SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Not all of us.”

There was a brief pause during which, he imagined, she might have been silently voicing her worry for him. “Radiation,” she said finally. “Ultraviolet is far too high, for one. Also some radiation produced by them. Communication, I guess. Will interfere with our exocortices.”

“So nothing deadly.”

“Not immediately,” she said, somewhat primly. “What are you hoping to find down there? You know better than to try to walk into a place that hasn’t had a first-contact experience.”

“I think they have,” Jase said. “With slightly customized Chideans. Zio, what was the complement of the Kasant mission?”

“Two hundred and twenty-six.”

“Do you have a visual of the locals on the planet?”

A hologram appeared before them, stuck halfway in the lab counter until Jase stepped away from it. Naka, beside him, muttered an oath. “They sure look at lot like Chidis,” he said.

Jase let the image spin slowly before them. Bipedal, like all of them, upright, multijointed. Much of the male’s body was covered in hair, like Tenzo’s visible bits. And like Tenzo, it either had no exocortex or its species had not yet invented them. It seemed heftier than and not as smooth-featured as the Chideans, and there were remnants of claws on its short fingers. Creating a disguise by tweaking a few genes would not have been a difficult achievement for the Chideans. “Furry thing, isn’t it?” he said, watching the excitement on Tenzo’s face as he prattled with Zio. “What’s he saying, Zio?”

Zio abridged what was surely a longer conversation: “He wants to meet them.”

“No doubt! Not so sure the rest of us will fit right in, though.”

“Jase,” Ranael said. “I’ve found nothing to indicate that there has ever been any first contact. We haven’t got through the languages yet but, so far, this species seems to consider itself to be unique and superior on this planet. As is usually the case in places like these. If there are Chideans down there, they’ve not announced their presence.”

Jase nodded, mostly to himself. First contact was not in their contract. Dangerous, messy, and entirely too far out of their realm of expertise. “Zio, have you found Chidean DNA?”

“Yes, Jase.”

“Where? How many survived?”

“Unknown. I’ve located nearly eight thousand individuals so far, but we have scanned only one-fifth of the planet.”

“Eight thousand!” Naka snickered. “Looks like your people have been doing a bit of breeding, Mister Tenzo.”

“Would you like me to translate that?”

“No.”

“These are not just Chidean,” Zio continued. “They are technically hybrids.”

“What are you saying?” Naka looked at the stasis chambers as if with new eyes. “They bred with the locals?”

Jase tapped the gene gun. The suspicion that had wormed its way into the back of his mind didn’t seem so far-fetched now. “Nothing so mechanical, I think.” He turned to Aga Tenzo. “Translate directly, Zio,” he said before addressing their sponsor. “The Kasant expedition wasn’t just exploring the rifts, were they? This is no coincidence. They knew this planet had evolved a compatible species.”

Tenzo glanced from him to Ocia and back again. “Yes.”

“They didn’t run out of fuel. There was no distress call. They meant to come here.” Jase gazed at the mute containers of frozen life, perhaps no longer entirely Chidean, waiting for someone to wake it. “This was some attempt at colonization.”

“A successful one,” Naka murmured.

“And you’re here to find that out, Tenzo,” Jase added when Tenzo said nothing. “To see if they were able to survive down there. Even if it meant altering themselves to blend in. Isn’t that right?”

“Why would they do that?” Ocia said.

Tenzo finally raised his hands in a sweeping gesture. “Chidea U Bann is a dying world. We will bring our people here. Kasant was to prepare the way for us and to develop the gene therapies we need to undertake before landing. They served as a vanguard to seed the planet with our people, to learn how to live here.” He looked away from Ocia’s furious expression to appeal to Ranael, who just looked curious. “We feel that we belong here. This planet has produced our mirror selves. Look at them! We’re not here to create hybrids. We will make them better. Think of this as of a…a metamorphosis.”

“And what of the people down there?” Ranael said. “The ones who belonged there first? Kasant’s presence will have changed everything. Changed their evolution.”

Tenzo shrugged again, angrily this time. “Out of necessity. The Kasant group did not share our technology with them. They built the lab up here to keep it safe. But those who went to the surface would have had knowledge far beyond that of the locals. It was to help them develop more quickly. We will need landing sites and power sources that don’t exist now. And leaders among them who will ease our arrival. That, too, is evolution.”

Jase crossed his arms. “Then we’ll let them evolve without us,” he said, angry at having the entire company dragged into this. “ We are not going down there. We’ve done some questionable things for fun and profit, but I’m not making this crew part of some planetary takeover. That belongs to ancient history.” He signaled Ocia to keep a careful eye on the Chidean. “Zio, delete whatever Mister Tenzo just downloaded from the system.”

“That research belongs to us!” Tenzo exclaimed. “I have to report back to my people.”

“Then hire someone else. This isn’t what I signed up for. We’ll return your fee.” Jase saw an objection on Ocia’s face. “Minus the transport expenses.”

“My people will not stand for this!”

Jase didn’t need Ranael’s intuition to recognize the desperation on the man’s face. He smiled grimly. “Your people don’t know, do they? Why hire a private prospecting outfit? Explorers do, even scientists do. But not governments trying to keep their species alive. You have a fine fleet.” He raised his arms to encompass the lab. “This experiment is still a secret. You think the end result will justify the means of achieving it.”

“How we operate—”

“I have located the last of the ships, Jase,” Zio interrupted, startling all of them.

“What?”

“On the surface. Not operational. The Kasant AI is there as well.”

“Active?” Ocia gasped. “On the planet ?”

“Only the transponder is active. I’ve compared its output to the signature provided by Mister Tenzo.”

“Good God,” Ranael whispered.

“Back to the ships,” Jase said, heading for the exit. “Zio, pinpoint the exact location of the ship and the AI.”

The others hurried after him, past the startled Chidean who was only now receiving the news from Zio.

Jase didn’t bother to listen to any reply he might have to the revelation that the brain of the entire Kasant mission was possibly in the hands of an alien species. “Naka, you and Senda ready your ships for takeoff—we’ll join you once we’re geared up. The nav-ship will stay up here. I don’t want another AI getting lost. “Ranael, are you there?”

“Where would I be, if not here?”

They slipped through the half-open exterior door and hurried to their ships. “We need you with us on this. Zio, see if you can find out who the AI is tied to, if anyone.”

“That model is fairly autonomous,” Zio replied. “As long as it detects Chidean brain waves, it’ll operate.”

“Can it detect any of these eight thousand you’ve found so far?”

“No. They would have to be in close proximity.”

“I’m guessing it is where the ship is. Maybe when they were done up here they took the last ship down, and the AI with it.” Jase nodded to Ranael when they entered the bridge and then looked up at the ceiling. “When you said that the AI wasn’t available, you could have said it was gone. That’s not the same thing, you know.”