Pete Manison: The Shadow Captain

“Yes,” she called. “But they promoted me to supervisor of my department.”

“Congratulations! You know, if you applied—”

He stopped, because he knew he didn’t have to say the rest. He’d asked her about it on each of his visits. There were as many female Captains as there were male ones. But Cara shook her head now, as she had before. On every world, young men and women aspired to be Captains. They put themselves through the training and then the tests. It was a five-year investment just to reach the point of being chosen for the program or passed over, and the vast majority were always passed over. Few indeed were selected to become Captains. And the Captains rarely commissioned a new starship to be built.

That would change us, she thought, holding the wineglass to the light and watching the burgundy reflections dance on her wrist. Why didn’t he just ask her to go with him? she wondered again, as she always did. But he didn’t, he never did, and it wasn’t a question one asked of a Captain.

Dinner was delicious. Rafael had prepared grilled salmon and wild rice, a simple meal but in his hands a gourmet’s delight. For dessert they nibbled fresh berries collected from the nearby fields. Then they kissed, their lips purple from the berries, and for a while Cara pretended that everything was normal.

“On Holder’s Relay they fry airfish in volcanic vents that give the meat a flavor like bacon. And they live on the eggs of dinosaurs who change color with the seasons.” His voice took on that quality whenever he spoke of the wonders he’d seen, soft and wistful and full of hidden tones and possibilities. But it always sounded like he was leaving out most of it, like there were no words to express the things he found out there among the stars.

“Rafael,” she asked later, after the Moon had risen with Cassiopeia low in the north, “what was it you were going to tell me?”

He looked at her in that way that sometimes made her feel like a small child. “I have to go away again,” he said, his tongue so nimble on the words that killed her. “Longer than before. Maybe a lot longer.”

She listened numbly, remembering how he had spoken similar words before. But she could tell at once that it was different this time.

The silence stretched out, and Cara held her breath. When he didn’t speak at all, she reached out and took one of his hands in both of hers. She lifted it to her mouth and lightly kissed his palm. “Whatever it is,” she murmured, “you can’t leave me not knowing.”

His eyes flared quickly. Not since his ascension to Captaincy, perhaps, had another human being told him what he could or could not do. But then his face gentled. When he looked at her again, his eyes sparkled with a forced amusement that seemed to cover something deeper. “Thank you, Cara. Thank you for being the strong one. I think I lacked the courage, alone. But if 1 hadn’t told you, I would have regretted it forever.”

She stared at him, knowing her astonishment was plain on her face. The Captains didn’t feel fear.

Then he told her the story, and she found herself wishing he had lacked the courage after all.

Drifting easily into orbit of the new world, careful not to disturb the lifeforms that have already been detected on the surface. Gregor takes the scout craft on manual, easing his speed until the transition is complete. Farprobe 7 hangs in geosynchronous orbit above an island whose offshore reefs reflect the greatest concentration of biomolecules. But it isn’t only this that has drawn him here, out of this wide system of asteroid belts and still-forming planetoids. It’s also the dreams. It’s mainly the dreams.

He reports none of this back to the mother ship, Paracelcus. He’s a Captain, and Paracelcus is his ship, and they can hear what he wants them to hear when he wants them to hear it.

He lets the landing computer put him down on the island.

All around, green oceans roil to the horizon. The planet has a single large moon, and the tidal effect is very pronounced. An Earth boat wouldn’t last five minutes out in that, even if the air were fit to be breathed.

“Computer,” he orders, “prepare probe for undersea mode. And scan biomass.”

“Probe ready,” it answers momentarily.

“And the biomass?” he asks.

“Scan underway. Available biomass for scanning is seven point nine trillion tons.”

“How much?”

“Seven point—”

“Captain’s interrupt. Scan a small slice of the biomass and report findings.”

“Reshuffling data. Analysis complete. Twenty-two thousand plant and animals species recorded.”

Gregor feels the thick hair of his forearms standing on end. But how stable is it? Has there been time?

“Computer, display the most highly advanced animal lifeform.”

The diving mode instructional screen drops off, replaced by a 3-D of something that makes Gregor gasp, his eyes widening in wonder, as he falls back into his seat. It’s huge — bigger than a humpback whale. But its shape is round, its body undulating, and it trails long tentacles behind it. It looks almost like a jellyfish, but the internal structure of the body is something never designed for human eyes to comprehend. Air bladders puff out along the outside—that much seems familiar. But within these lies a membrane full of tiny diamond-shaped holes, and underneath that are numerous tiny organs—some brown, some black and some red or green or blue. They all pulsate, and though they vary in size and shape they all have tubes that emerge from the creature’s body, pulsing with the passage of fluids through their lengths, and curve up to merge with the head. The head itself is as big as a living room, and inside the transparent membrane is something that looks like sand, colored in swirls from all the tubes that feed into it. The sand shifts and turns in living cyclones inside the animal’s head, sometimes in a frenzy of activity like a Martian dust-storm, sometimes slower and softer, like it’s dreaming.

“Look at that brain capacity,” Gregor says. His voice echoes off the walls of the probe. “If that is a brain.” But he’s laughing, his eyes moving up and down the length of the creature’s body, his smile making him look like a fisherman who’s finally gotten the one that got away.

He sleeps three hours, and then he takes the probe beneath the waves.

“I made contact with them almost at once,” Rafael said. Cara lay with her head in his lap looking up at his face as he spoke, and the depth of his voice made her imagine twisted shapes rising out of the alien sea, strange fourwinged birds circling overhead, and ghostly sails billowing from the decks of oddly-crafted ships.

“They must be very far away,” she murmured, looking past his face to the stars that sparkled across the sky now that the Sun had set.

But his voice was cold. “Not far enough.”

In the probe’s cramped interior, Captain Gregor programs the ascent sequence. He has already inflated three tug-alongs and filled them with biosamples, and now the probe is at maximum capacity and he’s almost ready to take it back up to orbit.

Almost.

The Hur’klee are fiercely territorial. They have conquered all the lower species, as humanity has on Earth, and the climb to the top of the planetary ecosystem has left them just as aggressive and inquisitive and possessive. Gregor fears for his life until he realizes there is nothing he possesses that could be of any value to them. Only his knowledge.

Three weeks he has spent among the Hur’klee, and now they have asked him to participate in a ritual before his departure. He hopes it will shed more light on their culture than the dances he has recorded. That is the only way they tell stories—by dance—and it takes a Hur’klee most of its eighty-year adolescence to master the nuances of the medium. The computer has made rough translations since the first week, but they’re literal translations only; good enough for rudimentary communication but insufficient for the decoding of myth and custom and law that weave the fabric of a culture.