Omens
"Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder where the hell you are..." Nicole Brennan's top replayed video of the year so far was Isaac's drunk karaoke record, of course, made before things went pear shaped. And she was watching it again right now, when the Ishimura crawls closer to Aegis VII's dig site.
Planet Anxiety VII was an unpopular but accurate nickname that circulated in small talks of CEC's mental professionals, ever since its first prospecting in 2505. People were notably uneasy right now already.
"Dr. Brennan, they need us at the hangar, it's the pod they caught." One of her coworkers, Anne, knocked at the door to her office. She was a junior level med tech newly rotated to the Ishimura like herself, working in the operating rooms as an organic mechanic like Isaac tends to call them. Anne sounded exhausted, "This should have been Dr. Mercer's job, but he's occupied."
"Meditation? Confession? Anyway I'm always fine to lend you a hand."
"Thanks, Altman be praised." Anne shrugged with irony, "I've got the bio-scraper kit ready."
They arrived at the hangar, where a small crowd has gathered around the so-called pod for free amusement, or morbid curiosity. The pod came across Ishimura's path less than a day ago when it was spat out from a Shockpoint anomaly. It was only a broken chunk of unidentified old machinery, possibly SCAF design, that needed decontamination in case of alien pathogens hitching a ride. Once it was passably clean, the engineering team would try to open it - and then whatever frozen, desiccated poor bastards inside would need to be DNA-sequenced. The Church of Unitology made a vow to identify every lost soul of the Earth Revolution War they ever come across, whether SCAF or Earthgov, and find their next of kin.
The pod was made of a pale white compound metal, flaking off left and right, and looked like the dismembered torso of a giant humanoid. There was even a boxy, oblong head on top of its angular main section. The construction was remarkably advanced, having very few screws or rivets, as if it was all molded from large stamped pieces.
"Hey, doc. There was some pink foam sticking on some seams, we've burnt them off." Security chief Alissa Vincent waved at Nicole, and pointed at some armored guards applying plasma cutters to the pod, "Just wait till the team peel off some more armor, then you can have what's inside."
"Pink foam?" It sounded concerning.
"I guess it's just self sealing material for the fuel tank, something like that. It's gotten brittle after floating for so long. No worries, my gorillas didn't eat any."
Twang! A bolt of plasma beam impacted a connection part on the pod, but scattered right on impact.
"Guess the metal didn't deteriorate, then. Load the Line Gun!"
CRASH!
The line gun did little visible good either.
"Should we call the Bench guys to take over?" The guard who operated the Line Gun asked, "It should be their job."
"How about you get a spoon and take over, Johnston? They're working their asses off prepping the gravity tethers."
"Fine. Ladies, this will take a while, Mike Johnston is taking over for Rousseau and Temple!"
A rusty squeak emerged from within the pod, startling everyone in the pressurized hangar. Knowledgeable professionals from security and engineering began hushing other onlookers away, anticipating a decompression or explosion inside.
Then, a duller metallic creak. Movable parts began shifting on the giant limbless torso, while aiming lasers from all directions danced on them.
"Doko koko? Nande?" A human voice followed, speaking old Earth Japanese. Nobody expected it, bot fortunately the RIG automatic translation programs all kicked in to help, "WHERE HERE? WHY?"
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Nicole watched a grimy figure in a ragged old spacesuit climb out under a well armored hatch at the torso's center. He stumbled and nearly faceplanted into the aim of a plasma cutter.
"He looks human, right?" Mike needed an educated medical opinion.
"Tanikaze, wait." Another voice came from the presumed cockpit, a female one also speaking in Japanese, sounding like both a child and a machine. The call made the man in old spacesuit to turn around clumsily.
"My eyes! She's wearing nothing!"
"I think they need medical attention." Nicole said, and Anne gave her a confident thumb up, a line at neck level, "Yeah, clothing too."
////
Tanikaze Nagate, pilot of the Guardian Type 17 humanoid combat vehicle, from colony ship Sidonia, year... 3395. Discovery of two newcomers finally warranted Dr. Mercer's attention, alongside Dr.Kyne's. The possibility of Shockpoint phenomena connecting to the future or other parallel worlds could make the biggest cosmological discovery ever since Altman found the Marker; it energized both of them no matter what they were thinking about an hour ago.
By all means Nagate was a top shape specimen of a human, his vitals and scans looked all normal, while he talked like an upright member of society. Though, he looked borderline unkempt and the artificial slime mold in his spacesuit gave him a lingering trail of odor. Who could have taken "biomechanic" that literally and use slime mold as a part of clothing?
Nicole did appreciated how much he cared about the girl in his cockpit, Hoshijiro Shizuka. Nagate was extremely concerned about two things simultaneously: First, she was not human, and second, he wouldn't let anyone touch her. Emphasis on the former: She was not human, at least not fully human.
The vocabulary used by Nagate and his cockpit operating system was old, not just pre-Earthgov old, but practically extinct before humans settled on the moon: A word they mentioned often, 奇居子 Gauna, is from a dialect of Okinawa. It meant hermit crab, but uncommon in both pronunciation and kanji characters. It should have been 寄居虫 Gouna, "bug that borrows a home", not "kid who live in a strange way". Neither Of these were still commonly used aby the times of Ishimura himself! They were the ultimate unthinking, uncaring nemesis of all humanity.
The pink foam was the main component of the Gauna, a homogeneous substance formed from some Hyggs particle called 胞衣 Ena. It would be Kyne's job to determine whether Hyggs particle is a form of the Higgs boson, while the idea of Ena would keep giving everyone present a headache - the name could mean both placenta, and maybe charitably, plant endosperm.
Hoshijiro Shizuka was a Gauna, built from this substance. Or, she used to be an appendage of a Gauna, reconstituted into a human like shape with this substance. Yes, an appendage that became fully humanoid when it touched him, but didn't bother to grow any socially accepted clothing. Now, severed from the Gauna core, she appeared just as human as him but still had the power to accidentally or casually brush whole armor plates off Alissa's combat armor.
Anyway, Nagate wasn't good at the sciences nor communicating technical details. She was a complicated entity of un-life, although she showed no signs of aggression since emerging from the cockpit.
At the end of the cross-briefing, Dr. Mercer decided from his position of authority to keep Shizuka in a stasis chamber while Nagate would have a temporary room in the medical section. Dr. Kyne would take over the onboard computer.
"Excuse me, Doctor, I'm starting to feel hungry."
"Sorry, Nagate, it took a while longer than expected to record this audio log."