Nine Hibiscus had been trying to sleep. She had removed her uniform, and laid herself down on her bed in an undershirt and sleeping shorts, and cued her cloudhook to dim the roomlights to almost blackout. She’d even set her messages to silent save for absolute priority; if the aliens attacked Weight for the Wheel, she’d wake up, but probably not for anything else.
If she ever went to sleep at all, anyway. She’d been trying for a full third of her eight hours, and had gotten nowhere. All she could think about was the flashfire deaths of the Shards—about whether the new biofeedback technology was worth giving half the Fleet post-traumatic flashbacks when someone half a sector away died badly. Cost-benefit analysis was antithetical to sleeping.
It was a relief when someone physically knocked on her door. Most likely they’d been trying to send a nonpriority message and hadn’t heard from her, and now something was happening and she didn’t have to pretend she was sleeping any longer. She raised the lights and wriggled into her trousers for a modicum of authority, and waved the door open. On the other side, looking apologetic, was her chief communications officer, Two Foam. This wasn’t one of Two Foam’s off-shifts—the bridge took careful and staggered turns, and when Nine Hibiscus was sleeping, Two Foam was usually awake—but she looked exhausted anyhow, even if she hadn’t been woken up.
“Yaotlek,” she said, “there’s been a major development.”
The crew of Weight for the Wheel called Two Foam Bubbles, because she wasn’t bubbly at all. The nickname was ubiquitous; even Nine Hibiscus had to remember not to use it. Instead she waved her inside her quarters without using any name in particular, and let the door shut behind her. Her own heart rate had kicked up; this was better than sleep, this was the shimmer-focus of being responsible in a crisis. “Yes? What sort of development that is significant enough for you to come fetch me?”
Two Foam didn’t seem particularly comfortable standing in her superior officer’s quarters while said superior officer found the other pieces of her uniform and put them back on. Nevertheless, she gamely directed her eyes toward the ceiling and explained. “Sir. We have one of the aliens.”
“What? Alive? Did we capture a ship?”
Two Foam shook her head. “Dead. A Shard from the Seventeenth found it floating in vacuum after one of the … engagements we’ve been having. He lassoed it and brought it back.”
Nine Hibiscus felt shaky with exhilaration; she had to exert effort to keep a visible tremor out of her hands. “Get that soldier a commendation. From Forty Oxide, if you can manage it; it should come from his own Fleet Captain. And—where is it? The alien?”
“In the medical bay,” said Two Foam. “The medtechs are going to autopsy it. But I thought you might want to see it first.”
“Fuck yes I do,” said Nine Hibiscus, and slammed her feet into her boots. “Let’s go.”
Medical was two decks up and in the rear of the ship. They made the fifteen-minute walk in ten, and Nine Hibiscus took a deep, brief pleasure in how Bubbles kept pace with her, a half step behind to her left. It made her feel like something was right in the universe, and she was going to need that to deal with whatever she was about to see. She was trying not to imagine it. Imagination created biases. And besides, all she could think of was a smaller, human-scale version of their three-ringed ships, and that was absurd; they clearly weren’t some kind of hungry ship-species that budded off smaller ships. The Shard pilot wouldn’t have been able to bring one in if they had been.
This was what imagining got her. Absurdities. Comforting absurdities. She suspected what she was going to be looking at would be much worse than anything she could come up with—
But it wasn’t.
Which was awful.
Laid out on the table the medtechs usually used for surgery, which had been stripped of its standard padding and cushions designed to hold a human body in place, pared down to flat metal, was something that looked like an animal. Not even a horrible animal. Just a new one.
They’d stripped it of its clothes, which were a deep red tactical-weight cloth and looked well made—someone would analyze them later, though the fact that it wore clothes at all was significant. But now, now was for the creature itself. Nine Hibiscus stepped close, close enough to see that it would have towered over her by a foot and a half at least when it had been alive and standing. The naked alien had four limbs, like most bipeds. The rear two were thick and short, powerful in the thighs below a long torso; the front two were overlong by human standards, with four-fingered hands that ended in blunt claws. The claws were capped, decoratively, in some kind of bright plastic shot through with silvery wires. Those might be a piloting interface, Nine Hibiscus thought, fascinated, and then kept looking, scanning up the body. The skin was mottled—it could have been trauma, or vacuum-chill, but she thought it was coloration, spots and blotches—and the neck. The neck was wrong.
Too long. Half as long as the torso, a neck for bending and tearing, flexible, muscle-ridged, leading to a head that was all jaw, mouth open in death, a dark tongue hanging over carnivore teeth, jagged and massive. The eyes faced forward, like a human’s eyes, and were sightless, clouded, the left one burst open during whatever dying had happened to it. Predator’s eyes, like a human’s.
The ears were cups set far back on the skull, and faintly furred. Somehow that was the worst thing about it. Those ears were like the ears of the soft almost-cat pets from Kauraan, that purred and bred in the air ducts and annoyed Twenty Cicada. And they were on this thing, this otherwise hairless scavenger thing that was killing her Fleet.
“Is it a mammal?” Nine Hibiscus asked. She knew how to kill mammals. They had fairly standard physiologies. The heart, for example, was in the chest.
“It’s not an insect or a reptile,” said the medtech. “Probably a mammal. A male-sexed one.” He gestured; Nine Hibiscus noted the penile sheath and nodded. “I’ll know more when we open it up.”
“Well, then, open it up,” she said. “Figure out how it works, so we can know how best to stop it from working.”
INTERLUDE
THIS is not the first time this has happened. The place: the depth of Bardzravand Sector, close enough to the Anhamemat Gate that the discontinuity of jumpgate space begins to distort vision. Human eyes—and other eyes, any eyes that function on the old clever model of refraction and reflection, that assembly of light on a retina into image flaring between one neuron and the next—they cannot see what a jumpgate does to space-time. There is an inability to assemble the light into any coherent image. A collapse of meaning.
That discontinuity shivers, shudders, spreads. A portion of it sections off, and moves. A ripple thrown into the black, the afterimage of a stone landing in water. The half-caught reflection of a school of fish, glinting once as light glances off their scales, and then—moving together, angling—gone, unseeable.
This is not at all the first time this has happened, and the last time it did—the last time it did, in the aftermath Dekakel Onchu held the hand of her terrified and half-dead pilot and imagined how the shimmering black between stars could resolve into hungry, lamprey-mouth rings. Could devour the entirety of an imago-line before there was any chance of preservation of memory.