A silvered beam of suspended nanomachines lanced out from it, slicing into Wright at the abdomen. Nathan cried out in shock, along with a number of the crew, Kris included, who shrieked. They were all drowned out, though, by the screams of mindless agony from the XO himself.
The beam scanned up and down his body, spreading the nanomachines all over him. The particles flowed around his body like a silvered mist, flaying him apart microscopic layer by microscopic layer, fast enough to watch him vanish, but too slowly to be merciful. His vacuum suit and skin vanished, and then the flesh beneath, but not one drop of blood was cast off, converted instead into ashen dust and silvered particles.
After too long a time, the screams cut off and they could only watch as their XO was rendered and skeletonized. The crew had surged back and lined the opposite bulkhead, some crying, some comforting, and all afraid of what sort of hell they had fallen into. Nathan, Kris, and David Edwards alone stood apart, the pair of them holding their Captain in place from his instinctual attempt to go to his murdered compatriot’s aid.
The beam stopped and the alien brought the device down. The cloud of nanoparticles kept up their work, though, and soon the XO’s bones started showing holes, thinned out, and vanished into dust. Of Wright, there was nothing then but a dense, swirling cloud of particulates.
After a moment, purposeful motion could be seen within the cloud. Similar to a time-reversed strip of film showing a decaying body growing backwards toward life, gray and silver dust coalesced, building up a body from the bones outward. Flesh, skin, hair and features appeared, laid down layer by layer, like a line-by-line printout of a human being, differentiated by what had been there before only by coloring. A body was made up of reds and whites, and a dozen other subtle hues between them, but this pallet had only gray and silver.
At its end, the cloud was gone, its entirety now comprising a statue of Christopher Wright, nude and flawless, inexplicably standing on the deck in disregard to the absence of gravity. As they watched, the gray and silver coloring of the body faded and gained inhuman detail. Finally, the statue took on the cast of white marble, shot through with random veins of pink and amber.
As a piece of art, a memorial to Wright, it had worth, but not any worth that justified his murder. Nathan no longer struggled against Kris and Edwards. He simply glared at the statue and the alien with unmasked hatred.
That hatred shifted to shock and confusion, though, as the marble statue of Wright turned toward him fluidly and smiled. The statue glanced back at the alien blocking the hatchway and then walked—again in contravention of microgravity—to Nathan, Kris, and Edwards.
The thing that had been their XO, and which mirrored his appearance in exacting detail, nodded to them all and spoke, its voice similar enough to Wright’s to be unsettling, but stripped of all emotion and inflection, words without conscious thought or feeling. “Greetings. I am prepared to communicate with you in regards to our purpose and design. Will you speak with me?”
Nathan shuddered, listening to the thing speak, unable to reconcile its toneless copy of Wright’s voice with the passionate, disciplined man who used to own that face. “What the hell are you?”
The statue gestured to itself, waving a hand over its body. “The man Wright was your ambassador. I, too, am an ambassador. This is our emissary, capable of communication in human terms, an avatar of the beings you know as the Deltans, though that designation is incorrect in every way worth considering.”
Nathan shook his head, horrified and confused beyond all measure. In the back of his mind, he realized that it could have just as easily been himself who was converted into this entity, a thought that both shamed him and relieved him at the same time. He struggled to get his mind back on track. “What do you mean, the ‘designation is incorrect’?”
“The beings en route to your planet are not from Delta Pavonis, nor any nearby star system. Their home and their place is quite distant from any place you would know, at least in any sense that you will understand. That star system was merely the sight of their last acquisition, a priceless treasure which you destroyed during your futile attack.”
Nathan’s eyes narrowed, and he looked back and forth between the alien and the statue of Wright through which it communicated. “Acquisition? Treasure? What are you talking about? Why are you coming to Earth?”
The avatar smiled. It might not have any emotion in its voice, but its expression demonstrated its condescension quite well. “Your people have openly displayed their magnificent cultural wealth for all within a hundred light-years to see, with selfless disregard for protecting its unique and singular worth. And we have taken notice. We are appreciative. We adore the works of Earth and we are devoted to its safety and guardianship. We do not seek enslavement. No, no. We only want to preserve and enshrine the greatness your species has wrought.
“We are your Patrons, and we bring you the galaxy, to the betterment of all.”
17: “UNIVERSAL TRUTHS”
Date Unknown; USS Sword of Liberty (DA-1), location unknown; Mission Day ???
They all stared agape at the aliens’ marble avatar, trying to process their thoughts and their pain, to reconcile its cold, mechanistic words with its face—the face of their own XO—which smiled at them in amused condescension. Nathan’s mind and emotions whirled about, unable to settle on any one bit of the automaton’s announcement. Patrons? The cultural works of Earth? The casual murder of Christopher Wright and his rebirth as this … thing? Where did one start?
Dave Edwards, an eminently practical—if impudent—individual, recovered from this latest string of shocks first. He pulled himself forward to float slightly in front of Nathan, focusing the avatar’s attention on him rather than his Captain. The Master Chief drew his face into an expression of contempt and distaste, the same look someone might give to a particularly large roach one has found in the sink. He shook his head and said, “Let me get this straight … we’re being invaded by art lovers?”
The marble avatar peaked an eyebrow over the blank, colorless hemispheres it had for eyes and glanced back to the alien—the Patron—holding station in the mess’s main hatch. The alien flicked a tentacle tip and the automaton nodded and turned back to them. “That explanation is rather simplistic, but it suffices.”
Edwards grinned with as much malice as he could muster, which at this point was a great deal. “Well, you’ll have to forgive me, but that’s about the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. No one crosses light-years of space and spends decades of time to go browsing over the artifacts of another planet like some sort of interstellar garage sale.”
Nathan’s eyes widened and his brain finally engaged. He reached out an arm and dragged Edwards behind him. Nathan scowled at the Master Chief and spun back toward the avatar. “Sorry about that, but I’ll admit that it sounds a little implausible to me as well.”
The avatar shrugged, its features quite expressive even though its voice remained toneless and uninflected. “However plausible it might seem, given your preconceived notions of value and worth, is irrelevant. I speak only the truth, and it is a truth which should make perfect sense if you only give it some thought.”
Nathan allowed himself to drift closer to the moving statue of his XO. “My thoughts are a little jumbled here, but I’m not getting it. We’ve imagined any number of dire motivations for you … Patrons to be coming to Earth—things like desire for our resources, or our biological diversity, or simply the desire to subjugate us as life different from your own. Art and culture weren’t high on that list.”