearest exit into the corridor. 

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