(2/2)


Their hosts. The original inhabitants. Holy shit, indeed.

The X.O. stands just behind him so as not to obstruct his view. 
She smiles over his shoulder as he pores through images after 
image from two of the far-flung digs. She'd had precisely the 
same reaction, just minutes before. 

"The team leader from the first site believes they may have 
uncovered a museum or, if the natives here weren't as keen on 
art as we are, then maybe a memorial sculpture garden. Less 
likely, a government site."

"Oh?" The commander breaks the thrall of the pictures of relics 
for just a moment. "Why's that?" 

"Because," the X.O. snickers in spite of herself, "the 
renderings are too realistic. The lieutenant leading the 
recovery team said that, if the statues had been commissioned 
by politicians for the politicians themselves, the renderings 
would have been flawless. I think his exact words were, "They'd 
have made themselves look prettier."

The commander snorts in amusement. "He's got that right." He 
moves to one side and guides the exec toward the display. "Look 
at them, X.O. Amazing, isn't it? I mean, they're odd looking, 
yes. But, on the whole, it's the similarities between us and 
them that I find so striking. Don't you agree?"

"Actually, Sir, what strikes me most prominently is how frail 
this species looks. Their arms and legs look, uh, well, kind of 
spindly, don't they?"

Something in her voice snaps his attention around, and he stares 
at her before replying.

"You're worried that these people were somehow close genetic 
relatives of the Grays, X.O.?" 

Meekly, she shakes her head in assent.

"And, if that's the case, it's that relationship that enabled 
them to avert colonization, leaving us... non-relatives shit 
outta luck?"

She nods again, and he knows that a whole host of follow-on 
objections are about to come pouring out. He holds up a hand, 
forestalling all of her 'what-ifs.'

"I'm no anthropologist, but, not for nothing, I'd point out 
to you that their body proportion is all wrong for that. Just 
look at the heads on those statues. No where near as outsized as 
the balloon-heads on those gray skinned bastards. And look at 
their limbs, X.O.! Those look like arms that do real work, and 
hands that can sculpt these beautiful statues." Instinctively, 
his voice assumes a more fatherly tone with his exec than is 
militarily proper. But, it has the desired effect. "See? They 
were more like us than you think."

The exec stares at the images for a long time, while the 
commander's words transform them before her eyes, from consorts 
of the enemy into distant cousins and allies. She exhales a long 
sigh, and smiles.

"X.O.?"

"Sir?"

"You said you had the reports from all three remaining sites?" 
When the younger officer still looks befuddled, he points to the 
view screen. "These are the results from two of the sites. There 
was also a third."

"Oh!" She nearly jumps as the recollection returns. "Oh, my God! 
Yes, Sir! Right away!"

She retrieves a small cellular set from a pants pocket, and keys 
'talk.' 

"Ensign?"

"Sir!" 

The voice on the other end of the transmission crackles so loudly 
that both officers on this end of it wince. The mission commander 
smiles at the irony of a species, his, harnessing a faster-than-
light drive when it isn't yet able to figure out a way to 
communicate person to person over long distances with reliable 
clarity.

"Bring the package to the mission commander's cabin. On the double, 
ensign!"

The exec clicks off before they are forced to endure the crackling 
affirmative they know is coming anyway.

In short order, a crewman, covered top to bottom in ochre dust, 
appears in the doorway outside the cabin. He raises the goggles 
from his face, the color of the exposed skin and the crewman's 
brown eyes stark against the wan yellow everywhere else on him. 
He deposits a large, peaked specimen container on the floor of 
the corridor and snaps to attention. "Sir!"

The X.O. returns his salute, and waits.

"Well, come on, Ensign. Don't just stand there."

The junior officer surveys the spotless interior of the 
commander's cabin and says, sheepishly, "Uh, Sir? Maybe I ought 
to open the container out here, and let you take the specimen 
box inside? Save the dust from getting everywhere."

At a nod from the X.O., he unlatches and pulls back the sides of 
the peaked lid. Inside, the white plastic is dust free. 

The exec leans through the hatch and lifts a brushed metal 
container gingerly out of the box. It is about the size of a 
shoebox, with various labels pasted about its surface. Whether 
these are identifiers, instructions or warnings isn't immediately 
clear, because they're written in an ancient and alien language.

"Be careful when opening that, Sir," the ensign says quickly. "The 
Geek, sorry, tech officer says that it's a portable refrigeration 
unit and the refrigerant still works!"

"Still works?" The mission commander has come up behind his X.O. 
and is spotted by the ensign for the first time. The ensign snaps 
to attention and silence.

"Yes, Sir," the ensign says stiffly. 

"Apparently," the exec picks up for the cowed junior officer, "it 
was stored in a larger, hermetically sealed container, from which 
the air had been siphoned." 

"This container," he says, touching its metal skin for the first 
time, "was stored in a vacuum?"

"Yes, Sir," the exec replies, then seems to remember that they're 
not alone. "Don't worry, ensign. I've been fully briefed. You're 
dismissed." She closes the hatch behind her and starts to take 
the container from her superior's outstretched hands, but bursts 
into laughter.

"Something strike you as funny? Major?"

She manages to control the giggles, and apologizes. "It's just 
that you were holding that box like I've seen a man hold a 
newborn child. Like he doesn't know quite what it is or what he 
should do with it, but he's stuck with it, all the same."

"Very amusing, X.O." he replies in a voice that seems clear of 
amusement. "Now, can you explain to me what this thing is, and 
what I should do with it?" 

Excitement overcomes her response, and she begins speaking about 
the object in rapid-fire.

"This is from the dig at site 16-Alpha, Sir. They discovered it 
at a geological level just below one showing signs of radioactive 
decay. This indicates that the area where the box was found was,  
at some point in the future - whether a year or one hundred years,
it's difficult to tell - subjected to bombardment with nuclear 
weapons."

"Nukes?" Reflexively, the commander steps away from the metal case.

"Yes, Sir. The facility the dig uncovered was a hardened bunker and, 
apparently, electronically shielded."

"Really? How primitive."

The exec responds to her superior's sarcasm only with a raised 
eyebrow.

"Do you know what's inside?" he asks, fighting off his irrational 
fear and moving in for a closer look. 

She looks up at him, eyes gleaming. "I have some idea, yes." 

Her hands hover above the box, poised to tackle the ancient 
locking mechanisms. As soon as she can gather her nerve.

"What do those labels say?" 

He apologizes profusely when his interruption makes her jump. 
They're both nervous, and with good reason.

She takes a deep breath and holds it, letting it go through puffed 
cheeks and pursed lips. She does this once more, just to make sure
her nerves are as calm as can be.

"They're handling instructions, I've been told. Not even The Geek 
knows what they say, word for word. The linguistic translation 
software had a devil of a time with them." She finds that talking 
about the minutiae of the box and its contents helps to calm her 
down as successfully as deep breathing. As a bonus, talking will 
keep the commander's questions at bay until she's finished.

He grunts. "Carry on, then."

"Okay. The translation of the stuff on the outside isn't as 
important as with what's inside, anyway. That's what delayed this 
shipment, Sir. The Geek, the tech officer, had trouble getting 
the software to make sense of these printed characters. It took 
him awhile to gather a text sample broad enough to establish 
a decent translation matrix."

"But, he did? Find a text sample large enough?"

She stands straight and looks at him fiercely. "You bet your ass 
he did. Um, Sir." 

"You," he points to the glyphs on the box, but intends the 
translation program instead, "you understand all that tech stuff?"

"Not really. The program compares the patterns in text samples of 
an unknown language against all known communication patterns, and 
uses the most similar of those to create an approximate 
translation matrix. The second stage of the program tries to 
smooth out the rough-draft matrix into a comprehensible language. 
If that doesn't work, the program starts over, using the two most 
similar known communication patterns to rough out a matrix, and so 
on, until it finds the right combination to produce a workable 
final matrix."

The commander gives his second-in-command a wry stare. "Not 
really?" he mimics.

The exec laughs, dipping her chin to her chest. "I talk a good 
game, but all I really understand is that you feed gobbledygook 
in one end, and it spits words and phrases out the other."

She turns back to the box, then looks up at him. "Ready?" 

He nods, mutely.

She grasps a latch in each hand and recites The Geek's mantra. 
"Left latch to the left. Right round to the right." She twists 
them until, as one, they click. 

A gas of some sort hisses from the broken seal. They both step 
back, surprised. The gas rises slowly, like the steady exhalation 
of breath on a cold day. 

"Phew. Come to think of it, they told me to expect that," she 
says as matter-of-factly as she's able. "The refrigeration unit 
reinitiates every time the case is opened, and resets every time 
its closed. Rather ingenious, really." Gently, almost reverently, 
she splits the case into halves.

On one side, set into a specially fitted cushion and clamped top 
and bottom by metallic restraining strips, sit a row of clear, 
glass vials. Each contains a fluid of some sort, and they are 
arranged by color gradation, darkest on the left, to nearly clear 
on the right.

In the vial on the far left, the fluid has a globular viscosity 
and a lustrous surface. It is almost perfectly black.

"Is that...?" 

For the first time in their acquaintance, the exec hears alarm 
creeping into the mission commander's voice.

"The Black Oil, yes, Sir. But don't worry. The tech officer at 
16-Alpha assures me it's in some sort of stasis."

"It's dormant? I thought that wasn't possible."

"Apparently not, at least for these, er, primitives, Sir," the 
exec says with a gracious nod. She knows, as does the entire 
ship's complement, that he has witnessed the horrors of this 
black plague first hand. She waits while he faces his nemesis 
head-on.

"And these other vials, what are they?"

"Well, roughly," she says, pointing to small labels underneath 
each of the middle three vials, "this translates into "sample," 
or, maybe, "batch." The program can't really differentiate, and 
the congruence of these two possibilities makes them the most 
likely."

He leans in to stare at the labels. They are inked neatly, but 
there is a handwritten quality to them. "And this single symbol 
on the end of each one?"

"The individual glyphs are, in all likelihood, numbers. We don't 
know which, but that doesn't really matter. Basically, these are 
batches 1, 2 and 3. What's even more remarkable, though, is this 
last one, here." 

He shifts his focus to the vial on the right, the one with the
clear fluid. He stares hard at the row of glyphs beneath it, as
if he could translate them through sheer force of will.

"It translates as "against" and "sickness." Or close enough, 
anyway. She waits for him to process this, but loses patience. 
"It's an antigen."

He looks up sharply. "A vaccine?"

His X.O. nods, tears in her eyes. "And, believe it or not, that 
isn't even the most amazing thing."

"Can they," he begins, his eyes darting madly. "Will the techs 
be able to distil it, figure out its composition? Is there enough 
of it left so that they can do that?"

"Sir. Sir! You're not listening to me. I said, that's not even 
the most amazing part. The techs won't have to figure out the 
chemical composition. It's already been done."

He looks from the X.O. to the vial, and back.

"What?"

"It's already done," she says, withdrawing a thin, silver disc 
from a pocket on the other side of the box. "The primitives. 
They had computers. Silicon based. Just like ours." He's 
searching for his voice when she takes the disc and slides it 
into the data port. "Hey! What the hell are you doing?"

"Getting to the amazing thing," she says, her smile deflecting 
tears off to the sides of her face.

Later, curiosity will catch up with him, and he will find out 
that the techs had used the same conversion process on the 
ancients' disc as they had with their own systems, synching them 
with the alien fluidic system. A marvelous technological 
achievement, by any standard. He will watch, in the weeks to come, 
as the techs retrieve the ancients' data from the fluidic system 
and reload it onto their own silicon based systems. "Effective, 
if circuitous," the tech will say. "In more ways than one," will 
be his sardonic reply.

Now, he merely gapes as data from another age scrolls down his 
display. In the middle of the document, immediately identifiable 
in spite of the fact that it is written in an alien tongue, is 
the chemical formula for the vaccine to the Black Oil. He's sure 
that the surrounding text is scientific in nature and dry as dust, 
in any language.

He turns to the X.O., who is now weeping openly.

"What do they think this is, here, at the top?" 

She leans in to peer through her tears. "Oh, that. Well, they're 
pretty sure that's the name of the native scientist who either 
lead the vaccine development effort, or developed it all on his 
or her own."

She watches as the mask of implacable strength crumbles from 
the commander's features, and a tear rolls down the cheek nearest 
to her.

"Sir?" He turns. "We're two days ahead of schedule now. I guess 
that means we won't have to decide between sending the transmission 
and lifting off for home, huh?" He gapes, wondering how she's found 
him out. Before he can ask, she winks at him. His proper, 
thoroughly by the book second-in-command winks at him. Then, in a 
breach of protocol he will never forget, and always be grateful 
for, she leans over and kisses him on the cheek.

"We're gonna win, Sir! We're going to win."

The realization is just beginning to sink in with him. Finally, 
he smiles broadly and straightens to full height.

"Call the excavation teams, X.O. Tell 'em to pack up everything 
and return to base, a.s.a.p. We're leaving for home in the 
morning."

"Aye, Sir!" She snaps a salute, swings herself through the low 
hanging hatch opening, and runs down the corridor.

"Tell them to pack all the relics they can! Make it a direct 
order," he yells after her retreating figure.

He moves back to the computer screen and just stares at it for 
many minutes. "We owe you a debt," he says to the long dead author 
of the formula in front of him. "We've had top people working on 
a vaccine, too, but with no results. For years! Our best and 
brightest. Many others have given their lives so that the effort 
to develop a vaccine might succeed. Some of my own people, in fact." 
Even though he's not a man of strong faith, he makes an habitual 
religious gesture in memory of one such person lost in the struggle. 
"People. Did you refer to yourselves as people?" he wonders. 
"Without your vaccine, my people would surely have been wiped out.
We owe you a debt we can't repay. But, my people are going to know
who you were."

He stares at his personal computer terminal on his desk, a 
mission report half complete on its screen and awaiting further 
input.

"Look," he says, "I don't know whether this was your custom, or 
whether you'd consider it sheer vanity. But when, in my report 
to the Resistance Council, I tell them about the formula for 
the vaccine, I intend to name it after you. I think it would 
be a fitting memorial."

He sits down at the terminal, scans the extant text, highlights 
and erases it all. He has a simpler, much more direct message in 
mind. He takes a glance at the other display, and begins to type.

        FLASH
        To:   Resistance Council
        From: Archeological Survey Mission, Ereth III

        Report from the dig at Site 16-Alpha, received 19:00 this 
        solar day, confirms existence of a vaccine to the Black 
        Oil, engineered by the ancient inhabitants of this planet. 
        Physical samples of the vaccine have been recovered from 
        the excavation site, and will be brought with us on our 
        return trip home, for examination and possible testing. 
        
        The formula for the vaccine has also been recovered and 
        is being sent ahead by sub-space carrier wave.

He doesn't understand how this is possible, that a radio beam 
will arrive ahead of a ship traveling faster than light. But, 
he's assured by his best people that it is so. And that's good 
enough for him. 

"You probably understood it, didn't you?" he says to the other 
screen, the formula and the name of its author glowing softly. 
He studies a flimsy of one of the statues that had been recovered. 
He feels an absurd fondness for these remarkable creatures and the 
miraculous connection they've established across light years and 
the ages.

"Bi-peds! Amazing. How ever did you balance against the pull of 
gravity, without the stabilizing benefit of a third leg? Aw, what 
do I know? Hell, maybe you were arborial?" 

But he knows this is unlikely, because the statues, at least, show 
no evidence of a prehensile tail on these beings. His own tail 
swishes in empathy for their loss. He refocuses on the screen 
before him.

        As mission commander, I have assumed the privilege of 
        naming the vaccine after the indigenous being we believe 
        to have been its creator. 

He picks up a stylus and tablet interface, and copies the strange 
glyphs by hand, affectionately and with great care.

        "Scully." 

        Formula follows:


-end-