Adaptation Page 3

  The second female, the one that drew his interest, felt fear, as well, but there was a thread of excitement and anticipation that accompanied the images that flashed through her mind. It took him a little while to realize that there was a consistency in those images. She was imagining young creatures, babies. His first reaction when he realized that was indignation. They had escaped their pods months ago! He might still be a long way from full maturity, but he was certainly no weak, helpless youngling!

  When he finally managed to subdue his anger over that insult, it occurred to him that that was why she was not as fearful as the others. That was why she felt excitement and anticipation in spite of the fear. She wanted to find younglings!

  As soon as that dawned on him, he began to study the images that flashed through her mind more carefully, trying to decide which appealed to her the most. He gave the image to Dae and Rak. If we take this form, the small female there will not be afraid and she will protect us from the others.

  He felt the revulsion of the others immediately.

  That is no surprise, Dae agreed. This looks like a new hatchling. Nothing would fear such a useless blob of flesh!

  Exactly! Noo said triumphantly. She wants to see something like this and the others will also not feel fear of it, so they will not attack!

  Dae shared a look with Rak and finally shrugged. The three of them focused on trying to assume the form. It was a struggle. The image was flat-not an entire image as they would have if they had actually seen the creature they were trying to mimic. Beyond that, it seemed far smaller than they were, but that was actually an advantage, they discovered. It was not at all difficult to appear fat and round when they had to compress themselves into such small things.

  Noo thought, at first, that he had made a serious error in judgment when the female halted and sucked in a sharp breath. Relief flooded him, however, when the first reflex of fear almost immediately began to diminish and interest took its place.

  "I've found-something!" Kate announced in a loud voice, shaky with both excitement and fear. "I think it must be what was in those eggs!"

  Chapter Two

  "Don't get too close!" Bill snapped. "This could be a very dangerous species! We don't know anything about them! Dr. Warner-we're going to need some cages down here-something that would be big enough for a large dog, I'd guess. We've found three … creatures. Very likely the culprits for the damage," he added, switching to direct communications with the team leader.

  Kate exchanged a questioning look with Sissy. Sissy was looking doubtful. "They're … actually, they're kind of cute, aren't they? I was expecting something … horrible, with maybe five eyes and really long teeth-reptile-like."

  Kate returned her attention to the creatures cowering in one corner and felt a flicker of empathy. She could see they were shaking. She didn't think it was because they were cold. "Poor little things," she murmured. Moving very slowly, she crouched so that she was more on a level with them and, hopefully, not as intimidating. "It's ok. Nobody's going to hurt you."

  After a few moments, Sissy crouched down to get a better look. "Can't tell much about them-except it looks like there are three of them. I think they must be from the eggs we found. They don't look much like birds, though, do they? That looks a lot more like fur than down."

  Kate smiled faintly. "Except for the wings-or at least they look like they might be wings. To be honest, they look like a cross between primates, canine, and Aves. Not reptilian, though."

  She spent the time while they waited for the cages trying to soothe them with her voice. Oddly enough, it did seem to soothe them. They stopped shaking and after a few moments, the one closest to her lifted his head and began to sniff the air. She smiled wryly. "You won't catch my scent through this suit unless you have an extremely sensitive olfactory system."

  The creature met her gaze when she spoke that time. An eerie sensation fluttered through her. As strange as it sounded, even to her, she almost felt as if something tangible passed through her mind. Dismissing the sensation with an effort, she focused on the eyes. They were very similar to the eyes of Earth creatures, at least from what she could see. The pupils were elongated like cat eyes and quite possibly for the same reason-excellent night vision for nocturnal hunting, but except for the strange color, which she had trouble pinning down, they didn't look alien. She finally decided to categorize the shifting colors of the eyes as hazel even though the predominant colors weren't green and gold but rather purple, blue, and green.

  "Don't look it directly in the eyes," Bill cautioned. "A lot of animals consider that a challenge and will attack."

  Too late, Kate thought wryly, but it didn't seem to antagonize the creature. She discovered when she redirected her focus to the creature again that it seemed to be studying her as intently as she was studying it. It took an effort to break eye contact with it, in point of fact. She discovered when she had that the other two were studying her just as intently.

  "How old do you suppose they are?" Sissy asked.

  Kate frowned and shook her head. "We know they can't possibly be more than a few months. Unless they somehow managed to get onboard when the robot was loading, they would have to be what was in the eggs we brought onboard ourselves. We can't be sure of that since the cams malfunctioned, but I think it's as good a guess as any."

  "The eggs weren't big enough to hold anything that size," Bill put in. "If they came from the eggs, then they've been out a while. They're certainly not newly hatched."

  "That would put them in the bird category, then, wouldn't it?" Sissy said speculatively.

  "It would if this was something from earth since they certainly don't look reptilian or amphibian. We don't know what to expect from Sirius."

  Two techs arrived carrying the cages Bill had called for. Without surprise, Kate saw that the new intrusion alarmed the creatures. Directing the men to set the cages down, Kate, Bill, and Sissy settled to discussing how to capture the creatures with Warner giving directions via the com units. The first thought was to try to coax them into the cages with food. The problem with that was that they didn't have a clue of what would entice them since they didn't have a clue of what the creatures ate.

  Bill finally left with the techs to search the specimen locker to see if they could determine what the creatures had been subsisting on since they'd hatched. His expression was grim when he returned a little later. "I'd say they eat pretty much anything," he said dryly. "Most of the specimens we collected are gone. It looks like they got into the food storage lockers, too."

  Guilt flickered through Kate. It didn't take a lot of imagination to know she was going to be in hot water with everybody who was waiting for specimens to study.

  "There was food onboard?" Sissy asked blankly.

  "It's standard procedure to always have emergency rations onboard any outgoing ship," Bill reminded her. "Anyway, they wanted to see what effect, if any, the hyper-drive might have on organic materials."

  Kate shrugged her discomfort off. "Well, if they've already eaten our food and it hasn't had any adverse effects on them, we could bring something from the station to entice them."

  "I sent the techs to get something."

  They want us to get into those strange pods, Rak said uneasily. I don't like the way this seems to be going.

  Me either," Dae agreed.

  Noo was studying the pods they'd called cages. They're made of the same stuff as the craft, he said finally.

  Which means we won't be able to get out of them, Dae said testily.

  Noo sent him a look. They open. I watched them open one side. If they can open them, then we can.

  So, you're saying we should just get inside them without a fight?

  Noo considered the situation. They aren't fearful of us now. If they'd meant to kill us, they would have tried already. I think they're only trying to figure out what we are, just as we are them.

  The pretty female doesn't want to hurt us, Rak said slowly. I'm not sure about the other two.

  The male thinks they can study us just as well dead, Dae said flatly. I don't think it's a good idea to get into those things. We'll be trapped.

  I don't like it either, Noo said reluctantly. But I don't think we have a choice. They'll bring more or they'll use those sticks they have to make us sleep. The male wants to do that and we won't be able to defend ourselves if they make us sleep.

  So we just go in, Rak asked uneasily?

  Noo sent him a disgusted look. If we do that they'll know we understand them, stupid! They're bringing food. When they bring that, then we'll go in.

  Rak glared at him, but decided to ignore the insult. I hope they bring something good. I'm hungry.

  Noo and Dae exchanged a speaking look. When Noo returned his attention to the alien creatures, he saw that the pretty female was watching them and uneasiness flickered through him at the speculation in her gaze. He sent her a limpid look and uttered a soft sound to imitate one of the sounds she'd made. Her brows knit together above her nose for a moment and then the look of suspicion disappeared. "They almost seem tame," she murmured.

  "They're wild animals," Bill reminded her sharply. "They just don't feel intimidated by us. I don't know if that's a good thing or not."

  Despite the fact that Noo had decided that their safest option was to allow the creatures to believe they'd been lured by the food that was brought, it irritated him when that was their immediate conclusion. He settled in one corner of the cage when they'd slammed the opening closed and fastened it, trying to pretend an interest in the food that he didn't feel at the moment, trying to ignore the resentment that they clearly considered him an inferior creature of little intelligence even though he'd deliberately given them that impression. He was also uneasy about their intention and trying hard to ignore that fear. Even though he'd convinced Dae and Rak that they would be safest to take this route, he wasn't as convinced as he wanted to be.

  They had an advantage, he told himself. The alien creatures had obviously underestimated their intelligence, which was a weapon they could use to their benefit. Beyond that, they weren't as weak as they'd allowed the aliens to believe. Unfortunately, they didn't have nearly the strength they would have when they reached full maturity either and that worried him. He thought that they were still far stronger than this species, but that was only a guess. Until he'd studied them more, he couldn't be certain that he could count on strength as a weapon.

  * * * *

  Kate rubbed her eyes and leaned back in her chair, staring thoughtfully at a point near the ceiling of her lab while she went back over the data she'd collected on the Sirian beasts over the past year. There was something fundamentally wrong with her conclusions. Deep down, she knew there was, and it made her uneasy-and not just because she'd been pressured to produce a conclusion when she'd known she wasn't ready, that she hadn't studied the creatures nearly long enough to arrive at scientifically accurate conclusions. She just couldn't figure out what, exactly, it was that she'd missed or even pinpoint why she felt so uneasy or, more importantly, the odd sense of urgency that had been nagging at her ever since the Eden convoy had left for Sirius with the first load of colonists.

  Leaning forward again, she propped her elbows on her console and cupped her hands together to rest her chin, examining the collection of images that she'd selected from the thousands they'd taken over the past year documenting the growth and behavior of the 'Sirian Sasquatch'.

  They hadn't been able to come up with a name for the beasts because it was just about impossible to pin down a genus they seemed to match-they had class characteristics of so many!-but as they'd grown to maturity, someone in the lab had called them Sasquatch and it had stuck not only because, outwardly, they seemed closer to that beast than anything else but also because they'd gotten really big, really fast.

  That wasn't the source of her uneasiness, though. It was actually a relief that they seemed to follow the typical maturing process of medium sized earth mammals when they didn't 'fit' anything else. They seemed to be, at least primarily, mammals, so the similarity of their maturing process to earth primates was almost hailed as a break-through discovery.

  Shaking her head after a moment, she got up from her chair, stretched the kinks out and moved to the door of the habitat that they'd designed for their aliens. She'd already disengaged the lock and grasped the handle when a sudden thought struck her.

  Frowning, she released the handle and moved back to the console, searching the data bank again for the image that had popped into her mind. She found nearly a dozen similar images, taken at different times before she found the one she'd been looking for. The uneasiness deepened as she studied it and the other images. After a few moments, she was on the search again. An hour later she had pulled up enough images to completely fill her holographic monitor and spread them out in the sequence they'd been taken.

  A chill began to seep into her as she carefully studied each image and verified the camera that had taken it.

  She was actually surprised to see that they'd managed to catch so many-considering their 'beasts' obviously knew exactly where the cameras were and what they were for.

  It occurred to her directly behind that realization that she'd unlocked the door leading to the habit. She'd designed and built it in the hope that they'd be able to observe the Sirian beasts under more natural conditions and thus get a better understanding of their behavior in their natural habitat.

  She wondered if they'd found that amusing or insulting, but the certainty had settled in her that they weren't dealing with beasts at all. The Sirian Sasquatch was no animal-it was an intelligent species. She was certain of it.

  Whether she could convince anyone else was a matter of debate, but she was a believer.

  Even as she surged up from her seat and headed to the entrance to the habitat, however, Sissy flew the door of her lab and skidded to a breathless halt. Kate, already unnerved by the direction of her thoughts, whipped around instinctively at the sudden intrusion. Sissy's hair was askew from her rush, her eyes as wide as saucers and her face pale. "They're going to terminate the project! They're on their way down here now!"

  "What?" Kate exclaimed in disbelief.

  Sissy gulped. "Warner said he had the order from headquarters and it was out of his hands. I tried everything I could think of to convince him we hadn't studied the Sirian Sasquatch nearly enough, but he wouldn't listen. What are we going to do?"

  Kate was so blank with absolute shock for several moments that she could only stare at Sissy. "They can't do that!"

  Sissy was ringing her hands. "They can! We can't stop them! He called security-they're on their way down here now!"

  Fear swept through Kate, completing her descent into complete disorder. "You mean terminate as in … kill? They're going to destroy them?" she gasped in disbelief.

  "That's what I've been trying to tell you!"

  "Like hell!" Kate snapped, surging toward the door. "I'll talk to him, make him see reason! They're an important species! They can't do this!"

  Sissy followed her as she surged out of her office. They hadn't made it to the end of the corridor when the tone sounded on the lift and the door opened. When it did, a half dozen armed security officers stepped out. Kate and Sissy braked to a halt.

  "Just hold on right there!" Kate said a little hoarsely. "I'm going to talk to Warner. Don't you dare do anything before I've had the chance to talk to him!"

  The officer in charge glared at her. "You don't have the authority to countermand Warner's orders-and he was clear."

  "Then I'll go over his head and talk to high command!"

  "The order came from high command, from General Hart himself!" he retorted. "Step aside!"

  "No!" Kate said stubbornly. "You can't do this, damn it! They aren't animals! They're an intelligent species! We need to understand them better! We've got colonists on the way to Sirius now. We don't have any idea what they might be up against!"

  The officer studied her grimly and finally nodded his head at one of the other officers. "Take her into custody-both of them."

  "You can't just shoot them down like animals!" Kate gasped as the security guard advanced on her and tried to subdue her, wrestling with the man to keep him from capturing her wrists. It was a short battle and she lost. Even as the guard secured her wrists, though, she suddenly remembered she'd left the containment door unlocked and Sissy had distracted her when she'd gone to secure it. A mixture of guilt, hope, and fear flooded her as her mind leapt to the possibility that the Sirians might have escaped when she and Sissy had abruptly abandoned the lab. She didn't think they'd been fooled by the habitat for one moment, despite her efforts to carefully construct it from the images they had of the surface of Sirius.

  Even as she watched the security team hurry down the corridor, however, she realized that there hadn't been enough time for the Sirians to escape even if they'd heard anything and been able to understand, and she doubted that. The guilt switched poles from her fear that she might have released a potentially dangerous species to guilt that she was the one who'd fought to have them brought back to start with and she was ultimately responsible for their deaths. She began struggling again against the man restraining her. "Don't do it! They're peaceful! They haven't hurt anyone or even tried, damn it! You don't need to do this! We could just send them back to Sirius with the next shipment of colonists!" she shouted after the security team.

  The team leader paused at the door to her lab and hope sprang into her that she'd swayed him. Instead, he sent another man back to help the first. "Take the two of them down to lock up until Warner decides whether he wants charges brought against them or not."

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