Interlude: Isolation

Tasser was not a medic.

Even treating his own species’ wounds, he was out of his element. Field triage was not one of the training courses he’d completed. Most soldiers specializing in counter-Adept tactics didn’t bother to learn to treat wounds. Fighting Adepts, most wounds were fatal anyway.

Nemuleki wasn’t a medic either, but she had to know more than he did. Tasser got out of her way as soon as he realized Osino had taken the bullet. Nemuleki grappled with Osino’s body as she tried to take stock of his condition.

Tasser wanted to try and save their squadmate’s life. Tasser had to ignore the impulse to rush in and do what little medical technique he was aware of—like take Osino’s pulse or keep him from swallowing his tongue. To leap in right next to her and frantically help.

There wasn’t enough room in the back of the truck. He didn’t know enough to help. He would only harm Osino’s chances.

Nemuleki rolled Osino’s body enough for Tasser’s belly to clench in distress. The back half of Osino’s skull was blown away. The wound had been instantly lethal.

Tasser had to bite his tongue to keep silent. He regretted not following his first instinct now. True, he wouldn’t have been able to help, but it might have made him feel better. Currently, the events were Osino had died, and Tasser had done nothing.

Following that, thinking that he should have done something only to make himself feel better twisted Tasser up more. A guilty knot tying itself somewhere under his lung.

“Is Osino okay?” Lorel shouted from the driver’s position.

“No.” Nemuleki said. “Through the head. He’s gone.”

Lorel swore angrily, but he didn’t hesitate to keep giving orders. There was a reason he was in charge.

“Nemuleki, check on our Adept, she’s not okay either.” Nemuleki scooted forward on the bench to look at Nai’s condition. “Tasser, is ‘it’ doing anything?”

Tasser shook himself. There was still work to do. “It’s… not doing well.”

It was guesswork on his part, but it really wasn’t looking healthy. At least not compared to earlier. It had remained mostly unconscious and inert for their descent, only rousing a few minutes before landing. But now, it’s face had darkened in color and moisture was beading up all over its skin. It was breathing like a pack animal and its eyes weren’t focusing on anything—its gaze was drifting.

Whatever this thing was, it had been pushing itself far harder up on Korbanok station. It had outrun Nai in more intense gravity than this. So what changed?

“What do we do if it dies?” Tasser asked.

It called itself ‘Cayleb’. That was its name. Tasser wasn’t comfortable calling it by name though.

It seemed like it was dying. He should do something. But when he checked in his mind for what to do, there was simply a blank. A million questions welled up in Tasser’s head to fill the gap.

What was it? Where did it come from? Why had it been on a Vorak station?

No… there were other questions that needed more immediate answers. No one would get any of those answers if it died here. If it were remotely possible, Tasser needed to find a way to keep it alive.

But Tasser was not a medic. Nor did he find himself particularly creative right now.

“Nemuleki.” Tasser said, a cold lump was in his voice. “What’s Nai’s condition?”

Hearing Tasser’s tone, the Casti sei paused her examination of the Adept. “She’s alive, but totally unconscious.”

“Is there anything obvious going to kill her in the next few minutes?”

“No, but she’s—”

“If she’s dying from something not obvious, can you do anything about it?”

Nemuleki looked taken aback.

“…No. I thought the Warlock was your friend, why do you want me to stop?”

“Because I’m out of my depth, and I need another set of eyes on this.”

She scooted back down the bench and joined him observing the alien.

“What exactly do you need my help with?”

“Just think out loud with me.” Tasser said. “Symptoms: heavy breathing, liquid on the skin—”

“—sweat.” Nemuleki supplied.

“—sweating… what’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing, but it wasn’t like this before.”

Nemuleki’s eyes flicked over its form taking in the details.

“In Farnata, sweating is for temperature regulation—it cools them down. Maybe it’s overheating because it was out in the sun?”

It had reacted intensely to reentry… the heat had affected it? But it had recovered quickly once their descent had slowed, and they weren’t subject to the unimaginable heat of atmospheric friction. That heat had been much worse than being under the sunlight.

“It’s color changed too.” Tasser said, “Why would its skin change color?”

“Red.” Nemuleki said, “It’s blood is red. It showed us those scratches on the station. Maybe blood membranes are breaking under its skin?”

“From what though? Bleeding follows trauma, but it hasn’t been injured.”

“I’m only guessing. I don’t know that much Vorak physiology.”

“But it’s not Vorak.”

Nemuleki said, “It’s got five fingers, hair; it might be shaped a bit different, but the features are all here.”

“It doesn’t speak their language or ours. Rak have actual fur, not this fuzz. Besides, look at its eyes. They’re round, not tri-slit.”

Nemuleki frowned. “If it’s not Vorak, what is it?”

“That’s why I need your help with this.” Tasser grumbled. “If it dies, we probably aren't going to find out.”

“Okay, okay.” She said, taking it a bit more seriously. “Let’s focus on what we actually know.”

“We don’t know anything!” Tasser hissed, “We don’t even have any assumptions. Odds are this thing is going to die and we’re going to be strung up for this.”

His temper was getting the better of him. He knew he shouldn’t let it, but he was too worn down to properly mediate himself. There were too many questions that he couldn’t answer, and too many of them weren’t about the alien. Tasser couldn’t explain to himself why he’d helped it the first time. His only thought at the time had been for Nai, so he’d been the one to peek through the door.

In retrospect, he shouldn’t have. For one, Nai didn’t need protection; things needed protection from her. Nai had nearly thrown the Vorak right into him. The moment of nearly being engulfed in her flames made his fingers numb.

Almost getting caught in Nai’s attack was scary enough, but the real part hanging him up now was how he reacted in the moment.

Instead of leaping to safety, his first instinct had been to grab the creature and pull it out of harm’s way too.

His brain had been going in circles the whole ride down. He chastised himself for reacting so hastily. What if the creature had interpreted it as an attack? But then Tasser’s brain bounced back, and he was ashamed for questioning the instinct of helping save a creature’s life. And finally he came full circle and out of paranoia and fear wondered if this strange alien would kill them all, and that he had saved its life.

He’d nearly screamed when it started talking to him in the emergency pod.

“Caylav.” He muttered the creature’s name and it looked toward him.

Dira, what had Tasser gotten himself caught up in?

“You’re right.” Nemuleki said. “We don’t even have assumptions. So let’s get some.”

“That’s stupid!” Tasser exclaimed, “We can’t just pretend we know things.”

“Underpinning Theory.” Nemuleki said, like that was supposed to explain everything. “We can probably guess it has similar basic needs. Food, air, water.”

“What is Under—” he began to ask.

“Doesn’t matter–based on previous contacted species, we can look for things unrelated life has in common to predict some traits of new life.”

Tasser had to take a moment to not snap back at her. They were both very stressed currently.

“Like, it probably breathes oxygen.”

“…and probably requires water.”

Oh duh. Water.

“Farnata. They sweat for temperature regulation, right?” Tasser asked. “So what if they don’t have the water to make sweat?” He cursed quietly to himself that he hadn’t learned much about other aliens. He wasn’t friends with Nai for conversations in biology.

“Do we have any water?” She asked.

“We left the bag with the ground reception team.” Tasser said bitterly.

“Sorry,” said Lorel simply from the driver’s seat. Part of the reason the ground crew hadn’t resisted was they hadn’t stranded them completely out under the sun. They’d left enough for the Rak to water themselves waiting for another ride.

The alien laid a hand against its head. Tasser was surprised it was moving. It was still breathing heavily, and it didn’t seem to be slowing down. ‘Caylab’ pulled open a tiny zipper on the satchel it had worn on its back and pulled out a long flexible white tube. It unscrewed the cap from one end and squirted some water into its mouth.

The alien was still well enough to attend to its own needs it seemed.

Their back and forth was not yielding the ideas he’d hoped. Even if they had water, it might not be safe for the creature to drink. Even just the wrong scrap of protein could be lethal, couldn’t it? For all he knew this creature would treat Casti molecules and tissues as neurotoxin.

Tasser’s knowledge of biology was limited in the general sense. So even the basic knowledge of proteins and macromolecules was well beyond him, much less how they might interact. He just knew that it could be bad.

Tasser suddenly jumped back, both for his own sake and ‘Caylab’.

“What?” Nemuleki asked.

“We’re breathing the same air as it.”

“And? It’s been that way for hours now—” realization dawned on her face.

“Aksi” she swore.

“First Contact.” Tasser said, ominously. He’d thought of it, not minutes ago, and still not remembered. There were proper steps to take, problems to preemptively address.

“Aksi.” Lorel agreed from the front seat. “We can’t go to the safe house, can we?”

“How could we forget that?” Tasser whispered.

“Because it’s First Contact!” Nemuleki cried, “It hasn’t been done in almost a century. And the Vorak didn’t have this thing quarantined, why would we think any different?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Lorel called from the front. “I don’t want to go to the Organic Authority if we can help it. They’ll report us to the Vorak—they’ll have to.”

“Sir,” Tasser began, “I don’t want to get captured either, but if this thing is an ecohazard, we might have to. This creature might be carrying bio-contaminants that could wreck the whole planet’s ecosystem. Vorak occupation or not, if we do this and we’re wrong? That’s millions of lives on the line.”

“The Vorak either didn’t quarantine it, or they let it out. Either way, we didn’t set it loose.”

That was thin reasoning, but Tasser couldn’t deny it was at least partially correct. What was the creatures relationship with the Vorak? They’d been mutually hostile on Korbanok, but Nai had ran afoul it too.

“…Head northwest.” Nemuleki said, “Tasser’s right, we need to quarantine it immediately. But there’s other places to do that besides the Organic Authority.”

“What do you have in mind?” Lorel asked.

“Kalins is about forty minutes north of us. Their bio-science wing could do it.”

“The university?”

“I dropped out of school to enlist, but I left on pretty good terms with a few professors in the biology department. We can quarantine both ourselves and it in one of their labs. It’s quicker and closer than the Organic Authority, and it doesn’t get us caught by the Vorak.”

“You sure they would help us?” Tasser asked.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“No, but look at our choices.”

“I’m sold.” Lorel said, “Nemuleki, put Nai in the back. I need you up here to navigate. I want to get there before nightfall.”

Tasser did his best to help bring Nai’s unconscious body to the back seats of the truck. They laid her out across the bench ‘Caylab’ wasn’t on. Tasser grimaced and clenched his jaw as he tried to avoid stepping on Osino’s body. It felt disrespectful to leave him on the floor, but they had all known what they were in for. And what else could he do?

If it had been Tasser lying there instead, Osino would have done the same.

Tasser redoubled his focus. He had two aliens he had to watch now. Even if one of them was unconscious for now, that didn’t ease the stress on him at all. He was out of his element.

It would probably be an hour’s drive to their destination. All he could do was hope that neither of the aliens’ conditions got any worse in the meantime.

* ····

The sun was setting when their truck rolled to a halt outside one of the greenhouses attached to the bio-science lab building.

Kalins University was the largest educational institution on the planet. More than eight-thousand students were still enrolled since the occupation. And like everywhere else, it wasn’t taken with a Vorak military presence on Casti colony worlds. Hopefully that meant none of the staff would sic the Vorak on them.

Tasser only wished Nemuleki’s contact wasn’t so curious.

“I really shouldn’t look, huh?” the professor asked.

Viranam, the professor Nemuleki had spoken of, had been accommodating. She’d been willing to scrap an experiment four months in the making to shelter them. But she was still curious. Who could blame her?

“This is a delicate situation that’s still unfolding…” Lorel began to give the default line, but Tasser could see the point where his commander ran out of patience for protocol.

“No. No you shouldn’t.”

Viranam gave a curt nod, apparently satisfied with the refusal.

“Well you won’t be seen inside greenhouse thi. We were culturing photo-sensitive fungal strains; we blacked out the windows and the entrance is air-gapped.”

“Sorry again about the experiment, professor.” Nemuleki said. “If we had any better option…”

“I understand.” The professor said simply.

“Is there any trace of the experiment still there?” Lorel asked. “I know this is short notice, but we need to quarantine something.”

“I scrubbed the whole greenhouse after Nemuleki called. There’s an airtight partition inside that you can make a somewhat proper quarantine.” Viranam said, “But I can’t help more without knowing exactly what you’re quarantining.”

The Casti soldiers traded a few concerned glances. They trusted the professor. They had to. But even then, if this wasn’t handled carefully there would be a panic.

“…am I at risk for being near you?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.” Nemuleki said. “I don’t think anyone is actually at risk. The odds are astronomically low. It’s just… we need to take the precaution.”

“Alright, is there anything else I should get you before making myself scarce?”

“A Farnata medical kit.” Tasser spoke up, “And any diagnostic manual you can find on Adept medicine.”

“Medicine for Adepts, or medicine done by Adepts?”

“The former.”

Viranam gave another curt nod. “I’ll get what you need, but one of you is going to owe me the whole story someday.”

“That’s going to be a while hahi.” Nemuleki grimaced, “We only have a small piece of that story.”

Viranam only responded with a curious look. She promptly left in the vehicle she came in.

“Let’s get inside.” Lorel said.

·····

‘Caylav’ was upset.

It was sitting on the ground leaning against the far wall of its new confines on the other side of a plastic partition built into the greenhouse. The tube of water sitting lying on the ground next to it, half empty.

It had tested the transparent walls of the partition, leaning against them. They had flexed and bent just under its weight. The sound the partition’s frame made as it bent made it obvious that if the alien put any real effort into it, their feeble enclosure wouldn’t hold it.

But so far it had stayed docile, if not totally amicable.

Tasser was not reassured though. If anything, he had reason to be increasingly worried now.

His impression was that it was reacting too strongly to being confined like this.

Exactly what part of the alien’s behavior gave him the impression? He couldn’t put it into words. But, Tasser had firm suspicion that it had been confined recently, and that it was reacting to being detained again.

The possibility that the creature might get violent again was a daunting one, but it raised the even more unsettling possibility that the Vorak actually had contained the creature.

Which begged the question, what had it been doing freely roaming the halls of Korbanok Station?

Nemuleki wasn’t a medic either, but she had more experience treating injuries than Tasser or Lorel. So she was observing Nai. Lorel had gotten Osino’s body into the university’s morgue somehow and was currently out disposing of the vehicle they’d stolen from the landing field’s receiving crew. He wouldn’t be back for a few hours. If Tasser’s sense of the squad’s commander was accurate, then he would come back with some new resources and options.

But in the meantime, it left Tasser to watch the alien.

“I promise you Lorel, I will get revenge for this” Tasser murmured.

And since it would be a disaster if ‘Caylab’ decided to get out, Tasser was the only one available to communicate with it.

Had Lorel and Nemuleki agreed on that by design or coincidence? Tasser understood he was the logical choice, but he didn’t particularly like that he was the logical choice. He would have much preferred if the alien had engaged one of the others.

But it had decided to trade names with him for some unholy reason. Tasser didn’t want to do this job, but this was how situations played out sometimes.

That was ridiculous. What situation developed into anything this insane? His name might end up in some history book, the person to first talk with this alien species. That was just too much.

But enough complaining. Like it or not, however unlikely, he had to do the job in front of him.

His job was First Contact.

One of the most important parts of First Contact, he remembered, was that communication in some form was more or less inevitable. Eventually, some breakthrough would get made, and everything that was reviewable could be understood retroactively.

So how you started carried weight. They had not started well.

The quarantine was the most immediately important thing to communicate right now. It needed to stay contained for now and if that was understood, even a little, then progress would be that much smoother going forward.

Also, the concept of microbes might be a good test for how intelligent this thing is.

Tasser decided to start with numbers and letters. ‘Caylab’ had recognized no Sasat so far, but it was clearly capable of some language.

He swore quietly to himself. He’d loathed to learn Sasat when he was younger. It had taken him arduous long hours of drilling to reach even the most basic proficiency. There was, by his own estimation, no one less qualified to try and probe an alien’s grasp of language.

The greenhouse had plenty of office supplies in one of the cabinets, and Tasser had retrieved a stack of paper-placards and a few scribs.

Scribs weren’t pens.

Pens laid ink onto a surface and let it dry. Scribs were a writing instrument all the same, but they only worked on certain surfaces and materials. It was basically a micro-range laser that reacted with a chemical that the paper was treated with.

Laminate the paper, and the laser still worked, it just passed right through. The brilliant advantage of the scrib over ink or powder marking was that it was totally reversible. The same laser treatment that marked the chemically treated page could be undone by a similar laser.

These were good scribs too, smooth crystal points to scatter the laser on the page.

So Tasser dumped a few pages and a scrib into the receptacle to pass small materials into the isolated section of the greenhouse.

The tool looked humorously oversized for its much smaller hands, but the alien picked up how to use the scrib quickly enough. It scribbled a series of lines haphazardly in the middle of the sheet and showed them to Tasser. He wanted to shout at the creature to wait for him, but ‘Caylab’ ignored him in favor of its own scrawl.

It had a few stick figures on it. One with a round head, the other with a triangular head. One of the round headed one’s arms was bent upwards.

The trouble was, Tasser didn’t recognize it as drawing. At least, not immediately.

“This cannot be your writing.” He said, “Is it a word? A letter?”

He and ‘Caylab’ were eagerly trading pages trying to find some information they both recognized. Tasser stared belligerently at the pages he’d received. One might have thought he was trying to force them into comprehension by sheer will. Some of them had fine compacted symbols in neat rows. But the other kind of writing he’d gotten was far too simple to be words, surely.

Maybe it wasn’t even real; a... 'proto alphabet' of some kind, maybe?

The creature let out a wail and moved its head from side to side. Tasser had gathered that was the opposite of nodding.

It grabbed another sheet from the many it had strewn on the floor. It was a similar round shape with attached sticks.

It stood up and flapped its hand back and forth, palm facing Tasser. With its other hand, it pointed to the pages Tasser had just received, and back to its own page.

The figures were identical with respect to the angle of the one line coming…

Tasser’s people did not emote so much with their mouths like this creature seemed to, but they did have similar cheek muscles in their face, especially around their eyes. And so Tasser didn’t ‘grin’, but it was something comparable that came across his face when he held the drawing up.

It wasn’t writing at all.

It was… his native tongue’s word for drawing didn’t refer to anything like this at all. But ‘Caylab’ was drawing all the same. Crude approximate drawing? There was an actual word for this kind of information exchange. It was… Pictographic! It was pictographic.

Tasser preened a little to himself. Not many Casti would have remembered cross cultural lessons like that one. Other species tended to be much more liberal with visualizations and pictures where his people only infrequently found images so… interpretable.

Casti eyes were too good. They were naturally inclined to notice differences and discrepancies. Visual metaphor got easily muddled when you could see and argue over minute differences no larger than a grain of sand.

If the image wasn’t accurate in some way, it wasn’t a very good image.

But this creature was drawing in approximations, in symbols. Difficult to decipher, but not impossible. The lines were torso and limb. He frowned. That triangular thing was supposed to be his head?

“I—” Tasser began, about to insult the creature’s eyes. But he thought better of it. This was still First Contact.

“—am sure you tried your best with that.” He finished. The creature gestured for more paper and started furiously drawing more pictures.

This was outside Tasser’s element, but he could see how it might work. No language could possibly function between them right now, so they needed some common standing.

And they both had eyes, didn’t they?

Tasser tried to draw a lens diagram, with each part implying magnification, and presented it. But the creature shook its head again and kept drawing.

Tasser sighed, “This is going to take a while, isn’t it?”

·····

That was about the extent of it for a few hours. Tasser trying to draw the idea of a quarantine and ‘Caylab’ not understanding. A dozen placards later and Tasser was getting frustrated.

It was possible that this creature didn’t understand the concept. Tasser had to set his scrib down for a minute.

“You are not making this easy.” He said wearily out loud.

The creature garbled a few sounds back and scribbled something down on one of its own placards. The creature hadn’t drawn as much, leaving most of it to Tasser. But it had written on a few set off to the side. He’d filled a few with the compact characters that Tasser was now sure was its normal writing and set them aside, but he’d drawn on some vague shapes on other sheets.

Odder still were the moments where the creature picked up one of the sheets, but set down the scrib, and seemed to draw some invisible series on the page only to discard it and scribble on it with the scrib immediately after. It was almost like it was pretending to write something, like it wanted to remind itself that it could.

On one of the few sheets it had marked, it had put down a series of dots and symbols on one sheet, and a different series of symbols on another sheet. The symbols with different dots under them were numbers, he gathered. The first symbol had no dots under it, and each subsequent symbol added a dot beneath it. The creature had even gone the other way to what Tasser guessed were negatives. Each symbol like its mirror from zero, but with a short line next to it. Little empty circles the same size as the dots accrued under each negative number. Decimal counting rather than octal, Tasser recognized. That tracked, ‘Caylab’ had ten fingers unlike him.

So, the creature understood basic mathematics. That was encouraging. A species that pursued abstract exercises like numbers would be likely to develop other sciences.

Hopefully, that meant trying to communicate the quarantine wasn’t pointless. Still though, Tasser was getting exasperated. He needed a break.

He stood up and said as much out loud, before starting toward the second partition where Nai was recuperating. The creature made a sound suddenly and repeated it a few times.

Tasser turned, but it wasn’t looking at him. It was looking down at the edge of the barrier, where the clear barrier warped just a little where it met the structure of the quarantine box.

“You see something?” He asked.

The creature spoke an equally unintelligible response and started tapping at the stack of placards that Tasser had scribbled all over trying to communicate.

Tasser picked them up and looked at them, was there something there that had caught its attention? He thumbed through each one checking each one with the creature.

It kept shaking its head, which Tasser had gathered was a negative response. It waggled a digit in front of it as Tasser went through the stack. It muttered a few more phrases to no effect, but Tasser had been talking essentially to himself too. Spoken aloud, their words were more for their own benefit it seemed.

Or did it understand that what it says aloud will be reviewable? It could have been just mimicking Tasser’s own speech to no one, but…

Tasser reached the bottom of the stack, holding the first placard, and the creature switched from the sound it had been repeating. Tasser held it up, puzzled. He’d tried drawing the lenses of a microscope in profile, distorting light outward and outward blowing up the image with each successive lens, but now that Tasser looked back, it was just a series of bulbous obloids with cones pointing each to the next ‘lens’. If he hadn’t known what he meant, he probably wouldn’t have gotten it either.

The creature grabbed another placard and started scribbling furiously across its surface. Instead of his own obloids, the creature drew a series of circles, each connected by some open-ended cones to more circles in series. The first was filled in almost dark, with just a few tiny spaces left blank. The next circle had seemingly the same pattern of blank spaces, but each resized to take up more space in the circle. The third one seemed to feature only one of the blanks, but still with the same detail on the blank’s now bigger space.

Oh, he was really dense, wasn’t he?

Stars.

The creature was drawing a telescoping diagram that featured a star in greater zoom with each successive circle.

It had gotten the magnification diagram, but it had taken it the other way toward macro-scales and big objects, far away things. Tasser had tried multiple times to demonstrate ‘small’ on the placards, but the creature had kept thinking in terms of space. Of course, it was. This was first contact for Tasser and the creature. It was thinking about where it was, in the void.

The one thing they knew about the creature, beyond any uncertainty, was that it could not have originated on Korbanok station.

The first question Tasser had wanted to know had been where was it from? But for ‘Caylab’ it must be the opposite: where in the void was it? It knew it was on a different planet than before, what else would it have been thinking of?

But still, Tasser knew how to show it now. “Show me the numbers again.” He said, gesturing to the sheet the creature had made and set aside.

Taking each number that the creature had labeled, he copied the creature’s circle-scope diagram and put a ‘nine’ under the first circle. Every circle got a number, going down. But in his first circle, he drew a figure like the one it had on the barrier, a circle head, plus lines for a body and limbs. He went ahead and added a similar figure but with a vaguely triangular head for himself. The second circle ‘zoomed’ in quite a bit, but the bottom of each head was still mostly visible, though the lower limbs were totally out of view. The next circle was entirely filled in, like they’d zoomed all the way into one of the line-limbs so that it eclipsed the whole circle. But the next, Tasser drew a fine dark cloud of dots, collectively only just lighter than the dark circle before it.

Here was the real test.

The next one had the dots more distinct, less finely distributed. Each one took up more space than before. There was vague detail in each one. The next circle—

The creature shouted! It leapt to its feet and started spitting out a string of words. It whacked its hand against its head a few times, shouting wildly. It repeated a word a few times.

It dropped back to the floor and grabbed its own pen instead of the scrib. Tasser stopped and watched it draw something in its notebook, unable to see until…

The creature slammed the drawing into the barrier, showing it as directly as possible to Tasser. Its face mad and wide, teeth showing, and mouth curved toward its eyes.

It was a blob with little lines poking out of the exterior. The inside of the blob was filled with all sorts of odds and ends. Dots, blocks, and spirals along with a large solidly filled in circle taking up a third of the blob right in the middle.

“[Germs!]” ‘Caylab’ said in its language, wildly gesturing to the hermetic seal and the airlock transfer receptacle.

Its drawing was unmistakable, even to Tasser’s eyes. A microbe.

“Germs.” Tasser confirmed in Sasat.