Mallory stood to confront his employer, but he couldn’t do much more than crouch on his feet with Wahid already standing in the cabin. “Was it necessary to send us to that ambush?”
“Yes, it was, Staff Sergeant
Mallory froze, wondering if he had misheard the emphasis on his alias. He wondered if Wahid heard the same thing that he had . . .
If he had, Wahid didn’t show it. “We deserve an explanation.”
“Perhaps,” Mosasa said. “For now, come forward to the cargo hold, so you can meet the other members of the expedition.”
Given recent experience, Mallory had been expecting more mercenaries. Instead, waiting for them in the brightly lit cargo hold along with Nickolai, Kugara, and Parvi, was a five-member scientific team. Four of the five wore the same kind of gray jumpsuit Mosasa wore and were seated with Mallory’s three fellow mercenaries in a semicircle facing a small dais.
“Please sit,” Mosasa told them, and Mallory and Wahid took the two open seats.
Mosasa stood next to the dais and introduced the new members of the expedition.
Dr. Samson Brody was a hefty black man with a bushy gray beard and a deeply lined face; Mosasa introduced him as a cultural anthropologist. He easily looked the oldest of the group. The youngest-looking of the team was the linguist, Dr. Leon Pak.
More problematic was the xenobiologist, Dr. Sharon Dorner. She was tall, blonde, and came from Acheron. Like Occisis, Acheron was a core planet of the Centauri Alliance. Given the interrelationship between xenobiology and xenoarchaeology, and the focused nature of both fields, the Jesuit xenoarchaeology professor, Father Francis Xavier Mallory, knew of her. Worse, he had
Dr. Dorner had given guest lectures several times at St. Marbury University, and Mallory had attended all of them. Once he had spent twenty minutes talking about the nature of the Dolbrians with her at a reception afterward, and five years ago he actually had the honor of introducing her.
It took every scrap of will Mallory had not to let the panic show in his face. Fortunately, Dr. Dorner showed no sign of recognizing him. There was little reason she should. Professionally, she would have met hundreds of people like Father Mallory: teachers, students, fellow scientists. There was no reason one professor should stand out in her memory.
Mosasa continued with introductions, apparently oblivious to Mallory’s sudden discomfort.
The last human of the group, the data analyst, didn’t have the titular “Doctor” before her name. She was a thin reed of a redhead named Rebecca Tsoravitch.
“Our last team member is a physicist and a mathematician. Since his given name is unpronounceable to a human palate,” Mosasa said, “he has adopted the human name Bill.”
Mallory had studied for six years at both seminary and the university after his retirement from the Marines. He had studied about the few alien races that human beings had come across in their travels to the stars. Of them all, the Paralians were the most important and influential, especially to anyone residing in the Centauri arm of human space.
The Paralians had been discovered back in the dark ages of the Terran Council. Travel to the stars had been a brutish business, a dangerous one-way affair through manufactured wormholes. When the Paralians had been discovered, the various human colonies had just begun to stabilize and trading among themselves. When the Centauri Trading Company had opened a wormhole above Paralia, they hadn’t only found an ocean-covered planet with a tolerable atmosphere, they had found natives.
Natives who, despite being planet-bound and unable to survive at a depth less than ten meters of their oceans’ surface, had developed mathematics beyond human comprehension. Within a few short years of first contact, discussions between human scientists and Paralian mathematicians discovered that the Paralians could model the universe in near-miraculous ways; models that led directly to the development of the tach-drive, which led in turn to the disintegration of the Terran Council and the rise of its successor, the Confederacy.
Despite having studied them, Bill was the first Paralian Mallory had ever seen in person. Until now, he’d never known any to have ever left the depths of the oceans on their homeworld.
Bill dominated the team, not just in terms of novelty, but in sheer bulk. Not only was his body itself half again the size and mass of Nickolai’s, he also resided within a transparent sphere five meters in diameter containing water under the extreme pressures that existed at Bill’s native depth. The sphere was mounted on a mechanical cradle that rested on six robotic limbs that added nearly another meter to the height of the whole apparatus.
Within the sphere, Bill floated. Mallory had heard Paralians described as squid-dolphins, but that was really only a halfhearted approximation of a description. The front of Bill’s body resembled a dolphin in the same way and for the same reason that a dolphin resembled a shark, or a submarine.
