Symbiosis: Chapter 25

“Has the captain done this to you before?” Rianya asked the reptile. Entering the mess room, she’d stopped Quixote on xes way out to coax the fellow to a table and talk about humans.

“I was in a different position the last time I served with the captain. I piloted the Hawk, that was our landing shuttle.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Your body appears warmer than usual to me. Do you feel normal today?”

“Yes, I’m just puzzled. Sometimes I can go with the landing party and sometimes I can’t. I don’t understand how I can be at risk sometimes and not others.”

“Is the captain not looking out for your safety? It’s been my experience over the years that he only assigns people to landing parties as needed, and no extra beings. Unless of course it’s shore leave. Even in that case he also allocates who goes when, simply to keep the ship properly crewed.” The intensity of Quixote’s vivid, tangerine eyes intrigued Rianya the way Tom’s brilliant, emerald eyes did, but with different emotions. Quixote often dilated and contracted the pupils as differences in the environment or xes emotional state changed.

“He is, but I can’t find a common link with his decision to take me along or have me stay aboard.”

“Our captain, I’ve learned, is what humans call an enigma. Uncommon, unique, puzzling, and dynamic. His reasons are valid, even if the rest of us find ourselves unable to understand them. I’m sure there’s an acceptable reason for both decisions at the time he makes them.”

“You’ve known him longer that I have,” Rianya conceded.

The two aliens sat together near a window watching Cinco go by beneath them, or perhaps they were going by above it. Quixote, finished with the meal break, glanced at the chronometer on the wall and back at Rianya.

“I’m afraid I need to go back on duty, Ms. Rianya. As an aside, it is my day to teach the girls this afternoon. We’re studying the flow of electricity. I want to be certain they understand how dangerous it can be.”

“That’s an excellent idea. Thank you for spending that time with them.”

“I am glad to be of help. If you’ll excuse me,” Quixote said and stood up, touching Rianya briefly on the hand with a claw. “Why don’t you accompany me to engineering and we can continue our conversation?”

“I think you answered my questions, Quixote.” She watched him stroll out the doorway and then debated about what dishes to pick up from the buffet line.

She meandered into the sick bay and found it empty, and mostly silent but for a couple machines emitting assorted blips and signals. Mills was off duty; Henderson was in the exam and treatment room.

In an adjacent room, she could see the preserved body she and Jane had worked on for a couple weeks now. Mostly human, but not entirely, its mixed DNA had spiked her curiosity since her daughter was half human. So many people had told her that combining DNA from beings of different worlds was impossible, how was it that the old mummified body could have more than four different ancestor species?

So, since Tom wouldn’t let her be involved in the Yersinia mission she waltzed into the Dry Room and donned surgical garments, gloves, and a mask. She flipped on a recorder and took a surgical pack from the cabinet.

“I’m tired of calling you ‘that body’ so let’s give you a name,” she said. “I propose your name to be… ‘Hero’. Okay, Hero, let’s figure out your secret.” She unwrapped the pack and selected a metal scalpel over a laser scalpel considering the cauterization effect of the laser might compromise her sample and the resulting data. She pinpointed her specimen at the base of Hero’s head where she could obtain bone, neural, and muscular tissue with a single procedure.

Rianya put the preservation wraps back on Hero and took her sample to the laboratory. She made a dozen sections from the singular specimen and put each one into a small, red container. Even with tiny, one millimeter cubes she was able to extract an abundant supply of DNA using Dr. Adams’ proprietary, quantum solution that separated the nuclei from the remainder of the cells. She pressed some buttons and the robot pulled ten milliliters of solution from each red container and transferred them into clean containers. She poured a centiliter of ethanol into each clean container and watched with utter fascination as cloudy white strings of DNA appeared before her eyes.

She moved the ten samples into the incubator, set it for 50 C, and tossed her surgical attire before going into sick bay. She had 30 minutes to kill, so she opened the database and pulled up a general sample of each species’ information. From there, she pulled up the human genome database and the accompanying several billion files, one for each person born since 2050. The quantum computer could access data at lightning speed and in less than a minute the data was available for examination as she’d requested.

When the timer beeped, the machine shut itself off, and Rianya transferred the warm liquid to clean blue containers, and had the micro nozzles of the robot deposit exactly half a milliliter onto transparent films. Another quick trip to the incubator would force the DNA to fuse on the films.

The rest would be up to the computer. She placed the films into the reader and turned on the computer. It would do the rest while she could go check on Zalara and Honey in the gymnasium. If it took her a year she was going to identify Hero’s ancestors and find the answer they were all looking for.

Ancestry for her people was always recorded in the Shaman’s Big Book. Zalara deserved to know the ancestors and culture on her mother’s world equally as her human family and father’s world. Obviously not to such a degree as the humans, but enough to realize her existence was unique.

Rianya slipped into the gym quietly and watched Zalara and Honey paying close attention to Quixote as xe leaned over their desks from the front and examined their illustrations. Without moving his body his eyes looked up at her, and she smiled back at the animated reptile. Both serving on the human ship as the only aliens they’d formed a close, if informal, kinship based on their parallel circumstances.

“I believe school is over for today,” xe told the girls, and both turned their heads toward the door. “Turn in your diagrams and I’ll assess their quality.” Straightening xts spine Rianya remembered Quixote was a tall being, more than two meters, and xe could be incredibly intimidating should xe choose to be, at least to those without scales for physical protection.

The two girls bounced across the room to greet Rianya with leg hugs. Honey and Zalara had declared themselves heart-sisters and the only time they were apart was in the evenings when their parents insisted they cut the rope.

“Thank you again,” Rianya called to Quixote. Xe ambled up to the trio of females.

“They are both doing quite well, Ms. Rianya, and they are obedient students.”

“Come on, girls, let’s get something to eat and I’ll find a film for you to watch in sick bay. I have some work to finish.”

“We can go to sick bay?” Honey asked. Rianya looked down at the pale face, golden hair, and bright blue eyes staring back at her. Humans had the strangest eyes.

“Of course, as long as I’m there.” Honey and Zalara all but giggled at the chance to play in another part of the ship than they were not normally allowed. “And if you take a single step out of bounds I’ll be sure to know.” Rianya raised her brows in a smile but her jaw remained firm and her mouth held a conservative line. Nods acknowledged Rianya’s oath.

Fed and tranquil, the three went to sick bay so Rianya could advance her sequencing project. The sick bay of Maria Mitchell was larger than the Stephen Hawking’s by at least double. She set the two children up in a private room with a monitor and dug up something entertaining for them to watch. Safely contained, she went back to the lab.

Her ten samples had been sequenced and were ready to analyze. She simply pulled up one and programmed the computer to scan for matches at the species level. The computer quickly discovered the human base pair sequences. She had expected that. While it continued its search, she took the human genome and encoded the computer to perform a mitochondrial trace. In less than a minute the monitor started displaying images and text identifying the sequences. Percent human: 70. Rianya leaned a little closer to the monitor for perfect focus.

Caucasoid; North America, Europe, Czech.

Caucasoid; Australia, Europe, Scotland.

Mongoloid; Asia, Russia, Yakutia

That was interesting information. This person’s ancestry was all over Earth. Nothing revealing anything particular that helped identify Hero. She tapped some buttons to broaden the search.

Pegasi; Northern Population 3%

Auchsonian; Continent III 3%

Cetian; Northern Territory 6%

Unidentified; 18%

Some of Hero’s ancestry was simply not in the database. But most of Hero’s body was human. Something else bothered her about the body that neither Adams nor Ferris had addressed in the report. His cause of death wasn’t determined yet. Cause of death would be a huge clue about his last moments on Cuatro. While the computer searched its billions of files for matches in the human genome bank, she took a subjective look at Hero.

His curled-up position likely indicated he felt cold, even on a planet as hot as Cuatro. Did he have a fever or was he in excruciating pain? She looked for evidence of weapons – knives, guns, lasers, crushed bones, spears and the like. No evidence of trauma. She pulled out a couple of hairs and set them aside for a chemical analysis. His dentition was practically perfect.

A blood sample was unavailable, but humans had an organ that stored blood, near their stomach, the one that Zalara had targeted on Honey. No, it wasn’t that one, it had a funny sounding name: spleen. She tapped up some information on anatomy using the computer to confirm her memory. She flipped the body so she could access it from the posterior, felt the ribs until she came to the final bone on the left side then counted until she found the intercostal space between the 9th and 10th ribs.

Finding the organ wasn’t as easy as she’d thought. The tissues were dehydrated and leathery, making a mechanical incision almost impossible. She retrieved the laser scalpel from the open pack. With dexterity and patience, she maneuvered the fine beam of blue light through the dermis, between the dry musculature, and into the spleen. Rianya shut the instrument off and picked up a suction cannula, withdrawing a few milligrams of viscous, dark goop from the rigid ball.

Reward in hand, she checked on the two young girls still watching an animated film and returned to the lab to process the cells for their genetic secrets.