“You speak of it as if it’s sacred.”
“I guess it is. At least to me. I don’t know what it is to poor Gleez.”
“Do you feel ready to return to your regular duties?”
The silence that followed wore on before Gwyn said, “I suppose.”
“How’s your focus?” Cambridge asked. “By that I mean, how much of any given hour do you spend thinking about the baby, and how much on literally anything else.”
The answer was next to none, but Gwyn didn’t think that would get her back in her chair any time soon.
“A bit,” she admitted. “She’s still there, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It isn’t. I am wondering how difficult you are finding it to compartmentalize the stress of separation.”
“Um… not too difficult?”
“Are you asking me?”
“No. Not difficult. Okay, a little, but…”
“Are you sleeping?”
Not at all.
“A few hours here and there.”
“Have you discussed your situation with any of the crew you consider friends?”
“They wouldn’t understand.”
“Some of them might. There are several species on board that have some measure of psionic abilities. Are you close with Lieutenant Lasren?”
“Kenth’s a good guy,” Gwyn admitted. “But he hasn’t been around much. He’s kind of glued to his station these days.”
“While I understand your desire for privacy, it might help to get some insight into what has to be a very new experience for you,” Cambridge suggested.
“I’ll think about it.”
Cambridge continued to stare at her in a way that made her feel he could read her mind. She knew he couldn’t. He was human. Still, she was certain he wasn’t buying what she was halfheartedly trying to sell.
“When you look at me like that, you remind me of my mother,” Gwyn offered.
“When was the last time you spoke with your mother?” he asked.
Eight years ago, when I left home.
“It’s been a while.”
“Are you close?”
“We share some fairly profound differences of opinion when it comes to”—everything—“many of my life choices.”
Cambridge chuckled at that. “Do you have any other Kriosian friends with whom you are in regular contact? I’m looking for anyone who might be able to offer you insight into your current predicament.”
“Empathic metamorphs are segregated from the rest of society. I don’t know anyone who knows one.”
Except, perhaps, my leedi, Mayla Fui.
“I see.”
No, I really don’t think you do.
Cambridge leaned forward. “Have you ever participated in regular counseling sessions before?”
“Never needed to.”
“There are limits to their efficacy, and those are set by the patient. Unless you decide that you want my help, there is very little I can do for you.”
But you can’t help me. No one can help me. I just need us to find her and the Galen and then everything will be the way it is supposed to be.
“Okay.”
“Same time tomorrow, then?”
Gwyn sighed. “Sure.”
SWOW (THE PLANET FORMERLY KNOWN AS DK-1116)
The first time away teams had been dispatched to the surface of this planet, Seven did not join them. She busied herself, instead, with attempting to determine how this unusual system had formed. To her utter disbelief, her models demonstrated that the most likely answer to that question was that the binary system had been formed when a rogue star had been sent careening through an existing system, destroyed several other planets in the process, and fallen into the main star’s orbit. She had then left the ship to analyze the debris this event created, now organized in two asteroid belts, one surrounding the B star and one surrounding the entire system. It was during this mission within the nearer asteroid field that she had first encountered the Edrehmaia substance and nearly lost her pilot, Ensign Gwyn, in the process.
Of the three now present, Seven, Lieutenant Patel, and Commander O’Donnell, only Patel had seen one of the planet’s subterranean stations up close. When the fleet had begun their explorations, all of the stations and biodomes had contained sufficient power to remain operational. One of the initial teams’ advantages had been the stations’ ability to regulate their atmosphere until it was suited to the precise needs of those occupying it. Patel’s team had conducted their survey sans environmental suits. Seven’s team was forced to perform theirs while wearing the bulky, uncomfortable EV suits when scans showed no signs that a breathable atmosphere remained.
As soon as the team materialized at the entrance to the cavern they had designated “Station One,” Seven checked her suit’s oxygen levels. “We have approximately two hours to complete our initial survey,” she advised the others.
“Then we’d best move quickly,” O’Donnell said, his voice sounding tinny and distant when processed by her suit’s comm array.“We have a lot of ground to cover.”
Seven privately suspected that O’Donnell would have been content to keep the team working here for the rest of their lives, so determined was he to understand everything there was to learn of the Edrehmaia and the first species to experiment with their creation. She understood his fascination. Few scientific mysteries were as tempting. But she also respected the potential hazards. For the first time she wondered if anything beyond professional curiosity was driving O’Donnell.
As the entire team lit their SIMs beacons and began to examine the walls of the cavern, little more than a wide tunnel leading to a larger space barely visible ahead, O’Donnell asked, “Anything look familiar, Lieutenant Patel?”
“Station Four consisted of a central hub for data retrieval and analysis, a library containing detailed visual records of past experiments conducted on the surface by multiple alien species, and a smaller tunnel consisting of cells protected by force fields that held samples of biological test subjects.”
“Was that where you found the interlocutor created from your DNA?” Seven asked.
“It was,” Patel replied. “There was also a vast cavern several hundred meters below where we found some of the technology controlling the biodomes and containing the raw materials used by the Edrehmaia. It was filled with the power conduits that were woven throughout the planet, composed almost entirely
