Repast

I thought there would be more drama around revealing Pen’s body. But there were only a handful of people present when it unfolded.

Nai talked to Umtane the next day while I spent the whole day in the secure lab again getting high-resolution scans of my body. One of the scans had demanded I lie motionless on a table for more than two hours.

It made me think of Pen. If the Farnata had suffocated in that hole in the wall…

Well, thinking of his fate made lying still a little more tolerable.

By that evening, Nai had told Umtane and the two of them had approached Director Hom-Heg together—another oddity. Umtane was being too cooperative. It made my skin crawl.

There had only been five of us when they opened up the obscure hallway near the upper levels; Nai, me, Umtane, the Director, and the Chief of Security. Even Tasser had been kept away.

Nai wasn’t precise enough to tell, so Umtane and I both cascaded the wall panel in question to see how it had been removed and how it was now affixed. We found it was sealed shut with plaster, or something like it.

Barely a word was spoken and not just because of the late hour. It was so odd being forced to spend so much time near someone you couldn’t trust. There was a lot of that going around.

The Chief of Security pried the panel free of the wall with a hollow crack. A hiss of air let out and I was suddenly grateful for the breathing mask I wore. One of the worst smells I could think of was associated with dead bodies: the scent of disinfectant the Vorak had used in the plastic tent where the other abductees’ bodies were. I didn’t need to add mummified Farnata to the list.

But Pen’s body wasn’t just mummified. It was wrapped in a translucent plastic tarp-bag. I felt a little relief at that. It meant he hadn’t died in this hole, at least. He’d been hidden here afterward.

Chief of Security blocked off the hallway with biohazard signs to preserve the scene without raising any alarm—spills were not rare in a facility like this.

Director Hom-Heg was not in charge of the medical facility for nothing. Pen’s body was technically in his custody since it was going to his facility’s morgue, and he wheeled the stretcher there personally.

·····

“So,” Umtane said standing over Pen’s body on a slab, “you said you would explain.”

Of the five of us who’d found the body, only the Chief of Security was absent from the morgue now. Chief Niza had left to ensure no one else would tamper with the scene.

Both the Director and Umtane were staring down Nai.

“The Coalition received an anonymous note traced to this facility. It alleged this Farnata was dead and hidden somewhere within,” Nai said.

“You were here for the bioweapon…” Umtane realized. “You learned it was being developed.

“No,” Nai insisted. “We didn’t know anything about a bioweapon until you mentioned it here, but we’ve grown moderately confident whoever tried to contact us is behind your bioweapon.”

“But you did have ulterior motives in coming here!” the Director hissed. “You brought a First Contact into a possible combat situation—”

“No, she didn’t,” I said from behind him.

I was keeping my distance from the body, but it wasn’t a big enough morgue for me to be totally separate from the conversation.

“They didn’t lie to me. I knew about the body. They briefed me on what else they wanted to do. Whatever things the Nai and the Coalition might have done wrong, lying to me is not one of them.”

“Regardless!” the Director said, nearly shouting, “in fact, informing you might be worse!”

“I am quite the patient and meticulous Vorak,” Umtane added, “but some of my more aggressive contemporaries might interpret that as you aiding the Coalition. They would view you as a hostile.”

“Ase Serralinitus warned me about that too,” I said. “Do you want to see the scars where two different Vorak already put knives through me? Or, since this is the Organic Authority, why don’t you ask Dr. Maburic about the needle scars I’ve got on my left arm. It wasn’t even a full day in Vorak custody before they started taking my flesh and blood without my consent.”

“Whatever the Red Sails did to you on Korbanok, proof or not, is immaterial here,” Director Hom-Heg said gravely. “The fact is the Coalition endangered you. In some ways it would have been safer to lie to you, ignorance could have protected you.”

“It didn’t,” I said. “I had no clue what was happening, and they still tried to kill me anyway.”

“The only time it didn’t is when the Vorak didn’t know you were ignorant ,” Hom-Heg said. “Even if the Red Sails are guilty of abducting you, once you were in Coalition hands, the protection your ignorance affords you grows stronger once more than the Vorak know of you. But it doesn’t even matter if you understand this or not, because they did!”

He pointed an accusatory finger at Nai.

The odd part was, I understood his anger.

He didn’t, couldn’t, know precisely why they’d told me. Neither the Director nor Umtane had any clue that there was data from Korbanok here. Data about me. About the ship. About the abductions.

“It wasn’t up to them,” I said. “I…demanded to know what was going on.”

“Just like you ‘demanded’ the Torabin share the body’s location?” Umtane asked.

One look at the Vorak and I knew bone deep he didn’t believe me. Fine. It didn’t matter if he did or not.

“I don’t really care if you believe me or not, Rak,” I said. “None of this changes anything. We came here to get me examined and to sort out a Coalition body. You’re here to stop a bioweapon. Nothing that’s happened prevents our first goal, and it turns out your bioweapon and our corpse are two ends of the same knotted rope.”

“Caleb, it’s not your responsibility to vouch—” Nai began.

“” I said. “I don’t appreciate the implication they’re leveling at you, at Tasser.”

“Caleb, he’s not wrong; if it had been my call, getting you examined and investigating at this facility would have been separate missions,” Nai said.

“Well, it wasn’t your call. [Hell,] it was my call more than yours!”

“First Contact is bigger than just you,” the Director said. “It’s unfortunate, but as long as you’re cut off from your people, you can’t be considered to have complete agency of yourself—someone has to be responsible for your wellbeing.”

“And especially in this light,” Umtane said, gesturing toward Pen’s body, “it’s questionable whether the Coalition should have been allowed to be involved with you at all.”

“Allowed?” I asked shrilly. “I must not be as fluent as I thought, because that’s definitely not what I thought that word means.”

Umtane grimaced at his poor choice of words at least. It didn’t make me feel any better though. The Vorak was civilized and personable enough to at least act like he regretted it. It made my skin crawl.

“Caleb,” Nai said impatiently, “this isn’t productive.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “But I’m not going to stand by while anyone tries to imply you guys were wrong to pull me off Korbanok.”

“From our perspective,” the Director protested, “it can’t even be confirmed you were even on Korbanok! All the confirmable evidence before us shows that the Coalition involved you in a military operation and implicated you as a combatant! You’re in more danger from the Vorak because of their conduct—it paints you as a combatant for them!”

“Well then I’m sorry,” I said, giving up. “I was mistaken. The Coalition didn’t tell me about this body. In fact, Nai is lying when she said we knew of it beforehand. She’s trying to protect me. She stumbled across it with her cascade completely by accident and thought you should be informed. Happy?”

The Director looked stunned. Umtane stayed completely still, considering what I’d said.

“…Huh,” he grunted.

“What?” I asked. “If you don’t believe me anyway, why shouldn’t I lie to you? You don’t have any ‘confirmable evidence’ otherwise.”

“I don’t understand what you hope to achieve with this, Caleb Hane,” the Director said. “Commander Nai, you cannot let him endanger himself like this. As long as the Vorak think he is a partisan for the Coalition, he, as a First Contact, is in unacceptable danger.”

“Yeah Nai, you and the Coalition have custody of me right now,” I said. “Force me to shut up. It’s your responsibility to keep me safe. Don’t tell me anything I should know, don’t treat me like a person. Just keep me in a nice safe box until the Vorak come clean about abducting two dozen children. It’ll happen eventually, I’m sure.”

“” Nai snapped, flipping the psionic script on me.

I did, but reluctantly.

“The Coalition is well aware of its responsibility,” she said, turning to the Director. “But you know why communication is the second priority of First Contact after quarantine. The sovereignty of the Contact matters. It’s our duty to do our best to accommodate the wishes and consent of the contacted persons. And regardless of whether or not you take us at our word, we do have the evidence to support his claim. And we do intend to acquire even more proof.”

Umtane raised his head in understanding. “…You’re going to move him off-world,” he realized quietly.

And my blood ran cold.

The two Adepts stared each other down for a tense second, and more than any moment before I thought a fight would start.

But slowly, Umtane raised his hands placatingly. He knew he’d still lose.

“You have two options, Rak,” Nai breathed. “You either tell no one of that, or you tell everyone. In either case, if the Deep Coils, the Red Sails, even the diraksi Prowlers turn up, if even a single Assembly-affiliated fleet attacks an effort to move him off planet…” she trailed off and I felt the intensity of her energy spike for a moment.

Had she even realized she’d done that?

“…Understood,” Umtane said, accepting the implied threat.

“Caleb Hane, on behalf of my entire organization, I strenuously object. Even if the Coalition keeps you separated from any military affairs, it would not keep you safe. Even if they pursued your abductors with nothing but your genuine interests, just your connection to them would put you at risk.”

“That will be true no matter who’s custody I’m in,” I pointed out. “…Except for yours,” I realized. “Because the Organic Authority wouldn’t have an interest in my abductors.”

“That’s not true,” Director Hom-Heg said. “We would investigate how you arrived here, and do everything in our power to fulfil the duty of First Contact and return you to your people.”

“But that’s not justice,” I said. “I want to see the culprit brought to justice: punished.”

“That is the responsibility of a court, a system of justice,” he said. “The Organic Authority is not a punitive body. It is a protective one. And as long as any custodian of yours willingly puts you at risk, even only by sharing information, it should not be allowed to be such a custodian: Ignorance affords safety.”

Hom-Heg reiterated the idea like he was quoting something. Except the precise word he’d used didn’t strictly mean ‘safety.’ It was how he meant it; I was sure. But the connotation of the word was much closer to ‘stability.’ He’d quoted to me the Casti equivalent of ‘ignorance is bliss.’

“There’s only one difference between a knife in my back or a gun in my face. What you’re describing isn’t safety, it’s comfort,” I said, “and I’m not interested in comfort.”

The Director winced.

“I’ll think about staying with the Organic Authority, I really will,” I told him. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

I turned to Umtane. Since he was still playing ball, however reluctantly, there wasn’t anything else to say but, “if we’re all still interested in stopping a bioweapon, let’s figure out what happened to this guy.”

The Director looked like he might object further, but decided against it.

“An autopsy will have to be conducted,” Director Hom-Heg said. “Cause of death is unclear at a glance.”

“If we can figure out when he died, we can narrow down a timeframe,” Nai said. “We could start identifying possible culprits based on who had access to that corridor around that time.”

“His body might have only been hidden there,” Umtane said. “It’s possible he could have been killed somewhere else. How easy would it be to move a Farnata body through the facility like this?”

“Extremely easy,” I said, looking over the body. Three sets of alien eyes stared at me. “The body could have been moved the same way we just did: on a stretcher, in a bag. No one would have looked twice.”

“Aral…” the Director swore.

“I’m not a medical expert,” Umtane said, “but if this body is older than a month, then the archived security footage won’t go back far enough.”

“Camera coverage in that area is limited anyway,” Director Hom-Heg lamented. “It’s a low security area—nothing critical is nearby. Most of the coverage is concentrated on the lab areas.”

“There’s still plenty of evidence to examine, even if we don’t have footage,” Nai said.

I agreed. “Do any of you think it’s a coincidence Rahi Pen’s body was wrapped in a body-bag just like the others in this morgue?”

“The bags are all over this facility,” the Director said. “Anyone could fabricate one in one of the material labs.”

“Then why is the tag on this one burned off?” I asked, pointing to the corner of the bag. A singed stump of fabric stuck out from the seam.”

“Anyone fabricating a bag wouldn’t bother including the tag,” Umtane said. “So this one must have been manufactured standardly, part of an identifiable batch and delivery.”

“We can’t identify which one, though,” the Director said.

“But it does tell us the culprit could have been identified based on that tag,” I pointed out. “That isn’t true for everyone. We can still narrow suspects to people connected to identifiable batches.”

Umtane’s grin grew a bit wider.

“I thought I wanted the Torabin helping with the investigation, but now I think you should help too.”

“No,” Nai said at the same time the Director said, “Absolutely not.”

“If there’s any single entity with unimpeachable credibility here, it’s Caleb Hane,” Umtane said. “There’s no one else we can be more certain was unconnected to the crime. And he’s clearly intelligent enough to contribute.”

“It’s not a question of ability,” the Director said.

“What is then? Safety? It seems to me we already reached the end of that voyage. And if propriety is your concern then he’s every bit as unbiased as me. To be honest, part of me wishes the Coalition was behind the bioweapon just because I want to see what this alien would do if they were mixed up in something like that,” Umtane said.

Nai consulted me with a look, “…You could have valuable perspective,” she said aloud before following it silently,

“I’d be doing the Organic Authority a favor,” I said. “Which I’m not opposed to, I just wanted to make sure we all agreed that’s what this is.”

Director Hom-Heg’s sour expression darkened, but he nodded.

“So if I’m helping, catch me up,” I told Nai and Umtane. “I’ve seen what brought Umtane here, what else have you figured out?”

“Not tonight,” Nai said. “You still have testing scheduled for the next two days, and that’s completely ignoring what else the doctors are going to want to do in addition to what’s already slated.”

“…Fine, that hallway has been sitting that way for weeks. Waiting another day shouldn’t be a problem right?” I said.

“Security Chief Niza will keep it undisturbed. In fact, since we know the culprit has likely already done their best to remove any trace of themselves, it might even benefit us if they were to attempt to return,” Director Hom-Heg said.

“We can reconvene tomorrow or the next day,” Umtane said.

Nai and I left the morgue and walked back through the complex to our accommodations. It was the first time I’d been allowed anywhere without security following me.

I asked.

<…I have no idea. He knows more than he’s letting on, I’m sure. But he seems to be sharing all the information he has. His mind is like a basket of ragvi.>

She ignored my English.

she said plainly.

she said wearily.

Both of us were tired enough that there wasn’t much more to say.

·····

The next day was consumed with the most frantic series of tests yet. The morning was blocked entirely for respiratory analysis.

They hooked me up to a blood monitor to learn more about how my lungs got oxygen into my body and more importantly, just what air mixtures and concentrations I could tolerate without passing out or dying.

I got a new air mask that fit better and more optimally maintained a concentration of oxygen in my lungs, but it came at the cost of almost passing out more than a dozen times.

After that was ‘lunch,’ but I hadn’t thought about eating in terms of meals for a while. Lunch was a meal; it was a break from the day to refuel. What I did now was just that last part: refueling.

The afternoon and evening were spent in the secure lab with Dr. Maburic who tried to incinerate my palms. It was my idea, at least a little. I wanted to see how durable these augmentations in my hand were. And as far as heat and cold went, they held up. I could hold my finger tip in an open flame for almost a minute before it hurt too badly to continue—even then it barely left a mark, just an angry pink spot that was gone in a few hours.

He wanted to test my augmentations just as badly, though for very different reasons. Biopsies of most of my major organs would constitute real surgery, which was understandably very complicated if it turned out there were pieces of the patient more durable than the tools you were cutting with.

I was not looking forward to that one.

By the end of day three, I was unprepared for how badly I wanted to drop all the medical stuff like a hot potato and solve a bioweapon mystery instead.

Halfway through day four, that feeling had only intensified.

“Come on, Caleb,” Tasser said. “You’re going to feel even worse if you don’t eat.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I told him. “This planet has a Casti food supply, you can have more appealing options than nutritious compact sand.”

“I’ve eaten rations before, you know…”

“I do know, which is why I would have expected a bit more sympathy from you. You know what it’s like to eat like this.”

He gave a weary sigh as we walked toward the secure lab. “Caleb, if you don’t open that foil, I’m never going to let you live it down.”

He didn’t even glance my direction when I gave him an annoyed look.

“Fine then…” I said, pulling the foil-wrapped brick out. But when I peeled at the foil, I found someone was having some fun with me.

Instead of a square of calorie dense meal, I was greeted with a small block with the words ‘surprise’ written on it in Tasser’s handwriting.

“In fact,” Tasser said, “I think I’ll do that regardless.”

“You wrote the word ‘surprise’ on what was supposed to be my lunch,” I told him, “but I’m still totally missing what you mean.”

“Well, it’s safe to assume you’re still going to be fed today, isn’t it?” he led.

“I would hope so.”

“So if that isn’t your lunch,” Tasser continued, “where do you suppose it is?”

“Oh [snap,]” I said. “Did you get a better ration for me?”

“No,” he said, painfully deflating my hopes. “But I am a little curious to see what Nai would say to this.”

“Don’t change the subject, what’s the deal with food today? And why would Nai care?”

“You would have known immediately what was in the foil if you were keeping up your cascade,” Tasser said.

“My cascade only fills a liter of space,” I protested. “I’m running it through my feet right now, feeling out what I’m walking on.”

“So you’d rather feel a few inches around your feet than whatever is in your hands? Even for me, those are some odd priorities, Caleb.”

“It reaches more than a few inches,” I corrected him. “I change its shape, so it reaches a few feet away.”

“For it to reach that far, it would have to be thin like a wire,” Tasser observed. “You wouldn’t get any meaningful definition from it.”

“Most of it has to be thin like a wire,” I corrected. “At the end I can make a little ‘bubble’ volume. That’s the part I actually pay attention to.”

“It’s almost the exact opposite of Nai’s then…” Tasser mused. “I’ll give you points then, it’s certainly a creative way to extend your reach.”

“Stop changing the subject,” I told him. “What the [hell] is happening with food?”

We arrived at the lab door and Tasser nodded toward it.

“Head on in and find out.”

It wasn’t until he put my attention toward it that I realized there were two Adepts inside the lab already.

They were Nai and Umtane, joined by Dr. Maburic and another Casti doctor I should have recognized. I had gotten a little lazy over the last two days—I hadn’t recorded everyone’s name.

“I didn’t know you two were coming,” I said to the two Adepts.

“I just followed the Torabin,” Umtane said simply.

“I’ve been eating the same four flavors of food pack for as long as I’ve been on this planet, Caleb,” Nai said. “I’m not missing real food.”

It was only then that I noticed Dr. Maburic’s lab setup for today.

Despite offering me exactly nothing, I’d poked my head into the mess hall on the Demon’s Pit base once or twice. It was a pretty rough setup and more or less what I expected from a kitchen attached to a nuclear fusion plant. But the one thing that had stood out to me was the hot plates.

Back home I remembered my dad gushing about how cool an induction plate was for cooking, and Dr. Maburic had several on one of the lab’s tables.

“You asked if I got you a better ration,” Tasser sagely said.

“[Oh you jerk,]” I told him. If I hadn’t been in front of two Org. doctors and Umtane I might have socked him lightly on the shoulder. “So I can eat this?” I asked, gesturing toward the feast before me. (It was actually just two pots of what had to be soup and a few pieces of soft lumpy bread, but by current standards, that qualified.)

“I’m fairly sure, yes,” the doctor that wasn’t Maburic said.

“And you are?” I asked, wishing that Org. Doctors wore ID.

“Statta Mo, I run the biosphere interaction department,” he said, “which includes the food lab, hence…” he gestured at gently bubbling pots.

“Dr. ‘Mo’?” I asked. ‘Mo’ was a conjugated form of one of the basic Starspeak state of being verbs. It was like someone being named ‘is’ or ‘are’ in English.

“I’ve heard all the jokes,” Dr. Mo said. “Although, who knows? You’re unprecedented, you might surprise me.”

“You’ve certainly surprised me with this,” I told him. “Nai seems to have already gotten a bowl of the one, so can I assume the other is human-safe?”

“Well they should both be safe for you to eat,” Dr. Mo said. “The molecules were rather carefully measured to make this as easy to digest as possible. I could tell you how they taste to me, but my tongue is very different from a Farnata’s and likely even more different than yours.”

“Dyn guessed this,” I recalled. “He said the molecules in my food ration weren’t that different from the Farnata stuff.”

Dr. Mo nodded. “I’m fairly impressed with the officer that wrote your preliminary reports. No specialized equipment but he still picked his way toward some great theories. Probably saved me a week of trials. Some of the other experiments I’m running are still pending results, but I’m confident your metabolisms depend on a common molecule for energy: raffatatrenasur.”

Biology had always been my worst science class, so my own knowledge was a little thin…but it had been one of Daniel’s fortes. And he’d left me a lot of notes.

“[Glucose…]” I guessed, consulting some of his work. “Uhhh…atomically speaking, it would be…six atoms of the 6 th element, twelve atoms of the first element, and then six more oxygen…I think…”

“That would be the simplified notation, but yes, that’s the composition of the molecule,” Dr. Mo said.

I asked Nai, in the middle of a spoonful of soup.

she said. She seemed to have gone still over it.

“So human and Farnata both have the same type of metabolism?”

“Same type,” Dr. Mo stressed, “but not the same at all. The input molecule is the same, but the cell respiration mechanisms are still significantly different from each other—though still more similar than any other two biospheres.”

Nai might have gone still from a chill going over her skin, because one went through me too.

“That doesn’t sound like it’s…well, likely,” I said.

Dr. Mo shrugged. “It’s not that absurd if you consider evolutionary pressures. There’s only so many molecules who’s chemistry is optimal for an ecosystem to develop. But…you are not wrong. It is an exceptional coincidence.”

“What does that mean as far as what I can actually eat?” I asked, sitting down for a bowl of soup.

“You’re not the first alien to have food-related questions arise,” Dr. Maburic said. “It’s one of the reasons I want to biopsy some of your organs, especially your liver and [kidneys], you called them?”

“Waste organs…” I guessed. “You want to look at how my body handles junk it doesn’t want or need.”

Dr. Maburic gave an affirmative click from his throat, “This,” he said, producing a square of metal with a complex pattern of lines etched into it, “is what we’re looking to complete for you. It’s an individual nutritional index.”

“It’s essentially a number that quantifies what categories of food molecules you can eat,” Tasser explained. “Every alien that goes into space, and tons of those who don’t, have one.”

“One number?” I asked, “you can simplify it down to one number?”

“It’s a forty-digit code,” Dr. Mo said, “and the etched card is just a convenient way to encode that number. But it encompasses everything from species diet to individual genetic disorders to allergies.”

“And this one is mine?” I asked, running my thumb over the etched quarter of the metal “It’s unfinished.”

Tasser snatched it out of my hands. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Now shut up and actually eat something.”

Well, I wasn’t going to argue with that.

The pots of soup both looked revolting. One was a sickly shade of transparent dark green with a few stray specks of leaf floating in it while the other was an opaque black.

But they both smelled incredible. Even through my mask, I was getting hearty whiffs of rich broth.

I was fairly sure my imagination was playing tricks on me, because I even went so far as to cascade the soup to see if I could pick out anything interesting about its contents. The best I could tell was that both soups weren’t anything more than a basic broth with what seemed like the Farnata equivalent of salt added.

The dark green one wigged me out slightly less, so I got a bowl of it first.

It was completely ordinary. Even more basic than chicken soup, but damn if it wasn’t the finest thing I’d ever tasted. It tasted faintly of fish but I didn’t care. I hadn’t been a fan of most seafood back on Earth, but I was a long way from Earth right now. Every drop was like liquid gold.

In the moment, I genuinely didn’t care if it would kill me or not. It could have been poison for all I cared.

The ultra-dark soup was just as good as the first, it tasted funky and alien too. Slightly sweet like candy and slightly salty too. Even the lumpy bread was good. It reminded me of naan bread from India, but ever so slightly, pleasantly, bitter.

At some point through my second bowl, I started crying. Both out of sheer joy and dread at the prospect of ever having to go back to the crumbly rations.

It was embarrassing. The last time I’d really cried in front of Nai and Tasser, neither of them had known me well enough to know what it meant.

They knew me better now.

It made me feel vulnerable, which I didn’t mind as much around them, but it was not what I wanted to feel in front of Umtane or even the Organic Authority’s doctors.

“Are you okay, human?” Umtane asked, frowning.

“I’m fine,” I nodded, my throat feeling tight and blinking to clear my eyes.

I reached for another bite of bread before feeling my airway close up entirely.

Oh.

Despite suddenly being unable to breathe, I actually felt a little relieved because it meant some part of my crying wasn’t just being overwhelmed by the taste of food—it was anaphylaxis too. And that made me feel like I’d failed some of the things Daniel had tried to remind me of before crumbling away.

Sorry Daniel , I thought. I’m better than before, but I’m still not totally there yet.

I sent to her,

She turned to him, “Epi pen?” she said.

Tasser’s eyes widened and his hand dove into his thigh pocket and pulled out a blue plastic tube with a button on one end.

I held my hand up and he tossed it to me. Casti weren’t the best at throwing things, so I had to flip it around in my hand, but I plunged the needle point into my thigh and pressed the button.

There was a faint hiss where the epinephrine rushed out of the cylinder and into my body. It took a few tense seconds for my chest to relax enough for me to hiss out some faint words.

“…I’m okay, I’m okay…”

It hadn't taken even twenty seconds. Dr. Maburic hadn’t even seen what was happening until Tasser had thrown the epi pen to me.

“Dr. Mo,” I rasped. “You mentioned allergies?”