The medical exam went by in a blur; all Casillo could remember was a harsh dot of light that examined his eyes, nose, ears, and hair. As he stuck out his tongue so the medic could prod it with a popsicle stick, he realized that he felt like a kid in the nurse’s office. It didn’t help that he’d exchanged his uniform for a pale green gown. At least the plastic garment gave him some small measure of dignity.

After sketching down some results on a clipboard, she nodded at the captain and left the room. A few minutes later the Chief Medical Officer walked in.

“Well,” Denys began, shaking his head in disbelief. “I give up. Is it ketchup, or one of those other human condiments you seem so fond of spilling all over yourselves?”

Casillo raised an eyebrow at the reptilian medic. Denys resembled the dinosaurs of old, with gray scaly skin, a serpentine tail, and a mohawk of orange feathers crowning his head and the backs of his forearms. What set the Sarvolyans apart from dinosaurs, besides their sentience, were the Sarvolyans’ multifaceted eyes, standing out like two lumps of coal on their mottled gray heads.

“Definitely not,” Casillo replied. “Ketchup dries on orange, not brown.”

He gestured to the bloodstains on his shirt, which had indeed dried on brown. Denys held up a hand and nodded, checking a few instruments to confirm his findings.

“I joke of course,” he said, swiveling a monitor around so Casillo could see it. He didn’t understand most of it, but there wasn’t much red, which seemed universally bad to all species they’d encountered.

“You say you coughed up blood,” Denys continued, pointing to one section of the monitor. “So I examined your lungs and respiratory system. Mostly fine, although your lung capacity is a little lower than I expected. Weren’t you a swimmer?”

“Not a very good one,” Casillo admitted as Denys moved on to the next slide.

“Upon a closer inspection, I found some remnants of apoptosed cells in your throat, mostly genetic material from lung and red blood cells. A deeper analysis found the area they broke away from, but it’s all healed now.”

“So there’s no problem?” Casillo asked, standing up and preparing to leave. However, a beady-eyed stare from Denys brought him back to his seat

“There is indeed a problem,” Denys replied after a moment. “Cells don’t die for no reason, especially in the number required to make you cough blood. I just haven’t identified the cause. I’ll run the sample I collected through the sequencer and see what I can find, then call you back down when I have the results.”

“Can I go now?” Casillo asked, raising an eyebrow. After muttering something in Sarvolyan under his breath, Denys nodded and waved the captain away.

Shrugging to himself, Casillo strode back to his quarters, where he got a fresh uniform. Looking at himself in the mirror, he shook his head. The message from Nistor was still echoing through his mind. He’d specifically said an SOS signal, meaning that the sender was either in distress or had just tapped into a previous SOS and replicated it in the hopes of attracting attention. The latter was far more likely.

Had the Sarvolyan Hegemony tapped their communications? Casillo’s gut thought it unlikely that the Coalition’s cold enemy would try something so bold, but one never knew for sure. Or, even worse, it was some other power or entity, one they hadn’t discovered before.

He must’ve been thinking for a long time, but it seemed like moments later when his comm chirped. Still staring at the nervous captain across from him, he picked it up, had a quick conversation with the comm officer, then left his quarters.

“Sir, we’ve almost completed our sensor sweep of the system,” Commander Asadi said when Casillo returned to the bridge. “One planet in the habitable zone, evidence of liquid water, oxygen gas, and carbon in the atmosphere.”

“A lot of EM emissions too,” Polk added, his hands gliding across the helm controls. Staring out at the viewscreen, Casillo watched as the Galaxie altered course, swinging a few degrees to port and heading for a dull green planet that was the fourth-furthest from the searing yellow sun. The star looked a lot like Sol.

“Can you get us a better picture?” Casillo asked, stumbling as he tried to sit down and watch the viewscreen at the same time. Without looking up, Asadi nodded, her toffee colored hands typing out a few quick instructions into her console.

The picture zoomed in on the planet, going from a small green blur to a larger green blur until the resolution increased. When it did, Casillo could see a verdant world with jade-colored continents, deep azure seas, and what looked like solitary gray mountains scattered across the surface.

“That has to be it,” Casillo said, more to himself than the bridge crew. It was the only planet in the system capable of supporting life and sending an SOS. But from the readings they were getting, the planet looked capable of supporting native life. They could be in the middle of a first contact.

The active scanning alarm seemed oblivious to the crew’s moment of awe and wanderlust, blaring out in a high-pitched wail that someone was probing them. It shattered the bridge’s calm atmosphere; people put on headsets, locked themselves into their stations, and began a chatter of technical talk that almost deafened Casillo.

“You know what I want,” Casillo said, raising his voice so the bridge could hear him. “Who, where, and how? For now, stick to passive scans until we know what we’re dealing with.”

Whatever was out there might have already spotted them, Casillo realized, making passive scanning useless. Passive was less informative, relying on collecting data instead of actively searching for it, but it was more stealthy. If they were already spotted, time may be of the essence.

Then Casillo dismissed these self-doubts with a shake of his head. If they were spotted, it’d be better not to act hostile. ‘Going dark’ and shrouding their engine emissions could throw them off guard, but it would do nothing to collect any particles they’d already given off.

“Whatever it is,” Asadi said, matching and then exceeding Casillo for volume. “It’s definitely isolated us. Passive scans show that it’s coming in at one-five Mark three-two-nine. Seems a bit small for something that powerful.”

Casillo turned to the viewscreen just in time to watch a small gray sphere hover into position between the Galaxie and the planet. Zooming in, Casillo noticed that the surface of the sphere was smooth save for about a dozen openings spaced randomly across it. From the scale, he’d say it was about six feet across; far too small to have an organic crew.

“Get me everything you can on that sphere,” Casillo ordered, glancing at Asadi to make sure she understood. When she nodded acknowledgement and got to work, he turned to Polk.

“Helm, I want us to go dark,” he continued. “Conceal our emissions, cut power to nonessential systems, all of it. Once you do that, throw an evasive maneuver at the sphere to see if we can fool its sensors.”

“Yes sir,” Polk acknowledged, flipping a few switches on his console. Casillo could feel the difference instantly; the lights dimmed to a dull yellow, power indicators dropped or shut off altogether, and the constant background hum of the Galaxie’s reactors quieted until it was almost inaudible.

The sphere hung motionless in space, as if oblivious to the panic it had caused. It had stopped probing them, although by now it wouldn’t need much more data. Studying it out of the corner of his eye, Casillo gave Polk the go-ahead.

The fresh-faced lieutenant took the Galaxie into a slow roll, pitching downward and away from the sphere, until it drifted off the viewscreen. After continuing the maneuver for a few more minutes, Polk shut off the engines and allowed the ship to drift. The whole bridge crew remained motionless, afraid to move lest the sphere rediscover them. Polk glanced back, his inquisitive blue eyes searching the crew for a gesture to continue. When he found none, he shrugged.

“Well,” he said, clapping his hands together loud enough to snap everyone back into reality. “Here comes the moment of truth. Taking us to a high planetary orbit.”

Moving with a forced casualness, Polk gently increased the throttle. The Galaxie, slowed by its power cut, crawled forward, inching towards the planet. Everyone not keeping track of the sphere was busy watching Polk’s progress, as they drifted towards their objective.

“Engines look good,” Polk read, glancing at the myriad of displays at his station. “Emission collectors are nominal, particle escape rate at about 28%. Nothing new on the nav display.”

“It’s pinging!” a sensor officer said, their voice climbing a few octaves higher than they intended. After taking a moment to collect themselves, they continued in a bulleted monotone.

“Sphere is sending out particle and EM probes in all directions, from all frequencies and particle types. They have not, repeat, have not locked onto us yet.”

“Give me an estimate,” Casillo ordered, glancing at the officer in question. “I want to know how much will get back to him, and how much our hull will absorb.”

Although currently commissioned in exploration, the Galaxie was originally designed for stealth, able to absorb most scans to prevent them from bouncing back to the sender. Finding the Galaxie while it ran on low power was like finding a flea using echolocation. Difficult, but not impossible. But for the sphere... Casillo drummed his fingers on his chair’s armrest while he waited for what seemed like an eternity.

“We should absorb about seventy percent of its initial slew, sir,” the officer replied after a moment. “Any more, and the absorbent hull coating will be saturated, causing the rest to bounce back. At its current rate, about fifteen minutes until they spot us, sir.”

Casillo pursed his lips. In situations like these he’d learned that there really wasn’t a right thing to do. Not that he could tell the crew that, of course.

“Tactical, ready weapons,” Casillo said, his voice dropping back to that conversational tone he’d worked so hard to learn. “Don’t fire until I give the order. Helm, I want a random evasive pattern; take your pick, as long as you can do it with current power. Comm, I want you to hail the sphere with the following message.”

The bridge crew hastened to carry out his orders, the tactical officers running from station to station to ensure that the torpedoes were armed, in the tubes, and ready to launch. Meanwhile, Polk took the ship into an upward spiral, moving even farther away from the ominous sphere. Casillo could only watch the viewscreen for a minute before he had to look away; while he wasn’t green by any means, his stomach could only handle so many corkscrews, and the vertigo they caused.

“Attention, unidentified object,” Casillo began once the blue-skinned comm officer handed him a microphone. “This is captain Leonard Casillo of the starship Galaxie. We were on a mission of peaceful exploration when we encountered your ship. We would like to meet with you or your creator so that we might learn from each other. Casillo out,” he finished, nodding to the comm officer.

As the bald, azure-skinned lieutenant transmitted the message, Casillo’s heartbeat sped up until it felt like it would leap out of his chest and into the nearest airlock. He couldn’t identify the cause, apart from the usual flutter of nervousness that accompanied every dangerous situation. His breathing tried to speed up to match it, until Casillo gripped the sides of his chair and took several deep lungfuls of air. That seemed to calm him down, although he could feel the panic lurking somewhere in the pit of his stomach.

“Captain,” the tactical officer reported, sounding…muffled, somehow. “I just read a surge in radiation from the sphere. It passed right through our shields, but doesn’t appear to have done any damage. Readjusting shields to compensate.”

“Should I tell them to prepare the lander?” Asadi asked, snapping the captain back into the present. He nodded without speaking, afraid to open his mouth lest the oily panic swirling around in his gut force its way though.

“Understood,” Asadi said, giving a brief look of concern. “I’ll lead the team, if that’s alright with you? We should probably get engineering to check on that radiation as well,” she added, nodding to the sensor officer.

Once again, Casillo’s heart started beating faster. This time, however, his breathing couldn’t quite keep up, causing an ache to spread from his heart to the rest of his chest like a corpse flower unveiling its bright red petals.

“Of course,” Casillo said, gripping the armrests of his chair so he wouldn’t clutch at his chest. Once the situation stabilized, he’d go down to see Denys again, maybe annoy him enough to get some painkillers. “Take a security and science complement with you.”

“Are you okay captain?” Asadi asked, picking up a datapad from her station. She always seemed to carry it on away missions, although he never could figure out why. At the moment though, all Casillo could think about was how he really needed something for the pain.

“Fine,” Casillo gasped. “Go to the lander and head for one of the… one of the mountains. They’re the only… the only things high enough for us to see the signals.”

As he spoke, the ache in his chest transformed into a searing needle of pain, jabbing him right between the ribs and slowly spreading out over the rest of his body. His ribcage became a prison, trapping his lungs like a straightjacket. The technical chatter and worried questions of the bridge crew faded into a dull murmur.

Casillo didn’t even notice that he’d fallen out of the captain’s chair until he was staring at the chrome-plated ceiling, not the viewscreen. It was difficult to tell, since his vision was tunneled down to the size of a pinhole. That pinhole pointed straight at a bank of harsh white lights, which were blinding even with the reduced power.

Funny, Casillo thought, the lights seemed to be dimming.